HP has just announced that they’re killing off webOS devices, namely the Pre, Veer, and TouchPad — or everything that competes with iPhone and iPad.

In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.

Derek Kessler, editor of our sibling site PreCentral.net pulls no punches:

So what does this mean? The statement was carefully worded to state that they’re “discontinuing operations for webOs devices,” not webOS as an operating system. If anything, this should add fuel to the second option we discussed earlier today when the shocking word of an HP breakup first surfaced: HP is more interested in webOS than devices. They tried to give it a go with hardware, but quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to make it work without massive long-term investment and commitment. So less than a year after acquiring all of Palm for $1.2 billion, we’re looking at a hazy future for webOS.

My wish: Google buying Motorola to prevent against manufacturers turning away from Android leads at least one manufacturer with more savvy and stomach than HP to turn away from Android and towards webOS. An HTC ThunderBolt II or Samsung Galaxy S III with Cards and Synergy would be very, very interesting.

Keep your browsers locked to PreCentral.net for continuing coverage.

[PreCentral.net]

Clayton Miller’s Interuserface takes a look at the iconic shapes behind today’s biggest mobile companies, and while Apple, iPhone, and iPad are obviously roundrects (rounded rectangles), their competition is just as geometrically aligned:

Microsoft’s Metro UI owns the square. Apple has a corner on the roundrect, from the Springboard launcher to the iPhone hardware itself. Nokia, despite its late entry with MeeGo’s Harmattan UI, found the squircle unclaimed and ran with it beautifully. Palm has used the circle from the early days of PalmOS, and in WebOS, HP continues the tradition with care (one might even note that both Palm and HP structure their wordmarks around the circle).

Zune, obviously, couldn’t hold the squircle, and neither Bada nor RIM could take the square or roundrect as their own. Interestingly, Google’s Android has no iconic hold on any simple shape (nor do Facebook or Amazon for that matter, who have elected to stick with letters).

[Interuserface via WPCentral]

HP dominates the commodity PC market, selling more beige boxes and plastic laptops than anyone else on the planet, so what’s to stop their upcoming webOS-based HP TouchPad tablet from overtaking Apple’s number one selling iPad to become… um… better than number one? Nothing but wishing it to be so, according to Eric Cador, Senior VP of HP Personal Systems Group of the EMEA.

“In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP’s products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus.”

We’re huge fans of webOS, and it’s great to see the company aiming high, but the iPad isn’t just “number one”, it’s still so far ahead there’s no clear “number two” at this point. HP first has to release one tablet, make sure that release is competitive with iPad 3 (it’s too late to compete with iPad 2), and offer features, functions, and apps that taken together are compelling enough for someone to buy it instead of an iPad (or for people intent on getting “not an iPad” to choose HP over Android Honeycomb or BlackBerry Playbook tablets).

Given that, and given the comments Roger McNamee made before the ill-fated Palm Pre launch, it might behoove the folks at HP to make sure the TouchPad speaks for itself.

[The Telegraph via PreCentral.net]

Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, writing for sibling site PreCentral.net lands an exclusive first look at an HP/Palm webOS slab device, potentially code-named Stingray.

While we are quite confident that the image is legit, unfortunately we don’t have a lot of confidence in any further information. Is the device coming or is it simply a prototype that has been canned? Our tipster described it as “an EVO with webOS” and suggests it simply has yet to be announced.

If real and if HP goes ahead and releases it, it will be their first phone without a keyboard, leaving webOS itself as their key differentiators. With more an more emerging about the tablet-specific webOS 3.0 (similar to how iOS 3.2 was iPad specific), it’ll be interesting to see what ultimately launches on the phone.

[PreCentral.net]

Dieter’s been killing it today over on sibling-site PreCentral.net, digging up tons of details on HP/Palm’s upcoming “Topaz” tablet, their big iPad competitor. Not surprisingly it lines up almost identically to the current iPad and rumored iPad 2 specs, including a 9-inch 1024×768 screen, gyroscope, and front-facing camera. Given how successful Palm was at attracting developers to the Pre given its iPhone 3GS spec-matching, maintaining the strategy and getting iPad games via an updated PDK is a no brainer.

The hardware is the least interesting part of the leak, however. Of course it will be running webOS, one of the most elegant mobile operating systems on the planet, but as always there some amazing Palm innovation along for the ride:

The Topaz will support Touchstone inductive charging – but obviously it won’t work with the current Touchstone. Instead, HP is developing something they were calling “Touchstone v2″ that supports additional functionality. That functionality looks to include both Bluetooth for wireless streaming of content and speakers for music.

That last is intriguing. The idea is that you can start watching a movie on the dock, but when you lift the Topaz out of the dock it switches into a wireless remote to control the video that it’s wirelessly streaming to the controller for play on your television.

It’ll also have Flash, which the iPad won’t, and it should include some nifty cloud integration into the rest of HP’s webOS and Windows-powered ecosystem.

While Apple COO Tim Cook recently took Google’s Android tablets to task for bizarre fragmentation, Palm uses the same integrated approach Apple does and that could make for some pretty compelling competition.

Check out the full leaks via the link below and then come back here and tell us what you think. iPad 2 need to worry?

[PreCentral.net]

Palm webOS news often seems to land right before Apple iPhone news and while we’re waiting for tomorrow’s Apple special music event and iOS 4.1 announcement, PreCentral.net’s gotten the scoop on what’s coming later this year for webOS 2.0:

• Palm’s multitasking ‘card’ metaphor is getting a refresh with Stacks
• Universal Search is getting majorly beefed up with ‘Quick Actions,’ will be opened to developers, and rebranded as Just Type
• Apps can have custom Touchstone at-a-glance views with Exhibition
• Synergy is opening up to developers
• HTML5 and Javascript support is much improved
• Hybrid PDK/SDK apps will be fully supported

What, no interruptive, modal dialog notifications? Sigh. Seriously though, the multitasking looks interesting and once again while webOS isn’t open source, it leads the game in being a far more open platform for developers and users than just about anybody else in the industry. Check it out and let us know what, if anything, Apple needs to do to keep up in 6 months for the iOS 5 preview…?

[PreCentral.net]

Derek Kessler over at sibling site PreCentral.net let us know that developer logs are showing traces of webOS 2.0 supporting the same 960×640 resolution as Apple’s iPhone 4 Retina Display:

This time the developer was Killin’ It, and the app was the relatively popular game Cloud Hopper, As before, it’s entirely possible that somebody has performed some malevolent trickery to make this happen, but unlike theRoadrunner spotting in Foursquare’s Metrix logs, this one wouldn’t be quite so easy. Cloud Hopper’s source code has not been made publicly available like Foursquare’s, which means any charlatan attempting to pull the digital wool over our eyes would likely have to perform some pretty tricky modifications to the webOS emulator to get it to spit out Roadrunner HD as the device, webOS 2.0 as the OS, and the heretofore unseen 640×960 as the display resolution.

Given that the original Palm Pre matched iPhone 3GS in resolution and processors, and the easy iPhone games to PDK porting benefits that’s given them, it’s not hard to imagine a Pre 2 (or whatever the next generation device is called) will match iPhone 4 in the same way.

[@KillingItLLC via PreCentral.net]

We’ve been asking where the iPad competition has been for a while now, and it seems like it’s slowly starting to pick up with LG, Palm, and Google/Verizon hitting the news this week.

We’ll take a look at a few of them, after the break.

Palm, recently acquired by HP, is full steam ahead on a webOS tablet, which may just be the best OS from a UI standpoint to compete with iOS:

In their earnings call today, HP responded to a question about whether or not tablets (read: iPad) were hurting netbook sales. In reponse, HP publicly confirmed that a webOS Tablet is coming in the timeline we were expecting, saying they will release “a webOS-based product in Early 2011.” [PreCentral.net]

Verizon, who’s had great success with the Android-powered Droid smartphone brand looks to be turning towards Google’s other OS, Chrome, for their tablet (DroidPad?):

Yes, our source tells us that Google is building a Chrome OS tablet. It’s real, and it’s being built by HTC. No surprise there, since HTC churned out the Nexus One for Google.

Yes, they plan to offer it in conjunction with Verizon — which probably doesn’t come as a shock to anybody at this point. The two recently tag-teamed that Net Neutrality proposal and they’ve had plenty of discussions in the past about cooperating in some capacity. [Download Squad]

LG, who makes the terrific LED IPS panels for the current iPhone 4 and iPad, says they’re going to focus on content creation as a way to compete, and that their tablet will “be better than the iPad”:

The tablet will include content focused on creation such as writing documents, editing video and creating programs. It will also have “high-end features and new benefits,” many of which will focus on productivity, Mr. Ma said.

“It’s going to be surprisingly productive,” he said. [WSJ]

Think any of these will put a dent in iPad sales this holiday season?

iPhone 4 with its 960×640 retina display, easy-peasy FaceTime video calling, high quality 5 megapixel, back-illuminated camera that shoots 720p 30fps video, and the silky smoothness of iOS 4 convincing you to switch from Palm’s Pre or Pixi to Apple’s newest handset? Worried about moving over your personal data like contacts, finding apps, getting used to the differences? Wondering where to get help?

Relax. You’re in the the right place. Follow along after the break for everything you need to know (more properly, everything the TiPb iPhone Forums have taught us) about switching from Android to iPhone 4 and iOS 4.

(And yes, we’ve done Android, Windows PhoneBlackBerry switcher guides as well).

webOS to iPhone – home coming

When half of Apple’s original iPhone team left for Palm to make the webOS, maybe you went with them? Or maybe you’re a loyalist who went from Treo to Centro to Pixi and never even considered an iPhone until now? No worries. That was then and this is now — iPhone 4 and iOs 4 now. Getting you up to speed and ready to go now.

Moving over contacts, calendars, and email

Hopefully if you’re using something called webOS your personal info is all store up in the cloud. If so, you should have no trouble getting it onto your iPhone. Just the pioneering Pre, iOS 4 can handle multiple ActiveSync accounts, including Exchange proper and Google Sync’s implementation. Just tap the Settings icon on the Home Screen, tap Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, choose Exchange, and enter your credentials.

If ActiveSync isn’t to your fancy, you can tap Other and set up pretty much any POP3 or IMAP account you have in your collection, and MobileMe, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, and anything else you can think of.

You can also load up any webmail account you like in the Safari web browser, including gmail.com, if that’s how you want to roll.

And you can access all of it in the new iOS 4 unified inbox and threaded email client. It’s not full on Synergy, but…

What about Synergy and Cards

There’s nothing as stupendous as Synergy built into iOS 4, though the previously mention Exchange, Google, and MobileMe contacts, calendars, and email can live together in quasi-synergistic fashion. If you install the Facebook app [iTunes link] you can get some contact mojo going on there as well. Other apps, like Orbit [iTunes link] can pull together your Facebook, Twitter, SMS, email, etc. contacts and let you assign different “volumes” to them so you can manage the level of interruption.

iOS 4 introduces a highly abstracted version of multitasking that, for mainstream users, would be indistinguishable from the real thing were it not for the great battery life and overall snappiness. Rather than Cards, you double click the Home button and the fast app switcher UI appears so you can quickly get to other apps (which can now save state so you go back to where you left them). But hey, if you find yourself missing Cards, just launch the Safari browser and hit the icon for Page view. It’s visually almost identical, though it lacks the ability to flick a page away to remove it.

And yes, in iOS 4, navigation, VoIP, and streaming music Pandora or Slacker-style can all multitask away blissfully in the background.

Finding other apps (and games)

Palm is the most developer friendly platform in the business bar none. They make Google seem closed and stodgy by comparison. But what Apple lacks in free-as-in-speech open App Store gates, they make up for in sheer tonnage of free-as-in-beer App Store goodness. And $0.99 goodness. And pretty much goodness at every level. Sure, there’s a lot of CrApps in with those apps, but at 200,000 and growing there’s also a huge amount of incredibly good, incredibly native, apps and games.

As Steve Jobs himself will tell you, Apple also supports HTML5 as a second, completely open platform. With local caching now available, HTML5 web apps can look and act far more like native apps. If you can’t find something in the App Store, chances are you can find it as a web app for the iPhone.

When it comes to apps of all kinds, TiPb reviews several a week and we’ve got a whole iPhone Apps and Games Forum ready to help you out as well.

Root meet Jailbreak

Again, Palm is so open and community friendly they make the Symbian foundation blush. There’s no manufacturer supported rooting on iPhone, and no ultra-cool Konami code to enter developer mode, and no encouraged patching of any kind. (Apple says “stop it” and would give the EFF noogies if they could.)

If you want to get into the root jail of your iPhone, you need to break it — hence, Jailbreak. If you want to side load apps outside the iTunes app store, you need to use the Jailbreak app store, Cydia (or Rock). Now, if you don’t understand what any of this means, just skip along to the next section, we’ll be there waiting. If you’re a diehard themer and patcher, you’ll want to keep your eyes peeled to our Jailbreak coverage, and more importantly — our Jailbreak Help Forum, and Jailbreak Apps, Games, and Themes Forum.

No. More. Keyboard.

You won’t be able to shave or cut cheese with the iPhone keyboard — because it’s virtual. If you believe the urban legend, current Palm CEO, Jon Rubenstein, back when he was still a VP at Apple, vigorously disagreed with Steve Jobs about the iPhone not having a physical keyboard. Hence, the Pre and Pixi both have physical keyboards.

And that’s okay. Just not on the iPhone. Apple likes their keys virtual so they go away when you don’t need them (without creaking, oreo’ing, popping batteries, or coming to the rescue when virtual keyboards just won’t do). On the plus side, if you’re multilingual or international, the iPhone keyboard can easily be switched to any alphabet, script, stroke, or pictographic symbol you want to use. It can also become optimized for numbers, games, or pretty much anything you (technically, a developer) can think of.

Best of all, if you really miss your physical keyboard, with iOS 4, you can tether up a Bluetooth one and knock email — and yourself — out.

Welcome back, iTunes

Remember Palm trying and ultimately failing to hack the Pre into iTunes? With iPhone, you’re a first (and only) class citizen with full keys to Apple’s media kingdom. Enjoy.

So long, OTA updates

And you’ll need that iTunes because while you can do a lot of things OTA (over the air), including syncing all your personal data via ActiveSync (including Google Sync) or MobileMe, download apps, and buy or rent iTunes music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, etc. (20MB or under over 3G, any size over Wi-Fi), updating the OS ain’t on. (Backing up ain’t two.)

Likewise, you can find apps that let you access your Google Docs, DropBox, Box.net, and other online storage. You can even convert and stream content on the fly with apps like AirSharing [iTunes]. But at some point, be it to install a software update like iOS 4.1 (probably due this fall) or backup your data, you’re going to need to plug in to iTunes. So 2007, we know. If it’s any consolation, Apple should release iTunes.com at some point…

Say WTH to interruptive notifications

Palm rules the roost with their elegant, non-interuptive, notification system. Compared to that utopia, iOS 4 notifications are some bizarre UI hell we’ll likely be immolating in until the next major OS update.

Here’s the condemnation – you get one notification popup at a time that you have to view or close before you can resume what you were doing (or about to do) and once you close it — or another notification pops up on top of it — it’s gone forever.

More webOS to iPhone help and information

If you haven’t already, check out our complete iOS 4 feature walkthrough. There’s an incredible amount of stuff in iOS 4 and you can save yourself some serious time cribbing off of us.

If you need help, or have a story to share, check out TiPb’s iPhone forum — we’ve got a special switching from webOS to iPhone 4 thread going just for you!

And if we forgot anything or just plain got something wrong, let us know and we’ll add it or fix it.

Palm has a stellar, non-interuptive, non-”choose it or lose it” notification system, and according to our sibling site PreCentral.net, the man who designed webOS notifications has left for Apple:

The man who “Invented the non-intrusive banner notification system used in webOS” and also did all sorts of other work for the OS, Rich Dellinger, is leaving Palm to return to his earlier employer, Apple, as a Senior User Interface Designer.

Does this mean iOS 4.x or iOS 5 will be getting better notifications? They’ve likely been working on that long before now, and who knows what Dellinger will be assigned to, but since notifications remain one of the few sore sports in iOS, we’re very much hoping it does and the sooner the better.

And let’s top that off by asking what kind of notification system you want to see in iOS? Palm and Android both do it well, how could Apple do it better? Simpler?

HP is buying Palm for $5.70 a share, or roughly $1.2 billion. Does this mean we can expect HP netbooks and tablets running webOS sooner rather than later? Sure would beat Windows 7 starter, wouldn’t it?

Says Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP:

“Palm’s innovative operating system provides an ideal platform to expand HP’s mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices. And, Palm possesses significant IP assets and has a highly skilled team. The smartphone market is large, profitable and rapidly growing, and companies that can provide an integrated device and experience command a higher share. Advances in mobility are offering significant opportunities, and HP intends to be a leader in this market.”

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was also quoted:

“We’re thrilled by HP’s vote of confidence in Palm’s technological leadership, which delivered Palm webOS and iconic products such as the Palm Pre. HP’s longstanding culture of innovation, scale and global operating resources make it the perfect partner to rapidly accelerate the growth of webOS. We look forward to working with HP to continue to deliver industry-leading mobile experiences to our customers and business partners.”

The question remains, webOS or no, can HP fix the hardware and carrier issues that have plagued Palm since their re-invention, and can they do it fast enough for it to matter?

PreCentral.net is covering the Palm/HP merger story as it develops and will be following the conference call starting at 5pm. Head on over there for more…

Reports are swirling around the internet that smartphone pioneer Palm is putting itself up for sale, with rumored suiters that include HTC and Lenovo.

After bringing in former Apple iPod lead Jon Rubinstein and members of Apple’s iPhone team, Palm went from an aging PalmOS platform to the ultra-modern webOS which leapfrogged other platforms in several key areas like multitasking, notifications, and social integration. Problems with timing and hardware, however, prevented them getting the traction they needed in the market and led to slower than expected sales.

While the idea of HTC H2D/EVO 4G level hardware no doubt brings drool to the mouth of every true geek, HTC getting a hold of Palm’s core mobile patent portfolio could radically equalize the relative positions in Apple’s infringement lawsuit.

Although typically left as a throw-away line at the end of blog posts (like we’re doing here, sorry!), the idea of Apple buying Palm is also interesting. They obviously have the cash (roughly 40 billion in the bank). Jokes could be made about Steve Jobs just wanting to get Ruby and those engineers back for the pleasure of firing them, but Palm’s patents are real and really important.

Apple probably wouldn’t have much use for webOS (neither would Microsoft or Google), however, so here’s hoping a company that wants webOS, that wants to continue driving it forward with great hardware and strong marketing, picks up Palm.

Apple needs the competition and so do we.

(And we’ll add our best wishes to everyone at Palm.)

[Bloomberg via PreCentral.net]

The MOTO Development Group is back with another round of capacitive touchscreen tests. This time they have stepped up their game by using robots to ensure the accuracy of the results. MOTO even tossed in a few extra handsets such as the Palm Pre and Blackberry Storm 2 for good measure.

You may remember that the original test that saw the iPhone take top honors. However some of you out there cried foul because of the fact a human finger was used in the tests. Hopefully this particular test helps put that all to rest as once again.

Now TiPb won’t spoil all of the results for you (as if we could!) but wait until you see what happened to the Moto Droid, ouch…

Full video after the break!

[MOTO via Engadget]

YouTube link

When last I left Palm they had but the Centro and some HTC Windows Mobile device to offer, now webOS and the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi’s inform Week 6 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin. Talk about night and day. Lucky I have the daywalker himself, our illustrious editor-in-chief and PreCentral.net’s own Dieter Bohn to show me how the brand new generation of Palm devices work. And works well.

Remember, every day you post on my PreCentral.net Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win a webOS device of your very own. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

This week also brings mobile powerhouse Matt Miller of Nokia Experts to TiPb’s own iPhone. He’s on the TiPb iPhone Forums and needs your help! Give him a hand and get a chance to win an iPhone 3GS for your troubles!

Video hands-on with Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, after the break!

(And if you’re confused by the intro to this year’s video, you really need to go watch last year’s Treo Pro video NOW!)

UPDATE: since Palm released the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus at CES 2010, CrackBerry Kevin and I got Dieter to give us an updated look at the new hardware. (Which is a bit of a cheat, really, since they’re not waiting for Apple’s Jan. 27 event to do their iPhone reviews!)

So according to sibling site, PreCentral.net, Palm is now updating all proud Pre and Pixi devices to webOS 1.3.5, but among the list of features we can’t help but notice…:

• App limit fixed.
• App Catalog downloads continue even after leaving the app’s page.
• App purchases have been expanded to US territories (sorry Europe, Canada, etc).
• Switching between days in Calendar is now faster.
• Sprint Navigation can be launched from a Contact.
• Palm Profile app restores happen in the background, letting the user get to the phone faster.
• Future webOS updates can be downloaded over 2G wireless (1xRTT).
• Notifications now work in landscape mode (which has strangely lost the rounded corners).

…the utter lack of iTunes sync hackery. Congrats Palm! Here’s hoping you can enjoy some OpenGL gaming in the near future, and a Verizon launch asap.

What, wait, they’re getting on Verizon before the iPhone?! And another update while we still wait for iPhone 3.2 iPhone 4.0!

(I know Palm — and Dieter! — did this deliberately just to mess with us during the Smartphone Round Robin!)

Our friends over at PreCentral.net bring word that Palm has launched a beta version of their browser-based IDE (integrated development environment) for webOS called Project Ares (sounds Manga, harkens to the Hellenic god of war — nice!). Supports Safari, Chrome, and Firefox (no mention of Internet Explorer?).

You can simply fire up your browser and go to http://ares.palm.com/, sign in with your developer account, and get coding.

Apple’s iPhone SDK and IDE, evolved from the very mature Mac Xcode and Interface Builder, and the Cocoa Touch frameworks are often cited as reasons for the App Store’s success and the quality and consistency of some of the very best apps. So, providing Palm webOS developers with similar tools (and frameworks?) is smart. And how utterly appropriate for a platform ballsy enough to be webOS, programmed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to be ballsy enough to move their IDE to the cloud. How Palm keeps out-Googling Google in the mobile space is amazing.

We throw the horns up in your general direction, sirs.

(We’ll also reference back to Apple’s PastryKit JavaScript frameworks, and wonder aloud again whether Apple will make it public, along with a Dashcode-style IDE for iPhone WebApps to go along with it? And would they — or should they — ever make it similarly cloud-basd?)

So the suspiciously familiar Dieter Bohn of PreCentral.net got a guided tour (check out the video) from yours truly to catch him up on all things iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 , and he shared his preliminary thoughts on Monday (same link). Of course, there was only so much help I could give him, so he went on over to TiPb’s iPhone Forums for the real experts — you, and boy have you given him some ninja-level instruction. He still needs you, however, so keep posting in that thread — and remember every day you do you get another chance to WIN AN iPHONE 3GS! (smartphoneroundrobin.com has all the details on that).

As for me, I’m still struggling with Nokia, the S60 N97-mini, and N900. Yeah, wish me luck with that. (Or give me some help and maybe win a Nokia smartphone as well!)

Palm recently had a problem with online profiles, and following on the infamous Sidekick failure, it becomes yet another cautionary tale and reminder for us all — backup, backup, backup.

That’s right, the process so nice vitally important we repeated it thrice. Data doesn’t exist if it it isn’t in at least three places: source (device), local backup, and offsite backup (which can be the “cloud” or it can be a little USB hard drive you take to work or leave at the parents’ place). Your device can be lost, stolen, or bricked. Your local backup can error out or burn up or get flooded, and the cloud can eat your data. Having all three puts the odds of having one available version considerably more in your favor.

iPhone users rely on MobileMe, or Google services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, etc., and since the App Store lets us re-download applications we’ve bought, some even rely on that as de facto cloud-storage for our priceless personal information and our costly purchases.

iTunes automatically backs up your iPhone to your PC hard disk. If you have an automated backup to a second hard drive (including Time Machine), along with MobileMe, Google, or a dedicated online backup service, good on ya. You’re doing it right.

If you don’t, set it up now. 1 second after failure is an eternity too late.

While TiPb is still waiting for an iPhone 3.1.1 bug-fix update, not to mention iPhone 3.2 betas to start dropping, it looks like the competition is getting their OS on this week:

• Palm webOS 1.2 didn’t re-enable the iTunes hack (kudos Palm!) but did bring some nifty new features including Amazon MP3 downloads over 3G, the foundations for paid apps in the App Catalog, improved cut and paste, and much more.
• Android 1.6 Donut is expected to hit now’ish as well. A new Android Market is coming with it, but not multi-touch — at least not yet.
• BlackBerry OS 5.0 still doesn’t seem to be official, but is leaking out all over the place (would that Apple had such porous pipes!). It’ll make your Berry more Berry, though it doesn’t seem to integrate a real browser yet, despite what the commercials say…
• Windows Mobile 6.5 might be on 30 Windows Phones by 2010, though even Ballmer is finally admitting Windows Mobile 7 should have been out this year. Bottom-line, it’s a skin-job, and even though it looks hawt’er than a old style centurion, it’s still a machine on the inside.

What does that mean for the iPhone? Even if RIM looks locked in stasis, Palm and Microsoft appear to have up-hill battles re-gaining their traction, and Android is still slowly ramping up, Apple can’t afford to coast. A new OS from RIM, a Palm-style rebirth from Microsoft, and webOS and Android gaining marketshare are all possibilities. Many of these updates have interesting new features that hopefully Apple is looking at and working their own magic on.

