Let’s just get this out of the way: in terms of hardware, the Touch HD2 is the nicest phone in the world. It’s ostentatiously huge and amazingly slim; it’s business-savvy and utterly pornographic. But hardware like this deserves better software.

From the outset, the HD2 is a tragic creature, built from the finest pieces imaginable and burdened with a categorically disappointing OS. HTC has done their best to hide the HD2’s shame, but it’s just not enough.

Meeting the HD2: Hardware

HTC’s got a funny way of designing hardware, where they settle on a basic set of components then pump out virtually every iteration of this basic spec set they possibly can. (See also: HTC as Taco Bell) It’s a rare occasion, then, that we get something like the Touch HD2, a followup to the similarly impressive, never Americanized Touch HD.

Top to bottom, corner to corner—and it’s a long trip—the HD2 is a perfect specimen of glass, plastic and aluminum. The massive screen-to-bezel ratio means the HD2 is essentially just a 4.3-inch piece of glass, its 800×480 multitouch display bordered by just a few millimeters of ink-black trim and a subtle row of satisfyingly pressable little buttons. The handset’s minimalist hindside, interrupted only by a slightly protruding lens for the HD2’s 5-megapixel camera and a ever-so-slightly grained aluminum battery door, is elegantly tapered, emphasizing just how thin this thing is—thinner than the iPhone, which is pretty good for a phone that I have to remind myself not to call a tablet.

It’s got the same space-warping powers as a supermodel; it looks like a beautiful phone in pictures, but when you finally see it in person, it’s twice as tall as you thought it would be and far too thin for its expanded proportions. It’s almost not fair to other phones. And it will give them body image issues.

Behind this spectacularly huge screen is a 1GHz Snapdragon processor assisted by 448MB of RAM—specs that would have put a top-line desktop to shame less than ten years ago—and 512MB of ROM, aided by expandable microSD storage. The whole battery of expected high-end smartphone amenities are here, from GPS to a facial proximity sensor to an internal compass to Bluetooth 2.1. There’s a 3.5-mm headphone jack, and charging comes by way of Micro USB, through to an adequate 1230 mAh battery (it’ll get you through the workday, which is par for the course nowadays). Unless you absolutely need to have a hardware keyboard, there is nothing—nothing—the HD2 leaves you wanting for.

Moving In With the HD2

One of the benefits of Windows Mobile not having changed much in the last few years is that it’s easy to compare new hardware to old, and let’s be clear about the HD2: It’s unbelievably fast. Applications open almost instantly and close without the slightest hesitation, and over Wi-Fi, web pages render in Opera Mobile as if you’re browsing on a laptop, not a cellphone. (And hell, if you put your face close enough to this ridiculous screen, it’s easy to forget you’re not.)

This near-magical experience is spread throughout the HD2: Calls answer and end without the expected delay, the camera—a decent 5-megapixel number with a blinding flash and VGA video capabilities—wakes up as fast as you can point its lens, and tapping the home button, no matter how many apps you’ve got toiling in the background, always results in a satisfyingly clean and snappy return to HTC’s ostentatious homescreen. Speaking of which!

This is one of the first Windows Mobile phones to have HTC Sense, which combines bits and pieces of their overhauled Android interface and kneads them together with years of TouchFLO 3D development. Practically, this means that using the HD2 is just like using any other HTC Windows phone from the last three years—a tabbed slider at the bottom of the screen moves you from homescreen panel to homescreen panel, where HTC has condensed a lot of the information you look to your phone for. It’s faster and more complete that you’ve seen before, with added color, a Twitter client and visual browser bookmarks, but it’s essentially the same HTC dashboard, just gussied up a little bit. And to the extent that such a thing—you know, a disguise—can work, it works.

Falling Out of Lust With the HD2

HTC’s software ethos has always been to hide the unseemly parts of Windows Mobile. And it’s got plenty! But with the HD2, they’ve taken this philosophy all the way to its logical conclusion: They’ve tried to replace Windows Mobile’s UI entirely. The HD2 is HTC: Reductio ad Absurdum Edition.

