With hype comes scrutiny. Build consumer interest in a device up to that which Verizon has built the BlackBerry Storm, and you’re bound to hear the complaints. The Storm has been on the shelves for less than a week, and forums around the web are already littered with word of reproach.
A list of the issues that RIM has recognized as software flaws has been passed out to Verizon employees to keep them from accepting them as reasons to exchange the customer’s device. Of course, this list made its way out almost immediately. According to the document, we can expect the first set of fixes to come in Week 1 of December.
Far more interesting than the problems themselves are the interim solutions. Key press not recognized? Solution: Press it again!
Issues to be resolved by the first OTA update (Maintenance Release 1) – December, week 1:
If a customer receives a call while listen to music at low volume using a wired headset, the music volume may suddenly increase to the highest level (!). Interim recovery instructions: Lower the volume using the buttons on the side of the handset.
When using voice-activated dialing, incoming audio may be muted. Interim recovery instructions: Enter the menu and select “Activate Handset or Speaker”.
The handset may reset itself while sitting idle or while using multimedia applications. No interim recovery instructions provided.
It’s not all that uncommon for handset manufacturers to forego the simplicity of a standard 3.5mm headset jack, instead opting for some clunky proprietary port. To take off a bit of the sting, they’ll generally include some sort of crappy-port-to-3.5mm adapter – or at the very least, they’ll stick a cheapo pair of compatible headphones in the box in hopes that no one cares that they sound horrible.
Overheard in the Motorola mobile development building:
“Sanjay! I’ve got it! I’ve got the idea that will be our next RAZR-level success!”
“.. Let’s hear it.”
“Okay, spec-wise, nothing too spectacular. 2.5 inch screen, Bluetooth 2.0, microSD support, QWERTY keyboard, blah blah blah. Here’s the stunner.. you ready for this? Drum roll, please!”
“…”
“… We’ll make it awkwardly proportioned! Can you believe that? It’s like a normal phone, but shorter! No, no, wait. Not ’shorter’. It’s squat.. People will eat it up!”
And that, my friends, was how the Motorola Hint QA30 was born. Take a standard QWERTY candybar slider, screw with the scaling, and kerplow – you’ve got a new device to sell. Coming to Alltel, pricing and launch date unmentioned.
After braving the cold air and riotous enviromnents of the BlackBerry Storm launch only to go home empty-handed, many Storm-hopefuls returned to try to get their new handset online. Sure, they’d have to wait a day or two for it to be shipped to them but how bad.. wait, what? They wouldn’t arrive till December 15th? Shenanigans! RING THE ALARM!! RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE.
If people could figure out a way to throw e-bricks through Verizon’s virtual storefront windows, I’m sure they would have done it.
Realizing that making people wait 3+ weeks for a device that they’ve hyped up to absurd levels probably isn’t a good idea, Verizon has managed to cut a week off of the wait time. It’s still sort of crazy, but those looking to nab up a Storm can expect the delivery man to show up sometime around December 8th be it that they get their orders in quick.
At long last, the Samsung Omnia has made its away across an ocean, through the torture labs of the FCC, and onto the delivery trucks en route to a Verizon store near you. VZW announced today that the Omnia will be hitting shelves in just under two weeks (December 8th), with orders starting now for $249.99 on a 2-year contract.
If Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional is your thing, it’s a pretty tough toss-up between the Omnia and the HTC Touch Pro. Both are solid pieces of hardware running custom interfaces on top of Windows Mobile; while I prefer HTC’s TouchFLO interface over Samsung’s TouchWiz, the Omnia has that big ol’ screen.
It’s really too bad it takes so long for phones to make it through the US vetting process; in the many months it took for the Omnia to make it stateside, they already blasted out a revised model with pumped up specs for Korea.
I can’t watch TV without my TiVo, but the one thing I’m really lax about is actually programming the damn thing (Best Invention Ever: Season Pass).
In an effort to strip away all my excuses for not finding new shows and movies to watch, TiVo is introducing a mobile site at m.tivo.com (warning: link may not be live yet) that will let subscribers with Internet-connected DVRs schedule their TiVo’s remotely from their phones, just like they can today via their laptops. (The mobile site was created by Mobui).
Using a cell phone,TiVo junkies will be able to search for shows, record episodes, get season passes, and browse daily picks and the most popular shows.
So now I have one more annoying, anti-social thing to do on my mobile phone when I’m out in public. But when I get home, I’ll have plenty to watch.
Now, when are they going to start streaming the shows directly to my mobile phone? Oh wait, I must be thinking of something else.
A note for all of you budding handset manufacturers out there: if you want to release your device as quickly as possible, don’t make the case white. As far as we can tell from the T-Mobile G1, making white cases takes a whole month longer than making them in black or brown. While all three colors were announced at the same time, the white one has been unavailable since the launch of the device.
