Sprint now has two top-notch smartphones. The Palm Pre is the energetic, if still somewhat unformed adolescent. The BlackBerry Tour 9630 is the mature adult. Both have things to learn from each other. The Pre could learn a lot from the Tour's great power management, world-phone capability, and rich third-party app catalog. The Tour, on the other hand, could learn a lot from the Pre about fun and about browsing the Web.
That's not saying the BlackBerry Tour isn't fun. It's as much fun as a BlackBerry gets, with excellent music and video players; it just never really lets its hair down in the interface department. That will actually come as a relief to BlackBerry loyalists, who have been clicking on similar icons for almost a decade.
Software Bundle
The Sprint Tour looks exactly like Verizon Wireless's Tour and shares most of the same features, so read that review for more details. It's a great world-roaming voice phone, a good camera phone, and a satisfying media player. It syncs music with iTunes without annoying Apple. The built-in Web browser is abysmal, but excellent alternatives are available such as Bolt and Opera Mini. The Sprint version, I'm thrilled to say, didn't show any of the bugs that bedeviled my Verizon Tour experience. It didn't crash while I was testing it and handled my 16GB SanDisk and Kingston memory cards just fine.
The Sprint model comes with a slew of exclusive Sprint apps, though. Between actual apps on the phone and stubs that lead to downloads, there's Handmark Pocket Express, a NASCAR app, NFL Mobile Live, MLB.com, Sprint TV, the Sprint Music Store, Pandora, Sprint's own software store (powered by Handmark), Sprint Navigation, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and five IM apps covering every popular protocol. Whew!
App Testing and Multimedia
Some of these apps are great. Some are no fun at all. The Sprint music store/player, for instance, had trouble displaying some of the titles for AAC-format songs on my memory card, ran sluggishly, and generally felt superfluous. The BlackBerry has a perfectly good music player, and you can buy songs for less money from several major stores including Amazon.com. The Sprint software store was just a Web link, nowhere near as usable as RIM's own BlackBerry App World.
Sprint TV, on the other hand, delivered at least a dozen channels of streaming video content without a problem. Pocket Express is a quick and easy way to get news and other information, and Pandora played several stations smoothly (though not over a Bluetooth headset.) NFL Mobile Live delivered jerky video in a tiny window, but it's also chock-full of stats and news that appeared to be useful, but made no sense to me as a non-football fan.
With all of those apps loaded, the Tour had about 99MB free for more applications and data. That seems like a decent amount, but remember, you can't store your apps on a memory card.
World Phone and Conclusions
One other advance Sprint has made is their no-nonsense SIM unlocking policy. Unlike Verizon, which makes you jump through a few hoops, the Sprint Tour can be used with foreign SIM cards for lower international rates with no fuss, although you'll probably lose your BlackBerry data service if you try that tack.
The BlackBerry Tour isn't a flashy new touch-screen phone. It's a reliable performer on a proven platform. On many measures, it's neck and neck with the Palm Pre. The Tour has removable memory, video recording, world-phone calling, strong battery life, and a much better keyboard. The Pre has a far better Web browser, better Microsoft Exchange connectivity, and a more sexy style. Much of the Pre's goodness also comes from its touch screen, multi-touch support, and accelerometer, though the Tour doesn't have those by design.
Ultimately, though, it's the BlackBerry's thousands of third-party applications that win the day. At the moment, there are BlackBerry apps to do hundreds of things the Pre can only dream of—manage your travel, sling your video, play lots of games, even connect to Google Voice.
Palm assured me that the Pre's third-party app catalog will ramp up, but it sounds like that process may take months. Until we see the next WebOS phone, then, I'm crowning the BlackBerry Tour 9630 as the Editor's Choice smartphone on Sprint.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:Continuous Talk Time: 5 hours 11 minutes
The HTC Touch Pro2 for T-Mobile is the best Windows Mobile 6.1 phone on the market. It could even be the best possible Windows Mobile 6.1 phone. But while its address book is a work of art and it would make a great addition to any Microsoft Exchange-based business, its cobbled-together interface and media playback problems hold us back from giving it an Editors' Choice. Buzz up!on Yahoo!
Design and Calling Features
The Touch Pro2 is a boat. At 4.6 by 2.3 by 0.7 (HWD) inches and 6.3 ounces, it's a big phone. But it's very solidly built and handsome, and you get a lot for the size. The phone's main screen is a vast 3.6-inch, 800-by-480-pixel resistive touch panel, and it slides to the side and tilts up so the Touch Pro2 can sit on your desk like a little laptop. With the screen opened, you can type on a huge five-row QWERTY keyboard, one of the best I've ever used on a handheld—it's roomy, spacious, and clicky.
The Touch Pro2 is a very good voice phone. It makes calls on T-Mobile's and foreign 3G or EDGE networks, and calls sound loud and sharp through the earpiece. RF reception isn't fabulous, but it's good enough. Very intense noise cancellation can make transmissions sound computery on the other side of a call, but it does a good job at blocking background noise. The speakerphone is loud enough, and there's a well-placed mute button on the top of the phone, because you're supposed to put the Touch Pro2 face down on a table when you're using the speakerphone.
Ringtones are moderately loud, and the vibrating alert is also surprisingly robust. The phone worked fine with a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. You can trigger the built-in voice dialing using the Bluetooth headset, but I found the voice dialing to be frustratingly inaccurate.
Unfortunately, we couldn't complete our battery tests because our battery-testing computers crashed several times—no fault of the Touch Pro2's. HTC advertises six and a half hours of 3G talk time, which seems in line with the partial results we got.
HTC's TouchFLO 3D
Windows Mobile 6.1 is old and creaky, so HTC has rewritten as much of the user interface as they could. The Touch Pro2 doesn't just have a cool set of animated home screens that you swipe across to quickly access your contact book, e-mail, music and YouTube. The program menu, address book, camera app, calendar, e-mail setup, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi setup all look nicer and work much more easily than their standard Windows Mobile brethren. If you stick to HTC's home-screen apps—SMS, e-mail, calendar, Web browser, stocks, camera, music, and weather—you'll never have to pull out the little stylus tucked into the corner of the device.
It's amazing what HTC has done to dress up every aspect of Windows Mobile, but the Touch Pro2 works best as a business communicator. It's full of useful little advances. When you receive an email, you can tap a button to quickly call the person who sent it. You can create conference calls on the fly, straight from the address book. From contact cards, you can quickly flip to see all the phone calls or messages you sent to a particular person. The Touch Pro2 also integrates Facebook details right into your address book.
To enter data on the Touch Pro2, you can use a nice-looking portrait-style on-screen QWERTY keyboard or the roomy physical keyboard; the screen doesn't rotate automatically when you turn the phone, but it rotates when you pop the keyboard out.
Web browsing and GPS on the Touch Pro2 aren't bad. The phone comes with the Opera Mobile 9.7 Web browser, which delivers desktop-formatted pages (albeit without Flash). I found T-Mobile 3G speeds to be good, with Web pages coming down at about 750 kbps. The phone comes with TeleNav's GPS program, which locked into my location quickly and offered spoken driving directions, even in midtown Manhattan.
The Touch Pro2 also comes with the usual Office Mobile apps (Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word), a PDF reader, Google Maps, and IM clients for AIM, Google Talk, Microsoft Messenger, MySpace IM, and Yahoo. It's fully set up to handle HTML e-mail with attachments, and any other kind of messaging you want to throw at it. The device has a 528 MHz processor, 225 MB of available memory, and a microSD card slot that takes 16GB cards, so there's plenty of room to add software.
Touch Pro2 Troubles
On the other hand, the Touch Pro2 is an embarrassing disaster as a media player. To plug in standard headphones, you must attach a stiff, four-inch long dongle that for some reason has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, a non-standard 2.5mm jack, and two USB ports on it. I took one look at that thing, gave up, and hooked up my Altec Lansing BackBeat 903/906 Bluetooth stereo headphones instead—I suggest you do the same.
The TP2 has two built-in media players: a music player you can trigger directly from the TouchFLO 3D home screen, and the standard, confusing Windows Media Player, which you need to use to play videos. The phone played MP3, AAC, and WMA music files fine, but 640-by-480 videos played jerkily. Smaller-format, 480-by-320 videos played fine in full screen mode. I got hideously low frame rates with SlingPlayer Mobile over Wi-Fi, often down to the single digits. HTC's custom-built YouTube application is gorgeous and easy to use, but a three-minute music video had to buffer twice during playback over Wi-Fi. That's not a smooth experience.
The Touch Pro2's 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera took surprisingly pixelated photos with way too many JPEG artifacts, especially in low light. The video mode recorded compressed-looking, washed-out 640-by-480 videos at 20 frames per second. That's a terrific resolution for video recording, but the videos weren't very high quality.
