Best Podcast Episode 2: Mobile Roundup

BestStuff.com PodCast: Mobile Roundup hosted by Bill Butler and Tim Moses. This PodCast emphasizes mobile phones and how we use the technology to make our lives easier. In this segment they address some of the issues consumers may have with syncing their phones with their Mac and PC’s. Bill and Tim cover their initial impression of the phones they reviewed, and what they wish the manufacturers should add to make the phones more functional. Their suggestions and tips may provide more insight into synchronizing the phones reviewed with various computer platforms. In addition to how much they enjoy NVDO.

The products covered in this segment are: Treo 650, Blackberry 8700, Samsung A920, Motorola Pebble, Panasonic BLC30 Wireless Camera, Shure i4c Headphones and myrateplan.com.

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Mobile Roundup

Bill Butler: Best Stuff podcast, May 12, 2006.


[Music]

Bill Butler: Welcome to the Best Stuff podcast. I'm Bill Butler.

Tim Moses: And I'm Tim Moses. Each month we'll discuss and recommend some of the best items in today's marketplace.

Bill Butler: This week, we'll discuss a variety of mobile devices.

Tim Moses: So, sit back and relax for the next half hour with the Best Stuff podcast.

Bill Butler: All right. Well, it was pretty much gadget week. Tim and I got to play with all kinds of cool phones. We had headphones, we had wireless cameras.

Tim Moses: The first thing I'm going to cover is the thing that I spent the most time with, and really liked. I have to start out by confessing that I am a Treo user - I love the Treos - I had the 300, I have the 600 right now, and I got to play around with the 650. Each one has been a huge leap over the past one. But, I guess before going into the specifics about the 650, I should just say what I like in general about the Treos. The big thing is just having a full keyboard. Unfortunately, I was not born at the right time to grow up with typing out text messages on a regular phone keypad. I may have just passed that by entirely; I don't know if I'll ever catch up with that.

Bill Butler: I think the cut-off on that is probably 1990.

Tim Moses: Yes. So I'm way off from that. But I love having a full keyboard; checking email from the phone, sending text messages, things like that. I don't want to sit there trying to figure out a keypad, I want something that works and works fast because I want to be able to type pretty fast. The Treo keyboards have all been pretty good; I can type with two thumbs and do that at a pretty good rate. Aside from that, you have the Palm software; you can do a lot of stuff with the phone, and at different times I've done a lot of different things with it. There's more software out there for Palm than for any other mobile device, even Windows CE. It's just, by far, more stuff available. But, to get into the 650 itself, the cool thing the 650 has that past Treos didn't is Bluetooth. Bluetooth works very well; I also am a Mac user, so being able to sync the phone with my Mac has been a big deal. Plus, the synching; normally with these phones you get the Palm desktop software, which is free and does the basics, but if you really want to have all the slick features, there's a separate product out there called Missing Sync for the Mac. The product is specifically for Treos, I guess they have a version for Windows CE devices.

Bill Butler: Is that the Mark/Space product?

Tim Moses: Yes, Mark/Space. It's just such slick software, it does everything. It syncs iPhoto, it syncs any of the photos you take on the camera with iPhoto, and sends photos back. It syncs with iTunes to the player on the phone. It syncs with iCal, your calendar, address book and each one of those, there's so many different options. You can pick your playlist, pick your albums, and there's so many different options for going back and forth between them. That's true on any of the Treos, but with the 650, you now do it wirelessly. So, that's pretty cool. The other thing, the camera is a little bit better on the 650 than the 600. If under a lot of light, I still get about the same quality pictures, but in lower light, it does just so much better than the 600 did. It has video recording built in, and the video is actually pretty decent. It's not too much worse than the still camera I have, a Sony Cybershot that does video, and it actually does pretty decent video for being a phone.

Bill Butler: The number of colors on the screen is incredible too.

Tim Moses: Yes, that's true. It's twice the resolution of the older screen, so it looks great.

Bill Butler: In addition to resolution though, it's color depth, the number of pixels it can display, I think the gradient of pixels it can display is greater as well.

Tim Moses: I have no idea. I wasn't even thinking about it, the resolution just made it look so much better.

Bill Butler: I don't know if you noticed, but when you have the keypad up, the standard default keypad for typing in a phone number, there's actually gradients on the buttons.

Tim Moses: Oh, yes.

Bill Butler: So you can see that they've added thousands of colors, instead of 256 colors on the previous. I didn't see the specs on that.

