iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S (Captivate), Evo 4G

Here's a review of the Apple iPhone 4m the Samsung Galaxy S (Captivate) and the HTC Evo 4G.

iPhone 4 vs. Samsung Galaxy S (Captivate) vs. Evo 4G:

Who Ever Thought Verizon Would Not Need the iPhone?

Make no mistake, Apple's iPhone has been a huge success for AT&T. Other carriers, and the most often mentioned candidate, Verizon Wireless, would likely not spurn the chance to sell the iPhone.

But it is just possible that Android devices now are getting enough traction that Verizon Wireless, though it might want to sell the iPhone, does not actually need to sell the iPhone.

That is a big shift. Android's growth, fueled by Verizon exclusives such as the Droid X and Droid Incredible, might finally be reaching the point where the issue no longer is so critical.

The Android-powered HTC devices might be reaching such critical mass that going too far out of the way to get an iPhone deal is less important. Apple has a carefully-cultivated and faithful following. But most people are not Apple addicts. If the Android can demonstrate it is as easy to use, supports the same apps, costs the same and works the same, most people are likely to give it a look.

Right now HTC seems to have captured most of those qualities.

What Android's Impressive Growth Means for You

BlackBerry Satisfaction Plummets, Changewave Finds

Though end user satisfaction with the iPhone has remained fairly constant over the last year, Research in Motion BlackBerry devices seem to have suffered a dramatic decline in satisfaction, dropping from a high of about 55 percent in January 2008 to June 2010, Changewave Research reports.

A reasonable observer would suggest this portends some trouble for RIM, the reception issues with the new iPhone 4 notwithstanding.

Apple iPhone Demand Seen Exploding

ChangeWave's latest smart phone survey of 4,028 consumers shows an "explosive transformation" occurring in consumer demand, suggesting some major new mobile handset winners and losers for second half 2010.

Changewave says its latest survey shows the strongest interest in smartphones ever recorded in a Changewave survey. But there's a significant change within that demand pattern: Apple and HTC devices are getting strong demand at the expense of Motorola and Research in Motion.

The future buying plans suggest coming huge moves upward for Apple and HTC, with a whopping 52 percent of respondents who plan to buy a smart phone in the next 90 days saying they'll get an Apple iPhone.

It also appears that Android demand has shifted to HTC and away from Motorola.

Explosive Changes in Consumer Demand Shake Up Smart Phone Industry

Apple Makes More Profit Than All the Rest of the Handset Industry

Since getting into the mobile handset business with its iPhone, Apple has blown away the whole rest of the handset industry in earnings (before interest and taxes), according to a new  analysis by Goldman Sachs analysts.

The other angle is that the rest of the suppliers have lost earnings momentum  precisely as Apple has grown.

At the moment, Apple likely accounts for about 58 percent of the mobile handset industry's annual earnings.

That's shocking, and a measure of Apple's new stature.

Only Issue: Will Apple Sell 1 Million iPhone 4 Devices Today?

The only issue is whether Apple will sell one million iPhone 4 devices today. A couple of obvious questions suggst themselves. Since all the early-adopter technophiles and even early majority users made their decisions long ago, Apple's sales now must come from the "typical" consumer.

Smartphone sales have been climbing for the past couple of years, so the issue is how much of the growth Apple is able to grab. The harder-to-answer question is whether Facetime, the videoconferencing app, which encourage families with widely-scattered members to get the device just for that feature.

iPhone, Evo, Droid Incredible, Nexus One: Which Has Best Total Cost of Ownership

The iPhone makes the most economic sense of leading smartphones if you opt for a minimum voice/data/text plan, says BillShrink.

The catch is, BillShrink’s research has found that that average data usage per person has risen a dramatic 3.5 times over the last 15 months. If higher usage means a user cannot buy the iPhone minimum data plan, then a Nexus One on a T-Mobile USA unlimited plan offers the lower total cost of ownership.

iPhone 4 a "Major Leap" Says Walt Mossberg

Wall Street Journal technology reviewer Walt Mossberg says the Apple iPhone 4 is "a major leap over its already-excellent predecessor, the iPhone 3GS," on both hardware and software fronts.

