The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

The long-awaited v2 upgrade to Palm’s WebOS will be called HP WebOS 2. Sorry Palmfans but this is the next step in the demise of the Palm brand. The new WebOS will initially run on the soon to be released Palm Pre 2, but don’t expect a Palm Pre 3 to follow, it is likely to be an HP Pre 3 or some other moniker under the HP brand. Sad for Palm, but good for WebOS, and hopefully ultimately good for us the consumers.

I hope HP is going to sell their WebOS phones in South Africa. SA Palmfans had to get their Pres from all over the world (mine from Germany with a qwertz keyboard) and still don’t have access to the Palm App Catalog. Here’s hoping HP will remember the SA market. HP has a long history of selling laptops, desktop and printers in the SA market and has an established reseller and support network here. C’mon HP.

RIM launched its version of the iPad yesterday. It is called the PlayBook and as you can see from the picture, it looks cool. Impressive specs also: 1GHz dual-core processor, lots of RAM, 7 inch 1024 x 600 capacitive multi-touch screen, front and rear facing cameras, Flash support, hardware graphics acceleration, 1080 HD video, HDMI output, and weighs only 400g (compared with iPad at 730g).

The software also looks promising. It uses an OS developed by QNX, who was recently acquired by RIM. The interface looks a lot like WebOS, which can only be good from a UI perspective. Apparently the PlayBook will also sync with your Blackberry phone (remember the Palm Folio?).

The biggest hurdle for the PlayBook is going to be to get developers to write apps for its new software platform. No apps no play.

My Palm Pre is now running at 1GHz! And as you can see from this photo, it is doing this speed at a very cool 21 degree celcius. Get the latest versions of Govnah and UberKernel via Preware and your Pre can also.

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.

I hear HP may be launching a table, codename Hurricane, running Palm’s WebOS, later this year. Please let it be true. HP did say it has big plans for WebOS, and it did scrap its Windows tablet plans. It could look like this:

To my Palm readers, I hear there is an WebOS update coming soon.

I have always been a qwerty man, well at least since qwerty phones became available. I have had many, including Palm Treos, Blackberries, Nokia 9300, E90, E71, E72, N97, HTC TyTn I and II. And now I have the Motorola Milestone, which is the non-US incarnation of the Droid, and I think it may well be the best qwerty phone available today. Let’s take a look at the competition:

Blackberry

All the Blackberries, except the Pearl and the Storm, have qwerty keypads. They generally work well as phones, and the Blackberry signature dish, its push email, is legendary. However, the Blackberry OS’ age is starting to show and smartphone activities such as web browsing, youtubing and tweeting are less than satisfactory on the Blackberry.

HTC

HTC has not produced a qwerty phone in a while. I think their most recent one is the Touch Pro 2 which was released early last year already. If you can remember that far back, it runs the now pretty much defunct Windows Mobile, has a resistive touch screen and 528MHz processor. HTC also produced the G1 which was the first Android phone. A good device but very much first generation Android, while the Droid is 3rd or 4th generation.

Nokia

Nokia has produced many excellent qwerty phones, from the brickish 9500 to the latest and very sexy E72. All very good phones, but boy Symbian is old now and it shows. The internal mail client still cannot handle HTML mails properly. The user interface is clunky. The E72 looks gorgeous until you switch it on. The resistive touch screen on the N97 is junk. The list goes on.

Then there is N900. Doesn’t run Symbian which is good. Instead runs Maemo 5. Not many people has heard of Maemo, but it is an open-source development environment and may be Nokia’s strategy for high-end phones into the future. Maemo looks very promising, with over a 1000 apps available already, but the N900 is very much still a work in progress, and lacks too many features to be a serious contender for the top spot.

Palm

Palm has the Pre and Pixie, and the Plus version of each. The Pre is a portrait slider, which is novel. The keyboard is small but very usable. The WebOS software is a slick and very user friendly platform, arguably the best modern phone OS available today. The appstore is also growing by the day. Ignoring Palm’s financial woes, I’d put the Pre into the second spot after the Droid. Its small screen and keyboard counts against it. Also doesn’t help that the appstore is not available to all users, including yours truly

Motorola

Motorola has one or two other qwerty phones, such as the Devour, but the Droid/Milestone is their flagship, so it is safe to assume that it is their best.

The Droid/Milestone

The first time you clamp eyes on the Droid, I doubt that the words “this is the best qwerty phone in the world today” tumble from your lips. It is quite ugly at first glance, and at second and nth glance to be honest. But use it for a month or two, and you will be impressed. It has a large screen (480 x 854 pixels, 16million colours) making it a pleasure to view web pages and videos on. The screen is a capacitive touchscreen requiring the lightest of touches to interact with. It is fast with a 600MHz ARM Cortex processor. It runs the latest version of Android, namely 2.1, which provides multi-touch, excellent gmail integration, and thousands of apps via the Android market.

So there you have it. The best qwerty smartphone in the world today is the Motorola Droid/Milestone. C’mon HTC I know you can make a better one.

Yesterday Palm announced their financial results for Q3 FY2010 and it was ugly. Worse news is that Q4 is going to be even uglier. Palm made a loss of $102.8m. In terms of cash flow, Palm burned through an additional $22m cash this past quarter, still spending more than they are managing to bring in. Nearly a million phones were shipped, while only 408,000 were actually sold. Ouch. This was also fewer than the 573,000 phones sold during Q2.

Given that Palm has an excellent software platform in WebOS and competitive hardware in the Pre, I blame their woes on:

1. Their initial exclusive tie-up with Sprint which was not good for them as Sprint did not invest enough in marketing the Pre. It also meant that by the time Palm launched on Verizon their moment had past, and the Droid had arrived in a big way, stealing what little thunder was left for the Palm. The Droid sold 1.05m units in the first 74 days after launch, more than the iPhone’s 1m units.
2. Their restrictive practices around developing WebOS apps as well as restricting access to the apps to users in the US.

How is Palm going to reverse their fortunes? They still have options, but will have to move quickly if they want to stay relevant.

They should launch in South Africa. That will be turn things around. Maybe not for Palm but it will for me and Alastair and Roland, the only 3 Palm Pre users in Africa.

A few days ago I thought the Novatel MiFi personal 3G wifi router was a cool gadget. If you missed that post, read it here. Now I hear that Verizon is bringing a new app to the brand new Palm Pre/Pixie Plus that turns the phone into a wifi hotspot that up to five devices (laptops etc) can use to access the internet via the phone’s 3G connection. How cool is that? Why has no one else done this before? Conceptually any phone with support for wifi and 3g should be able to do this.

Verizon is going to charge an extra US$40 for this, which will include a 5Gb a month allowance. And I thought broadband allowances were a unique feature of the South African networking landscape (we call them caps). Here’s hoping that the independent developer community will run with the idea and develop the same type of app for all the mobile platforms.

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.