We don’t have pricing, we don’t have specific dates, we just thought we’d let you know that Sony Ericsson’s already outdated Android phone is arriving in the UK in April. This agrees with the release schedules for Japan and Germany, making the fourth month of the year seem like a certainty for the global launch of what is still a hotly anticipated device. Just why the X10 engenders such fervor, we’re not really sure, but it still marks Sony Ericsson’s most aggressive plunge into the smartphone shark pool yet. We’ll just have to wait another couple of months to find out how well that Donut-based OS swims.
Tired of waiting for the Xperia X10 for your first taste of Android and Sony Ericsson? Leave it to the gang at the XDA-developers forum to jump the gun. Last week marked the successful port of Android 2.0.1 (or Android 1.6, if you so choose) to the Xperia X1. No bluetooth, camera, or GPS — not yet, at any rate — but WiFI, GSM, resistive touchscreen, and all the other amenities should be functioning. Tweakers at heart can find all the necessary files and instructions via the source link, and as for the rest of us, there’s a video to live vicariously through after the break.
Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.
These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.
But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.
Making Phones Bigger
First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)
So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.
When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.
Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.
So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.
Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?
If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.
There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.
Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.
To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.
All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.
But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.
That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.
Shrinking PCs Down
Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)
What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:
There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.
HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.
Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.
Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach
Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.
Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.
We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.
What We Need Is a Third Approach
The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.
The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.
Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.
If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.
Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.
It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.
If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.
Google’s been doing some pretty slick stuff with QR codes lately, and now it looks like The Weather Channel’s getting in on the fun — it’s running a little on-screen graphic prompting Android owners to download their app by scanning their TV screens. Sure, it’s not the craziest thing in the world — it just takes you to the Android market listing — but it’s certainly fun, and one of the more mainstream uses of QR codes we’ve seen in a while. Check the video after the break.
Update: We originally said it takes you to the webpage; in actuality, it takes you to the the Android market. (Thanks, Caleb!)
Yes, we’ve seen this puppy before — but last time, we’d merely heard it was running Android. This time around, we’ve got a little more confirmation that the so-called Zeppelin from Moto is sporting Google code (allegedly Cupcake, sadly) with a dash of Blur added in for good measure. Gizmodo Brazil — which scored some time with a prototype — suggests that this’ll see duty on the lower end of Motorola’s smartphone lineup, and we tend to agree considering the HVGA display that takes up far less space than it could if Moto had wanted to go for broke. A keyboardless companion to the CLIQ / DEXT, perhaps? Carriers are an open question here, but we’ve heard rumblings of interest on T-Mobile USA’s part; the site says it’ll hit streets in March, so we shouldn’t have long to wait to find out.
While just recently made official, there have been plenty of Motorola Devour leaks over the years (er, months) to keep us occupied. This latest one has the aluminum colored phone sized up in bokeh-filled and yet surprisingly small, compressed and grainy shots — as if Mr. Blurrycam is holding up a nice, low aperture DSLR lens to his RAZR’s sensor. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts. What’s particularly helpful here is this comparison shot with the Nexus One, which shows the Devour to be a good bit larger, despite its significantly smaller screen size. Size isn’t everything, of course.
Motorola and Verizon Wireless on Wednesday announced the availability of a new Android-based phone, the Motorola Devour.
The Devour will be available in March and will include Motorola’s Motoblur, a social networking variant of Google’s Android OS. Motoblur includes a “happenings” widget on the home screen that consistently monitors networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and integrates updates, e-mails, and texts into a “universal inbox.”
The new phone includes a 3.1-inch capacitive touch screen, and touch-sensitive navigation pad. Slide it up for keyboard access. The phone comes preloaded with apps including Gmail, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Search, and Google Maps. The Android Market will provide access to 20,000 additional apps.
And just like that, it’s official. Verizon Wireless has today announced that Motorola‘s scrumptiously named Devour will be heading to its network next month, with it being the first VZW phone to feature Motoblur. Not that we’re seeing any surprises here, but a quick specification run down draws our attention to a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen, a touch-sensitive navigation pad, a pre-installed 8GB microSD card and Bluetooth support. Unfortunately, there’s no apparent mention of multitouch — and we wouldn’t expect it out of the box, since the Devour runs Android 1.6 — but we’re crossing our fingers (and toes, for that matter) for Google to sling that delightful Nexus One update to the rest of its high-powered Android phones in the very near future. There’s nary a mention of an asking price, but we’ll be sure to keep an eye out as launch day approaches.
It’s not everyday you get to see six (6!) Android devices pitted against each other in a display-quality grudge match. No, not that sensor sensitivity nonsense again, rather, just a plain ol’ video playback comparison for your subjective observations. Fortunately, the Android-loving kids over at HDBlog shot a video of the MyTouch 3G, HTC Hero, Motorola Milestone / Droid, Acer Liquid, Nexus One, and Samsung Galaxy (laid out clockwise in the image above). In our opinion, the Nexus One with its 3.7-inch AMOLED display packing a 800 x 480 pixel resolution comes out on top with the best overall image (though slightly on the red end of the color spectrum) — good thing the video wasn’t shot outdoors where that AMOLED is all but unreadable. But hey, that’s our opinion, form your own in the video after the break.
Remember the OPhone platform, Open Mobile System? You know, China Mobile’s supposedly beefed up Android? Things have become even more interesting as OMS jumps from 1.5 to 2.0 — it now supports Scalable Vector Graphics UI elements and does voice recognition, but what really caught our attention was the vague mention of Windows Mobile API support. Now, our understanding is that it’s been China Mobile’s intention to make Symbian and WinMo apps run on OMS all along, but we don’t know if this update means WinMo apps will run natively in OMS through some compatibility layer, if there’ll be Symbian- and WinMo-based versions of OPhone, or that it’ll just be easier for developers to port WinMo apps to OMS. No word on what phones will be getting 2.0 or when they’ll be getting it, but considering Android’s generally positive outlook on upgradeability, we’re hoping the answers are ‘all’ and ‘soon.’
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To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.
