בס''ד

מדבר'ם טכנולוגיה

I’m a geek according to my friends. I’m not sure why because I try my best to be cool at all times, but apparently that doesn’t work!

According to a press report last week geeks are actually much more brand loyal and spend more than the average consumer. Geek is a name I don’t like, but Super Shopper is something I can live with ☺.

I’m an IT Architect with more years’ experience than I’d like to admit. I expend a lot of time taking a consumer view of the world and using my devices like just like everybody else. The thing that fascinates me most about technology is how it is useful. I don’t enjoy technology for its complexity or just for the sake of it. I want to know how it can be used and if it will make life simpler or at least save me some time and help me be more productive. It’s beyond geekdom to understand that technology only becomes important once people adopt it and use it. The IT world often looks up in collective horror as things that seem mundane and old hat to them are adopted in rapid fashion by consumers throughout the world. One just needs to look at the iPod and see how many people scratched their heads at the time. It wasn’t that there were not great audio players out there for many years before, but New Yorkers wouldn’t let go of their Walkmans before the iPod. It was geeky and awkward to use a portable MP3 player that required you to use the funny applications you had to search for just to put your CD's on the player. Apple came along and with a really cool looking device and with some clever marketing and simple software essentially reinvented the market so that consumers “got it” and purchased it in droves.

My latest forays have seen me experimenting with phones and computers lately and must say the results surprise me.

Firstly, I must be certain people understand that when I choose a phone that it better be a phone above all else. I don’t want slow responses and circles and hourglasses when I want to make or receive a call. In fact I’m so analytical that I actually understand what I want from my phone. I’ve even created a list of priorities, in order, for what I want from a so-called smartphone:

1. It’s a phone – it must do that well. I must have one button that makes it do that, not a million menus and clicks and stuff just to make a call!
2. It must browse the web very well
3. Email is a must, and it must connect to my work email and a plethora of other accounts
4. Texting – I use it, but not as often
5. Battery life
6. If it’s a smartphone I must be able to install cool apps

Without those six I’m pretty much not going to use it at all!

Even greater than all of those and even more encompassing, it must be PRETTY and EASY TO USE! I’m tired of black phones with ugly buttons that are just purely functional. I’m a girl and I demand girliness. I don’t spend time making myself look good just to haul a scratched, charcoal brick out of my pretty handbag. I don’t want to spend a million years scratching around in the recesses of the dark insides of my bag looking for a stupid black phone that is impossible to find unless you have the eyes of a falcon and the touch sensitive, braille capabilities of a blind person. If I choose to have long nails or short nails it must still function. If I need a PHD in telephony to use it you lost me. If I cannot buy a pretty cover for it, preferably Ed Hardy or pink then I’m not interested. If it weights a ton, forget it. If it hasn’t got enough blue teeth so I can just hop in my car and use it without looking like something from CSI with a weird, alien or wiry thing hanging from my ear then it probably isn’t going to be my first choice ever. I’ve had enough of twisted cables and/or trying to find the stupid ear piece thing when I receive a call while driving and can’t untangle or find them because I forgot about them and they’re lying in the dark recesses of my bag or in the side pockets of the door or something! I know discipline could solve that but the last time I checked in the mirror I was a human being and when we rush we forget things on occasion. When my seatbelt goes click my phone better chirp that it’s connected.

So with all that narcissism and bearing my selfish set of desires in mind it comes down to three of the four phones I possess (I’m in IT and I look at lots of stuff and also have five laptops and a few PC’s, one which is an Apple MacBook running OSX Snow Leopard).

Of course people might want a technical comparison of processor speed, memory and all sorts of other things but to me it’s a phone and I want it to work. I expect enough storage to do what I want to and I expect enough speed and responsiveness to get the job done. I’m not comparing features. I’m comparing them in terms of do they get the job done that I need them to.

