By now most of us have heard this story in one fashion or another: when Steve Jobs and Apple were in the planning stages of the iPhone, the first carrier they brought the device to was America’s largest network, Verizon. Even if you haven’t heard how the tale ends — Verizon refused and Jobs took his multi-billion dollar ball to AT&T — you surely know the outcome. The iPhone has soared to become the ultimate smartphone, the must-have accessory that everyone from celebrities to your mom wants — nay, needs — to have in their pocket. It’s changed the landscape of modern cellphones, put a serious dent in the sales of competing devices (just recently overtaking the venerable RAZR as the best-selling domestic handset), and unquestionably raised the bar when it comes to expectations for features in new handsets.

Industrial design

The Storm is a striking device. From the second you lay eyes on it, it’s clear that a lot of time and care went into crafting this phone. The majority of the front panel is display, a large 3.25-inch (480 x 360) touchscreen sitting just shy of flush with a silver bezel that runs around the sides, top, and bottom of the device. The bands seem to be plastic, not metal, and trace the outline of the moderately thick (0.55-inch) phone, looping around the back, while the rest of the surface is a high gloss, piano black plastic. Below the screen are four familiar BlackBerry keys (phone, menu, back, and end / power), along the left is a convenience key and a micro USB port (RIM has eschewed the more common mini USB slot for the lower profile of the newer variation, though that seems to be the way the industry is headed), and on the right side is another convenience key, volume rocker, and (yay!) 3.5mm headphone jack. Around back, the battery cover is made from solid piece of brushed aluminum, and the camera and flash sit atop the plate, covered by a glossy plastic strip. Along the top of the phone there’s a single LED to the right, and lock and mute keys incorporated into either side of the casing like soft rockers — a nice touch. Generally, the construction of the hardware and components used seem higher in quality than previous devices from the company, with buttons that click tightly and a heft that tries (and succeeds) to communicate an understated class. In the end, it sucks when compared to iPhone.

It’s not completely rainbows and unicorns, however. I noticed backlight leaking in through the sides of the screen, which partially killed the continuity of the design (and had us raise eyebrows at build quality), and the screen sort of slides around when it’s pressed down and held (more on that later). No deal breakers, but certainly a couple minor niggles we wish we hadn’t seen.

Touchscreen

The touchscreen is where most of the attention on this phone will be focused, and rightfully so. Unlike similarly stacked competitors (the iPhone and Instinct come to mind) the Storm doesn’t just boast a capacitive touch display, it also utilizes a completely unique “click” technology called SurePress which actually allows you to click the screen down like a mouse button. The purpose of this technology, ostensibly, is to provide two aspects to touch screens which are currently lacking in most devices: the ability to “hover” without selecting or moving an on-screen element, and the physical sensation of “clicking” when you type or navigate. The Storm’s screen certainly provides those two things in spades, but our question is whether or not they actually improve the experience of using this sort of device — and in our opinion, they do not. ITS ACTUALLY A HASSLE. iPHONE was alot faster to type with.

Before we plunge into why we feel the hardware doesn’t work here, we need to preface it with some information about the software. You can’t really talk about one without the other.

What you first should know is that the operating system used on this phone is almost identical to previous BlackBerry OSs — notably 4.6, as seen on the Bold. The main reason for stating that is because you must understand the basis for the UI design. All modern BlackBerrys use a QWERTY or SureType keypad coupled with a trackball for navigation, in addition to heavy emphasis on a pop-up menu accessible by the “menu” key from pretty much every section of the OS. The difference in 4.7 is not a paradigmatic shift away from this approach, rather, the company has added touch and multitouch functionality to take the place of trackball movements. What this means is that unlike the iPhone, which is most certainly the closest competitor on the market to this phone, the Storm’s UI is not custom built for touch navigation — touch navigation is added after the fact. Things which flow naturally on an iPhone — flicking through lists, scrolling for a contact, moving around in a webpage or looking through photos — feel inelegant and uncomfortable on the Storm. There’s no inertia to movement, no assurance that your finger is the lynchpin to control of the device. The screen is sensitive enough, surely, but how its software reacts to those touches makes all the difference, and here the feeling is that you’re never completely in charge of the phone.

BlackBerrys have garnered an almost mythic stature as the phone for email and messaging. One of the components of RIM’s success for that model has been the inclusion of QWERTY keypads (and more recently the halved QWERTY SureType keyboards) on their phones. As any email addict will tell you, very few devices can compete. The slant from RIM’s PR on the Storm is that the new clickable touchscreen delivers another high caliber typist’s dream to their roster — but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather than the click making things easier, it actually makes them more difficult. As you press down to engage a “key,” you’re required to release before moving to another, which means that you can only type so quickly. In our tests, we were constantly frustrated by the staggering, laggy movement when trying to type with any speed. You have to let the click depress before you can strike another character, and that makes for a stuttery input process. Additionally, hovering over characters is represented by a blue glow, which looks nice when moving around, but in practice doesn’t do a very good job of letting you know what key you’re touching. We had spelling errors aplenty. All of this would be helped greatly by an intelligent software component that guessed what you meant to type — much like the iPhone’s predictive element. Unfortunately, what RIM provides is more of a glorified T9, which means if you type “fo,” it doesn’t know you meant to type “do.” Ultimately we found ourselves slowly and carefully pecking out messages that should have taken less time to put together, clicking screen or not.