Underlying Windows Mobile issues can make using the Touch Pro2 a hassle at times. The touch screen sometimes didn't register my presses or swipes. If you leave the cozy confines of HTC's apps, you're presented with the tiny little stylus-centric interface elements that have given Windows Mobile a bad name. If you open too many apps, you'll run out of memory just as you can on all Windows Mobile phones, though HTC puts a task manager right up on the home screen to let you easily quit apps.
And the whole thing feels a bit cobbled together; there are two media players on board, two Web browsers, two calendar apps, and two sets of settings screens. In an era where clear, unified interfaces rule, it's difficult to cheer for a split personality.
Conclusions
The Touch Pro2 is the pinnacle of Windows Mobile phones, and it makes a marvelous business communicator. But we still recommend the BlackBerry 8900 as our Editors' Choice on T-Mobile, even though it has a lower-resolution screen and no 3G. Why? Consistency is one big reason: although HTC has done great work dressing up Windows Mobile, you still end up looking at an old, stylus-centric interface if you dig too deeply. The Touch Pro2's media troubles didn't help, either. The Touch Pro2 is an excellent way to stay in touch with people, but it's a new OS away from being a world-beating smart phone.
The Touch Pro2 will be available on August 12th at T-Mobile, and I expect to see other versions of the phone appear on other major carriers throughout the summer. T-Mobile has not announced a price yet. Technology Update: Daily Updates on newly launched Gadgets, Gizmos, Mobiles, PC's & Laptops, Hacking, Gaming & Emerging Technological Trends.
It's no secret that Windows Mobile isn't getting a lot of love lately. But the HTC Ozone makes a great case for its aging OS. For just $49, it offers 3G, Wi-Fi, and GPS radios. The Ozone syncs with PCs, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Exchange accounts beautifully, and opens and edits Word and Excel files to boot. And it's slim, comfortable to type on, and looks sharp. If you can get past the creaky operating system and stingy software bundle, the Ozone is a winner.
Most of what applies to the HTC Ozone also applies to its near-twin the HTC Snap on Sprint; for more details on the unit's performance, read that review. Instead, I'll focus on the differences here. The Ozone measures 4.5 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.7 ounces; that's half an ounce lighter than the Snap. The Ozone trades the Snap's hard black plastic battery cover for a soft touch, contoured grey version that feels more comfortable to hold. The Ozone's keyboard has slightly larger, straight rows of keys, compared with the Snap's curved layout. The Ozone's key arrangement makes more sense; the A key is back at the left of the keyboard where it belongs. The 2.4-inch, 320-by-240-pixel screen isn't a touchscreen, but it's sharp and bright. Buzz up!on Yahoo!
Unlike the Snap, the HTC Ozone is a true world phone, with dual band (800/1900 MHz) CDMA EVDO Rev. A and quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM/GPRS/EDGE radios. The SIM card slot is locked, but Verizon will unlock it for you once you're a customer for 60 days in good standing. Voice calls sounded loud, punchy, and clear in both directions, albeit with a low-level but persistent hiss in the earpiece. Reception was also a touch below average. The Ozone sounded clear when paired with a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset, and its speakerphone was just about loud enough for outdoor use. Battery life was excellent at 6 hours and 18 minutes, almost two hours longer than what the HTC Snap scored on Sprint.
Most of the rest of the Ozone's hardware and software features worked the same as the Snap. The UI is very responsive for a Windows Mobile 6.1 handset, due in no small part to the Ozone's copious 192MB RAM and its speedy 528 MHz CPU (as well as the fact that it's running Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard instead of Professional, which has a smaller footprint in memory). The home screen is a little cluttered, but it scrolls smoothly between messaging, photos, local weather data, and other tasks with a push of the 5-way control pad. One key difference here is the lack of Sprint's Inner Circle feature, which helped prioritize e-mail from selected important contacts. That was nice, but I'll take the Verizon handset's world phone capability and lower price any day.
A few other changes: The Start menu shows all icons immediately here, instead of first showing a condensed version like on the Snap. Verizon trades the TeleNav-powered Sprint Navigator software for its own VZ Navigator, which has a different UI but works very well; it costs $9.99 per month or $2.99 per day of use. The Ozone also works with Verizon's visual voicemail service, and can be used as a modem for PCs. Unfortunately, the IM client is Verizon's usual, cheesy SMS-based version that charges by the message. The Ozone also comes with the weak Internet Explorer Mobile browser, though you can easily remedy that by installing the free Skyfire 1.0.
The Ozone lacks Sprint's robust lineup of music and video services. But in a world of DRM-free music downloads, it's easier (and usually cheaper) to buy songs from Amazon MP3 and then sideload them onto the Ozone. Music tracks sounded crisp, clear, and detailed over a paired set of Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones. That's a good thing, since the Ozone requires a clumsy dongle in order to plug in standard-sized, 3.5mm stereo earbuds. Video files played back very smoothly, though a few audio sync issues marred the experience. The 2-megapixel camera took crisp, detailed pictures with flat colors and little contrast, and recorded dim but smooth videos at 352 by 288 resolution. The microSD card is underneath the battery cover and works with 16GB cards; my 8GB Kingston card worked fine.
Our Editors' Choice for Verizon smartphones remains the new BlackBerry Tour 9630, which has a more robust OS, stellar push e-mail, and a much higher resolution screen than the Ozone, although it's considerably more expensive. The older BlackBerry Curve 8330 is a real deal for bargain shoppers and also has the same excellent push e-mail as the Tour. But the Curve 8330 isn't as fast or powerful as the Ozone, and the latter is just as inexpensive. In fact, the Ozone leaps ahead of other Windows Mobile smartphones on Verizon. If you or your employees need compatibility with Microsoft's ecosystem, the Ozone is an excellent way to do it on the cheap.
The good: The RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 offers world-roaming capabilities as well as Bluetooth, GPS, and a 3.2-megapixel camera. The smartphone offers a great design that combines a sharp display and an easy-to-use QWERTY keyboard in a fairly compact size.
The bad: The smartphone lacks Wi-Fi. The Web browser falls short of the competition, and there's a bit of shutter lag on the camera. You can't save applications to a media card.
The bottom line:With a winning design and fast performance, the RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 is one of Verizon Wireless' top smartphones for both business users and messaging fanatics.
Long awaited, the RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 has finally arrived in town, and it's putting on quite a show. As the replacement to the RIM BlackBerry 8830 World Edition, the Tour offers 3G world roaming capabilities and brings a number of improvements in all three departments of design, features, and performance. While we're disappointed by the lack of Wi-Fi and other minor annoyances, the pros far outweigh the cons. It's one of the strongest smartphone offerings from Verizon Wireless, and its business customers will be well-served by this device. The RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 will be available from the carrier starting July 12, for $199.99 with a two-year contract and after a $70 mail-in rebate.
Design
The RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 looks like the lovechild of the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 and the RIM BlackBerry Bold, inheriting some of the best traits of the two smartphones. In terms of size, the Tour is more similar to the Curve 8900, though slightly bigger and heavier at 4.4 inches tall by 2.4 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick and 4.5 ounces. (The Curve comes in at 4.2 inches tall by 2.3 inches wide by 0.5 inch thick and weighs 3.8 ounces.) Still, the device is much more pocketable than the Bold and the BlackBerry 8830. Plus, the extra weight gives the phone a satisfyingly solid feel, and the back of the phone also features a partial soft-touch finish for extra durability.
The BlackBerry Tour's design is a nice combination of the BlackBerry Curve 8900 (pictured here) and the BlackBerry Bold.
The Tour features the same screen as the Curve 8900. It measures 2.4-inches diagonally and shows 65,536 colors at a 480x360-pixel resolution. Images and text look crisp and vibrant, and and colors pop off the screen.
Like the Curve and Bold, the Tour features an updated user interface that's fairly straightforward and easy to navigate. Several of the menu icons look similar, so they can be hard to distinguish at a glance, but overall the user interface is very straightforward and easy to navigate. You can rearrange the icons and organize them in folders, and as always, you can customize the home screen with background images and themes.
Below the display, you'll find the Talk and End keys, a menu shortcut, a back button, and a trackball navigator. Pressing the Alt and menu key will bring up an application switcher where you can toggle between tasks, but we found it more convenient to assign the switcher to one of the convenience keys located on the left and right sides of the phone. To program these buttons, simply go to Options > Screen/Keyboard and scroll down to the left and right convenience fields to assign an app or task to the controls.
The BlackBerry Tour's QWERTY keyboard is fairly easy to use.
For text entry, the Tour offers a 35-key QWERTY keyboard that is reminiscent of the one found on the Bold, which is a good thing. Obviously with the Tour's more compact frame, the keyboard isn't quite as roomy as the Bold's but still features good-size buttons. To prevent them from feeling too flat, the rectangular keys have a slight ridge and a white backlight makes the letters and numbers (highlighted in red) easy to see in darker environments. We were quite happy using the Tour's keyboard. Plus, the keyboard just had a more high-quality feel compared with the Curve's where the buttons felt a little plasticky. Our only minor complaint is that the outside keys are a little difficult to press, since the downward slope of the buttons make them a bit flat against the edge of the phone.
