Tag Archives | Smartphones

“Nexus Prime” Rumored for October, Just in Time for iPhone 5

Posted by Jared Newman on August 19, 2011 at 10:41 am

Get ready for a big smartphone battle in October, when Google’s Nexus Prime Android phone is rumored to lock horns with Apple’s iPhone 5.

The Nexus Prime will reportedly run Android Ice Cream Sandwich, which will merge Google’s smartphone and tablet operating systems into a single version of software. Like previous “Nexus” phones, we can assume that the Nexus Prime will run a pure version of Android with no custom user interfaces from the phone maker and no bloatware from wireless service providers.

And the hardware, according to the Korean-language Electronic Times (via Boy Genius Report), will be beastly. Rumored specs include a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor and a 4.5-inch display with 1280-by-720 resolution. Samsung is reportedly the manufacturer, although Nexus phones are Google-branded.

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TechHeads: The BlackBerry Situation

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2011 at 10:12 am

Here’s another TechHeads.tv segment. This one features Sharif Sakr of Engadget and me talking about the past, present, and future of BlackBerry. (We recorded it last week, which is why the biggest news in the phone business in years doesn’t come up.)

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My First Ten Questions–of Many!–About Google Buying Motorola

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 15, 2011 at 1:47 pm

Apple buying T-Mobile.  Microsoft buying Adobe. We’re all used to reading stuff by tech pundits talking about seismic, world-changing acquisitions in a somewhat fanciful manner. But Google buying Motorola Mobility, the recently-spun-off part of Motorola that makes phones and other consumer hardware, is real–and the most potentially world-changing acquisition in many years. (Compared to this, HP buying Palm was positively humdrum.) If I’d been drinking anything when I read the headline this morning, I would have done a spit-take.

It’s not that it’s a completely unthinkable merger–in fact, it’s existed as a rumor for quite a while. It just seemed really unlikely, until it happened.

Mergers that are supposed to change everything have a lousy track record of changing everything–sometimes, they don’t change anything at all, at least for the better. (They also don’t have a perfect track record of actually happening: we should be careful about assuming this is a done deal until it is.) Right now, I’m still processing the news and asking myself questions. Such as…

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Help Me Help My Mom Pick Her Next Phone

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 11, 2011 at 12:00 pm

My mom, sans BlackBerry.

My mother isn’t the sort of person who craves the latest smartphone just because it’s the latest smartphone. Actually, she remains smitten with her BlackBerry Curve 8900, which she’s had for a couple of years. But it’s developing an odd shadow effect on the screen, and so she rightly thinks she may be in the market for a new phone soon.

She asked me for advice on what to buy. And now I’m asking you for advice.

When it comes to decisions like this, I’m not a missionary. I don’t instinctively want to steer mom off the BlackBerry platform, or onto a particular OS. (For the record, I use an iPhone 4 most of the time, and a Verizon Fascinate some of them time.) I just want her to own a phone she’ll like at least as much as her BlackBerry.

Here’s what’s important to her:

  • She does a lot of e-mail on her phone.
  • She loves reading Kindle books on her BlackBerry. Very important to her.
  • She’d use a browser if she had a decent one.
  • She might dabble in Facebook.
  • She might take photos if her phone had a respectable camera.
  • She might well make video calls on Skype if she could.
  • She might listen to music if someone showed her the ropes. Video, probably not. (Unless it’s of her grandchildren.)
  • She’s not going to play games, do any social networking other than light Facebook use, or install apps willy-nilly.
  • I don’t think she’ll detect much of a difference between 3G and AT&T’s “4G”
  • As far as I know, she has no desire to leave AT&T. (I think she’s nearing the end of a two-year contract and might be able to wangle a new handset at full discount.)
  • I don’t think she has a specific price in mind. But when I mentioned phones being available for a penny on contract, she sounded happy. And when I talked about the iPhone 4 costing $199, she sounded alarmed.

I don’t think mom has had real hands-on experience with any modern smartphones. But my dad has (and likes) an HTC Aria, so she has some sense of the world beyond the Curve. And she told me she’s intrigued by touchscreens. She’s not adverse to trying something new.

