Mom: “Son, the teacher said you had an accident in class today. ”

Son: “The other kids tickled me in my special spot.  I couldn’t help it, and I just let go!  But it is okay, Mom.  Last week, Jim Blackberry got squeezed really hard, and the same thing happened to him! Jim might be (in) a lower grade, but he’s really popular.”

Mom: “I have always told all the other moms how amazing you are.  You are so bright and vibrant and unique.  You are one of the best kids ever, but I suppose if you want to just point fingers and show yourself to be only as good as that Blackberry kid who peaked in kindergarten, well…. I guess I can just put you in the same class as him.”

The one hint that Apple still has some decency was Steve admitting the iPhone 4 drops more calls than the previous iPhone.  He played it down by saying that it was less than one extra call per hundred.  I thought for sure this nugget would be all over the tech sites, but they mostly focused on how irate Steve appeared.

Let’s do some simple number crunching.  We’ll be generous and say the iPhone 4 drops only one more call per two hundred.  If the 3GS dropped just one call per hundred, this would be a 50% increase!  I guess you can be “optimistic” and hope the 3GS dropped five calls per hundred, so the increase would only be ten percent.

I don’t know about you, but I want them to have to measure dropped calls per thousand or ten thousand.  That they can be measured in whole numbers per one hundred tells me cellphone technology has not come as far as I thought.

There’s been a lot of talk about how signal strength and its representation by bars on cellphones, especially due to the iPhone 4 having a significant problem with attenuation when held the “wrong” way. I’ve also seen a lot of people posting responses to articles asking things like, “Why can’t they just represent the strength as a percentage?” and “Why isn’t there a standard to representing signal strength?”

The iPhone 4 has a unique design that eliminates some attenuation that the antennas would face in a normal phone because the antennas are not surrounded by a casing. That means the iPhone 4 can not only receive signals at a higher level, but it can also transmit at a lower level. The problem is that the antennas are on the edge of the phone, allowing a user to directly touch them. Since our hands are capacitive, bridging the antennas can cause a problem. If the antennas were recessed, the phone would probably be fine.

Apple’s first answer was simply to hold the phone differently. After complaints about the issue gained momentum, Apple announced that they were “shocked” to discover their formula for calculating how many bars to display was incorrect. Those of you with memories will recall that Apple changed the way it calculated the bars in release 2.1 of iOS (called iPhone OS then), artificially inflating the number of bars users were seeing. Now they’re releasing a minor update to iOS that will give users a more accurate and honest portrayal of the signal strength; unfortunately for them, most people will just see it as “This update made me lose one of my bars!” An appropriate solution to the hardware problem is to cover the antennas with insulating material (or, at the very least, the problem corner). This can cost pennies per phone.

People seem generally confused about what the issue is and why it affects some people and not others. Anandtech did a good review of the issue, finding that holding the phone in a certain way could result in a signal drop of nearly 25dBm. Decibels are logarithmic, so a single bel represents a 10:1 ratio. If you take an artificial number such as 100 to represent your signal, a 10dB drop would be dropping it to 10. A 20dB drop brings it to 1, so a 25dB drop brings it to less than one percent of what it was. That’s significant attenuation that will definitely cause problems in any area with a mediocre signal.

The other interesting side of this issue is how everyone is focused on signal strength, which is not a good measurement of reception quality. It’s kind of like the emphasis of X app store has Y apps. If you need some drinking water, a single jug of water is much better than getting an ocean of oil (perhaps courtesy of BP). When I worked on satellite communications equipment in the Air Force, outgoing signals were measured in watts (quantity because the quality is assumed to be perfect, and you don’t want to overload a receiver) and incoming signals were measured in BER which means bit error rate, how many good bits per each bad bit, measured in scientific notation (so a shorthand of “-7″ would mean 10000000 good bits for each bad one). It’s a much more useful measurement than milliwatts or even dBm.

