Posts Tagged ‘htc’

Sprint and HTC offering 10 free Evo 4G phones

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Today Sprint and HTC announced a contest to win 1 of 10 HTC Evo 4G phones to real people to use and help spread the word about the phone.  I, of course, had to enter seeing as how I’ve already sung its praises.

Here’s my entry to win one of the phones:

So there I was, slogging away at my unending 9-5 job when suddenly I hear a heavenly glow emanating from my computer.  Intrigued I feel my hand, of it’s own volition, clicking over to Engadget’s coverage of this new ‘phone’, the HTC Evo 4G, which doesn’t sound like it’s possible or even real.  I devoured the spec sheet, each line seeming more incredulous than the last and making my tech-saliva start to froth.

Having  heard of this amazing new super-phone that was rumored to be coming from Sprint and HTC, I was already eager to upgrade my phone to just about anything newer.  But when I saw and believed that THIS was going to be my new phone, I knew I had been a good boy this year and was going to receive my more than ample reward.

Being the sole computer programmer for my company, I am THE person responsible for ensuring hundreds of people can access the data that they require to do their jobs.  It is essential that I can update my FB, twitter & foursquare statuses lightning fast so that I can perform at my peak efficiency.  Add in the ability to video conference from a handheld device to keep all my bosses happy and you already have some steep requirements for a new phone.  And finally having the awesome network coverage of Sprint while on the road to be on call 24/7 to be able to respond when needed to outages is what keeps me skinny, paid and happy.

So that’s my entry, hopefully I’ll win.

Till Next Time

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what palm needs to do with WebOS

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

A little while ago I laid out what I believe Palm should do with their next phone.  Since then Sprint has announced the HTC Evo 4G and I’m seriously considering getting it when my year with the Pre is up.  Here is what Palm should do with WebOS as a platform, not just as a phone OS.

I believe the biggest thing holding WebOS back now is the hardware.  The hardware is limited to phones right now, is a year and a half old and is badly in need of a refresh.  Seeing as how the iPad is coming out this weekend, I have naturally been thinking about the tablet form factor in general.  I’m not a big fan of the iPad (obviously), but I believe the form factor has alot going for it and for the right features and price I would be all over it.

WebOS excels at it’s purpose, being a finger-friendly, multi-touch, multitasking operating system.  This would translate perfectly over to a tablet form factor.  Taking the iPad’s form factor, which is almost without flaw, Palm could make the software match the hardware for beauty and usability.  Enable a ‘touch bar’ around the entire border of the display.  Allow developers to enable or disable portions of the touch bar to enable different hand positions on the device.  Just like on the Palm Pre, having a gesture area that is not on the screen can be very useful and add valuable real estate to the device.

Also, and this is a big one, add a camera!  It appears that even Apple had a camera in the iPad but was removed before it’s debut for some unknown reason.  Adding a front-facing camera enables native Skype calling, picture/video capture and a new interactive level to games. This ran a close second to being the biggest reason why I don’t want to get an iPad(yet).

Update WebOS to be able to operate like Google’s Chrome OS by saving all your documents to the web.  If I could prop the tablet up and sync a keyboard to the device and work on any documents that I need without the hassle of dealing with copying them manually to another device, that could solve a huge hassle when you’re sitting on the couch decide to type a quick something up and sharing it with others.

Add USB ports (or even microUSB)!  Adding two little ports would expand the usability exponentially.  The ability to directly connect millions of peripherals to the tablet directly would greatly expand the capabilities of the device without the need to buy any special adapters or new accessories.

Till Next Time

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hopes for Palm Pre v2

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

I’m a proud owner of a Palm Pre, circa June ‘09.  My phone is now getting a little long in the tooth compared to what phones are coming out now.  I’m really liking the Nexus One and the Droid.  Having just heard about the new Windows Phone 7 Series that Microsoft just announced,  that has seriously my interest peaked as well.

I’m very happy with my Pre and only have a few small quibbles with it.  Occasionally the phone slows down, I’m assuming due to background apps, but I’m not sure.  I would like the app loading to be a little faster, for simple apps like the calculator it should be lightning quick to load.  I would also have liked a louder speaker on the phone when either using it as a speakerphone or playing music over the speaker, it’s just not quite powerful enough.

Now onto what I would love to find in the next Palm phone.

To really show that Palm is back, they need to show that they have both ends of the spectrum covered.  They wowed everyone last year with the introduction of the WebOS platform and now they need to knock everyone’s socks off with some new high-end hardware.  They need to be first (or at most, second) to market with a 4G handset.  It appears that the HTC Supersonic will be first with an integrated 4G modem, but if Palm comes out with a 4G radio I believe that will be the biggest sign that Palm is truly coming back.

Secondly, they need to up the screen specs.  Palm needs to increase the size to at least 3.7″, up the resolution to at least 800 x 480 and go AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic LED).  Since the Pre has the gesture area below the screen, it allows them to run a slightly smaller screen but new generation device screens are more than 20% larger and come with many more pixels.  OLED would help offset the larger display’s power consumption, but more importantly, it would at least match the screen quality of the current top-end phones available today.

Third, take a page from Google’s playbook and add voice-to-text for any text fields.  This is a fantastic evolution of speech recognition.  There have been countless times that I would have found that very convenient to be able to speak what I need typed.  In addition to this they need to get an on-screen keyboard; many times I have need to type something short and quick into my phone and I wanted to do it one-handed but that is not very feasible with the slide-out, physical keyboard.

While I don’t expect, yet still hope, that all of these changes are in store for the next Palm phone, I hope that they will soon start releasing information on the next device – my year is almost up and I need a new phone.  I believe they need to continue pushing the envelope if they want to stay relevant and carve out a niche for their future success.

Till Next Time

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