Otherwise, there are a few great implementations of the screen — copying and pasting, which is the norm on RIM phones, is fully represented here with elegant multitouch functionality. You just grab the beginning and end of a section of text you want to snag with two fingers, and a menu pops up along the bottom for copy / paste duties. In the browser, you can hover above a link with your finger before clicking it (a big help on crowded pages), and you can double tap (not click) to zoom into pages, though there’s no way to back out other than hitting the minus magnifying glass. We don’t think the technology used for the screen is a dead-end by any measure, but it has a long way to go before it’s honestly competing with the iPhone for virtual keyboard domination. Right now it’s a nice idea with less in the way of usability than we need. If speed isn’t a concern, you’ll probably find it manageable, but for BlackBerry addicts and those accustomed to typing on the iPhone, this will be a disappointment.

Besides the new technology behind the display, the screen itself is fairly tremendous. Colors are rich, and contrast is solid. The brightness isn’t quite as eye-searing as the iPhone at full tilt, and doesn’t even approach the supernova 8830 we’ve got here, but frankly, how bright do you need it? Everything looked sharp and clear, though we’ve gotten a little spoiled by the Bold’s incredible pixel density, and now other phones seem to pale in comparison.

Software

As we said, 4.7 isn’t a huge step up over 4.6, but there are a number of improvements worth mentioning. Navigating through menus and the home screen is still very much a typical BlackBerry experience though. The phone has two levels of “application” screens, the initial landing screen, which gives you eight app icons of your choosing, and a deeper level which displays all of your folders and programs. You can use the touchscreen to hover (or select) each of the icons, giving it that blue glow, but we found it annoying that you couldn’t drag your finger across the selections and have the glow follow you (as it does when typing). It gets stuck on the first thing you touch, and you have to re-press to move to another icon — it seems like it would be more convenient to have the selection follow your movements, but the phone doesn’t seem to know the difference between a quick flick up or down and a selection. You click down on the screen to launch an app or make a selection in a list, and you can swipe up and down to move through the list of apps, though it’s not nearly as smooth as it should be. BlackBerry fans used to a real keyboard and shortcuts might find themselves a bit lost here when trying to get around quickly — you can set one of the convenience keys to pop open the virtual keyboard, but it doesn’t seem to recognize long presses, shortcuts, or find-as-you-type contact searches like traditional RIM devices (typing on the Storm just takes you to the dialer, why we don’t know).

Most components of the UI which require scrolling don’t seem drastically changed, but you can now jump through lists by up-down gestures. Again, we found that the lack of inertia made this seem stiffer than expected, though it worked well enough when moving around the phone. RIM has added a few visual tweaks to the OS on the Storm, like crossfades and sideways swipes of pages which admittedly give it a bit more polish, although they seem largely superfluous (don’t worry, we feel the same way about the iPhone’s zooms and scrolls). Overall, transitions between screens and inside of apps do seem a bit more sluggish than the performance on the Bold, but whether this is due to those new effects or a higher CPU load given the touch recognition and screen size, we can’t say. We did find ourselves missing the speedy response of a traditional BlackBerry, and also felt like responses lagged behind our movements enough to be annoying. There seemed to be a few noticeable bugs floating around, and at least one that ground the phone to almost a halt — when quitting the browser on a page that was still loading, it turned the navigation on the home screen to molasses. Another flaw we had crop up was accelerometer related, an irksome bug that rendered the portrait-to-landscape switching (and vice versa) non-existent. We can’t say if that was hardware or software related, but the details count, and those little snags take points away.
Thankfully the browser has been considerably updated. If you have any experience with RIM’s last attempt at mobile browsers (the Bold), then you know what manna from heaven any fixes would be. 4.6’s browser is, in a word, unusable. Load times are painful, rendering is only sometimes accurate, and mostly it’s just a tortuous mess to get around in. We can honestly say that the Storm’s implementation is leaps and bounds beyond what the company has previously offered. Pages load quickly and are generally formatted correctly, navigation is much snappier (zooms don’t take hours to redraw), and scrolling is tolerable, if not as buttery smooth as we prefer. And ultimately, that’s a point that must be made — while the browser is much better than earlier versions, and is an admirable attempt, it’s still a bit behind Mobile Safari and the G1’s Webkit-based “Chrome light,” lacking support for more advanced features like multiple tabs. Why RIM doesn’t build something from scratch (or buy a license from Opera) is a question for the ages — we can’t imagine anyone has any real affection for this experience. Still, for casual tasks and most browsing, you could certainly do worse, and it’s nice to know that a lot of energy went into this update.

On the messaging and email front, very little has changed here from earlier RIM phones, save for some of that visual flair. Particularly when it comes to email, the use of screen real estate and selection of fonts seems dated when compared with the iPhone. We won’t complain about the email service itself, delivery of messages was rock solid (of course), but a quick glance at the iPhone versus a quick glance at the Storm provides a strong juxtaposition of design languages. Reading email on the BlackBerry was an inconsistent experience, and highlighted the feeling that not too much trouble had been taken to freshen up this UI and format it for the bigger screen. Under the hood, we found account management simple enough, but those looking for solid Gmail integration (like, say, all the people Verizon and RIM hope to lure away from Apple’s camp) will be seriously let down. There doesn’t seem to be any decent alternative for getting Gmail the way you’re used to, save for Google’s own app (which is remarkably good save for a few issues).

