just my 2 cents worth on iPhone Appstore Rating System

I am not an avid photographer but I do enjoy taking photos using my iphone to capture some instant moments that will otherwise slip past. And I'm quite inspired by Greg Schmigel's iPhone Photography blog ( http://justwhatisee.com ). I started to try out some iPhone applications that I can use to apply different filters to the photos and email to my friend or upload to my Flickr website. I come to realise that Apple's rating system has little meaning to me.

Appstore had limited apps on photography when it first started. Now it has over 10 pages of photography-related apps. I don't have the patience to go through all the reviews and I depend on the average rating to make a quick decision whether to review further. Then I realise that the average rating is actually quite flawed. Firstly, it can be skewed if there are more comments given on the first version of the app then on the subsequent version / update. Secondly, not many people will revise the rating even if they download an updated improved version of the app. Thirdly, there are no date stamp on the reviews. Although the most recent review will be shown first, you simply have no idea if this review is about the first version of the app or subsequent versions. Just take an example: if an app is downloaded 1000 times when it first made the debut and isonly downloaded 10 times since the last revision, it will be "draggeddown" by the average rating as it's highly skewed, regardless if greatimprovements have been made to the latest version of the app.

If Apple is indeed betting on Appstore as the future for iPhone, it should improve the rating system - this not only benefits the developers but also the customers. While I agree that the Appstore should still maintain the average rating of the app since the debut of the app at Appstore, it should also show separate ratings for different versions of the application so that a reader can know at one glance if the app has a better rating since the last revision. In addition, it should correspondingly filter and only display the comments regarding a particular version of the app instead of the full laundry list (which of course could be an option if the reader chooses to view all). Plus, it will be useful to know how many times has the app been downloaded. I'm sure this will provide better user experience and will be something welcomed by the developer. If the developer has indeed made great improvements to the app, he deserves to charge at a higher price and customers will be willing to pay if the rating is indeed good and the comments are indeed positive. Today, you can't really tell unless you read all the comments and try to make out whether the comments are referring to the latest version of the app or the earlier version.

Perhaps Android or Blackberry can also consider doing the same.

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

{UPDATED} Wow, should I get SAMSUNG PIXON or NOKIA XPRESSMUSIC 5800? Which One?

Would like to thank Mike for pointing out the oversight I made about ShoZu and I would like to repost my review on Pixon 8800 to make sure that all my readers are correctly informed. If you are re-reading the post, please the correction is made to point 11 under Phone OS and Applications.

Further to the short video demo that I uploaded yesterday, here is the point by point analysis of the phone. I hope you enjoy it. 

Phone Hardware

1. Samsung has clearly taken the pole position in the phone-camera category. In a short span of months, Samsung has pushed out her second 8 megapixals (MP) camera – Samsung M8800 PIXON after i8510 INNOV8. Clearly, no other phones except LG perhaps can come close to Samsung in this area. PIXON is the slimmest phone with a 8 megapixals resolution, a record previously held by LG RENOIR KC910 (a successor to LG KC990 VIEWTY).

2. PIXON is a 3.2 inch touchscreen phone but it's not the first touchscreen phone launched by Samsung. However unlike OMNIA, M8800 PIXON is not a windows mobile phone. It is also not using Symbian OS which is the OS for INNOV8. Instead, it uses Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz interface (I'll touch more about the phone OS and applications in the later section)

3. Let's talk about the camera feature first since this is the key USP for PIXON. The new PIXON is equipped with the core functions that you will find on any Samsung's low end point and shoot range camera. PIXON's camera features include auto-focus, 16x digital zoom (which, to me, is pretty useless if you want a high quality shoot. Optical zoom will be much more important), fast-shutter and face detection. And of course, being a phone, it provides the geo-tagging function and easy uploading via the mobile internet.

4. It's natural that that we compare PIXON to LG RENOIR since both have 8MP camera. While I have not tested LG RENOIR, I learnt from third party sources that RENOIR uses Schneider-Kreuznach lens and Xenon flash. PIXON on the other hand uses plastic lens and dual LED flash. In addition, RENOIR has active autofocus whereas PIXON uses passive autofocus. But the report also commented that camera speed-wise, PIXON has an edge over RENOIR and PIXON has a more friendly user-interface. ( http://technorati.com/posts/OpbBYGK7SrgKE3pAz_SSxWJrJcNHyvOX4y9G993i3j0%3D ).

5. Putting aside the camera feature, I tend to compare this to Nokia XpressMusic 5800 as well. Both are very lightweight (PIXON 121g and Nokia 109g). Both have long battery life with Nokia winning by a slight margin (Samsung has talktime of upto 3 hours and 40 minutes and standby of 290 hours; Nokia has talktime of up to 4 hours and standby of upto 300hours). However, unlike Nokia, Samsung has only 256k colors. Nokia 5800 by contrast, supports 16m colors.

6. Some other similar features are the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and full virtual Qwerty keyboard and built-in GPS. PIXON uses Google Maps whereas Nokia has its own Nokia MAPS (which requires a subscription). However, Google maps is free and to me Google maps serves my purpose as I don't need a turn by turn voice navigation.

7. Samsung PIXON also uses a resistive screen and as mentioned in my earlier post on Nokia XpressMusic 5800, I am not very used to the "touch" on resistive screen. It requires you to exert pressure on the screen to scroll down. It requires more deliberate efforts to scroll than the multi-touch capacitive screen on iPhone.

8. PIXON uses proprietary headset jack. But all is not lost. You are able to connect a 3.5mm normal earphone to the connector provided by Samsung. The only thing is you can't afford to lose this connector. In addition, the phone also has the ability to do TV out. You have to purchase the accessories separately.

9. PIXON has an internal storage of 200M (much larger than Nokia 5800's) and similar to most phones today it has an expandable memory slot using microSD card.  

10. In terms of its speakers' quality, Samsung included its own SRS (surround sound system). By comparison, I feel that Nokia 5800 is a cut above Samsung when I play the same song using the speakers. The music player also boosts some presets (in total 8 of them). However, unlike Nokia's XpressMusic, you can't change the presets to customise your own. (More about this in the later section)

11. While PIXON has a 3.2 inch screen, its browser is not friendly. You can't open several tabs at one go. And because it has resistive screen, it is not using to navigate with fingers as you need to press against the screen as you move around on a web page. But what I like about the phone is that you can zoom in and out by using the volume up/down button or to use the virtual buttons on the screen. Both are easy to control. I don't' encourage you to buy the phone if you intend to browse a lot. Besides the less-friendly browser and browsing capability, PIXON does NOT support WiFi. WiFi is important for me because I tend to put my phone on WiFi when I'm at home or in the office so that I don't have to pay for cellular data charges. PIXON is not the right phone for web-browsing. iPhone or G1 are clearly far better choices.

12. Last but not least, PIXON has several physical buttons to provide one-click access. It has 3 buttons at the bottom of the screen. The left and right buttons are self-explanatory (making and ending calls / power switch). The middle button is NOT a home or menu button. Rather it is a "Back" button. I had thought it would be easier to have a Menu button but Samsung has designed the Menu button as a virtual button (read on to find out). On one side of the phones are the camera button and the volume buttons (which can act as zoom in/out and and scroll up /down depending on the application that you are running). On the other side of the phone are the hold button and a menu button that provides a virtual menu for quick access to "call", "music player", "messages", "browser", "main menu" and back.


