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iPhones, gPhones, RIMs, Treos and Open Mokos, oh my!

Man. Stuff is happening in the smart phone world! Seriously, if you don’t believe that the iPhone is having a huge effect on the world. Well. I don’t know where you’ve been.

iPhone 3G (the hardware) and iPhone 2.0 (the software, confusing! I know!) are raging successes. Apple’s sold 1 million phones and had 10 million app downloads. In 3 days. It took the first iPhone 74 days to do that. Search the net for iPocalypse and iFail, no shortage of reporting on what a failure this launch was due to a big snag early on Friday. I hit the snag myself, just updating my 1st gen iPhone to 2.0. Fail? Are these people watching the same product launch I am? As of yesterday there were still up to 5 hour lines at the Apple stores! Every company in the world wishes their failures were so good. Even the folks caught up in the problems on friday were in good spirits. You know Apple’s doing all right when even the Pope is down with the Jesus phone.

Interestingly enough during this period a whole bunch of other handset news has come out. Huh! Who knew there was other stuff to talk about!

Google

First were the gPhone rumors, bunked then debunked. Not surprised, I just don’t think it makes any sense for Google to make a handset. Then they have to somehow get the carriers to carry it and then sell it and support it and they’d have to be making an unsaid statement that this, their phone, was better than the others. And they’re not so good at having the confidence in their own products. Of course it would be interesting model to build a phone and get the carriers to carry it by saying, this phone and its OS is free. And then reap the advertising rewards, somehow.

In the meantime they’re still plugging away at Android. Except they’re raising the ire of their developers by ignoring them while they’re trying to get an actual phone out. Makes you think, huh, maybe actually having a product first is a good idea, then get the developers. Nah, that would mean doing a lot of work all by one’s lonesome, Google wants an Alliance!

RIM

So the Canadians are still going strong. RIM’s new Bold has been fondled and reviewed, mostly positively. Much more interestingly, though, are the pics of RIM’s BlackBerry Thunder. The differentiator between RIM and iPhone has always been people saying they couldn’t live without a hard keyboard and RIM makes the best. Um. Ok, so RIM’s big hope is now a keyboardless phone? Haptic shmaptic.

The problem with the iPhone’s keys isn’t that you don’t know you’re pressing it. I don’t need the phone to buzz. You still simply can’t touch type on a virtual keypad, it only counts if your fingers can feel the move from key to key. Anyhow, so this new Thunder has a glass screen, multi-touch and uses webkit for the browser. Huh. Sounds familiar. With Apple’s increasing friendliness with the Enterprise and the burgeoning App Store and great low price on its phones (with contract), why would people want this new BlackBerry? Ok, it’s got copy and paste, but beyond that?

Palm

So, you probably didn’t notice, but Palm launched a new WinMob phone, Treo 800w on Sprint. Palm asks, is this the best Treo ever? I guess the real question is, does anyone care? Everything that doesn’t involve their new Linux based OS towards the end of the year (my guess is not till next year) is pretty much irrelevant. Sure it’s nice that they’ve finally got WiFi on one of their phones and it seems they’ve got A2DP which the iPhone somehow doesn’t. Sure the reviews are positive. But really, that 320×320 screen used to be impresssive, but now? Not so much. And nobody’s buying phones that are Apple’s, RIM’s or under $100. I’m just saying. Hurry up Palm, just get with the next gen OS.

OpenMoko

And dark horse OpenMoko just went live with their fully open source hardware and software platform. Help yourself to freedom with the Neo FreeRunner. This Linux based phone is probably not for the average consumer right now, filled with nerdly goodness and with too many decisions to make (which software stack do you want? GNOME? Qtopia? FreeSmartphone.org’s?).

Nevertheless, a full open hardware/software platform, a nice big 480×640 touch screen shouldn’t be ruled out of the game. Open Source is never that good at building UI’s and smart phones are, more or less, all about the UI (as 1st gen iPhones proved). But there’s always surprises in life or some individual or company could take interest and build something amazing on top of it. Who knows? Bears watching, certainly an interesting competitor to the other linux OS’s (Android and Palm’s next one, oh and Access Linux).

I think that’s most of the phone news that’s occurred in the past couple weeks. Lotta interesting stuff out there. Hoping it does nothing but speed up. What’s your phone of choice? What’re you looking forward to?