Rogers Announces Two New Smartphones

Rogers has two new smartphones for Canadians; the Blackberry Pearl 9100 and the Acer Liquid E.

The Blackberry Pearl 9100, like other Pearl phones has a compact qwerty keyboard and really looks fantastic!  While most Pearls seem to have been aimed at consumers the 9100 looks all business-like in it’s black suit.

The 9100 specs include a 2.2 inch, 360 x 400 TFT display, a trackpad and a 3 megapixel camera.  The OS seems to be very similar to the BB Bold, but I really don’t know much about Blackberry.

The other new phone is Acer Liquid E, a slate style phone running Android 2.1.  The E also includes a QualComm Snapdragon processor, 3.5” touch screen, and 5 megapixel camera.  We are hoping to get a review unit soon and will let you know more about this phone.

Both phones are $49.99 with a three year agreement and a minimum $45 per month plan, which is pretty decent pricing for new entrants in Canada.

Low Memory Warnings on Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published way back on January 23, 2007 on my personal blog. There have been some changes since then and my personal blog is, well..  more personal focused. Mobile Jaw is where I post mobility related information. It was recently brought to my attention that a number of people that are still looking for this solution. So I decided to raise it from the dead and post it here for everyone to enjoy. So.. Enjoy!

Running low on memory with your Smartphone? Well, you’re not alone.  This is one of the most commons problems people seem to have with their device.  So what’s the cause? Well, for whatever reason, Microsoft didn’t put a limit on the maximum size for IE Mobiles cache files. This means that after a little surfing, you’ll start seeing errors about running low on memory.

There are a couple things you can do to minimize this problem.  The first, is to clear your IE Mobile cache files.  Just launch IE Mobile and the push Menu / Options / Memory – then select Temporary Files and press Clear.  You might also want to clear Cookies and History, but they don’t tend to add up to much at all.

Once it’s cleared, I would suggest moving it out of main system memory and onto the storage card. This will allow it to grow and not interfere with the devices day to day operation. To do this create 3 folders on your storage card: \Storage Card\Temp\Temporary Internet Files and \Storage Card\Temp\Cookies and \Storage Card\Temp\History Once you have these created, open your handy-dandy registry editor and browse toHKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders and modify the key values to match the new folders you’ve just created.

Another thing you can do is to move the storage of email and attachments out of main memory and on to the storage card. This change involves making changes to the registry, so you’ll want to be extra safe when making this change. First thing you need to do is create a couple folders on your storage card. The first folder should be \Storage Card\Mail\ and the second folder should be\Storage Card\Mail\Attachments\ You can call them whatever you want, but I would recommend using the standard names. Once these are created, you’ll need to edit your registry.  Open your favourite Windows Mobile registry editor and browse to HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\MAPI and create 2 new string values.  The first should be called PropertyPath and should have a value matching the mail folder you created.  The second should be called AttachPath and should have a value matchings the attachments folder you created.  So PropertyPath = \Storage Card\Mail and AttachPath = \Storage Card\Mail\Attachments

It’s too bad that Microsoft couldn’t have better management of IE Mobiles temp files.  If they could keep those under control, then you wouldn’t need to do any of these hacks. I hope these tips help make your Windows Mobile experience more lovable.

Exploring the LG Eve Smartphone

I recently got my hands on the LG Eve (GW620R), an Android based smartphone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. While it was hard to do, I put the HTC HD2 down and decided to make the Eve my primary device for a little while. The Eve is not a Nexus One, Desire, or even Hero. But it is a pretty stylish device with plenty of goodness, and considering that this is LG’s first crack at an Android device, it’s also pretty impressive.

For those of you that are not familiar with the Eve, here’s a quick run down of the specs:

• Quad-band phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
• UMTS Dual-band – North American 3G (1900/850 MHz)
• 3.0 inch, 320×480 pixel Resistive screen
• 5 Megapixel Camera
• Powered by Google’s Android 1.5
• FM Radio
• Slide-out QWERTY Keyboard
• Support for microSD expansion cards
• WiFi – 802.11 b/g
• Bluetooth 2.1
• 3.5mm Headphone jack
• Weight – 4.90 oz / 139 g
• Dimensions – 4.29x 2.15 x 0.63 inches / 109 x 54.5 x 15.9 mm
• Accelerometer & GPS

Specs are one thing, performance is another. Overall, in terms of hardware, I’ve been pretty impressed with what the Eve has to offer. The keyboard is responsive and has a great feel to it. Of course, the fifth row of numbers is an excellent plus! It’s a thin device, yet the battery is enough to make it through a day of regular use. A 3.5 inch headphone jack is always nice to see on a smartphone.

