Hasta La Gadget!

Alltel Wireless has announced that the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 smartphone will hit retail stores and the online site beginning in early May.

The handset is one of the few flip smartphones out there, combining the popular form factor with a genuine BlackBerry handheld. This model is a bit larger than most other flips–it extends more than half a foot when fully opened–but it features the Pearl’s SureType-style QWERTY keyboard, along with a 2.3-inch LCD and a 2 megapixel camera.

The 8230 is essentially the same as the somewhat buggy 8220 model on T-Mobile that we reviewed several months ago, except that the 8230 lacks Wi-Fi. Hopefully RIM and Alltel will have cleaned up some of the bugs by the time the handset is released–most notably, an extremely slow Web browser implementation (much more so than other BlackBerrys).

Dell has been long been the Ugly Betty of the PC industry–functional, smart but severely lacking in the looks department.

But over the last two years, the company’s consumer-targeted PCs have gotten a design makeover that would make Tyra Banks proud. Dell’s latest machines offers sleek designs; unusual materials such as fabric, bamboo and leather; and striking covers designed by graffiti artists. 

"You are seeing the switch from total utilitarian, speed-and-specs kind of thinking to something that will fit the personality of consumer," says Ed Boyd, vice president of consumer products at Dell. "It’s the same transformation you saw in cellphone and the automotive industry."

The former global creative director for Nike, Boyd has helped build Dell’s consumer division into a design powerhouse, churning out products that the company hopes will put it ahead of rivals and bring in consumers who want both style and value in their PCs.

The commitment to better design comes at a challenging time for Dell. Dell’s personal computer shipments fell 16.7 percent worldwide in the
first quarter from a year ago. In the United States alone, Dell shipments fell 16.2 percent, according to research firm IDC.  Meanwhile, Dell’s rival Hewlett Packard increased U.S. shipments 2.9 percent worldwide and 12.2 percent. Dell now ranks second to HP in terms of overall market share in the United States.

In focusing on design, Dell is making a risky bet. Better design could help rejuvenate consumer interest in the company’s products — or it could add to costs and make its products pricey at a time when consumers are rushing in droves to buy inexpensive netbooks.

Meanwhile, driven by Apple’s focus on design, customers are increasingly
looking for products that are stylish yet offer value, says Craig
Vogel, associate dean and professor of design studies at University of
Cincinnati.

"The design of the iPod and the iPhone has driven sales to Apple’s computers, which is something that other companies have noticed," says Vogel. "Design is not an option anymore, the marketplace is demanding it."

It took the clout of Dell founder Michael Dell to get the frumpy, utilitarian PC maker more focused on style. Two years ago, Michael Dell stepped back into the CEO seat to take over a company that seemed to be in danger of losing its luster. Dell’s much-admired efficient supply chain process no longer seemed enough to put the company ahead of its competitors. Dell’s customers were beginning to balk at the company’s bulky machines.

"Nineteen months ago, Michael told me the horse that we rode so far wasn’t going to take us to the next level," Boyd says. "Design was going to have to play a much bigger role at Dell."

As the first step, Michael Dell brought on Ron Garriques, the former Motorola executive credited with the success of the RAZR phone, as the president of Dell’s consumer products.

Garriques, in turn, has attracted star designers like Boyd and helped put together a design team that is growing fast. Five years ago, Dell had just about half a dozen designers on its team. Today the company has 130 members on the team. They include a behavioral and cognitive psychologists, usability experts, former designer from companies such as furniture maker Herman Miller and auto maker GM.

There have also been changes to how Dell has organized its design teams. "Earlier, design reported to engineering and marketing," says Michael Smith, who has been part of Dell’s design team since 2003. "But now it is becoming its own entity with equal footing."

The moves have helped Dell get more fashionable, fast. Most conspicuously, the company is experimenting with different materials and finishes. The company’s Studio XPS 13 and 16 laptops use leather trims. The Studio hybrid desktop offers an optional bamboo casing, and the Studio One 19 PC — aka the ‘kitchen PC’ — can come with a fabric panel that fits around the display.

Many of the design improvements have to do with the outermost surface of the Dell’s computers, and that doesn’t go deep enough for at least one industrial designer.

