Tag Archives | Smartphones

Droid vs. iPhone 3GS: An Update

As I wrote a few weeks ago, frustration with AT&T coverage in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood led me to put my iPhone 3GS aside and switch to a Verizon Wireless Droid. I found that I liked the reliability of Verizon’s  service, and loved certain things about Android–but that the overall experience was way less polished and predictable than the iPhone.

Here’s an update: Over the last week or so, I’ve been using the iPhone most of the time. It still has severe issues in SOMA (or at least a bunch of places in SOMA where I hang out–it claims perfect signal strength, but the most reliable thing it does is to drop my calls). Otherwise, though, I’ve spent far less time futzing than I do when I’m in Androidland. I’m coming to the uneasy realization that I may want to use both phones, depending on what sort of limitations I can deal with at any given time.

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Jack Schafer on Apple's iEcosystem

Slate’s Jack Schafer, a writer I admire very much, has written about the iPad, the iPhone, the App Store, and Apple’s very un-PC-like control over the entire system. His title, “Apple Wants to Own You,” kind of says it all. But here’s more:

Actually, the iPad and its silicon predecessors, the iPod Touch and iPhone, aren’t insane. What’s insane is the perimeter mines, tank traps, revetments, and glacis he’s deployed around these shiny devices to slow software developers to a crawl so he can funnel them through his rapacious toll booth and collect a sweet vig before he’ll let their programs run on your new iDevice.

[snip]

[The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It author Jonathan] Zittrain peppers his book with examples of “killer” applications that nobody could have imagined emerging from uncredentialed developers. A hobbyist in Tasmania wrote Trumpet Winsock, which allowed Windows PCs to access the Internet. A pair of students wrote the first graphical PC Internet browser in three months.

I’ve squawked frequently about both the overarching principles and specifics of the App Store myself. If the day comes when Apple lets apps get onto iPhones and iPods without insisting on being an intermediary, it’ll be a profoundly good thing. But I think anyone who rants about the current situation needs to address the following points:

Despite Apple’s restrictions and micromanaging, the iPhone has inspired far more creativity than any mobile platform before it. (Or if you wanna argue that third-party Android, say, exhibit more imagination than iPhone ones, be my guest–but make your case.)

Apple may take a thirty percent cut of the money people fork over for paid apps, but a substantial percentage of apps (including some of the best ones) are free. In those cases, Apple is subsidizing distribution, not serving as rapacious toll collector. (Yes, of course, it profits handsomely from the fact that all those free apps make the iPhone and iPad so compelling, but the embarrassment of free apps does interfere with any “Apple wants money every time you do something on its devices” theory.)

The App Store is rife with interesting products from uncredentialed developers who wrote programs to solve their own problems. Guys in basements. Teenagers. Other folks whose software found a wide audience quickly thanks in part to Apple making it easy for iPhone and iPad users to find it.

Shafer says that anyone who thinks that “Apple’s rules are more about blunting competitors and creating a prudish atmosphere guaranteed to offend nobody than they are about throttling viruses and improving the user experience” is “a captive of Steve Jobs’ reality-distortion field.” Maybe so. But with the possible exception of a BlackBerry–and setting aside AT&T issues for the moment–the iPhone is the only smartphone I’ve ever owned that I can actually count on to work. (I can’t say that about my Droid.) I don’t think people who find the iPhone’s stability to be a major plus are dupes.

Like I say, I’m no Apple apologist. (Every time I think of its refusal to approve the Google Voice app–without ever quite rejecting it–my blood pressure rises.) But Schafer’s piece, like some of the ones he applauds, doesn’t ever address the reality of the iEcosystem as evidenced by the apps and services that exist for it. It’s simply not that dystopian. And while I continue to believe that openness will eventually prevail over closed systems, the iPhone’s more open rivals have yet to prove they can provide a better experience than Apple’s semi-walled garden.

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Glympse Lets You Share Your Location on Facebook

Glympse is a clever app for iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile that lets you temporarily share your location via dynamically-updated maps that show where you are–but only for as long as you want them to. Until now, the obvious application for the services has been to alert family members, friends, and coworkers to your whereabouts–maybe because you’re on your way to meet them somewhere and might be late.

Now Glympse has added a nifty bit of Facebook Connect integration that lets you embed a Glympse map in your Facebook wall. You can choose to make it either a one-time indication of your location–which Glympse describes as being similar to a Foursquare check-in, although it seems only vaguely related to me–or an auto-updating map that shows your travels for up to four hours. (That restriction is in place so you don’t forget and let Glympse reveal your wanderings to the world without your knowledge.)

