I find myself in a quandary. Apple says it’s AT&T’s fault and AT&T is pointing the finger at Apple. Either way, after Apple swapping out my iPhone a few months ago didn’t resolve my connectivity issues  (while I’ve continued to pay full monthly service fees) AT&T has been trying to prove the problem is not theirs but the iPhone I have. Frankly I don’t care whose fault it is. I want a phone that has quality audio while in a call and makes/receives calls without dropping signal and hence the call while I’m sitting at my home office desk talking to someone who is on a land line.

While my wireless experience on AT&T over the last three years (since switching from SPRINT after 10 years to get my iPhone) has been mediocre at best it really took a nose dive after my move to our current neighborhood. When we moved in a year ago the coverage map showed we were in an excellent coverage area. Since my persistent calls and reports of dropped calls or crappy signal the coverage map has been updated to only GOOD coverage all around my neighborhood. At least that changed.

I will give AT&T credit. There are some folks who have bent over backward trying to help, but I’m beginning to believe their employer has placed them in  kobayashi maru (yes! got a Star Trek reference in this one) situation. I’ve tried to emphasize to the customer service folks and the technical support folks I’ve talked with that, though I AM a very frustrated customer, I would do my best to not take out my frustration with AT&T on them personally. It’s always good for me to remind myself of that when I begin a call to complain to one of them.

The latest attempt to “solve” the problem was to provide me with a loaner Samsung Captivate to test drive and see if it experienced the same issues my iPhone 3gs experiences. This has given me a great opportunity to compare the two phones and below are my impressions and thoughts on both. (This is not meant to be a comprehensive and “scientific” review of the Captivate or exhaustive comparison of the iPhone 3gs vs the Captivate. Just my impressions having poked around on it for a couple of weeks.)

Form Factor
I have to give this one to the Samsung Captivate. I absolutely love the design of this case. Well, except the charger jack and how it’s concealed. It seems a little clunky and is awkward to get plugged in most times. I love that the Samsung is thinner than my iPhone yet a little wider. The extra width, plus the curved edges on the underside of the body make me feel much more confident I won’t drop it when picking up the phone or removing it from my pocket.

Weight
This one simply goes to the Samsung Captivate (Galaxy S). It’s not only thin, it seems to be half the weight of the iPhone.

Screen
Hate to throw this one to Samsung also, but it is one gorgeous screen. (Of course the battery demands is high to power that gorgeous screen, but it is gorgeous). In fact, this screen blows away the iPhone 4g phones I’ve seen and handled as well.

Battery
I’d call this a draw as far as the phone keeping a charge. In both cases I wish a charge would last longer on both phones. I don’t care how long the phone will sit on stand by when I don’t use the phone features so stop telling me that for comparison. I’d like to know how long it typically takes to charge the phone. How about how long each battery will last on 3G network when running Facebook, checking email, and surfing the web regularly. What about the same on wifi the whole time? What about on the Edge or whatever the carrier’s less than 3G network is called? Give us some stats worth knowing and comparing. Oh, and how long does the battery last… how many charges will it take? Can I expect the battery to last for one year? Two? Three?

A second battery related comparison, and this one goes to the Captivate/Galaxy S, is the ability to swap out the battery. I don’t want to have to send my phone off to Apple to replace the battery. With the Samsung I can access the case without breaking my warranty and replace the battery if needed.

Camera
I’m going to give this one to the Samsung as well. A 5mp camera for stills and video plus a number of controls (wow… takes a while to figure out all the settings and how to manipulate them) make the Captivate great for someone who wants a point and shoot still/video camera but doesn’t want to carry around two devices. The video is 1920x1080HD which is amazing for a cell phone camera. Not necessarily the cleanest HD I’ve seen but for a camera phone… very amazing. I usually have a hard time moving back and forth between the camera and gallery when reviewing shots and taking more but that’s software related and I’ll get to that in a moment.

Contacts Application
This is one for Android/Samsung. Even though the overall application navigation is less friendly when you are looking at a list of people in your contacts, touching a person’s picture, or where a picture would be if you had one, reveals a window with icons that lets you select to interact with that person based on the contact info you have stored for them. Press the envelope with the @ symbol and you are composing an email, press the phone icon and a call is underway, press the little contact icon and you are viewing their contact record. A great feature.

There is an item called Activities in the main group of choice of contact options (Contacts, Groups, History, Activities) that has nothing in and and I have no idea what to do with it. Annoying.

Incoming Phone Call
While the screen swipe necessary to wake the phone up or accept an incoming call takes a vigorous swipe to register, the real beauty of the Samsung incoming call application is the option to ignore with a set of text messages. Nice.

Usability
This is where the love really starts to shift back to my iPhone. And here’s a very simple example. Samsung Captivate has six buttons for overall interaction with the device. iPhone has two. One of the key rules I learned early on for usability was to not require users to learn new navigation systems across an application. I’m sure the Samsung (and Android) folks think they are providing more consistency by locking in the four buttons (menu, home, back, and search) on the device, but I find it more disconcerting than helpful as not all the buttons  always do the same thing when pressed. Specifically the menu button can have different actions (or none at all) depending on the application you are in. For some reason I find it bothersome that I can’t know what to expect when I click a static button.

For iPhone users copy/paste was a huge requested feature noticeably absent from the OS for quite some time. They said they wanted to make sure they got it right when they did release it and I have to say… they did! This is one of the most annoying (lack of) features for the Samsung. I have a very difficult time guessing where to touch the screen in a sentence to get the cursor before or after the precise letter I need to being my edits with. I miss my press and hold to see the spotlight to know exactly where I am and selecting chunks of text… hopeless on the Samsung.

