I am a Verizon customer and typically only carry Verizon phones. I used ATT for three or so years when that was the only way to get an iPhone in the US, but returned to Verizon when I could. Verizon is not perfect and it’s expensive, but they offer by far the best service in the US. Being on Verizon limits me to their Android handsets.

Friends and family who are verizon customers often ask me what phone they should get to replace their aging handset. Short answer today: none. Wait. There are better options coming.

I carried the Samsung Droid Charge for about six weeks before passing it on to someone else at the company. The LTE network was fast, but the phone itself was dog slow. It was slow enough that I had to train myself to pause after taking actions or I would take the same action twice.

Speed was the number one problem on the Charge. People look at me funny when I say that because it’s an LTE phone and we all know that LTE is fast. Yes, LTE is fast, and if you enjoy running speedtest.net on the phone all day to confirm the speed of your local 4G network, then this phone is for you. But if you are hoping to do more than that, say, maybe, read email or browse the web, then you will be disappointed.

Battery life is the second issue on the Charge. It won’t last a day on medium usage. It’s a 3pm phone. That’s a non-starter when I am traveling.

People also rave about the contrast, saturation and viewing angle of the OLED display on the Charge. Yes, those things are all there, but what they forget to mention is the terrible color accuracy and overblown reds that detract from looking at photos on the device.

The weight of the Charge is manageable. Officially it’s 5.0 oz. By contrast, the iPhone 4.8 oz. The size of the phone is significantly larger than the iPhone and not completely comfortable in the hand. It’s hard to reach for some of the bottom buttons. But overall, the Charge has pretty good ergonomics.

Other nice features: you can take a screenshot with the Charge (samsung addition); there is a pretty nice dock that turns the phone into a bedside alarm clock and charges a second battery (which you will need). Samsung puts controls for wifi and bluetooth in the notification bar.

I downloaded and paid for a clean copy of the Android 2.3 keyboard because the 2.2 keyboard that Samsung ships is not great and the phone has not yet been updated to 2.3.

The Droid Bionic I have only had for a few days. It’s heavier than the Charge, coming in at 5.6 oz. The screen has better color rendition, although you can see some pixelation. Viewing angle is inferior.

But the big news with the Bionic is that the phone itself is fast, more than fast enough that I don’t think about the speed.

Moto’s customization of the Android UI is not attractive to me and the phones ships with lot’s of crapware. You can’t remove the crapware unless you root the phone, which I have not done. I downloaded Go Launcher to change the home screen. That made me marginally happier. Battery life is still under review by me but my guess is that it will be a 5pm phone.

The phone feels less plasticy in the hand than the Charge, but the ergonomics are no better and possibly worse with a power button that is on the top left.

Neither of these phones are anywhere near as polished as the iPhone 4 in terms of the physical hardware. We also are running iOS 5 on our iPhones (we are developers) and although we can’t review or talk about any specific features until Apple releases that, Apple is working through the list of shortcomings of the iPhone versus Android that I outlined about one year go.

So as a Verizon customer right now, my recommendation would be to wait. If you love iOS and the iPhone, then the rumors say the iPhone 5 is imminent. If you are a lover of the Robot then wait for the rumored Nexus Prime. I don’t think LTE is worth the sacrifice in battery life, weight and size that it requires today. The rumor is that Apple is not putting LTE into the iPhone 5 and given the battery life, size and weight of the first generation of LTE phones, I think that was a smart decision on their part.

Finally, some will be asking Android vs iOS? What’s better? My feeling is that Apple has the better product. The main deficiency today is the lack of turn by turn navigation, which you can solve by buying a third party GPS app for the iPhone (I bought the TomTom app, which works adequately if not brilliantly;traffic is an added yearly subscription; TomTom customer support, if you have the misfortune to contact them, is HORRIBLE).

Android is also very strong if you are a Google Apps user. The integration with Google Apps makes it an attractive option for those users. If you are a Google apps user on the iPhone, make sure you configure your account as an Exchange account against m.google.com versus setting your account up as a Gmail account. You will get contact synchronization that way.

One of the benefits of blogging is that I get to suggest untenable solutions to other people’s problems. Ok, Here goes.

So the issue with the iPhone 4 antenna is that touching with human skin changes it properties. Maybe it changes it frequency response, or maybe you are bridging the two antennas. Not sure.

The crude solution is to add a bumper. Bumper is non-conductive. Problem solved, but not elegantly. So the question is, how else can we protect the antenna from connecting electrically with human skin while still keeping the iPhone beautiful.

Covering with a thin film of some sort of plastic is not an acceptable solution because the plastic woud easily scratch. I don’t think covering with glass would work well either. Too brittle and likely does not expand and contract at the same rate as metal.

You could anodize the metal. Anodizing a metal creates a thin oxide that is not conductive. Alas, you can’t easily anodize steel, because that oxide is called rust and it’s not particularly durable.

Aluminum anodizes well. You can even dye the resulting oxide. My guess is that the outer colorful skins of iPod Nanos are dyed aluminum oxide. But for some reason you don’t see a lot of aluminum antennas out there. Maybe the material does not make a great antenna.

It’s clearly possible to bond stainless steel to aluminum. That is the design of All-Clad cookware, my personal favorite. Their LTD line is stainless steel on the inside, aluminum on the outside. And the aluminum is anodized!

You might have noticed that Apple recently licensed technology related to the creation of alloys. My theory is that this license is related to creating a new external antenna that will have an anodized outer finish.

The other benefit of this solution is that Apple could offer the iPhone in a variety of different antenna colors, as they do the iPod Nano. The solution will be both stylish and functional. How Apple!

