Tech I Trust // The 2012 Writing Project

First off, a statement of my bias. I am a happy iPhone owner. I have been since the first generation iPhone came out in 2007 and through each of the five generations that have been sold ever since the late Steve Jobs introduced the device by asking the crowd at the iPhone’s first unveiling “Are you getting it?”

I did.

Because before the iPhone, like many people, I had a variety of cell phones, quite a few of them made by a Finnish company called Nokia. Nokia was still the largest maker of cell phones in the world for 2011, but it was caught a bit flat-footed by the sea change in the demand for so-called “Smartphones” which the iPhone and then Android-powered phones brought about in the past five years.

In much the same fashion, Microsoft–whose Windows software powers the vast majority of personal computers in the world–has struggled to make a dent in the mobile phone space. That industry’s quest for devices that do so many things that they were dubbed “smartphones” was first dominated by Blackberry and more recently by the combo of ever growing features in iPhone and Android models. You wouldn’t be in the minority if you said you had no idea what a Windows Phone even looked like, let alone who might make one.

Thus you would be forgiven if you didn’t know that Windows Phone is currently in Version 7.5. And that Nokia now makes a phone that uses it.

Questionable marketing decision aside, on this Easter Sunday AT&T began selling the Nokia 900, it’s first Windows Phone featuring both the current version of Windows Phone software and the ability to operate on the wireless carrier’s next generation 4G “LTE” network. I’ll spare you the long explanation of why “LTE”, short for Long Term Evolution, is thought by many to be the first true 4G technology that next generation cell phones will be able to take advantage of for very fast data connections. This gets a little confusing, because AT&T markets their current network that features a faster variation of its 3G technology as being 4G, though its not actually the 4G with LTE.

Confused yet? Add to your puzzlement that AT&T only has 31 cities where it has 4G-LTE up and running, with more promised to come. This is a big marketing point with rival Verizon, who has its own variation of 4G-LTE technology, which has rolled out in a large number of areas. That’s a topic for another article.

But back to this new Nokia 900 phone. I’ve just spent a few days trying it out and I’ll cut to the chase in terms of the headline here: It’s a very impressive phone.

I’m not about to tell you that I’m quite ready to trade in my iPhone for the Nokia as my favorite smartphone, but if I couldn’t have an iPhone and was faced with the other choices currently on the market or particularly if I was thinking of replacing a Blackberry for my work phone, I would likely buy the Nokia 900 as my next phone. And I would absolutely do so over any Android phone that I’ve seen so far.

This is in part due to the fact that despite all of the manufacturers who make Android-powered phones, along the various twists on the Android software that each of them seem to have, I’ve never quite shaken the feeling that Android isn’t as cohesive an experience as iPhone’s iOS software. I’ve used a number of them and while they are not bad phones (for the most part), I just haven’t been that impressed with any of them enough to think that I would want to give up my iPhone for one.

On that score, this new phone comes much closer to that elusive target of being equal to or maybe better than the iPhone.

The Nokia 900 takes Windows Phone and its very graphic “Metro” interface that sports large “tiles” that you touch to get to all of the major functions of the phone, to being ready for primetime–or at least to being ready for business everyday. And that may be the best way to sum up the strength of this mobile device. It’s a sleek and well designed unit, that features a bigger screen than the iPhone–though not as big as some of the current Android phones that really are too big to fit in a pants pocket or even next to the side of your head. The 900 is very sleek in its design and is in no way a second class model to any current Android or iPhone that you’ve seen.

The screen on the Nokia 900 sports a little less resolution (read dots or “pixels” to the naked eye) than the iPhone or many Android phones–but most people won’t notice the difference. The Nokia is bright and sharp enough to make the Windows Phone interface look really good. Not everyone may like the very stylized type-driven menus of the Metro interface, but I found it to be a strong design that works really well in daily use. This is one of those things that really falls into the “your mileage may vary” category, it can be a subjective choice at best, but now on this hardware from Nokia, a Windows Phone deserves serious consideration for people considering their first smartphone or their just their latest model.

Credit AT&T for being aggressive about pricing the Nokia 900 at just under a hundred bucks, when the iPhone 4S or a top-of-the-line Android phone like the Samsung Galaxy II Skyrocket go for at least twice that amount. Note that the current iPhone doesn’t run on AT&T’s LTE network either. There have been some early reviews that state the Nokia 900’s battery isn’t the best for a full day spent on an LTE network, which can suck up more juice than older networks–but since Cincinnati isn’t a place where AT&T 4G LTE is available, I wasn’t able to test that one way or the other.

Believe me when I say that I wasn’t prepared to like this phone all that much. I’m not the biggest fan of Windows on a PC, and based on earlier versions of Windows Mobile devices (what it was called before the name Windows Phone appeared), I expected a so-so experience on just another slab of glass and plastic. I’ve ended up surprised at what this Nokia 900 actually delivers.

So credit Nokia for building a phone that looks and feels good as device you hold and use all the time, and credit the Windows Phone software as being finally able to compete equally in the state of the art market for powerful devices that you can carry in your pocket and use to do so many things that we now take for granted from our cell phones.

