I keep complaining about Google’s Android ever-splintering upgrade strategy turning once-hot phones into loaves of day-old bread. But Engadget says there are plans afoot to make sure they stay tasty desserts…
Tag Archives | Smartphones
Line2: A Fresh, Flexible Take on iPhone VoIP
As I mentioned in my story on Skype’s new version for Android and BlackBerry handsets on Verizon, I have this dream of using Google Voice or a Google Voice-like service to make calls on a smartphone over the data connection, thereby avoiding using up my precious supply of voice minutes. It turns out that Skype Mobile can’t help. But Line2, a new iPhone VoIP service from Toktumi, might be just what I’ve been looking for.
David Pogue reviews Line2 for the New York Times today, and he mostly likes it; I got a demo from Toktumi founder Peter Sisson yesterday at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas. The service gives you a phone number that you can use via your AT&T line, over 3G data , or Wi-Fi. If you use the latter two options, you don’t use up your voice minutes. And it seems to do a remarkably good job of dealing with the fact that third-party apps can’t run in the background on the iPhone. (If Line2 isn’t running when someone calls you, you’ll get the call anyhow–it just comes in via your standard AT&T number.)
Unlike Google Voice or Skype, Line2 isn’t free–but the $15 a month sounds reasonable, and might pay for itself if you can downsize your AT&T plan to a level of service with fewer voice minutes. Sisson told me that Toktumi is working on an Android version of the app, which will make Line2’s benefits available on carriers other than AT&T.
As Pogue says, Line2 looks and feels very much like the iPhone’s standard phone dialer, only with more features; maybe you have a theory as to why Apple thought that the Google Voice app would “confuse” iPhone owners but is okay with Line2.
I’m signing up for a trial account and will let you know what I think…
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New Takes on TV in Your Pocket
Hulu Mobile. It doesn’t actually exist, but when and if Hulu arrives on cell phones, it’s going to have a huge audience. And in the meantime, you might want to check out Bitbop, a new TV-on-phones service which was announced yesterday at the CTIA Wireless show. (It’s part of Fox Mobile, whose parent company, News Corporation, is part owner of Hulu.)
Bitbop will offer TV shows (and, later, movies) from Fox, NBC Universal, Discovery, and other sources as both streams and downloads, via an app that will be available in iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry versions. It’s a for-pay service with a Netflix-like business model: Ten bucks a month gets you all the content you can watch. The company plans to make the apps and service available within the next few weeks.
I got a quick peek at Bitbop at the MobileFocus press event in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, and it was enough to leave me wanting to try it out, at least. Also at MobileFocus was another pocketable TV product which I first saw at CES in January, and which still hasn’t shipped: Mophie’s Juice Pack TV for the iPhone. It’s a version of the company’s Juice Pack Air case/battery pack with a built-in tuner for Qualcomm’s FLO TV service.
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Sprint’s EVO 4G Superphone vs. the Next iPhone
One product has dominated the buzz at this year’s CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas: Sprint’s EVO 4G, the first 4G phone headed for the U.S. The fact that it’s Sprint’s first WiMAX handset is the big news, but with its 4.3″ screen at 800-by-480 resolution, twin cameras (8MP on the back, 1.3MB on the front), 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 512MB of RAM, and 1GB of built-in storage plus MicroSD slot, this Android 2.1 phone has the best specs I’ve ever heard of in a phone.
Great specs, of course, don’t guarantee much of anything. Still, when I saw the EVO in person, my socks were indeed knocked off. It could be the kind of phone you consider switching carriers to get. (Sprint’s lead in 4G wireless ensures that no other U.S. carrier will get an EVO doppelganger just yet.)
The phone’s over-the-top specs also led me to wonder: How well-equipped will Apple’s next iPhone be? When the iPhone 3GS shipped last June, it seemed pretty beefy. But advances in screen sizes and resolutions, CPU speeds, cameras, and other areas have left the 3GS feeling fairly basic. Thanks to the quality of the iPhone OS, it still delivers an experience that fancier phones are scrambling to catch up with. And Apple, more than most companies, rarely ups the specs of its products for the sake of pure specsmanship. But chances are high that we’ll see a new iPhone (call it the “Next iPhone”) within the next few months…and it’s possible that its hardware will represent the iPhone’s greatest leap forward to date.
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AT&T Announces MicroCell Rollout Plans
I’m blessed with good AT&T coverage at my home. But if the situation was sketchier, I’d be interested in the company’s 3G MicroCell femotocell, which uses your broadband connection at home to enable five-bar quality voice and 3G data on AT&T handsets. The device has been in limited testing for awhile, but AT&T has announced here at CTIA that it’ll begin nationwide rollout in April. It’ll cot $150 (before a $50 rebate) and there will an unlimited calling option for $20 a month (which should help if your cell phone is your only phone and you’re not on an unlimited plan).