On that note, third-party software is still a bit weak for the platform, and essentially non-existent for the Storm itself. It doesn’t look like using this phone will break any (or most) of the software already out for BlackBerry devices, but there’s also not much taking advantage of the new format and screen real estate. In particular, something like the Facebook application — which Verizon and RIM are pushing hard with the launch of the Storm — is a poor stand-in for the iPhone offering, sporting exactly the same functionality it does on an older RIM device. Reps from the company assured us that their version of the App Store was coming, and they do have a tidy application manager on the phone already, so we’re hoping that third parties really step up their game with the introduction of the Storm.

Because the phone is being marketed as a convergence device, it’s got an extra emphasis on media functions. In truth, the media players / browsers are almost identical to 4.6’s options, though again there’s some nice visual flair added. The bigger screen allows for larger artwork to be shown off, and it’s a match made in heaven for video playback. Management of media is still pretty standard — we copied files back and forth between the microSD card (8GB is included with the phone), but there’s no flashy Cover Flow or anything. In fact, we noticed a slight graphic glitch when moving from portrait to landscape, which might be nothing, or may be due to the fact the phone has no hardware acceleration for graphics.

All in all, the software feature-set the phone ships with is incredibly strong. There’s a broad selection of applications, including the “To Go” suite that allow you to view and edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. Average (and even not so average) users will be hard pressed to find something that’s missing, and RIM makes it easy enough to grab key software if someone wants it. You have to hand it to them, they cover pretty much all the bases… save for one nasty omission.

We were a bit stunned to find out that we couldn’t sync the Storm with our Mac out of the box. We don’t mean “hey we couldn’t sync with iTunes” (we’re not insane), we mean, “hey, we can’t sync this, at all, in any way.” For the few Mac users that also happen to dig BlackBerrys, there’s a piece of software RIM offers free of charge called PocketMac, which does a half decent job of at least throwing your contacts, calendars, and other assorted must-haves onto your device — but you’re out of luck if you buy a Storm. Apparently, the software needs an update badly, and if you expect to enjoy the same service it provides to something like a Bold, you’ll be surprised and annoyed (as we were) to find this doesn’t let you sync your data. For that, right now, you’re going to have to go download (and pay for) something like Missing Sync. It’s pretty outrageous to us that in crafting a device so obviously aimed at the iPhone’s marketshare no one thought to make it accessible to Apple users even a little. Look, we know it’s not a huge segment of the market, but it’s there, and if history has taught us anything, it’s a segment to be reckoned with.

Phone / Data

When it comes to sound quality and reception for making actual phone calls, you can’t beat this combination. RIM phones generally have loud and clear earpieces and speakerphones, and Verizon — love it or hate it — has a great network. Those two facts are certainly apparent when it comes to the Storm. We found the earpiece to be plenty loud, and the speakerphone equally booming. If we had a complaint, we’d say the mid-range was a bit shrill on the phone. The Bold, by comparison, has a much warmer, well-rounded output. Still, that’s a pretty minor complaint, and if you’re looking for sheer network-clutching goodness, this is a pretty damn good choice. In addition to Verizon’s CDMA, EV-DO, Rev. A madness, the Storm sports a GSM radio (a number of them), so you can grab HSPA in the rest of the world, and truck on some sweet, sweet EDGE here in the States.

Speaking of that EV-DO, the download speeds and network stability of the Storm seem pretty tight. Although the phone omits WiFi, as long as you stay inside decent Verizon coverage areas, you won’t feel that sting too badly.

Camera / GPS / Battery life

In general, picture quality was excellent on the camera, which offers a healthy 3.2-megapixel resolution. The only problem we had — and it was a big one — was the fact that it took ages to focus and snap a shot. There were numerous times when trying to photograph something that we lost the shot because of the length of time it took the camera to kick in. In broad daylight, things fared a slight bit better, but when using the flash, it was pretty hard to get good results. This seems like something that could take a simple software tweak to fix — we know the camera looks nice, we just need it to take photos faster. A lot faster.

One of the nice things about the Storm is that it’s not just capable of doing still photos, but can shoot video as well. Results are mediocre, allowing capture up to 320 x 240, with quite a bit of heavy artifacting. Still, knowing that you can pull this out to grab something reminds us — yet again — that this is a necessary basic for modern cellphones.

Using the device for navigation garnered excellent results in terms of signal reception and tracking, but having to slug through the abysmal Verizon Navigator software isn’t exactly joyous (dudes, that intro animation is the worst thing we’ve ever seen). It would be nice to see some third party options on the device for PND duties, though at least Verizon tries to throw a lot of content into the mix (movie times, traffic, local search), no matter how heavy handed it feels (real, real heavy handed).

Since we had a very, very limited time to test the phone, we can’t really give you solid figures on battery life. In casual use, however, the Storm seems to be going strong even after a heavy workload: browsing, media player, and phone calls. We’ve had the phone on and chugging all day, and it’s only seeing about about a 30 percent drop in life so far. If this keeps up, you can color us officially impressed with the juice you can pull out of this thing.

Wrap-up

It’s clear from the device itself and the massive promotional push that both RIM and Verizon are giving the Storm that they view this as a proper threat to the iPhone’s dominance in the smartphone market. Over the last few weeks we’ve been bombarded with commercials, leaks, press releases, and special events all celebrating the arrival of the Storm, both here and abroad. So it seems fairly obvious that yes, the companies believe they have a real contender on their hands — and in many ways they do. The selling points are easy: the phone is gorgeous to look at and hold, it’s designed and backed by RIM (now almost a household name thanks to their prevalence in the business and entertainment markets), and it’s packed with features that, on paper, make it seem not only as good as the iPhone, but better. The hitch in this plan is a major one: it’s not as easy, enjoyable, or consistent to use as the iPhone, and the one place where everyone is sure they have an upper hand — that wow-inducing clickable screen — just isn’t all that great. For casual users, the learning curve and complexity of this phone will feel like an instant turn off, and for power users, the lack of a decent typing option and considerable lagginess in software will give them pause. RIM tried to strike some middle ground between form and function, and unfortunately came up short on both.