So, let’s get on with the 3.2… and 4.0. March is only 6 months away, after all, and Apple needs something else to wow Smartphone buyers with at the next SDK event…

Looks like the USB Implementers Forum has taken Apple’s side over Palm’s in their ongoing war of USB locking vs. USB spoofing. Digital Daily (via MacRumors) has the deets:

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that oversees the Universal Serial Bus standard, has finally responded to Palm’s (PALM) claim that Apple (AAPL) is “hampering competition” by repeatedly disabling the Palm Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes–and it’s not looking good for Palm. In a letter submitted to Apple and Palm today, the group dismissed Palm’s claim that Apple has violated its USB-IF Membership Agreement. Worse, it took issue with Palm’s alleged use of Apple’s Vendor Identification Number (VID), which it says violates USB-IF policy.

Palm’s response?

“We engaged with the USB-IF because we believe consumers should have freedom and choice in how and where they use the non-rights managed media they already own. We are reviewing the letter from the USB-IF and will respond as appropriate.”

We’ve already weighed in on the situation in general (we think Palm has more important things to spend their limited funds and resources on), and PreCentral.net has posted up the whole sordid history along with their take, but what do you think? Is the USB-IF making the right call?

New Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was the debut guest on the brand new The Engadget Show, and host Joshua Topolsky asked many of the questions that needed asking. Starting off with some of Ruby’s history at NeXT and Apple with Steve Jobs and his role in resurrecting the latter with products like the iMac and iPod, they segued into Palm talk for a bit, before bringing in back around to more controversial topics like Palm holding product announcements/releases right before annual Apple iPhone/iPod events, and the ongoing Palm “hacking” iTunes sync saga.

Fascinating interview, and awesome start for the Engadget crew. Congrats on the new endeavor, and we can’t wait to see if Jobs, Schiller, Cook, Joz, or Forstall show up next…

Palm is abandoning Windows Mobile to concentrate their resources on their new webOS platform as currently found on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.

As former Palm users (I had a Treo 600 at the time), we still remember Bill Gates and Ed Colligan taking the stage together at CES 2006 and showing off the first-ever Windows Mobile Treo 700. (Talk about cats and dogs living together!) Picture speed dialing on the today screen was an immediate sign that Palm was working their “secret sauce” (TM, TreoCast) magic to customize WinMo and give Palm users as much Zen as they could. It was equally evident when the razzle dazzle ended that Palm’s own PalmOS was reaching the end of its useful life and with Cobalt vaporizing, Palm needed something to pin their immediate future on.

A couple years and one long walk in the desert (TM, TreoCast) later, and now webOS is a fresh new take on the smartphone space, and Windows Mobile is the OS in danger of being left behind. Add to that Palm’s limited resources, and the focus makes sense. It’s also gutsy, going all-in on webOS, and Palm needs to be gutsy at this point. No better way to make people believe in your future than believing in it yourself.

In the video embedded above, which we’re offering now in tribute, we argued the Palm Treo Pro was neither a Palm, a Treo, nor particularly Pro (it was an HTC running WinMo with a tiny keyboard). Now maybe they’re a Palm with some new Apple blood and still stuck in tiny keyboard land, but give them a year or so of distance and pure webOS differentiation, and we’re excited to see where they go.

We sympathize with Windows Mobile Treo fans, but cheers Palm. Now bring the competition, Apple needs it, and Apple’s customers will benefit from it in the long run.

Check out PreCentral.net and WMExperts.com for ongoing coverage.

We’re not surprised. Obviously. Apple plays the product cycle and media hype engines to perfection. Still, it’s interesting to see Electronista‘s take, based on ChangeWave data:

A mid-June study from the research group has 14.4 percent of those tracked looking to buy some kind of smartphone within the next 90 days, a record high and a large jump from 11.2 percent in March. Of these, a full 44 percent now plan to buy an iPhone compared to 30 percent just three months earlier.

As the above graph shows, Palm went from 4% to 8%, BlackBerry from 37% to 23%. Android, Nokia, and Windows Mobile weren’t shown

Other device makers likely know this, explaining why we’re seeing so many iPhone-style devices hitting the market. TiPb still thinks it’s more than a set of features, however. Sure, iPod halo and Apple brand help, but in the end the iPhone is all about usability and user experience for the consumer market, and that’s not as easy a task to duplicate.

It’s been suspected for a while now, but PreCentral.net let us know that Palm has gone and made it all official-like:

Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) today announced that its board of directors has appointed Jon Rubinstein to lead the company as Chairman and CEO upon the departure of Ed Colligan, who is stepping down after sixteen years of leadership at the company. Rubinstein, who joined Palm as Executive Chairman in October 2007 to help bring innovation back to the company, assumes his role as CEO on June 12. Colligan plans to take some time off, then join Elevation Partners.

As mighty Zeus did before him, Rubinstein came from Apple to slay the titans of Palm past and bring a powerful new pantheon of WebOS devices into their own.

So the former head of iPod hardware becomes the new head of Palm every-ware, and Ruby brings his vision of the iPhone-come-Pre head-to-head with the actual iPhone — and more interestingly — his once and former master, Steve Jobs.

Best of luck!

Meanwhile, TiPb would like to bid a fond farewell to Ed Colligan, who helped found the very industry we hold so dear. Many of us have owned many Palm Pilots and Visor and Palm Treo devices (and Dieter likely still has every single one of them on his desk!) and each was wonderful and innovative in its own time. Enjoy your much-earned respite and here’s wishing health, happiness, and much success with your future endeavors.

Standing ovation

(And who knows, a year from now Colligan might just pop up at RIM with a new OS of his own — how’d that be for poetry?)

Our good friend, Dieter, over at PreCentral.net has just got his hands on a leaked internal AT&T document that puts our beloved iPhone 3G into the ring up against the yet to be released Palm Pre. We are beginning to wonder what will happen first, Palm going out of business or the Pre actually being released… (Yes, we kid because we love…)

While some of the things that made the list are cold hard facts that every Palm fan will have to swallow, AT&T seems to be reaching on a few as well. Here are a some of the better ones:

• The iPhone has a “thinner, lighter, bigger screen; metal and glass design” compared to the Pre’s “plastic casing”.
• The iPhones App Store has over “25,000 Apps” while the Pre has an “Unproven App Catalog app store”.
• The iPhone sports “Global GPS; aGPS for maximum speed, accuracy and reliability even in built-up areas” while the lonely Pre “Can’t receive map updates or location assist information in most of the world due to lack of GSM capability”.

What also caught our eye was:

• The Palm Pre “Touchscreen control gestures not intuitive” whereas the iPhone features “Patented Multi-Touch screen” and “Fast and responsive navigation.”

If the Palm Pre cloned some of the iPhone’s UI interactions, didn’t AT&T just dash our chances for some lawsuit action?

What do you think? AT&T simply stating the facts or could they possibly view the Palm Pre as a legitimate threat? Now head on over to Precentral.net to check out the full leaked AT&T memo!

No sooner did we report the outlandish statement from Palm backer Elevation Partners head-geek Roger McNamee that come June, every iPhone 2G owner would ditch the platform and AT&T to become Pre-verts on Sprint, than our sibling site PreCentral.net went and updated.

Seems McNamee thinks iPhone Mobile Safari ain’t all that, compared to the Pre (even though the Pre uses Apple’s open-source WebKit foundation — which we know comes from KHTML/Konquerer…):

“Our product is just going to run rings around them on the web. If you want to go the web, it’s going to be a million time faster, well, not a million times, several times faster and that’s a huge deal for most people.”

Really? And since Sprint can’t do simultaneous voice and data, the minute you answer a call, your speed drops to zero. How much faster is that?

Apparently, however, McNamee’s hurt turns to heart for Apple’s Mac platform:

I’ve been an apple fan for years and I would never use any other kind of computer!

Bulletin: Some may just feel the same about the iPhone, b’okay Roger? See the whole crash-and-burn on video at Bloomberg…

Hey, it’s nice to see Palm getting back into the game! No, not with their admittedly compelling — if Apple inspired — Palm Pre handset set to land sometime in the first half of 2008. But with their rhetoric. You know, the same rhetoric that had Palm CEO Ed Colligan, when asked about the iPhone before it’s launch say, Apple wasn’t just going to walk in and figure smartphones out.

This time time it’s not Colligan however, but Palm uber-financier and Bono-buddy Roger McNamee, he of the coolest utility belt since Batman, who’s firing the mouth-cannon Apple’s way. McNamee tells Bloomberg (via Daring Fireball):

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said today in an interview in San Francisco. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

Not one? Really? We’re certain some die hard Palm faithful and curious technophiles will become Pre-verts come launch day (we even suspect an editor-in-chief we know might just be waiting in line already…) but not one?

Given Apple’s statement that June is also iPhone product cycle, and that the Pre has fairly shamelessly glommed Apple’s iPhone style — and several high profile members of the iPhone development team — we’re certain Steve Jobs won’t make it a point to have a shiny new iPhone 3.0 ready for just about the same time, so that original iPhone owners have an easier, maybe even moe compelling upgrade path available. Can’t see that happening, can we…?

Confession: it was a pretty boring call from Palm CEO Ed Colligan today. No Pre release date. No Pre feature update. No assault on Apple. Nothing and pretty much more nothing. We kinda wish Steve Jobs had crashed the event and gone all Christian Bale on Palm. At least that would have been interesting! Still, PreCentral caught this tidbit, for what it’s worth:

On the issue of PATENTS, Colligan made sure to note that there are no pending legal actions with Apple right now. More pointedly, he noted that Palm has 15 years worth of patents (over 1500 of them in total) and that in patent fights often go like this:

The reason you do that is to have a defensive position. It’s like two little porcupines going around, and you don’t want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything’s OK and you keep working together. We’re very respectful about people’s intellectual property, we believe we’re huge innovators and have been for a lot of years and that this product has an enormous number of innovations in it. If something does happen there, we do have the portfolio, we think to defend ourselves and to be successful doing that. But nothing’s happened to date, so we’re really just focused on getting the product out the door.

Note to Palm: while you fancy yourself a prickly little rodent, Apple’s totems are the big cats, so either you’ll bloody their mouth and run them off, or they’ll use those quills to pick their teeth clean after they’re done eating you.

As we mentioned briefly during TiPb’s live coverage of Apple’s Q1 conference call yesterday, and our new sibling site, PreCentral.net elaborated on, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook, might have made a shot across Palm’s bow when it comes to the Pre and Apple’s multi-touch patents (text via Macworld):

We like competition, as long as they don’t rip off our [intellectual property], and if they do, we’re going to go after anyone who does. [...] Don’t want to talk about any specific company, just making a general statement. We are ready to suit up and go against anyone. However, we will not stand for having our IP ripped off and will use whatever weapons we have at our disposal.

Recent capacitive touch devices like the Google Android and the BlackBerry Storm have steered very clear of anything even remotely resembling the iPhone’s behaviors, but the Palm Pre duplicates many almost exactly (rubber banding, pinching, panel sliding, etc). Then again, Palm hired Rubinstein and many other Apple employees to round out the Pre team, didn’t they?

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld 2007, one of his big bullet points was “and boy have we patented it”, so I guess now we can all sit back and see if we’ve got a fight on our hands. Will Apple go after Palm, and does Palm have any patents in their own portfolio to fight back with? (Because they sure don’t have Apple’s multi-billion dollar war chest behind them).

And yes, we know Jeff Han showed off many “Minority Report” style multi-touch behaviors long before the iPhone.

UPDATED: Apple filed for their own patents starting back in 2004, before Han, and also acquired a large amount of patents when they bought Fingerworks in 2005 (via Engadget comments).

It’s been some time since the 2.2 firmware dropped, yet we have not heard of any developers getting their hands on the next version. So Dizzy wants to know, when is iPhone 2.3 firmware coming? That is a very good question, so check out that thread and let him know what you think…

Next up is a thread regarding the sharing of a single SIM card between your iPhone and another phone on the AT&T network. I’ve done it previously with no issues, now it seems like AT&T is tightening the screws just a bit. Have you tried sharing your iPhone SIM with another phone? Let us know how it’s worked out for you.

Forum member, EnterpriseGlobe, has started a fun thread – where did you get your iPhone? I stood in line for 2 hours or so on July 11th at my local Apple store. To kill time I emailed pictures and updates to Dieter while he was in line at the Providence, RI Mall. Oh the memories.

I know what you are thinking, this is an iPhone site, so why feature a thread about the upcoming Palm Pre? We all love competition, it just makes products better. Or at least that is the idea. To cut to the chase, what are your feelings regarding the recently announced Palm Pre? Is this real competition for the iPhone or is it simply one last ditch effort by Palm to try to stay afloat?

Finally, spidermanroach wants to know, Yahoo or Gmail? Which one do you think is better and why? Get in the forums and let him know!

Remember, before you can get in on any of the TiPb forum action be sure to register! It’s free and will only take a minute of your time.

See you on the forums!

As I’ve said many times before on TiPb, I’m a Palm guy going back to the Palm V, and Treo guy going back to the Treo 600. When Palm essentially abandoned that user-base (see my Palm Treo Pro Round Robin video and review) a few years back, I abandoned them and dove headlong into the iPhone (and now the iPhone 3G).

I still have a very warm spot in my heart for Palm, however, their innovation in the smartphone space, and their focus on zen-like user experience. So, when Palm announced their new WebOS platform and premiered their new Pre handset at CES (see our new baby sibling site PreCentral.net for all the details and a massive hands-on video), I was more than just a little ecstatic. I won’t lie, it’s the first post-iPhone device that’s caught my attention.

Don’t get me wrong, I still fear for Palm — the market is much more crowded than it was when they helped create it, and for all the problems WebOS and the Pre solve, they bring their own set to the table. However, watching the Palm Keynote fro CES I, presented by former Apple iPod father Jon Rubinstein and Palm founder Ed Colligan, two things stood really stood out for me:

• What Palm outright stole from the iPhone and put in the Pre
• And what Apple should immediate steal from Palm and put into the next iPhone OS.

We’ll get into both, after the break.

What the Palm Pre Stole From the iPhone

First, stole is exactly the right word. No, I’m not talking about Rubinstein’s verbiage (you can copy a Jobs script, but not the delivery, b’okay?) Feature for feature — gesture for gesture — the former Apple team headed now by Rubenstein as Palm straight up jacked whole swathes of iPhone functionality to a degree that I’m pretty much certain Apple’s lawyers are drafting up whole heaps of infringement claims against them for all those patents Steve Jobs mentioned during his first iPhone introduction back at Macworld. Let’s take a look…

Form Factor

Okay, an iClone is an iClone, and many would argue Apple didn’t invent the singular black slab that is the iPhone’s now iconic shape. Many would also argue there are only so many ways to make a full-screen, touch-screen device. Fair enough. But from that full, touch screen to the singular center button at the bottom, degree of rounded-ness not withstanding, we’ll call an iClone an iClone when we see it.

Specs

Not only does the Pre look like the iPhone, it’s built like the iPhone. It’s almost like the iPhone feature set was lined up and checked off one by one: 320×480 capacitive touch screen — check. Accelerometer, ambient light, and proximity sensors — check. While the package is smaller in its closed state, and has been amped up (hello A2DP stereo Blue Tooth!), the mold from which it was cast is still patently obvious.

The Dock

The original Palm PDA platform had a static, lower tier application launcher space, if anyone remembers that platform anymore, but it was interrupted by the stylus input bad, and later hard-buttons took its place. With the Pre, however, Palm has taken a step sideways into the iPhone launcher paradigm. You get five buttons instead of four, and they focus on Palm’s nouveau Pillars of PIM — Phone, Contacts, Email, Calendar, and… up arrow (I’m guess a way to launch more options).

Real-World UI Interactions

It was amazing, back at Macworld 2007, to watch Steve Jobs effortlessly flick through a list of contacts and see them bounce with virtual elasticity when they reached their end. This kind of intuitive visual cuing is invaluable to the user experience. No wonder Palm copied it almost exactly. Flick through the Pre contacts, same capacitive acceleration, same elastic bounce back.

Likewise panels zoom in and zoom out, and slide over each other, just like with the iPhone, to give a sense of stacking and information depth.

Turn the Palm Pre and not only does the accelerometer rotate the screen, it does so with the same animation as the iPhone. No smash cuts like other handsets here.

Multi-touch

This is the big one, and the one I think have Cupertino’s lawyers revving up their engines. Rumor has it that other post-iPhone capacitive handsets were supposed to ship with multi-touch, but fear of Apple’s patents ultimately made them reconsider that functionality. The Palm Pre looks to have done no such reconsideration. Witness: pinch to zoom, double tap to focus, flick to scroll.

It’s not just that they used multi-touch, they used the exact same gestures the iPhone already used to do it.

WebKit

Apple’s open source web rendering engine, WebKit (based on the Linux Konquerer technology) doesn’t have a huge desktop browser share outside of the Mac, but it’s positively pwning the mobile space. Nokia uses it, Google’s Android uses it, (some think Microsoft should dump Internet Explorer 6(!) for Mobile and use it!), and now the Palm Pre uses it as well.

What the iPhone Should Immediately Steal from the Palm Pre

What’s more important than dwelling on what the Palm Pre stole from the iPhone is what Palm did to extend, and yes, improve upon it. Several of these improvements are so compelling, Apple immediately needs to take a little vengeance on Palm and steal them right back! Which ones?

Multitasking “Cards”

One of the most impressive features shown off in the Palm Pre demo was the concept of stacked cards, where the center button could “zoom out” and give a real-time, updated view of what was happening on other open applications. The iPhone needs this badly. Not multitasking third party apps will increasingly be seen as a limitation on the iPhone, but RIM or Windows Mobile style Task management is likewise a non-starter.

Luckily, the iPhone already has 2 existing metaphors for this. First and most closely resembling the Palm Pre cards are the Mobile Safari “tabs”. Tap the tab button and the current web page zooms out and you see all open tabs. Pick the tab you want, it zooms in full screen. This could easily be adapted to multi-tasking applications.

Frankly, however, I’m not sure its good enough for the iPhone. The second metaphor, CoverFlow, might just be. We don’t know what’s driving the Palm Pre under the hood, but we know the iPhone has awesome OpenGL and PowerVR graphics that just beg for a drool-inducing task-switching implementation. Flick to change between your apps as easily as you do your albums in iTunes.

To close an app, as the Pre does with an upward throw-away flick, Mobile Safari Tab “X” buttons could be a solution, as could the flick-away, but I’m not sure how necessary that is. In an ideal world, iPhone OS X would transparently handle memory in the background, “sleeping” (saving state) what hasn’t been used or isn’t prioritized as needed.

As to the reorganization ability of the Pre task manager, I’m not convinced you need it in a switching system as fast as capacitive flicking.

Short of a Mac-inspired Expose for the iPhone, CoverFlow app switching would be killer.

And what better, easier, and more elegant way to implement it than just hitting the Home button in Landscape mode?

Merging the Cloud

Palm made a big deal about the Pre being built from the web up, and it sort of (and it no doubt increasingly is) a big deal. Since we’re not sure what kind of media capabilities the Pre will have, the need to cloud-manage 1GB+ movie files may not be a worry to them the way it certainly is to the iPhone, but for PIM data did what they’ve always done — nailed it.

Pre hooks into popular cloud data stores, Exchange, Gmail, and Facebook (and perhaps others) and merges all your data behind the scenes to present you with a single handheld gateway — a unified view. Exchange contacts seamlessly integrated with the matching picture from your Facebook friend was the example given, and it’s a game-changing one. Likewise, Pre combines together IM and SMS into a single, person-centric threaded conversation.

Tying in IM, Twitter, and people’s own email address cards create something close to what I’ve always been asking for — an application that unifies and HIDES all the various pipes away from the user.

Chad has mentioned several times that Apple has all sorts of Mobile iChat patents floating around. Can we get those put to use?

This is the type of flawless user experience both Palm and Apple are famous for. Palm is giving it to us first on the mobile platform. Fine. Apple, give it to us next.

(And we won’t even get into what might happen if Apple leverages their new iPhoto ’09 Faces (facial recognition) and Places (geotagging) technology into this paradigm!)

Status

On the Mac, if you have iChat open and you receive an email from someone who’s also an iChat buddy, their availability status is shown to you. Palm’s Pre works in a similar manner, showing you IM status in the email app. Sadly, the iPhone currently doesn’t do this. It should. Dieter has asked for it repeatedly and he’s right. Even though iPhone apps like Pinger do a great job aggregating status, there’s no reason it shouldn’t become ubiquitous throughout a mobile experience. And there’s every reason it should.

As mentioned before, the user interface lines between SMS, Twitter, IM, etc., and even email are and should be blurring, and a way to not only manage all those communication pipes, but seamlessly leverage them as well, is increasingly becoming a necessity for connected users.

Auto-Save

Palm has always “just worked” when it came to saving state of data. Add a contact and no matter how complete or incomplete, Palm has just saved that state of the data on the device and for sync. With the Pre they’ve taken it a step further and saved state right back to the cloud as well.

The iPhone, by contrast, wants you to confirm the save with a button tap. This is okay to prevent fragmentary entries from polluting your pristine data store, but in the real world it’s just annoying. If you start entering a calendar event, and you suddenly and urgently need to go into a different app (something that happens in the real world), you shouldn’t have to worry about losing whatever data you’ve entered, or having to start over.

Just like Palm, and like Apple already does in Apps like iMovie, data should just be saved on exit as-is, and synced back to the cloud or local machine, also as is. It’s simply a better, more robust user experience.

Keyboard Launcher

Familiar not only to everyone who’s ever used a Treo, Vista Search, or Mac Spotlight, but truly understood by anyone who’s become a QuickSilver (or similar application launcher) user, sometimes typing is just the fastest way to reach the data you want. The Pre does a great, Spotlight-esque job of quickly parsing keystrokes into local and cloud search results, and the iPhone should be able to leverage Apple’s Spotlight just as powerfully.

Sure, the Pre has a hard keyboard, which is the last thing I want on an iPhone (remember — at least for me — the era of hard keyboards is over!). So what to do?

Stick a Spotlight icon on the Home Screen, what else? Okay, sure, make up something fun… Let me shake on the Home Screen to bring up a Spotlight optimized keyboard. Shake is used in other apps to do neat things, leverage it to let me do killer search as well. Shake, type, boom! (I kid, a little, see quickie mock-up pick).

Either way give me rapid search access into contacts, events, files (yes, give me a single, multi-app accessible file storage bin so I can get some Office action going — but more on that in a future article), and the option to shoot off into CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV (iDisk), or general Web searches.

Conclusion

We didn’t touch on everything, including the swiped App Store come App Catalog, or the innovative non-modal notification system, but hopefully this gives some idea of our ideas on where the iPhone brought the smartphone space, where the Pre has taken killer features from that, and what Apple could do to take some killer features of the Pre right back.

But what are your ideas? Anything from the Pre (or other post-iPhone smartphones) YOU think Apples needs to immediately integrate into iPhone OS 3.0?

Confession: I’m just leaving Macworld and haven’t had a chance to form much of an opinion about the Palm Pre yet (see pics). TreoCentral (and our new baby sibling site, PreCentral.net) absolutely KILLED it on the first impressions, and make sure you check out the live blog (and congrats to Dieter on the trifecta of Schiller, Balmer, and Colligan all in one week! Superstar!).

The Treo 600 was my first smartphone, the 680 my last before the iPhone, so I have great fondness for Palm despite them leaving me “out in the desert” (TM, TreoCentral TreoCast) for years and years. I want them to succeed, I want them to force the entire industry to keep up the innovation and revolution the iPhone started. I want Steve Jobs and Apple to run back to the drawing board and feel compelled to make the iPhone HD 3.0 even better than they intended.

First blush: I love the organics of the device (the egg-shape does throw me, but that’s the only exception and the overall look brings it home) and think cloud-focus and their WebOS platform (which I think is based on Apple’s open-source WebKit, same as Safari on iPhone and Chrome on Android) are gutsy moves. Apple uses a hybrid of rich clients and web connectivity and smashes it out the park with Google Maps-style iPhone apps. Palm is running WebOS apps like native WebApps (which should avoid the outcry Apple faced with the original, pre-App Store and SDK iPhone dev solution). If it works Palm could have brilliantly out-maneuvered the whole “they’ll never get developers”. However, one look at Apple’s focus on gaming shows the power of the rich local client — is AJAX enough to run iPhone caliber gaming and other really hard hitting applications? I guess we’ll see. We’ll also see how they nail multitasking better than any previous OS, according to Dieter, when part 2 of TreoCentral’s first impressions go online later.

On the negative side, for me (the anti-Dieter in some ways), I still think the era of hard keyboards is over, and dislike the moving parts of a slider all the more after the round robin (even portrait ones). That’s just personal taste. The capacitive touch screen with gesture area looks solid, though I have to wonder if Apple’s lawyers will rev up the multitouch patent files?

Apple’s rivalry with the new Palm will be telling for political reasons as well. Those who remember the history know that the new guru behind Palm’s new hotness is the old Guru behind Apple’s old hotness, the iPod. He reportedly really wanted a hard keyboard on the iPhone, and Jobs skidoosh’ed it. (Which is why I jokingly called it the “iPhone Slider”. I guess we’ll see, however, over the next few months if Rubinstein remains but the learner, or if he is now the master.

Enough of my thoughts, iPhone lovers — especially former Palm faithful — what do you think?

TiPb isn’t the only Smartphone Experts site working our tails off this week. Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn is pulling the live-blogging trifecta, going straight from Macworld to cover Steve Ballmer’s CES kickoff tonight at 6pm PST for WMExperts AND for the (very much anticipated) debut of Palm’s next generation NOVA hardware and OS for TreoCentral — not to mention everything AndroidCentral. Never to be out done, CrackBerry Kevin (with a full on CrackBerry Crew!) will push any and all BlackBerry news they get their cracky hands on. Check out all our sites throughout the day for the latest, greatest, most Smartphone-geeky coverage.

