Posts Tagged ‘android’
Today marks an Android first: the launch of the T-Mobile Pulse – the first PAYG Android device on the market.
Priced at under £180 this could be exactly what’s needed for Android to move beyond the luxury smartphone market into more mainstream adoption. Infact, this price puts it cheaper than the popular Nokia 5800 XpressMusic on T-Mobile’s current pay-as-you-go price list.
T-Mobile Pulse (image from techcrunch.com)
Using the same processor as the HTC Hero (a Qualcomm MSM7200A for those that like detail) it’s not obvious that many corners have been cut; although the case design isn’t up there with the Hero, and certainly reminds me a little of an old HTC Touch Winmo handset.
Screenwise, the resolution is standard Android at 320×480, although physically its reported to be a little larger that the Hero at 3.5″, making it about the same as the iPhone. See here on why having a physically larger screen could be a good thing for Android usability.
This is great news for mobile consumers, and great news for us at bemoko – we’re huge fans of internet-centric devices with capable browsers. And the more people that use devices like this, the more opportunities this gives us as mobile web designers.
This is the week that we saw Google Voice pulled from Apple’s app store concerning the industry sufficiently for the FCC to investigate.
Google Voice scares AT&T (and probably other operators) as it provides an alternative way for users to make calls as well as making it easy for user to switch between operators whilst keeping the same number (think roaming – pop in a local PAYG SIM).
I look back at my twitter stream from the week and I see a pattern of activity. We wait with baited breath to see if Apple will approve Spotify – an alternative to getting music from iTunes. We also see a pattern of rejections from Apple for PhoneGap apps. PhoneGap is an innovative service that makes it easy for web developers – with HTML, Javascript skills – to create iPhone apps … and Android apps … and Blackberry apps … and soon support for Palm WebOS, Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile apps.
What is made clearly apparent is that an app store owner has control over what they choose to let there users install. Control is good – we don’t want apps to introduce vulnerability and stability risks to our phones and we probably want to avoid some of the shady sides of the industry – but who is to decide where to draw this line? When phone owners only have one place that they can go to get apps we are subject to problems of monopolisation control.
Apple cannot maintain strict control of application delivery to iPhones without seeing a backlash of people looking at alternative platforms with their alternative app stores. Apple have the user experience advantage at the moment – no where else is it so easy for user to get their hands on a rich set of applications – but as alternatives rise which have decent user experience and provide killer functionality missing from the iPhones, iPhone lovers may start to look elsewhere.
Michael Arrington (Techcrunch) quits the iPhone and Steven Frank (Co-founder, Panic) is “Not buying any future iPhone OS based devices” until the situation improves.
Apple, the iPhone and their app store have lifted the mobile industry in the past couple of years. I pray that Apple relax a few of their constraints, as I want Nokia, Palm and the Google Clan to have beat Apple by improving their user experience – not because Apple gives away the customers.
Update:
- Frustrating transcript of a call between Riverturn (provider of Voice Central one of the apps that Apple pulled) and apple highlighting some the challenges that app developers face
- Who refunds all those people who can’t now get support for the app they’ve downloaded and previously paid for
It’s great to see the G1 and Google’s Android make such an impression, in the UK in 2008 it accounted for 20% of all contract sales for T-Mobile and mobile broadband revenues were up 250% over the previous year. This is inspite of the fact that the HTC G1 hardware was not all that great.
Having seen the G2 or more commonly called the HTC Magic at MWC recently this is a far superior device, all touch, great capacitive screen, Android OS, I’d say the second best device at the show behind the Palm Pre. This all bodes well for further increases in uptake by the masses of mobile internet, especially when looking at the Palm Pre and even the Garmin Asus Nuvifone G60! However, it’s a shame that the more experienced and mainstream phone manufacurers just can’t get it together and produce phones that will really give users great internet experiences now that operators are starting to provide decent tarrifs, for example Virgin Mobile offer internet access for £0.30 per day.
Well, these are the devices that were most hyped and as was the rule at MWC this year the hype was inversely proportional to quality. Aside from the Huawei which is an unknown, they really should be better but don’t come close to the benchmark of the iPhone.
LG KM900 / KC910i
LG had a really fancy touch table, full multitap, much like the on in the latest James Bond film. Boded well for the phones but no, touch screen poor and therefore the virtual keyboard just annoying. Interface ok but not slick and not terribly intuitive. There was an interesting array of watch phones.
