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The iPhone 3GS came out today. And as always, there was just about as much media coverage as ever. Pictures of long lines, and people all excited about shelling out more money to Apple and ATT. While I think the improvements are nice, and the new 3.0 software has some cool-ish things, I’m still not at all interested in buying one. Heres why:

The big features of the 3.0 software that everyone is talking about are:

– Copy/Paste
I have this on Android, and most other smart phones do this. Pure catch up

– Landscape keyboard
Really? Only just now getting this?

– Type new messages while the old is still sending
This is a feature? I can do this on Android, or better yet, type a message, send it, go do something else, and still have my streaming music player open in the background.

– Spotlight search
This is very cool, and a nice addition

– YouTube video upload
Android, Pre, etc can do this already.

– Turn by Turn nav
Nice, but Pre had it out of the box, most all Verizon phones have this as well.

– MMS*
Welcome to the 21st century iPhone! Oh wait ATT still doesnt support this…

– Notifications
Nifty I guess, but my Android phone notifies me all the time, and Androids notification system is far better. More on this later

And the new 3GS hardware itself has some new toys:

– Compass
Ok, I have this on Android and I rarely use it, I wouldnt switch phones for this

– Video recording
Again, this is not new and somethign that should have been there a long time ago.

– Tethering
ATT is killing this, so no point in upgrading for it. T-Mobile wont let Android either. VZ lets you, and its pretty fast too.

– Voice control
Could be interesting, I would have to see how it actaully works in practice. I can do voice google searches already on my Android, but I rarely use it.

– Better battery
This would be by far the best part of the new HW. If the batt is much better a lot of people will be happy.

– Faster processor. This is the new Cortex chip, so should be a nice speed improvement. But the Pre has this chip too… and the Toshiba G01 has a Snapdragon that will toast anything else… so not a wild technology leap, but still a good upgrade.

Notifications were one of the biggest things hyped about the new 3.0 software. This is Apples answer to the cries for multitasking. But this still won’t matter. For example, say I have a notifications enabled IM app, and then I go off and open Pandora and listen to some tunes. I get an IM and I get “notified” however that happens to look on the phone’s UI. If I switch to the IM app, I still have to kill pandora and my music goes away.

Now, lets look at this scenario on Android. I’m playing music on fast.fm. I get an IM on gChat. It pops up in the notifications area and I can simple slide the notifcations bar down, read the message and be done. Or, I can click on it and gChat opens and I can respond. And guess what? My streaming music is still playing!

In the end, I this won’t stop the complaints about no multitaksing, it will just finally make some things actually work ok on the phone – IM clients and the like.

So for me, while I love the physical design of the phone, and the interface is so nice and polished, I just don’t see how I could upgrade and lose out on things I do the most – IM and txting, and being able to do those things while I have whatever else I want running at the same time. Oh ya, and ATT still has a sucky network…

Qualcomm moved into part of the spectrum vacated in the DTV transition. This paved the way for expanding their MediaFLO service (streaming TV on your phone or other devices).

Nice eWeek Article here.

More about MediaFLO here.

Billshrink.com is an interesting site that lets you compare cell phones and services. They have a graphics that compares some pertinent features of the 3 big smartphones.

A few interesting points about this. The storage capacity is the base amount (or with the Pre the only amount). The G1 looks bad, but then again, it has a micro SD slot so you can put whatever you want in there.

Battery life for the G1 looks bad as well, but this is very different from other data (see last post) where standby was over 300hrs. However, as a G1 owner, I can say that standby time is not stellar, and I don’t think its really 300hrs.

Voice commands are interesting. The new Android 1.5 software has Google voice search. Which is interesting I guess, but most of the time I’m using my cell, its not ideal conditions for voice commands.

The app store should have listed an approximate number of apps available. Obvious the Apple App Store is the huge winner. Android Market isn’t bad, several thousand apps now. The Palm Catalog is new and has less than 20 apps, but we should give it a few months before passing judgement.

Multitasking is slightly misleading on the iPhone 3GS. The new 3.0 software has “notifications” so things like IM can “run” in the background. Or at least you could stay logged in and be notified when a new message comes in. Of course this isn’t real multitasking. And there is no way (that I have seen) to let 3rd party apps hook various system features. Android is great at this.

Finally, the thing that hurts the iPhone most in this chart is the service plan. ATT is more expensive than plans from T-Mobile or Sprint. I shopped plans myself, and I do a lot of txting and data, but don’t need a lot of minutes. Sprint ended up being cheapest – about $55 a month plus their free night minutes start at 7pm! T-mobile (my current carrier) was next cheapest at about $70. The win with them is the “My Favs”. I get unlimited calling any time to any three numbers. I use the Phonalyzr app to keep track of who most of my minutes go to, and set them as my favs. I have never gone over my minutes. ATT is fairly expensive by comparison. $20 extra just for unlimited messaging! My $25 unlimited data plan from T-Mobile includes unlimited SMS and MMS.

Bottom line from this graphic is the iPhone still has the edge in a apps and storage. But carrier selection hurts and still no true multitasking is a bummer. However, if the notifications service works well, that might be good enough for most people.