And don’t get me wrong, this whole Sense thing is surprisingly usable—it’s a fairly rare occasion that you fall out of HTC’s safe, smooth, grey-and-black arms, and into the Windows 3.1-esque hell that has been, and somehow still is, a Windows Mobile hallmark. With Sense HTC has made a sort of meta-OS, which uses Windows Mobile 6.5 as a behind-the-scenes stagehand, which only shows its face when it absolutely needs to. HTC has even added multitouch to the browser, maps and photo applications, which works well enough for what almost certainly qualifies as an after-the-fact hack.

In fact, that could describe the whole Sense experience just well. It’s good, considering what it is. It’s just that that’s a huge qualification. As pretty as HTC’s replacement apps are, they’re not the same as having good core apps in the first place. Want to add music to HTC’s fancy new media player? You’ve got to find Windows Mobile’s old media player, add a directory and switch back. Want some new apps? Trundle on over to Windows Mobile’s sorely lacking Marketplace, where most of the apps you download will look and behave differently than the ones in HTC’s coddled ecosystem. Press Start, and you’ll be greeted with Windows’ unsortable mess of a Start Menu. Need to modify a setting that HTC didn’t deem important enough to put in their own control panel? Good luck. And god forbid you don’t like Sense, and want to stick with vanilla 6.5, you basically can’t: It’s not quite ready for stylus-free use, and the HD2’s screen doesn’t come with—or support—those forsaken almost-pens of yore. As much good work as HTC has done here, it’s an uneven experience. Remember those flashy old Windows XP shell replacements like bbLean and Litestep? No? There’s a good reason for that.

Every time you notice the absurd lengths to which HTC has gone to deny this phone is running Windows—they’ve even replaced the calendar and text messaging apps, for god’s sake—you find yourself asking the same question: Why even bother?

It’s a question for consumers as much as it is for HTC. For HTC, why spend so much time and effort desperately—and only marginally effectively—hiding an OS when they know they can just replace it entirely? I understand they’ve got a legacy with Windows Mobile, but right now that legacy is starting to seem toxic, as HTC’s insistence on distancing themselves from it in the form of passive-aggressive disguising operations shows. And for anyone thinking about buying this thing, why not wait a little while? We’ve seen how fantastic this hardware combo is, so why not wait until someone loads it up with software that HTC doesn’t feel like they have to hide away like some kind of dark secret? Sony’s about to outspec the HD2 with the Android-powered Xperia X10 anyway, and HTC would have to be stupid not to be working on something similar right now.

If you’ve got some undying loyalty to Windows Mobile, be it personal or work-enforced, life won’t get any better than with the HD2—it’s shipping on multiple carriers sometime in early 2010, though I don’t suspect it’ll be cheap. If you don’t, then just wait this one out. Trust me: for hardware like this, the payoff will be worth it.

UPDATE: Some people are saying I’ve been too dismissive of the phone simply due to its software, and they have a point: The HD2 is, without qualification, the best Windows Mobile phone on the market right now. And being a Windows Mobile phone isn’t all bad: The browsers have Flash, Exchange support is perfect, and multitasking is seamless. On top of that, the Sense shell is an impressive piece of software, especially in terms of social networking and media playback. But the point remains: Even behind the very convincing disguise of a modern phone, Windows Mobile is lagging well behind its competitors in terms of new app development, fast OS development and general user experience, and by the time you get your hands on this phone—and just as importantly, by the time your contract is halfway through—Windows Mobile 6.5, Sense or no Sense, will feel like a complete dinosaur. Hence the “wait”—for a similar phone with better software, or for Windows Mobile 7.

[HTC]

The 4.3-inch glass display is pure bliss


Actually, no, this whole handset is bliss. If they were sitting right here, right now, I would kiss the hardware designers on the mouth. With tongue.