Tell me why my idea won’t work in the comments.

I truly believe that Apple has the better product right now. The hardware is smaller, lighter, and more attractive. The software is more intuitive, better polished and better looking.

Nevertheless, Android is gaining momentum. Here are the things that apple must do to address some of the advantages of Android.

• Solve the dropped call program in the US. I am putting this separately since there is some anecdotal evidence mounting that the problem is not purely related to ATT and that other ATT phones hold calls better.
• Offer the iPhone on Verizon. Verizon is the strongest carrier in the US. Nearly everyone I meet that owns an Android-based Verizon phone tells me they would have chosen an iPhone over an Android device had it been available.
• Include turn by turn navigation on the iPhone built in. This will require an enormous capital outlay to get permanent and unfettered access to the dataset needed. Navteq is owned by Nokia. So that is pretty much out of the question for Apple. Tele Atlas is owned by Tom Tom. Tom Tom’s market cap is only (Euros) 1.09B. Apple should just buy them and include as much of their tech as possible in iPhones. Mapping and navigation are core to smart phones and Apple needs to remove the dependency on Google.
• Better integrate voice-to-text on the iPhone. Being able to hit the microphone button in all contexts (SMS, email) and include a sentence by voice is very convenient on the Droid X. Apple could possibly license the tech from Nuance, or buy Nuance for stock. Voice is a critical part of the mobile experience.
• Provide Mobile Me (email, contacts, calendar) for free for Apple customers. One of the best things about the Android experience is the tight support between Gmail and Android. There are built in Calendar and Gmail apps for Android that integrate better with Google’s services than Apple’s Mail and Calendar program do. Phanfare uses Google Apps and I will miss the built in apps.
• Provide a 3G mobile hot-spot for the iPhone. Can cost extra. I wound up trying Android because I continued to maintain an Verizon MiFi for business when I switched from ATT to the iPhone. When the Droid X started shipping with the mobile hot spot, I realized that for maybe $20/month more, I could move service from the MiFi to the Droid X and have not only a mobile hot spot when traveling but also a verizon phone for calling. I realize the mobile hotspot will kill the battery. That’s ok.

If Apple addresses these issues, I believe that Android momentum will stall. Long run, Android may still win with their multi-vendor low-cost approach. But it will take a lot longer if Apple takes care of these items.

I have had an iPhone since five days after the launch in 2007. I have been using it as my primary phone since the launch of the iPhone 3G in 2008. Before that I was an 11 year Verizon customer. I think I am pretty acquainted with the tradeoffs.

We have quite a few customers complaining that we ignore Android. It’s true. Ever since we bought a G1 and returned it because it was horrible, we have focused our mobile efforts on iOS. But it’s been a few years and it’s time to at least learn how the other half lives.

I bought a Droid X from Verizon. I bought the Droid X because everything I heard about the battery life on the HTC Droid Incredible turned me off. And I have a bias against HTC and toward Motorola. Motorola made some of the phones I enjoyed most in their day including my trusty Startac. If that phone causes cancer I am in trouble because I had that thing attached to my head for hundreds of hours.

I considered the Droid 2 but prefer touch screens now. I only considered Verizon. I already have a phone from a carrier with challenged US domestic coverage. I don’t need another one. Droid X came with Android 2.1 on it with Moto and Verizon extensions.

My working hypothesis going in is that Android’s traction in the US is due mostly to the lack of availability of the iPhone on Verizon. But that was just my intuition. Time to test the hypothesis on a sample size of one.

I am going to post each day so that I can put down my impressions while they are still raw. These are going to be impressions of Android, the Droid X, Motorola extensions to Android and Verizon forced customization.

Hardware impressions (that is the easier stuff)

The Droid X is too big for my hands but I can get by with it. I have trouble reaching the notification bar at the top when I am positioned to use the physical buttons on the bottom.

It makes a phone call like a champ. Gotta love a Verizon CDMA phone. No dropped calls yet and only one failed outgoing call. Call connection time is faster.

The phone is not as comfortable in my pocket as the iPhone 4. I wish it were the thickness of its thinnest part throughout.

Camera is not as good as the iPhone 4 but adequate.

I don’t love physical buttons anymore. They are more work to press. I would probably prefer that the dedicated buttons on the bottom be capacitive touch buttons. I find that its requires a higher cognitive load to remember that there are UI elements that are not on screen that I need to consider pushing.

When typing in landscape mode, the phone is large enough and the bottom bezel big enough that I have a bit of trouble reaching with my right hand to the center of the keyboard.

I prefer the higher pixel density of the iPhone Retina display, but this display is fine.

Android + Moto Blur + Verizon

Not being an experienced Android user, I don’t really know where Android ends and Moto Blur and Verizon hell begins so I will review it all at once.

Android is competent, if not sexy. The web browser works, but not as well as the iPhone browser. Double clicking on a column zooms it more slowly.

We use Google Apps at Phanfare. Configuring that on the Droid X was painless.

There is more than one way to do a lot of stuff and that is confusing and makes me uncertain that I am doing it the right way. I can favorite a contact, or I can add the contact to a home screen. I can use the facebook app, or I can use the facebook social networking widget from Moto. I think I can add my Gmail acct to the universal Inbox, but I don’t want to.

The facebook app is not as good. I can’t view the Phanfare page. I am just going to use the web browser.

The Gmail app is excellent. It works better with Gmail than Apple’s mail app and its nice to have the email all there versus use the web browser to manage gmail on the device.

The social networking widget on the home screen would not work. “Internal Error.”

