We’ve seen our fair share of iClones in the past but this product out of China has taken the knockoff to a new level. It is quite unique in the fact it’s the first iClone we’ve come across that runs two mobile OS’s – Windows Mobile 6.5 and Android 2.1. The hardware is composed of a cheap plastic casing and buttons, 512MB of RAM, 5 megapixel camera sporting auto focus, and a 3.6 inch WVGA capacitive touch screen with multi-touch.

All of this can be yours for a cool $260.

More images after the break!

[bbs.m8cool.com, M.I.C. Gadget]

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 Microsoft’s Windows Phone (Windows Mobile) 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?

Deep breath. We’re here to help. Just hit the jump link for everything you need to know (more properly, everything the TiPb iPhone Forums have taught us) about switching from Windows Phone to iPhone 4 and iOS 4.

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

Windows Phone to iPhone – the paradigm shift

Sincerely, we don’t think many people switched from iPhone to Windows Phone (and won’t until Windows Phone 7 ships), though some of you may have had Windows for work, and many of you, old-school power warriors all, may have been Windows Phone users for years, eschewing the iPhone until its functionality caught up with its form. It’s all good. We’re back to the future now — iPhone 4 and iOS 4. This is about getting you up to speed and ready to go.

Moving over contacts, calendars, and email

If you’re heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, you probably use Exchange — especially for business. Good news, 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 you’re more casual and personal about your Microsoft Mail and Hotmail/Live Mail is how you roll, ActiveSync support is coming for that as well (and some users seem to have it working already).

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.

And you can access all of it in the new iOS 4 unified inbox and threaded email client. It’s not the “best of breed” Exchange experience like Windows Mobile, and it’s not WinMo Outlook, but it gets the job done.

What about customization, file system access?

Um… with iOS 4 you can change your wallpaper, both lock screen and home screen? Seriously though, the iPhone isn’t about tinkering and customizing (except for Jailbreak, see below). It’s not about working hard to make the phone the way you like it. It’s about not having to work hard and the phone just working. Apple controls the experience, which will drive you control freaks crazy, but there’s no such thing as a perfect phone so every advantage is matched by an equal and opposite disadvantage (and each of those varies by user).

Same deal with diving into the bowels of the file system. There isn’t one — at least not a user-facing one. You’re supposed to spend your time using the phone and apps, not fiddling with directories and hierarchies.

With iOS 4 Apple is struggling towards file utility — you can open documents from email, online storage, or synced via iTunes, but it’s not where it needs to be yet.

Again, think 80/20 rule. For most people not seeing how the sausage made is a huge plus. For former Windows Mobile tweaking junkies, it will be frustrating at first.

Hopefully the modern UI, great web browser, and amazing apps will distract you long enough to get past the DTs.

Finding other apps (and games)

Windows Mobile had apps since before there was an iPhone. Fair point. But what Apple lacked in early deployment they’ve more than made up for with modern adoption. Make fun of fart apps all you want, but there’s like a hundred of them. There’s like a hundred of every app type and that means there’s a huge chance that there’s 5 or so amazing apps of just the type you want.

The power of the ecosystem, whether it’s apps or accessories, is something you’re just going to have to experience.

And there’s even Bing (iTunes link) and Windows Live Messenger (iTunes link) to help make you feel at home. (Or at least in a familiar home that’s been recently redecorated with a really slick user experience…)

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

Windows Mobile, especially HTC devices, seem so easy to root and cook ROMs for that, hey, even Phil and Malatesta can do it. (I couldn’t).

If you want to get into the root jail of your iPhone, you need to break it — hence, Jailbreak. That’s also the only way to side load apps outside the iTunes app store — via 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. Or. Stylus.

No front facing QWERTY like the Treo Pro. No side slider like the Touch Pro. No “Pro” appended physical hardware keyboards of any kind. Apple hates buttons and keyboards are nothing if not homes for dozens of buttons.

We kid. Apple prefers the flexibility of a virtual keyboard, and they do flexible keyboards better than anyone in the business. Seriously. Multitouch capacitive interface of any kind on glass can be a transformative experience.

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.

As for the stylus and resistive screen, well you can get a stylus if you really want to (cold weather users especially), but resistive screens have gone the way of the dodo. (Nature selected them for extinction, not Apple). And yes, you can input Chinese just fine with a stubby finger on iOS, thank you. (There’s a built in input method for that).

Okay, about iTunes

iTunes doesn’t run as well on Windows as it does on Mac and with an iPhone you’re stuck with iTunes for OS updates, and for local sync if that’s the way you want to go.

Performance is a pain point for many, no doubt. Functionally however, it keeps getting better. It does so much now, we’re actually a little surprised it’s still called iTunes and not iSync or iStuff.

Buh-bye platform, hello product

Which brings us to the nut of it — Microsoft is all about platforms, Apple all up in products. It’s a huge difference. Most users appreciate the flexibility of platforms but just want their products to ship on time and work. You can, ideally, do anything with a platform and that’s a blessing and a curse. With a product, again ideally, it does what it does well.

For every one of the frustrations you’ll face in leaving Windows Phone and coming to iPhone you’ll experience one or more moments of — don’t laugh — childlike wonder. iOS is a modern mobile operating system with the best user experience in the business. Apple worked on it for years while every other player in the game slept on the sidelines and it shows.

It won’t do everything your old Windows Phone did, but what it does it will do incredibly well and while Microsoft is just now readying version 1.0 of their new Windows Phone 7 platform, Apple is only 8 or so months away from releasing their iOS 5 product in beta.

More Windows Phone 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.

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

Rumors about Windows Mobile 7, or Seven as our sibling site WMExperts is calling it, are near-iTablet level over on that side of the smartphone space. If you read my Windows Phone (based on 6.5) review, you know I had only questions and no answers for Microsoft when it came to what they could do to become competitive in the increasingly important consumer space.

Well, Mal over at WMExperts has put together a ton of whispers, mixed it with keen insights, and unleashed a Windows Mobile 7: What we expect and what we are hearing article of epic proportions. Here are some highlights, but you need to go read the whole thing:

• Two versions, stripped-down Business and pimped-out Media.
• Business Edition will be more like current WM, skin-able by HTC Sense UI and the like, and is more complete right now.
• Media Edition (yes, ME is back, baby!) will be the closest thing possible to a ZunePhone without being a ZunePhone, with maximum Microsoft Experience, but it’s not yet as far along.
• Office 2010 super-integration
• Silverlight (Microsoft’s inversion of Flash), Mediaroom (Microsoft’s TV center), Xbox Live (possibly gaming!), Facebook and Twitter, and Zune Music integration.
• New “Orion” platform to do GPS faster and better.
• 720p (!!) 1280-720 resolution screen on LG “Apollo” handset.
• Dieter and Phil should get the first glimpses for us at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next month.

Again, go read the full article and then hurry back an let us know if you think this is finally Microsoft getting Xbox 360 and ZuneHD serious with Windows Mobile/Windows Phone, and if it’s enough to make them competitive — or more than competitive — with the iPhone in 2010.

Week 4 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin brings me face-to-big-glass-face with our most ancient nemesis — Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Phone, this year spawning the killer keyboard of the HTC Touch Pro 2, and the monstrous hardware of the HTC HD2. Yes, that’s 2 times HTC version 2 devices and to help me out, I’ve got the dark lord of WMExperts himself, the one and only WMExperts Phil Nickinson to show me the ropes — and quite honestly to help me lift that ginormous HD2 onto the table!

Remember, every day you post on my WMExperts Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win the Windows Phone of your choice. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

This week also brings the yin to my yang, the productivity to my play, my best frenemy forever, CrackBerry Kevin back to TiPb and the iPhone he claims never to use. Head on over to the TiPb forums and help him out, would you? (i.e. show him some neat new games). And get a chance to win an iPhone 3GS for your troubles.

Video hands-on with the Touch Pro 2 and HD2 after the break!

