Monthly Archives: December 2010

Comment of the day goes to this tweet from Steve Litchfield- “So the Nexus S is $529 SIM-free in the USA and £549 SIM-free here in the UK? That’s *scandalous* “

I started writing PDA-247 almost 9 years ago when the most advanced mobile devices were Sony Clies. Only geeks and people who didn’t leave the house often (at least that’s how many people viewed us) owned these mythical mobile devices and the industry was niche in every sense of the word.

The smartphone has gradually entered the consciousness of more people than ever before over the past three years, but this year everything changed. Take a look around you- more people than you could have imagined in those Clie days now own sophisticated mobile devices, and most importantly they actually use them for more than just calling and testing.

Before I start my prolonged look back at 2010, I need to thank some people who make this site what it is. Jon, Chris, Wardy and the rest of the gang at Clove have been hugely supportive over the past few years and even more so in 2010. They have supplied almost every review device we have covered on 247 and on top of that continue to advertise. On the subject of advertising I also have to thank Mingo and both Eva’s from PDair who have supported the site for a few years now and our longest term advertiser, Brando, who has been crucial in keeping the site on the air for such a long time. Todd from Smart Box Design is not just an advertiser, but one of the nicest people I have dealt with in this industry and the representatives from Mastersoft and Piel Frama have also helped tremendously alongside an old friend Jason Goldman.

It’s not just about finding the money to keep the site going, but the interactions that occur daily. So many of you are happy to have your say every day and without your true and honest views it just wouldn’t be the same site. Gavin, Trevor, Peter, Philippa, Joel, James, Jah, vboelema, Simon, Murray, Bob and so many more are more than happy to discuss, debate and occasionally argue which makes it all the more fun. I need to also thank Gavin and Trevor for their help writing reviews and content this year- it really made a difference. I admit that I was close to giving the site up in the middle of the year, but have now got my mojo back and am confident that it will get much bigger over the next few months thanks to recent developments, more on that in the next few weeks.

OK, let’s get back to the world of mobile in 2010. At the start of the year I was using a BlackBerry Bold 9700 and an iPhone 3G. Since then I have progressed through an iPhone 3GS and ultimately to the iPhone 4. That may seem like a lot of changes, but it is much fewer than in previous years. I, and I am sure many of you, have reached a point where the modern smartphone does not have significant weaknesses and thus the need to constantly upgrade has diminished. The Mac Mini made an appearance half-way through the year for me and I am sure that my Windows days are well and truly over, at least for the next few years. The iPad appeared twice and despite selling the first one within a month, the second one has made me wonder why I sold the first one.

Some see 2010 as the year of the tablet, but I suspect that 2011 is more likely to show the world where this form will be heading. The reality is that 2010 was the year of the iPad with some other tablets, such as the Galaxy Tab, taking small portions of attention away from Apple’s most innovative product to date without ever getting close to the limelight. PDA-247, like most of the other smartphone sites, had to jump in and cover this form factor that had failed so badly first time around. Apple was responsible for this because iOS is so deeply embedded on both the iPhone and iPad and in software terms you end up talking about both when either is written about.

On the smartphone side there have been considerable advancements, but not to the level that we saw when the iPhone was first introduced. The past twelve months have consolidated the industry and work has been put in to improving smartphones rather than reinventing the wheel. It could be argued that RIM and Nokia needed more reinvention and that is why they are on the verge of a deep dive in market share.

My first review of the year was the Motorola Milestone which was a powerhouse at the time and only suffered from a lackluster keyboard. It went on to huge success in the States and was the first indicator that Motorola was starting to drag itself out of the RAZR period that it clung to for far too long. Next up was the Acer neoTouch P300 which continued Acer’s long run of releasing smartphones that inhabited the middle ground without daring to go higher. The line that sticks in my mind is this one- “Acer has produced a smartphone in the P300 which is so similar to so many other Windows Mobile smartphones that it is hard to understand why it made the investment to produce it.”

And then came the HTC Legend which I summed up as follows- “Without doubt this handset is not just a pretty face- it is a powerhouse of a smartphone wrapped up in a gorgeous exterior and as such I have to give it a top recommendation. Simply superb!” It truly showed that HTC was capable of producing a smartphone that could rival the iPhone 3GS for performance and looks. I also got my hands on the HTC Desire in April and this proved that HTC was well in the Android game. It was almost faultless apart from a lackluster screen that suffered in direct sunlight. The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 followed and was a very good smartphone, but still didn’t quite have the design or muscle to compete with the aforementioned HTC phones.