There is a lot of crapware on the phone. Feels like a PC: Limited time offers from City ID to tell me the city and state a phone call is coming in, a Blockbuster app, and some crazy Places app that is actually a paid listings service that I am guessing competes with Google. I see no way to delete the crapware apps.

The Motorola supplied keyboards are harder to type on than the iPhone. I have not tried swype yet. There are multiple keyboards, but for many of them, the space bar is too small in the center bottom and I wind up hitting period instead.

The phone comes configured to say “Droid” when you receive new email and has a hoaky Droid ringtone. You can change these things but it feels like a PC in that you spend the first day uncustomizing the thing. I blame Verizon. They own the Droid brand, have no taste and little restraint.

GPS appears to be turned off by default, and turning it on, which is a deliberate action on the second home screen, seems to cause the battery life to suffer. Running maps does not turn on the GPS by default, I don’t think. This is sort of a big deal. I like to pull the map out when traveling and get a quick fix and look around. But if I need to go and turn GPS on before doing that, its an extra step. And I miss the compass integration (I thought the device had a compass) that would orient you. (Update: I found A-GPS turned off in settings and turned it on. Maybe that is the hybrid mode I need?).

Kindle app is excellent. Dropbox app is good too, although the PDF reader built in was not as good.

I have not yet figured out how to get my music onto the thing. I am sure that will be a project.

Little niggles: the crop rect tool that comes up when you want to change the wall paper is fussy and hard to use; the dialog to set your email sig in the gmail app does not accomodate seeing what your are typing if your sig is more than six lines (corp sigs are long); I can’t for the life of me get the cursor placement tool to work right (it’s probably a moto enhancement).

3G hotspot appears to work, but I have not tested extensively yet.

It does not seem to offer up WiFi networks to connect to automatically. This auto-discovery is very convenient on the iPhone. You often discover and open network you would not otherwise have been aware of.

I know of no way to force an app to quit. On an iPhone in iOS 4, there is a way to kill a task and on iOS 3 and below, hitting home always quits a third party app.

Visual voice mail is an extra $2.99/month. Annoying and ridiculous.

I have pretty much figured out the interaction between the menu key, the home key and the back key, but I would argue it makes for a more confusing experience than the iPhone’s one button approach. I think I like the dedicated search button.

I miss my games. I play Words with Friends with my mom and now can’t take a turn during the day. But there are a lot of apps now: Yelp is there, OpenTable is there, Shazam, Kindle, DropBox. I have not used them all yet to determine if they measure up to the iPhone versions.

So my early impressions would be that the phone works, but is not as enjoyable or intuitive to navigate as an iPhone. I don’t remember thinking this hard to figure out the iPhone. I don’t think my Mom could use this device. She uses an iPad just fine.

I get that it’s more open to extension. It seems that the entities that have most leveraged that openness so far are Verizon and Moto. On balance, neither one has improved the experience overall. I might prefer a stock Android phone better, but on Verizon, the latest hardware seems to all come with customized Android.

Back tomorrow for a shorter post.

Many of my friends and colleagues who own iPhones have noted that they already use their home computer much less, instead simply using their iPhone. The iPhone is already a decent replacement for a home computer if you are just surfing the web, playing games, reading email and looking at photos.

What it needed to be is bigger. So they made it bigger.

I think Steve Jobs did not position the device entirely honestly in the release announcement. He positioned it as sitting between the PC and the smart phone, implying that it was a device that consumers needed in addition to these products. I believe he did this because he knows the early market already owns the other two devices. If you want the Apple faithful to buy the product then you have to convince them they need an additional device.

I wrote in July 2007 about the iPhone’s potential to herald in a new age of consumer computing and my views about operating systems for consumers. The real impact of the iPad won’t be felt for some time. The iPad has the potential to replace the personal computer for the casual user who is not a knowledge worker. If your mom needs a replacement for her aging computer, the iPad would be a great recommendation. If she occasionally likes to type long emails, get her the optional keyboard. Even for knowledge workers, the iPad will work just fine when they are doing things other than work.

I don’t believe the iPad will help the newspaper or magazine industry much. The iPad is an information appliance and the forces that are eroding newspapers and magazines will continue unabated. In books, its nice to have another player selling the media.

I agree with Jeff Bezos that avid readers may still buy a purpose built device for quite some time. And I agree with Jobs that most people will buy a more general purpose device that can read books. Long term trends favor the iPad; the greater user base will pay for more advanced development and we will see the same cannibilization from the low end that we see in photography and GPS devices.

As for what percent of books will be able command charging anything or whether the basic format of a book will survive is a larger open question.

I went out geocaching today with my son. Geocaching is awesome. It combines three different activities that I love: hiking, treasure hunts and GPS electronics.

I have the Groundspeak geocaching app for the iPhone. It’s a pretty neat piece of work, leveraging the built in GPS to provide lists of caches nearby with full descriptions, maps and log entries. The app provides all the collateral info that I need to decide which cache to pursue, alleviating the need to do legwork on the computer before going out to geocache.

But when it comes to actually finding a cache under heavy tree cover, the app is no subsititute for a dedicated GPS unit. Today was typical. The app got us within 100 feet of the cache, or so the phone seemed to indicate, but the location kept jumping around. Lacking confidence that we were in the right vicinity, I entered the coordinates into my Garmin GPS 60csx, a three year old unit. The Garmin pointed me about 100 yards away. When I got to the location the Garmin centered on, the cache was about 20 yards away and easily visible.