The iPhone 4 redesign features a radically-sharper screen; a second, front-facing camera; a larger battery; a better rear camera with flash; and a faster processor into a body that is 24 percent thinner, a bit narrower, and retains the same length and weight as its predecessor's, says Mossberg.

With the front-facing camera, and clever new software called FaceTime, Apple has brought simple, high-quality video calling to mobile phones, albeit, for now, only over Wi-Fi and only among iPhone 4 owners.

In addition, the iPhone now includes an updated operating system that adds catch-up software features such as limited multitasking; folders for grouping related apps and a unified email inbox for multiple accounts and the ability to present messages as threaded conversations.

"While its 3.5-inch screen, once considered huge, is now smaller than those on some other smartphones, the high resolution packs in a lot of material and makes text appear almost like ink on fine paper," says Mossberg.

"Voice quality was quite good, even on long speaker-phone calls, and data performance over Wi-Fi was excellent," he adds. "Video and audio streamed from the Web played smoothly."

Apple claims longer battery life for most functions—seven hours of talk time, for instance, versus five hours on the earlier model.

Some will question the degree of multitasking support, though. To prevent a drain on battery life, Apple has allowed only certain apps to fully multitask, such as Pandora or voice-prompted navigation apps, which keep working while you're on a call. Others that fully work in the background include Internet calling apps, and those that perform long downloads, he says.

"But some logical candidates, such as Twitter and Facebook, merely pause in place when you switch away from them," says Mossberg.

Apple says constant fetching of hundreds of social-networking updates in the background would kill the battery too quickly.

"In fact, for many scenarios, such as games, Apple's version of multitasking is really just fast switching among open apps that save their place," he notes.

Because iPhone users can easily accumulate hundreds of apps, it can become difficult to organize them. So the new iPhone OS now allows you to group them into folders.

"The most important downside of the iPhone 4 is that, in the U.S., it's shackled to AT&T, which not only still operates a network that has trouble connecting and maintaining calls in many cities, but now has abandoned unlimited, flat-rate data plans," he says.

In an effort to improve performance, Apple added a wrap-around antenna, and the device automatically tries to connect using the least-congested frequencies as well as frequencies with higher quality (less signal interference).

"Just as with its predecessors, I can't recommend this new iPhone for voice calling for people who experience poor AT&T reception, unless they are willing to carry a second phone on a network that works better for them," says Mossberg.

"For everyone else, however, I'd say that Apple has built a beautiful smartphone that works well, adds impressive new features and is still, overall, the best device in its class," he says.

26% of iPhones Break Within 2 Years

About 25.6 percent of iPhone owners experienced a failure in the first two years of use, according to warranty data from SquareTrade. If you have teens or college-age children, you might say the failure rate is higher than that.

The typical but it’s actually below the industry’s average, according to SquareTrade. The expected failure rate over a two-year period was 33 percent one year ago, when SquareTrade only examined the iPhone and the iPhone 3G.

Most of the failures (18.1 percent) result from accidental damage, while only 7.5 percent are a result of a hardware malfunction. Touchscreens are most likely to fail, followed by power supplies.

26% of iPhones Break Within 2 Years [REPORT]

A Contrarian View on iPhone?

It takes a brave constitution to suggest iPhone is losing its "cool" factor, especially given iPhone's success in the very-tough Japanese market, where foreign-made devices tend not to succeed.

BlackBerry To Introduce First Touchscreen Devices to Rival iPhone

I loved my BlackBerry when I first began using one years ago. Over time, my business reasons for using a smartphone have changed, with the biggest change being that email is no longer mission critical, but web apps are way more important. As much as I have loved composing text messages on a BlackBerry, the web experience has simply gotten to be painful.