[This is an official Smartphone Experts Round Robin post! Every day you reply here, you're automatically entered for a chance to win an iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset! Full contest rules here!]

Our video preview is done, our final review is posted, but you had Palm Treo Pro questions and so we’ll try to provide some answers… After the break…

deathscaller Says: Does the Pro’s Internet speed compare to the iPhones at all?

3G is 3G, but the cpu speed and software engine can make a difference. Web browsing on the iPhone seemed much faster, which I chalk up to MobileSafari’s WebKit foundation (well known from back in it’s Linux Konquerer days for its sheer speed). Email is much lighter than web rendering, and iPhone does HTML email, where I only saw mobile email from the Treo Pro, so that’s not a fair comparison, but both were snappy (though Gmail IMAP still gives me fits on every platform)

Justin Says: I’m curious to know your thoughts on the email set up. I had a hell of a time when I used the Treo 750, and that was ultimately what drove me away.

I won’t lie: it’s fairly hideous. Then again, Windows makes you set up Exchange in Control Panel rather than Outlook, so my expectations have been trampled. I couldn’t get Exchange to work due to the failure to allow custom certificates to be accepted (on the iPhone, you can just ignore the warning). Gmail set up, but defaulted to POP, not IMAP. It did do a decent job of auto-detecting Gmail’s settings, however.

Mike M Says: How well does it do things the iPhone is lacking? Cut and paste, to dos, mms, etc. And would you even consider switching just to get these features? I know I wouldn’t, but I’m sure there are people out there who are on the fence who would like to know.

I really wanted cut and paste, but on both the Treo and Android I ended up not using it much. It was too annoying. On the iPhone, if I want to send you a webpage I’m looking at (or location, or photo, etc.) I just hit the + button, pick your address, and boom, email is sent and I’m back in on the web. Having to manually fiddle with highlighting tiny, irregular text blobs, going through menu gymnastics, manually switching apps, etc. just slowed me down and made me think it wasn’t worth it.

MMS is useless to me as I don’t have any friends or family using it either, and everyone else I just email the stuff to right off the iPhone. It’s device independent, which I prefer.

If Apple really nailed implementations of these features, I’d certainly be really happy and probably use them when I had to, but if they did it badly (no Storm jokes!) I’d be even more annoyed. So no, I wouldn’t switch.

Anthony Martinez Says: How’s that keyboard. I picked up a Palm in a store once and thought it was way too small. But then the iphone keyboard is small in portrait mode too. What are your thoughts?

Material is better than the 6xx/7xx series, but the narrow width takes that step forward back a notch.

Jeff Says: What have you missed most from the iPhone that the Pro doesn’t offer?

Without a hint of sarcasm: joy. The iPhone is just a pleasure to use. The Treo Pro was powerful but a lot of work. I didn’t enjoy the experience, even when it impressed me. User experience on the iPhone — every little detail from app flow to stretch and bounce animation effects — is just so well polished.

PRIMECHUCK Says: Does the phone stream live events

Qik style? According to WMExperts, yes it does.

Mike M Says: How close do you think palm and the iPhone are from being incomparable devices? Palm doesn’t seem to be much of a contender anymore, how long before they drop out of the competition?

I hope never. While Apple is amazing at competing with themselves (see the iPod space), everyone does better with strong alternatives pushing innovation.

Jason Says: Is the touchscreen very important to navigation/data entry/etc? Most other phones are either all keys or all touchscreens…

I’m used to using touch screen on Palm devices (insert stylus humor here), so for me it was very easy to default back to. Crackberry Kevin, by contrast, likely never went near it.

Rey Says: What’s the best and worst thing about it?

Best is that it’s a really great WinMo device with excellent hardware. Worst is that it wasn’t a Palm Treo.

Touch Me Says: The tiny 320 x 320 screen on the Treo looks like a big disadvantage compared to the iPhone’s 480 x 320. How does that affect its use? Or does not needing screen real estate for a virtual keyboard and menus make it a wash?

It felt cramped, which is amazing since the previous gen WinMo Palm had 240×240. And when the default soft keyboard popped up, not only was it tiny and stylus-compelling, it usually covered the field you were supposed to type into.

BLUELINE Says: What is of like haveing a phone with both touch and physical buttons for the ui. Do you think it is better or worse then a all touch or no touch phone?

I like having the choice, though I won’t know for sure until I’ve used a completely non-touch device like the BlackBerry Bold. However, I’m increasingly coming to believe that hard keyboards — for some types of users like myself — are a thing of the past.

Jason Says: Has palm changed anything about the Windows Mobile OS to make it their own? Sort of like the panels on the SE Xperia or the Fuze…

Not this time around, far as I could tell, though that keeps WinMo smoking fast (if heinously ugly).

Jeff Says: what was the learning curve like on the keyboard going from the iphone to the pro?

I used to have a 680, so not too bad. I did find it annoying that the hard keyboard wouldn’t change to reflect state. With the iPhone, I’ve gotten used to pressing “shift” and seeing upper case, pressing 123 and seeing numbers, etc. Especially in password fields, I was never sure what I was typing (even with the little icons on screen).

Jason Says: With the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, would you use the Treo Pro (or AT&T Fuze and T-Mobile G1) as much for music/videos?….I can’t imagine using the connectors

Treo Pro has the 3.5mm headphone jack, it’s the Android G1 and HTC FUZE that don’t have them, and yes it’s even more egregious than the original iPhone 2G’s wonky 3.5mm (because it needs an even more annoying adapter).

Jeff Says: How about battery life?

It was great! It lasted more than a day, however because I couldn’t get everything working, I did far, far, far less with it than I typically do with an iPhone.

KLutes Says: I am curious as to how robust the device feels as a whole in comparison. More solid less solid or about the same build quality. I see lots of cracked glass iphones on my college campus and I am curious as to how bang up prone this little gem is.

Both the iPhone 3G and the Treo Pro have had reported problems with micro-cracks in the plastic casing, but Dieter’s Treo Pro is still pristine! Build quality is superb, with a ton of fit and finish. However, it’s plastic, not glass, and was a little creaky around the battery cover. The iPhone has no removable battery, so it’s as close to a solid slab as you can get.

Bela says: Do you feel that this phone compares to the Android ?

Android is still very much a beta/technology preview, while WinMo in its current incarnation is a relic, so as the former rises and the latter falls, they could be comparable during this brief slice of time. What Android 2.0 and WinMo 7 look like is a far more important, and difficult question.

Thanks everyone for sending in your questions!

[This is an official Smartphone Experts Round Robin post! Every day you reply here, you're automatically entered for a chance to win an iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset! Full contest rules here!]

Of all the reviews I have to write as part of the Smartphone Experts Round Robin, I have a feeling this one is going to be the hardest. See, I was a Palm OS user since the Palm V and stuck with the platform through the Treo 680, before switching to the original iPhone.

That, year after year after year, Palm still hasn’t been able to ship a successor to Palm OS Garnet is inconceivable to me to the degree that what I’m now holding in my hand, gorgeous and powerful though it may be — isn’t a Palm, isn’t a Treo. Not really. I was funny about that in my video. I’m actually more than a little sad about it real life.

The Treo 800 series should really be running Palm OS 2.0 “Nova”. Since it’s not, however, I’m reviewing an HTC handset running Windows Mobile 6.1 — something I’ll be doing almost immediately again with the HTC FUZE/PRO.

How to handle that? To avoid redundancy, I’m going to stick reviewing hardware — a front facing Qwerty this time, slider the next — and breaking up the software into two parts. This review (and thanks to Dieter for the idea!) will focus on the traditional Palm core — the four pillars of PIM (Personal Information Management). The FUZE review will cover everything else Windows Mobile (media, apps, maps, etc.)

And I’m going to begin, after the break!

Hardware

The Palm Treo Pro hardware is a real departure. Gone is the little gray box that debuted with the Treo 600. The big honking antenna disappeared with the 680/750, but now even the legacy Treo 800 inset screen and gunship good looks have been given the heave ho.

Some have said this is because HTC basically designed and built the unit. Whatever the reason, it looks fresh and modern. It moves Treo — physically at least — into the next generation.

It looks good. It feels good. The form factor is very nice in the hand. Like the Google Android G1 (also by HTC) it does feel a tad creaky, but I’m beginning to think that a) the iPhone just spoiled me for build quality and b) plastic with removable battery equals a little bit of creak.

Buttons and Keys

A few niggles. The camera button is oddly placed. Having a physical button is okay, and I’m sure some appreciate it, but putting it below the volume rocker is non-sensical to me. The iPhone, by contrast, puts the mute button there, so all volume controls are grouped, and you can feel if the mute is in-line or off-line with the volume rocker, letting you immediately understand state.

On the opposite side is a WiFi on/off button. I’m not sure why it’s there, or why it even exists. An “airplane mode” style toggle, maybe, but why just the WiFi radio? Is that any more necessary than Blue Tooth or cell? I really don’t know.

The keyboard, on the other hand, while a little cramped compared to the 680, is a huge improvement just based on the key material itself. Gone are those hard, rounded nasty little nubs I could never really type on, and in their place is something… like gummy bears. I can’t really describe it, but boy does it improve my typing experience. Keep this material and expand the keyboard back to full Treo size, and Palm has a real winner on their hands (and in ours!)

That said, the iPhone has really spoiled me off hard keyboards and the Treo has re-affirmed that fact. I only need the keyboard for text entry, and after I’m done, I was just sitting there staring at it staring back at me. “Go away! I’m done with you!”, I felt like saying, “I want to watch some video now and you’re in the way!”. But it couldn’t go away. I’m not sure if the FUZE or Bold will pull me back from this precipice, but for some types of users, I’m thinking the era of hard keyboards is over.

As to the hard buttons — they depress me a little. And confuse me. The original Palm PDA’s were pretty much perfect at this, but it’s something Palm has struggled with since transitioning to the Treo line. My 680, for example, had a Green, Red, and Phone button (3 buttons just for the phone!). The Treo Pro has a Green, Red, Windows, and OK button. None of these seem optimal to me. And hitting Red (end call) to get to the Today screen seems counter-intuitive. So does every button but the center of the 5-way and OK serving to wake the device, with the center unlocking it. I realize we need different buttons to wake and unlock, but the center just seems so natural.

Screen

Windows Mobile Treo has finally caught up with the Palm OS 650! Yup, we have 320×320. It’s unfortunate that it happened around the same time the Bold shipped 480×360 and the HTC Touch HD dropped the 800×480 bomb, but welcome to the 21st century! Speaking of which — FLUSH! This is something I’ve wanted on a Palm for a long time, and boy does it deliver. After Kevin’s epic deflation of the stylus in his review — an issue I shan’t revisit here since he nailed it so well — it’s nice not to have to try to poke into corners with any type of input any more.

The next step for Palm will hopefully be a non-square screen. This device with the Bold screen would be impressive (and would likely make Dieter faint).

Fit and Finish

The speaker being placed along the side is genius. If I hold the iPhone wrong, I can’t hear a sound coming out of it. With the Treo Pro, even if I put it flat on the table, the audio is not effected one bit.

The standard USB connector is also very much appreciated. Absent a near iPod monopoly and the ubiquity of the dock connector that goes with that, sticking with standards is a win for every body.

Overall, this device really shines in fit and finish, and it’s obvious Palm and/or HTC spent a lot of time sweating the details. While I benefited from Kevin and Dieter’s tutorials on how to open the battery cover, once open there’s a handy tab to pull out the battery, and SIM entry/exit was a breeze. I use this example because it’s easy to scrimp inside where you think no one’s looking. We looked, and no scrimpage was found.

This device is well made — and beautiful — inside and out.

Final Hardware Thoughts

Downside? I have iPhone out cables that connect to TVs to basically give me a portable AppleTV (the dock even works with the Apple Remote). I take shows and stuff I’ve rented to my friends and family to enjoy together on the big screen. This week in particular, I really missed being able to do that. Apple is still the only one who’s nailed ecosystem.

In a world without the iPhone, however, — and maybe the Bold, can’t say yet — this would be the type of hardware I want. If they could better the buttons, it would be the kind of hardware I carried — if I still wanted a hard keyboard, which is a thought I’ll be finishing in the FUZE and Bold reviews.

Windows Mobile for PIM

Palm nailed the Zen of PIM back in the late 90s. Say what you want about the aging Palm OS (and I’ve said plenty myself!), but it’s arguably still one of the best PIM app suites on the planet. The story about it, about the early Palm team counting key strokes, is near legendary now, and it showed. Everything was easy. Everything was intuitive. Everything worked.

This is not that Palm.

Windows Mobile works — don’t get me wrong! — but it takes work. I have full faith and confidence that if I invested the time to tweak and tune every little setting, to dig into every little registry entry, to basically Dieter or Malatesta the heck out of it, I could achieve something that the Palm OS did pretty much out of the box. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to do that.

By way of example, I bought my iPhone 3G on launch day, and iTunes was down, so no syncing, no activation. No problem. I put in my Exchange details, boom, work was running. Put in my MobileMe, boom, personal was taken care of. Put in my Gmail, boom, TiPb was happy. It all just worked.

With the Treo Pro, I never got OTA anything working. I never got BT sync working despite trying 3 different Macs (all failed at different points). I even bought MissingSync out of desperation, and USB tether would cause MissingSync to beachball of death continuously. I tried launching Windows XP via Parallels and it wouldn’t even see the device.

Now, most users aren’t Mac users, fair enough, but I am and I know many, many Mac users were Palm users prior to the iPhone, so I don’t accept the really poor user experience. I should also point out that I never had a problem syncing my old Treo 680 via MissingSync via BT or USB on the Mac, and I likely could have figured this out too given more time and patience (and forum help). But I oughtn’t have to.

Cases in point:

Mail

Phone aside, Email is the killer app. It’s what made the BlackBerry the Crackberry. I use Exchange for work and Microsoft makes not only the Treo Pro’s OS, but Exchange itself, so I was anticipating a quick and painless set up.

I was wrong.

First, just like I inexplicably can’t setup Exchange in Outlook on a PC (gotta go to Control Panel!) I had to setup ActiveSync first on the Treo. Entering my info was easy enough, though password handling reminded me of iPhone OS 1.x, where we’re expected to enter pseudorandom passwords that are totally obscured, which was made extra hard by having to use shift and alt to change state on a visually unchanging hardware keyboard. I managed to do it eventually however, only to be stopped dead by ActiveSync refusing my company’s certificate.

On the iPhone, I just ignore the security warning and it works fine. With the Treo, I could find no way around it. TreoCentral Forum member Conrad gave me awesome directions for manually finding my certificate on my desktop and transferring it to the Treo Pro, but there’s no excuse for that having to be part of the process.

So, while I could get the certificate easily enough, I couldn’t transfer it over from my Mac by either BT or tether, so I couldn’t get Exchange.

Really depressing.

I did get Gmail setup, though it defaulted to POP. Forum member RichChestmast tipped me to flipping on IMAP, however.

Calendar

I like the Calendar App. I couldn’t sync either Exchange or MobileMe (where I keep my personal data) over, so I just re-entered everything manually (which technically avoided tethering!). Anyone who’s used Outlook — anyone who’s used any Calendar app, will be right at home, and that’s the highest of praise for PIM apps.

As mentioned, there’s a hard key for the calendar, letting you zip right into it and cycle through states, and I’ll use this opportunity again to announce my appreciation for the Today Screen, which would be a welcome option on the iPhone.

Also, the Windows Mobile calendar provides both week view (like the G1), which the iPhone lacks, and year view, though the screen size and ratio constricts it to 9-month view. Both of these would be welcome additions to the iPhone.

Tasks and Notes

As I mentioned in my Android review, the iPhone’s stupefying lack of a Tasks app, and lack of any built-in way to sync notes, even with Exchange which supports just that type of syncing, has conditioned me to pretty much stop using these pillars.

They’re here. They work. But they’re not particularly attractive (making me miss Marker Felt is about as low as any Notes app could ever sync). I’ll get into this more in the FUZE review, but it’s not 1998 any more. UI matters.

Secret Sauce

(Yes, I refuse to surrender that jargon to lesser complaints). When Bill Gates took the stage at CES and stunned the world with a Palm running Windows Mobile, one of the first things that got me psyched was the Photo Dialing. I loved how Palm tweaked out Windows Mobile.

I didn’t notice anything special about the Treo Pro. In a world with Touch Flo 3D and Xperia Panels, I was expecting something.

Far as I could tell, though, when Palm ordered up the Treo Pro, they held the sauce.

Pity.

PIM Postcript

When I was having trouble figuring out how to review this not made by Palm, not running Palm-OS Treo, Dieter gave me some great advice — review it as a Treo, as something you use on the go to get things done.

In that regard, it’s decidedly middling. The latest, greatest hardware and Windows Mobile, while better looking and far more powerful than my old 680, just weren’t as fast and easy to use. They took more work, and that meant they were far less Zen. And, dagnabit, the measure of any true Treo is in the Zen.

Conclusion

I’m really conflicted about this device. It looks and feels great, it’s powerful and configurable, but for every point I feel it improves from the Treo 680, there’s an equal point where I feel it falls short.

I love the new key material but the board is more cramped. I can do far more with it, but it’s just not as easy to get things done. It’s not the aging Palm of yesteryear, but it’s not the Palm I need today — not quite.

I’ve pretty much come to a conclusion that’s been brewing in my head for a while now (and I’m sure I’m not the first to think or post about it). In many ways, the iPhone is far more the successor to the original spirit of the Treo than any current model being sold by Palm today. Windows Mobile, for all the smart business and stop gap reasons that make perfect sense for Palm Inc. from every angle, just doesn’t feel like a Treo to me, and the iPhone does. The iPhone is what I wish Palm had shipped 5 years ago. So I’ll end where I began the Treo Pro is an HTC Windows Mobile device — a terrific one, maybe the best one available here and now — but it’s not a Palm. Not a Treo. Not for me.

Here’s hoping Palm hits a home run with Nova for next year, and we get a 2.0 OS device in Round Robin 2009.

[This is an official Smartphone Experts Round Robin post! Every day you reply here, you're automatically entered for a chance to win an iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset! More below!]

[Digg link]

I loved Palm devices and used them as my “main brain” from the Palm V all the way to the Palm 680, before transitioning to the first iPhone. But here’s the thing, I don’t feel like I left Palm — I feel like they left me. Will the Palm Treo Pro be enough to lure me back?

Fair warning: About 1 minute of this preview is done “Zero Punctuation” style (without the salty language, of course!). Apologies to Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw and everyone at the Escapist for the poor (very poor!) parody, and to our readers… er… viewers, but it had to be done!

Check it out, then head on over to Treo Central to help me get this thing working! Every day you post, you get entered to WIN one of FIVE smartphone prize packs! And you can enter each site’s contest, so don’t forget to help Dieter un-harshen his mellow with the iPhone!

Prize details after the jump…

Every day you comment here, you get one entry to win not only a supra-shiny iPhone 3G, but the Case-Mate Naked Case which allows full touch through access to the iPhone’s amazing screen. Smartphone Outlet is also kicking in the revolutionary Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset AND a runner-up prize, $50 coupon good at any SPE store, including the new Smartphone Outlet, where you can find refurb Smartphone Accessories at very (very!) low prices.

Check out our full contest rules!

Recently our friends at sister site TreoCentral pointed us to this snippet: Apple was seriously interested in purchasing Palm back in 1997.  This is interesting for all sorts of reasons, but chief amongst them for me is this: Had the deal gone through, we might have seen the iPhone not only come to market earlier, but possibly seen it prevent other smartphone manufacturers (like RIM) from being able to compete.  It’s an interesting ‘what could have been’ scenario: just as Apple was killing off their Newton line, it would pick up the Palm Pilot and add functionality to it at presumably a more rapid pace than Palm did.

It’s also notable that even back in 1997, the powers-that-be in Apple recognized that they would need to transition from a strictly-computer company to a consumer products company:

A perhaps little known fact: in the Summer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Benhamou, 3Com’s CEO (the company owned Palm). “Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Directors. Only Apple can make Palm a true consumer brand.” Nothing happened. Apple’s foray into the product segment had to wait ten more years.

Of course, neither Apple nor Palm were in a position to really get things moving quickly at that time.  Palm would have to wait until their first (of many) convoluted ownership shakeups sorted itself out and Apple itself was still in the midst of redefining itself for the Steve Jobs era. The parallels between Palm now and Apple then are also fun to think about — both in dire need of a turnaround, both written off by much of the industry, and both have/had Jon Rubinstein playing a key role in revitalizing hardware.

I could go on and on playing “What If?” but instead there’s something else that this little snippet brings to mind: Palm got something right with the original Palm Pilot way back in 1997 and I really wish Apple would take a closer look at that 1997 tech.

Read on to find out what Palm got right way back in the mid to late 90s.

Pitting the PalmPilot against the Newton was (and is) an interesting exercise. The Newton clearly had aims to become the next major computing platform (the iPhone has similar aims and better chances), it was powerful, networked, and generally ambitious. The PalmPilot: it had aims to replace your organizer and that’s about it. It was a simpler device because Palm recognized that it would need to be pocketable and (relatively) inexpensive.

Back then, at least, the PalmPilot won out — and one lesson that Apple clearly took from that was the simplicity and pocketability trump power in handheld devices. That’s not to say that the iPhone isn’t powerful (it is), but Apple has taken a strategy of unveiling that power bit-by-bit as they’re ready to do so. First and foremost, Apple focused on nailing down the core functionality and a consistent UI.

The PalmPilot was a compelling device for many many people for several years (and continues to be some a smaller group). In the form the the PalmOS Treo and the Central, the PalmOS continues to be a useful, though simple, OS for millions. What about the PalmOS was so compelling then and remains compelling now. I could point to a few things, but for most I think it was simply the ability to create and sync the “Four Pillars of PIM.”

The what now? The Four Pillars of PIM are the 4 applications that were given separate buttons on the original PalmPilot. They were the essential core things you would want to do with a pocket organizer. You’d want to be able to enter data both on your computer and on the device itself and have that data seamlessly sync. The Four Pillars of PIM:

• Calendar
• Contacts
• Memos
• ToDo

On all of these applications on the PalmOS, you can create new entries incredibly quickly and you can enter your data on the desktop and sync it over. You can probably tell where I’m going with this, but I’ll come out and say it anyway: the iPhone only gets 2 of the four. Contacts and Calendar sync seamlessly (and now wirelessly!), but Notes on the iPhone lives in its own little world and ToDo/Tasks is nowhere to be seen.

Now, I understand that both of these gaps can be filled with 3rd party applications on the iPhone, but those apps require you to sign up for some 3rd party’s website and then further find ways to sync or access your data there. What should happen is that these last two Pillars should sync over — either through iTunes, Exchange, or MobileMe. Exchange, you might note, fully supports syncing both ToDo and Memos. It does so with Windows Mobile, in fact, just fine.

What’s especially frustrating is that there have been signs that we’d see support for these features. Over a year ago we reported on a warning error that popped up in Mail’s Notes feature. Here, take a gander for yourself:

“Rich text notes may not be editable on iPhone and other devices.” If you are using a Mac with 10.5, you can go create that error yourself right now.

What’s more, when Apple updated OS X’s Mail.app client back then they not only added notes but they also integrated ToDos. Whereas previously they had only lived in the Calendar Application, now they were in Mail. In short, Apple seemed to be setting up Mail.app to have similar functionality to Microsoft’s Exchange email client. The implication was that they’d be able to sync all four Pillars of PIM on both platforms. The reality is that something is keeping Apple from finishing off these features that they clearly have started.

I wish I could say I knew what’s stopping them. I suspect that Apple’s more concerned with other issues (like getting push notifications worked out) that they believe are more important than Notes and ToDo.

I’m happy that in addition to the Four Pillars of PIM our devices now have other, equally essential features like Push Email, SMS, Web browsing, and Telephony (the Four Pillars of COM, if you will). I’m equally happy that syncing PIM information is moving to wireless push instead of tethering and manually syncing. All this pleases me and overall we’re obviously much much better off now than we were a decade ago. Still…

People used to talk about the “Zen of Palm.” It was 1 part minimizing taps, 1 part removing features that weren’t necessary, 1 part speed, 1 part intuitive UI, and, well, a lot more. Nowadays people refer to “iPhone-Likeness” in a very similar way. But part of the “Zen of Palm” is that they recognized what the four most important organizer functions were and made those functions seamless, easy, and immediate. Having to sort though 3rd party apps, pick one, then try to re-work your current set of notes and ToDos to fit with some new system is definitely not “iPhone-Like.” It’s janky, and Apple needs to fix it ASAP.

In other words, yes, I’m already looking forward to iPhone OS 2.3.

One last bit: the PalmPilot also had a feature that’s sorely lacking on the iPhone and, in fact, on most non-PalmOS devices: decent device-wide search capabilities. One field that searched through the databases of every core app and many 3rd party apps. If the PalmPilot was able to do this, you’d like to think the iPhone could.

This. Is. iPhone JEOPARDY!… Judges Round!

Way back on March 14 we covered some of the bold, bodacious pontifications the CEOh-no’s of Microsoft, RIM, and Palm had made about the iPhone. Quick-on-the-buzzer as always, it’s time once again to go back to our judges and see how they did!

“Why We’re Not Worried about the iPhone” for 100

Ed Colligan:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Daily Double-Talk

Steve Ballmer:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Final Jeopardy!