Purpose-built devices will nearly always outperform general purpose devices. The only caveat to that is when the market for the general purpose device is so much larger that there are inadequate R&D dollars to fund a better purpose-built device.

Purpose-built devices are typically more expensive, especially considering that they do only one thing well, but if you need performance, you will buy a purpose-built device.

Photography and GPS are both under seige from the low end from smart phones. But in both, if performance is your primary criteria, then you will likely buy a purpose-built device. However, there are attributes of the general purpose device, in particular the network connectivity and UI that smart phones provide, which are becoming essential features of GPS devices and cameras. So if the manufacturers want to attract the performance-driven consumer, they will need to add those.

Case in point: my 7-yr old son was calibrating the compass on the 60CSx and tried to active the ’start’ button by touching the screen. Of course, there is no touch screen on the 60CSx, but he is so used to user interfaces being touch and intuitive that he would never think to hit a dedicated button. In his world, you point at what you want on the screen.

My son looking to touch the screen, only reiterates that the purpose-built devices better have the other basic features like networking and user interface worked out to be competitive.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that Garmin is not going to be hurt by smart phones. They will be hurt, but I suspect that they can continue to exist for quite some time at the high end of the market if they make the right investments. I would buy a dedicated Garmin GPS unit, based on Android, that was very accurate and could also provide me the information that the Geocaching app provides on the iPhone. How they will manage to get wireless data on there is another matter.

Also, I just want to make clear that this post is an update to my earlier post when the Geocaching app first shipped. Back then, I though I might be able to leave my Garmin at home for geocaching. True some of the time, but not for the harder caches.

Of course, the general purpose devices are not standing still. If the GPS performance gets much better, then Garmin will be squeezed even further into the high end.

However, this version also removes our super cool image import flow and replaces it with the default image import picker. That picker forces you to import one image at a time and is much slower. You also can’t choose what album the image goes into.

We removed our custom import flow and associated user interface screen at Apple’s request. Apparently, their developer agreement changed and they no longer permit modifying that flow or allowing us to access the camera roll except through their interfaces.

While we understand the need to enforce standards and keep the platform stable, there is no doubt that Apple has failed to provide alternative methods that work as well as the ones developed by third parties, like ourselves.

It is our hope that Apple will eventually modify the rules to allow extension and customization such as we provided, or improve the native interfaces to provide the same interface. Until such time, any third party camera application for the iPhone can’t provide an experience that matches what Apple provides in their built in app.

Phanfare Photon synchronizes your media wirelessly to your iPhone and provides a full set of management and editing tools. Hence, it provides features and functionality unmatched by Apple’s built in app or their MobileMe service. But prohibiting us from modifying the camera to take photos as quickly as the built in camera app or allow fast import from the camera roll means that Phanfare Photon’s utility for capturing photos from the iPhone is somewhat limited.

This turns out not to be a huge deal for Phanfare customers, most of whom own digital SLRs and find that the iPhone is much more interesting as a multimedia display and management device than as a capture device.

We can’t possibly divine Apple’s motives for creating the set of rules that they did. The iPhone ecosystem is enormous and successful. There are over 100,000 apps. They could be trying to impede competitors to the built in iPhone experience, or they could be trying to keep the platform stable and not care what the impact is on camera apps. Unlike many out there, I think it is their right to do whatever they want with their platform.

If you don’t like what they are doing, let them know, because we have little say here. We try to follow the rules, support the platform and Apple ultimately decides what gets accepted into the app store.

It’s kind of funny, because the iPhone was a huge step forward for developers in opening up a mobile handset to third party development. Compare how open the platform is to what it was like under the old regime convincing Verizon that you wanted to go ‘on deck’ in their terrible ‘get it now’ experience. Walt Mossberg used to refer to Verizon and the other service providers as “the Soviet Ministries.”

And yet, as much as Apple broke new ground in opening up a mobile platform to developers, there is much left to be desired. For that, we may need to look to Android. Android is not competitive with the iPhone today, in my opinion, but for an app developer the platform is more open and updates can go out with no review. That’s a double edged sword. It means that developers can respond more quickly but it also means that consumers need to be more wary about destabilizing their phone by downloading an app.

We will see how it all plays out. Right now, it seems that Android is providing the open, cross hardware platform that will take longer to mature but may in fact be much larger than the more controlled Apple experience. Apple is very good at providing a strong paternal hand in crafting experiences that are seamless from end to end. The iPod and iTunes is a great example. But control by its very nature stifles innovation and drives up costs. There is a good chance that it will be Android that powers the majority of the smart phones in 5 years. If so, it will be another example where Apple led and then left open the door for someone else to be the market share leader with a lower cost solution that is more open, has a bigger ecosystem and more rough edges.

We worked with HP to get this all working. We are the first app outside of HP’s iPrint Photo that will allow you to print directly from the iPhone via Wi-Fi.

For Phanfare customers, Phanfare Photon wirelessly syncs your entire photo and video collection to your iPhone, enabling you to print any photo.

Phanfare Photon also allows you to order prints by mail – but that has been true for a while.

Phanfare Photon for the iPhone is our sandbox for showing how we believe connected digital cameras should work in the future. Every photo and video you take automatically floats up the cloud and every photo and video you have ever taken is available for viewing on the camera.

Truth is, most of our customers have digital SLRs, so they are more likely to view their photos and videos on their iPhone than take new ones, but we find our customers do take a small percent of their photos using their iPhone. And it is nice to be able to get a print in pinch.

This release talks about home printing, but of course, if you have a network connected HP printer at work, it works there too.

The details of why the rejected Google Voice are not all that surprising and will certainly be discussed by everyone endlessly. I am more interested in the review process since we go through it regularly.

