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Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Featured, iphone, winners

TiPb Responds to iPhone Reviews — Smartphone Round Robin

February 3rd, 2010

spe_rr_2009

Over the last 5 weeks of the 3rd Annual Smartphone Round Robin, the editors of our sibling sites, Casey from AndroidCentral.com, Kevin from CrackBerry.com, Matt from NokiaExperts.com, Dieter from PreCentral.net, and Phil from WMExperts.com have all had their chance to review TiPb’s flagship iPhone 3GS. And we’ve just had to sit here and take it, the good and the bad, the raves and the rants. Well, it’s week 6 now, baby, and TiPb gets to retort!

PreCentral.net’s Dieter Bohn

Week 1 saw our Editor-in-Chief, Dieter Bohn, this time representing PreCentral.net, return to the iPhone he’s reviewed about 5 or 6 times already, and… he was remarkably fair and I’m kind of sad there’s nothing much to pick him apart over. Thanks for nothing! One of his negatives is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, though:

I will admit to being a little tired of the iPhone’s design. It’s iconic and singular, but honestly it doesn’t feel as ‘high end’ as it once did. Not that the Palm Pre or Pixi is the picture of luxury, but sometime soon Apple will need to remember that phones are fashion and fashion changes.

iPhone 3G was indeed a departure from the original iPhone 2G; it lost the aluminum and gained a new, curved-for-thinness form. And people got really upset their cases didn’t fit any more, their docks didn’t fit anymore, and accused Apple of changing just to force people to re-buy all their accessories. Then the iPhone 3GS came out, new model same as the one before, and people got really upset that it wasn’t refreshed. Fashionistas complained one could tell they had the new model. Both the iPhone casing and the iPhone home screen wouldn’t be hurt for an update, but Apple won’t win either way.

As for Dieter’s conclusion:

We try not to pick winners in the Smartphone Round Robin, but rather talk about user needs and preferences. If you need apps and music, right now your choice is iPhone. If that’s not big and you care about openness and multitasking, webOS has a serious leg up. What’s sort of amazing is that most users don’t need to dismiss either out of hand.

I’d add the mobile web to that. iPhone Safari still hasn’t been exceeded and there’s a reason iPhone-optimized sites are still what other mobile WebKit clients want to pull. The point itself is spot on though — iPhone is owning the app and media space while BlackBerry owns messaging, and Android, Palm, Nokia, and WinMo battle it out over “openness” and “in-between”. Multitasking we might get in a future update (iPhone 4.0?) but it’s tough to see Apple loosening their ties on the App Store until and unless competition forces them to. Geeks and philosophers notwithstanding, some users and some developers prefer the level of trust a “gate-keeper”-style store provide (though Apple could certainly do better on the consistency side).

hmmm-iphone

WMExperts’ Phil Nickinson

Week 2 brought us Phil Nickinson, editor of WMExperts.com, and again he was frustratingly fair. He also raised some good food for thought:

Some of the best conversations surrounding smartphones these days have to do with Apple’s singular vision. It designs the phones. It keeps a tight fist on the manufacturing process. It largely controls the marketing of the devices. Even the act of selling an iPhone is controlled by Apple. Want to use the iPhone? You have to connect to iTunes at least once. Apps? Only (official) way to get them is through Apple’s App Store. Everything, at least at some point, must pass through Apple. Do not pass Go, head directly to Cupertino.

I’ve been toying with the over-simplification that iPhone involves surrendering control to Apple in exchange for user-experience, Android involves surrendering privacy to Google in exchange for free services, and BlackBerry involves surrendering serenity to RIM in exchange for constant connectivity. There’s no perfect device or perfect model; everything is a compromise, and for a large swath of users, that’s a good deal. They don’t want to control (or have to worry about managing) their device — they just want to easily use it.

Phil’s conclusion:

We don’t believe in iPhone killers. That’s a phrase that was coined by writers who couldn’t think of any other arguments to make. No, we’re not looking for Windows Mobile 7, if and when it’s announced and later released, to “kill” anything, save for maybe the bad taste that Windows Mobile 6.5 left in a lot of mouths. But even that isn’t entirely fair. Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 6.5 and for the most part delivered exactly what it promised. No more, no less. A stopgap to hold things over until WM7.

Actor and gadget aficionado Stephen Fry uproariously so elegantly phrased:

Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

That the iPhone jumpstarted a complacent smartphone industry in 2007 is undeniable, as is the impact its made since. In that context, the media contrivance of “iPhone killer” makes sense. Until something makes that same original-iPhone-in-2007 level leap, it’s likely the media will keep comparing everything to the iPhone. Steve Jobs was recently rumored to have said Google’s Android wants to “kill” the iPhone, and likely the Windows Mobile team does as well. They have to if they want any hope to be competitive. No doubt the iPhone G4/4.0 team at Apple wants to kill the iPhone 3GS/3.0 as well. That is one of the keys to Apple’s success.

AndroidCentral’s Casey Chan

Week 3 had Casey Chan, editor of AndroidCentral.com share his thoughts on the iPhone 3GS, and forget the conclusion, he starts with the bang:

Ah, the iPhone. For better or worse, the iPhone has become the starting point for many consumers looking to buy a smartphone. In a sense, it’s become the standard for everyone to measure themselves against. Because of its position at the forefront of consumer’s minds and the fact that it’s in everyone’s pocket, that’s completely fair. But because of Apple’s sometimes senseless decisions in dealing with all things iPhone, it leaves the rest of us a little uneasy.

Our own Chad Garrett likes to say the iPhone is the first smartphone for everyone upgrading from the RAZR and there’s some truth to that. With the iPhone, Apple mainstreamed the smartphone — they took it from a power device for power users with a powerful requirement for tweaking, managing, and messing around with, and carefully packaged a subset of important features for the masses. That means that, for any particular user — and especially for a power user — there’s a high chance that subset doesn’t include an important feature.

That’s Apple’s modus operandi, however. They’d rather start limited and add slowly. They’d rather leave something out completely than add in something they don’t think just works well enough. They’re masters of always leaving something else on the table for the next update. And they’re laser-focused on those features they consider essential for the user they’re targeting.

And yes, it drives us all nuts, even as they’ve sold 70,000 devices on the iPhone OS platform and used it to familiarize everyone with the next-step in multitouch iPhone OS UI — the iPad.

CrackBerry.com’s Kevin Michaluk

Week 4 was our best frenemy forever, CrackBerry.com’s own Kevin Michaluk and he embraces the same yin/yang theory about iPhone/BlackBerry as TiPb:

I’ve said it many times over the past two years, be it in blog posts, on our CrackBerry podcast, or to individuals asking advice on what device to buy, that if you want the absolute no-compromise best smartphone solution that you keep a BlackBerry in one pocket and an iPhone (or iPod Touch) in the other. Though both Apple, RIM and every other manufacturer and platform in the smartphone space for that matter have the aim of developing the one device you need (in other words they’re trying to be both Yin and Yang), I still think as of now it takes two devices to have Best of Class everything. A device like the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the ultimate communication and productivity tool, which excels in areas that matter both in enterprise (security, deployment, IT management) and to people who run their business and their lives depending on the phone, maximizing every minute of their day (one-handed speed of use, battery life, push everything, etc.). Apple hit the market with a compelling touchscreen experience that’s both intuitive and enjoyable to use that fits into the Apple ecosystem of products and services (ie. iTunes) and took it to the next level by causing a revolution in the mobile app space. So while the BlackBerry is still the ultimate communication / utilty tool, the iPhone arguably remains the ultimate convergence device.

Kevin being Kevin, however, he can’t resist tweaking us either. The Man who, in the first year called the iPhone 2G the iSmudge (before BlackBerry copied its black and silver design) and in the second year called it the Ah Frak Phone (on the eve of the BlackBerry Storm launch no less), decided this year he’d call the iPhone 3GS the douchebag phone (he owns one — as do almost all the Smartphone Experts editors).

NokiaExperts’ Matt Miller

Week 5 closed things out with NokiaExperts.com’s Matt Miller, who like Dieter is a multi-handset mobile gadgeteer with a lot of experience and a global point of view. His take:

As a guy who has used every smartphone operating system I am also quite frustrated with the iPhone OS because I know Apple can do better as they have shown glimpses of in the past. One of the main things people mention with the iPhone OS compared to other smartphone operating systems is the lack of multi-tasking with 3rd party applications. [...] Personally, the major thing I want to see in the next version of the iPhone OS is support for some kind of Today or status screen where I can put widgets or parts of applications on a single screen so my key information is glanceable without having to dive into applications. [...] Another area I would like to see addressed is notifications. Palm’s webOS and Google Android have the best implementation of notifications while the iPhone’s is pretty poor.

Setting aside that these are some of the most popular reasons people still Jailbreak their iPhones, Matt (and the other editors who took similar issue with iPhone functionality) will likely find many TiPb readers agreeing with him, yours truly included. Only built-in Apple apps can multitask, only your latest push message is shown on the Lock Screen (if you haven’t already dismissed it), and that same one message/dismissal is the crux of the notification problem.

This brings everything sharply into focus. Apple prides itself on making software “5-years ahead of the competition” (see iPhone virtual keyboard). They would rather not provide a solution than provide one that they don’t think answers the problem simply and elegantly (see cut, copy, and paste appearing only in iPhone 3.). They would rather provide a highly focused subset of functionality for the mainstream than to check off every power-user want (see everything all of us, er… want). Every version of the iPhone adds features that were considered “missing” to the previous version, either as technology and development resources allow, or Apple deems us sufficiently learned on what came before, and sufficiently motivated to buy what’s next.

So, if RAM and CPU are at the level where multitasking will almost never crash the Phone app and Apple decides they have the UI for it they want, if Dashboard goes mobile but can remain uncluttered and Apple-esque in execution and DashCode joins the iPhone SDK, if… well, given the rapid rise of push notifications, there’s no if — we need better alert handling — we just might get some or all of these things in iPhone 4.0.

Conclusion… Coming Soon

Week 6 is my turn. The iPhone 3GS comes home to TiPb and given everything every other editor has written about it, and everything I’ve written about the Nokia, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone, and Palm webOS, I have to re-examine and re-review the iPhone 3GS.

While that may not be conclusive, it will be TiPb’s conclusion for this year.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Responds to iPhone Reviews — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Dieter, androidcentral, casey, crackberry, crackberry kevin, matt miller, nokia experts, phil nickinson, precentral.net, tipb-retorts, wmexperts

Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, webOS Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

January 24th, 2010

My first smartphone was a Palm Treo 600 and so my last 2009 Smartphone Round Robin “away” review focusing on Palm’s new webOS platform as embodied by the Palm Pre and Palm Pix does not lack for symmetry. Between the two, last year I reviewed the Palm Treo Pro which I quipped was more HTC than Palm, ran Windows Mobile and not a Palm-made OS, and had a keyboard that was hard to consider “pro” level. 3 years of round robin, three totally different platforms from Palm, and only this review for me to try and make my own sense out of it.

Luckily I had the mobile accomplisher himself, our editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn to show me Palm’s new platform and their new devices, and the truly exceptional community over at PreCentral.net Forums to help understand where it’s at and where it’s going.

(And just a reminder, every day you post on that PreCentral.net thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you’re entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Now let’s get this on…

Previously on Palm

First, this is where Palm stood last year, without a PalmOS device in the competition, represented instead by the HTC-built, Windows Mobile running, Treo Pro:

And now, just one year later Dieter was kind enough to show me the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi running the all new, all different, all Palm webOS:

CrackBerry Kevin and I also stopped by Palm at CES 2010 to check out the new Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus for Verizon:

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

Hardware Design

I’m starting with hardware only because every other review started with hardware, and I’m telling you that because I really wish for this one review I didn’t have to start with hardware. But I’m a sucker for consistency.

