OS 3.0 released

This is not the blog to read about OS 3.0. There are clearly, better places on the web like Engadget. But do read the link to see the "potential" that can be unleashed with this device. In that we at hndhld also concur that the potentilal of this device - or potential of wireless handheld devices has just about been tapped.

Fast company has an article that points to the direction that many of us have been. The iPhone is almost there as a gaming platform competing with Sony and Nintendo and perhaps a certain Xbox as well? Hmm...

Image Search

The new google image search is superb! It detects (atleast thats how it appeared to me) that you are connecting from a mobile device and tailors the results appropriately!

With the new Image Search results, you can easily scan up to 20 images on a single results page and get the details for images that interest you. From the details page, you can view a larger thumbnail, visit the web page containing the image, or view the image by itself in full size. The new results page also supports "search-by-style" filters, which allow you to restrict your search results to people's faces, clip art, line drawings, or photo content. [Google Mobile blog]

Where will you read books?

The great book reader war is on. Yes. Its Kindle versus google. Kindle wants you to buy a new e-book reader, while Google is giving it on your mobile phone. The big difference is that Kindle lets you buy almost anything on Amazon, while Google will let you buy stuff on its "book search". Right now it is too early to call and clearly, they can both co-exist, but since this is a mobile phone blog, here goes.

15 million books in your pocket. Imagine that!

How many do you want to read? Go ahead, download that book and read it on your phone..

Google Latitude

Google Latitude is such a smart idea.

Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device. It's also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you. So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather. [Google Blog]

The future of the mobile phone is not the phone itself, but the network that it enables. So, imagine the potential uses of Latitude - if a group of friends is visiting a new city, you will know where each one of you are. Its so easy. (You will relate to this only if you have gotten lost in a new city while going together in a group). I also think it will be wonderfully useful for senior citizens...

Premium app store?

Wired reports that rumour has it that the iPhone will soon have a premium app store.

The Apple App store is a big hit among users. Independent app makers can make hundreds of thousands of dollars hawking games such as iShooter or Twitter apps like Tweetie.

But along with the increased downloads, developers have seen the average price for games pushed down steadily. Three weeks ago, Silicon Valley Insider analyzed prices of the top 100 paid apps in the iPhone app store. Their spreadsheet showed apps prices dropped an average of 19 percent over the previous two months.

A premium section or a tiered App Store could help change that. The premium section could offer a channel for the more expensive products and protect the $20 price point. [Wired]

Dont know how far it is true, but this is a good direction. And if Apple does it, can the others be far behind?

Touch and gaming

Over the past few weeks playing with the Gphone, I have no doubt that touch is perhaps going to evolve as a great gaming media in the days to come. A recent article at Wired pretty much talks about the same.

There have been rumours that the iPod Touch is being primed as a gaming platform. Once you play on a touch sensitive platform, it is easy to see why.

Sure the Wii is great (and though I dont have one, I am fan of it) and Playstations and Xboxes are good - this is an awesome gaming platform - plus, you dont need to buy a newfangled machine to get going.

And, as for kids games, well, dont get me going on that. Almost everybody who owns an iPhone or a Gphone has their kids completely hooked to it! More thoughts on this coming up...

Power Manager

The power manager app is a nifty app that lets your conserve battery power. It shows battery life in percent, battery status and automatically lets you conserve power if you are running low. Nice...

Tub Thumper

What are you waiting for? Beat those drums - lightly, with your touch ;)

Ding!

Now, doesnt that Ring a bell? Choose from desk bell, gong and cow bell. Cute, we thought :)

Steels a steal!!

We took a look at Chomp SMS that changes the SMS interface of the G1. If there is an SMS program, can a browser be far behind?

Actually there are more than a few browsers available on the G1. Other than the default browser (with which I was neither impressed nor unhappy), we tried out the Steel. The Steel practically makes the slide-out keyboard redundant. On touching the address bar, the virtual keyboard pops up and you can enter the address of any site.

Once you click a link, rather, touch a link, the superbly intuitive thumb level controls take over. (See pic.) You can chose to either copy, share, open, enlarge or magnify depending on where you have "touched".

The copy, paste option particularly impressed me, because otherwise the copy, paste function takes a little while getting used to. So, right now, Steel is what we are using. Got to try out the Opera too sometime...

Software is king!

The most popular

First up, we decided to try some of the more popular apps. Those which exploit the full features of the phone or which bring out the whole point of the Android phone. Two of them qualified right away. Chomp SMS and Labyrinth.

If you ever end up buying the phone, Chomp SMS will probably be the first on your list. It converts whatever format the G1 had for SMS into a iPhone similar format. Cute, fast and works very well. It even recreates a virtual keyboard for you that vibrates for every alphabet you touch.In one word - unmissable! This is one app that has got a lot of publicity and we were keen to see how it worked and we were very happy with it. (Of course, it does not let you forward and therein lies a secret.)

Perhaps it was done this way. The original SMS format for the phone is, well, just about ok. Chomp SMS gives it a dash of panache. Perhaps it was done to prove a point. That software is king in this phone. Do whatever you like. (or as that popular Honda ditty used to go - Hate Something, Change Something.)

Whoever has heard of accelerometer has probably heard of Labyrinth as well. Now, having realized that a statement like that is an overstatement, let me retract that. The best way to tryout the accelerometer functionality is to try out Labyrinth. It involves moving a steel coloured ball through a maze of holes into a specific hole using your hands to tilt and shift the phone and hence the ball. When the ball falls into any hole, you get a tactile response (neatly done) that is almost spooky the first few times.

And while it is not easy, it is real fun. Steady, slow hands do the trick. And the first 8 levels are free, post which you can download the entire 800 levels. Freemium model? Absolutely.

More later...

On starting

Remember that you need an active data connection on your SIM card to boot up this phone - not sure how it will be when it is launched in India - but for now this is required. Second, you need a google account to get started. One google account per phone is how it is supposed to work, but you can check mails of any google account (for instance, if a friend wants to check etc.).

Without this basic step, you will be stuck. So, get a google account and an active data connection - which you can later deactivate once you have the phone up and running...

Apps and more

It took us a while to figure out (dumb us) after surfing the Market website trying to figure out how to download apps to the phone, that the App Market existed as an icon on the phone itself! And having found that after a bit of stupidity, we kept searching for games only to find it listed separately.

The app market is sort of a vicious circle. There are two ways of listing - one is by popularity (downloads) and the other by date. The "popularity" ensures that you see apps which are most downloaded and hence they get downloaded more often. Sure thats a crib for newer developers but the only way you can overcome it is if you decided to try out the newer apps sorted by "date".