Technologizer » Smartphones

The Nexus One Gets AT&T Friendly

Harry McCracken — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:18:39 +0000

When Google released its Nexus One “superphone” back in January, it was available in both a subsidized version locked to T-Mobile and a $520 unlocked one. But even the unlocked one wouldn’t work on AT&T’s frequencies at 3G speed. Which left it as a sort of pseudolocked phone: Almost nobody would choose to buy it and use it on AT&T rather than T-Mobile.

Now Google has a new version of the Nexus One that’s compatible with AT&T 3G. It’s not an “AT&T Nexus One,” exactly: It’s only available as a $529 unlocked phone, and Google appears to have no marketing relationship with AT&T. But given how crippled AT&T’s own first Android handset is, the AT&T-friendly Nexus One is currently the coolest Android phone that’ll run on that carrier. By far. And it’s also the first new AT&T-ready handset to remotely rival the iPhone for general sex appeal.

Of course, at $529, it’s a phone with an even more limited market than the apparently slow-selling existing Nexus One. But I’m especially curious about one thing: Will the people who spring for it find it to work any better on AT&T’s network than the iPhone 3GS does?

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Windows Phone 7 Series: No Full Multitasking

Harry McCracken — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:53:05 +0000

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series OS may not look much like the iPhone, but the platforms have a number of philosophical similarities. Including the fact that only Microsoft’s only own apps will be allowed to run in the background. (At least at first: Microsoft, unlike Apple, says it intends to let third-party programs multitask eventually.)

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Windows Phone 7 to Get Netflix

Harry McCracken — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:04:06 +0000

For some folks, here’s a fairly compelling reason to buy a Windows Phone 7 Series handset: Microsoft’s mobile OS is going to get Netflix Watch Instantly.

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A Good Hire

Harry McCracken — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:30:32 +0000

Tim Bray, one of the smartest, most influential guys on the Internet, is joining Google’s Android team. Good for him; smart of Google.

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First Impressions: Opera Mini on the iPhone

Harry McCracken — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:26:08 +0000

Here at South by Southwest Interactive, I finally got a little hands-on time with Opera Mini for the iPhone, which Opera started showing off last month at the Mobile World Congress Show in Barcelona. The Norwegian browser company told me that it’s still putting the finishing touches on it and plans to submit it to the iPhone App Store real soon now.

On every platform it runs on, Opera Mini’s signature feature is that it’s speedy, thanks to server-side compression that crunches Web pages down before they get sent to the browser. In my extremely informal experiments here at SXSW, Mini didn’t feel particularly zippy. (Actually, it loaded the New York Times’ home page more slowly than Mobile Safari did.) But it may not have been a real-world test of how it’ll perform when Apple approves it (please!) and it shows up on the App Store: An Opera representative told me that the compression is still going on via servers in far-away Norway, which would tend to bog things down.

Whatever its performance turns out to be like, Opera Mini has some features that might lead some folks to opt for it over Safari, at least on a part-time basis. It’s got Opera’s Speed Dial feature, which lets you get to favorite Web sites with one tap. It uses Opera Link to synchronize bookmarks with other copies of Opera on different devices. It lets you search for text within the current page, a pretty basic feature which Safari lacks.

On the other hand, Mini doesn’t try to match the desktop-like accuracy with which Safari renders Web pages: It just displays a rough approximation (albeit an acceptable one, at least on the pages I visited). And I don’t think it offers Safari’s ability to play YouTube videos.

Once Opera submits Mini for approval, Apple’s response will be one of the bigger litmus tests in iPhone history to date. Apple has been known to reject apps on the grounds that they duplicate existing iPhone functionality or might confuse users. But iPhone owners deserve to be treated like grownups who are smart enough to try multiple browsers before settling on one if they so choose. Just as they get to do on Android and just about every other platform, mobile or otherwise.

By submitting Opera Mini, Opera will be doing iPhone owners a favor. Heck, it’ll even do Apple a favor, by giving it a golden opportunity to do the right thing.

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Rhapsody Readies Offline Music for iPhone

Harry McCracken — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:02:59 +0000

I’m at the amazing South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, where I ran into a couple of folks from the Rhapsody music service who gave me a quick peek of something I’ve been waiting for since Rhapsody hit the iPhone in September: an update to the iPhone app that lets you download music over 3G or Wi-Fi to the phone so plays directly from the handset rather than streaming over the Internet. The company says it’s finishing it up and planning to submit it to the App Store shortly.

Caching music locally guarantees that a song won’t die in midplay if your Internet connection flakes out. It lets you listen in places where the Internet doesn’t go, like most airplanes. And it uses way less battery power. Basically, it should make a $15-per-month Rhapsody to Go subscription look a lot more attractive. (The usual rules of subscription music apply: You can listen all you want as long as you pay the monthly fee, but if you cancel service all the albums you’ve added to your collection go away.)

Once Rhapsody for iPhone does offline music–I’m assuming Apple will approve it without delay–the one feature it’ll lack that you’d want is the ability to play in the background while you use another app. That’ll only happen if Apple enables third-party multitasking. But Rhapsody says that it plans to add music downloading soon to its Android app, which already runs fine in the background.

Here’s a video preview of the iPhone app from Rhapsody:

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Opera Mini 5 Beta for Android

Harry McCracken — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:26:33 +0000

Opera has released a beta of its Opera Mini 5 browser for Google’s Android OS. Mini’s signature feature is the way it caches and compresses Web pages on the server side so they’re relatively snappy on a phone even via a sluggish wireless connection. As its name suggests, Mini started out as a pretty basic browser, but version 5 is full-featured for a phone browsser: It’s got tabs, a password manager, and Opera’s Speed Dial feature that provides one-click access to favorite sites.

In my brief time with Mini 5 so far on a Verizon Droid, it felt fast but not strikingly faster than the standard Android browser (an experience which PCMag.com’s Sean Ludwig also encountered). Formatting is never as faithful as in the stock browser, and some of the sites I visited with the beta looked just plain wonky. But on the plus side, Mini let me get into one Web site–the back-end part of WordPress.com I use to update Technologizer–which I haven’t been able to access with the bundled Android browser.

Worth a look if you’re a browser buff with an Android phone (and I’m glad that Android users have the option of choosing Mini–here’s hoping that iPhone owners get to choose, too).

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Rumor: iPhone OS Multitasking

Harry McCracken — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:14:09 +0000

Apple will enable multitasking of third-party apps in iPhone OS 4.0? Sounds good to me…

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AT&T’s Backflip: Fresh Out of the Android Oven–and Already Stale

Harry McCracken — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:55:45 +0000

More Android fragmentation madness: If Motorola’s Verizon Droid is a loaf of day old bread, then its new AT&T Backflip sounds like it’s stale beyond all recognition.

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Android Market Needs Stars

Harry McCracken — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:05:11 +0000

The quantity of software in Google’s Android Market app store is growing rapidly. But compared to Apple’s App Store, the Android one is still short on stuff by rockstar developers like this one. Wonder what Google is doing to make it worth their while to build great stuff for its platform?

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