I think that I’ve been lucky with all of the phones that I’ve reviewed in the Smartphone Round Robin. I think there’s a proper order. I began with the device furthest away in mentality to the iPhone, the BlackBerry Curve, and it was a fine device. I missed having a touchscreen, but it was a good device. Then, I got to use the Tilt for a week, and that was actually another good device — very powerful with its touchscreen, and it has a form factor at least in parts reminiscent of the iPhone, though maybe without some of its ease of use. And last, I get to review the Treo, which is in many ways the closest of all of the phones we’ll review to the iPhone. Did you know that iPhone owners were 7 times more likely to have used a Treo (or Sidekick) than any other phone?
How quickly we’ve reached our 9th podcast! Amazing, simply amazing. Plenty of stuff to talk about in this podcast, and yet somehow we hit our time target. I should be injured from a "light-hearted" and "fun" game of "touch" football and Dieter should quit smoking for every podcast. Wish him success and support by sending us an email at podcast at phonedifferent dot com. Or call us and leave a message, that secretly pleases us more.
We had to up the bitrate again; something is different in how Leopard encodes MP3s or maybe GarageBand is exporting additional noise in Leopard or something — the 1411kbps AIFF file sounds great, the 48kbps/60kbps podcast sounds like garbage. Maybe we’re both just being more finicky about how the podcast sounds, but we’re getting some weird artifacts, both with LAME encoding and iTunes encoding. So, we’re letting this one out at a 80kbps bitrate. We’ve also been storing the art inside the individual MP3s; let us know if it shows up.
Of all the smartphones we test during the Smartphone Round Robin, the constraints of our phone exchange is felt most with the Windows Mobile 6 AT&T Tilt. One week is just not enough to get a full grasp on what Windows Mobile can do. If you’ve read some of my other reviews, you’ll hopefully recognize that as a compliment-dig.
For the past few days, I’ve been working with the AT&T Tilt, a Windows Mobile smartphone. I’ve used Windows Mobile before, so this isn’t quite the new experience that the BlackBerry Curve was, but I haven’t used the latest version of Windows Mobile (version 6) either. I used WM5 with a Treo 750 for a while, but I ended up dealing with a bad bug that prevented calls from ringing. That was pretty much a killer for the device, and I stopped using it.
And that would be the end of the story, but for the Smartphone Round Robin. And here we are again.
Today’s podcast is a big one. We cover all of the new news with the upcoming O2 and T-Mobile launches, the Smartphone Round Robin sides of things, Google’s Android and whether it competes with Apple, plenty of iTunes news, and the final words from the community..
Details of the iPhone’s launch in the UK is spilling out rapidly, and O2 are making some last changes in preparation for iPhone’s arrival. Their CEO granted an interview that gives a peek into Apple’s carrier selection process. O2 has changed the way that they deal with limited “unlimited” plans — they still limit them, but at least they will give users a warning before they punt people away. And lastly, UK gadget magazine tried out the iPhone for a while, and they have information about the 1.1.2, the upcoming firmware update and iTunes 7.5.
So, my time with the Curve has come to a close. It’s a dirty little secret of the Smartphone Round Robin, but I’m glad that I got to use the iPhone again for a day. I airlifted the 8310 Curve off to Jennifer of TreoCentral, and Kevin is shipped me the Windows Mobile-based AT&T Tilt. I got to keep my SIM card firmly seated in the iPhone for a full day!
It’s been an interesting week with the Curve, but the limitations of it started to wear pretty thin on me as the week progressed. Once the newness of the curve wore off, I started eyeing my iPhone a lot more. I’ve been looking forward to shipping the Curve off so I could use my iPhone. Looking to the future, I began — shudder to think — looking forward to the Tilt. But there are some strong redemptive features to the platform.
“There is no evidence to suggest that this particular jailbreak utility is at all malicious but how long will it be before copycat sites appear that have less honourable intentions?”
For the first week of Smartphone Experts’ Smartphone Round Robin, I was assigned the BlackBerry Curve 8310. As I’ve indicated in the Crackberry forums, I’ve said some nasty things about BB in the past. Some of that is going to have to be put behind me this week; this BlackBerry 8810 isn’t going to use itself.
And don’t forget - a comment on this post counts as an entry in the Round Robin Contest!
We are now launching the cool project we were hinting at in the last podcast: the Smartphone Round Robin. For the next 2 or three weeks, all of the editors of the various Smartphone Experts sites will be using one of the “other” smartphones out there.
For me, this week, it means using a BlackBerry 8310. For Dieter of WMExperts, it means using a Treo 680. for Jennifer of TreoCentral, it means using her iPhone. And for Kevin of CrackBerry.com, it means using the AT&T Tilt. There are rules that we’ve all got to follow — we all have to give the device a full shakedown. I’ll be posting an article later today about my first few days with the Curve, and then a full article on Friday.
This week, I’ll be posting a few articles about the strengths and weaknesses of using a BlackBerry. I’ve already got a few posts in at CrackBerry.com.
So what’s in it for you? Well, there’s a chance to win a prize: a smartphone of your choice and plenty of coupons to spend at the store associated with it. Just leave a comment in any Round Robin thread in the forums. Four sites, four chances to win per day. Just head on over to the Smartphone Round Robin update page for the deets.
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
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