Here’s the final comparison iPhone 3G vs. Blackberry Storm:

Feature        iPhone                                                BlackBerry Storm

Camera 2MP (gud quality)                               3.2 MP (average quality)

Video nice video resolution and quality        nice reolution & average quality

Processor scalable upto 667Mhz                        530Mhz

Graphics & UI GREAT feeling & responsive        relatively sluggish & slow

Keyboard fast enough                                     typing speed I cud manage to get was much lower bcoz of                                                                           Press-sensitive keyboard

Applications/ SDK Awesome, 1000s of apps      wait for Apps before I can comment.appStore available

Gaming good Processor, great Gaming device    Low end games only

Dimensions slim and long                                  thick and short

Battery life 6 hours practical talk time                4.5 hrs

Browser (wiFi) 25seconds                                        32 seconds

(Time to load www.taranfx.com/blog)

Browser feel: silky smooth and adaptive             rugged and slumpy

Screen Brighter and higher contrast             higher resolution

Rarely do we receive so many questions, so many comments and demands over an upcoming review.  In the few days since our HTC Touch HD unboxing and hands-on video demo, the messages have been flooding in.  Today, we’ll try to answer those questions - and, of course, the biggest question of them all: have HTC managed the unthinkable and tugged the must-have crown from the head of the iPhone 3G?  In the first half of our two-part review, we’ll be looking at the touchscreen, OS, GUI and keyboard entry, as well as the Touch HD’s internet abilities and more.

For first-impressions we’ll point you at our unboxing post.  We’re still waiting to hear back exactly what will and will not be included in the retail packaging.  Someone at HTC has obviously given no small amount of thought to the perceived quality of what’s included - the USB cable, for instance, is finished with a soft-touch, rubberized coating; a small point, perhaps, but you notice it - but I wish they’d given equal thought to the AC adapter.  A universal design, with slot-in country-specific pin sections, with a UK plug it protrudes down from the socket not up and, as such, if your power point is in a low skirting-board, it won’t fit.  Just as with the USB cable, it’s a small point but, yes, you notice it.

Put a 3.8-inch 480 x 800 display into your smartphone and you’re making a statement; you’re also taking on some impressive competition.  The iPhone 3G is just one of HTC’s key rivals with the Touch HD; there’s also RIM’s BlackBerry Storm, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and the Samsung Omnia i900.  Each has their advantages, certainly, but with the exception of the Storm - which we’re yet to spend time with in person - the Touch HD bests them all.  Picture the crispness of the HTC Touch Diamond’s screen, stretched to take up the fullness of this new, broader sibling; image quality is something we’ll not tire of.

It’s that fact which makes the resistive touchscreen all the more frustrating.  Like with the rest of its Windows Mobile range, HTC have selected a standard, non-capacitive touch panel; the benefit is that it responds both to the stylus and to a finger, making it suitable for both general prodding and the sort of handwriting input we’re told the Asian markets prefer.  The downside is that, while good for a resistive screen, it feels less precise and responsive than the display on, say, the iPhone.  A slightly-flexible plastic front is necessary, rather than glass, and the fact that it responds to finger pressure means scrolling isn’t as smooth as on the Apple handset.

Nonetheless, it’s certainly no slouch.  For once HTC’s custom Windows Mobile GUI, TouchFLO 3D, has room to really spread out.  The bottom tab icons are large and finger-sized, and swiping from side to side quickly flicks through the panes.  Everything has been spread out, some aspects more successfully than others.  The weather pane, for instance, now incorporates both the large day’s forecast with the next four days along the bottom, rather than on different pages; however on the main home pane the clock has become oversized and squandered space that could have been used to display more calendar entries.  Only three will fit without scrolling, just one more compared to the Touch Diamond’s 1-inch smaller display.

Still, there’s more customization on offer, with the new found ability to remove and reorder the different panes (although the home tab is locked in place and you can’t switch it, the settings or the program launcher panes off).  A new Stocks display has been included, too.  It makes it all the more disappointing when you drop out of TouchFLO 3D and into standard Windows Mobile, which is pretty much a given unless you’re only making calls and taking photos.  Microsoft’s smartphone OS might support high-resolution displays, but it certainly doesn’t take advantage of them: font options are basically large & clunky or small & stylus-demanding, with none of the finesse seen on rival OSes.  Contrast any of the standard settings pages with HTC’s communications manager, and tell us which you’d prefer to have more of.  This isn’t HTC’s fault, as such, but it undoubtedly takes away from the user experience; Windows Mobile 7 can’t come soon enough, frankly.

Happily touched upon by HTC’s GUI finessing is the on-screen keyboard.  In addition to the usual Windows Mobile QWERTY, ‘block recognizer’ (similar to Palm’s old Graffiti system), ‘letter recognizer’ (which accepts handwriting letter-by-letter) and ‘Transcriber’ (which accepts full-screen, whole word handwriting), there are three of HTC’s own keyboards.  Phone offers a standard numeric keypad for either multi-tap or T9 entry; Compact QWERTY is similar to the BlackBerry SureType system, with two letters per key and T9 used to decipher which you intend; Full QWERTY gives the whole keyboard.  Each has a straightforward switch to toggle T9 on and off, together with several pages of characters.  The video at the bottom of this page demonstrates all the available options.

