(Instead of giving you a roundup of last week’s news, today I’m excited to give you a glimpse into the news you’re going to see at our Smartphone Experts sites over the next two months! — Dieter)

We are pleased to announce the Smartphone Round Robin!. Each year the editors of the Smartphone Experts family of sites literally trade their phones to see what life is like on the “other side.” What you’re going to see over the course of the next two months is each of our five SPE Community Editors reviewing smartphones that they’re not used to using. Each editor has a checklist of “Must-Dos” that ensure they’re getting the full experience with each smartphone. It’s quite a ride.

Read on for more on the Smartphone Round Robin and for details on how you can win one of five Smartphone Prize Packs!

More importantly for you, at the end of the Smartphone Round Robin we will be giving away five smartphones — one from each site! All you need to do to qualify is post a response to any official Round Robin thread in our forums or comment on a Round Robin blog post (with a valid email address). Be sure to check out the Full contest rules for more information. Huge thanks go out to our Round Robin Sponsors: Palm, Celio (makers of the Redfly), Case-Mate, and Smartphone Outlet. Here’s what you can win:

• From Android Central, the T-Mobile G1, the BlueAnt Z9 Bluetooth Headset, and SPE Screen Protectors
• From CrackBerry.com, the BlackBerry Bold, Spare Battery, and Case-Mate Second Skin
• From The iPhone Blog, the iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset
• From TreoCentral, the Treo Pro, Case-Mate Clear Armor, and Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth Headset (original)
• From WMExperts, the HTC Fuze and the Celio Redfly Mobile Companion

So don’t just sit back and watch — participate! You can check out a full list of all of the latest Blog posts and Forum posts on our Smartphone Round Robin Updates Page. There are chances to chat and win right now as our editors have already started asking questions in our forums. Finally, if you’re an RSS user, you can track the whole event from our RSS Feed or even get daily email updates.

So head on into our forums and help us out this week and every week through the end of the year — there’s no better way to both spread the word about your favorite Smartphone or to learn more about what those other smartphones are all about. Or heck, we’ll kick things off here too, this is an official Round Robin post, comment here for your chance to win an iPhone 3G

I can hardly remember my life before having a PDA. I held a Palm Pilot for the first time in 1996, a Pilot 1000 my father received at work. He was somewhat non-plussed; technology was not his gig and he deferred to me for most things with a power button. For me, the Palm Pilot was something revolutionary and Graffiti input was mind-blowing.

The addiction and PDA-dependence grew from there for me. I was “plugged in” and my vocabulary would now include words and acronyms like “stylus”, “PIM” and “SD Card”. As other platforms emerged, like Pocket PC and Symbian, I remained doggedly loyal to the Palm OS through it’s progression of versions. I watched Palm OS become Garnet and then “FrankenGarnet.” I even got used to seeing “Powered by Access” when I fired up my trusty Palm. I made the leap from PDA to a converged device with the Treo 650, then the 680. Throughout the years I endured the criticisms of Palm’s lack of multitasking, multithreading, no wifi (!?!) and antiquated PIM. I remained a Palm loyalist and apologist, looking toward the horizon for a Cobalt or Palm OS 2 that would never come.

More on my migration to the iPhone after the break!

I was feeling restless and the seed of malcontent began to first germinate and then sprout tiny roots. I dabbled with Windows Mobile and felt dissatisfied. I returned to familiar, safe territory with Palm. Though long in the tooth, it was an OS I was familiar with and I had a plethora of third-party software that met my needs. But the roots spread deeper and wider as my discontent grew, and I started looking for an answer that would replace my restlessness and discouragement with hope.

Hope finally came with the release of Apple’s iPhone. After much anticipation and fanfare, the iPhone became a reality for me on June 29, 2007. My local Apple Store was open late. I called and sheepishly inquired about iPhone availability, fully expecting laughter followed by an attempt to politely explain that all iPhones were long-gone. To my pleasant surprise, I was asked which flavor I wanted, 4GB or 8GB? Once I knew that Apple had planned well and had numerous iPhones in stock, I drove to the store and was greeted at the door. The store employee asked me which phone I wanted, and I did well to contain my excitement and managed to calmly tell him I wanted the 8GB iPhone. Moments later, he returned with my new iPhone in a gift bag. I handed over my credit card without hesitation and returned home with my prize, anxious to connect it to my MacBook Pro and embark on a new journey.

Once plugged in, my iPhone activation process began and I was presented with the “Are You a New or Existing AT&T (Cingular) Wireless Customer?” screen. I clicked the radio button indicating I was already an AT&T subscriber and was replacing my current phone (my Treo) with my shiny new iPhone. Moving my mouse arrow down, I could click on “Go Back” or “Continue”. I paused. These two choices suddenly appeared in my mind’s eye like a blue pill or red pill. “Go Back” was the blue pill. “Continue” was the red pill. The words of Morpheus came to me: “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

Was I not in Steve Job’s “Wonderland”? Was I not peering through the looking-glass, in this case, the glass of the iPhone’s brilliant and unparalleled multi-touch display? I mused upon this metaphor for a moment, then clicked the “Continue” button. I was taking the RED pill, dammit. I had already decided.

The Rabbit Hole

I know there are lots of different options out there for a smartphone or even semi-smartphone, but I’m keeping this strictly about the Palm OS Treo vs. iPhone and my experience making the switch. I took the red pill and I’ve not regretted it. I’ve never looked back and wished I’d taken the blue pill instead. I know there are others out there who have made the same decision, others who are thinking about it, and still others that prefer to with their Palm OS Treo (no offense, of course. It’s all about free will, baby!). My goal is to take you down the rabbit-hole with me and help you see why I’m liking the journey.

Having used the iPhone as my primary device since what I fondly refer to as “i-Day”, I can honestly say there is nothing like it. It’s elegant and functional design is what one would expect from Apple, but design is only part of what makes this phone special. Apple has thought of so many of the little touches, like sensors for light and proximity. My cheek has made countless inputs on my Treo when I was on a call, anywhere from scheduling a new calendar event without my knowledge or disconnecting my call entirely. I don’t have this problem with my iPhone because it’s smart (and who said it wasn’t a smartphone??) – it knows when I’m on a call and my cheeks are allowed mischief no longer!