“Mike Lazaridis”:

“Talk — all I’m [hearing] is talk about [the iPhone's chances in Enterprise]. I think it’s important that we put this thing in perspective.” [...] “Apple’s design-centric approach [will] ultimately limit its appeal by sacrificing needed enterprise functionality. I think over-focus on one blinds you to the value of the other.” [...] “Apple’s approach produced devices that inevitably sacrificed advanced features for aesthetics.”

And to top it all off:

THERE’S a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. “I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,” says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.”

Judges?

10 Million iPhones sold in 2008, almost 7 million in Q4 alone. More units of a single SKU moved than all RIM SKUs combined, and more than (we think!) WinMob licenses as well. 200,000,000 App Store downloads, 5500 Apps available, and now being copied by Microsoft, Google, and RIM. Form factor and touch-centricity copied by both Microsoft-OEMs and RIM (who’s also introducing a no-keyboard Blackberry Storm!). And Palm? Er… Anyone heard from Palm lately?

And the Winner Is!

None of the players today.

For the Pundit Round, be sure to check out Daring Fireball’s awesome set of links, and MacDailyNew’s Compendium of iPhone Naysayers.

It’s been a while since our last Today on the Forums post, but hopefully today’s topics will make up for it.

Today on the forums we have some great ideas from Alienwhere, who would like to see some more integration with his iPhone and his Mac. I agree… Check out some of his ideas and add to them if you can.

Next up we have Reaktor5 who wants to know, do you feel inferior when a new Apple product comes out? Everyone who is in this game of electronic gadgets knows there is always something around the corner that will be better. That’s just the way it works. But do you care about the newer device?

How has MobileMe been treating you lately? Fed up to the point where you can not take it anymore? Well look no further than gymnofrool’s thread, MobileMe Alternatives. I recently made the switch to an Exchange account and it has been working perfectly for me. I’m actually getting all of my mail…

Lately there have been so many new devices being announced and released. Everyone here at TiPb is curious as to what you think about the latest and greatest. To comment about devices such as the Touch HD, Palm Treo Pro, Blackberry Storm, etc… head on into the Smartphone Different: Other Gadgets forum.

So what are you waiting for? To get in on the forum action be sure to register, only take a few minutes of your time!

See you on the forums!

Yeah, A-Day — it’s like that. No sooner did Apple announce the iPod Touch as the “funnest” ever (yet apparently didn’t tell OS X’s built in dictionary not to take issue with that obscure, yet valid usage…), then Google and T-Mobile decided to have a little, er, “fun” with it themselves:

The friendly feel of Google but funnerer, smarterer, and conecteder

No enough they’re undercutting the iPhone’s price by $20 ($179 vs. $199, though there are reports some would be buyers are getting it for up to $350!), and breaking out innovative features like sliding alerts and pattern, almost game-like unlock screen, and even advertising it in Google white.

No, they have to go and get with the Funnererer…er…

Well, with Windows Mobile 7 delayed until late 2009, which may be before Palm OS 2.0 even sees the light of day, and Blackberry still not even on the next generation OS radar, it’s nice to see someone taking it to Apple (even if they, with a CEO on the board of Apple, and services linked to the iPhone, may be more about complementing than competing at the moment).

Still, when the dust settles, and Steve takes the stage at Macworld 2009, we’ll just see who’s the Funnererer…est!

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: Zilch again. Nadda. We’re too busy getting ready to cover the no doubt universe denting news Apple will unleash at “Let’s Rock” on Tuesday. And, frankly, so is the competition. Face it, they’ve been quiet as little blue-OLED mice lately.

Blackberryboss Lazeridis is all dressed up like Leo Laporte and is already lining up in San Francisco to find out what Apple’s releasing this year… so he can release it next. Palm-Top Colligan’s not releasing anything new until Nova ships sometime in 2012, and Larry and Sergey have shifted the focus off Android and onto their new Chrome browser, which we just know they’ve been running on gLinux in-house for years but is somehow only released (in what will not doubt be perpetual Beta) for Windows.

And speaking of Windows, Steve Ballmer’s off preparing an extra-special CES-sized Monkey Boy dance (YouTube it) for his first adult Keynote since Bill Gates retired to make $10,000,000 mockumentaries with Jerry Seinfeld (Wikipedia him).

No doubt they’ll return to their usually scheduled schedules next week, and so will we!

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: Boldly browsing (or not), AppClones, HTC’s dreaming, and Treo requiem.

The Bold and the Buggered

We can’t even make fun of this. Seriously. It harshens even our mellow. Crackberry Kevin spent days and days simply trying to get a freaking javascript enabled website to load up on his state-of-the-RIM Blackberry Bold, and basically every other Bold he could get his addicted fingers on, and word is he’s still waiting for the progress bar to hit 2%.

Yeesh, who does RIM think it is, shipping a buggy, clearly pre-release firmware on one of the most hotly anticipated handsets of the year? Apple?

Official List of Blackberry OS 4.6 Features and Enhancements

First!

Okay. Fine. Crackberry.com deserves some bragging rights over predicting the new RIM iClone… er… Touchscreen Blackberry would be called both the Thunder and the Storm. However, as any long term reader of this column (hi mom!) knows, WE were the first ones to bust out ThunderStorm and it’s inherent brando-confuso. NOT them. Us. So on behalf the the TWiSS nation:

Nailed it!

(And when Microsoft finally unveils WinVistaZuneMob for Windows Live! (Technology Preview), we’ll be right back to claim credit for that to!)

That Ain’t a Browser

While they may handle Javascript better than the Bold (and likely Flash better than the iPhone!), Crackberry claiming Nokia leads in “Mobile Bowsers” just because they’ve jammed a WAP rendering engine on 8 kazillion frighteningly insecure feature phones is like claiming Microsoft Paint is the premiere graphics package in the world just because it ships on every Windows PC since 3.1 (Take that, Photoshop!).

When it comes to the really realz browser champion of the world, if Crackberry even dreams of calling it any other way, they better wake up and apologize to the iPhone…

Putting the Carts Before the Stores

First came the iPhone, then came the iClones. Next came the App Store, so now we’re getting the Aped Stores. Kinda. Google is doing one for Android called Market (because it’s not a store, get it?), which has no production units yet, and it looks like Microsoft is doing one for Windows Mobile Se7en called SkyMarket, which has no modern SDK.

We suppose it stands to reason that, what with the App Store making developers money handset over fist, all the commodity OS makers would try to duplicate it. Would that they would spend half the time or effort, however, duplicating the innovative spirit and business prescience that drove App Store.

(And seriously, SkyMarket?! To fit in so perfectly with Xbox Marketplace and Zune Marketplace? What, we’re supposed to believe Windows Mobile Marketplace was taken? Does it tie in to SkyDrive, and leverage Mesh? Could Microsoft’s branding be anymore broken? We can’t even make fun of it anymore, because every week they come out with something funnier than we ever could… yeesh!)

Does Android Dream of Engadget Peeps?

We’ve got to give full faith and credit to HTC, they actually made manifest a handset that so totally embodies the palette and yet completely misses the spirit of the Google home page. Bravo-oh.

Given the 87 fold out slider keyboards this gPhone sports, however, why couldn’t they squeeze in a hardware button for “I’m feeling lucky”?

Xperia’ncing Delays

HTC must be super busy pumping out phones for Google, Palm, and… themselves, what with Sony being pushed back to 2009 (which can feel like decades in gadget time). We could joke that they’re waiting on WinVistaMob for Windows Live! Se7en (Technology Preview) to hit, but that’s more likely to be 2012 on the outside… What’s especially confusion is that Dieter actually used the Xperia waaaaaaay back in April and it seemed to be working fine. His thoughts on the delay?

Good luck to ya, SE, given how long you’ve been working on this since we saw it, we suspect you’re going to need it.

You Only Look Twice, Mr. Bohn

Speaking of Dieter, his mega-super-ultra-everything-plus-the-kitchen-sync-and-pipes Treo Pro review is now online, finishing the “beauty and beast” double feature that began with the 800w a month back. As we’re unlikely to see any more Treo’s out of Palm this year, and certainly nothing rocking NovaOS 2.0 (What comes after Garnet and Cobalt anyway… Kryptonite?) it’s be best to savor these. The truly masochistic among us might even want to join Malatesta for second look…

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: A day late but sadly no jokes short, Boldly browsing, unboxings galore, big love from HTC, who does Rubenstein really work for, and ZOMG! a new Android beta!

b.engadget.com…

…the Blackberry specific, RIM-browser optimized version of one of the most popular tech blogs on the planet… doesn’t exist. Neither does t.engadget.com for those of you who’ve actually figured out how to load a semi-functional browser on a Treo.

Nope. Turns out one of out-going Editor-in-Chief Ryan Block’s final acts at Engadget was to set up the iPhone, and the iPhone alone, with the keys to its own special gate. We wonder why…

(Hint: Palm Treo 755p: 0.1% share. Blackberry Anything: didn’t even make the list…)

And special well wishes to Mr. Block, with thanks for all the hard work he put in at Engadget, and best wishes for whatever he chooses next. Health, happiness, and much success!

Speaking of Blackberry Browsers

Lots of brouhaha this week over some dodgy iPhone vs. Blackberry Bold browser battles. Crackberrians cried foul, saying the Bold was hamstrung by a pre-release ROM and faulty WiFi connection. The initial test was against the original, iPhone 2G, however, and subsequent tests run on the iPhone 3G still smoked the poor little Bold. Admittedly, the Bold was again a pre-release ROM, however anyone who’s ever used an iPhone 3G running 2.x knows that’s pretty much a pre-release ROM as well, every bit as buggy. So until Crackberry.com runs some of their own tests, no doubt against a specially prepared iPhone, we’re calling it fair fight, and iPhone by complete domination.

Attention Blackberry Developers

Remember RIM’s answer to Apple’s iFund? You know, the VC pool established to fund Google-class iPhone App development? Yeah, us neither. But Crackberry.com has confirmed what we’d already forgotten: Even though “Blackberry” is in the name, RIM has nothing to do with it (just like Apple really has nothing to do with the iFund, we swear), and — get this — neither does the Blackberry.

Just tell the money-bin that one day you might possibly (wink) consider thinking about maybe porting (wink wink) a future beta of your hawt new iPhone App to the Blackberry, and you’re golden. Literally.

The Hunt for Bold All Over

Congrats to Crackberry Kevin on actually finding a Blackberry Bold in stock somewhere in the harshest hinterlands of Canada. With RIM reportedly only shipping 1 or 2 units per metric googlometer, his threats of SMASH no doubt precipitated Lazaridis to pull up in front of Crackberry HQ, fresh new Bold offered atop a red velvet cushion.

Palm-Treo Games

Likewise, congrats to Dieter on getting his already over-phone’d hands on a Treo Pro. Though his story wasn’t as blog’d out as Kevin’s, it was probably every bit as Tom Clancy-worthy in its own right. And if you’re into fringe smartphone Pr0n, check out WMExperts Treo Pro vs. Everything video. They even sacrifice it to an iPhone 3G, poor little [redacted].

Speaking of [Redacteds]

Last time we asked why the Treo Pro bore little-to-no resemblance to it’s 700 series forefathers. Turns out the 700 series might not have been any of its fathers. Mamma Palm, it seems, went and dallied with HTC. Given how the 800w turned out, however, can you really blame the old girl?

The HTC Xperia’nce

Sparing us all some overly obscure Foxworthy-esque joke about the HTC Palm Treo Pro and HTC Sony Xperia getting divorced but remaining cousins (whoops, so much for sparing), we’ll just point out that the next in a long line of nouveau-chic Windows Mobile handsets that were announced ages ago but have yet to actually ship, has now been announced to still eventually actually ship. One day. In Europe.

For those who don’t remember that far back — and who can honestly blame you? — yes, this was the banana slider Sony abandoned Sybian and cozied up to Microsoft for.

What’s the UI Equivalent of a Paper Bag Over the Face?

Seems to be a third party shell or launcher. And if you’ve been afraid to take your Windows Mobile out in public looking like its been beaten with the Redmond stick, Brian heartily recommends this… er.. iPhone “inspired” full facial replacement.

Looks good to us. Now how do you fix the OS?

All Rubinstein, All the Time

Rubinstein helped Steve Jobs and Apple launch the iPod to the stratosphere, and while Jobs’ second mobile act, the iPhone, has pretty much revolutionized the industry, Rubenstein’s has… er… had somewhat less of an impact.

The man who left Apple when he wasn’t allowed to jam a tic-tactile keyboard on the elegant, full screen iPhone, is now overrunning Palm (or, at least, serving as plenipotentiary most excellent to Lord Bono), canceling “several” Treo’s, and tweaking many others (though sadly not the cosmetics on the 800w…).

Why? Not to make an iPhone killah. Oh, no. That might harshen Poppa Jobs’ mellow and lead to the resurgence of Palm. No, Rubinstein simply wants to kill Treo make a killer Treo. Even if that honor currently belongs to HTC…

(Anyone bother to check and see if Rubinstein is really off Apple’s payroll?)

Another Beta

No, not the 4th release of Apple’s iPhone 2.1 Beta in almost as many weeks, but the first new beta build of the Android “platform” in Google knows how long. (And no, we’re not counting those secret builds given to select privileged elite developers while the common mundanes were left to wonder what “open as in beer” really meant to the folks in Mountain View).

Dubbed 0.9, this new beta, which seems prepped to give Gmail’s beta period a run for its money, may eventually set the possible stage for the OS that finally ships one day with HTC’s Dream handset (2nd cousin once removed to both the Treo Pro and Xperia for those charting smartphone genealogies at home).

And no, we’re not poking a little fun at Andorid here. Android is poking a lot of fun at all the developers and users who really, truly want something to keep Apple competitive. Let’s hope they get serious sometime that is soonish.

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: All Bold all the time, spy pics, HTC gets red, and happy five-oh!

Rogers Hoses Hopeful Bold Hosers

When notoriously gouging Rogers Mobility in Canada gave its 11th hour reprieve on data rates to save its July 11th iPhone 3G investment, we all kind sorta knew it would someday, somehow, come back and bite us in our wallets. Well, it didn’t. It bit Crackberry Kevin in his instead. Rogers official price for an iPhone 3G 16GB on 3(!) year contract? $299. Rogers semi-official price for a Blackberry Bold 0GB on a 3(!) year contract? Priceless. Or dang near. $399.

No doubt news reports of a giant green Crackberry yelling “Kevin Smash!” and laying waste to Rogers HQ will follow shortly.

And good on that.

All Bold All The Time

Or at least it seems that way. Canadian pricing fiasco aside, the Bold little buggers are really taking the cake these days. Popping up everywhere. Maybe Crackberry’s right? They’re going to be huge.

Just not at HSBC…

Kickstarting the Pearl

Of course, the iPhone 3G isn’t the only handset Rogers is likely subsidizing out their vice-clenched assets. The new Pearl flipberry (nee KickStart) is going for a relatively tiny $49. They’re likely targeting the same new users that the Palm Centro has been so successful at attracting lately.

Given RIM’s brand power and compelling messaging on… er… messaging, seems like a can’t miss, doesn’t it? Especially with the ever increasing femal demo. Extraspecially if Virgin Canada keeps helping out…

Uber-Hawt New Spy Pics Leaked!

The intertubes FTW! Fresh new spy pics of still undisclosed, unreleased, unauthorized smartphone hawtness. And what do we get? Sleek, elegantly curved black form-factor, flush screen(!), brand-defining centralized button navigator with oh-so-easy to hit task buttons radiating outwards, above a killer tic-tactile keyboard combined with enterprise-class “push” technology!

Luddites to Gentoo-men, we present the:

Treo Pro! er… Blackberry Javelin… er… Treoberry Javepro???!!!

Seriously, this is a “bold” new step for Palm away from the locked-to-Treo-600 design-dearth of yore. Given Rubenstein and all the other Apple droppings they’ve picked up lately, it makes perfect sense the Pro should resemble a… Blackberry. We mean, hey, while everyone else and their OEM is lately — and lamentably — iCloning themselves to innovation-less stupors, here comes Palm stepping up the WinMob side of their Harvey Dent-esque product strategy with something at least on par with the latest/greatest from sales leader RIM.

It’s about time.

HTC Dazed and Con-Fuze’d?

Seems like AT&T might be all set to launch the artist formerly known at the HTC Touch Pro, now re-dubbed the HTC Fuze. Yeah, we had to look it up too. Turns out it’s an iClone slider…

Word to HTC marketing: While you may have had Fusion on the brain (something Palm nailed years ago with the Treo brand, and again just recently with Centro), never leave ambiguity enough in your product name to conFuze perspective buyers or they’ll just reFuze to take you seriously. No way to deFuze it now though. Thankfully, at least, Moto must have had FUZR pre-marked (or was that BeastWars?)

Diamond Already in the Red?

So WMExperts would have us believe. If he didn’t have his wee mits all over the Treo Pro, we’d suspect Bono was [Product]-izing just in time for the holidays…

Still, red being the color of Blood, and this Touch being branded as the Diamond, perhaps another word needs be taken with the marketing geniuses over at HTC…

Blackjack II vs. Q9h

Is sort of like the battle for 53rd place in the Olympics, isn’t it? At least “Atila” has a shot at making it a three-way race…

Palm Set to Unleash the Hounds

No, not of the long, long, did we say loooooong?, promised Palm OS 2.0 (?!) Nova-based handsets. Just tons of new WinMob devices. Yay?

When those of us who loved the Palm OS first saw Bill Gates hoist a 700w up on stage at CES, even with all the talk of more options and better business plays, should we have recognized it as Colligan really just opening the seventh seal of stop-gapocalyps?

Signs point to yes.

Happy Anniversary

The TreoCentral Treocast got all golden on us this week, celebrating its 50th episode. May the next 50 be just as grand, and we look forward to hearing you on episode 100…

…probably covering the possible impending future potential pre-launch of Nova (beta).

And to Mike and Dieter — the premiere duo in smartphone coverage — Congratulations mobile accomplishers!

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: Pearl gets kicked, ZuneNokia cometh, Android isn’t late (again!) and… a Centro clone?!

Blackberry Developers Conference…

…Now taking registration. For anyone who still wants to code for Java Micro Edition. Seriously. All 2 of you.

And for the record, no, this isn’t a panicked attempt to re-court developers who may be considering jumping ship to the modern, Objective C, desktop class iPhone SDK, what with all the money to be made there (and the FreeRiders still waiting — and waiting — on the various LinMo initiatives).

Of course, serious Blackberry developers (aka the ones who work for RIM and thus have access to the actual APIs) are waiting on the next gen OS anyway, currently scheduled for some time after the square of the date Palm’s Nova hits divided by the root of the tangent of Android’s first handset’s delivery…

KickStarting the Pearl

When we joked that Blackberry had more code names for their KickSeaStart-tacWolfRAZR flip phone than Microsoft had Vista SKU’s, little did we know yet another — and at the same time much, much older — was about to be grafted on for release.

Yup, say hello to the… Pearl.

WTF is right. With the flip putting the actual pearl on the inside, shouldn’t this be more properly branded the “oyster shell” ?

Blackberry Curve Price Cut

Just in time for consumers to cut it from their shopping list.

Reason? Not iClony enough, what with the ThunderStorm now firmly on the horizon… er… Verizon.

Still, given that Amazon was paying people to take Blackberry’s off their hands just a short time ago, isn’t this still $199 to much?

Crackberry.com Says Show Your Blackberry How Much You Loves It

By yanking out the battery. We concur.

Crazily enough, however, they actually suggest you put it back in right quick thereafter…

It’s Not the First Sip That’s Going to Kill You…

Delicious Monster’s Wil Shipley takes on what he considers to be the poor science and worse concept behind Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment”.

The bottom line? Try a little sip, then go watch Super Size Me.

What does this have to do with smartphones? See Diamond, HTC Touch…

ZunePhone’s Coming, and… Nokia is Coming With It?!

Probably not so much, what with Nokia being all SymbiLinMo But then again, Nokia is ditching Blackberry for Exchange as part of the Grand Plan to actually get people off of one buggy, proprietary, outage prone service (no, not MobileMe… grumblegrumble…) and into another even buggier, proprietary, distributed outage prone service. But why do all the hard core punditry ourselves when, in grand bloggy tradition, we can just quote/link to it!

Nokia is already trying to establish its own Ovi portal as a mobile music store. It needs Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace as much as it needs another Symbian virus. Not only is the Zune Marketplace a sleepy, deserted mall with no customers and scant merchandise, but it has absolutely zero traction (or attraction) in Europe or other markets where Nokia sells its phones. The Zune is only sold in the US, where Nokia has minimal uptake. Adding the Zune Marketplace to its phones would do nothing for Nokia apart from making its own store look sidelined and associating the company with another megafailure brand. Nokia already has NGage for that.

Android Isn’t Late!…

…At least when it’s compared to WinVistaMob Se7en.

Okay, so the spin is Android is still on schedule but as anyone who’s ever tried to run a simple school function by committee knows you can’t settle on themes and decorations, much less deploy a brand new OS across multiple OEMs using different form factors and semi-secret SDK revisions on the backs of already beleaguered developers without a schedule more flexible than the whichever girl wins a heap of gymnastic medals this week. It’s simple chaos theory.

And, sure, WinVistaMob Se7en isn’t technically behind schedule either, unless you consider releasing an OS in 2009(ish) that’s meant to be almost (squint and tilt head) competitive with what Apple released out-of-the-gate in 2007, as not being behind something…

Alert Custer

Motorola has just totally ripped off his strategy.

From the once mighty empire that ruled the world with the first RAZR, comes pinning their final, futile hopes on WinMob 6.6.6. And to think, Moto, people have accused you of running the company into the ground…

How To: 2 Tips to Make Windows Media Player on WM Suck Slightly Less

Yank out the battery. Oh, sorry, we covered that already under Crackberry… wait… here it is… Dieter claims there might just be a way.

Attack of the CentroClones… Er… CloneTros… Er… ?

No, we don’t mean the Blackberry Javalin (that’s more a Treo 680 clone, n’est ce pas?), we mean this poor confused little OQO G900.

Hey, we appreciate them giving the iPhone iCloning a rest, don’t get us wrong, and when Palm sold 2 million of these lowest-end smartphones, it pretty much guaranteed some uber-cheaper knock off would be spun up. But, irony of ironies… what if it’s actually more profitable than the real thing?

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: Bold, Bull. Bull, Bold. WinMob Can’t Count to 20, and Colligan Loves the iPhone

It’s Cosmo Cramer, Cracky!

We had to suffer Krakow’s silly iPhone spewings, so it’s only fair our sister site, Crackberry.com gets the the man who pushes market o-spin-ion almost as well as RIM does email.

So, yeah, bullish on Bold. Just sell before he does.

We Who Are About to Dial Salute You!

It is BlackBerrious TicTactilous Maximus, Leader in smartphone sales, email pusher extraordinaire, loyal enabler of the one true unpaid overtime, mate to workaholic partners, child to absentee parents, and in this generation or the next it will totally pwn you.

Fair enough, then, that Crackberry.com tortured the tyrannical little handset to death in retaliation.

Well done.

Flipping the Berry, Part Deux

KickSeaStart-tacWolfRAZR exclusive video reviews continue. Watch them fast before RIM NOC’s them off!

WinMob to Sell 20M Licenses… Eventually

Sorry… we’re… reporting… near… Redmond… and… have… to… keep… ducking… to… avoid… flying… furniture…

Whew! Ballmer finally blue-screened. Anyway, seems when Microsoft said they’d infect 20M units this year, seems what they really meant was that they wouldn’t infect 20M units this year, because, well, they didn’t. Still, 20M is a HUGE number. 20x what the iPhone sold in one weekend. Though the iPhone only has one model still on the market, by one manufacturer, running on one technology (GSM), in 22 countries, mostly on exclusive carriers. And, well, while we’re admittedly mathlexic, we seem to remember there are more than 20 weekends in a year?

Maybe that’s why:

iClones Becoming iCliches

Stop it. We mean it. The first dozen or so iPhone wannabes were at least mockable. Now they’re just a mockery. We’d tell you to fire your industrial designers — if we thought for even a moment you actually employed any. Bad enough Palm’s been rereleasing the Treo 600 for what seems like 10 years now. How long do we have to put up with the iClones? Lazaridis? Colligan? Ballmer? Little help?

Bad Branding: Microsoft Advanced Studies Program

Does the tech industry have their own special version of the Razzies? They must, given how badly Microsoft keeps gunning for one. Last week we jokingly suggested Redmond would rebrand their struggling handset business as WinVistaXZuneMob Se7en Cairo Edition Phones for Windows — LIVE! And little did we know that was actually BETTER than the stuff Microsoft could spittle out on their own, at least if the new names WMExperts.com says they’re kicking around (quite literally) for Live Search!

Look upon their words ye mighty and despise:

• Bing
• Hook
• Kumo

Too. Many. Jokes. Crashing. Server.

Statler & Waldorf Dept.

Fear not, dear listeners of our sister podcast, WMExperts has not been secretly taken over by pod-people far more concerned with film, books, weather, shower habits, or basically anything even remotely NOT having to do with Windows Mobile, it’s still firmly in control of Dieter and Malatesta — who just happen to be far more concerned with film, books, weather, shower habits, or basically anything even remotely NOT having to do with Windows Mobile.

But seriously, given the previous news items, can you blame them? We can’t.

Colligan Gets His Tech Checked!

TreoCentral.com informs us that Palm CEO Ed Colligan sat down for chat, and sure, typically we’d tear apart whatever non-sensical, factually challenged, anti-iPhone rhetoric bullet points he was fed by Ruby, Bono, et al. but turns out that — wait for it — he likes it! Okay, so he can’t figure out how to email with it (hint: try the envelope icon), but overall he has some love for the design and innovation.

