It’s got a 4.3-inch 854×480 screen, 1GHz OMAP processor, 512MB RAM, 24GB storage, 8-mega-pixel stills, 720p HD video, DLNA w/HDMI Micro out, three mics for noise cancellation and wireless N with 3G hot spot capability. It’s powerful, and it’s got a good design, but there’s more to the story.

I don’t like the fact that Motorola has to push their blur bits out, and it’s running a fairly outdated Android 2.1. It does come packed with 7 home screens and they are mostly filled with stuff you don’t need and won’t use, so you waste time removing all of it and getting it the way you want it. It has it’s own built in contact system for Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, MySpace and more, and this is to help you update across all networks, but it kind of clashes with the apps for those services, and I’ve gotten to the point where all I want is Android and none of the other junk that the carriers and manufacturers put on the phone, let me decide how I want to customize it, don’t make me use your crap.

The phone itself is great, it’s display is nice, but again it was nearly impossible to see outside, and it’s a bigger phone than most. With the lack of a hardware keyboard, I was surprised how I could use the software one with no issues, and typing was virtually the same as on iOS and an iPhone 4.

The camera was less than impressive to me, and it seemed to produce a lot of blurry photos, and it took forever for the camera application to launch, and by the time it did, I lost the shot.

I also noticed that the touchscreen even though it was nice, it sometimes took two taps to open an app, and even then it was hit or miss, This phone should have shipped with Android 2.2 Froyo, but even if you try to install it yourself, your phone will no longer work until you downgrade back to the stock version thanks to a chip that Motorola added that makes sure you only use official versions of the software.

I was also excited to try the mobile hotspot app, but was instantly annoyed, it would constantly drop the connection, and was not very reliable at all, I would have to constantly turn it back on and reconnect.

The battery life on the phone was decent, but I sometimes struggled to get through a full day, and at times with normal usage, it would be dead by 3pm and I would have to charge it.

In my opinion, I think the people who make the Android phones need to keep it simple and just put Android on there and let the users decide how they want to customize it. Leave it alone, I don’t need your widgets or apps, if I want them I will install them, I don’t have a problem with you customizing the market with a page for the carrier or manufaturer which Verizon does, and that’s fine, it gives me the choice to install your apps if I want to.

Again for me, the biggest hiccup this phone had was being on Verizon, I had horrible service, and would drop 1 out of 3 calls, I would also have to constantly refresh internet enabled apps because the data service would drop, and the speeds of Verizon were horrendous.

In the end, this is a good phone but I would say if you like to root or keep your phone manually updated don’t buy it because of the chip that Motorola put in it because you have to use their approved software, if you like to customize and keep your phones updated, then go with the HTC Droid. If you are a regular person then I would say you would love this phone and you will be happy with it.

Here’s the cost comparison:

I would say if you are able to switch, get an iPhone 4, it’s display is better, the camera is better and it’s cheaper in the long run, but if you are staying with Verizon then the Droid X is a smart buy, but they really need to work on their pricing plans, as they are fairly expensive.

Illustration Nikki Cook

I had time to look at the Kin One and Two over the past couple weeks, and I have to say, Microsoft really knows how to screw up a phone. It’s not quite a smartphone, but it’s also a little more than a regular phone, as it ties into the major social networks, has no app store, and they still charge you for a smartphone plan.

That being said, I got used to not being able to do anything but look at and update my status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Windows Live, but that’s about all you can do, besides email.

Both phones feature hardware keyboards, and the One is small and squat, while the Two is a more standard size, both keyboards were difficult to type on, but were usable none the less.

The Kins also feature something that I can’t believe Microsoft has done is that it’s a new OS for them. Kin’s are labeled as a Windows Phone, but have nothing in common with Windows Phone 7, or Windows Mobile, it’s a totally new OS design. It’s got a bunch of panels that include all your updates and feeds and contacts, it’s kind of hard to explain, so I’ll show you in this short video.

The interface is nice, but all in all the phone is very flawed, it was very slow, again, I had no Verizon signal at my house, and I’m getting to the good part now, it’s an expensive phone to own (Now that Microsoft has killed it, I don’t know if you can buy one from Verizon) here is the breakdown of the Kin vs. the Palm Pre Plus a true smartphone.