The HTC full QWERTY offers keys the same size as those on the iPhone.  Happily the resistive touchscreen is precise and responsive enough to differentiate well enough to make typing at a reasonable speed possible.  Two factors, though, keep the iPhone input method ahead: first, and most simple for HTC to change, is the way the iPhone letters ‘pop up’ when you press them.  Typing on the Touch HD with the stylus is no problem, as the keys are big enough to still see which you’re tapping; with a finger, however, the whole button (and most of those surrounding it) is blocked.

Second, and more frustrating, is the poor auto-correction.  Here the iPhone is leagues ahead of Windows Mobile, managing to make sense out of even the most haphazard of typing styles.  On the Touch HD, meanwhile, simple things such as “I’m” - where you’d like to miss out the apostrophe, have it automatically added, and the ‘I’ captitalized - aren’t recognized.  It’s not a deal breaker, certainly, but it slows you down.

The messaging app is the usual Windows Mobile 6.1 fare, with Microsoft Exchange compatibility for push email (along with wireless calendar and contacts synchronization).  Giving Microsoft their due, setup of an Exchange account is always straightforward on WM handsets; email and password was all it took to get everything up and running.  POP3, IMAP and Hotmail are all relatively easy to set up too, but push email does initially confuse by having on- and off-peak delivery frequency switched on by default.  The handset assumes that, out of office hours, you’re content to get new email every thirty minutes rather than as soon as it arrives; that may be so, but with no suggestion that it’s set up that way it can lead to initial confusion.

Thankfully HTC preinstall Opera Mobile 9.5 (build 2682 on our review sample).  Unlike the mobile version of Internet Explorer, Opera Mobile supports tabs; however out of the box it only permits three at a time and there’s no obvious way in the normal settings menu to change that.  Instead, go to “opera:config” in the address bar and there’s an option to increase the number.  That tweak made, it’s a very usable browser; zooming - in the absence of multitouch - is triggered either by double tapping on a section of the page, or by calling up a zoom scroll-bar by tapping the icon in the bottom left corner.  Panning around the page is done by dragging with your finger or the stylus.

It’s not perfect, though.  The zoom seems less “intelligent” than that on Mobile Safari, for instance, which automatically reframes around different sections of the page.  On the Touch HD it instead zooms in by a specific amount, and then requires you to tweak the level and shuffle the page about to fit in exactly what you want to read.  We also have an ongoing issue with selecting links: it almost seems as if the Touch HD’s high-resolution screen is better than Opera’s designers ever expected it to be.  When viewing a whole webpage we can see the links, we can even tap on them individually (with the stylus, at least), but the browser won’t actually register the tap unless you zoom in closer.  It’s an ongoing frustration and adds an extra step into browsing.

We look at GPS performance, the media functionality of the smartphone - including the camera, audio and video - and battery life.  We also explore how the Touch HD performs as a phone.  You can find Part Two of the exclusive SlashGear HTC Touch HD review here.

The new version of Google’s Mobile iPhone application that includes voice search recognition was made available as a free download on the App Store last night.

“The new Google Mobile App for iPhone makes it possible for you to do a Google web search using only your voice,” said Dave Burke, Engineering Manager for Google’s mobile team. “Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and say what you’re looking for.”

In addition to allowing users to speak their search queries instead of typing them, the updated app (Free, App Store) includes an Apps Tab that allows you to reorder Google Apps to make it easier to access your favorites.

Google also said there’s no longer a need to specify where you are because Google Mobile App now has Search with My Location.

“Search for ‘movie showtimes’ or ‘Mediterranean restaurant’ and you’ll automatically see results based on your current location,” Burke added. “For this to work, Location Services must be enabled on your iPhone and you have to opt-in to let Google Mobile App use your location.”

For a bit of the history behind Google’s new speak-to-search capabilities, see AppleInsider’s report from last Friday.

USB 3.0 is one step closer to being included in our computers
It seems like everything uses USB today from cell phone chargers to keyboards, mice, printers, and cameras. What many really want are faster USB connections. USB 3.0 has been on the horizon for a while now and for a time the future of the specification and cross compatibility was unknown.

The USB 3.0 Promoters Group announced yesterday that the USB 3.0 specification was finally complete. The specification is a sort of roadmap that allows manufacturers to build controllers and products utilizing the USB 3.0 standard. The specification has now been turned over to the USB Implementers Forum, the managing body for USB specifications.

Members of the USB 3.0 promoters group including — HP, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, ST-NXP, and Texas instruments — have had a long road with accusations from non-forum members that it was keeping the completed specification from other manufacturers in order to give member companies a competitive edge in the market.

The accusations led AMD and NVIDIA to announce that they intended to begin work on their own open host controller for USB 3.0. This move was potentially catastrophic for USB 3.0 as different manufacturers would not have been able to guarantee compatibility across platforms for USB 3.0 devices.

USB-IF president and chairman Jeff Ravencraft said in a statement, “SuperSpeed USB is the next advancement in ubiquitous technology. Today’s consumers are using rich media and large digital files that need to be easily and quickly transferred from PCs to devices and vice versa. SuperSpeed USB meets the needs of everyone from the tech-savvy executive to the average home user.”