Unfortunately for Palm, the market pretty much agrees with him.

Could Palm Have an Earnings Surprise in FY Q1?

No.

Treo 800w: Selling a lot or Not enough to sell?

That’s why.

Maybe they should drop the price below cost? It’s working for the Centro…

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: ThuderStorms, iClone Double Feature, Dead Treo’s, and Open Marriages!

Crackberry Dubs the New Blackberry: ThunderStorm…

…Only 3 days after we did. Congrats, sister siters. This week we’re all about the KickSeaStart-tacWolfRAZR. We look forward to seeing it Monday!

(WinVistaXZuneMob Se7en Cairo Edition Phones for Windows — LIVE! is already dibbed by WMExperts. Sorry.)

Introducing the iClone Nano!

Dear reader Kevin sends in these spy shots from “the wilds”. Is it the long-rumored iPhone Nano? Nope, just an iClone Nano, courtesy of the usual suspects at Research in Motion. Seems like gloss black and silver trim is this years gloss black and silver trim…

If only Waterloo could iClone the interface and iTunes experience, eh?

Introducing BlackBerry Media Sync

D’oh! Well, we guess it’s technically not iClone iTunes if RIM just stoleded it outright, right?

Your Music on Your BlackBerry Smartphone. It’s That Simple. Easy to Update

Because it’s connecting to iTunes, of course. Imagine if Apple hadn’t tried to roll their own MobileMe service and just hacked their way into RIM’s NOC (Network Operations Center). Who’d have functional push then, huh? Who?

(Sorry, not having had email for two weeks makes us a little prickly…)

Speaking of Little Prickles…

Yes, we do listen. We appreciate the feedback. And we’ll redouble our efforts. Much love.

Attack of the iClones: WinMob Supplement

WMExperts is masochistic kind enough to show us a real life, side-by-side comparison between the iPhone 3G and the iClonic Samsung Omnia and HTC Touch Diamond, and what can we say? Good job with the screen quality there. 1 degree viewing angle must be an industry record of some kind, right?

(Actual photo at top of post. Thanks for sparing us any photoshopping this week, OEMtards!)

Enter… the ZunePhone!

May want to hold on to them tats a smidge longer there, Zune-dude. WMExperts reports (and we spin) that Microsoft is all shook up, and along with throwing chairs, Ballmer may just throw a ZunePhone our way as well…

Good luck with that. We hope it’s like totally as successful as the Zune proper. Sincerely.

TreoCentral Asks:

Will the BlackBerry KickStart be a Centro Killer?

Yes.

(Unless you hate flippies. Then no. But yes.)

The More Treo’s Change

The Treo 755p is dead. Long live the… er… ah…

When’s Nova exploding again?

And in No Other News

Analysts, which is increasingly another word for those who lost employment within an industry and now make even more money spouting even worse nonsense from without, are saying the troubled “Open” Source Android platform may be merging with the soon to be troubled “Open” Source Symbian platform.

And if you believe that, we’ve still got that second bridge left over from WWDC to sell you…

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

This week: Blackberry device outages, Android SDK, Palm launches Treo 700 v3

Bold Behind, ThunderStorm Downgraded

Congrats to sister-site Crackberry.com for breaking the first images of the Blackberry ThunderStorm’s soft, virtual keyboard (you know, the one RIM’s CEO can’t use and would never make). Might just be a sticker, though, as NERDFIGHT or no reports continue to say the latest iClone just don’t work yet. (But dig the UI work! Jonathan Ive must be quaking in his elegant yet understated ash black #7 boots…)

No problem, right? Because the Bold is launching any day now? Er… no so much either… Looks like it doesn’t work so well either yet. Radio code, they say. That or RIM’s desperate scramble to try and launch their iClone double punch as fast — and loose it seems — as possible.

Chill guys. Take your time. Get it right. And here’s a thought — why not innovate something of your own while you’re at it?

Asked… And Answered!

Crackberry.com asks:

How come every new big BB app is running into such teething problems!?!

And Crackberry.com responds:

RIM just updated their site with BlackBerry JDE 4.5

Ahem.

When you have scads of devices scattered across multiple outdated OS versions all based on Java Micro Edition, you have a development nightmare that makes Windows Mobile look, well… not completely horrible by comparison.

Memo to Waterloo: In addition to innovative handsets, let’s add a real OS to the list. You know, something that couldn’t run a RAZR. We hear LinMo is the rage with all the cool kids these days…

Crackbettey Brings Less Hawtness to the Blog…

And dang right, ours is better than yours.

But we could teach you to use an iPhone, L-Loh, now that Fake Steve is no longer in charge…

AT&T Crackspiracy Redux

We covered this story early in the week (and of course Crackberry.com iCloned it with a rapidity that would make RIM proud).

Way to go, tic-tactile-tards. Next time just be honest. Tell them you ran out of iPhones and you’ll order them some when Apple can find your out-of-nowhere parking-lot kiosk. Better to be embarrassed than humiliated.

Does Android Dream of Exclusive Sheep?

Huge surprise. Mega. Potential Android developers (yup, some people are still waiting for their iPhone App Store acceptance and have to keep busy somehow) are growing impatient with the lack of SDK updates coming out of Mountain View.

Only not so much. Turns out there hasn’t been a lack of updates at all — they’ve just been reserved for specialer, more privileged partners.

Non-disclosure agreements and selective access to development tools are hardly emblematic of an open ecosystem. Google has intentionally disadvantaged many developers and kept the broader Android community in the dark about the progress of the platform. Google’s failure to fulfill its commitment to openness has eroded one of the principle differentiating factors that made Android a relevant alternative to Apple’s iPhone operating system. If Google cannot change course, the lack of transparency in the development process will likely push disenfranchised developers towards other mobile platforms.

Way to embrace the spirit of “open” there, eh, Google? Not evil phase all past us now then?

Making an OS is hard, even when you have a CEO on the Apple board and the iPhone to use as a blueprint. Making an OS by committee is even harder. Making an OS by committee and expecting it to work on multiple, different handsets from OEM partners is something that probably still gives Bill Gates night sweats.

Hate to say we told you so… not.

Live Mess

At least we figure the “Mesh” thing must be a WMExperts typo, given the state-of-the-art-of-1990 GUI…

Opera… Oprah. Oprah… Opera

The browser you’ve all been waiting… and waiting… for to replace the massively outdated Pocket Internet Explitivor is finally here. If one of the many known issues isn’t a deal breaker. And if it’s available for your device. And if you don’t mind resource hogs.

Maybe they should pull a Krakow and just license LinMo and WebKit?

Palm Releases a Treo!

Stop the presses… er… posters! Palm has released a new Treo! No, we’re not joking, TreoCentral.com even has a review!

It’s the 700w v3 800w, which sees the antenna become an intenna, and the Treo finally getting some WiFi. (Yeah, we fainted too). Screen’s still recessed, form factor’s still jurassic, the OS ain’t Palm or Nova, but hey — it’s a NEW TREO!

And in No Other News

Pop quiz: You’re Motorola and you’ve recently been all but Icah’ned apart. Through lack of vision and hubris-filled mismanagement, you’ve lost more ground than even the RAZR bump ever gave you, and now, facing the iPhone, what do you do? Beg back the designers and engineers that once made you great? Take a RSK on making something new and wonderful? Or just sue one of the poor souls who jumped ship before it broke itself open on the RKS?

The latter of course. You’re Moto, right?

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: What? Surprised we’re here? Thought we’d be taking this edition off so we could play Super Monkey Ball or Bomberman Touch, or otherwise just hide in our tasteful Cupertino estates drooling over our totally awesome new, glossy plastic backed iPhone 3Gs? We did that last time. We totally had the device before Mossberg and like 99% of the people at Apple. Totally.

We’re having a bit of weekend, is all. Maybe you heard about it? MASSIVE failures. Epic. Keep reading on to find out why its all Microsoft and RIM’s fault!

Thanks Bill! Now Who’s Running the Asylum?

Confession: Apple had to use Windows on iPhone 3G launch day. Embarrassing, of course, but due to monopolistic abuses, Microsoft has just totally wormed their way into the carriers. Do you know how distressing it is to have UK Apple Stores running VMWare Fusion because O2 can’t connect to anything but Internet Explorer? Putting ActiveSync on the iPhone is one thing — Sun Tzu told El Jobso he’d have to make some deals with the devil if he wants to break into enterprise — but IE on iMacs? It’ll take weeks of iTunes meditative podcasts to restore their sense of wonder.

And hey, Rogers up in Canada, what’s the sound of a million Canadian IE6 browsers cr@pping out? Sales Central Down?! What’s running the back end, a 386 on Windows for Workgroups? How about next time we pay our ISP bill on time, b’okay?

Of course, iPhone firmware 2.0 dropped at the same time, and since like some huge percentage of iPhone users are Windows users, so all those quirky we-had-to-make-them PC iTunes fired up trying to grab it all at once… At Infinite Loop, the OS X Leopard Data Center — which is shaped into a perfect Yin/Yang of mechanical alignment in matching aluminum and black glass trim — running the iTunes authentications services was just totally flooded in raw Microsoftian harshness. Ever seen kernal panic? Imagine that gone nuclear. Total loss of mellow. Total. Apple IT will reportedly be in intensive yoga all week.

Funny how this all happened the minute Bill Gates left the building, though, isn’t it? If he and Ballmer weren’t waiting in line over night at the Apple Store in Seattle, it would be uber-suspicious. Sure, they could have used body doubles or something, but Ballmer completely lost it waiting for his shiny new iPhone 3G to get unbricked. Chairs and sweatstains flying like that are rather unmistakable…

RIM Stealing iPhone’s Thunder?

Why not, they’ve stolen everything else, right? What better way for RIM to hypejack some press coverage on iPhone 3G launch day than to carefully plant the seeds of a NERD FIGHT! Tell Crackberry.com that the iClonic new touchscreen Blackberry Thunder may actually work, then tell the Boy Genius Report the much more believable story that the Thunder is totally hosed, step back, and laugh your apps off. After all, this is the company whose CEO just recently said touchscreens were unusable. Why not prove it with an unusable touchscreen device? Especially when Apple’s new MobileMe service is bringing the heat!

(Though, in all fairness, Apple did start the latest round with some retaliation of their own, what with copying RIM’s NOC failures, first with random .Mac outages, and then with the complete clusterfail of the MobileMe transition…)

Palm: We Want to Lose 30% More This Quarter!

After recent financial losses widely attributed to the spectacularly poor business strategy of selling the Centro entry-level, candy-bar cool smartphone for LESS than it costs Palm to make it, it seems the pressure of the iPhone 3G has sent Colligan and Co. even further over the edge. Witness TreoCentral announcing that as of now, you can get a green-keyed Centro for only $70.

Why not -$70. Pay people to take them, that’s what Amazon did with Blackberry‘s after all. Should we expect this, what, next quarter at the latest?

And in No Other News

Unbelievable as it may sound, Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola, along with Google, announced the unprecedented–

Cannot connect to the iSatire Server. An known error has occured...

D’oh! Not again!

ChangeWave is back with trends in intended smartphone buying for June 2008. The good? The iPhone has soared from 29% to 56% from a low this time last year of 18%. The bad? Rim has tumbled from 29% to 23% from a high of 33% last July. The ugly? Palm has held steady at 3%, having free fallen from 24% way back in late 2006.

The iPhone dominated almost all rounds, causing an overall increase in planned smartphone purchases to 10%. Satisfaction levels were through the roof at 78% (way above RIM’s 54% and trouncing Palm’s 29%)

Blackberry held on to the title of reigning email monster, with a holding-steady 42% ownership of that space, but Apple is making inroads even there, up to 11%.

The KO? Of those planning to buy a smartphone fully 50% plan on getting an iPhone over the Blackberry and Palm.

We expect Big John to jump in and end the slaughter any minute…

Read Via

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: Nothing. Sorry. No time. We’re already lining up for the iPhone 3G. Dieter got here early, but the rest of us are way back, forced to climb over ever-growing mounds of junked Crackberries and WinMobs and about a million Centros — ouch! Heckuva tailgate going on, though. Ballmer keeps breaking out the Monkey Boy while Colligan and Lazaridis take turns timing their virtual keyboarding.

So yeah, sorry. Zip this week. Zilch. But it’s totally not our fault. We don’t even think the sister sites have been updated. (We’d ask Kevin and Jennifer but they’re off playing hacky-sack with Sergey and Larry.)

UPDATED: Okay, fine. The Commenterati have spoken. We’ll scour the interwebs. We’ll find something. You’ll get your fix. Anything to stop from harshening our pre-launch mellow!

Blackberry Kickstart Special TV Offer — While Supplies Last!

Attention Crackberrians! You’re not gonna pay $249 for the new RIM Kickstart Flipberry, are you? No! And you’re not gonna pay $149 either, are you? Nope! You’re not gonna pay $99 or $79 either. All you’re gonna pay is one easy payment of $49! But wait, there’s more! Act now and we’ll throw in near-weekly service outages, and the classic StarTac form factor, for FREE! Tell them Crazy Mike sent you, and we’ll even throw in a free Flowbee!

(Yeesh, when did entry level become throw away? We know Amazon was even paying people to take Blackberry‘s off their hands for a while, but crack open Palm’s books sometime, Mr. Canadian CEO of the Year, and see what selling stuff for less than it costs to make it does for the old bottom line, b’okay?)

Blackberry Done Copying iPhone, Starts Copying Windows 95

Yeah, so the Thunder will still iClone the iPhone, at least as much as the old-but-not-Palm-old Java “OS” is capable of, but RIM isn’t intent on just copying Apple, oh no. Their next target — Windows 95! Seems just like good old Win95 (which knowing MS was probably release in 1997, right?), one day in the distant future a Blackberry OS may — wait for it — try to avoid “nuked” or “bricked” units by allowing users to — wait for it again — boot into safe mode!

(We need to pause here to explain to iPhone users that those poor unfortunates with “smartphones” rather than mobile computers don’t have OS’s for realzies like OS X, just weird little management systems that are far less stable and are just as likely to turn on as they are to spontaneously cease functioning. Think Xbox 360).

Rather than a function key, the tic-tactile escape key will do the trick. Press it and you’re in safe mode. Kind of makes you wonder just how unsafe regular mode is if you have to escape it…?

In faker news, head BBOS developer Marty McFly tells us we can look back to a DOS-style CTRL-ALT-DELETE “feature” by 2020…

Windows Mobile Gets… Facebook!?

Confession: We’re not sure what the story is here. Windows Mobile finally gets an application even the Palm Centro’s already had? Or is it that Pocket IE is such a non-browser that WinMob requires an entire application (GUI created in MS Paint, really?) simply to load Facebook? Or is it that people with WinMob have just now discovered this neato new site called Facebook where — just maybe! — all the cool kids used to hang out?

Now it’s WMExperts Giving With the Paper Cuts and Lemon Juice

Not enough that last week Crackberry.com made fun of the disgusting money grab that passes for Rogers’ Canadian iPhone price plans, this week the diabolical editor of WMExperts just has to point out that the HTC Diamond Touch, is getting all-it-can-eat unlimited data from Bell for $30.

Well done, Rogers, you’ve succeeded where neither HTC nor Windows Mobile have before — you’ve actually made people consider getting a Diamond Pro. Enjoy whatever layer of Hell greedy telco’s get condemned to (we forget the exact number, same as the latest WinMob release number, right?)

Palm Hires Interface Designer!

How about that? We can’t believe we typed it either, but this is big news from Treocentral. Huge. Palm actually hiring someone to consciously improve their user experience is like… hmm… if Windows Mobile actually hired someone to consciously improve their user experience (taking notes there, “J“?)

Turns out they got someone ultra-hip, ultra conceptual too. Same guy who did Helio, which according to Google Image Search has an interface consisting solely of a white flame brand over blue field. We’re not kidding. That’s all there seems to be. Makes the Google homepage looks busy. But who knows how the kids smartphone these days.

What’ll he bring to Palm? Probably something just as innovative. We’re guessing no screen at all. Joke all you want, but it would be light years ahead of Palm’s vintage-yet-still-sadly-current anti-anti-aliased 8-bit circa 1990s groove.

And in No Other News

That’s it. We have to go. The Motorola boys are playing the “iPhone 3G is the only reason we have left to live” card, trying to cry their way up in line. Brian and Casey aren’t buying it, but Chad might let them in. Meanwhile, the Nokia and Samsung iClone teams have gotten bounced for trying to get early peaks inside. We feel for them, really. Rules are rules and all, but c’mon. If they don’t find out what Apple is releasing this year, what’ll they have to copy for next year?

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: Boldly late… and on strike, WinMob vs. Android, more Windows raves, and Real Ed vs. Fake Steve!

Blackberry Bold-ly Not Going Where the iPhone Will Have Already Gone Before

The 11th reason the Blackberry still doesn’t compare to the iPhone 3G? The iPhone 3G will be out on time.

Unlike Apple, who typically doesn’t pre-announce but sends CEO Steve “El” Jobso out on stage to BOOM! their tech when its good to pretty much G.O., in its panicked desperation to pip the iPhone 3G to the publicity post, RIM rushed to pre-announce their Bold before it was finished and, it seems, before they had a real idea of when it would be finished.

So, also unlike Apple’s Jobs who gave us an emphatic July 11th to circle in red on our calendars (and bank accounts!), RIM’s Lazaridis gave a nebulous date which, according to Crackberry.com, has just gotten “pushed” back:

August. Maybe 2008.

Rumor has it battery issues and overheating are to blame. Yikes. Either way, that’s a full month after serious futurists have already gotten themselves an iPhone. I guess diehard Crackberrians should just expect it when they ship it.

Take Your Push and Shove It, We Ain’t Emailing Here No More!

Yup, seems like members of the Writers Guild, among others, believe that both unfair and unequal treatment for their work on the internet and in DVD sales is matched only by having to use Blackberry’s as reasons to go on strike.

Crackberry.com says ABC (the American one, not the Australian one, we’re properly ethnocentric on this) backed down quickly in face of the Blackberry-out, and no scripts or fall season release schedules were harmed under the repetitive stress.

Crackberry Gives Papercut, Pours Lemon Juice On it

Yes. Thank you, Crackberry.com. Potential iPhone 3G customers in Canada are going to get Rogered by the local GSM monopoly — almost as badly as the RIMtards. The difference? Whereas the Blackberry is pretty much a business appliance typically subsidized by companies, the iPhone is a mobile computer platform typically paid dearly for by consumers themselves.

Way to drag us down with you, hosers.

WinMob vs. Android: Complexity Showdown!

WMExperts gives us a peak beneath the Android Kimono, and what a peak it is! Seems Google’s little mobile monster is poised to give Windows Mobile a run for its so-many-versions-developers-will-tear-their-neck-beards-out money. Way to go. May the least of the worst win the bottom of the most!

More Raves for Windows!

Typical Windows user feedback?

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues. [...] So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. [...] Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time? [...] Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. [...] What an absolute mess. [...] The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.

Nope. THE Windows user feedback to rule them all, courtesy of Kaiser Bill Gates himself. Now, sure, this is technically about the desktop version of Windows 5.5 (aka XP), and not the similar-in-name-and-ill-conceived-GUI-only handset version, currently on 6.6.6 (or something), but the probative value far exceeds any potential prejudice (or the humor outweighs the difference, whatever).

Sadly, though much like typical user feedback, it had absolutely no effect on future development.

Keeping Palm Real Fake

Real Ed:

We are more confident than ever in our transformational effort. We’ve added extraordinary new talent, the Centro is a smash success, we have an incredibly competitive product pipeline, and are developing a world class software platform. I expect together, these efforts will deliver positive results in the coming years.

Fake Steve:

You turn your $500 Treo into a $100 Centro, sell each unit at a massive loss, and make it up on volume. How totally brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that? I mean here at Apple we’re still stuck in that old-economy mindset where you sell stuff for more than what it costs you to make it. Meanwhile Palm is getting inquiries from Chris Anderson of Wired who wants to do a big cover story on how “selling for less than cost” is the new future of business.

Real Ed:

I have never felt more enthusiastic about our product pipeline and our ability to get back on the right track.

Fake Steve:

If you really want to scare the crap out of yourselves, check out your company’s official earnings statement and scroll down to the balance sheet. Little item called “Total stockholders’ equity.” Look at where it is today versus a year ago. Teeny tiny drop from $1 billion last year to $100 million now.

Real Ed:

We are extremely confident that the enhanced functionality of this new platform and its accessibility to the developer community, combined with the game changing hardware we have designed for it will usher in a new era for Palm. This platform development effort is proceeding very well and we look forward to bringing these products to market.

Fake Steve:

Well, nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Ahem. Anyway, much love to all of you. We miss you. Not really. And if you’re thinking about maybe you’ll crawl back here when Palm goes under, um, don’t bother. Peace.

And in No Other News

Motorolo is pinning all their hopes for the future on the Alexander. That’s not a joke. The sentence, I mean. Motorola definitely is.

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: Blackberry iClone’s visual voice mail — but don’t make them angry! Windows Mobile 6.0 ready to crash already frozen Treo 800wx’s, and can Centro has future?

Apple Reinvents the Phone. RIM Regurgitates the iPhone.

RIM loves them the iPhone. They love it’s glossy black facade. They love its silvered bezel. They love its rounded rectangular slab-like form factor. They love its iTunes connectivity. And despite we-think-they-doth-protest-to-much comments to the contrary, boy do they love its touchscreen. They love it so much, they’ve done nothing but spend the last year iCloning it. They’re latest, according to Crackberry.com?

Visual Voice Mail.

Yup.

Way to go, Lazaridis. A year and a half later, and you’re finally copying something Steve Jobs showed off six months prior to the iPhone launch…

Good news for Crackberrians, though! At this rate, you’ll get a MobileSafari class browser by 2011!

You Won’t Like Crackberry Kevin When He’s Angry!

Okay, we totally take back that last story. It wasn’t us, and it certainly wasn’t RIM. In fact, it was probably those troublemakers over at AndroidCentral saying the iPhone was copying the Bold again. Totally. Just don’t get Crackberry Kevin angry. We don’t like him when he’s angry. We mean, did you see what he did to Rogers’ data rates when he got angry? We don’t have the healing factor to take that kind of pain!

We’ll just stick to making fun of WindowsMobile for the rest of this edition, okay?

Please?

Obsolete Hardware, Meet Outdated OS!

Speaking of making fun of Windows Mobile, looks like the Treo 800wx will finally be getting an upgrade to version 6.0. No, that’s not a typo. They’re actually taking the oldest WinMob Treo (actually, the “fixed” rev of the oldest WinMob Treo, but why split petrified hairs?), and cramming the previous (not current) version of Windows Mobile on it.

And they’re not even doing that yet, so some poor battered-consumer syndrome hax0rs have stepped in and actually made the monstrous little FrankenTreos themselves. Think getting XP up on your 486. Sorta.

WMExperts.com has the gory details. Or it could just be another spy shot of the 800w. Either way…

Centro: Can Has Future?

TreoCentral.com bravely asks: “Can Palm’s Centro Still Roll With The Big Dogs at AT&T?”

In a sentence: About well as Motorola has post-RAZR.

In a word: No.

But if they play the chihuahua card low and long enough, they might sneak by until their next handset can go… er… Nova.

And in No Other News…

Samsung announced, and Sprint spat up $100,000,000 to advertise, the Instinct to compete with the old iPhone about 5 minutes before Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 3G, officially making the Instinct a year too late and a (next) generation too short (not to mention quite a bit too expensive when faced with a $199 price tag for the Real Thing). So, the big bosses at Samsung and Sprint bit the bullet and dropped their prices… But not enough to impress Uncle Walt, much less our own big boss, who summed up the whole thing thusly:

Honestly – is anybody out there seriously considering an Instinct over an iPhone? We’ll grant that there are some people who prefer to pick their carrier first, phone second — but still, is it possible to even pick up the clean end of a piece of …Instinct?

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: RIM Flips, Windows Mobile is why Ballmer should quit, and Palm’s Centro is a… hit?!

Kirk to Enterpise, the [Redacted] NOC is [Redacted] Down Again!

Crackberry.com continues their awesome trend of RIMsclusives, this week bringing us the pre-release (and bathroom-floor?) pics of the upcoming BlackBerry Flip… er… KickStart. Kudos to RIM marketing, the idea of kicking your new form factor to start it is both glee-worthy and certainly cathartic. The first live YouTubes of a boardroom full of business suits round-housing the flipugly little things through the plate glass and down to 100 story doom will earn our inaugural “favorite” badge.

RIM design should likewise be praised for boldly (oops, wrong model!) flippedly going where no one since 1960s sci-fi has gone before. Maybe the Aurora will sport it some phaser chic?

Blackberry Can Has Windows Live Candy?

Yes, that’s apparently NOT a typo. This really does pass for screencandy on the Blackberry.

If an iPhone app ever came out looking that 2001, it would only be because Ashton Kutcher had developed it and was filming the reaction from backstage…

The OS Update Heard Around the World!

As we’re all probably sick of hearing about now, a little OS update was announced this week. Flaunting a host of new features, the update will soon let everyone, everywhere, experience the next great revolution in smartphone… er… experience. Unfortunately, the announced OS update won’t be released right away. Nope, we’re all going to have to dig deep and wait just a little bit longer. But the relentless media coverage, the rumors, the anticipation, the fanboy frenzy… it will all be worth it soon.

Yup, in just a few short weeks, WMExperts.com says we’ll be getting Windows 6.6.6 for the Moto Q9h! Booyah!

Windows Mobile — Yup, THAT’s a Firing!