What about the keyboard? Where is it? How could ANYONE like a virtual keyboard?? Well, to borrow shamelessly from another film franchise of mega-iconic proportions, using the iPhone software keyboard requires using “The Force” (I’ll come back to this momentarily). I really do like the Treo keyboard and had become quite proficient in using it. I have big hands and fat fingers, but I still managed to tap away at that Treo keyboard with minimal errors. The iPhone’s software keyboard is unlike anything else I’ve used for input — no tactile feel and it’s non-existent unless your iPhone decides you need it. The advantages of the iPhone’s keyboard are more screen real estate and far less physical force to type something. I had my doubts about this “soft” keyboard, but after just a few hours of use, I became a believer and adopter.

Remember “The Force” I was talking about? If you focus on the keyboard and at least attempt to type correctly, the iPhone is EXTREMELY good at figuring out what the heck you are trying to type and does a FANTASTIC job of correcting your mistakes. For me, Mr. Sausagefingers, I’ve had little trouble. If I use The Force and have faith in my iPhone, I can tap away at a high rate of speed and feel confident that my iPhone will get it right.

Web-browsing? No comparison, really. That’s the first thing I show someone who has never held an iPhone in their hands. Several of my acquaintances have inquired about my iPhone with mocking skepticism, only to begin salivating and babbling “my presssssscious!” (another shameless movie rip-off) as they scroll and “pinch” to their bug-eyed delight on the iPhone’s Safari web-browser. With a Treo (using Blazer, Opera Mini, etc.), I only used the internet when I had no other choice, and it was a chore of epic proportions. My iPhone? A different story, my friends. I use the web-browser on a regular basis and now take for granted how it renders full web pages. Man, am I spoiled.

Like millions of others, I have an iPod. I love how I can store all of my music, videos, podcasts, and photos on my iPod. With a Treo, you have the same features using various 3rd-party apps or even the out-of-the-box software that comes on the Treo. There is a big difference for me, though. I rarely used my Treo for multimedia because it felt too cumbersome. I’ve done my fair share of “tweaking” my Treo, but it was too much of a hassle to use one program for videos, another for music, yet another for photos, and still another for podcasts. I’m not that smart. Rather than use my Treo for multimedia, I carried around my iPod instead. The beauty and genius of the iPhone is it’s simplicity — I can carry around my aforementioned multimedia on my phone and conveniently sync it with iTunes. It’s virtually dummy-proof.

How about email? Email, at least for this comparison, is really part of a larger whole, that greater whole being 3rd-party native apps. They are coming for the iPhone as I write this. The Treo wins on the many different email solutions via 3rd-party apps, but for my needs, my iPhone’s email app is adequate. I have a .Mac account for email and it is regularly delivered to my iPhone via the Auto-Check feature. This isn’t as handy as true “push” email, but I don’t mind having the option to have my iPhone check my mail every 15, 30 or 60 minutes. If someone needs to reach me THAT urgently they can always call, right? I’ve also found a nifty way around the enterprise (or lack thereof) mail problem. I spoke to the IT guys where I work and now my work email is forwarded to my .mac account, so I’m not missing anything. I get all of my email on my iPhone and don’t need a Treo to do it.

The iPhone has many onboard features that can be matched or exceeded by a Palm OS 3rd-party app, like stock reporting software, weather, clock, calculator programs ad infinitum, notes, etc. Many of these inequalities that are missed from my Treo days will hopefully be resolved when the SDK is available and developers start cranking out software for the iPhone. Even so, the apps that are standard on the iPhone are well-designed and simply beautiful to look at. They are also very functional and easy to use. Until a parity is reached with 3rd-party apps, I can live with using the myriad of web apps that are available to take care of one or two things that I used to use my Treo for, like a checkbook program (one of my only major gripes). Also, some of the iPhone onboard apps are simply superior when you combine functionality with the expansive screen real estate, like Google Maps. YouTube is also worth it’s weight… er… memory space in gold when it comes to entertainment value.

Both the Treo and iPhone have cameras. And yes, both of their cameras are, shall we say, closer to the Fisher-Price end of the spectrum than a Nikon, for instance. Neither platform can brag about the camera, but again, for me, it’s about ease-of-use and functionality. With the iPhone, I can take a picture and save it, make it the phone wallpaper, delete it, email it, or upload it to my website to share to the world with one press of the virtual button. Treo has an advantage with the ability to take video, and I’m hoping video will be a future iPhone feature. Also, iPhone is embarrassingly lacking the MMS feature with its messaging so I can’t send a picture via text/multimedia message, but hopefully this will also be addressed in future updates.

Personal Information Management

The Treo, and Palm OS in general, has a very simple PIM (Personal Information Management) that is what first attracted me to Palm so many years ago. I will be the first to admit that the Treo’s PIM is superior to the iPhone’s PIM in that it is easier to access and more straight-forward. A To-Do list is standard (iPhone, at the time of this writing, requires a web app for any kind of “to do’s”, sadly). The basic Contacts/Address book for Palm is first-rate, but the iPhone’s is very similar by comparison. As for Memos, the Treo allows categorization, which is nice. The iPhone’s “Notes” program leaves a lot to be desired, from the Market Felt font to the lack of organizing notes in any kind of logical way.

My biggest gripe is the Calendar. With a Treo, a calendar entry is as simple as opening up the calendar app, tapping on the time you want, and entering the text for an appointment. It’s as simple as you care to make it and everything is saved. With the iPhone, you tap on the Calendar, hit the “+” button, then have to enter the appointment details, scroll through the “start” and “end” times, and make sure you SAVE it or it’s lost. I’ve messed up that last step one or twenty times and it can get irritating.

Even with some of the drawbacks, though, I can accept some of the idiosyncrasies of the iPhone’s PIM when considering the entire package of what I’m getting with this baby. Although I prefer the Treo’s PIM features, it’s not enough to even make the blue pill look tempting.

How much deeper will the Rabbit Hole go?

I could go on about the pros and cons, like user-replaceable battery vs. non-user-replaceable, expandable memory, 3rd-party apps, stylus vs. finger (can’t say I’m missing the stylus), and maybe my biggest pet peeve of all: CUT AND FRICKIN PASTE, please. I’m not going to tell you, my good reader, that you should be baptized an iPhone convert, but I will say that I was not happy with Palm’s lackluster roadmap and was elated to finally have an option to take a blue or red pill.

