A Battery of SMS Problems

I've enjoyed the Hero so far - it's been a nice device. The battery life had left something to be desired however - it only could make it about eight hours. I also noticed that SMS messages just... stopped. There was silence whenever I sent a message via the old short message service.

Then I started reading about a litany of problems with HTC's SMS client. First, several found that the "Messages" app never lets the handset suspend. While the display may flicker off the engine keeps revving, eating up cycles and draining the battery. In a maybe related issue, many people have also been reporting their Hero cannot receive SMS messages, although this doesn't seem to happen for everyone.

I installed Handcent SMS for Android and have been using it in lieu of HTC's Messaging. It is definitely a superior SMS application to begin with and it is much more gentle on the battery.

I contacted Sprint support about the lack of inbound SMS messages, and they had me update my handset profile over the air. Basically I had to:

1. Shutdown the handset and remove the battery for two-ish minutes
2. Start up the handset, open up the Android settings -> About phone -> System updates -> Update profile and update yon profile
3. After the profile update, reboot the phone again

I'm not sure if having a service rep on the line is integral to the process or if they tweaked my profile. Maybe they did and I was just sync'ing up the handset with the central office. Things seem to work now however.

I've had a few crashes, especially with Android widgets embedded in SenseUI. All-in-all it's working wonderfully however. Astrid has been great for organization, and Meebo has been a serviceable IM client. My one dearest wish is multi-protocol Off-the-Record Messaging for Android - then I would never need to turn on my laptop again.

Paused For a Moment, Then Went On

Stopped by the local Sprint Shoppe on the way to/from work today. I decided to try out the Samsung Moment and see how it compared to my Hero.

The reviews of the Moment are pretty much on target. Most people noted that the Moment feels more "plastic-y" than the Hero, and I now see what they are talking about. There are a number of open seams, creases and joints that join several plastic components that comprise its shell. Even the rubber covers over the headphone and USB jacks add to the effect, making it seem like you're holding an enclosure that's a composite of several black, plastic slabs.

Aesthetics aside, the OS itself isn't much. I never really appreciated all that HTC did with its SenseUI; I kinda forgot about its revamped dialer, lock screen or music player. The Hero's Android "extras" integrate so well you tend to delude yourself into believing that it represents a stock Android 1.5 experience. Quite a shock to pick up the Moment's Android 1.5 build - it has the same awkward lock screen, dialer and window components that come default. Not a killer, but it makes you less likely to show off your phone to the nearest nerdcore.

The AMOLED display is nice, but not NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE like everyone else seems to exude. Contrast is spectacular and images are vivid (especially with video), but it's not a huge improvement for day-to-day operations. True, this should theoretically help battery life, but given the stats it seems the 800MHz sips on the saved juice. I had no problem with the touch screen's sensitivity - it was just as responsive as the Hero's screen.

A fold-out keyboard is very nice and is something I've really wanted, especially since I've been using a Nokia n810 for the past 18 months. I didn't have any issues with the Moment's keypad, and I didn't find the layout the least bit cumbersome. The space bar, even though it is two individual buttons "glued together" under a single piece of plastic, was just fine. Breaking apart the alpha keys so they straddle the space bar didn't bug me a bit; I was quickly typing things out rapidly after only a few seconds.

Samsung's 800MHz SoC is what really saves the day. By upping the clock speed and putting the cellular modem on a separate piece of silicon multi-tasked applications ran much faster on the Moment. This seems to be its crowning achievement - I could run several apps, side-by-side, with very little lag. Screen transitions even went off without a hitch.

One thing I was confused about was how the integrated Moxier Mail was going to work with Exchange. After dorking around with it a bit it seems to work much in the same way that HTC's Exchange client works; the calendar syncs with the native Android calendar, mail is a completely separate app from the GMail app, contacts are imported directly onto the handset. The big difference is that Moxier appears to support many more server-side Exchange options, such as remote searches and tasks. For what I would want to accomplish, it appears Moxier has the best solution until native support appears in Android 2.0.

Speaking of Android 2.0, I asked the manager of said Sprint Store if Samsung was going to offer an Android 2.0 update with the Moment. The manager was very gracious and spent nearly 30 minutes researching the answer and delving into the secret Sprint-only archives, but it was for naught. She could find no sign of Samsung offering an upcoming Android update for the Moment, never mind an Android 2.0 update.

Ultimately the Android 2.0 update was the clincher. HTC has gone on record that it will offer an Android 2.0 update, but Samsung has remained mum. One has to wonder if they'll push out an obligatory 1.6 update then cease Moment support. Many forums (such as XDA and phandroid) appear to anecdotally support this; several users (albeit perhaps fanboys) claim poor support of legacy handsets on Samsung's part, while HTC is still even updating its legacy, flagship Android handset.