Seems Jim Lynch over at ExtremeTech loves him some Windows Mobile almost as much as pundit Paul Thurrott. How much is that? Enough to make it his #4 reason Microsoft CEO Steve “Internet Monkey-Boy Dance Phenom” Ballmer should be fired:

Windows Mobile has been a dismal failure for Microsoft that has only become more apparent with the launch and success of the iPhone. Microsoft blew a lot of money and time with Windows Mobile and never managed to come up with a good mobile operating system. Apple, on the other hand, managed to hit a home run the first time out by using Mac OS X in the iPhone. I remember owning a Compaq iPaq years ago and, at first, I loved it. But as time went on I stopped using it and finally just got rid of it. Looking back at it now, from the perspective of an iPhone owner, I see that the iPaq was a good product but it suffered from a poorly thought out and awfully implemented operating system. Microsoft never got it right and still hasn’t. As usual Microsoft is playing catch-up to Apple and we’ll no doubt see Microsoft blatantly copying Apple’s iPhone interface and features in a future release of Windows Mobile. For letting Windows Mobile continue to be a failed also-ran, Steve Ballmer should be fired.

No Dev in the Palm is Worth 2 Million Centros?

TreoCentral.com informs us that the “breakthrough hit” that is the Palm Centro is on track to sell 2 million units this year… of an OS Palm introduced only 6 years ago! And now they’ll be selling on shiny happy Verizon as well! Everyone is thrilled. Seriously. Stock is up 9%. Colligan and Rubenstein are high-fiving in the halls.

Sure, instead of 2 million with a 6 year old OS, Apple sold 6 million with an OS introduced barely a year ago, but think about how much work that must of been, all that innovation and stuff. Why break a sweat when you get sit on your apps for 6 years and still bump the stock, right?

And since by the sounds of it, the next generation Nova OS will basically be a web browser, it looks like Palm has finally found it’s winning strategy and is going for it! All engines in reverse, and straight ahead ’til yesterday!

And in No Other News…

Pop quiz, hotshot: You’re a once relevant mobile phone manufacturer who once struck gold with the then-innovative RAZR and has since done everything corporately possible to never again recapture the lightning in that bottle. Your boogeyman of the last few years has just switched his attention to the MicroHoo! debacle, and Apple has shown you can still shake up the space with a breakthrough device fresh out the gate.

What do you do, hotshot? What do you do?

If you’re Moto, you fire half your design team. That’s what!

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: Nothing. Seriously. It’s like there’s some event on Monday that’s blotted out the smartphone sun…

(Okay, fine, maybe there’s some small something or other we can dig up. Hit the read link…)

Breaking: TiPb Welcomes Messrs. Lazaridis, Ballmer, and Colligan!

More fake breaking news, as we’ve received no tips reporting that the head honchos over at RIM, Microsoft, and what’s left of Palm have done nothing all week but wire up fiber channels and practice hitting “refresh” in anticipation of our live meta blog coverage of the WWDC keynote on Monday.

When reached for non-comment, dead-pan funnyman Lazaridis said, “C’mon, I need to know what Apple’s new phone looks like this year so I can figure out what RIM’s will look like next year!”

Monkey-Boy dance phenom Ballmer didn’t chime in with, “We’ll be selling 3 friktillian smartphones with Windows Mobile Se7en on by 2012, and we’re going to need to know what else to copy beside Multi-touch!”

Colligan, however, when awoken from his 5 year stasis, never remained cool, “We have no interest in duplicating the iPhone. We’re about to release our 19th version of the Treo 600, and we’ve got 37 more where that came from!”.

Alrighty then…

ATTN: Crackberry.com, RE: Coming Back Around…

Confession: We make a little fun of RIM’s well-publicized and hugely embarrassing network outages (see, we did it again right there). But last week, when .Mac went down and we here at TiPb reported it pro-forma as the nothing little insignificant blip on an otherwise perfectly clear iPhone sky that it was, Crackberry.com wasted no time, and spared no level of glee, in NOC’ing it up, and twisting it into some big brouhaha.

Bulletin: A .Mac outage probably effects exactly 3 iPhone users. If that. We don’t like to publicize it, but even Dear Leader doesn’t really use the service (he’s using the new one already, which is why they needed some massive super secret upgrade you may be hearing about at a little developers conference you may have hear about, b’okay?) Anyway, .Mac going out is like the 300th ranked ISP in Bavaria going out — barely anyone noticed. They were all busy with setting up their new Exchange or MobileMe accounts for Monday.

Payback: However, you noticed, and we noticed you noticing, so we called up our “friends” in Waterloo and convinced the former Canadian Tire cashier whose hand’s on the giant red NOC-off lever that, since everyone on the planet will pretty much be iPhone-only this weekend, it would be the perfect time for a “scheduled” outage. Poor kid. We’re talking hook, line, and voice-cracking sinker…

We’re not sure what Crackberry addicts pop when the push is down (our guess — Solitaire on Win95), but enjoy the weekend!

Microsoft Out the Gates and High on Life

Or something! First up we have Microsoft (probably Ballmer), who according to WMExperts.com is sending letters (probably cut out of a soon-to-be-extinct magazine and stick-glued onto unsold Vista boxtops…) to their partners desperately reassuring them that Windows Mobile 6.6.6 (or 6.1, whatever the latest — and by that we mean most currently behind schedule — release is) will somehow still be relevant come Monday after El Jobso drops the iPhone 2.0 bomb.

Er… yeah… Not sure how to break this to you, but Windows Mobile 6.x wasn’t relevant after iPhone 1.0 back in January 2007. And instead of trying to get Windows Mobile Se7en up to iPhone 1.0 standards, you might want to think outside the little beige box and shoot for something innovative your own self?

And no, spreading rumors of a Blu-Ray Xbox 360 in some attempt to “steal Apple’s thunder” is not innovative. A giant, red-ringing, PowerPC, noisy, inelegant gaming machine, no matter how we loves us our Gears of War, suddenly getting the technology that beat the stuffing out of your own HD-DVD format years after Sony released it in the PS3 just doesn’t crossover the same news circles.

But here’s an idea: maybe call that friend of yours Bill. You remember him, the one you no longer need but may still use? (Leastways he could help keep you from blurting out your envy towards the iPhone’s admittedly top-tier browser experience…)

Government Tracking Treo Users

TreoCentral.com is claiming that the US government is tracking cellphone users. Since some of us aren’t in the US, or in Government, we have no way of knowing whether this is true or not, but since we grew up on everything from Orwell to the Matrix, we kinda just assumed it already.

What’s particularly disturbing, however, is that TreoCentral.com reporting this makes us think the US Government is tracking Treo users as well.

Why?

Is it for anthropology, like when the Discovery Channel finds some lost, never before contacted Amazonian tribe and wants to study their behavior? Is it that they think tax dollars are well spent analyzing a people untouched by mobile technology since 1999?

Dunno. But we sure hope Dr. Jones doesn’t get a shunning for his troubles.

And in No Other News

HTC finally got around to still not releasing their HTC Touch Diamond, which early reviews say just crackles on EDGE, given its lack of support for North American HSPA. Not a problem though, as it seems the OS is slow enough that you can barely notice…

Points for consistency, but you had to know slapping an extra layer of OS on top of WinMob and then chipping down the radio was putting the advertising spin before the handset, right?

There could be plenty of reasons why iPhone market share has slipped. For one, the shortages could be a big part of the puzzle here, people aren’t buying iPhones because there aren’t any iPhones to buy. Another reason could possibly be educated consumers who realize that the iPhone 3G is imminent thus delaying their purchase. Not to kick the iPhone when it’s down, but the price and carrier-locked nature of the iPhone could also play a role in its diminished market share.

Regardless, the iPhone is still driving smartphone interest and increasing the market’s sales and its competitors are posting lower market share than a year ago. My personal take? I want to see device-by-device sales numbers. The iPhone is a one man army against multiple fronts from RIM and Palm yet still manages to be more than competitive. Narrow down the numbers and specifying the models could paint an entirely different picture.

Or maybe not. iPhone 3G to the rescue? What do you think?

Read

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

In this week’s edition: Windows Se7en, Great Googley Android, India’s circling the RIM, the Treo 800w guest commentary, and no other news on Safari for Samsung…

Windows Se7en

Microsoft is still the only real game on the planet, especially when it comes to business, what with their whopping 90%+ share of the market. And as Bill Gates rides off into retirement, he can be justifiably proud at how close he came to his dream of a computer on every desktop and in every home. In that light, his swan song with longtime crony and internet “monkeyboy” dance phenom Steve Ballmer at the “D” All Things Digital was particularly poignant this year, especially given that they chose to use the event to showcase their next generation OS to the public for the very first time.

What groundbreaking new features did they show off? What killer new technology was highlighted? Was it WinFS, the revolutionary all-registry all-the-time file system they’ve been promising since the code-name “Cairo” vaporware of yore? Was it MinWin, the ultra-small, ultra-modular kernel that will return some long absent agility to the platform? Was it a complete revamp of the horrible mishmash that passes for an API stack, cleansing 8-bit fossils and 16-bit artifacts, providing something uniform for the 64-bit future? Was it a renewed focus on their core business users, streamlining bloat and minimizing eye candy in favor of virtualized compatibility and blazingly fast architectures moving forward?

Nah uh.

It was 10 finger multi-touch paint. 10 @#$%ing finger multi-touch paint! Are you kidding me?! From the team that brought us the big @$$ table, we get nothing of the future promised us for decades by Microsoft, nothing by way of making up for the titanic PR disaster that has been Vista, nothing that may convince consumers who are routing towards the Mac in ever increasing droves, and businesses who are stubbornly clinging to the terribly outdated XP or jurassic 2000, to hold out for a better tomorrow. No. We get 10 @#$%ing finger multi-touch paint and yet another in the endless string of failed Gatesian prognostications about interfaces, inks, and whatever else makes him think tablets have been a booming success for over a decade. (Word to Bill – the only thing even remotely resembling a tablet that’s even approached a modicum of cultural penetration is — wait for it — the iPhone, and it wasn’t made by Microsoft).

But what does Windows Se7en have to do with Smartphones, you may ask? (After all, WMExperts.com thought it barely worth a mock-mention). Unlike Apple, aren’t Microsoft’s mobile offerings similar only in that both have the word “Windows” grafted in front of them? Nope. They’re also similar in terms of the minds driving them, the vision of the future those minds have, and the experience those visions seek to bring to us, the end users.

And right now both Windows Se7en and WinMob Se7en are driven by minds so drunk off their collectives posteriors that their futuristic visions are entirely consumer by 10 @#$%ing finger multi-touch paint.

Great Google-y Moogley: Android Gets Slightly Less Vapory!

Microsoft loses money on search, which is pretty much just a way to glue eyeballs to pages so said eyeballs can be blinded by flashing neon “hit the bouncing monkey!” banners. By contrast, Google’s bouncing monkey banners net them somewhere near 8 kazillion dollars a year. Likewise, while Microsoft’s busy showing off a 2010 desktop OS that really, truly hopes to be competitive with Apple’s 2007 mobile OS, Google is readying an iClone that may just ship this year!

Confession: We thought the Google Android demo was right skippy. Caveat: We though the exact same thing when Steve Jobs did it at Macworld 2007.

Memo to Google: We know your CEO, Dr. Evil… er… Eric sits on the Apple board of directors. We’ve heard he recuses himself from iPhone discussions to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Here’s a thought: how about avoiding the reality of one as well?

Apple is all about the paradigm shift. The command-line in your home with the Apple II. The GUI on your desktop with the Mac. Multi-touch in your hand with the iPhone. It’s what Apple does. The gloss, the shine — the boom.

You need to embrace what Google does. All white screens with nothing but search boxes. That’s what Google does. Forget about the overcrowded iClone market and embrace that. That’s your niche. That’s your Zen.

Circling the RIM: India’s Never-Ending Ultimatum

Yeah, we thought this had been resolved too. Seems India’s still demanding and RIM is still claiming it has a headache. Or whatever. Crackberry.com somehow retains the energy and interest to cover it. We just can’t stop snickering over the fact that it’s the Network Operations Center (NOC), pusher of all pushers, single-point-of-snooping, that let’s India push RIM so hard to begin with.

Big brother FTW!

So You Think You Can Smartphone?

Okay, so we’ve been giving the Treo 600… er… 800w a bit of a hard time around here. Fair point. Certainly opinions must vary, and much like we had special guest quotes from Windows Super Siter Paul Thurrott a few posts back, in the spirit of equal time we turn this segment over to TreoCentral uber-editor Dieter Bohn. Go ahead, boss. Tell us all how great the 600 v3 is:

Look at it. It looks cheap. It looks cheap. I’m like secretly hoping that this isn’t the final casing. That they have a secret casing and this is just the stuff they’re sending out to the beta testers. [...] It doesn’t look professional. I mean recessed screens are so 2003. Whatever. Right? [...] The way it’s recessed looks chintzy. The soft buttons underneath the screen are just sort of randomly there. Nothing about it speaks like… It doesn’t speak like… to being solid or futuristic. [...] A business phone should project an aura of power. [...] This is just not good looking. I’ve been saying for a long time now that this is the year you’ve got to cut Palm a ton of slack, and I’ve been cutting Palm a ton of slack, but this looks like cr@p. [...] It does not look great. This needs to look great. They should have one great phone this year and this does not look great. This looks the opposite of great. [...] I tell you what, [when This Week in Smartphone Schadenfreude put up an image of the Treo 600 as the Treo 800w] I didn’t notice. Somebody had to point out the joke to me.

Score!

For those truly interested in the complete, uncensored, Treo 800w curbing, check out the podcast (spoiler: in the name of all things merciful and nostalgic, Mike pulls Dieter off and holds him at bay until the Smithsonian can show up and cart off the old girl’s mangled, circuit board-strewn corpse. NOT for the squeamish).

And in No Other News

Speaking of maulings, some Executard or PR flack over at Samsung, in a fit of drunkful-thinking, shot up a release stating the notly anticipated L870 S60 slider (honestly, do they pull these names off of pseudo-random password generators?) would have not just a WebKit browser, but the full on iPhone Mobile Safari king-of-all-mobile browsers. Absent, you know, an OS, UI, or the basic design and engineering skills to support it.

Riiiiiiigggghhhhhttttt…

Long Live the King

Before we get started with the other folk’s take on the iPhone, it’s good to remember why the iPhone is the best device out there. Mike Overbo, Editor Emeritus, realizes that the iPhone isn’t perfect but has come to believe that the iPhone’s future is the biggest reason he switched. In this article, he takes a look at each device that participated in the Round Robin (Blackberry Curve, AT&T Tilt, and Treo 680) and gives an in-depth look at what’s good, bad, and where the iPhone can learn.

Read on for the rest of the links!

First Look, Final Review from Crackberry’s Kevin

Crackberry has been the butt of a lot of TiPb’s jokes/articles recently because it’s hilarious to poke fun of its shortcomings but honestly, the reality of it is: RIM is the Number 1 Smartphone Maker and they have proven that their devices matter to their users, therefore their users opinion’s matter to the rest of the Smartphone Industry. Kevin’s take on the iPhone is that it should have been called the iGadget and that the iPhone is great at everything the Blackberry is terrible at and vice versa.

First Look, Final Review from Jennifer Chappell of TreoCentral

Hey, Palm still exists? We kid, we kid. One of her biggest gripes about the iPhone was the lack of 3rd party apps, which is fair coming from a Palm user’s incredibly vast software selection. Luckily, that problem will be solved next month! Aside from that, she found the iPhone to be a great device–awesome UI, sweet web browsing, and just loved the overall experience. 

First Look, Final Review from WMexperts (and now TiPb’s) Dieter Bohn

Hey, looks like our good friend/editor has grown a bit and joined the greener/TiPb side since getting his hands on the iPhone. He realized that the iPhone is completely different from the Windows Mobile platform and came up with a hilariously great analogy.

Basically, my week with the iPhone was like a week at a posh resort – I wasn’t as connected as I usually am, I didn’t get very much done, but damn if I didn’t enjoy the view.

Overall, the Round Robin was a great idea to get each user community excited about another device. It gave the readers of each site well-informed looks of the devices that stepped away from the usual fanboy (or fangirl) speak. Hopefully, we can provide you guys with another Round Robin later this year with the iPhone 3G, Blackberry Bold, Sony XPERA X1, and Palm…wait the Treo 850 is a new device? I swear I saw that thing 5 years ago. Again, I kid. I kid.

No need for double-takes. You didn’t click the wrong link. Just breath, dig deeply, and stick with me for a moment. Yes, you really are still reading the iPhone blog.

For a 1.0 device, the iPhone knocked the ball — if not out of the park — soundly into the fence, and sent a complacent industry fumbling and flurrying to catch it. But no device, not even from Apple, could get everything perfect the first time at bat. Now, I’ve pretty much staked my turf here by playfully poking a little bit of fun at the competition but, truth be known, when they’re not wasting their time on iClones every platform and handset has some great — even killer — features to recommend it. In that spirit, here’s my top 5 list of what Apple should seriously consider stealing… er… learning from the competition if they want to hit a home run with 2.0 and beyond…

5. Blackberry’s Email Management

RIM is the undeniably #1 in smartphone market share, but they come in at #5 on my list for the simple reason that, while what they do well they do phenomenally well, as a platform I think that very maturity has led to little innovation, and hence little (and narrow) potential to mine for iPhone improvements.

That said, they are the email monster for a reason. With one major caveat, nobody does email bigger or better than Blackberry and while Twitter, IM, VoIP, video chat, and other technologies old and new battle it out for communication domination, email remains the mainstay of the mainstream, business and consumer alike, and in that regard Apple has something important to learn from Blackberry.

What Blackberry Does Right

Blackberry does email to the point where the two are almost synonymous. Push notwithstanding, when it comes to managing email, the Blackberry is a beast. It’s simply the best there is at what it does.

What Apple Could Do Better

RIM uses a centralized Network Operations Center (NOC) to handle all Blackberry messaging everywhere, providing true, near-instantaneous “push” to thousands and thousands of Crackberrians each and every moment. But here’s that major caveat: it’s a single point of failure. Outages, from carrier to regional to network-wide have increasingly plagued the service, as have privacy and security concerns.

With the upcoming 2.0 update, the iPhone will support the ActiveSync “push” technology Apple licensed from Microsoft. ActiveSync eschews the “one NOC to manage it all” and instead simulates “push” between local Exchange Server and mobile client — in this case, the iPhone. If someone else’s Exchange Server — even Microsoft’s in Redmond — goes down, it effects your iPhone service not one bit.

That just leaves the iPhone MobileMail app itself. Fairly easy to set up and use, it still remains a challenge to manage multiple accounts and messages. Better mass-mail handling, especially for important functions like delete, is imperative (and is rumored to be coming with 2.0 as well).

Beyond that, however, better organization is needed. A single, unified inbox, like the one on the desktop Mail.app would be a great first step, followed by the ability to hide selected, seldom-used IMAP folders to clear up some clutter.

Speaking of IMAP, since MobileMail can “see” IMAP folders for Calendar, Apple Mail To Do, etc. better integration with the iPhone Calendar and Notes application (and dare we dream — Task app?), seems natural given what’s been done in OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Mail.app.

And since the spammers seem intent on mail-bombing the internet back to the stone age, some client-side anti-spam filters would also be most welcome.

Taken together, these improvements would go a long way to making the iPhone king of the next email generation.

4. Palm’s Click Counting

We want powerful, we want beautiful, and — dangit! — we want drop dead easy to use. Great design is functional design, great user experience is intuitive, almost transparent experience. Apple nails this to a large degree. I’ve said it before, but my two-and-a-half year old godson can pretty much navigate his way around the iPhone, from pictures to camera to notes (his ABCs) to calculator (his 123s) which unbelievable ease and accomplishment. But there remain a few problem areas.

Palm OS, dinosaur that it is, has legendary ease of use. Rumor has it that early Palm developers, like co-founder Jeff Hawkins, literally counted each and every “click” it took for a user to accomplish a task, and did everything possible to optimize and minimize that number. It has failed miserably to keep up with the times, but in a few key ways (no pun intended!) it’s still timeless.

What Palm Does Right

Palm understands moving around a mobile device like nobody else. Almost every task can be accomplished with just a few touches, clicks, or key presses. Brian has already covered the ease of entering appointment/calendar data on in the constantly-saved model of the Palm OS, and I’d add past innovations like photo speed dialing (which seems a natural for the iPhone, and ironically was a Palm innovation for their first Windows Mobile device, and requires a 3rd party add on for Palm’s own OS!). TreoCentral.com no doubt has many more examples. Though perhaps not as practical on an all-touch device, even little things like typing to begin a contact search or call are all time-saving techniques mastered by the Zen of Palm, and a spirit the iPhone could easily learn.

What Apple Could do Better

In addition to being so old its joints creak and crack every time it turns around, the Palm OS lacks the power to deliver a modern user experience, and bizarrely lacks standardization even across its own device platform (besides the aforementioned lack of photo dialing on the Palm side, GSM and CDMA phones have sported different dialing apps, some modernized while others are left to languish in whatever layer of hell 1990 monochrome aliased bitmaps are condemned).

Adding photo dialing to the iPhone would be trivial. All the Quartz and Core Graphics/Animation services are there, just begging for an Apple take.

Likewise improved calendar entry: tapping on an empty slot should bring up a New Event editor the same way tapping on a filled one brings up a viewer. And data should be saved automatically unless specifically cancelled. The mobile world is both more prone to interruptions and less forgiving of them, after all.

The sideways flick currently used to move between photos, Weather app cities, and other information surfaces could be leveraged more widely as well to speed up functionality. Let me flick between album lists while a song is playing, or email folders from one account to the next.

Digging down into, and backing up out of stacked screens is so iPod Classic.

3. Windows Mobile/HTC Speeds, Feeds, and Divergent Needs

As any WMExpert would tell you, Windows Mobile — in Microsoft’s most favoritist model — is not a product but a platform. So, I’m adding in stalwart hardware manufacturer HTC to round out the reference. Before we get too deeply into that, however, it’s worth remembering that the Microsoft model makes for an almost diametrically opposed situation to Apple’s. At the time of this writing, there is only 1 iPhone model, from 1 manufacturer, on 1 US-based carrier. Last count, there were 3.2 gazillion Windows Mobile phones across a plethora of OS variations (standard, smartphone… er… purple?) and innumerable manufacturing SKU’s not only from HTC, but Palm, Motorola, and even Symbian co-founder Sony Ericsson, among others, which run on every carrier and it’s multitude of resellers.

But Apple’s end-to-end control of the device, while giving it an undeniable edge in stability and user experience, comes at the cost of variety and individual configurability.

Back in the dark days of tech support we used to joke that if you were in Mac support, every question had a simple “yes, here’s how…” or “no, sorry” answer, while if you were in Windows support, every question inevitably started with “maybe” and led to hours and hours of digging, tweaking, and testing. And in many ways, the same holds true with the iPhone today: One feature set and a limited range of settings. And in very narrow ways, that leaves room for Apple to learn something from Windows Mobile.

What Windows Mobile Does Right

Again, I’m including HTC in this equation, and from that standpoint, they deserve credit for upping the game with a VGA quality screen and a release schedule that allows them to continuously field the latest and greatest mobile processors.

On the Windows Mobile side proper, the beast is so infinitely tweak-able it might as well be a hobbyist kit. Dig deep enough, and you can find settings for how you’d like your settings, and settings for those settings as well.

What Apple Could Do Better

While my heart remains set on a Nano-esque 202dpi screen (the current iPhone is 160dpi) bringing 720p to the mobile world, I would realistically expect VGA’s 640×480 in the next revision. The iPhone, with the video-out cables, is already capable of pumping 640×480 to your TV, why not to the iPhone screen? And while a yearly, single product release cycle doesn’t give much room for proc bumps, going beefy from the start, and getting the new chips early like Apple does with their laptops and desktops, would keep up the cutting-edge tradition and reputation, and help see devices healthily though their annual life cycles. (This might even be something proprietary chips via the recent PA Semi purchase could help with…)

On the configuration side, while Windows Mobile has ‘em, they’ve also left them pretty much scattered every which where but under under a unified Settings area, which is precisely where the iPhone sorts them. However, though its certainly understandable that Apple is focusing on the casual user, surfacing some lower-level options a la Windows Mobile, organized and implemented with Apple’s fit and finish, would go a long way to appeasing power users who currently turn to jailbreaking in a desperate attempts to get closer to the metal. On the Mac side, there are 3rd party apps that create GUIs for otherwise Terminal-only settings, and while I’m not suggesting (though maybe pipe dreaming a little…) that Apple should provide an official way to get Terminal up on the iPhone, an Advanced button that allowed for more options and deeper tweaking would be a happy medium for many users.

(What, you thought I’d beat the dead horse of cut and paste?)

2. Nokia’s Mobile Video Creation

“I’m streaming live right now, come chat!” is pure Twitter bacon (like spam, but you opted in to it). Many tech pundits, who are also iPhone users, love the Web 2.1 ability to stream video from anywhere and everywhere, whether it’s Robert Scoble shoving a camera in front of economic powerhouses, or the infinitely better looking Cali Lewis demoing Wii fit for the good of the masses, or the first lady of Apple (and self-confessed Jobstalker) iJustine zooming down the highway, live streaming video, especially live streaming mobile video, is the latest IT thing.

Many (most?) of these bleeding edge technojournalists are also Apple fans and devoted iPhone users. So, the fact that they’re all using N95′s to stream their mobile videos shows that Apple could learn something from Nokia.

