Tag Archives | Smartphones

HP Buys Palm: The Optimist's View

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 28, 2010 at 1:48 pm

Wow. The rumormongering about Palm ends today: HP is buying the struggling mobile pioneer for $1.2 billion. One of the largest tech companies on the planet will own WebOS, one of the best available mobile operating systems–but one which has failed so far to make much of an impact as it’s shipped on Palm’s Pre and Pixi handsets. It qualifies as a shocker given that most of the scuttlebutt about possible purchasers involved Asian manufacturers such as Lenovo and HTC.

When a huge old-school company buys a scrappy (relatively) little one, my instinct is always to be worried. There are far more examples of such mergers failing than there are of ones that have thrived. And there aren’t many examples of companies in distressed condition getting turned around big time.

But let’s play optimist for a moment…

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Firefox Arrives on Android

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 28, 2010 at 1:27 am

Are you a browser junkie with a phone running Android 2.0 or above? Mozilla has released a “pre-alpha” Android version of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox.

When they say it’s pre-alpha, they’re not being self-effacing–it’s pretty rough. On my Droid, at least, I couldn’t even get the on-screen keyboard to pop up. But it’s in decent enough shape to whet the appetite. And it’ll be great if the browser race on Android is anywhere near as exuberantly competitive as it is on Windows and OS X. (I’m already a part-time user of Opera Mini for Android.)

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Microsoft Strikes Phone Patent Deal With HTC. Should Google be Worried?

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 27, 2010 at 11:58 pm

Finally, news about smartphones and patents that doesn’t involve large companies suing each other: Microsoft has announced that it’s signed a patent licensing agreement with HTC covering the latter company’s Android smartphones. HTC gets to build Android phones without fear of patent trouble with Microsoft; Microsoft gets to collect a royalty on every Android handset HTC sells. Which is quite an accomplishment given that the company behind Android–Google–doesn’t charge handset manufacturers royalties.

Microsoft would presumably rather be collecting royalties on Windows phones–before it went gaga for Android, HTC was best known as the dominant maker of Windows Mobile devices–but a peaceful relationship between the two companies benefits both parties. (If HTC isn’t among the first companies to jump on the Windows Phone 7 bandwagon, it’ll be very surprising.)

The Microsoft press release doesn’t say anything in specific about the patents involved, but Microsoft has plenty of them covering phone-related technology.

If HTC requires a license to make Android phones without violating Microsoft’s intellectual property, what does that mean for Motorola, Samsung, LG, and all the other companies that make Android handsets? Stay tuned for news of further deals, I guess. Or lawsuits.Either way, it’s also hard to interpret the arrangement with HTC as anything other than an oblique shot across Google’s bow. (Here’s a Cnet story by Ina Fried on all this with a sound bite from Microsoft’s deputy general counsel that makes the shot slightly less oblique.)

Then again, it’s also hard to imagine that it would be in Microsoft’s best interest to sue large phone companies who are logical licensees for Windows Phone 7. Unlike Apple–which is in court with both HTC and Nokia–Microsoft’s business model requires decent relationships with the rest of the industry.

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A First Peek at BlackBerry OS

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 27, 2010 at 2:33 pm

BlackBerry maker RIM has one of the bigger, more fascinating challenges in the whole world of tech: It makes some of the most successful, beloved devices on the planet, but its aging software platform is a dead end. At its WES 2010 conference today, the company previewed the upcoming BlackBerry 6 OS–due in the third quarter of this year–in a video that was clearly meant more to tantalize than to inform.

We can tell that it looks as much or more like the iPhone (and Android, and WebOS) than the current BlackBerry OS. We see social-media feeds and multimedia features, but only a hint of the modern new WebKit-based browser. We don’t actually get a peek at a phone, but the Minority Report-like floating display has a virtual keyboard rather than plastic keys. (Which I hope and assume doesn’t mean that BlackBerry is giving up on physical keys–seems like the most exciting possible next-generation BlackBerry would still be an awesome phone that happened to have an excellent real keyboard.)

Here’s the video–BlackBerry users, does it leave you excited, apprehensive, or a bit of both?