The rabbit-hole is not uniquely mine. If you look closely, you should find a rabbit-hole in your own back yard (think AT&T or Apple Store) and perhaps, if you are still reading, you’ll feel the same compulsion I did and decide to see how deep the rabbit-hole goes for yourself. On the eve of the highly-anticipated SDK release with the promise of 3rd-party apps and future product upgrades, I believe the rabbit-hole will go deep indeed. I traveled a similar rabbit-hole long ago with a similar excitement, but Palm’s rabbit-hole, at least for me, resulted in a disappointing dead-end. With Apple’s iPhone, I am happy to have found a new rabbit-hole and I believe that THIS one does, in fact, lead to Wonderland.

Yankees vs Red Sox. Coke vs Pepsi. Obama vs Hilary.

Apple vs RIM?

Are we walking down a path that will lead to a no-holds-barred smackdown between smartphone giant RIM and newcomer Apple? Chris Ullrich over at TUAW certainly thinks so. He recently pitted the iPhone against the Curve and comes away with a conclusion not so much different from our good friend Mike Overbo.

The iPhone and Blackberry have long been on a collision course since the iPhone’s inception. With Treos still stuck in the 1990′s and Windows Mobile’s, well, Window-ness, these two companies are destined to battle it now and for the rest of eternity.

So where do you place your bets? Apple, in all its gleam and glory or RIM, with its utilitarian approach? Or is there enough room for the two of them?

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.

Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com reviewed the iPhone and reviews it positively. He’s got a thread going in our forums too. Someone may have asked if they could keep the 4GB iPhone until it became available on their carrier; I won’t name any names, nor will I offer proof (because I forgot to take a !@#$ screenshot). No, I’ll be content to insinuate. The other party would have accepted except that they have other immediate plans for said iPhone once the Smartphone Round Robin is over. Still, it’s an interesting proposition, and if someone had a spare iPhone to give, someone would have taken someone else up on it. If someone could dole out iPhones to people that needed interface love, someone definitely would.

Of all the smartphones we test during the Smartphone Round Robin, the constraints of our phone exchange is felt most with the Windows Mobile 6 AT&T Tilt. One week is just not enough to get a full grasp on what Windows Mobile can do. If you’ve read some of my other reviews, you’ll hopefully recognize that as a compliment-dig.

INFINITE POWER

The thing about Windows Mobile that I came to appreciate is that it’s ridiculously powerful. If I want to check my mail, I can do it. If I want to browse the web, I can do it. If I don’t like the default app that ships with Windows Mobile, I can replace it with a better one. The system is admittedly a tweaker’s paradise. If you like getting gadgets and playing with them and they’re like toys for you, than Windows Mobile is basically an infinite playground.

All of the user interface metaphors are pretty much the same as Windows, good or bad. If a person is familiar with Windows, they’ll be fairly familiar with Windows Mobile.

I spent most of the week untethered to a desktop with the Tilt. I’m not sure there’s really any huge need to sync it to a desktop, which is a real breath of fresh breath of air coming from the activate-jailbreak-unlock world of the iPhone. I installed programs online, I checked all of the email that I wanted to — I can really see why Microsoft thinks that Windows Mobile could replace the computer in some parts of the world. If I could plug in a keyboard and add a decent sized-screen, there isn’t much that it can’t do in terms of simple computing tasks — edit documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, play games, browse the web, work with calendars, to-do, shared calendars… the whole shebang, and you don’t even really need to interact with a computer to do any of it. It’s an obscenely powerful mobile platform, and that I respect.

The other thing that I respect is that Microsoft has made their system easy to expand upon — if I don’t like the Today screen, I can replace it with something better (and I did — SPB Mobile Shell). If I don’t like the default browser (and I don’t), I can replace it with something better (usually Opera Mini, but I decided to give Opera Mobile a shot this time, since I could). If I don’t like the default keyboards (and I didn’t), I could replace them with myriad other keyboards, many of them iPhone-like. I think I’ve even got an old iPhone theme that I could install on Windows Mobile from way back in the day, before the lawyers dragged it off the internet. I didn’t think of it until after I sent the Tilt on to Jennifer, which is a bummer.

ITTY BITTY LIVING SPACE

It would probably take me a few weeks to get used to Windows Mobile. Maybe more, maybe a few months. But I could get used to it. It would probably be second nature after a while, I wouldn’t have to think about it. But you definitely have to think about it at first: the out-of-box experience on the Tilt isn’t so great. I had to install a bunch of programs to get to the point where I wasn’t constantly snarling at it. Some other Windows Mobile might ship with those programs pre-installed. Or maybe someone works at a business where they pre-install those applications for you.

It would be better if it wouldn’t take a few weeks, though — one of the things that I really like about using the iPhone is that I never had to figure “the platform” out. I could just start using it. I didn’t have to dig through a new style of control panel, I didn’t have to try all of the different screen input methods to figure out if there was one that was usable.

what you get with 240×240. Not to scale. Not representative. Not from Windows Mobile 6. Windows Mobile 5. Not ideal

There are reasons that I was hoping to skip over Windows Mobile 6. I’ve heard a lot about Photon, the successor to Windows Mobile 6. It supposedly is a drastic rewrite of the general interface to Windows Mobile. I’m glad that the Tilt had a 320×240 screen, because using WM6 on the Treo 750 with its 240×240 always bugged me. And those omnipresent menu bars at the top and bottom of the screen, I was never sure that they were necessary. And the scroll bar on the right, it eats up so much space. I wish they were some of the theme-able bits of Windows Mobile, because I hate wasting that much screen space. It’s one of the reasons that I purchased a 680 instead of a 750, honestly. One thing that I’ve learned from using the Tilt is this: the more pixels Windows Mobile has, the less it bugs me. One other thing: the Windows Mobile Start Menu is too dang small for my fingers.

Though I wasn’t especially a fan of the Tilt’s form factor, it’s pretty close to my current ideal: a flat brick with a full touchscreen. The tilting screen and slider form factor felt kind of gimmicky after a while. I’d be happier if it was a full touchscreen device with no hardware keyboard, but still: it’s close to what I like best, and that definitely made my week with the Tilt more pleasant. I am fond of the iPhone form factor (and I’ll admit that I’ve made fun of the LG KS720, also called the LG Prada 2), and the Tilt was close enough that the odd stylings of the device didn’t bug me. The Tilt is a big device, which is probably why Dieter shipped it out with a belt holster. It’s almost too big to be pocketable — almost.

And Windows Mobile could ship with a better software keyboard. Something my fingers could use would be awesome, the iPhone really opened up that world to me. I didn’t know how much I hated styluses until I didn’t have to use one anymore, and if they were able to tune Windows Mobile to the point where it didn’t need a stylus, they’d be able to ship devices that were thinner. Ditto for that sliding keyboard gimmick, but that’s not Windows Mobile’s fault. There are so many Windows Mobile phones of different shapes, sizes, and functionalities, odds are good that I could find one that fit me better.