The Facebook integration makes Glympses a bit more public, and therefore a fun way to share vacations or other interesting travel. But I like the granularity of the control Glympse gives you: When you set up Facebook on your phone, you can set your Glympses to be shared with just friends, friends of friends, everyone, or several other settings–including “Just Myself.”

After the jump, a few images.

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Verizon Gets Another Droid. And It’s Incredible!

There’s the Droid. And the Droid Eris. And now there’s the Droid Incredible, a new Verizon Wireless Android-based handset made by HTC.   It’s got a 1-GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.7″ OLED display, an 8MP camera, and Android 2.1 with HTC’s Sense user interface. The Incredible is $199 after $100 rebate with two-year contract–just like the Droid was when it shipped last November. (Actually, the Droid is still officially $199, but for most of its life Verizon has had 2-for-1 deals and other incentives–and other sellers have had the phone for as little as $50.)

As long as you don’t want a physical keyboard, the Incredible is clearly the new flagship of the Droid line. And, on paper at least, maybe the Android handset to beat for the time being–although new Android phones arrive so quickly that it could well lose that honor shortly after it ships on April 29th.

The Bay Area, incidentally, is still rife with “Droid Does” billboards–although the new ones focus on apps, so the message is presumably less that the Droid trumps the iPhone than that it’s not completely uncompetitive. The fact that there’s a plain-old Droid as well as an Eris and an Incredible is kind of confusing–I assume that future advertising extravaganzas are more likely to focus on the sexy Incredible than the aging–hey, it’s been out for five months!–Droid.

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Needed: Tweetie for Android

I’m still at Twitter’s Chirp conference, where Cofounder Ev Williams told a questioner In the audience that there will be an official Twitter client for phones based on Google’s Android operating system. He wouldn’t say if the company I’d building a new or will acquire an existing app. But he said they’d hoped to have been ready to announce the details at Chirp but fell short, so I assume it’s not too far off.

And I know what I think Twitter should do: it should bring Tweetie–er, Twitter for iPhone–to Android. The application which Twitter bought last week has just about everything about doing Twitter on a phone figured out perfectly. Why build or buy something else for Android that almost certainly wouldn’t be nearly as good? Shouldn’t the mobile Twitter experience be consistent across all phone platforms?

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Skyfire Eyes the iPhone

Mobile browser maker Skyfire is congratulating rival Opera for the arrival of Opera Mini on the iPhone App Store–and saying that it wants to put its browser on the iPhone (and, it sounds like, the iPad). Which is interesting not only because it’s a neat product, but because it could put Flash sites on the iPhone without putting Flash on the iPhone–like Mini, Skyfire caches and compresses sites on the server, but it goes further by transmitting everything–including Flash video, audio, and interactivity–to the phone.

Wonder how Apple (not to mention Adobe) would feel about that?

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Opera Mini for iPhone, Finally!

Three weeks ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of its Opera Mini browser to Apple for approval, and I cheerfully predicted it would show up on the App Store within a couple of weeks. I was off by one week: Mini is now available as a free download.

I figured the app would make it because…well, I couldn’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t. Apple isn’t involved in epic battle with Opera (unlike, say, Google). It can be pretty confident that Safari will remain by far the iPhone’s dominant browser even if Opera Mini does quite well. And hey, making trouble for browser companies that wish to run on your operating system is demonstrably bad juju.

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Microsoft’s Kin Phones: Very Social, Zune on Board, No Apps

Rumors of Microsoft phones that pack Zune software and are essentially next-generation versions of the Sidekick platform it acquired have been around forever–or at least since 2008.  This morning, Microsoft made it all official at an event in San Francisco by announcing two phones it’s calling Kin.  There’s a Kin One and a Kin Tw0–the models that have been floating around the blogosphere for months–and the Sharp-manufacturered handsets will be available next month on Verizon Wireless at prices yet to be announced.

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Palm 4 Sale?

Bloomberg says that Palm wants to sell itself and Lenovo and HTC are interested. As a bystander who’s fond of both Palm’s current products and its immense legacy, my preferred outcome is still that Palm figure out how to stay independent and successful. If that’s not possible, I’m rooting for a buyer who can figure out how to make WebOS into the major mobile-OS player it deserves to be–and I’m fretting about scenarios in which its gets bought and withers away.

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iPhone OS 4 Developer Beta: What Works, What Doesn’t

Most iPhone OS applications should work on the iPhone OS 4 Developer Beta. But as with any major revision of n operating system, there are sure to be some problems.

After the jump, a report on common applications I’ve run on my iPhone 3GS and the issues (if any) I encountered. I’ve had a fairly good success rate in running applications without a hitch, but there are a few that don’t do so well.

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