[YouTube Video link]

Paul Thurrott over at the Windows Supersite Blog posted this up in reference to Microsoft’s apparent strategy so far when it comes to Windows Mobile and Zune.

Funny.

Steve Jobs likes to quote hockey legend Wayne Gretzsky’s famous line — don’t skate to where the puck is, skate to where it will be. Let’s just hope they remember that, and this comic, and really bring it next year with iPhone 4.0 and the 4th generation iPhone, now that Android 2.x and webOS are on the ice.

So, yeah, Windows Mobile and Zune. In all the excitement over the Droid (and Pixi), Microsoft went and snuck in some new, competitive updates.

First, the iPod touch’s rival, and media darling, the Zune HD got a firmware update that enhanced the browser (though we still get shivers at any mention of IE6, mobile or otherwise) and paved the way for 3D gaming. (Check out the video, above). As with previous games, they’re free, but you might have to watch a 15-30 car commercial before the game (or calculator app) launches.

Second, Windows Mobile proper just saw the launch of Windows Marketplace for Mobile Phase II, including an on-phone update for the Marketplace App, and the ability to purchase apps right from a desktop PC browser. And, yeah, the new Marketplace security has reportedly already been cracked.

For the customization junkies, George at WMExperts has also run down some of the more popular UI layers currently available for WinMo, including manufacturers’ like HTC and Samsung, vendors’ like SPB and Vito, and, of course, Microsoft’s home grown.

So, anything Apple and the iPhone should be paying attention to? Any greener grass on Microsoft’s side of the road with these updates? Check out the links and let us know what you think.

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.

Microsoft has officially announced that the next skin point release for their handheld operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5, will launch on Oct. 6 and include App Store Windows Marketplace for Mobile (catchy!) and MobileMe MyPhone services. WMExperts asks the impertinent question:

Will Windows Mobile 6.5 be available for any phones on that date? Will we see new phones released with WinMo 6.5?

We shrug in sympathy. Typically it takes a while to go from release to manufacturers to release to consumers. What benefits the split platform strategy has in consumer choice, it lacks in speed to consumer market.

When it does arrive, WinMo 6.5 will support both physical and virtual keyboards, no-touch and touch screens (resistive only?!), GPS, accelerometer, high res cameras, and likely spinning, multihued beechball wheels of wait (our Macs sympathize).

That the same company can ship the Zune HD before Windows Mobile 6.5, however, still puzzles us. That they’re arguably shipping both years too late to be competitive… well, that just frustrates us no end.

Throw a couple billion at Windows Mobile 7, would you please, and get her out asap?

According to sibling site WMExperts, Microsoft has released a developers guide for porting iPhone apps to — shock and horror — Windows Mobile.

Can’t blame them, though, 65,000 apps via a unified, on-device store, fart apps and rejected apps aside, is a huge competitive gap to make up, especially when your previous generation was stuck in a Windows 95-style user experience.

Selfishly, we hope the competition helps force out those fart apps and get those rejected apps back into Apple’s iTunes App Store where they belong…

In a write up nonchalantly titled “Lies, damn lies, statistics, and Apple…“, our good friend Phil Nickinson over at sister-site WMExperts rightly points out that Apple gave Windows Mobile a full on shunning during the WWDC 2009 keynote:

Windows Mobile isn’t even mentioned. Sure, Microsoft hasn’t yet launched its dedicated app store, Windows Marketplace for Mobile. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t stores from which to buy apps – ahem, here’s one – and it’s an insult to all of the developers of the 20,000 Windows Mobile applications available.

Windows 7 did get a mention (and a ribbing, as usual, from OS X head Bertrand Serlet), but in the smartphone space…?

Nothing.

That might seem callous from Apple’s part — but here’s the worse problem for Microsoft: Windows Mobile was missing from a lot of post-WWDC analyst and media commentary as well.

Apple still owns significant smartphone mind-share and the Palm Pre has captured the attention of the blogsphere and, since RIM is holding fast, that’s coming at the expense of Microsoft (and maybe Android, which was last year’s next big thing).

Realistically, with so many platforms now, when someone writes “Apple iPhone and…” “BlackBerry and…” and now “Palm Pre and…” there’s only room for so many others in the sentence, and those places are becoming increasingly competitive.

With Windows Mobile 7 pushed out until 2010, and 6.5 not in consumer hands yet either, and with iPhone 3G S about to hit, things might not be changing any time soon either…

Welcome to 2009, where Microsoft will — at some point later this year or next — release versions of what Apple released in 2008!

Our frenemies over at WMExperts have the details, and we have the snide remarks:

• SkyMarket looks to be the App Store done Microsoft’s way. Does that mean each app will ship in Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Really Professional, Ultimate, and 8 more server SKU’s?

• SkyBox, which if MobileMe is “Exchange for the rest of us”, makes SkyBox “MobileMe for the same of you?”. We can only guess it’s a repackaging of Hosted Exchange and Live! services, so join in on the Sync Toy/Live Sync/Live Mesh/Azuze MPD-brandfusion. It will, reportedly, run on non-WinMo devices (which is actually a Very Nice Thing).

• SkyLine, either a business version of SkyBox(!) or a Mobile clone of iDisk, depending on who’s reading the tea leaves.

Microsoft, like RIM, Google, and Palm have to go in this direction. Apple opened a floodgate with the AppStore, no doubt about it, so while we poke some friendly fun, we also hope this gives Apple more competition, like the new Palm Pre, so that Apple has to up their game and give us iPhone faithful more functionality faster than we might otherwise get.

Anyone racing to pick up an HTC FUZE and try it out?

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Join us for the second of two special Smartphone Round Robin Roundtables! This week, Casey, Kevin, Rene, and Dieter discuss the final two devices in our Smartphone Round Robin: the T-Mobile G1 and the the HTC Fuze. Plus, they answer your questions live!

Music: Our Slanted Voices by DoKashiteru

Our sibling site, WMExpert’s tells us about all the speculation surrounding code-name “pink”, which may have to do with some manner of next generation Windows Mobile stuffs. (We’ve heard whispers of “rouge” as well, so we’re guessing there’re some real “Lady Marmalade” skunkworks going on).

What thinks noted Windows pundit Paul Thurrott, who has made a side career absolutely annihilating Windows Mobile as of late? As much as he loves Vista and Windows 7 and everything else Microsoft (Internet Explorer rightfully excluded), and as much as he bashes and baits all things Apple, iPhone user Thurrott has been saving his most impassioned rants of late for Windows Mobile. The latest?

Yep. [News that Windows Mobile 7 may not hit the market until 2010] is bad. Microsoft is working on a number of things before that major update, Windows Mobile 7. These include a new version of the WM version of IE, called Internet Explorer 6, and a new Windows Mobile platform called Zune Mobile that includes Zune functionality. But it’s not happening quickly enough.

Really? 3+ years after Steve Jobs hit the stage at Macworld 2008 and pulled the original iPhone from his pocket isn’t quickly enough? That’s how long it takes to even begin a response? “Pink” aside, is there no sense of urgency in Redmond? No desire to step up their game in the face of the iPhone walking in, stealing their mind share, and smacking around their market share?

I wanted to at least mention one thing I found vaguely alarming. When asked about the success of the iPhone and how that impacts Windows Mobile, I was told that the iPhone “validated” Microsoft’s approach. That’s some weird combination of revisionism, wishful thinking and, perhaps, delusion.

Apparently not.

Another analyst deflating missive from everyone’s favorite mythical Mac pundit, the Macalope. This time, the horny headed one explains why there’s no Flash or Java on the iPhone:

Uh, because they blow?

There’s more to it than that, of course:

And here we have the real issue. Sure, the iPhone could run Flash, but — particularly given the already unoptimized state of Flash on OS X — it would probably have to run some stripped-down, crappier version of Flash.

For the full story behind the various procs and cons, check out the full article, and also take a look at the Macalope’s weekly column for the latest Windows Mobile CES news — which makes TiPb wonder if Ballmer is picking his code names from Lady Marmalade these days…

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[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!]