Phone OS and Applications

1. As mentioned earlier, the phone uses TouchWiz OS. It has several widgets on the home screen that you can pull out from the side of the screen to the main screen. Some neat widgets include Google Search, Weather Channel, Favourite Contacts, Photo Album, Music Player and others that are already pre-installed on the phone and many more that can be downloaded from Samsung FunClub website.

2. Pixon's organizer application comes with some handy tools such as Calendar, Memo, Task, World Clock, Calculator and Converter. 

3. For the music player, the interface is very friendly and easy to use. You can set any piece as voice or video call ringtone or caller ringtone. You have the option to decide whether to allow background music playing. It has an additional feature similar to the Shazam. PIXON has this application called the "Music Recognition". It will try to identify the song that you are playing. I have not tried out too many songs (in fact, only a few), hence it's not fair for me to comment on the accuracy. So far it recognizes most of the songs I bought from iTunes. Between the two phones, I'll recommend Nokia XpressMusic 5800 over Samsung PIXON for music not just because Nokia 5800 has better music player features and speakers but also because Nokia is targeting squarely at the iTunes market with the music store via its Come with Music service.

4. Nowadays most phones have both music and video players. Given the 3.2 inch screen size, it's comfortable to play a video or movie on it. What's neat about the video player is that you can choose to upload to web or to send via email/MMS or Bluetooth (same for music) and even add tags to it (only for videos). You can view the video in either portrait or landscape mode.

5. In addition, PIXON has this Video Editor application that allows you to insert one video track and two audio tracks. You can choose 176x144 or 320x240 for the resolution settings. You can choose from 5 different effects (Emboss, Black&White, Sepia, Solarise, Sharpen) to apply on the video. Interesting tool for you to make your own little impromptu video.   

6. Just to also mention that the phone has a voice recorder application but it can only record up to a maximum of 60 minutes. I thought if Samsung really wanted this to be a "fun phone" for photo-taking and video editing, it should perhaps include some effects to make some tweaks to the voice. What you can do for video editing is only to trim the length.

7. Don't bang on this phone too much for games. PIXON has some pre-installed games (mostly for trial only). It doesn't have the depth and breadth of an iPhone appstore.   

9. The phone can be used easily for mass storage. It has a Documents Viewer application that allows you to open Microsoft Office (only 2003 and not 2007) documents. This is a pleasant surprise to me. I have tested it out on a few powerpoint files (since I tend to deal a lot with powerpoint files). You can view in portrait or landscape mode. And more surprisingly it has a Search Function. This means I can go to certain particular slide easily if I can remember the keywords in that slide. The viewer has a zoom function too.  

10. Okay, I just want to say that this phone is not cut out to support heavy duty email. Of course, PIXON is never provided for that. It can support POP3 or IMAP. I have tried setting up using IMAP. I realised that it seems slow in processing my emails. There is also a limit on the size of the file that you can download. Only up to 5Mb. Most powerpoint file that I receive tends to be bigger than 5Mb. So this is practically of no use to me. If you just want simple text reading, this phone serves the purpose. If you read my earlier post on Nokia 5800, I mentioned that Nokia 5800 supports Mail For Exchange which allows synchronisation of Inbox, Calendar and Tasks. For PIXON, only basic email function is supported. 

11. CORRECTION: Samsung includes the ShoZu application which serves as an aggregator platform to allow a user to easily access many social networking sites including Facebook, Blogger, Picassa (for more details, please visit www.shozu.com and it also just launched an application that runs on iPhone). This provides a one-click convenience for a user to have a single sign on to access all these sites. The litmus test is the single sign on capability (that is user will not suffer from frequent timeout errors or disconnections from the sites that he wishes to access through Shozu and the ease of use of the application itself (by that I mean the interface design and navigation). I'll be using Shozu over the next few days and will write a post on this next week.

12. PIXON has a Photo Album application that uses its built-in accelerometer sensor. Not only does it auto-rotate the screen when you change the orientation of the phone, it also allows you to advance back and forth easily by tilting the phone. Cool way to view hundreds of photos quickly.

13. There is another neat thing I like about this phone. At times, we may send a sms to the wrong party. This phone has this "precautionary" feature built in by requiring you to click the "Done" virtual button so that you can preview your entire message again before sending out. In addition, when you type your message, the textbox is enlarged so that you can view your draft message easily. You can choose to use the normal phone keypad or handwritten (using the stylus) mode or the virtual Qwerty keyboard.  However, I somehow feel that it is a little slower than most phones in sending out the messages. Not sure if it's because it has the dialog box that shows "Sending" and hence the perception that it's taking a bit longer.

14. Lastly, I just want to say that this phone supports RSS. This means you can import your favourite feeds into the phone easily. That's something I must have for all phones. Feeds are my daily needs.

So in summary, I would say that if you are looking for a phone that can double up as a proper camera and have decent music and video players. This is the phone to go for. It has long battery life. This is important for taking photos and playing videos. Plus with the light weight, I really won't mind carrying one more gadget with me. 

See the full gallery on posterous

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Google vs Apple in the New Mobile World

I thoroughly enjoy being a handset reviewer. I'm always one of the few to have the privilege to try out new handsets. And just to say how much I really love being in this role - I only write a review after I feel that I've tested the handset enough and have a good assessment of the proos and cons. Every review that I write is not a mere collection of secondary sources. It's my own assessment after using the test set that I'm given for a few days. But well, what few people know is that I ended up being a handset reviewer (as part of my job scope) by chance because I was really looking at the SaaS trends and the future product roadmap in the mobility and collaboration space.

As phones become more and more like mini-computers, the types of applications running on the phones become more and more important. More and more people use phone for doing more than just making phone calls and SMS/MMS or emails. I use my phone to tweet, to check out my news feed, to play games and videos, listen to music and do some simple photo editing.

Between Apple and Google. I am placing my bet with Google. While Apple is really good with its devices and has huge success with its Appstore, Apple is still very much in the consumer space. Apple is driving iPhone adoption in the enterprise market by supporting Microsoft Outlook  Exchange push mail and leaving it to the software developers or SaaS providers such as salesforce.com or sugarsync to develop iPhone applications. Its move into push mail for Outlook Exchange has certainly waken RIM up. RIM has just launched its business grade iPhone-equivalent as a retaliatory tactic (see my other post on Blackberry Storm).

Google on the other hand uses a flanking approach. It does not support Microsoft Exchange push email and therefore does not attract much attention from RIM. G1's target segments are users who really love to have push capabilities for email, calendar and contacts and yet do not want to pay for Apple Mobile-Me or the great fans of Gmail users who desire to have the push capability as well as the small businesses who do not have outlook exchange and are or intend to use web-based emails. In addition, I believe over time Google will replicate its full suite of desktop apps onto its mobility roadmap. All the Google apps are part of a growing suite of services that support search, collaboration and mobility.