All this means: 1) the average consumer does not have an understanding of radio propagation, 2) there are a lot of ways to measure a signal, and 3) there isn’t a universal standard. Not only is there no standard for what a given number of bars should mean, it’s extremely hard to define. You can say a given amount of power, but that doesn’t take into account the sensitivity of the receiver. The iPhone 4 is capable of holding calls that most phones would drop in a hands-off scenario. The other issue is that your real signal is constantly changing as your phone checks with multiple towers and the signal is affected by nearly everything, so you can’t simply show the current signal quality/quantity. You have to average it out for a short period of time to avoid the constant jumping.

Really, we need a more useful standard. The current bars are the equivalent of a fuel gauge: The reading is relative to your vehicle but not to another vehicle. You might have a full tank (five bars) and someone else might have half of a tank (3 bars), but that doesn’t mean you actually have more fuel (signal). Nor does it mean that you can go further than the other person because you don’t know the fuel efficiency (receiver sensitivity). Even with a useful measurement like fuel efficiency, you still run into different conditions that affect it like highway or city driving (cell tower transmission quality, interference, etc.).

It’d be nice to at least show dBm and have the color change to red as it gets closer to the receiver’s minimum usable level. For now, unless a universal standard is created for all cell phones, you would do better to measure your signal based on calls dropped, call quality, and data rate than by comparing bars.

Dan Morill of Google said this:

Because it means everything, it actually means nothing, so the term is useless. Stories on “fragmentation” are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits’ blogs, but they have little to do with reality. “Fragmentation” is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers.

Ryan Paul of Ars Technica said this:

[R]estrictions effectively ensure that all Android devices that are intended to run third-party applications are basically the same with respect to application compatibility. In addition to mandating some consistent hardware specifications, Google has also taken steps to make the Android software more resilient to fragmentation.

And yet, we get people like Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDnet saying things like

[T]here’s already fragmentation of the platform… For Joe Average, this created an ultra-confusing marketplace where operating system versions changed every few months. It also meant that compatibility issues were inevitable.

Apparently “Joe Average” has a tough time tapping on the Android Market icon and then downloading any visible app in the entire market. Google filters out apps that aren’t compatible with your device (due to both OS requirements and hardware requirements). That doesn’t sound ultra-confusing to me.

The reality is that developers will choose the lowest level of the Android SDK that they can build their apps against to target the largest possible audience. If a developer makes a live wallpaper, it will only show up in the market for people whose devices support live wallpapers. So the only real issue is the question of whether manufacturers and carriers will push out the latest version of the OS for their phones.

OS Updates
Undoubtedly, there will be older devices that aren’t able to handle the latest version, but those aren’t the high-end smartphones, and they will have prices which reflect that. As far as the phones that are capable of running the latest version, if consumers see that X manufacturer’s phones always have the latest Android version within two months, those phones will be popular, especially through word of mouth. If consumers see that Y manufacturer never upgrades its phones, those phones will be decidedly less popular. The same is true of carriers. And, fortunately for Android, the number of carriers and manufacturers behind these devices is not limited, so simple economics will put enough pressure on these companies that they’ll be eager to upgrade. We’re already seeing all the latest Android-based phones coming out with Android 2.1 (even ones that were slated for 1.6), and they’re all capable of running 2.2. With the huge performance improvement that Froyo brings, there is a large incentive for manufacturers and carriers to ensure they get Android 2.2 on their devices as soon as possible.

iOS Fragmentation
Anyway, people’s minds are pretty set on whether fragmentation is an issue or a scare tactic. I thought it would be useful to point out how this issue affects (or doesn’t affect) the popular iPhone because you really don’t hear much about it.

First, the iPhone has some advantages in avoiding fragmentation. It is made by one company. The OS is made by the same company. The phone is limited to a single carrier (in the US). The phone has very incremental improvements at one year intervals rather than spurtive, frequent improvements.

Despite these steady improvements, there are hardware differences that are further affected by the OS running on the iPad and iPod as well. Some devices don’t have a camera, some have a 2mp camera, some have a 3mp camera, some have a 5mp camera, some have two cameras, some have autofocus, and some have flash. Some support 3G and some only support WiFi. Some have 412MHz processors, some have 532MHz processors, some have 600MHz processors, some have 1GHz processors, and some we don’t know. Some have 128MB of RAM and some have twice that. Some have a magnetic compass. Some have a gyroscope. Some can lock orientation. Some are 480px wide, some are 960px wide, and some are 1024px wide. So there is hardware variation because devices must improve, or they will be left behind.