In other words, you might want to get it.

Amazon has begun selling its newest device under the Kindle name that it adopted a few years back for its line of “e-book” reading devices. Because of its size and clout, Amazon really took the whole idea of electronic books from a niche concept to a mass market success.

But as the Kindle began really taking off, Apple came along and changed the game with the wildly successful iPad.

Its not the first time that Apple has come along and disrupted a market, it did much the same thing with electronic music players when it launched the iPod back in 2001. The iPad comes with its own iBooks software to allow for the purchase and reading of ebooks on Apple’s tablet device. Sound familiar?

To its credit, Amazon played the game and released an app that allows iPad users to buy and access ebooks from Amazon directly, rather than having to use iBooks. But Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is not the kind of guy to see a growing market and not want more of it for his online shopping behemoth. And he doesn’t miss the idea that the biggest reason we all shop at Amazon is because we can usually get things cheaper there.

So how do you compete with the huge success of the iPad?

You build a cheaper mousetrap.

Amazon did just that with its new “Kindle Fire”. As in when you “kindle”, you start a fire.

(Ah the joys of clever branding to give us the sense that we are doing something monumental like discovering fire. In 2011? Right.)

Right up front, I will tell you that I’m not smart enough to know if this new device will set the world on fire. But after using one for a few days, I believe that Mr. Bezos and company will sell a lot of them.

The Fire is smaller in every meaningful way than the iPad. The screen is 7 inches, vs. nearly 10 inches for the iPad. The memory–how much the device can store–is smaller in the Fire (half of the smallest iPad model). And most importantly for many folks, the price is much smaller: $200 vs. $450, the latter figure is likely to be cheapest iPad price you see this holiday shopping season for the least featured model.

But it would be short-sighted to dismiss the Fire on the size questions alone.

The physicality of the thing is more useful than I expected. Kind of the same way that an edition of Reader’s Digest is a bit more portable and somehow friendlier than the size of a typical consumer magazine like People or Time. The Fire is easy to hold with one hand, and while it won’t fit in your pocket, it will fit easily into a small bag, backpack, or those sherpa-like handbags that every woman carries and seems to be able to produce any randomly-needed item from at anytime.

From a technology standpoint, the color screen is good and usuable for its intended use. Video looks good on it, and books are readable–though the limitation that doing either of those things outside on a bright, sunny day won’t really work. But that’s true of the iPad and every other color screen device out there, including most cell phones. One other note about the quality of the screens–aside from its bigger size, the iPad is a markedly better quality screen than the Fire to my eyes, but that may be one of the explanations as to the difference in pricing.

What Amazon has done right is make the Fire a one stop shop for entertainment.

You can buy (or rent) Movies, TV Shows, Music, Books, Magazines and just about any kind of content that Amazon sells. If you are a member of Amazon’s Prime service, which will set you back 79 bucks a year, you’ll get access to some content for free–which makes the Prime membership that gives you free 2-day shipping on anything you buy from Amazon and some other benefits–an even better deal for regular Amazon customers.

The Fire does need a wireless internet connection (Wi-Fi) to download your stuff, and because the Kindle doesn’t have a huge memory inside of it, Amazon wants you to use their “cloud service” to store the stuff you aren’t reading or watching this very moment (but might want at some point in the future.) This is similar to Apple’s “iCloud” take on how to store your personal media library.

Like everything electronic, the Fire is battery powered and comes with a charger. In my early testing, the battery life is solid, and Amazon claims you can use Fire for up to 8 hours without needing to recharge it. As always with any claim from a manufacturer for such things, your mileage may certainly vary.

Yet underneath its easy to use, and well-designed interface, the Kindle Fire is actually a tablet powered by Google’s popular Android software. This means that aside from being a hand-held entertainment center that can go with you anywhere, the Fire can also fetch your Email, browse the Web, log onto Facebook, play some games and most other things that tablet devices are known for. There is an “app store” where you can buy software that will let your Fire do different things, but its Amazon’s own app store–so not every Android app is available, as it is from Google’s app store.

As all tablets do, the Fire fits in the space between lugging a laptop computer with you anywhere you go, and being on a small smartphone screen that is very portable–but not always big enough to be comfortable to read a book or watch a movie on for a longer period of time.

Would I tell you to buy a Kindle Fire? The answer is probably yes.

If the idea of having a device that lets you take a lot of entertainment with you wherever you go (or at least wherever you can get to a WiFi “Hot Spot” to download new stuff) then you are going to want to have a tablet device. To be clear, I still think the iPad is still the best device in this fast growing category of marvelous devices. The price tag on an iPad is significantly more than the Fire, and there is some degree of “you get what you pay for” in many aspects of comparing the two.

But if you can’t swing the extra cash for the iPad, the Fire is a really good smaller alternative, both in size and scope. You can probably think of a lot of people who would to get one under the Christmas tree this year, including the person who is reading this right now.

For more information, I’ve included a link to Amazon’s webpage for the Kindle in the comments below.

The Windows Phone Surprise

Should You Play With Fire?

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