Smartphones and new kinds of PCs were top of mind at the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas.
One of the most talked-about products of the show, Google’s new Nexus One smartphone, wasn’t even announced at CES but in Mountain View two days before the show opened. Several Googlers showed up at a press party the night before CES and started to show off the phone. I picked up a loaner that day and am just starting to get a feel for it.
My first impressions are positive, starting with the “out-of-box experience.” The phone’s packaging looks like it could have been designed by Apple, and the experience of getting it to work is even better than with an iPhone.
Admittedly, I had a bit of a head start because I’ve used other phones with the Android operating system, so getting to know this particular Android phone is a little like a Windows user adapting to a new PC. Actually, it’s a lot easier because, as you’d expect from Google, all your data is stored “in the cloud” on Google servers.
I expected my contacts and Gmail to be automatically synced to the phone over the air but was surprised when my son’s picture automatically showed up as my wallpaper. I never put his picture on this phone but it was my wallpaper when I was reviewing the Motorola Droid, another Android smartphone, a few weeks ago. Apparently Android syncs everything to the cloud and back.
While I was delighted to see my son’s image, I thought it
was a bit creepy to suddenly have a photo show up unexpectedly. I can imagine some scenarios where that could be a bad thing.
What I like about this and other Android phones is the tight integration with Google Voice. I review a lot of phones — each with its own unique phone number — but I have my Google voice number for life. It’s easy to configure Google voice to ring any phone (it can ring up to five at a time) but with an Android phone you can configure all outgoing calls to go through Google Voice.
That means people see my Google number on their caller ID, not the number that happens to be associated with the phone. For most people this isn’t an issue, but it’s great for the few people like me who keep changing phones.
As powerful as today’s smartphones are, there’s still a role for the personal computer. But it, too, is starting to morph. It was at CES several years ago that then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates introduced the tablet PC. Gates repeated his pitch for the tablet the following year. But while several PC makers build tablet PCs, the category never made it to mainstream.
Sure, there are niche applications, but I don’t see a lot of people walking around using a stylus to hand-write notes on the screen of their tablet. But now that Apple is rumored to be about to introduce its own tablet, there is a renewed interest in them.
During his keynote speech this year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed a prototype of a Hewlett-Packard “Slate” PC. The one he was holding was running Kindle PC software but, as he pointed out, it can also be used to view video and listen to music — all things that the Apple tablet is reportedly going to be good at. I’m not saying there is a connection between the rumored Apple product and what HP is developing, but there is certainly an incentive for Ballmer to preemptively crow about it.
Like just about every journalist at CES, I needed Internet access during the show but, unfortunately, there were times when the press room’s Wi-Fi network was overwhelmed. That bothered me the first day I was in town but, lucky for me, on the eve of CES, Sprint announced its new Overdrive3G/4G Mobile Hotspot. It’s a box about 3 inches square and a half-inch thick that creates its own Wi-Fi hot spot that can serve up to five WiFi-enabled devices with a range of about 150 feet.
Sprint loaned me one to use at the show, and it works just fine. Sprint has already rolled out its high-speed 4G network in Las Vegas and 26 other cities, but the Bay Area won’t be online until later this year. However, the device will work on Sprint’s older 3G network in the Bay Area and most other parts of the country.
Sprint says the device will deliver between three and six megabits per second, which is faster than most DSL lines and more than enough for streaming video. They plan to pitch this for home use — possibly as an alternative to fixed DSL or cable broadband.
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