The Smartphone Hub

Short version: A competent and useful, but ultimately limited handset. Recommended for GPS lovers, but not for Android lovers.

Features:

• Dedicated Garmin Navigation function
• 3.5″ 320 x 480 display
• Garmin “Breeze” interface
• MSRP: $199 (incl. $50 rebate) with 2-year agreement (T-Mobile)

Pros:

• Navigation is fantastic
• Bright and responsive multi-touch screen
• Breeze interface ain’t so bad

Cons:

• Kind of chunky
• Lack of many Android creature comforts such as LED indicator light, home screen widgets
• Breeze interface ain’t so good, either

Full review:

Many Android phones these days focus on adding a dedicated social layer, with widgets crammed in every cranny for this or that notification service or social network. Location data and maps, however, are rarely treated as anything more than standard functions of the phone, relegated to the standard Google Maps. The GarminFone pretty much takes the complete opposite tack here, sacrificing even core Android functionality to the all-important feature: navigation. If that gets your heart racing, this may just be your phone. If you’re skeptical right off the bat, however, I don’t think there’s much value in it for you.

The key feature of the GarminFone is its dedicated navigation app. It essentially functions as a complete Garmin GPS device, almost completely independent of signal and data connection. You can use Google Maps if you want, but the pre-loaded database of roads and destinations in the Garmin app is often far more convenient, and you can search via Google from within it, so the only reason to use Google Maps is if you prefer the look (I do, personally), or for using other Google meta-mapping services. In any case, the Garmin navigation is simple, powerful, and fairly attractive. Garmin compares the phone’s abilities to one of its higher-end devices, which can use data services to get traffic and other data.

I found its database to be reasonably comprehensive for established locations, and its directions were accurate. It didn’t have a few newer places, but it’s easy enough to get them via Google Local Search. The multiple views possible make it suitable for driving or walking, and the voice cues were well-timed and easy to follow. Multi-touch was in full effect, allowing for quick zooms. The map was responsive, but not nearly as fluid to move around as I’d like.

The GarminFone has a separate display for satellite signal, which is handy but occasionally futile to consult — it’s not like you can wave it around and get a better connection with the satellite. It’s reassuring when you’re driving, however, to look over and see that yes, you have full bars on satellite, and it’s not going to suddenly think you’re a quarter mile behind of where you actually are.

Hardware

The phone’s form factor is, depending on your perspective, either pleasantly plump or overstuffed. The main body feels solid and it’s a pretty good-looking piece of kit. The buttons stick out a bit far, however, especially the on-off button: it protrudes from the rounded top and was constantly being hit when I put in a pocket or bag. It also has the annoying Android 1.6 habit of occasionally not turning off when you tell it to, then when you hit the button again, turning off and on real fast. Why can’t people seem to design a screen on-off button that works properly?

I could have done without the touch-sensitive buttons. They’re responsive enough and give a little buzz when you hit them, but they’re pretty easy to hit on accident. The square D-pad takes a little getting used to, but works as expected.

Unforgivably, there is no 3.5mm headphone jack. Come on, people.

The GarminFone does come with a competent car kit too, which I did not have time to mount. It includes a dash mount and charger; it grips the phone via the contact points on the side.

The rest of the phone

If you are a person who relies on GPS to get you where you’re going, this could be a killer feature for you. GPS unit and phone in one — a life-saver for a few of you out there. But what about its performance as a smartphone?

Not so good, unfortunately. The first thing you likely noticed was the custom interface. It puts all the focus on navigation, and unlike other custom interfaces (Motoblur, Sense), it’s almost completely non-customizable. What you see is what you get.

The oversized buttons on the main screen are there forever, so get used to them. The App drawer opens from the side, which isn’t really any better or worse if you ask me, but I’ve always felt a little weird opening it up horizontally and then scrolling vertically. You can, of course, download all the apps you want, which appear in chronological (and arrangeable) order in the app drawer. Rearranging is a slow process, however, and the way moved apps push the others down makes it a sort of puzzle to get them the way you want. The always-accessible left-hand column of the app drawer is handy, but honestly not nearly as handy as having multiple home screens.