What Nokia Does Right

Say what you want about Nokia’s Soviet-military design aesthetic and their rather pathetic North American release schedules, they know how to throw a camera at a smart phone. The N95 sports a massive 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens and DVD(ish) caliber video capture. This compares to the rapidly obsoleting 2 megapixel cam on the iPhone, which also fails to enjoy any Apple-provided video capture (which means jailbreaking and loading unsupported third party apps are your only current option).

So, while Apple and the iPhone’s built-in iPod rules the roost when it comes to consuming mobile media, the N95 can’t be touched when it comes to creating that media on the go. This is why all those aforementioned iPhone toting blogerati, when they clog my Twitter feed with their live streaming announcements, are streaming live via the N95.

What Apple Could Do Better

There have been rumors of an upcoming iChat Mobile application, and even video conferencing, and that’s a start. Apple, however, stands alone in 360 degree spherical integration, and while they don’t have as massive a footprint in most of them the way Microsoft might, they at least have a toe in all of them, from hardware, to software, to services, from production, to processing, to deployment, to consumption. You can fire up Final Cut Pro on your iMac, create a movie, upload it to .Mac and sync a copy to your iPhone. Imagine that power harnessed around mobile media creation?

Right now, QIK and Nokia need each other to produce streaming video (while the N95′s battery lasts, that is). Imagine an iPhone with a decent camera and video capture that could stream live via, or send recorded clips to, .Mac gallery. And imagine if Apple took the much-needed step of enabling support for UstreamTV, stickam, Flickr, and YouTube.

Coupled with seamless integration with the Mac, iMovie 08, and higher end apps, and — BOOM — the king of mobile media consumption becomes the king of mobile media creation as well.

Everyone could be a life-caster.

1. Android’s Cloud and Location Based Services

I know. Android is still somewhere between vaporware and the eternal beta tag that hounds so many of Google’s initiatives. How could they be my #1? Here’s the thing: with a few notable exceptions (we’ll get to those in a paragraph or two), they’re batting nearly 1000 on all “cloud services” right now. And the cloud is the future.

What are cloud services? Most of us run applications locally on our computers. We buy software, install it, and use it to save files on our hard drive. Cloud services change that game entirely. They run applications on servers (often huge data centers) that we access via our browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox), or through a dedicated client (iTunes, Sidebar Objects, Dashboard Widgets, etc.). Instead of buying them, we get them for free, sponsored by advertising, or via paid subscription. And instead of saving files locally, we have the option of saving them on the same servers (and data centers) the services themselves run on. We may lose some potential privacy and control, but we gain the advantage of multiple backups scattered over many geographies to preserve our data. If you think this doesn’t sound too different than the old server-client model, or the Sun and Oracle predictions of the network being the computer, you’re right. Just on a far greater scale.

What are location-based services? According to Google, the next gold rush. It’s tying the cloud in to your current location, based on WiFi, and better yet — GPS coordinates.

Apple provides some of these services already, with .Mac mail, iDisk storage, .Mac galleries, Back-to-my-Mac, and Sync, and rumors indicate they may be amping it up with IMAP IDLE-style “push” email and PIM sync, and maybe even a complete revamp with the next release, but they still could learn a lot from Google.

What Google Does Right

Confession: I’m a .Mac subscriber. Yes, it’s buggy and overpriced, but Back-to-my-Mac and the Sync features alone were enough to lure me in. Nevertheless, Google owns this space. They’re predicted to earn more than Microsoft’s Windows + Office monopoly soon, and some say that’s only the beginning. Indeed, the entire raison-d’être for Android is to give away an OS in hopes of getting Google’s services onto more phones and thus, into more hands.

They want you to meet an old friend over one of their Open Social powered networks, use their email to contact the old friend, their search to find a great diner near the both of you, their calendar to schedule a lunch, their Docs suite to get some work done while you’re waiting, their Blogger to write up the event, and their Picasa gallery to store pictures of your reunion. (All with tasteful text and banner ads, tuned per your interests and location, served up along with your results and data)

What’s more, many of their cloud services allow for easy collaboration. You can share your calendar, work on your spreadsheet along with some colleagues logged in back at the office, and publish everything online for the world to see.

And the most important piece — indeed the missing link up until recently — Google Gears allows for offline persistence; you can keep using many of your cloud apps and cloud-stored data even when you don’t have a WiFi or cell connection. If you have to get on a plane to see your old friend, you can keep typing away, and when you land everything will sync back up.

What Apple Could Do Better

Where Google strikes out is integration. Their offerings are a disjointed and sometimes disoriented mishmash of homebrews and buyouts, with nowhere near the cohesive user experience or inter-offering leverage Apple could provide. Until recently, some services didn’t even work under a single login. There are also huge holes in their offerings, like Amazon S3- or Microsoft Skydrive-like storage (yes, you can rig up gDrive, but I’m talking official offerings here).

Apple already has some of these holes filled (iDisk), but are missing many more pieces themselves. There are suggestions Apple doesn’t “get” social networking (or doesn’t want to get it). But an easy to use blogging service built into .Mac and the iPhone would be an excellent start. And given Apple’s existing “Cult of Mac”, a social network tied into that admittedly snobbish demographic would be an easy sell as well. Tie it into the location-based services (opt-in, of course) and suddenly the cloud network takes on physicality as well. Instead of “Steve’s Twittering: Meet up at the Mothership after Keynote”, Steve can see how many of his friends and contacts are already at Keynote, and tying into search, calendar, IM, and other services could make for a very easy workflow to set up the meet.

This brings me back to the integration. The way Contacts flows into the Apple client for Google Maps gives a hint at how it should “just work”. The iPhone Maps app in general shows that Apple can make hybrid client/cloud software better than anyone on the planet. Imagine that leveraged across the device?

Get an email with a spreadsheet, and instead of just a preview, you could launch iWork Online, make your edits, and have them available to all team (or family — Apple’s consumer focus!) members instantly. Still working when you get on that plane? Newer versions of WebKit promise offline modes with database support for just such an eventuality, and WebKit is the foundation of the iPhone’s MobileSafari browser, and much of its data rendering in general).

And once the iPhone scales, and iPhone data starts to get aggregated and leveraged (with firm privacy and security policies!) for the benefit of other iPhone users, watch out. Today’s social networks and sharing proof-of-concepts will looks positively anemic.

Apple (or an Apple/Google alliance even?) could get an immediate edge going into the next great paradigm shift in computer technology.

Conclusion

So there you have them: better Blackberry-style email management, Treo-centric focus on click counting, Windows Mobile-ish configurability, Nokia inspired mobile video production, and Google Android beating cloud services are my top 5 things the iPhone could learn from the competition.

Is Apple already thinking along these lines? We’ll have to wait for WWDC — and likely Macworld 2009 — to know for sure. How about you? If Apple could take 5 things from the competition to improve YOUR iPhone, what would they be?

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

BREAKING! RIM to Preemptively Release bbTablet!

We don’t break fake news here often, so when we do, you know it’s going to be big — and dare we say — bold. No, scratch that, BOLDER!

Keenly aware that Apple may be releasing the long-anticipated iTablet at WWDC this June, and fed up with being called on for blatantly copying the design of the iPhone, RIM has decided to strike first this time and rush out a tablet of their very own: the bbTablet, aka Blackberry 1200, aka BOLDER!

Crackberry.com probably has one on order from eBay as we speak, but it’s tiPb that’s scored the exclusive specs: ultra-wide 1920×320 “Lawrence of Arabia” screen, OSish 4.6, and full desktop size Qwerty keyboard! Take that, Apple!

Mike “Deadpan Funnyman” Lazaridis, when asked for fake comment, had this to say about what makes RIM’s device the “iTablet Killer”:

Full desktop Qwerty keyboards. I’m sorry, it really is. I’m totally not making this up. Totally. People don’t like screens. They really don’t. Makes them squint. And read. Totally. They’re getting tired of looking at their old tablets and they’re coming into the stores and they want to be able to do, like, Facebook and they want to be able to do, like, instant messaging and they want to be able to do, like, e-mail and they ask for those features thinking that they’re going to get another tablet, and I tell them they don’t need screens for those things, they need keyboards, big @$$ keyboards. Totally. They need the (BlackBerry) BOLDER because it’s the best devices for doing those kinds of activities. And so what is the defining factor? The keyboard. I mean, if the suits would let me, I’d ship without a screen at all. 100% keyboard. Totally.

RIM Bends Over (Backwards) for India

Sadly, and shamefully, this is news of the unfake kind. We’ve covered the seemingly endless RIM vs. India debacle before (where by debacle we mean “India says they want to spy on all Blackberry traffic” and “RIM says want fries with that?”) and now, according to Crackberry.com, it looks to finally be resolved. So what was the sticking point? Did India want a way to reassure citizens they were restricting their surveillance to dully processed, court-certified “people of interest”? Nope. Did RIM fight for the privacy of their user base? Not so much either. Seems all RIM wanted was some legal @$$ cover in case, you know, giving India the keys to their digital vault resulted in personal data being made public.

Jeez. Ya think?

So India now joins China and Singapore as countries RIM actively helps violate the privacy of their citizens? Nice! Unless you’re one of the citizens… But it isn’t like you’re not about to get a heckova better option soon anyway…

The Worst of All Worlds?

Corporate crony stuck with your company’s massive overspending on a RIM server and legacy dependence on Microsoft monopolyware? Desperate — willing to do anything! — for some small sip of ice water in big, buggy server hell?

Okay, just DON’T DO THIS!

Not since Sony Ericsson’s Flashenjavastein Monster has anything so hideous blighted the mobile world. (Note to Interwebs, why must you upload images we can never unexperience?)

If you want an iPhone, get an iPhone. If you want Vista, go tell Steve Ballmer you’re the one. In either case, when it comes to these “themes”, in the words of Casey and Dieter: EPIC NO!

Now GSM Can Has Outdated Treo’s 2!

Not so fast, AT&T and Sprint users! Been making fun of the Palm 800w inflicted on the CDMA world? Well, it’s karma time! TreoCentral.com and WMExperts.com have double-teamed-up to bring a little payback in the form of the newly leaked Treo 850! That’s right, 50 more Treo points wrapped up in the same 600-ish package, albeit with a sure-to-win-innovation-of-the-decade new feature: flush screen!

Hey Palm, 2003 called and they would kindly like their device back.

And in No Other News

It’s happening just like we said it would: Apple has set the bar so high, other manufacturers are now ducking under it. Witness Nokia. Now, if you live in North America like we do, you might think Nokia is just that great Norfinwedish furniture store — you know, where you pick up stuff on the cheap and then break a thumb and die cursing trying to put it together yourself? Well, apparently in the rest of the world they sell smartphones (we were just as surprised, honest). We might of known that, of course, if their US market share hadn’t free-fallen from 20% to 7% in the last two years (not coincidentally the time frame between the N95′s launch in Europe to the last neck-bearded blog post vaguely remembering it still hadn’t really seen the light of day in the US…)

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

[Note: Due to the dust settling from our mega-merger -- and our subsequent allergies -- we’re keeping it short this week. Just the low-lights.]

Crackberry Cracks the Net

Big week down Crackberry.com way as none other than Kevin himself plastered the interwebs — from Daring Fireball to Engadget to Gizmodo — with his exclusive videos, reviews, and… video reviews of one of the most hotly anticipated handsets of the year.

Or so we thought.

Nice try, Crackberry. While the elegant chrome bezel and glossy black facade almost had us fooled, the huge, honking tic-tactile keyboard kicked our aesthetic back to reality.

So what device did Crackberry.com break the interwebs (and likely Kevn’s paypal account) for? Confession: they lost us at keyboard, so — shrug — Treo 400?

Assault and Blackberry

Celebrity publicists, eager to meet the needs of the Paris Lohan’s of the world, often seem to karmically torture their torturous clients with whatever RIM product Amazon will pay them to take (while expensing it at full price, no doubt…)

But what about the poor celebrities that have to use the tiny screened, tiny keyboarded, media-challenged monsters? What are they supposed to do?

Turns out one got so angry she tried to destroy her hated handset by bashing it (repeatedly?) into a Brooklyn neighbor.

No jail time for the celeb, Crackberry.com tells us. The Blackberry? Authorities are reportedly seeking the recycle penalty.

Attack of the iClones

Our special Wait-a-Thon edition covering the HTC Touch Diamond, and posts on the Philips x800 and the Sprint Instinct $100 million ad campaign show that some carriers and manufacturers can, by throwing vast amounts of money down the pit, make a sixth generation Windows Mobile handset flounder and ultimately still fail to copy the inaugural iPhone. Point taken.

Now how about taking this point — and all that money, engineering skill, and software architecture experience — and making a great Windows Mobile handset that is, you know, like not totally ashamed to be Windows Mobile?

Windows Seat on the TyTn’ic

The good: WMExperts.com lets it be known that HTC will finally fix the crippled video drivers that have been plaguing TyTn II owners since the dawn of time (or, at least, since the dawn of them buying the disastrous device).

The bad: They probably won’t be fixing it for any version anyone is likely to own, including the AT&T Tilt.

The ugly: HTC won’t be fixing the crippled drivers pandemic to any of their other devices either.

Nope, they’re too busy claiming the shoddy performance of their grafted-on TouchFLO interface on the Diamond iClone will be fixed in a future update. Credibility much?

Super-Size Your Centro!

With over a million Centro’s served, Palm finally asks the next logical question: want fries with that?

Yup, TreoCentral.com says official Centro branded accessories are on the way. Or more of them. Or just a mediocre cradle and audio adapter. Or something. But at least now every bargain-basement, ancestral-generation would-be smartphone neophyte can get the combo.

Look, More Palm News!

We can’t believe it either, but we actually have two (2!) minor Palm items this week. And speaking of minor Palm items, it looks like both the 800w and 850v (or 500z or whoknowswhat?) will see the cold, cruel light of day some time this year (and not, as many thought, flux-capacitor-like back in 2001 where their design seems frozen…)

And In No Other News

In apparent retaliation for the iPhone, and the sense of childlike wonder it is now threatening to restore around the world, those Norfindwedish fiends at Nokia are now retaliating by bringing more of their hyper-powered, Soviet designed handsets to North America, including the N95, a handset so costly it made Steve Balmer briefly consider picking up a relatively inexpensive iPhone…

What’s next, the similarly military sounding E66 and E71? (Or were those old Epson dot-matrix designations…?)

Death by utilitarianism. Fiends.

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

Official: RIM’s Finally Flipped!

What, you thought we’d go straight to the outage double-header? Come on. While we certainly agree there’s no better time to hit a mobile than when it’s (service is) down, even we have some small modicum of mercy. (And by mercy we mean it happens so often it’s not really considered news anymore…)

So we’re switching gears, just as Crackberry.com tells us RIM has flipped out. Good news, RIM has taken a short break from trying to iClone the Apple iPhone. Bad news, they’ve decided to clone the Moto RAZR instead… StarTac much?

Seriously though, we applaud diversity and innovation, and can’t wait to see Blackberry’s next exciting form factor. The brick? The suitcase? The rotary-dial booth? Sarcastic minds want to know!

Storm Warnings

Remember that short iCloning break we mentioned earlier? Neither does Blackberry, apparently. Not content with merely copying the iPhones silver bezel and rounded slab factor, Crackberry.com tells us they’ve now got their sites set on the touch-screen too.

Known as the Storm — or not — RIM affectionately refers to it as the Apple Killer because, as we all know, being able to murder fruit falls right below HTML email on the feature list. Box, consider yourself checked!

No specs or date or anything but desperate promissory vapor yet, though. When exactly did RIM become Microsoft?

Speaking of Microsoft and iClones…

As Redmond gets the Mobile OS X 1.0 competitive WinZuneMob 7.0 ready for beta sometime around two-thousand-and-never, hardware partner HTC is picking up the iClone slack with not one but two little “Inspired by Apple in Cupertino” numbers.

First up, running version 6.6.6 (or 6.1, it’s so hard to keep track!), is the Sony Ericsson branded XPeria (proudly sporting a VISTAperia Capable sticker, no doubt). WMExperts.com expects it to ship mid-September, and in typical Windows fashion it will try to compete with the similarly expected iPhone 2.0 by throwing in every feature they can think of, including a slide-out kitchen sink.

Second up is the Diamond Touch or Touch Pro or Out of Touch or whatever millionth derivative of the Touch trademark they’re overcompensating with next. Similar specs (though smaller screen — c’mon HTC, we know if you try really hard you can iClone Mini your way into a postage-stamp 720p!) hampered by the same OS.

Looks like it might just be rocking a “squircle” control there, doesn’t it? Could this be the fabled Zune Phone? We’re one Monday morning Monkey Boy dance away from knowing for sure…

Microsoft Kills the Digital Stars

Does MSN Music play on WinVistaZuneMob devices? We don’t really know, since we don’t really know anyone who uses MSN Music… or WinVistaZuneMob. But if they did, and you do, they won’t for much longer.

Proving once again how Digital Rights Management (DRM) is all about enhancing consumer enjoyment (TM, RIAA), Microsoft has announced it will soon be enhancing the amount of time consumers will enjoy no longer listening to their MSN purchased music.

As of August 2008, turns out MSN Music will be turning off, meaning no more authorizations. Sure, you can keep on using any machine you already authorized, provided you never, ever, change it or its OS. (No worries there, though, hey Vista sales numbers?)

Hmm, maybe this is why Microsoft tossed the “PlaysForSure” name last December. After all, can’t call it “PlaysForSure” if it doesn’t anymore, right? So what did they rebrand the new, non-working name to? Oh, right… “Certified for Windows Vista”…

All Access Pass

Typical bonanza week for Palm news…

So, anyway, Dieter Bohn (the man who totes more smart phones than the FCC) caught up with Access, formerly Palm Source, formerly Palm, the makers of Palm OS Garnet, (which has literally shipped on every Treo since the stone age), Palm OS Cobalt, (which has literally never shipped), and now the Access Linux Platform (which is only taking slightly longer to develop than Longhorn at this point).

His conclusion? Things are going better than he previously thought. (Of course, any long time listener of the Treo Central Treo Cast knows how low a bar that was to crawl over…)

And In No Other News…

Remember last week:

Our Norfinwedish friends over at Nokia may have convinced Sony BMG to join Universal Music in offering the “unlimited” Comes-With-Music-And-Hefty-Price-Bump market-fart. Maybe. It’s been delayed until mid-2008, probably to get the DRM working extra-poorly. At least that’s all Engadget can Google-translate for now. No doubt they’re preoccupied getting a post ready for when the service goes bye-bye, the DRM locks down, and everyone’s stuck with “unlimited” Can’t-Be-Authorized-Again-Silence…

Sounds even better after the MSN Music debacle, doesn’t it?

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

Outages Online

CrackBerry.com’s near-constant updates on Blackberry outages not enough for you? Need the latest, greatest, up-to-date-est news on RIM’s downtime in near real-time? Well, apparently so does the guy behind DataOutages.com. (Yes, we realize the domain name doesn’t explicitly convey that the site tracks RIM/Blackberry outages, but it’s with extra special schadenfreude we point out there really isn’t any other kind, b’okay?)

Amazon Pays People to Order Blackberries

We knew the mindset was shifting to Apple, the cool kids were all Cupertino-bound, the status simple was no longer cheap-plastic black but aircraft-grade aluminum, but — wow…

According to Crackberry.com, Amazon was actually paying people to take Blackberries off their hands last week. You read right. $75 big reasons to stick yourself with a tiny screen, tic-tactile keyboard, and all the outages you can eat.

Yeah, still too expensive for us as well…

India or Indiana?

No update on the great Indian crackberry crackdown this week, but in related news American GSM RIM-bounds have discovered their MyCingular.BlackBerry.net email is now being blocked — nay, permanently disabled — as well. Crackberry.com claims it’s some pre-announced corporate branding transition thingy-thangy. Sure. C’mon. Like they couldn’t try to come up with an even somewhat believable cover story?

Someone steals the White House Blackberry recycling box the very same week and we’re supposed to just accept it’s a coincidence? (Good thing they’d already switched to iPhones. Yeesh…)

Balmer: Can Has Moto Q for $99?

Yes you can, and I’ll cede the soap-box for a moment so John Gruber can tell you how that works out:

Motorola’s quarterly results: 27.4 million phones sold and $7.45 billion in revenue. But the bottom line? A $194 million loss. What matters is profit; market share and revenue only matter insofar as they lead to making money. Motorola sold 16 times more phones than Apple for at least 8 times more revenue — but is there a person on the planet who would trade Apple’s phone business for Motorola’s?

Epic failure there, Steve. No achievement points for you. What? You’ve got the RROD anyway?

Karma.

Hit up WMExperts.com for the grisly details…

Palm Dumping Unlocked 750s?

Massive markdowns on the ancient handset, at least according to TreoCentral.com. Will that help? Probably not. They need to take a page from RIM’s book and start paying people to order them? $1000 a pop sound about right?

Treo Tips and Sightings

Brian has branched out his excellent Tips column to TreoCentral, with a handy, dandy gem for contact lookups. By accident, however, he seems to have included screenshots from the 1999 vintage Palm V PDA’s app instead of the latest, greatest Treo 2008 version. The 2-bit, non anti-aliased interface is a dead give a–

What? Those are screenshots of the latest, greatest Treo?

Gulp! Moving on…

Seems Jennifer found Treo’s showing up all over TV. At first I thought that, what with the writer’s strike and all, the networks were so desperate to fill slots they used stuff from the History Channel. Turns out they were new episodes. For something called “Ugly Betty”.

Harsh.

And in No Other News

Our Norfinwedish friends over at Nokia may have convinced Sony BMG to join Universal Music in offering the “unlimited” Comes-With-Music-And-Hefty-Price-Bump market-fart. Maybe. It’s been delayed until mid-2008, probably to get the DRM working extra-poorly. At least that’s all Engadget can Google-translate for now. No doubt they’re preoccupied getting a post ready for when the service goes bye-bye, the DRM locks down, and everyone’s stuck with “unlimited” Can’t-Be-Authorized-Again-Silence…

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

Blackberry Out of Outages?

Given CrackBerry.com’s near-constant updates on RIM’s outages, unscheduled, scheduled, re-scheduled, and beyond, I thought there would be no way RIM could top themselves again. Boy, was I wrong. This week marked the first time in a long time (long time being the history of this series, ‘natch) that RIM was complete out of outages!

Talk about poor supply-chain management. Sure, they’ve had infrastructure and service failures before, but a failure failure?

Brain trust in Waterloo: get on it!

India to RIM: Push This!

Those hoping RIM would conceded to India’s desire to invade the privacy and security of every user in the nation — by, for example, setting up proxy servers the way they have in China and Singapore, or just giving Indian security agencies the keys to encryption-city — tough luck!

Crackberry.com tells us Sriprakash Jaiswal, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, has gone and forced carriers to block any and all Blackberry to Blackberry messaging.

India and RIM will meet again soon, but the carriers aren’t wasting any time in fighting back themselves. Expected this week: new advertising campaigns, boasting the first Blackberries in the world with equally good email and media handling!

Microsoft: Gotta Get You Some! (Taste, That Is!)

While WMExperts.com was all over the WinMob news this week (doubtless yet another iterative handset or 3rd party patch for missing OS functionality), I really couldn’t follow it after exposure to Microsoft “leaked” “internal” “moral-booster” video for the troops. Blind and deaf, yet unmercifully not amnesia-tic, I’m left to wonder why they insist on releasing things the world can never un-experience?

(Poor Paul Thurrott was so traumatized he blamed the interwebs for not getting the “joke”, not realizing there are levels of joke, and failing at a joke this spectacular becomes an even bigger joke — laughing at it, not with it, b’okay Paul?)

Treo 800w — Beta!

You’re Palm. You revolutionized the handset industry only to fall so far behind you can no longer see the competition. You’ve saddled yourself with a monstrous OS almost as dated as your design specs. And due to chronic mismanagement you have no hope of releasing your own product or updated OS in the foreseeable future. What do you do?

Drop the beta bomb.

That’s right. Treocentral.com brings us word that Palm is looking for a few good beta testers. Beta, of course, implies unfinished, unfinished demands forgiveness, forgiveness leads to understanding when the inevitable shortcomings and delays follow.

So the company that should have innovated us an iPhone-class device 5 years ago may manage to release a single, dated device this year. In beta.

Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Rubenstein!

And in No Other News…

Zip. Zippo. Ziltch. You’d have better odds getting Motorola’s software and hardware divisions working together. Seriously. It’s getting to the point where you just want to give Samsung a gesture alright…

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

NOC Back to RIM’s Regularly Unscheduled Outages

Having finally mastered outages both unscheduled and scheduled, CrackBerry.com tell us RIM once again led the industry in outage innovation with the new, improved, cluster-buster outage. Your carrier, your area, your email? Dunno. Not when, not where. It was, however, limited to AT&T. And Verizon. And, yeah, T-Mobile. East coast only. Plus west coast. Oh, and in between too. We’re mostly sure about that. Mostly.

Compete with that, ActiveSync!

(Ha Ha! Indeed…)

RIM to India: Please… be Gentle.

Lest we forget that RIM’s Network Operations Center (NOC) isn’t just about communal service failures so regular they must be on a high-fiber diet, CrackBerry.com reminds us about their other advantage: convenient one-stop security and privacy violation spots.

Obliging to a degree that makes even Jerry Yang do a spit-take, RIM already maintains proxy-servers in Singapore and China designed to allow those governments to spy… er… surveil all data traffic in their respective dictatorships… er… countries. Now they may go so far as to provide the government of India the translation code(s) needed to decrypt the actual messages sent from Blackberries themselves(!?).

