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Smartphone Decision for Young Programmer?

11 points by alnayyir ↗ HN
Switching to T-mobile soon and want to take advantage of their excellent data plan, I also have need of a "rough" GPS device although a fully functioning one is a plus. I know my way around enough that just having google maps 'should' be enough.

Anyway, my choices are any smartphone that is unlocked and GSM. My primary contenders are

Palm Treo, for the price factor since I can get one for under $200 unlocked.

Apple iPhone, for under $500, although the totalitarianism is a serious turn-off.

Any Good Windows Mobile Phone?

Nokia N95, heard it was good, but the reports of cheap construction and laggy interface are a huge turn-off for me. I hate laggy interfaces. Love the GPS though.

Who among you are very happy with their smartphones?

Ability to do wifi is important, GPS is a plus, a good ecosystem of applications is a near-must since I'd like to tether without paying the ridiculous fees for it.

Hackability/Open Platform is a plus, I'm a programmer so something I can tinker and learn on, and provide my own solutions to small problems is a big boon for me.

A decent web browser is a small plus, but Opera Mini is near ubiquitous, so it shouldn't be a huge deal.

Please offer your suggestions for phones!

46 comments

[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 99.5 ms ] thread
martythemaniak
As I've posted elsewhere, I think the Blackberry if vastly underestimated by people around these parts, which I don't really understand.

The OS is rock solid, they have very durable hardware construction, a huge number of features compared to the iPhone and a $20 API key will get you access to APIs which iPhone users only dream about (regular APIs require no key).

I don't know what you mean by hackability. The iPhone is good because with the amount of attention it has received, you can get a huge number of cracked applications, something you won't find on the BB. If you were planning on actually buying apps, this won't be a problem.

I used about 12 different BBs for a year and half, and about 2 weeks ago brought an iPhone. I am trying to give it a fair shot, but to be honest I will probably have to sell it soon - the amount of sacrifices you have to make up to use that pretty GUI are just too many.

nailer
> The OS is rock solid > I used about 12 different BBs for a year and half

I've used a Blackberry, an iPhone, Nokia N95, and Windows Mobile 2005/6 in the last 4 years.

Blackberry was by far the most stable. Mine never ever crashed, after about a year and a half of daily use.

Is there a BB with a gecko / webkit / opera browser?

smhinsey
You can download Opera for the BB (at leas the Curve, whatever model that is) but I honestly found that I preferred the built-in Browser app over it, and I am a long-time Opera user. Trying to use the mobile Opera is when you really start to feel constrained by the BB's UI.
davidw
> I don't know what you mean by hackability. The iPhone is good because with the amount of attention it has received, you can get a huge number of cracked applications, something you won't find on the BB. If you were planning on actually buying apps, this won't be a problem.

That is not what we mean by hacking around here, or it shouldn't be.

saundby
I'll be interested in what folks have to say, too. I have a Nokia 3650 I'm looking to replace. It's been a nice system for years, but it's time to move on. The main thing I've missed on the 3650 is a keyboard. Actually coding on the system is prohibitively slow except for the shortest bug fixes or constant changes. T-Mobile's data service has been good and affordable for me, so at this point I'm not looking to change providers.

If the Nokia 810 had a phone I'd get one in a heartbeat.

alnayyir
Roommate has one, it's nifty but one of the laggiest mothers I've ever used. I'd go berserk using it as a phone, personally. :\",
babul
Anything with a full touch screen is a good start.

Found the iPhone 3G was disappointing (more like a toy) compared to my Blackberry.

However, the HTC I've been using for about a year (http://www.coolsmartphone.com/article727.html) is excellent and definitely the best of the lot.

alnayyir
Intriguing. Can I find a tethering app to access my phone's internet via my laptop using Windows Mobile on this HTC? I was interested in the HTC Touch, but the reviews killed it for me. This one looks fascinating.
martythemaniak
$20 for an encryption key which allows you to digitally sign your app and get to the more interesting parts of the API - system event listeners, background processes, auto-startups, system modules etc. For the iPhone you need a $99 key to do anything, and I don't know what the situation is with WinMO.

BB's have been tetherable for years, though I don't know about unauthorized ways to do this. The browser is decent, and every model has a GPS variant.

As for the platform, its fairly open. Its much more capable than the iPhone and regular cell phones, but not as open as Android (which is obviously about as open as you can get).

alnayyir
Android effectively doesn't exist yet and is as good as vaporware to me until I see some phones on sale.

Hm. So far I'm leaning towards a jailbroken iphone, but! What particular blackberry model would you recommend?

paulgb
The blackberry bold is coming out soon, maybe you should hold off until then.

