So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by:-
7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard.
1 x Ethernet cable: into wall-socket of hotel room.
8 bucks a day. But using Ethernet rather than the hotel’s wi-fi allows
me to share via a wireless network that I create on my laptop. That way
all my other toys can be online without separate logging on and
billing. Hotels make so much money from “high-speed” internet these
days. Well, they’ve lost their once juicy phone income I suppose. I
remember back in the early nineties, before the world wide web was so
much a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye and the net was all VERONICA,
JANET, WAIS, Gopher and FTP, I ran up a Princeton hotel phone bill of
three and half thousand dollars in one calendar week. Ach, die schöne Zeit …
Stephen Fry awaiting the storm © Samfry Ltd 2008
4 x iPod/iPhone chargers: I seem to use one iPhone
exclusively for mad hacking, jailbreaking and frigging about with,
another as a pedometer, another for music, another as a – guess what ?
– phone. I know I’m putting my botty on the line by confessing to
jailbreakage and hackery, but I think Apple (while each update brings a
new weapon in their war against Pwnage and SIM-card skulduggery) are man enough to take it.
3 x Hard drives: Took the hasty decision to come to
America (I shan’t be back in Britain till late January) with just one
computer, one of the new MacBooks. It doesn’t have Firewire. Duh?
Maddening, since my favourite hard drive is Firewire only. But at least
the MacBook allows a proper connection, unlike the underpowered USB of
the original version of the scrumptious MacBook Air. You know that
feeling when you have a whole lump of data on one device or peripheral
and you want to get it on another and you suddenly realise you can’t?
‘Okay, so I upload it onto a compact flash card. No onto an SD card.
Hell where’s my card reader? Right. I email myself the file…’ etc., etc. That happens to me a lot.
1 Snowball USB Microphone: just in case I have the sudden yen to record a podgram. You never know.
6 x SIM cards: Orange, Vodafone, 2 x O2, T-Mobile,
AT&T. My UK mobile number is Orange, that’s my regular number, but
one needs to swap and shuffle and use other networks in order properly
to play. I know. I’m weird. I’ve long accepted it. But weird is just
another way of spelling “wired”. I drew weird in another way and got
wired.
1 x Blackberry Bold
1 x Blackberry Storm
1 x HTC G1 Android ‘Googlephone’
1 x Pocketsurfer
n x iPhones (too many, you’d only laugh or snort with derision if I told you the exact number)
Assorted CDs
Assorted Manuals and Quickstart Guides.
A delicious nest of happiness © Samfry Ltd 2008
It’s a bombsite, as the photo reveals. But to me it’s a delicious
nest of happiness, a heap of bliss: a mess I’ll nestle in,
paraphernalia paradise. There is much swearing and ‘why the hell won’t
you do this?’ and ‘oh, for goodness sake what is wrong with you?’ and all kinds of curses and imprecations, but if I’m honest a glowing contentment underlies it all.
A strange obsession, mine. But better to be addicted to smartphones
and gismos than cocaine or sex, I suppose. Well, I don’t know, the
result is the same after all, very little sleep, great expense and
horrific mess everywhere.
My very first blog to my website
was on the subject of Smartphones. ‘I never met a smartphone I didn’t
buy,’ I wrote with somewhat overcooked hyperbole. So nearly true as to
be worth the mangling of Will Rogers’ famous, (and equally
unbelievable) claim.
Incidentally, I was faintly horrified to note, while seeking a good
site to link to Will Rogers, that Barry Manilow wrote a song with that
same title, whose lyrics are written out here with an illiteracy so fantastic as almost to be beautiful. Eek.
I nearly always have to preface this kind of article with a
‘Whatever you think of Apple, there’s no doubt…’ or ‘Love them or
loathe them, Apple have changed the…’ or ‘No matter what your view of
Steve Jobs, you can’t deny he…” and so forth. Take these opening riders
as read: they are there so as to deter enraged anti-Applers from
turning and charging into the bushes, snorting and stamping in disgust.
Some people despise Apple, hate Macvangelists and abhor everything
positive that might be said about what comes out of Cupertino. I have
in the past been guilty of just such visceral overreaction when it
comes to Microsoft. Tribal loyalties have riven the world of personal
computing since Bill Gates came late on the scene and took every
IBM-compatible user with him. A triumph of business manoeuvring, a
triumph of opportunism, a triumph of financial acumen, a triumph of all
kinds of things except computer science or technological advancement,
in the opinion of people like me at least. Every time Windows had a
rebirth I would get hold of it and buy a new machine to run it on
believing that they must now have got things right and finally created
an operating environment that could excite, impress and enthral me. But
each time their system got more ham-fisted, more insulting and more
indifferent to the pleasures and interests of the consumer. Windows
users meanwhile watched the Mac transform itself from niche – almost
hobbyist – toy to glamourpuss of the digital world and it was important
for them to demonstrate their contempt for the, as they saw them, media
poseurs who so proudly swung open their MacBooks in coffee bars and
airport lounges. Such a schism was silly but hard to stand back from.
History is already having its way with Microsoft; the Redmond, WA
empire, as all empires do, will crumble. Apple crumble will be served
up in time too. MS got big by seeing, which IBM didn’t, that the future
was with operating systems: Google got big by seeing, which MS didn’t,
that the future was with online systems. What will we all fail to see
next? Certainly one battleground that everyone has at last identified
is the one on which mobile handheld do-it-all computing and
communication devices clash. For want of a better word we will call
these devices smartphones.
The conclusion that no observer can fail to come to, whichever side
of the tribal divide they inhabit, is that the iPhone has Changed
Everything when it comes to smartphones. Without so much as a blush,
all the major players have presented to the world over the last few
months an ‘answer’ to the iPhone. The point, it seems to me, is not to
win or erode the share iPhone already has, but to stake a claim in a
marketplace that in three or four years will see the majority of the
world’s mobile phone using population, who now have ‘ordinary’ cell
phones, switch over to smartphones. The potential rewards are enormous.