While the form factor of the G1 phone is not exactly as sexy as that of an iPhone, the G1 phone and Android software are really designed to support search, collaboration and mobility. To facilitate its mobility roadmap, Google made Android an open platform so that developers can access the core mobile device functionality through standard APIs to develop apps that truly encourage collaboration and mobility. I won't be surprised if Google starts to make the mobile version of its Google Gadgets available on its Android platform. That means the Google gadgets can be placed easily on my mini-mobile web pages or microblogs.

Where would you place your bet on? Google or Apple?

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

Wow, should I get SAMSUNG PIXON or NOKIA XPRESSMUSIC 5800? Which One?

Further to the short video demo that I uploaded yesterday, here is the point by point analysis of the phone. I hope you enjoy it. 

Phone Hardware

1. Samsung has clearly taken the pole position in the phone-camera category. In a short span of months, Samsung has pushed out her second 8 megapixals (MP) camera – Samsung M8800 PIXON after i8510 INNOV8. Clearly, no other phones except LG perhaps can come close to Samsung in this area. PIXON is the slimmest phone with a 8 megapixals resolution, a record previously held by LG RENOIR KC910 (a successor to LG KC990 VIEWTY).

2. PIXON is a 3.2 inch touchscreen phone but it's not the first touchscreen phone launched by Samsung. However unlike OMNIA, M8800 PIXON is not a windows mobile phone. It is also not using Symbian OS which is the OS for INNOV8. Instead, it uses Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz interface (I'll touch more about the phone OS and applications in the later section)

3. Let's talk about the camera feature first since this is the key USP for PIXON. The new PIXON is equipped with the core functions that you will find on any Samsung's low end point and shoot range camera. PIXON's camera features include auto-focus, 16x digital zoom (which, to me, is pretty useless if you want a high quality shoot. Optical zoom will be much more important), fast-shutter and face detection. And of course, being a phone, it provides the geo-tagging function and easy uploading via the mobile internet.

4. It's natural that that we compare PIXON to LG RENOIR since both have 8MP camera. While I have not tested LG RENOIR, I learnt from third party sources that RENOIR uses Schneider-Kreuznach lens and Xenon flash. PIXON on the other hand uses plastic lens and dual LED flash. In addition, RENOIR has active autofocus whereas PIXON uses passive autofocus. But the report also commented that camera speed-wise, PIXON has an edge over RENOIR and PIXON has a more friendly user-interface. ( http://technorati.com/posts/OpbBYGK7SrgKE3pAz_SSxWJrJcNHyvOX4y9G993i3j0%3D ).

5. Putting aside the camera feature, I tend to compare this to Nokia XpressMusic 5800 as well. Both are very lightweight (PIXON 121g and Nokia 109g). Both have long battery life with Nokia winning by a slight margin (Samsung has talktime of upto 3 hours and 40 minutes and standby of 290 hours; Nokia has talktime of up to 4 hours and standby of upto 300hours). However, unlike Nokia, Samsung has only 256k colors. Nokia 5800 by contrast, supports 16m colors.

6. Some other similar features are the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and full virtual Qwerty keyboard and built-in GPS. PIXON uses Google Maps whereas Nokia has its own Nokia MAPS (which requires a subscription). However, Google maps is free and to me Google maps serves my purpose as I don't need a turn by turn voice navigation.

7. Samsung PIXON also uses a resistive screen and as mentioned in my earlier post on Nokia XpressMusic 5800, I am not very used to the "touch" on resistive screen. It requires you to exert pressure on the screen to scroll down. It requires more deliberate efforts to scroll than the multi-touch capacitive screen on iPhone.

8. PIXON uses proprietary headset jack. But all is not lost. You are able to connect a 3.5mm normal earphone to the connector provided by Samsung. The only thing is you can't afford to lose this connector. In addition, the phone also has the ability to do TV out. You have to purchase the accessories separately.

9. PIXON has an internal storage of 200M (much larger than Nokia 5800's) and similar to most phones today it has an expandable memory slot using microSD card.  

10. In terms of its speakers' quality, Samsung included its own SRS (surround sound system). By comparison, I feel that Nokia 5800 is a cut above Samsung when I play the same song using the speakers. The music player also boosts some presets (in total 8 of them). However, unlike Nokia's XpressMusic, you can't change the presets to customise your own. (More about this in the later section)

11. While PIXON has a 3.2 inch screen, its browser is not friendly. You can't open several tabs at one go. And because it has resistive screen, it is not using to navigate with fingers as you need to press against the screen as you move around on a web page. But what I like about the phone is that you can zoom in and out by using the volume up/down button or to use the virtual buttons on the screen. Both are easy to control. I don't' encourage you to buy the phone if you intend to browse a lot. Besides the less-friendly browser and browsing capability, PIXON does NOT support WiFi. WiFi is important for me because I tend to put my phone on WiFi when I'm at home or in the office so that I don't have to pay for cellular data charges. PIXON is not the right phone for web-browsing. iPhone or G1 are clearly far better choices.

12. Last but not least, PIXON has several physical buttons to provide one-click access. It has 3 buttons at the bottom of the screen. The left and right buttons are self-explanatory (making and ending calls / power switch). The middle button is NOT a home or menu button. Rather it is a "Back" button. I had thought it would be easier to have a Menu button but Samsung has designed the Menu button as a virtual button (read on to find out). On one side of the phones are the camera button and the volume buttons (which can act as zoom in/out and and scroll up /down depending on the application that you are running). On the other side of the phone are the hold button and a menu button that provides a virtual menu for quick access to "call", "music player", "messages", "browser", "main menu" and back.


Phone OS and Applications

1. As mentioned earlier, the phone uses TouchWiz OS. It has several widgets on the home screen that you can pull out from the side of the screen to the main screen. Some neat widgets include Google Search, Weather Channel, Favourite Contacts, Photo Album, Music Player and others that are already pre-installed on the phone and many more that can be downloaded from Samsung FunClub website.

2. Pixon's organizer application comes with some handy tools such as Calendar, Memo, Task, World Clock, Calculator and Converter. 

3. For the music player, the interface is very friendly and easy to use. You can set any piece as voice or video call ringtone or caller ringtone. You have the option to decide whether to allow background music playing. It has an additional feature similar to the Shazam. PIXON has this application called the "Music Recognition". It will try to identify the song that you are playing. I have not tried out too many songs (in fact, only a few), hence it's not fair for me to comment on the accuracy. So far it recognizes most of the songs I bought from iTunes. Between the two phones, I'll recommend Nokia XpressMusic 5800 over Samsung PIXON for music not just because Nokia 5800 has better music player features and speakers but also because Nokia is targeting squarely at the iTunes market with the music store via its Come with Music service.

4. Nowadays most phones have both music and video players. Given the 3.2 inch screen size, it's comfortable to play a video or movie on it. What's neat about the video player is that you can choose to upload to web or to send via email/MMS or Bluetooth (same for music) and even add tags to it (only for videos). You can view the video in either portrait or landscape mode.

5. In addition, PIXON has this Video Editor application that allows you to insert one video track and two audio tracks. You can choose 176x144 or 320x240 for the resolution settings. You can choose from 5 different effects (Emboss, Black&White, Sepia, Solarise, Sharpen) to apply on the video. Interesting tool for you to make your own little impromptu video.   

6. Just to also mention that the phone has a voice recorder application but it can only record up to a maximum of 60 minutes. I thought if Samsung really wanted this to be a "fun phone" for photo-taking and video editing, it should perhaps include some effects to make some tweaks to the voice. What you can do for video editing is only to trim the length.