Symbian is being open-sourced, and Nokia is known for being developer friendly as far as I know.

iPhones are cool, but don't seem to be particularly developer friendly. Also, FYI, I think you need a mac to develop for them.

alnayyir
Yes you do need a mac. The only mac in my room out of the many, many computers I own is a PowerMac G4 I got with 768mb of ram (500 mhz proccy! :( ) for $30 a month or so ago.

Got a fresh install of Tiger on it, then stopped using it. I like OS X, but the lag kills me compared to my primary server/desktop machine with quad xeons and 4 gb of ram :\

Sigh. I'm not paying what apple or second-hand sellers want for a mac. Period. Unless I get a steal or Apple invents the second-coming of performance.

akd
I run Tiger inside VMWare on my Dell.
orib
I second waiting for the bold. It's quite capable, and has a screen with double the pixel density (screen has the same resolution, but is smaller to make room for the keyboard) of the IPhone. It's beautifully sharp, and I'd have to say that the tactile keyboard leaves any touchscreen in the dust when it comes to actually doing input to the device.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-op student at RIM for the summer. This means that I've gotten to play with the Bold, but it also means I'm a bit biased =P

alnayyir
I looked at the bold, and as long as I can subvert the tethering fees that T-Mobile has, I'll be okay. It seems to have all the features I want, and the processor looks beastly. This is important (TM) to me, because laggy interfaces make me want to fling devices across rooms. namely, my room.

What was your experience, in detail, you'd say, with the bold?

orib
I'm not actually using the Bold (I'm beta-testing a different device as my personal device) but I've played with it, and I'd say that it's a major improvement over the curve.

It's much faster, the screen is beautifully sharp. It's browser isn't great -- especially when compared to WebKit -- but it works decently well.

Really though, I think the best option is to find one and play with it when it comes out. Try everything you can out yourself. Still, if you were considering getting the Curve before, I strongly suggest waiting for the Bold.

tienshiao
For Windows Mobile, you might be able to get away with the old free Embedded Visual C++ (eVC++) and Embedded Visual Basic (eVB) tools. I don't know how well they will work, and you probably won't be able to take advantage of the latest features.

You could potentially do development with the C# command line tools. But that is probably extremely difficult

Otherwise you will need Visual Studio.

ensignavenger
I've got a friend with an HTC touch, and it is awesome. Definitely recommend taking a look at the HTC lineup.
nailer
Don't ever rely on HTC backup tools.
etfb
I had a Nokia N70 before I got my N95, and the N95 is definitely must faster (less "laggy") but still not perfect. The quality is fine, and I can't think of many features it doesn't have. If you want a good, solid, reliable phone, the N95 is the best thing I've ever seen from Nokia, and I place Nokia at the top of the list for mobiles.

As for something you can hack -- I don't know. I gather there are options for the Nokias, but I've never got around to trying them. I'd avoid MS and Apple on principle (the totalitarianism, as you say, is a deal breaker) and Palm is a bit overpriced and underpowered; they're really stuck in the 1990s, the poor dears. What does that leave? Not much.

alnayyir
While I'm not a partisan, and value trying to be as even-handed as possible in evaluating situations, I hand Microsoft the torch in the case of mobile. They've been far more fair, open, and straight-forward with Windows Mobile and the APIs.

Bonus points that I use Windows dev platforms on a regular basis, so it would be fairly trivial for me to deploy on a windows mobile phone.

Still bouncing around the ideas I'm seeing.

tsuraan
I have a blackberry pearl with t-mobile, and it's not bad. The data rate is slow (200k if you're lucky, usually much lower than that), but it lets you use the DUN bluetooth profile when connected with OSX, so it's an acceptable wireless modem, and a decent phone. The DUN profile only seems to work with my powerbook though; I've tried using the phone as a bluetooth modem with my nokia 770, and the blackberry won't advertise that profile in that situation. I don't understand how that works, but it's a limitation to be aware of.

I'm personally holding out for an Android device, mostly because the pearl thing in the blackberry gets crap in it and then you can't really use the UI until you manage to work the dust particles out.

Also, what is this excellent data plan you're speaking of? Is it just the $40/month unlimited internet plan on their 2G network, or is there an actual 3G data plan somewhere that I haven't been able to find?

alnayyir
non blackberry devices get unlimited data for $20, this is why I'm trying to avoid blackberry devices, or at least avoid letting them know I have one.
tienshiao
In my area, the BlackBerry plan is also $20. On HowardForums, people used the BlackBerry plans when the data plan got bumped up to $30.

Unless you're grandfathered into the ancient $5.99 T-Zones plan, I don't think you will find a cheaper option.

