Who Does Number 2 Work For?

When I was looking for market share numbers to populate my previous post comparing smartphones I found that market data even a month old was waaaaaaaaay different than current data representing a month later. Android marched from 6%, to 9%, to 12% almost within the same quarter. This is all with only two phones on the US market - the flagship G1 and the more mainstream myTouch.

Now let's look ahead to Q4. There are seven new handsets due to be hosted by four different carriers. That's a HUGE growth in carrier coverage in just one quarter. I'm sure this was a completely premeditated blitz but it places Android handsets on a path to possibly eclipse the iPhone in a few years. It's too bad that WebOS is getting blistered in the process - it was a nice UI on some very nice hardware. In the end, however, those with a more robust development environment will win.

Don't get me wrong - the iPhone has a great development environment and well-documented native SDK. I even like Objective-C. Still, the Android development kit is built on lots of familiar Java components (and semantics) that everyone knows and loves, aside from kludges to save clock cycles (such as the guideline of refraining from abstract classes or inheritance). The mix of easy resource management, internationalization, event notifications and asset management with lots of static sugar makes life easier on Android developers. It makes me better understand Nokia's acquisition of Qt, since Qt also offers a great platform with the same benefits, if not more.

Consumerism Gone Wild

I'm still comparing smartphones. Because I'm a big dork.

	iPhone GS	HTC Hero	Motorola Sholes	Nokia n900
CPU	ARM Cortex A8, 600 MHz	Qualcomm MSM7201A, 528 MHz	ARM Cortex A8, 600 MHz	ARM Cortex A8, 600 MHz
GPU	PowerVR SGX 535	None	PowerVR SGX 530	PowerVR SGX
Memory	256 MB DRAM	288 MB DRAM	256 MB DRAM	256 MB DRAM
Display	320 × 480 LCD	320 × 480 LCD	854 × 480 LCD	800 × 480 LCD
OS	iPhone OS 3.1	Android 1.5	Android 2.0	Maemo 5
Market Share	60%	12%	12%	<1%
Carrier	AT&T	Sprint	Verizon	None
(Subsidized) Price	$199	$180	$199?	$649
Available	Now	2009-10-11	2009-10	2009-10

Judging solely on hardware, the n900, iPhone and Sholes are in a dead heat. The n900 and Sholes will have expandable memory options however, making them more appealing. The Hero completely lacks OpenGL hardware acceleration... a real downer.

I'd like to develop apps on the handset also. Mebbe to distribute or sell... mebbe just for a lark. With the Hero I wouldn't have any graphics acceleration which makes game development a pain in the butt. I don't want to compromise vertex counts and lighting algorithms. As far as market share goes everyone but Maemo comes out just fine... Android and the iPhone will be neck-and-neck in the foreseeable future.

There is also the question of price and carrier. Unless T-Mobile picks up and subsidizes the n900, the price is a bit prohibitive for me. While I don't actually talk on the phone that much (which may seem weird considering I'm so intent on shopping for smartphones) I do want to actually have coverage and intelligible audio, so AT&T is out. Verizon's data plans are too pricey for my liking. This leaves us with Sprint & the Hero.

How freakin' frustrating. I guess we can just wait until October and see how everything pans out, but right now the worst hardware (of the four) is dedicated to the best carrier, and the best hardware is dedicated to the worst carrier(s).

Cellphone Crysis

The smartphone wars are finally on. I love the irony... first the cellular carriers said pre-paid plans would never take off, then the European (and veeeeeeery slowly American) markets proved them wrong. Then they thought that having a closed platform and refusing to let independent developers write apps would allow them to market "exclusive" content, and Apple drop-kicked that notion in the groin. Finally carriers posited the Blackberry theory of economics where only business users would pay for unlimited data plans. And now Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T have cost-effective calling plans for personal use. In fact, Sprint just announced $70 "everything" plan to really give T-Mobile and AT&T some competition.

All this fighting and vying for consumer dollars has worked on my feeble willpower. I my brain is pretty suggestive when the marketing war machine comes charging at me. I'm at the point now where I've self-justified the purchase of some smartphone in my near future, especially since I'm going to be re-negotiating my contract in the coming months. This is a complete 180 degree turn-around for me... three years ago I swore off multipurpose devices entirely because of my craptastic PalmOS smartphone.

This is a new era however. Now phones can have OpenGL acceleration, hardware video decoding, unlimited fast data access and capacitive high-resolution touch-screens. The PowerVR mobile chipsets are especially compelling, offering decoding and OpenGL ES acceleration using tile-based rendering.

Currently the only readily available smartphones with hardware-accelerated OpenGL are the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre, with the Motorola Sholes supposedly launching with Android and PowerVR soon. However, Palm quite stupidly offers no way for developers to tap into the power of hardware-accelerated OpenGL with their inspid WebOS SDK (as far as I can tell). Supposedly Motorola's Sholes will offer PowerVR acceleration with OpenGL ES soon, but it's landing on the overpriced Verizon network. And the iPhone's exclusive carrier AT&T has reputation for poor service and dropped calls; indeed most people I speak with on their network drop or cut out. Ultimately Nokia's n900, which runs on the custom Maemo OS and a PowerVR chipset, would offer the best platform / hardware combination of any other smartphone out there... but the hardware purchase currently isn't subsidized by any carriers and so is a bit prohibitive.