Tim Moses: Maybe so, hold the 600 next to the 650 and there's an unmistakable difference. It looks so much slicker. Even though you're running the same software, it just looks so much better. The phone that I've been using has Versamail on it. I had Versamail on the 600; I think it may be included with the 650. Versamail is just a really slick email client; it will do IMAP and POP and has a ton of features. The great thing is, I keep lots of folders in my IMAP account and I'm able to get to everything from that program, so email wise, it works very well for me. In fact, the only complaints I could bring up about the 650 would be, it doesn't support e-video through Sprint, so I don't get the high speed access. I guess I could always wish for it to be a little smaller, too.

Bill Butler: Well, they do have a version through Cingular that does support Edge, so if someone really wanted that high speed functionality, the Edge network is kind of the complementary high speed network on the Cingular side. So they could opt for a different provider, I suppose.

Tim Moses: Who knows, maybe with the 700 they'll have Edge in there as well, if you're not on T-Mobile. Anyway, I've been very happy with it, and I wish I could keep this one and replace my 600.

Bill Butler: Well, I guess you have to talk to Jeff about that. I'm going to review the Blackberry 8700, so this is the arch nemesis of the Treo product line. Blackberrys are most notably in the PC realm; they're typically dealt with for enterprise type applications, and they excel at push email and synching calendar, all within the confines of, like, Outlook. All within the confines of kind of the standard business mantra, and I'm kind of trying to use mine in a bit more of an open source sort of a way. What I've found is that it can be done but there aren't as many applications, there isn't as much support as there is for Palm, as Tim said. Everything that you do with the Blackberry right now, as far as the Mac goes, is a little tricky. Although, I've got to give credit to the Blackberry folks because there's a product that used to be a pay product called Pocket Mac, and apparently Blackberry is allowing, I don't know if there is a monetary exchange going on there or not, but I can download Pocket Mac for free and I can sync everything I want to for free. I can sync my iCal without problems, I can sync my contacts, which is the other main thing. It cannot sync email across it, but contacts are the largest thing anyway because if I have 600 contacts, entering those in the phone can be tedious otherwise. I can edit my contacts on the phone and when I do the sync, it syncs it back into my address book.

Bill Butler: Let's see, just going down the list: it has excellent battery life. I've been very happy with that. They advertise four hours of talk time; I would say it's probably more. I haven't actually done the test but I talk a ton on my phone every day and I've never had a situation where I've been a quarter or even a third of the used battery life in a day. And they have an advertised ten day standby time on the battery, which is pretty incredible as well.

Bill Butler: Bluetooth connectivity; it does connect via Bluetooth to my laptop and it does sync my contacts across Bluetooth. Edge network capability as well; this is an amazing thing. It is on the high speed Edge network, it also has a Google map program you can download for it, so the same things that work on the Samsung, which we'll be talking about later, the Google map and direction finding functionality is beautiful, especially with the large screen.

Bill Butler: Now on the PC, you can use this device as a modem. There's an independent 3rd party company called MobiShark, mobishark.com , and you install that software on your PC and it can make a connection to the Blackberry and the Blackberry acts across that high speed Edge network. You don't have to have another provider, it just uses the existing data service that you have with your provider. It lets your PC surf the web across this device. So, Bluetooth to the Blackberry and then Edge and out from there. I have not used that so I can't vouch for it, but I've read a number of reviews online and people seem very happy with it.

Bill Butler: As far as the synching, I may have misspoken earlier. I think that I actually, when I've synched this, I've synched it over my USB cable. Bluetooth, I have not been able to actually sync anything across that yet, but, I can form the connection. At this point, I've put in a lot of requests to Blackberry to see what we can do about improving things for Mac users. From a PC standpoint, and if you're getting it for your business, it's an incredible tool for push and pull email. I've got to say their IMAP functionality on the Mac needs a little bit of work. When I receive an email on the Blackberry, if I delete it on the Blackberry, it deletes it on my inbox, like I would expect for IMAP. But if I delete it from the inbox on my PC or on my Mac, it doesn't delete it from the inbox.

Tim Moses: Oh, even the next time you sync up and check mail?

Bill Butler: Right.

Tim Moses: Oh, that's weird.

Bill Butler: So, something's strange with the way Blackberry handles IMAP pushes and pulls, but I'm sure that will be resolved at some time in the future.

