Category: Mobile

[sc:mobile-category ]The HTC Titan has been the premier WP device for the last couple of months, but HTC just announced this monster of a follow-up today.

Yes, you read that right, a 16 megapixel camera.

I’ve always said that HTC’s camera’s were one of it major weaknesses, however the reviews of their latest handset camera’s seemed to indicate a major improvement over my HD7 (which is looking puny at this point).

I can’t wait to see what that 16 megapixel beast can do.

Now repeat after me; I don’t need a new phone, I don’t need a new phone, …

There are still two things missing:

1. More storage, 16g just won’t cut it for my next phone.
2. Wireless charging.  The standards are there, make it happen HTC!

CES hasn’t even started yet, I can’t wait to see what MS has to say tonight in their keynote.

 

[sc:mobile-category ]So new years came the other night to find use once more forging directly in to the future.

For me, it is just another night and I was watch some TV while playing on my TouchPad when midnight rolled around.  Shortly there after I put the TouchPad down and turned it off (or put it to sleep really, not an actual power off).  About 30 seconds later, the screen lit up all by itself.

“Well that’s weird” I thought to my self and shut it off again.

Once more it powered back to life a few seconds later.

After repeating this a few more times I figured out that when the clock ticked over to the next minute, the TouchPad came back to life.

I don’t know if it was a bug in the OS or some of the software I have installed, but either way I decided the best way to deal with it was a hard boot.

Once the TouchPad was back up, all was good and we both had a good nights sleep .

[sc:mobile-category ]RIM recently released they’re quarterly results and had an increase in sales and profit, yet the stock to a beating.  Why?

Easy, they also announced that they wouldn’t have a handset based on OS 10 until the second half of 2012.  That’s a REALLY long time in the mobile industry and there’s some real questions around what that means.

Let’s look at another company that was in the same boat a few years ago, Microsoft.  MS had Windows Mobile in the market  for years before iOS or Android came along, but it was stagnate and looked like it a dinosaur in comparison to the new kids on the block.  MS said it wouldn’t have the successor to WM to market for over a year and took a beating in the marketplace (their stock would have slumped much more if it wasn’t for the fact MS has a diverse portfolio or products).

When Windows Phone  finally arrived, it was a stunning achievement of innovation (something some say MS can’t do, but in fact does very well) but that’s not enough in the market.  Quite often the better product is not the one that wins.  Microsoft has spent the better part of year fighting to get traction with WP and it looks like 2012 might get it done for them.

But that means RIM is in for some rough times coming up.  Don’t get me wrong, they have a loyal following of users that aren’t going anywhere and business users won’t easily give them up either.

But if Apple has taught the industry anything, is that  the mass market is a very lucrative place to be if you have the product everyone wants.

The question that is starting to appear in my mind is “Is a Blackberry a smart phone?”.

And that’s a problem for RIM, is the BB starting to look too much like a feature phone to be considered viable in the consumer space?  No one wants to buy a feature phone these days, I know people who have no idea why they have an iPhone, but it’s what they wanted and so they bought it.

The other day I was talking to a friend, who’s not in the IT industry but is a gadget geek, he has two phones.  A BB for BBM so he can communicate with his business partners and an Android phone so he can run the apps he wants.

That’s a big change from a few years ago when the BB was the phone that could do it all.

Will RIM remain successful?  Absolutely, just like Nokia, they have a huge market to sell to even if it’s not smart phones at the moment, but they do need to get OS 10 devices out the door ASAP, not wait another 6 months if they want to compete in the smart phone space.

[sc:mobile-category ]So HP finally, kind of, sort of, made the fate of WebOS known last week and then went on to talk about some more details.

First off, open sourcing the OS is fine, but open source isn’t a magic bullet.  Real people have to be behind it and it sounds like from the interview that HP will continue to commit resources to the project.  That’s a good sign.

An even better sign that HP is really committed to the future of WebOS is that they intend to make more hardware for it.  The TouchPad hardware was not the crowning achievement in tablets that WebOS deserved, nor was WebOS perfect.

Will we see more relevant hardware  come from HP to support WebOS next year?  We can only hope that they don’t forget what was good in the hardware (ok, not much, but TouchStone is VERY cool and the 4:3 display format seems right).

What would this new hardware look like if I were designing it?

• Less rounded, more angular
• Front and rear facing cameras, significantly better than the webcam that came with the Touchpad
• Thinner and lighter
• Mat finish on the back, the glossy finish on the Touchpad is just a dirt magnet
• Mat finish on the display, too much reflection
• Use standard USB voltages for charging
• Metal body instead of plastic

HP certainly has the engineering skills to make a world-class piece of hardware for WebOS to run on and it will be interesting to see what they learned from the TouchPad.

From an OS side, there’s not much to do, 3.0.4 is a better OS than what shipped with the TouchPad:

• Bing and Live integration
• Some kind of visual feedback when the OS is busy
• Password management in the web browser

I’m looking forward to the first open source release of WebOS, I expect to see some community versions with features that HP would never have implemented as they don’t make sense from a big business perspective.

Will WebOS flourish with other hardware vendors?  I can see some of the small tablet companies picking it up as an option so they are not tied to only android devices, but I doubt any of the big players will do much with it.

It still has the big disadvantage of its app store and I don’t think we’ll ever see another phone with it, that looks to be coming down to a three-horse race between Android, iOS and Windows Phone (yes I know Blackberry is in there too, but with the announcement this week that OS 10 is delayed for 6 months or more, it looks like they may have lost the smartphone wars without ever firing a single shot).

I’m hopeful that WebOS will continue, it’s a fine OS that deserves better treatment than HP has given it so far.

[sc:mobile-category ]As an early adopter of Windows Phone I knew the various organizations that would be supporting the device would take a while to get everything in order to give the best user experience.

When I purchased my HD7 (on the first day it was available from Bell) Bell had done a reasonable job at providing the tools and software you would expect on the phone.  The one I used most often was the Self Service portal which they provided a link to in the web browser.

This worked fine for determining the about of data I had consumed and checking other basic information about my rate plan and other items from the phone instead of logging in to the main Bell website.

Around the time of the Mango update (though I can not confirmed it was at the exact time) I noticed that the bell web portal stopped working.  With a cryptic “Your profile does not support this feature” message.

The first time I saw it I just assumed it was a problem on Bell’s side and ignored it.  A few weeks later when I tried it again I received the same message.

So last week while on a support call with Bell about the tethering update I decided to ask about the error I was receiving.

The conversation kind of went like this:

Me: I’m getting an error message on the self service option, something about my profile not supporting this feature.

Bell: Ok, have you tried uninstalling the app and re-installing it.

Me: I can’t, it’s a web page.

Bell: Ok, let’s try the following, go to the application list then press and hold the self service application.

Me: I don’t have the application in the list, on Windows Phone it’s just a link to the website.

Bell: Oh, ok, well you have to install the app then, go to the Marketplace and install it.

Me: [Quick search on Bell in the Marketplace and install the app] So I guess it would have been nice if they told the early adopters a new app was available eh?

Bell: I guess so.

So its nice that Bell has made an app (though it’s not much more than a wrapper for the website) but I guess not telling anyone about it is just another bump in the road of an early adopter .