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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!

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You — iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Presents: iPhone Live! #67 – Zune Invasion!

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

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!

Android Central

We also wondered why Google would comply with Apple’s request to leave multi-touch out of the G1. Hint: It has something to do with maintaining a great relationship with Apple. Read: Google still wants to play nice with Apple to get iPhone eyes on Google AdSense.

Nokia Experts

Some topics of interest this week on Nokia Experts includes the amazing Nokia Maps 3.0 beta update, Nokia 5800 firmware update, Nokia E63 availability in the US for just $279, and the announcement of the Nokia 5630 with 600 MHz processor.

PreCentral

We also had more Touchstone details to emerge when Adam Kaufman, a Product Manager at Palm started answering questions on Facebook.  Plus, many people are wondering if the Palm Pre made an appearance on the TV show “Knight Rider”.  

The iPhone Blog

Maybe jailbreakers, as the EFF asking the US government to grant it an exemption from the DMCA has Apple declaring jailbreaking illegal. (Oops, we just jailbroke live for xGPS on the last podcast!). Lastly, Google gave us Spreadsheet editing, but did Apple deny the Android multi-touch and… a 3.5mm headphone jack?!

TreoCentral

We also learned this week that the Sprint Treo Pro is now targeted for a March 15th launch, and that some Sprint stores are now getting re-stocked with new Treo Pro’s with the new ROM on board. And even though the Sprint Treo Pro is delayed, it was great to hear that Palm’s stock has neared double-digits.

WMExperts

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Around SPE for February 15, 2009

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 a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Smartphone Experts at CES 2009! WMExperts, TreoCentral, Android Central, and CrackBerry.com 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!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Round Robin: WMExpert Dieter’s Final iPhone 3G Review!

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.

Look no further than the very next day on WMExperts, when Dieter posted a rant of his own, asking people to help save GPS on Windows Mobile, which we’ll paraphrase thusly:

It’s this kind of manipulation from [Microsoft and the OEMs] 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. [Microsoft and the OEMs] make the [software and hardware], and [Verizon] provides the service. There’s too much collusion going on. If [Verizon] wants to [lock down the GPS that's not fine]. [And] don’t tell me [I have to pay to subscribe to Telenav in order to do it]. And don’t use [Microsoft and the OEMs] as a proxy to do so.

See what we’re getting at? Targeting Apple and the iPhone — which hits the rabbit-eared AT&T 3G towers like Elmer Fudd with a rail gun — for redirecting high-bandwidth traffic to WiFi, when Verizon is locking out GPS entirely is platform division at the expense of a united front against a common enemy. It’s the WinPot calling the iKettle black in a cupboard full of charred cooking ware, and it misses the main culprit: the carrier fire.

Now, while Apple has done more in it’s brief 1 1/2 years in the mobile space to break the carrier locks than Microsoft or any other megacorps have done in a decade it’s still not enough. Just imagine what could happen if Microsoft put their own, still ginormous weight behind reform. Imagine if Google, rather than taking the carrier-centric, business-as-usual Android licensing route put their “don’t be evil” mantra where their handset was? Imagine if RIM, rather than letting carriers rip WiFi from the Blackberry Storm, stood up told the carriers just where exactly they could push their odiferous demands? Imagine if Apple told AT&T to invest a little in infrastructure cause unlimited means unlimited and podcast downloads they are a coming!

Those are the rants I want to see more of, and in more places.

Go get ‘em, tigers!

PS: Particularly perplexing with the current 10MB cap on podcasts in iPhone OS 2.2 is that they only apply to direct downloads. Hitting the title, on the other hand, will begin to stream the podcast over 3G (or WiFi) without any such limitations or restrictions. What’s up with that? Anyone know if streaming traffic is any different for the 3G network than download traffic?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Retorts: iPhone Shmodcasts?! WinMo GPS Locks?! Fight the Real Enemy!

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?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Vetoes Carrier Veto Power

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.

First, Some History

When I last used Windows Mobile, I was frustrated at the lack of real estate — I was used to a 320×320 screen from the Treo 680 (which I’ll be using again next week), and the 750’s 240×240 screen felt really small. When the pixels are limited like that, the seemingly glaring excesses of the Windows Mobile interface… the bars across the bottom and top of the screen, plus the right scroll bar: I was not a happy camper with how the real estate was divided. Dieter of WMExperts told me that WM6 was basically WM5, but with less bugs. The user interface, the way that Windows Mobile presents itself to people using it, was pretty much unchanged, and I figured that maybe I’d check out Windows Mobile again once their new version, Photon, was available. This was all pre-iPhone, so my options of escape were a bit limited.

But, that was a different device, a different Windows Mobile, and a different time. Which leads us, finally, to the Tilt.

About the Tilt

The tilt is a Windows Mobile slider, meaning that it has an iPhone-like front, except that it slides up along the middle to reveal a full-sized keyboard along the front. The form factor, except for the sliding part, is a lot like the iPhone. Oh, and the double-thickness. The iPhone is perhaps a centimeter longer, but half the depth.

