The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

Motorola has been turning out Android-based smartphones at a rate of knots, and in every conceivable form factor. Have you seen the Flipout or the Backflip? I think they are simply throwing designs out to see which ones will stick. The Droid Pro is one such design which is going to stick I think. It is a design that has been used successfully for years by Blackberry – portrait with a fixed qwerty keyboard. Coupled with a 1GHz processor and Android 2.2 which provides enterprise email integration and document editing capabilities this promises to be an impressive device. The device will come with other enterprise goodies, such as remote wipe, complex passwords, device and sd card encryption and VPN ability.

If you are a corporate Lotus Notes user you will be very pleased to hear that Notes Traveler for Android is in beta. Hopefully by the time the Droid Pro lands on your desk you will be able to sync your Notes email, calendar and contacts using Notes Traveler.

The Droid Pro will launch on Verizon in the States in the next month or so. No word yet on a European launch, but if Motorola does release it in Europe it is likely to be called the Milestone Pro. South African droiders shouldn’t hold their breath though, as Motorola has been very slow in releasing their Android phones here. Point in case: the Milestone was launched in Europe/UK a year ago, while it became available in South Africa only a month or so ago.

Last week I overclocked my Palm Pre to 800MHz. Today my 500MHz Motorola Milestone is clocking 1.2GHz. Does that make it the fastest Android phone on the planet? Close, if not. You need two apps to achieve this, both available from the Android Market: Easy Root and Milestone Overclock. Easy Root from unstableapps.com lets you root your phone without having to do any techie stuff. Will cost you a dollar or two, payable via paypal at unstableapps.com, in order to get your registration key, but definitely worth the money. Milestone Overclock is free and lets you set your phone’s cpu at various speeds all the way up to 1.2GHz.

This morning I re-read my January post on Nokia’s Maemo-based qwerty slider called the N900. Why? Because I have had one in my hands for the past few days so I wanted to compare my expectations with reality.

Reality bites.

I know the phone is already 6-7 months old, but still, Nokia could not have thought that they can take on the iPhone or Android (or even Palm WebOS) with the N900. Firstly the phone just is not stylish – it is too thick and chunky. It doesn’t say look at me I am cool. It says look at my I am a geek. I know there are many geeks out there, and some of them are loving the open-source nature of the N900 and Maemo, but there are not enough of them to create serious market momentum behind the Maemo platform.

The slide-out qwerty keyboard is not bad, but is also not good. It has three rows only, with very little space between the top row and the edge of the screen. As a result my thumbs bump against the screen edge when I type on the top row. At least the keys are nice and large with decent travel. The keyboard on my Motorola Droid/Milestone is much better.

The screen is nice and bright with good resolution (not as bright as the Milestone), but is resistive. Those Finns and their gloves again I guess. The response of the screen is poor compared to any of the zillion capacitive screens out there. It is similar to the N97′s screen in terms of response. The N900 even comes with a stylus! I thought styluses (is that a word?) died out with Windows Mobile. Anyway nothing shouts geek like a stylus.

And then there is the screen orientation. Nokia has been marketing the N900 as a “mobile computer” rather than a phone, but forcing one to do everything in landscape orientation, except for phoning, is a bit much. It means you need both hands for pretty much everything. What a drag. Anyway I don’t see how this phone is more of a computer than any of the other high end phones out there, except maybe for the iPhone 4 which still cannot properly multi-task, something which computers have been doing for years.

Let’s look inside the phone, at Maemo the operating system, which at one point was touted as Nokia’s new high-end operating platform. If it is, Nokia is in trouble. Maemo may be open-source and powerful underneath, but it is dressed in out-of-date unstylish clothes. The user interface is better than Symbian’s but only just. Compared to WebOS, Android, and iPhone OS, it looks and feels way out of date. And it is just not finger-friendly enough. The multi-tasking works well though, with a single screen called the dashboard showing all your open apps. Not that you will have many apps open, as there are only a handful of apps available for Maemo.