Other features of the BlackBerry Tour's design include lock and mute buttons on top of the device. In addition to the aforementioned convenience key, there's a volume rocker, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a Micro-USB port on the right. Finally, the camera and flash are located on back, while behind the battery cover, you'll find the SIM card and microSD expansion slots.
Verizon packages the RIM BlackBerry Tour with a load of accessories, including a travel charger, three international adapters, a USB cable, a stereo headset, a 2GB microSD card, a SIM card, a swivel holster, a Global Support Kit, a software CD, and reference material. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.
Features
As the replacement to the RIM BlackBerry 8830 World Edition, the RIM BlackBerry Tour offers dual-mode functionality (supporting dual-band CDMA and quad-band GSM networks) for world roaming capabilities and ships with a SIM card. With this capability, the phone switches automatically between CDMA and GSM networks to offer seamless international roaming--all while keeping the same phone number. In addition to voice coverage, the BlackBerry Tour supports the 2100MHz UMTS/HSDPA band, so you can get 3G support overseas, while working on Verizon's EV-DO Rev. A network domestically. In all, you'll get voice coverage in 220 countries and data coverage (e-mail and Internet) in 175 countries. Be sure to check the international roaming rates for voice calls and text messages before you head off on your trip: Verizon's rates can get pretty pricey in some areas, ranging from $0.69 up to $4.99 per minute. You can find the carrier's international plans here.
The RIM BlackBerry Tour offers world roaming capabilities and ships with a SIM card.
Other phone features include a speakerphone, voice-activated dialing, smart dialing, conference calling, speed dial, and text and multimedia messaging. The Tour also supports Visual Voice Mail, but be aware that this service costs an additional $2.99 per month. The phone book is only limited by the available memory with room in each entry for multiple numbers, e-mail addresses, work and home address, job title, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can attach a contact photo, group ID, or a custom ringtone.
While offering 3G support, the BlackBerry Tour does not have integrated Wi-Fi, but this isn't a case of Verizon crippling the feature; Sprint's version of the Tour also lacks Wi-Fi. You do get Bluetooth 2.0 with support for wireless headsets, stereo Bluetooth (A2DP/AVCRP), hands-free kits, phone book access, serial port, and dial-up networking. The latter allows you to use the Tour as a wireless modem for your laptop, but to use the feature, you will need to sign up for Verizon's Mobile Broadband Connect plan, which range from $39.99 per month for 250MB of data up to $59.99 for 5GB of data.
GPS is also onboard. The smartphone uses both satellites and cellular triangulation to find your position and can provide navigation via several methods. The smartphone ships with BlackBerry Maps, where you can get maps, text-based turn-by-turn instructions, and search for local businesses. However, for real-time voice-guided directions, you will need to subscribe to a location-based service, which Verizon provides through VZ Navigator. The service costs $9.99 a month; unfortunately, our review unit was not set up with the service to test it out.
Of course, what would a BlackBerry be without e-mail? The BlackBerry Tour can sync with your company's BlackBerry Enterprise server, with support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise, to deliver corporate e-mail in real time. With BlackBerry Internet Service, you can also access up to 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts. There's also an attachment viewer for opening Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Corel WordPerfect, PDF, JPEG, GIF, and more. Thankfully, there's more instant messaging support as well, so in addition to BlackBerry Messenger, there are also preloaded clients IM for Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and AIM.
To supplement the attachment viewer, the smartphone ships with DataViz Documents To Go Standard Edition, so you can now edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files as well. If you want the ability to create new documents, you will have to upgrade to the Premium Edition, however. Staple personal information management tools, like a Calendar, a task list, a memo pad, a voice recorder, a calculator, will also help keep you on track. Recognizing the growing popularity of social networking sites, Verizon and RIM has also included Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr on the BlackBerry Tour for easy access.
In addition to the preloaded apps, the BlackBerry Tour supports the recently launched BlackBerry App World. The catalog has a basic, but easy-to-use, interface and features a fairly comprehensive database of applications, which you can view by category, top downloads, or featured items. You can also search by title. We downloaded several programs over Verizon's 3G network, including Slacker Radio, the Weather Channel, and AP News, and had no problems. The bad news, however, is that like the T-Mobile G1, you can't save apps to the microSD card, so you'll have to download them to the phone's main memory, which isn't that much at 256MB.
While the app store has plenty of entertainment apps, there are some onboard options as well. The BlackBerry Tour features a built-in media player that can play various music and video formats, including MP3, WMA, WMA ProPlus Bluetooth, AAC, AAC+, and eAAC+ files, and MPEG4, WMV, and H.264 video clips. There's a search function, playlist creation, shuffle and repeat, and you get a full-screen mode for video playback. You can purchase and download songs over the air though V Cast Music or stream music from various sites. The included software CD also contains a copy of Roxio Easy Media Creator, so you can create MP3s from CDs and add audio tags. Make good use of that 2GB microSD card and save all your multimedia files on there. If you need more, the expansion slot can accept up to 16GB cards. Video and TV buffs might be disappointed to learn that the Verizon BlackBerry Tour will not support V Cast Mobile TV, whereas Sprint's version of the Tour will support the carrier's mobile TV service.
Picture quality was mediocre, and there's a bit of shutter lag.
The BlackBerry Tour comes with a 3.2-megapixel camera with 2x zoom, auto focus, flash, and image stabilization. It can also record video and geotag photos using the phone's GPS. Despite the image stabilization, we found picture quality to be a little fuzzy. There's a bit of shutter lag so it may be that we pulled the camera away too soon, but that in and of itself is annoying. Video quality was actually more impressive. The picture had some expected pixelation but was mostly clear and it did well even in darker environments. For enterprise customers whose workplace bans camera phones, Verizon will also offer a version without a camera.
Performance
We tested the dual-mode (CDMA 800/1900; GSM 850/900/1800/1900; UMTS/HSDPA 2100) RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 in San Francisco with Verizon Wireless service and call quality was good. We heard our callers loud and clear; in fact, it was almost too loud so we had to take the volume down a couple of notches. There are also settings to enhance the audio by boosting the treble or bass, but we didn't feel the need to so. Our callers also had positive comments and said calls sounded quite clear. However, they could tell when we switched to the speakerphone unannounced. While the audio was not quite as pristine, we were still able to carry on with the conversation. On our side, the calls had enough volume but sounded just a bit hollow.
We paired the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset and the Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active headphones.
Armed with a 528MHz Qualcomm processor, the BlackBerry Tour was able to keep up with our day-to-day demands and was quite a fast little device. We encountered minimal delays, and we were able to switch between tasks with no problems. Verizon's EV-DO Rev. A network also provided speedy as well as reliable coverage here in San Francisco. App and music downloads were pretty swift. It took 52 seconds to download the Slacker app, while a 1.94MB song took 1 minute and 27 seconds from V Cast Music. Thanks to the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack, we were able to plug in our Bose On-Ear headphones and enjoy rich-sounding tracks. Video playback was also smooth with synchronized picture and audio.
Using the Tour's full HTML browser, CNET's full site downloaded in 38 seconds--quite impressive considering other 3G smartphones have taken up to a minute--while CNN's and ESPN's mobile sites came up in 7 seconds and 15 seconds. We've said it before, but we'll say it again. BlackBerry's Web browser isn't the best. It's come a long way and it's much less frustrating to navigate with the onscreen cursor and different page views, but still there's a lot to be desired.
Since our review unit didn't include VZ Navigator, we couldn't really test the voice-guided navigation. However, we used BlackBerry Maps, which was able to provide accurate directions to our destinations. The GPS reception was pretty good; from a cold start, the phone was able to find our location within two minutes and subsequent starts were a little faster at about a minute or less.
The RIM BlackBerry Tour comes with a 1400mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 5 hours and up to 14 days of standby time. We are still conducting our battery drain tests but will update this section as soon as we have final results.
The new BlackBerry Tour 9630 is a remix of many of the best BlackBerry features on the market today packed into beautiful hardware. It's the benchmark for business smartphones, as well as being an excellent music player and a terrific tool for social networking. My unit was a little buggy, but the Tour is still the best smartphone on Verizon Wireless.
The Tour is beautiful. At 4.4 by 2.4 by .6 inches (HWD) and 4.6 ounces, it looks like a cross between the BlackBerry Bold and the Curve 8900, with the Bold's closer-set keys, but the 8900's softly rounded top. The 2.4-inch, 480-by-360 screen is so tight, you can't even see the pixels, and the back is a nice mix of soft-touch and textured plastic. The Tour has a 3.5mm headphone jack that works with ordinary music-player headphones, and a standard microUSB charging port. Buzz up!on Yahoo!