No wonder everyone’s toes are being dipped into the water.
We should remind ourselves of the state of play before the arrival
of the iPhone four and a half digital years ago in June 2007, (Fry’s
Law of Digital Time states that 1 calendar year = 3 digital years).
There were smartphones, in those far off days, that used the Symbian
operating system, Nokia and Sony-Ericsson principal amongst them; there
were smartphones using the Palm OS, though these were being (wrongly
and sadly in this writer’s opinion) phased out and replaced with Treo
units ‘powered’ by the third major OS, Windows Mobile, which could also
be found in other devices, notably and most successfully those
manufactured by the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC. And, expressly for the
businessman, there was the Canadian firm Research In Motion’s famous
BlackBerry. RIM had begun to make a few incursions outside the
corporate sector with the BB Pearl which boasted such unBlackBerry
features as a camera and music player, but essentially the BB was a
businessman’s tool focussing on its branded push email service, using
either Enterprise servers controlled by individual companies (BES) or –
as a concession to individual customers - open Internet servers (BIS).
Its operating system was proprietary, though third parties could avail
themselves of its APIs or supply over the air (OTA) Java applications.
And so the stage was set for the arrival of the iPhone. Many people
(they won’t care to be reminded of it, but there were hundreds of them)
warned that Apple’s chances of entering such a competitive market from
a standing position were less than zero. Many others were incensed by
the hype engendered when the product finally arrived, by the fact that
its launch made national news, that photos of cheering queues outside
the Fifth Avenue Apple Store were on every newspaper front page. ‘Style
over substance’ jeered those who looked at the phone but hadn’t yet
used it. ‘My WinMob TyTN can do that. And it’s got GPS and 3G!’ cried
others, pointing out in exultant disbelief the features the iPhone
lacked.
Despite Apple’s ‘foolhardy’ standing start, despite the gaping
lacunae of those missing features, despite the units being primly and
firmly locked to single network providers, iPhone was a gigantic
success right out of the traps. And over the intervening eighteen
months the arrival of 3G, GPS, some kind of non-enterprise or ‘Cloud’
push service and third party apps (installable OTA or via the desktop)
ensured that the iPhone’s position as an epoch-altering giant, a
seismic, paradigm-shifting, cliché-evoking phenomenon has been
incontrovertibly affirmed.
This is no triumph of style over substance. iPhone is all about function, all about ease and pleasure of real, hard-working use,
all about the fundamental understanding that is Steve Jobs and Jony
Ive’s (Apple’s Chief Designer) great contribution to digital (and
therefore cultural) life in our time – that human beings, willy-nilly,
forge relationships even with inanimate objects and that those
relationships, being human, take on all the colours of emotion: it is
in our DNA for this to be the case. With objects that we spend most
hours of most days with such a relationship is far from a secondary
consideration. There is no ‘pathetic fallacy’
here, this is not an additional luxury for media types only, a
pretentious over-reading for the leisured and chattering classes, this
is a deep and important human psychological truth that allows machines
to function better: much, much better.
At the extremes humans can love or hate. I have raved, screamed,
shrieked and cursed when my iPhones, Macs, iPods, Airport base units
and Apple TVs have betrayed me, let me down. I expect so much of them.
But it is nothing to the venomous fury, disbelieving rage and
overmastering contempt that floods my being when attempting to get
function, sense and use out of a Windows, especially a Vista machine. I
made quite a spectacle of myself over this very issue not long ago.
But, despite my emotional as well as intellectual belief in Apple
there is much wrong, or at the very least deeply unsatisfactory about
the iPhone and perhaps about its ‘business model’. When the first
generation came out I offered the view, based on my experience of
releases and refinements in this field, that iPhone the Third would be
The One. I still believe this to be true. Any wishlist for hardware and
software improvements in v3.0 would be bound to hope for – nay demand – the following:-
1. Cut and paste. I mean come on!!
2. iPhone version of Safari to be Flash capable.
3. Video recording: iPhone should be like a Flip
4. Upgrade of camera (xenon flash, higher res)
5. Front facing video camera for 3G video calls
6. MMS
7. User file management capabilities
8. Bluetooth that is worthy of the name. File transfers between different phones and platforms is a minimum requirement.
9. A memory card slot.
10. AM/FM radio. (Mobile TV too, why not?)
11. Better (and removable) battery.
12. Built in projector (this prolly won’t come till V4, but you never know)
13. Customisable glossary for Apple’s predictive text input system.
BlackBerry has a superb autotext that allows BB units still to
outperform iPhone when it comes to input.
14. Email to be widescreen capable.
15. Attachable proprietary or third party peripherals: keyboard,
projector (if not built in see wish 12), printer etc. Maybe not
necessary if iPhone implementation of Bluetooth gets the kick up the
arse it needs.
I would add to that list three demands that are more to do with the
way Apple and the network companies limit the iPhone’s power.
1. Jailbreaking to be tolerated – encouraged, even
2. Unlocking not to be hobbled by iTunes
3. Apps designers to be freer to innovate yet further.
Without most or all of these requests being implemented Apple will
find itself in danger of falling behind. But hell, they know that
better than me, and I’m sure they will surprise us with capabilities I
haven’t begun to think of. I believe that not only can they now afford
to open up but also that they cannot afford not to. Google’s Android is
the reason they have to redouble their efforts as we shall see later on.
Looking back, then, at the first phase in the history of smart
communication devices, the real mystery is not how Jobs and Ive and
their team made their breakthrough with such conspicuous speed and
success, it is how the might of Symbian, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and
Microsoft could have bestridden the market for so many years without so
much as making an attempt to satisfy, please, solace and ease the
smartphone experience: even a quarter of Apple’s imagination,
creativity, innovation and delight in technology would have
been something. Weird to remind ourselves yet again of just how
unanimous in their scepticism the press and professional techies were
about the possibility of Apple being able to make a dent in the market
as an untried newcomer while now we’re already thinking of them as the
big brutal bullying champion. How could the major players have left a
gap in the market so wide that a complete novice in mobile telephony
could so instantly shame them? Shame them in the eyes of the world, at
least, if not in their own. The excuses made by the CEOs and spokesmen
of BigCell for their failures remind me of publishers I have met who
have tried to explain why they turned down the manuscript of J. K.
Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel. ‘Ah, yes. You see it was our
publishing house’s policy not to consider MSS over 40,000 words for the
children’s market… nothing I could do. No point even reading it….’ ‘Ah,
yes, well, you see it’s not our fault it was the networks/It was not
our fault it was the manufacturers.’ Hmmmmm.
Ever try to connect to a wireless network on a Sony Ericsson P
series or WinMob smartphone? The contempt implicit in these foul,
fiddly behemoths was breathtaking. The profound ugliness of Nokia’s e
range, the horrible underpowered nightmare of Sony’s UIQ devices, the
quite staggeringly insulting ghastliness of Windows Mobile… for two
years I kept believing that the manufacturers and software developers
in this field would eventually get it right and produce something as
truly usable as the old Psions, the old Palm Pilots and Treos, while
utilising the newer technologies and capabilities of the 21st century.
The only major player an enthusiast like myself could genuinely admire
was RIM, because the BlackBerry was everything it aspired to be. It
deliberately had no camera, (secret business meetings, factory visits
and so on often necessitate the leaving of cameras at the door, like
guns in a western town being cleaned up by James Stewart) and never
embarrassed itself by pretending to be a media player. It did what it
was supposed to and refused to pretend to be anything other than what
it was.
So there we were. They all left an open door through which Apple
charged. And now, with unblushing fanfare they each attempt to bring
something similar to market. This is good. Apple have shown that there
is a huge demand for exciting, innovative, lovable and imaginative
consumer devices. All the rivals have to do is to … is to what? To
produce cut price lookalikes or truly to pioneer and innovate? Well,
the latter is what they should do, but the former is what most of them
will do of course, because these dumb firms never ever learn. They are
afraid to be good. They will blame stockholders, consumers, anyone but
themselves.
Don’t you sometimes long to be CEO of a company like Sony Ericsson,
Samsung, Nokia or Microsoft? So that you can say to your coders, your
designers, your development teams and your software architects: “Not
Fucking Good Enough. I haven’t said ‘Wow’ yet. I haven’t gasped with
pleasure, amusement or admiration once. Start again. Not Fucking Good
Enough.”
And (forgive this ranting sidebar) how one would lay into the packaging department! “Nowhere near Fucking Good Enough. I’m not enjoying opening this. It’s clumsy, dumb and contemptuous. I’m in product-opening hell. Not Fucking Good Enough.”
Oh, yes Stephen. That’s all very well, but you try being a CEO in
the real world of share prices and financial officers. Bullshit. Any
CEO who hides behind his shareholders isn’t worthy of their job: I’ve
met enough business leaders to know that the good ones lead, they don’t
follow. Isn’t that kind of what ‘leader’ means? I seem to be straying.
But it’s all relevant really and it all needs saying again and again.
Managers, corporates, finance people, executives in tech companies –
they all need to understand for the sake of their pride and happiness
as much as their success, this simple rule: ‘That’ll do’ won’t do. ‘That’s good enough’ is never good enough.
And so we come to the three products under advisement. I shall start
with the Blackberries. Throughout their six year history RIM have
produced excellently serviceable messaging phones. That is what they
are all about. Instant pushed email with no frills for the business
consumer. You don’t need me to tell you that this approach has earned
RIM and their phone a kind of cult metonymical status. Now, in the Post
iPhone era, they appear to have come to the conclusion that this is not
enough. Either that or they feel they have more or less saturated their
existing core market and now wish to move into fresh woods and pastures
new. A sudden blizzard of new RIM devices has hit and is hitting the
market. The Bold is a legato evolution, the Storm a break into strident
falsetto while the Pearl/Kickstart 8820
clamshell flip phone might be regarded as a melody in an altogether
different key. I have had no access to the Kickstart, though with WiFi
capabilities, a 2 mp camera, quad band EDGE and an all new form factor
it looks like a larky entry level winner.
THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
So let’s begin with the Bold, pausing only to reflect on the horror
of its name. A detergent with built in softener, a polari code word, a
Merseyside district, an emphatic typographical style – all of those may
be said to be bold, yes. But a phone? ‘Do you want to see my Bold?’
Very odd.
At first glance the RIM Blackberry 9000 Bold,
to give it its proper designation, looks a little fatter than either
the 83×0 Curve or the shiny piano black 88×0. A band of silvery metal
(which turns out to be plastic) surrounds the candybar body lending it
a faintly iPhonic appearance, but the classic keyboard, pearl trackball
and BB logo menu key soon remind us that we’re in RIMland. Less
sculpted than the Curve, this is a device that nonetheless fits very
well in the hand, most of the pleasure deriving from the design of the
back, whose faux leather texture and softly rounded corners feel and
look immensely satisfactory. An external flap for a micro SD card means
we can kiss goodbye to the boredom of having to jerk out the battery
every time we want to change memory cards. Otherwise the usual
assignable function buttons, a standard 35mm stereo jack (thank heavens
we have seen the last of the horrid days of freakish proprietary
earphone sockets – or have we? More later) a mini USB port and a
standby/mute button complete the exterior hardware features.
Blackberry Bold © Research in Motion Ltd 2008
It is the screen that takes up all our attention. This Half VGA 480x 320 display is an absolute honey.
The images are crisper, clearer and brighter than you could possibly
have expected. Moving and still images dazzle with their pleasing
clarity and depth of colour.
