Droids Are Expensive

So yes, Motorola's Sholes (a.k.a. Droid) is coming October 30th. Its hardware is unmatched and a basis for comparison of all other smartphones on the market. Without a doubt it's a killer handset.

Yet Verizon killed it for me. Pricing things out on each company's web site, comparable monthly plans for Verizon and Sprint cost $102.98 and $69.99 respectively. That means Verizon will cost me an additional $791.76 over the span of a two-year contract, ultimately for less features than what Sprint provides. Verizon's top priced smartphone is currently $199.99 subsidized - so I imagine the price of the hardware itself won't be prohibitive. It's the plan.

Given that Droid will sport a much more impressive CPU, GPU and display than previous handsets - especially HTC's - I would love to have one. It's hard to justify an extra $800 tho, even if that price tag spans two years' time.

No Donut For You!

Everyone on the Interwebs kinda assumed that the Android handsets that Sprint is due to offer in the coming weeks were going to be based on Android 1.6. After all, Android 1.6 was the first to offer CDMA support... and Sprint is a CDMA carrier. Right? Right???

No such luck. Both Android devices Sprint will release will ship with Android 1.5 with the CDMA codebase apparently backported. Not only that, it sounds like Android 1.6 won't be available from Sprint until 2010 and it won't be an over-the-air upgrade. Sprint's official word on exactly when is just "when it's available".

1.6 has a number of notable API changes but also a number of important features - most notably text-to-speech and multitouch functionality. HTC's SenseUI was an attempt to staple on several features on the 1.5 codebase that only recently became available. Now that Android 1.6 is available some of those SenseUI features are redundant... such as multitouch in the Web browser.

The biggest problem isn't necessarily with the end-user however - Spring launching with Android 1.5 causes huge headaches for developers. Several developers... myself for one... was counting on this product launch to usher in a landscape of 1.6 apps. Without an easy, transparent means of updating to 1.6 (such as over-the-air upgrades) it is also unlikely that the average Hero or Moment user will ever upgrade to the latest OS.

So what's a guy to do? Well... Motorola's Sholes is supposedly going to hit before the end of the year, and supposedly with Android 2.0 (although I doubt that). On the other hand it's launching on Verizon's network, which can be prohibitively expensive.

Sounds like there are no good options right now for an Android 1.6+ handset, unless Sprint can figure out an easier way to push updates.

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.

Bluetooth Affinity

Now that I have my handy-dandy Bluetooth phone I'm a regular Bluetooth addict. I've always had an odd engineering respect for the specification (the true measure of a geek is how emotionally attached they can become to a tech spec). Bluetooth seems to have been designed by engineers for engineers, and done very well. The fact that it uses the Hayes Command Set gives me that odd sensation of nostalgia... like seeing a Pac-Man clone on a modern $600 cell phone.

I was pretty impressed with Linux Bluetooth support - a single KDE desktop applet allowed me to browse all Bluetooth devices within range and view their individual services. Within only a few seconds I was able to transfer files and view device status... very schwag.

One thing I didn't understand until now was the concept of Bluetooth "profiles." Just as TCP may be a conduit for HTTP or FTP, Bluetooth is a conduit for OBEX exchanges or headset commands. It makes sense in retrospect, but Bluetooth host devices offer up services such as HSP (headset communication), OPP (pushing files) or BPP (printing).

No OSS project I've run across so far has been able to do vCard or vCal retrieval or transmission. Most projects appear to perform vCard and vCal access via OBEX, which Linux supports. One thing I was hoping to do was send vCards and vCals to and from the phone, but thus far I've been unable to do so. My phone doesn't have the SYNCH profile used for PIM exchange, yet it supposedly transmits raw vCards over Bluetooth... but I haven't been able to get Linux to receive them. Something I can hopefully remedy.

This limitation seems to exist even in commercially available products. DataPilot evidentally supports syncing the phone book, but not the calendar or text messages. Mobile action is evidently C|Net's choice, but just does contacts also.

From what I can tell, my handset supports:

HSP

Headset Profile

Uses Hayes Command Set for headset operations

HFP

Hands-Free Profile

Used for car interop. Synchronous Connection Oriented link with mono, PCM audio

DUN

Dial-up Networking Profile

Networking dial-up abilities using SPP from laptop or other workstation

OPP

Object Push Profile

Transfers are always instigated by the sender (client), not the receiver (server) using the APIs of OBEX operations connect, disconnect, put, get and abort

FTP

File Transfer Profile

Uses OBEX as a transport and is based on GOEP for getting folder listings, changing to different folders, getting files, putting files and deleting files

BPP

Basic Printing Profile

Sends print jobs to printers without needing drivers

A2DP

Advanced Audio Distribution Profile

Possible ALSA integration, used for headphones & media players

AVRCP

Audio/Video Remote Control Profile

Used in concert with A2DP or VDP to allow a single remote control (or other device) to control all of the A/V equipment to which a user has access