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Google Voice for Android Gets Better SMS
When I started using a Droid with Google Voice as my primary phone, I figured I could use Voice’s free SMS feature to avoid paying Verizon for a text-messaging plan. But it turned out that Google’s SMS feature was less than real-time–messages sometimes took minutes to arrive–which eliminated one of the basic characteristics that makes text messaging useful in the first place.
Now Kevin Purdy of Lifehacker is reporting that an update to the Google Voice Android app enables Voice to do SMS in real time, or close enough. If it works as advertised, it’s another meaningful step toward making the already-amazing Google Voice the only primary phone number I’ll ever need…
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iTag: Finder of Lost Phones
iTag, which launched here at CTIA today, is a little like LoJack for lost or stolen Android phones. Or, to make a more relevant comparison, it’s a rough equivalent of Apple’s Find My iPhone, with a dash of location-based social networking tossed in for good measure –a service that can help you locate your phone or, if it seems to be gone forever, make sure that nobody else can get at your private data.
Among its features:
- The ability to make your phone ring–even if its ringer is turned off–which is handy if you’ve simply misplaced the handset somewhere around the house;
- A feature which detects if someone has inserted a different SIM card in the phone and then alerts you of that fact;
- The ability to remotely lock the phone and delete data from it;
- Over-the-air backup and restore of your contacts;
- Simple location features that let you send your location via SMS to a contact, or request that someone send his or her location to you.
- A feature (which you can disable) that alerts you when you’re near friends who are also running iTag.
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Skype on Verizon: Coming This Thursday
Last month, Verizon and Verizon Wireless announced that they were working together to bring a mobile version of Skype to users of BlackBerry and Android handsets on the Verizon network. Today at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, they’re divulging the details, including the precise timeframe: Skype Mobile will begin to be available for download this Thursday at 3am ET.
Russ Shaw, general manager for mobile at Skype, told me that the version of Skype that BlackBerry- and Android-toting Verizon customers will get has been optimized for the Verizon network and the devices in question. For instance, it runs in the background in always-on mode, but won’t drain the battery too quickly, he said.
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Opera Submits Opera Mini to the App Store. Your Move, Apple
Norwegian browser company Opera Software wants to be the second company to release a browser for the iPhone–after Apple, of course. And so it’s announcing today that it’s submitted Opera Mini to Apple for App Store approval. Opera says that it considered charging for the app, but has decided to give it away.
The company touts its server-side compression technology as making Opera Mini up to six times faster than Apple’s Mobile Safari. When I tried Mini on the iPhone last week at the South by Southwest conference, I didn’t see that speed boost–but an Opera representative recently told me that Mini was misconfigured at SxSW. And I was impressed with the browser in other ways.
Will Apple approve Mini? Assuming that it follows the iPhone developer agreement and doesn’t involve security risks, I think it would be a horrible mistake if it didn’t. Safari is going to be the iPhone’s dominant browser no matter what, and spiking Mini would resurrect Google Voice-like concerns that Apple is unwilling to permit competitors to build iPhone apps that rational people might prefer to Apple’s own wares.
It’ll be good for iPhone owners, Opera, Apple, and the American way if Apple approves Mini without delay. And I’m in an optimistic mood. So I’m hereby predicting that it’ll show up on the App Store within the next couple of weeks.
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Palm and Dell Phones on AT&T
I’ve landed in Las Vegas for CTIA Wireless, the U.S.’s biggest phone confab. The show floor doesn’t open until tomorrow, but news is already breaking. AT&T, for instance, has announced that it’s adding Palm’s Pre Plus and Pixi Plus to its lineup, as well as Dell’s Android-based Aero–the first Dell phone to ship in the U.S.
At the moment, it’s fashionable to declare Palm to be dead. It’s true that things look bleak at the moment, but pundits have been writing premature obituaries for the company for years, so I’d take the current round of knowing analysis with a grain of salt. With the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus’s arrival on AT&T, there are Palm handsets on ever major U.S. carrier except T-Mobile. That can’t hurt, and might help.
(I’m sorry that the AT&T Pre Plus lacks the nifty Mobile HotSpot feature that’s available on the Verizon version. But I’m not surprised: If AT&T had enabled MHS on the Pre while continuing to deny iPhone users the tethering it said was “coming soon” back in 2008, iPhone users would have headed towards AT&T headquarters with pitchforks.)
Dell, meanwhile, is a company that hasn’t had much luck with handheld gizmos in the past (remember the DJ?). The Aero runs Dell’s own Android interface and is based on the Mini 3, which has only been available in China and Brazil until now. I’ll try to track one down before I head home from the show.