Join us for the first of two special Smartphone Round Robin Roundtables! This week, Casey, Kevin, Rene, Jennifer, and Dieter all come together to discuss three of the Smartphone Round Robin devices: The iPhone 3G, the Treo Pro, and the BlackBerry Bold!

Music: Our Slanted Voices by DoKashiteru

This week’s Around SPE is sponsored by the the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store, which has long been your best source for iPhone accessories. A lot of iPhone 3G upgraders were left out in the cold when their car chargers turned out to not be compatible, but they’ve got plenty that are, not to mention plenty of headphones that are a step up compared to the standard white buds

Last week both CrackBerry.com and WMExperts found themselves on the cusp of major releases — the BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, not to mention a few others on the Windows Mobile side. So while everybody has been anticipating new devices, all of the editors at SPE are anticipating something else that will be starting on November 17th. The hint is right up there in the picture!

Read on for the full skinny on what’s been happening around SPE!

WMExperts

WMExperts made a big splash Friday afternoon with the ‘net’s first and only video of the HTC Fuze for AT&T! Be sure to check back Monday morning because we’re also cooking up a full review of this latest and greatest Windows Mobile smartphone. It looks like the Fuze release date has finally been pinned down, too.

WMExperts also tends to cover some more general industry news, so all the action at the FCC last week definitely caught our eye. Lastly, we’re more than a little proud of our writer George Ponder, who used a Treo Pro to help manage the election in his district.

CrackBerry.com

Over at CrackBerry.com, thousands of BlackBerry enthusiasts rejoiced as AT&T stayed true to their promised November 4th release date and launched the Bold. Picking election day turned out to be a smart move for AT&T and RIM, as stations like CNN played the new AT&T BlackBerry Bold commercial all day long.

The BlackBerry Storm, RIM’s first touchscreen BlackBerry, continues to build on the hype leading up to its launch. Vodafone has dropped word of a November 14th release, and the Vodafone BlackBerry Storm bus has been traveling London which has turned out a bunch of Storm preview videos. While Verizon has not given official on the availability of their Storm, the educated rumor points to the week of the 23rd.

You’ll want to keep it locked to CrackBerry.com this week. The What Would You Do for a BlackBerry Storm? Contest has come to an end and the top ten finalists have been selected. In order to win their new BlackBerry, the winners have to carry out their “To Dos” which will be published on CrackBerry.com as they come in. The first one hits on Monday!

The iPhone Blog

According to JD Power, the iPhone is absolutely destroying the Blackberry in *business* satisfaction due to it’s drop dead ease of use and killer UI, but does Apple just not “get” the Four Pillars of PIM, something Palm nailed way back in 1997? Probably not, as the latest iPhone OS 2.2 leaks focus on over-the-air podcast downloads (admittedly super sweet!) and yet more App Store tweaks.

Speaking of the App Store, turns out Opera Mini was NOT denied (but probably would be), WeightBot’s developers aren’t done innovating on the iPhone just yet, and Shazam wants a piece of Midomi in our App vs. App battle royal for music mastery. (Leave a comment and you just might win an iTunes gift certificate). Of course, if you want to win a whole slew stuff — an Ultimate iPhone Accessory Pack no less — check out the Phone Different to find out this week’s way to enter (hint: requires @theiphoneblog and rhymes with “sweet”.)

TreoCentral

Over at TreoCentral, we learned via a Barron’s article that analysts at Avian Securities and Morgan Keegan downgraded PALM due to the belief that Palm’s cash position will significantly erode ($248 million at the end of the latest quarter to $75 million over the next year) which leaves “little room for error.” The downgrade was also due to a U.S. retailer survey resulting in the belief that smartphone sales will come in below expectations for the next several quarters.

We also found out in that same Barron’s article that we might not (corrected, thanks Scott!) be seeing the Treo Pro on AT&T and the Treo 800w on Verizon in time for the holiday shopping season.

Plus we learned that Apple almost bought Palm back in the summer of 1997. Jean-Louis Gassée noted in an article over at Monday Note:

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.

Android Central

We’ve settled in over at Android Central, now that the G1 seems to be out there and getting used by a surprisingly large number of people. Just check out these download statistics for the Android Market to see what we mean, or check out some the backstory behind Android Apps.

Our favorite new app: the Android Gameboy emulator! A close 2nd favorite use for the G1 might be the newly discovered tethering method, though. Meanwhile, we’re keeping our eye on the just-discovered Android Jailbreak and security risks that have popped up.

This week’s Around SPE is sponsored by the Android Central Store, where you can find a full complement of accessories for the T-Mobile G1 including headset adapters, body skins, and screen protectors.

What’s the big news in the Smartphone world this week? It’s a mix, really. Android’s looking like a viable platform to more and more people, there are a ton of Windows Mobile devices on the way, and both CrackBerry.com and the iPhone Blog are running contests that ought to spark your interest. Read on!

Android Central

Android Central is still enamored with the G1, so we followed up our full review of Android with a look at the Android Market App Store. We’re excited to see that said App Store should soon be populated with quality games from EA, not to mention complete Exchange support for push email and PIM info.

Of course, like the rest of the Android-watching-web-world, we noticed that some folks were touting that they’d successfully unlocked a T-Mobile G1. Yeah, we did that a week earlier than anybody else did and we got AT&T’s data working just peachily as well, thanks. We’d be more bitter, but the fact that you can grab a G1 at Walmart has our head spinning so fast we ain’t got time to mope.

CrackBerry.com

CrackBerry Nation is abuzz with new BlackBerry releases. After months and months and months and months of waiting, the BlackBerry Bold will finally be available from AT&T this Tuesday! Storm fever is still going strong, with launch parties taking place and release dates getting near. You can now pre-order a Storm from Vodafone, and things are still looking on track for the Storm to be out on Verizon by Black Friday. The Pearl Flip is making its rounds too: T-Mobile is now offering it in Red (in addition to the Black model they launched with) and it’s starting to pop up in Rogers stores (in both black and pink) with November 4th availability everywhere.

Phase 1 of the The What Would You Do for a BlackBerry Storm? Contest was a huge success, with over 3,000 crazy CrackBerry addicts entering their What Would You Dos. Judging for that is going on as we speak (should be complete by Monday night).. with the top ten soon-to-be Storm winners to be contacted on Tuesday. Next step – they’ll have to carry out their To Dos on video!

And the long-waited CrackBerry Book is nearing it’s eBook launch date (print copy to follow in a couple weeks)… Featuring real life tales of BlackBerry Addiction gone too far and effective strategies to help get your use under control, this will be a must read for the BlackBerry Addict (expect your signifcant other to pick you up a copy!). Keep your eyes peeled for it to surface later this week!

The iPhone Blog

iPhone Live! — our new podcast which will alternate with Phone Different and make us all nice and weekly — is now archived and available in the iPhone blog’s usual feed. Join Dieter, Brian, Chad, and Rene, for a discussion of iPhone 2.2, GPS, Turn-by-Turn Navigation, and a Q&A from our live chat audience.

…You’ll also be interested in the beginning of our Ultimate Accessory Pack Give Away Contest!

Big week for Apps as well, as TiPb interviews PCalc’s James Thomson for a look behind the marketing and money of the App Store. New release Google Earth also goes App vs. App against veteran Earthscape, and we take a look at why Apple may have denied browser rival Opera Mini a place on the iPhone.

TreoCentral

Over at TreoCentral, we found via WMExperts about another clue telling us that the Treo Pro is on its way to Sprint. And we found out that the Treo 750 has disappeared from AT&T’s website, and you can only get it from Palm in the unlocked variety.

We read that John Hartnett, Palm’s SVP of Global Markets, is leaving the company in November for undisclosed reasons. This comes on the heels of Palm hiring Simon Lloyd as Senior Director, EMEA Marketing, to try and win some ground in the European market as Palm wants to make a comeback against the BlackBerry and iPhone in brand stakes. And speaking of markets, how about the stock market, in which Palm’s stock teetered at low records (hitting $2.70) on Tuesday.