And the Palm Pre Hardware Just…

Well, it isn’t great. The concept is killer, don’t get me wrong. The river-stone ergonomics are beautiful. The execution, however, especially on the early units, was really unfortunate given how much else Palm got right.

After using the iPhone’s glass screen for years, using the plastic screen on the Pre just feels… not good. The first Pre I tried at a local Best Buy had a screen protector over the plastic, and I found it almost unusable. If I was Kevin I could figure out some witty, spot-on analogy about layers of prophylactics between me and my multitouch but I’m not and I can’t and so I won’t. I’ll just say Palm needs to switch to glass and now.

The Pre is also a vertical slider. It looks like an iPhone slab but pull down and a full physical keyboard is revealed. While this could be a best-of-both-worlds compromise, the lack of an official, built-in virtual keyboard means (unlike the Motorola Android Droid) you have to use the physical keyboard and… it’s not great. A couple of Pre devices I’ve tried didn’t have very solid feeling sliders and all of them had cramped quarters that made the physical keyboard not that enjoyable for me. I had to use the tips of my fingers/nails and still watch out on the top ridge of the display and the sharp edges of the sides.

I’m not sure what they could do to fix it, though Dieter says the new Palm Pre Plus is an improvement in the feel of the keys itself. That, combined with the better build quality control could be part of the answer. I look forward to spending more time with it in the future to find out.

Palm Pixi By Contrast…

Eschewing the slider for their second webOS device, Palm returned to their roots with the front-facing QWERTY. They also returned to the form factor of the Palm Centro, which saw high sales if low margins during the final year of PalmOS.

The device is tiny. It’s deceptively tiny. It’s so tiny that, like in the Dark Knight movie, you half-expect that if Dieter’s Pre ever broke at the mechanism, he’d pull a release, a full Pixi would eject, and he’d just keep on typing. Actually, he’d likely type better because, counter-intutively, the Palm Pixi keyboard feels better than the Pre’s. I don’t know if it’s crazy Pixi magic, or just the better Feng Shui of not having to type inside the Pre’s cavity, but the tiny keys worked well.

The huge problem here, however, is that Palm reduced the screen size to fit in that keyboard. This isn’t the Treo 240×240 or 320×320 of yesteryear. In 2009, never mind 2010, screen size matters. Aspect ratio matters. In a post-iPhone, capacitive era how we interact with our device is more screen-dependant than anything else. There are times you won’t need a physical keyboard (watching video, playing games, reading e-books). There’s almost no time when you won’t want the full screen. Sure, it’s only a few pixels shorter, but on a screen that small, the difference is noticeable. It’s like having a 16:9 HDTV for a year or so, then suddenly getting a 4:3 SDTV again. You know what you’re missing.

There’s no easy fix for that easy, unless they jettison the physical keyboard and go with a fullscreen Pixi with a virtual keyboard. Many would hate that, but it’s something I’ve been increasingly considering as of late…

Is the Era of Physical Keyboards Over?

Originally this section was going to be called “the era of physical keyboards is over” but a funny thing happened on the way to writing this review — I kind of changed my mind.

Physical keyboards on smartphones are a strange beast. That a QWERTY button layout originally intended to prevent jamming on ancient IBM typewriters still exists on some of the most modern gadgets today is… either stupefying or a testament to the intractability of consumer typists.

Interestingly, Palm didn’t start off with physical keyboards. The Palm Pilot had no keyboard and used a proprietary form of handwriting recognition. The iPhone doesn’t have a physical keyboard either, and does offer recognition for Chinese character input, but uses virtual keys for most other languages, and sticks to QWERTY for English.

Rumor has it, physical vs. virtual keyboard was a huge area of contention between Apple CEO, Steve Jobs and then-Apple VP and head of iPod, Jon Rubinstein. Jobs didn’t want a physical keyboard, Rubinstein did. And we all know how that turned out — we have the iPhone sans-physical keyboard and Rubinstein has a new job as CEO of Palm.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when the Palm Pre debuted and looked a lot like an iPhone with a physical keyboard, many (and yours truly included) figured it was the iPhone Rubinstein always wanted to build.

He wanted the keyboard so much, as mentioned, he sacrificed screen real-estate on the Palm Pixi for it. I find that absurd. I would have removed the keys and made it an iPhone-nano-esque slab. As I said, until this review, I would have whole-heartedly exclaimed “the era of physical keyboards is over”.

But then I started thinking about the BlackBerry and how the Storm2 is no replacement for the 9700 for their user-base. Just like it took a long time to transition from CLI (command line interface, the text-only days of DOS prompts and UNIX terminals) to GUI (graphical user interface, the windows, mouse, pointer paradigm we see today), it will take a while to transition from physical keyboards to virtual ones. And just like some people (not gonna say neckbeards!) still turn off the GUI on Linux, go pure Terminal on Mac OS X, and ignore WIndows completely, some people have been so raised on physical keyboards, even on tiny little devices, that they wouldn’t transition to virtual even if, from an overall usability standpoint, they could or should.

BlackBerry is the easy example because they’re essentially messaging devices. The iPhone is essentially a big screen you fill with media and apps, so that’s an easy example of where the virtual keyboard fits best (especially Apple’s still unequalled implementation thereof).

And that brought me to the crux of this long, rambling, tangent — what’s the Palm Pre (and webOS in general)? I had the same question about Android and pretty much determined it was Google’s mobile insurance policy. But Palm is a mobile company. It’s not an “also have” like Microsoft. It’s their sole reason for being, and they’re one of the original innovators in the space.

So I wondered again, what’s the Palm Pre? And then I realized Palm told us from the beginning — it’s the fat middle. Where the Treo converged three devices into one, the Palm Pre bridges the traditional, keyboard-centric mobile messaging device with the new, screen-centric mobile platform device.

It’s likely not keyboard enough for a BlackBerry addict, and it’s not screen enough for an iPhone user, but it’s a compromise form factor for those who want the okay-of-both-worlds.

I’m so happy with the iPhone keyboard that I’ll never go back to a physical one. I use my iPhone keyboard far more than I ever used the physical keyboards on my Treo 600 or 680 because it works better for me. Not having to engage forearm muscles to depress tiny keys and hold the rest of the phone stable while I do so is a huge advantage in my book. It’s just effortless and it just works. I won’t be writing novel-length compositions on a BlackBerry anyway, so no argument about volume of typing impresses me. Likewise, I see enough physical keyboarders glancing constantly at their screens that muscle-memory no longer resonates with me as a deal-breaker either. New devices are about consuming information as much as creating it, and even glance-ability requires — you guessed it — glances.

One day haptics may be sufficiently advanced enough that mighty-morphin’, there-and-gone-again virtual-that-feel-like-physical keyboards are enough for everybody. But right now, today, you have legacy keyboarders who’ll never abandon their keys, and devices on Android that still haven’t gotten their software right, and there needs to be a middle ground.

Or to be more succinct — Smartphones are evolving beyond priority messaging devices to priority (data/media/etc.) consumption devices and hardware keyboards are legacy, bolted-on technology comforting for the former but waiting to be obsoleted when technology allows virtual keyboards to better serve the latter (and we’re part of the way there with the iPhone).

(hat Palm didn’t have hardware keyboards when the Pilot was priority PIM device is interesting as an aside. And no, Dieter, I won’t take that back )

Inductive Charging

Palm debuted it with their Touchstone accessory. Cool. Future. Let’s me leave this section on a positive note.

Software Experience

Okay, here’s where webOS is interesting enough that any complaints about the hardware take a back seat. First let’s get something out of the way. We’ve teased Palm about having the former head of Apple’s iPod division as their CEO, and about bringing over a bunch of iPhone engineers to help create webOS. We’ve listed what webOS adopted from the iPhone (and we’re far from the only ones), but it’s important to remember the iPhone wasn’t made in a vacuum. The icon grid as launcher, the tabbed phone app, and other paradigms existed in earlier Palm Pilots and Treos and Apple took them and put them together with a bunch of other stuff for iPhone OS. Likewise, some of the multitouch gestures in webOS are the same as the iPhone (and thank goodness), the way Cards works is greatly expanded from, but visually identical to how iPhone Safari Pages work, etc. In the end, they’ll figure out the legal issues and we’ll say the user benefits from a certain amount of consistency when it comes to these platforms. With that behind us…

HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Palm faced a huge problem when launching webOS. They couldn’t really bring PalmOS developers forward because the platform was different and, unfortunately, the time it took between the decline of PalmOS and the rise of webOS meant a significant amount of developers had moved on. iPhone 2.0, meanwhile, had re-framed the mobile discussion for the second time, going from killer UI in 2007 to being all about apps in 2008, and Palm didn’t have the money or mindshare of Google who was already offering the Android alternative. So what to do?

In a move I called brilliant at the time, they decided to make their UI layer, and hence development environment, out of web-standards — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While they would — and did — take a performance hit by essentially running localized web pages as apps, it meant anyone who knew how to make webApps could fairly easily develop for webOS. (That Palm named it webOS shows how seriously they take that concept).

Apple tried a non-localized version of this with iPhone 1.0 and it’s “sweet” (TM, Steve Jobs, WWDC 2007) WebApp SDK. It failed. But 2009 brought far more robust web technologies, including HTML 5 with SQLite for local storage, CSS3 with animations, and a whole lot more maturity in WebApp development. While Palm hasn’t succeeded with this to App Store levels, no one else has with interpreted SDK (Java) or native apps either. Palm has succeeded to some degree, however, and iPhone 3.0 is now supporting localized HTML 5 apps on the iPhone home screen, while RIM, Android, and others are embracing WebApps and widgets.

It was a gutsy gamble. I still think Google saw webOS, smacked themselves in the Android and raced to make Chrome OS in response. It’s also clearly a first step for Palm. Just like Apple released a full, native SDK for iPhone 2.0, Palm is now offering native plug-ins for games like Need for Speed (something that WebApps can’t do, and even WebGL might struggle to get them to do as well).

It’s not perfect. webOS’ lack of contrast in the UI still flabbergasts me. More practically, it’s sluggish at times, especially on the anemic Palm Pix processor, and it can take far too long for built-in apps like the calendar to launch. It also presents problems for developers who want to hide their source code, although Palm now has a solution that doesn’t involve limiting apps to onboard RAM (something Android and BlackBerry still suffer from). Full GPU support might (though I think likely not) improve that, but hardware is always getting faster and bandwidth is (hopefully) getting bigger. Palm will benefit from both. In a year or two, it will be buttery smooth and still enjoy the flexibility and future-proofing that is webOS’ promise.

Synergy Contacts, Multitasking Cards, and Non-Modal Notifications

Three areas where webOS absolutely kills are their Synergy contact system, their Cards visualization for multitasking, and their non-modal notification system.

Synergy, as far as I can figure out, takes all of your online data points, sucks them in while maintaining them as separate silos, then aggregates them, filters out duplications, and presents you a unified view of the data. So, for example, you have Facebook friends, Gmail contacts, a couple of Exchange accounts, and an old Yahoo! setup. Synergy will take all that, figure out that 700 of them are the same, create a unified contact that has all the information for each of those 700 (while leaving each untouched on their own service), and present you a single contact list containing those 700 as well as all the other (unique to Yahoo! or Gmail, etc.) contacts. I can’t explain it as elegantly as it works most of the time (on occasion it won’t match and you’ll have to do some work to help it), but it’s the future of contact management as far as I’m concerned — with a few caveats.

If I don’t want Google’s terrible, promiscuous email retention polluting my phone contacts (or Facebook messing up my Exchange) that needs to be easily managed (it might be on webOS, I didn’t get into it but hope it is). Also, an easy way to export the final, Synergy-zed contact list for backup — or replacement of other online contact data bases! — would be nifty. That webOS’ approach allows them to elegantly handle multiple Exchange accounts is testament enough.

