Posted on Sunday, Jun 8, 2008 by Rene Ritchie
File Under:This Week in Shadenfreude; Tags: BlackBerry, htc, palm, rim, this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude, Treo, Windows, windows mobile, wwdc
Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!
In this week’s edition: Nothing. Seriously. It’s like there’s some event on Monday that’s blotted out the smartphone sun…
(Okay, fine, maybe there’s some small something or other we can dig up. Hit the read link…)
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InfoWorld’s Peter Bruzzese is the kind of IT guy who’s old enough to have lived through every major paradigm shift in technology. When not plodding along at his Windows workstation, surrounded by a sea of blade servers, he’s regaling colleagues and friends with his adventures back in the heady days of DOS computers and UNIX mainframes. The very mention of OS/2 gets him misty eyed, and if you see him hunched over a book about Fortran, well… just leave him be.
So when the old Windows warhorse suddenly took a shine to iPhone, people began wondering… and worrying. Somehow this grizzled old Windows veteran became an iPhone lover, wildly exploring its features like a five year-old in a McDonald’s playland, without the greasy fingerprints and spilled drinks.
But old habbits are hard to break. Peter is still heavily rooted in his Windows world, and continues using a Windows Mobile 6 device for its Exchange DirectPush support. So he wanders through the hallowed halls of InfoWorld wearing a Batman utility belt and pouched vest to carry his iPhone, Windows Mobile phone, Pager, GPS receiver, tape recorder, and PalmPilot. He’s old school, but all class.
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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.
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I saw this Neonode N2 phone cross by in my RSS reader, and it looks like it could practically be the iPhone Nano. After reading the review at pencomputing.com it’s clearly not, but the N2 is absolutely tiny. It’s also built off a touchscreen interface, though the N2’s is built off infrared instead of multitouch. The weirdest thing is that the Neonode N2 and N1 have been using iphone touch, tap, and swipe interfaces since 2002 — they’ve been around a while.
The other weirdest thing about the N2 is that it’s built off Windows CE, just like Windows Mobile, except the N2 doesn’t add all of the Windows Mobile interface, they just use the bare guts of CE and add their own pretty. I have to say, it looks pretty decent from the few screenshots.
I’m not going to say that it’s going to sell like hotcakes, because it probably won’t. It costs about $645 US, doesn’t do 3rd party apps, doesn’t even do EDGE, and does only 1 GB of storage. They use a mobile processor I’ve never heard of on its own boffo architecture, so converting apps over isn’t necessarily going to be a slice of pie or a walk in the park. I just figured it’s kind of interesting. I wonder how well they patented their stuff and if we’ll see yet another iPhone lawsuit.
This guy Core of wickedpsyched.net coded a version of AFP, the Apple Filesharing Protocol, for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This means that you could enable filesharing on your iPhone and copy some files over directly from your desktop over wi-fi. If you ask me, this is better than disk mode, where you can plug in your iPhone and it shows up as a removable disk. It apparently doesn’t show up in Installer.app yet, but give it a few days and I’m sure it will be there.
There’s also great news if you’re more of a windows person. Say you just prefer the Samba/SMB/Windows Filesharing so you can share with windows and mac, well he’s got you covered there too.
figure 1: It is with a heavy heart that Pogue informs us that the latest Windows Mobile phone from T-Mobile blows.
David Pogue has an excellent article on how the iPhone really broke down a bunch of barriers in the smartphone world, the best he claims, is “the way Apple took veto power away from the cellphone carriers.”
So yeah, that’s just the first sentence. The unfortunate part of the article is that most of the rest of it is a review for a T-Mobile Windows Mobile device. The good news is this: if you want to think about how awesome your iPhone is compared to a poorly-implemented Windows Mobile device, the second half of his article will really interest you. There’s a silver lining in every cloud, right?
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.
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The fourth annual iLounge 2008 Buyers Guide works for the iPhone and iPod, and is viewable online for smaller screens like the iPhone, iPod Touch, or laptops. If you prefer, for desktop viewing.
Verizon is lowering their data rates for feature phones in preparation for competition with the iPhone. Expect a snarky comment from Dieter on this one. Unfortunately, their smartphone data rates are still sky-high. And, you can add a Canadian roaming plan for just $20. The Phone they’re thinking about using to “compete” with the iPhone is the Samsung F700, though they might re-brand it as the U940. That’s some “brilliant marketing.” I don’t usually report on “iPhone killers,” but I’m glad to see the iPhone forcing prices down for everybody.
Rumors from AppleInsider indicate that iTunes 7.5 will be coming out in the next couple of weeks. This probably means that any iPhone updates with post-Leopard goodness require an iTunes update. This iTunes update will also bring support for the UK, German, and likely French iPhones. Oh, and it will include better duplicate song management. w00t!
Mark/Space, makers of many popular “Missing Sync” smartphone sync softwares, have announced their intent to release “Missing Sync for the iPhone” later this year. Their software will include Notes.app syncing, SMS backups, better call log management, and a migration tool to copy data from a BlackBerry, Palm OS, or Windows Mobile smartphone.
If you want to downgrade the firmware on your iPhone, iBrickr has an easy option for downgrading the firmware from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2. Thus spoke Nate True:
Just a small update - if you want to downgrade your iPhone from 1.1.1 back to 1.0.2, iBrickr will guide you through it. No button holding either, it’s easy!
And if you’d like to download it,
iBrickr has its own web domain that will redirect you to the proper place. The update doesn’t work with unlocked iPhones that were bricked by upgrading to 1.1.1, but that tool is still on the way from possibly multiple sources.
figure 1: All this and more for just 70 Schrutebucks.
If you use a Windows PC as a DVR and are looking to get away from iTunes for syncing your video to your iPhone or iPod, it looks like Beyond TV might be worth a peek. The new version of Beyond TV, 4.7, not only syncs your shows to the iPhone or iPod, but also pulls out your podcasts from iTunes. Not bad!
