The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

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.

In an attempt, a good one at that, to increase the current dismal haul of Palm Pre/Pixi apps, Palm has released Project Ares, a development environment that runs entirely in a web browser. How cool is that. No need to install any software on your computer. It is in public beta. Get it here

Sign up for Seven’s beta program and you can push the corporate email, calendar and contacts of up to 25 people using a single desktop pc. They call it a beta program, but it is really Seven’s way of testing its products before releasing them to its main market, mobile networks who in turn offer Seven in rebranded form to their subscribers. Despite this I have found the “beta” software to be of very good quality. Their support is also excellent, provided via the forums on their website.

Seven supports a number of mobile platforms – Windows Mobile, Symbian, PalmOS (the old one, not the new WebOS) and Android. On the other end of the pipe it supports Microsoft Exchange of course and Lotus Notes. Not that many push email systems out there catering for Lotus Notes, so this is good news for those of us wedded to Lotus Notes for better or for worse. Seven works in always-on mode, so emails come through in real time. Does hit your phone’s battery life, but luckily the software allows you to set quiet times/days during which time email do not get pushed.

Am using it currently on my E90. Have used it on various Windows phones also, as well HTC’s Hero. Only syncs emails on the Hero though. Wish they’d bring out a client for the new Palm Pre, but in the meantime I use Commontime mNotes5 for the Pre. More about that later.

Did I mention that it is completely free? Get it at http://community.seven.com

Symbian is toast, at least for Nokia’s future top of the range devices. Maemo is the new Symbian. First used in Nokia’s internet tablet in 2005, the brand new N900 runs the latest Maemo incarnation. Looks very sleek, and with Mozilla as its web browsing technology, should be yum. Like just about every other new mobile OS, e.g. Palm WebOS, iPhone OS, etc, Maemo is also based on Linux. The latter may not have succeeded in dislodging Microsoft Windows from its pc throne, but it is a clear winner in the mobile world.

Ditching Symbian on its high-end phones is probably a good move on Nokia’s part. Symbian is solid, but old, and still can’t probably handle rich text format HTML emails. It also falls short in many other areas such as web browsing and on-line video. The latest Symbian adaption for Nokia touchscreen phones like the N97 and Express Music falls way short of the competition in terms of its user interface. Anyone that has used either of these phones will know about the confusing way in which you have to double-press in some places and single-press in others.

The best feature of the N900 is arguably its 3.5 inch 16 million colours touchscreen. But why another resistive touchscreen Nokia? It is time for a multi-touch capacitive screen. Everyone else has one, even Winmobile! I can understand that the Fins don’t want to take their gloves off, but it is warm where I am. No gloves here.

Glowing red cyborg eyes, bombs dropped from stealth fighters, emotionless calls of “DRRROOOIIID” every time you get a text message — it’s enough to scare yesterday’s lunch out of anyone. Verizon’s no-holds-barred advertising campaign for the Motorola Droid has been so hellishly frightening overwhelmingly successful, in fact, that it appears to be paying dividends either directly or indirectly against Moto’s biggest rivals.

YouGov’s BrandIndex — an ongoing survey measuring brand loyalty through some secret-sauce methodology that only analysts would fully comprehend — shows a marked spike in Moto’s score in the critical adult male category, while Apple and RIM have taken hits over the same period. These numbers look terribly volatile over a relative short span, so we’re not going to be rushing to any conclusions — but by any measure, it’s pretty wild to see Moto go from a has-been to besting the bulletproof cult of iPhone in just a few short weeks.

The movers and shakers in 2005:

And in 2009…..