Battery life isn’t as atrocious as you’d expect it to be


HTC Sense does extensive damage control on Windows Mobile, making this the best WinMo experience out there right now.


Not to beat a dead horse, but it’s still Windows Mobile. (What that means)

This week we met Motorola’s Droid, the first handset with Android 2.0. To an outsider, it just looks like another Google smartphone, but 2.0 is more than that: it’s proof that Android is finally going to take over the world.

So Wait, What Is Android, Exactly?

In Google’s words, it’s “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.” That doesn’t mean much, so here’s a breakdown: It’s a Linux-based, open-source mobile OS, complete with a custom window manager, modified Linux 2.6 kernel, WebKit-based browser and built-in camera, calendar, messaging, dialer, calculator, media player and album apps. If that sounds a little sparse, that’s because it is: Android on its own doesn’t amount to a whole lot; in fact, a phone with plain vanilla Android wouldn’t feel like a smartphone at all. Thankfully, these phones don’t exist.

Android is Linux insofar as its core components are open-source and free, and Google must publish their source code with every release. But the real heart of the Android phone experience—the Google apps like Maps, GChat, Gmail, Android Market, Google Voice, Places and YouTube are closed-source, meaning Google owns them outright. Every Google phone comes with these apps in one form or another so to the user this distinction isn’t that important. That said, it occasionally rears its head, like when Android modder Cyanogen had to strip the apps out of his custom Android builds to avoid getting sued by Google:

The issue that’s raised is the redistribution of Google’s proprietary applications like Maps, GTalk, Market, and YouTube. They are Google’s intellectual property and I intend to respect that. I will no longer be distributing these applications as part of CyanogenMod.

This can lead to more mainstream (and confusing) issues, like with the, erm, touchy (sorry!) multitouch issue: Android OS supports multitouch, in that it can recognize multiple simultaneous input points on its screen. But Google’s Android apps don’t. So when a company like HTC comes along and decides to properly add multitiouch to the OS, they can only add it to the open-source parts, like the browser (or their own closed-source apps), not Google’s proprietary apps. That’s why the Hero has pinch-zoom in its browser and photo albums but not in Google Maps, where it’s just as at home.

The issue gets even less trivial as the apps grow more central to the Android experience. You know how Google Maps Navigation was, like, the banner feature for Android 2.0? Well, it was, but technically speaking, it’s not a part of Android. It’s just part of an app made by Google for Android, and that’ll ship with most Android handsets. Except for in countries where Google doesn’t have their mapping data quite together enough, where it won’t. That’s what’s happening with the Euro Droid, which, by the way, does have multitouch in its browser, like the Hero. That’s why the distinction matters.

So, why take so much care to set up and protect this open source component, when surely Google could just slap together a closed-source mobile operating system and give it away for free, right? It would deprive handset manufacturers of their ability to freely modify certain core components of the OS, sure, but the real reasoning, oddly enough, has less to do with phones and more to do with, well, everything else.

How We Got Here

Flash back to November 7th, 2007, when the Open Handset Alliance, a massive coalition of mobile industry companies, held hands to announce to the world their new child. His name was Android, and we were told very little about him. What we were told, though, was delivered almost entirely in frustratingly vague platitudes:

Handset manufacturers and wireless operators will be free to customize Android in order to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost. Developers will have complete access to handset capabilities and tools that will enable them to build more compelling and user-friendly services, bringing the Internet developer model to the mobile space.

We were a little disappointed that the GPhone wasn’t strictly a phone, but like most people, this sounded exciting to us. Vague, but exciting.

And so we waited, patiently. And waited. Then, nearly a year later, we got our hands on the first hardware to actually use Android. It was called the T-Mobile G1, and It Was Good. Then, six months later, we got another phone—the Magic, or MyTouch, which was more or less exactly like the first one, minus a keyboard. It wasn’t until two full years since Android’s first appearance—when not just HTC but Motorola, Samsung and Sony started showing off fresh wares—that Android began to feel like more than an experiment. And more important than getting fresh hardware, Android’s OS had changed too. A lot.