Cards for multitasking is likewise the future. If you’ve used Pages on the iPhone Safari — where you can keep several web sites available at the same time and easily zoom out, see all the pages, swipe across to change them, and then zoom back in — then imagine that but taken to the ultimate, logical, extreme. That’s webOS Cards. Instead of just web pages, every app including web pages gets its own Card and you can zoom out to see them all, swipe to change between them, and tap to zoom back in. Yes, that means webOS supports multitasking for 3rd party apps, something only Apple apps are allowed to do on the iPhone.

It works well on the Palm Pre. It works mind-bogglingly well on the Palm Pre Plus (Dieter had 50 apps up all at once). It works so well, in fact, it kind of makes me sad I can’t drag and drop elements from one Card to another. Why give me that fantastic visualization, why make a windowed multitasking interface for a small screen, if the biggest advantage of doing it — drag and drop — isn’t implemented. Unless, of course, that’s the “next step”. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for webOS 2.0…

Notifications, in terms of webOS, means once again I have to complain about the iPhone’s current, modal implementation. Modal, if you’re not familiar with the term, means that once the notification pops up, you have to either “dismiss” (and lose it forever) or “view” (and interrupt whatever you’re doing) immediately. There is no later. And if another notification comes in, it obliterates the previous one entirely. With webOS, like Android, you’re told about a new notification but you’re free to ignore it and the system will just keep track of them for you until you choose to take a look at them. That difference means everything, especially when you start getting a ton of notifications coming in.

Conclusion

It’s not all rosy for Palm, webOS, the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, and their mobile strategy going forward. Sprint exclusivity might have guaranteed Palm some money but it doesn’t seem to have given them the sales they needed. They’re hitting Verizon now, and AT&T soon, but if they’d gone on Verizon sooner (before the Droid) they could have had a much bigger impact. Unlike Apple, Google, or Microsoft, they don’t have billions in the bank or other businesses to prop them up. Unlike RIM or Nokia, they don’t have entrenched business or international market share to ride. It’s going to be an uphill battle for Palm. That they’ve accomplished and innovated so much in just a year is an outstanding accomplishment, however, and means I’ll be cheering as they battle up that hill.

For iPhone users, switching to webOS means you gain a physical keyboard and those nifty Synergy, Cards, and notifications. You’ll also gain a more “open” system as Palm has treated hacking webOS in a way Apple almost certainly won’t for the foreseeable future. We didn’t really get into the whole homebrew (think jailbreak apps) and patching culture of webOS, or Palm’s efforts to reach out and embrace developers, but kudos to them for doing it. If that’s something that’s important to you, and Android/Google is a non-starter, it’s certainly another plus in Palm’s column.

As I write this, however, Apple might just be on the verge of announcing iPhone 4.0, and that just might “invent” multitasking for iPhone users. Better contact and notifications might be on tap as well. Hey, maybe even an iPhone on Verizon. The soonest we’ll know is this Wednesday’s “Come see our latest creation” event, otherwise Apple usually shows off new software in March and new hardware at WWDC in June.

I’m not saying wait and see before you leap to webOS or another platform. I’m just saying… wait and see.

The biggest thing about this year’s Round Robin is that every device-maker brought the competition. Apple is still ahead in some areas, but they’ve been overtaken in some others. Apple having to catch up… that’s good for iPhone users, and it’s good for everyone.

Things are exciting again!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, webOS Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Reviews, iphone vs palm pre, iphone vs webos, palm pixi, palm pre, webos

iPhone Hands-on from a Nokia Expert’s Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

January 19th, 2010

We’re in the final “away” week of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, and since I began the event looking at Nokia, what better way to cap it off than with NokiaExperts‘ Matt Miller looking at our iPhone 3GS.

Matt’s got his thread going at TiPb’s iPhone Forums, trying to figure out if even a applezillion apps can make up for the loss of full-on N900 Mozilla, so hit reply and help him out. Every day you help him on that thread, you’re entered for a chance to WIN AN iPHONE 3GS! (smartphoneroundrobin.com has all your details!)

As for me, I’m over at the PreCentral.net Forums learning me some webOS via the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi. Give me a hand over there, and you could win one of them as well!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Hands-on from a Nokia Expert’s Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

iPhone Review from CrackBerry Kevin — Smartphone Round Robin

January 19th, 2010

Apple’s third iPhone meets CrackBerry Kevin’s third iPhone review, exclusively in the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin. Year one he called it the iSmudge. Then they got the Storm. Year two he called it the Ah **** phone. Then they got the Storm. (Joking. Not.) What’s he calling the iPhone and iPhone users this year?

Yeah, it ain’t pretty. But he’s also calling the iPhone the yin to his yang, the night to his day, the left pocket to his right pocketed BlackBerry, the… you get the idea. (We got it too.)

All credit for what little progress he’s made goes to our outstanding TiPb forum members, who learned him as much as any CrackBerry addict-in-chief can really be learned.

If you want to win an iPhone 3GS of your very own, you can still enter once a day on his thread, or any of the previous Round Robin threads in our forum. And for all the other videos, reviews, and contest threads (there are 6 smartphones up for grabs after all!) keep your browsers locked on smartphoneroundrobin.com!)

Now go read Kev’s review, then come back here and tell us whether you agree or disagree, and why!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Review from CrackBerry Kevin — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, crackberry kevin

Palm Pre, Palm Pixi webOS Hands-on Video — Smartphone Round Robin

January 18th, 2010

When last I left Palm they had but the Centro and some HTC Windows Mobile device to offer, now webOS and the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi’s inform Week 6 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin. Talk about night and day. Lucky I have the daywalker himself, our illustrious editor-in-chief and PreCentral.net’s own Dieter Bohn to show me how the brand new generation of Palm devices work. And works well.

Remember, every day you post on my PreCentral.net Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win a webOS device of your very own. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

This week also brings mobile powerhouse Matt Miller of Nokia Experts to TiPb’s own iPhone. He’s on the TiPb iPhone Forums and needs your help! Give him a hand and get a chance to win an iPhone 3GS for your troubles!

Video hands-on with Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, after the break!

(And if you’re confused by the intro to this year’s video, you really need to go watch last year’s Treo Pro video NOW!)

UPDATE: since Palm released the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus at CES 2010, CrackBerry Kevin and I got Dieter to give us an updated look at the new hardware. (Which is a bit of a cheat, really, since they’re not waiting for Apple’s Jan. 27 event to do their iPhone reviews!)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Palm Pre, Palm Pixi webOS Hands-on Video — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Dieter, iphone vs palm pre, palm, palm pixi, palm pre

TiPb Invades WMExperts Podcast — Round Robin

January 18th, 2010

Phil and Mal over at WMExperts.com were gracious enough to invite me onto the WMExperts podcast today to ~~kick my apps~~ discuss my Windows Phone Review, as well as all the weeks news — including whether the iTablet or Windows Mobile 7 wins the prize for most rumored, unannounced product of the year.

Check it out!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Invades WMExperts Podcast — Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Podcast, iphone vs windows phone, wmexperts, wmexperts podcast

Microsoft Windows Phone HTC Touch Pro2 and HTC HD2 Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

January 16th, 2010

Windows Phone is only slightly better off in this year’s Smartphone Round Robin than Palm was last year — like we substituted in the WinMo Treo Pro for the aging PalmOS in 2008, we’re using two heavily HTC-skinned devices as WMExperts entries in 2009 — the HTC Touch Pro2 and massive HTC HD2.

And I’m melancholy about that, because I kind of liked the unabashedly Windows Mobile tweaky, geeky Treo Pro last year, and was hoping to see a pure Microsoft Windows Mobile 7 device this year. Scrappy, underfunded Palm was able to deliver webOS after all, Google went Android 2.0, and Apple went iPhone 3.0. Instead we got Windows Mobile 6.5, which was decidedly bashed, and the aforementioned HTC Sense UI/TouchFlo shellacked over it — a UI so opaque I think users might have trouble distinguishing HTC’s Windows Phone devices from their Android ones going forward.

But those are the WinPhos we were dealt, and they’re certainly tremendous in their own rights. To help me make sense of them (no pun intended), Phil Nickinson went over the finer points for me and the WMExperts Forum members really helped me out.

(And just a reminder, every day you post on that WMExperts thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you’re entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Okay, enough preamble, it’s time for the review… after the break!

Windows Treatment

Previously, Phil took me on a tour of the HTC Touch Pro2 and HD2:

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

WMExpert’s Phil Nickinson, Keith Newman, and Rene on the iPhone Live! podcast.
WMExperts HTC Touch Pro 2 — All the different versions head to head (yes, they vary by carrier!)
WMExperts HTC Touch Pro 2 (aka Tilt 2) review (specific version we looked at)
WMExperts HTC HD2 Review
2008 TiPb Smartphone Round Robin Touch Pro 1 (Fuze) video and Treo Pro video
2008 TiPb Smartphone Round Robin Touch Pro 1 (Fuze) review and Treo Pro review

Hardware Design

HTC makes great hardware, no ifs, ands, or buts. These are two distinct form-facters, the landscape slider (with tilt!) of the Touch Pro 2, and the massive black slab of the HD2, but they both feel solid, they both feel premium.

HTC Touch Pro2

The Touch Pro2 is one of the better sliders I’ve tried, far less rickety in the hinges than last years devices, and the keyboard, impossibly, is even better. If you’re really one of those people who demand a physical keyboard on your mobile, if you’re really serious about the QWERTY, then this device is for you. It may not be a tiny netbook like the Nokia N900, but it’s got almost a netbook-caliber keyboard. Fear it. The screen is also big and bright, but it’s still resistive and requires you not just to touch and flick but press and drag to trigger interaction. And even though resistive screens are reaching new heights, they’re still nowhere near as visceral, as tactile, as I’m-a-part-of-this-device as capacitive screens. In all fairness, however, none of us ever reached for the stylus, if I recall right, but that’s only because most of us would rather grit our teeth and press and drag.

HTC HD2

On the other hand (or both hands, it’s that huge) the HD2 is the first Windows Phone to have a capacitive screen — supposedly coded by HTC itself. And what a screen it is! I think just the screen is as big as the iPhone. While I won’t use the analogy CrackBerry Kevin did, it really does verge on the ridiculous. The entire device, in fact, is so utterly pimped out I’m certain HTC made it just to show off what their hardware engineers are capable of. It’s the $10K gaming rig of smartphones. It’s gadget pr0n. And because it’s capacitive, it’s size doesn’t stop it from being usable. If your thumbs can reach across its girth, you’re good to go.

Software Experience

I usually break software experience down by device, but in this case while there’s minor version differences in the HTC Sense UI/TouchFlo lacquered over both these devices, by far the biggest difference between the HTC Touch Pro2 and HD2 is to the latter’s capacitive screen (which, yes, I’ll keep harping on because I’m an iPhone guy, okay?). Especially for someone coming from the iPhone, it makes all the difference in the world.

HTC Sense UI/TouchFlo

If Sense UI/TouchFlo kind of warbles on the Touch Pro2, having the right notes but missing the rhythm at times, it sings on the HD2. And its eye-candy, frankly, makes the iPhone look dated. It’s got all the bells and whistles and widgets you want, and every time I write about it, I’m compelled to mention that the HTC weather screen is an instant crowd pleaser, and on the HD2 the windshield wiper is almost big enough to really make you think you’re in your car. The UI still isn’t as intuitive and consistent as I’d like — when to move in what direction and so forth — but it’s so far beyond last year’s frustrating TouchFlo experience on the Fuze that I’m hopefully they’ll nail it completely in the near future.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Titanium

One of the huge advantages of WIndows Phone is how customizable they are, especially the HTC devices for which ROMs are readily available. Lots of “cooks” and their “kitchens” whip up custom versions of the entire software stack, giving previews of upcoming, unreleased versions, stripping out carrier bloatware, maximizing speed and/or stability, and so on. And flashing ROMs is fast. I mention this because Phil was able to change the ROM on his Touch Pro 2 in the time between two video shoots. Super fast.