Brian has written a review of the Celio Redfly, which makes a great mobile companion for the Palm Treo Pro. If you haven’t bought the Redfly as of this writing, you still have a chance to grab it for $199.95 in the TreoCentral Store.

WMExperts

WMExperts is buckling down for a deluge of new Windows Mobile releases in the coming weeks, although we did manage to get out of the gate early with first review of the Touch Pro on Sprint. We’re expecting the AT&T version of that device, AKA the Fuze, to arrive on Monday and for the Verizon version to be pretty much identical Sprint’s.

Mostly, though, we focused on the wider launch of Microsoft’s Live Mesh service, which is a great cloud-sync application that works on Windows, Mac, and of course, Windows Mobile. Be sure to check out our early walkthrough.

Not enough for you? Well, we did confirm the rumor that we also were the first to report, namely that the Treo Pro will hit Sprint. WM devices on Sprint also finally joined the MMS crowd and, well, there’s a mystery version of Windows Mobile that we’re waiting on as well.

You may not realize it, but the site you’re reading right now is a part of one of the premier networks of smartphone news and review sites. We call it the ‘Smartphone Experts Network’ and if you haven’t heard, we’ve recently added a new member to our family, Android Central. That brings the number of our smartphone communities up to five sites. You can find links to these sites and to their latest stories either in the sidebar or footer of every SPE site.

I thought now would be a good time to introduce a new weekly blog post I’ll be putting up at each of our sites called ‘Around SPE,’ which will give you a very quick roundup of the biggest stories at each of our sites. Now, ‘big stories’ are just a tiny part of what we offer, as each of our sites also feature vibrant communities, engaging podcasts, and also accessory stores if you’re looking to make your smartphone a little better.

In addition to our new sister site, there’s also some other SPE Network news to share, so follow me after the break to learn more!

Let’s start with a quick note about Smartphone Experts:

Beyond the launch of Android Central, there’s also a couple other things that may interest you. First and foremost, we’re going to be launching the 2nd Annual Smartphone Round Robin on November 17th! If you’re unfamiliar with the Round Robin, here’s how it works. An editor from each of our five sites must, for one full week, give up their smartphone of choice and use a competing smartphone. During the course of that week, each editor will be publishing a review of that new smartphone from their unique perspective. It’s a great way to gain insight into how all these different smartphones work.

We have chosen our devices for this year (it was tough!) and everybody’s getting ready to give up their own favorite phones to try their hand with the others. We’re going to mix things up a bit this year with some multimedia coverage and maybe another surprise or two — so stay tuned! If you want to get caught up, you can check out all the articles from the 1st Annual Smartphone Round Robin here.

One other quick note — I’m an RSS fiend and I figure maybe some of you are too. I’ve created a Combined RSS Feed for the SPE Network that mixes all of our daily postings in a single feed. Heck — you can even Subscribe to SPE Network by Email. I’m going to go ahead can call the combined feed a “Beta” for now, there are a few kinks to work out in our system. The good news is the URL will always stay the same.

Alright, enough of that, let’s get to the news of the week!

-Dieter Bohn, Editor in Chief, Smartphone Experts

The biggest news of the past week in the entire smartphone world is — without question — the release of the T-Mobile G1. At Android Central, we’ve been covering the news from every angle. The most important angle has to be our full reviews of the device.

If you’re unfamiliar with Android, our video overview of the platform is a great primer. If you’re interested to hear how this first ever ‘Google Phone’ is from a hardware perspective, our hardware review of the T-Mobile G1 has you covered. Finally, we’ve also published a full review of Android on the G1. Grab yourself a tasty beverage and dig in. If you have any questions about the G1 or about Android in general, be sure to stop by the new Android Forums.

Over at CrackBerry.com, you’ll find there was a lot of news out of the first-ever BlackBerry Developer Conference. While the BlackBerry App Center/App Store news was big, perhaps the most exciting takeaway wasn’t made in the form of an announcement at all, but rather that RIM is becoming a much more sociable company as they focus their energy on the consumer market. Day 1 and Day 2 highlights give a good impression of what went down at DevCon.

Who are we kidding? The biggest news of the week was that Kevin has posted his full hands-on review the BlackBerry Storm!

One of the best things about Windows Mobile is the multiplicity of devices available for the platform. This week at WMExperts.com has been a pretty good example of that. We gave one of the first reviews of the Samsung Epix on the web, looked forward to the AT&T Fuze, and celebrated the official launch of the Touch Pro on Sprint.

A story that may have flew under your radar is a roundup of rumors coming from what appears to be an insider at HTC. If you’re of a more technical bent — or just want to see what sorts of crazy hacks are possible on Windows Mobile, check out Registry Edits I Have Loved.

The iPhone Blog has been focusing on how The iPhone made huge financial numbers this week for both Apple and AT&T, with almost 7 million iPhones sold — (temporarily?) eclipsing both Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Just imagine what an iPhone HD could do! At 5500 Apps and 200,000,000 downloads to date (some of which you can win right now in TiPb’s AT WORK contest!), however, questions remain as to whether or not developers for the iPhone’s market defining App Store will likewise enjoy the “long tail” of success.

Over at TreoCentral, we read that Access recently unveiled their new version of the Access Linux Platform (ALP). Although not strictly-Treo-related, it is an interesting look at what might-have-been for the Treo. Access is the company that ultimately purchased the rights of Palm’s original next generation platform, then called Cobalt, before scuttling it. It will be interesting to see if ALP picks up any traction against Android or Palm’s upcoming OS.

We also learned that Sprint is finally joining their competitors in trimming the outrageous fees they charge for early termination of cell phone service contracts. In an interview with the Associated Press this week, Sprint’s CEO, Dan Hesse, said Sprint could start lowering the fees as soon as December, pending updates to its billing software.

That’s it for this week, folks! Stay tuned for more details on the Smartphone Round Robin and be sure to say hello over at Android Central!

Whoabuphew! Tell Buffy to stand down, Giles to close the books, and Willow to de-dark — for the moment-ish. Turns out the above travesty video of what we first thought was Windows Mobile running on the iPhone may just have been viral marketing much.

But you can’t un-raise that demon, now can you? The Hellmouth has been harshened, and it’s only a matter of time before someone gets all Voldermorty with it and tries to conjure up some Windows Mobile — or Android — style iPhone possession.

Sure, some people may be looking forward to that. Be we’ll just keep the crosses, garlic, and holy water at the ready. B’okay?

Next time it could be for realz!

Taking a break from not buying Yahoo! and single-handidly driving the internet Monkey Boy dance phenomena, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer decided to throw a little advice Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ way: Break up the iPhone! (Please!)

Right now, of course, Apple tightly integrates both the iPhone hardware and software, just like they do with the Mac. This gives them unrivaled fit and finish and ensures developers (and consumers) a unified platform, end to end. It also ensures Apple — who makes their money on hardware, not software — very good margins and, thus far, very profitable business.

Enter Steve Ballmer’s plea, according to Ars Technica:

[Ballmer]‘s expecting Apple to do poorly in both the smartphone and notebook markets over the next five years, mostly because the company continues to stand by its rather un-Microsoft-like integration of both proprietary software and proprietary hardware.

For the full video interview, see ZDnet.

For a reality check, see how the current iPhone model has rejuvenated an industry and led to a bevy of iClones, while Ballmer’s Windows Mobile 7 has been pushed back to 2009, meaning we won’t even begin to see a 2007 iPhone competitive device running anything Microsoft until 2010…

So, yeah, we’re sure Jobs will get right on that…

But what do you think? Should Apple scrap the iPhone model and go the Microsoft route?

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!