The T-Mobile G1 shipped with Android 1.0, which wasn’t exactly missing much, but still felt a bit barebones. We had to wait until February of 2009 for paid apps to show up in the Android Market, after which April saw the first major update, Android 1.5 “Cupcake.” (Updates each have alphabetical, pastry-themed codenames.) This was followed by 1.6 “Donut,” which most new handsets are shipping with now, then 2.0 (yes, “Eclair”), which throws in social networking integration, an interface lift, support for new device resolutions, a fresh developer SDK and support for the optional Google Maps Navigation. This version is currently only found on the Motorola Droid, but should start showing up elsewhere with a few months. And so here we are. And that’s just half of it.

Android Isn’t Just a Phone OS

That announcement I showed you earlier? That was from the Open Handset alliance, a consortium of phone folks—handsets manufacturers, mobile chip makers and the like. But let’s look back at another announcement, from the Android project leads, back in early 2008:

Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications…Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.

Almost all the talk about Android over the last two years has been about Android the phone OS, not Android the lightweight Linux distribution. While Google was busy pumping out high-profile phone-centric updates, Android was starting to creep into other industries, like a disease. A good disease, that everyone likes! Yes, one of those. This is where things get weird.

Remember all those not-quite-there Android netbooks? Part of the plan. The Android-powered Barnes & Noble Nook? Shouldn’t have been a surprise. Android navigators? Why not? PMPs? Creative’s got one. Photo frames and set-top boxes? Already in the works.

Most of these devices won’t look like Android hardware to us, because our strongest Android associations with the OS are all visual and phone-specific, like the homescreen, app drawer and dialer. Nonetheless, this is as much a part of the Android vision as phones are—it just won’t be as obvious.

Your Android-powered DVR won’t have an app drawer, but it will share the kernel, and an unusually good widget system. Your Android-powered PMP may run a custom interface, but it’ll have access to thousands of apps, like an open-source iPod Touch. Your Android-powered photo frame might look just like any other photo frame, but when it drops your wireless connection, it’ll have a decent, full-featured settings screen to help you pick it back up. And over-the-air updates. And it might actually cost a few dollars less that it would have otherwise, because remember, Android is free. This is our Android future, and it sounds awesome.

What Happens Next

But the first step in the Android takeover is necessarily the phones. Android 2.0 means the handsets aren’t just interesting anymore; they’re truly buyable. As Matt said this week:

In time, Android very well could be the internet phone, hands down, in terms of raw capabilities…. Android 2.0’s potential finally feels as enormous as the iPhone’s, and I get kinda tingly thinking about it.

What problems the phones still have—among them, poor media playback and the lack of a bundled desktop client to manage media—are not with Android but with Google, which is really just a major supporter of Android. Either Google will solve them hands-on, or the dream of the open source and app developer communities rising up to fill in all the gaps will become a reality. What’s certain is that Google—or someone—needs to address them if future legions of Google-branded phones are to succeed to their full potential.

Speaking of potential, it’s massive. In addition to everything else Android has going on, timing is on its side. Windows Mobile is limping along with two broken legs, and its hardware partners took (or maybe gave) notice: Motorola, lately a pariah in its own right, doesn’t want anything more to do with Microsoft; HTC is stating continued support while quietly phasing out the WinMo ranks; Sony Ericsson, which hasn’t seen a true hit come from one of their Microsoft-branded phones in years, is dabbling in Androidery. And as far as most consumers are concerned, anything Windows Mobile can do, Android can do better.