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Will the Pre be Palm’s Tonic?

I got thinking about the Palm Pre the other day and started wondering if it will be enough to save Palm.

First let me say that I think the Pre is great and is certainly going to be a successful product on its own but I would think it would have to be a smashing success to keep a whole company afloat. Yes, Palm still has the Treo Pro and Centro but those have not been anywhere near hot enough to get Palm out of its financial hole despite the number of units they have sold.

The argument of whether the Pre is going to be better than the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone or Nokia is not the question here. There is no doubt that many will prefer the Pre and as such will buy one. But the Pre would need to be a runaway commercial success and I don’t think that it will.

Most of the buzz for the Pre has been coming from people that know about mobile phones. They can see that much of what Palm has done has been a very nice evolutionary step for smartphones, especially for social networking smartphones. They understand how different those things are from current offerings and are able to decide whether they will buy one or not. Still, many of these mobile enthusiasts will just take a wait-and-see approach because they already have a smartphone that works just fine.

So, who will buy the Pre? Will it convert the faithful from the iPhone? Will it erode Windows Phone sales? Is the Blackberry is danger of losing some of its momentum? Or will it draw in an all new crowd of feature phone users that are ready to upgrade to the big time?

All of the above platforms are going to have some defectors, but again, Pre needs to be a very big success to keep Palm alive. Let’s take a look at each of the above.

First, iPhone: I highly doubt we are going to see a lot of people dropping their iPhones for the Pre. The iPhone will do most of what the Pre will do and the iPhone has some kind of Voodoo hold on its user’s minds. Most are white-knuckling their iPhones and will not let go for anything. Plus, with 3.0 coming out they have more functionality to play with. I just don’t think there will be a lot of people walking out of the iPhone camp.

Windows Mobile users: I can see Pre actually stealing a lot of the Windows Phone users. WM users tend to be less emotionally tied to the OS than iPhone users; it’s more about functionality. If the Pre can do everything WM can then it is not a hard decision. Unfortunately for the Palm they are really targeting consumers and not business users with the Pre. There are bound to be a lot of WM users that will consider the Pre to be only for social networking despite this not being the case. Plus, WM come in MANY different shapes and sizes while the Pre is only coming out in one form (unless the Palm Eos is real).

Blackberry: Nope. I just don’t see this affecting Blackberry sales much at all. Blackberry phones are like cockroaches (is it possible to mean that in a good way?), they can survive anything!

Feature and regular cellphone users: Sure, there will be a good number that decide to make the move up and get a Pre but I still doubt the numbers are going to be significant enough. Many just want their phone to be phones and don’t want the added expense of a data plan.

The bottom line is that the Pre has a chance of keeping Palm alive but I think it is a pretty slim one. It’s going to be a fantastic phone but I doubt it is going to be enough for Palm’s ultimate survival. If Palm was to follow up the Pre with a number of new form factors they would potentially be able to create enough momentum to make it through but that takes money and erodes the profitability of the Pre itself.

Honestly, I hope I am wrong. I was a Palm user all the way back to the III and used to write a guide to sales software for Palm. I would love to see them survive and bring out more products like the Pre. I just can’t help but think that they will end up being bought out by someone else. That isn’t all bad as long as they can remain intact as a group in order to continue to advance the platform, but only time will tell if that future is autonomous for Palm.

Excuse Me, That’s a Nice Looking Phone

Over the weekend I spent some time at a birthday party for a friend’s son. Through all the noise and commotion I spotted another Dad playing a game on his i-mate device. It’s not uncommon to see parents with their face buried in their mobile device at these events. However, I don’t often see people with i-mate devices. I’m seeing more and more Windows Mobile, but not so much with i-mate. So I figured that this person was either a hardcore i-mate fan, or a Windows Mobile fan who just happens to have settled on the i-mate PDAL device. Either way, I decided to talk with him and see how he liked Windows Mobile and i-mate.