In their response, Apple discloses that there are 40 full time reviewers dealing with 8500 new apps and updates per week. If you assume that Apple is neither falling behind nor catching up, that means that they spend 11.2 minutes reviewing each app (40 people working 40 hrs per week processing 8500 items per week – the average wait time of 14 days is not relevant to the calculation of throughput if my recollection of queuing theory is correct).

Apple said that every app is reviewed by two people, so that means that a reviewer has about 5 minutes to review an app. If true, the level of quality in the app store is remarkable since it takes us a lot longer than 5 minutes to QA an update of Phanfare Photon before we send it to Apple. It also means that Apple certainly relies on some degree of automation to test apps and make sure they conform in various ways. For example, I would guess that they check for the use of undocumented frameworks programatically.

Apple also states that they have reviewed about 200,000 apps in a little more than a year. But at 8500 apps per week, they are on a run rate of 442,000 apps per year, so the number of app submissions is accelerating.

• Video is now synchronized to the iPhone over the air and will play offline in airplane mode.
• Properly supports the new Phanfare Site features, including sending sharing invites to Phanfare sites and publishing an album to your Phanfare site.
• Supports changing album properties under iPhone OS 3.0.
• Fixed the bug that prevented associating with a facebook account from Photon.
• Better support for album sections. You can see and edit album section descriptions.
• Support for shooting and uploading video from iPhone 3G S phones. Note that we are still not converting iPhone video properly on the service but are working to address that.
• Supports assigning albums to Subsites for Pro users.
• Follows the convention of other Phanfare apps (Mac,PC and Web) in showing an album as private (ghostbusters icon) if the album is not published to your Phanfare site.
• Deprecates the Phanfare social networking features. New albums are created with friend & family visibility turned off. Friends and Family features are off the main tab bar and appear in the “more” area.
• Numerous small bug fixes. For example, deleting the last image in album does not crash the app.

You will also notice that our extensions the camera view are gone. They were touch-anywhere-to-shoot, image-stabilization-assist and self-timer. These features were disallowed by Apple when they released the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS. The good news is that we believe that we can put these features back in using a future version of the iPhone OS.

Our data shows that more than 90% of photos taken using Photon don’t use the camera within the app. Most people prefer to take photos and videos using the built-in camera app on the phone, saving them to the roll. Then they import the photos and videos to Phanfare Photon.

The built-in camera still has a much shorter shot-to-shot time than the camera within Photon. This is due to limitations of the iPhone SDK. We recommend that all users shoot with the built-in camera. We would pull our camera control out but we are leaving it in since we believe we will be able to provide the camera extensions in a future release. Let us know how you feel about having it in.

The computer will run a variant of the iPhone OS. It will include WiFi, bluetooth and 2 USB ports. It won’t contain a 3G radio. Good chance it includes an ethernet port. For most consumers, that tablet will be the only computing device they need. Like an iPhone or touch, it will not expose the user to the memory hierarchy or the file system because well designed consumer devices never do. Nevertheless, there are challenges and open questions.

• Will the device come with a bluetooth keyboard or will that be optional? I think it will be a lot more versatile for counter use if it has a keyboard. Will it take a mouse? new pointing device? or will you just tap on it? I think it will optionally take a mouse.
• Will they extend the iPhone OS to support multiple logins? Is the device designed to be a single user device, like an iPhone, or a multi-user device, like a personal computer? I suspect that many home users share a single login, so the answer of how to best address allowing two different people to read email and have their own bookmarks is not obvious. And remember that on the tablet, people will likely use the Apple mail app, not a web browser, to read email.
• For Photography is it client or host? Will they do a version of iPhoto for the tablet? Will they put in all the USB code and acquisition stuff to allow acquiring photos from a digital camera to the tablet? Will an iPhone be able to sync with the tablet, or do they view the tablet as a client that is either left unsynched or syncs with a personsal computer? I think the iPhoto model is entirely broken so you really need to pick your poison on this one. More on this below.
• What about iTunes? can you sync your iPod to the tablet or is the tablet a client?
• How will they allow all existing apps to run on the larger screen? Two major options here: have each app run in a little gadget window that is the size of an iPhone or redesign apps to run full screen. I think they do both. They run iPhone apps in compatibility mode in a little gadget window but most Apple apps will be redesigned to use the full screen. Given the design philosophy of iPhone apps, they could just encourage apps to build views with multiple long columns across the page, the right hand columns being deeper in to the hiearchy than the left columns (like the column view in finder).

I have long thought that iTunes should be a caching client that you can login to from anywhere and get to all music you purchased plus imported. Ditto with iPhoto (this is the Phanfare solution).

Using that model, both phones and the tablet would be clients to the cloud and the phone would sync wirelessly with the cloud even for music (as Phanfare Photon on the phone does for photos).

As they say, the devil is in the details and it will be interesting to see how Apple executes the product. I imagine a raging debate within Apple about whether people wil be presented with a “login” screen on the tablet and encouraged to “add users.”

If Apple really comes out with the tablet in October, as rumored, then I think they will do the expedient thing. That means that the tablet will be just like a phone and will need to sync with iTunes on a PC or Mac to get to its music. The one feature I expect they will add is network sync over wifi. They already have this feature in the Apple TV product, so no big deal porting it to the tablet.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/07/open-questions-with-the-apple-tablet/feed/ 6 http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/06/i-love-my-new-verizon-iphone/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/06/i-love-my-new-verizon-iphone/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:10:35 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=411 I am traveling down Interstate 91 South in New Hampshire, returning from my 20th Dartmouth Reunion, enjoying pretty decent data access on my iPhone 3G, even though there is zero ATT service on this stretch of the road. I am getting a few hundred kilobits/second.

