Mobile Concerns

By now you will be aware of the reported problems with the iPhone 4 and its flawed antenna design. You know the one, where you hold the phone a certain way and the signal strength drops a couple of bars. Apple’s admission of the problem wasn’t great but reporting of the issues also left a lot to be desired.

Now Spencer Webb of AntennaSys Inc. provides a detailed quantitative analysis of the problem. Yes it is real. Yes using a bumper with your iPhone 4 helps. Yes the iPhone 3G suffers a similar problem without the external antenna design.

Read the full analysis and explanation of the testing methodology here.

With 15,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, I have to ask, “Is this really the long tail?”. The marketing department at Apple would have us believe that the App Store provides iPhone users with a myriad of applications to suit your every specific need. But is there really a need for 50 different task management applications? I think that iPhone customers would benefit from two or three best of breed applications for managing tasks instead.

So is the current App Store ecosystem in the best interest of consumers and developers? It is undoubtedly a great selling point for Apple and it is definitely easier to buy, download and install an iPhone application than a Windows Mobile application. However, Apple may have has set the barrier to entry too low for iPhone developers. Today the most popular iPhone applications will bubble to the top, but what will happen in the future? Will the next great iPhone application remain undiscovered among the noise of 100,000 lesser applications?

Apple unveiled iPhone OS 3.0 on Tuesday, addressing many of the short-comings iPhone users have had to suffer with in earlier versions of the OS. The most important feature – Cut & Paste – is now there, as is MMS support provided you have a 3G phone.

Apple has also included enhancements that will support the iTunes Store ecosystem including an API that allows developers to handle the purchase of content and services from the iTunes Store. They have scaled up their Push Notification service, allowing an iPhone to receive an application notification even when the application isn’t running. The Push Notification service is centralised meaning that all iPhone applications connect to the same set of notification servers. Apple’s rationale for adopting this architecture is that it eliminates the need to maintain applications running in the background which can significantly reduce standby battery life.

Interestingly, today’s smartphones seem to be just catching up to where the Japanese were with their i-mode service in 2002.

Other iPhone OS 3.0 features include Bluetooth peer-to-peer connectivity to support gaming between phones; inclusion of the Google Mobile Maps service; access to iPod hardware accessories and access to the iPod library.

Many of these feature will also be supported on the iPod Touch.

One of the most import aspects of this OS release is that is will be made available to all existing iPhone customers for free.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced a new free service called My Phone. Currently in beta, this service allows you to back up your mobile phone data to a password protected web site. Check out the Windows Mobile Team Blog for more details.

When I first saw My Phone, the first thing I thought about was Microsoft’s Live Mesh service. This is where Microsoft is light years ahead of the competition - including Google.

Cloud computing services such as Microsoft's Live Mesh allow you to sync and share your data between devices as well as access your data from anywhere using the power of the Internet. Live Mesh also allows you to remotely control the desktop of any device from anywhere.

At the moment Live Mesh only supports devices with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X but Windows Mobile support is coming soon. If you access the Live Mesh beta, you get access to 5GB of storage to get you started.

Yesterday, Microsoft presented a first look at the next version of its Window Mobile Operating System (OS) – Windows Mobile 6.5 – at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This version of the OS is due for release towards the the end of this year and will be the last Windows Mobile 6 release before Windows Mobile 7.

Although there have been some efforts to improve the usability of the user interface, initial feedback is that new honeycomb interface is too little, too late. What has many people baffled is how can HTC and Sony-Ericsson do such a good job of improving the usability experience on Windows Mobile 6.1 while Microsoft seems to still be behind the times with Windows 6.5.
I suspect one of the problems is that Microsoft needs to support a user interface that works on a wide variety of devices with different screen resolutions and form factors. Hence they must cater for the lowest common denominator. HTC and Sony-Ericsson on the other hand can build a fantastic user experience around their latest smartphones with state-of-the-art screens and features.

I think Microsoft should consider decoupling the user interface from the operating system, allowing each smartphone manufacturer to optimise the user interface experience for their specific smartphone. This may lead to inconsistencies in user experience, but hey, isn't that what we have had with WM 5, WM 6 and now WM 6.5?

Today I tried using the Microsoft Tag Beta with a Dopod smartphone. For those who don’t know, a Microsoft Tag is like a barcode that you can capture with your mobile phone’s camera and have the Tag Reader software on your phone decode. A Microsoft Tag supports different types of content such as URLs, vCards, Phone Numbers and Text.

The image above is an example of a tag. Click on it to view the the full-size image and then try capturing the image on your mobile with the Tag Reader installed. I had to try it a couple of times as the image needs to be in the centre of the view finder, but otherwise it worked seamlessly.