Maybe RIM's new line will fix that. I'm not saying I'd go back, as I am more intrigued by Android devices. I do miss my keyboard, though.

Android Outsells iPhone in First Quarter

Smartphones carrying Google’s Android operating system outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, say researchers at NPD Group. During the quarter, Android handsets accounted for 28 percent of smartphone sales, beating out iPhone OS and its 21 percent share.

BlackBerry remains the bestselling OS, with its devices capturing 36 percent of the market. NPD attributes the shift to strong sales of the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris.

Strong sales of the Droid, Droid Eris, and Blackberry Curve via these promotions helped keep Verizon Wireless's smartphone sales on par with AT&T in the first quarter. According to NPD, smartphone sales at AT&T comprised nearly a third of the entire smartphone market (32 percent), followed by Verizon Wireless (30 percent), T-Mobile (17 percent) and Sprint (15 percent).

The continued popularity of messaging phones and smartphones resulted in slightly higher prices for all mobile phones, despite an overall drop in the number of mobile phones purchased in the first quarter. The average selling price for all mobile phones in the first quarter reached $88, which is a five percent increase from the first quarter of 2009. Smartphone unit prices, by comparison, averaged $151 in the first quarter of 2010, which is a three percent decrease over the previous year.

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RIM Readying Tablet PC, New BlackBerry OS

Research In Motion Ltd. is  testing a touch-screen smartphone with a slide-out keyboard, the Wall Street Journal reports. The phone runs on a new version of the BlackBerry operating system and works much like an iPhone, letting users swipe through screens and expand images with their fingers. It also has a universal search bar that lets users scour all the phone's data and some data online as well.

RIM is also is reported to be experimenting with a tablet device to serve as a larger-screen companion to its BlackBerry phone. That device, which is in an early stage of development, will connect to cellular networks when tethered to a BlackBerry phone.

The new offerings come as RIM faces increased competition from devices built by Apple and those that run on the Android operating system from Google Inc.

RIM still sells more smartphones globally than any company besides Nokia Corp., and last year grabbed 19 percent of the world market for smartphones, according to  Strategy Analytics. But RIM's share of the North American market is slipping.

RIM's share of the North American smartphone market by shipments dropped to 38 percent in the March 2010 quarter from 54 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

Apple's share climbed from 18 percent to 23 percent over the same period.

The new slate device comes with four gigabytes of storage space and a five megapixel camera, the Wall Street Journal reports.

RIM is also readying a new Internet browser that renders Web pages much faster than the current browser, and allows users to access more than one Web page at a time, people familiar with the device said.

Mobile Web Use: Android Grows, iPhone Drops

Android’s share of mobile Web consumption in North America has gone from just five percent to 20 percent from January 2009 to May 2010, while the iPhone OS has dropped from about 75 percent to 59 percent, according to Quantcast.

The BlackBerry OS accounts for 10.4 percent, and all others combined account for roughly 11 percent.

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Steve Jobs Speech Introducing iPhone 4: Watch the Video

You can watch the entire speech and demonstration by Steve Jobs, introducing the iPhone 4, here.

Steve Jobs Speech Introducing iPhone 4

Will Apple Be First to Make the Video Calling Breakthrough?

Lots of people will point out that person-to-person video calling appliances and features have been available for a while. Most of us would point to Skype, while others would point to the capabiltiies Nokia has been offering on its high-end phones, or the specialized video telephony products now on the market.

Apple's new  iPhone 4 "FaceTime" video calling feature might be notable, though. People will have different opinions about the ease of use for Skype video telephony, but the big snag for most consumer video telephony appliances has been the need to buy them in pairs.

The iPhone 4 might be the first "appliance" supporting video telephony that does not actually have to be "bought in pairs," given the huge installed base the device is likely to have, globally. The other angle is that video telephony could become a "mere feature" of the most-widely-used communications appliance on the planet, though of course for the moment only on Apple iPhones from version 4 and forward.