Whether it was a result of this, or simply Phil turning off SenseUI/TouchFlo on the Touch Pro2, I’m not certain (I lost track!) but he also showed me the default Microsoft experience on the phone, Titanium. If you imagine the ZuneHD interface layered on top of a new, “finger friendlier” (please, someone, anyone, kill that term — it’s embarrassing to the implementer in this day and age!) home screen and… pretty much the same Windows 98-esque UI beneath the surface.

Windows Mobile… Everything Else

And SenseUI and Titanium are just two of the many, many, (did I say many?) UI options available to Windows Phone aficionados. Since the iPhone only has one, and even if you Jailbreak you can only skin that one, it’s a huge difference and shows how truly tweak-able Windows Phone really is.

George Ponder rounded a lot of them up over at WMExperts, including SPB Mobile Shell, Winterface, Xperia Panels, Touchwiz, etc. Check it out.

Wherein We Explore the State of the WIndows Phone

While we’re looking at individual phones this year, we’re also looking at the platforms in general, where they are, and more importantly where they’re going. And that’s actually a good thing for Microsoft because where they are is nowhere good. I know a lot of people love their Windows Phones (if they know they have a Windows Phone, but we’ll get to that in a moment). I’m willing to bet these people love them in spite of Microsoft, not because of it, for what they and their community can do with Windows Phone and not what Microsoft has so far done for it. Could that change?

Ghosts of WinPhos Past

One of the questions I had about Windows Phone was — if they were going to try to brand the overall platform, why call it Windows Phone? I mean, Apple didn’t call their device the MacPhone, did they? Sure, it’s Microsoft’s attempt to bring some uniformity to their mobile device strategy, and okay Windows Vista was a consumer disaster but Windows 7 is proving popular and lots of people use Office, right?

But if a consumer walks into AT&T and sees all the phones on the wall, is a Windows Phone going to have any more luck against an iPhone or BlackBerry than an HTC phone?

Microsoft’s most consumer friendly brand is the Xbox. Yet they didn’t name their MP3 device the Xplayer to leverage that name (nor did they bother to integrate the services, but that’s another rant), they called it the Zune. And while the latest ZuneHD is outstanding, it still hasn’t been anything approaching successful. Now people, including WMExperts, have asked Microsoft to make a ZuneHD a phone (just stick a microphone on it, Nickinson oft bellowed), but is slapping a phone on a failed brand really the answer? Instead of Xbox, Zune, and Windows Phone in the commercial space, why isn’t it Xbox, Xplayer, and Xphone? If a consumer sees the Xbox ecosystem next to an iPhone, maybe then it becomes a fight for their mindshare.

But we know why this hasn’t happened. Microsoft isn’t one company, it’s multiple companies, 6 or so, and they don’t get along together. In fact, Microsoft is willing to sacrifice one to benefit another. Instead of keeping Exchange tied to Windows Mobile to combat BlackBerry’s proprietary push service, they’ll license it to everyone, including BlackBerry, iPhone, and Google. Microsoft has Exchange, and Bing, and yes, Zune not so that they can expand their platforms but so that they can offer those services to competing platforms. Maybe you’ll get Zune services for webOS one day. Who knows. On Windows, that’s fine because it has a 90% share. On Windows Phone?

Compare that to Apple. Seen iPod App for Android lately? It looks to this iPhone outsider as if Microsoft has intentionally fractured their offerings and licensed or given them out — or set them up to license or give out — at the expense of Windows Mobile. That’s great for those services, arguably great for the overall internet (though open source, non-proprietary versions would be better), but — again — it’s not great for Windows Mobile.

That’s problem one. Problem two is the same things I mentioned about Google and Android — I don’t think Steve Ballmer cares about Windows Mobile any more than he thinks Microsoft needs the mobile screen in their catalog. He’s smart enough to know the future is mobile and he wants Microsoft to own that future, but he doesn’t care about the end products to the degree that Steve Jobs cares about iPhone or the RIM co-CEO’s love their Berrys, or Jon Rubinstein poured himself into Palm. Even Android has Andy Rubin at the helm, a singular visionary whose vision is hampered by the needs of a larger corporate mandate, but remains singular none the less.

Who has Windows Mobile got in their corner?

Ghosts of WIndows Mobile Future

I just said I don’t think Windows Mobile really has Steve Ballmer in its corner. I don’t think it has its own division honcho, Robbie Bach in its corner either (which may be a good thing). I’d hope it has J Allard, who WMExperts called their savior and is responsible for the Xbox 360 and ZuneHD, given the seriousness of connected mobile. However, given his grand role, he may well be dreaming up the UI for the Xbox 720 or Zune1080p, and not be dedicated enough to give Windows Mobile the attention it needs. Maybe it’s Roz Ho, formerly of Microsoft’s Mac Office Business Unit (sigh) and currently leading up the horribly code-named Project Pink, reportedly based on Microsoft’s acquisition of Sidekick-maker Danger. But anyway, that it’s not widely known, that we don’t see a singular visionary on stage at CES, Mobile World Congress (MWC) or special Microsoft events holding up Windows Phone version whatever, putting his or her name and reputation on it, just like Andy Rubin did for Android and the Nexus One… makes me nervous.

Windows Mobile 7 is delayed. Yes, it’s not fair to call an unannounced product delayed, but if Microsoft didn’t intend to get a new OS out earlier than now, they have bigger issues than a delay. So, yeah, delayed. I don’t know if Microsoft got the same kick in the restarts Palm did after seeing the iPhone, but 3 years have passed since Macworld 2007 and Microsoft still has nothing revolutionary on the market — not for consumers.

If they have restarted, if they’ve restarted more than once or several times already, it’s taken so long now that they can’t just equal or even better iPhone or Android or webOS in terms of user experience. They can’t rely on a Windows Vista-esque bad taste that makes for a Windows 7 equally and opposing-ly sweet reception. Windows doesn’t have the competition Windows Mobile has. No, for Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft has to knock it out of the park so far it lands in the basketball stadium across town and swooshes clear through the basket, no net.

What that revolution is, I have no idea. It’s easy to imagine the Zune UI but that lacks telephony features and other elements a phone would require (think how much more the iPhone is than just the iPod app). And the ZuneHD still suffers from being merely competitive, not revolutionary. Microsoft could go for natural interfaces, the kind Bill Gates has been advocating for years, but Google’s Nexus One already does voice well enough that Microsoft is still only left with better. Current rumors postulate an Xbox “Project Natal”-style gesture interface where you can wave your hands and cameras pick up your movement along with facial detection and voice. Maybe that’s Star Trek enough, but it occurs to me when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and its capacitive display and said, at last, people could “touch their music”, he was exactly right — people like the intimacy and sense of connection provided by touch. Not to go all CrackBerry Kevin on this review, but is waving your hands 5 feet away from your significant other and reading their body language with no contact the best experience you can imagine for human interaction? Likely not.

I have no answers, only questions, but Microsoft will need answers to slingshot Windows Mobile 7 back into the public mind, to become relevant again.

If that sounds harsh, I don’t apologize. 4 years ago I was all in on Microsoft. I had a Windows XP machine, Xbox, and Windows Mobile device, and… none of them worked together in any significant way. Individually I was annoyed enough to change all of them for other platforms. Collectively I was disheartened enough to leave Microsoft entirely and go almost all in with Apple (and Sony, since Apple doesn’t make game consoles or TVs yet). Microsoft could have been the integrated offering a decade ago. They had all the pieces in place and whether they were scared of anti-trust (and I don’t buy that excuse because you can integrate without anti-competitive behavior) or just couldn’t get themselves organized as a company enough to do it, Windows Mobile as much as anything suffers for that today.

Wherein this Review, Lost Track, Attempts to Re-Find it

Thanks in large part to the versatility and partner-centric model Microsoft decided to imbue into Windows Mobile, and the near miraculous deep-skinning ability of HTC, the Touch Pro2 and especially the HD2 are fully competitive devices in this year’s Round Robin. Spec for spec, the HD2 is unrivaled (perhaps only because the Android Nexus One, also by HTC, wasn’t ready in time to enter). I could never have used the Fuze for more than a week last year. If there was no iPhone, I could use the HD2 for a good long while.

If you were to leave the iPhone for the Touch Pro2 you’d get a world-class horizontal keyboard, deeper and better Exchange integration, and a phone that’s as individually tweak-able as your imagination and latest ROM cook-ups allow. You can also find versions across all the major carriers, multitask your heart out, and install Windows Phone apps from anyone and in any which way you please.

If you were to leave the iPhone for the HD2 you’d get… a bigger iPhone-like phone. That’s not a knock, far from it. As you no doubt suspect I love the iPhone. But unlike the different form factor of the Touch Pro2, the HD2 is the same shape, just much larger, with a far more animated if not quite as consistent a UI, and the same integration and ecosystem issues as any other Windows Phone. It’s also only coming to the US on T-Mobile at the moment, which means no 3G for any other North American network.

You’d lose out on the iPhone’s iconic integration and ecosystem, however, which still includes the best user experience and apps in the mobile space. Power users won’t care — they can figure out, and around, almost anything. For new smartphone owners, however, it’s hard to put a price on “just works”.

At the end of the day, however, if Apple running the iPhone like a benevolent dictatorship drives you batty and you don’t trust your privacy to Google and their Androids, if webOS is too abstracted and BlackBerry is too much messenger and not enough computing platform, if you want the latest and greatest hardware and the ability to do pretty much anything you’re smart enough to do with it, Windows Mobile remains the only choice (outside of Nokia, which just isn’t that popular here at home).

More than anyone else in this year’s Round Robin, Microsoft has to bring it next year. It won’t be enough to impress us, they’ll have to astonish us. Here’s hoping they can and do.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Microsoft Windows Phone HTC Touch Pro2 and HTC HD2 Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, hd2, htc, iphone vs windows phone, touch pro2, windows phone

iPhone Hands-on from a BlackBerry Abuser’s Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

January 13th, 2010

Well, well, look who’s coming to demo — CrackBerry.com’s Kevin Michaluk, and we gave him the full-on look at Apple’s latest iPhone 3GS, so be sure to check that out.

Kevin being Kevin, he’s also hopped onto TiPb’s iPhone Forums to ask “where’s the keyboard on this thing?” Every day you help him on that thread, you’re entered for a chance to WIN AN iPHONE 3GS! (smartphoneroundrobin.com has all your details!)

As for me, I’m over at the WMExperts Forums trying to figure out if the HTC HD2 is the obelisk from 2001… or something bigger. Give me a hand over there, and you could win one of them ginormous bad boys as well!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Hands-on from a BlackBerry Abuser’s Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

Microsoft Windows Phone HTC Touch Pro 2, HD2 Hands-on Video — Smartphone Round Robin

January 13th, 2010

Week 4 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin brings me face-to-big-glass-face with our most ancient nemesis — Microsoft’s Windows ~~Mobile~~ Phone, this year spawning the killer keyboard of the HTC Touch Pro 2, and the monstrous hardware of the HTC HD2. Yes, that’s 2 times HTC version 2 devices and to help me out, I’ve got the dark lord of WMExperts himself, the one and only WMExperts Phil Nickinson to show me the ropes — and quite honestly to help me lift that ginormous HD2 onto the table!