Although its RF reception is merely average, the Tour has the best receiving voice quality of any Verizon Wireless phone on the market today. Calls sound beautiful through the earpiece, and crystal-clear through mono or stereo Bluetooth headphones. The speakerphone's decent, too. Transmissions weren't quite as perfect, as some background noise came through.
The Tour is a true world phone, able to connect on Verizon's 3G network here in the U.S. and on 2G GSM/EDGE and 3G HSPA networks abroad. (There's no Wi-Fi.) It comes with a SIM card that charges high roaming rates but promises seamless calling with your U.S. number. If if you want to use a foreign SIM card and number at lower rates, you can call Verizon to unlock your phone's SIM slot after 60 days.
Voice dialing worked fine over a Bluetooth headset. The Tour comes with visual voicemail, and both ringtones and the vibrating alert were of average power. Talk time, at 6 hours and 32 minutes, was very good for a Verizon Wireless phone.
If you send messages, the Tour has you covered, whether they're e-mail, IM, SMS, MMS, or social networking updates. The Tour offers the usual excellent BlackBerry push e-mail, with a new setup screen that's easier to use than ever. Included DataViz software lets you view or edit Microsoft Office document attachments. The Facebook client now plumbs right into the BlackBerry's native contact book and calendar, even throwing Facebook status updates into your list of messages. The MySpace client is good-looking and relatively complete. The Tour comes with AIM, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google IM clients that support full desktop buddy lists, too.
The BlackBerry Web browser is still weak, stalling on many JavaScript-heavy pages. Your best bet is to install an alternative browser, either Opera Mini for pure speed or BOLT for desktop fidelity; both worked smoothly, though BOLT's default text size is very small on the high-res screen.
The Tour offers an unusually flexible set of music options. You can download songs directly onto the phone for $1.99 each through an on-device client, sync music over from a PC with Rhapsody, sync unprotected iTunes playlists using free software from RIM, or drag and drop your music. Music sounds great. Videos look sharp, too; the Tour plays the same MP4-format videos the BlackBerry Bold does, and has no problem playing movies from a memory card or streaming YouTube videos over Bluetooth headsets. You can store media in the 105 MB of free onboard memory, or on a microSD card. The Tour comes with a 2GB microSD card to store all your media, and it worked with my 16GB SanDisk Mobile Ultra card as well.
The 3.2-megapixel camera has autofocus, which is a mixed blessing; it made for sharp photos with terrific exposure and white balance, but stuck the Tour with an annoying 1.3-second shutter delay. Alas, there's no way to turn off the autofocus. The video camera mode takes smooth 480-by-352 videos at 24 frames per second. You can automatically geotag your photos, or upload them to Facebook, MySpace, AIM, or Flickr from the camera screen.
The Tour also comes with two mapping options (the free BlackBerry Maps, which offers GPS positioning but not spoken directions, and the $9.99 VZ Navigator, which adds spoken directions) and works as a modem for PCs and Macs. I got download speeds from 550 to 750 kbps with the Tour, which isn't great for an EV-DO Rev A modem, but will do in a pinch.
If you want more apps, you can download them from the 1,600-strong catalog in BlackBerry App World on the phone. Java performance tested with the JBenchmark benchmark suite was a bit slower than the BlackBerry Bold, except that the Tour successfully ran a gaming benchmark at which the Bold couldn't complete.
Sounds great, huh? Here's the warning: My Tour, using the same 4.7.1.40 software that Verizon says will be released to the public, was buggy. But it says something about the Tour's great bones and Verizon's weak smartphone lineup that I'm still recommending it. That said, you should buy this with your eyes open to its potential flaws.
I noticed two major bugs on my unit. First, the screen emits a subtle, very high pitched noise when it's on. Some people can't hear it at all, and you can't hear it when you're wearing a headset. But it can be annoying to people with very sensitive hearing.
The Tour also twice suddenly stopped being able to read its memory card. The first time, re-seating the card fixed the problem; the second time, I had to pull and re-seat the battery.
I'm confident that Verizon and RIM will fix these flaws, and the Tour is such a positive jump forward from the BlackBerry Curve 8330 that I'd say go for it. As the rest of Verizon's recent smartphone lineup consists of the BlackBerry Storm and a bunch of Windows Mobile phones, which have their own issues, the Tour is still the best choice of the bunch.
The Tour will be released July 12 on both Verizon and Sprint for $199.99 with a two year contract, after rebates.
At the time, mobile devices were becoming PCs worthy of note, and it's been my job to champion handhelds as tiny personal computers, not just as extensions of the 130-year-old telephone system.
That used to be a fringe idea. Now it's mainstream. The objects formerly known as cell phones are, increasingly, handheld computers with a voice phone tacked on to them—take the iPhone 3GS, for instance. The next generation of "cell phones" I see coming out soon may finally do away with the traditional, circuit-switched voice calls that we've used for more than 100 years, replacing them with some sort of VoIP capability. In some ways, my first five years as a phone analyst may be my last five years as a "phone" analyst.
I haven't gotten all of my calls right. In 2006 and 2007, I shouted that "The unlocked cell-phone revolution begins now!" and tried to get people to break free of their carriers. Total failure. People love cheap phones. They're fine with iron-clad contracts and carriers holding them in a vice-grip, as long as they can have cheap phones. Lesson learned.
On some things, we were just ahead of the game. With Jamie Lendino, I helped launch Smart Device Central back in 2006, with a mission to review (among other things) lots of mobile apps. The app reviews flopped. On some reviews, we got tens of page views. Now, of course, our mobile app reviews are huge.
The difference in that case is the iPhone, which gets me to the real topic of this column: The five most important products I've reviewed over the past five years. (In my next column, I'll discuss the five most interesting failures. Then I'll stop congratulating myself until 2014.)
When the RAZR came out in 2004, it blew my mind. It blew everyone's minds. In many ways, it was the first true "fashion phone." Yeah, sure, there was the Qualcomm Thin Phone and a few entrants before it, but the RAZR made style a major part of the mobile-phone equation. It also buoyed, then doomed Motorola. "One product can't sustain a company," I say, looking warily at Apple.
The Motorola E815
One of my favorite phones ever, Verizon's Motorola E815 got voice calling almost perfectly right. It had great reception, terrific sound quality, and a marvelous keypad; it was everything a voice phone should be. I bought one with my own money, and if I could rewrite the review today, I'd make it even more positive. As we move into a world where handheld devices become more computers than phones, it's a little sad that many phones can't surpass the kind of voice quality I heard in 2005.
The Audiovox SMT-5600
Nokia had already been making consumer-style smart phones for a year or so when this HTC model hit the market. But in my mind, the SMT-5600 set the bar for many consumer smartphone experiences to come: It heralded the rise of HTC, it was a high point for Windows Mobile, and it was a small, well-designed and stylish device. I see echoes of the SMT-5600's sleek lines in the super-successful BlackBerry Pearl lineup, for instance. And it says something tragic about Windows Mobile's lack of progress that the SMT-5600 still feels current in many ways.
The Nokia N95
The Nokia N95 had so many features when it came out in 2007, it seemed to have "dropped out of a time warp from the future." It's taken years for the mainstream to catch up to Nokia's super-powerful smartphone vision, including a 5-megapixel camera, DVD quality video, and a really good Web browser. But the N95 was also misleading, in a way—it stoked my enthusiasm for the unlocked phone market, which largely flopped over the next few years.
The Apple iPhone
From my perspective at TechnoUptodate, the iPhone is the most important handheld of the past five years. The iPhone finally changed the conversation to be no longer about devices, but about apps—not about gadgets, but about platforms. Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian had been trying to do that for years, but just as it took the iPod to popularize digital music, it took Apple's marketing brilliance to popularize mobile apps. The iPhone has set the tone for the next five years of mobile coverage at TechnoUptoDate.com.
These are just five picks. I could have picked five other phones. I'd love to hear in what you think are the most important phones of the past five years, so go ahead and let me know in the comments.
Verizon's best texting phone so far, the LG enV3 gives you terrific bang for your buck. Although it doesn't have the touch-screen luxury of the slightly more expensive enV Touch, it's a classy, high-quality device that delivers more features per dollar than its competitors, the Motorola Rival and the Samsung Alias 2 SCH-u750. We recommend it for Verizon users looking for a reasonably priced media, texting, or all-around phone.
Like its predecessors, the VX9800, enV VX9900, and enV2 VX9100, the enV3 is an unusual flip phone that looks like a candybar-style phone, but flips open sideways to reveal a large screen and full QWERTY keyboard. The enV3 is lighter and larger than the enV2, weighing 3.77 ounces and measuring 4.1 by 2.1 by 0.65 inches (HWD), but it feels more pleasing in general thanks to larger number keys and a larger (1.6-inch, 160-by-96-pixel resolution) external screen. The internal 2.6-inch screen has a 320-by-240 resolution, and is bright and sharp.
