Treo Versus T-Mobile G1—Software

Walking out of church last night, I was stunned at the sight of Venus in the night sky. Nights when you can really see the stars are rare in a big city like Chicago with its many lights. Being the nerd that I am, I whipped out my T-Mobile G1 and tried to see what I could see. Sky Map is powerful application available for the G1 on the Android Market. It uses the G1's GPS and accelerometer to create a tiny planetarium in your phone. The view changes as you move the phone around providing what is at times a mind-blowing effect. I also used Sky Map a bit during my trip to Texas to watch the night skies in a more rural setting and it was a pretty cool experience.

But Sky Map is slow...so slow that Android sometimes thinks that it has stopped responding an offers to force the application to close. I usually just tell Android to wait and Sky Map responds just fine once it has updated all the information that it needs to calculate to show its interactive star map. That's just the price of working with a complicated application right?

Actually I have a similar application installed on my Treo 680, Astro Info. It's a much simpler application which shows a globe with the positions of the stars plotted on it. It takes a lot of work to set up, you have to install the application along with several other databases which contain the stellar data that it needs. Then you have to figure out your geographic coordinates and enter them into the application. While Astro Info does allow you to define several different locations, if you find yourself out on a country road at night and the mood to do some stargazing strikes you better have a map or a compass or you won't be able to get much information out of Astro Info. Sky Map on the other hand, is still good to go.

Still Astro Info is a simple and powerful application once it is properly set up. You still have to know if you are facing north, south, east, or west but if you know that, it's pretty easy to use Astro Info for stargazing. In some ways it's easier than Sky Map because you don't have to wait for it get a GPS fix (actually Sky Map does have a manual mode but I rarely use it). I can usually find any star Astro Info by using the moon as a reference point.

These two applications are a good example of the differences between the Android and Palm OSes. One is extremely modern and can leverage just about every technology you can name to form powerful platform. The other is old and tired but simple and flexible enough that it has allowed many powerful applications to be created despite its limitations. One allows for extremely simple, easy to use applications but all this simplicity is build upon a complex foundation. The other is inherently simple and easy to use but its age has made it increasingly difficult to create easy to use applications since developers must work hard to get around its flaws.

Another good example of the difference between Android and PalmOS can be found in their contact applications. This one area where Palm after all these years is still ahead of most of its competitors. Creating a new contact in Android opens a busy window full of boxes, buttons, and icons which wastes tons of space. The G1's 480x320 screen allows you to enter six pieces of information in your new contact: a picture, full name, cell phone number, e-mail address, ringtone, and a checkbox to tell Android whether or not to send this contact's calls directly to voicemail. Scroll down and you also see a More info button which allows you to enter a wide variety of phone numbers, e-mail addresses, IM addresses, and other information like an organization for the contact or a note.

The Treo 680 by contrast produces a much starker, more elegant, and efficient window. Despite its smaller 320x320 screen, the 680 actually shows more information in the new contact window than the G1 does. It shows eight pieces of information: separate first and last names, a picture, ringtone, company (note that Android buries this option in the More info menu as Organization), title, and work and home phone numbers. Scroll down and you see fields for a cell phone number, e-mail, another phone number, IM address, website, a physical address with separate fields for number, city, state, zip code, and country. Scroll down a little more and you see fields for a birthday, anniversary, and four custom fields which you can define yourself. And Palm also makes good use of its limited screen real estate by putting a category menu (in a tremendous contrast with an Android phone which as far as I know cannot assign a contact to a different group even though Google Contacts does support organizing your contacts into various groups), and icons for creating a note (an option which Android buries at the end of its More info menu), and an icon for adding still more phone numbers, e-mail and IM addresses, physical addresses, and even more custom fields. The Treo's Contacts and other PIM applications really do typify the "Zen of the Palm" the simplicity which once made Palm's PDAs and smartphones so popular.

I could go on comparing the software available for the Android to software available for the Palm. But I think that comparing these two applications make my point. I have two problems with the software on my T-Mobile G1, one which I am confident will be solved with time and another which I fear will never be solved. Android lacks a full suite of applications before it can be a legitimate mobile computing platform, the big one is an office suite. But Dataviz has announced plans to port its excellent Documents to Go application to Android so that problem will be solved soon. Similarly, Android e-book and PDF applications are already in their infancy and will only improve over time. The other problem is less serious but is also less likely to be remedied. Android does not seem to have a design philosophy beyond "make it colorful and pretty." This emphasis on style over substance makes Android applications clunkier and dumber than they should be.

Treo Versus T-Mobile G1—On The Inside

One of the greatest strengths of Palm's Treo smartphones has been their large, removable batteries. The large batteries are also one of the reasons why Treos tend to be so thick. The T-Mobile G1 also has a fairly large removable battery but the device itself is so capable that battery life takes a major hit. Moreover, while the G1's battery is removable, it's not nearly as easy to remove as the Treo's battery.

The Treo's battery compartment is very well thought out. As you can see from the comparison photo, the Treo has a nice little button near the bottom of the battery cover which allows you to easily pop it off and get at the battery. While it's not exactly a unique cell phone feature, it works so well that beginning with the 680, Palm decided to abandon the use of a reset button and now sets its devices to automatically reset when you remove the battery.

The G1's battery compartment is somewhat less elegantly designed. The G1 has a release tab which allows you to remove the back panel and get at the battery. In order to do this you must, "Slide open the display to reveal the keyboard." and "Pull the release tab out while at the same time peel the back cover off." (These are direct quotes from the T-Mobile Getting Started booklet.) In practice however once the release tab has been pulled out, the back cover is still firmly attached to the phone and must be removed using an uncomfortable amount of effort. While it's not exactly hard to remove the back panel, the amount of force you need to use tends to slightly deform the back panel causing it to creak slightly—a disappointing thing to see in a hot new phone.