I asked him how he liked that phone because I don’t see many of those around here. I even pulled out my BlackJack II so he could see that I am also a Windows Mobile user and hopefully jump right into a nice geek conversation about mobility. Ha! What really surprised me was that he didn’t really understand that he was running Windows Mobile. In fact, he didn’t even know the name. Now, a lot of people don’t know the Windows Mobile name. But someone running i-mate hardware is typically more aware of the OS than the average user who picked out the device from the carriers line-up. This person went on to tell me how great it is because he can open Excel documents on his device. Which clearly tells me that he didn’t understand that my device, although different in looks, runs the same OS.

What I’ve been trying to figure out since then is if this was a problem with him not understanding that Windows Mobile runs on numerous different devices? Or was it more that my device looked too “BlackBerry-ish” so he took one look and figured I was using a BlackBerry based device and felt the need to tell me why his was so great? Both of these are growing problems. So much so, that Microsoft is now calling Windows Mobile devices “Windows Phones” (the actual OS name will still remain Windows Mobile) in hopes that people will better connect with the OS of the device. I’m not sure that this will help people better understand that their Moto Q is running the same OS as the BlackJack II, or that the HTC Diamond is running the same as the Samsung Omnia. Both HTC and Samsung are doing their part to build iconic devices. Microsoft needs to do their part to take their OS to a new level and educate the consumer about Windows Mobile. What do you say Microsoft? Are your product and marketing team up to the challenge?

Invasion of the Feature Phone!

Have you noticed the number of feature phones increasing lately? More importantly, have you noticed now capable some of these phones are? Its got me wondering about where smartphones and feature phones are going to intersect.

Feature phones include the Sidekick, Samsung Instinct and Impression, LG Xenon and Motorola Hint and they are really quite capable; there is really very little that separates these from smartphone.  What keeps feature phones from being considered "smart" would be third-party developers, customization, tethering and a few other things.  The newest Sidekick does stretch this definition though, as it already has dozens of apps in its app store.

This is exactly my point though.  If you look at using phones more or less out of the box there is very little difference between these two classes.  You can browse, email, listen to music, watch videos, etc.  Believe it or not, there are a LOT of users of iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry that are actually out-of-the-box types that do little or no customization.

One of the biggest differences we see is in the cost of data.  In Canada you can get $10 unlimited mobile browsing (which really doesn’t differentiate between browsing and downloading data) but data costs (for smartphones) are astronomical.  From Bell you can get $10 unlimited internet on a feature phone but on Windows Mobile you pay $35 for 500mb.  Pretty darn nuts!

So, what is going to happen?  Will we see high priced data packages start being used on feature phones or much better flat rates for all phones?  Obviously I would hope that carriers just bite the bullet and make mobile data flat rate and cheap.  Maybe figure out some way to detect tethering or something, but devices should be FULLY usable.

Lets hope that competition makes cheap mobile data a reality.

HTC Returns to the Messenger Market with the Maple Smartphone

It’s been a long time since HTC had a device in the messenger space. The Excalibur, HTC’s first messenger style device, was a smash hit with T-Mobile users under the name of Dash. This device was also sold across many other carriers and under many other names, including HTC’s brand as the s620. Following the Excalibur, HTC released the Cavalier. This device added 3G, but never managed to get any traction and didn’t last very long. At this point, HTC turned their focus to other devices and left the messenger market to it’s own devices and companies like Samsung and Moto came in and took over with their BlackJack and Q series of devices.

If the pictures posted by Cnet Germany (via WM Experts) are any indication, all that is about to change. The new HTC Maple is the first messenger device from HTC in a while and it sure looks nice. There is no official comment from my sources at HTC and as such, there is no official specs to be had. But if we look at what HTC has been doing and what this image shows us, we can guess at what features this might have. HTC’s most recent WinMo Standard device, the Rose, has a 528Mhz processor with 256MB for RAM and ROM and 3G in a very small package. I would be surprised if these specs don’t make it to the Maple. WiFi is also a staple on most, if not all HTC devices, so expect to see WiFi. Further, you can clearly see the trackball on the front of the Maple. This is a welcome change from the horrible JOGGR touch panel that the original Excalibur and Cavalier sported. The screen appears to be 320×240 and shows the sliding panel home screen from WinMo 6.1. Don’t take this as an indication that there won’t be WinMo 6.5 on the device. We haven’t seen any screen shots of 6.5 on a standard (non-touch) device. So it’s unclear what the user can expect to see with 6.5. WinMo 6.5 will mainly focus on finger usability, so it’s possible that there is no new user experience changes to standard devices.

