We've Moved!

For those of you who haven't noticed yet, AndroidGuys has moved! Earlier this week, we hopped off of Blogger and moved over to our own server. All of your favorite articles are over there, but they look/feel a whole lot better!

Please make sure to update your bookmarks and feeds.

New address: http://www.androidguys.com
New subscription feed: http://androidguys.com/?feed=rss2 Full Post

It Might Get Dusty

Alright, so we decided to throw caution to the wind and make the switch to the new server right in the middle of our Tuesday lunch. So, start updating your bookmarks now. Going forward, you'll no longer need to come to our .blogspot address. Get your bookmarks and feeds set up for the site over at http://androidguys.com and http://androidguys.net! We'll continue to post mirrors of the articles for the next few days before doing a complete redirect. See you over there! Stop and tell us what you think in this article. Full Post

34 Weeks of OHA: #9

Open Handset Alliance Member Profiles (Week #9 - HTC Corporation)
For 34 weeks, each Tuesday, Jordan from fandroid.net will be joining us to offer a profile of each of the 34 members of the Open Handset Alliance.

Company Name: HTC Corporation

How the OHA site classifies them: Handset Manufacturer

What the OHA site says about them: Our mission is to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

What they do: Build pretty badass handsets.

I own an HTC S621 (the Rogers-specific version of the S620, aka T-Mobile Dash, aka Excalibur (hell yeah, Excalibur; kneel before me, peon.) Honestly, I love it. It's slim, pretty to look at--I still think it's the prettiest full-QWERTY candybar I've seen. The rubberized plastic gives it a pleasant smoothness in the hand, and nearly eliminates the creak of plastic-against-plastic that cheapens the feel of many handsets. The keys are nicely restistant and easy-to-use; despite the realtively small size thumb-typing is easy. It's only a 200mhz processor, but feels peppy enough for most apps. And, I use the hell out of it; I browse my feeds, I read eBooks, I listen to my music and podcasts, I receive both work and personal emails, I keep lists, etc., etc., etc. I also make phone calls – not just over the conventional cellular connection but also using VOIP over the WiFi.

It's not perfect. The JOGGR touchpad slidy thing is just silly. The battery life is not great, which is not helped by the Direct-Push email sucking juice. It doesn't have a touchscreen, which I know is not the norm for this form factor but is still is on my wish list. The EDGE data connection is poky. The 1.3 megapixel camera gives a slightly purpleish hue to everything. Oh, and there's the Windows Mobile part... I'll get into that in a bit.

In the end, I'm proud to lay this thing down along side my friend's Motorola Q or the Blackberries that are so common in the corporate environment in which I swim daily. People admire it, ask to hold it, make nice comments. And then the inevitable comes out: “Who is HTC? Never heard of 'em.”

Unfortunately, in the electronics business the unheard-of brand carries a stigma, that of the cheap-knockoff, Made in China (which these days is actually a sign of quality), Radio-Shack no-name crap.

So who is HTC?

The High Tech Computer Corporation of Taiwan, founded in 1997, was originally in the market of building stuff for other people: T-Mobile, Verizon, Dell, HP. A lot of the folks I work with don't realize that the Palm Treo 650s they were still using until just a few months ago were built by HTC. Recent indications are that Palm is actually going back to HTC for some manufacturing, and Engadget Mobile has rumoured that the new Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 that caused so much stir at the World Mobile Congress (and which, as well as being pretty-as-hell, has a feature list that reads like smartphone version of a Penthouse letter) is an HTC design. HTC are ODM leaders.

It was the decision to produce HTC-branded Windows Mobile handsets, however, that brought the company out into the open. It was a smart choice for both Microsoft and HTC: HTC got Microsoft and the recognizeable Windows brand behind them, and Micrsoft got probably the best smartphone maker on the planet.

Truthfully, Windows Mobile sucks. In my experience, it's buggy, ugly, and hard to get around in. At least once a week I have to do a hard reset on my phone 'cause something's locked hard. There are a couple of good points...okay, not a couple, one: there are plenty of folks out there building apps for Windows Mobile, so its relatively easy to find programs to do almost anything I want (an SSH client, eBook reader, a better media player). But, basically, Windows Mobile is ass. Really.

