2010 Year of the App Phone (Android vs. iPhone vs. WebOS)
2008 and 2009 were all about the iPhone. Smartphones were obsolete, nothing else came close. That will be different this year. 2010 is the year of the App Phone.
Last week I looked at the version of a common app on Droid vs. iPhone. The iPhone still won hands down. (Not that a great app couldn’t be delivered on Android, but iPhone has been so much more successful that developers still prioritize it far above the others.) Why will that change this year?
iPhone has the lead in most areas as the most polished and intuitive device with the most apps. But Android and Palm are set to rapidly gain enough market share and maturity of their own to stand up as viable competition.
And they’re all being freed of carrier lock-in. Palm announced WebOS handsets for Verizon. AT&T announced that it will sell Android and WebOS. iPhone may be available on carriers other than AT&T as soon as June. Google has announced its Nexus One, and many more Android handsets are sure to come this year.
For me personally, this means a big change. I am, afterall, the guy who camped at the front of all three previous iPhone lines.
But at least in San Francisco and NYC, the experience of being on the AT&T network is bad enough to drive one to accept a distant second best phone in order to avoid dropped calls. I ordered a Google Nexus One yesterday. Now I’ll have two phones, one that’s good for apps and one that’s good for phone calls and Gmail. I’ll have to carry both until one does it all for me again. (Maybe I’ll even pick up a Verizon WebOS handset.)
On the one hand, I’m a little sad that I have to carry two devices. I thought the geeky habit of having two kinds of computers was a habit I broke a long time ago. On the other, these are exciting times — it’s been a long time since the competition and advancements have been significant enough that I considered using two computing platforms. Twenty-ten looks like it’ll be a fun ride.
Update: Harry’s having the same problem with AT&T coverage, and taking a vote on what he should do about it.
iTunes 9 Home Sharing/Sync the Wrong Solution. Give us automatic media caching!
We live in an age when homes don’t have a single computer on a desk, everyone has their own laptop. It’s great that iTunes9 recognizes the need to share files between computers so that everyone in a home can make local copies to hear each other’s music and watch each other’s videos.
Except that we have tiny storage in iPhones, MacBook Air and netbooks — some iPods hold more. We need to solve the problem of keeping only the files we need with us and having the rest stored on the network. I want an automatic system to swap in and out the files on my machines based on my requests and favorites, caching all the most used files locally and pulling less-often used files off the network as needed.
Best iPhone Twitter app comes down to Tweetie vs. Twittelator Pro
Tweetie screenshot main page
Gizmodo’s new comprehensive review of iPhone apps evaluated many more than I did (“ten zillion”), but matches my own experience. We both narrow it down to Tweetie vs. Twittelator Pro.
I’ve been switching back and forth between the two for the last month or two. Either is a great app with the edge for smoothness going to Tweetie (which also seems to display more tweets on the page). The edge for pure power goes to Twittelator Pro.
Twittelator Pro screenshot main page
Twittelator has a great feature I wish was included in other iPhone apps: a button to scroll down a whole page at a time. This is especially useful in catching up with a long list of tweets. This is the only app I’ve seen with this functionality, so it’s a nice innovation.
The other power feature I make use of in Twittelator is the ability to define my own saved searches.
I can’t think of anything in Tweetie that Twittelator doesn’t do (well, there are fart noises and the flashlight if you enable the Popularity Enhancer).
Despite all that, my current swing is in favor of Tweetie, though I still switch it up. Which do you prefer?