We agree with Crackberry Kevin getting this and WMExperts blogging about it, and you know how crazy that makes us…

Why so? Google is playing a cagy game of supplying services to all major platforms while simultaneously deploying their own smartphone OS with Android, browser with Chrome, and likely in the labs, computing OS with gLinux. Gotta keep the existing big players happy; gotta have their own backups in place just in case same big players get unhappy (or unruly). Smart strategy, equal parts Microsoft and Apple.

And it will benefit iPhone users in the short term, perhaps more than any other platform base. See, we already get helpful Google web services, and maybe some Chrome innovation will filter down to WebKit and get picked up for MobileSafari (minus the troubling security and privacy issues, of course). But here’s the thing: The iPhone didn’t get location aware Google Maps until firmware 1.1.3 was shown off at Macworld 2008, which if memory serves was after other smartphone platforms announced it (and after people complained about the iPhone not having it). Heck, other smartphones had Google Maps before there was an iPhone. But their UE (User Experience) wasn’t very good. Early soviet design comes to mind.

In his joint talk with Bill Gates at D All Things Digital, Steve Jobs talked about the iPhone Maps App, and how it “blew away” every other maps app. And he was right. If you haven’t watched the video above, watch it. Forget Street-View and look at the UE. Yes, Blackberry users really have to experience that only a daily — or hourly — basis. Then tap open Google Maps on the iPhone. Now imagine that with Street-View carefully, expertly — beautifully integrated, because that’s likely the next addition to that particular app.

Are we jealous? For now, you bet. But we’re also grateful to our Crackberrian and WinMobile friends for putting up with that kludge until Apple wraps it up the way it’s meant to be wrapped — in just the precisely proper Jobs’-approved shade of gray, no doubt.

(That is, unless they keep the good stuff for Android from now on…)

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!

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.

An enterprising fellow has caught the iPhone 3G in the wild! Whilst at dinner in London he ran into a few Apple employees who gushed about the device, talked up the upcoming launch, and generally passed the iPhone 3G around for everybody present to ogle. Basically the Apple folks were so giddy they couldn’t help themselves. See his rundown here.

That’s all very nice, isn’t it? Here’s the best part: The fellow we’re referring to is Derek Snyder, aka Master of Mobility, the Wizard of Wireless, the Warlock of Windows Mobile, aka the Senior Product Manager for Windows Mobile.

When even the folks in charge of Windows Mobile can’t help but try to scoop the iPhone 3G, you know you’re looking at a ‘big deal.’ (We kid Snyder because we love). Still, good and proper to see that Microsoft is keeping an eye on the iPhone front, it’s even better that they’re playing nice with Exchange on the iPhone. Hugs all around!

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?

Here’s an idea: take the most revolutionary, innovative, and talked about smartphone in years and suggest it should chuck it’s industry changing multi-touch, UNIX-solid OS for something every manufacturer saddled with is desperate to burry (see Windows Mobile, HTC Touch Diamond), or something so old and Java-limited its only claim to fame is server-bound “pushing” wrapped in ever-increasingly iPhone derived packaging (see Blackberry OS, Bold, Thunder, Storm).

So, in other words, in the land of individuality and excellence, in order to succeed the iPhone should abandon everything that makes it… the iPhone, and embrace the mediocrity of lowest-common smartphone denominator?

That’s what Gary Krakow (we don’t know who he is either…) tells a theStreet.com reporter so disturbingly qualified she fails to challenge him on any of the near-constant stream of fallacies, ignorance’s, or unqualified statements he makes. (Here’s a freebie “But didn’t Apple already license Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft in an event so widely seen it nearly brought down the Internet?”)

The iPhone needs to up its game? Do either of you depressing examples of modern media even know what game Apple’s playing?

But enough about them. Here’s our take on whether or not Apple should ditch iPhone OS X for Windows Mobile or Blackberry OS:

How about NO!

How about Microsoft is desperately sending reassurance letters to their partners, pointing out their sales numbers, precisely because the iPhone is what it is? How about RIM is spinning every which way but loose, alternately iDissing, iDeveloping, and iCloning, precisely because the iPhone is doing what its doing?

Bottom line, does any serious-minded journalist or pundit alike (if any such animal still exists!) really think the smartphone space would be better off with Apple merely producing just another Windows Mobile or Blackberry device or form factor, instead of offering another choice, and undeniably pushing the entire industry out of complacency?

We didn’t think so.

(And for the record, yes, we are calling up Rob Enderle and warning him theStreeties are gunning for his “job”…)

Yeesh.

Confession: The real reason I can’t wait for the iPhone 3G to drop? So that at long last the rest of the smartphone industry will have something new to copy!

Today’s offender is the Samsung SGH-i900, and boy does it run the iClone checklist: rounded rectangular slab? Check. Glossy black facade? Check. Silvered trim? Check. Job dropping interface or any sense of pride in innovation? D’oh! Not even close.

Sister site WMExperts.com offers up the usual suspects specs:

[O]ne of the upcoming batch of über-Windows Mobile phones – 6.1 Pro, 240×400 (weird) screen, 1500mAh battery, FM Radio, TV out.

Way to stand out from the crowd!

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!

WinMob on ur Blackberryz

No, Crackberrians, no need to have an OS attack. Ballmer isn’t threatening to unleash his BSOD’d “platform” on the Javaware that passes to power your little e-mail monster (yet). Our bad. Maybe we should have titled this “WMExperts on the Blackberry Bold”, or maybe just “Hawt or Not?” instead?

Anyway, seems WMExperts.com had this to title about the first-to-market iClone job from RIM:

Alright, the BlackBerry 9000 is Hawt

Think of It as an iPhone With a Broken Touchscreen

Blackberryz in ur iTunez

Sadly, this title is accurate. First RIM announces a $150 million development fund for “all mobile platforms” (read “iPhone”, since pretty much every other platform has had development going for years now and should already be a huge success, right?). Then, flabbergast-ingly enough, RIM — incapable of, you know, actually engineering their own way to effortlessly sync media to the Blackberry even with $150 million to throw at it — has decided to use Apple’s. So far there are no reports of RIM actually licensing iTunes connectivity from Apple, like… say… Apple just licensed Exchange ActiveSync connectivity from Microsoft.

Oksy, so let’s get this straight. First, RIM says they’ll give to the iPhone whether Apple likes it — or needs it — or not, and now they’ll take. Fiendishly clever, Lazaridis. Or it would be if you were a 12 year old 133t Hax0r in your parents’ basement, and not the CEO of the (technically) dominant smartphone maker in the world.

Hey RIM, how’d you like it if Ballmer monkey-boy danced his way into your NOC?

Epic kludge.

State of the WinMob — A Microsoft Mulligan?

Microsoft pundit and Apple-baiter extraordinaire, Paul Thurrott gave an(other) impromptu State of Windows Mobile speech on last week’s Windows Weekly:

You know, Windows Mobile is horrible. [...] It’s horrible. Horrible. [...] Don’t even get me started, we don’t have time. I… I… Windows Mobile is a disaster. [...]

[Is Windows 6.1 better?] Better than what? Yeah, it’s better than 5. But so what? This thing has the latest, 6.1 or whatever, the phone I’m using now. God, what a… it’s terrible. It’s terrible. They should be ashamed of themselves. They’ve had this thing… I don’t.. God, it’s embarrassing.

And, you know, I stuck around and I had the motorola Q for along time which I stuck with because of the high speed network and the fact that I could tether it to my laptop and use it as a high speed modem for my laptop. That’s great. I miss that. I’m going to tell you, though, the Windows Mobile stuff.. geez… It’s like going back.. Oh, god, it makes Windows 95 look futuristic by comparison.

[Is it challenging getting an OS onto mobiles?] Okay, Apple did something pretty impressive.

[The iPhone doesn't have cut and paste.] I hear ya, I’m just saying, you know, from a usability standpoint — night and day. [...] This thing is a piece of crap. They should completely start over. It’s horrible. It’s a complete waste of time. They should just pretend this never happened. This is.. it’s… it is the mulligan. They should just start over. Nobody uses the thing anyway. It’s just ridiculous.