When you fold open the phone, it can stay halfway open like a little laptop (perfect for sitting on a desk) or lie completely flat. The QWERTY keys are roomy and well spaced, with a group of keys highlighted in blue for gaming.
LG typically makes rock-solid Verizon voice phones, and the enV3 is no exception. Reception is fine, and earpiece volume is strong, although voices got a little muddy at top volume. The phone has an unusual amount of side-tone (the feedback of your own voice into your ear); I like that, as it prevents me from yelling into the phone. You need to open up the phone to use the speakerphone, but once you do, the speakerphone is exceptionally loud and clear. Transmissions didn't push through much background noise, but they sounded a little weak and thready. The enV3 paired automatically with our Plantronics Voyager Pro mono Bluetooth headset and Altec Lansing BackBeat 903 stereo headset, including using voice dialing over Bluetooth. Battery life was very good, with more than six hours of talk time. Ringtones are very loud, and the vibrating alert plenty powerful—but you can't use your own songs as ringtones. Visual voice mail is a $2.99-per-month option.
As you'd expect, the enV3 makes texting a priority. With the flip open, you've got buttons to start a new text message or access your 10 favorite contacts—but notably not buttons to launch IM or e-mail, both of which Verizon phones are pretty weak with. The SMS/MMS client handles text and picture messages and shows them threaded by recipient, which makes long conversations much easier to manage.
The enV3's big internal screen and its ability to sit open on a table suggest a solid multimedia experience. The phone delivers, except for one annoying false note: a 2.5mm headphone jack that doesn't accept regular music player headphones. But if you can get past that, you'll find that the enV3 plays MP3s, AACs, and WMA music files in an attractive interface that's speedier than what older Verizon phones sported. It syncs with Rhapsody on PCs using an included USB cable, and it plays 320-by-240-pixel MP4-format video files clearly and smoothly. Games also played well on the large screen and roomy keyboard.
The phone's 3-megapixel camera is only so-so. You can take photos with the flip open or closed, but opening the flip lets you access camera options through a series of relatively easy-to-use icons. Full-resolution still pictures look soft, even a little blurry, though the white balance and color are good. The phone also takes relatively sharp, if wobbly, 320-by-240-pixel videos at 15 frames per second (fps). The enV3's camera is better than either the Rival's or the Alias 2's, however. You can store your photos on a microSD card tucked into the side of the phone (our 16GB Sandisk Mobile Ultra card worked fine), or on the phone's 120MB of available memory.
But this isn't a smartphone, and that weakness shows up in a few critical areas. The enV3 uses Verizon's standard, lackluster e-mail programs. Mobile Email and RemoSync connect to personal and Microsoft Exchange accounts, but they do so with clumsy, bare-bones interfaces and deliver text-only e-mails. The IM program supports the AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! IM systems, but in a dull, basic format.
The Obigo Web browser on the enV3 is technically a full browser, but it's also slow, jerky, and clumsy to operate. That said, it's a step beyond the competing Motorola Rival and Samsung Alias 2's WAP-only browsers. Verizon and LG try to jazz up the browser with a new feature, Dashboard, which provides Flash-based information channels. It's a neat idea, but too many of the channels are sluggish or just offer links to Web sites in the Obigo browser.
The enV3 has GPS, which works with Verizon's VZ Navigator driving directions software. It also works as an EV-DO Rev 0 modem for Macs or PCs using the included USB cable and Verizon's VZ Access Manager software. Testing it, I got an excellent 990 Kbps down and about 110 Kbps up.
The LG enV3 VX9200 competes primarily with Verizon's two other texting phones, the Motorola Rival and the Samsung Alias 2. The Alias 2 has its truly awesome e-ink keypad and a very roomy screen, but it costs $70 more than the enV3. The Rival costs $20 more than the enV3, and is generally inferior all-around. Although the enV Touch is even better (and decidedly sexier) than the enV3, this is still our pick for a budget, text-focused Verizon Wireless phone.
Benchmark Test Results Continuous talk time: 6 hours 6 minutes
Moving a step ahead i thought, i would compare all the smart phones in a single post.
It is perhaps the time of the year when all cellphone makers are upgrading to the next level in touchscreen smartphone battle.
Just as Apple lifts the curtain off its upgraded, next-generation iconic device, Nokia has a ready touchcreen rival to take it on. Not far is the Korean giant Samsung, which already boasts of many new high-end smartphones in its kitty. And the latest to join them is US-based Palm which recently showed its strong iPhone contender. Not to be left behind is HTC which has launched its upgraded Touch Diamond 2.
All the companies are aiming to grab the growing touchscreen mobile marketshare, the segment created by Apple iPhone, which boasts of high-end multimedia features.
Here's a compare meter that evaluates iPhone 3G S, Samsung Pixon, Nokia N97, Palm Pre, HTC Touch Diamond 2 and LG Arena on various yardsticks.
1. LOOKS AND DISPLAY
Plam Pre: Measuring 59.5mm x 100.5mm x 16.95mm, the Palm's latest entrant weighs 135 grams. The phone boasts of 3.1-inch touchscreen with a 24-bit color 320x480 resolution HVGA display. The phone comes with a multi-touch screen as well as physical QWERTY keyboard that slides out.
iPhone 3G S: iPhone 3G S offers nothing new in terms of looks. The phone looks exactly same like its predecessors with same dimensions and screen display. Both 16GB and 32GB models will be available in Black and white colour options.
Pixon12: Measuring 108x53x13.8mm, Samsung Pixon12 features a 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen display. The screen boasts of a contrast ratio of 10,000:1.
N97: The sleek handset pairs a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a QWERTY keyboard. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard is a full 3-row. The smartphone transforms from a touch slate to a landscape QWERTY device. The touchscreen has a 16:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels.
HTC Touch Diamond2: The 13.7mm thick Touch Diamond2 has a 3.2-inch high-resolution wide-screen VGA display and packs a new touch sensitive zoom bar for faster zooming.
LG Arena: The phone has a 3-inch WVGA screen with around 16M colours with 400 by 240 pixel resolution.
2. FEATURES
Plam Pre: One of Pre's most promising features is its integration with social networking services such as Facebook. The phone is also strong on multi-tasking, the ability to have different applications open at the same time. Pre allows users to zoom in and flip through applications without closing them. It lets text messages and calendar appointments appear as notifications at the bottom of the screen.
iPhone 3G S: The new iPhone promises MMS capability allowing users to send each other photographs from the phone. Earlier, users could send text messages or snapshots via email only. The new version also has cut-copy-paste feature. The voice control feature in the iPhone 3G S allows users to dial by saying the name or number. Search features have also been enhanced in iPhone 3.0 with the addition of Spotlight.
Pixon12: The phone packs features like GPS, Bluetooth and an FM radio with RDS. Pixon12 offers a fast image saving feature that allows users to capture next shot in less than 2-3 seconds.
N97: The phone has a 3.5mm headset jack, microUSB port used for syncing and charging, Haptic feedback and 1500 mAh battery. The N97 introduces the concept of social location (So-Lo). Using the GPS receiver and integrated compass, N97 has the capability to always know where it is located and with social networking integrated it can broadcast that position to authorised friends and family. Nokia claims that the N97 will use a browser that supports Flash and Flash video.
HTC Touch Diamond2: One of the latest features that Diamond 2 packs is HTC Push Internet. It’s designed to ease slow downloading and rendering of Web pages on a mobile phone.
LG Arena: The phone features a new 3D S-class user interface to provide quality audio and video output. Arena is said to be the first phone in the global market to use Dolby Mobile from Dolby Laboratories meant to deliver enhanced sound experience.
3. CAMERA
Plam Pre: Pre has a 3 megapixel camera that can shoot in both horizontal and landscape mode. Pre is designed to let you scroll through your photos by dragging your finger across the screen.
iPhone 3G S: With iPhone 3G S, Apple has finally fulfilled a long time wish of its fans by increasing the megapixel count of its iconic device. The new phone now packs an improved 3 megapixel camera with video capturing, auto-focus mechanism and editing capabilities.
Pixon12: The phone's USP is its 12 megapixel camera which puts it miles ahead of its competitors. Samsung claims that it is world's first phone with 12 megapixel camera. Pixon packs a Xenon power LED flash and touch autofocus, which lets users decide the focal point with the touch of a finger. Pixon12 also has a 28mm wide angle lens and a Smart Auto feature. Pixon12 records with 720 by 480 resolution at 30 frames per second.
N97: The phone packs 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash.
HTC Touch Diamond2: Touch Diamond2 has 5 megapixel auto focus camera.
LG Arena: Arena packs a 5 megapixel camera with auto focus. The company says the camera is capable of recording DVD resolution videos.