The specification for USB 3.0 debuted at the SuperSpeed USB Developers Conference in San Jose on November 17. Among the new improvements that USB 3.0 will bring are higher data speeds and enhanced power efficiency.

The first USB 3.0 discrete controllers will be available in the second half of 2009 and the first consumer products using USB 3.0 are expected to be available in 2010. The first products to be commercially available for the specification will be flash drives, external hard drives, and digital music players.

Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA went around and around in June with accusations over how complete the open host controller specifications for USB 3.0 were. AMD and NVIDIA claimed the specification was complete and Intel wasn’t releasing it in an attempt to gain a competitive edge. Intel maintained that the specification wasn’t complete and when it was complete, they would release it to other manufacturers.

This is what led AMD and NVIDIA to announce they were starting work on their own specification for USB 3.0 open host controller. Exactly how far the two firms went with their own specification was never announced. The competing specification was never made available and if the two firms did begin developing their own product and just haven’t released it yet, the project is certainly dead now. It’s a safe bet that the first specification to market will be the standard for USB 3.0. An AMD source claimed that it was at work on its own specification in June.

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Does it really have capacity to strom away iPhone ?

Given how good the Storm looks, the fact that it’s $100 less than the BlackBerry Bold (with two-year contract, of course), and comes with 8-gigs of storage versus one gig on the Bold, I don’t see why anyone would prefer the Bold unless tactile keyboards are really critical to you.

Actually, the Storm does have one major drawback: no Wi-Fi.

That’s close to inexcusable, especially given that the Bold does have Wi-Fi.

Still, if Santa is reading this post, I certainly wouldn’t mind getting a Storm for Christmas.

8 (Stupid) Reasons To Pick The BlackBerry Storm Over The iPhone?

CIO offers up eight reasons to pick the forthcoming BlackBerry Storm over the Apple iPhone 3G. At least one of them is invalid. What about the others?

The reasons given by CIO writer Al Sacco to skip the iPhone 3G in favor of the BlackBerry Storm are as follows:

8. Stereo Bluetooth
7. Removable battery (who needs that )
6. Expandable memory (16, 32 GB was enough i guess)
5. Digital camera, video recording (iPhone vieo quality is better)
4. Storm works as a tethered modem (iPhone also does that)
3. Touch screen provides tactile feedback
2. Cut-and-paste
1. Multitasking champ

How do these reasons really stack up? I can’t disagree with the first one. I wish the iPhone came with stereo Bluetooth and am still disappointed that Apple hasn’t seen fit to include this feature. It could easily be added to the iPhone as part of a firmware update. C’mon, Apple, where’s stereo Bluetooth?

What about the removable battery? Almost all other smartphones have removable batteries. The Apple iPhone doesn’t. To this day it causes frustration for some users, especially since the battery life of the iPhone 3G isn’t exactly superlative. Being able to swap in a spare would be great. Will it ever happen? Not likely.

Sacca argues that the iPhone is limited to either 8 GB or 16 GB of storage, depending on which model you choose. The Storm can accept microSD cards up to 16 GB, matching the iPhone’s capacity. Sacca is right in pointing out that users could purchase as many microSD cards as they wish and swap them out at will, meaning the Storm has virtually unlimited storage capacity. However, it is very easy to create multiple playlists and just sync different playlists with the iPhone so it holds different content. This one could go either way, depending on how you look at it.

The iPhone’s digital camera has good days and bad days. That it is limited to 2 megapixels is disappointing, but what’s worse is that it won’t record any video. The Storm ups the ante to a 3.2-megapixel camera and also offers video capture. That’s a big plus in favor of the Storm, no doubt.

It’s the No. 4 point that I say is totally moot. Sure, the Storm will be able to serve as a wireless modem, but so will the iPhone.AT&T (NYSE: T) has said that it is working with Apple to bring that functionality to the iPhone. While they haven’t provided an exact date, it is coming, and thereby Sacco’s argument here doesn’t quite hold water.

Sacco’s argument that the Storm’s haptic feedback is better than the iPhone’s lack of haptic feedback is probably debatable. I’ve used the iPhone and many devices that provide feedback. The type of feedback that is supplied and how well it works are big factors that contribute to its effectiveness. Quite honestly, as an iPhone user, I do not miss haptic feedback in the least and it isn’t a feature I am eager to have added at any point. In fact, there are many phones that execute haptic feedback poorly and wish you make you could turn it off.

There’s no debating the cut-and-paste argument. Apple, you’re behind the ball on this one. Fans have asked for it since day one. Get with the program.

As for multitasking, it is something that BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile devices, and Symbian S60 devices do well. It means you can minimize one application and open another for a while and return to the previous app without losing where you were. The iPhone does this to some degree. You can, for example, listen to music while browsing the Web or composing messages. You can’t, however, run most other apps at the same time. Is there a real benefit to this? There is if the application is something that you need to sign in/out of, such as an instant messaging program.

Overall, though, I use Windows Mobile and S60 devices regularly along with the iPhone. I don’t think iPhone users are missing all that much with the lack of multitasking.

Stay tuned for Taranfx’s full review of the BlackBerry Storm next week.

 New NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card Featuring CUDA Massively
 Parallel Processing Architecture; Offers Most Robust Performance
 and Features to Date for Oil and Gas Exploration, Medical Imaging,
 and Styling and Design Applications.