The only really new capability on this phone is 3G. RIM has bowed to
the inevitable and sacrificed some of the BlackBerry’s fabled battery
life for the sake of being able to badge it as a speedster. Emails
don’t arrive any faster, because they couldn’t be quicker than they
always were on EDGE and GPRS anyway. 3G is only justified for OTA
app/file downloading or power web browsing and is the BlackBerry a
phone where you are likely to do much of either? The in-house browser
is not very good and likes nothing better than to visit a site and then
throw up a warning screen that says “The XML is not well formed” or
something equally rude and stupid. It does offer the possibility of
online video, but only from the few compatible sites that offer 3GPP
RTSP streaming. There is also the boredom of it expressing itself as
either the badged network provider browser, in my case Orange, or
splitting itself in two when using Wi-Fi and calling itself a HotSpot
Browser. All very silly and lazy. Most users will prefer to download
Opera Mini which while certainly better, calls up the built-in browser
anyway whenever there’s downloading to be done.
As far as other apps are concerned, I have given up trying to
persuade the GooSync client for synchronising Google Calendars to work.
It needs to piggyback off a deeply unsatisfactory application called
SyncJe which Simply Won’t Work. I did manage to download Twitterberry
which functions adequately without being any of fluent, function rich,
legible or appealing.
BlackBerry Maps of course, Simply Won’t Work either. But then they
never have on any of the half dozen or so models of BlackBerry I’ve
owned in my absurd life. I sometimes wonder if Wayfinder or another
third party provider of navigation software doesn’t pay RIM or the
network providers a kickback of some kind. When fired up, the BB Maps
application (mapplication?) offers a splashscreen that tells me that I
don’t have a BES or BIS connection, which is manifestly untrue since
BIS is cheerfully pushing emails at me faster than Bendick’s pushes out
Bittermints. The same is true on the BlackBerry Storm, so it seems to
be horribly usual. How they get away with advertising their map service
I can’t imagine, when a quick search through the help forums seems to
show that BB Maps works for just about NO ONE.
But then – and one can’t repeat this often enough – that isn’t the
point of BlackBerry. The point of BlackBerry is fast and furious
emailing. Instant Messaging out of the box, it must be confessed, is
limited to PIN2PIN chats between fellow BlackBerry users, but IM
clients like VeriChat and Gizmo allow the usual AIM, Yahoo, Google and
MS chatter. SMS texting is reasonably well threaded, but email … well,
it’s hard to explain to the uninitiated quite why the BB email
experience is so satisfying, but deeply, joyfully satisfying it is. And
now, with the Bold, it is even more so. For the Bold is not just a new
box, it brings with it a new operating system, version 4.6, which
amongst other things offers correctly formatted HTML emails. Well,
jolly nearly correctly formatted – correctly formatted for the screen,
shall we say? The annoyingly overprotective options don’t allow you
automatically to see the images in your email (I’m talking about images
embedded in the format here, not attachments) until you select the
option from your menu each time for each email. But again, some BB
aficionados will see graphical email as completely unBlackBerry anyway
and won’t mind a bit.
OS 4.6 offers fabulous speed and smoothness from its 624MHz Intel
XScale PXA 270 processor. The fonts are gorgeous and automatically
anti-aliased, without the need for the font smoothing option of old.
The charming white-light neon outline icons of the home screen are not
always easy to interpret, but you soon get the idea. In Britain, the
Bold comes exclusively from Orange, in America AT&T have that
honour. The Orange handset I have comes with two themes: Precision
Orange and Precision Silver. Icons, settings, shortcuts, trackball,
autotext (one of BlackBerry’s clinching USPs) and menus work the same
way they have for years on BlackBerry so it’s an easy transition from a
Curve, Pearl or 8800. The same but better, smoother, faster, prettier.
It seems that early releases of the Bold were so problematic that
Orange in the UK actually yanked it from their list of phones for a
while. All seems to be well now, although the Orange badged version
doesn’t allow the Wireless updating of the system that is a vaunted
feature in other territories, nor the implementation of GPS ephemeris
for star-gazers. Maybe some kind of update will help.
The media browsing and playing is much as it has been since the
first Pearl models, hardly up to iPhone or iPod standard, but the new
screen though small, presents knockout video and photo reproduction.
There seems to be an improvement in the built-in speakers too. You
wouldn’t use them to play music at a country house rave, but for
reference and handsfree talk they are much better than once they were
and better than the iPhone can offer. You can’t say that about the
camera however. Same resolution as the iPhone’s at 2 megapixels, but a
woefully less impressive lens and end product. To compensate, you can
geotag your photos and there is an adequate video capture programme too.
Only a gigabyte of onboard memory is offered, but this can be
supplemented by up to 16GB via the MicroSD slot (some rumours suggest
32GB is possible). Included as standard are voice recording, voice
dialling, some dumb but prettily implemented games, a suite of Dataviz
document readers (which can become full read/write apps if you pay for
an upgrade), a calculator, a memopad and a sweet little alarm/clock/stopwatch with a cunning bedside mode. No front-facing lens for video chat though.
Power will be drained if you use too many of the radios at the same
time, so best go with GPS and Bluetooth off unless you really need
them. Once you’ve tired of seeing the strange sight of “3G” on a
BlackBerry screen you might as well go to phone options and choose an
EDGE connection. It will save you a lot of battery life and you’ll lose
little functionality.
Text input is achieved via a keyboard slightly different from that
of the Curve and, in my opinion at least, better. I think I can type
faster and more accurately on a BB Bold than on any make of phone I’ve
ever used. The Palm Treo 650 used to take that prize, but I think the
design, ergonomics and heft of the Bold edge out that beloved old Treo.
The usual small annoyances remain (surely RIM can come up with a better
shift and alt lock? Why not a double press in each case?) but all in
all it’s a fine and serviceable keyboard.
In short the Bold is a superb evolution of a winning formula (if
formulae can be said to evolve): it looks and feels attractive, solid
and well-made. The software architecture and hardware design complement
each other perfectly. Above all it remains wholly, proudly and properly
a BlackBerry. It is, to be sure, no threat to the iPhone
except in one regard: devoted BlackBerry users will be less anxious and
uncertain than they might have done a month or so ago. They will feel
proud, happy and loved once again and all thoughts of moving to iPhone
will vanish away.