7. Don't bang on this phone too much for games. PIXON has some pre-installed games (mostly for trial only). It doesn't have the depth and breadth of an iPhone appstore.   

9. The phone can be used easily for mass storage. It has a Documents Viewer application that allows you to open Microsoft Office (only 2003 and not 2007) documents. This is a pleasant surprise to me. I have tested it out on a few powerpoint files (since I tend to deal a lot with powerpoint files). You can view in portrait or landscape mode. And more surprisingly it has a Search Function. This means I can go to certain particular slide easily if I can remember the keywords in that slide. The viewer has a zoom function too.  

10. Okay, I just want to say that this phone is not cut out to support heavy duty email. Of course, PIXON is never provided for that. It can support POP3 or IMAP. I have tried setting up using IMAP. I realised that it seems slow in processing my emails. There is also a limit on the size of the file that you can download. Only up to 5Mb. Most powerpoint file that I receive tends to be bigger than 5Mb. So this is practically of no use to me. If you just want simple text reading, this phone serves the purpose. If you read my earlier post on Nokia 5800, I mentioned that Nokia 5800 supports Mail For Exchange which allows synchronisation of Inbox, Calendar and Tasks. For PIXON, only basic email function is supported. 

11. What I find strange is that Samsung includes ShoZu for MobileBlog (which also allows you to upload your photo to ShoZu). I thought it would be more useful to include a Flickr or Facebook application since this is primary a camera phone. But then again, Samsung may want to encourage people to do micro-blogging and hence ShoZu application will fit the bill.

12. PIXON has a Photo Album application that uses its built-in accelerometer sensor. Not only does it auto-rotate the screen when you change the orientation of the phone, it also allows you to advance back and forth easily by tilting the phone. Cool way to view hundreds of photos quickly.

13. There is another neat thing I like about this phone. At times, we may send a sms to the wrong party. This phone has this "precautionary" feature built in by requiring you to click the "Done" virtual button so that you can preview your entire message again before sending out. In addition, when you type your message, the textbox is enlarged so that you can view your draft message easily. You can choose to use the normal phone keypad or handwritten (using the stylus) mode or the virtual Qwerty keyboard.  However, I somehow feel that it is a little slower than most phones in sending out the messages. Not sure if it's because it has the dialog box that shows "Sending" and hence the perception that it's taking a bit longer.

14. Lastly, I just want to say that this phone supports RSS. This means you can import your favourite feeds into the phone easily. That's something I must have for all phones. Feeds are my daily needs.

So in summary, I would say that if you are looking for a phone that can double up as a proper camera and have decent music and video players. This is the phone to go for. It has long battery life. This is important for taking photos and playing videos. Plus with the light weight, I really won't mind carrying one more gadget with me. 

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

Samsung Pixon M8800 : Short Video Overview of Phone. Buy the Phone if you like to take photos or videos. Read on...

This is my first attempt to upload an actual demo of Samsung M8800. I have been asked by some of the readers to include photos or videos if possible. So here is the first video on Samsung Pixon 8800. If you find the video useful, please leave me a note in the comment box so that I know if I should continue doing this in the future. 

I was mulling over whether I should upload the video together with my detailed review but I decided against it. I thought it would benefit some of you who are just interested to have a quick two minutes view of how the phone looks like and what are the key features and how is the user interface. In summary, this phone is great if you are really looking for a high megapixals camera (and yet a light weight one) and are interested to snap photos or videos on the fly and do simple video editing. In addition, it's music player, while not as great as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

In the next part of the review, I would include screenshots of Samsung Pixon 8800 and run through the phone point by point. Do look out for it. Once again, if you find this video useful, please drop me a note in the comment box or send me a tweet @poohwinn. Thanks.

Click here to download:

Samsung Pixon M8800 Nov 2008.m4v (12960 KB)

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More on Blackberry Storm

In my earlier post on Blackberry Storm ( http://is.gd/8fwc ), I compared Storm to iPhone.

To hear more views on Blackberry Storm, go to Buzz3r.

http://www.buzz3r.com/cluster-bar/blackberry-creates-its-own-storm-mixed-reviews_1/

So whats your view? Share with us!

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

How Apple iPhone Changes the Market Landscape and What Should Carriers Do?

The runaway success of iPhone across the world has indeed revolutionalised the next generation of phones. Before the debut of iPhone, touch phones were at best a good to have feature. For example, resisitive screens have always been available on Windows Mobile phones, but it was not THE thing. We would always prefer a physical keyboard and a stylus. Apple changed the game when it launched its first generation of iPhone 2G/Edge . We are awed by the convenience of touch and the ease of zooming in and out of internet pages by panning and pinching with our fingers. The capacitive screen brought the touch phones to a new level. (see here for more details on how capactitive screen works: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone2.htm )

Since then, we have seen a slew of phones that aim to provide the similar touch and accelerometer capabilities as the iPhone. I said similar and not same because to date, I have yet to test a phone that offers the same level of finess in its touch and accelerometer capabilities (see my other posts on the recent phone models). Storm and G1 are close competitors to iPhone in this aspect - they make it up with many other features that are missing in iPhone today - such as expandable slot, MMS, copy and paste function, just to mention a few). If you may remember, Samsung Omnia had some good success, particularly in countries where iPhone 3G was / would be launched later than Omnia. Now almost all major phone manufacturers from Nokia to Sony Ericsson to HTC have their touch phones series. I won't belabour too much on each of these phones since this is not the intent of this post. I thought this is healthy for the market. Now, we have more choices. Apple has indeed caused a disruptive change in the competitive landscape in just 2 short years. It has even overtaken RIM's second position in smartphone sales. Of course, now with Verizon launching Storm, we have yet to see how this will pan out.

iPhone is not simply about the Phone itself. In fact, iPhone brings with it an ecosystem - the iTunes. If you are a Blackberry user especially if you are a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) corporate user, you have very applications that you would buy and load into your Blackberry. Reasons are two-fold. Firstly, the range of applications is limited and certain corporate policies may prohibit installation of third party apps. Secondly, the applications are relatively expensive, say about $10 or $20 or more. Thirdly, traditional Blackberry phone is really meant for one core functionality - messaging. The same goes for Windows Mobile phone or Symbian Phones. To be fair, I must say that there are many third party Windows Mobile applications that are availabie. There is no lack of applications. Then one might wonder, why didn't the "appstore" concept take the central stage in the past so many years since the availability of Windows Mobile phones. Let's look back in history. Windows Mobile was an attempt by Microsoft to take away market share from RIM by extending its dominant reach in the PC market and desktop Windows / Microsoft Outlook base to the mobile world. The whole "wow" factor of having a Windows Mobile phone was that you were able to finally synchronise your emails, calendar appointments and contacts over the air. The big "PUSH EMAIL" capabilitiy was why people wanted to buy a Windows Mobile phone. Plus, the early Blackberry gadgets limited phone functions as its primary purpose was for messaging. Even then, it was a real pain to read attachments on Blackberry. Windows Mobile made up for the shortcomings in Blackberry. Not only do I not need an activation pin/password that is required for my Blackberry (which is different from your Outlook user name / password and domain), I can easily set up my email outlook account on my Windows Mobile phone anytime. Reading attachments was much better on Windows Mobile phone. I could also buy third party applications like Documents To Go. In the case of Blackberry, while similar third party apps for reading attachments are available, they are usually on a subscription model (if you are recall, you could not download and save attachments from a Blackberry back then. You could only open them).