Trevor saw the potential of the iPad way before I did and wrote a feature about his first month with what would turn out to be a huge seller for Apple. The fact that we all knew that Windows Mobile was on its last legs did not stop Sony Ericsson producing the Aspen which easily wins my sh*t smartphone of the year award. This line sums it up- “I don’t think I have reviewed a phone as dated and badly designed as this one in a long, long time.”

One of the longest reviews I have ever written was for the Samsung Wave. I didn’t expect much from the phone or from Bada, but was overwhelmed by the good bits. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, a fully fledged smartphone, but it is hard to ignore the quality of the hardware or the software. This explains why Samsung expects to have sold 5 million of them by the end of the year. Samsung managed to better the Wave with the Galaxy S which is to this day one of the very best Android smartphones you can buy. The screen, camera, voice quality and so many other features on the Galaxy S are exemplary and showed to me that Samsung is now a major force in the smartphone world.

A quick review of the Nokia 7230 in June showed that you do not have to spend hundreds of pounds to have a phone capable of multiple tasks and decent voice quality, but this was overshadowed by my iPhone 4 review which did extremely well and showed me that a smartphone can included multiple high quality features that are incredibly easy to use. I still use the phone daily and will do so until someone produces a phone that knocks it off its lofty perch.

The HTC Wildfire followed and proved that budget smartphones can work well, but it did little to capture my imagination. The Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro did better and showed an unusual drive of imagination from a manufacturer that has historically followed the rest. The BlackBerry Pearl 3G also showed imagination from a manufacturer not know for this trait. It is still the most impressive mini smartphone I have used to date.

The Motorola Milestone XT720 did well, but the industrial design and odd quirk meant that it didn’t have enough to lift itself above an ever growing crowd of Android phone that were starting to cause some fragmentation in the market. I also pitted the iPhone 4 against the Galaxy S and HTC Desire in August with the Galaxy and iPhone equal in almost every respect. They still remain at the very top of my smartphone list and it is extremely difficult to decide which is best.

The BlackBerry Curve 3G showed that RIM was still capable of producing good smartphones at cheap prices, but that it had also failed to move on significantly in the past two years in terms of materials and design. The quite bizarre Motorola FLIPOUT had many strong points that made me wonder how so much could be crammed into such a small place, but ultimately it fails to offer everything the serious smartphone user needs.

Richard wrote a review of the new Amazon Kindle and rightly scored it very high. I am still wondering if I need one of these to this day. The first Android tablet that I got to use was a complete disaster and maybe I should have known better because it was being sold by a clothing retailer, Next. The review got picked up by many other sites and even appeared in The Guardian which I am sure Next loved…

The Orange San Francisco lifted my spirits and proved that budget + Android does not always = rubbish. It is an astonishingly good smartphone for the money and I still presume that Orange loses money on every one it sells. The BlackBerry Torch heralded the arrival of BlackBerry OS 6 and was somewhat disappointing. No matter how much I tried to like it, the OS and the hardware just didn’t blend together as well as I had hoped they would.

The Huawei S7 Android tablet also proved that budget Android gear could offer the user some decent specs and a decent experience at a lower price point, but the HTC Android Z then took the argument the other way and showed that sometimes you get what you pay for. The BlackBerry Bold 9780 is by far the best BlackBerry phone ever built, but does it have enough to challenge the big boys in the smartphone market. Arguably it sticks to a near perfect formula born on the Bold 9700, but did highlight that OS 6 is a worthy operating system in the right hardware.

The Nokia N8 proved to me that Symbian really is way behind the game in comparison to iOS, Android and Windows Phone and despite excellent hardware and a great camera, it was a pain in the backside to use. The LG Optimus 7 was not a pain to use and showed me that Windows Phone has huge potential in the future. Whether it can be brought up to a level to beat the rest remains to be seen, but it is highly impressive already with some rough edges that need fixing. The HTC Desire HD is on a par with the Galaxy S and one of the best phones I got my hands on all year. Only the limited battery life let it down and had that been rectified it could have been my phone of the year. My last review of the year was the Motorola Defy which will conclude tomorrow. It may not have all of the high-end features of a phone designed to take on the world, but is the first of what promises to be a long list of tough smartphones that can cope with anything we throw at them.

So, that was my year as far as reviewing smartphones went. From the Motorola Milestone in January to the Motorola Defy in December only a few of the smartphones stood out from the clever crowd. I would pick the iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S and HTC Desire HD as my phones of the year with the choice for top spot still spinning around in my head. There can be no winner because they are all so different, but the really good news is that all of these phones, with a few exceptions, are much better than the selection available in 2009. The overall quality of smartphones now is at a level never seen before and we are quickly heading to a point where they will all be kept by users for two years at a time with no need to upgrade, at which point the manufacturers have to try even harder to get our money. This can only be good news for you and I.