Important sacrifice necessary in the war against whatever amorphous threat-du-decade allows governments to trample individual privacy, or overt act of an evil empire in-the-growing? Well, the telcos support it, so easy call…

In Ur WinMob Runningz Android

Windows Mobile not making your current smartphone buggy and unstable enough for you? Google to the rescue, says WM Experts!

Simply take your old, outdated, Windows 6.0 or 6.1 phone and install the destined-to-be-in-perpetual-beta, Android OS on it, and bingo! (Or is it BSOD?) Twice the OS with half the resources and still nothing in the way of user experience!

Word on the street is that this is only step one. Soon you’ll be able to run Access Linux Platform on top of Android. And with ALP’s killer Garnet emulation mode, that’s a quad-OS sammitch writing so far from the metal you’ll never be disturbed by anything even remotely resembling a phone call again. (But you will be able to run all 300 8-bit 160×160 apps you bought for your Treo back in 1832!)

Lab tests show performance isn’t great, however. Only twice as fast as current milestone builds of VistaMob 7.

NOC-Down, Drab-Out

A special bonus WMExperts podcast this week, with special guest CrackBerry Kevin, brings us a techno-a-techno “push” email punch-out, as Blackberry’s Notorious NOC takes on Microsoft’s MSCMDM (aka Miskumdum, which, apparently, Superman must somehow trick Steve Balmer into saying backwards in order to banish the Monkey Boy back to his home dimension).

Elegantly available, ironically enough, via iTunes.

Treo 755p Sprint’ing Towards the Finished Line?

Treocentral.com reports that Sprint has stopped selling the latest — 2006 vintage — top-of-the-line Palm OS Treo 755p. Or not. Apparently the sales numbers really don’t indicate either way.

And in No Other News

First it was Blackberry, then it was Samsung, now Nokia has sent in an iClone of their very own.

Seriously.

How do you say “shameless” in Norfinwedish?

Gotcha. “Tube”.

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Outage Huge Success

After several weeks of failure, CrackBerry.com reports that RIM finally succeeded in taking down their network, as scheduled. Unlike previous outages, reportedly the result of failed upgrade attempts, this one required the pulling down of an overly large Looney-Toons-esque lever marked with a big, red “OFF” and stymied Waterloo based engineers for weeks.

Proving it’s easier to succeed with failure than fail with success, once RIM restored their “push” to the legions of addicts, one CrackBerry.com commenter reported the service seemed slower.

Great. Last week they copied the iPhone design, now their copying the Microsoft upgrade model.

In Ur Fridge. Can has Push?

On April 1st, CrackBerry.com informed us that RIM, doubtless under heavy iPhone ActiveSync pressure in the board-room, was making the next logical move to expand both their product base and their waist lines: BlackBelly Kitchen Appliances.

According to the CTIA release, each fridge will come complete with enterprise-class “push” water and ice dispensers, and teeny, tiny little tic-tactile keyboards on the handles. No desktop-class browsers, however, are currently planned.

Staff who were on-scene overheard a RIM employee mumble: “@#$%ing Steve Jobs comes out with a multi-touch fridge and think we’ll care? We’ll just stop-and-run straight to the bathroom… Already got the SureType flusher working in the lab…”

Microsoft Releases Windows Mobile 6.6.6

Unlike the previous item, this one has April Fool’s written all over it. Sorry, WMExperts.com, but we’re not biting. Just how stupid do you think we are, really? There’s no way Microsoft wasted the 6 months between Macworld 2007 and the iPhone release, and the almost 9 months that have followed, on this most incremental update of the beast.

Nice try, especially the Paint.exe’d up screen shots (mad skills there, Bohn!) and pitch-perfect spoof of a classically lame Microsoft presentation. If you’d thrown in a Steve Balmer “Mobile Developers!” dance, it might (might) have been a tad more believable.

As it is, even a die-hard Windows fan-pundit would probably react to this with:

Microsoft is failing badly here

Better luck next April Fool’s!

Sony WinMob Reaches Xperia-tion Date

Take one Sony Ericsson phone and… throw it away. Then, In a touching vote of confidence to the industrial design force who crafted you everything from the PlayStation line to the Rolly, get HTC to build you a new kit. Finally, in a show of good faith to your longtime Symbian alliance partners, ditch your time-tested, world-dominating OS and shoehorn Windows Mobile 6.6.6 onto the device. And what do you have? The beginning of a Palm-esque downward spiral. (Can you downward spiral from the bottom? We don’t know. We’re mathlexic, remember?)

WMExperts.com brings us bitter-sweet first impressions on the last rights, in all their banana-slide-out gory glory.

Apparently the device is aimed squarely at North Americans. For a Japanese/Norfinwedish company, that’s a pretty overt act of aggression. The minute RIM releases their international-only Symbian-powered Blackberry, it’s payback time, fellas!

In Palm News

Treocentral tells us Mexico got a blue Palm Centro.

Yup.

Moving on…

And in No Other News

We blew the Norfinwedish meme already, so no N-Gage jokes from us this week (luckily Nokia supplied their own!). If anything else happened, like say if an Asian powerhouse took a page from RIM’s playbook and proudly announced their entry into the iClone market we’re blissfully unaware.

For reals.

Pop quiz, hotshot:

You’re the top dog in smart phones with “push” email technology so killer people have likened it to crack. But last year a new kid showed up with a glitzy multi-touch interface and media to die for, and sucked all the buzz out of your room. What do you do? What. Do. You. Do?

If you answered, out innovate them, come up with next year’s “it” device, you’re correct. You’re also clearly (and unfortunately) not the brain-trust at RIM.

We’ve already talked about Apple licensing Microsoft’s ActiveSync, looking to eat into RIM’s Blackberry business dominance. We’ve even made fun of the new old-look Blackberry 9000 (yep, that’s the new BB pictures above. What, you thought it was the Meizu?). But this cuts deeper into the industry.

For years Palm pushed out tepid evolutionary designs. RIM, while having copied a little Palm look-and-feel at times, has made tentative flirtations, for good or for ill, with innovation in devices like the Pearl. For the most part, however, everyone has been content to regurgitate and duplicate. Everyone but the iPhone.

When Steve Jobs pulled the iPhone from his pocket at Macworld 2007 it was unlike anything we’d seen in smart phones before, but also instantly Apple. It was a revolution.

Palm needs to do this so badly the company hinges on it.

RIM does as well. Sure, they’re in great shape. They move tons of units to an enormous, addicted user base. They own the market. But they no longer lead it.

Copying Apple’s design is superficial but it’s a sign that RIM is following. They are going where Apple has been. They are surrendering mindshare and, in doing so, surrendering leadership of the market.

Sure, Apple competes with Apple. They cancelled the mega-popular iPod Mini only to release the super-mega-popular Nano. And they’ll push themselves on smart phones all alone if they have to. But every industry needs competition.

WinMob 7 is still vaporware and is also targeting where the iPhone was. That’s Microsoft’s MO. Palm’s Nova needed to be out 2 years ago, if not earlier. They’ve long ago lost the drive that made them the original innovator. That leaves RIM (and perhaps Nokia).

Hotshots, you need to do better.

[Jobs help us, we're making this an official Wait-a-Thon post! Leave a comment here for you chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card! In the meantime, congrats to last week's winner, Dyvim!]

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Outages Outage

Last week Crackberry.com let slip that RIM had gone so far as to begin scheduling their own network outages. Not merely content to follow trends, however, RIM has now one-upped themselves again and, apparently, scheduled an outage for their outage!

You heard right! The once on off is off again! No word yet on when exactly the outage will be rescheduled, though smart money is on a date to be surprised by later!

Waterloo, Start Your Photocopiers!

Two years ago at WWDC we thought we’d poke a little bit of fun at the folks in… Oops, sorry, wrong copycats. This time it’s the fine folks at RIM who’ve toiled away for hours to ensure that no Blackberry owner will ever again mistake their device for a Palm. How? By making their latest model a form-factored photocopy of the iPhone! Glossy black frontage? Check. Rounded chrome edge? Double check. 3.5″ gorgeous media wide-screen? D’oh! ‘Fraid not. You still get a tic-tactile hard keyboard to burn 90% of your useful face-matter!

Sincerest flattery aside, nothing says market-leader like dressing up in last year’s competitive dress…

WinMob Treo 800 to Rock… 6.0?!

What’s better than outdated hardware running the latest version of Window’s outdated mobile operating system, 6.1? You guessed it, patched-up hardware running the already obsoleted version of Windows, 6.0! WMExperts.com is kind enough to report Sprint’s July roadmap, touting the Stockholm-syndrome supporting release in all it’s antiquated glory.

But don’t give up all hope, there’s still VistaMob 7.0 on the horizon, and given Microsoft’s current schedule, the 2007-era OS should hit beta by 2011, RTM by 2015, and be almost usable by SP1 in 2017, just in time to magically pair with the much-delayed Surface! (Warning, link contains harsh language).

Palm Reports Lack of Financial Results

Speaking of Palm, er… is anyone still speaking of Palm? Ed Colligan, we guess, who according to TreoCentral.com, busted out a shiny pink Centro worth of financial woes this week. Sales up but revenue down? Jaysus, that’ll harshen Bono’s elevated partnership’s mellow right quick now, won’t it?

But with Rubenstein, Bell, and Fox freshly pilfered from high-margin Apple, that’s a trend that will hopefully level out around 2010 when Palm’s 2005 OS, Nova, and astounding new form factors (can you say “clam shell!), finally ship!

And in No Other News

Yeah, we still can’t speak Norfinwedish (Nokian?) and we’re still not paying any attention to other smart phones, if there are any (we’re not even sure). Heck, an entire major mobile manufacturer could be ripping itself in half right this very minute and we wouldn’t have a clue. Seriously.

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, this Week in Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Likes Outages So Much They Start Scheduling Them!

CrackBerry.com brings word that RIM once again gave some tough-love to Blackberry addicts in the form of a NOC outage on March 22 from 2AM to 6AM EDT. Sorry, no email for the after-after party, Lin-Lo! But it’s not just the Hollywood scandalrati who’ll suffer. 2AM EDT translates into late night on the west coast, early morning in Europe, and midday in Asia. Giving a nation of Jet Lee’s the DTs? We’d start running now, Lazaridis!

WinMob Treo 800 Delayed Until… Er… Hello?… Little Help?

According to WMExperts.com, the two long suffering mobile platforms that suffer longer together, Windows Mobile and Treos, will not see the new high-end model drop until sometime later this year. Why? Who knows, but we can offer some hypotheticals:

1. This baby will be rocking the new OS, which is still running just a tiny bit behind schedule as Microsoft wants to make sure users enjoy VistaMob every bit as much as its big desktop brother.
2. It was shown at a Gatesnote, and as such is contractually forbidden to hit the market for at least another year. (Hi, Surface!)
3. Bono now owns the place and spent enough time in Cupertino to inject himself into every little feature discussion. “Jaysus, needs more red now, dunnit?”

And in No Other News

Yeah, sorry, nobody much covers other smart phones in these parts. Nokia probably did something in Scandinavia but we can’t read Norfinwedish so who knows? It’s not like they’re being sued by a thousand year old lady or are — yet again — beating, stomping, hammering, pummeling, and slapping around the dead horse that is N-Gage, right?

This. Is. iPhone JEOPARDY!

Welcome everyone to the smartphone space where competing CEO’s answer in nothing resembling the form of a question. Lucky for us, however, they’re quick on the buzzer and their bold, bodacious pontifications, more often than not, come right back to bite them on their assets.

“Why We’re Not Worried about the iPhone” for 100

Previously on iPhone Jeopardy, smartphone innovator and Folio-smasher, Ed Colligan of Palm/Treo fame jumped on the iPhone launch:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Strongly put. Let’s go to the judges…

“Initial iPhone buyers were 10 times more likely than other new phone buyers to have previously owned a Treo.”

Ouch! The correct answer seems to have been “Who are the Mac guys who walked in with a far more than a descent phone and dug into my lunch?” Better luck with Nova!

Daily Double-Talk

Next up was famed Microsoft CEO, monopolist, and internet dance phenom, Steve Balmer who went for the steal:

“You can get a Motorola Q for $99. [...] [Apple] will have the most expensive phone, by far, in the marketplace.”

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Really? Survey says!

The struggling American electronics company Motorola is considering breaking itself up through a sale or flotation of its poorly performing mobile phones business.

NPD’s figures make Apple’s Sept. quarter iPhone sales look even more stellar. Apple sold 1.12 million iPhones last quarter, representing 27% of NPD’s U.S. smartphone market and 3% of the overall Q3 cellphone market.

D’oh! The correct answer looks to have been, “Who was hardly the most expensive and grabbed even more mindshare than their impressive first-year market share (not to mention dominating customer satisfaction reports) while companies I mentioned prepared to flee the space?” No bonus points for lack of bold ActiveSync licensing predictions. Come back next time with WinMob 7, b’okay?

Final Jeopardy!

Now we have current smartphone market leader RIM’s business “pusher”, and outage-plugger extraordinaire Mike Lazaridis taking “Post SDK Over-Reactions” for a thousand:

“Talk — all I’m [hearing] is talk about [the iPhone's chances in Enterprise]. I think it’s important that we put this thing in perspective.” [...] “Apple’s design-centric approach [will] ultimately limit its appeal by sacrificing needed enterprise functionality. I think over-focus on one blinds you to the value of the other.” [...] “Apple’s approach produced devices that inevitably sacrificed advanced features for aesthetics.”

Final answer? Okay, pens down and no peeking!

Well, what do you think? Will RIM’s success just keep on multiplying, or did the Blackberry Boss just gamble it all away?

Find out next time on iPhone Jeopardy!

When I say the King is dead, I don’t mean that the 680 is a bad device, or that there’s no reason to use Palm OS, or that anyone that uses it is dumb. Far from it, I think the 680 is pretty high up on my list. It’s still a good phone. If I thought Palm OS was dumb or not relevant, I wouldn’t do the TreoCentral TreoCast. It boils down to two things with Palm OS: the hardware and the software. The hardware will see updates. There will probably be more Palm OS GSM phones to come out. Better cameras, 3G, smaller form factors, the whole shebang. When it comes out, it will probably be a compelling upgrade for Palm OS users. But I don’t think we’ll see a significant software update for Palm OS in the next two years. While some may accuse that it’s unfair to say “the king is dead” alluding to Palm OS, it’s not accurate to say the king is alive, either. But still, there are always these persistent rumors about faked deaths and random sightings…

680 Hardware

It’s a bit of a shame that the 680 was what we ended up reviewing; Palm, for unknown reasons, tends to do all of their innovation on CDMA before they do anything new for GSM. Palm’s Centro is actually a pretty neat phone, ,and it bodes well for what they’ll be introducing in the future. The 680, though only a year old, doesn’t seem to age quite the way that one would like. Two of the other phones in the Smartphone Round Robin are very nice and svelte — the iPhone and the BlackBerry Curve — and the other, though brickish, is packed with features like 3G, wi-fi, and GPS. The 680 seems paltry by comparison in many areas.

Palm can do better than they did with the 680; the Centro is proof of that. But Palm only releases a couple of phones per year, and we probably won’t see anything to replace the 680 on the GSM side of things for another few months at least. This leaves the Treo 680 dated in terms of features.

If you’re on CDMA, there’s at least the option of the Treo 755P and the Palm Centro. Those two phones are technologically advanced, at least moreso than the 680. The 680 shipped with a VGA camera, almost criminally obsolete for a smartphone. What makes it worse is that it fixed a color balance problem the preceding 650 had. A lot of people thought the 680 was what the 650 should have been. I don’t agree with that assessment, I think Palm traditionally innovates along a path — they’ve chosen a form factor, and they’ll continue to refine it. You could even say that they started the form factor, or at least popularized it when they invented their Palm Pilot.

The thing about Palm is that they’ve been the market leader before. They know what it’s like to be on top, and they probably have a good idea of what they have to do in terms of engineering to get back there. They’d probably like to engineer a few things away; they’ve been humbled a bit by other device makers — for example, the iPhone really showed a lot of people what a smartphone could really be capable of doing. But Palm has to wrangle with some inherent limitations. The biggest one is their software, Palm OS.

Software-Constrained

Because of the way it was written back in the day, Palm OS doesn’t allow more than 2 radios at the same time. There are a lot of useful radios that go into a feature-packed cell phone. Of course, the integral radio transmitter is the cell antenna, which handles such things like phone calls, GPRS, EDGE, 3G, 1xRTT, or EV-DO. The first choice is pretty much made.

The second choice, that gets tough. Bluetooth requires a separate radio. Wi-fi requires a separate radio. For all I know, GPS requires a separate radio (in terms of how Palm OS would deal with it). Wi-Max requires a separate radio. If the new 700MHz wireless block gets bought by Google and they unveil a new, cheap-as-in-free wireless network, that will require a separate radio. Everyone can pick as many radios as they can stuff into a little metal and plastic candybar/brick shape and go from there. Palm can pick two radios altogether, and the die is cast: they have to have a cell radio (1) and they chose bluetooth (2). End of story. They could fix it, but they’re not going to.

680 Software

Okay, that transition was unnecessarily negative. Palm OS has a ton of strengths. In a lot of ways, Palm OS has more strengths than some of the other platforms out there — their software is pretty easy to use, there are a ridiculous amount of 3rd party apps, and a large and vocal community dedicated to the platform. What good is integrated GPS if you have to dig into arcane COM ports before you can use it? But, there are some revolutions coming in the mobile phone world, and PalmOS, as it stands now, is equipped to miss them. Without wi-fi, the likelihood of using a PalmOS phone for VOIP calls is unlikely, for example. And Palm’s mindshare and marketshare is slipping more and more with every passing year.

Once Palm finishes their next-generation Linux operating system the situation will be different. At that point, Palm may leapfrog everybody out there. Palm has licensed their operating system before, they may again. However, the last time they did license, they spun off their software division so the hardware and software sides of Palm didn’t have any inherent advantage in working with each other. That led to a lot of hassles for Palm in the long run and they’re probably not likely to repeat the same mistakes.

The bummer of it is that I think Palm is more constrained by their software than anyone else in the Smartphone Round Robin. Sure, the software on the Curve isn’t all that advanced, but it’s plenty stable and designed to do a much smaller subset of functions than the 680 — people don’t really expect as much, and RIM’s OS gets better and better with each passing day. And since Palm wasn’t able to sell the enterprise on the necessity of a touchscreen for smartphones, well… they lost a lot of customers.

The operating system on the 680 is both enabling and limiting — once the software is on the device, there’s a lot of things you can do. I have this feeling that it takes Palm a lot of work to get PalmOS on hardware in the first place. I could easily be wrong about this, but when I think about getting PalmOS on a device, I think about bolted-on compatibility libraries designed to run a bunch of code that was done in assembly for a different chip architecture. To give an analogy, the PalmOS is kind of like building something by hand. The iPhone, Curve, and Tilt operating systems would be more like building a something with robots on an assembly line.

Looking to the future?

Now I’ll move on to what might be the toughest thing about the 680. Palm is done with the Palm OS. They don’t want to put too much development effort into it as I stated in the earlier article. They probably wont’ be buying some neato Palm OS widget and bolting it on as a cosmetic upgrade. It’s not worth it to them; it’s more important to get their Linux OS out the door faster. Unfortunately, that’s probably the right thing to do in their case.

They’ll probably have some sort of compatibility layer that runs the compatibility layer that runs the old dragonball assembly so that most of the old Palm OS apps run on the new Linux OS. They have all the rights they could possibly need for this due to a licensing-rights and code-ownership settlement with the seemingly-incompetent software company that used to be part of Palm that Palm perhaps mistakenly spun off and maybe wanted to buy back but was bought by Access instead. Are you confused? Yes? Good, then you’re halfway there. Actually, you’ve probably pretty much got it covered. It was a debacle; the important thing is that whatever it was, it happened and it’s behind Palm now. They can focus on the future, and they’re now essentially doing so now with steely-eyed determination.

The Foleo could’ve been a good indication of what they’re planning except for the fact that they revealed that the Foleo wasn’t based off their next-gen Linux system. Palm was tight-lipped about the Foleo before it was introduced; they’ll probably be tight-lipped about their new Linux OS will be too. We don’t know what it will look like; we don’t know how much it will build off of the current Palm OS. We don’t know if they’ll keep the interface similar; we don’t know if they’re going to blow everyone away with how awesome it is, we don’t know when it will be out. We don’t know if they can keep it a secret. We don’t know if they’re going to copy Apple or leapfrog them. No one knows, but you ask me, Palm is definitely the wild card in this race.

Snapped Back to the Present

In the meantime, we have the Treo 680. It’s a good phone. My wife uses my old 680, and will continue to use it until the next iPhone comes out. I’ll probably buy that new iPhone because Palm’s next-generation Linux OS won’t be available yet and it’ll be my duty as an iPhone blogger. She’ll gripe about the money I’m spending but I’ll ameliorate her disquietude by giving her my current iPhone and her orange 680 will be gifted to whomever in our family or friends is on GSM and needs something more advanced than their current featurephone. The 680 will still be perfectly functional, and there will be a bunch of software they can use with it as long as they’re comfortable with having a HotSync ID of mike.

The fourth annual iLounge 2008 Buyers Guide works for the iPhone and iPod, and is viewable online for smaller screens like the iPhone, iPod Touch, or laptops. If you prefer, for desktop viewing.

Verizon is lowering their data rates for feature phones in preparation for competition with the iPhone. Expect a snarky comment from Dieter on this one. Unfortunately, their smartphone data rates are still sky-high. And, you can add a Canadian roaming plan for just $20. The Phone they’re thinking about using to “compete” with the iPhone is the Samsung F700, though they might re-brand it as the U940. That’s some “brilliant marketing.” I don’t usually report on “iPhone killers,” but I’m glad to see the iPhone forcing prices down for everybody.

Rumors from AppleInsider indicate that iTunes 7.5 will be coming out in the next couple of weeks. This probably means that any iPhone updates with post-Leopard goodness require an iTunes update. This iTunes update will also bring support for the UK, German, and likely French iPhones. Oh, and it will include better duplicate song management. w00t!

Mark/Space, makers of many popular “Missing Sync” smartphone sync softwares, have announced their intent to release “Missing Sync for the iPhone” later this year. Their software will include Notes.app syncing, SMS backups, better call log management, and a migration tool to copy data from a BlackBerry, Palm OS, or Windows Mobile smartphone.

figure 1: The Orange Treo 680 is what I used before I got an iPhone. This and a featurephone, actually, for when I wanted to take a non-useless picture of something. I used both AT&T and T-Mobile.

Let me put on my Carnac the Magnificent hat and guess that you were on T-Mobile too. There’s an interesting survey report done by the NPD group recently that caught my eye, specifically because it names Treos. I still have love for Treos, but I’m off the wagon in terms of using one regularly at least until their Linux OS ships. But here are the fact nuggets that they report:

• iPhone owners were 10 times more likely to have owned a Treo
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to use a T-Mobile phone, such as the Sidekick
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to switch from T-Mobile or Alltel
• iPhone owners were no more likely to buy an iPhone if they had a Blackberry

They don’t break down the numbers for you much in the press release, but as always these reports are meant to be bought and sold by industry analysts and stock market guys and stuff. I’d like to believe that they have a breakdown of PalmOS and Windows Mobile in there, but they don’t specify in their press release. The only quote nugget is from NPD’s Director of Industry Analysis Ross Rubin:

“The iPhone’s Internet and media capabilities have resonated with consumers — especially those who previously owned Treos and Sidekicks. Its advanced operating system makes it competitive with smartphones for many tasks, while its sleek design and lack of expandability is reminiscent of fashion phones”

Speaking personally, I had a devil of a time with getting media on the Treo. It’s just not convenient to use it to consume media at all. You need the special headphones, you need to drag your files into which directory on the SD card again, or worse, you use Palm Desktop to do it. My loathing for Palm Desktop and Palm Conduits really knows no bounds. Even with the iSync conduits, it was still a pain. Oh, and my loathing for Blazer — that knows no bounds too. I wrestled with Java to get Opera Mini installed, juggled my 4-5 SD cards, trying to remember what was on which one, etc. I wanted to like Windows Mobile, but missed the screen resolution and couldn’t cope with the interface. Syncing on the iPhone is quick, easy, and seems to take much less time than anything on Palm Desktop would ever do.

The New York Times has a neat article on third party applications and how the iPhone is currently the only device on AT&T’s network that doesn’t support them. The article has some good things to say about Palm too, which I always welcome. The big gist of it is how Jobs’ quote from a January Newsweek interview doesn’t jive with reality:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform… You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Whereas the reality of the situation is that Cingular/ATT welcomed development on every single other phone they had on their network, whether it be Java/J2ME, PalmOS development, Windows Development, or Flash Lite / whatever. This is backed up by Mark Bercow, Senior VP of Development at Palm. Talk about your David vs. Goliath situations here; I feel like Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field just failed for a second or something. But, there’s another quote that the Times dug up that I’d forgotten about from his video conversation with Walt Mossberg at the All Things D conference in July:

“This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.”

The more I think about this quote, the more I think he’s talking about widgets here. You only really have to worry about a widget’s security if there’s a browser bug or exploit, and HTML/CSS/AJAX is definitely open. He probably doesn’t want to open up a full native SDK until the software and hardware platforms are stable and proven, much like he did with the original Mac series. That is, if he wants a full native SDK available to the public at all.

There are a few other interesting tidbits from the article that I can’t help but mention:

1. Two-thirds of Treo owners have purchased 3rd party apps
2. Ten percent of Treo owners have purchased 10 or more 3rd party apps
3. AT&T has a website to get developers on all of their development platforms except the iPhone.