Fast forward to today. What has Apple done? When Apple launched iPhone 2G, Apple was not targeting at enterprise users. It avoided direct head-on competition with either Windows Mobile or RIM. Instead, it aim straight at consumers. Apple leveraged on its core competence - designed a phone that had the form factor which would wow people as an iMAC or MACBOOK did and positioned the phone as a all-in-one for voice, videos, photos, and music. This is what a Apple is good at. By then iTunes was already widely used by both Mac and Windows users and people were used to buying music and synchronising it into iPod. No doubt there would be some cannibalisation on the iPods, but the upside was far bigger. iPhone would allow Apple to make inroads into the mobile world and take a slice of the mobile market which would tip 1.8 billion by end 2007 (estimate from Yankee Group report).

Apple upped its ante in 2008 with the launch of iPhone 3G and this time, Apple aimed squarely at the enterprise market by annoucing the capability of provide Exchange push mail. This will expand its addressable market to some "prosumers" who are at two minds about using iPhone because of the lack of Exchange push mail. Most importantly, the linchpin of Apple's iPhone strategy again lies in its iTunes contents and ecosystem. This time, it announced the availablity of appstore on iTunes. Free applications would be available. Paid applications would start as low as $0.99. This lowered the entry barrier for consumers to try out many types of applications. I would not mind paying just under $5 for any application. Most of the applications were largely games and utilities tools initially but as more and more corporations adopt iPhone, we see that more and more software developers are now incorporating mobile applications on iPhone into their roadmaps. I'm sure Apple would realise that as user loads more and more applications onto the iPhone, he is less reluctant to switch to a different phone and loses all the applications that he has been using or has bought. This is very strong customer stickiness. RIM must have realised this and thus it's luanching its first Application Centre to support Blackberry OS 4.7 (which is what Storm's OS is). If you take a leaf from Apple's iPod strategy, Apple is not going to rest on its laurels and cede the market share. Apple will push out new upgrades on iPhone firmwares (Just look at the time interval between major firmware upgrades 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 - it's getting shorter). Let's see over the next few months how the competition will heat up. In the meantime, sit back and hold tight to the coming mobile war.

While social networking such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter became popular way before iPhone took the market by storm (let's see if Blackberry Storm will replicate this success), iPhone has popularised this even more. Now, I can easily access do my 'twittering' or update my flickr or facebook easily with one button on the iPhone. The types of iPhone social networking apps, particularly for Twitter, reflects the underlying trend. Now even Sony Ericsson X1 has a new panel for Facebook. Storm will also come with pre-installed application for Flickr and Facebook. Given the increasing penetration of social networking tools, I'm wondering why carriers (telco operators) are not leveraging on this for their marketing or customer support. I think there is a lot of opportunity in the social media marketing that the carriers are missing out. I have yet to come across a carrier that is proactively using blogs or twitter to do product releases or news updates or to use social networking tools to make product or event annoucements. Going forward, phones will become more powerful and applications running on the phones become the key factor to creating customer stickiness. Carriers should exploit this opportunity to work closely with the handset manufactureres or the independent software developers to pre-install certain applications unique to them. Carriers should also be aware that customer support has to go beyond just supporting the phone hardware itself if carriers really want to be the first touch point to customers. It's no longer good enough to just set up retail stores to sell the phones. Carriers need to understand the needs of the customers and provide the right type of phone to customer. That's true customer service.

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X1 Sony Ericsson Xperia : Best Windows Mobile Phone To Date? Is That So?

I'm lucky to have been able to lay my hands on X1 and use it for a few days....here's my personal take on X1. Of course, comments are welcome.

It's uniqueness is really on its panels - so instead of the usual windows mobile screen. One can transform the screens based on his or her preferences or context.

At work - I can choose a more professional Homescreen that shows my appointments and RSS feeds to allow me to keep tabs of the world. However, if I feel very 'zen', I can choose Gold Fish panel to relieve my boredom or stress. Else, outside work, I can simply choose an Entertainment panel that allows me to access my photos, music, videos easily - while still have the start button at the left hand top corner for me to access my program and with one click to get out of the program to go back to the panel.

Phone - hardware itself
1. Easy to hold in the hands and carry around. However, the form factor is a little 'masculine'. I'm referring to the aluminum version that I have. Can't comment on the black version as I've not seen it. However, the finish is good and gives a good appeal to those who want a 'professional and sleek phone'.

2. Battery life seems rather okay - I put my phone on 3G and full push email capability.

3. Keypad - though the buttons appear small - but they are not too difficult to do the 'thumbing'

4. A downside to it is the memory - it internal memory is only 400Mb although it can have an SD card.

5. The speaker quality is clear and audible enough when I played a movie.

6. Compared to most windows mobile phone (or probably most of all the present windows mobile phone), it's a great relief to some who need to have only ONE phone to read email and do some entertainment to have a 3.5mm jack. That means I can plug in my headset and enjoy the music or video. This is a good feature to have.

7. Camera is only 3.2megapixel. Good enough for simple photo-taking but not the key selling point. Samsung has taken that position with its 8megapixal phone.

Phone - software
1. Fundamentally it's a windows mobile phone. It runs on the latest windows mobile v6.1. It includes two web browsers. The default is Internet explorer but a better browser is the Opera 9.5. While browsing is not as easy as iphone to pinch and spread the fingers, Opera is a very good browser for windows-mobile phone to allow easy pan and zoom and it has the tabs functions. It's easy to navigate but unfortunately if you try to click open any link in an email, it will open up in Internet Explorer. There could be some way to set the Opera as default instead but I've not explored it.

2. It is windows-mobile so you can't synch the phone with a cable for movies and music if you are using a MAC. You need to use an adapter and transfer the files manually to the microSD.

3. GPS - it' has this application WayFinder. I've not used it... It does have Google Maps and another applicaiton Quick GPS which helps to speed up the time to determine your GPS position.

4. Panels - that's the 'uniqueness' of Xperia. With a one button click, you can pick and choose the panel depending on what you prefer/want. The response time is considered good. On average it takes about 3 sec for the panel to load. However, you should take note that if the internal memory is used to almost full or if the panel is stored on external storage card, the response time may or may not lengthen. But so far, it's good. What I like is the ease of switching. And if there are more panels being developed in future (probably some may be chargable), that will provide more choice to people. Currently the panel functions are pre-fixed. That is you cannot install additional widgets to run on a particular panels. What you can do is however to customise the chosen panel in terms of colors, the RSS feeds I want to receive, the number of appointments / tasks to show, the application launcher to show on the home screen etc.

5. I've played a 45min episode on the phone. Thought the screen size is not big, it's still for viewing. In fact, amongst all windows-mobile phone, I think this is really one of the top choices.

6. Applications is not an issue. It's windows mobile and there are already many applications for windows mobile....

There is a SDK for developers to develop more panels but currently panels are limited - and at any one point, a user can only have 9 panels loaded onto the phone. And the 'one button' is convenient.

