Join Rene, Chad, and special guest Phil Nickinson of WMExperts for iPod touch G3 vs. Zune HD, iPhone 3.1 and iTunes 9 redux, and all the week’s news. Listen in!
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With our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn off in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, the inmates site editors are left running Around SPE this week. So, while he’ll be breaking news and giving us some hands-on observations on all the new software and hardware on display, we’ll be keeping you covered here at home, starting with a quick recap of where we are right now:
CrackBerry.com
In the world of BlackBerry, T-Mobile customers were happy to see the official roll out of the next-generation BlackBerry Curve 8900 this week. With AT&T said to be dropping support for 2G phones, there has been some worry that this new Curve wouldn’t come to AT&T, but with the 8900 SKU now showing up on AT&T systems, it’s likely the device will launch there in the next month.The BIG new this week comes from the CrackBerry Podcast. Kevin was in NYC on for a RIM Business Solutions Press Preview. While there, him and Craig recorded a podcast and for the first time had an employee from Research in Motion on the show. Joined by Mike Kirkup, Manager of Developer Relations, they tackle a bunch of topics from the upcoming App Store to OS 5.0 and whether or not Flash support will appear in a BlackBerry browser and more! Listen Here.
More after the break!
Smartphone Experts at CES 2009! WMExperts, TreoCentral, Android Central, and CrackBerry.com Coverage
TiPb isn’t the only Smartphone Experts site working our tails off this week. Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn is pulling the live-blogging trifecta, going straight from Macworld to cover Steve Ballmer’s CES kickoff tonight at 6pm PST for WMExperts AND for the (very much anticipated) debut of Palm’s next generation NOVA hardware and OS for TreoCentral — not to mention everything AndroidCentral. Never to be out done, CrackBerry Kevin (with a full on CrackBerry Crew!) will push any and all BlackBerry news they get their cracky hands on. Check out all our sites throughout the day for the latest, greatest, most Smartphone-geeky coverage.
[This is an official Smartphone Experts Round Robin post! Every day you reply here, you're automatically entered for a chance to win an iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset! Full contest rules here!]
The iPhone 3G doesn’t have a task manager. It doesn’t have a registry. It doesn’t have a sliding keyboard. It doesn’t have a start menu. It doesn’t have Pocket IE. And most egregiously of all — it doesn’t have a stylus!
Will that be the feature that breaks our Editor-in-Chief’s Windows Mobile back? Or will the ultra-modern OS and buttery smooth UI restore his childlike sense of wonder? Head on over to WMExperts to read his ultimate opinion, and — if he deserves it — give him a bag of hurt, TiPb style!
Be sure to comment both here and on Dieter’s review — on all of our sites — so you can try to win as many smartphones and accessory bundles as possible!
What’s next? Crackberry Kevin gets my beloved iPhone this week! Will he even know how to type on a touchscreen? (No Storm jokes!). He’s asking for your assistance in TiPb’s iPhone Forum, so you get another chance to win over in his thread. And I’m off to WMExperts for the (gulp!) HTC FUZE. Help me!
Sibling site WMExperts, which — while Dieter doffs his WinMo cap and rounds his robin reviewing the iPhone — brings us Phil Nickinson’s exception to iPhone OS 2.2’s Podcast Download feature.
Okay, it’s not cut and paste, lack of MMS, no unified inbox, no Flash, etc. etc. In all fairness, it’s an interesting look at some of the things we here at TiPb complain about as well, pointedly the 10MB cap for podcast downloads over the 3G network (you have to switch to WiFi for anything larger, same as the App Store has enforced since iPhone OS 2.0):
It’s this kind of manipulation from Apple that keeps a good many of us from wanting to deal with the company (and frustrates many who do). It’s not that the hardware’s not sexy. It’s not that the software is lacking. It’s that lines are being blurred, or destroyed. Apple makes the hardware, and AT&T provides the service. There’s too much collusion going on. If AT&T wants to set a 5-gigabyte cap on my data, fine. But don’t tell me how to use those gigs. And don’t use Apple as a proxy to do so.
The only problem with the argument? The inclusion of Apple.
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.
Dieter Bohn of WMExperts recorded a longish video of comparisons between the HTC Touch and the Apple iPhone. He spent about a week with the iPhone before the Touch came in, so the iPhone gets a pretty fair shake in terms of how its stacked up. I’ll spoil the ending, the HTC Touch wins. So why link the video? Well, it does a fine job of showing why I gave the iPhone a 7/10 for smartphone users and a 9/10 for featurephone users in my review: the iPhone is a monster in media and browsing, but a bit of a laggard for 3rd party apps and PIM. The iPhone looms heavily in his mind, though. Witness his closing sentence:
“Man… Microsoft, you gotta get that browser fixed… Like, right now.”
It has to be said that this video compares “Windows Mobile version 6″ to “iPhone version 1.” As I said in my review, I have no plans to return to any of my previous Palm OS or Windows Mobile smartphones. Many of these shortcomings will be fixed with software updates. The big question is pretty much “when?”