That’s some serious boasting by NVIDIA, but this is some serious graphics horsepower. The Quadro FX 5800, already seen in NVIDIA’s Quadro Plex D data cruncher, replaces the 5600 at the top of the NVIDIA heap with 240 CUDA-programmable parallel cores and the industry’s first card with 4GB of graphics memory. MSRP? Just $3,499 for you big spender — pennies for the companies who can harness the power for the purposes of oil and gas exploration, 4D modeling, and graphics design.

    SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Professionals searching
for oil, diagnosing illness or styling the next high-performance luxury
vehicle all have one thing in common, the need for advanced visual
computing solutions. NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in visual
computing technologies, today unveiled the most powerful professional
graphics card in graphics history -- the NVIDIA(R) Quadro(R) FX 5800.

    (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020613/NVDALOGO)

    "The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The
challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data
by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze and use to make
impactful decisions," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional
Solutions, NVIDIA. "At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even
people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive
datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make
fast and accurate decisions."

    The Quadro FX 5800 graphics card offers unprecedented performance and
scalability to rapidly visualize and interpret massive datasets that until
now were unattainable on a workstation graphics board. Offering up to 240
CUDA(TM) programmable parallel cores and the industries first 4GB of
graphics memory, the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card is ideally suited for oil
and gas exploration, medical imaging, styling and design, and scientific
visualization. Other advanced features of the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card
include:

    -- Interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capabilities
    -- Massive memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second
    -- Fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels per second and geometry
       performance of 300 million triangles per second
    -- Support for next-generation OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX 10
       applications
    -- Advanced multi-system and multi-device visualization environments with
       Quadro G-Sync II

    "Landmark's recently launched GeoProbe(R) R5000 software empowers
geoscientists with an unprecedented ability to visualize large-scale
regional datasets at full resolution from a standard Linux(R) workstation,"
said Nicholas Purday, manager of Geophysical Technologies at Landmark. "The
NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 graphics card has a more powerful GPU and superior
triangle performance, which make it possible for the GeoProbe application
to quickly render large surfaces, and allow us to move many
computing-intensive processes to the graphics card, significantly enhancing
the overall user experience." Landmark is an industry leading software and
technology services brand of Halliburton, one of the world's largest
providers of products and services to the energy industry.

    "The advanced textured graphics capabilities of the Quadro FX 5800 are
enabling CyberHeart to provide 3D radiosurgical target visualization and
definition tools for the purpose of treating cardiac arrhythmias," said
Thilaka Sumanaweera, CTO, CyberHeart. "Our applications are processing very
large data sets acquired by the state-of-the-art 64-slice CT scanners using
respiratory- and cardiac-gating. The Quadro FX cards provide us with the
extreme bandwidth necessary to support our cutting-edge technology, and
essentially, save lives." CyberHeart, Inc., is a medical device company
developing a non-invasive radiosurgical system for cardiac applications.

    The Quadro FX 5800 GPU features true 10-bit color enabling billions
rather than millions of color variations for rich, vivid image quality with
the broadest dynamic range. Professionals now benefit from viewing their
models with higher degrees of precision and realism never before possible.

    "Our customers are making important decisions about future products on
the basis of RTT-powered 3D real-time models," said Ludwig Fuchs, cofounder
and CEO of RTT. "The new Quadro FX 5800 will be the platform of choice to
bring that arena to the next level. Higher levels of realism, physical
correctness and large models are now made possible through a double number
of cores and a generous frame buffer." Realtime Technology AG, is a leading
supplier of real- time visualization technology and virtual prototyping
solutions to the automotive, aerospace, industrial and consumer goods
design industries.

    Pricing and Availability

    NVIDIA Quadro solutions are widely available through leading PC
manufacturers and workstation system integrators and NVIDIA channel
partners PNY Technologies (US and EMEA), Leadtek (APAC) and Elsa (Japan).
The Quadro FX 5800 graphics board has an MSRP of $3499 USD. For more
information about the full lineup of NVIDIA professional solutions please
visit http://www.nvidia.com/quadro.

    NVIDIA Corporation

    NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) the world leader in visual computing
technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor
which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations,
personal computers, game consoles and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the
entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce(R) products, the
professional design and visualization market with its Quadro(R) products,
and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla(TM) products.
NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout
Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit http://www.nvidia.com.

    Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to,
statements as to: the benefits, impact, power and scalability of NVIDIA's
Quadro FX 5800 graphics cards; impact of NVIDIA's Quadro FX 5800 graphics
cards on the GeoProbe R5000 and CyberHeart; and the availability and
pricing of NVIDIA's Quadro FX 5800 graphics cards are forward-looking
statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause
results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors
that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development
of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software
defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes
in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different
standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and
interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies
when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to
time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange
Commission including our Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended July 27,
2008. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and
are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements
are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date
hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to
update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or
circumstances.

It seems like every tech company is feeling the pinch these days, and Dell is no different. In order to cut costs, they are encouraging employees to take up to five unpaid vacation days or a severance package during Q4. CEO Michael Dell has also initiated a hiring freeze and announced that the company will be using fewer contract workers during this time. Dell hopes to trim $3 billion off its annual spending over the next few years, and my guess is that another round of layoffs might occur if these preliminary measures don\’t help enough in the short term.

Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google’s and Amazon.com’s current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation’s own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, the Azure effort has brought more of a Wild West feel to the whole arena of cloud computing. If this were the late 1880s, Amazon.com would provide the land grants, as well as raw Linux and Windows acreage to build your applications upon. Google’s general goods store would stock and give away all the APIs that a programmer could ever use, and some of the scrappy prospectors that came to build the new towns would be from Microsoft. Steve Ballmer as Billy the Kid, anyone?