There is the widget screen, of course, which you can fill with widgets, but not apps. Holding down the home button brings you to the last used widget, though I would prefer it brought you to an anchor, such as the center widget screen or the last used apps widget.

The included apps are a mixed bag. The “vanilla” e-mail app is attractive and functional, though it shares many quirks with its sibling, the default 1.6 email client. Messaging is pretty standard, but has a few incomprehensible design choices: why does it default to the message text box when you start a new text, instead of the “to” box? And why isn’t there a “send” button when I’m typing my message in landscape mode? Little UI lapses like this are scattered about the phone, and although they’re only slightly frustrating and at most result in a few lost seconds, it sucks to know that they’re never likely to be fixed.

It also comes with a few other location- and navigation-centric apps like Ciao and Garmin Voice Studio. As for the location-based extras, that’s something that is better handled by Google and/or social apps like Foursquare, so I didn’t get much use out of them and I doubt many users will, either.

Typing on the keyboard was a pleasant experience, I found; the auto-complete feature and vibrating keys were problematic, though, and led to lots of mistakes. Otherwise the screen was responsive and accurate enough that I was typing almost as fast as I can on my G1’s hard keyboard.

Frustratingly, some applications have their notification or display settings buried in the universal Settings>Applications menu, instead of their own context menus. Why this is, I have no idea, but it’s a pain. Speaking of notifications, there’s no LED notification indicator. What the hell? I rely on that thing! I also found that a custom notification sound I use faded in instead of simply playing, leading to a rather weird phased effect. That might be an isolated problem, though.

Battery life was quite good, which was surprising considering the amount of satellite callouts it was doing. The hours quoted in its specs are probably within reason — after a full day of checking email, doing some browsing, and checking maps fairly often, I still probably had four or five more hours left.

Conclusion:

To be honest, despite my various issues with the UI, I found it easy and intuitive in general. The real argument against it, however, is not that it isn’t usable, but that it will never be improved. It’s running Android 1.6, and is almost certainly never going to get the 2.1 or 2.2 treatment. The many features and optimizations (to say nothing of useful apps) present in those and upcoming versions will never be yours if you get the GarminFone. Again, for those among you who just want a good smartphone and a good GPS unit in the same device, this is likely not an issue, but for people who put the phone first, it is a potential deal-breaker.

The GarminFone is a handy and unique device, especially for people who are used to dedicated GPS units, but whether it’s worth the trade-off in smartphone features is a choice you’ll have to make. It succeeds well at what it tries to do, but it remains to be seen whether that’s enough.

Product page: T-Mobile GarminFone

Check out the rest: MobileCrunch

Richard Gaywood—Ph.D in wireless network planning from Cardiff University—has tested the iPhone 4 communications problem. Before, he thought there were no problems. Now, his conclusion is clear: “The iPhone 4 is a fantastic device but a lousy phone.” More »










IPhone – Smartphone – Handhelds – Apple – iPhone 4

Check out the rest: Gizmodo

Foursquare finally announced that it’s raised $20 million in Series B funding, including money from Andreessen Horowitz, a fund that publicly walked away from the Foursquare investment because of all the attention. (Head fake, anyone?) The funding news has been the subject of speculation befitting the very public-private life of Paris Hilton rather than a tech startup. And I’m glad it’s out of the way, because now the focus should shift to important stuff. Important stuff that involves New York-based Foursquare going from 1.8 million subscribers to tens and then hundreds of millions of subscribers. Important stuff that involves Foursquare going from a product to a company.

As someone who is an unabashed fan of Foursquare and what it represents, I have to admit my usage of the service has been waning. The early thrill of checking in at different locations has vanished, replaced by indifference. And I am not alone in feeling that way. As the number of folks on Foursquare’s network have gone up, it has become virtually impossible to become the mayor of a location. The mayorship and special badges were the “rewards,” and a physical manifestation of the gaming philosophy behind Foursquare, making the service enjoyable in the process.