Palm Pre Plus
Price: $30
Baseline voice with texting: $60
Unlimited Data: $30
Total cost of ownership: $2190

Kin One
Price $50
Baseline Voice with texting: $60
Unlimited Data: $30
Total Cost of Ownership: $2210 with a Zune Pass, $2570

I think calling this phone a smartphone is not the thing that worked for it, as it’s not a true smartphone, but since Microsoft decided to kill it off and have the Windows 7 phone team work on it, I think with the merger the interface and the new features could work for the new Windows phone 7. We’ll see how it all works out in the end, but my final word is to avoid these phones.

The Droid Incredible has been out for less than a week now and it’s by far the best Android phone on the market. The hardware is fast and HTC has upped the internal storage to 8 gigs, but no included microSD card, which for most people will make them go and buy one because the Android OS doesn’t recognize the internal storage for some apps and an external card is needed.

Moving on, HTC has polished up the interface a little with Android and Sense UI, and running apps was fast, as well as doing things, the whole experience on this phone was good, but being a heavy smartphone user, I had to charge the battery twice a day, the battery life was ok for normal use, but heavy users would want an extra battery.

The display is an 800×400 AMOLED which is the same as the Nexus One, and it does have some color issues for all but the hardcore geeks, and using the phone outside in the sun was almost impossible because I could barely see the screen unless I went into some shade.

Also to note, this phone doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, but the software keyboard was easily usable, but I found that even though the keys were virtually the same size as the iPhone’s, it was hard to use two thumbs as it wasn’t as responsive as the iPhones, but it is what it is unless you shell out money for an app that offers a better one.

The camera is an 8 megapixel dual lcd flash camera and it’s decent enough although the photos weren’t the best, they were ok for use.

The sound quality was great, and the speakerphone and speaker could be heard in a moving car, it was also easy to hear people in the earpiece, except that again with this phone, Verizon was the worst thing about it, I was constantly dropping calls, people were cutting in and out, and the data service was itermittant at best, leaving google maps and other services like @foursquare and @gowalla impossible to use because I was unable to connect. I had at all times one or two bars of signal until I went on a little trip and was on the interstate in the middle of the state, then I finally had a full signal.

The OS itself is Android 2.1 and the sense UI which makes the usability a lot nicer and the touch was responsive and easy to use. I’ve written a lot about Android in the past so I won’t go into to much detail about it, but this phone does offer some interesting features. It gives you seven homescreens with the option to save them as a scene, so you can customize your homescreens for several different usage scenarios and change between them very easily.

I would definately recommend this phone over the Devour but if you want a hardware keyboard then the Droid would be for you, but this phone was a lot faster than the droid, and in my opinion a lot easier to navigate and use.

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I don’t know what Motorola was thinking when they decided to pit the Devour against their better option the Droid, they weren’t thinking clearly.

The DEVOUR is priced at $150 with a two-year Verizon contract.

What the Devour is

I thought the Devour was to be considered an alternative to the Droid, but that’s not the case, it’s got a smaller screen, but the phone itself is actually larger and heavier, but the form factor is a little better than the Droid and the slider feels a little springier than the Droid, and it’s keyboard has a nice little place to rest your thumbs when it’s open.

First Impressions

When I first turned on the phone the custom MotoBlur interface looked good and ran very fast, then you realize you are running an old version of Android, and it’s non updateable because of the custom Motorola build, plus there are quite a few apps some of them Google ones that don’t even work or show up in the Marketplace, and not having the choice to update the software version is not a very redeeming quality, even though it’s cheaper than the Droid, you should be able to upgrade to get the newest version of the Android software.

Verizon was actually the worst thing about this phone

I had network issues like crazy, I only had at the most one or two bars and dropped calls and had issues with internet apps not connecting on 3G, so I was mostly limited to wifi. It took 5 minutes over 3G to load a google map, and speed tests using the FCC speed test app on my iPhone 3Gs and the Devour in the same location pinging the same server confirmed that the 3G speed was awful. Calls were tinny and a lot of people couldn’t hear me very well, and places where other Verizon users had full signal and decent 3G I had none, this is definately a big problem for this phone and I did read other users had the same issues.

Final Thoughts

If I were looking to upgrade to a smartphone would I pick the Devour? Simple answer is no. The Droid is a better choice and if you want a crippled version of Android that is non upgradeable then the Devour is for you, the Motoblur is nice, but not necessary in Android, and newer versions of Android have that capability. The battery life was ok, but I couldn’t get through a whole day without having to recharge, but the hardware is very capable and fast and it’s got a nice design. If you can afford the extra $50 go with the Droid, this one needs some work, and it should be able to upgrade to the newest version of Android.