It's a good thing that the elegance of the HTC hardware is there to save the day.
To an unsuspecting public, however, the Windows name is a selling point, and that has served HTC well, to the tune of $3.7 billion in revenue in 2007. The HTC touch, which saw the company's TouchFlo interface apply a serious coat of paint to the Windows-Mobile-interface-of-the-devil, has sold 2 million units, which ain't too bad at all.
What they bring to OHA and Android: As I said above, these guys are likely the best makers of smartphones in the world. The problem is Windows Mobile. If we take WM out of the mix, and replace it with a sexy, open, LINUX-based mobile OS, the results just may be brilliant.
The buzz is that HTC will produce 2 or 3 Android phones in 2008. Let's conjecture that we'll see a candybar full-QWERTY sans touchscreen (a la my S621), a primarily-touchscreen-interface job with a small form factor (like the Touch), and a slide-out or clamshell full-QWERTY + touchscreen ultra-handset (The Kaiser, the XPERIA X1).

Are you telling me that thought doesn't get you excited?
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zzzPhone To Run Android?

I have to admit up front that I had never heard of the zzzPhone prior to this morning, but they are preparing to release a handset that my be running Google's Android in the near future. You can read the complete article here on gearlog.com. The author is expecting his phone to arrive soon, but it will be running a proprietary OS, not Android. Be sure to check out the email the company sent to it's customers pending the handsets release. It's good for a chuckle. Here's a direct quote from the email.

Please understand that most of the initial orders were placed during the Chinese New Year Holiday, which also happened to coincide with one of the worst nation-wide snowstorms in history. (people dying, power outages, ect.)

Yeah, I'm thinking that guy should be fired, or seriously reprimanded for making light of such a tragedy. Sheesh. Stay tuned to Android Guys or news on the ZZZPhone and all things Android.
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Google Gears Is Here!

If you own a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device you can now try out Google Gears. What is Google Gears? Well, its an add on for your browser that allows you to launch some web based applications while your device is offline. These apps have to be written to take advantage of Gears, but the idea seems very promising. Imagine being able to check your bank account balances with or without a connection to the internet. How soon before we see a version for other platforms such as RIM, Symbian and Apple's iPhone? Stay tuned for an update on Gears once we've had a chance to install it and try a few of the apps available for it. Full Post

How The RAZR Cut Motorola

Not long ago Motorola dominated the US and world handset markets. The name alone seemed synonomous with cell phones and pagers, and even as a child I have fond memories of playing cops and robbers with my Motorola "walkie talkies". Anybody else remember those things? Now, Nokia dominates market share worldwide, and Samsung is a distant number 2. So what happened to the once mighty Motorola? I think their most recent struggles can be summed up by one word, albeit a misspelled one: RAZR. When the Motorola RAZR debuted in 2004 it was among the hottest properties in any industry. The design was unlike anything we'd seen before in a cell phone. Instead of the bulky styles we had all become accustomed to, the RAZR introduced a sleek design that actually looked sci-fi and cool. It was something you wanted to be seen carrying. The introductory price was $599 to $699 with no contract and it quickly became the must have item of the year. Motorola was back on top, but this success would be short lived.

Motorola made the huge mistake of devaluing the hot property that was the Moto RAZR. They did this in a couple of ways. It was selling extremely well, but they wanted to cash in by getting this phone into the hands of more people. Obviously for this to happen the price had to come down, but in order to lower the price Motorola had to first find a way to decrease production costs. Lower production costs did lead to a cheaper RAZR, but it also resulted in more defective units being sold. Some will have you believe that because the RAZR sold so well it stands to reason that there would be more defects reported. While this does hold some merit, I sold this phone for several years and to be honest it was my most troublesome, and most returned handset in my inventory. Motorola should have taken a cue from Nokia and the way it handles it's N Series line of phones. You will not find a Nokia N Series sold for peanuts, and having owned 4 different models I can say with some level authority that they are very well put together units.

Other than being made by Motorola can you guess what these handsets have in common? PEBL. KRZR. ROKR. RIZR. SLVR. W490. They all share striking design similarities to the RAZR. The W490 with it's strange name bears the most resemblance to the once iconic RAZR, and coming in at $19.99 with a 2 year contract it is priced for the masses. If you want to make sure your once hot item becomes just another cell phone on the shelf, take bits and pieces of it and use them in your other line of phones over and over again! Such a lack of originality on Motorola's part has had more to do with them sinking than anything their competitors have done. Is it too late for Motorola to regain the prominence it enjoyed years ago? Things aren't looking very good, but as a member of the OHA who knows? Stranger things have happened. Full Post