Samsung Omnia & Beat
Much like the LG’s and previous Samsung touch screens, they don’t do well at registering when and where your finger touches and the UI is nothing special and no real advance. I really liked the idea of the Beat (a mixer on a phone… nice) but with the rubbish touch screen mostly a frustrating experience. Only pics I have are of the stand as there were burly security guys making sure no one took photo’s of the phones. Probably because they are pants and Samsing don’t want anyone to have any proof 
Toshiba TG01
From a distance when we saw this we got rather excited and bustled out way over. Looks nice, big screen, wafer thin but once again let down by the touch screen and it’s Windows Mobile. I’m not particularly anti Microsoft, I’m writing this blog on my Vista laptop, but Windows Mobile is pants! Notice I’m not even bothering to mention the HTC Touch and Diamond (Windows Mobile) and just focusing on the HTC Magic. The TG01 didn’t work at all, the lady on the stand reset it by taking battery out, she couldn’t replace the back of the phone properly and it still didn’t work. She grumpily mumbled it was a prototype.
Huawei Android
This phone was the only one we didn’t manage to get our hands on. Lots of hype and fingers crossed the hardware lives up to Android. When we asked the guy on the stand if we could hold it he just laughed, I didn’t think the Chinese were renowned for their sense of humour.
These are the phones I was most impressed by at MWC this year. In order of preference, best first.
Palm Pre
Best new device I’ve seen, a whole new world of ease of use, great UI and productivity. For a fuller run down see my other blog at mwc-barcelona-palm-pre-best-in-show.
The left pic is the Pre sittingon it’s magnetic induction charger playing a movie. The right pic below is of the task bar you can drag up from below the screen.
HTC Magic (G2)
HTC’s second Android device with a very responsive capacitive touch screen this is a step up from the G1. Virtual keyboard which worked well with the capacitive touch screen. Only available on Vodafone in the UK. As you can see from the pics it’s very slim and good pocket size. To compare and contrast the G1 is bottom right.
Nokia N97
I really wanted to like this phone more for two reasons, the Nokia hospitality at MWC was the best and I really like my N82 but it’s not as good as it could be. Interface is slow (may be better for launch), not multitap, touch screen not very responsive, in fact aside from the big screen, nice angled flip out keyboard and widgets I can’t see any improvement on current NSeries phones. Available from June 2009.
Garmin Nuvifone G60
This nearly made 3rd but bumped to 4th as it’s not as functionally rich as the N97. What it does do of course is full on navigation. It has a nice responsive capacitive touchscreen like the HTC and Palm with a fast and slick UI. I was surprised at the user frieldly, well laid out UI but I guess Garmin are not encumbered with any phone history, just good experience of making decent navigation UI’s. It has a webkit browser with a PC user agent, hence the PC site displayed below, this will be changed for launch. Wi Fi. No ability to write apps for it, it’s a closed platform but does have some nice premade apps, for example “Ciao” a type of find things and friends near me app. In fact I couldn’t find anything it lacked when comparing to my N82 and it’s slim and a good size.
Let’s start with the depression and then I’ll lift you. There are a lot of big name device manufactures that are really struggling at creating that goal of usable mobile internet devices. So apple have paved the way and although they weren’t at the MWC this year – the iPhone they released over a year a go would still have been the cream of today. So what is the competition missing? LG, Samsung and Toshiba are all creating smartphones that miss on so many fronts – clumsy UI, unresponsive touchscreens and slow interactions. Docomo show some promise of innovation with the push into projector phones and I’ll keep an cautious eye on Huawei now that they’re press released their Android strategy and put a shiny phone in a glass box.
The Nokia N97 is making small step forwards, but it doesn’t feel a leap from the excellent N82. I like the home page widgets and the personalisation that comes from this, but the UI is a little tired and was slightly unresponsive. Not a bad phone, but didn’t impressed me like I wanted to be impressed.
When we finally tracked down the HTC Magic we got a glimmer of hope. The device was responsive and showed promise, but it still was lacking that end-to-end-I-want-one feeling. The UI is slightly cluttered and, although it looks more robust than the G1, it still needs someone to take Android and create a polished experience (a goal I don’t think is far off and I strongly believe will happen). A disappointment I’d had on previous windows mobile device was reaffirmed at HTC where I could try the HTC Magic (Android) against the HTC Diamond (Windows Mobile). The HTC Diamond felt it was stuck in the wrong gear. Other people have commented on a similar windows experience – Gizmodo, Edible Apple, PPCKitchen. Is it the hardware / touch screen or is there something inherently up with Windows mobile usability?