When I asked Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley about my lack of interest, he emailed me back saying that many of these issues will be addressed as he and his team of 27 are building what is essentially Foursquare 2.0. He didn’t want to go into details — he’s worried about being copied. The whole idea of check-ins (as we have written in the past), badges and mayorships have been copied ad nauseam. Don’t believe me? Take a look at Loopt’s LoopStar. ?(Robert Scoble recently came up with a list of things Foursquare could do in order to ??escape the attack of the copy-cats.)

Crowley wrote that he and his team are working on redoing the core game mechanics, aka  ”what incentivizes me to check in.” Why is it taking so long to launch? “Because we’re growing so quickly that we have to address our technical scaling issues first,” he said. Crowley also alludes to these scaling issues in a blog post announcing the Series B funding:

We’re hoping to build a world-class engineering organization, based primarily in our headquarters in the New York City to help us develop the next generation of mobile + social + local products that will excite our users and provide unique value for local merchants. The new investment capital will also help fund the infrastructure needed to house our team (we’re finally getting a new office!) and support our growing audience of nearly 2m users.?

Clearly, the new money is going to come in handy for Crowley to build an operational team, which in turn should help the company transition from being merely a product to becoming a company. As he builds a core team to handle the business issues, Crowley will have time to address what is the most important issue facing his young company: the transition from an early adopter service to one used by mainstream customers. Incentivizing early adopters is very different from the incentives for mass market users, as many sites dependent on network effects have learned in the past.

As Stacey Higginbotham put it in a post earlier this year:

Much like it took time for people to see use cases and value in Twitter, which was an entirely new means of communicating, it will take time and a display of beneficial results before folks will see the value in displaying their location rather than focusing on the loss of anonymity. Until that happens, many people, when faced with an unfamiliar friend request, will likely hit delete. And without that large network of strangers, then the idea of machine-mediated serendipity remains just that — an idea.?

The good news is that Crowley and Co. now have the money to figure it all out.

Check out the rest: GigaOM

Check out the rest: Windows Mobile News copy

While Google continues to try and maintain a foothold in China — it was recently forced to change the way its Chinese website operates, after the government threatened to remove the company’s license — one expert in Chinese censorship says the real problem is actually Google’s competitor, Baidu. Baidu is working closely with the Chinese government to monitor and censor users, and U.S. investors and advisors are partly to blame for backing the company, says Rebecca MacKinnon, the co-founder of Global Voices Online and a former fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

MacKinnon testified today before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission at its hearing on “China’s Information Control Practices and the Implications for the United States.” In a blog post, she described her testimony and also posted a PDF of what she planned to tell the commission. In effect, she argues that by financing Baidu — which has an estimated 63 percent of the search market in China — and allowing it to continue collaborating with the Chinese government, U.S. investors are setting a bad example and making it harder for that country’s technology industry to resist government pressure to censor and monitor users.

The American investment community has so far been willing to fund Chinese innovation in censorship technologies and systems without complaint or objection. Under such circumstances, Chinese industry leaders have little incentive and less encouragement to resist government demands.

MacKinnon also describes how the government’s behavior towards Google — as well as its recent release of a white paper praising the use of social-media tools such as as Twitter (which China routinely blocks) — is an exercise in a new strategy she calls networked authoritarianism. In addition to well-known tools of censorship such as the “Great Firewall of China,” MacKinnon says, there is also a coordinated process of delegating censorship to the private sector, while appearing to be open to new tools and Internet services. This is the system that Baidu is a key player in, she says.

MacKinnon notes in her testimony before the Economic and Security Review Commission that Baidu has two U.S. directors on its board (they are William Decker, a former partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Greg Penner, a partner with a California investment firm called Madrone Capital Partners), and that “U.S. investors provided much of Baidu’s
startup capital [and] U.S. institutional investors own significant stakes in the company.” Among those institutions are mutual funds such as Fidelity Management and Morgan Stanley Asset Management.

Baidu also recently got a $50 million investment from Providence Equity Partners, backers of the streaming-video service Hulu, to start its own Chinese version of the video site. MacKinnon says that she isn’t advocating that U.S. investors pull out of China or stop investing in companies there, just that investors “should be clear about what kind of innovation they are financing.”

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): As Cloud Computing Goes International, Whose Laws Matter?