Remember, every day you post on my WMExperts Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win the Windows Phone of your choice. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

This week also brings the yin to my yang, the productivity to my play, my best frenemy forever, CrackBerry Kevin back to TiPb and the iPhone he claims never to use. Head on over to the TiPb forums and help him out, would you? (i.e. show him some neat new games). And get a chance to win an iPhone 3GS for your troubles.

Video hands-on with the Touch Pro 2 and HD2 after the break!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Microsoft Windows Phone HTC Touch Pro 2, HD2 Hands-on Video — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, hands-on, hd2, htc, touch pro2, windows mobile, windows phone

Apple iPhone 3GS vs Google/HTC Android Nexus One Hands-on Video — Round Robin Redux

January 10th, 2010

Literally right after I finished my 2009 Smartphone Round Robin week with Google’s Android platform, represented by the HTC Hero and Motorola Droid, Google went and brought in a ringer — the HTC-built, Android 2.1 sporting Nexus One.

Android Central’s is still en-route but our Editor-in-Chief, Dieter Bohn has been using the Nexus One all through CES so we grabbed him — literally — and got him to very quickly put it one-on-one with the great one — the iPhone 3GS.

Does it change things from our previous hands-on-Android video, and my “power but no passion” full review? Like I said when I posted our iPhone vs. Nexus One gallery, my first impressions are that the Nexus One is top notch when it comes to Google services and hardware specs, but the iPhone is still the king of media and it’s user interface remains unequalled. Am I right? Watch the video below and tell me in the comments!

[Note: No, I didn't slam it in the video or try to make the iPhone look better -- that's not the point of the Round Robin. Ultimately the more, better devices that hit the market, the more, better iPhones Apple will have to make for us here at TiPb.]

[YouTube link]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple iPhone 3GS vs Google/HTC Android Nexus One Hands-on Video — Round Robin Redux

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Featured, android vs iphone, nexus one, nexus one vs iphone

iPhone Review from Android Central’s Casey — Smartphone Round Robin

January 6th, 2010

A long time ago on a blog far, far away, Casey Chan wrote about the iPhone. Then there was a great disturbance in the ’sphere and he ended up editing Android Central and embracing the dark side of the G1. Easily, seductively, his powers grew with the Hero and now the insidious DROID itself. But a new hope emerged in the form of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, which forced him to put down the evil red eye of Google (and their massive Nexus One coverage!) and pick up the brightly sided iPhone 3GS. Did he restore balance to his mellow?

Given the Jedi-level help our TiPb Forum masters, certainly unlearn he must. Right? Well, take a read of his final iPhone from an Android perspective review and let us know — what forever controls his destiny?

Also, your only hope to win a brand new iPhone 3GS is to head on over to that thread linked above and drop a new reply every day. (Or a brand new Android device if you help me out on the Android Central Forums — and I’ve also snuck into the WMExperts Forums a tad early to get a jump start on next week!)

And for all the other videos, reviews, and contest threads (there are 6 smartphones up for grabs after all!) keep your browsers locked on smartphoneroundrobin.com!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Review from Android Central’s Casey — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, casey

Smartphone Round Robin Podcast Part 2: Device Impressions!

January 5th, 2010

spe-rr-2009-1

You may have heard that we’re taking a short break from the 3rd annual Smartphone Round Robin for CES this year (and for our own sanity, truth be told.) Lucky for you, we have just the thing to tide you over this week: two podcasts with your favorite editors from the Smartphone Experts Network.

This week we have the second podcast we recorded over the course of our time together. We’ve embedded it below, but honestly: you’ve subscribed to TCPJ by now, haven’t you?

How to listen to the Smartphone Round Robin Podcast Part 2:

The Cell Phone Junkie
Subscribe with your favorite client
Subscribe via iTunes
Listen via phone with Podlinez: 510-495-6352
Download the show directly

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Smartphone Round Robin Podcast Part 2: Device Impressions!

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Featured, Podcast

Android Motorola Droid and HTC Hero Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

January 3rd, 2010

Google’s Android was last year’s “new thing”, and while Palm’s webOS takes that place this year, Android Central brings us their second generation hardware with the likes of the HTC Hero, and the 2.0 version of its OS with the Motorola Droid. That Google enjoys massive tech-geek cachet while at the same time maturing into two such different (potentially fractured?) sets of hardware and software, while being the cloud company and yet not enjoying the most cloud-centric OS in the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin are what make it potentially the most interesting platform this year.

To help me figure it all out, Casey Chan went over the finer points for me and the Android Central Forum members provided tons of great feedback. Thanks to all the ‘droidekas!

(And just a reminder, every day you post on my Android Central thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you’re entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Okay, time to get Androidy with it… after the break!

Android: Take Two

First, here’s the Droid and Hero tour I got, courtesy of Casey.

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

Hardware Design

Android’s two entries in the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin couldn’t be any more different. One is made my Motorola, the other by HTC. One runs on Verizon, the other on Sprint (or also on Verizon under the name Droid Eris — more on that later). One is vanilla Android 2.0, the other is HTC’s Sense UI. One is an HD slider, the other an SD slab. One’s design harkens to the hard edges of the Millennium Falcon (if MC Hammer had repainted it), and the other the softer lines of the princess (if that irony isn’t too rich).

Droid

More specifically, the Droid is a well built slider, impossibly thin — iPhone thin — for a device with that type of keyboard. However, that type of keyboard is woefully inadequate on the Droid. It’s so flat and so lacking in separation, it really feels like little more than the stick-on it is. If having a better keyboard would have meant having a thicker Droid, I would have been fine with that. Oh, and that 5-way? Yeah, it’s a 5-way. It confused all of us. It looks like the chip on our new credit cards, feels like it should be a a touch pad, but it seems to be a 5-way. I’m still not sure though. All I know is that it shoves an already poor keyboard all the way to the even-less functional left.

Again, the irony of mocking Apple as having form over function should not be lost. Other than that — and it’s a big “that” for the hardware keyboard set — the build quality here is top notch. (Okay, maybe the camera is disappointing given its specs, but like others I hold hope for a software fix).

The screen is fantastic, however. Big and bright and 16:9, it’s very much what the next generation of smartphones should be.

Hero

The Hero is just as well built. Depending on what version you get, it can be chinned or chinless, but the basic clean curves and clear screen is the same. It isn’t the monster the Droid is — it doesn’t have the huge keyboard or screen or camera, but that’s the point. Not everyone wants a monster, and for those who want more of (I’ll say it!) an iPhone form-factor, the Hero might just be the better Android hardware.

Software Experience

Where to start? Android is now on version 1.5. Or 1.6. Or 2.0. Or maybe 2.1 in beta. And its UI is the Google Experience. Or HTC Sense UI. Or MotoBlur. Or some other stuff like Samsung or Sony are spinning. Is that a software experience or software schism? More on that later.

Droid/with Google Software

The Motorola Droid runs a Google version of Android 2.0. Compared to previous “with Google” devices, it’s good if not great, powerful if not polished. Lightyears ahead of the G1 I tried last year (where it would ask for input when none was possible), but it’s still not the iPhone US. It’s still inconsistent, and for whatever reason, even though Android 2.0 supports multi-touch, the Google apps on the Droid don’t. (And yes that makes a difference on a capacitive device).

If you’re heavily invested in Google services (like I am, and like most geeks are), you won’t find a better shipping device that supports those services. From a real, honest-to-threads-and-labels Gmail app, to free Google Maps Navigation in the US, if you’ve decided Google’s convenience is worth more than your privacy (and it’s a very convenient convenience, which is why most of us have), then deciding Google’s own platform best leverages that isn’t a hard second step.

As to the rest of the OS, it’s pretty much what we saw last year. It’s got multitasking but not as well visually represented as Palm’s webOS. It’s got far better notifications than the iPhone, even if again they may not be as well handled by the UI as webOS. It’s also got apps. Not as many as the iPhone, of course, but building quickly and given the open nature of the Android Market, while the apps may not be as many or as polished as the iPhone, they have apps Apple won’t even let in the store. (Not coincidentally Google’s own Latitude and Voice.

Hero Sense UI

Unlike the Google experience on the Droid, HTC has wrapped up the Hero in Sense UI, an evolution of the TouchFlo UI they previously lacquered on top of Windows Mobile (and will be using going forward on that platform as well).

It’s widgety and beautiful, and works much better on the Hero’s capacitive screen than its predecessor did on the Touch Pro in last year’s Round Robin. The weather animation is still something I unabashedly hope Apple somehow integrates into the iPhone OS. It’s still slightly less intuitive and consistent to me than the iPhone UI — but the eye candy alone balances the scales.

The tradeoff — and there’s always a tradeoff — is that it takes time for HTC to spin their Sense UI on top of Android updates, so while “with Google” devices might go to 2.0 sooner, HTC might only get a Sense UI version out later.

And This is Where it Gets Interesting

To recap: Google offers Android on a liberal, open-source license. Motorola makes MotoBlur for their Android devices, but not for the Droid which uses the Google experience. Actually, Verizon owns the Droid trademark and they also offer a Droid Eris, but that’s made by HTC and is otherwise called the Hero and runs Sense UI. HTC also made the G1 and myTouch which don’t run Sense UI. Oh, and the Droid off Verizon will be called the Milestone.

Apple has the iPhone.

Brand-aid

Contrast those two paragraphs. As a consumer, if you want an iPhone you get an iPhone. As a consumer, I’m not even sure if you know what an Android device is. I’ve seen Droid commercials here in Canada, but that device won’t exist in Canada. I go to my local carrier and try to buy one and get what… confused? And if HTC runs Sense UI on top of Android and Windows Mobile, do I buy an HTC device and not even notice what’s running underneath? Or do I just get a Verizon device like Droid or Eris and never know they’re Android or are the Milestone and Hero?

What I’m getting to there is branding. Apple offers a single, consistent brand. Google’s Android is sundered amid who knows how many brands and while that doesn’t hurt individual devices, could it hurt the platform as a whole? (We’ll be covering Windows Phone next week, which Micrsoft is now calling Windows Phone because it seems many people who had Windows Mobile devices had no idea what platform they actually had — does that answer the question? We’ll see.)

Frak-ture

So the Droid outside Verizon will be the Milestone. And the G1/myTouch off T-Mobile are the Magic/Dream, and on my carrier they might be stuck on Android 1.5 forever, because Google only updates “with Google” devices and HTC may only be updating Sense UI devices, and Rogers certainly doesn’t seem to care. These are devices sold in 2009.

To contrast again, even an iPhone 2G from 2007 is currently running the latest iPhone 3.1.2 software.

I’m tempted to say for an average consumer it won’t matter because they won’t even be aware of updates. They’ll buy the device they want and when and if it doesn’t update (if they even know it didn’t update) they’ll just buy the next device. But I don’t think many average consumers buy Android devices yet (possibly with the exception of the much-hyped Droid on Verizon, who had a paucity of smartphone selection previous to its release).

In general, I think more savvy, geeky users seek out Android, and seek it out specifically, and they’re exactly the type of user who will and should care.

And not just because they may not get the latest Android OS, but because the breadth of Android platforms out there, from 1.5 to beta 2.1 makes a huge target for developers, and not in the good sense of the term. With the iPhone (and iPod touch) there are 50+ million users most of whom updated to 3.x at some point when they plugged into iTunes (and we won’t get into Google still lacking an offline sync/backup/media management tool like iTunes). So the choice for developers is targeting tens of millions of almost identical Apple devices, or nearly a dozen Google phones on 4 different versions of the OS, running one of 3 different UI layers, with at least two different screen resolutions and an odd assortment of input methods (touch only, touch and keyboard, touch and keyboard and trackball/trackpad/etc.)