[Treo 700w, HTC, and people love Sprint handsets...] I wouldn’t say love. Remember what they love about these devices are the form factors. The keyboards and, you know… You’re not going to find too many people who… I… I shouldn’t say that because, of course… [...]

You know what, look, I hear from Apple guys obviously. At least that I get. I mean, I could have my arguments with these people but at least Apple makes high quality stuff so we can arg–we can nitpick over whatever we want.

If someone is actually going to come to me and explain that Windows Mobile is not, in fact, a piece of crap, I’m sorry, I don’t entertain lunacy. This… This thing is ridiculous.

No, it’s terrible. No, it’s not even like a debate, it’s terrible. There’s no — you know what I’m saying — we can debate things. We can’t debate this.

[...] It’s terrible.

There’s nothing there. And this from a man who likes the Zune…

Yowza.

Palm’s 800th Verse — Same as the First!

Okay, even we have to admit it: the upcoming 800w is the Palm device we always wanted…

Back in 2005 when it should have shipped.

It takes until now to get WiFi? Now? Really? And still not on Palm OS “Granite”, but on Windows Mobile 6.1, which even HTC is desperately trying to hide like a Remond-headed stepchild?

Treocentral.com has the first “spy” pics, but honestly, who can tell if that’s even an 800w and not a 680 or even a 600 with a clever case and antenna mod?

And word to the “shadowmite”, how about obscuring the serial number on the proto and, hey, your reflection on the screen, so, you know, Colligan doesn’t have the hounds unleashed next time he spots you sneaking into the antiquities wing of Palm HQ, b’okay?

Definitions of Nova

nova |ˈnōvə|
noun ( pl. -vae |-vē; -ˌvī| or -vas ) Astronomy
a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness and then slowly returning to its original state over a few months.

Do they pick these code names just so these columns write themselves? Seriously. Nothing says next generation, second coming, return to dominance like something that explodes, kills all life, only to end up an infinitely sucking mass of dark matter.

On the other hand, since it won’t ship until first half 2009 at the earliest — by which time iPhone 3.0 will be on its way, and maybe a new, non-iClony Blackberry revolution (we dare to dream!) as well — perhaps Colligan and Co. really are code name picking geniuses?

And In No Other News…

We already covered how Sprint is spending wasting $150 million advertising dollars just to make the brand new Samsung Instinct pale in copy-catastrophe next to the last gen iPhone, but in an effort to be more helpful than hurtful, here’s some advice:

Just spend the money giving the devices away to your few remaining customers. You’ll move far more units than if you try and sell them, and maybe even engender a few more months of gratitude usage.

Wow, being nice really is its own reward…

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?

[Ed: We're bringing back the Wait-a-Thon and making it regular again. Sorry we dropped it off there for awhile, folks. With all those 3G and iPhone 2.0 rumors flying about these past couple of weeks, it almost felt like the release was already here. In the meantime, comment on any post tagged "Wait-a-Thon" for your chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card!]

This is not a response to Crackberry.com‘s excellent article, Top 10 Reasons Why the iPhone Is NO BlackBerry. Quite frankly, the iPhone doesn’t need a response; it’s the rest of industry that’s so desperately trying to find one to the iPhone.

I don’t know about you, but it’s getting more than a little tiring hearing everyone compare themselves to — and constantly try to rip-off — the iPhone. I can’t surf a website or cruise the main without some claw-handed Crackberry addict, neck-bearded Palm artifact, or frazzle-haired WinMob frustrati glaring and frothing with barely-contained envy at the perfectly balanced, seamlessly integrated, lustfully convergent iPhone held ever-so casually in my grip.

They know the iPhone is beyond cool. Sure, they cling to their once innovative, formerly revolutionary (at least in the case of Palm and RIM) devices, the ones overwhelming nostalgia or massive business infrastructure investment won’t let them slam to the ground and stomp into the call-dropping, web-mangling, constantly crashing oblivion they so richly deserve.

So the comparisons to the iPhone just won’t stop, despite the fact that the iPhone is pretty much incomparable. Don’t believe me? I’ve got ten reasons to back me up. And these aren’t minor feature gripes or personal peccadilloes. In proper Apple fashion, these are just 10 simple little words…

10. Communication

It’s right there in the name: iPhone. Steve Jobs said it himself at Macworld 2007: the killer smartphone app is voice. How ironic, then, that so many other smartphones so often kill voice.

Making and receiving calls without my phone freezing or crashing, as my previous device did almost daily, is huge. Unprecedented simplicity in everything from easily finding my way back if I navigate away from the phone app, to elegantly handling call holding, muting, and multiple output sources like Blue Tooth, to effortlessly setting up conference calls is huger still. I can’t remember how often I got lost, couldn’t get calls off my headset, or accidentally hung up on people with the confusing hackjobs that passed for interfaces on my previous smartphones.

The iPhone also introduced desktop-class HTML email rendering and “just the internet”, AJaX powered, standards compliant web browsing, along with interface innovations for SMS, .MAC gallery transfer for photos, and the ability to email YouTube videos, photos, and web links at the tap of a virtual button.

(The browsing is so good, ironically, everyone from Amazon to Facebook to popular blogging plugin makers are providing iPhone-optimized web pages now, lumping every other device into the substandard “mobile” experience or the abortive hell that is WAP).

While some may grumble that this or that power-user feature, or device-specific protocol is missing, Apple has proven they can deliver updates faster and better than anyone in the industry (going from version 1 to 1.1.4, with 2.0 immanent, in less than a year and adding significant capability in the process).

For the user, the interface is the app, and for Apple, their interfaces are remarkably back-end independent. So, if the iPhone needs to improve SMS, or add IM or MMS for now until the differences between desktop and handset protocols evaporate, well Apple’s already got patents pending for that as well.

In the mean time, as most of the iPhone commercials show, having music or video or web pages fade away when your phone rings only to fade right back when your done — that’s truly killer.

Listen up, communication-centric users, especially those who want the internet in their pocket, are all over the iPhone.

9. Media

The iPod is the king of all mobile media, with an over 70% share of the US market. People love them their iPods and Steve Jobs has repeatedly said the iPhone is the best iPod Apple has ever made.

Just look at the stats: up to 16GB of flash storage, a 3.5”, 160dpi wide screen display, and seamless integration with the #1 music and leading downloadable media store in the US, iTunes.

Apple can also extend iPhone media in ways their competitors can only dream. From high-end Final Cut Pro for Hollywood scale video production, to (Mac) desktop Garage Band podcast and ringtone creation, to Apple TV syncing and streaming the same iTunes content to your big screen TV, Apple literally can create, manage, and deploy iPhone media from end-to-end. They can do it easily, and what’s really scary (for the competition) is that this is something the iPhone merely inherited. (Imagine what they might just be preparing for the future…)

No one else, not desktop monopolists, old media stalwarts, or upstart email monsters, even come close.

For media-centric users who don’t want to fill their pockets with a second device just for voice and data, the iPhone’s barrier of entry is zero.

8. Gaming

Though not to anywhere near the extent of media, Apple has been integrating gaming into the iPod — and into iTunes — for years now, and with the SDK Roadmap event, they’re getting serious about putting it on the iPhone as well.

EA’s Spore and Sega’s Super Monkey Ball (among others, including Apple’s homegrown Touch Fighter) were given the spotlight, taking full advantage of the iPhone’s unique video and audio power, accelerometer, and multi-touch controls. Sega even said they’d so underestimate the iPhone’s potential they had to fly in another developer just to crank up the graphics. Wow.

No other smartphone, even today, can boast the 1 year old iPhone’s raw feature set (chips + sensors + inputs + display). As for gaming handhelds, the Sony PSP can’t fully match it (though their dedicated chipsets and vast software library clearly give them a huge advantage… for now). Only the Nintendo DS, which sports touch and mic, is competitive (massive understatement given they’re the sales leader in mobile gaming).

