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Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Pollett. I'm
Speaker 1: an editor here at How Stuff Works. Sitting next to
Speaker 1: me as usual as senior reyner Jonathan Stricklands. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and it's funny. Uh, you've been in Communicado a few
Speaker 1: days ago when you went to the ce S, probably
Speaker 1: because there were so many new smartphones out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. There were quite a few, and I couldn't help.
Speaker 1: But first of all, gaze at them longingly. And second
Speaker 1: of all, uh, you know what, there's a funny thing
Speaker 1: about getting a bunch of journalists and techy's together in
Speaker 1: one place at one time, all of whom have smartphones. Uh,
Speaker 1: it tends to come up the signals. There were times
Speaker 1: where Las Vegas, you have to understand, is has got
Speaker 1: phenomenal connectivity. Al Right, So in the in the convention center,
Speaker 1: there was WiFi, there was three G access, there was
Speaker 1: edge access. I mean, all this stuff was available, but
Speaker 1: you also had tons and tons of people and devices
Speaker 1: using this bandwidth. So it got kind of got kind
Speaker 1: of difficult to rely upon this this technology, but there
Speaker 1: were some really cool ones there. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I think I maybe one of the last people in
Speaker 1: America to have a dumb phone. Um. Actually, my, my,
Speaker 1: my dumb phone is actually kind of smart because it's
Speaker 1: gotten WiFi connectivity, so I can go into an area
Speaker 1: where there isn't necessarily a signal and if there's a hotspot,
Speaker 1: it'll connect to it. So all phones are getting a
Speaker 1: little smarter, Yeah, they are. I guess we can kind
Speaker 1: of sort of define what a smartphone is versus a
Speaker 1: regular phone. It's a little it's a little harder to
Speaker 1: define now because, like you say, a lot of the
Speaker 1: regular cell phones are now getting the capability is that
Speaker 1: traditionally we would call a smartphone capability. But let's go
Speaker 1: back a little bit. We'll talk about some of the
Speaker 1: early smartphones to like you know, the Palm Trios and
Speaker 1: the Blackberries and that kind of thing to kind of
Speaker 1: kind of explain. So a smartphone, it, uh, it can
Speaker 1: do more than a regular cell phone. It it usually
Speaker 1: there's um, at the very least, some scheduling software on
Speaker 1: the phone, some sort of calendar program Uh, there's a
Speaker 1: usually a really complex contacts management system. There's usually some
Speaker 1: form of email on their UM. It has its own
Speaker 1: operating system, just like a computer would. Uh. A cell
Speaker 1: phones due to but those are usually pretty rudimentary. The
Speaker 1: the smartphone, cell phone, it's comparable to, you know, a
Speaker 1: severely underpowered computer. But a computer, it's got to operate
Speaker 1: system just as a computer would. Okay, So if you had,
Speaker 1: for example, a Motorola rasor very popular phone UM and
Speaker 1: you compared it to a BlackBerry or Palm Trio, you
Speaker 1: would see that Motorola has its own proprietary Razor operating
Speaker 1: system that does some of those things that you were
Speaker 1: talking about. But if you were using the BlackBerry, the
Speaker 1: BlackBerry has a more advanced operating system, Palm has the
Speaker 1: you know, the Palm os um or if you were
Speaker 1: using a Windows mobile device, you'd be using a Windows
Speaker 1: operating system. An iPhone has an iPhone has its own
Speaker 1: operating system, and of course there's the Android operating system,
Speaker 1: and there there are several operators, Symbian operating system. There's
Speaker 1: several operating systems on the market. They all essentially do
Speaker 1: the same thing. They all they all act as a
Speaker 1: foundation for applications, and these different smartphones have different applications.
Speaker 1: Some of them have applications that are analogous to one another,
Speaker 1: others have applications that are peculiar only to you know,
Speaker 1: whichever a kind of smartphone you have. But the point
Speaker 1: is that the smartphone allows you to do way more
Speaker 1: stuff than just making and receiving phone calls and texts.