To put that in some form of end-user perspective, when I first got the G1 last year I went to Android Market and downloaded a Snake game and was told to “push up to start”, and it took forever for me to figure out what “up” they meant. (The screen, the keyboard, the trackball?)

When one of our writers got the Droid, she tweeted exactly the same problem.

It’s hard enough to make a truly spectacular app. It’s harder still to make it when you can’t count on consistent hardware specs or software implementations. Users may not know or notice this, but they feel the lack of great user experience it can lead to.

(Apple needs to pay attention to at least part of this as well if they intend to compete in screen resolution this year).

That Android Thing

Let’s be clear — as much as Apple runs iTunes on low-margins to promote the sale of iPods (including the iPhone), Google gives away web services to promote the attraction of our eyeballs to their advertising. They’re just as happy if those eyeballs are looking at Google services on an Apple or Microsoft or Rim or Palm or whatever platform, but if Microsoft or Apple (for example) ever locked Google out to promote their own services (like Bing or MobileMe), Google would have a problem. (Just look at how Facebook locks out Google for an example).

Enter Android. By having their own platform on the market, Google knows there’s one place from which they can never be locked out. And more than that, they can use it as a lever to promote the technologies that best serve Google services — things that make the web, and hence WebApps run faster and more reliably. That’s good for everybody, but make no mistake — Google does it because it’s good for Google first and foremost.

I state all this not because that makes Google any different from any other for-profit company — or platform in the Round Robin — but because it makes it the same, and for some reason the technorati often likes to assume Google is different. No company is. I’m not sure any company can realistically afford to be.

Which brings us back to Android. Google’s current Mobile OS is a conundrum. It’s a traditional platform OS from the company that’s usually anything but. I still half-suspect Android was acquired solely for the reason stated above — to guarantee Google couldn’t be locked out of the mobile space. Then when Palm released webOS, Google smacked their head and Chrome OS was born. That the most traditional of all smartphone companies beat the new kid, Google to the web-ification of mobile is amazing, and it raises some interesting questions and concerns about the Android platform.

Apple made the iPhone because Steve Jobs wanted an iPhone. Yeah they figured they could sell 50 million of them, but primarily Jobs is a diva who wanted to dent the universe one more time. I’m guessing RIM makes BlackBerrys because they’re just as passionate about that pushy little platform. Elevation Partners may be sinking money into Palm in a bet to get a part of the huge mobile pot of the future, but if Rubinstein hadn’t have wanted it he could have stayed retired on his giant pile of Apple-bucks and let Palm churn out the Treo 900. And Microsoft… well I don’t really get the feeling Ballmer cares about Windows Mobile any further than he thinks Microsoft needs that screen in its collection, and I think that’s part of their core problem (but we’ll get to that next week).

Google has much the same problem as Microsoft — the people at the top don’t seem to be, and really don’t need to be, as passionate about their platform, and that shows. Now I’m not saying Andy Rubin, who founded Android isn’t passionate, and I’m sure many of the Googlers are deeply passionate about Android, but at the top Android doesn’t exist because Eric or Sergey or Larry just had to have that phone. It exists, like I said, so that Google can’t get shut off from mobile eyeballs by a competitor.

And that’s what the Android thing feels like to me. Not the product Google wants themselves (that might be Chrome OS), but a strategic move they decided to make.

Conclusion

Yes, Android offers killer Google services integration. If Google is your life, Android is clearly the OS for you. If you don’t use Google, I’m not sure there’s any reason to get Android over another device. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good at everything, but unlike the other devices, it’s not killer at any of them.

It doesn’t have the UI or handle media as well as the iPhone, it’s not the communications monster BlackBerry is, it’s not full-on Linux like Nokia’s Maemo, and it doesn’t make the web manifest, nor handle multitasking or notifications as elegantly as Palm’s webOS.

If you’re on Verizon or T-Mobile or Sprint and want something iPhone-like. If you can’t stand Apple’s dictatorial control over the iPhone app ecosystem. If you want a hardware option other than the full-screen slab. If there’s some dealbreaker for you about the iPhone then Android is a good alternative.

Which is crazy when you think Google makes this OS. They’re the megacorp of the 21st century. They’re a verb. They have more money and talent and reach than almost any other company. They make Android… but I think the problem is they don’t champion it. Again, their ultimate C-level goal isn’t to make the best smartphone on the planet, they’re goal is to get the most eyeballs on the planet, and that means making great stuff for every platform.

Now it’s quite possible that Google will keep iterating and by this time next year it could be head and shoulders above everyone else. It could be the “iPhone killer”, swarming over Apple’s device with a hive of Android-powered alternatives, some of which are clearly better in many or most ways. Anything is possible when it comes to Google. (Though people used to say that about Microsoft as well, but again we’ll visit that next week).

In the end, this is a very different review than I expected to write, and I think that’s because of how much I expected from Google this year. Arguably Android has as much if not more potential than any other platform, yet now in year two it still doesn’t seem to fully realize it. It doesn’t seem as ground-breaking as it should. Just look at how far Palm has come with webOS out of almost nowhere. Google’s had longer than that with Android and far more resources than Palm. That makes no sense to me, except that it’s exactly how Google has positioned it. For now.

Next year Google might just announce free cell service for everyone in the US. Then it’s game over.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Android Motorola Droid and HTC Hero Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Google, Reviews, android vs iphone, droid, hero

iPhone Hands-on from an Android User’s Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

December 30th, 2009

This week our main man Casey Chan from Android Central got a hands-on demo of the iPhone 3GS from yours truly, so be sure to check out that video. Now he’s asking TiPb iPhone Forum members for their help as well. Every day you reply to that thread, you’re entered for a chance to WIN AN iPHONE 3GS! (smartphoneroundrobin.com has all your details!)

Also, this week on the Cell Phone Junkie Podcast, all the Smartphone Expert editors get together for a round-table talk on the iPhone, where it is, and what the future holds for Apple’s mobile platforms. Listen in!

Lastly, I’m getting droidy with it over at the Android Central Forums, not sure what that slide out alphabet is really for on Motorola, and getting splashed by HTC’s awesome Sense weather app. Help me out and you could win the Android smartphone of your choice as well!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Hands-on from an Android User’s Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

Google Android HTC Hero, Motorola Droid Hands-on Video — Smartphone Round Robin

December 28th, 2009

Week 3 the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin serves me up on a princess-splattered platter for Google’s Android platform with the equally pretty HTC Hero and the red-eyed macho-mech, Motorola’s DROID.

Our ace Android Central expert, the generally non-grievous Casey Chan is helping me out in the video below the fold, and I’ve also headed over to AC’s cantina to mind-trick me some answers.

Remember, every day you post on my Android Central Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win the Android of your choice. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

And since turn-about is fair play, the aforementioned Casey has returned from the ~~Dark~~ Droid Side to once again wield the iPhone, and you can now be his Yodas in the TiPb Forums! (And win an iPhone 3GS!)

Now brace yourselves for the jump to lightspeed (and a week of poor Star Wars puns!) because Casey’s about to show me everything new and hopeful about Hero’s Sense UI and Droid’s Android 2.0!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Google Android HTC Hero, Motorola Droid Hands-on Video — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Motorola Droid, android vs iphone, htc hero

iPhone Review from WMExperts’ Phil — Smartphone Round Robin

December 27th, 2009

I’m an iPhone. Phil’s a Windows Phone. Typically the jokes about creaky old, stylus and resistive bound, UI impaired smartphones of generations past would start there, but for this year’s Smartphone Round Robin Phil’s strapped with the HTC HD2 and not only are we unable to poke fun — we’re afraid to. But now that he’s armed with the Windows Phone equivalent of an ICBM, how will he treat our iPhone?

Given the amazing help our TiPb Forum members provided him, I’m hoping the answer is “well”. To find out, head on over and read Phil’s complete iPhone from a Windows Mobile perspective review and then let him (and us!) know what you think.

Did he nail it or did he fail it? Remember, you can still add a reply to the forums for another chance to win a brand new iPhone 3GS! (Or a brand new BlackBerry if you help me out on the CrackBerry Forums).

Speaking of me — I’m about to jump the next star freighter bound for Android Central, holding out for a sassy princess Hero and wondering who’s looking for that Droid. Empire-style sequel or Phantom-mess prequel? Watch for my video, under the googley guidance of Casey Chan, coming Monday.

And for all the other videos, reviews, and contest threads (there are 6 smartphones up for grabs after all!) keep your browsers locked on smartphoneroundrobin.com!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Review from WMExperts’ Phil — Smartphone Round Robin

BlackBerry 9700 and BlackBerry Storm2 Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

December 27th, 2009

RIM has one of the oldest OS platforms in the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, but unlike Nokia’s S60 (reviewed here last week), and Microsoft which is busy rebuilding, CrackBerry.com’s signature BlackBerry Bold 9700 and BlackBerry Storm2 enjoy huge popularity in North America, a seemingly unbreakable hold on the Enterprise market, and an ever-increasing focus on consumers.

Last year, Dieter likened the previous BlackBerry Bold 9000 to the Treo 650 — perhaps the ultimate representation of a platform at its peek of perfection… yet raising the question of where that platform had left to go. On the other hand, the original Storm1 never failed to disappoint, a hit in numbers but not hearts of BlackBerry lovers. Now it’s a year later. Does the BlackBerry Bold 9700 take the roll of Treo 680, a slimmer, more polished perfection, still not hinting at platform futures to come? And does the Storm2 get right what the Storm2 done so wrong?

To try and answer that, the SPE editors did a Round Table with Mickey for the Cell Phone Junkie podcast, and I got plenty of help from CrackBerry Kevin and a stupefying amount of information from the CrackBerry Forums. Huge thanks to everyone — I needed it!

(And just a reminder, every day you post on my CrackBerry.com thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you’re entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Okay, time to bring the BlackBerry rain… after the break!

If you haven’t watched it already, check out my BlackBerry 9700 and Storm 2 walkthrough with Kevin. It’ll help with the context.

Back in BlackBerry

Here are some other helpful links:

Got it? Good.

Hardware Design

BlackBerry 9700 — Bold but not Bolder

RIM typically makes great hardware and the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is no exception. If last year’s BlackBerry Bold 9000 was the full-sized Cadillac limo of front-facing-QWERTY, this is the new Caddy coupe. It’s everything that was great about the device made slicker and faster. The most notable change is the width. Gone is the epic expanse of the Bold1, repackaged now in Curve-like proportions. And I kinda miss the luxurious size of the Bold 1, to be frank. It better fit the Bold name and the sheer audacity of the form factor screamed flagship. This new Bold2 is like the recession era remake. Still premium, but trying not to be all overt about it.

What I don’t regret is the trackball has been replaced by the new, sexy trackpad. Just like the Mighty Mouse became the Magic Mouse, RIM has eschewed mechanical, misfiring parts for optical, touchable technology. Bravo. BlackBerry users will never be gunked-up again.

Storm 2 — the Mulligan

Remember when I said RIM typically makes great hardware? I said typically because, given Kevin’s gripes about the design-decisions behind the Storm1, I can’t say always. Happily, the Storm2 seems to fix each and every one of those gripes. No more leaking light from around the edges, no more wobbly little feet on the back, and no more giant honking button for a screen. Now there are four medium non-honking buttons — or button-like things. The amazing of it is, when the power is off the BlackBerry Storm 2’s screen isn’t a button at all. You can’t press. It’s as un-pressable as an iPhone. Turn the power on, however, and suddenly you can press away, and due to the 4 actuators (or whatever they are) you can do so far better than you ever could with the Storm1. See, with that old bag of hurt, you pressed, waited for the whole thing to come back again, then could do a second press. Click. Pause. Click. Pause. Click. Pause. Roll eyes. Click. A huge drag for typing.

