Real World Computing
Between the nines
And speaking of finger-friendliness, let's not forget the iPhone. It's a stunning example of what can happen if the hardware people, the user-interface people and the operating system people actually speak to each other during the development phase, but despite that - and I realise that for some readers what I'm about to say will amount to heresy - I don't find its on-screen keyboard all that easy to use. And it has no proper support for corporate push email, so again it's a good nine, but not a ten.
It does sound as if I am actually complaining, but really I'm not. All the phones I've mentioned are better than good, they're brilliant, and if you're shopping for a new phone I'd strongly advise you to go and play with all of them first. Each has minor flaws, but each is a very usable smartphone.
Slow on the draw
Really heated debates are proceeding on various blogs and forums right now about the video capabilities of some recent HTC smartphones. There's a whole bunch of very vocal people who claim the devices they purchased contain sophisticated display-acceleration chips for which HTC doesn't supply the relevant drivers, so their screens refresh really slowly. They've even set up a website at www.htcclassaction.org and are considering a class-action lawsuit in the US. These people seem to be obsessives: their website goes into immense detail about the internal workings and chipsets of these phones, pulling apart line-by-line and rebutting every response they get from HTC.
And as for those HTC responses, the official statement says the devices in question "don't use video acceleration hardware", and I'd guess they ought to know. But please note the very careful wording: it says don't "use" rather than don't "contain", a difference that's subtle but might be important, because it doesn't rule out the original complaint that these devices actually do contain the relevant chips but lack any software to drive them. I guess if that is the case then HTC will simply release a patch at some point, if only to shut up the moaners.
What puzzles me about this whole affair is that I've got a load of recent HTC devices in my toy box here and I use many of them on a regular basis. That includes a couple of TyTN IIs, an S730, a couple of Touch Duals (16-key and 20-key versions), plus a few others. But until I read about this class action I'd never considered the screen-redraw speed of these devices to be slow, and compared with my BlackBerry Curve the HTC devices are positively nippy. I've used them for web browsing, satnav and watched videos on them.
Of course, having read the various complaints, I've now convinced myself that they are slow, but how do I know that isn't just the power of suggestion? Or perhaps there's some Schrödingeresque observational effect at work that makes them slow down once they know that you know about the alleged problem! And, like the complete and utter bastard that I am, I've now told PC Pro's whole readership about the alleged problem. You were all probably quite happy with your HTC phones yesterday, but now you've read this, you'll notice the painfully slow screen redraws. Sorry!
Internet radio
As regular readers will have gathered by now, I'm a bit of a gadget addict, and like all hopeless gadget fans I own a large number of radios, including a Wi-Fi internet radio. (Actually that's an economy with the truth - I actually own several of them). One feature I really like on some of these Wi-Fi radios is that as well as listening to live streams from around the world, you also catch up on things you've missed by accessing archive material such as Auntie Beeb's Listen again facility. There is a problem, though, in that not all internet radios have this facility, and most of those that do are based on the Reciva chipset (www.reciva.com).