There is software variation too. Most devices are running a 3.x version, but that will change soon as some devices are able to upgrade to iOS 4 and some aren’t. Of those that upgrade, the features supported will differ. The iPhone 3G devices purchased for $100 a few weeks ago will never officially get multitasking. Hopefully the poor souls who bought those are able to wait out a two-year contract before realizing how essential multitasking is.

With all these differences, would you call iOS fragmented? I wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t call Android fragmented either. They’re both evolving platforms. Android had some catching up to do when the G1 came out, so it has evolved significantly faster than iOS, but evolution is not fragmentation.

When you compare any of the newer competing smartphones to an iPhone 3GS, you see what a difference resolution makes. For instance, the Motorolla Droid has a 854×480 display that is 3.7″ (diagonally). That gives it a pixel density of 265ppi compared to the iPhone 3GS density of 163ppi. The new iPhone 4 has a density of 326ppi, which is better than the Droid and significantly better than the previous iPhones. If you were to shrink the Droid display to the same size as the iPhone 4 display, it would have a pixel density of 280ppi—just 20ppi below what Steve Jobs says is the limit of perception. You can see what a huge difference pixel density makes in a previous post comparing the Nexus One display to the iPhone display.

The new display is also an IPS LCD, which gives it much better viewing angles than a traditional LCD; however, the contrast ratio is not amazing at just 800:1. That’s a huge step up from previous iPhones, but the Droid’s contrast ratio is 1400:1 and the Nexus One is 65,000:1 (source), meaning that the contrast ratio is likely to impress you if you’re using a current iPhone but not if you’re using one of many other leading smartphones. The “retina display” appeared darker than the iPhone 3GS, but we’ll have to wait to see if that’s really the case or just an issue with the demonstration setup.

Video Calls
Another big feature that was shown off is the ability to make video calls. For some people, this will be huge, but keep in mind that the iPhone 4 can currently only talk to other iPhone 4 devices and only if they are both on WiFi. This is a very different approach than was taken by the Evo 4G (which uses Qik), but the WiFi limitation is probably for the better considering the problems users have reported with AT&T’s network.

AT&T
Speaking of AT&T, they have made some notable changes to billing recently. The good news is that people who were eligible to upgrade an iPhone this year are immediately eligible to upgrade to the iPhone 4. The mixed news is that the monthly data plans are now $15 for 200mb and $25 for 2gb. There is no unlimited plan for iPhones, and tethering is going to be an additional $20 a month. If you’re a light data user, this is great news because you can pay less and it should lower the stress on AT&T’s network. If you’re somehow actually using 2gb a month, the news is not so good. Plus, the overage fees are distributed in “buckets” too. If you go over your 200mb allotment one month by even a single byte, you’ll be paying double for your data fee ($30) and you’ll get another 200mb. And, finally, the bad news: A new smartphone contract comes with a $325 termination fee. Meaning that even after the pro-rated change, you’ll still pay close to $100 to terminate your contract just one month early. I expect to see the FCC look into this, but who knows if anything will actually come out of it.

Design
The iPhone 4 is in the new case revealed by Gizmodo. It’s 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS and even a half millimeter thinner than the Samsung Galaxy S. Some people love the design; some people hate the design; some people think it looks like a Vizio TV (I tend to agree, but Apple products have commonly borrowed design from other sources). The design is all about functionality and squeezing as much hardware in as little space as possible. It’s been some time since the Gizmodo leak, and in that time it has grown on me as a very industrial, function-over-form design. I definitely don’t consider it good-looking, but it’s not ugly either.