Overall an annoying aspect of the Samsung (I acknowledge some of it can be the Android OS and apps running on the phone), which is supposed to utilize the fastest processor running Android, and a usability issue to me, is the lack of responsiveness of applications. While there are many hardware, network, and software factors engaged in each interaction the basic result is often lagging. On occasion I’ll click something and begin the long process of waiting on the screen to do something… anything. While it’s not frequent enough to say it’s easy to reproduce, it is frequent enough to make me long for my iPhone OS/device which occasionally leaves me waiting on the device to catch up.

Visual Voicemail
This is truly an annoyance. After 3 years with visual voicemail on my iPhone I have been totally frustrated with once again having to call my voicemail and cycle through each message and pressing a number (never can remember the numbers and have to listen to the instructions after each message) to save or delete the message. iPhone got this one totally right.

GPS
I would really like to be able to compare the capabilities of both phone’s using all the GPS features, but the Captivate’s GPS just doesn’t work reliably. I was excited to try the Google Maps with turn by turn directions but couldn’t. Whether I was in a rural area or metro area the Samsung phone simply lost GPS signal so often I gave up. Come to find out it’s a known issue with the Samsung. The phone comes with a nifty widget on one of the homescreens that will tell you if there’s gas, Starbucks, or other amenity nearby… problem is the widget doesn’t work and almost always says “Loading wait… Retry clicking on arrows”.

I could probably keep listing stuff on this, but then it would go on and on and on more than it already does. So I’m going to close it out for now and post. If I have any further monumental impressions I’ll update the post. If you are curious, despite some wins for the Samsung Captivate in the comparison, what I really want at this point is an iPhone that works on some network that gets reasonable coverage. Maybe the January rumors of the iPhone coming to Verizon will be a solution worth considering?

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I read my first ebook cover to cover on my Dell Axim. So the screen size is not a huge issue for me at this point. It was actually my reading on the Dell Axim that provided the convenience that actually got me back into reading books regularly. So, anyways I downloaded the iPhone Kindle software and thus far I have to say I am very impressed. I read another blog post by Don Reisinger reviewing several other popular ebook readers available for the iPhone and found I disagree. So here’s my two cents worth as far as what I like about Amazon’s offering:

1. Perhaps the biggest perk for me is that books I buy on Amazon now for the Kindle I can read on my iPhone and on that glorious day when a real Kindle is mine I have them for it as well.
2. Simplicity. Others rave over the Stanza or eReader, both of which are free like the Kindle software for the iPhone. I tried them as soon as the App store opened and found them uninteresting and a little too complicated. The simplicity of the iPhone’s overall interface was carried well into Amazon’s Kindle software.
3. Ease of getting books to the iPhone for Kindle. I was really impressed when I chose a sample chapter from a book and indicated I wanted it sent to my iPhone. Shazaam! It was in the list of available books. One of my complaints with the other readers was the complicated process to get books into the reader. While I couldn’t find any that let me buy right through the actual app, I found the buy it on Amazon and it gets sent to your phone to be simple enough.
4. Reading screen itself. For some reason, the Kindle software for iPhone just looks better on my screen in it’s stock install. I guess I could tweak the others and find something similar, but why should I have to. I think someone actually spent some time reading on the Kindle for iPhone and that’s why it has a better stock interface for reading. The Stanza and eReader seem to be a bit behind here. eReader needs to adjust their spacing between lines. I understand they are trying to fit more on the screen, but one of the big wins for the iPhone Kindle is the leading between lines. The Stanza has a way to increase it and tweak the font, size, etc. but I think the Kindle format is fine as it is loaded.
5. Margins. This seems simple, but it makes a big difference. The Kindle has some margins around the edge of the screen. I’m guessing Stanza and eReader want to show a maximized approach to screen utilization. I remember a comparision of the difference getting from one place to the other would make speeding verses doing the speed limit in the city. It was pretty sobering to realize the risk of speeding would only buy me a minute or two. Same for the screen readers in my mind. The margins around the edge maybe only get me one more line on the screen, but having the margins seems to massively increase the readability overall in my opinion.
6. While Don Reisinger applauded the scroll bar for pages I find it irritating and unnecessary. It’s a nice feature but one I doubt I would use. Keeping with my old rule of tech/multimedia “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

My only fear at this point relates back to an eBook I purchased on Amazon and after several years of not looking at it I went back to view it and was unable to. First problem was they were using Adobe’s stupid edoc reader (not just a standard PDF) and the computer I had the document on was gone… crashed… finito. So the book was no longer accessible without re-downloading it to satisfy Adobe’s specs. When I tried to find it I could not and contacted Amazon. They informed me that the publisher (and a major one) had terminated the contract and they were no longer able to provide access to the book. So basically it was tough luck dude! I was pissed, but there was nothing anyone could do.

I’m hoping the Kindle and Kindle for iPhone have better service for this side of the issue, but for now I’m in love with my iPhone version of the Kindle and will (finally) have a screen reader I feel I can use. Thanks Amazon!

I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done several years ago and attended a GtD training where I worked. It was amazing. I’m still striving to implement the things I learned there. This week, I discovered a new chapter in the GtD saga. Inbox Zero. I won’t confess here all the “oops, I do that and I know it’s really useless, but I still do it” moments I had while watching Mann the Man’s presentation. Awesome. Now I have more things to target.

It was simple to install and after some deleting of what were considered duplicate emails during my first manual sync I now have a completely synced local address book and online address book through my webmail. YAY!

Final piece to attaining the holy grail and being 100% synced up will be when I can sync my iPhone to my Google app hosted domain/email/calendar. When oh when?

Now, at my desk I can manage my calendar using Thunderbird and away I can use my iPhone to update my Google Calendar and the two stay in sync. YAY! Today’s tech post checked off… now off to be productive.