4. STORAGE
Plam Pre: As for storage, Pre packs 8GB memory storage. It offers support for USB mass storage.
iPhone 3G S: Apple's latest version of iPhone has a higher 32GB memory capacity. The new model will come in choices of 16GB and 32GBmemory capacity. The iPhone 3G (second generation) comes in 8 and 16GB model versions.
Pixon12: As for memory capacity, Pixon12 comes with 150MB of internal memory and supports up to 16GB of MicroSD cards.
N97: Nokia's second touchscreen phone offers a 32GB memory with microSD for adding 16GB more (making it a staggering 48GB).
HTC Touch Diamond2: The phone packs 512 MB ROM and 288 MB RAM. The phone supports microSD memory card for expansion.
LG Arena: The phone has a 8GB of internal memory and a 32GB micro SD slot.
5. COST
Plam Pre: Palm Pre is selling for $199 with a 2-year contract and mail-in rebate in US.
iPhone 3G S: 16GB iPhone 3GS will cost $199, and the 32GB model will come with a price tag of $299. The price of the original 8GB iPhone 3G dropped to $99 from $199.
Pixon12: Samsung Pixon12 will be available for the European markets by the end of this month. The company says that the phone will reach other markets by October. However, Samsung has not revealed the pricing details so far.
N97: The phone is priced around Rs 35,000.
HTC Touch Diamond2: The comes with a price of Rs 29,990.
LG Arena: Priced at Rs 24,990, LG Arena is available in silver and black titanium colours.
6. OPERATING SYSTEM
Plam Pre: Palm's latest smartphone will run on Palm webOS.
iPhone 3G S: The device comes with the latest iPhone OS 3.0 mobile operating system that promises over hundred new features.
Pixon 12: Samsung Pixon is based on Symbian S60 OS 5th edition.
N97: The smartphone runs on S60, the latest version of Nokia’s Symbian operating system.
HTC Touch Diamond2: The phone runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 OS.
7. MISCELLANEOUS
Plam Pre: Pre packs a built-in music player. The Palm media sync feature allows users to transfer DRM-free iTunes music, podcasts, photos, and more to Pre.
iPhone 3G S: The new version also packs a built-in digital compass that will help users locate their way. The new Compass app will automatically reorient maps to match the direction.
Pixon 12: The phone's camera has touch-based focus, allowing users to tap on the screen to select what they want to focus. The phone also packs quad-band GSM/EDGE, dual-band UMTS/HSPA, Bluetooth and GPS.
N97: Unlike the iPhone and other smartphones which have applications, N97 has widgets. These widgets appear as square and rectangular icons and offer shortcuts to frequent contacts, calendar, music player and other phone features. N97 will be the company's first phone to come preloaded with Nokia's just-launched Ovi store. Described as a one-stop shop ecosystem for all things that a smartphone user might need, Ovi comes packed with over 20,000 titles from launch, including both free and paid applications and also podcasts, wallpapers and ringtones.
HTC Touch Diamond2: Among other features, the phone has gravity and an ambient light sensor, 3G, Wi-Fi, EDGE, Bluetooth with A2DP. It also has HTC’s latest Touch FLO 3D interface.
LG Arena: The phone includes enhanced Internet connectivity with HSDPA 7.2 networks, Wi-Fi and A-GPS.
Nokia must be cursing its luck; the launch of its new flagship handset has been overshadowed by Apple’s latest gadget, the iPhone 3G S.
In truth, the two devices are poles apart: the N97 is the telecoms equivalent of that solid, dependable Scandinavian icon, the Volvo, while the iPhone is sleek, sexy Ferrari.
Price appears to be the one major issue that could prevent people plumping for Apple’s turbocharged new iPhone. O2 is refusing to let existing iPhone owners upgrade without finishing their contract, a decision that drew the ire of the blogosphere. The iPhone 3G S will set you back at least £175, plus a new 18-month contract starting from a minimum of about £30 per month.
The N97, by contrast, will be available for free on most networks, but in many ways it feels like the ugly duckling to the iPhone’s swan. While the kick-slide design, giving the option of a Qwerty keyboard and touch-screen interface, will appeal to some, to others it smacks of imperfection; there should be no need for a physical keyboard if the virtual one is any cop.
The 5-megapixel camera, though, is largely a delight to use, while the cavernous 32GB capacity means the N97 can double as a media player, particularly as it is capable of streaming and storing TV shows from BBC iPlayer. Its Live Widget homescreen is a fantastic invention, producing a screen that will tell you, at a glance, whether you’ve received any new text, emails or Facebook messages, the latest score for your favourite team, the news headlines or local weather report. The Live Widgets can be personalised and run, well, live on the homescreen so you will see things in real-time.
The iPhone 3G S, on the other hand, boasts only a 3-megapixel camera, but users will finally be able to record video. The nippier processor makes applications, programs and web pages much faster to load, while the device-wide search makes it feel even more like a pocket computer. Of course, the iPhone is all about the apps, and that’s why, despite being undone in many hardware areas by the N97, the iPhone remains the best device around. There are more than 50,000 applications to choose from, with more being added every day.
So which device should you go for? If money is no object and you covet style and flair, the iPhone 3G S is the smart choice. The App Store, faster processor, video-recording capabilities and search functions make this a compelling choice. But if you favour quiet efficiency, choice and flexibility, the Nokia N97 is a safe bet; solidly built, logically designed, and with a fantastic live homescreen, it will appeal to many consumers, too.
Despite Android's huge initial promise, there's still just one U.S. smartphone running the OS: the T-Mobile G1. That device is now almost a year old—and it didn't look particularly cutting edge when it was released, either. Luckily, that situation will soon change, as Motorola, Samsung, and others have stepped up with promises to release Android-powered handsets. But Google itself hasn't rested, either. The latest version of the OS, Android 1.5, features a number of major enhancements, including video recording and playback, faster camera and GPS performance, and support for home screen widgets. Collectively, it's still not enough to overtake the iPhone's stellar media playback and broad third-party app support, however. And Android 1.5 isn't as flashy as Palm's new, multitasking WebOS on the Palm Pre, either. But version 1.5 is a big step in the right direction.
For current T-Mobile G1 owners, installing the OS is dead simple. If your handset doesn't already have it now, head to Menu > Settings > System Updates, and then tap Install and Restart. The T-Mobile G1 automatically reboots, downloads the 32MB installation package, and installs the new OS. On my test G1, the installation took roughly 10 minutes running EDGE; a Wi-Fi download would have been much quicker. Buzz up!on Yahoo!
One of the most obvious improvements is the new on-screen keyboard. At first, it may seem redundant, since when the G1 was first introduced, one of the its biggest advantages over the iPhone was a slide-out hardware QWERTY keyboard. Having said that, sometimes it's a chore to flip out the keyboard for just one or two words. The on-screen keyboard eliminates that problem, and offers rudimentary predictive text to boot. The new virtual keyboard is a little crunched in width compared with the iPhone's, and Android's doesn't rotate to landscape mode, either. But it's certainly better than nothing, and you always have the hardware keyboard for extended typing chores on the G1. The on-screen keyboard will come in especially handy for upcoming Android devices without a keyboard.
On the wireless front, Android 1.5 can now automatically pair with any nearby Bluetooth 2.1-enabled headset. It also adds support for stereo Bluetooth headphones. In one music test, Marcus Miller's electric bass guitar threw a wide stereo image, but sounded surprisingly muffled over a paired wireless set of Motorola S9-HDs, which are normally brighter and crisper sounding. The automatic pairing worked great with the S9-HDs, however. I also really liked Android 1.5's Bluetooth setup screen. It showed all nearby devices right away, along with whether they were paired, connected, or both. It also showed the Bluetooth profiles each one supported. These are welcome improvements, but, note: you still can't pair with an external Bluetooth keyboard
Android Camcorder
One new feature that ought to wow in Android 1.5 is Camcorder, a built-in video recorder. Unfortunately, it recorded dim, jerky 352-by-288 videos—worse than many smartphones. Outdoors in sunlight, the animation sped up considerably, however. There are virtually no software adjustments, so forget about improving matters. On the plus side, you can share videos via Gmail or even YouTube right after recording them; for the latter, you can even tag your videos and mark them as public or private. The regular camera is snappier now, with its near-instant recovery and quick save times. The auto-focus still causes a several-second delay before the shutter opens, though. You can upload pictures directly to Picasa.
A few other enhancements are included. There are new home-screen widgets for displaying photos, playing a music track, or showing the next event in the calendar. Google Talk is now a separate app, and it has a nicely designed interface with colorful icons and roomy dialog boxes. Google also added a voice-enabled Google Search feature, which was remarkably accurate for Web searches in a variety of tests. The mic icon in the top right makes it easy to run another search almost instantly after the first one displays the results page.
Web browsing was already excellent on the G1. Android 1.5 adds copy and paste, along with a find text feature for Web pages. Underneath, there's a revised WebKit core and updated JavaScript support, along with smoother Web page scrolling. I didn't see much of an improvement—especially over EDGE, which drags just about anything to a crawl. On Wi-Fi, though, the G1's Web browser soared—and looked great to boot.