The list of shortcomings in Maemo/N900 is long:

* No Youtube viewer. The browser (try Mozilla Firefox if you don’t like the on-board browser) supports Flash so you can view videos directly in the browser, but the performance and image quality is a distant second to the excellent Youtube apps available on all Android phones, Palm Pres and iPhones. Even the Winmobile HTC HD2 has a Youtube app.

* The browser is so-so. It doesn’t even reformat the text when you zoom in, so you have to drag the screen left and right in order to read text. What a pain.

* The N900 wouldn’t upload the phone contacts to my car’s bluetooth system. I read up on this and it seems this a missing feature in Maemo. More pain.

* The phone does not sync properly with Gmail calendar and contacts. Read about Maemo’s Mail for Exchange implementation here before you buy this phone.

* The biggest killer for me is that the support for corporate email and calendar stops at Mail for Exchange with no plans to support Lotus Notes. Not clear why Nokia has not provides Lotus Notes support, especially considering that the E72 comes with Notes Traveler built in. To me this is big sign saying that Nokia does not (never has or no longer) regard the N900 as their flagship nor Maemo as their new platform. I have asked the guys at Commontime to see if they can get their mNotes5 product working with the N900. If they succeed then the Lotus Notes geeks (like myself) will be able to sync our corporate email, calendar and contacts.

I can carry on with the litany of shortcomings, but I am fast losing interest in the N900. So, in summary, it is not good enough. Nokia needs something better, and they need it fast. Roll on Symbian 4.

It has been four months since I got my Milestone/Droid, and I am still using it daily, well most days. It is not as if I haven’t played with other phones over the past four months, but I keep going back to the Milestone. It is just such a good all-round performer, with a large, beautiful, capacitive touch screen, fast processor, Android 2.1, and best of all a large qwerty keyboard. And Motorola has been good in providing regular firmware updates over the air. Only yesterday they announced that the Milestone will be getting Android 2.2 shortly. The Google Nexus One is the only other phone that has received the latest Android update to date.

My favourite Android apps used on the Milestone are ChompSMS, Twitdroid, WordPress (with which I update my blog directly from my phone), Scan2PDF (with which I can scan a document using the camera to PDF) and best of all Touchdown by Nitrodesk with which I sync my corporate emails, calendar, tasks and contacts. Touchdown syncs with pretty much any ExchangeServer, but I use it to sync with my company’s Lotus Notes server via Lotus Notes Traveler.

I saw the first local mention of the Milestone in the Sunday Times over the weekend, so South African consumers should be able to get a Milestone on contract soon. Go get one, you won’t be disappointed.

Hi everyone. I am back from 2 weeks in Verbier Switzerland where the skiing was fast and the internet even more so. Took my Droid/Milestone and Pre with. Thought maybe I could get apps via the Palm appstore while in Switzerland, but no luck. Maybe that will change once HTC has bought or merged with Palm. Have you heard the rumour? I hope it is more than a rumour. HTC and Palm are well suited to one another, and has a long-standing relationship as HTC has manufactured many of the recent Palms pre the Pre. HTC makes very good hardware and Palm makes very good software. Put the two together and it may just work. Gaining WebOS will be brilliant for HTC who has been at the mercy of Microsoft and Google etc with respect to software. The HD2 is a case in point: brilliant piece of hardware but is stuck with the old Windows Mobile. Palm has been less successful at building solid hardware, as most Pre owners will testify to. HTC will also gain Palm’s treasure chest of patents, which can only help to defend itself against Apple’s patent attacks. Branding could be a problem for the new entity. Palm is a well known brand with a lot of brand value built up over many years, but HTC has spent much money and effort to build its brand over recent years so may not want to let go of it. I could live with HTC Palm. Sounds better than Lenovo Palm, which is another rumoured suitor. Also sounds better than no Palm.