If you’ve been waiting for a G1 encased in a shell that stimulates all three color cone cells in your eye at nearly equal levels, your time has come. In other words, T-Mobile just sent us a note to let us know that the white G1 is available beginning today.
Although the market has more interesting phones and services than ever before, what with iPhone triumphant, Android ascendant, and data unlimited, the economic slump has curbed spending on what consumers perceive (probably correctly) as a luxury. For someone like moi, the newest smartphone is easily justifiable, but fewer people than expected, and probably even less next year, are making that same judgment.
I think we all understood this intuitively, but now it’s official — and big companies like Samsung are only going to really act once it’s official. So if “the downturn” somehow wasn’t official enough yet, at least now they’ve got their own rubber stamp on it.
Revising their previous target of 600,000 HTC G1s shipped by the end of 2008, HTC CEO Peter Chou has disclosed that the company now expects to ship at least 1 million of the world’s first Android handset by year’s end.
Of course, these numbers may seem a bit low if you’re still going on the false idea that pre-orders alone reached 1.5 million, a count which blazed across the internet as a result of some faulty calculations in a Motley Fool story.
While it’s not quite as mind-boggling as the 1 million iPhone 3Gs Apple sold in just 3 days after launch, pushing one million handsets in 2 1/2 months is no small feat. According to a comment made by Steve Jobs in July, the original iPhone broke the 1 million mark in 74 days, which also works out to just about 2 1/2 months. By units shipped, the first Android phone is looking to be as much of a success as the first Apple phone.
So why might HTC be seeing an increase in orders? Traditional factors (like marketing) aside, I’d imagine that much of the success stems from worth-of-mouth triggered by Android Market applications. When a handset does something cool, owners show it off; the easier it is to add more cool stuff to the device, the more likely it is that people will be saying “Hey! Check this out.” As more intriguing applications make their way to the market, demand for Android handsets will go up as a result.
It’s been a while since we last got wind of the Motorola Attila, rumored to be half of Motorola’s final all-out effort to make successful handsets post RAZR. If these leaked shots from PhoneHK turn out to be the real thing, it looks like Motorola is still crackin’ away.
If things haven’t changed since the leaks back in August, the Attila will tote WCDMA 850/1900/2100, HSDPA 7.2Mbps, quad-band GSM, and Windows Mobile 6.1 over a 2.8″ screen. We’re definitely hoping the person holding the device in the above shot has itty bitty hands, because that thing looks big enough to surf on. As in actually surf. As in on water. Of course, the whole thing could be a sham, as made quite evident by that iPhone theme visible in the picture after the jump.
With the BlackBerry Storm vanishing from the shelves at big city Verizon shops around the nation, folks have been looking for an explanation for the shortage. When it was discovered that the identification sticker on the Storm box could be peeled away to reveal another sticker with different software version numbers, rumors were abound that a last minute software flash was the cause of the limited availability.
Not so, says RIM. While they acknowledge that a small chunk of the boxes had to have new stickers placed on them, they say it was because of a typo. In fact, the erroneous software version (4.7.0.82, rather than the 4.7.0.65 which actually shipped on the device) doesn’t even exist.
It’s okay, RIM. We mistype “65″ as “82″ all the time. The keys are right next to each other.
Back in April, Opera released a technical preview of Opera Mini for the Android SDK. The version of the SDK it was developed for was far from the final version, so by the time the G1 was launched in October, the Opera Mini package wouldn’t even make an attempt at installing to the device. Love it or hate it, the G1’s built-in browser has been your only web-perusing option since launch – until today, that is.
While there hadn’t been much indication that Opera had continued pushing forward with Opera Mini on Android since that preview release, they’ve gone and pushed an Android version of the just-released Opera Mini 4.2 to the market.
Caution: Pink Floyd blasting as soon as you hit “play”
I’m pumped about this because I just got a G1. This video shows a pretty basic paint program tracking two inputs at once — it’s pretty hacked together but it clearly works okay. We knew it was possible technically, now we see it’s possible practically, and hopefully soon we’ll see it supported officially.
If you were betting on the iPhone 2.2 firmware gettin’ the jailbreak treatment within a day, it’s time to go collect. If you were betting against it, you obviously need to spend more time reading MobileCrunch. Yep – the iPhone dev team has done it again.
This jailbreak carries a few more precautions than normal – 2.2 fixes an issue in the baseband, blocking off an exploit the iPhone dev team was working on utilizing to unlock the device. They’ve figured out how to get you the goods from 2.2 without modifying the baseband, but tread lightly to make sure you’re picking the right options.