It doesn’t stop with Microsoft, either. Symbian, whose boss called Android “just another Linux platform,” is losing ground, and losing some of Sony Ericsson’s business doesn’t help. The Palm Pre, polished and beautiful as it is, can’t keep up with Android’s exploding app inventory, multiplying hardware partners and rock-star ability to draw talent. RIM’s BlackBerry isn’t generally seen as a direct Android competitor, but Android 2.0, along with Palm’s WebOS and Apple’s iPhone OS, are the main reasons the BlackBerry OS feels so clunky and old. That matters. From here, the outlook is clear: Android and the iPhone are the next consumer smartphone superpowers.

And even if it takes Google 10 years to iron out Android’s faults and push this kind of adoption, you can expect Android, or its unofficial pseudonym “Google Phone,” to become a household name. Besides, Android will start creeping into our lives in places we might not expect it. It’ll power our settop boxes, ebook readers, PMPs and who knows what else. It’s not just going to be the next great smartphone OS, it’ll be the quiet, invisible software layer that sits between all our portable gadgets and our fingers.

Source photo courtesy of NASA

Still something you wanna know? Still mixing up your Androids and your hemorrhoids? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints here, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

RIM’s successor to the original Bold — the BlackBerry Bold 9700 — has finally landed on our doorsteps. The 9000 is in many ways a hard act to follow. Hardware-wise, it lived up to its name, going where most phones never went with its retro, leathery, nearly clunky looks in an age of rounded edges and shiny curves. Don’t get us wrong — we loved the 9000’s aesthetics obsessively — which is why we couldn’t wait to get our hands on its newborn child. A few questions we had in mind: would the 9700 live up to its predecessor’s notoriously uncompromising fashion sense? Would the new Bold feel as good to hold and use in the hand as its loving parent? How would it stack up against other, new devices from RIM? If these are the kind of questions you think you might want answers to, read on for our impressions.

Continue reading BlackBerry Bold 9700 hands-on and impressions

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BlackBerry Bold 9700 hands-on and impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A year ago, Android was an unfinished OS for nerds, bursting with potential. With Android 2.0, it’s evolved into something sleeker, more refined and focused—but still something not quite human.

Over the last year, Android’s evolved more rapidly and appeared in more shapes than any other smartphone OS. Every major update has made Android more capable and advanced, while custom interfaces from companies like HTC and Motorola, mean it’s constantly and continually shifting shapes. When you look at the bucket of bolts everybody started with, some of the oh-so-shiny end results were kind of amazing. Android 2.0 blows all of that away, and lays down a platform for the next year that’s wildly more compelling, even as it retains a lot of the same fundamental weaknesses.

We reviewed on Android 2.0 on the Motorola Droid—our review of the actual phone is here.

New Skin, Same Awkward Body

Android 2.0 is glossy—not in an Apple “the whole world is shiny and reflective” kind of way, but more like molded plastic for a collectible action figure. The cartoon whimsy—the classic Google rainbow of bright colors—are gone. The iconography, redrawn for high-res displays packed with tons of pixels, is smoother and sleeker, more subtle, and forces you to ask yourself, “Google designed this?”

While icons and menubars have been polished to fine gloss, and some things are cleaner and better organized—settings, for instance—overall, the user experience is basically the same: three desktops, which you can pack with icons and widgets; the still brilliant drop-down notification shade, which pools everything Android wants to tell you; and a pop-up tab where all of your apps are at. This is all still fine, mostly, if a bit muddled.

The reason that cluttered interface confusion is mostly fine is that multitasking with Android is addictive, and it’s a better, easier-to-use implementation than any phone but the Pre. The window shade, a simple but powerful concept, is what makes it work. If I’m browsing the internet and get a message, I can pull the shade down, check the message, and go right back to browsing. Or flip over to messaging, reply, and get right back to browsing. At this, Android 2.0 excels, especially now that everything runs faster.

The long press and menu button conventions are still used nearly everywhere throughout the OS, but almost always inconsistently. If you’re trying to do something in-app and have no idea how, there’s a good chance the action you’re looking for is buried behind the menu button or a long press. But these controls do different things in almost every single app, and even sometimes in the same app, depending on the context.