Also, I think a BlackBerry without the BlackBerry plan will be heavily neutered. I'm guessing email won't work because it depends on the BIS backend. BIS is used for "personal" email things like your school's Exchange server, your Gmail account, and your IMAP/POP account. BES is used for hooking up with corporate Exchange setups running BlackBerry's Enterprise backends.

christefano
It doesn't meet your criteria, but I recommend the Palm Centro without hesitation. The ecosystem of developers and applications (freeware, shareware and commercial) is enormous.

Say what you will about the operating system being old (not to mention the sad, backwards ways of Palm, the company), but my Centro is running brand new programs alongside 8 year old applications without a problem. Oh, and the Centro has real copy and paste.

The GSM version of the Centro also has the lowest SAR radiation levels of any phone I've seen (it's something like 0.74).

I share my Centro's data plan over Bluetooth with my Nokia N810 tablet all the time. Ironically, all my Palm software also runs on the N810 with the Garnet VM from Access.

alnayyir
I'll definitely look into it, I did consider a Palm in general in lieu of that Treo I mentioned. If it's price competitive and it has some of the features I'm looking for, I'll strongly consider it. Thanks for the heads up.

Personally not concerned with the radiation levels though. Power output of a cellphone is a couple orders of magnitude below anything I see causing cancer or non-trival DNA damage.

capoeirista
What constitutes trivial DNA damage?
alnayyir
the amount you receive by spending 1 hour in the sun.

next question?

alnayyir
I just looked up prices for the Centro, no can do. That puts it in shooting distance of every single windows mobile phone I'd been considering and the iPhone as well. And the Nokia N95 if you tack on $100.
christefano
The Centro currently has a $100 rebate.
rcoder
I have a BlackBerry Curve on T-Mobile, and generally think it's the best mobile email client I've ever used. There are a decent number of downloadable apps, and OTA J2ME provisioning is actually pretty awesome. In terms of "hackability", it's tough to find anything better than a full-featured, reasonably-fast Java stack, since you can do development and deployment from your choice of platforms and hosting providers.

However, the Curve firmware (at least at OS version 4.3) has two major flaws. First, it's intermittently crash-prone and slow when using 3rd-party applications. Second, it locks up after a few minutes and has to be hard-rebooted when I try to use it as a Bluetooth modem for my Mac, which is especially annoying since a full restart takes more than five minutes.

Regardless, I still think I made the right choice in selecting the Curve over an iPhone, for one simple reason: UMA. Being able to pay $20/mo. for unlimited calling over any WiFi network has already paid for itself many times over when I've been outside the US (or even in rural parts of the US) and avoided having to pay roaming fees.

christefano
Have you used the MidpSSH client for the BlackBerry? I'd be interested to hear how well it works compared to what's available for iPhone, Palm OS, etc.
sbt
I would recommend getting Nokia E71 if you can get it in the US.
sharjeel
I've been using HTC P3300 (http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_p3300-1693.php) and I've found it almost a replacement for my laptop to use it on the go. I use it to check my mails, browsing (OperaMini rox), connect to my servers using Putty, car navigation using Pocket Google Maps, WarDriving, storage device and a lot of other stuff including using it as speedometer :)

I am thinking about upgarding to HTC TyTn II or HTC Touch Pro. Both are great phones. Infact Windows Mobile is a cool platform with so many useful applications. Windows Mobile doesn't is great out of the box but with little tweaking no other phones can beat it.

I recommend that you go for any Windows Mobile 6.1 based device. However HTC TyTn II and Touch Pro are highly recommended :)

LKM
Obvious solution: Buy iPhone. Get approved by Apple as a developer. Write awesome application. Make 1000+ bucks a day. Buy every other cell phone on your list and compare them yourself. :-)
tienshiao
I would advise against a PalmOS based device if you plan on doing development. The OS is outdated, and on its last legs.

The iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, and the BlackBerry OS are all more modern and have better tools. Can't comment on Symbian.

christefano
Agreed. Not only is it old, nobody really knows what plan or timetable Access has for it.

If I were a developer of mobile phone software, I'd go iPhone all the way. Despite Apple's restrictions, every single iPhone owner would have easy and immediate access to my software. RIM's version of an "app store" looks pretty empty at the moment:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/builtforblackberry/

astrec
Nokia addressed most of the N95 issues you describe with the N95-3, also called the N95 8Gb.

'Tethering' (bluetooth) is trivial so long as you know the APN. Works great on the train for me.

Browser is webkit based and works very nicely, except in their wisdom they've made tabs difficult.

hapless
I think I'm missing something important here.

What is the purpose of a smartphone in the first place, particularly for 'a young programmer' ?