Line Dancing as Teambuilding Activity : How to do it? Simple Instructions

I just organised a workshop and we had line dancing as the teambuilding activity. This is good for as big a number as 100. I've posted a simple instructions as a teambuilding brief and a judging sheet for your use. I

This is a low-cost but very enjoyable team building activity. The group first learnt how to do simple 16-count line dancing steps in about 40 minutes. It's very fun to have 100 people dancing together and making all sorts of mistakes initially and eventually "mastering them" and dance in a more coordinated fashion. We then split the teams into several groups. Each group had about 15-20 people. Each team was given a song piece (about 3 minutes) with the accompanied props. Team was supposed to make use of the steps that they learnt to chronograph a dance and use the props that they were given (they were allowed to do barter trade). Other than team bonding, this teambuilding activity also encouraged alot of creativity - think out of the box on what to do with the props and how to do a variation of the basic steps learnt. We spent less than $800 in total for a group of 100. The $800 was spent entirely on the props.

Thought that some of you may want to try it out.

Download now or preview on posterous

Mission Possible Leading the Line.pdf (58 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

Teambuilding judging form.pdf (68 KB)

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic aka the "Tube" : Can it beat iPhone? Here's my take!

Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic or otherwise known as the Tube is the first touch phone launched by Nokia. As the name has it, it's positioning itself as an entertainment phone and yes, it does.  

Phone Hardware

1. Phone colour is chic in a fashionable way. But because it's plastic, it does not feel as sleek as the other high end nokia phones. Target segement is probably those who are looking for a cheap but good entertainment phone, specifically for music and video. 

2. It has a 3.2" screen that is big enough for viewing and yet the phone has a nice size that is not too big to hold it even if the palm size is small. I believe Nokia deliberately designs the phone in a manner so that all the controls can be performed with one hand. Phone is otherwise known as the "Tube". 

3. This is Nokia's answer to iPhone on a touch phone. However, it uses a resisitive touch screen to support both finger and stylus input, unlike the capacitive touch screen iPhone (refer to this wikipedia entry on the differences between the two touch screen technologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen). 

4. The downside to resistive screen is that you tend to have to use a little more force when you enter text using your fingers. *New update with thanks to Gogo's feedback (see comment)* Resisitive screen requires you to exert pressure on the screen when scrolling and it is not as intuitive as iPhone's multi-touch capability. On the iPhone, I can scroll down my long contact book very quickly by swiping my finger on the screen whereas on Nokia 5800 I tend to be slower because I need to press on the screen. What's good is that it provides the haptics that gives a vibration when you touch it.

5. When it comes to composing sms or email, it doesn't have the auto-correction function that iPhone has which makes virtual keyboard easy to use. For those who are used to having a Qwerty keyboard, this phone has a virtual mini-Qwerty and a full screen Qwerty. Else, you can choose to use the stylus for text input or to use their handwriting recognition with stylus. 

6. Like any other Nokia phones, Nokia 5800 has a simple user interface that is intuitive – perhaps as good as iPhone (this is based on judgment that I don't need to read a manual to know how to use a phone and can use the phone without much frustration for the first time). However, for young children iPhone is still a notch up because everything is just a click on the home button to go back to the home screen to launch an application. 

7. The phone has a 3.5mm jack and this is especially great and important if you want to position the phone for music and video. You can easily just connect it to a portable stereo speaker to play the music or to the TV to play the video. 

8. The phone has very small internal storage – 81Mb but this is not a major concern because I can always choose to decide whether to save your downloads onto SD card. The expandable slot is using microSD – similar to X1 or G1 (see my earlier posts on X1 and G1) 

9. The phone has built-in (supposedly surround sound stereo) speakers. Music experience is great if I compare amongst the phones I have used and tested. And it has built in equaliser into its music player – this gives the music buff the ability to change the settings or even create their own presets.

10. Battery life is very good. Probably because I don't surf as much using this phone. And the purpose of this phone is really not for web browsing. So for playing music, this is probably one of the phones that offers long battery life. 

11. Nokia 5800 has the accelerometer-alike capability but it's not as smooth as iPhone in that it has a more discernible delay and it does not work in all apps. For example, its calculator will not auto-rotate when you flip the orientation. 

12. The phone is really not for heavy web browsing. It's narrow screen is a challenge but X1 (with an equally narrow screen size) overcomes this by including Opera mobile 9.5. Nokia's own browser falls short in this aspect. I'll provide more details in the section on OS and Applications. 

13. Last but not least 5800 has 3.2megapixals camera with Carl Zeiss. But if you let me have a choice, I prefer a higher megapixals camera phone say 5 or 8mp then a 3.2 with carl zeiss. Again, just my own preference.


Nokia 5800 OS and Applications

1. 5800 uses symbian S60 5th edition for its full touch phone. Generally Symbian seems to be a more efficient operating system than windows mobile. Opening a few applications concurrently does not have any visible delays in the processing speed or cause any frozen screens. 

2. Because this the new edition symbian OS is rather new, many of the old applications need to be 'upgraded' to run on the S60 5th edition. I've tried downloading a few apps from Nokia Beta Labs but encountered the message that the app is not compatible with the phone. 

3. 5800 has Mail For Exchange supported but Mail For Exchange  (MFE) only synchronises the INBOX for mails although it does synchronise the calendar/tasks as well as contacts. What's good is that at the calendaring application, you can also have a view of the tasks to be done. MFE allows you to access the global address book but this cannot be accessed directly in SMS or Email. For global address book access, you have to open up the company directory application in the MFE folder.  But I doubt people will buy the phone because of emails because if that's the case, one would choose the E-series for enterprise use if the user is a die-hard Nokia user. 5800 also supports the typical POP3 and IMAP account. MFA allows you to read emails but opening up attachments is a problem as it does not have the quick office application built in. You may have to buy separately. 

4. Web-browsing. As mentioned earlier, this phone falls short in this aspect. It's not as smooth as iPhone where you can scroll /swipe up and down using the fingers. Plus the narrow screen size makes web browsing challenging. It does not use Opera mobile 9.5 unlike X1 and does not have the pinch and zoom capability on iPhone's safari. But I think in time to come Opera will release a browser that works on Symbian OS S60 5th edition. 

5. The phone has a Instant Messaging (IM) application but setting it seems challenging to set it up. However you can always install third party IM application to get it going.

6. In terms of games, iPhone is a notch up with its big screen and its accelerometer function and with the huge repository of games in the iPhone Appstore. Don't think games will be a core value proposition for this phone. At least not for now. Nokia had dabbled in N-gage before but the results were mixed. 

7. As mentioned earlier, the internal speakers are solid and the music player interface is easy to use. In fact, there is a choice of equaliser and the ability to use the song for contacts / ringtone. More versatile than iPhone.  Not sure if this phone comes with free subscription to the "Comes with Music". If so, it will certainly attract people to this phone. 

8. I tried to access the mobile music store through the phone. It is not yet ready. So no comment on this. Today, I can access iTunes (US) through iphone and preview the music. If I like it, I will then purchase it.  

9. I'm pleasantly surprised that this phone can support podcasting and also import of OPML – news feeds. It's really an entertainment phone. 

