Which is the best 1st generation smartphone??

For sometime now I have been carrying two smartphones with me, thanks to me being a Mobile Developer. Till yesterday there was a HTC Mozart(Windows Phone 7) and a Nexus One (Android Froyo), but today I had to swap my Nexus One for a iPhone 2G(iOS 3.1.3). While playing around with these phones, I realized both the iPhone and Mozart are first generation phones of their respective platforms. In that aspect, I have also used HTC Dream (G1, Android) for quite sometime. So the thought came to my mind, Amongst the 3 first generation phones, which is the best?

Before going into my opinion let me tell you that, I have traditionally been a Microsoft fanboy, and an Android lover, and a bit of Apple hater ;). But I will try to be fair on my judgement. 

The iPhone2G is a first generation phone in terms of hardware, the OS is not. My 2G is running iOS3.1.3 which is almost 2-3 years younger than the rig. Also, it has a million+ apps base now backing it. But to even this advantage out, the 3 year old phone is compared with a new Phone that was launched few months ago, and another a little earlier.

User Interface 

iPhone has a child-like user interface with embossed, glossy icons placed on a low screen resolution display, though many people say it is very intuitive and simple. 

Windows Phone has an unbelievable and revolutionary user interface. Everything looks so aesthetic, and eye pleasing. Giving much importance to the actual content than Chrome, you hardly see the phone OS, you see exactly what you are looking for. Be it your phone book, or your tweets.

The HTC G1 has a very barebone user interface. And it feels like using Windows 3.1, in terms of the styling and theming, it is definitely not the most beautiful designs I have seen. It gives you most of the things you want though, in terms features.

Verdict: WP7 beats iPhone by a few miles and Android by a few light years.

Usability

As mentioned before, this is about the software, so technically iPhone has a little advantage. But still, it lacks multi-tasking, and looks more or less basic. I still get mails delivered in the background and my tweets pushed through notifications, so it is very much usable. 

Windows Phone 7 fails here miserably. It starts with the lack of multitasking, similar to the iPhone it fetches your mails though.There is no push notification support, no sockets (no chatting), a poor browser (limited HTML5 support) and (hence?) pretty limited apps.

Android scores a home run here. It gives you everything you can think of. You can run a plethora of apps in the background (in the 70MB available memory), be available on chat all the time, receive tweets, and anything you could actually do in an computer.

Verdict: Android pays back Windows Phone,and iPhone stays where it was.

Stability

The iPhone I have is already 2+ years old, with a broken glass and is jailbroken (multiple times), but still is rock solid. No app has ever crashed while I was using it (you can't know if it crashed, even if it actually did :] ). 

Windows Phone has to catch up here. Few of my apps have crashed multiple times ( eg: Foursquare) and my phone itself crashed once and I had to hard reset it.

Android was worser, I used to get "Force close" messages and numerous crashes regularly. Maybe I am biased here, as I used to develop apps and run them on the phone :) Moreover the I could run any spurious app I want, on the phone, with no app restrictions in place.

Apps

Apps have been iPhone's forte and it will be, at least for some (more) time. Only that many of the apps have evolved and ignores the 2G phone now.:)

Windows Phone has some good apps, and generally they have kept the quality of apps high. Also, every app has a "try" option which is good. I haven't seen gaming experience get any better than the XBox live hub in my Windows Phone.

Android again has had a different approach, you can find all sorts of apps; good, bad, harmful, crappy and what not. It was hard to find quality apps in the platform, though there were a few.

Verdict: App-le it is, followed by Windows Phone and Android.

I can't say which is the best first generation phone, each one of them have been exciting in their own ways, if it was the fresh User Interface in the Windows Phone, iPhone brought about the touch phone revolution itself. Android took smartphones closer to computers and gave me infinite possibilities. 

But, if a G1, Mozart and iPhone was kept in front of me and I had to pick one, I would have probably picked the G1, er.. no... the Windows Phone..oh..or is ..it ... the iPhone?

Send in your choices. Which one would be your pick?

PS: I really miss my Nexus One. It is a hell of a phone!

-Codevalley

An early look at Froyo, a.k.a Android 2.2

Well, it has been a long time since I wrote. Mostly because I was busy with *other stuff* and also because I was smitten by micro-blogging [read twitter]. Now that I am back, I will start with the talk of the town, Android.

For the last 2 days, I spent my nights watching youtube. But, before you come to weird conclusions, let me clarify, I was watching the GoogleIO live streaming like 25,000 other people around the world. And what I was primarily interested in was Froyo.