WINDOWS ALL OVER AGAIN

The developer community around Windows Mobile is immense and vibrant — there’s so many different apps out there, it’s practically bewildering. I didn’t know where to start. Not only does Windows Mobile ship with an office suite, but if it doesn’t cut the mustard for you, there’s a better one available. If you miss having a BlackBerry around, you can get their BlackBerry Connect software installed, which I’m pretty sure saved Kevin’s life.

It’s a great mobile gadget platform, and there are a lot of things to like about it. It might be the most advanced smartphone OS that I’ve ever used (I won’t be able to say definitively until there are 3rd party apps for the iPhone), but there are downsides to using it.

Interoperability

The biggest downside to using Windows Mobile is that, well, it’s Windows all over again. You take the good, you take the bad, right?. If you’re already using Windows and Office and Outlook and Exchange, Windows Mobile is (or should be) a no-brainer for you. You’re already sucked in 80% of the way, you might as well collect all 5. That’s the way Microsoft designs their software, to keep you inside the ecosystem. The more you stray outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, the more isolated Windows Mobile seems to be.

As it ships, Windows Mobile doesn’t have any way to sync information over from a Macintosh. There is software available that does it: Mark/Space’s Missing Sync for Windows Mobile ($40). Usually though, Mark/Space’s deal has been to add extra features to syncing, so you get more than what the generic handset sync software will give you, instead of being the only possible solution.

I’m used to living in a Windows world, though — I tend to keep all of my contacts and calendars online if I can, in Google or Yahoo! or .Mac or whatever so I can keep my data portable; I don’t like putting all of my eggs in one basket in case of some sort of computer catastrophe. I figured I could import some contacts from one of those very popular online services. I was wrong.

As it turns out, the recommended way to really move data over into Windows Mobile would be to Outlook or Outlook Express… via a CSV file. If you don’t know what a CSV file is, it’s an ancient primitive text spreadsheet. The copy of Outlook Express on my Windows box doesn’t have a field for Mobile phones, which — as you might well assume — is a dealbreaker in terms of categorization. The situation might be different with Outlook, but that’s another $110. Even then, I’m probably still looking at hacking my way through a CSV file.

There’s an easy answer to this: provide iSync conduits for the Mac, or some software to sync with the big online services. I have no idea why Microsoft doesn’t do this anyway. They’d be able to sell Windows Mobile phones to a lot more customers if they did that one simple thing. Another option would be to sync with one of the online services. It’s frustrating to see all of my contacts in the Yahoo! Go app on the Tilt, knowing that there’s no simple way to get them into the Tilt’s contact system. If they fix that, everybody wins! It’s not like someone is going to pick an email address or a computer based on what mobile phone they can sync it with. I don’t think it will threaten their monopoly on the desktop. It’s all pretty simple: you put the horse in front of the cart.

HAVE YOU BEEN DOING THE MATH?

If you’ve been adding up the cost of software that I’d need to buy to use the Tilt as my permanent main brain, you realize that there’s a real cost of acquisition to Windows Mobile. It takes time to get it to work in a way that makes sense, it costs a lot of money to get software for some basic functionality, and if you’re on a Mac or not using one of the Microsoft services for anything you’re in a special world of hurt.

If you’re running a standard Microsoft shop though, there’s less cost involved.

TECHNOLOGY RISEN FROM THE GRAVE

It seems that Windows Mobile is still very much a work in progress, like they haven’t fully figured out how to make it friendly for use, and occasionally the curse of MS-DOS pokes its head out. They’re trying, you can tell they’re trying to remove the cruft. That’s why they gave me the choice of “Intermediate GPS Driver” and my choice of 20 or so COM ports. COM Ports! What is this, the eighties?

Did I mention CSV spreadsheet files already? Why yes, I did. Let’s see, did I use the words “ancient” and “primitive?” Yes on both counts. I believed I mentioned them just 4 paragraphs ago. And here they are again.

Some of the experiences in using Windows Mobile are really jarring. Here is this incredibly advanced mobile operating system, but due to these weird compatibility or interoperability decisions that Microsoft has made, you get lurched back in time to do some things that should be very easy and simple. It really doesn’t make sense to me. I’m sure they’ll update Pocket IE one of these days. Maybe this stuff will be less transparent in Photon. Maybe then I won’t be able to see the old man behind the curtain.

LAST THOUGHTS

It’s powerful. I spent many hours customizing everything. I was able to do anything that I could do on the other platforms and more. “Where do you want to go tomorrow” and stuff. It’s still not friendly to use. It required a lot of tweakery and extra apps to get it to work in a decent way. The user interface, though I think it’s better than the BlackBerry’s cluttered featurephone interface, is still kind of a mess. It’s a powerful mess, but I’d rather not have to memorize all of these arcane things just to do some simple things on my mobile phone. There’s a real complexity problem with Windows Mobile, much more so than with the other smartphones. In a lot of senses, the crown of “most powerful smartphone is a pyrrhic victory, achieved at great cost.

For the past few days, I’ve been working with the AT&T Tilt, a Windows Mobile smartphone. I’ve used Windows Mobile before, so this isn’t quite the new experience that the BlackBerry Curve was, but I haven’t used the latest version of Windows Mobile (version 6) either. I used WM5 with a Treo 750 for a while, but I ended up dealing with a bad bug that prevented calls from ringing. That was pretty much a killer for the device, and I stopped using it.

And that would be the end of the story, but for the Smartphone Round Robin. And here we are again.

First, Some History

When I last used Windows Mobile, I was frustrated at the lack of real estate — I was used to a 320×320 screen from the Treo 680 (which I’ll be using again next week), and the 750′s 240×240 screen felt really small. When the pixels are limited like that, the seemingly glaring excesses of the Windows Mobile interface… the bars across the bottom and top of the screen, plus the right scroll bar: I was not a happy camper with how the real estate was divided. Dieter of WMExperts told me that WM6 was basically WM5, but with less bugs. The user interface, the way that Windows Mobile presents itself to people using it, was pretty much unchanged, and I figured that maybe I’d check out Windows Mobile again once their new version, Photon, was available. This was all pre-iPhone, so my options of escape were a bit limited.

