Fring Wins Race To VoIP On Android

First off the blocks with VoIP on Android is Fring with its versatile VoIP and IM aggregator. Supporting Skype and MSN Messenger as well as Android staples Google Talk and Twitter, this looks like a winning application.

Skype are supposed to be working on their own VoIP application, although if you're on the Three network you can use the Three Skype application to take advantage of free Skype to Skype calls - its not true VoIP as it routes calls over the Three network, but if you're on Three you can't beat free...

Read more...

When Irish Eyes Aren't Smiling

So suddenly Thierry Henry is public enemy number one and the Irish have suffered a terrible wrong. Yes the crazy world of football threw up another of its frequent injustices yesterday, however once again the media have taken the opportunity to blow the incident out of all proportion.

Face facts: cheating is endemic in professional football.

Face facts: referees sometimes make mistakes.

Like everybody else I feel sorry for the Irish, however that doesn't mean that there should be a replay, otherwise it will set a precedent for every match with a contentious result to be replayed and then we'll never see the end of any tournament ever.

And to those Irish fans (and politicians) who feel cheated by the result and are demanding the French offer a replay, consider this: Robbie Keane was penalised for deliberate handball earlier in the game, if the referee had missed this and Keane had gone on to score the goal which had sent Ireland through to South Africa would they do the same? Not a chance.

Until such time as FIFA finds a way to use video evidence 'in game' this sort of incident will always happen and the only consolation is that this sort of thing evens itself out over time. Maradona's hand of God, for example, is balanced by Owen's 1998 dive...

Read more...

HTC's Adverts Are Working

Seems like HTC have got something with their new TV advertising, which really seems to be making an impression for the company that no-one outside geekdom had heard of six months ago.

Twice today I was asked about my Hero by people who recognised it from the TV spots or from the bus shelter advertising blitz which is supporting it. Both were iPhone users and both were pretty much sold after a few minutes play. Looks like people only realise the benefits of multi-tasking when they experience it for themselves.

The Sense UI got them excited too, realising that the home screen should be more than just a list of applications.

Read more...

Symbian To Die In 2012

And so it goes, the OS that came from Psion's line of handheld's as EPOC, powered the first recognisable smartphone (the Ericsson R380, the earlier GEOS powered Nokia Communicator not qualifying by virtue of its mammoth size) and went on to dominate the smartphone market; has had time called and Nokia will kill it as early as 2012.

In truth Symbian has been dead ever since the arrival of the iPhone, its fans and makers being the only ones who hadn't realised. When Nokia made its laughable attempts to add touch to what was essentially the anti-touch OS it soon became clear that there was no hope for Symbian and it was only a matter of time before Nokia turned to its open-source stablemate, Maemo, previously restricted to the Finnish company's Internet Tablet range.

Today's announcement isn't a big surprise, it was inevitable once Nokia announced a Maemo-powered smartphone. What will be worth monitoring is the success, or otherwise, of the Maemo handsets that Nokia has planned. The company has gambled on an OS which has seen only limited support from the open source community and, given the emergence of Android as a credible open source competitor for the iPhone's crown, I wonder how much that will be improved with the release of version 5. My guess is that Symbian developers will not necessarily support Maemo, rather chasing the big markets of the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile.

I fear that Nokia would have been better served copying Sony-Ericsson and picking the best of each platform to test the market, rather than looking to develop a new platform from scratch.

Read more...

Self-control, What's That?

Remember how I said that I wouldn't consider going back to Android until version 2 was released? Yeah, that didn't last too long...

This morning I was seduced by a rather nice HTC Hero, ably assisted by a nice salesman at the Carphone Warehouse who showed me how I could get one SIM-free for around £50...

No its not some kind of disgusting pyramid selling deal, rather that the Warehouse is now doing instore trade ins. And at better prices than being offered on their website.

With such a good deal on offer it would have been rude to decline, which is why I'm back in the Android camp.

Two things strike me about the unlocked Hero, it doesn't suffer from the lag which affected the network locked units that I tried last month; and most of the problems I experienced with the Pulse appear to relate to the Pulse rather than Android, which should probably be taken into account if you're considering taking the plunge.

The learning curve on the Hero is much smaller than other Android phones because of the commonality in the Sense and Touchflo interfaces used by HTC.

As ever I'll keep you up to date on how. things progress.

Read more...

T-Mobile Texting Problems

How bizarre. My T-Mobile SIM refuses to deliver text messages to other T-Mobile phones but works fine with phones on other networks. What's going on there then? Anyone?

Read more...

Where Have All The Buttons Gone?

Since the arrival of the original iPhone there's been a major move towards touch interaction with smartphones at the expense of almost everything else.

I'm currently using a T-Mobile Vario 2 - a pretty old piece of kit which pre-dates the announcement of the first iPhone. It's covered in buttons, up front there is a five way d-pad controller, two softkey buttons, two application buttons, start and end call keys; and a Windows Start button and OK/Back button. On the right hand side are power, wireless and camera buttons; on the left another Ok/Back button, a voice dial button with separate functions for push and hold; and a jog dial with push to select.