Speaker 1: Sore browsing the web is another good example. A lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of cellular phones now you can do
Speaker 1: some web browsing, but usually you're web browsing on very
Speaker 1: specific sites that have a mobile device version of that site, right,
Speaker 1: And a lot of the smartphones have a large enough
Speaker 1: screen and enough processing power that you can go and
Speaker 1: look at the regular site as opposed to the mobile
Speaker 1: version of the site. Because the mobile version tends to
Speaker 1: be stripped down, a lot of the features are gone.
Speaker 1: But then, you know, a lot of the smartphones you
Speaker 1: can actually look at the site as it is intended
Speaker 1: to be viewed. So although it is sort of nice
Speaker 1: to be able to, uh to see um, something of
Speaker 1: the entirety of the page versus you know, a very
Speaker 1: very tiny version of the official web page. Now a
Speaker 1: lot of the A lot of the smartphones also have
Speaker 1: a pretty simple interface for zooming in and zooming out
Speaker 1: of web pages so that you can kind of get
Speaker 1: around that. You know, you don't have to you know,
Speaker 1: you don't have to put on your reading glasses and
Speaker 1: grab a magnifying glass to read the CNN page because
Speaker 1: suddenly everything shrunk down to a teeny tiny size. Usually
Speaker 1: you can expand and contract the window so that you
Speaker 1: can zoom in on anything that looks interesting and uh
Speaker 1: if you zoom out and makes navigating the web page
Speaker 1: a lot faster. You know, you don't have to keep
Speaker 1: scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to try and finally get
Speaker 1: to where you're going. Um. But yeah, for the longest time,
Speaker 1: these smartphones, they were really the in the realm of business.
Speaker 1: I mean it was it was enterprise, the enterprise exactly
Speaker 1: it was. It was meant for people who had to
Speaker 1: stay connected to their office, to their job while they
Speaker 1: did lots and lots of traveling, like executives who had
Speaker 1: to go to a lot of meetings, whether it was
Speaker 1: on site or off site. The phone allowed them to
Speaker 1: have a direct connection to things like their email and
Speaker 1: even their office phone. You can know, a lot of
Speaker 1: them would allow you to bridge phone calls from office
Speaker 1: to your your smartphone, UM, so that they could be
Speaker 1: extremely responsive um and if something came up, they could
Speaker 1: act on it to meet a LYE as opposed to
Speaker 1: having to wait to either talk to an assistant or
Speaker 1: go back to their office or whatever. Well, it makes
Speaker 1: sense for people who are constantly on the road to
Speaker 1: be able to have that kind of functionality. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know you're in the airport, you're waiting for your luggage.
Speaker 1: If you're one of the people that you know check
Speaker 1: your luggage, I guess um fewer a number of these
Speaker 1: days now there's a fee for that. But UM, you
Speaker 1: know you're waiting on something at the airport, you can
Speaker 1: go ahead and catch up on your email. You can uh,
Speaker 1: you know, make a conference call. You've got your calendar
Speaker 1: right there and it's SYNCD up with the exchange server
Speaker 1: UM at your company, and you've got all that information.
Speaker 1: Even the newer GPS phones you can get directions onto
Speaker 1: you know where your hotel is and move on to that.
Speaker 1: It makes sense that you'd want one device that can
Speaker 1: handle all those different applications than carrying a p D
Speaker 1: A and a phone, you know, maybe even a paper
Speaker 1: planner with you. You know, it seems like, uh, it
Speaker 1: would be a valuable tool at least for the business person.
Speaker 1: And there's a double edged sword there, which means which
Speaker 1: is that people, once they realize you have one of these,
Speaker 1: know that they can get in a hold of you
Speaker 1: at any time, anywhere. And so that's the other side
Speaker 1: of the coin, is that owning a smartphone on the
Speaker 1: enterprise side at any rate, means you sacrifice a lot
Speaker 1: of your whatever freedom you may have had during the day,
Speaker 1: because people know they can get ahold of you and
Speaker 1: get in touch with you. Um, and they don't have
Speaker 1: to go through an assistant, and they don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about leaving voicemail necessarily because you'll get the the
Speaker 1: the notification as soon as it happens, assuming your phone
Speaker 1: is on. And um that yeah, I know some people
Speaker 1: who regret that part of the equation. But then, of course,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure almost everyone out there has heard, these
Speaker 1: things are can be very very addictive. Uh. There's another
Speaker 1: name for a BlackBerry that's pretty popular, crackberry. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's because people once they start using it, they really
Speaker 1: do become accustomed to it, and then they start to
Speaker 1: depend on it, and uh yeah, before too long, it's
Speaker 1: intervention time. Yeah. The thing is, that's sort of funny
Speaker 1: about it. You you would think that that would become,
Speaker 1: you know, something that you might want to get away from.