But, that was a different device, a different Windows Mobile, and a different time. Which leads us, finally, to the Tilt.

About the Tilt

The tilt is a Windows Mobile slider, meaning that it has an iPhone-like front, except that it slides up along the middle to reveal a full-sized keyboard along the front. The form factor, except for the sliding part, is a lot like the iPhone. Oh, and the double-thickness. The iPhone is perhaps a centimeter longer, but half the depth.

The Tilt is huge — not a device that you can use with just one hand. And there are buttons all over the place — one for the camera, one for power/sleep, one for push-to-talk, two OK buttons, and a scroll wheel. Then there are phone, hangup, mail, browser, start, left menu, right menu, and (another) OK key. Then there’s the 5-way directional pad. Many, though not all, of these keys are present yet again in the slider keyboard.

The Size is Deceptive

The battery life on the Tilt is a bit of a disappointment. With the iPhone, I’m used to leaving wi-fi on pretty much all of the time. I recharge the phone about every two or three days. With the Tilt, battery life is great — as long as that Wi-Fi is off, and I don’t have any programs chewing up bandwidth in the background. I suppose this could be said of any phone, but given the size of the Tilt, I kind of expect more battery life out of it.

Given the size, I also kind of expect more speed… response on the Tilt is a bit sluggish, which kind of surprised me. I don’t know if it’s a RAM issue or a processor speed thing, all I know is that the Tilt is kind of pokey. Windows Mobile ships with its own special version of the spinny beach ball that indicates that something is going on. You can’t do anything while the ball spins, the mobile is pretty much locked.

Those are the bad things about the Tilt, off the bat. I’m still not a fan of Windows Mobile, I still find myself lamenting that the UI is bad. The start menu is too small to be thumbable accurately, for example.

Redemptions

But there are good things about Windows Mobile, there always have been. One thing that I do like about Windows Mobile is the power of it all. Real multi-tasking is a boon. Of all of the smartphones that everyone has been using over the Smartphone Round Robin, the Tilt is the only one that really has it. If you want to have GPS mapping going while you browse the web whilst music plays in the background, have at it. The Tilt may not be especially responsive during that time, but it will work.

Windows Mobile also has “a real file system.” With that real filesystem come a lot of benefits. For most things, it means “real apps.” If you want to download something to your phone, have at it. If you want Outlook on your phone, it’s there. If you want to make powerpoint documents or spreadsheets or word documents, it’s all there, ready for you to use. It’s a very powerful system.

For Every Gripe, an Equal and Opposite 3rd Party App

And though there are a lot of things that I don’t like about the way Windows Mobile looks and behaves, there’s a slew of programs out there that attempt to fix it.

I don’t like the Today screen, for example. I miss having a useful background image, and I don’t like the way that the standard information is presented to me. There are programs out there that fix that — the most notable one is probably SPB Mobile Shell, which I use to replace the default ‘Today’ screen.

The browser is really bad, too. Pocket IE is pretty much a joke — it’s incredibly slow and absolutely offsets any speed gains you get from using the Tilt with a 3G network. Opera Mobile to the rescue! It’s not as good as MobileSafari on the iPhone, but it’s a sight better than Pocket IE. You can use it to replace pretty much everything that PIE does — download files, the whole shebang. Opera Mobile is one of the reasons that I’ve been looking forward to using the Tilt.

I also think that the software keyboard on the Tilt is very bad — it’s tiny and requires frequent use of the stylus. I’m pretty certain that there’s an iPhone-like keyboard available. One of the times that I tapped the keyboard with the stylus, though, I got a menu where I could pick and choose from several less-bad software keyboards. The keys are still infintesimal on most of them, but there’s a choice. And some of the helpful forum users have pointed me to other software keyboards that might be better, and I’m pretty sure that there’s an iPhone software keyboard clone floating around on the itnernet somewhere.

Nothing to Reference

One of the things that sets Windows Mobile apart from the other smartphones we’re all testing is that Microsoft doesn’t actually make the device — they just make the software. The rest is all up to HTC, or Palm, or Motorola, or anyone who decides to ship a Windows Mobile smartphone.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it’s a platform — it means that anyone that wants to build a smartphone and has the hardware know-how can build one, because they don’t need nearly as many people to get the software side of things working. Since all of these hardware companies are using the same software platform, it means that it’s a lot easier to get better apps to use and games to play with — it gives Windows Mobile a lot of legs, in terms of what you can do with it.

The downside to all of this is that you don’t necessarily get a strong design edge out of this method of doing things. It’s a lot like Microsoft in the computer world — maybe your average beige computer box is kind of ugly, but that’s not Microsoft’s fault, they just did the software.

And HTC’s Tilt, though not by any means a bad-looking device, shows all the symptoms of this problem. There are huge buttons all over the place, but the hardest one to find and activate is the sleep button. The red phone button, which we’ve all been taught with countless featurephone designs, should turn the device on, or at least wake it up from sleep. Looks like someone missed that, as the red phone button does nothing. It may be that there’s a way to swap those buttons in software — if there is, please post.

Endless Customizability

One of the other things about Windows Mobile that struck me is that there’s endless customizability. I’m willing to bet that many if not all of the things that I can find that I don’t like, there’s an app or tweak or registry edit that fixes it. All that matters is that you have the time, knowledge, and/or money to throw at the things you don’t like about Windows Mobile. And that you have a parachute for the learning cliff.

It’s been an interesting week with the Curve, but the limitations of it started to wear pretty thin on me as the week progressed. Once the newness of the curve wore off, I started eyeing my iPhone a lot more. I’ve been looking forward to shipping the Curve off so I could use my iPhone. Looking to the future, I began — shudder to think — looking forward to the Tilt. But there are some strong redemptive features to the platform.

Minor Nits

I got tired of pressing the spacebar a zillion times to scroll through lengthy end user license agreements, giving rights away, etc. The Apple solution of having the EULA presented in iTunes with activation is actually kind of elegant, now that I think about it. But you only have to agree to a EULA once, and then it goes away. Until you update the program, and then they present you with a new one. If the memory of this wasn’t fresh in my mind from this week, I wouldn’t remember it.

There are two odd niggles that I discovered in using it. I use email aliases fairly extensively. My actual email address is michael dot overbo at smartphoneexperts dot com. But the one I use and give out to everybody is mike at phonedifferent dot com, and I send and receive emails from that address. Both are valid, but any email I send out on my iPhone isn’t from the Smartphone Experts address, it’s from the Phone different address. When I tried to set up an account with the phone different address using the BlackBerry’s ‘Personal Email Set Up,’ it choked. There might be an advanced email setup mode or something that I didn’t look for.