Other Improvements
The new camera sensor is significantly improved and has an LED flash. The pixel quantity (5mp) is nothing to get excited about, but the quality Apple is claiming is extremely impressive. We’ll have to wait until this is in real-world conditions to see how it really performs though, particularly in low-light conditions. It is also capable of 720p video at 30fps, which is very good for a cellphone (though, again, we’ll have to wait to see the quality). The strange thing is that, according to Apple’s specs, the iPhone is capable of outputting video at

1024 by 768 pixels with Dock Connector to VGA Adapter; 576p and 480p with Apple Component AV Cable; 576i and 480i with Apple Composite AV Cable (cables sold separately)

This suggests that there is currently no way to directly output the 720p video to a TV. I’m wondering if this is an actual limitation of the phone, the connector, or simply a site typo.

The iPhone 4 has a noise-cancelation mic, which is strangely at the top of the device rather than the rear. The phone now has an A4 processor similar to what is used in the iPad, which should give excellent performance for standard apps, but I’m curious to see OpenGL performance. The battery is slightly larger and is claimed to have better life. Unfortunately, battery life is another spec that requires some real-world testing. The phone now has a gyro, which should give better motion sensing (presumably for games because the accelerometer already seemed good).

Conclusion
Overall, the hardware is really solid, and I expect it to have a very good, quality feel. This is a huge leap ahead of the previous iPhone, but this revamp puts the iPhone 4 very near to other leading smartphones. The biggest problem is that this isn’t a major leap ahead of other smartphones, and now they have an entire year of improvements before the next iPhone comes out. For current iPhone users whose devices do everything or nearly everything they want, this will be an excellent upgrade, but I don’t expect many Android-leaning people to be swayed.

The majority of the added features are already available in other mobile operating systems, but Steve does an excellent job of getting crowds excited about features they should have had long ago. Let’s take a look at the announcements (credit to Engadget’s coverage).

1 – Multitasking
Steve at least acknowledges that this has been available for other phones for years, but it looks like the multitasking will be pretty limited. The majority of apps will just do state-saving, similar to the current experience. Applications can be modified to have specific background services, such as Pandora playing in the background. I love this quote: “It’s no exaggeration to say that the iPhone has changed the future of Pandora.” I’d say iPhone has been holding back Pandora by not allowing it to run while you check email or whatever else. Finally, this will change for iPhone 3GS and the newest iPod Touch devices this summer (and iPads in the fall). iPhone 3G… sorry.

It doesn’t sound to me like there will be support for background tasks that aren’t initiated by the user (e.g., having a news app download the latest news in the background based on a time interval). Widgets would have also been a nice announcement, but they’re absent as well.

2 – Folders (and Wallpapers)
Now you can create folders and change your background image.

3 – Enhanced Mail
Unified inboxes, multiple Exchange accounts, and thread-based organization… I didn’t realize they didn’t have thread-based organization, so that’s a nice change for Apple users.

4 – iBooks
This app is now included in the OS.

5 – Enterprise
This point included re-mentioning of multiple exchange accounts, so that’s clearly important to some people. Better data protection, mobile device management, wireless app distribution … minimal details on this. Hopefully the wireless app distribution means you don’t have to deal with any of the certificate hassle, but I doubt it.

6 – Game Center
Basically this is Xbox Live/PSN, which isn’t innovative, but it definitely has a lot of potential. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

7 – iAd
Apparently Steve thinks that current advertising in applications sucks, so they’ve created iAd. This adds potential for interaction (sweet, “punch the monkey” can finally come to iPhone!). iAd actually has the potential to be really effective; unfortunately Apple is being extremely greedy and taking 40% of the revenue. In theory, that leaves 60% to the developer, but there are many cases when ad revenue is shared. Say a developer earns 50% of ad revenue and 50% goes to company XYZ. That 50% is now really 30%, so the developer earns less than 1/3 of the profit of the app, pre-taxes.

Play with the numbers some more: a developer who would have earned 33% will drop to 20% (from 1/3 revenue to 1/5). Apple is going to make more money for their shareholders and developers are going to have a bigger challenge (when they’re already facing an over-saturated market).

Conclusion
Uh, that’s it. For most people (well, people who have an Apple device that is less than a year old), this boils down to multitasking and some minor improvements (e.g., folders). As far as innovation, that is pretty much just iAd. Other devices have had multitasking, folders, custom wallpapers, thread-based mail organization, book readers, wireless distribution, etc. If nothing else, this shows that competition is good. Even if you’re an Apple fan who dislikes Android, WebOS, etc., you can still acknowledge that their presence is forcing Apple to finally make some improvements, and you don’t have to make as many excuses as to why your phone doesn’t have X feature.

