In the cellular world, it is not often that we come across a truly useful app that can be used by not only smartphones or iPhones, but also by pretty standard handsets that only support Java apps. I recently read about a new Mobile IM client that aggregates all the available IM networks in one easy-to-use interface on your Java-enabled phone.
Of course it was not long before I downloaded my copy of Trutap and sure enough, a really great app that I am sure to use a lot of in the future. It combines AIM, MSN Messenger, GTalk, and even Facebook chat. It is kinda like a Digsby for your phone (I cannot recommend Digsby in strong enough words, amazing app).
Not many mobile apps have impressed me so fast, in fact I think the only other one was Fring, and there is no need to tell you how awesome Fring is (although it does not work on my Java-enabled 6288). Anyway, Trutap is entering a pretty competitive market, but I think it has all the apps that I know of beaten.
Motorola seems to be attempting to get back in the game, but just like last time, they are doing it all wrong. Motorola released the new Motorola Aura (at least last time, they had a pretty cool name, I mean, Aura?) handset, I think you should sit down for this.
Before I tell you what is so special about this phone, let me tell you what is not. The specs! The phone is 18 mm thick (just for reference, the original Razr was 14mm), it does not have 3G or Wifi, and the camera is a boring 2 megapixels.
So then someone please tell me why the heck this phone costs, (are you sitting down?), a whopping (I’m telling you, you’re gonna want to sit down for this one) $2000? OK so it is supposed to be one of those stylish looking phones, I get it, but at least the Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte has 3G and a decent 3.2 megapixel camera.
Well, at least they did a good job with the design, right? Wrong! This phone is, in my opinion, one of the ugliest phones I have ever seen. Is it just me? Even in the below video, in which they are attempting to show off the beauty of the phone (I think that’s what they are doing, I need to brush up on my Russian), opening and closing the phone seems painfully difficult.
I don’t know about you, but Motorola making $2,000 phones when they have not made a good $50 phone in months, just does not sit well with me. Someone needs to talk some sense into whoever is making the decisions over there in the Motorola house, otherwise, at this rate, when I buy my son his first cellphone (he is now 4, I figure he has a few more months), he will never have heard of Motorola.
In Motorola’s defense, they have not given up. I have to admit that with phones like this, this, and this, I would’ve given up long ago.
Google released a new version of their Mobile Gmail client for all Java phones as well as Blackberry devices. The new client brings offline email so you can read and compose your emails when you have no access to the Web. It also supports multiple account access and a few new shortcuts to access its menu.
I have used this app many times and as convenient as it was to have Gmail on my phone, it always struck me as a little primitive. After reading about the enhancements of the second generation Mobile Gmail, my opinion has not changed. In the 3 years since the original app came out, all Google could come up with is offline access? Didn’t Outlook do that like 10 years ago? OK, granted Outlook is on a PC and this is on a cellphone, but still, I expected much greater enhancements, like maybe the ability to have it run in the background and notify you of new mail.
Maybe Google should stop spending money on fighter jets (yes, Google bought a fighter jet) and pay their developers more money to actually make useful products.
Over the last few days, things seemed to have slowed down a little in the cellular world. I really did not come across any huge industry news when going through my daily blog routine, which by the way includes the following blogs/sites:
Only two pieces of news struck me as blog worthy, one because of its beauty and innovation, while the other, for the exact opposite reason.
Let’s start with the new Intel Mobile Internet Device (MID). It does not have a real keyboard and its specs are too weak for it to be a laptop. However, it is not small enough to be a phone, it seems to be in a category of its own, the category of MIDs.
This device looks pretty cool to me, kinda like a stretched out iPhone. There are not that many specs available, but the video of the thing definitely does a good job marketing the concept.
On the flip side of things, Motorola (wait, who?) is trying to get into the touch screen game. Except they are not doing a very good job, in my opinion. I don’t know what happened to the cellular giant of the first few years of the 21st century, but it seems that after the Razr (I do not mean that with any sort of sarcasm, I remember the first time I laid hands on a Razr, I was wowed!), they disappeared completely. Yea, they make an announcement here and there, but it is not for no reason, that I have not mentioned the word Motorola on this blog until now.
Anyway, Motorola announced their new handset, what they call the Crave. Seems like a cool name for a phone, right? Well maybe the name is cool, but the phone is far from it.