Tim Moses: Not having used a Blackberry and having used a Treo all this time, I always look at the Treo as being chock full of features, everything works great for the Mac. Is there also a price difference, because the Treos are pricey?

Bill Butler: These are pricey too, but I don't think quite as pricey as the Treo. This, with the rebates, is about $300.

Tim Moses: Oh, okay, that's about the same.

Bill Butler: The Treo 650 might be coming in close, what's that, $450?

Tim Moses: I think it's $300 with the rebates, around that.

Bill Butler: Okay, so fairly similar. I think if you live and die by getting emails instantaneously, this is probably the choice, the Blackberry is probably the choice. If you can wait fifteen minutes to get your emails, then I think having a standard IMAP client on the Palm is probably the better choice. Or I could also say, if you're more of a Mac user than a PC user, the Palm is probably the better choice.

Tim Moses: That's interesting.

Bill Butler: Whereas if you're a corporate enterprise PC user, the Palm doesn't really touch the Blackberry in terms of the integration it can offer.

Tim Moses: Okay good, thanks. That's the first time I've actually had a decent comparison of the two. I should add that I was able to connect to the internet, albeit slowly, I was able to connect over Bluetooth through Sprint on the Treo 650 from my Mac. It was easy to set up, it really didn't take much to do.

Bill Butler: Cool. I did have one other feature request here, and I imagine on the Treo too, I'm starting to use Google calendar a lot, because I love the interface.

Tim Moses: I think I have an answer for you too. Go ahead.

Bill Butler: Oh, really? I want to see Blackberry and Palm and anyone who has a calendar app, offer that additional piece, where you can say publish this calendar to my Google calendar.

Tim Moses: Here's my answer. If you, again, this is is if you're on a Mac, but you can probably do something similar on a PC, you can subscribe to your Google calendar from iCal and then you can sync your iCal to your phone. That's a one way calendar, because if you make changes on your phone it's not going to make it all the way back to Google. But, that does at least get your Google calendar to your phone, and that works pretty easily. So the iCal, you subscribe to your Google calendar, that's an easy step, and if you're synching your calendar then that comes across and shows up on your phone.

Bill Butler: Yes≈, the only caveat to that is that the Pocket Mac people, the way they've done this is anything you enter on your Blackberry actually gets pushed to your iCal, but it doesn't pull from anywhere. It only pulls and pushes from that Pocket Mac sync category. Little caveat there. I want to see, and it's a great stopgap measure, but since these devices are wireless and on the internet, I really want to see them talking straight to Google, and ideally talking straight to the same calendar app that my PC, that my Mac is talking to, that my PC might be talking to and all synchronizing to that one central source. But, I'm probably asking too much.

Tim Moses: Keep dreaming. Someday.

Bill Butler: We might have to wait a couple years on that request. OkayTim, you've got the next one.

Tim Moses: One last thing I was just comparing size here too, because -

Bill Butler: Because size matters.

Tim Moses: Because size matters. Got to be careful how I word this, but the Treo is narrower, it's a little bit taller, it is narrower, but the Blackberry is definitely lighter, too. Kind of weird.

Bill Butler: Because it's plastic.

Tim Moses: About the same thickness. So, if you're going to pick the two of them up, the Treo has got a nice hefty feel, so if you needed a phone to whack somebody over the head, the Treo would be better. The Blackberry is lighter if you're, I don't know, I guess it really wouldn't matter. Close enough.

Bill Butler: Well the screen's a little wider.

Tim Moses: That's true, it's a bigger screen.

Bill Butler: If you like watching widescreen HD movies, which you can't do on this, but it has a wider screen.

Tim Moses: All right. I guess that's beaten that to death. The next product is the Samsung A920, through Sprint, and I had got that the same time I got the Treo 650, so I started playing around with both. You can't really compare the two, so you really have to -

Bill Butler: So we're not going to.

Tim Moses: It's not a phone that's in the same range with these other two, but as a regular phone, it's a pretty impressive phone to look at. When you start it up, you get this full color screen, real nice screen on it. All the icons and the menu are animated; very slick interface on it. Probably the best thing I could say is on a trip to Chattanooga, my eight year old son got a hold of the phone and wouldn't let go of it. He figured out how to take pictures, take video; he was playing games on it, played with Google maps, and the phone's using e-video and so the Google maps are coming up fast and it was all I could do to pry that phone out of his hands. He still refers to it as his phone; he's going to be very sad to see that one go. According to my son, it's the best phone ever.

