Brian's Blog

Let me preface this by saying that this is the first time with the Palm Pre, I didn’t have the chance to use one of the originals, and my main phone is an iPhone 3GS. I also tried to keep my iPhone in my pocket and use the two Palm phones exclusively during the time that I had them. That said, here is my review.

The Palm Pre Plus is the same old Pre with a few upgrades. They got rid of the home button, but it still has that cheese cutting edge on it, they changed the color of the keyboard. The Pixi on the other hand is a non-slider unit that feels a little bit more sturdy, and the Pre has a cheap plastic cover on the MicroUSB door that has almost come off a few times, but the Pixi has a small flap that feels a lot sturdier and stays in place a lot better. With the inclusion of the word Plus on the phones, Palm has upped the storage in the Pre to 16GB and in the Verizon version they doubled the RAM, the Pixi doesn’t change except they included WiFi.

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When I had the 1st iPhone, as soon as the jailbreaking software became available I decided to take the plunge and jailbreak the phone, not only for the added features, but for making the phone completely my own. During my time with the iPhone 3G, I had no need to jailbreak as most of the apps and usability of the jailbreak became irrelevant, as I wasn’t all that excited about custom themes or anything else of the sort.

A few days ago I noticed that the now pulled Google voice apps I had been using stopped working, so I once again decided to take the plunge and perform a jailbreak using the blackra1n version. I hooked up my iPhone 3GS to iTunes and performed a full sync including backup, then opened the blackra1n app and clicked on the make it ra1n button, and a minute or so later I had a jailbroken iPhone. I then proceeded to install the Cydia and Rock installer apps, and then installed the GV Mobile app, which worked great.

I hate to say that the only reason I jailbroke was for the one app, but that is the only reason, and now by looking around the other app stores, I have been reminded why I jailbroke in the first place. I have my calendar on my lock screen, the temp in the status bar and you can add a lot of left out functionality.

So if you are looking to add features and functionality to your iPhone, go ahead and jailbreak, it’s gotten so easy to do, and there are virtually no risks.

Verizon and AT&T seem to be in a never ending battle over who has the better network. Verizon however has begun taking low blows at AT&T in what I believe is iPhone envy, but neverless, they claim that every new smartphone they come out with is the next iPhone killer.

What the carriers don’t realize is that most people choose their carrier because they have the phone they want, not because of the network. If someone really wants an iPhone, they will switch to AT&T because they have the phone they want

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The Motorola Droid is official, and I’ve had a week to get to know the device. Being an avid iPhone user, I set up this phone and used it exclusively for the week. Here’s the breakdown:

The Hardware

The phone is made of two pieces, the display and the keyboard, it has a 3.7 inch capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 480×854. It has an ARM Cortex A8 CPU (a 600MHz OMAP3430 chip down-clocked to 550MHz), 256MB of RAM, 512MB of ROM and comes with a 16GB microSD card. The device is speedy, and is similar in specs to the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS, but I was somewhat surprised that some of the functions like pulling down the notification shade was a little too sluggish for my tastes.

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The Motorola Droid comes out on the Verizon network tomorrow, I’ve had one for almost a week now, and will be posting my full review of the phone soon.

Windows Mobile 6.5 has finally come out, and with the HTC Imagio, they make it somewhat useable thanks to Microsoft giving the carriers and handset manufaturers a little give and take when it comes to using the mobile OS.

The Lowdown

The Imagio is a touchscreen Windows Mobile 6.5 handset with a 3.6 inch WVGA screen, Wi-Fi, GPS, a 5-megapixel camera, 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD storage expansion (with no included card), it is also the first smartphone capable of V CAST Mobile TV, and it has a little kickstand.

It costs $200 on contract with Verizon after a $100 rebate.
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The folks over at Lifehacker have published a great guide for smartphone users on how to save your battery. The gist of it is:

• Follow the laptop battery rules
• Keep it cool and out of your pocket
• Switch off 3G when unnecessary
• Swith off any unneeded service
• Be frugal with background apps and notifications
• Use a black or dark theme
• Fiddle with screen time-outs and brightness
• Use mobile site versions

I recommend reading the full article over at Lifehacker for more details and information.

An Exhaustive Guide to Saving Your Smartphone Battery [Lifehacker]

The Blackberry Tour is a fairly decent offering in the Blackberry line of phones. I am a heavy iPhone user, so I was a bit worried about using this phone with the hardware keyboard and scroll wheel interface. Let me say that the keyboard was very difficult to use for me because the keys are very small and hard to press without making a lot of mistakes, and making a phone call without any contacts to choose from took some effort.

Let me go into more detail about why I didn’t have any contacts to choose from, it seems that Blackberry software isn’t compatible with the Mac (They did finally release version 1.0, but I didn’t get a chance to use it), which I exclusively use, and without purchasing any 3rd party software, I was out of luck, so dialing a number was very difficult while in the car and moving.

I do have to say that the blackberry software was snappy, and somewhat easy to use, however I do think that the home screen needs to be a little more organized, I couldn’t access unread sms messages off the home screen without going into the menu and then into the sms app, and it was not easy to move stuff around.

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I recently had a chance to use the Verizon MiFi and give it a good test drive. Upon first looking at the device, it’s pretty sleek and interesting. It only has one button on it and one light indicating a wi-fi connection. The wireless is only b/g and you can access the web based UI to manage the hotspot and security settings as well. The micro USB port that is used to charge the device via the wall charger, but also allows you to tether the device to your computer and that disables the wi-fi.

This is a great little device and it works as advertised, so I took it on a little vacation with me.

I was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and got fairly good connection speeds, here are a few results of a speed test done on my laptop and iPhone

1. 2.18 Mb/s Down/0.53 Mb/s up
2. 1.98 Mb/s Down/0.39 Mb/s up
3. 0.55 Mb/s Down/0.20 Mb/s up
4. 63.3 kB/s Down/22.5 kB/s up
5. 142.0 kB/s Down/26.5 kB/s up

Will this device replace your internet at home? I don’t think so, because it does have limited range, and you will get a faster connection with your cable or DSL provider, and it’s not cheap. Verizon charges $100 for the device with a 2 year contract and after a $50 rebate, and the data plan is $60 for an unlimited plan with a 5GB/month cap.

I would however recommend this device for small businesses who send their people to conferences or trade shows, and even for other groups of people who travel together and can split the cost. If I had the extra money, this would be the only mobile broadband device I would choose because of it’s easy use and no hassle set up.

My final word: This is definitely the best mobile broadband device, and if you are in the market for one, this is the one to get.

The Palm Pre launched on Saturday, here is a roundup of all the pre news.

Engadget’s Pre Coverage is here.

Gizmodo’s Pre Coverage is here.

Palm’s New Pre Takes On iPhone – Walt Mossberg’s review

cnet’s Coverage is here.

That’s a lot to go through, so read up. I won’t have a chance to review one until they bring the phone to Verizon or AT&T, or I get lucky and get a review unit, so until then it’s up to you, Leo Laporte liked the phone, so that goes far.