GPS should also be expected. Although, to be honest, you can never tell these days. Some devices where you expect to see it, it’s doesn’t get added. It sure would be nice to see this with GPS, as I use it so much these days. With any luck, we’ll see a spring launch and hopefully it will be here in North America.

I’ve got my fingers crossed – can’t wait to try the new HTC Maple.

The New HP iPAQ Voice Messenger Smartphone – Take 2

Jack Cook posted about a new voice messenger device from HP earlier today. What’s interesting to me, is that HP might have learned from their past mistakes on this device. The original Voice Messenger device from HP was a horrible unit with poor screen, low memory, and no real appeal or wow factor to speak of. To be fair, the voice software that came on the device was pretty cool, but aside from that, there was nothing that made anyone want to own one of these.

I rode HP hard about this device from day one, and I’m excited to see that they listened to what the community had to say and came back with what appears to be a pretty sweet device.

The new Voice Messenger comes with a sure-type like 20-keypad device, integrated GPS, WiFi, 3G, Quad-Band, Bluetooth 2.0, 128MB SDRAM / 256MB Flash ROM, a 1260 mAh battery, and a 3.1 megapixel camera. Best of all, it runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard edition. It’s great to see that some companies still see the value in having a non-touch screen device.

Visit HP’s web site to learn more about the new Voice Messenger Smartphone. I haven’t seen any information on price or availability yet, but I would expect this to be shipping in the next month or so. I think I’m going to need to get my hands on one of these for review.

Free Halloween Ringtones From Microsoft

It’s getting close to Halloween and why decorate just your house when you can outfit your smartphone as well. Microsoft has released a collection of Halloween themed ringtones and wallpapers. I didn’t care to much for the wallpapers, but the ringtones are actually pretty good. Check them out for yourself – they’re all free to download (with registration). There’s also a large number of non-Halloween related sounds and images. So if you’re simply bored with what you have, it’s a worth while place to visit.

New HTC s740 Smartphone is Nice, But…

Earlier this week, HTC announced a new Smartphone called the s740. This new device is a non-touch screen version of the Diamond-like Touch Pro. Unlike most other devices these days, the s740 came as a complete surprise to many. The s740 sports a 528MHz processor from Qualcomm (could this be the fastest Smartphone we’ve seen to-date?), 256MB of ROM, 256 MB of RAM, Quad band GPRS, HSDPA/WCDMA , GPS, WiFi, and a 3.2 megapixel camera! Overall, the phone looks very nice with a standard 12 key layout on the face of the phone and a slide out QWERTY. (Real world picture from NewMobile’s quick hands on impression and pictures taken at the IFA in Berlin. Product specifications are taken directly from the HTC web site.)

However, if you’ve been using HTC Smartphones over the last couple years, the general design of this phone should be pretty familiar for you. It’s the exact design as the s710/720 Smartphones. Of course, this version has much better specifications and has some serious style. But underneath the same problems that lead me to hang-up on the s710 are still present in this new device. The whole “rotate-slide-wait” procedure every time you want to use the keyboard can get a little annoying – especially for those of us that do a lot of email from our devices. The keyboard design and layout leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion. I never did get use to the off center screen.

Instead of wasting their time with this device, I think HTC would have been much better off creating 2 other Diamond like devices. The first is a simple phone with the regular 12 key number pad. Just take this device, slice off the keyboard part and offer a super thin Smartphone. Heck, I would buy one of these just to drool at the thinness of the device! The other device would be more like the Excalibur / Cavalier devices that we saw years ago from HTC. Just rotate the screen 90 degrees and add a full BlackJack-like keyboard on the front. No silly sliders and no rotating.

Maybe I’m wrong, but you can’t argue with the increase in people using messenger style devices. Samsung, Motorola, and even RIM, all have devices that allow quick and easy access to the keyboard. I can’t imagine that all these companies are making these devices if there wasn’t a market for them. I want to see HTC return to the messenger field and make a device that I would be proud to carry.

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