RIM BlackBerry 9000 Bold
Stars •••• (4/5)
Operating System: v4.6.0.xxx
Processor: Intel XScale PXA270 @ 624MHz
Network: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA (Quad band)
Display: HVGA 65,000 Color LCD (480×320). Backlighting. Light sensing screen.
Camera: 2MP
Wi-Fi: 802.11 a/b/g
GPS: Built in (A)
Battery:1500mAh 13.5 days on standby, 4.5 hours talk time
Weight: 136 grams, 4.8 oz
Card slot: MicroSD, (TransFlash), microSDHC
On board memory: 1 GB
Media player: MP3, AAC+, WMA etc
Video player: WMV, 3GP, MPEG4, H.263/4, MPEG4, DivX, Xvid
STORM WARNING
But the Bold is not RIM’s only major new model this year. In fact,
superb as the 9000 model is, almost all recent press coverage has been
focussed on BlackBerry’s entry into the touchscreen and accelerometer
age, the 9500-9530 Storm
(and you thought Bold was a bad name). An accelerometer is a device
that lets an object know which way up it is. That’s just what the RIM
corporation itself seems to need, for it is clear that with the release
of this dog they don’t know their tits from their tibias.
Available exclusively through Verizon in the States (non-Americans
should know that this network provider’s name is pronounced to rhyme,
not with ‘berries on’, but with ‘horizon’, as in “There’s a Storm on
the Verizon”) and through Vodafone in the United Kingdom, the 9500 is
RIM’s answer to a question it should never have been asking in the
first place.
Blackberry Storm © Research in Motion Ltd 2008
The American version of the Storm is (under) powered by a Qualcomm
528 MHz CPU while the British model relies on the 624 MHz Marvell Intel
XScale. The very fact that the same phone can vary so fundamentally
shows how much heft network providers have these days when it comes to
phone manufacture, design and marketing. My suspicion is that the
Storm’s most glaring faults derive from the unseemly haste with which
it has been released: pressure on the software and design teams that is
more likely to have come from the two V’s, Verizon and Vodafone, than
from RIM. I may be wrong, but that is my feeling. On that subject, some
defensive types will accuse me of reading too much into an early
release (not a pre-release: my toys, as usual when I am not reviewing
through the pages of the Guardian or similar, are mine, bought and paid
for). Software updates, firmware patches and other improvements are
certain to come out in the next months – indeed already have done so. I
am as certain as I can be that I’m running the latest version of the
OS. So everything below is written in the knowledge that while things
might well get better it is legitimate to judge what is currently on
offer and busily being advertised. Software updates or no software
updates it remains true that, as they say in the music industry, ‘you
cannot polish a turd.’ A turkey is a turkey, no matter what colour you
dye the feathers.
The dedicated 4.7.0 operating system is tasked to manage the Storm’s
major selling feature, it’s haptic ‘SurePress’ touchscreen. Haptic
doesn’t really mean much more than ‘of or about the sense of touch’ –
in ergonomics and the digital sphere, however, it tends to suggest
something deeper than the usual glass capacitive touchscreen that we
find on iPhones and the like, it promises some measure of tactile
feedback (like the wonderful buzzy kick you get from an HTC Touch when
playing a Get-The-Ball-Bearing-Down-The-Hole game, only more sensitive
and useful). All the patented SurePress actually does is click like a
dislocated knuckle every time you press down on it. The idea is that a
single, gentle touch highlights and selects a screen object or option
to be dealt with, like a single mouse click, while the action of
pressing down confirms, executes or opens – like a double click or
enter key. It feels plasticky and … well, just plain wrong.
The accelerometer meanwhile allows the screen to change from
portrait to landscape in the manner we are all now familiar with.
Except that it allows no such thing because it’s shite. It revolves the
screen when you don’t want it to and it waits a maddening five seconds
when you do actually need it to turn. Grrrr.
But first things first. Out of the box the Storm doesn’t look too
bad. Undistinguished perhaps, but certainly not dreadful. A little
narrower than the Bold and a fraction shorter, it somehow contrives to
feel bigger. I think the reason for this is the size of the icons once
the device is switched on. The whole GUI feels overblown, as if the
zoom button got stuck. This is especially true when the device is
(eventually) oriented into landscape mode. The very icons (white neon
outline style) that so delight and impress on the Bold are somehow
clumsy and annoying when magnified on the Storm. This melancholy state
of affairs will be thematic as we go through the whole blighted and
benighted disaster.
If things feels clumsy when viewing nothing more than the home
screen icons, just wait until you have to input text. This is where the
Storm enters into its own misguided and nightmarish hell. The SurePress
protocols of Touch-to-Highlight and Press-to-Execute are needed to
operate its ‘soft’ (i.e. graphical) keyboards.
Now, the iPhone relies on an audio click to tell you that a key has
been pressed: you can turn this alert off, since it is so annoying to
partners and friends. The Storm relies on the physical click of a
screen press – it’s the same noise someone with a broken nose makes
when they waggle it to gross you out at dinner parties. This feature
you of course cannot turn off since it is fundamental to the whole
design. It is supposed to be the grand response to the problems of
iPhone text entry. I will admit that I commonly swear at my iPhone when
typing. I wrote from the first that this is an issue for those who,
like me, often type more words a day than they speak. I am still more
productive in that respect on a QWERTY keyboard, or even a Pearl-style
SureType than on an iPhone, although my speed there has increased and
will do so even more when and if Apple allow/introduce autotext
glossaries and macro expanders.
In the sphere of keyboard entry RIM was right to see an opening. But
what they have done is to arrive chirpily on the battlefield equipped
with smart shiny new muskets to face off an enemy armed with Gatling
guns. Yes, Apple’s Gatling may not be the last word in field artillery:
it jams, it stutters and it often misses… but its raking automatic fire
sure as hell beats the Storm’s muzzle-loading arquebus, with its
laborious tamping and dangerous backfiring.
Watching someone writing an email on a Storm is like watching an antelope trying to open a packet of cigarettes.