Bill Butler: I had the A900, actually, personally, I was using that phone, and the battery life wasn't quite where I needed to be, but the feature set was really quite incredible. It had voice dialing, it had Bluetooth, it had e-video network, so, all the things I needed. I was actually able to send photos from the phone to my laptop, to my Mac. I was actually also able to send contacts - one by one - I couldn't actually synchronize contacts but I could send the important contacts without having to re-key them into my phone, which was good too. Samsung probably has to work a little bit on its software for the Mac, I'm not sure about its PC.

Tim Moses: That's an important thing to note if you're a Mac user; there is no synching; there is file copying though. Although I wasn't able to get the 920, I wasn't able to get the photos off, using Bluetooth or the USB cable.

Bill Butler: Which was different from the 900, we just want to clarify that the 900, even though it has a lower number, we believe it is a newer phone, and so we assume that Samsung's probably added that functionality to the 900. Which is the Razr killer, it's the very ultra-thin, sort of sexy phone that Samsung has out now. The 920 has better battery life than the 900 by a long shot though, so, if you're looking for battery life and a good solid phone with a nice interface, I think the 920 is a good choice.

Bill Butler: All right, on to the Motorola Pebl. The Motorola Pebl is probably the kind of, I just imagine like Paris Hilton or someone wearing this phone. It looks like, I described it in one of my blogs, it looks like a pebble you would find -

Tim Moses: You mean your contact list can be stolen?

Bill Butler: Right. It looks like a little pebble you would find on the bottom of a trout stream or something. It has a very -

Tim Moses: Is that what the name is for?

Bill Butler: I think so.

Tim Moses: Because it does, it's very rounded.

Bill Butler: It looks like a pebble. I assume they meant to draw that. It took me about a week to figure out how to open the front. It's extremely easy, but it's so easy that I couldn't figure out, it's kind of like a lot of Mac products out there. You actually slide down with your thumb and it flips open.

Tim Moses: Oh, that's cool.

Bill Butler: It's got a magnet on the hinge that closes the clamshell, instead of a clip and I guess that clip will never go bad because it's a magnet, obviously. The good things: it is a cool looking phone, it's a great conversation piece, I think. The battery life is very good, it's a cool flip design. It does not have Edge service. From my standpoint and when I review things, when I see a phone this new, my first thought is that it needs to have Edge, it needs to have these higher speed networks, and I assume they're saving costs by not including them. Motorola does have nice synching features with the Mac and with PCs, but to not have Edge, means that you can't use it as a high speed modem. It means that if you're trying to pull up data on the internet, you're not going to get the speeds. But if your needs are not data oriented, if you just need a cool phone with a reasonably good interface, the Pebl is a sharp phone and it's a nice statement and it's got good weight to it.

Tim Moses: Yeah, you could whack somebody on the head with this too.

Bill Butler: It does have Bluetooth also, so Bluetooth means that you can easily sync your contacts to it, you could sync your calendar entries to it.

Tim Moses: So what's the display on the front used for?

Bill Butler: It's kind of funny, it's really down the lines of aesthetics that we're talking about with this whole phone. It says the time on it, but it breaks it up into, like if it's 12:24, it puts the 12 on the top and the 24 on the bottom. What I found is that as I looked at that phone, time looks so much more interesting when it's vertical like that. It's almost like art, everytime you look to see what time it is, it's like, oh wow, that's such a nice looking way to display it. It's a conversation piece, and a phone that functions really well. We used it on the T-Mobile network the whole time we had it. It's not one that I would personally use, it doesn't fit my needs because it doesn't have a full keyboard and the types of things that I need on a PDA, because I need a PDA phone integrated. The one flaw with it that I found that is kind of an issue with Mac users is if you do sync it up with your Mac, it instead of putting one person with their three contact numbers, it actually enters that person three times. So, it would have multiple entries for the person instead of aggregating the phone numbers. Anyway, that's the one thing that I think Motorola could, it's probably a fairly simple fix in the iSync program in the Mac.

Tim Moses: Now, normally on this phone, can you give one person multiple phone numbers?

Bill Butler: Yes, you can. It's built that way.

Tim Moses: You can. Okay. It's the synching software that's the problem.

Bill Butler: A minor software fix, I would say.

Tim Moses: It is cool looking, I've got to say, and the way it opens is really slick. I wish you hadn't run the battery all the way out because I want to see what it looks like.