The Hero does lag something fierce at times, but at least HTC is tantalizing everyone with promises of an Android 2.0 update. With Samsung remaining quiet about Android 2.0 coming to the Moment anytime soon, one has to wonder if a 50% faster CPU, marginally better Exchange support and somewhat prettier screen is worth it. Let's face it - I'm a sucker for frequent desktop updates and revamps. I simply can't turn down the super-happy funtimes that HTC is promising.

A Little Bit More Self Restraint This Time

Today was Éclair day. Google published the Android 2.0 Release 1 SDK. Verizon announced the first Android 2.0 handset. HTC announced they will release port Android 2.0 to the Hero. On the heels of all this hullabaloo I finally went ahead and picked up... Sprint's Hero.

By all accounts the Hero is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay inferior to Verizon's Droid. Even inferior to the Samsung Moment that is being released in mere days on Sprint, the self-same carrier of the Hero. After reading the early reviews, however, it appears that the 800MHz SoC and AMOLED display isn't enough to lift the Moment out of mediocrity.

The Hero's camera does suck, no doubt. And Samsung makes a nice camera. However my biggest items of desire were:

• GPS turn-by-turn navigation, because I can't find my head with a flashlight
• One central, integrated calendar to keep my day straight at home and work
• Exchange integration for work info

It sounds like the Moment's GPS is a bit finicky, flaking in and out at times. Exchange integration is supplied by the very capable Moxier Mail but it doesn't sound integrated into the main calendar interface itself. The AMOLED display reportedly washes out in direct light as well, and the keyboard has added considerable bulk to the package.

On top of this there are several forums that swear up and down that Samsung has a habit of abandoning their handsets, pursuing new hardware releases instead of updating old once. On the opposite side of the scale HTC has already announced Éclair support coming soon, so they appear to have a bit more dedication to their userbase.

The Moment has the hardware in spades, and I hate the fact that HTC's Android handsets use a Qualcomm 528MHz CPU that shares cycles with the modem on-die. All my engineer instincts tell me to get the Moment. However... my engineer instincts also told me to pick the iRiver iFP over an iPod, the n810 over an iPhone, HPNA 2.0 over 802.11b, VIA EPIA over AMD or Intel. A pretty poor track record as far as instincts go. Specs may win on paper, but market share is what gives a device longevity and sustainability.

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.

Wait a Moment...

My obsession with Android smartphone hardware continues. Because I'm lame.

Sprint is about to have two Android handsets on the market - HTC's Hero and the Samsung Moment.

The hardware couldn't be any more different between the two handsets. One has just softkeys, the other a slide-out keyboard. The Moment has an OLED screen. One has a trackball, the other has a proximity sensor. The biggest difference that I'm curious about is the processor.

The Hero uses the conventional 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor, a chipset that claims 3D acceleration to the tune of 4 million triangles a second. The Moment uses Samsung's own 800 MHz S3C6410 which claims the same 4 million triangles per second with OpenGL ES 2.0 support.

I'm not sure who wins, especially since the Hero has an entirely different UI and a lil' bit more RAM (288M vs. 256M). With OpenGL acceleration being about the same... hard to say.

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.

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.

ARM and a Teg

It has been interesting to passively watch news concerning embedded processors and system-on-a-chip designs since I started my irrational rationalizations about smartphones. The landscape is much wilder than conventional notebooks/desktops.

The weird thing is that the Qualcomm MSM7201A gets anecdotal low marks on the speed of its accomplice platforms, but Qualcomm claims that it has an ARM11 processor, an ARM9 modem, Java acceleration and can do 3D acceleration with 4 million triangles per second with a 133 million pixels per second fill rate. Perhaps hardware sporting the Qualcomm chipset has similar problems to my old VIA EDEN - acceleration was largely borked at the driver level. There seems to be a resonant believe with many developers/users that the 3D acceleration just isn't there, although with Android maybe it is. Either way it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

NVIDIA's efforts with Google and Tegra are somewhat more reassuring, as NVIDIA is definitely wanting to get its foot in the Android/ChromeOS door with Google. NVIDIA already has great consumer-ready hardware with Tegra on the Zune HD. This sparring match will only get more interesting as Intel launches their systems-on-a-chip, which have a gazillion different chipsets crammed into one. Intel is even wedging the PowerVR chipset in their designs.

I just need to remember that all this nifty hardware comes with a big caveat... without driver support, all of this functionality just sits idle between transistors.

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.