8. Similarly this phone plays video very well too. Definitely between G1 and Nokia, G1 video application needs a lot more improvement. In fact, it's video capture capability is better than X1. 

9. It has a editing tools for photos – including basic ones like saturation, brightness, and the fun ones like adding a bubble talk. 

10. 5800 has Nokia Maps. However, I feel that Google maps is more intuitive to use and navigate but I believe the voice enabled turn by turn navigation will certainly be an advantage provided that the price is right. 

11. At this moment the applications for S60 5th edition will be limited but as far as I'm aware 5800 does have backward compatibility support for some applications.  

12. Last but not least, Nokia certainly designs the phone to bring out its value in music and entertainment. Its one touch access to Music, Video, Web on the top right corner is very convenient. 

13. Some other shortcuts – if you click on the clock, it brings you to the time / alarms settings. If you click on the top left corner of the screen where the email icon is, it brings you to your mailbox. At the centre bottom of the screen is a one click access to the dialer and the contact book. Simple interface but intuitive. 

If you ask me whether I will buy this phone, the answer is yes if I want the phone for simple calling, texting and for music primarily and if the phone is priced at a lower end compared to iPhone. iPhone is more than music. I bought the iphone because it has reads email attachment the best (note – it's attachments not emails per se). In addition, iphone has excellent web surfing browser, fun games like SPORE and other many applications that I need such as colour palettes, Japanese flash cards, and of course the iTunes store where I download lots of podcasts. 

Nonetheless, Nokia 5800 is very user friendly and if you have been a die-hard Nokia user, you will find this phone very easy to navigate. Plus if you don't relish the other features provided by the iPhone but simply want a phone that allows you to play music and songs with reasonable good quality (in fact, Nokia's built-in speakers transmit much better sound quality than iPhone's) and take better quality camera as well as video (which is missing in iPhone), then this Nokia 5800 is for you. 

Let me know what you think?

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

Blackberry Storm - A Match to iPhone or is it not? Read on...

Phone Hardware

1. Blackberry Storm is RIM’s answer to Apple’s iPhone. It’s also Blackberry’s first touch phone. Having said that, Blackberry has retained a very similar user interface to its traditional blackberry and that makes transition from the old Blackberry to the new Storm relatively smooth.

2.  I’ll make references to iPhone for comparison since Storm is often compared to iPhone. It’s touch screen with tactile feedback (which I will touch on more at the next section) and has accelerometer capability. However, I feel that iPhone is easier to hold in my hands because it’s thinner and lighter. I went to check up the actual specifications to confirm my thoughts and the specs are as follows; Storm: 112.5mm (H) x 62.2mm (W) x 13.95mm (D) and iPhone 3G : 115.5 (H) x 62.1 (W) x 12.3mm (D). Storm weighs 155g and iPhone 133g.  

3. Storm has a slightly smaller screen than iPhone. Storm’s screen size of 3.2” is a little smaller than iPhone’s. However, it’s screen resolution is sharper.  On the other hand Storm’s screen has a slightly higher resolution than iPhone’s.

4. There is no doubt that Storm has a much more superior design than HTC G1. Storm retains Blackberry enterprise look. BUT a big minus to many Blackberry users is the lack of a trackball – which you don’t really need in a touch inteface as you can swipe your fingers across the screen. But I can bet with you if you speak to any die-hard blackberry users, they will tell you that the trackball (or scroll button) is what they love about Blackberry. Notwithstanding this, I believe that people who are going to take up Storm will not miss this feature too much. It takes time to adjust. Similar to G1 phone, you need to press the menu button (one of the four physical buttons at the bottom of the device) to gain access to the menu functions within the application. This is something I am not used to as I often just need to press the scroll button.

5. Storm makes up for what are lacking in iPhone. It has a removable battery (allowing a replacement of battery when the juice runs out), 1G internal memory but with microSD slot (technically can support up to 16G). Also, it’s battery seems to last longer than iPhone but charging Storm battery to full capacity seems to take much longer as compared to iPhone. While Storm has  longer battery life, it can’t last more than a day for me.

6. RIM has packed in a lot of entertainment features into Storm. While camera is not a traditional enterprise feature, it seems that most phones nowadays are equipped with camera. Storm is no exception. It has 3.2megapixals camera and has video and voice recording capabilities. Pictures taken can be uploaded to Flickr directly with a one click access on the menu.

7. I played MP3 on Storm. The sound quality emitted through the speakers is loud and clear and I do felt that its quality is slightly better than that of an iPhone although not significantly so. Clearly it loses out to Nokia 5800 XpressMusic but then again, Storm is not made to be a music phone. Video playback on Storm is smooth and video controls are easy to use. Storm also has its own media synch software that allows you to put your own iTunes music into Blackberry.

8. However, there are certain features that iPhone is one up against Storm. Storm’s built-in speakers are loud and clear but I have tried it out for audioconference, the microphone’s audio-pickup quality is not very good. Not sure if this is because mine is a test set. Most importantly, Storm does not have WiFi capability. I know that some of us may feel that WiFi is not necessary if you are on 3G. However, this is a real shortcoming to me because I tend to put my iPhone on secured corporate WiFi in office and home wifi when I’m back home. Reason being it’s a lot faster to pull down emails with big attachments and web surfing is a lot faster. Last but not least, you are not paying for the cellular data charge (of course, if you are on a corporate scheme, this may be less of a concern to you).


Phone OS & Applications

1. In terms of the phone OS features, Storm is certainly a clear winner. Storm has not just the basic SMS and Email, it also has MMS – a feature that’s greatly missed for iPhone users. It also provides more customisation features such as the font size, sensitivity level, etc. A power tool for enterprise users.  

2. Email set up with Blackberry is easy but I encountered some problem during set up and it frustrated me because I could not do anything but wait till the following day. What happened was that I was once a Blackberry user but I’ve stopped using Blackberry since Microsoft enabled Push capabilities in Windows Mobile phone (and now iPhone). My Blackberry account while still a valid account nonetheless requires an activation password. I set up my phone only after work, past 8pm. IT department supporting Blackberry Enterprise Service has closed. While the Blackberry customer support desk was extremely helpful, he could not do anything. This however would not be the case on Exchange email as I could set it up easily anytime, anywhere over the air.

3. If you are a heavy email user and receive hundreds of emails a day, you will appreciate Storm’s email search function. This is lacking in iPhone today. While I enjoy reading my email and attachment on an iPhone, it become  a real pain if I have to go through 200 emails to find a particular email and I can’t recall when the email was sent to me. iPhone only displays the emails in chronological order with the most recent email at the beginning.

4. In terms of reading email attachments, iPhone is still the best phone for this. iPhone is the only phone in the market that can open not just microsoft office documents, acrobat pdf files, iPhone can also open iwork documents. Something that a true Mac user would appreciate. In addition, the ability to pinch and zoom a document using the fingers makes reading easier. You can’t however download attachment and save it locally. This is where Storm has an advantage. It can download attachment and edit the documents with the application “Documents to Go” - but I seem to encounter error messages to say that I can’t download and save any attachment with file size greater than 3Mb although I can still open it.