My company (Qualcomm) publishes a magazine called QMag (link to online edition, or you can subscribe for free).

There were a couple of interesting things in the latest edition.

One of our divisions works on a display technology call Mirasol. As we all know, battery life is one of the most important issues with mobile phones, and the display usually eats a lot of that. Just like on your laptop, if you dim you screen, your batt life goes up. In talking about display technology, there was this interesting bit of info:

** Not in original QMag article

Interesting that the HTC has the best resolution (by far) and also the best battery life.

And then there is a small blurb about some researchers at Washington University that came up with USB ultrasound probes that work with WinMo. So apparently in developing countries, doctors could use mobile phone technology to take an ultrasound. Pretty cool.

I’d been a Verizon customer for quite a few years and loved the service, coverage was great, 3G was fast, and for the most part customer service was good. Even the plans were ok.

But more and more it seems like VZ is falling behind in the phone department. Cruising their website shows a mediocre selection and some downright odd handsets.

Apple initially talked to VZ about the iPhone, and for whatever reason, they didn’t take it. Sure, it was probably a risk then, and maybe they would have had to give up a little control to do it.. but you know they are kicking themselves now.

Then came Android, and all the talk about how VZ had a falling out with the Open Handset Alliance. It seems they have rectified this, but still, there have been no handsets announced, and just rumors and statements saying they are coming.

And then VZ goes buck nutty about the Balckberry Storm. Initially it looked pretty good. BB has a great reputation for email devices, and a full touchscreen BB seemed pretty cool. I had one for about 6 months, and I wasn’t impressed, but thats another post.

And now Sprint has the Pre. I’ve played around with it a few times. Its a great phone, and a definite competitor. If they get their app store off the ground, this could be good times.

So, VZ, with the best network in the country, is left with nothing, while all the other big networks have a signature phone. They need to put down the beer and get with it. VZ is a joint venture with Vodafone… and Voda got the very cool HTC Magic. Why not VZ?

I switched to T-Mo to get an G1, and love Android. But I would switch back to VZ in a heartbeat if any one of the Android, iPhone, Pre options were available.

So we got a demo Toshiba G01 at work. Or should I say a friend did, they are looking at graphics drivers and such. The G01 is the first phone to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor. This is basically netbook level power (think Intel Atom) in your phone. Crazy.

The first thing you notice when picking up the phone is the unique size. Its very thin (thinner feeling than an iPhone), but the other 2 dimensions are bigger than any other phone I’ve seen. Its almost like someone took an iPhone and used a rolling pin on it. This might be a problem for people with smaller hands, and I’m not so sure its great for the pocket of your jeans. The other thing is the phone is very light. The body seems solid, and feels nice.

The huge standout here is the screen. Its big. 4.1 inches of goodness. And at 800×480, it looks great. The media player supports DivX and other popular formats, so you will put that screen to good use. Also, supposedly the browser will support Flash. But we’ve heard this before about phones, so that remains to be seen.

The demo unit had WinMo 6.1 along with Toshiba’s custom UI layer. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of WinMo, it just looks old compared to the competition. But no big deal. The thing I didn’t like at all was the Toshiba UI. It was just odd and not intuitive. Like most other smart phones, there are icons in a grid, but then there are 3 colored stripes in the background that divide the screen equally. Swiping left to right (or R to L) makes these three stripes spin, and you realize they are supposed to be three “3D” columns that rotate. Each time you swipe across you spin to a new side of the columns and see new icons. This is kind of weird.

I didn’t see much in the way of other widgets to UI improvements, so hopefully something is going to change before launch.

The real win with this phone is the insane processing power and good battery, but if the UI is lame its not going to matter all that much.

The Samsung Omnia gets very little press.  I have had one for about 6 months now, and I am still pleased with it.  Feature for feature it seems to leave other phones in the dust.  I know most people dislike the windows mobile UI.  But with features like the following I think I can overlook the few times where I actually have to look at the Windows Mobile UI:

5 Megapixel Camera
With a 5 MP camera on your phone it basically replaces your camera.  I know it’s not going to replace your DSLR, but it definitely replaces your simple point and shoot cameras.  The other feature about the camera that you really don’t see very many other places is the smile detection; the phone can be set to take a picture when all the faces in the picture are smiling.  I was skeptical at first of this, I thought there was no way this was going to work.  Surprisingly, it works really well.  I have used it for some of those awkward occasions where you would have normally used a timer to automatically take a picture.  Also, if you have an Omnia from any other carrier than Verizon you have geo-tagging.  That is where the camera uses the phone’s GPS and records the longitude and latitude of where the picture was taken into the picture’s properties.  Another crazy cool feature of the phone is it’s business card recognition.  Open up the business card app and take a picture of a business card and it automatically parses out the person’s info directly from the photo and puts it into your contacts.  This has worked really well for me.

GPS
Again, thanks Verizon for turning off the GPS, I am still waiting for that patch to turn the GPS back on.  Seriously, you can’t do things like this in the age of location-aware apps.  Live Search with the Gas Prices feature would be so much better if I didn’t have to type in the address.