Also, some additional (very limited) details are available on Apple’s site.

First off, we have to clarify the concept of multitasking. On a desktop, notebook, netbook, etc., you will frequently have multiple programs open at a time and often more than one is visible on the screen. In most cases, these programs are actively running (usually with priority given to the application in focus) and using some processing cycles. Sometimes the background applications do need to use resources, such as an instant messaging client or music player. Sometimes they don’t, such as when you are actively playing a game but left a browser window open in the background.

The misconception is that Android handles all these processes the same way, forcing them to fight it out in a cage match with the winner getting processor cycles. Fortunately, that is not the case.

Unnecessary Processing
Most of the time the limited screen real estate means you don’t need background processes running for applications that don’t currently show any UI. Essentially, the processing associated with an activity ends, but the activity remains in memory until that memory is either needed or the activity is back in focus (obviously this is a bit of a simplification). When an activity goes into the background like this, it typically does any saving necessary. That allows the memory to be recovered aggressively, if needed, without creating delay at the time of recovery.

Some iPhone apps actually have similar behavior, but they store their state to the phone’s storage rather than the memory. This allows you to reopen an app, starting from the same point you ended it. Clearly, both Apple and iPhone developers see this ability to quickly switch tasks as valuable, despite that it isn’t “built in” to iPhone OS.

Necessary Processing
The other key situation is something called a service, and this is where the differences between Android and iPhone OS are most noticeable. A service is a process that does not directly have UI or an activity associated with it. A process for handling the reception of instant messages is a good example. You don’t want to sit on a screen all day to wait for new messages. You want to be able to check your email, browse the web, or play a game. The service can run in the background and unobtrusively notify you of new messages.

Apple’s Situation
Apple sees the need for some apps to have background processes; the music player is a good example. Apple just hasn’t fully opened the door to letting the third-party developers run background processes. Instead, they allow for push notifications.

But push notifications are not the complete answer. They have an extremely limited 256-byte maximum payload. They are not secure. They require extra infrastructure. They overwrite each other. They are designed for text only. The application cannot manipulate the push notification data if it is not running. And, worst of all, push notifications are extremely intrusive! Implemented properly, push notifications could be the correct solution for some situations, but they currently present a bad user experience and have limited value to developers.

Additional Uses
Besides music players, instant messengers, and SSH connections, location-based services like Google Latitude are virtually useless without background processes. Another example of a background service is common in feed readers such as NewsRob. While you don’t have the app open in the foreground, it is still able to periodically fetch new feed items. That means you can later open that app without an internet connection and still read your favorite feeds. With iPhone, you have to actively open each app and tell it to cache the data for offline reading, wait, and then repeat for each app you might want to use (such as during a plane ride).

Even if you disagree
Finally, even if you believe nothing of what I have written and still believe that background processes waste a huge amount of processor cycles and drain your battery, then you should ask yourself how the Nexus One has a battery life comparable to the iPhone’s when it has a faster processor that is pushing more than twice as many pixels, it has more RAM, it runs third-party background applications… not to mention the battery is user-replaceable ($25 for an Android battery; roughly four times that for Apple to replace an iPhone battery). It must be from HTC stealing Apple’s innovation again *sigh*.

Overview
Since most people aren’t likely to read this entire post, here’s a quick summary of my expectations as far as hardware.

Faster Processor
The iPhone should have an improved processor. It may be the same A4 that is in the iPad, though it would probably be underclocked to 800MHz. It’s very unlikely that the iPhone would have a processor running at 1GHz because that means it would feel like it is outperforming the iPad because of the resolution differences.