Video calling might be a social function and therefore there is a network effect not possible when the units are deployed pair by pair.

Some significant sub-set of the mobile user population uses iPhones. In my own family, for example, all four of my children use iPhones, and it appears iPhone use among their peers is just about that high.

By confining FaceTime sessions to Wi-Fi connections, Apple avoids the almost-certain uneven quality of experience users would experience on AT&T's 3G network.

Innovations sometimes, perhaps ever, solely or primarily dependent on development of new technology. More commonly, it is a combination of ease of use, user installed base, price and the face that lots of other people seem to be doing it. Up to this point, almost no users had to worry about "everybody else doing it." That could change, beginning with the iPhone 4.

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What iPhone 4 Means For Google, Microsoft, Netflix, And Amazon

Apple's new iPhone 4, announced yesterday and on sale June 24, has wide ranging implications for big Internet players like Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon, Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth believes. For starters, the "mobile Internet" will be more platform-based and less URL-driven than the traditional Internet.

What does that mean? Mobile platforms and app stores, as well as "apps," will be more important than platforms or app stores tend to be for the PC-based Internet use case. People are simply not going to "search" as intensively, or interact as much, as they do when using the Internet in a PC mode.

Google remains the default search engine on the iPhone, which helps Google. But Apple seems to be highly optimistic about its prospects in the mobile display ad market.

Anmuth does not believe Amazon Kindle sales will be hurt much. He expects the iPad to take some share, but not much, from Kindle.

What iPhone 4 Means For Google, Microsoft, Netflix, And Amazon:

Apple iPhone 4: All that Metal Includes the Antenna

Which means signal reception is going to be affected by the way the user holds the device, though possibly less so than in the older design.

That's a lot of metal, with fairly good spatial dispersion for the antenna element. So in a weak signal area, reception might improve, for voice, when the speakerphone is activated and the user is "hands free."

AT&T Appears to Allow Some iPhone 3GS Users to Upgrade to iPhone 4 Without ETF

AT&T says it has adjusted eligibility requirements for at least some iPhone owners, allowing them to upgrade to the version 4 model without being slammed with an early termination penalty.

It is not clear to me that "every" iPhone customer will be able to do so. One of the iPhones on my account was replaced in November 2009 and it still appears that the upgrade date remains November 2011.

With some exceptions such as this, it appears AT&T wants to avoid negative reaction from most iPhone users who have gotten their 3GS devices and have had them a year or so.

Last year, AT&T likewise allowed some, perhaps most, iPhone 3G users to upgrade to the newer iPhone 3G S at the same discounted price as new subscribers. The move followed customer criticism about having to pay a $200 fee to upgrade to the iPhone 3G S before their two-year contract was over. Now AT&T is getting ahead of the crowd to make sure recent customers will see the same heavily-subsidized iPhone pricing as new and out-of-contract users.

Less Apple Hype Than is Typical

Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone on June 7 that is thinner with a flat back, higher resolution display and a front-facing camera. Apple might have additional details about the iAd network and Game Center, the social networking feature, according to Wall Street Journal reports.

There might be less hype for this upgrade than typically is the case, because of the unauthorized leak of a prototype.

A new iPhone OS 4.0 operating system also will be debuted.

Analysts believe that the phone will be priced at a similar range as the current iPhone 3GS, which starts at $199 with a two-year contract, with the iPhone 3GS price cut to $99 with a similar contract.
The new lower price for the 3GS device, combined with AT&T Inc.'s new data prices, which lower the entry-level monthly service rate, could accelerate demand beyond the strong triple-digit growth the phone has been seeing, some believe.

"One of the impediments to smartphone adoption has been the service plan," says Shaw Wu, an analyst for Kaufman Brothers, adding that "when they make a form factor change, it's pretty powerful."

Apple is expected to sell about 36 million iPhones in its fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2010.