There are two input keyboards. In portrait mode you are given 20
soft buttons, arranged on a 5×4 grid. The paired character groups are,
reading along the top row, QW, ER, TY, UI, OP – yes, it’s BlackBerry’s
SureType system which works so brilliantly well on the Pearl, allowing
rapid and cleverly predictive QWERTY text on a phone-pad sized
keyboard. On the Storm the system does work but is slower, so-o-o much
slower. Partly this is because suggested words for completion and/or
correction are popped up in a menu and, while key pressing is accurate if done right
(see below) menu selection is an ever-living mother of a horror. Menu
items are highlighted and your finger automatically stabs the wrong
one, usually the one above – something to do with parallax, I shouldn’t
wonder. If you aim low in order to compensate you will, such is life,
make your one accurate selection of the day. If you slow right down and
do it deliberately you increase your chances of success, but slowing
right down is not what a smartphone experience on the hoof should be
about. You’re an important person, you have emails to fire off which
the world is awaiting with rabid impatience, you don’t want your
fingers to imitate those executive toy ducks that slowly in perpetual
motion used to dip their beaks into glasses of coloured water. But that
is the only kind of action that guarantees accuracy. When I said above if done right, that is what I meant. Let’s twist the Storm and wait for it to go into landscape mode.
Now we are presented with a full QWERTY soft keyboard and the
results are immeasurably worse. Thumbing is the only real option here,
unless you’ve plonked the device down on a table, and thumbing will
achieve nothing but pain and sorrow. Remember, to input text you have
to snap the screen down each time, just touching achieves
nothing but the highlighting of a letter. If you build up a slow, even
rhythm you can get by, but try and hurry it and you will
produce nothij a;ldfk ep[w d ;s;m a; s pir nd fcking arrsewippe.
What a painful horror. Carpal tunnel syndrome or worse forms of RSI beckon. How one longs for a pearl trackball ...
For the rest, the camera is 3.2 MP rather than the 2MP offered by
Bold and iPhone and the pictures, still and moving, are of high
quality. The media browser works well too.
But what makes this Storm a stumer, little more than a worthless
tchotchke, is that not satisfied with introducing a white elephant of
an input system, RIM has decided it should take its stand in the
marketplace without WiFi.
Derr? Wh...? Huh? Yougoddabekiddingright?
Go figure.
Original iPhones with 2.5G EDGE only and without GPS might have
struck some people as underequipped, but WiFi was always there, WiFi
capability remains crucial in a smartphone worthy of the name. Even iPODS have it for heaven’s sake!
Incidentally, if you are a Mac user it seems that RIM, Verizon and
Vodafone would prefer that you didn’t buy this phone. Updates are
achieved, not Over The Air, but online via the desktop only through the
Windows version of BlackBerry Tools or by downloading a Windows
executable file using Internet Explorer only. There is no Mac or OTA
alternative. That is also true of the Bold. Oh well. At least Vodafone
offers an option whereby you can drop off a phone for upgrade at one of
their stores. Though after you’ve spent a few days with the blasted
thing, an option whereby you can drop it off one their roofs for
destruction will strike you as preferable.
For the rest, the wirelessless Storm’s files and apps are all laid
out in a familiar BlackBerry way, except that keyboards have a habit of
popping up when you don’t need them and failing to when you do.
Scrolling is juddery and doesn’t speed up when you flick faster as it
does on the iPod and G1. As an implementation of touchscreen technology
the Storm sucks: I’ll go further. The Storm could teach an industrial
vacuum pump how to suck. It could teach Linda Lovelace how to suck. It
could… you get the idea. It is as if RIM decided to point out to us all
the impressive things about the iPhone that we might have missed in our
excitement at the more obviously stellar features. How responsive it
is, how swift, how smooth, how light and quick on its feet, how
instinctive and intuitive, how little you have to think and consider
what to do with it.
I dare say some of the judder, lag and jerk will be smoothed out by
further software or (more likely) firmware updates, but nothing can
take away from the fact that this is the Edsel of smartphones, an
absolute smeller from top to bottom.
It’s easy to be wise after the event, but how RIM could have been
persuaded away from their core business of providing a slow, steady,
quality evolution of business oriented push email devices is a mystery.
A rush of blood to the head, I suppose. But at least the 9000 Bold is
still there, proving that they haven’t really lost it. I am sure
founder Mike Lazaridis and his fellow CEO Jim Balsillie will have the
courage and wisdom to learn from this.
If you want a BlackBerry – and why wouldn’t you? – make a Bold move and steer away from the Storm.
RIM BlackBerry 9530 Storm
Stars • (1/5)
Operating System: v4.7.0.xxx
Processor: Intel XScale Marvell @ 624MHz or Qualcomm @528MHz
Network: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA (Quad band)
Display: 3.25" HVGA 360x480 Multi-touch: up to 65K Colors
Input: Touchscreen with SurePress™ technology
Camera: 3.2MP
Wi-Fi: NO
GPS: Built in (A)
Battery:1400mAh 14.5 days on standby, 5 hours talk time (dependent)
Weight: 155 grams, 5.5 oz
Card slot: MicroSD (TransFlash), microSDHC
On board memory: 1 GB
Media player: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, WMA ProPlus
Video player: WMV, 3gp, MPEG4, H.263, MPEG4, H.264
I would love now to be able to turn to Sony Ericsson’s new Experia X1
smartphone, which has replaced their long line of P series UIQ
flavoured Symbian phones, which I liked in principle and in look and
feel, but which were flaky and prone to crash, not to mention being
possessed of a WLAN connection procedure that made one almost long for
a WinMob device.
Experia X1 © Sony Ericsson 2008
Sony Ericsson, like Palm, have made the fateful and imponderably
daft decision to ditch their previous OS and offer a WinMob phone
instead. Windows Mobile is so ghastly that all manufacturers these days
hide it as much as possible behind their own proprietary front ends.
But underneath it all the Experia is a Windows Mobile phone and I’m not
going to fork out over $1,000 bucks to report on a device whose front
door I will admire and whose interior will make me want to sick up.