Better Screen
The first thing nearly everyone notices about many new devices is the screen, and Apple really should improve the resolution of the iPhone. 320×480 is good, but it is no longer great. Unfortunately, more pixels causes problems. For starters, it means more processing has to go on for the display, which decreases battery life and can decrease performance (especially in OpenGL-based games). Also, Apple hasn’t had a native way of supporting multiple resolutions (and can’t just use the iPad version of apps, due to the physical size differences), so the phone would also have to upscale apps, which can look bad (unless they take a nice multiple of the current pixel format) and would use more processing power. So, an increased pixel density ultimately means lower performance and lower battery life. Therefore, I see it as unlikely.

More RAM
Apple would be absolutely foolish to not increase the amount of RAM in the next iteration of the iPhone, so it’s really a question of how much of an increase. My hope is for it to have 512MB, matching many other leading phones, and significantly improving performance. Plus, 512MB means that they can support multitasking in one form or another, even if it only amounts to widgets. Somehow, I think that 384MB is pretty likely. It will give a big boost to performance and be plenty for the iPhone if multitasking continues to be unsupported for 3rd party developers. Plus, it means bigger profit margins for Apple.

Buttons
Before the iPad was announced, I really expected Apple to add a few buttons. These can be dedicated parts of the touch screen, so a hardware change isn’t necessary. Having a menu button means that a menu doesn’t have to waste screen space on every app you use. However, having less screen space on an iPhone means people are more likely to see the need for an iPad, so there isn’t much incentive for Apple. A dedicated search button would be very effective because it means that Apple can have your homescreen be the middle “page,” with other pages both left and right instead of just right. This would increase the efficiency of selecting an app that isn’t on your home screen by 50%. Of course, I doubt a search button will be included either.

Customizable Home Screen
I think this one is pretty much a guarantee; it’s just a matter of extent. The new iPhone will surely support desktop backgrounds and probably allow you to place icons without having them forced toward the top left. Moving and interactive desktop backgrounds that can be created by 3rd parties seems very unlikely.

Multitasking
I definitely wouldn’t hold my breath for true multitasking. It requires better specs all around and changes the user flow. If the iPad doesn’t have multitasking, the iPhone won’t either. Widget support would be nice though….

Conclusion
I see the next version of the iPhone as being a very logical and calculated step in the same direction Apple is already going because that is working well for them and the iPad did not significantly deviate from the current iPhone versions. Incremental hardware increases are likely, but the software changes aren’t as obvious. What are your thoughts?

Here’s the disclaimer: I did my best to fairly show the differences between the screens of a Nexus One and an iPhone. Both phones were set to maximum brightness and were indirectly lit in an attempt to avoid glare. The Nexus One has a much greater tendency to reflect light than the iPhone. The camera (Canon 7D) was set to output to JPG because I didn’t want to subconsciously favor one display over the other when processing from RAW. The full-sized images are around 7MB each, so I created a resized version (1024×683 from 5184×3456) and, in some cases, a detailed version. The detailed version is a crop from the original image with no resizing. I just took two 512×683 crops and put them together. I didn’t label them because the Nexus One is always on the left and the iPhone is always on the right. Images embedded in this post are 400 pixels wide and link to the larger versions.

Home Screen

The iPhone’s home screen looks rather bland compared to the Nexus One. The icons are fairly similar, though you can see that the Nexus One icons are smaller and varying shapes (some iPhone 3rd party icons are different shapes, but transparency is not properly handled by the iPhone OS, so these only look transparent with a black background).

The Web – New York Times

For most people, the web browser will be the most used feature of a smartphone. These photos illustrate the difference that a higher resolution makes. Though the displays are close to the same physical size, small fonts are unreadable on the iPhone. I recommend viewing the full sized version of the detailed photo.

The Web – Image

Both phones are browsing a photo on Flickr, but you can see that the iPhone can’t display the full image at its native size (note that the Nexus One is actually zoomed in a bit on the image because the image is only 500px wide). The difference in the shadows is probably the most noticeable part of this comparison. The Nexus One appears to display oranges a bit brighter than it should. The iPhone loses detail in darker parts of the photo.

Maps – Satellite View

Though both displays a very usable, the Nexus One looks particularly crisp compared to the iPhone here.

Maps – Traffic View

I had a particularly challenging time getting these views to be zoomed identically across both displays, so don’t put too much emphasis on these. I did notice that the iPhone didn’t report construction on its maps application, but the overall data was basically the same. Again, the Nexus One appears much sharper.