Video/Audio
This is one of the few phones I have ever seen that support Divx and Xvid movies; and of course it supports the staple, MP4, WMV, H.263 and H.264.  It also supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, OGG, AMR and the DRM protected music.  It also has a built-in FM radio with RDS (not too many phones that can boast that).  One last thing it supports A2DP and AVRCP.  (I love that iPhone finally is adding this with a patch, therefore the technology was built into the phones all this time, it was just turned off.)  It also supports DLNA, which is quickly becoming widely accepted.  Crazy that my phone can push media directly to my TV.

Ah, spring. Birds, leaves on trees, outdoor events, maybe some good beer. And thousands of rabid apple fanboys converging on San Francisco for the annual love-in with Steve & Co.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple a lot. In fact I’m writing this post on my MacBook Pro with some sweet Mac software called MarsEdit. But I’m just not so sold on them that I overlook the somewhat obvious issues that Apple can have.

Lets start with the MacBook announcement. Better price, this is good, especially given all the “I’m a PC and I’m cheap” commercials of late. Also, finally removing the ExpressCard slot was nice. I’ve never used mine, and don’t think I ever will. But an SD slot would be so nice. Maybe not nice enough to pay for a new system, but this is a win. But a non-removable battery?? Seriously Apple, why? Every other notebook on the planet has a user changeable battery. So now I have to make an appointment with a “genius” and wait around while someone does this for me. Lame, not a win.

Snow Leopard. Big win here with the $29 upgrade price. Microsoft should really remember this someday. But then again, the list of new features is fairly tame. Sure there are under the hood improvements, but we’ll have to wait for the upgrade to see if its noticeable. The inclusion of OpenCL is pretty cool. I’ve been a fan of GPGPU for a while now and the usefulness of this could really be big, especially for compute intense apps like video processing or graphics apps. Not that it hasn’t been available before. NVIDIA’s CUDA package has been out for Mac OS, and could have easily been used to do much the same thing. The win with OpenCL is that it is a common standard that NVIDIA and ATI are at least somewhat on board with. So this could be a win if anyone writes apps to take advantage of it.

And now for the iPhone. I love the iPhone for many reasons, even though I don’t have one. It really kicked the wireless industry in the pants and finally got other companies really thinking about a true mobile computing platform. Unfortunately I still think there are some issues, most notably ATT. Verizon really screwed up when they passed on this.

With that said, the new 3.0 software seems like a good move in a few areas, although not as far as I would have liked to see it go. MMS support (finally) is nice, but is this really something to get excited about? I mean I’ve had MMS on cheap phones for years. Add to that that ATT won’t actually support MMS when 3.0 launches means this does nothing for anyone right now (well at least in the US).

Notifications is an interesting take on having “background” apps without fearing battery loss. Some of my friends who are rocking their 3Gs complain about battery life, so I can see where this might be an issue. But my Android phone has true background apps and I don’t have battery issues. I digress. So essentially you can register with some apple server and get push notifications on the phone that can be read with whatever app. This will be great for IM and the like where you can finally stay logged in and actually do anything on the phone. The big issue I have with this is that Apple controls the notification path. So crippling or removing services they dont like or don’t want you to have is easy. Also this is a single point fail for everything. Its better than nothing, but real background apps would have been so much better.

The 3G-S is interesting. No cosmetic updates at all, but then again the design is pretty much the coolest phone out there right now. The only thing that comes close is the new Palm Pre, but still. The 3MP camera upgrade was long long overdue. I wouldn’t even say this is a win, its a catchup. And video recording? My 9 year old little brother has a cheap Verizon phone and he takes pics and vids all the time and MMSs them to me. So no win there.

The compass is nice I guess. My Android has one, but I never really use it. I mean with GPS enabled Google Maps, why would I try to navigate on my own?

The claimed performance increase would be a big win if it is actually true across the majority of apps. But the biggest thing I read about the 3G-S was the improved battery life. This is the single biggest issue with mobiles, and the iPhone was hurting in that area as it was. So this alone would make me more interested in the phone if I was thinking about it. Which I would be, if I didn’t have to go to ATT.

Oh ya, the HSDPA+ addition. Meh. This isn’t cutting edge, many other phones with this support. The bigger question is can ATT’s network handle all these phones all wanting that much bandwidth. Will you see the 7Mb speeds in real life? Most likely not, unless you live in a small town in Kansas and are hugging the base station at midnight when everyone else is in bed.

Apple needs to be careful going forward with the iPhone. They are no longer the far and away winners in the smartphone world. The Palm Pre is a gorgeous device with a nice OS and a lot of good features, and once Android gets a better handset, it will be right up there too. So Apple needs to innovate, not just sprinkle some “updates” and hope to keep gaining market share. While they still hold the edge over Android in handset design, UI quality, and amount of apps, I think the Pre wins over the iPhone in several areas – background apps, better app management in the UI, and real background apps. If the Pre can get a sizable app base, this could be a bg problem for Apple.