Speaker 1: But it seems that more consumers are turning to smartphones.
Speaker 1: I think. I think there are two things in particular
Speaker 1: that have started to to appear in smartphones that have
Speaker 1: attracted more and more consumers. Two things I think that
Speaker 1: have attracted them the most are music players smartphones that
Speaker 1: incorporate some sort of MP three player, and cameras. A
Speaker 1: lot of the smartphones now have cameras. I think there's
Speaker 1: some that have up to you know, five or six megapixels,
Speaker 1: which is pretty impressive for a for a a phone,
Speaker 1: you know, for a digital camera, you know, you can
Speaker 1: get the ten or twelve or whatever before a phone
Speaker 1: to have five or six, considering that that's not the
Speaker 1: main purpose of the phone, that's pretty impressive. And a
Speaker 1: lot of them have multimedia capabilities where you can take
Speaker 1: a video with your phone and then send it to
Speaker 1: someone else, or you know, pictures, or you can do
Speaker 1: geo tagging. Because if it has a GPS system. It
Speaker 1: can actually detect where you are automatically tagged the photos
Speaker 1: you're making. And then a lot of them have applications
Speaker 1: where you can do things like interact with services like Facebook,
Speaker 1: so you just with a touch of a button send
Speaker 1: your pictures to your Facebook account. They're already tagged. It
Speaker 1: can tell people what it is and where it is.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's just making this whole connectivity thing
Speaker 1: so much easier. So that I think is what pulled
Speaker 1: people in. Plus, I mean, the prices started going down
Speaker 1: a lot of them. A lot of the manufacturers struck
Speaker 1: deals with carriers, so for in return for a like
Speaker 1: a two year contract with some carrier, you might be
Speaker 1: able to get one of these smartphones for just a
Speaker 1: couple hundred bucks, you know, on their own, they would
Speaker 1: be close to eight hundred or nine hundred dollars. Sure. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, I was, I was doing
Speaker 1: some research on this, and industry analyst Gardner said that
Speaker 1: the smartphone segment of the market, uh was in the
Speaker 1: second quarter of two thousand and eight, and um, it
Speaker 1: was even up eleven point five percent in the third
Speaker 1: quarter of two thousand and eight. Even though we were
Speaker 1: seeing signs of the economic downturn. It was weak year
Speaker 1: over year. UM. I think you know, it's possible that
Speaker 1: that may even be partly because of the saturation of
Speaker 1: the market now with shartphones. UM North America is definitely
Speaker 1: the fastest growing segment. UM that there are thirty six
Speaker 1: point five million worldwide, which is pretty impressive. UM. I
Speaker 1: would say that there might even be another application, uh
Speaker 1: that is more popular and even newer smartphones that that
Speaker 1: might be helping their popularity. In addition to the music
Speaker 1: and the cameras, games games are big. Like if you
Speaker 1: look at the the iPhone, the iTunes store and look
Speaker 1: at the applications, games are huge, absolutely, even though there
Speaker 1: are some fantastic productivity and and other applications in their
Speaker 1: games are a huge segment. And the ability to UM
Speaker 1: take your you know, photo, video game, phone, calendar, email
Speaker 1: machine with you everywhere you go, it's pretty compelling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the iPhone, we can we can probably credit
Speaker 1: the iPhone with almost single handedly propelling the smartphone market
Speaker 1: into the consumer market, I mean all on its own
Speaker 1: pretty much. I mean there there were other people who
Speaker 1: were buying smartphones for their own use rather than for
Speaker 1: for the office. Like you know, you had people who
Speaker 1: were by a BlackBerry just to have a BlackBerry, not
Speaker 1: so that they would you know, suddenly be able to
Speaker 1: be joined at the hip to whatever company they worked for. Um,
Speaker 1: but I think the iPhone really that's the name of Apple.
