The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

So anyway my new Motorola Droid Pro arrived just over a week ago. My initial impressions were a mixed bag. I liked the relatively low weight, when compared with my HTC G2/Desire Z, and liked not having to flip the phone into landscape mode in order to type on the keyboard, but wasn’t impressed by the screen, which apart from being as small as the screen on the Palm Pre, was not as bright and clear as I expected. The keys were also surprisingly difficult to type on. They are small and have ridges that are unlike other keypads I have experienced. Guess this will get better as I get used to the phone.

I wasn’t surprised when the phone prompted me for a code to unlock it. My supplier, CA-Cellular, warned me that the phone was locked to Verizon, and that they will email me the unlock code. When the code arrived a day later, I was however surprised when entering it failed to unlock the phone. A few email exchanges later I received another code from my supplier, which also didn’t work. I then bought my own unlock codes through Swiftunlocks, but knew I had a problem when these guys sent me the same two codes I had received from my supplier previously. With the aid of Google I soon discovered that the anal suits at Verizon have implemented a sophisticated locking mechanism that changes the lock codes continuously over the air. So apparently the only way to get the code is to phone Verizon and ask pretty please. Except they won’t give it to you if you are not a Verizon customer, which of course I am not, living in South Africa. So I had to send my phone back to my supplier, and am now waiting to see if they succeed in unlocking it. It has been more than a week, so am getting worried…

Don’t know about you, but I think these restrictive business practices are really irritating, out of sync with customer sentiments, and am convinced that they don’t result in the outcomes the providers are seeking. Why lock the phone to your network? If the customer wants to buy a contract from a particular network he will. And a willing customer is the best kind. You know why I don’t have an iPhone 4? Because once I have replaced my normal sim with a micro sim, it makes it that much harder to use another phone again. Apple clearly went the micro sim route as a way to lock in their customers. This kind of strategy can work in the short term, and possibly even for a long time, but at some point it will back fire. Look at Egypt. Mubarak’s customers have had enough of being locked into a single party dictatorship, even if it has been benevolent to a degree. They want freedom of choice of their service provide aka government. Take note Verizon, and Apple. Upshot of all this is that I am still using my HTC G2, and am still happy with it. I know I have called it boring in a previous post, but it is a good phone. Excellent keyboard, fast processor, Android 2.2. Everything works well on it, except that it loses cellphone signal from time to time in places where other phones don’t.

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.