The Tilt is huge — not a device that you can use with just one hand. And there are buttons all over the place — one for the camera, one for power/sleep, one for push-to-talk, two OK buttons, and a scroll wheel. Then there are phone, hangup, mail, browser, start, left menu, right menu, and (another) OK key. Then there’s the 5-way directional pad. Many, though not all, of these keys are present yet again in the slider keyboard.

The Size is Deceptive

The battery life on the Tilt is a bit of a disappointment. With the iPhone, I’m used to leaving wi-fi on pretty much all of the time. I recharge the phone about every two or three days. With the Tilt, battery life is great — as long as that Wi-Fi is off, and I don’t have any programs chewing up bandwidth in the background. I suppose this could be said of any phone, but given the size of the Tilt, I kind of expect more battery life out of it.

Given the size, I also kind of expect more speed… response on the Tilt is a bit sluggish, which kind of surprised me. I don’t know if it’s a RAM issue or a processor speed thing, all I know is that the Tilt is kind of pokey. Windows Mobile ships with its own special version of the spinny beach ball that indicates that something is going on. You can’t do anything while the ball spins, the mobile is pretty much locked.

Those are the bad things about the Tilt, off the bat. I’m still not a fan of Windows Mobile, I still find myself lamenting that the UI is bad. The start menu is too small to be thumbable accurately, for example.

Redemptions

But there are good things about Windows Mobile, there always have been. One thing that I do like about Windows Mobile is the power of it all. Real multi-tasking is a boon. Of all of the smartphones that everyone has been using over the Smartphone Round Robin, the Tilt is the only one that really has it. If you want to have GPS mapping going while you browse the web whilst music plays in the background, have at it. The Tilt may not be especially responsive during that time, but it will work.

Windows Mobile also has “a real file system.” With that real filesystem come a lot of benefits. For most things, it means “real apps.” If you want to download something to your phone, have at it. If you want Outlook on your phone, it’s there. If you want to make powerpoint documents or spreadsheets or word documents, it’s all there, ready for you to use. It’s a very powerful system.

For Every Gripe, an Equal and Opposite 3rd Party App

And though there are a lot of things that I don’t like about the way Windows Mobile looks and behaves, there’s a slew of programs out there that attempt to fix it.

I don’t like the Today screen, for example. I miss having a useful background image, and I don’t like the way that the standard information is presented to me. There are programs out there that fix that — the most notable one is probably SPB Mobile Shell, which I use to replace the default ‘Today’ screen.

The browser is really bad, too. Pocket IE is pretty much a joke — it’s incredibly slow and absolutely offsets any speed gains you get from using the Tilt with a 3G network. Opera Mobile to the rescue! It’s not as good as MobileSafari on the iPhone, but it’s a sight better than Pocket IE. You can use it to replace pretty much everything that PIE does — download files, the whole shebang. Opera Mobile is one of the reasons that I’ve been looking forward to using the Tilt.

I also think that the software keyboard on the Tilt is very bad — it’s tiny and requires frequent use of the stylus. I’m pretty certain that there’s an iPhone-like keyboard available. One of the times that I tapped the keyboard with the stylus, though, I got a menu where I could pick and choose from several less-bad software keyboards. The keys are still infintesimal on most of them, but there’s a choice. And some of the helpful forum users have pointed me to other software keyboards that might be better, and I’m pretty sure that there’s an iPhone software keyboard clone floating around on the itnernet somewhere.

Nothing to Reference

One of the things that sets Windows Mobile apart from the other smartphones we’re all testing is that Microsoft doesn’t actually make the device — they just make the software. The rest is all up to HTC, or Palm, or Motorola, or anyone who decides to ship a Windows Mobile smartphone.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it’s a platform — it means that anyone that wants to build a smartphone and has the hardware know-how can build one, because they don’t need nearly as many people to get the software side of things working. Since all of these hardware companies are using the same software platform, it means that it’s a lot easier to get better apps to use and games to play with — it gives Windows Mobile a lot of legs, in terms of what you can do with it.

The downside to all of this is that you don’t necessarily get a strong design edge out of this method of doing things. It’s a lot like Microsoft in the computer world — maybe your average beige computer box is kind of ugly, but that’s not Microsoft’s fault, they just did the software.

And HTC’s Tilt, though not by any means a bad-looking device, shows all the symptoms of this problem. There are huge buttons all over the place, but the hardest one to find and activate is the sleep button. The red phone button, which we’ve all been taught with countless featurephone designs, should turn the device on, or at least wake it up from sleep. Looks like someone missed that, as the red phone button does nothing. It may be that there’s a way to swap those buttons in software — if there is, please post.

Endless Customizability

One of the other things about Windows Mobile that struck me is that there’s endless customizability. I’m willing to bet that many if not all of the things that I can find that I don’t like, there’s an app or tweak or registry edit that fixes it. All that matters is that you have the time, knowledge, and/or money to throw at the things you don’t like about Windows Mobile. And that you have a parachute for the learning cliff.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Round Robin: AT&T Tilt

“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?”

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Dieter Likes His Windows Mobile