Speaker 1: Their reputation for designing really beautiful products that work that
Speaker 1: really went a long way. And plus, like you say,
Speaker 1: the applications, uhh, that that really put iPhone over the top.
Speaker 1: They had this huge potential for applications that could do anything.
Speaker 1: I mean everything from business applications to games, to social
Speaker 1: media applications. All of that suddenly became available and people said, hey,
Speaker 1: I can have a device that's as powerful as a
Speaker 1: as a computer essentially that lets me do all these
Speaker 1: things that I do on the computer. Anyway, why wouldn't
Speaker 1: I get one of these instead of getting you know,
Speaker 1: another laptop. Well, that's true. Let's make phone calls on it.
Speaker 1: There you go, um and it. The iPhone also inspired
Speaker 1: a slew of competitors for people like Samsung and l
Speaker 1: G and um, you know, Nokia has come out with
Speaker 1: a couple that are are pretty interesting. Um, BlackBerry too,
Speaker 1: I mean, you like the BlackBerry Curve, the BlackBerry Bold,
Speaker 1: the BlackBerry Flip, You're all flip. But all of those
Speaker 1: are in some way a kind of calling out to
Speaker 1: the consumer market rather than in the traditional business market.
Speaker 1: And and by that very nature, they are competing with
Speaker 1: the iPhone. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, most of
Speaker 1: them used the Sembia or you know, of course, the
Speaker 1: Blackbays used the rim operating system that comes with it.
Speaker 1: But they do have a new competitor, and you've had
Speaker 1: some experience with that competitor. Would you like to to
Speaker 1: mention what my my new toy is. For a long time,
Speaker 1: it was rumored that search giant Google you may have
Speaker 1: heard of them, was going to come out with their
Speaker 1: own phone, and that turned out not to be true. However,
Speaker 1: they did come out with their own phone operating system,
Speaker 1: and they are partnering with lots and lots of phone manufacturers,
Speaker 1: and the first to hit the market was HTC, the
Speaker 1: Chinese hardware manufacturer. UM. They've made phones for lots of
Speaker 1: different people, and some of them actually they have a
Speaker 1: sizeable share of the market, except that you might not
Speaker 1: know it because they actually appear as the T mobile
Speaker 1: something or they split something. UM. They don't appear as
Speaker 1: the HTC name, but HTC actually is putting their name
Speaker 1: on the g One. Yes, the HTC g One, also
Speaker 1: sometimes known as the HTC Dream, runs on the Android
Speaker 1: operating system. It was one of my Christmas wishless items
Speaker 1: and I got. It's awesome. So yeah, I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about my impressions of the phone.
Speaker 1: If you can't tell, I enjoy it. Um, it's very
Speaker 1: It's very like the the iPhone in some respects. It's
Speaker 1: got the big touch screen, right, it has a touch screens,
Speaker 1: not multi touch. It is only single touch, so unlike
Speaker 1: the iPhone, not multi touch. That's you know, that's definitely
Speaker 1: iPhones got it over that. iPhone also had a huge
Speaker 1: jump start in the applications market, and that's still the case.
Speaker 1: iPhone has more applications available than Google's. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, the Google application system, it's open. Anyone can
Speaker 1: create a an application for Android. They can upload it, um,
Speaker 1: you know, they can. It can be fee shar in
Speaker 1: Google side, or you can find it somewhere else. You
Speaker 1: don't have to go through Google to get an application
Speaker 1: for your phone. Now with iPhone, it's very much a
Speaker 1: controlled system. Your application for the iPhone has to be
Speaker 1: approved by Apple and it has to appear in their
Speaker 1: store in order for you to get your hands on it,
Speaker 1: unless you have a jailbroken iPhone. UM. But with Google
Speaker 1: it's different. You can you can create an application and
Speaker 1: host it somewhere, just let people know where it is
Speaker 1: and they can go and grab it. That doesn't have
Speaker 1: to go through Google. UM. Google does have a kill switch,
Speaker 1: which means that they have the option to stop and
Speaker 1: essentially destroy an application if it turns out to be malicious.
Speaker 1: So if someone were to make an UM some kind
Speaker 1: of computer virus or uh phishing software whatever, Google could
Speaker 1: step in and intervene before it got out of control.