Ok, there is one small detail I a left out. I am using a MiFi 2200 Wi-Fi hotspot in the car. This little device, smaller than a deck of cards, connects to the Verizon data network, establishes and EvDO connection, and puts up Wi-Fi cloud around itself.

Using the MiFi, my iPhone is essentially a Verizon iPhone. I use data more than voice, so this really does bring the better Verizon coverage to my iPhone. The device is battery operated, although you can plug it in or attach it via USB to a charging source, such as the 12-volt adapter in the car.

No doubt, this is an expensive solution. The Verizon EvDO card is over $60/month. But, truth-be-told, I have had EvDO service for over 4 years now since I find it useful when traveling. The sad truth is that while the ATT 3G network is faster than the Verizon data network when it is available, it is often not available.

When we hike out west I like having the security of a cell phone when we are on the trail. This is the first summer in 11 years where I don’t own a Verizon cell phone, and it will be nice to have the security of the Verizon network while using my iPhone.

The Mi-Fi is not perfect. I found that after being idle for several hours, it turns off the Wi-Fi network and hence essentially needs to be rebooted before you can use connected devices again. But given that it is close at hand, this is not too much of an inconvenience.

As an added bonus, the Mi-Fi supports up to 5 devices (a limitation probably imposed by Verizon) and so my laptop and my old iPhone, which is now the family iPod Touch, can also be on the network.

Carrying your own personal Wi-Fi cloud has never been easier. You could do it using a variety of devices for the past few years, but they were big and clunky and required multiple pieces of hardware. The Mi-Fi gives you a very convenient form-factor and built in battery that makes the concept significantly more useful. And by letting you share the expensive EvDo connection, it also makes Verizon’s EvDo service more economical.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/06/i-love-my-new-verizon-iphone/feed/ 9 http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/02/google-releases-sync-makes-it-possible-for-us-to-move-to-google-apps-ditch-windows/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/02/google-releases-sync-makes-it-possible-for-us-to-move-to-google-apps-ditch-windows/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:59:44 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=237 Google announced wireless syncing support for the iPhone through ActiveSync, which makes googles calendar, email and address book look like an exchange server from the standpoint of the iPhone. This is significant and here is why.

We use iPhones and we want wireless sync. Until now, there were two solutions for this: MobileMe and Microsoft Exchange. We use Exchange today, but Microsoft Outlook is has been driving me a bit batty lately. It slows down, rebuilds its database far too frequently, and recently the search functionality inside Outlook got an order of magnitude slower (something broke in vista and I don’t know what). What’s more, we need to back it up and use a separate spam service (postini, owned by google) to make email usable.

We would love to move to a cloud-based service for email, contacts and calendar and simultaneously ditch Outlook. But to move Phanfare to google apps, we need wireless sync of our email, address book and calenda to our mobile devices. MobileMe does wireless sync, but they won’t host phanfare.com, so that is a non-starter. Also, Google’s web-based tools are better.

Now with the Google’s sync services, if they work, we could move off Exchange. And if we can move off Exchange, we can move the desktops off Microsoft Windows.

So while this may seem like a minor geeky announcement, it is not. This is a major step forward in allowing businesses to ditch Windows. And Microsoft enabled this by expanding the licensing of ActiveSync.

I applaud Microsoft’s willingness to do this. Google’s new sync service also works with windows mobile devices. It is this type of relentless cannibilization of your own business that is the hallmark of companies that come through disruptive transitions alive. Microsoft sees the writing on the wall with Windows and even with Exchange and they are opening up the ecosystem and competing with their core products.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/02/google-releases-sync-makes-it-possible-for-us-to-move-to-google-apps-ditch-windows/feed/ 10 http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/garmin-disrupted-by-the-iphone/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/garmin-disrupted-by-the-iphone/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:13:15 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=159 The iPhone has GPS built in with maps from google. That probably has Garmin worrying, but the truth is that the iPhone does not work all that well for street by street driving directions that it is replacing a Nuvi for most road warriors or busy moms. The Garmin device is cheaper to own (no recurring contract) than an iPhone and works really well.

Network connectivity does not yet enhance driving GPS navigators enough to make the iPhone a win there. The GPS implementation in the iPhone is slow to lock the satellite and is not well designed to use on your windshield.

Geocaching is a different story.

I have been geocaching for a few years now with my kids. For those not familiar with geocaching, it is a global treasure hunt where people hide little caches, list their GPS coordinates on geocaching.com, and then wait for people to find them. Geocaching is a lot of fun, and it can be challenging if you choose caches that include difficult terrain or a well hidden location.

To geocache, I would go to geocaching.com, find a cache that looks interesting, attach my Garmin GPS 60CSx, and download the waypoint for the cache, print out the description and hints, and then drive to the trailhead.

The 60CSx is an amazing GPS device. It is waterproof, durable, daylight readable and includes a magnetic compass so that it can tell you, even when standing still, how far away the cache is and in what direction to move.

Recently, Groundspeak, which runs Geocaching.com, came out with a Geocaching iPhone app. That app will find nearby caches based on your location, giving you the description, the hints and the ability to log field notes, all from the iPhone. You can navigate to the cache via google maps and once close by, use their simulated compass (only works when moving) to head to the hide location.