I also ended up with a bunch of partial emails in my integrated inbox. I’d receive a partial of a push email. Then I’d receive another partial a few seconds later. And then the full email in maybe a minute. This occurred for multiple accounts. It’s not a big deal, but it is kind of odd. It might be AT&T’s fault, who knows. I’m not going to blame the Curve.

I need to stress that these nits don’t amount to much. I’ll bet that if I wanted to, I could fix them, probably with a quick post to the CrackBerry.com forums. All of the folks there have been great. The aforementioned nits are just being reported for completeness’ sake.

Media and Entertainment

Depending on what manner of fancy SDHC cards you’ve got sitting around, the Curve can match the amount of storage the iPhone has. But most of the market has their music sitting in iTunes, working with their iPod. I’m one of those people. TunesSync ($10) would have gone part of the way for me, but is Windows-only, I’d have to migrate my playlists and library from Mac to Windows. Missing Sync for BlackBerry from Mark/Space would have gone the distance, but costs $40. It would be a necessary purchase if I was going to use any BlackBerry as a real replacement for my iPhone.

There is a lot of 3rd party software available for the BlackBerry, which is admittedly one of the strengths of utilizing the J2ME platform. All of the games that were available on my feature phones are probably available on the BlackBerry as well, which is a nice touch. Granted, none of the J2ME games I’ve got from those days are compatible with the Curve, which is one of the things that sucks about J2ME (and BlackBerries don’t even support the full MIDP 2.0 standard). And it’s not like the BlackBerry ships with a decent five-way or d-pad — control schemes for most mobile games with the number pad have still been invariably bad, in my experience. Still, you design toward your control strengths. The Breakout-clone that shipped with the Curve was pretty good, and I’ll bet there’s a pretty kick-posterior version of Centipede for BB scroll wheels floating around somewhere. And I know that there will be some great crossword or Sudoku puzzles out there. Maybe even a crossword app that receives the NY Times crossword puzzle, pushed out daily. Play to your strengths, right?

OS Upgrades

One of the things that I really do like about RIM and the BB OS overall is that they do allow users to get OS upgrades. RIM was pretty slow to add user-centric functionality to their devices at first, but ramped up with the built-in apps pretty quickly, and they pushed that functionality back to their older devices. Case in point, there’s an update coming out that adds video recording functionality to the Curve in the near future. There are likely more advances on the way for the Curve. Palm OS used to do that, but they largely don’t anymore. Windows Mobile is doing it now, at least to a certain degree, but Microsoft’s best efforts are stymied by the carriers and handset operators.

I really respect that BlackBerry does those updates, though. For one, it doesn’t leave businesses and customers in the lurch. And, it gives users of older devices something to look forward to. I know that the iPhone is missing functionality now, but I’m extremely confident that that functionality is going to increase as Apple releases software revisions. Functionality will expand exponentially once the SDK becomes available. I just have to be patient for it.

If you need an email lifeline, but aren’t as concerned about a web or media lifeline, the BlackBerry OS is a good option. RIM has been putting media functionality into the BB platform pretty rapidly, which prevents users from defecting. They might gripe about the wait, but it’s not too likely that they’ll defect for a feature that’s short months away. Judging from the market success of the BlackBerry, it’s a strategy that’s working, I’m not going to predict that RIM is going to go under or anything stupid like that. Really, I’m not sure that the BlackBerry competes with the iPhone at all.

Parting Thoughts Shots?

That headline is deliberately misleading. I like the Curve a lot. And you know, the specs on the Curve are excellent. It’s got a good camera, GPS built-in, perfectly good battery life, a great form factor, feels very good in the hand… there are a lot of things that are great about it. It’s a world-class piece of hardware, for sure.

That said, it’s missing three things that I really just can’t do without. In the previous article, I griped about some of the things that are missing that bug me. Lots of things bug me, but something that bugs me isn’t necessarily a show-stopper. These things are show-stoppers:

1. A Real Web Browser

   
   Which one would you rather use?

   The browser. If they can’t get anyone to write a decent Java-based browser, they should port one of the lightweight HTML kits like WebKit or KHTML or persuade Opera to develop a push-based native version. Their browser is bad, and the lack of a touchscreen really hits home here (more on touchscreen in #2). Opera Mini is a stopgap, but they should be making deals with Opera to make a push-compatible version of Opera Mobile. Or they should be making a J2ME compatible WebKit/KHTML. Did I repeat myself? Yes, this one is twice as important as the other gripes. Whatever it costs, it doesn’t matter. It should be done. I’m not going to say that Palm OS aren’t going to get hit on this one. They will for sure.

   On the iPhone, the scenario is like this: the wife and I will watch a TV show, see a familiar face and think, “Who is that actor and/or actress? Where have I seen him and/or her before…?” And I’ll look it up on the iPhone. A few moments later, we know who he and/or she is. Persistent annoying bug in the back of our minds solved. I didn’t even try for any of that stuff on the BlackBerry. I’ve still got a bunch of stuff in the back of my mind somewhere that I wanted to look up. I’ll remember it in a few days and then stare sullenly at the Tilt, in all likelihood. Queries to Wikipedia definitely hit an all-time low this week with the Curve.

   
   case in point: what’s his face

2. A Smartphone in Feature Phone Clothing

   A UI push would be a smart move. If they had a UI that brought in some innovations from the other smartphone operating systems, BlackBerry users would be even more efficient than they already are with their push lifestyle. That’s kind of a scary thought, no?

   In some ways, the BlackBerry OS isn’t as far along as I’d expect it to be, given how long it’s been on the market. The big innovation that BlackBerry has brought to the mobile world — push — is the best part of the platform, but I feel that beyond push, RIM is a bit out of their league. I think that RIM has been grabbing their interface paradigms from feature phones instead of smartphones or computers, and I think that could be unfortunate in the long run.

   It makes me sad, but copying feature phone UIs might actually be a smart move for now. Feature phone UIs, though tortured, are what 90% of North American mobile phone users are familiar with (insert your own obligatory 90% Windows users joke here). Everyone is familiar with feature phone user interfaces. There are bunches of indistinguishable icons, plenty of carrier-branded apps that interfere visually with platform apps, buried settings, and plenty of themes to choose from.