For the record I have used the Droid since the end of February and have been impressed with it. Fast, big screen, big qwerty, lots of apps. And now that my employer has implemented IBM Traveler the Droid also syncs over the air with my corporate email, calendar and contacts. I use a 3rd party app called Touchdown by Nitrodesk for this. Works beautifully. My Droid travelled the Verbier ski slopes with me, in my ski jacket pocket. Fell on it a couple of times. Still works.

After using the Droid (ok, mine is actually a Milestone, but that is such a lame name, and too close to Millstone, which given the heft of the phone….) for a few days I am no longer so sure that this phone is going to kick butt. I know it has been selling very well in the States, but I wonder how much of those sales were due to the huge marketing spend by Motorola and how much due to the phone’s own intrinsic appeal.

Ok, let me start with the things I like about the phone. It has a large 3.7 inch capacitive screen that is large enough to render complete web pages. It is also very sensitive to the touch and a pleasure to work with gesture-wise. Mine has multi-touch support, while the real Droid doesn’t (or didn’t when originally released late last year). The phone is very fast, faster than I expected given that the Arm Cortex A8 CPU (a 600MHz, OMAP3430 chip downclocked to 550MHz) also powers the Palm Pre. The Droid is definitely fast than the Pre. The keyboard is excellent in terms of the size of the keys, travel and tactile feedback. The keyboard feels like a high quality affair, like the rest of the phone.

Typing on the Droid is somewhat spoiled by the lip sticking out the right side of the phone (when holding it in landscape mode with keyboard slid open) as well as the space used by the dpad. The result is that the phone juts into my right hand and requires my thumb to have to stretch. Quite uncomfortable. Also not enough space between the top row of keys and the bottom of the screen which makes it hard to type numbers (these are on the top row).

The vanilla Android interface on the Droid is not very slick, especially when compared with HTC’s Sense as implemented on the Hero, or with the Palm Pre’s WebOS interface. It could do with a bit more pizazz. Font size control is also completely absent, and with the small fonts used on the Droid, I have to put on my reading glasses every time I use the phone. Giving my age away here I guess, but Android badly needs the ability to change font sizes. So does, WebOS for that matter, but I at least managed to patch WebOS to get bigger fonts. Windows Mobile has had the ability for years. So has Symbian. Blackberry leads the pack here, providing a large variety of font sizes and types.

Then there is the Droid’s battery, all 1400mAh of it. It is just not good enough. I haven’t been able to get through a day (12 hours) on a single charge. Even using JuiceDefender to limit the data connection to 2 minutes out of every 15 minutes has not helped enough. It did improve the battery life, but not enough for a full day’s operation, and it meant that the phone would not connect at all outside of the 2 minutes window, which is very irritating when you are trying to surf the web for example. I see the Seidio has a 2800mAh battery for the Droid, but it makes the phone heavier and uglier, neither of which the phone needs.

Google integration is good as can be expected from an Android phone. The Youtube client delivers excellent quality videos, coupled with the screen, maybe the best quality Youtube videos I have seen on a mobile phone to date. Android market is also good, and downloading and installing apps is a painless (and free, since I can only access free apps) exercise.

My overall impression after the first few days? I am back to using my Palm Pre.

The Motorola Droid has been launched in the US with a lot of media activity.

It is being touted as the phone to resurrect the flagging Motorola brand, and of course the usual iPhone-killer claims are also being made.

It will eventually make its way to South Africa as well, 1st quarter 2010 I heard, but if you can’t wait that long, head over to www.cacell.co.za who is selling it as the Motorola Milestone. Apparently the Droid moniker was dropped for markets outside the US. Why, I don’t know. And why Milestone I also don’t know. Personally prefer Droid. Milestone too close to millstone (of the around my neck variety).

Anyway the phone looks promising. I have been using an HTC Hero aka G2 Touch for a while now, in between using the Palm Pre, and have been very impressed with Android. Have often felt the Hero would be the perfect phone if it had a real qwerty keyboard. The Droid has a real keyboard. Of course HTC’s Sense user interface added a lot to the slickness of the Hero. Will have to see if Motorola’s use of the native Android interface works for the phone.