Geocaching is never quite as easy as it sounds. Even my Garmin will only isolate you to a 1000 square foot area, so you need to do some hunting. Hence, the limited accuracy of the iPhone GPS is a not a major liability. The Geocaching app on the iPhone offers an amazingly good Geocaching experience. You don’t need to plan ahead and load waypoints using a USB cable, and the built in maps support means that locally you can pretty much use Google maps on the iphone to get to the trailhead.

Of course, the iPhone is not as good a GPS device as my Garmin device, but the GPS part is good enough, and the supporting information and wireless network access to the data makes it more convenient. If a user already has an iPhone, then using it is cheaper (Geocaching app is $9.99) than buying a Garmin device. High end geocaching users probably won’t be satisfied with the iPhone geocaching experience, but it is cheaper and offers attributes the traditional solution does not. And its getting better fast. Does that sound like disruptive technology? You bet.

The iPhone is deeply disruptive to Garmin’s geocaching market. What’s worse for Garmin, they have no consumer-friendly way of adding networking to their handheld devices. They already learned that nobody will pay a subscription fee for their real-time traffic reports. They will find out that nobody will pay a subscription fee to get a data plan for their Nuvi either.

What is garmin to do? Well, to some extent, there is nothing they can do. they are going to lose the casual Geocaching market to GPS-enabled smart phones. They can try to come out with a smartphone, but this is pretty far from their knitting.

I think the only solution is to camp out at the high end and at least produce a device that is as useful as the iPhone for geocaching for those willing to pay. To do that, I would suggest they handle the data network access like the Amazon Kindle.

Rather than charge a subscription fee, let users browse for geocaches on the Garmin handheld for free. Then if the consumers wants to reveal the actual coordinates of the cache, charge a small transaction free of $1 that includes the cost of the network bandwidth. This is how Amazon handles the wireless charges for book deliver on the Kindle. Makes perfect sense.

I would be willing to pay a a small fee to get a superior GPS experience and all the ancillary geocaching information. The other obvious option is to try to create ad-supported wireless networking for the Garmin Nuvi. I doubt it would pay the freight today for access to the cell phone networks.

The iPhone (and other smartphones) won’t just disrupt the portable handheld Geocaching GPS market. They will also disrupt the point and shoot photography market for similar reasons (this is where Phanfare comes in). Canon is going to have a hard time getting consumers to pay a monthly subscription fee to get access to a data network to move their photos and video to and from the cloud, but that is exactly the convenience that smartphones are going to offer. And given that the trend is toward unlimited data plans, the bandwidth required is already sunk cost to the consumer.

Mobile photography is not very threatening to dedicated point and shoot cameras today and Canon is not much worried. Garmin is probably not seeing too many people forgo handheld GPS units for geocaching today either – but check back in two years. Things will be very different.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/garmin-disrupted-by-the-iphone/feed/ 13 http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/is-the-iphone-a-business-class-device/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/is-the-iphone-a-business-class-device/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:28:00 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=124 One of my readers asked the following question when thinking about a Nokia phone versus an iPhone.

The OS is ugly – I agree. The question is (and I know your love of Blackberry) one of purpose. In your opinion, is the iPhone a business class phone? Is beauty the be-all end all of mobile computing?

One way to get to this answer, is to ask a more extreme version of it:


If I were running IT for the whitehouse, would I equip the incoming staff with iPhones?

The phone that I know most about, one the definitely is a business-class phone, is the Blackberry. So let’s compare it to that.

Security
The Blackberry encrypts email, but all email goes through RIM’s servers and network, making it a potential target.

The iPhone can be made to encrypt email by using HTTPS (I think) and running in ActiveSync mode, the device communicates with your email servers directly, distributing the security issue a bit.

Battery Life
The battery on the iPhone is simply inadequate for a power user who will be away from AC for over 12 hours. It is a serious issue, and you can’t swap out the battery making it even more cumbersome to solve the problem.

I carry a power adapter when I travel, and I carry it even on trips to NYC for the day.

The network
The ATT GSM network coverage is inferior to Verizon’s CDMA coverage in the US. Whether this is a problem depends on where you typically go. For me, it is usually not a problem, although I have noted many more dropped calls (could be a HW issue) and dead spots compared to the Verizon Blackberry. I can make a call in Princeton, NJ on my Verizon Blackberry and hold that call all the way to NYC (more than 50 miles). On the iPhone, I often start the conversation with a warning that we may get disconnected.

CDMA has other benefits as well. A CDMA phone has a range of up to 40 miles in rural areas with good line of sight to the tower (properties of the spread spectrum technology used). I used a Verizon blackberry in Grand Canyon on the roof of the RV. There was no GSM coverage at all. I believe that there are no cell towers inside the park, so both had to reach outside the park.

Email Robustness
On the blackberry, people receive every message and never receive a duplicated message. On my desktop, I get an indication of which message I responded to, which is actually quite useful.

On the iPhone, in poor network conditions, I hear from recipients that they sometimes get multiple copies of an email message that I send.

I can search my Blackberry email. While this does not sound like a major deal, it is an important feature for a power user trying to remember the details of an email before a meeting.

Typing
While originally I found the iPhone keyboard to be a huge liability, at this point I can type well enough that I only reach for my Blackberry for the longest messages.

Thinking about mission critical applications, the Blackberry with a full keyboard has the benefit that I look at the screen as I type. On an iPhone, I look at the on screen keyboard. As a result, and partially because of the autocorrection built into the iPhone, I am more likely to lay a word down that is different from the word I intended. If life were hanging in the balance, this imprecision may not be acceptable.

