iPhone4 review

The new iPhone 4 isn't perfect. It's a very good handheld computer, beautifully designed, with many powers. But it isn't perfect. And a few days after launch, it's clear that the device has some rough edges, which Apple is rumored to be working on smoothing out.

There was quite a bit of information packed into the nearly two-hour-long double announcement and press conference. Here, distilled down to the essentials, are iPhone OS 4.0’s pros and cons, as well as a few additional things to consider in the run up to its release:

Pros:

• Multitasking – The big one, and what users have been clamouring for since the beginning, Apple has devised a way to allow programs to run as background processes in a way that doesn’t harm the CPU and battery. Really, their solution comes just short of true multitasking, allowing key processes for certain apps to run in the background while resources can be directed to apps in the foreground. So now you can finally run Pandora while checking your mail, or take calls from Skype while browsing while your phone’s performance won’t take a hit. Other implementations include backgrounded location for GPS and social media programs, Push notifications, and local notifications.
• Folders – A common niggling complaint among iPhone and iPod Touch users is that their devices just don’t have a great way to organize apps on the homescreen. In iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has created Folders as a way to organize apps that correspond to their respective App Store categories, or whatever the user wants them to be. Just drag an icon and hover it over another to make a folder on the fly.
• Wallpapers - Took them long enough.
• Enhanced Mail – In OS 4.0’s Mail app, you’ll now have a unified inbox that can handle multiple accounts, as well as threaded messages and attachments for third-party apps. Combined with multitasking, you can open an attachment in Mail that opens another app in what will hopefully be a seamless experience. Very cool.
• Enterprise – Deploying multiple iPhones over a business network is made easier and with security as a focus. Also, company-developed apps can be downloaded right from the jump, bypassing the App Store.

In just those five points, Apple has covered its bases pretty well: Again, multitasking is the biggie, but these address some of the biggest and most widespread user complaints about iPhone OS 3. However, not all is as rosy as seen through Steve Jobs’ glasses.

Cons:

• Support – OS 4.0 will be available in all it’s proposed glory for the iPhone 3GS and 3rd Generation iPod Touches. 3G and 2nd gen models of the respective devices will only have “many” features, with multitasking conspicuously absent from them. Jobs explained that the decision was a non-issue as older models simply don’t support these new features, but was vague as to what exactly might be missing. And if you’re an iPhone 2G or 1st gen iPod Touch user, you’re pretty much out of luck. This also begs the question of how OS 3.2 will be handled after this release. So, if you can’t pony up the dough for the new tech, you may have to keep on dutifully abiding by Apple’s TOS.
• Unsigned Apps – During the Q&A session after the event, one audience member asked if users can expect a future app store that didn’t hinge on Apple’s approval, citing Android and WebOS’s offerings. Jobs’ response was a flat and unsurprising no. Apple’s control over the App Store hinges on their not wanting porn apps that might be downloaded by children, although it should be noted Mobile Safari already accesses plenty of porn sites optimized for the iPhone. Not a blemish on the OS itself, but yet more fuel to the App Store management fire.
• No Flash. Period. – Apple has made it clear that it will not budge on the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. How this will turn out is anyone’s guess, but what can be considered a con now might be a pro in coming years as sites slowlly embrace the new standard.

Android review

Pros and Cons of the Android Phone

By , RebecaCondo

Would-be smart phone owners often find it difficult to choose between phones running the Android operating system and other popular smart phone models, such as the iPhone or Blackberry. Careful consideration of the pros and cons of Android will enable you to make the right decision for your lifestyle and phone usage.

Hardware

Pros:

Most Android models have a removable battery, which allows users to purchase an extra battery and swap them out.

All Android models have the ability to accept an SD card, allowing for expanded storage.

Some Android models have physical keyboards.

Cons:

Most Android models have smaller screens than competing phones, such as the iPhone.

Not all models have physical keyboards, which can render typing difficult.

The 3.0MP camera packaged with most Android models doesn't produce very good pictures.

Software

Pros:
It's possible to run multiple applications at once on Android.

Android has excellent integration with Google Apps.

Cons:
There is no automatic sync between the Android and your PC or Mac, meaning you must install a third-party syncing application or manually sync your Android and pc

windows phone 7

Windows Phone 7 OS

• Pros -Gorgeous design. Zune player provides a high-quality music and video experience. Xbox Live gaming has potential.
• Cons - Doesn't work well in landscape mode. Not many apps yet.
• Bottom Line Yes, it's version 1.0, and it's missing some features and plenty of apps. But Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system is already a player in the mobile space.

Windows Phone 7 is a brand-new thing. Microsoft's total mobile OS reboot is bold and fresh. It's also definitely a Version 1.0. Zune fans will be immediately impressed, but for everyone else, buying into Windows Phone 7 is taking a gamble that Microsoft will sand away the rough edges quickly.

For now, Windows Phone 7 is arriving on six phones in the U.S.: theSamsung Focus ($199.99, 4 stars), HTC Surround ($199.99, 3 stars) and LG Quantum on AT&T; the HTC HD7 and Dell Venue Pro on T-Mobile; and the HTC 7 Pro on Sprint. Verizon has said it may support the OS in 2011, but hasn't made any clear commitments.

All the initial Windows Phone 7 models have a lot in common. They run on the Qualcomm QSD8250, 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 chipset. They all have 800-by-480 screens, 5-megapixel cameras, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM radios. They vary in terms of hardware keyboards, phone performance, camera quality, preloaded software, and available storage.

The Basic Interface
Windows Phone 7's home screen is made of big blocks of bright colors, called "live tiles." Live tiles aren't quite icons, and they aren't quite widgets. They could be apps, such as the contact book. They could be individual contacts. Or they could be collections of related apps, such as "Xbox Live" (all the games on your phone) or "Music & Video." Slide the screen to the right and you'll get a more traditional app menu.

Whenever it's given a choice between pretty and fast, Windows Phone 7 chooses pretty. Screens slide and twist and flip whenever possible. This will infuriate geeks who just want to get to the data as quickly as they can; it might even be a dealbreaker for them. On the other hand, my wife (who is an artist) loves it.

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Text entry is handled by two touch keyboards—one portrait, one landscape. There's no facility for third-party systems like Swype. The keyboards are fine, letters pop up when you press them, and the system autocorrects. It's certainly better than the older Android keyboards; it's about on par with the current Android and Apple solutions, at least if you don't count Swype.

Microsoft doesn't let carriers and manufacturers mess with Windows Phone 7's interface the way they can with Android. Rather, they're allowed to add six applications, all removable. On the two phones I've tested so far, AT&T adds five apps and the manufacturer gets one. For more details, check out the individual phone reviews.

E-Mail, Social Networking and Web
When you're setting up a Windows Phone, you're asked to add a Windows Live ID. You need this for the Marketplace and Xbox Live, but Hotmail comes along with it. The OS also supports Microsoft Exchange e-mail, AOL, Google, Yahoo, and POP/IMAP, all with a rich array of attachment support and all (except POP) with some sort of "push" option. There's no universal inbox; each account is its own Live Tile, showing the number of new messages. E-mail looks great in full HTML.

Contacts come from Outlook, Windows Live, Google, and Facebook. Calendars sync with Outlook, Windows Live, and Google. Windows Phone 7 doesn't sync PIM information locally with PCs, which will affect a small but very passionate group of Outlook users. You need to have your addresses and calendars in the cloud—that could be Microsoft's cloud, Google's cloud, or a corporate cloud.

The OS clearly works best with Exchange 2007 servers. It had a hard time communicating with corporate Exchange 2003 SP2 servers on two different phones, stalling out when trying to detect settings, and once it was set up, not being able to access a Global Address List. That said, a lot of phones have trouble with our company's elderly e-mail system. Our experience underscores the fact that you really need to work with your IT department if you're trying to get essential business data.

Windows Phone is very reliant on Facebook for social networking. Facebook dives into the address book, combining with the various contact lists from your e-mail programs; the OS tidily combines duplicate contacts and lets you manually combine cards as well. Facebook updates and Wall posts are displayed on both contact cards and in the address book as a whole, and you can comment on your friends' walls directly from the address book.

Since this is Version 1.0, it doesn't cover all communications possibilities. Twitter is an app disconnected from the core address book. MySpace is totally absent. There's also no IM program, yet.

The Windows Phone 7 Web browser is based on Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and it displays desktop Web pages very clearly. Pop-ups appear; Flash doesn't. Dynamic pages are semi-supported—it's hard to drag little selection handles, for instance. The browser zooms smoothly with pinch-to-zoom, and pages show up in both landscape and portrait mode, though you can only enter new Web addresses in portrait mode. You can spawn several tabs which appear as little thumbnails.

The browser isn't that fast, though. On a Wi-Fi network when compared with the iPhone 4 running iOS 4.1, the Samsung Focus and HTC Surround loaded both WAP and full Web pages considerably more slowly than the iPhone—sometimes only half as fast.

Apps and Xbox
It won't surprise you to know that Bing and Microsoft Office play major roles in Windows Phone 7. Bing, of course, is the default Web search engine; it also offers pinch-to-zoom maps. On my sample phones, Bing maps locked onto my location quickly and offered driving or walking directions. But it's still behind the leader, Google Maps. It doesn't do turn-by-turn, spoken driving directions or transit directions. When you zoom in on individual blocks, you don't see buildings or businesses tagged. And it got some addresses in New York City quite wrong, for instance putting JFK Airport in Manhattan.

The Microsoft Office implementation on Windows Phone is excellent. You can create, edit, and round-trip Word, Excel, and OneNote files, as well as edit PowerPoint docs. There's only one false note: no easy way to copy those files to and from your desktop. You have to send them to yourself via e-mail, save them on Microsoft's SkyDrive (for OneNote only) or store them on a SharePoint server.

Windows Phone 7 carries the Xbox Live brand, and gaming is one of the real weaknesses of the competing Android platform. At launch, Windows Phone 7 is probably already ahead of Android, but is behind Apple, the leader in mobile gaming.

Games you download appear under an Xbox Live icon on the home screen. There are only a few available right now, but they're very good-looking, with high-test graphics and smooth action. Even casual games such as Monopoly have 3D graphics. I'm frustrated by the lack of multiplayer XBox Live games at launch, though. In Windows Phone's interface, you can see your avatar, various gaming achievements and leader boards, but there's no option to play games with your friends. Microsoft says that feature is coming very soon, perhaps by the time you read this.

Microsoft says about 1,000 apps will be available by US launch, with "several hundred more" arriving each following week. A whole range of big names may be available by December, including Netflix, Kindle, Sling Player, ESPN, Facebook, and games from EA. The big-name apps were starting to filter into the store at the end of our review period; EA and Glu Mobile games, for instance, started appearing the afternoon that this review published.

Third-party apps aren't allowed to run in the background, though some apps save their states to resume to the same place when relaunched. Microsoft's multitasking is much weaker than Apple's and Android's here.

That said, the Marketplace is an interesting and pretty usable experience. At first it will be curated; only 2,000 developers who Microsoft prefers will be allowed in. That will (hopefully) populate the catalog with some high-quality stuff before the floodgates open. You can try any app before you buy, and you can bill apps directly to your AT&T phone bill. There's no option to return apps you don't like, though.

I especially like how you can browse the app catalog on a PC and schedule downloads to be synced over to your phone. If you choose to buy your app on the phone itself, titles under 10MB can be downloaded over 3G. For anything larger, you'll need a Wi-Fi network.

The Zune Phone
Windows Phone's biggest selling point for now—and, not coincidentally, the feature that isn't Version 1.0—is Zune.

Every Windows Phone is basically a Zune HD. Okay, it doesn't have The Social, that weird feature that lets Zunes see what other Zunes nearby are playing. But that's not a huge loss as far as I'm concerned.

Windows Phones sync with PCs running the Zune software either through a USB cable or wirelessly, by connecting to the same Wi-Fi network as the PC. Microsoft will also offer a limited Mac client, which syncs unprotected music and videos from your iTunes library via a USB cable. There's no mass storage mode—you have to use the Zune software to sync.

The Zune desktop experience is richer than any other mobile-phone media option, including iTunes. You can buy a wide range of music, rent or buy movies and TV shows, or download podcasts, and browse the Windows Phone 7 app catalog and download apps. What makes Zune special, though, is Zune Pass, a $14.99 combined subscription/purchase option that gives you unlimited music access, plus 10 song purchases per month. For big music fans, that's a good deal.

The Zune interface relies so much on sliding panels that it's a little too easy to get lost in it, but after a little while, you adapt. It certainly beats the 1999-era music player on most Android phones. Music sounds clear over wired headphones plugged into the 3.5-mm jack that's standard on every Windows Phone, and videos look sharp.

Zune is a finished-looking, smooth, rich experience. Microsoft has immediately vaulted itself into the top rank of entertainment phones. It would be on par with the iPhone, if the iPhone didn't have an overwhelming number of third-party apps such as Hulu Plus and SlingPlayer on its side.

What's Next
Microsoft is already planning new features for Windows Phone 7, and the company says that updates will come promptly. While manufacturers aren't allowed to mess with Microsoft's updates, carriers still have to approve them, which could slow down the process. We still think it will go more smoothly than the Android upgrade mess.

So what's down the road? Copy and paste is high on Microsoft's priority list. The compant demoed the feature to a group of journalists, and it's pretty straightforward: tap, drag a few handles, and you're copying or pasting. Multiplayer games are coming soon; ditto for high-quality, third-party entertainment options like Slacker, Pandora, and Netflix. Turn-by-turn navigation and better SkyDrive integration may also be coming soon. I assume third parties will also fill the instant-messaging gap.

My biggest concern is Microsoft's snubbing of a landscape-format interface, which can make using Windows Phone 7 a bit awkward on some devices. If every Windows Phone was portrait-mode like the Samsung Focus, that would be fine, but phones like the HTC Surround and LG Quantum practically beg to be held sideways. I hope Microsoft makes the OS more compatible with that usage.

Stop Symbian

Stop Symbian Before It Loads Again!

Symbian, on touch screens, is a total disaster. I used to love Symbian, and I still do, on non-touchscreen phones. Symbian's interface isn't designed for touch-screen use.

Everything about the N8's software is bad. I can't find a good thing to say. When I reviewed theSony Ericsson Vivaz (1.5 stars), I called it the worst smartphone in America, and I blamed Sony Ericsson for the terrible software. Actually, it's Symbian's fault.

We've been tiptoeing around this problem for more than a year. Look at our reviews of the Nokia N97 Mini (3 stars) and the Nokia X6 (3 stars), for instance. Symbian phones are now designed solely for people who previously owned Symbian phones, because the interface just doesn't make sense to anyone else.

For instance: Text entry. The N8's landscape-format virtual keyboard defaults to turning off predictive text and autocorrect (they can only be turned on via buried menu options), and the phone doesn't even have a portrait QWERTY keyboard. In portrait mode, you're triple-tapping on a T9 number pad like it's 1998. That landscape keyboard, by the way, takes up the whole screen, obscuring what you're typing into.

To go to a new Web page in a touch-screen mobile browser, you typically swipe to the top and enter something in the address bar. Not here! It takes four clicks through unintuitive, nested menus to open a new page.

Also, the N8's music player took a long time to scan my memory card for songs in my tests. That made the software feel stale, even though it looks good, sounds good, and displays album art well.

Ovi Maps Navigation gives N8 owners free turn-by-turn driving and walking directions, along with attractively detailed maps and lots of ancillary content from big-name partners like Lonely Planet. So far, so good. But I couldn't figure out how to set the start point to anywhere other than my current location. I later found out that you have to tap on a location and then click "add to route" —it's doable, just not intuitive, like so much in Symbian.

Wow, does Symbian love folders. Nesting folders on a non-touchscreen phone makes a lot of sense, because it takes a lot of clicks to get through a long menu. But when you can scroll a long distance with just a flick of your finger, hiding options multiple taps deep is just frustrating.

Everything seems to involve more clicks than necessary. Take adding an app shortcut to the home screen. I couldn't figure this out initially, because if you click on the home screen and add "Shortcuts," you get a preprogrammed shortcut bar with no obvious way to change its contents. Instead you have to click the bar you've added again, pick "Settings," choose one of the four shortcut slots from a separate text list, pick "Application," and then choose what you want. It gets the job done—in the most awkward, unintuitive way possible.

The hideous software even damages the N8's two positive experiences. Where most of the rest of the smartphone world is working hard on multiple address book integration, the N8 syncs one, and only one, at a time. I could get my Microsoft Exchange contacts, but not my Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Yahoo address books. You can append Facebook and Twitter information to individual contacts, but you have to enter them one at a time, using an interface with several steps per contact. That's just a no-go.

The camera app, meanwhile, has trouble turning off. I sometimes had to stab an unresponsive touch button several times to quit the camera.

Nokia has sped up considerably and smoothed-out login problems in its Ovi app store, but there's still very little in there that anyone would want to download. I typed in two dozen popular American Web brands and content providers and came up with only a few apps. Want to enjoy media? There's no Netflix, no Pandora, no Slacker Radio. Nokia offers three proprietary Web TV channels, which are outdone by any carrier's MobiTV lineup. (And no, MobiTV is not available.)

Nokia's own TV commercial for the N8 shows how unaware the company seems to be. The commercial calls out as top features "three home screens" (competitors all have more), Ovi Store (without U.S. content), and Symbian^3, which is meaningless to Americans.

I could go on like this for a while, but you get the point. The touch-screen smartphone world has a consensus on the way some things should work. If you're going to buck that trend, you need a radically usable new idea. Symbian^3 brings a 2004-era, non-touchscreen interface awkwardly translated onto a high-end touchscreen phone. It's infuriating.

If the rating on a review was just about features, the Nokia N8 would get much higher than a 2.5. But I wanted to throw this phone through a window, it was so frustrating to use. Nokia says about the N8, "it's not technology, it's what you do with it." The company needs to take their own words to heart. If you don't make your $549, super-smartphone usable, nobody will want to do anything with it at all.