Anyone with a Windows Live ID can sign-in and create tags. The process is simple and done online. You can then render your tag in a variety of formats.

A Microsoft Tag is a similar to Nokia’s Mobile Code (seen to the left). I haven’t tried installing a Mobile Code Reader for my smartphone yet, but there are several available.

The benefits of using the Microsoft Tags include:

• The ability to categorise different tags;
• Define Start and End dates for your tags and;
• Online reporting on how often each tag has been scanned.

These features will undoubtedly be of interest to businesses that need to analyse the effectiveness of marketing campaigns that make use of Microsoft Tags.

After having used the HTC Touch HD for just over two weeks now, I would like to share with you my experiences and discuss some of the pros and cons of HTC’s latest smart phone. Others have described the Touch HD as the Windows Mobile answer to the iPhone. When you first open the box you are indeed presented with a very sleek and stylish looking mobile with a form factor very similar to that of the iPhone 3G. It may be personal preference but I think the straighter lines and larger screen of the Touch HD make the overall look more appealing.

The thing that immediately stands out is the large 3.8” screen that screams promises of new entertainment and productivity possibilities. See the comparison table below to compare the Touch HD with the iPhone and Touch Diamond. With a resolution of 480x800 the Touch HD doesn’t disappoint. Reading documents, browsing the web and watching wide-screen video are now not only “doable” but also “enjoyable”.

Having used the Touch HD, Touch Diamond and iPhone 3G I found the Touch HD to have the most useable form factor. It is of a convenient size that you can carry around in your pocket or handbag but with a screen large enough to allow you to get some real work done.

When you turn on the Touch HD you are presented with HTC’s TouchFLO 3D Home screen. For those who don’t know, TouchFLO 3D is an application that sits on top of the standard Windows Mobile 6.1 user interface, allowing you to use screen gestures to navigate through your most commonly performed tasks and applications. At first responsiveness of the touch screen was sluggish but downloading a patch from the HTC support site quickly fixed this. Overall, TouchFLO 3D is a joy to use and had me accessing all of my most commonly used functions via a very stylish user interface. My only comment is that I wish that it went further, in terms of being more customizable and allowing similar control of all Windows Mobile windows and applications. Are you listening Microsoft?

The Touch HD is fully featured with 5 Mega-pixel front and rear cameras, Assisted GPS, G-Sensor and FM Radio. There is no proximity sensor but HTC have added some nice touches such as how the device comes out of stand-by mode when the stylus is removed. It would be great if all applications responded to the G-Sensor to automatically change orientation when switching between portrait and landscape orientations. The 3.5mm audio jack is a plus but the lack of a flash with the camera is a minus.

Connectivity is great and I love using Wi-Fi at home as a way to save on mobile access and data charges. The best thing about this phone is you can sit at home on the couch and browse the Internet, read email and blogs and watch YouTube. I downloaded my work email and thanks to Office Mobile could easily read attachments such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets without moving back to the PC. It is also the first time I have been able to read PDF documents as in the landscape orientation I can easily fit a full line of text across the screen.

The Touch HD comes with an impressive suite of applications including Office Mobile, Adobe Reader, Google Maps, YouTube, Opera and World Card Mobile. World Card Mobile is an interesting applications that allows you photograph business cards and automatically generate contacts from them.

Battery life is a nice surprise. When the Touch HD was announced there was a lot of concern that the large screen would be a power drain. The specifications state talk and stand-by times that exceed those of the iPhone and I am happy to report that I can use Wi-Fi access for most of the day without needing to recharge. In normal use I am finding that it will run for several days without needing to recharge.

So are there any downsides? There are a few and I hope these will be fixed in coming releases. First I have tried downloading a couple of 3^rd-party games and found that they won’t run on the Touch HD. I am not sure if this is due to not supporting the device’s screen resolution or interaction with TouchFLO. I have however installed DivX player without any problems. My only other gripe is that I have no short-cut key to quickly lock the device. According to the documentation this should be possible by holding down the end key, but all this seems to do is take you back to the home screen.

Despite these short comings I am very happy with the Touch HD. It is designed to offer the perfect balance of business and personal use. It seems to have plenty of processing power and the 8GB micro-SD card will keep me going for a while

I am a little disappointed with the problems I encountered with 3^rd-party applications but in reality, the pre-installed applications do everything I need. I would love to see TouchFLO 3D extended and all applications respond to the G-Sensor. If the Touch HD did all this then I would have no hesitation in rating it 10 out of 10. Instead, HTC will need to be satisfied with a 9 out of 10. This is a great smart phone that I would recommend to anyone who needs a mobile for both business and personal use that justifies the price tag.

Comparison Table