Another problem with the difficult to remove back panel is that the SIM card resides underneath the battery. And the slot where the SIM card resides is just long enough to make removal difficult—not hugely difficult mind you but just enough to annoy. The Treo 680 by contrast, has a handy little tray for the SIM card which makes it easy to remove. The end result is that it is harder to switch back and forth between phones with the G1 than it is with the Treo.

One area where the G1 outshines the Treo is in terms of removable storage. The T-Mobile G1 has a tiny (fingernail sized) microSD card (a 1GB card ships with the G1) which fits into a tiny side door which is built into the device's "chin" which is revealed when you slide out the display to reveal the keyboard. It has all the same problems as the SIM card slot—tiny and hard to remove (I know it's sexist but I sometimes think that the G1 was built specifically for women with small hands and long fingernails). But the nice thing about the G1's microSD card is that once it's in, there is no reason to take it out because the G1 alerts you and offers to mount the card as a removable drive when you attach it to a computer. As a result, it is easy to get things on and off of the card. About the only problem with G1's storage scheme is that there appears to be no way to use the card to store applications which can run on the phone. As a result, you have to rely on the phone's own built-in storage which is somewhat limited. With the growing diversity of third-party Android applications for the G1, expect to see a lot of "low space" warnings.

Palm has always had problems handling removable memory on its devices and the Treo 680 is no exception. The Treo has a large battery door on its side which accommodates SD and SDHC cards. While it's never actually snapped off, the delicate plastic certainly feels like it could snap off easily. And this is a bad thing because there is no way to mount the Treo's SD card as a removable drive on your computer without resorting to expensive third-party software. This has been a problem with Palm devices for years going all the way back to m500 which debuted way back in 2001. It's simply mind-boggling that Palm never got around to fixing this problem in seven years. (Perhaps they figured that it wasn't important and best left to third-party developers but this ignores the fact that this feature has been available on Palm's Windows Mobile smartphones for years while devices based Palm's own, more flexible OS languish.) On the bright side, it is fairly easy to run applications directly from the Treo's SD card although some applications do need to reside on the phone if they handle alarms or are older and can't see the SD card.

Overall, the story of the Treo's internal hardware is one of thoughtful touches marred by one stunning omission. The G1 on the other hand is quite consistent in all areas, rough around the edges but consistently powerful. The G1 is bristling with radios: the obligatory cellular radio which also transmits 3G data, wifi, Bluetooth, and a GPS unit. It downloads email automatically and switches between 3G and wifi on the fly. While you can save on battery life by shutting down its various radios, the G1 uses them so well that there is a tendency to leave them on. If the back panel were easy to remove, carrying a spare battery with the G1 would be a no-brainer. While its battery life is generally poor in comparison with the Treo its hard to see how it could possibly be better given current battery technology, the device simply does too many things. I was going to write that the G1 struggles to get through a day of light usage the fact is that there is no light usage with G1 unless you start turning everything off and just use it as a phone (if this was all I wanted to do, I'd get a dumb phone), it will always be active in the background. The Treo on the other hand gets much better battery life but does less and does a lot of what it does do less well than the G1 does.

Treo Versus T-Mobile G1—Keyboards, Is Bigger Better?

One of the reasons why I've been blogging about the T-Mobile G1 is because of the transition that I'm making from my Treo 680. It's a big leap and it has forced me to think about the way I do things when I'm on the move. One of the biggest and most direct comparisons is between the keyboards of the two devices.

When making a side by side comparison of the keyboards of the Treo and of the G1, the most striking differences are the size of the keyboards themselves and the brightness of the keys when they are lit up. The Treo's key are much brighter than the G1's and this makes a huge difference when operating in low light conditions. When lit up, the keys G1's keyboard take on a dull grayish tint which greatly reduces the contrast between the keyboard characters and the silvery background of the keyboard this not only hurts the readability of the G1's keyboard in low light conditions; even under normal indoor lighting conditions the G1's keyboard can become a little harder to read when it is lit up.

The Treo's keyboard by contrast has always been its strength and is very well thought out. It has two different sets of keys, a white on black set of hybrid number/letter keys which also double as a tiny telephone keypad occupies the center left position of the phone. The rest of the keys have black characters on a pearly white backgound. When the Treo keyboard's bright backlight is turned on, the result is a very bright high contrast keyboard which is easily visible in almost any lighting condition.

The size of the G1's keyboard is deceptive. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that the lack of size of the Treo's keyboard is deceptive. While the G1's keyboard is much wider and taller than the Treo keyboard, its keys surprisingly enough are roughly the same size as the Treo's keys. This is mainly because the Treo's keys are packed tightly together and curve subtly upward allowing them to occupy about the same amount of space as the G1's more squarish keys. The Treo's keys are also domed and quite bulbous which makes them even easier to type with. While the size of the G1 keyboard is great, its flat keys tend to cause fatigue when you do a lot of typing on it.

Finally, the biggest change between the Treo and the G1 is the end of one-handed typing. It's easy to whip out a Treo and type away on it with only one hand which makes it perfect for use as a phone which after all is the device's primary function. The width of the G1's keyboard makes this impossible. While the G1 does have an excellent onscreen keypad with nice big keys which can be used to dial a phone number with only one hand, the Treo allows you to use its entire keyboard with one hand. More importantly for people who live in northern lattitudes, the G1's onscreen keypad forces people who wear gloves in the winter to take them off in order to use it. The Treo's physical keyboard (like the G1's) by contrast can still be used even while wearing a light set of wool gloves. Now this might not seem like a big deal at first blush but when the mercury dips below freezing, it becomes a huge advantage.

In the end, I'm forced to conclude that while the G1 does have a good keyboard, the Treo's keyboard beats it almost every way.