I was pleasantly surprised to see Garmin asus make a worthy contender with the G60. Garmin have Android rumours all over them – something that the Garmin representative did nothing to hide – but for the time being the G60 is linux based. Garmin I know well from the satnav section of my Halfords store and Asus I know well from defining and conquering the low priced, well built small laptop market. What a great combination of two trusted brands. People are already budgeting for Garmin satnav devices so the cross over into a tight mobile internet phone seems perfect. The G60 UI is clean simple fast and does the job. It doesn’t show off and isn’t trying to be an all functional smartphone, but it has it’s worthy place and things can only look up for Garmin as they take this strategy forward. Lot’s of choices for them on the direction – not least their distribution channels and how they engage with the operators.
So … leaving the best for last. We were blown away by the Palm Pre – something that Tim has already blogged about. So now wanting to repeat his message, I’ll quickly summarise my thoughts. It’s such a rounded device – both physically (like a polished pebble) and user experience wise. For me user experience is everything – if something annoys or bugs me in a device then it can ruin the whole experience, but here is a device that I couldn’t fault. Albeit, through the rose tinted glasses of desire, I did try to find faults – but they were difficult to find. A few days in my pocket may unearth some. The battery life might be an issue as could the price tag – rumoured at ~$500 (keeping it firmly in the high price end of the market). Those aside – we’ve got a very user-centric device here. Palm have thought about the user and what they want and that includes multi-tasking/multi-cards, clever gestured, subtle on screen feedbacks (where your finger has been), consolidated search interface. The synergy concept to aggregate contacts and calendars from multiple source is great from a consumer view, pulling together social contacts, but also from an enterprise side where it could be pulling in contact from your CRM. This device really is true cross over between consumer and enterprise, seemingly without compromise to either (we’re all people aren’t we so it should be possible). I can see people who like the iPhone and people who like the Blackberry take more than a double look at this Palm pre device and consider that it’s time for a change.
… and did I say the Palm Pre packaging is neat. All recyclable, no bits of plastic and unnecessary plastic bags, whether they did this for marketing or altruistic reasons – it doesn’t matter. It shows they care.
Take care – and here’s to an exciting future for the (mobile) internet.
In the end, and after my much deliberation, I went for the Nokia E61i as my new phone. I always liked the Nokia E61 which was my main phone for most of last year and once you’ve got over the form factor well the E61i is a natural upgrade path. I did ponder over the iPhone, but �269 is just a little too much as an inital payment, when I can get better hardware for “free”. Oh but the UI is so sweet. A colleague got me interested in the Samsung F700, but thankfully I didn’t since the same colleague took the phone back after a few days, as it was pretty deficient in several ways (such as poor PC synchronisation, bad use of the big screen and poor support from Samsung). Maybe Samsung’s software issues will go away when they start building on top of the Android platform. This is not too far in distance since Android is leaving the virtual world and becoming a reality as EU Edge demonstrate with a deployment of Android on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760. The $10million purse for the best mobile apps should also help things along. I’ll find out more at Google’s Android day in London this Thursday.
So why the the Nokia E61i then?
The Wifi support is great. I would love to see better wifi hoping functionality, such as utilising the access point groups to define my preferred access points in order and better support across all the apps. I seem to spend a bit of time in each app switching between access points, but at least connection is pretty solid once set up. Wifi usage does help reduce my Vodafone data usage which is capped at a less than attractive 120Mb per month.
With the E61i, the synchronisation of email, contacts and calendaring is pretty seamless. I’ve got it hooked up to our Zimbra server using the Nokia’s Mail for Exchange client (which you can clearly use for Exchange if you have that). I went for syncing my contacts via my mac with iSync because (i) I was playing around with iSync at the time and (ii) it lets me sync my contacts without an internet connection (e.g. when I’m travelling abroad). You’ll need to download the iSync plugin for the E61i since it isn’t provided by default. With the E61i I really can have my email, contacts and calendaring kept in sync between my phone, mac and zimbra effortlessly.
The E61i has also thrown in a camera which is a nice addition over the E61. Don’t expect too much from the camera, but it’s enough for my purposes which are general taking photos of whiteboards and quick photos on business trips to send back to my wife.
The UI is intuitive and quick – the ability to configure the shortcut buttons allows me to get to what I want to quickly. The screen and keyboard are fantastic – I can easily read my inbox and write messages whilst in queues and on the move. Of course the mobile browsing can pretty much read anything out there and do a reasonable job on it, whether I’m using the default browser or opera mini.
So all in all a pretty handy device whilst I’m out and about (or even at home but don’t want to flip out my computer to read my mails). And with a bluetooth headset I don’t have to put the brick that it is to my ear.