InnoPath, my benevolent employer, is located in Silicon Valley, one a wireless backwater and now much closer to the center of the industry. Thus, I too am located in Silicon Valley.
This has drawbacks: insane housing costs and lots of traffic among them. But it also has benefits.
There is unmatched diversity here, with things like a turbaned Sikh holding hands with his Asian girlfriend, both in training gear in front of the gym and the ready availability of hard to find things like Indian-style Chinese noodles and the particular kind of fish eggs that my Japanese wife is unhappy without. The mountains around the valley are another of the local blessings; with the lush redwood rainforests of the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and with the dry grasslands of the Diablo range to the east.
As performance enthusiasts (and those prone to car sickness) would note, mountains tend to imply curvy roads and these are no exception.
I have two very different vehicles for enjoying and exploiting these hills. One, a somewhat elderly and arthritic Mazda Miata, which despite her advancing age and decrepitude is still a credible dance partner capable of humbling vastly more powerful and expensive hardware on sufficiently twisty roads. While she corners well, and breaks better than a Prius, she lacks power to the extent that you can have the AC on or go up a hill, any one of your choice but not both at the same time.
The other machine, a Suzuki Hayabusa, is a brutal beast of a motorcycle. In a world where 600cc motors are fast and 1,000cc bikes are downright scary, Suzuki dropped a 1,300cc motor in, streamlined it for top speed, and wished the buyer good luck. All motor, all the time. There is in fact no replacement for displacement with this thing being proof. Sure, a bit lardy and not the most nimble thing but sure does go in a straight line. The polar opposite of the Miata.
We got some new phones in the house the other day, always a cause for great celebration. One was the infamous Google Nexus One, a beast of a phone with the latest and greatest version of Android, 2.1 and the mighty Qualcomm (News - Alert) Snapdragon CPU beating strongly at 1GHz in its mighty heart. The other, the weak sister, also built by HTC, is an AT&T Branded Tilt2, running Windows Mobile 6.5. The weak sister’s heart beats far more feebly at 528MHz, a Qualcomm MSM7201A. Both phones sport similar size screens, at 800x480, but the Nexus, with its AMOLED display, looks better.
The Nexus One, with a very sleek, refined and adult look, certainly looks the part. With no physical keyboard, it is thin and classy. The Tilt2, in contrast, is a bit of a mixed bag. It has one of the very best keyboards in the business, but in AT&T (News - Alert) trim the silver finish of the keyboard in combination with the blue illumination can under many indoor lighting conditions work like the active or diffused lighting camouflage experimented with in World War II, where lights were fitted to ships and aircraft which made it harder to find them against light backgrounds. It is the same for the letters on the keyboard. Other versions of the Touch Pro2 don’t suffer from this problem. The Nexus One, in contrast, has a merely OK touch screen keyboard, better in landscape than portrait mode but with an occasional glitch and not laid out in the best way.
Multimedia, particularly HD video, provides a handy answer to the question of why someone would actually need a 1GHz CPU in a phone. While the Nexus One provides a stunning and largely stutter free HD YouTube (News - Alert) experience, the ubiquitous but feeble MSM7201A in the Tilt2 just cannot cope.
While the Nexus One has been blasted for the support model (or lack thereof, although with Google looking for a call center manager this may be changing in time for the Nexus Two), it has been overall a decently stable device. Sure, the 3G data on T-Mobile (News - Alert) is currently rather flaky but at least the phone doesn’t crash. The Tilt2, in contrast, has already been through a couple factory resets after some pretty hard crashes and hangs. In killing TouchFlo3D, HTC’s Windows Mobile UI, the counterpart to HTC’s Android (News - Alert) Sense UI, restores some stability and helps performance as well, the Tilt2 running 6.5 continues a venerable history of Windows Mobile devices with questionable stability. While Microsoft helps conditioned us to accept such on desktops back in the bad old days of Windows 98 ME and other horrors, Ma Bell with 5-9s+ nailed up reliability taught us to expect more from our phones, and to be honest, doing factory resets is a disruptive PITA.
On the messaging front, particularly for those working in corporate land with an Exchange Server at work, the Tilt2 trumps the Nexus One. With the killer keyboard, tilting screen and Microsoft’s consistently excellent ActiveSync integration, the Tilt2 does email, contacts calendar and everything you would expect a well behaved corporate citizen to do. The Nexus One, handicapped by either religion or perhaps aggressive development schedules, can do email but really needs to be married to a Google account, although you can use the normal mail client on the device to talk to your Exchange Server via an Outlook Web Access box, which is pretty standard practice. However, you are not going to be seeing your calendar on the Exchange box, kind of crippling if you are going to be using the phone for serious business applications.
When I go from my Miata to the Hayabusa, it is always a thrill, much in the same way that going from a glider to a rocket is a thrill. Big motor, always there, always willing, burly and impressive. Going the other way, from the hypersport bike with the romper stomper motor to the cute little secretary’s car, can be a bit of a let-down in terms of lack of excitement from the loud pedal. In many ways this mirrors the experience of going from the Nexus One to the Tilt2. The Nexus One impresses with speed while the Tilt2, when not crashed or hanging on reboot, impresses with Exchange but with most other things, like a GM diesel from the 80’s, leaves you longing for more power.
Yes, there are bugs and glitches, but hopefully many, if not most, will be sorted in the next or subsequent OTA updates for the Nexus. The Tilt2, in contrast, may gain some stability but probably not the speed it really needs. Perhaps the HD2, when it comes to NAM, will make for a more equal comparison, more of a battle of the superphones than beating up on the weak sister.
Jason Lackey is marketing manager at Innopath Software.Edited by
Michael Dinan