Out-of-the-box VPN connectivity is important to me also. I connect to clients using Cisco's VPN gateways (using vpnc) often as well as OpenVPN. With Nokia's Maemo OS I can do both vpnc and OpenVPN, with iPhone OS 3.x I can do Cisco VPN IPSec, and with Android I can do neither (without root access). However, ports of vpnc and OpenVPN clients are likely in the future with Android, since it's a Linux-based embedded system that does support tun devices.

With Sprint wanting to win the smartphone war on its own CDMA network it has made some compelling decisions. Their consumer-friendly data plans are nice, but it's upcoming launch of the HTC Hero means it has a well-received handset to push the service as well. Engadget reviewed the European model a little while back and thought it seemed like an ambitious OS on insufficient hardware, nagged by stuttering and slow rendering. Their review of the US Sprint model found the exact same issue, however CrunchGear gave the smartphone high marks and said it doesn't suffer the same stuttering and lag that previous incarnations of the Hero suffered.

So which to choose? The iPhone GS definitely has superior hardware, but its current exclusive carrier makes it a hard pill to swallow. Why by a smartphone when the "phone" part doesn't quite pan out? The Palm Pre has a great UI and fantastic hardware, but the developer SDK is limited and so independent development is stifled. The n900 would be fantastic - it uses Qt 4 for application development, has a very open SDK and OS and runs on some great hardware. If the n900 could find a home on a good carrier that would subsidize it's purchase, it would easily be the #1 contender.

Is Sprint's Hero the best choice? It hasn't even launched yet... it's due October 11th... but it already has been opening to good reviews. However the Hero appears to not allow root access and doesn't permit tethering, limiting my ability to tap into the subsystem and have vpnc or OpenVPN clients running. It also lacks hardware acceleration such as the PowerVR chipset, although it does offer OpenGL ES support via software rendering. Sprint's carrier service is quite good - however I'd have to compromise on both of my "must have" features.

Bleh. Maybe I'll just wait until Q4 and see how this all pans out. Right now there's no phone that has a reliable carrier, hardware accelerated OpenGL and OpenVPN clients. Or maybe I'll just buckle because my self-restraint is remarkably weak.

PowerVR's Tile Based Rendering

I've been reading up on the iPhone's GPU and 3D rendering pipeline based on the PowerVR SGX The PowerVR pipeline is based on Tile Based Deferred Rendering and advanced Hidden Surface Removal that occurs very early, prior to the actual rendering phase. Apple's developer site has some compelling information on the PowerVR platform and how it performs well as a mobile GPU.

Occlusion detection and the culling of unseen polygons ultimately means less primitives to render, which of course equals less horsepower going to effects you never see. Removing hidden surfaces too aggressively can cause weird stuff to happen, like stencil shadows popping through textures or light blooms shining through walls. But for something with limited power and screen real estate, it makes a whole lotta sense.

I can see why Carmack has had so much fun porting titles to the iPhone - it's a kit that really makes for some nice titles. And with iPhone OS 3 having more robust p2p bluetooth capabilities, this thing could turn out to be the next big gaming platform.

What the NDS and iPhone Have In Common

This past weekend I saw a copy of Opera for the Nintendo DS just idly sitting on the store shelf. I picked up a copy and thought to myself "damn, I'm out of the loop. I didn't even realize this was out yet!" Evidentially I picked up an early copy - the release wasn't reported until the following Monday.

I'm surprised how much I'm using the browser. I didn't think I'd be the type to roam through my house checking random sites on the NDS. But in an age of ubiquitous WebMail and continuously streaming blogs, a device that allows you to quickly scroll through snippets of online text is actually pretty useful. There turns out to be plenty of opportunities where I "just want to check something," such as see if a webcomic has been posted for today or check if I've received new e-mail at work. Instances not exactly worth booting up a laptop, but perfect for just cracking open the NDS and hopping on wireless briefly.

The DS doesn't have an open third-party SDK, and no accessible means for running homebrew currently exists. Instead, Nintendo is hoping that Web applications will grant enough functionality to fill the gap. Sound familiar?

Steve Jobs' recent keynote hammered home the insistence that while 3rd party API exposure won't be available for the iPhone, Web applications will be more than enough to offer custom functionality. He suggests that a Web browser can be used in lieu of an ability to launch third-party applications.

The assertion that modern Web applications, what with their asynchronous JavaScript and XML, can replace standard applications is pretty ridiculous. Can JavaScript monitor what roaming tower your SIM card is using? Er... no. Can XML be used to play Doom? No. While you may be able to monitor a RSS mashup, no applications can leverage the hardware in your hand. Saying that any Web application is going to replace a device's native API is hella stupid.

But will the lack of third-party applications hurt the iPhone's success? Not likely. Lack of homebrew availability on the NDS hasn't exactly hurt sales all that much. If you do something and do it well, you're going to sell.