Now, with Storm2 it’s almost like multitouch. You can press and only that “button” goes down, which means you can immediately press somewhere else and almost always get a different “button” to recognize the input. Click. Click. Clicketyclickclick. Click. Much improved.

It’s still 2 steps — navigate to/select what you want via touch, confirm/execute what you want via press. For example, touch “A” to highlight it, press “A” to write it in. This is RIM’s trademark input paradigm, after all. But with Storm2 you can press right through, essentially selecting and confirming in one shot. (Yeah, you could do that with Storm1, but the “wait for the one button” schtick effectively ruined it).

In other words, you can either go the sure and safe way, carefully selecting then confirming, or the fast and loose way, just typing away. It’s nice to have the option — and to have it workable and so much less frustrating this time around.

Software Experience

Like Apple, RIM makes incredible hardware flawlessly integrated with fantastic software. Unlike Apple, however, who have kept almost identical device-types over the last 2 years, RIM has embraced a wide variety of form-factors, and hasn’t developed a unified, carrier-interference-free, method of keeping even the last couple years of all those devices updated to the same OS. (Witness a list of BlackBerrys that will, and by omission will not be getting 5.0).

Storm2 and Bold2 definitely have the latest and greatest, so that’s what I’m looking at. But here’s the thing — due to RIM’s enterprise footprint, a lot of the new features they have been adding over the last year aren’t obviously consumer facing (some seem to require an enterprise server on the back end). That makes it hard for an iPhone guy like me, who doesn’t really know his BIS from his BES, to just pick up and point out how RIM’s latest OS, 5.0, is different from last year’s 4.x offering.

(Maybe that’s a criticism of Apple, where things as absurd as cut and paste and MMS make for easy generational demos.)

Luckily, CrackBerry.com has a full list of BlackBerry OS 5.0’s incremental features as well.

JavaScript being turned on by default in the web browser is huge, however, though not as huge as their getting a WebKit browser will be — hopefully by next year.

App World! Application Time! Excellent!

As opposed to 5.0, RIM’s new BlackBerry App World is easily pointed out. Following the success of Apple’s iTunes App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch in 2008, every other platform raced to launch one in 2009. Of course, almost all of them already had 3rd party apps and had them for years, but the centralized, on-every-device and all-in-one-place model was, well, revolutionary.

RIM has kinda, sorta done that with App World, though there are a few exceptions. Since places like the CrackBerry.com App Store have been serving up software for years, there wasn’t the exclusivity or desperation for it like there was on the iPhone. Also, in RIM’s incredibly partner friendly manner, there’s some weird arrangement of App Worlds and carrier-specific (and other) storefronts that are or will be available.

That means, however, they can avoid the “rejected apps” controversy that still plagues Apple, and since they’ve made price-points fixed — for example, you can have free apps, but the next step up is $2.99 — they’re hoping to avoid the “race to the bottom” that many believe also plagues the App Store.

Needful Hierarchies and Business as Unusual

If you haven’t yet read Kevin’s Hierarchy of Smartphone Needs, go do it now. I’ll play games on my iPhone while I wait.

Back, okay. Brilliant stuff there and important to keep in mind because devices like the iPhone and the BlackBerry can both be best-in-class when we’re talking about different classes. And different businesses. That’s a point I come back to over and over again when we reach BlackBerry week in the Round Robin. I understand and deeply appreciate how perfect the BlackBerry is when it comes to super-quick, keyboard-driven messaging that can go for days. For many users, and for many types of classical business (finance, sales), that’s what matters most.

The iPhone’s strengths aren’t in messaging (unless we’re talking Twitter — I’ll put iPhone’s top Twitter apps against any other platforms). I’ve even joked that when I’m using my iPhone and a phone call or message comes in, I get mad at the interruption. (Yes, joking. Kinda.)

For internet anywhere, for work that involves creativity, design, or requires complex apps, the iPhone becomes decidedly the professional choice.

It’s that duality between iPhone and BlackBerry that I think explains why we see so many users dual-wielding both. That BlackBerry is getting better about browsers is great. If they would dump their app size limits and JavaME abstractions, it would be fantastic. But then Apple would have to figure out a unified email client, release a Mobile iChat, and figure out better enterprise management. What Bizarro universe that would be, it would be hard to imagine…

BlackBerry to the Future

…Which doesn’t mean I won’t try.

A couple of years ago — last year even — the general concern in the Round Robin was that RIM had hit the end of the line with the BlackBerry OS, that they would need to “spend their time in the desert” the way Palm had to transition from PalmOS to webOS, and Microsoft is now doing to grow from Windows Mobile 5/6/6.5 to Windows Mobile 7.

RIM has done a lot since to mitigate those concerns. The BlackBerry Developers Conferences have been a huge part of that. New APIs, the aforementioned WebKit browser, support for widgets and localized WebApps, OpenGL for gaming, etc. will certainly modernize the BlackBerry OS.

But they won’t make it a modern OS.

Now sure, that’s hypocritical coming from the guy who’s platform is based on BSD Unix, which is no spring chicken to say the least. But while the foundations of the iPhone OS are tried and true, the upper layers, especially Apple’s Core APIs (CoreAnimation, CoreData, etc.) and the Objective C-based Cocoa Touch frameworks give developers a huge advantage — especially the major developer, Apple.

The Bold 9700 is the no-compromise BlackBerry. If the 9000 was the Treo 650, this is the Treo 680. But like Palm faced with that device, the question becomes, what’s next? It’s possible RIM can continue their incremental evolution, keep the platform modernized and meaningful for many years to come. But it’s jut as possible BB OS is at its prime, and RIM, like Palm did with webOS, may need to — or may already be working on — the next generation ‘Berry.

Conclusion

This is where I try to bring it all together from an iPhone point of view. And from that point of view, I can say if you’re trying to choose between an iPhone and a BlackBerry Bold 9700, you’re… well it’s an easy choice. They’re Yin and Yang, day and night, and while there is some overlap their areas of excellence remain so opposite, so complementary, if you think for a moment about what you’re actual needs are, it’ll be immediately apparent which one you need — and the answer to that could actually be both. (Them dual-wielders we keep seeing).

Sure, AT&T can be a factor. Can’t use AT&T, can’t really use an iPhone in the US (though plenty of people in SF and NYC apparently keep trying, regardless). But if you need a glorified pager with the best messaging in the business, if you wear a suit and tie and all your VIPeeps are on BBM, if you just have to have a physical keyboard (and why not the best one), you’re a Bold.

If, on the other hand, you want a glorified iPod, if you need the web on the go, 116,000 apps for that (which sounds ridiculous until you can’t find the one of them you really need on another platform), access to high performance audio and video isn’t a nice-to-have but a must-have-it, and if Apple’s pushing-the-pace of smartphone innovation appeals to you now and into the future, you’re an iPhone.

And what about the Storm2? That Verizon threw it under the bus in favor of the Droid is kind of a shame, but only kind of — the Storm line is an attempt to adapt the BlackBerry experience for a touchscreen. It wasn’t designed for that form factor, and for many it might not be what the BlackBerry experience is about anyway (there’s just something so “right” about BB OS on Bold-style hardware). The Storm2 is a square peg better forced into a round hole, but unless your needs really demand some BlackBerry/iPhone hybrid, or you’re Verizon4Life, getting the best of either is probably better than settling for the okay of both.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

BlackBerry 9700 and BlackBerry Storm2 Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, 9700, blackberry bold, blackberry storm, storm2

TiPb Presents: iPhone Live! #81 — Back in BlackBerry!

December 24th, 2009

Join Rene and Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com for Round Robin BlackBerry Bold2 and Storm2 vs. iPhone, mega iTablet, iPhone HD, and iPhone 4.0 rumors, and all the week’s news and opinions. Listen in!

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

I Called You — iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Presents: iPhone Live! #81 — Back in BlackBerry!

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Featured, Podcast, blackberry bold, iphone live, iphone vs blackberry, itablet, storm2

iPhone from a Windows Phone User’s Perspective, Smartphone Round Robin

December 23rd, 2009

rene_phil_iphone

I’m an iPhone. Phil’s a Windows Phone. But this week our good buddy from WMExperts is taking a look at TiPb’s signature device, and to he’s asking TiPb iPhone Forum members for their help in understanding Apple’s integrated, iTunes-bound universe dent’er. And remember, every day you reply to that thread, you’re entered for a chance to WIN AN iPHONE 3GS! (smartphoneroundrobin.com has all your details!)

Meanwhile, I’m over at CrackBerry.com trying to figure out why the BlackBerry Bold 9700’s touchscreen just won’t work! (And why the Storm2 holds such a grudge!) Head on over to the CrackBerry Forums and give me a hand, and you could win the BlackBerry smartphone of your choice as well!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone from a Windows Phone User’s Perspective, Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, iphone vs windows phone, phil nickinson

BlackBerry Bold 9700, Storm2 Hands-on Video, Smartphone Round Robin

December 21st, 2009

Week 2 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin sees me take on TiPb’s Public Frenemy #1, the almost-diametrically opposed BlackBerry — or is it? This year in addition to the new flagship BlackBerry Bold 9700, we officially have an actual touch-screen ‘Berry in the ‘Robin — the Storm2. What’s an iPhone blogger to do?

Lucky for me, I have the world’s foremost BlackBerry lover in my corner, CrackBerry Kevin Michaluk himself, and as if that weren’t enough, I’ve enlisted the million-strong CrackBerry Nation to help me out as well!

Remember, every day you post on my CrackBerry Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win the BlackBerry of your choice. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

Now grab your hotdogs, popcorn, and spicy drink, because after the break CrackBerry Kevin gives me a guided tour of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Storm 2, and everything new in hardware and BlackBerry OS 5.0.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

BlackBerry Bold 9700, Storm2 Hands-on Video, Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, BlackBerry, blackberry bold, blackberry storm, storm 2

iPhone Review from PreCentral.net’s Dieter, Smartphone Round Robin

December 19th, 2009

hmmm-iphone

I don’t envy Dieter’s introduction to the 3rd Annual Smartphone Round Robin — reviewing the iPhone 3GS for PreCentral.net. He’s had to review various generations of iPhone more than a few times already, both for TiPb and for the last two Round Robins. While other platforms offer skads of devices in all form of factors, the iPhone remains THE iPhone. That’s not to say it doesn’t evolve, however, and TiPb takes HUGE pride in our iPhone Forum members who offered such great help and advice, bringing Dieter fully up to speed (literally) with the iPhone 3GS and 3.1 software.

So what was Dieter’s final take away for the iPhone in 2009? Go check it out and let him, and us, know what you think. (And hey, if vociferous agreement or righteous indignation aren’t motivators enough, you can still add a reply a day in the forums for a chance to win a brand new iPhone 3GS!)

As for me, I’m about to get back into BlackBerry with the Storm2 and Bold 9700. Watch for my video, under the addicted guidance of CrackBerry Kevin, coming Monday.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Review from PreCentral.net’s Dieter, Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Dieter

Nokia S60 N97 mini and Maemo N900 Review — Smartphone Round Robin

December 18th, 2009

How does the iPhone compare to sibling site NokiaExperts.com’s two platforms, trusty Symbian S60 OS as seen in the N97 mini and the next generation Maemo OS of the N900? That’s the question I’m looking to answer in TiPb’s first week of the 3rd annual Smartphone Round Robin

I’ll confess from the start that I wasn’t terribly familiar with Nokia’s platforms coming into this review. They dominate the rest of the world, of course, but for a variety of reasons they haven’t made much of a dent here in North America yet. Lucky for me, the SPE network has reached across the pond to Seattle (hey, there must be ponds between Montreal and Seattle!) to bring Matthew Miller to the table this year. His tremendous knowledge and enthusiasm — along with the incredible help I received from the NokiaExperts community — are the only reason this review was able to happen. So to him and to them; thanks.