Enough of the metaphors. Mary Jo Foley’s excellent explanation of the different bits and pieces of Azure is worth reading. But the first instance of Azure is long on vision and short on the actual implementation: Microsoft calls it a “community technology preview,” what the rest of us would consider an alpha version, given how long it takes Microsoft to actually get things nailed down and working properly (Version 3 is usually where most of us start to think of its code as solid). Granted, Google calls many of its applications beta, but they are typically in much better shape — I mean, Gmail has been in beta for about 17 years now.

What you’ll need to settle on the Azure frontier
So why should you consider entering Microsoft’s cloud frontier? First, consider what your .Net skill set is and whether your programmers will use JScript or something else for the majority of their coding work. The good news is that Azure will work with .Net apps right from the start. (Support for SOAP, REST, and AJAX will be coming, Microsoft promises.)

Microsoft has talked about testing and debugging these apps on your local desktop, just as you do now, then deploying them in its Azure cloud. The bad news is that you probably have to rewrite a good portion of these apps so that the user interface and data-extraction logic can work across low-bandwidth Internet connections.

Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie, in a Cnet interview, says, “Fundamentally, the application pattern does have to change. Most applications will not run that way out of the box [on Azure].” While good programming practice today is to separate Web-page content from formatting instructions, most programmers assume they are running everything on the same box. Remember how miserable LAN apps were back in the days of Token Ring? We have 10Gbps Ethernet now, and people have gotten sloppy.

This is no small issue, and my prediction is that most apps will need some major surgery before they can be cloudworthy. One wag already has placed his bets:Stephen Arnold writes in his blog, Beyond Search, “I remain baffled about SharePoint search running from Azure. In my experience, performance is a challenge when SharePoint runs locally, has resources, and has been tuned to the content. A generic SharePoint running from the cloud seems like an invitation to speeds similar to my Hayes 9600 baud dial-up modem.” For those of you who are too young to remember, that means very slow.

While you are boning up on .Net, you might also want to get more familiar with Windows Server and SQL Server 2008, because many of the same technologies will be used for Azure. One thing that won’t be in Azure is Hyper-V; apparently, we have another hypervisor to run the Azure VMs. Too bad — I was just getting comfortable with Hyper-V myself. Nobody said this was gonna be easy.

The datacenter land grab: Enough for a secure frontier?
Speaking of servers, Microsoft is in the midst of a major land grab of its own, building out datacenters in multiple cities and beefing up the ones it already has. More good news is that Microsoft plans on using Azure to run its own hosted applications and is in the middle of moving them over to the platform (so far, only Live Mesh is there today). Right now, all Azure apps will run in its Quincy, Wash., datacenter, 150 miles east of Redmond, but you can bet this will change as more people use the service. At least Microsoft tells you this; Amazon treats as a state secret how many and where its S3 and EC2 datacenters are.

Of course, the big attraction for cloud computing is scalability, and Ozzie, in the same Cnet interview, has this to say about it: “Every company right now runs their own Web site, and they’re always afraid of what might happen if it becomes too popular. This gives kind of an overdraft protection for the people who run their Web sites.” I like that. But given the number of outages experienced by Amazon and Google over the past year, what happens when we have bank failures in Dodge?

Second, where do you want to homestead your apps? Just because you want to make use of the Microsoft services doesn’t mean your apps have to reside on its servers. If you are happy with all the Google Goods, stay with that. If you like someone else’s scripting language or toolset, do likewise. (By the way, our sister publication CIO.com has published a thoughtful, helpful examination of the JScript universe.)

Oh,and how does the cloud frontier play with the enterprise?
The real trouble with all of this cloud computing is how any cloud-based app is going to play with your existing enterprise data structures that aren’t in nice SQL databases; they may even be scattered around the landscape in a bunch of spreadsheets or text files. SnapLogic (and Microsoft’s own Popfly) has tools to mix and mash up the data, but figuring out the provenance of your data is also not taught in traditional computer science classes and is largely unheard of around most IT shops, too. Do you need a DBA for your cloud assets? It is 10 p.m.: Do you know what your widgets are doing with your data?

Next, pricing isn’t set, although for the time being, Azure is free for all. If you look at what Amazon.com charges for the kind of real estate that Microsoft is offering (2,000 VM machine hours, 50GB of storage, and 600Gbps per month of bandwidth), that works out to about $400 a month. Think about that for a moment: $400 a month can buy you a pretty high-end dedicated Linux or Windows server from any number of hosting providers, then you don’t have to worry about bandwidth and other charges. And there are many others that can sell you a VM in their datacenter for a lot less.

However, Amazon.com’s S3 storage repository is amazingly cheap, and it’s getting cheaper as of this week; in fact, Amazon.com is now charging less per gigabyte the more you store with it. Microsoft should set tiered, fixed monthly pricing and make the storage component free. I am thinking a basic account should be free, and $100 a month would be just about right for the next level. The pricing of Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business hosting services is an indication of what to expect.

Finally, take a moment to do a browser inventory as best you can. Writing cloud-based apps is going to be hard enough without having to account for variations in how your browsers support Java and other APIs, too. You’ll find that you are supporting way too many different versions from different vendors, and getting people to switch just because the IT sheriff says so is probably impossible.

If you are going to enter the brave new world of cloud computing, this is yet another indication of the beginnings of where the Wild West will begin for you.