:: Deepquest ::

After more than 2 years of loyal service of my 2G iphone, was about time to get a new mobile. Of course 3Gs was the one I looked at first being an old school Apple user. First Apple product used was more than 25 years. I assumed I can call myself an advanced Apple user.

If you want a “smart” device you have 4 choices: Iphone, Windows mobiles (smart), Blackberry and Android. Most of the phones on the market have very similar features: quad-band, 3G, GPS, smart media, camera. Major difference are based on graphic interface and the software to link to your computer.

BlackBerry

I love to talk with BB users to know what are the advantages of their BB. I always hear BB messaging, that allow to send receive text messages, voice notes or pictures. Of course the protocol is obscure and proprietary: BB speak to BB only. Funniest part is when a BB user want to speak to another BB user, they need a pin: a random ID based on numbers and letters. Come one guys in 2010 your ID something like 2b4dh3u! Can’t you get a real personal username? The second so called great feature is the push mail: you receive your mail as soon it arrives. That’s a great feature, but most smart mobiles have that now (Gmail works great on push mail). The biggest concern raised by security experts is the Blackberry network: Datacenter based in Canada, and core system locked down. Few network outages blackout took several million users disconnected. I won’t even talk about the application available, or even the size of the screen (1/2 of the iphone). Check the Android or Iphone and compare the number of apps installed compare to Blackberry.

Iphone

Iphone is a great platform, I have been one those early buyer of iphone. I was a revolution: great interface, millions of apps, stable operating systems. Most of the people who had crashed where on jailbreak iphones. You can’t complain about that if you make some custom changes to your car don’t expect to still have the warranty. The major problems are the camera and missing flash. The camera quality is very poor even some 3rd party softwares can improve the quality. Adobe Flash is also a missing part, I assume that the main reason is that Flash is not available if that it needs frequent updates and on iphone. Updates on iphone are provided by Apple only. The other good thing is that it runs on Unix, so I can play with it in command line.

So I checked out the Iphone 3GS in several shops in Bangkok. There is only one official telco selling Iphone with plans but you need to have a credit card from a defined Thai bank. I’m not going to change bank just to have a phone. There are  2 kind of 3GS available  on the grey market: The ones from Hong Kong and the ones from US. Both are jailbreaked but the ones from Hong Kong cannot be rebooted otherwise it will be locked again, the ones from US can be rebooted but a bit expensive. So wait a minute a 700$ device is going to give me headaches because of  the contracts between Apple and the Telco? The updates of the devices are going to be difficult and will have to wait that some 3rd party hacker fix a way to by pass Apple’s restrictions to upgrade my phone??? No way!

So I looked at the other solutions Android the mobile Operating System from Google. I just looked at the very sexy spec:

• 5 meg camera with flash, and autofocus as close as 6 cm. Can be used for movies or picture.
• Quad band, with UMTS/HSPDA/HSUDA and wifi (b/g).
• Bigger screen than any phone: 3.7 inch.
• 1 Ghz processor
• Memory cards can be expanded up to 32 go. No need to pay extra crazy price to triple the capacity of you phone.
• The phone is NOT locked to any provider and easy to upgrade.

The second thing I was looking at are the apps and how easy it to sync the mobile. The apps there a 1000’s of them. I must admit that Apple appstore is great but so many crappy app: how many “farting” apps? I even found one of the greatest exotic language translator: Thai to english with OCR. You take a pict of Thai text it will OCR the pict and translate it.

Google provide for free what me.com provide for 100$ per year and very unlikely to have to outages like Me.com. Apple support forum have a lot of complains from customers. I was able to sync my address book in few seconds:

• Connect the Nexus one to your mac
• Open the address book, select all cards and choose export. Save it on the mounted memory card.
• On the Nexy one, open you address book select import et voila!

For the pictures and music just drag and drop them on the mounted device. You can use any of you mp3 as ringtone. No need to buy them like on Iphone if you already own the mp3. You want buy mp3? Simply use the amazon mp3 store.

The most impressive feeling I had was about the speed, switching from app to another one. Flawless. The 5 meg is insanely great and fast.

Another cool feature is the speech recognition: just talk to your phone to call, write sms or text notes. It’s fast and accurate even for non native english speakers.

After 48h with the Nexus One, no crash, great  Graphical interface, easy updates and sync. The google phone made me forget the 2 years of Iphone usage just in 48h. Google didn’t make much noise about the Nexus one, but it’s already sold out in US. And I think that google really don’t care to see there phone in the hand of celebrities to promote because this one just works out of the box.