PDF

Though you’re unlikely to read significant amounts on either phone, this PDF comparison shows the advantages of a higher pixel density. This also makes me question the recently-unveiled iPad as a serious reading device (its long side is only 1024 pixels, 224 more than the Nexus One, despite being much larger).

Apps – TV.com

As you can see, the TV.com app has a different interface on iPhone OS vs. Android. The Android version is able to show a lot more data at one time, though part of that is due to not needing a static menu on screen. During video playback, the actual video doesn’t take up the full width on the Nexus One. Here, you can see the greater range of colors on the Nexus One, particularly in the detailed photo. I also noticed that the iPhone’s black was a bit blue and not as dark as the Nexus One’s black. The Nexus One picked up a bit of glare but was still very usable.

Final Thoughts
One thing that really stood out during this test was how much more the Nexus One screen shows, and I don’t just mean in pixel count. Since Android has support for more than one button, applications do not have to waste screen space by displaying a menu. In most cases, that means displaying an extra row worth of information.

The Nexus One definitely has a more significant problem with glare, but it also has much darker blacks. It is a little over saturated around orange colors, though not significantly so. The iPhone screen does a good job of diffusing light, but the blacks never look fully black. The colors seem well balanced with less range, but the lower resolution really hurts the iPhone when it is next to the Nexus One.

At the end of last week, the iPhone application I have been working on was released. It’s the free CBS News application for the iPhone (iTunes link), and it’s the best type of application from a developer standpoint: an application to be proud of. I developed the code that processes the APIs we ingest, and I also created the web views that display the data. Fortunately, that means I didn’t have to create the Objective-C that ties it all together (not that there’s anything wrong with Objective-C).

The great thing about this application is that it just works. Data is cached, so you see results quickly while updated news is loaded in the background. Tweets in the Twitter section that contain links to CBS News articles, blogs, or videos can be tapped on to directly view that content in application. Videos from top CBS News shows such as 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News with Katie Couric can be played directly in the app. Even the image galleries are searchable.

The reason that I say this is an application worthy of pride is because of all the “magic” that happens behind the scenes to make this application work. Most people who aren’t developers will use the Twitter section and tap one of the CBS News tweets and then tap on a “(view)” link to read the story. The flow is simple enough, it makes sense, and why shouldn’t you be able to view that story in the application? And that’s exactly right. There’s no point in including a Twitter section that just ends up always linking to the full CBS News site or that only includes CBS News tweets. That wouldn’t be much different from an RSS feed. Similarly, having all the in-story links open a new webview that just loads the next CBS News article from their site would be illogical and virtually unusable from the end-user perspective (and, really, that’s the perspective that matters).

Of course, the developer perspective is a lot different. An inexperienced developer might just assume we’re using some special Twitter API that includes metadata with article IDs or something that would make this really easy. A more experienced developer will know things are rarely that easy and will imagine the code involved with following links from TinyURL, bit.ly, and other URL shorteners, possibly to an RSS feed which then points to the real article. And maybe that developer would even consider that links to videos point to Flash videos, which aren’t usable on the iPhone. Anyway, there is even more involved than that, but all I’ll say is that this “magic” is complicated code that makes the end-user enjoy his/her experience and makes the developer proud.

I checked at an ATT store in person because I thought I could make a deal. I owe them less than half of my contract, so maybe I could get the iPhone for half the difference ($300), but they wouldn’t do that. Interestingly enough, the contract breakage fee is $175 (not sure if you can do this but it would actually be cheaper to break the contract and sign as a new customer than to re-sign as an existing customer!). They don’t want to give me a deal for $300 and have me go from a $45 monthly payment to a $75+ monthly payment. Instead, they want to wait until the last moment to offer me a deal, hoping that I’m really impatient. Of course, at that time other carriers might be looking a lot more appetizing. More Android devices are coming out, and the Pre will probably be pretty cheap with its sibling, the Pixi, coming out. Plus, data plans are cheaper with other carriers such as T-Mobile.

What ever happened to rewarding customer loyalty?