Bill Butler: Here's what I was doing for the first week, I was trying to grab one of these almost nonexistent seams to pull it open.

Tim Moses: It's definitely well manufactured, and everything about it looks very smooth, fits together very well.

Tim Moses: I have had the Panasonic BLC30 wireless camera for a while now, and that's not really a very catchy name for what this thing is. It's a remote video camera, so you could use it for security, or for keeping up with anything. Cool thing about it is, it has a decent color camera built in, and it has a web server built in, so you can access this camera, see what's going on on the camera, you can even control pan and tilt on it from a web page. It's a pretty small camera, it's about maybe 2 - 2.5 inches wide by 3 - 3.5 inches tall, very small thing. It just works very well. To go into a little more detail, when you get the camera, probably my only complaint about it is that while it's pretty easy to set up if you have a standard configuration, standard network set up, or you have a standard wireless network set up. It will connect over ethernet, or over wireless, B or G. The only problem is, if you don't have a standard setup, it can be a hassle to configure. You do have to do that through a web browser on a PC. Once you have it configured, though, you can get to it from any web browser, you can pan and tilt from the web browser, see still shots, see video. It even has some cool extra features like a heat sensor and timers built in, so you can have it automatically send an email when something is triggered.

Bill Butler: Does it send an email with a picture, or does it -

Tim Moses: Actually I never sent one of the emails, I was just playing with the web page. Anyway, it's very slick. They really did a good job. It's just a nice, complete package. It does what it does very well. It has a lot of features to it. Price points, I just looked up on Amazon; they have it for $260, so it fits in, a little pricier than the super cheap wireless cameras you might get from Exten or someplace like that. But, the fact that it has the web server built in, it's this all in one product. Once it's configured you can put it any place you can get a wireless connection. You do have to plug in to power, but you don't have to have a PC anywhere around to make this thing work. It works entirely on it's own, which, for $260, is amazing.

Bill Butler: Now you said the initial configuration required a PC, but after that, it's web based?

Tim Moses: Yeah, so the one thing I'd say, I don't see that as a barrier to getting it, even if you're on a Mac. It's really a one time thing; once you configure it, you're set. So you might need to get to a PC that first time, and that's something to keep in mind if you are going to drive out 100 miles to set it up some place without a PC, it's probably not a good idea. But, when you look at other cameras with these same kind of features, you're really looking at cameras that are several hundred dollars or more, and to have some $260 device that gives decent 640x480 video, works in pretty low light and gives you a great picture, I think it's really hard to beat.

Bill Butler: Okay, so that's the Panasonic BLC30. Great, well, I'm going to talk about these Shure headphones. It's the Shure I4C and the main purpose behind these headphones is to allow you to have your cell phone plugged in at the same time you have, say, your iPod. So, it's got two cords coming out, one with a mini plug for a phone and one with a mini plug for an iPod, and then it has a switch on it. You can just toggle the switch between telephone and music. It's a great concept, and the sound was very good on the earbuds. Personally, my ears are too small; I tried all those adapters and I couldn't quite get them to fit into my ears. My wife used them and she was very impressed with the audio quality, and of course, it's great to have the switch, to be able to go between your phone and your music device, if the two aren't integrated, which most aren't yet. If you have that need, I think it's a great choice. As a matter of fact, I'm speaking on a Shure SM58 microphone, so we all love Shure products around here.

Bill Butler: The only other thing that we're going to review today, and it's not really a review so much as a mention, because I think it really fits in the vein of what we're talking about, and it's a site called myrateplan.com . Basically, if you go to myrateplan.com you have the ability to look up phones by feature, service plans across various phones and features, everything we've talked about today including Bluetooth and Edge and battery life on phones and ability to sync and those types of things. It's difficult to research every phone and I found that myrateplan.com was very helpful in order to navigate, in particular they have one area of their site where you can specify I want Bluetooth, I want high speed data connectivity, I want a PDA, and I want the weight to be at this level, all the features you want. You can basically drag the sliders and phones will sort of disappear as they get filtered down to the level that you want to see, and so you can really cull it down to two or three phones that you want to make your final decision on.


[Music]

Bill Butler: Thanks for tuning in to this week's edition of the Best Stuff podcast.

Tim Moses: And be sure to visit beststuff.com . If you'd like to contact us with story ideas or general questions, please email Bill or Tim at beststuff.com .

Bill Butler: For Best Stuff, we're Bill Butler, and Tim Moses. Thanks for listening!

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