2010 has been a very good year for the smartphone industry, the best by far, but one in which there has been a power shift that few could have expected. The mobile networks are building capacity as quick as they can to keep up with the insatiable demand for mobile data, the kind of demand that sees a 17 year-old use more mobile data on Twitter and Facebook in a day than a businessman did in a month only a couple of years ago. Apple has managed to force its rigid pricing structure onto the networks and even attempted to wrestle more power away from the networks by way of embedded SIM cards. That particular idea failed, but who is to say it won’t happen in the next few years if Apple manages to create yet more devices that the networks simply have to supply to compete? I still don’t believe this will happen because, if anything, I can see the money having to be distributed more evenly in the future. Despite the mobile networks raking in huge profits, some of them anyway, the pressures on cash flow are growing all of the time. With more demand for data and less revenue in the sell through of handsets, plus a slight trend towards consumers buying direct from Apple and other resellers, they are already starting to ask for extra revenues from the mobile phone manufactures. HTC, Apple, Nokia and the rest reap the dividends of the hardware they sell without having to worry about the onward costs of usage. I am not for one minute blaming the manufacturers for causing this problem because it is great for us as consumers, but there will come a time when the manufacturers have to fight harder to take a bigger slice of the pie. How they will do that remains to be seen, but they will have to get together to do so, and this is from a collection of companies who all spent multiple billions to buy the rights to 3G bands because they wouldn’t talk to each other.

We all know that Google and Android will dominate the numbers game for the next year or so, but likely not the profits. Apple will remain hugely profitable and there seems to be little stopping the juggernaut of success that will see each piece of the puzzle come together resulting in household after household owning multiple Apple products that all talk to each other.

Many analysts, who are often wrong, are predicting doom for RIM and I can see why, but it is far too early to make such predictions. The smartphone industry moves at a frantic pace, but the cycles are slow and major shifts only occur every 3 years or so. In an industry dominated by RIM, Apple, Google, Microsoft, HTC, Samsung and Nokia it is easy to see that the potential directions it can flow are varied to say the least. Whatever is happening now is unlikely to be happening this time next year and change is the only guarantee.

I don’t know what will happen over the next year and won’t pretend to, unlike 99% of analysts, but do not expect massive changes. There will more than likely be a smaller iPad, an improved iPhone (5) and the usual gradual improvements from HTC and Samsung on the Android platform. I suspect that Nokia will jump on the Android bandwagon purely because it has nowhere else to go, but don’t discount Nokia being a major player in the Windows Phone platform; Microsoft and Nokia need each other. RIM will still be strong over the next year and I expect a major development around June that will give it a lift, but as per usual I have to keep some thoughts on what could happen in the meantime that may make the improvements seem uninspiring.

I do believe, however, that Samsung will gain in market share quickly on multiple fronts. From what I have seen so far, the company has proved itself selective when making hardware and tends to have a greater understanding of what a mobile phone / smartphone should be than most of the competition.

One final point, I did a straw pole among 15 people I know and found that 12 own smartphones: 5 iPhones, 4 HTC’s and 3 Samsungs. I fully expect this number to be 14 or 15 next year and it highlights how quickly the mobile industry has adopted the smartphone. 2 years ago that number would have been 2 or 3 at most.

So, thanks for all of the help and support this year and here’s to an even better year in 2011. What do you expect to happen next year and what was your mobile highlight of the past year?

PDA-247’s 2010-

Smartphone of the year

1st (joint) IPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S
3rd HTC Desire HD

Tablet of the year

1st Apple iPad
2nd Samsung Galaxy Tab
3rd Huawei S7

Mobile game of the year

1st Angry Birds (iOS, Android, webOS, Symbian)
2nd WordPop! (iOS, Windows Mobile, Palm OS)
3rd Infinity Blade (iOS)

Mobile app of the year

1st Awesome Note (iOS)
2nd Pocket Money (iOS)
3rd Week Calendar (iOS)

Manufacturer of the year

1st (joint) Samsung and Apple
3rd HTC

Innovation of the year

1st Apple iPad
2nd 3 MiFi
3rd Gorilla Glass

Best value product of the year

1st Orange San Francisco
2nd BlackBerry Curve 8520
3rd Palm Pixi

Worst product of the year

1st Next 10” Tablet
2nd Sony Ericsson Aspen
3rd Nokia N8