That's six programmable buttons to launch my preferred applications. The d-pad is used to control any of a selection of media players as well as to move through the interface. In fact before the arrival of the iPhone Microsoft were trying to move its touchscreen and non-touchscreen interfaces closer together with the result that the Vario 2 can be navigated without ever having to touch the screen.

Returning to the Vario 2 after eighteen months of touch-only interaction I have to say that I think Microsoft were heading in the right direction before the world went iPhone-crazy. It is so much quicker and easier to interact with the Vario 2 using its buttons (and not forgetting an excellent full qwerty slide out keyboard) that I could be easily persuaded to make it my daily driver once more, despite its shortage of memory and low resolution QVGA screen.

Now if only someone would build a new model with a VGA screen and 256MB of RAM, I'd be onto that like a shot...

Read more...

In a World Of Doesn't

Looks like the latest Droid advert (which stems from US mobile network Verizon) has ruffled a few feathers.

This one points out a few of the things that the iPhone can't do or won't allow its owners to do before calling Apple arrogant and pointing out that the DROID does... and it achieves this without mentioning either Apple or the iPhone by name.

Its advertising by negatives, which isn't common in the UK but seems prevalent Stateside.

Only one such advert has ever made it over here: Apple's "I'm a Mac" series. Nice to see the biter get bit isn't it?

Read more...

New Phones Bring Windows Mobile Back To The Fore

Just when it looked like Windows Mobile was out for the count two new handsets have arrived which show that WM6.5 is still able to compete.

First off is the HTC HD2 which has garnered some rave reviews so far. Packing a Snapdragon processor, a WVGA screen of mammoth proportions, HTC's Sense UI which for the first time on Windows Mobile is paired with a capacitive screen. The HD2 will be available on contract from both O2 and Vodafone.

The second new handset taking Windows Mobile to new heights is the Omnia 2 from Samsung. Whilst not generating the same number of column inches as the HD2 the Omnia 2 has still managed an upbeat reception. This is a slightly more compact handset than the HTC, the trade off being a smaller (if still large) screen. Samsung's Touchwiz 2 interface isn't quite as slick as Sense but it does a remarkable job of reskinning everything that the user is required to interact with to operate the phone.

Microsoft's partners seem to have got to grips with WM6.5 very quickly and this is resulting in more and more competitive handsets arriving. Microsoft now needs to fix its end of the equation and work harder to gain mindshare for Windows Phone with TV and print advertising outside of the tech arena.

It doesn't matter how competitive the handsets and OS are if all the potential customers are buying iPhones because they have been suckered into believing Apple's "only on iPhone" commercial message.

Read more...

T-Mobile Pulse Wrap-up

Well I promised to give Android a go and for two weeks I stuck to that promise. Today however the Pulse is back with T-Mobile and I'm looking around for a new phone again.

Android was more impressive than I expected in some ways, desperately disappointing in others. In the end I could have lived with the shortcomings, but repeated hardware failures meant that I couldn't commit to keeping the Pulse.

The Canvas front-end which Huawei have added to Android seems to work much more logically than HTC's Sense front end with the bonus of being expandable and relatively lightweight. The Touchpal keyboard was also an impressive part of the bundle.

Yet there were areas where Android is clearly behind the competition and Google needs to focus efforts to catch up. The quality of applications in the app store was disappointing - not helped by some of the most useless and pointless reviews ever committed to keyboard. There are plenty of solid applications in the Market but no real way of telling what works well on what hardware and which applications conflicted with each other. In the time I had it the Pulse was the least reliable device I've ever owned, suffering random slowdowns and self resetting for no apparent reason. I became close friends with the 'application has force closed' dialog box and also saw spontaneous resets and on at least three occasions had to reboot the Pulse by removing the battery because it had locked so hard.

The Pulse worked with none of the major barcode scanning apps, rendering one of Google's big selling points moot.

The built-in music player is lame, not helped by a lack of responsiveness from the Pulse's screen when on a car cradle. Failure to recognise screen taps when trying to advance through tracks was hugely frustrating and whilst I found other music players that seemed much more promising all were stymied by the screen issue, a Pulse problem I think.

The much vaunted multiple-tasking was a letdown too, running the music player in the background with Bluetooth streaming meant that whatever was trying to run in the foreground ground to a near halt. Windows Mobile devices can perform that task with capacity to spare, so ultimately, that's a real letdown for the platform as a whole.

In fact there's a definite feeling of 'work in progress' about Android. It's neither as slick and well planned as the iPhone, nor as flexible or powerful as Windows Mobile.

The end result is deeply unsatisfying, yet I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the Pulse and Android. I think I'll wait until version 2 is upon us before I travel down that path again though...

Read more...