But here’s the thing: while other smartphone are playing copycat and catchup with 1.0, the iPhone is poised to go to 2.0, and while dedicated gaming kits have undeniable advantages, they can’t make cell phone calls, can’t play iTunes media, and can’t do a host of other things the iPhone delivered on day one.

For anyone who wants to game and doesn’t want to carry around a second, dedicated box to go with their media-savvy phone, June will score for the iPhone as well.

7. Business

Make no mistake, the aforementioned iPhone SDK event didn’t only reach out to gamers, it offered a firm handshake to business as well. Exchange ActiveSync (not to be confused with the confusingly named desktop Windows ActiveSync), 802.1x, Cisco VPN, remote wipe, Enterprise “App Stores”, and a host of other features were released as part of the iPhone 2.0 beta.

What’s more, unlike RIM’s technology, which uses a single Network Operations Center (NOC) to handle all Blackberry data transactions — making the service infamously prone to failures and terrifyingly susceptible to security compromises, state-sponsored and otherwise, ActiveSync offers a direct connection between enterprise server and user client. No Chinese or Singaporean RIM-supplied proxy snoopers, no Indian data disconnections. With ActiveSync, each individual business’ server would have to be individually compromised or blocked, a vastly more difficult task.

For Microsoft users worried about a “premiere” experience, having an Apple client may just redefine their concept of “premiere”. And for open-source advocates, Apple’s been their from the beginning, with full support for standards like IMAP, and community-friendly initiatives like CalDAV.

Bottom line, the iPhone is in a unique position to appeal to almost all business-centric users who don’t want to lug around an second or third device just to watch a movie or play a game on the flight home, or call their loved ones when they land.

6. Convergence

Communication, media, gaming, and business. In one or two of these areas, other devices currently have an edge. That is, if you’re happy with the idea of carrying around a feature phone, iPod Touch, Nintendo DS, and Blackberry all strapped to your utility belt (I’ve been there and it wasn’t pretty!).

Convergence, however, doesn’t begin or end with just the iPhone. As we touched on before, Apple is the first, and so far only company to truly deploy spherical integration across their product line.

Apple designs its own hardware (iPhone handset), engineers its own operating system (OS X) and software (built in apps like MobileSafari Touch and the Google Maps client), creates its own accessories (docks, media cables, headsets, etc.), offers its own ecosystem (from Macs to the Apple TV, from iLife to Leopard Server), sells them all in their own retail Apple Stores (which bested Tiffanies last year in earnings per square foot), handles their own carrier activation via iTunes, provides value-added services (iPhoto books), runs its own cloud services (.Mac) and ties into other cloud service providers (Google search, Yahoo! weather), offers the #1 music marketplace in the US (iTunes), which also provides TV, movies, and a staggering amount of free audio and video podcasts, iTunes University, and other free content, and is about to be joined by the App Store, which may just do for 3rd party App sales what iTunes did for music.

Verizon commercials like to show a virtual network of technicians following its users around everywhere they go. Just imagine that commercial with Apple’s 360 degrees of integration backing up every iPhone user.

When it comes to convergence, nothing else matches the current iPhone’s capabilities, never mind its next-generation potential. Anyone looking for the “one device to rule them all” will find it all elegantly wrapped up in only one package: the iPhone.

5. Development

Okay, numbers 8 and 7 — and thus 6 — are still in beta. Fair enough. But what’s driving that beta is an SDK the likes of which has never been seen before in the mobile space.

Sure, some platforms use Sun’s “Compile once… er… often.. run anywhere” Java language/interpreter, or Microsoft’s Windows-in-name only kit, and others delve deep to the metal on Palm’s sold and bought-back and locked-in-stasis OS.

Apple, much as they miraculously managed to cram a UNIX-based OS, BSD networking, Open GL, and other desktop class systems into the iPhone, also delivered a remarkably mature, surprisingly polished SDK based entirely on their existing Mac Objective C and Cocoa (dubbed Cocoa Touch for the iPhone) architectures.

Far from the afterthought or hurried response partisan pundits paint it, thanks to Steve Jobs’ legacy from NeXTStep, its frameworks, and its processor independence (it’s run on PowerPC, x86, and now Arm), Mac developers instantly gained the ability to dive right into the system, while those familiar with other flavors of C quickly ramped up thanks to powerful tools like X-Code and Interface Builder.

(It was stated repeatedly during the SDK event that demoes were produced in just two weeks, mostly by developers who’d never touched Objective C before in their lives. Amazing.)

A desktop-class OS with desktop-class development tools leads to something no other smartphone maker has ever been able to deliver to consumers before: desktop class mobile Apps.

Even a cursory look at who’s announced development plans for the iPhone reveals an impressive list of real companies making real apps… maybe even Microsoft and RIM.

Combine all this with a serious attitude towards security, ensuring the platform doesn’t become unstable or an easy target for malware, along with an unprecedented delivery system in App Store — which will put every App in front of every iPhone user, including free Apps for free, and numbers 8, 7, and 6 might actually underestimate the iPhone’s ultimate appeal.

Basically, anyone who wants to run anything on the next great platform wants an iPhone.

4. Design

While software may sell systems, when electronics became mainstream consumers began to shop not only with their brains but with their senses and their tastes.

And if there’s one thing Apple has plenty of, it’s taste.

From the translucent berry-colored iMac and clamshell iBook that re-ignited Apple’s consumer push, to the iconic brushed-aluminum, rounded-rectangular slab that all but makes the computer disappear inside the ultra-thin current iMac, MacBook Air, and iPhone, Apple (or more specifically, the team led by perennial design award winner, Jonathan Ive) seems to hold the magic formula to modern, drool-inducing, industrial design.

Indeed, Apple has not only shaped this electronic generation, it’s shaped the design path of many of it’s copiers… er… competitors as well.

Let’s face it, for a long time garish gray or neon paint over chintzy plastic bodies that looked at though they were assembled from old lego parts with build quality straight out of the Soviet salvage committee were all consumers had to choose from. And, as the saying goes, while consumers don’t always notice good design, they sure do notice it’s absence. Apple knows this, just like they know for good design to be great, it has to be functional.

See, it’s not that Apple “just works”, it’s that Apple designs things, from first transistor to final trim, to “just work.”

Why else, at this very moment, would Jonathan Ive be jetting between NASA and Shenzhen finalizing some futuristic, light and yet durable stealth-like composite that will form the outer shell of the next most lusted-after consumer electronic device — the iPhone 3G?

So that when consumers see, touch, and use it, it’ll be just like the first iPhone — what they want.

3. Usability

I have a two-and-half-year old godson who, first time he picked up the iPhone, figured out how to navigate in and between photos, effortlessly type his ABCs and 123s on the soft keyboard, play with his numbers on the calculator, tap to show and hide video controls, use the camera, flick through the weather, and transition between them all with the solitary hard button on the device face. And not only that, he enjoyed it so much he wants to do it again and again (and again!) every time I see him. (If Apple would just add dial-by-photo, I swear he could call me on his own already).

Give him any other smartphone and you know what he could figure out? How to use it as a building block or a projectile (and with my luck, the latter). A quick search of YouTube will show he’s not the only infant interfacing with the iPhone either.

We’ve seen a lot of iClone skins and sku’s, attempts to duplicate the most superficial aspects of the iPhone, but what few competitors understand is that its not the gradients and transparencies, not the special effects and animation that make the iPhone’s software revolutionary — it’s the user experience.

Sure, I could lecture on about how animation hides transition, allows for error recovery, lends analog comfort, taps into intuitive understanding, and makes use of precious space in truly Tog-worthy fashion, but what’s the point?

Apple has made the smartphone so elegant and easy that a two-and-half year old not only can use, but really wants to. And they’ve done the same thing for adult consumers.

2. Brand

The little forbidden fruit with a bite out of it ranks up there with Superman’s S and the Golden McArches as one of the most recognized brands in the world.