My three phones, two of which I use regularly are a BlackBerry Bold 9700, an Apple iPhone 3GS 32GB and an HTC Touch Pro 2 running Windows Mobile Professional 6.5. I don’t have an Android phone yet, but that’s only because it sounds a bit too SkyNet and T600’ish for me to want one just yet (I bet the geeks popped up and recognized the Terminator Salvation references because there was no T600 in the previous movies).

I don’t hack, jailbreak or mod my phones in all the crazy ways technical people do. I want to know how they work and I want to rely on them. It the same reason you wouldn’t find my taking my car for a dyno “tchune” or putting side skirts, a splitter, mags and a boot spoiler on it. I like the out of the box experience and I want to blame the vendor if it doesn't work satisfactorily!

So how do they compare in my list of priorities?

The iPhone is the prettiest, but my BlackBerry comes a very close second with its Ed Hardy cover ☺ I don’t hug them or anything, but I like how they look.

For ease of use I’d rate the HTC and the iPhone about level, with the BlackBerry a little bit behind. They’re all easy to use, but the BlackBerry does seem a bit more fiddly and delicate.

As phones the Apple and BlackBerry are on an even par, while the HTC makes me wait sometimes which is not really my cup of tea (although I might just get one while I pull the battery out and reboot it). I probably run too many applications on my HTC or something, but quite frankly if it’s made for that then it must do that well. I’m led to believe the HTC HD2 is far superior, but I can’t comment just yet.

I visit a number of websites each day. They’re pretty much the same websites and they keep me up to date with news of Israel, Judaism, the News and IT. I’m an addict, but I have limited my regular sites to about 8 overall and they don’t occupy much time. I also make use of Facebook and Twitter a lot. The best phone for browsing in my view has to be the iPhone. It just works, the formatting on sites, even those not designed for mobile, are usually outstanding and I can zoom in and out so easily I just love it. The BlackBerry follows a close second. It sometimes messes things up, but that’s rare. The BlackBerry does lose points for showing the tiniest text on the planet. I need binoculars to read some websites at times. I wish it could zoom in better. It can zoom in but then I have to move the screen around with a fiddly touchpad to read the sites. It was hard enough learning to follow Hebrew as an adult, just imagine trying to do that while simultaneously using one of those magnifying rulers that my grandfather used to use that only covers a section of a line at a time! The HTC is not blessed with the best of mobile browsers. The zooming functions are great but layouts get messed up. I tried Opera Mini on it. That is great, but it’s not on par with Safari even if it is quicker. In fact on the HTC I tried Internet Explorer, Opera Mini and Skyfire. Sometimes they did a better job of specific sites than any other phone, but in general I’d rather just have one built-in browser that does the basics really well.

For email the HTC kicks all other phones into touch, including the Nokia E90 and HTC S740 I have lying around. I like its keyboard. I can type really quickly and also do quite long messages, sometimes more than an A4 page, on it while I wait in the never-ending lines at Norwood Pick ‘n Pay on a Thursday. It’s a real productivity helper for me. I work in a worldwide company and I like to stay on top of my mail in a spare moment or two. It is also far better at being able to connect to just about any email system under the sun, including my company's email system and can even handle rights protected, encrypted email. The iPhone comes in second and gets extra bonus points for its universal Inbox which lets me see all unread email from all my email accounts in one place. Why do I have multiple accounts? Because I run multiple websites and need to have a presence on all of them! Brands are important. Searching for email is just simpler on the HTC, with the Apple a close second. BlackBerry email is very functional, but if you’re a power user it is pretty devoid of functions you use every day. This past year alone, just with my work email account I have sent 7754 emails. The volume I received in the same time period was more than eight times that. Never mind the many other email accounts I have.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Hebrew support. I like putting the occasional מזל טוב or שבת שלום in my messages. The HTC does not support Hebrew, and even the applications you can buy for it that can are just crummy. The BlackBerry supports Hebrew, but I’ve yet to find stickers to put on the keys! It’s a guessing game to figure out what key on the keyboard corresponds to the letters of the Aleph-bet. They’re not even the same as those on a computer. At least the BlackBerry displays Hebrew well.