Universal search, and in particular, voice commands which let you quickly access search, map or navigate with surprising accuracy (seriously, it deciphers my mumbling better than my mom), are probably the most significant improvements to usability. Universal search isn’t quite as universal as we’d like, though. It only pores over apps, contacts, YouTube, music and the web—you have to go into the messaging and email apps separately to search through them, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

And while Android 2.0 is capable of multitouch, other than making typing smoother, it’s nowhere to be found, at least not where I want it: the browser and maps. Also, the portrait keyboard’s still too tiny.

A Killer Machine, Sorta

Software is inextricably tied to hardware in many respects, and nowhere is that more true than performance. Droid, the first Android 2.0 phone—and the only one we’ve used—is ridiculously capable, with an ARM Cortex A8 TI OMAP3430 processor that’s basically the same as the chips inside of the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS. Point being, it’s got heavy duty processor firepower.

So it’s absolutely inexplicable that while it’s overall the fastest version of Android yet—most apps fly open instantly, run zippily and practically zoom from one to another, even with a couple running in the background—very basic user interface elements, like the main pop-up menu on the home screen and sliding over from one desktop to another, often stutter or lag (with no apps running up front, and just a couple of widgets on the desktop). At this point, it’s clear that these performance hiccups are an Android problem, not a hardware deficiency. It’s maddening to hold a badass phone like the Droid and watch it handle menus like a pussy.

Accounts, Contacts, Exchange and Other Serious-Sounding Words

Besides Google Maps Navigation Beta, Android 2.0’s most significant upgrade for regular people is all about contacts and networking. Like the Palm Pre and HTC’s Sense UI, it integrates contacts from multiple sources—namely, Facebook and Exchange (no Twitter yet). The scheme works exceptionally well, with finesse that’s almost out of character for Google. The way it pulls in your Facebook contacts actually makes sense: When you add the account, you can choose to add all 900 of your Facebook contacts, or just the ones who you have actual Google contacts for. Oh, sweet reason! It even managed to match our address book contacts with correlating Facebook accounts pretty accurately and seamlessly, with a few exceptions.

1. Everybody whose name is capitalized in the screenshot is matched up with Facebook—I loathe capital letters, but got over the inconsistency.
2. And the rarely mismatched contacts prove difficult, if not impossible, to completely straighten out.

Quick Contact is what keeps this orgy of personal information from getting too messy when it’s time to get down to business—clicking on a contact’s icon blooms a row of icons, letting you instantly ping them via SMS, phone, email, Facebook or whatever you want.

Android finally approaches a real smartphone when it comes to accounts. Multiple Google accounts and Exchange support come stock. What’s that mean? Well, if you have a hosted Google apps account for work, and a personal one (like all of us at Giz do), you can use the awesome native Gmail application for both, instead of being forced to relegate one of the accounts to the separate, okay-but-not-as-good email app, which is what handles all of your Exchange, IMAP and POP mail. The only bummer is that you still have to toggle between each Google account mailbox in the Gmail app. (Yes, there are two different email applications. A Gmail app, and one for everything else. And they’re completely different.)

There’s one serious limitation to the multiple Google account support: The only Google calendars that sync to the phone are the ones from your main Google account, not your secondary one. Exchange calendars, on the other hand, use the separate-but-equal-as-far-as-I-can-tell “Corporate Calendars” app. We tested Exchange support using mail2web’s free service, and everything seemed to show up correctly, FWIW.

Maps

The biggest change to Google Maps is Navigation, which Wilson Rothman, a Magellan for our time, reviewed extensively here. My assessment is mostly the same after a weekend in a car—it’s pretty good, but occasionally befuddling and hard to get around. A potential point of confusion is that Navigation is both integrated into Maps and also its own distinct app, unlike Latitude.