Conclusion
In sum, If I were equipping mission critical staff with portable devices that had to work in a disaster where minutes matter to the lives of others, i would use Verizon Blackberrys. The benefits of the iPhone are mostly in providing a more entertaining and well rounded computing experience, things that while nice, are not mission critical for most people in their jobs. A Verizon Blackberry running against Microsoft Exchange using the Enterprise redirector is a workhorse that is nearly perfect for the task at hand.

That said, in my life, I prefer the iPhone, and I do run a business. All the issues above nag at me a bit, but my overall level of satisfaction is higher with the iPhone. I do travel with the backup Verizon phone, but I should say that I have traveled with 2 cell phones for many years, simply to have redundancy and because the voice experience is better on a Motorola Razr than on any smartphone. voice is more important to me when I travel.

I spend most of my time in my hometown, and there my iPhone works well enough. If there is a major invasion of a foreign country, I learn about it on CNN, not from my boss. And if a call occasionally goes to voice mail because of bad network coverage, no big deal. I also use the iPhone on wifi to browse the web and read blogs using Google Reader much more often than I used my Verizon Blackberry (which btw, does not have wifi because Verizon is the devil).

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/is-the-iphone-a-business-class-device/feed/ 6 http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/12/phanfare-photon-for-iphone-now-helps-you-along/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/12/phanfare-photon-for-iphone-now-helps-you-along/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:45:25 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=97 We did a small release of the Phanfare Photon app for the iPhone and iPod touch that shows help screens and and allows you to add albums from the main play screen. There are also a few bug fixes.

The help screens are designed to guide new users through the process of creating albums, adding friends and viewing content.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/12/phanfare-photon-for-iphone-now-helps-you-along/feed/ 0 http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/11/phanfare-iphone-app-now-allows-you-to-manage-your-collection/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/11/phanfare-iphone-app-now-allows-you-to-manage-your-collection/#comments Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:21:57 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=91 We just released a new version of the Phanfare iPhone app that brings rudimentary album and image management to the palm of your hand. From the app you can now:
• Edit the album name, description and sharing settings
• Add or edit image captions
• Save a photo to the iPhone camera roll
• assign a photo to someone in your iPhone address book
• Email a photo
• Delete a photo

With the iPhone app you can take your entire photo and video collection on the go, wirelessly synchronized to your iPhone. You can also shoot photos with the iPhone and upload them in the background to your Phanfare site.

The Phanfare iPhone app works on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone. On the touch you can’t shoot photos, since there is no camera, but the viewing experience is just as good.

Once your photos and videos are wirelessly synchronized to your iPhone, you can show them even when there is no network connection present.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/11/phanfare-iphone-app-now-allows-you-to-manage-your-collection/feed/ 9 http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/phanfare-iphone-app-now-wirelessly-synchronizes-all-your-stuff/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/phanfare-iphone-app-now-wirelessly-synchronizes-all-your-stuff/#comments Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:32:01 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=90 We are thrilled to announce a new version of the Phanfare iPhone app that improves upon the viewing experience by wirelessly synchronizing and caching your recent albums right on the phone. The viewing experience is buttery smooth, includes videos, and works (for photos) even when the iPhone is in airplane mode.

New photos you take on your iPhone are integrated directly into your collection. With this new version your iPhone is transformed into a managed wireless digital camera. Your whole collection appears on the camera and new content is automatically uploaded to your account in the background.

This new version of the Phanfare iPhone app is available for the iPod Touch as well. While the touch lacks a camera, you can still view your photo and video collection via the app.

For many shooters, the iPhone is only one of the many devices they use in their photographic life. Phanfare brings all the content together, viewable from the web and on the iPhone. We also support TV viewing via our media server software combined with the PS III and Xbox 360. We would love to be in TVs directly (if you manufacturer TVs, contact us – we would be happy to provide API keys).

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/phanfare-iphone-app-now-wirelessly-synchronizes-all-your-stuff/feed/ 9 http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/photography-apps-on-the-apple-iphone/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/photography-apps-on-the-apple-iphone/#comments Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:00:40 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=89 Apple recently lifted the NDA that prevented us from commenting on the iPhone platform. Practically speaking, that prevented us from saying anything negative. We have already said lots of positive things about the iPhone platform.

Overall, the platform lives up to the hype. The touch interface is ground breaking and the UI sets the bar to a new level for mobile devices.

Our goal with the iPhone is to transform it into a full-featured wireless camera. Most of that is just a small matter of programming. But there is one area where we and every other photography app is hobbled, and that is in the camera controller.

If you use the built in camera on the iPhone, it has a shot to shot time of about 3 seconds. This is not groundbreaking compared to a point and shoot camera from Nikon or Canon, but it is tolerable for many situations. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to use the same camera controller that Apple uses for its built in camera. Instead, we are forced to use a different camera controller class (this is all software) that calls the real camera controller behind the scenes. The result is awful.

Compared to the native camera controller, the one we must use has a shot to shot time of 14 seconds. You can background some of that and get it down to 9 seconds, but do that at your own peril because the camera controller also uses a lot of memory and as any iPhone developer knows, if you run out of memory, the operating system kills the app.

The shot to shot latency is not the only issue. We are also forced into an “official” workflow for the digital camera that involves a common interface that says “use photo” and “retake” after each photo. The built in camera app that Apple wrote that uses the native camera controller skips that annoying step. We can’t skip it.

The solution is to let developers use the native camera controller. Sure there is no default shutter effect or shutter sound, but that is fine with us. We can innovate there and have our own unique experience.

The iPhone is the first smartphone with a UI so good that it could possibly replace the point and shoot camera for many situations. But to realize the full potential of the platform we must be allowed to use the native camera controller libraries.

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