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.

Palm’s Web OS

With the Pre and the Pixi, they of course use Palm’s WebOS. To me, this operating system is like a series of web based widgets that you run, and can flip through them like cards. This is definitely a good mobile operating system, but the hardware itself, even though it has the same chip as the iPhone 3GS seemed to make it sluggish and slow even with only 2 or 3 things open at the same time.

I really thought Palm did a great job and the apps available were nice, but I found it hard to rely on it for everything I did on my iPhone, which was a lot faster, and apps took way too long to load, I would launch an app and sometimes it would be thirty seconds before it actually opened, which made it difficult to get information in the phone quickly. It was rather discouraging when I was getting someones contact info and I had to say hold on a second while it loads, that shouldn’t have been happening, but I think WebOS still has a long way to go, but in the end it’s a nice Mobile OS.

The one thing that stands out on these phones with Verizon is the inclusion of a mobile hotspot application that is similar to the MiFi device whereas it turns your phone into a WiFi hotspot that up to five other devices can connect to. The other thing about the way Palm has done this is the notifications which pop up on the bottom of the screen then minimize themselves to stay out of the way. The one thing about the multitasking and background apps is that the battery life was horrible. I was running 3 apps, then got a phone call and watched my battery life drop from about 70% to 25% in about 20 minutes. I do have to say that I’m not all that happy about that, but I also don’t need the multitasking. I don’t have multitasking on my iPhone and can still get IM’s, email notifications and the like without compromising my battery life as bad as this.

Verizon

Palm has made a good move with this device upgrading it a little bit and putting it on the Verizon network, however, I never got a full signal where I live, and I was constantly getting data disconnects and would have to reboot the phone for the data signal to come back, this wasn’t an issue with WiFi, but since I only had one or two bars in all the normal places I travel, I couldn’t rely on the phone to stay connected or not drop calls. The quality of the calls was very good as it always is, but not having a strong signal in an area of town that usually has a great signal on other phones maybe says something about the phone itself. Pricing on the Verizon network is expensive as well, and the mobile hotspot feature will cost you an extra $40 a month.

Final Thoughts

All in all I would probably recommend this phone for people who are getting their first smartphones as it’s very easy to use and it syncs seamlessly with your Google account for contacts and calendars, but for the die hard smartphone users, they would easily get frustrated with the lag time on app loading times. As with all smartphones, you will always find something you don’t like or get annoyed with a decision that the company made. With Verizon, there are a myriad of choices for the smartphone users, the very excelent Droid, or the upcoming Nexus One, or the tons of Blackberry options out there, but why choose the Pre? Well, the WebOS is a revolutionary operating system, and if you stick with it and give Palm some time to get it perfect and live up to it’s potential, then you should choose the Pre.

I mentioned the Pre mostly in this review because I feel like the Pixi was a baby version, and the screen was much smaller, but the operating system is the same, and it’s truly up to the individual as far as what style you want, so this review applies to both of them.

Nutshell

More RAM means a slightly faster phone, but I didn’t notice it

Keyboard was small and hard to thumb type on

Hotspot app was great and very usefull

Not as many apps as Android or iPhone yet

WebOS has a lot of potential and I’d like to see where Palm takes it

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.

The screen is quite impressive, and most gestures registered with little to no lag time, however the lack of multitouch is a definite turn off for me. Android 2.0 supports multitouch, but it isn’t on this device.

For some people, the reason they don’t use the iPhone is the lack of a physical keyboard, however the keyboard on this phone is nice, but I found myself typing faster on the iPhone than using the keyboard on the Droid, the keys were flat and hard to type with, I had to use the thumbnail method to get any decent typing done, I don’t know what would make it better, but before I had my iPhone I had an HTC Wizard, and the keyboard was great, the keys were bigger and curved out, and I could type without having to check every key pressed.

The camera is a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with led flash, and it’s capable of shooting video, however the camera takes forever to autofocus, and the results can be quite unpredictable. The video was decent enough, but they need to get the formats out of war, and it should be able to do h.264 mpeg, but instead it uses the 3gp format.

The sound from the speaker/earpiece was great, weather it be music or a speakerphone call, but on any Motorola device I have had, the speakers have been good.

The Software

Since this is my first time with the Android software platform, I don’t have much to compare it with. That said, here is my take on Android 2.0.