Skyfire, which ranks pretty dang high on our list of free mobile browsers and is the only one to support Flash, Silverlight and a good chunk of other rich multimedia formats, was for quite some time limited to residents of the US. Back in October, they opened it up to Canada. This morning, their reach was further expanded as they released v0.85, simultaneously opening the door to folks in the UK and, albeit unofficially, the rest of the world. The new download page can be found at http://get.skyfire.com.
Previously, getting your hands on Skyfire required punching in your mobile number, and only numbers with a +1 country code were accepted, limiting downloads to North Americans. Today’s addition brings support for UK numbers (+44 country code) and, more importantly, adds a manual download link “for experts only”. Fortunately, the criteria for that “expert” title is pretty much “knows how to sync applications to their phone”.
The Big Changes in v0.85:
No registration required for download or use.
UK servers added, so folks in the UK won’t have to tunnel all the way over to the US proxies
Client/Server performance enhancements
Support for Symbian devices, which has long been limited to v.6. With this release, Skyfire for Symbian now has the SuperBar (search and URL both use one single text box), bookmark support, battery efficiency, content sharing, and overall performance improvements.
Here come some numbers with decimals, so get ready. BGR is speculating that batches of the BlackBerry Storm that had been shipped with OS version 4.7.0.82 may have caused some sort of glitch. And when BGR asked Verizon about the official OS version, Verizon told them it was 4.7.0.65 – that’s lower than 4.7.0.82, mind you.
That’s a bit of a grotesque-sounding headline, isn’t it? But it’s true. This handset is one of those designed for older people with limited manual dexterity and no experience with mobile phone technology.
It’s got a simple layout and basic high-contrast screen, easy-to-set quickdial buttons, and no features to speak of other than text messaging and an FM radio (oldsters love that stuff).
We tried to set my Grandma up with some Motorola flip phone last year and it was a disaster. This HandleEasy is something the Greatest Generation (and their retiring, non-tech-savvy kids) can actually use.
According to a Reuters report, there was 200+ CrackBerry addicts waiting this morning at the mid-town Manhattan Verizon store for the BlackBerry Storm and most of them were turned away due to supply levels. The report then states,
The angry customers caused a ruckus and police came to restore order.
Really? The police had to be called to calm down middle-aged suits? What’s wrong with these poeple. Plus, did anyone read all the crappy reviews?
We ran a poll here on the site and 44% stated that they had purchasing plans for the Storm, but a 200 person line is iPhone-impressive. Even though Verizon ran out of the Storm, they still took peoples money and promised a next day Fedex delivery.
Anyone snag a pic or have first hand accounts of this situation? Send ‘em to us: tips AT crunchgear DOT com
Further proving that security through (very, very light) obscurity isn’t a good means of keeping things secret, a new beta version of Yahoo’s Mobile Front Page (generally known as just m.yahoo.com) has been found hiding just one character away from the beta announced to the public back in January.
Where as the public beta can be found at beta.m.yahoo.com, our tipster dug up the new version by instead navigating to beta2.m.yahoo.com. Unfortunately, it seems we weren’t supposed to see this just yet; within a half-hour of us reaching out to Yahoo! for comment, the page had become password protected – but not before we snagged a couple screenshots.
The calendar now reads November 21st and, just as expected, iPhone firmware 2.2 has been released to the masses. Seeing as a pretty good number of developers have had their hands on test versions of 2.2 for sometime now, and as NDAs generally turn to pudding after a few hundred people are in on the secret, we’ve had a pretty good idea of what this release would bring to the table for a while.
For the sake of those who may have missed a day or two, though, we’ll recap: Safari’s address bar/search has been tweaked a bit, apps now request a rating upon deletion, over-the-air podcast downloads (which, oddly, works over 3G, though podcasts downloaded over radio can’t be over a certain size, determined by the carrier), various video and audio quality tweaks, and assorted bug fixes throughout. Oh, and Google Maps has been upgraded to include Street View and directions for public transit and walking – if you have an iPhone rather than an iPod Touch, that is.
According to early reports, 2.2 for the iPod Touch brings everything but the Google Maps upgrade. No one’s quite sure why Touch users are missing out; perhaps Apple came to the conclusion that they would have legally had to charge for the upgrade, as they did when they added the Mail/Maps/Stocks/Notes/Weather applications? Seems a bit absurd, seeing as this is simply an upgrade – but we’ll wait until some sort of official reason before passing judgement.
Although the market has more interesting phones and services than ever before, what with iPhone triumphant, Android ascendant, and data unlimited, the economic slump has curbed spending on what consumers perceive (probably correctly) as a luxury. For someone like moi, the newest smartphone is easily justifiable, but 
Skyfire, which ranks pretty dang high on our list of free mobile browsers and is the only one to support Flash, Silverlight and a good chunk of other rich multimedia formats, was for quite some time limited to residents of the US. Back in October, they 
