Tag Archives | Phones

Is an iPhone 3G Unlock Imminent?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 26, 2008 at 8:28 am

Have a hankering to unlock your iPhone 3G so you can run it on any network? You may be in luck before too long.

The iPhone Dev Team–the group of hackers who figured out how to unlock the first-generation iPhone–has cracked the iPhone’s baseband processor and can run applications on it. That’s a critical step–maybe the critical step–in figuring out how to unlock the phone, since the software that does the job will run on the baseband processor.

I’d love to have an unlocked iPhone 3G, partially for practical reasons (I’d like to be able to buy a cheap prepaid SIM when I travel internationally) and partially on the principle of the matter (when a phone is locked, it’s been intentionally crippled). And you gotta admire the technical chops of the iPhone Dev Team. But I’m not all that excited by its progress in unlocking the iPhone 3G. In the past, Apple has showed itself to be completely willing to foil people who do things to its products that it doesn’t want done. And it doesn’t want you to unlock your iPhone. So me, I’m not going to risk it.

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Motorola’s $2000 Aura Phone vs. the Rolex Submariner: The Ultimate Showdown

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 21, 2008 at 7:04 pm

In introducing its new $2000 Aura cell phone today, Motorola repeated comparisons to luxury watches. So contrasting it to an iPhone or a BlackBerry or even the Prada phone may not do it justice. How about facing it off against one of the most famous mobile status symbols of them all, Rolex’s eternally popular Oyster Perpetual Submariner? I did just that for this T-Grid, and found that it’s a close contest–the two gadgets have much in common, but both sport some attractive features that the other doesn’t. Bottom line: If you’ve got a spare $8K, you might want them both!

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A $2000 Cell Phone, Motorola? Good Luck With That

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 21, 2008 at 10:52 am

Swiss precision. More than 200 tiny parts. A sapphire crystal. A price tag that’s close to twice what I paid for my first car. It sounds like something from Rolex or Omega. But it’s the Aura, a new cell phone from Motorola.

The Aura has the following features:

–the phone industry’s first round display, with 16 million colors and 300-dpi resolution;

–a stainless-steel frontpiece that takes two weeks to make;

–an “assisted opening” blade mechanism that involves more than 130 ball bearings (” an effect more like opening a luxury car door than accessing a mobile device”) and which is visible through the back of the phone;

–Stereo Bluetooth!

(Motorola’s press materials don’t mention whether it has Internet access or not; if if it has a browser that reformats pages so they’re round, I’m impressed.)

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T-Mobile’s G1 Android Phone: The Reviews Are In

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 16, 2008 at 8:05 am

T-Mobile’s G1, the first phone to use Google’s Android operating system, doesn’t go officially on sale until October 22nd. But a bunch of reviews ave hit the Web. And since I don’t have a G1–I’m hoping to remedy that–I’ve been reading other folks’ takes on the device.

After the jump, highly-compressed summaries of three of the reviews I’ve checked out so far.

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Whither the BlackBerry Bold?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 10, 2008 at 10:55 am

Way back last spring, when I still worked at PC World, we received a visit from RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. He showed us the company’s next-generation smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold. And I got really excited. The Bold had one of the best screens I’d ever seen–one which, in terms of dpi, offered far more resolution for its size than the iPhone display. It had an updated user interface, media apps, and a new browser. It was the first 3G GSM BlackBerry. The keyboard looked excellent. In terms of aesthetics, it was a stylin’ little gadget (except, maybe, for its “leatherette” backside).

All in all, it looked terrific–I thought it probably was the second most interesting smartphone of the year after the second-generation iPhone (whose name we didn’t know yet). And for folks who like little plastic keys, it looked like the most interesting phone. I looked forward to AT&T rolling it out–and at the time, it sounded like that would happen at roughly the same time that the new iPhone made its debut.

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The T-Grid: BlackBerry Storm vs. iPhone 3G

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 7, 2008 at 10:30 pm

Another week, another new touch-screen phone that has an awful lot in common with the iPhone 3G. But the most interesting things about RIM’s BlackBerry Storm aren’t the ways it’s similar to an iPhone–it’s the ways it’s different. Starting with the fact that it’s a BlackBerry, with all the wireless synching goodness you’d expect. It will be on Verizon–a major plus for lots of folks–and will be a world phone that does CDMA at home and GSM around the world.

The Storm is the first touchscreen BlackBerry, but its screen features haptic feedback that gives a clicky feel as you type on the virtual keyboard, which sounds interesting, at least. (Most of the BlackBerry fanatics I know are e-mail warriors who really, really want a phone with a physical keyboard–it’ll be fascinating to see if the Storm’s simulation of one is good enough to convince them to go touchscreen.)

I’m also happy to hear that the Storm comes with DataViz’s Documents To Go Office-compatible suite preinstalled–though I’m also curious to see just how easy it is to edit documents on a phone without a real keyboard.

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The State of iPhone Satisfaction

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 30, 2008 at 5:52 am

It’s one of the most popular phones in history. It’s also one of the most controversial. And it’s almost certainly inspired more news, reviews, analysis, and general punditry than any phone–maybe any other gadget–ever. But when all is said and done, the bottom line on the iPhone is simple: What do the people who use them every day think of their phones?

There’s only way to answer that question–ask a bunch of iPhone owners. Which is what we did from Friday morning through Sunday morning, when we fielded an in-depth survey on life with the iPhone. Over 2150 users of both the iPhone 3G and the original model took the time to participate. And they were a passionate bunch with strong opinions about their phones, both positive and negative. (I published a representative selection of these opinions in “An iPhone Opinion Explosion.”)

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T-Mobile Relents, G1 Bandwidth Caps No More

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 25, 2008 at 11:31 am

Well, that was quick. Not much more than a day after it first disclosed a 1GB bandwidth cap for users of the G1 Android phone, T-Mobile USA did an about-face and has decided to not enforce any kind of restriction after all.

In a response to questions by the New York Times’ Saul Hansell, T-Mobile said Wednesday night that it had decided to remove the cap. Courtesy of the Bits blog, here is a portion of their statement:

We removed the 1GB soft limit from our policy statement, and we are confident that T-Mobile G1 customers will enjoy the high speed of data access over our 3G network. The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with current customers and potential new customers.

Like I had said in our initial post on the subject, T-Mobile does have a right to ensure that all users get a satisfactory level of service, which the carrier argued as well. But at the same time, bandwidth caps have been almost universally criticized, and would have done more harm to T-Mobile than good.

The removal of the cap isn’t the end of the road, however. T-Mobile is looking into other ways to protect its network from high-bandwidth users, it said.

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The T-Grid: T-Mobile’s G1 Android Phone vs. the iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 23, 2008 at 9:48 am

It was all but official for what seemed like an eternity. Now it’s just official, period: T-Mobile is releasing the G1, the first phone powered by Google’s Android operating system. It’s essentially impossible to not instinctively compare it to the iPhone 3G. With phones more than almost any other technology device, the devil is in the details, and the best thing about the iPhone–its incredibly refined user interface–needs to be experienced to be appreciated. So a real comparison of the two superphones will need to be a hands-on one.

Still, there’s some value in a simple features comparison. Here’s my first stab at one, with data from sources such as Gizmodo’s writeup of the G1. (What’s a T-Grid? It’s an at-a-glance comparison in this format, and we’ll be doing them on other topics as appropriate.)

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