Smart Phones of today

I can?t believe the number of people who got confused last Friday. They must have thought the Treo 800w was launching three days earlier than it did and on a different carrier. Too bad the poor folks got stuck with the iPhone 3G. The new Treo is available today from Sprint with a nice set of features inside the phone?s, um, classic Palm look.

Running Windows Mobile 6.1, the 800w has EVDO Rev. A, built-in GPS, Bluetooth, and WiFi (about time, Palm!). Program memory is solid at 128 MB, and there?s a microSD slot to supplement the 256 MB device memory. The camera is 2.0 megapixels and can take video, and the 1150 mAh battery is rated for 4.5 hours of talk time.

Last time Palm released a new phone it worked out pretty well for them. Jumping back into the WinMo world may be tougher, especially since the 800w will set you back $250 with a contract on top of the $70+/month for a Sprint unlimited data plan. The Treo 800w might have been a hit a couple of years ago, but it looks to me like too little, too late.

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Along with the news that Apple sold a million iPhone 3Gs in its opening weekend came the announcement that 10 million applications were downloaded for the iPhone 2.0 software, which runs on older iPhones and iPod touches.

I had agreed with the spirit if not the letter of this Gizmodo post. in that the app store ? which will also run on the original iPhone and the iPod touch ? is in many ways the biggest difference between the iPhone 3G and earlier versions. However, 3G is an important enabler for many of these applications.

I?d love to hear what the distribution of those platforms were and how many were downloaded off of Wi-Fi as opposed to 3G or EDGE. And of course, how many were free as opposed to paid downloads. Outside of games, it?s still going to be difficult to drive sales of applications simply because the monetization of software has shifted so much in the past few years. But games for the iPhone are an interesting development opportunity, not so much because the iPhone competes with, say, a PSP, but because it does offer console-like platform stability, at least for now.

In any case, the 10 million number ? an order of magnitude over the hardware sold during the weekend ? is a testament to the appeal of these applications, their overall quality and variety. And a lesson to the whole industry that you can drive consumer interest in native smartphone applications and move the industry past the Java/BREW level of lowest common denominator development. On the other hand, Apple is far more incentivized to drive the platform given the revenue share for paid downloads and no carrier revenue sharing.

One number we?re perhaps more likely to get from Apple is the percentage of OS X iPhone developers who are knew to the platform. It seems to be significant. Last week I met with one of the launch developers new to OS X who was raving about Apple?s developer tools and downplaying limitations, saying what the SDK buys you is worth the limitations (and this is a developer whose application would definitely benefit from background processing.) That said, he acknowledged that the Windows Mobile tools are also pretty good.

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Particularly impressive is the new gallery feature. This makes it easy to upload photographs and other images and then view them in a more modern looking gallery. Viewers can customize their viewing experience with a Coverflow-like interface making it easy to skip through lots of images quickly.

The service is now PC friendly, and works with Microsoft Outlook and allows you to sync your contacts and calendars across you Macs. PCs and iPhones.

I hope to post a review of my personal experience at a later date. In the meantime, if you are not an existing subscriber to the .mac service, the big question is whether or not its worth signing up? Its $99 a year and for that you get 20GB storage (for emails and files) and 200GB/month transfers quota. This is better than the .mac service it replaces.

If you look elsewhere around the web you can get free online storage from providers such as iDrive [2GB] and Mozy [also 2GB]. Both offer unlimited storage for reasonable monthly fees. What neither offer though is the integrated service MobileMe offers and for that reason, in my books the MobileMe service is worth the money.

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