Speaker 1: So UM. But yeah, touchscreen device, lots of need applications.
Speaker 1: It's got GPS, three G capability, WiFi uh one downside,
Speaker 1: battery life not so good. No, but I heard a
Speaker 1: rumor that they were going to come out with a newer,
Speaker 1: bigger battery that might help with that. I've heard that,
Speaker 1: I've actually seen pictures of it. UM. It does look
Speaker 1: like that it would increase the thickness of the phone
Speaker 1: by quite a bit, which would probably turn off some users. Personally,
Speaker 1: I would I would trade the the sleekness for the
Speaker 1: battery life any day. I mean, I would much prefer
Speaker 1: to have my phone last longer. And it was incredibly useful.
Speaker 1: On my most recent trip to UM to C E. S.
Speaker 1: I actually had my entire schedule down on my phone
Speaker 1: and I could refer to it whenever I needed to
Speaker 1: and see, oh, I need to get to the South
Speaker 1: Hall because I'm meeting with so and so. In fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: I'm at the North Hall. How do I sprout wings
Speaker 1: and fly? But at least it told me what was
Speaker 1: going on. I didn't have to carry around a planner.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to carry. In fact, on Friday, I
Speaker 1: was there for Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the C E.
Speaker 1: S Show. On Friday, I didn't experiment. I did not
Speaker 1: take my computer with me. All I took was a
Speaker 1: backpack to carry all the press kits I was going
Speaker 1: to get and my phone. And you know what, it
Speaker 1: worked like a charm. I did not need my notebook
Speaker 1: computer at all throughout the entire day. I could do
Speaker 1: everything I needed to do on the phone. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sold. I am a I'm a lifetime Android fan.
Speaker 1: I really hope that it uh, that it takes a
Speaker 1: good um, a good hold on the market and continues
Speaker 1: to develop because I love it. Wow, that's a pretty
Speaker 1: ringing endorsement. It's an unbiased opinion and uh just on
Speaker 1: the c E S shout out. At the time of
Speaker 1: our podcast, we had not yet seen one in person,
Speaker 1: but Palm announced a new phone with a new operating system, touchscreen,
Speaker 1: and a slideout keyboard, called the Palm Pre Yeah. This thing,
Speaker 1: I've heard nothing but good things, nothing but good things
Speaker 1: about it. It It has the ability to do things like
Speaker 1: coordinate multiple calendar nerves so that you get a single
Speaker 1: calendar view. So let's say you want to you can
Speaker 1: you can sink your your Outlook, your Google calendar, and
Speaker 1: your Facebook calendar onto a single view and see everything
Speaker 1: that you need to do that day, because of course,
Speaker 1: you may not want to put like if people have
Speaker 1: access to your Outlook calendar, you may not want to
Speaker 1: put little Susie's birthday, um, or maybe you do. I
Speaker 1: don't know. But if you don't want to do it,
Speaker 1: and you have it on your Facebook calendar but not
Speaker 1: your Outlook calendar, this device would let you see all
Speaker 1: of that in a single view. You don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about people bugging you about that kind of thing. Um.
Speaker 1: And it also has the there's a that has one
Speaker 1: of the accessories you were talking about, Uh when we
Speaker 1: had our CS discussion about charging wirelessly. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: just put it down on a surface and the charges
Speaker 1: the battery without having to hook it up to something.
Speaker 1: It's got a magnet and the magnets align the phone
Speaker 1: properly with the chargers so that it charges exactly the
Speaker 1: way it's supposed to. I used to use it at
Speaker 1: an older Palm, so it would be kind of fun.
Speaker 1: People were saying that this was Palm's last end at CS,
Speaker 1: and I think they think they pulled it out. Well,
Speaker 1: I think they. I think that was a successful and
Speaker 1: I think there you know, if the Palm, if they
Speaker 1: can deliver it on time to the market, then I think, Uh,
Speaker 1: I think they're around for a while longer. Well, if
Speaker 1: they reach out to business and consumers, they'll have a
Speaker 1: good shot at it. Wow. Well this was a good one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: good conversation. And we do have an article on how
Speaker 1: smartphones work. We also have how Google Android works, we
Speaker 1: have how iPhones work. All of this information that can
Speaker 1: be found right now at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk to you again really soon for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
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