"Dell needs to treat design as something that is not superficial," says
Max Burton, executive creative director for Frog Design in San
Francisco. "What they have right now is more of applique design — [it’s]
more about finishes than real change to the materials and process."

But Dell execs say that their focus on design means more than just looks. For example, a Dell Studio hybrid desktop launched in the last year uses 70 percent less material and power than older desktop models, says Boyd.

Design improvements do not have to come out of the consumers’
pockets, says Boyd. It’s about making the right tradeoffs. "We can
take out the non-value-adding functionality, such as too many
connectors, and put value where people find it," he says.

For instance,
designers removed an external button for turning Wi-Fi on and off in
the Dell XPS 1330 laptop. Now users have to go through the software
program to do it. "That’s money I save," says Boyd, "and give it back
to the customer in the form of lower prices or better finish."

"When we do put more money into the finishes and industrial design, we don’t do that arbitrarily," says Boyd. "In those products we see a spike in sales, as in the redesign of the Studio XPS line."

Boyd has also helped the team improve on such things as packaging and accessories, says Smith. Adamo, for instance, comes in a clear package and offers optional accessories such as tote bags from Tumi.

All that may not be enough. Design experts such as Vogel and Burton say Dell needs to take a chapter out of Apple’s playbook. For instance, Apple’s latest Macbook, introduced last year, has a body whose main part is machined from a solid piece of aluminum. It allows for lightweight, yet sturdy, machines and better design.

"The innovation with the aluminum is a big step ahead in terms of process and design especially when Dell is still using injection-molded plastic in many of its machines," says Burton.

That kind of fundamental change in how Dell approaches design could take much longer. For now Dell is walking a tightrope — trying to please its flock that is price-sensitive, even as it tries to court the fashionistas. It’s a feat not many designers have been able to pull off.

See also:
Dell’s New Notebooks Take Design Seriously
Bamboo-zled: Eco Veneers Storm the Design World

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Mobile Internet Device maker OQO’s tiny notebooks were undoubtedly beautiful. But looks alone don’t seem to be enough to save the company.

OQO has reportedly canceled all pre-orders for its latest device, the Model 2+. The company had announced the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and priced a basic version at $1,000.

The Model 2+ offered a breathtakingly vibrant 5-inch OLED touchscreen display, 1.86GHz Intel Atom processor, 2GB RAM and support for 3G connectivity. The company had planned to launch it in the first half of the year.

But for the last few weeks OQO has been struggling to survive. It recently lost its CEO and a top product manager even as resellers
stopped taking pre-orders. OQO did not respond Thursday to our request for comment.

For a detailed analysis of what went wrong at OQO, read the story at Wired blog Epicenter: OQO’s Brutal Lesson: Innovate and Die.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

You guys may not know this, but we have some really, really cool stuff coming up in the world of Engadget — and not just on the editorial front. In fact, we’re currently looking for a salaried, full-time designer with backend / developer chops to join us in the creation and maintenance of said cool stuff. If you’re an incredibly smart, talented, hard-working human that loves Engadget, happens to have killer design sense, and knows their way around a screen full of code — we’d like to speak to you. Keep in mind that we’ll only be looking at candidates with a portfolio, and we’re going to be seriously scrutinizing the work that we see. Read on for a list of our requirements.

Continue reading Engadget is looking for a lead designer / developer!

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The Verizon Hub is unstuck in time. It’s a 2006 device that’s just getting here, now, in 2009, begging the question, “Is it better to be late than never?”

The Hub is a landline slayer launched in a wireless world, where the landline is almost dead. It’s a fertile garden behind a red-painted wall—red ’cause it’s Verizon, har har—found when most people are trying to break down those walls. It’s a Verizon Wireless VoIP phone coming about at a time when AT&T is killing their VoIP service entirely. It’s the phone we imagined before the iPhone, tethered to our home broadband connection for instant-pizza-ordering awesomeness. In other words, it’s a lot of interesting things, appearing in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

That’s not to say it’s bad. It’s just unfortunate. The Hub makes sense in a very specific context: If you’re a lock, stock and barrel Verizon customer, from wireless to TV to internet to, obviously, landline phone service. That’s where the “Hub” name comes in—it brings a bunch of different Verizon services together in one spot: You can monitor cellphone locations using Verizon’s Chaperone, send maps and directions from the Hub to phones running VZ Navigator, and manage a central calendar that your entire family’s phones sync to. Eventually, you’ll be able to do more, like manage your Verizon FiOS TV DVR. While a minor point, in a sense it’s a very sore point with the Hub, since you can already do that from many Verizon cellphones this very second. Why do I need a Hub again?