Froyo, typically means a dessert made of yoghurt {Frozen Yoghurt}. But Google meant a dessert of a different kind, it was the latest update for the Android OS, version-ed '2.2'. I was most amazed by the feature list that was unfolded by Gundotra. And right from then, I was restlessly checking on my Nexus One, whether it has been blessed with an Update from Google. After two [long] days of desperation, I came across a post in Phandroid.com which was an howto on manually updating the phone with Froyo. And within 20 minutes and a few taps, my N1 was running the Froyo.

What's new?

Immediately after installation and boot, when I tried tapping and swiping I found the system was little jerky and bumpy. Maybe, because it was the first boot and it had not done with it. Once it settled down, I went through it and here are the enhancements I found.

• Animations: Animations are smoother, and are more fluid. Like when you drag between home screens, you have a bouncing halt rather than a jerky switch.
• Applications menu: First they had the draggable applications menu, then the grid button, now they have the 3-icon set of Phone, Grid and Browser. And the applications screen is are bouncier and fast.
• Call Log: The call log is more organised. If same caller has multiple calls consecutively, they are made into an expandable groups, so you can seen more info. I liked it.
• Messages: The messages screen has been touched up a bit. Nothing special about it, but looks better.
• Android Market: This is big. Market has got lots of goodies. Now, you can set auto-update for any app, it downloads updates whenever available. Even better, you have update-all button to download all updates. Also there is a separate, comments tab for applications.
• Search Bar: Search bar is also enhanced with a drop down button, from which you can filter you search to Apps, Web, Contacts or All. I felt it was redundant though.
• Mail: This is a huge [I guess]. I don't remember being able to add multiple Google accounts to my phone before. Now, you can do that. You can add as many Google accounts you want into your GMail and sync the contacts etc.
• System speed: Though in general the system appeared faster, some places it lagged behind previous update. Like in the album application, the loading was pretty slow.

• Flash 10.1: This almost gave me a nightmare. I installed the firmware and went to every flash website I knew. None of them were loading. I checked the system settings. No mention of flash anywhere. I was bamboozled until I checked in the Android Market. You have to manually install the Flash plugin as an Application. And it is a beta. Nevertheless once I installed it I could check out all the flash websites and even games on browser. I checked the desktop version of youtube.com [though] the video playback was not very smooth. Had a low frame-rate playback.
• Applications: The manage applications screen also has minor make-ups. The biggest one being the ability to move installed applications to SD-Card to save space. But it was greyed out in my phone.
• Google Maps: looks faster in the new build. The tiles load very fast. So is the case with Google Earth.

So that's my initial impression on Froyo after 3 hours of usage. Will post more updates as and when I find them.

The catch is that, this update is only available for Nexus One, that too would roll out in a period of over 3 weeks [unless you take my route]. What about the other phones? Samsung Galaxy and the likes are still running the Donut [Android 1.5].

Codevalley

Google's android, the new mantra or a damp squib?

There was a time when we would relate the term Google with "web searching". Even the Oxford dictionary has added a verb "Googling" which means searching something online. But, since the, Google has grown too big. Their web presence virtually spread to all around the spectrum from banner ads, social networks, Video hosting and what not. But it seems, Google is not ready to stop with what they have. They are now on the process of developing an OS, No, I am not talking about the Googubuntu. This time the stage is different.
Google last month, in a consortium called Open Handset Alliance, announced a new platform for the mobile, called Android. Android is supposed to be very flexible and support 3rd party apps to any extent. The kernel is basically built around a modified and trimmed version of Linux GNU 2.6 kernel, and the whole framework works on Java Language. Java apps for mobile are supposed to be very secure, while limited and rigid in functionality. Now, Google is all set to change this concept with Android. Saying that, the coding would not be in J2ME as in normal mobile Java programming. Android has its own set of APIs and function to play with.
Even though there was initial excitement on this news, soon there were dark shadows cast, when I came to know the Open Handset Alliance does not include the major players in the mobile industry, like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola etc, whom refused to accept the offer. (But still some like T-Mobile, Qualcomm, Intel, LG, Samsung, DoCoMo etc have lent their support.) Also, some already established mobile developers like Symbian, Microsoft, etc believe that this will only create more fragmentation rather than uniting the development.
But Google is again working with the magic world "Open Source", with Android. The android code is open and very easy to develop. They is offering a mammoth $10 million developers developing great apps for Android. But the news from Developers themselves is that Android is not very stable, at times it does not respond at all! But we need not take this very seriously since the actual Android release would be only by mid 2008, by which they can make the platform more reliable.

Android Home page
Android SDK Download
Android Wallpapers

codevalley