The iPhone has great Hebrew support. One button on my keyboard switches between the alphabet and the aleph-bet. Because it’s a touch screen it can change the keyboard on the fly so I can see what I’m doing with ease which makes both email and texting fun and simple.

The HTC is awesome for texting because of the keyboard. It really works well. I’d say my favourite is the BlackBerry though. It has BlackBerry Messenger, and it seems that every Jewish person I know either has a BlackBerry or iPhone. I use BlackBerry Messenger everyday simply because others do. Quite frankly if I could have BlackBerry Messenger on my HTC I’d take it. Touch screen texting on the iPhone is bothersome. Although it guesses the words you’re typing and does a very good job of eliminating nearly every mistake, both independent research from other organizations and my personal experiences show writing any substantial text on a touch screen device can be about 10% of the speed of the keyboard. What a silly idea. It’s possible to install WhatsApp on your phones, but it’s yet another application that eats up your battery running in the background and it is not free on iPhone. It also cheekily adds all the people in your contact list who are running WhatsApp into itself. That means even those people who are relative strangers are suddenly your friend and you must manually remove them or get spammed by people you just might not like. You probably don’t want your boss or your overly political, corporate colleague seeing your non-pc status update messages on occasion either.

In terms of battery life the BlackBerry is the clear winner. It hardly ever seems to cause me problems day to day, even when I forget to charge it some nights. It lasts up to 3 days with use. The HTC is pretty good too, lasting up to two days. My iPhone, oy vey! I’ve had it run out in the morning while I’m at work. It’s a very poor choice if you use your phone as often as I do. It has improved markedly since the iOS 4.0.1 update, but it’s still third in my list.

For cool applications there is one clear winner. The iPhone has some of the coolest applications on the planet. I’m a Formula 1’o’holic and the official F1 application is outstanding and works so well with the accelerated 3D display of the iPhone. There are also some nice applications from jewishcontent.org that benefit from the bigger display on the iPhone. BlackBerry has a very useful application model too and I find the Twitter and Facebook applications on BlackBerry to be the best of all the phone platforms. They’re always on but somehow don’t run my phone’s battery down. HTC is okay. It’s really nice to have Office 2010 on my phone so I can view documents, and even edit them, but the other applications available are a bit of a let-down. They work, they’re functional, but they feel fiddly and don’t seem to be as efficient in terms of battery life e.g. Skype will kill the battery in a moment if you’re using 3G and leave it running in the background. Fortunately all the phones integrate with Facebook and Twitter and can run the most jaw-dropping example of a cloud-based application, Shazam. If you ever wondered what that song is that’s playing in a shop or a restaurant. Just open Shazam, watch it listen for a few second and then voila it tells you. It’s almost like magic, without paying for David Copperfield. Of course if you’ve never experienced Windows Live Sync (my fav cloud app of all) before you might just be persuaded to go and grab an HTC or other Windows Mobile Phone soon. To be able to sync files across my Windows systems, my Mac and my HTC is quite handy, and unlike Apple Mobile Me it is a free cloud service.

So the winner is… I can’t declare a winner really. All I can say is that an iPhone with the HTC keyboard, Windows Mobile’s email and BlackBerry Messenger would be near the perfect device. The iPhone is pretty and fast, but lacks some key elements that could make it an outright winner. The iPhone 4 has not resolved those either. We’re actually at a point where the best of all worlds really are not incorporated into one device.

With Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry 6 (with slide out keyboard) and Android 2.2 devices coming out to our shores soon I can only see all of these current devices being leap-frogged. The iPhone 4 is a bit samey with a sleeker body and better display so I’m going to ignore it and look to the new features of the next generation phones instead, but for now I’m pretty happy with the three phones I have.