The garden walls reach their greatest heights when you try to text or picture message to a non-Verizon phone—you can’t. The calendar isn’t open, using a standard like CalDAV for easy export—it’s squarely in Verizonland. A surprising amount of managing the Hub actually takes place on Verizon’s website, like uploading contacts (via CSV files) and photos. Thankfully, the Hub’s pages are better designed than the rest of Verizon’s website—there’s legit eye candy in the photo gallery, for instance. And nearly anything you can do on the Hub itself, you can do from the website remotely, like manage voicemail or check your call history. But it’s odd you can’t do something very simple like upload photos via the Hub’s USB port.

It doesn’t really matter if there are walls around the garden if you’re never tempted to leave. Unfortunately, the Hub isn’t enough of an attraction. Pretty much anything you can do on it—buy movie tickets, send text messages, check traffic or watch videos, you can do faster or better on your computer or cellphone. The virtually useless selection of VCAST videos make the average YouTube video feel like HD in comparison, and the “traffic report” isn’t a map with live traffic info, but a canned audio briefing from Traffic.com that you have to sit through an ad to hear.

The Linux OS itself isn’t particularly a joy. God knows, Verizon’s committed some horrible user interface atrocities over the last few years, but at least the Hub’s is alright—usable, not mind-blowing. I wish it moved faster. The keyboard is annoying to type on, but it’ll get better in the next software update, which adjusts the spacing and adds pop-up letters. A persistent set of buttons on the left gives you constant, instant access to the two main menus: The phone and the uh, menu, where you get to your apps. In the top right corner is the home button, which takes you to the desktop, where your widgets, like for weather, time, voicemail, etc. hang out. Applications tend to have a two-pane layout that’s framed by buttons on three sides, which doesn’t sound like a problem, but it becomes one since the touchscreen is not so responsive around the edges. I’ve accidentally called two people at 3 in the morning while trying to press the menu button. Not cool.

Actually, that’s one of my more concrete frustrations with this phone: The hardware feels cheap and shitty. The handset, which costs $80 a pop, is a plastic piece of garbage with a shoddy build quality and terrible screen. (It doesn’t help that you can’t do much from the handset either, like send text messages.) The touchscreen isn’t as responsive as it should be, and it distorts with even the slightest bit of pressure, adding to the whole crappy feeling. A screen designed to be touched shouldn’t freak out when you touch it. The speakers really harsh, crappy and tinny too. I couldn’t stand using it for loudspeaker calls.

There are a few bright points. While the directory isn’t as precise as say, MenuPages, it is fairly painless to find a nearby pizza place and call them in a single stroke. The synergistic—I know, that word provokes a gag reflex—stuff works well. Directions quickly went to the Samsung Sway test phone I got with it, which promptly fired up VZ Navigator and pointed to wherever I pointed it. (Too bad VZ Navigator is slow and sucky, but that’s somewhat besides the point.) And the call quality itself is pretty good—or at least I sounded “loud and clear” to the people I called.

The brightest light may end up being the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel—the promise that developers will be able to create their own apps for this thing in the future. The included ones, for the most part, just aren’t that hot, and some of the newer ones in the pipeline are definitely more head-turning. But it’s hard to see how this product can sustain itself long enough to engender a solid third-party developer community. More likely, it’ll get slightly better, then go extinct.

It’s pretty ballsy to charge $200 for a landline phone with $35/month VoIP service right now, one that does the same thing you can do on an iPhone or G1, but is tied to your desk. Which is a lot of the reason I like it. But it’s just as ridiculous to ask that much for a phone that’s built with subpar hardware and doesn’t live up to its full potential in a world where it’s already horribly outmoded. Time was up two years ago. [Verizon]