Sorry, but twenty-five times bitten, once finally shy.
Nokia’s most exciting looking phone for years is the N97
which hasn’t hit American shores yet. When I get back to Europe I
intend to get my hands on one as soon as I can. Samsung’s entry into
the iPhone knock-off market meanwhile is the nah-ish WiFi free Eternity, which looks like the closest physical rip-off of an iPhone yet.
GEE! ONE OF THOSE!
But that leaves us with the most interesting rival to the iPhone of all, the G1, the first of the so-called Googlephones.
The G1 is manufactured by HTC,
the Formosan funsters who release WinMob phones like the TyTN, the
Touch, the Diamond Touch, the Touch Pro and so on… but it’s not the
phone that’s interesting, it’s the operating system behind it.
Google announced a year or so ago, following the earlier acquisition of the name and key personnel of a company called Android,
that the rumours were true, they really were going into the smartphone
business. They would produce an operating system for smartphones in
cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance.
Based on the Linux kernel, Android would be a true Open Source entity,
around which any manufacturer could build his device. HTC (part of the
Alliance) were the first to produce such a phone – the G1, which is
badged T-Mobile, but which in the spirit of Open Source (how unlike
Apple and ATT) can be unlocked within three months and run with any SIM
inside. There’s another Android phone ready to be released, the Kogan Agora,
which is just becoming available in Australia and looks for all the
world like the bastard son of a BlackBerry 8800 and a Samsung i320. In
China the QiGi offers the unlikely combination of both WinMob and Android. Well, there you are.
HTC G1 © HTC Corporation 2008
The G1 is a little narrower than an iPhone and has an attractively
light, semi-matt, almost rubberised texture to its back and a glossy
enamelled lustre to its front that I happen to like. I am assured by a
friend that ‘coffee bean’ would be a good description of the colour of
the one I bought, a kind of dark army brown/grey, officially designated
‘bronze’. ‘Metallic mocha’ is also suggested by this colour literate
acquaintance. Black and now white are also available and I must say it
does my heart good to see a phone that isn’t trying too hard to imitate
the iPhone in its exterior lineaments. When I saw pictures on the web I
thought, as did many, that the ugly stick had given the G1 a damned
good thrashing, but in the hand and up close it’s much better than I
expected. It has a gentle, somehow retro form factor that I find
comfortable and appealing without eliciting screams of desire. The
bronze version reminds me of GPO brown from the days before BT: trimphones
could come in that colour and also had those simultaneously square yet
rounded corners. The lower section of the front, which carries five
buttons and a trackball is tilted forward and up in such a way as to
have earned the soubriquet ‘the chin’. Otherwise standard volume
rockers, an angled camera lens and a camera button in the usual place
complete the outward appearance, in the closed position at least. Yes,
‘closed position’, for this is a slidey-open phone which reveals a full
qwerty keyboard when the top half of the sandwich is prised away from
the bottom. More on that later. The hard buttons, incidentally, are
Menu (context specific), Green Phone, Home, Back and Red Phone. Pretty
basic and all one could need. I am pleased by the addition of a
trackball. Apple’s purity can sometimes get in the way of convenience
and I like thumbing balls. Hang on … look … stop it at once …. you know
perfectly well what I mean.
I bought a (quite legally) unlocked G1 which I was able to register
and activate after a bit of lateral thinking which involved calling up
the menu after three failures and inputting my SIM network’s APN
information. The moment you do activate and the device is roaming (in
EDGE, I can’t get 3G here, even though the SIM and account are bona
fide 3G) the phone exultantly reveals one of its strengths – its
seamless integration with a Google account. If you use Gmail (and who
wouldn’t? it has the best Spam filter around and you can send ‘as from’
any of your preferred email addresses) you will already have a Google
account. If you don’t, it’s a snap, as Americans like to say, to be up
and running with one in no time. It’s free and comes with lots and lots
of serverside storage. Of course you’re instantly a unit in Great
Google’s Adword databank of commercial trickery and avarice – but if
you’re cool with that, as I lazily am, the advantages are legion. I use
Gmail as a hub for all my email accounts and I am hopelessly devoted to
Google Calendars. The G1 had all my Google data installed and syncing
within moments of connection.
[Sidebar of interest for Mac users only: one stupid
and typical wrinkle in today’s digital world. Apple’s address book is
brilliant. Using it with an iPhone either syncing by cable or OTA via
MobileMe is fantastic. Apple’s iCal, on the other hand is less
impressive, in either desktop or MobileMe web form. Conversely,
Google’s Calendar is superb, but its Contacts nothing less than a pile
of rancid old pants. So the ideal device for me at the moment would
sync my Mac address book and my Google Calendars: I
need the latter because I have several different GCals for different
projects which can be read and/or amended by the various people I’m
working with. There’s no proper client for syncing Google Calendars
with an iPhone and no way you can sync a G1 to your Apple Address book.
All the utilities (and there are at least four, Spanning Sync and
BusySync being the best) while coping with calendars well, run into the
stark truth that syncing Apple Address Book with Google Contacts is
horrible.]
So I’ve got the G1 working and it’s already loaded with my major
details. A home screen, entirely customisable, offers four apps in
basic, rather clunky cartoony icons at the bottom of the capacitive
touchscreen. A capacitive touchscreen, incidentally, is the
ultra responsive kind, like the iPhone’s, which can only be operated by
a finger, as opposed to the slightly more sluggish resistive sort, as seen on plenty of WinMobs, Treos, the Nintendo DS etc, which respond to styli too.
Unfortunately, multitouch, the ability to use different kinds of
finger action to manipulate screen objects, isn’t yet available. The G1
recognises differing speeds of flicking/scrolling as well as the
distinction between a touch and a long hold. It does this responsively
and accurately, you very soon learn to trust the screen in exactly the
way you don’t with the BB Storm.