   It’s an easy move to present something familiar to those people in lieu of developing a more structured and intuitive user interface. I do think it’s a possibility that RIM will lose customers to Windows Mobile if they don’t address the convergence aspect of smartphones and address the emerging needs and wants of the prosumer and “mobile accomplisher” crowd. Think of the future: Microsoft designs mobile and desktop Windows to look similar. Eventually the tortured-ness of the Windows Mobile UI will be more familiar than the torturned-ness of the feature phone UI to that 90%.

   
   AT&T’s theme for the BB might be the best one, usability-wise. AT&T’s theme hides most of the extra AT&T cruft in folders. Why don’t folder settings apply across themes?

3. A Touchscreen

   With a touchscreen, you can scroll through big lists pretty quickly — flicking is a pretty efficient way to scroll through bunches of stuff. Without one, you mash on the spacebar a bunch of times or flick the scroll wheel a lot. I’ll predict that the motions would be pretty similar to what you see on the iPhone. Worries about battery life on TouchScreen BlackBerries seem a lot like Palm’s supposed worries about battery life with wifi: old and busted. Everyone else BB competes with has figured it out, why hasn’t BB?

Honorable mentions:

• I think some of the other reviewers will include 3G, but the truth is that I’ve never really used it — the Twin Cities area hasn’t had it. The best I’ve had for mobile data is 1xRTT, GPRS, EDGE and wifi. And you know what? Wi-Fi is definitely my favorite.
• As I mentioned in the previous Curve article, Microsoft will eventually whittle down the BES advantage. It may take months or years, but they’ll do it.

Until We Meet Again

I don’t want to end my time on the Curve on a bad note, though. It wouldn’t be fair to the Curve, which I’m forced to admit is a great device — in its own right, and on its own terms (isn’t that great? A compliment-dig).

I think that iPhone and BlackBerry are diametrically opposed in what they try to do, which makes them complementary. What the BlackBerry is good at, the iPhone sucks at. Where the iPhone excels, the BlackBerry sucks. And both platforms provide updates to their users, which I like. If I worked for a business, that expected me to lug around a second smartphone besides my iPhone, I’d try and finagle my way into one of the smaller BlackBerries like the Pearl. There, I said it. I would hide all but like eight icons on the BlackBerry and use the iPhone for everything else on the sly and let each device play to its strengths. Also, in the event that I ever get sick of having a touchscreen smartphone, I’ll look to BlackBerry first (another compliment-dig).

There’s a flip side to that coin, though. There always is: I think that the hardcore BlackBerry users will be entranced by the iPod Touch. Or, if they need a personal cellphone in addition to their enterprise-managed BlackBerry, the iPhone is not going away. I don’t know how long the affinity will last; part of me expects each company to begin viciously tearing pages out of each other’s playbook, but it’s definitely there now.

The BlackBerry Curve (8310)

For the first week of Smartphone Experts’ Smartphone Round Robin, I was assigned the BlackBerry Curve 8310. As I’ve indicated in the Crackberry forums, I’ve said some nasty things about BB in the past. Some of that is going to have to be put behind me this week; this BlackBerry 8810 isn’t going to use itself.

And don’t forget – a comment on this post counts as an entry in the Round Robin Contest!

Setup

I went about setup a little backwards; I didn’t go about setup the usual way. I probably should have set up the BlackBerry on my computer first, but I wanted to get a feel for the device as is. Plus, we weren’t allowed to post on the forums until yesterday. So, I set up my emails on the BlackBerry itself, and figured I’d set up other services later.

I’ve used some featurephones fairly recently (I used a Sony Ericson w810i as a cameraphone intermittently before my final love affair with the Treo 680), so a lot of the Java BlackBerry apps are pretty familiar — Opera Mini and Google Maps for Mobile specifically, and some more that I’m curious to see. Google Mail, Yahoo! Go, and Facebook are all in that camp. I was really pleased to see a good AIM client in Ramble; a lot of users suggested JiveTalk as a superior client, and I may yet give that a shot.

Sync

Syncing, at least on the Windows platform, was pretty much a non-issue. I’m pretty good at moving contacts to and fro between various online services and applications, and once I found out that I could pull information from a Yahoo! account, I just put all of my information into my Yahoo! mail. The closest thing the iPhone comes to real push is with Yahoo!, so that account has been getting a bit of love of late. Most of my experience in syncing has come from the Palm Desktop side of things, which leaves a bitter taste in my mouth; I’ve had my fair share of troubles with Palm conduits and iSync over the years.

My favorite sync method is obviously with the iPhone, since it’s built to be perfectly integrated into all of the Apple Mac apps like Mail.app, Address Book.app, and iCal.app, but that really shouldn’t surprise anyone. In fact, this entire paragraph is gratuitous.

I’ll probably wipe the Curve and see what it’s like from the Mac side of things on Wednesday or so; I want to give it some time on the Windows side first, since it appears that’s the overwhelming demographic using the BlackBerry.

What’s Awesome

Mail

By a longshot, the best part about the BlackBerry is the mail. I feel a bit like an idiot, since all of the people that use a blackberry obviously know that. I manage 4 accounts — 2 personal, 1 work, and one for an intermittently high-volume list, and the Curve is a monster in gobbling those emails up. Coming from the iPhone, that’s a new world all over again; the iPhone is a dog for managing a lot of mail. I would definitely be a happy camper if the iPhone suddenly slurped through email like the BlackBerry does.

Integrated GPS, Radio Signal

The GPS chip on the 8310 is amazing too. I have GPS pucks that won’t pick up a signal anywhere inside, and here the Curve was able to pick up a satellite signal in my kitchen. GSM radio reception was also excellent.

Form Quality

I was really impressed with the overall form-factor; it’s really an excellent refinement of the Treo form factor. The keyboard is pretty much the exact same shape and the response on it is really quite good. Nice and clickable, a lot like the high-tactile-response old-school IBM keyboards.

The Curve is quite slim compared to a Treo; not nearly as slim as the iPhone but much shorter, altogether a very pocketable device. No creaks when you try and move it. One of the keys to good design is if it looks like it should be expensive. And the curve does — it’s a pretty stylin’ device.

Stereo Bluetooth

I’m glad to see the A2DP, I have some bluetooth stereo headphones that have been patiently waiting for a purpose for about half a year. Today, they find their purpose: to listen to music streamed in stereo from Bluetooth A2DP-capable device.