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A Harvard Professor Puts Smartphone Usability to the Test

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 9, 2011 at 11:39 am

[UPDATE: Upon further reflection, this seems to be a student project created for the class, not research by Galletta himself. And as I said, it’s not clear how serious a test it was or what the methodology was. (I do note that the end credits list a “cast.” My bad for jumping to conclusions after reading this story.]

Professor Dennis Galletta has been teaching a summer course at Harvard on Human Factors in Information Systems Design. As part of it, he conducted some usability testing of the iPhone 4, Samsung’s Windows Phone 7-based Focus, HTC’s Android-based Thunderbolt, and RIM’s BlackBerry Storm. He had people who hadn’t used any of the phones try to make a call, add a contact, and send a text message, and videotaped their attempts to do so.

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BGR on the First QNX BlackBerry Phone

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 8, 2011 at 9:58 am

BGR is full of rumors that are uncannily accurate–and ones that turn out to be false alarms.  So take this story with a jumbo-sized grain of salt for now. But it says that RIM’s first BlackBerry phone based on its QNX operating system will come out in the first quarter of next year, will sport a single-core processors, and won’t support today’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

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What do People Prefer to Sex? According to Tech Companies, Everything!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 4, 2011 at 7:39 pm

This week, GPS software maker TeleNav revealed the results of a survey it commissioned about Americans and their phones. The tidbit it chose to highlight: one-third of us would rather give up sex than do without our phones. The news didn’t shock me a bit. Tech companies love to commission surveys that give Americans (and Canadians, and Britons) a Faustian choice between giving up sex and giving up some gadget. (Or, sometimes, giving up sex to get a gadget. Or giving up sex to avoid something, such as PowerPoint.)

They keep on conducting these surveys, and news sites and blogs keep reporting the results as news. And somehow, the news is always that people would rather give up sex than give up gadgets–even when the surveys show that most people prefer sex to gadgets.

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RIM’s Osborne Special Edition BlackBerries

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 3, 2011 at 7:57 am

AT&T is going to get three new “4G” BlackBerry models: a Bold with a touchscreen and two Torches, including one Torch with a large-ish 3.7″ display. They’ll run the new BlackBerry 7 OS, which RIM says offers “a much smoother and faster BlackBerry experience.”

I wanna give the phones and BlackBerry 7 a chance–and a BlackBerry with both a big display and a slide-out keyboard could be cool. But the new models have a whiff of the Osborne effect about them: RIM is already talking about even newer handsets that sport dual-core processors and software based on the potent QNX-based OS that debuted in its troubled-but-has-potential BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

BlackBerry fans who remain largely happy with the platform might get excited about BlackBerry OS 7. But I suspect that everybody else–phone shoppers who are at least as likely to consider an iPhone, an Android, or even a Windows Phone or WebOS handset–is reserving any potential BlackBerry-induced excitement for the future QNX models. Which aren’t available yet. (At this point, 2012 seems likely.) Why get too emotionally attached to a next-generation platform that we already know will become a last-generation platform before too long?

My personal barometer remains simple: We’ll know that RIM is in solid shape when there’s a new BlackBerry that Lance Ulanoff is enthusiastic about.

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For Adobe, Edge Represents Opportunity, Not Surrender

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 1, 2011 at 4:08 pm

“Adobe Quietly Surrenders to Steve Jobs, Builds Flash Alternative.” That’s the headline on Adam Clark Estes’s article over at the Atlantic on Edge, Adobe’s new HTML5 authoring tool. It captures the tone of a lot of coverage I’ve seen. Edge supposedly represents a capitulation on Adobe’s part. And it’s supposedly a product that Adobe might never have come up with if Steve Jobs hadn’t kept Flash off of the iPhone and iPad and been bluntly public about his reasoning.

Well, maybe. It’s true that the inability of Flash to run natively on iOS gives Adobe a powerful incentive to get on the HTML5 bandwagon. I tend to think, however, that this take gives Apple too much credit, and Adobe too little. Edge isn’t about Adobe bowing to Steve Jobs; it’s about it acknowledging reality. And Adobe shouldn’t be building this product in a grudging, grumbly fashion. If Edge is a great HTML5 tool, there’s no reason why it can’t be an enormously popular and profitable component of the company’s portfolio. It would be nuts for Adobe not to do it.

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