Also new, sorta, is layers. Basically, every bit of information you wanna see in Maps is now a “layer.” Like if I’ve got Latitude up on the map, and want to see nearby coffee places with satellite view, that’s three layers—Latitude, a search for coffee, and satellite view. It can get a little confusing, especially if you’re going from search to search or Maps to Navigation and then back to Maps—none of it’s conceptually clean or simple, and the interface isn’t always aren’t entirely self-apparent. Also. Pinch. To. Zoom. I want it.

Browse Awesomer, But No (Multi)Touchy

The browser’s faster, smarter and more powerful, and is probably the second best browser now, next to mobile Safari. It mostly cuts through lardass sites like Gizmodo with pep previous versions didn’t, with more responsive scrolling and panning (slowdown does happen though). The browser actually starts you out on each site with a view of the entire page now, which is nicer in theory, but then it makes you want to pinch to zoom in—which, like Maps, is not enabled. You’re stuck with unwieldly buttons and double-taps that never quite line the page up the way they should. If Palm, who’s an insect by comparison, can pinch and zoom with impunity, why can’t Google? Don’t say it’s out of friendship, because Apple doesn’t even like you guys anymore.

Well, It Would Be a Better Camera

More controls! Yay! White balance, focusing mode, color and more. It’s just too bad that on the Droid, the camera’s completely unresponsive garbage. I don’t know if it’s software or hardware, so I’m mentioning in it both here and in our Droid review. Fix please.

Multimedia, or the Lack Thereof

The only way to get your music and videos on the phone is to manually drag and drop the files. There is no syncing, no easy way to get your music library onto your phone. How are normal people supposed to figure this out? Verizon reps actually joked about how putting music on the Droid is sure to make for a lovely Saturday afternoon. What. The. Shit.

And, there’s not even a built-in video player! I have a phone with drop-dead gorgeous screen that I can’t use to play movies without digging up my own video app, even if I could figure out how to get videos onto it. Correction: The video player’s tucked inside of the slow and rather buggy Gallery application, where you also browse photos. And it wouldn’t play videos that worked perfectly on a Zune HD or iPhone. Also, it and the music player are hideous.

Until I can magically and perfectly sync 12 gigs of music and videos over the air, you can’t get away with not having a media sync desktop application. And DoubleTwist, a third-party app that can sync to Android, doesn’t really count, since it’s not bundled with it. (Update: FWIW, if you know where to look, Motorola offers a PC-only Media Link application for its Android phones. But it still doesn’t solve the larger Android problem—Google needs to specify an easy-to-use syncing solution for people who need that.) Make no mistake, for a phone platform that’s supposed to be ready for consumers now, this is a disaster, like a spaceship that’s about to shoot into the atmosphere with a gaping hole in the side.

Goin’ to the Android Market, Buyin’ Some Apps

The Android Market has over 10,000 apps, and its state of the union is still a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s finally got official apps from Facebook, Amazon, Pandora and other critical names people expect on their phone. On the other, and almost universally, these apps aren’t nearly as polished or full-featured as their iPhone counterparts (look no further than the Facebook app, which lacks even messaging in Android). And games? It’s a pretty desolate wasteland, if you’re looking for something beyond NES emulators. The library is getting better, and will undoubtedly keep getting better, but it’s hard not to lament Android’s comparative app ghetto, even as the platform’s poised to explode. (Update: Another point I forgot to mention, and part of the reason Android games are limited in scope, is the storage limit for apps since they can’t be installed on the SD card—for instance, it’s 256MB on the Droid.)

A problem that’s currently plaguing the ecosystem, and is hopefully not a foreboding omen of the fragmentation to come, is that many apps weren’t designed for the higher resolution screens that Android 2.0 supports, so their icons and graphics render crap-ugly on Droid, even in the main menu. (Granted, the phenomenon is partly Google’s fault for restricting access to the 2.0 SDK to all but a select group of privileged developers until basically the day Droid was announced.)