There is currently no way to input text except by sliding out the
qwerty keyboard. I don’t like this keyboard. Others do. I find its keys
okay, it’s simply that it is hard to read, being always in shadow and
underlit. I’m never quite sure how to grasp the device for the best
keystroking either. The slide mechanism seems robust enough, which it
will need to be of course, for the hinge will be used scores of times a
day every day.
For those familiar with the iPhone, and even I suspect those not,
the G1 is similarly intuitive and simple to use. Icons can be dragged
around and placed wheresoe’er sir or madam desires. Among the standout
features are the notifications at the top of the screen, informing you
of incoming emails, texts, missed calls and so on, which can be
expanded into the full screen by pulling down a kind of a window blind.
An equivalent at the bottom pulls up a drawer style screen containing
all the home screen applications, settings, utilities and other icons
as well as an Android Market button, which opens the system’s
equivalent of the iPhone App Store.
The Market is where Android will prove itself. At the moment there
is nothing even close to the number of programs that the App Store can
boast, but the G1 is all about the future. It updates itself
transparently over the air, it is open enough to allow for new and
imaginative solutions to its current shortcomings. Its current SDK
doesn’t allow for the kind of programming that will really take
advantage of the OS, but then the OS doesn’t yet take advantage of the
possibilities of the Apps Market either. Each needs to catch up with
the potential of the other. One thoughtful feature of the Market is a
warning screen that appears when you select an app for installation and
download if that app in the course of its use will access any or all of
either your location information, your personal information, your
system tools or your full internet network connection.
The web browser is good, it uses Webkit, the same rendering engine
Apple uses for Safari on the iPhone and, like Google’s Chrome browser,
combines search and URL input in one field. In the absence of
multitouch you will probably find the trackball useful for zooming and
selecting when you browse. A YouTube player attempts to make up, in
exactly the way the iPhone does, for the unfortunate lack of Flash. The
G1 YT player is fine and can even search categories, which is one up on
Apple’s.
As you would expect, the specific Gmail handling is good – the app
in appearance and handling is not unlike the mobile site one has been
able for some time to access from web capable mobile browsers. There
seems to be a push system at work which means that emails come in very
quickly indeed. Setting up other email accounts through an entirely
different (and rather bland) email application is easy enough too.
The 3.2 MP camera is fine, and (auto) focusable which I like. This
allows macro detail (a business card reader app must be in the works
somewhere, one feels: like the one the old Sony Ericsson P series
boasted) and for the camera to combine with a splendid Market app
called Shopsavvy, which reads barcodes in shops, looks them up and
compares prices with online stores. Images on the screen however, which
ought to be as good as the iPhone just aren’t as bright and clear. I
compared the same photographs on each and the G1’s were unquestionably
murkier and bluer each time. You can never be sure though, can you,
that you haven’t got a duff screen?
But the G1’s problems run deeper than a less than perfect display…
Finding satellites to link with the otherwise excellent
implementation (naturally) of Google Maps is deeply frustrating. Don’t
get lost and rely on it.
The G1 is no business phone, that’s for sure: Enterprise servers and VPN are not possible at this time.
The G1 is no mediaphone, that’s for sure: movie player not
included, audio playing is primitive, the sound is sub par, and there’s
no audio jack socket – you have to use special (crap) headphones that
connect thru the USB port. Bah!
You cannot sync the G1 with your PC or Mac – your music files have
either to be downloaded OTA (your best bet may be Amazon’s DRM-free
collection) or copied from your computer onto a MicroSD card that is
then inserted in the G1. Cumbersome and disappointing.
There is a lot wrong with this phone, yet to my mind none of that
fundamentally matters. These imperfections may make you delay your
immediate purchase of an Android phone, but they needn’t. The chances
are that with a good contract (T-Mobile are the G1’s only network in
the US and the UK so far) you will be on a free upgrade path anyway.
Unlocked phones seem unnecessarily expensive in Europe, where customs
imposts make the device close to prohibitive for most pockets. One can
bet that the G2 and G3 will better bear the luscious fruit of Open
Source development before very long. Meanwhile, the G1 stands as a
reasonably priced and impressive first shot from HTC and Android. The
whole system can only improve and when it does it will truly give the
iPhone a run for its money. Especially if Apple stays as tightly closed
as they are now.
For the moment, however, it has also to be added that it is hard to
believe that T-Mobile and Google have quite figured out their intended
market. It is certainly not to be found amongst the suits who cluster
so loyally round their BlackBerries nor amongst young people who
cluster so disloyally around the favoured music and video playback
device of the moment. In the US the talk is of G1 being the natural
upgrade for the “Sidekick generation” – ie those raised on the Danger Hiptop,
a device that always struck me as weird. Whatever the market, I wish
the G1 well, I really do. Apple needs the competition and the world
needs diversity, confidence and imagination in its choice of do-it-all
communication devices.
HTC G1 Android
Stars •••1/2 (3.5/5)
Operating System: Android 1.0
Processor: Qualcomm MSM7201A ARM11 @ 528MHz
Network: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA (Quad band)
Display: 3.2 in (81 mm) HVGA (480×320) (180 ppi) 65K colour
Input: Capacitive touchscreen (without multitouch)
Camera: 3.2MP with autofocus
Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g
GPS: Built in - operates with Google Maps
Battery:1150mAh, 5 hours talk time, 130 hours standby
Weight: 158 grams
Card slot: MicroSD (TransFlash), microSDHC
On board memory: 192 MB DDR SDRAM 256 MB Flash
Media player: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, WMA ProPlus
Video player: WMV, 3gp, MPEG4, H.263, MPEG4, H.264
Well, there’s my overblown round up of three important and (for
saddoes like me, at least) fascinating products. Within 6 months the
landscape will be immeasurably different and I shall hope to be there
again, fiddling, syncing, swearing and smiling at the strange world of
digital devices.
x Stephen
© Stephen Fry 2008
If
you're really, really, really excited about President Obama, then you
might find this Obama phone attractive. It's got a big Obama logo on
the back, the Obama "O" on the main button nub, and a classy color
scheme. It's pretty basic beyond this.