(Speaking of the NokiaExperts community, remember you can still jump on that thread and each day you reply, you’re entered to win your choice of Nokia smartphones, including the two reviewed below!)

Now let’s get it on… after the break!

Hardware Design

Nokia is often — and rightly — praised for their hardware. Heck, any company that can make stainless steel smartphones and still get great radio reception knows the deep dark secrets of telephony. Let’s not even mention the 8-megapixel camera model either. (I know I won’t, I can’t remember all the numbered names the way Matt can).

And that’s one of the first thing to note about this year’s Round Robin and our platform-centric, rather than device-centric mandate. Decidedly unlike the iPhone, Nokia (and every other entrant) fields multiple models and form factors every year. In Nokia’s case specifically, maybe too many (though they’ll reportedly be cutting back in 2010). Luckily for me, both the N97 mini and N900 (can I call it maxi?) are horizontal sliders.

Last year I had some misgivings about the sliders as they generally felt “squeaky” and unmistakably two parts even when closed together into one. Nokia’s felt solid (so solid Matt had to help me open them up the first time). If physical keyboards are a must for you, and you love the landscape, this by itself gives both one huge advantage. (Big fat camera lens with blinding LED flashes gives both another.)

Where the Nokia devices differ is that the N97 mini is a slender candybar when its keyboard is stowed. Nokia really trimmed off the sides when they slapped on the mini, and while the d-pad was lost, the arrow keys and right-aligned space bar made the smallish physical keyboard perfectly fine to type on.

The N900, by comparison is a beast. It’s exactly Nokia’s internet tablets past with a phone thrown in just for the fun (and future) of it. It wasn’t the biggest slab in this year’s slobber-knocker (we’ll get to the HD2 in coming weeks) but that’s not for lack of trying. If the BlackBerry Bold 9000 remains the Cadillac of smartphones (and keyboards) this thing is the F150 truck — pure power. If a netbook is still too big for you, here’s an alternative. Seriously.

Neither, however, have the iconic singularity of feel or sheer solidity of the iPhone (not that any slider could). The N900 especially keeps design out of the way, but where the iPhone is the pure sex of glass and chrome and plastic so tough it really, truly, does not blend, Nokia’s devices manage to be equally black and shiny, though undoubtedly less iconic. Also, having no slider makes the iPhone much slimmer and more pocketable than either Nokia device.

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Software Experience

For a great reference look at the software on these Nokia devices, check out Matt’s videos:

Back? Okay, here we go!

That Jailbreak Thing

I’ll state this at the outset of every review — for the Round Robin, we’re dealing with a stock iPhone. Sure, if you do run a Jailbroken iPhone, it does change the equation considerably — full background multitasking, robust notification systems, complete theming options, apps not approved by Apple, and so on. But fair is fair, and this review compares only the iPhone that Apple gave us.

Multitasking Mania

The iPhone multitasks very well, thank you. But since the iPhone is the only entrant in the 2009 Round Robin that doesn’t let 3rd party apps run in the background, we’re going to start with this and likely concede the same ground for every week, and every platform that follows.

Nokia, by stark contrast, multitasks its apps off. They’re just all supposed to run in the background. On the N97 mini, however, this creates a bit of a problem as Nokia, for some unimaginable reason, decided to drastically starve the device of much-needed RAM. So, yes, you can run many apps at once and enjoy background refreshes and streaming music and whatever you want — you’ll just run out of memory quite often when you do so. Heckuva job there, Nokia.

The N900 on the other hand does it with RAM to spare. 4 desktops to swipe through (or press, drag to be more exact), with multiple apps, widgets, and full, live, Mozilla browser windows open all at the same time. If I could drag and drop between them, I might forget I wasn’t using a desktop OS. In fact, not being able to drag and drop is the only thing making me less worried about the iPhone still not multitasking.

Right now, the only major advantage to multitasking is speed of app update and transition. On the iPhone, for example, when I launch my RSS app I have to wait for it to check and update, which feels like it takes a long time. Having that updating transparently in the background would be great. Likewise, the old cliche about not being able to stream Pandora still applies. Otherwise, 2 factors help mitigate the lack of 3rd party notification for much of my daily use — 1) Push Notification handles a lot of deal-breakers that would otherwise come up (i.e. you are near-instantly alerted to a new IM) and 2) the iPhone 3GS is so fast, and developers are getting so good at saving state, that the app switching between closed apps becomes pretty much unnoticeable.

However, when we really start to see multiple apps become usable at the same time, when they can interact together as peers (rather than one being in the background while the other interacts with the user), the game will change again, and Apple better be ready. (And yes, I’ll come back to this when I get my shot at webOS in weeks to come).

In the meantime, Nokia is great at multitasking but in a way that makes it a nice-to-have for me, not a must-have. I wouldn’t choose S60 over Maemo or either over iPhone just because of it (or rather, because the iPhone lacks it).

Customize This

One of the first things Matt pointed out to me on the N97 mini was how easy it was to customize the experience. No, not just wallpaper though that’s certainly a snap. He could arrange his apps in folders, where and how he wanted them. More so, S60 supports widgets and supports them well. The iPhone doesn’t support them at all.

If you’re not familiar with widgets, think Dashboard on OS X or Sidebar/Gadgets in Windows Vista/Windows 7. If you’re not familiar with those, think small applets that run on the home screen and dedicate themselves to showing you easily glance-able bits of information. So, you could (and they do) have Twitter status widgets showing the most recent post or two in your @mentions, weather info for your city, breaking news headlines, and many others that you can create, enable, and slap up onto the screen.

But with the ability to manage your device to that degree comes with it the equal and opposite reality of a device that needs to be managed to that degree. If you don’t want to fuss with your phone or deal with folders or figure out what widget really should go where, Apple is more than happy to decide for you (or just decide you don’t need some of that stuff anyway). And that’s not me being obtuse (yet), that’s a very real segment of the iPhone’s user base — people who just want something that works, not something that makes them have to work.

The Right to Remain Resistive

Plain and simple, Nokia won’t offer any capacitive multitouch screens until 2010. That means both the S60 N97 mini and the Maemo N900 come with resistive touch screens. In their favor, both work pretty well. They work well enough I never felt the need to reach for a stylus (and Matt later told me the N97 mini doesn’t even come with one — how’s that for resistive confidence!)

Having gotten used to glass, capacitive screens over the last couple years of iPhone use, however, I’ve come to regard using a resistive device as a chore. Instead of light flicks and swipes with the finger, Nokia devices require firm presses and drags with the finger nail. Sure, resistive screens are more pixel-precise, but they’re far less immediate than capacitive ones, and that lack of immediacy results — for me — in a lack of connection to my device. The iPhone’s screen feels like it knows what you want it to do and just does it. Nokia’s screens feel like they do what you force them to.

If you absolutely need a stylus or want to put your long fingernails to work, you may be just fine with resistive, but especially for new users, I think capacitive is just a far more natural-feeling technology.

State of the Apps

It’s tough for any platform to compete with the (as of this review) 116,000 plus iPhone and iPod touch apps in the iTunes App Store. Nokia is going to try with the Ovi Store, already launched for the S60 and coming soon for the N900. Then again, there will be no approval-style gatekeeping that I’m aware of on Nokia either. So, while there are less apps, there will also be less apps rejected or simply not allowed because the platform owner doesn’t want them.

In fact, Symbian is in the process of going open source with the Symbian Foundation, which claims it will be even more open that Google’s Android platform. So if that’s your scene, it’s certainly something to consider.

There are some inarguably excellent S60 apps as well, including the social-network powerhouse, Gravity, and two way video calling with Fring (the iPhone can only receive, not send, video calls via Fring). For the N900, you have to be a higher level geek and get into repositories if you want 3rd party apps, but come on, the thing runs a full Mozilla desktop-style browser. (That includes Flash, and Flash-ads, for good and ill).

For those contemplating making the switch, however, it’s a mixed bag of hurt. You’ll get more apps on the iPhone — more variety of apps and variety of choices within each type of app, but only so far as Apple approves them. For new-to-smartphone users, Apple providing a managed (would that we could say well-managed) environment is likely more positive than negative. It’s a dictatorship but a mostly benevolent one, easier and safer, and ultimately that’s a comfortable way to start.

Conclusion

People get the iPhone because they want the iPhone. In North America I think it’s fair to say people have to really want Nokia to get a Symbian S60 or Maemo device. While you can only get the iPhone on AT&T, that also means it’s subsidized down to $199 or $299 ($99 for the 3G). Nokia hasn’t been able to come to terms with US carriers for most of their devices, which means you’ll have to pay full price on top of your monthly cel service (though perhaps absent a long term contract). Even then you’ll be restricted to GSM carriers AT&T and T-Mobile, and if they don’t have T-Mobile’s unique 3G bands, restricted to EDGE speeds.

Likewise, all the power of Nokia’s platforms demand greater responsibility from the user. The more you can manage, the more you typically have to manage. Again, that’s what many Nokia fans love, but it’s not something everyone will want to bother with, and its what makes me say you really have to want it want it.

The real crux of the two Nokia platforms, however, comes down to the fact that there are two Nokia platforms — one struggling to remain relevant and the other working to become credible. That Nokia is the world leader in smartphones with a fortune in the bank means there’s no real risk in adapting either — Nokia isn’t going anywhere. But it is a little disturbing that they’re keeping both horses in the race. Pushing a smartphone platform into the forefront of consumer mindshare is tough. Pushing two, when North America has eluded them so in the past borders on the strategically unfathomable. Sure, S60 is transitioning to open source and theoretically won’t be entirely Nokia’s burden alone, but considering what (and who) else is happening in the space, it will still be almost entirely Nokia’s burden alone.

These are the dichotomies that face Nokia and its platforms — globally popular yet locally unknown, past its prime yet not ready for primetime, targeted at emerging markets yet embraced by high-order geeks. And given the strength of other options, I’m not sure it’s one most consumers will be willing to investigate.

At the end of the day (and of this review) the best advice I can offer is this — if you’re trying to decide between Apple’s iPhone and Nokia’s N97 mini or N900, get the iPhone. If you know the iPhone is not enough for you, if it’s too limited or you’re just too much geek, then get Nokia, and seriously consider the N900. Better to brave the future than get stuck in the past. (Heck, if you want the world’s tiniest Linux netbook with a phone bolted on, get the N900.)

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Nokia S60 N97 mini and Maemo N900 Review — Smartphone Round Robin

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, Featured, Reviews, Symbian, maemo, nokia, nokia vs iphone, s60

TiPb Invades PalmCast #88 — Smartphone Round Robin Style!

December 17th, 2009

Derek, and Keith were gracious enough to invite me on to this week’s PalmCast live to help Dieter figure out why he couldn’t find a physical keyboard on the iPhone 3GS, and how to get to all the amazing games and apps in the App Store amid tens of thousands of $0.99 farty flashlights. He did fine. Hopefully we all did, and it’s live on the web and in iTunes now for one and all to enjoy… or to give us what for in the comments.

And remember, every day you help me help Dieter on the TiPb iPhone forums, you get entered for a chance to win a brand new iPhone 3GS! (Details on smartphoneroundrobin.com)

Listen in!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Invades PalmCast #88 — Smartphone Round Robin Style!

Posted in 2009 Smartphone Round Robin, palmcast

TiPb Invades PalmCast #88 — Smartphone Round Robin Style!

December 17th, 2009

And remember, every day you help me help Dieter on the TiPb iPhone forums, you get entered for a chance to win a brand new iPhone 3GS! (Details on smartphoneroundrobin.com)

Listen in!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Invades PalmCast #88 — Smartphone Round Robin Style!