Android is furnished by Google, so it’s kind of a no-brainer that it will sync with your Google accounts, as well as Facebook and Exchange (I don’t have an exchange server so I wasn’t able to test this feature). After putting in my Google account information it pulled my contacts, email and calendar into the phone with no other work besides entering my username and password. There is a limitation to the calendar support for Google is that it only syncs the ones from your main Google account, not any secondary ones you have.
The Google Maps app adds the new Google Navigation, this was one of the nicest features, and it got me around ok, however putting it side by side with TomTom, I didn’t always get the same routes, and TomTom would get me there faster most of the time. I did however like the satellite view and the street view when you arrived at your destination, and hopefully Apple will allow Google to put their navigation app in the app store or update the native maps app to allow the new Google Navigation and the biggest gripe, pinch to zoom, please add multi touch, the zooming absolutely sucks without multi-touch.

The browser is good, and it displayed sites as good as Safari on the iPhone, and loading times were decent, however I did notice there was a significant delay after I hit the enter button when I put in a search or a site. Another downside is no multi touch, you have to double tap or hit the zoom buttons to zoom in, and it doesn’t always zoom to the right location.

The camera itself is decent, and it has more controls like white balance, focus mode and color, but the app itself is unresponsive and not good to use, please fix this soon.

Another thing that they need to work on is the multimedia support, yes you can drag and drop music to the phone, and it works fine, but the video support is horrible, the video player is hidden in the Gallery app, and it wouldn’t play videos that weren’t formatted in the 3gp format. This is a big setback if you want to use your phone for more than just music.

The Android market was fairly straightforward and easy to use, and it has over 10,000 apps to choose from, except if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for it’s kind of tedious to browse the categories. Another setback of the Android platform is that apps can’t be installed on an SD card and the storage limit for apps is 256MB on the Droid, so that limits developers.

Final Thoughts

It may sound like I don’t like Android, but I do, and with some work it’s got great potential. I like the multitasking and integrating with your Google accounts. It’s a lot easier to use than Windows Mobile, and if you aren’t able to get an iPhone, then I would recommend this phone. The phone is user friendly enough that non smart phone users won’t have any problems using it, and Android is definitely a good platform.

1. Integration with Google is great and the native Google apps are awesome
2. Web browsing is good and websites display like they should
3. No native way to sync music
4. Video and music player are downright awful
5. Was sluggish at random times and randomly rebooted

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.

For the regular users of Blackberry’s, the tour is the obvious choice over the storm or the curve, and it’s got solid hardware, and the Blackberry software is getting better.

One thing I must mention is that I couldn’t tether or sync on the Mac, but it seems that Blackberry has come out with a beta version of their software, so if you are a Mac user, unless you absolutely have to have a Blackberry, I would think twice about getting one.

The trackball navigation was smooth when selecting apps, but I found myself always clicking on the wrong thing because I would slightly move the trackball and it would click on the wrong answer or app, even with the sensitivity down, it was too sluggish to do anything, so I had to leave it fairly high.

The browser was ok, and I didn’t have any issues on most websites, but I didn’t really like the trackball pointer navigation. The Blackberry messenger is a new version, and it worked better than all the previous versions, and it also allows you to send your location via built in GPS.

The only thing I find about the whole Blackberry experience that would turn me away is the Blackberry App World, it’s limited in the number of apps, and most apps I use on a daily basis on my iPhone, were not available or in a different form, they were extremely overpriced.

All in all, the BlackBerry Tour is the best BlackBerry on the market despite it’s few shortcomings. Verizon needs to stop crippling devices, and RIM needs to start putting WiFi in their devices. The screen was a tad small, and didn’t use most of the available real estate, but if you are a die hard BlackBerry user, then the Tour is the best choice.

I wasn’t impressed with the battery life on my iPhone 3G, but the 3GS is a lot better. Planning on going on a little trip this year, I decided to start looking at battery packs for the iPhone. I decided upon the Mophie Juice Pack Air (Amazon Link). This product is great. It doubles the life of my iPhone battery, and it’s smart about it. It has an on/off switch, so you can turn it off, but the thing I like the most is that when it’s on, it will drain the juice pack air first, and then the iPhone battery. It comes with it’s own cable, so when you plug it into the computer it will charge the juice pack or iPhone, and you are also able to sync, it will also charge if you plug it into the power adaptor that came with the iPhone. I got the white version because I have a white iPhone, but they have black and purple available as well.

It retails for $79.95, and it’s worth the price.

Buy the Mophie Juice Pack Air from Amazon

Juice Pack Air Photos