The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

Strangely enough I am looking forward to getting the Blackberry Storm 2 in a few days. Unlike most of my mobile phone acquisitions, this one is coming my way courtesy of a network contract renewal. Blackberry is the preferred, actually the only officially sanctioned, push email mechanism provided by my employer, so I have had my fair share of Blackberries – Pearls, 8800, Bold, etc. The Bold is very good and I still use it from time to time. It sucks in a few areas though, specifically web browsing, youtubing and doing my gmails in html. Overall the BB experience is somewhat boring and falls short of the user experience on the iPhone, Android, WebOS and even Symbian I think. I considered the Storm when it was released but decided against it as it had no wifi – what was RIM thinking. And then everyone complained about the SurePress clickable touch screen. The Storm 2 looks quite a bit better though with an improved screen (read somewhere that this screen is the closest you will get to a physical keyboard with a touch screen one), wifi, and 2GB ram. And the web browsing is better than on the Bold. Maybe this will be the phone that converts me to a virtual keyboard. Will see.

The combination of a 1Ghz Snapdragon processor, 4.3inch screen and a 1320mAh battery has been worrying me. Windows Mobile is not exactly known for the sparing way in which it sucks on your device’s battery. This cool-looking accessory combines anextended battery,  with double the capacity of the standard battery,  with a kickstand and promises to keep your HD2 going (or standing) for much longer.  It was spotted at Cloves the UK-based retailer and is expected to sell for around US$90 from some time during February.

In South Africa, where I live, hotspots are frequently used in the context of crime, i.e. such and such place is a crime hotspot, but much less fequently in the context of internet access. In fact, public wifi hotspots in South Africa are scarcer than apps in Palm’s app store. We do have good 3G mobile network coverage though with two large network operators competing fiercely to provide the SA consumer with the best possible coverage at the highest possible price – the result of an oligopoly. So much for Economics 101. Next time you and up to 4 of your closest friends are killing time in your local library/pub/park/shopping centre and you feel the need to surf the web using your Vivienne Tam netbook, pull out your Novatel MiFi, equipped with a 3G SIM card from your favourite oligopolist, connect your netbook to it via wifi and voila! you have created your own hotspot.   Actually not even necessary to pull the MiFi out of your pocket or stylish laptop bag, as it runs off batteries and requires no wires to be connected, although I guess you will want to pull it out to press the On button if not to show it off to the unconnected laptop users at nearby tables.

The GSM version supports 3.5G HSDPA which means that you can get up to 7.2Mbps download speeds which is pretty decent. There is also a CDMA version should anyone be able to find a public spot in the US that is not already covered by a wifi hotspot.

It is selling for around ZAR2,000, which is not cheap, but I am not going to put a price on real style.

Can’t wait for Windows Mobile 7? Want to buy a WinMo phone now? Buy an HTC HD2. Rumour has it that it will be only one in HTC’s current product range that will get Windows Mobile 7 when it is eventually released.  Apparently HTC Russia made this known via a tweet, which was subsequently removed. The same information was allegedly emailed by an HTC support staffer also.

PalmOS hasn’t totally kicked it yet — a company called Aceeca is actually releasing two Garnet-based devices later this year. If you don’t remember the Palm saga, the source code for PalmOS actually ended up with Access, which now licenses it out to other companies – including Palm, as it happens. Confusing? Yes. So is the idea of forking over $199 for the Aceeca PDA32 Garnet, which packs an unnamed ARM CPU, a QVGA screen, and an SD expansion slot into a case that’s “taller than a Palm TX and about twice as thick.” Oh, and you’ll have to pay extra for “wireless options”. Sounds like a winner, not. Corporate customers get some dated hardware of their own from Aceeca: the MEZ1500 Garnet, which will run a steep $499 and keeps the QVGA screen but adds a bigger battery, a faster processor, and an expansion bus for various optional barcode scanner, RFID readers, and so forth. You’ll have to pay extra for WiFi and Bluetooth on this one too, and you can also get a WinCE 5.0 version, which is apparently some kind of hilarious vaporware no one’s been waiting for. Can you say “iPhone killer” ha ha?

HTC is targeting the lower cost feature phone market with its new HTC Smart. It runs Qualcomm’s BREW operating software which promises a more limited smartphone experience than found on its phones running Winmobile and Android. BREW, which stands for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, is  not new, but runs mostly on US phones and is virtually unknown outside of the USA. Apparently Qualcomm makes it quite expensive for developers to release software on the platform, which has probably throttled the growth of 3rd party apps. HTC’s strategy makes sense and is likely designed to counter the competition from the new batch of high-end feature phones from Samsung, LG and others. These phones promise functionality nearly as good as smartphones, with faster response times and better battery life. Samsung’s Star is being marketed as “faster than a smartphone”. Once again HTC has stuck its brilliant Sense user interface on top, which should make the user experience on the Smart very similar to the experience on its latest Android and Winmobile phones. The Smart can do the basic stuff such as making calls, emails, messaging, photos, html browsing, twitter and so on. For many users this is likely to be sufficient and the Sense UI BREW combination may be less intimidating to deal with than a phone running Android for example. The phone comes with a 2.8inch touch screen – hopefully and likely to be a capacitive one, 3mp camera, 3g, but no wifi. The battery is only 1000mAh which hopefully indicates the lower power consumption of the BREW platform. If it had wifi I might even be tempted to try one.

WebOS does not provide a way to change the screen fonts. Pretty poor if you ask me. Anyway I have been struggling to read the text on my Pre’s tiny screen. Still struggling but can now at least read my sms text. Accomplished this by downloading from Precentral.net a patch to reduce the messaging text to 15 pixels. Edited the patch file, which is a normal text format file. Replaced 15 with 36 and voila – VERY BIG text. See picture below. Installed the patch using WebOSQuickInstaller, also available via precentral. Now just need to figure out how to increase font in emails and how to get web browser to wrap text when zoomed in.