Besides its obvious ugliness, the specs are outright boring. 2.8 inch touchscreen (not quite there), 2 MP camera with no flash (I am falling asleep writing this), 138 MB internal memory (didn’t Bill Gates once say a few MBs will be enough?), and, are you ready for the big feature? Bluetooth! OK, I am exaggerating a little, it also has GPS, but all in all this phone does nothing for me.
I am sure Motorola will sell a few of these devices, but I have one major question about this phone. OK, so it is a little on the boring side, and not the most attractive of handsets, fine, I can handle that. The only thing I really don’t get here is, why would Motorola cover the touch screen display with an external plastic cover? Isn’t the point of a full touch screen the ease of accessibility? Why would one want to have to lift a piece of plastic every time one wants to access the very feature that is supposed to make the phone somewhat modern? Anyone, anyone?
If you are still reading this post, maybe you are a lover of Motorola, then you can watch the video of the crave below.
To sum things up, I would have expected the Intel MID and the Motorola Crave to have been announced in different times (the MID in 2020 and the Crave in 1999), with at least a 20 year gap between them, and not in the same week. Seems like Motorola is going to have to work just a little harder.
Oh, and while I am giving Motorola some advice, I have 3 words for them: STOP MAKING RAZRS. I don’t care that they still sell, it has been too long to continue selling a phone that’s only appeal is the fact that it is slim, too long!
Once again, Apple’s marketing team has managed to amaze me. The only question I have is, why don’t other companies, like say Microsoft, learn from Apple’s marketing strategies? They really are nothing short of brilliant.
Now I know this is Aryeh’s area of expertise, and I know nothing about marketing, except of course as an average consumer I know when marketing achieves its goals, i.e when I want to buy the product that is being marketed, but besides that, not much. However, after watching Apple’s video presentations, that they always post on their site right after a product is announced, I somehow always want to buy their product.
For example, 5 minutes ago, I was not interested in buying a new Macbook, nor did I know what the new Macbook offered that the old ones did not. I innocently surfed to Apple.com, maybe to check out some trailers, maybe to look at one of their innovative products. But before I could get to my destination, I clicked on a video presentation of the new Macbook, and guess what? I want one! I have officially been transformed from a PC to a MAC, in 5 minutes!
Isn’t that what marketing is all about?
This is not to mention Jobs’ brilliant keynotes, or any of their other marketing strategies, I already talked about those here. This is just a simple combination of caring enough to post a video presentation on the site, and making it just great enough, that after watching it, I know what I want for my birthday.
There really is no way to post about all the new handsets that are released on a daily basis. The trick is to pick the ones that generate the most hype or offer the most innovation. Well, the Sony Xperia is definitely bringing a lot of hype, but is it justified? Does the Xperia do anything that the iPhone, Omnia, HD, or Innov8 doesn’t?
Well, to be honest, I do not have an opinion, YET! I am not wowed by the phone, but then again, I might not have given it the attention it deserves, I was kinda busy looking at new phones like the Tube and the HD.
I am not generally a huge fan of Sony Ericsson’s phones, but I could be wrong, it has happened once or twice before. Just because my old Sony Ericsson K610 was a pretty boring and unimpressive phone, doesn’t mean they all are.
In fact, the specs on the Xperia are quite impressive. It offers a 3 inch wide VGA (800 x 480) touchscreen display, 3.2 megapixel camera (with photo light), A2DP Bluetooth, aGPS, WiFi, and microSD, just 400MB on board. Navigation is accomplished via touch, arc-sliding QWERTY, 4-way key and optical joystick.
I will study this phone and read people’s reviews more carefully before I express my opinion (wow, my wife would be so impressed, I am actually thinking before talking), but in the meantime, check out these videos:
-Hillel
Aryeh recently told me that short posts are the way to go, so here is one for him. He asked what digital camera to buy, to which I say, CANON ONLY!!
OK, fine, I will be a little more specific, get this camera (did I read those specs right? 15 Megapixels?), or this, or this (something about those stunning 3″ screens get me every time). Whatever you do Aryeh, get Canon. They are, and always have been the best cameras.
OK, at this point, you are probably wondering, “this is not such a short post, there have been shorter posts on this blog before, so what’s the deal?”. Let me explain, my original intention was for this post to say two words “GET CANON”, but as many people have told me, I have a big mouth and do not know when to shut up. I tend to ramble on about topics, when there is no need.
Anyway, before I knew it, this was actually a pretty long post. Then came the dilemma, do I change the title? Maybe just leave the title, and people won’t notice…Oh man, people are so right about me.
OK, so back to my original point, GET A CANON CAMERA!
I don’t know when it happened, but it seems to me that in the world of cellphone manufacturers, HTC came out of left field, and is now a market dominating player. After announcing highly impressive handsets like the HTC Touch Pro, the ever-so-talked-about G1, and of course my all time favorite, the Touch HD, looks like HTC is wowing us once again with the introduction of the HTC T8290.
The T8290 is yet another full touch screen handset, with a display matching that of the Touch HD, a whopping 480 x 800 pixels, 3.8 inch screen. As if that was not enough, the T8290 offers something else to the consumer, something that its competitors do not, WiMAX!
WiMAX, for all of you who have not heard, is the next big thing. It enables you to connect to broadband, just like a WiFi hotspot, with one major difference. A WiMAX signal has a 30 mile radius. That means if you are within 30 miles of a WiMAX tower, you can surf the Web at speeds even higher than the ones we use today.
Anyway, this is the kind of phone that can change the way we think completely. Let’s hope other manufacturers follow in the path of HTC, both in terms of design as well as technology.
Sorry for the corny title, but Engadget already used every other play on the word storm. The new Blackberry Storm was recently announced and will be hitting shelves pretty soon. It is definitely a very attractive handset with some even more attractive specs.
The Storm is RIM’s very first touchscreen phone, mounting a 3.26-inch 480 x 360 glass display on a unique clickable surface so that the entire thing can be pressed downwards just like a real button for tactile feedback when making selections (hmm, seems like a good idea to me). It includes a full HTML browser, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint editing capabilities, Bluetooth 2.0, 1GB of on-board storage (1GB?) with an 8GB microSD card bundled in the box (OK, not too shabby), 3.5mm headphone jack (take that, G1), automatic orientation and ambient lighting sensors, and a 3.2-megapixel autofocus cam with dedicated flash.
Did you notice something missing among those specs? Why, oh why, RIM, would you leave Wifi out of such a phone? I just don’t get it. Anyway, another thing that makes this phone attractive to yours truly, is the fact that there is a CDMA version of it, the 9530 (yes, I am sorry to say, I am still on CDMA).
Although many handsets being introduced today claim they support push mail, none of them do it (as far as I know) as smoothly and flawlessly as the original Blackberry technology. I am saying this, after I was just told by an iPhone 3G user, that with push mail activated, the battery lasts 1.5 hours. Na, we can’t have that.
I have to conclude by saying that with the advantage of real push mail, this could have been a real HD killer (have you not heard? The term “iPhone killer” is no more, ever since the HTC Touch HD filled those shoes. We are now on the lookout for an HD Killer. I think I am officially coining the term “HD Killer”). But with the lack of Wifi, I think the HD will stay on its thrown for now.
A lot of cool things developing today in the cellular world. Just thought I would mention a few of them.
Let’s start with a great and comprehensive article on Techradar.com that compares the iPhone, G1, and Tube. It really puts all aspects of these three handsets to the test. You can read it here, but for all you lazy people who just want to know the conclusion, it was a tie between the iPhone and G1.
He sums it all up by saying:
“Well, which one do we like the most? The iPhone is complete in most areas, the Nokia Tube has some nice touches and decent features, especially in the media and camera section, yet the G1’s Android interface is super-smashing-great.
It’s surprising, but it’s a tie between the G1 and the iPhone at three wins each, and that’s with the G1 not even being nearly at full potential just yet.
So well done to the iPhone and the G1… if you get either of these in your stocking, you should feel pretty smug with yourself”.
Another piece of exciting news is that Cnet has a full review of one of my favorites, the Omnia, you can read it here. There conclusion is, to sum it up in my own words, they did not love it! Oh well.
The last piece of exciting news is that HTC now offers a full emulator of how the G1 is going to look and perform. You can access it here, but don’t forget to press the Emulator option and not just the 3D image of the G1.
That’s all folks! Nothing else to report now, besides of course that I spent some time in the new Israel Apple store and had a great afternoon looking at things I will probably never be able to afford. It just seemed more fun then spending the afternoon in the flea market!
Just to end off on a positive note, check out this hands-on video of the Nokia Tube…