The Market itself, while it got a desperately needed facelift with 1.6, still has a ways to go. There’s no way to update all of your applications simultaneously—you have to click through the update process for each one. And finding apps remains a problem. Browsing for apps exclusively on your phone is a tedious experience, especially when there’s so many apps to wade through. Besides more refined browsing and suggestions, there needs to a way to look through the Market on your desktop. Also, Google’s got this whole cloud thing going, why aren’t my apps tied to my Google account, so if I move to another phone, they’ll all magically repopulate it, like my contacts?

Wherefore Art Thou, Android?

I probably sound like I’m more down on Android 2.0 than I actually am. I like it a lot, truthfully. It’s an amazing conduit for Google’s services. If your online life is lock, stock and barrel Google, there really isn’t a better or more powerful smartphone for getting stuff done in that universe. The Gmail app is a perfect distillation of Gmail for a small screen. The Google Talk app, if you have a bunch of friends using Gtalk, is fantastic. Google, really, is Android’s greatest strength. Excellent multitasking is a close second.

In time, Android very well could be the internet phone, hands down, in terms of raw capabilities. And while it’s not as easy to use or polished or seamless as the iPhone—or to some extent, Palm’s WebOS—it’s way more usable than most other smartphones, and keeps evolving, way faster than anyone else, continually closing that gap. Android 2.0’s potential finally feels as enormous as the iPhone’s, and I get kinda tingly thinking about it. I can’t say Android 2.0 is ready for your mom yet, but it’s definitely ready for anybody reading this.

Google’s apps are simply awesome


Facebook and Exchange integration works pretty well


Second best mobile browser


New look, same feel


Multiple Google account support somewhat limited


Still kinda sluggish at random intervals


No native way to sync music


Crappy music and video player

Remember the xpPhone? The 4.8-inch touchscreen slider has netbook-like specs, some sort of “AMD Super Mobile CPU”, and runs a full-blown copy of Windows XP. They’ve just sent through shots of its phone-function interface…and they actually look pretty good.

The main phone screen (pictured below) has call-centric icons, plus shortcuts to regular Windows apps that can be categorized into icon-based tabs on the left.

The interface can also switch between landscape and portrait views, and there’s a unified look to it all. I’d like to see some extra flair, though…like photos of contacts for incoming and outgoing calls. It’s such an obvious thing, so hopefully that’ll show up by the time the phone arrives. The xpPhone’s maker—China’s In Technology Group aka ITG—also says it will support direct access to the Outlook address book for contact management.

Their English pre-order page remains more like an expression of interest form, as it still doesn’t list price. If you curious, you can choose a 3G module for your carrier’s necessary frequency (AT&T, Vodafone, and Orange are listed).

Jokes about getting a blue screen of death mid-call aside, I’m getting more and more intrigued about the xpPhone. I mean, the thing weighs almost a pound, but just look at those specs below compared to say, the Nokia N900. I’ll fill you in when I hear more on pricing/availability—or any plans for an actual U.S (non-import) release. [ITG]

Configuration
• CPU: AMD Super Mobile CPU
• Memory: 512M/1G
• SSD: 8G/16G/32G/64G
• HDD: 30G/60G/80G/120G
• LCD: 4.8′ TFT Touch-screen LCD 800*480
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP
• Network: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA (HSDPA/HSUPA)
• CDMA/CDMA2000 1X/CDMA1X EVDO,TD-SCDMA，TD-HSDPA
• Wireless: WiFi 802.11b/g,WiMax(optional),Buletooth,Stand-alone GPS
• Camera Specifications:CMOS, 300k/1.3 Million
• Ports: 1 x earphone jack, 1 x microphone jack,Docking Connector (includes VGA output signal ), 1 x USB 2.0, SIM Slot
• Battery: Removable Lithium-ion
• Talk time: about 5 hours,Stand by time: about 5 days
• Real life: about 7 hours(Standard), about 12 hours(Large)
• Talk time: Standby time，Operation time may vary depending different usage.
• Weight: 400g (include battery)