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The Verizon Nexus One is Vaporous–and That's Okay

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 26, 2010 at 12:18 pm

Ever since Google announced back in January that it would be selling be a Verizon Wireless-compatible Nexus One in the spring, I’ve known people who planned their whole smartphone-buying strategy around that fact. As of January, the Nexus One was the hottest Android handset on the market, and plenty of folks swear by Verizon. It sounded like a match made in heaven–or at least a potentially attractive combination,

Well, spring has sprung, and it sounds like the Verizon Nexus turned out to be DBA (Dead Before Arrival): Bloomberg is reporting that the handset has been scrapped. It’s not entirely clear why–the story begins by saying that Verizon “retreated” from being involved with the Nexus One, but then it quotes a Google spokesperson saying that Google decided to skip it because of “amazing innovation happening across the open Android ecosystem,” and a Verizon spokesperson who seems to say that the carrier is still interested. Maybe it was a mutual decision.

In any event, it’s no biggie. Verizon has already launched the Droid Incredible, a well-reviewed phone that’s essentially the Nexus One only more so. And for all Google’s talk of changing the way people buy phones, it remains unclear what the benefit is of getting your phone from Google rather than a carrier–especially in the case of Verizon, since there’s no such thing as a Verizon-compatible phone that’s unlocked and able to work on other networks. The Verizon Nexus One was going to be a Verizon Nexus One, even if it was Google doing the order fulfillment.

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Rhapsody's Offline Mode

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 26, 2010 at 3:32 am

Rhapsody’s new iPhone/iPod Touch version with offline listening is live in Apple’s App Store. I’ve been giving it a whirl, and the new features are pretty darn straightforward–and overall, they do a good job of filling in a major hole in the original iPhone edition of the music service. It’s the first music service for the iPhone that offers both streaming and downloading. (For U.S. users, at least–in Europe, Spotify has has both. And maybe Apple will see fit to unleash the wonderful unreleased LaLa app it now owns in some form someday.)

As before, whenever you’ve got a 3G or Wi-Fi connection you can search for albums and artists, pull up playlists (including ones you created on a PC or Mac), and stream an unlimited quantity of music from Rhapsody’s millions of tracks. But now your playlists have a Download button–tap it, and all the songs in that list get downloaded so you can listen to them when you don’t have an Internet connection (or have one that can be spotty, which is often the case when you’re driving).

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Google Working With Adobe on Android Flash and AIR

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 21, 2010 at 10:13 am

The saga of Flash on the iPhone may be ending–at least for now–but Google is announcing that it’s collaborating with Adobe on the Android versions of Flash and AIR. It’s not clear what that means, exactly (details are to come at next month’s Google developer conference). But if there’s one prominent phone OS with no Adobe stuff, and one with the best possible Adobe stuff, consumers will get to decide just how big a selling point Flash and AIR are. And that’s good news.

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Fifteen Things We Still Don't Know About the Next iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 20, 2010 at 1:28 am

I think we can definitively say that Gizmodo has put a massive crimp in Apple’s existing publicity plans for the next iPhone. When Apple announces the phone, the Reality Distortion Field may be a tad less potent than usual. But even if we assume for the sake of argument that the phone Apple releases will be identical to the one that Gizmodo bought from a barfly, there’s plenty that we may not know until Apple has its say–and , just as important, until reviews and consumers get their hands on real, fully-functioning units.

Such as:

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The Next iPhone, (Apparently) Revealed

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 19, 2010 at 10:56 am

Over the weekend, Engadget published three photos of what what it said would seem to be the next generation iPhone–along with a weird tale of the phone being found hidden inside an iPhone 3G case on the floor of a bar in San Jose. Now Gizmodo has a long post based on extensive hands-on time with the same phone–although they say it’s up highway 101 in Redwood City. Giz has photographed it, and shot video of it, and dismantled it. And while we don’t know for sure whether this is precisely the phone that Apple will presumably release sometime in the next few months, it seems unimaginable that it’s a hoax or a Chinese clone or any of the other things the phone might be other than a real Apple prototype.

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