A number of things are still missing from Android. Two of the biggest are built-in Exchange server support and Adobe Flash capability in the Web browser (although there are a few third-party Exchange sync options like ContactsSync and MailShadowG). The iPhone has the former, but not the latter—although Windows Mobile smartphones now get Flash support with the third-party, free Skyfire 1.0 browser. In addition, the G1 still feels a step behind the iPhone in overall UI elegance. The menus look much cleaner, but playing music feels dated. The Android 1.5 G1 feels Spartan when compared to the iPhone's stellar music and video iPod integration. Android 1.5 has very basic video playback, and no iTunes or video file sync. Even two-year-old BlackBerry Curves are better in this regard.
Despite its various omissions and disappointing video recorder, Android 1.5 is a must-have update for G1 owners. Android Market is a sharp, easy-to-use third-party app store with about 5,000 apps at the time of this writing (check out our recent android app reviews), and the overall OS platform is as stable and responsive as ever. If you can get past the dowdy hardware, the T-Mobile G1 running Android 1.5 remains one of the most powerful smartphones available today. It'll be interesting to see what new hardware can do with Android 1.5.
New iPhone is here, iPhone 3G S. iPhone 3G S offers as many as 100 new features and more than double the speed of the earliest version. Plus, it comes with a price cut. Seems like users have got all they wanted and wished for in the new gadget. Not really!
iPhone 3G S though offers a lot, still leaves a lot wanting. The revamped iPhone disappoints users on many counts, some which were on top of their wishlist for the new iPhone.
Here are the 9 things that disappoint many users in iPhone 3G S.
No change in looks
Apple products are known for their design. Apple iPhone too scores high on looks. But a change is always refreshing. So, a change in looks was high on users' wishlist. However, the new iPhone 3G S disappoints with almost nothing new in terms of appearance.
The phone looks exactly same like its predecessors with same dimensions and screen display. iPhone 3G S, in both 16GB or 32GB variants, will be available in black and white colour options.
Camera
Apple finally upgraded iPhone's camera megapixel. iPhone 3G S offers 3 megapixel camera over 2 megapixel in the previous version. However, 3 megapixel looks pale in front of the higher megapixel camera smartphones that are flooding the market.
Recently, world's top cellphone maker Nokia unveiled its second touchscreen phone with 5 megapixel camera (with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash). Other iPhone rivals including Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson boast of a portfolio of higher megapixel camera phones.
No Flash
iPhone 3G S also disappoints fans looking forward to Flash support in the new version. The latest iPhone too offers no Flash support. In case users wish to see those multimedia files that require Flash, they will have to do away with them.
Presently, when users browse through Web pages with Adobe Flash, it displays empty spaces with missing icons. Earlier, Apple said that Flash would run too slowly on the iPhone.
USB port
Another big miss in the new iPhone is the absence of a standard USB port. iPhone 3G S comes with a proprietary USB connector rather than a microUSB. This means users have to shell out extra money to buy separate cables to use phone's USB features.
User-replaceable battery
Like the all earlier versions iPhone 3G S too does not come with user-replaceable battery. Apple has increased the battery life but it does not still allow users to replace battery when it runs out of juice.
Apple had earlier reportedly said that it left out the user-replaceable battery because it adds bulk and weight, but users can't help comparing it with other smartphones.
No front-facing camera
Though Apple has fulfilled a long time wish by enabling the device to record videos, however, iPhone 3G S still lacks front-facing camera for video conferencing. This means the device is not capable of sending videos across a Wi-Fi or cellular network in real time.
No high-resolution screen
Another disappointment is no upgrade in screen resolution. Apple has made no enhancement in the iPhone 3G S screen resolution, which is same as its 2007 and 2008 predecessors. It has 480 x 320 pixel resolution at 163 ppi, same as the iPhone 3G's. Recently-launched Nokia N97 boast of a wide touchscreen that has a 16:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels.
No HD support
As speculated, iPhone 3G S does not support HD (high-definition) content. iPhone 3G S supports 640 x 480 videos as its predecessors and is not capable of playing higher-resolution videos. The phone supports video formats: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 x 480 pixels, 30 frames per second.
HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition (SD) video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1280 720 pixels (720p) or 1920 1080 pixels (1080i/1080p).
iPhone FM transmitter
Another big rumour doing rounds was an iPhone FM transmitter chip. However, it remained a rumour only. iPhone's new model does not offer support for FM Transmitter. Some reports claim that the chip would have enabled faster wireless connection and FM transmission.
What's inside the two smartphones could make the difference for buyers
The guessing game is over: Apple's iPhone 3G S has arrived. Don't let appearances fool you. On the outside nothing looks much different with the 3G S. The real difference is what's inside. So how will Apple's iPhone 3G s compare to the Palm Pre?
The main difference is quite obvious -- for the same price as a 16GB iPhone3G S you only get a 8GB Palm Pre. In comparison, the current generation 8GB iPhone 3G dropped in price to $99, going after Pre's lower capacity storage.
For just $100 more than the Palm Pre (that is if you get your $100 mail-in rebate) you can get a top-notch iPhone 3G S with a whopping 32GB of storage (four times more than the Pre).
However, the Palm Pre offers a better deal against the iPhone 3G S when it comes to the data plan. AT&T did not reduce its iPhone tariffs, so the Pre on Sprint still offers more for the buck when it comes to data, voice and text plans.
Both the Pre and iPhone 3Gs have a 3-megapixel cameras, however there are some major differences in features. The Pre's camera has an LED flash, but no autofocus, video recording or editing capabilities. You also cannot adjust white balance or exposure.
Apple did not throw in a flash for this generation, but the iPhone 3Gs brand new camera gets some pretty nifty features nonetheless. You can now control focus either by tapping on the screen or using the autofocus feature.
But perhaps the biggest edge the iPhone 3G S' camera has over the Pre is its video recording capability. You can record 30fps VGA video with audio by simply going into the camera app and switching from still to movie. Autofocus, auto white balance and auto exposure features apply to video, as well.
Video recording was long overdue for the iPhone, especially since it is a feature that most low to mid-range phones carry. Even better: You can edit your videos with a tap of the finger by picking an in-point and end-point and hitting "trim." Then, you can tap the share button to send over e-mail, MMS, MobileMe gallery or YouTube-pretty cool.
But the new iPhone 3G S also matches in features some of software advantages the Pre had over the 3G model. The 3G S has now copy and paste, MMS, tethering (coming later this year), A2DP Bluetooth capability, geotagging (photo and video) and turn-by-turn navigations.
While none of the two phones features a FM receiver/transmitter, the iPhone 3G S has a built-in digital compass and voice controls over the Palm Pre. On the downside, the new iPhone still doesn't feature a removable battery or a hardware keyboard (but nobody was expecting the 3G S to have one anyway).
There is also an essential advantage the iPhone 3G S has over the Palm Pre -- it's the App Store. Apple packs over 50,000 apps in its store while Palm's App Catalog is still at the beginning of the road, with 12 apps available and a store in beta stage.
Apple claims improved battery life on the 3G S, which would be a welcome addition to the not-so-acclaimed 3G's lifespan between charges. But then again, the Palm Pre didn't score too well either. Meanwhile, iPhone 3G S' battery shall withstand the usage test when it comes out in just under two weeks.
But the final battle between the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre will be carried out on June 19, when Apple's new device is to hit the stores. Besides the obvious storage capacity and price difference, each buyer will have to carefully consider whether they really want a physical keyboard or a LED flash for the phone's camera.
Looking for a free and easy-to-use Twitter client for your BlackBerry? The free TwitterBerry 0.8, the first product from independent developer Orangatame, offers a number of useful features. The latest version supports TwitPic, which lets you share photos on Twitter. It also works with next-generation BlackBerry handhelds like the Storm, the Bold 9000, and the Curve 8900, as well as all previous 8800s, Curves, Pearls, Flips, and even 8700, 7100, 7200, and 7520-series models dating back several years. It's a solid app, even if it doesn't have the features and flash that TweetGenius offers.
For this review, I tested TwitterBerry 0.8 on a BlackBerry Curve 8330 (Verizon) and on a BlackBerry Bold 9000 (AT&T). To download and install TwitterBerry 0.8, head to orangatame.com/ota/twitterberry/ from your BlackBerry's Web browser. Fire up the app and you see a mostly blank, white screen that asks, "What are you doing?" along with a running character count at the bottom. The Menu key displays a pop-up menu that lets you view the friends timeline, @replies, direct message list, the public timeline, your own page, a friend list, and options to send direct messages or configure the app.