What’s not awesome

The Browser

Coming from the iPhone, the browser is a real impediment for the Curve. Opera Mini has been out for quite a while now, and I really don’t understand why companies don’t tear down Opera’s door to make Opera Mini the default browser on their platform. This alone might be the biggest impediment to my productivity — I’m on the baby internet, the kinda sorta internet. Opera Mini goes a long way towards fixing that (and can even be used to sync bookmarks back to the desktop), but Opera won’t multitask and can’t be used for downloads.

It’s amazing how quickly I got spoiled with the iPhone. Just three months! It has double the pixels, and I can view the web in pretty much full glory. The iPhone almost passes the acid2 test. Opera Mini already runs on the BlackBerry. What’s the holdup? Why hasn’t RIM moved to secure a real browser? Expect this question to be asked on this site for the upcoming Treo and Windows Mobile Smartphone Round Robins.

The internet is about way more than just email. I feel that almost all of the handset companies, not just RIM, have blinders on in this regard. Nokia might be the only handset maker that really “gets it.” They install Opera Mobile on most of their phones, and have WebKit-based browsers on everything else. A decent browser is one of the big reasons that I jumped ship to the iPhone. The world wide web is what got the populace on the internet in the first place. Why ignore it in the mobile space?

User Interface

I have a lot of problems with the user interface. A lot of the icons are similar to each other, the icons don’t always have good contrast with the default background, the shadowed font effects don’t really lead to readability… I could go on. And given the chance, I often will. I was advised by Kevin to hide the icons for what I didn’t use, which is great advice, but I still had to slog through the apps to see what I’d use and what I wouldn’t, since the Curve ships with its own fair share of AT&T/Cingular-branded bloatware.

To AT&T’s credit I found their more simplistic default theme more usable than the standard BlackBerry icon view. And it has to be said that there are plenty of themes to choose from. I think it’s excellent that 4 out of 5 of the top-sellers are all iPhone lookalikes. 8 out of the top 10 are all iPhone lookalikes, and there are no other themes in the top 10.

Settings All Over

I had a hard time looking for all of the places that I’d use to change settings. As I mentioned in the forums, it seems that there’s a never-ending supply of places to look for where settings are stored. Ringtones and profile settings are stored in ‘Profiles’, a bulk of the settings are stored in ‘Options’, Bluetooth gets its own app AND has settings in ‘Options’, ‘Set Up Email Accounts’ has its own app… it’s not the most user-friendly system out there. I can see why they separated ‘profiles’ and ‘options,’ but the other stuff frankly mystifies me. But for profiles, all I really want is a vibrate switch.

Shroedinger’s Touchscreen: Simultaneously Awesome and Not-Awesome

I miss having a touchscreen. I can tell because there are absent-minded fingreprints all over the Curve’s screen right now. But, omitting toucscreens allows RIM to make their devices slimmer, and problem helps them last longer. It’s pretty much expected that they should have a slim device. And yet, the iPhone throws that conventional wisdom on its side.

But I have to say, there are enough keyboard shortcuts that it makes use pretty easy. Once you learn all of the keyboard shortcuts, that is. I’m also impressed by the one-handedness of it all, and that’s something that RIM probably wouldn’t have focused on so much if there was an ‘easy way out’ touchscreen available. I will miss the BlackBerry’s magnificent ‘N’ key when I return to the iPhone.

The Philosophy

I’ll admit that the Philosophy of BlackBerry is confounding to me: compete mainly in the centralized-management enterprise, be an email beast, be secure, and worry about everything else later. I don’t get that; I’ve got all this stuff that I want to carry around with me — I want to be able to carry media with me, sync playlists with the music app that I use, sync my bookmarks to and fro, store TV shows that I purchase online, the whole shebang. In using it, I don’t always feel like the BlackBerry got the convergence memo. And putting the SD card behind the battery… not the most convenient place. I don’t think they ever expect me to change SD cards once I get one in. That says a lot about what BlackBerry thinks the Curve should be.

But, I can also appreciate that the BlackBerry can constitute essentially bit of a mobile office-on-the-go for a lot of mobile workers. For a lot of employees, maybe that means using the BlackBerry as a DUN connection to their laptop for EDGE internet access anywhere. Maybe it means that email is one of the key features for them at work. For managing email, the BB is a champ.

I do worry about RIM in this space, though. Their philosophy is to push content that people want, be an email beast, and compete in the enterprise space. The reason that I worry about RIM is that they’re competing with Microsoft. I’ve said in our Treocasts that Microsoft is a vicious competitor, and they’re relentless in the areas that they want to focus on. Like Ballmer said at his CTIA conference, they just keep coming and coming and coming and coming at you. They don’t intend to stop, and the Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 is aimed squarely at BES. Microsoft is hungry to maintain and grow enterprise because the server and mobile spaces are the two spaces that they’re not a giant in — they’ve essentially got a lock on the desktop and office software. The purpose for MSCMDM08 is for Microsoft to wedge themselves into spots that RIM was wedging into, and that puts a pretty large onus on RIM… once MSCMDM08 comes out, that is.

Final Thoughts

So I respect the laser-honed focus on email, but that focus dulls the sheen a bit for someone more interested in a consumer device. Mobile accomplishers abound. Truth be told, the BlackBerry has been improving of late in this regard. I can take pictures now, I can play MP3s (and use them as ringtones, natch), I can even watch the errant video now. I was surprised to see the Roxio media sync there. The BlackBerry is maturing fast, and I’m going to have to keep a much closer eye on the platform than I ever did. In that respect, my use of the BlackBerry has been a real eye-opener.

We are now launching the cool project we were hinting at in the last podcast: the Smartphone Round Robin. For the next 2 or three weeks, all of the editors of the various Smartphone Experts sites will be using one of the “other” smartphones out there.

For me, this week, it means using a BlackBerry 8310. For Dieter of WMExperts, it means using a Treo 680. for Jennifer of TreoCentral, it means using her iPhone. And for Kevin of CrackBerry.com, it means using the AT&T Tilt. There are rules that we’ve all got to follow — we all have to give the device a full shakedown. I’ll be posting an article later today about my first few days with the Curve, and then a full article on Friday.

This week, I’ll be posting a few articles about the strengths and weaknesses of using a BlackBerry. I’ve already got a few posts in at CrackBerry.com.

So what’s in it for you? Well, there’s a chance to win a prize: a smartphone of your choice and plenty of coupons to spend at the store associated with it. Just leave a comment in any Round Robin thread in the forums. Four sites, four chances to win per day. Just head on over to the Smartphone Round Robin update page for the deets.