Post and thumbnails courtesy of Flickr user exfordy

Check out the rest: GigaOM

Normally it’s the big game you have to worry about, but thankfully, when these two tiny animals attacked this wildlife photographer, someone was standing nearby to take the shot. [Buzz Feed] More »










Art – BuzzFeed – Shopping – Visual Arts – Toys and Games

Check out the rest: Gizmodo

Buried deep in the frozen tundras of a Russian podcast, Google’s plans for the next step in Android have been uncovered. I have to say, it cuts down on my excitement somewhat that with Android, you’re constantly aware of the improvements you’re unlikely to get. In this case, even the few 2.2 users out there are left behind. Here’s what we know.

Gingerbread will sport an entirely new interface, apparently similar to the 3D gallery app on the Nexus One. I’m okay with that. It effectively kills any handset-maker custom interface, though, something which Motorola and HTC have been dedicated to since the beginning. Less work for them, I guess.

New hardware requirements are being instituted: a 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, and at least a 3.5″ display. Not so bad; a lot of phones already sport that. But if you miss one, you can’t get Gingerbread at all. At all. The high-end and tablet devices will be 3.0, and many phones will just stop at 2.2.

The operating resolutions have been increased as well: 1280×760 (notably just a touch larger than 720p) will be natively supported for 4″ devices and above. I’ve been holding out for Chrome OS, but I’m beginning to wonder whether that’s wise.

It’s expected to be released sometime around the holidays, probably mid-October. Same time as Windows Phone 7… oh dear. To the death, then.

Check out the rest: MobileCrunch

Have you fallen head over heel for your girl, but worry she doesn’t return your affections? What you need is Nintendo’s Love Tester! Crafted from the hands of the Game & Watch creator in 1969, it tests your luuuurve. More »










Nintendo – Video game – Games – Console Platforms – Nintendo 64

Check out the rest: Gizmodo

Updated: Microsoft’s supposed comeback to the mobile market with the Kin twins — two phones for the teenage set — has run into trouble. Apparently, the phones are not selling and the company today announced price cuts. Kin One is now being sold for $30 (down from $50) after a $100 discount. Kin Two with a bigger screen is now being sold for $50 down from $100 (after the $100 discount on a two-year contract.) These cuts went into effect six weeks after the Kin devices went on sale — indicating that there are not many buyers. These cuts come despite some heavy promotion by Microsoft on VH1 and MTV.

Frankly, I am not surprised. First of all, the phones — despite their interesting looks — lack a certain hipness that comes with some of today’s new phones. In my first hands-on experience of the devices, I felt they were “trying to do too many things at once. And in the process, it’s defying what has become standard user behavior among young people: trying and buying applications.?” In the end they lacked a certain coherence. The market seems to agree with that prognosis. Of course, what hasn’t helped is that the phones are saddled with smartphone-like data plans even though the phones are being targeted at budget-sensitive teens.

Update: It appears that the reduced pricing could be part of a fire sale as Gizmodo reports that Microsoft is close to killing off the already dying Kin. Microsoft confirms a change in strategy and offered this statement to Gizmodo:

We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.

Check out the rest: GigaOM

We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.

These words from Microsoft serve as the epitaph for the Kin series of socially-oriented handsets and their ecosystem. It’s been less than two months since the handsets and service were announced, and rumors of incredibly low sales had us questioning the lifespan of these little guys not long after. Add to that the weird interface and inexplicable pricing, and it’s clear in retrospect that the Kins never had much of a chance. In fact, we heard the project was canceled before it was even officially announced.

My take on it is: it was a fork of the new mobile OS team plagued by delays and leaks, which was given one chance to justify itself. There was probably a pre-existing arrangement: launch by X date, sell X handsets, or get rolled up. And I get the feeling some of the team are likely relieved to have this thing off their backs.

I’m actually glad to see those guys merged with WP7; I think the new OS has promise — not to say a chance in hell of surviving come October. The addition of some Kin stuff (the browser timeline was actually really cool) could sweeten the deal, though.

RIP, Kin. You were… well, you were.

Check out the rest: MobileCrunch