The Friends Timeline displays small color icons of each friend, along with the appropriate user ID, part of the tweet, and when the tweet was sent. You can set TwitterBerry to update manually or set it to poll every minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and so on up to 120 minutes. If you have TwitterBerry set to manual updates and you haven't updated in a while, all of the time stamps adjust accordingly. So when you load TwitterBerry later, it correctly displays the last updates as "4 hours old" (or however long it has been) until it finishes loading new updates. The number of recent tweets you can see depends on your screen resolution. On the Curve 8330's 320-by-240-pixel LCD, I could view four at a time, while the Bold displayed six.
On the Friends Timeline screen, the menu options change as well. Here, you can open individual tweets to read them in full, refresh the page, favorite tweets, or follow or leave users. You can also open bit.ly or TinyURL links in your default browser. Keep in mind, however, that many linked pages are for desktop sites that may not render correctly, at least in the BlackBerry's built-in browser. Other pages, such as for @replies and direct messages, work exactly as you expect. The friend list lets you scroll through and display individual user's timelines; you can also send direct messages, replies, and follow or leave people from here as well.
You can send tweets only from the main page. If you're viewing one of the lists, you have to hit the Back key. That's one of the ways TweetGenius is better, since you can pop up the update balloon wherever you are in the app. On the plus side, TwitterBerry includes a spell-check option for the update page. The app also supports BlackBerry key shortcuts, such as hitting the Space key to scroll down a screen, or "T" to jump back to the top of the page. The TwitPic integration is also pretty simple. To send a picture, head to your media folder, press Menu, and select Send to TwitterBerry. When you launch TwitterBerry again, you'll see the picture attached as part of your next update.
TwitterBerry's UI isn't particularly attractive. In fact, there's virtually no eye candy at all; TweetGenius is much more visually appealing. The app doesn't really take advantage of the extra screen resolution available on the Bold or on the Curve 8900. I saw plenty of unused white space on various screens. All of the text and icons were left-justified, with nothing on the right. Performance-wise, TwitterBerry was usually very fast. Sometimes, however, updates took 30 seconds or more to load for no appreciable reason. This may not be TwitterBerry's fault, since the delays could be attributed to cellular data network problems. Still, there were a lot of these episodes during the review period.
TwitterBerry also doesn't pop up alerts on the home page, the way Facebook for BlackBerry or the handset's default message list does whenever a new item comes in, which is something TweetGenius can handle. Finally, TwitterBerry lacks most of TweetGenius's other advanced features, such as being able to insert your GPS location, the ability to track certain users more closely than others, and a comprehensive search capability (TwitterBerry has no search function at all). If you've got the $4.99 or $9.99 (depending on whether TweetGenius is still on sale) and you've got a next-generation handset, TweetGenius is more capable and more fun to use than TwitterBerry. But if you're using an older handset or just need the basics, it's tough to beat TwitterBerry's simple interface and ease of use—and it's free.
The Samsung Instinct M800 was part of the first wave of last year's iPhone knockoffs. But unlike most clones, the Instinct was actually quite good, and ended up being one of Sprint's best-selling phones ever. This time around, Samsung infused the new Instinct s30 SPH-M810 with a number of upgrades, including a more responsive touch panel, a thinner and more streamlined design with Cobalt Metal and Touch of Copper color options, and an Opera Mini 4.2 browser upgrade (actually added midway through the first version's product cycle). Individually, these changes aren't enough to compel original Instinct owners to upgrade. But they add up to a decent refresh; combined with a lower price ($99 with two-year contract and after rebate), the Instinct s30 is a solid choice for Sprint subscribers—that is, if the Palm Pre doesn't tempt them first.
Compared with the original, the new Instinct s30 is a bit lighter (3.9 ounces versus 4.2 ounces). It's also thinner, at 2.2 by 4.6 by 0.5 inches (HWD). The design is rounder and sleeker than before, and it's now even closer to the iPhone's look. The sides contain Power, Camera, Voice Control, and Volume buttons. There's also a side-mounted microSD card slot, a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack, and a covered proprietary charger port.
Unlike most of Sprint's recent handsets, this is a dual-band (850/1,900 MHz) EV-DO Rev 0 phone—not the faster Rev A. It also still lacks Wi-Fi support—a disappointment. In a rural area northwest of Boston, I had some trouble with reception. Whereas a nearby Sprint BlackBerry Pearl 8130 stayed solidly in EV-DO mode with two bars, the Instinct often displayed just one bar, which likewise showed in some test voice calls. On occasion, calls broke up and sounded a little spotty throughout. (The 8130 never had this problem.) Wind resistance, on the other hand, was good, with the other party never noticing a moderate breeze on my side. Voice timbre in both directions was a tad harsh compared with the 8130, but not terrible.
The s30 paired automatically and sounded fine with a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. The speakerphone had just enough gain for outdoor use, as long as there wasn't a ton of background noise. The Speech to Action button lets you control the s30 with your voice; the handset also supports visual voice mail and voice dialing, and there's no training required. The removable battery lasted 4 hours 18 minutes, about average for a slim CDMA phone.
The 3.2-inch, 240-by-432-pixel touch screen has a lower resolution than the iPhone's—and looks it, with drab icons and blocky menu graphics. But Samsung wasn't joking about the touch-screen upgrade: It's a tenth of an inch larger and considerably more responsive than before, and feels about as precise as the iPhone's capacitive touch panel. The subtle, pleasant haptic feedback (vibration as you touch the screen) can be disabled if you don't like the effect.
The software design, however, needs work. For example, the phone opens to a favorites page rather a menu of icons. That's good if you like to custom-configure things but annoying otherwise. What's more, when you tap the dial button, it defaults to a speed-dial list instead of the dial pad. So it takes a few clicks to get around, and the favorites page and speed-dial lists are rather unattractive looking, as well.
Technically, the s30 still isn't a smartphone, since it's not equipped with an open OS for running thousands of third-party apps, as can the iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, and the Palm Pre (once it begins getting third-party apps in earnest). But Samsung is blurring the line by giving programmers access to core Java APIs and other handset features. That makes the handset more "open" than before, and Samsung is bringing these changes to the original Instinct as well. The effects of this on the third-party app market, however, remain to be seen. There's still no Mac support or ability to sync calendars or notes to a PC.
Browsing the Web is better than before owing to the Opera Mini 4.2 browser, which is always pleasant to use. Combined with the expansive touch screen, it's a decent package on paper. But in operation it still felt somewhat clunky with its lower-resolution screen, lack of two-finger pinch zoom, sometimes unexpected sluggishness given the slower 3G radio, and the blocky UI elements surrounding the browser window. In addition, Sprint finally added an IM client (with Sprint's usual AIM, Yahoo, and MSN support)—a curious omission on the original, given how many other Sprint handsets come with one. Many of the s30's other features carry over from the original Instinct.
The s30 won't leave you wanting for media options. Music playback sounded clear but tinny through the included set of Samsung earbuds, and unusually bassy and muffled over a normally bright-sounding pair of Motorola MotoROKR S9-HD Bluetooth headphones. The built-in speaker was loud enough but sounded too thin to play music through. Album art blew up to a nice size on the screen, but the player app chopped off the edges of some album covers. A variety of sideloaded video files played back well at a smooth frame rate, but the LCD's flat colors made it difficult to discern details in dark scenes. In addition, you have to store them in a folder called MEDIA or the Instinct doesn't see them. The s30 plays games well, and it supports streamed Sprint TV, NASCAR and NFL video, and voice-enabled, TeleNav-powered GPS navigation—all of which are standard with Sprint's Simply Everything plan.
The 2-megapixel camera is unchanged. There's no LED flash or autofocus feature, and you still can't adjust the resolution, ISO, or other settings. Even so, the s30 takes nicely detailed pictures with even, balanced lighting. None of my test photos immediately screamed "camera phone" when I opened them on a nearby iMac. Indoors or out, the s30 did well, although color was a little flat and lifeless regardless of the setting. Recorded 320-by-240 videos were relatively smooth and usable as well. The s30 also automatically detected my 8GB SanDisk microSD card and saved photos and videos to it, which is a nice touch.
Sprint's Instinct s30 SPH-M810 occupies a unique place in the company's lineup: It has more power than most feature phones, but it's not really a smartphone. The Palm Pre is our Editors' Choice Sprint smartphone due to its stunning touch-screen UI, powerful messaging, and slide-out QWERTY keyboard. But the s30 has longer battery life, less weight, a thinner design, and a lower price in its favor. You could also go with the $199 HTC Touch Diamond, which has a much higher screen resolution and most of the same media options, or the $299 HTC Touch Pro, which adds a slide-out, five-row QWERTY keyboard—although both of these are more expensive and more difficult to use. If you're a messaging fiend, you may want to skip the touch screen and go for the free Samsung Rant, which offers a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, though it's not nearly as capable in other ways. Overall, if you want an iPhone-like experience on Sprint, but you don't want a Palm Pre, the Instinct is a solid choice.
Very Good
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