5. The gripe I have is the lack of a trackball (as in the case of G1 phone) or magnifying glass (for iPhone). There is more hardwork involved just to place my cursor correctly at a particular part of a paragraph where I want to do my correction. What makes up for it is the cut and paste function which many people have bemoaned lacking in iPhone....imagine this. You type a long email. You realise that you just want to copy a particular section of the email and send it off in a separate email to another person. But you can’t do it. You have to retype. I hope Apple will include this and the email search capability into its next firmware upgrade if Apple is indeed serious about breaking into the enterprise market.

6. RIM touts its SurePress technology. This means you first touch the screen to highlight the selection that you want and then physically press on the screen to confirm the choice. The need to press (not touch) the screen to confirm my choice somehow makes it more difficult for me as I tend to press a wrong selection despite the fact that I’ve highlighted my intended selection correctly with a touch the screen. I’ve also tested this with a few other people who are first time users. This is a common occurrence. But rest assured that after a couple of days you will get used to it and this will be less of an issue

7. So far so good about Storm...until I start trying to compose a long email. As in all touch phones, the keypad is virtual. Compared to iPhone, I find that finger swiping on Storm is smooth but it is not as smooth as the that on an iPhone. On the other hand, the good thing about Storm is  that you can choose to compose using the virtual portrait keypad or the landscape full qwerty keypad. Today iPhone native mail application only presents a portrait Qwerty keypad although there is third party application that allows you to compose email in a landscape form.

8. If you prefer to type in portrait mode, you can use the SureType keypad which has auto-suggesting words features. You just need to tap the suggestion you want to use. However, I realised that often I tap on the wrong suggestion...but it may be just a matter of getting used to. I am definitely not a SureType master and I believe that with ample practice, you should be able to improve and type much faster and more efficiently. Of course, if you really think SureType isn’t your cup of tea, you can always use the Multi-Tap feature.

9. I prefer a full Qwerty keypad. While some may not like the fact that iPhone’s native full Qwerty keypad is only in portrait mode, I find typing still faster than if I use Storm’s full Qwerty keypad in landscape mode. When you touch a letter on iPhone’s keypad,  you will see the letter being ‘magnified’ and hence you will know whether you are pressing the right letter. In addition, iPhone’s auto-correction is good. In addition, iPhone can learn new words and will be able to recognise similar keystrokes the next time you try to type that word. It will also recognise the common keystroke errors that you frequently make and will present the word that you intend to type. When it comes to fast typing, I tend to press the wrong letters more often on RIM’s Storm as I don’t see the letter that I’m pressing except for a bluish light that emits from the position where my finger is placed on the screen. If you fingers are big, it may prove to be quite a challenge. For iPhone, the numbers are presented as the top most row of the keypad. This not the case for Storm. Numbers are embedded in the alphabet keys, and I have a higher chance of typing the wrong numbers. I have not used Storm long enough to made an assessment whether its learning capability equals that of iPhone.

10. Unlike iPhone, RIM’s Storm is a  “Clickable Screen”. That means when you type, you need to press down to simulate a “click”. It is as if Storm has virtual buttons underneath the screen. While some may like this feature, I find that I have “finger-ache” after long typing and it actually slows my speed in typing. While some say isnt this the same if you type on a physical keyboard, I can tell you that if you actually type on a physical keyboard, the strength required may actually be smaller because you only press on that key (not to mention that you definitely make fewer typing mistakes and hence fewer corrections needed). For Storm, you need to press on the whole screen.

8. There is no debate that Storm is able to do multi-tasking. That means you can open up an application while other applications remain running in the background. The same goes for G1 phone. Both Storm and G1 demonstrate good processing speed for multi-tasking. Windows Mobile phone usually will be more sluggish and iPhone can’t really perform this task well (it can allow you to listen to music while you check your emails or surf the net but it cannot open two applications say email and web browsing at the same time). What does this mean? It means you can let your Google Talk or MSN continuing running in the background while you clear your emails and if there is an instant message coming through, you can toggle to the application by pressing on the menu button for 3 seconds.

9. Blackberry allows tethering. Today you can’t do this on the iPhone unless it’s jailbroken. AT&T has recently announced that AT&T is working with Apple to make this available on Apple soon.

10. iPhone users can help themselves to a plethora of apps available at the Appstore. RIM is also going to have its own Blackberry Application Centre early next year – likely March 2009. At this moment, third party apps for Storm will be limited. Generally, RIM’s apps will target more for enterprise uses and given RIM’s traditional business arrangement is to work closely with the carriers, it is likely that carriers will play a more active role in supporting the Blackberry Application Centre. Indeed there is report that says that the application centre will allow user to retrieve applications hosted by carriers. If this is indeed true, then it’s certainly a different business model from that of iPhone where Apple plays a key role in deciding which apps to be put onto Appstore and it’s an open for all concept.

11. Blackberry browsers is not as user friendly as Safari on iPhone. Web browsing on iPhone Safari by far offers the best user experience. Blackberry browsers have a virtual buttons for you to zoom in and out of a web page but it’s not as intuitive as using your fingers to pinch and pan. Web page loading is also slightly slower on Storm.

12. Last but not least, I like the screen capture feature on iPhone. I use this feature when I want to email something interesting that I read in the email (without having to forward the whole email) or on the internet. I don’t think this is a key feature to most people, but it’s just something that I enjoy.


On the whole, Storm is certainly a strong match to iPhone if we compare the phone’s features. As a casual phone, Storm’s multimedia features are richer if we strictly compare the phone hardware and native software (what comes with the phone). However Apple’s Appstore made the difference. Appstore has many applications that make the whole iPhone experience more fun and personalised. If I’m a designer, I can download color palettes and photo editing applications over the air from Appstore onto my iPhone. I do not think Blackberry Application Centre will be able to match Apple Appstore, at least not in the short run.

IPhone’s form factor is definitely more attractive. What makes iPhone stand out from the crowd is not just the phone itself. The iTunes ecosystem creates the stickiness with consumers. Putting aside the applications, movies and videos, what is truly amazing about iTunes is the depth and breadth of the podcasts contents. If you have been using iTunes since the early days, you will realise the big leap that Apple has made over the years and this is not something that a competitor can easily catch up with.

I think Storm is a phone that RIM wishes to position as an All-In-One phone. However, I do feel that it somehows blurs the positioning of RIM. For serious business users, what they want is a phone that allows them easy access to emails and global address book. They do not need a phone that has many different functions but they do want a phone that can do emails for serious users. That means a phone with long battery life (although with 3G network, it’s hard to last Bold or Storm for more than a day) and has the ability to perform powerful email functions such as search, document editing and last but not least a phone that allows the user to type emails efficiently. That’s why after so many years, most of the Blackberry users still prefer a full physical Qwerty keyboard and is the preferred choice for business users. iPhone may have overtaken RIM in the total number of units sold (for now), but we have to remember that RIM has always been a phone for business users and not for consumers and if you compare like for like the number of iPhone enterprise users certainly pale in comparison to that of RIM’s. My take is that Storm is an attempt by RIM to attract the more casual users who also need to access emails regularly. There is less tendency for current heavy email Blackberry users to switch to Storm. Bold is likely a better choice for this group of users. There is no loss to RIM, however, as Storm expands its addressable market. The thing that RIM needs to be careful is not to lose its brand positioning amongst its group of professionals.

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous