iphone

I know, I know, everybody's all atwitter over various iPhone software elements making their way to Windows Mobile. The latest is this keyboard over at XDA-Developers, which would be nice if you had a screen as large as the iPhone's. You don't, so this keyboard is going to be a single-index-finger affair. That's nice, it also utilizes Windows Mobile's predictive text, which has an advantage over the iPhone in that it will auto-complete a word for you with a tap. No, it's not as smart as the iPhone's "fix it after you type it" style, but it's still pretty nice.

However - I much prefer one of two other options: a physical keyboard or, barring that, SPB Full Screen Keyboard. It's $9.95 and works great. SPB did try to put in some of that fancy predictive magic that iPhone users have, but in my experience it's not all that useful. What is useful is that it's in landscape mode (it can do portrait too, but I'd advice against it). This, my friends, is eminently thumb-able. If you are one of the strange / lucky ones with a WM touchscreen device sans physical keyboard, this is what you want.

See, the nice thing about a Smartphone* is that if the built-in functionality isn't enough for you, you can hunt down and install 3rd-party applications to fill the gap. :p

This application won't analyze your next possible character like the iPhone does, but it is a skin for the Windows Mobile keyboard so you'll still get the native predictive word functions that you normally have.

Read: jkOnTheRun: Does this Windows Mobile iKeyboard look familiar?

( * Yes, I know this "the iPhone isn't a smartphone" thing is fast becoming a losing argument what with some decent web-apps coming out and the likelihood of serious updates from Apple in the near future. It's still mostly true (especially on a plane, hey?) and it's still completely fun to write. )

Here they are on my desk, sitting quietly next to each other. On the inside, though, both are smoldering cauldrons of hate and jealousy. Seriously, there's almost steam rising out of the speaker grills on each phone. We'll get to software in part two (here's a preview, though, it's apples and oranges / featurephone v smartphone), but for today let's just compare the hardware. I'm sure that nobody out there would actually base their purchasing decision between these two on which is thinner (iPhone), but it's still fun to look.

Read on for some pics and thoughts.

Buttons

The HTC Touch has the fewest buttons of any WM device I've used. It's positively button-aenemic, there's power on the top, a camera button, the 5-way, send, end, and a volume slider. Given my standard usage habits, I found this to be pretty aggravating.

Of course, compared to the iPhone the Touch is just awash in buttons. The iPhone has power, home, a volume rocker and a ringer switch. On both devices the tactile feedback on the buttons is satisfying - both have good clicky-ness, though the iPhone's button have more travel.

I know, I know, I'm writing about buttons on devices whose main selling point is that they don't primarily use buttons. Fine, let's move on. Before I do, though, slightly related to buttons are indicator lights. The Touch has 'em (elegantly hidden within the speaker grille and blinking in various colors and rates to tell you your signal for Cell, WiFi, and Bluetooth), the iPhone does not.

Advantage: Touch. Yes, I get what Apple's aiming for here, but the Touch is example #1 that you can have some buttons without killing the elegance of the device.

Touchscreens

Sorry, HTC. The touch loses, but it's not your fault. You thought the touch was playing in the big leagues, but it turns out it was just AAA ball. The touchscreen on the Touch is really very good - it's actually among the top 2 or 3 touchscreens I've ever used in my life, actually. It's not a gigantic screen, but compared to some of the stuff I'd been using lately (Treos and Blackjacks), it's more than enough. Brightness, response, contrast, etc etc.. All fine, good even.

But the screen on the iPhone is just abso-@$@#$@-lutely stupendous. It's gigantic, 3.5 inches, and high-res, and it sports 160 pixels per inch. It's bright. It has the oft-mentioned "multitouch" feature which is fun (but won't change your life, sorry).

The iPhone also has an ambient light sensor tucked away in there so it doesn't blast your eyes out when you're using it in the dark or fail to even appear on in direct sunlight. It's really nice. Also nice is the proximity sensor that prevents it from working when held up to your face. Finally, the iPhone's glass surface really does feel much nicer than the Touch's plastic.

Advantage: iPhone. "Advantage" isn't the right word here. It's a blowout, it's almost not even fair.

Dimensions

The short of it is that the iPhone is thinner and taller, but they are about the same width. Their weight also isn't all the noticeable to me, either.

The long of it is that physically-speaking they're both very satisfying devices to hold in your hand. I prefer the soft-touch-paint approach of the Touch a little more than the brushed-metal feel of the iPhone, I think it helps grip-ability more. But the brushed-metal of the iPhone isn't exactly a slippery doomsday scenario, it seems fine.

The iPhone is more rounded than the Touch on the sides, which is nice but not essential.

Advantage: iPhone by a slim margin. It's a surprising result, perhaps, but I stand by it. Yes, the iPhone is more elegant and polished overall than the Touch. But the Touch's short stature makes it feel very nice held up to the ear and in your hand. By comparison, I'm almost tempted to call the iPhone a slab.

iPhone vs Touch Hardware edition: iPhone wins.

The Touch held up remarkably well for me, much better than expected when I was imagining it next to the juggernaut that is Apple hardware design. It put up a valiant effort, but I suppose from a hardware perspective it was doomed from the start.

Coming up later is the main event: Specs and Software. Stay tuned!

Just finished up with the live Apple Keynote blogstravaganza, mostly over at Engadget, who caught the absolutely stupendous image over at the right. And I'm finding myself suddenly less worried about the iPhone decimating Windows Mobile than I was before. A lot less worried.

Here's the relevant quote from Engaget's coverage, straight from the mouth of his Steveness:

And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, check email, look up a location on Gmaps... don't worry about distribution, just put 'em on an internet server. They're easy to update, just update it on your server. They're secure, and they run securely sandboxed on the iPhone. And guess what, there's no SDK you need! You've got everything you need if you can write modern web apps..." Weeeeeaaaak

Weeeeeaaak indeed. Like I said just a few days ago, "a smartphone is a platform, and a platform needs 3rd party apps." Jobs' reply: "There's no SDK you need!" In other words: No Apps For You! Use webpage and online apps instead.

Orly? How about security - sure, a web developer can secure a webapp, but it's easier to just depend on a phone's built-in security on an app that's housed on the phone. Or how about when you don't actually have reliable and useful data signal? Too bad, so sad. Or what about the fact that I like to use my phone a little differently than you use yours - so I can install a custom ToDo app, or a neat little shortcut hack, or whatever. Sorry - with the iPhone you can use any interface you want as long as it's the default.

No support for a real developer community means that Apple is releasing an appliance, not a platform. Without a platform, the iPhone is not a smartphone, Q.E.D. Just so we're perfectly clear here: It's looking like Blackberry has better third party support than the iPhone will.

And that photo... at first glance it is (among other things) yet another joke on Steve Ballmer; but if Apple really intends to lock out all genuine "on the phone" 3rd party development... Well then we'll probably see Ballmer smile like that on his own.

Update: phone different's OMGNOAPPZ series weighs in with a slightly more optimistic (though still troubled) take.

Seeking Alpha's Sramana Mitra puts into words something like what I've had in the back of my mind for quite awhile now: it's possible that the iPhone could actually help WM. I'm not on board with her "the iPhone is actually laptop competition" argument, though. But consider this:

In a relatively small lakeside town in Minnesota, Excelsior, a new bar/restaurant opened up in December called Jake O'Connors. Everybody was thinking: this place is so nice that all the other bars and restaurants are going to have to shut down, there's just not enough space to go around. What actually happened, though, is that Jake O'Connors is doing great and all the nearby restaurants are doing better than they ever before. The new kid on the block made people want to come to that block, not necessarily just to see the new kid.

The basic idea here is that the smartphone market is growing -- quickly -- and it's likely that the iPhone will accelerate that growth. But the growth could come for the entire smartphone market, not just for the iPhone portion of it. There are a lot of feature phone users out there who are just starting to think "I need a smartphone", and the release of the iPhone could set them looking. I think its fair to say that there's a portion of those people who will choose WM over the iPhone.

It's like the old saw that opening a new fast food restaurant immediately next to a competing fast food restaurant actually improves business for both. A rising tide raises all ships. A bird in the hand.. wait, that last metaphor doesn't work.

So the iPhone may not spell doomsday for everybody else, after all. I agree with Mitra on one point - the iPhone's robust OS should make consumers demand a robust OS from their smartphones, whatever kind they decide on. Right now, Symbian, RIM, and the PalmOS don't cut it and that's an opening for Windows Mobile. There's another mixed metaphor for you - people tend to rise to the level of expectation; perhaps smartphones will too?

c|net sat in on a press conference with Chris Sorensen, who is in charge of MS's Asian smartphone strategy. His knocks on the iPhone are the ones you'd expect - no physical keyboard means it might not work for messaging (jury's still out on that), no Office means no business users, no 3G means pretty much the same.

Then again, everybody's pointing out that MS scoffed at the original iPod.

Basically I think that MS's intuition is right, the iPhone won't grab hold of business users, but it's going to be a huge shift in the consumer market. Whether or not Microsoft can maintain the progress they've made in that space remains to be seen. Let's see: by the end of the summer we'll have the iPhone, a bevy of WM6 devices, and the announcement of Palm's super-secret 3rd-type of device. Damn if it isn't a great time to be writing about smartphones.

"However, it's a closed device that you cannot install applications on, and there's no support for Office documents. If you're an enterprise and want to roll out a line of business applications, it's just not an option. Even using it as a heavy messaging device will be a challenge," the executive added.

Read: Microsoft: iPhone lacks business savvy | CNET News.com

Let's kick off our prizes with a classic, hey? The Plantronics Bluetooth Headset, a great in-ear Bluetooth headset with a nice little portable charger.

How to win:

It's Monday, so we'll keep it simple: Go on and register in our forums (those of your registered at TreoCentral's forums are already registered!) and then head over to this thread: Prize-A-Day, Day 1: iPhone SmackTalk Edition.

Anybody who posts a reply in that thread between 9amEST on Feb 13th and 9amEST on the 14th will qualify for the drawing (and also will receive one entry for the Grand Prize. But we want you to do more than qualify, we want you to talk some smack in honor of the Windows Mobile 6 announcement. The preferred format is:

Your iPhone is so [blank], it [blank]!

Don't be fair. Don't be nice. (Don't be vulgar, though, either). Heck, don't even be truthful. We're talkin' smack here, kids!

(Full Contest information here - must use valid email address to register.)