Apple brought the first consumer computers to market with the Apple II, the first consumer GUI machines to market with the Mac, the first consumer MP3 (AAC if you want to get technical) players to market with the iPod, the first consumer music download service to market with iTunes. And in so doing, they’ve earned a reputation for cutting-edge, consumer-driven innovation.

Sure, Blackberries have their addicts, but the cult of apple is legendary and, as outlined before, far wider reaching than just the smartphone space. You can’t buy that kind of brand projection, trust, or loyalty (just ask Microsoft).

When Apple negotiates innovative features like Visual Voice-Mail, pressures carryings to lower data rates, gets Starbucks and AT&T to stop gouging and start giving away free WiFi at their hotspots, their brand is leveraged to benefit consumers.

When Apple Care or the Apple Store swaps out a 8GB iPhone with one dead pixel for a 16GB replacement, or instantly commands a managerial intervention for any unsatisfied email response, their brand is being protected to consumer advantage.

Other smartphone makers, who worry less about their lesser brands often abandon you the moment your credit card clears, or dump you to outsourced OEM ping-pong at the first sign of trouble. Is it any wonder the iPhone continually tops user satisfaction surveys?

1. Leadership

Apple is far from the sales leader in the smartphone space, yet they’ve instantly become the de facto market leader. When every other company is racing to copy Apple’s hardware and interface, and all competitive product releases are tripping over each other to proclaim themselves the iPhone (or Apple) Killer, they can’t be doing anything else but following.

Palm almost patented Zen with their original Treo, but then they got comfortable and stayed there, with the original Treo, long after the world — and technology — moved on. Blackberry made mobile email so addictive it’s likened to a drug (and for the record, please don’t drop and drive), but buried their head so far up their email they seemingly forgot about everything else. And Microsoft… well, if Zen has an opposite, it’s Windows Mobile, an OS whose power is matched only by its legacy handicaps and user impenetrability.

So now Palm is raiding Apple talent. RIM either wants to be the iPhone or just on it. And even die-hard Windows Mobile pundits have given up on Microsoft’s ability to deliver on even their most realistic of vaporwares.

That leaves Apple, alone atop innovation mountain. And luckily, that’s just where one Steven P. Jobs likes to meditate.

It’s impossible to discuss Apple’s leadership without discussing its leader. If any one factor encompasses Apple’s (and the iPhone’s) current success, it’s the CEO. Perfectly melding unsurpassed customer savvy with unequalled industry prescience, his singular focus and uncanny aesthetic have not only brought Apple back from the brink, but made it the greatest second act in tech history.

It’s largely due to Steve Jobs that no one else has, or can come close to the iPhone. Who else besides Jobs or Apple could sit on something like the iPhone for close to 3 years without so much as a peak or a peep. Who else could ditch the floppy one generation (iMac) and the optical disk the next (MacBook Air)?

Every great artist (like Johnny Ive’s design team) needs a patron and every benevolent dictatorship (like Apple Inc.) needs its guiding mind. As long as Apple has Steve Jobs, the competition can try to copy iPhone 1.0 all they want. Jobs is already putting the final, tiny touches on 2.0 and has his sites firmly set on 3.0 and 4.0. And that’s fine because Apple — as it proved when it killed the iPod Mini and replaced it with the Nano — is really the only one who can compete with Apple anyway.

Jobs has always said Apple makes the devices they themselves want to use. Well, they make the devices an ever increasing amount of consumers want to use as well.

Conclusion

So, there they are. The top ten reasons that every other smartphone maker on the planet keeps comparing themselves to the incomparable iPhone. Come WWDC in June, the official SDK release, and — dare we guess? — iPhone 3G debut, it’s only going to get worse (and harder!)

What do you think?

[Ed- Digg link...]

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.

Sure, die hard Windows pundit Paul Thurrott has already stepped out of the iPhone closet, skewering Windows Mobile both in his blog and in a (cold medicine induced?) tirade during the Windows Weekly podcast on the TWiT network.

Now, in response to to the CTIA Conference‘s official announcement of Windows Mobile 6.1, Thurrott once again gives anything but his usual spin:

Microsoft’s response to [the iPhone] threat has been abysmal. On the other hand, at least the company is responding. In the year since Apple first announced the iPhone, there’s been a sudden flurry of activity in the Windows Mobile world as Microsoft scrambles to embrace iPhone-like UIs and technologies in its own products. But Windows Mobile is hobbled by a number of factors, not the least of which is the gap between the software itself and the broken ecosystem (especially in the US) that is responsible for incorporating that software into devices and selling them to end users. The smart phone market isn’t like the PC market, and Microsoft can’t easily offer updates to existing Windows Mobile customers. Sometimes it can’t do so at all.

And, bringing to mind George Wallace’s comedy classic, “You know a better time to kick a man?”, Thurrott jumps on the downed OS maker thusly:

Lost amid all this, I think, is another indication of Microsoft’s inability to compete effectively in this market. They’re creating deceptive advertisements that make Windows Mobile look better than it really is. Here are two example “screenshots” of Windows Mobile 6, taken from the Microsoft Web site. See if you can spot the problem: [...] If you guessed, Windows Mobile doesn’t actually look anything like that, then you guessed correctly.

(Be sure to check out Thurrott’s complete post for the screenshots.)

How far behind the curve is Microsoft in the mobile OS space? Can they catch up to the iPhone? Are they even trying? What do you think?

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?

Longtime Windows pundit Paul Thurrott has always had an interesting relationship with Apple. He has a MacBook, uses iPods, and link baits Apple fanboys every chance he gets.

But the times, they may be a changing! Look no further than the Windows Weekly Podcast, where Thurrott had this to say about Microsoft’s own Windows Mobile platform efforts when compared to the iPhone (transcribed):

“I have one very callous thing to say myself about the Windows Mobile guys, which is s**w them because, no offense, but seriously, you guys have had – I was there for the first version of WindowsCE, Pegasus I think it was called, and I have watched as they’ve mismanaged this smartphone market from day one. It has… it has always lagged behind, it’s not always been Microsoft’s fault – I understand part of it is just the nature of the business – but you know, Apple revolutionized the smartphone business not just with the hardware and the software but also with the way that they’re now presenting this stuff to users and updating the system over time, providing new functionality. This is something that doesn’t happen with other smartphones and it’s the type of thing where I can go to a Microsoft event and they can announce a new version of Windows Mobile, and that thing, I won’t see it in a store for another, you know, at the time, 18 months. That’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous. Yeah, s**w ‘em. If a Windows Mobile device was better than an iPhone I would use it, but you would have to show me that device.”

Wow. Guess even Balmer hath no fury as a Windows pundit scorn…

While his original iPhone 1.0 review was mixed (or honest, as he claims, in the face of too many softball reviews from others), it slowly improved with firmware 1.3, and now with the beta of 2.0… Well, we’ll let iThurrott speak for himself:

Think of it this way. If you look at how the technology industry is changing, some core segments emerge: Traditional desktop and server software (Windows, Office), so-called software + services solutions that bridge the gap between the desktop and the Internet cloud (Office Live, certain Windows Live services), cloud computing (Gmail, Google Calendar, much of Windows Live), and mobile computing (Windows Mobile, Tablet PCs). Here’s the wake-up call: the iPhone touches on all four of these segments. And because most iPhone users are, by definition, Windows users, this is too important of a product to ignore. The iPhone is demonstrably more important than certain Microsoft products, including the Zune or Xbox 360, if only because it will affect a much wider audience. You can choose to ignore the iPhone at your own peril. I will not be making that mistake.

Is this the beginning of a tipping point towards iPhone? Pent up frustration against the long series of Microsoft announcements that never seem to materialize? Or just the momentary flirtations of anyone, even a diehard Vista-lover, when coming face to face with Pappa Job’s gift to the mobile world?

This post is a Wait-a-Thon post! Your comment posted here enters you for a a chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card! Also note that you can use your User Referral Link (found here when you log in) to get two entries in this week’s drawing.