Left to right: Pre, N97, i8910, Ion
I got invited to a "Drinks with Nokia" event for local bloggers here in San Francisco yesterday. Ewan, tnkgrl, Matthew Bennett, folks from Ubergizmo, Mobile Burn and quite a few others were there. Nokia brought at least three N97s and several E75, E7ix and 5800XM phones for us to try out. And when mobile geeks gather there are always loads of cool phones of all makes around too. I took a couple of comparison shots of tnkgrl's Palm Pre, one of the N97s, Ewan's new Samsung i8910 and my HTC Ion. I also got quite a bit of hands on with the Pre and N97. It was pretty wild to have four of the five phones that make up what Matthew calls the "June Tsunami" in one place at the same time. The missing one was the iPhone 3GS announced today at WWDC. The June Tsunami marks the first wave of serious iPhone contenders. All those touch dumb phones from Samsung and LG, while interesting, aren't really the same class and the G1's hardware is too clunky to challenge Apple's ground breaking phone. The 5800XM is a nice phone, but I think even Nokia would agree it isn't really directly targeted at iPhone However, the Pre, N97, i8910 and HTC Magic are all phones that can seriously challenge the iPhone 3GS.
Here are my initial impressions of the five contenders:
HTC Ion, aka Magic, aka T-Mobile MyTouch 3G: Android came of age with this slick piece of hardware and the Cupcake OS release. Fast, rock stable and the most open of the five, the Magic is a solid phone with excellent build quality. It feels great in the hand and pocket. The Android user interface is elegant and quite intuitive. The Android Market is a little rough around the edges but it does put all the Android apps in one place for easy discoverability and one click installation. With 4900 apps (compared with the iPhone's 50,000 and Symbian plus Java's tens of thousands) most of my important application needs are covered. Geek tools like FTP and and SSH clients, file and task managers are well represented in the Android market as are games. Content creation is a weak area with no real word processor, spell checker or video editor. Android is most inherently local aware platform. Almost every Android application that can possibly benefit from access to location uses it including weather, transit and local search apps. I also love the way Android alerts me whenever there is an update available for any of my installed apps, a feature that the N97 also implements. The Magic's weakest points are the keyboard and flash-less 3 MB camera. Neither are terrible, the camera is at the level of a good feature phone, the keyboard I rate the lowest of the five but it's still much better than T9.
Palm Pre: The most pocket friendly of the five, I like the Pre's shape when closed. When the keyboard is opened there are sharp edges at the top and bottom of the phone. They aren't dangerous but they do give the phone a slightly cheap and unfinished feel. The Pre's OS reminds me of the first Android rev, fast, with reasonable stability; it shows a lot of potential. The UI is the most original since the first iPhone, task switching with a swipe of the finger is very cool. The gesture system is a great power user feature but with so many new UI paradigms, WebOS does seem to have a bit more of a learning curve than the others. I didn't really try the camera but other reports seem to put it at least on a par with and probably better than the Magic's. The Pre keyboard has received some criticism but I thought it was pretty good. The phone feels well balanced when typing. The keys are tiny but are raised and well spaced and I was able to achieve pretty high accuracy with it. The Pre's weak point is the initial application selection. With an unfinished App Store and a mere 18 3rd party apps, early adopters will have to wait a bit. DataViz is working on an office suite but for now the Pre's Ace in the hole might be "Classic" a third party app that lets you run many of the tens of thousands of legacy Palm OS apps.
Top to bottom: Pre, Ion, N97, i8910
Samsung i8910 HD: I didn't get any hands on with this phone but at least on paper it looks like a winner. 8MP! camera, S60 5th edition with an 640x360 capacitive OLED touchscreen, 13mm thick. Appearance wise it does live up to the hype. A beautiful phone with a gorgeous screen. tnkgrl was able to shoot some photos and videos with both it and the N97. To my eye the i8910 images look a hair sharper and more saturated than the N97's but not by much. Stability was definitely an issue with this phone, it crashed and froze at least a couple of times during the two hours people were playing with it at the event. There is no hardware keyboard on the i8910, like the Magic and iPhone it's a pure touchscreen interface. I'm not a fan of touchscreen keyboards but I'll reserve judgment until I get to use this one.
Nokia N97: of the five, my clear favorite. As a long time Symbian user I'm probably biased but knowing that all the S60 and Java applications I use on my N95 will likely run on the N97 makes it hard to beat. Add to that an excellent camera, Symbian's proven multi-tasking and video capabilities and elegant, quality hardware and the N97 is an impressive package. The new active home screen widgets (bottom photo) are pretty sweet too. I didn't expect to like the keyboard with only three rows of keys and the top hinged screen that I feared would restrict access to the top row. I was surprised to find the keys were nicely raised, really large and well spaced and that there was enough space to squarely place the ball of my finger on the top row without
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posted by Dennis Bournique
June 8, 2009 @ 9:46 pm
7 View Comments
