Common Paradox Tech Blog

Good news for those of you who are fans of Motorola’s Backflip and its somewhat funky form factor. AT&T now offers the backward flipping smartphone for $99 through its website.

There are a couple of caveats, of course. To get below the $100 price point, you’ll have to play the mail-in-rebate game, which comes in the form of an AT&T Promotion Card "valid wherever VIsa is accepted, and for 120 days after issue date." You’ll also need to commit to a 2-year service agreement and $30 per month data service.

What you get in return is an Android 1.5-based smartphone capable of being upgraded to Android 2.1. The Backflip also sports a 5MP camera with 4X zoom, 3.1-inch touchscreen with a 480 x 320 resolution, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, a 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD card expansion up to 32GB, and a 1380 mAh battery Motorola claims amounts to up to 6 hours of talk time and 13.5 days of standby.

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Image Credit: Motorola

Skype for Symbian has gotten out of beta and appeared in Nokia’s Ovi Store today, enabling users of Nokia’s Symbian-based smartphones to make free voice calls over 3G or WiFi connection.

Besides free Skype to Skype voice calls, the app enables you to send and receive instant messages, share pictures, video and other files, receive calls to your online number, and import names and numbers from your phone’s address book.

The app works on following Nokia models: Nokia N97, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia X6, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia 5530 and the following non-touch devices: Nokia E72, Nokia E71, Nokia E90, Nokia E63, Nokia E66, Nokia E51, Nokia N96, Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8Gb, Nokia N85, Nokia N82, Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8 Gb, Nokia N79, Nokia N78, Nokia 6220 classic, Nokia 6210 Navigator, Nokia 5320.

See a video demonstration of the Skype app for Symbian below.

You can download the app from Skype or from the Ovi store.

Tags: Nokia, Skype, smartphone, Symbian, voip

In January, there were murmurs of Bing replacing Google as the default search provider on the Apple iPhone. The Gregorian calender has moved to March at its traditional pace and nothing has happened on that front. But Google Search is now on the verge of getting snubbed on its own turf: Android. If you are unaware, Android is coming to AT&T in the form of the Motorola Blackflip, which is scheduled  to hit stores on March 7, 2010. But Google will be a little less excited about the launch now, for the carrier is said to have removed Google as the default search provider “throughout” the phone and opted for Yahoo instead.

“Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It’s crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything’s been programmed to use Yahoo. We love us some irony, but golly, we’d prefer Google searches most of the time,” Engadget’s  Chris Ziegler wrote on the blog after unboxing the phone.

It is no secret that Google is the world’s most popular search provider by a long distance. It is difficult to imagine why smartphone users may want to use Yahoo or any other search engine over Google. However, in case there is even an iota of doubt over Google’s popularity among smartphone users, it is best to leave the choice to the users themselves. Search engine ballot, anyone?

Microsoft, for the time being, is being a bit of a stickler over the hardware requirements for Windows Phone 7. If a smartphone doesn’t meet the minimum requirements, it won’t be getting Microsoft’s new mobile platform OS.

Case in point is HTC’s highly regarded HD2 touchscreen smartphone. A nice little device with a 1GHz Qualcomm processor, a high resolution capacitive touch display, and a five megapixel camera. But, the HD2 has five buttons–Windows Phone 7 says three and no more. No Windows Phone 7 for the HD2!

It is suspected, perhaps, that the HD2 fails in some other ways as well. It’s hard to say, exactly, because the Microsoft hasn’t made public the hardware requirements for Windows Phone 7. That’s expected to happen this month at the MIX developer conference in Las Vegas. Whatever the case, any legacy hardware that doesn’t meet these requirements is going to be left behind.

What little solace Windows Mobile 6.5 users have is that Microsoft says it won’t abandon them. An upgrade, to version 6.5.3, is expected before rebranding to Windows Phone Classic. And Windows Phone Classic will stick around for the “budget-minded smartphone buyer”.

Image Credit: HTC

The Highlander battle among chip manufacturers has started anew. This time it’s among the makers of chips that run smartphones. Besides initiating a new round of cutthroat competition, this battle suggests that computing is undergoing a substantive conceptual shift–from units that are all powerful to ones that are strategically powerful.

The objective is to make more powerful chips that consume less energy, and take up less space, with the intent of creating products that are smaller and less functional than their PC brethren, but are more in-tune to the particular needs of their users. The big players include the well known, such as Intel, ARM, Samsung, AMD, and Apple, and the lesser known, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Microelectroincs, and GlobalFoundaries. The money being spent in this competition totals in the tens of billions.

These chips are prevalent in smartphones, and they are working their way into netbooks, tablets and eReaders, where the current PC processor OS restriction doesn’t apply. This means that a whole new world of computing potential will be showcased as this little war plays itself out. It also means there will be some multi-billion dollar casualties along the way.

Suggested by this is the concept of computing shifting to address the particular, rather than the general, needs of users. If this market becomes economically attractive it might lead to a decrease in attention to the higher end, which in turn could mean slower development of the ‘hot’ technology that currently drives the market.

Image Credit: Apple Computer

Did you like the look of HTC Hero? If the answer is yes, you’re in for a treat, as HTC Legend is a leaner sexier, and all-around better version of that phone.

Compared to HTC Desire, which I wrote about earlier, Legend is an inferior phone, mainly because it has a 600 MHz CPU (compared to Desire’s 1 GHz Snapdragon). On the other hand, compared to the Hero, it has a bigger (3.2 inch) screen with the same resolution (320 x 480 pixels), and the manual trackball has been replaced with an optical one (which I rarely thought of using when I tried it out — the touchscreen was more than enough for me).

Other specs to note, besides Android 2.1, are the 5-megapixel camera, 512/384 MB of ROM/RAM, and Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth and GPS. These should make the Legend a bit less desirable (pun intended) than the Desire, but with its aluminum housing, the Legend definitely wins the beauty contest.

After trying it out, I’m also happy to say that the Legend not even that much slower than the Desire. They both suffer from minor stuttering as you go through some parts of the Sense UI, but the Desire’s superior hardware shows mainly when you browse images, and even then it’s not a huge difference. Depending on the price difference, the Legend might actually prove to be a better seller than its stronger, elder brother.

Reviews: Android, Bluetooth

Tags: android, HTC Legend, Mobile 2.0, smartphone

Microsoft’s made it official–it’s taking another crack at the smartphone market with the “next generation” Windows Phone platform: Windows Phone 7. Microsoft says Windows Phone 7 will bring together “the content people care about”, including applications and Internet. And, for the first time, bring Xbox LIVE games and Zune music and video to a mobile phone.

Windows Phone 7 is designed as a “holistic” system that “informs every aspect of the phone.” The Start screen contains “dynamically updated “live tiles”” which show users real-time content. Rather than an icon linking to an application, for example, it can be linked to a person, making all information on that person available through that icon.

Windows Phone 7 provides further integration through “hubs”. According to Microsoft: “Hubs bring together related content from the Web, applications and services into a single view to simplify common tasks.” Windows Phone 7 includes six hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office.

Microsoft says it has partnered with mobile operations, including AT&T, Spring, and Verizon Wireless, and manufacturers such as Dell, HTC, LG, and Sony Ericsson. The first Windows Phone 7 devices are expected to be on the market by “holiday 2010”. More information can be found at Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 site.

Image Credit: Microsoft

Citing un-named "industry sources," news and rumor site DigiTimes says you can expect capacitive touch panels to move into the mainstream as the touch panel of choice for upcoming handsets.

Most of Taiwan’s major handset display makers have started producing capacitive touch screens, including Wintek, Sintek Photronic, Cando, Emerging Display Technologies, and Giantplus Technologies.

These aren’t just trial runs, either. Sintek plans to kick up production to 24 million capacitive touch panels (3.5-inch equivalents) each month, while Giantplus is on track for volume production with 1 million 3.5-inch equivalents a month by the third quarter of 2010.

For a primer on capacitive vs resistive touch screen technology, see here.

Image Credit: kf12.com

There’s no denying it: Google’s Nexus One, although being one of the best Android-based smartphones on the market, isn’t selling well.

One of the reasons behind sluggish sales is lack of true customer support. Who does an owner of a Nexus One turn to in case of trouble? HTC, the phone’s manufacturer, mobile network operator, or Google itself? This issue is still not solved, but at least now Google gave customers live phone support.

Live phone support is available at 888-48NEXUS (63987) and it works from 07:00am to 10:00pm PST; unfortunately, you can’t request tech support, as this line seems to be limited to status and shipping issues. Furthermore, as an international user, my best bet is still going through online forums in case of problems. Google is getting better at this, as they finally realized that providing proper support for a smartphone is a not as easy as launching a support website. Still, Google has a long way to go to make Nexus One users really happy.

Reviews: Google

Tags: Google, nexus one, smartphone

Symbian, which powers a decent number of the world’s smartphones, has made good on its promise to go open source. The code, as much as possible anyway, has been made public. Great news if you happen to be in the smartphone business. But what does it mean for the rest of us? It could mean a lot, if the goals of Lee Williams, chief executive of the Symbian Foundation, are realized.

Symbian, like any other OS, needs to evolve (especially when there’s an Android stalking you). That’s a tough thing if you’re proprietary. Very few companies have the savvy to keep proprietary products ‘fresh.’ Rather than buck the general trend, Symbian will tap into the creative resources of third-party developers, who will update and add functionality to the OS.

And not just with smartphones in mind. Williams is looking to tablet PCs and netbooks as a logical extension of the Symbian OS. Which means it has to be hardware independent. Williams says there is a “Wild Ducks” project that makes Symbian hardware independent on smartphone platforms, and a port of Symbian to Intel’s Atom processor already exists.

As for tablets and netbooks, Williams says: “It’s very likely that, in the next year or two, you would see such a product hit the marketplace. A lot of companies are experimenting with PDA-tablet-style form factors, also for stereo systems, and internet-connected devices running low power on primarily ARM architecture.”

What’s interesting in all this is direction of OS movement. While ‘bigger’ OSes are struggling to fit into the smaller hardware environments of the netbook, tablet PC, and smartphone worlds, the opposite seems less true. Smaller OSes, like Android, Symbian, or the iPhone, are scalable upward, making them credible challengers for this emerging marketplace.

Image Credit: The Symbian Foundation