But Android is beginning to blossom in the market for this class of device, which is really a hand-held computer that performs many laptop-like functions.

In August, T-Mobile began offering a new $200 myTouch Android phone. Motorola (MOT) will shortly launch a new $200 Android model called the CLIQ. And, on Oct. 11, Sprint (S) will start selling perhaps the most unusual Android phone so far, the $180 HTC Hero. I’ve been testing the Hero, a touch-screen phone without a physical keyboard that has some important distinctions from earlier Android models. In general, I like the Hero and can recommend it to Sprint customers, or others looking for something powerful, but different.

HTC, a veteran Taiwan-based maker of phones, has altered Android more than anyone else so far. It has been gradually developing its own signature software layer that sits atop phone operating systems. With the Hero, it has applied this software for the first time to an Android phone, and that’s what sets the Hero apart from its Android brethren. The latest, beefed-up, version of this HTC software is called “Sense.”

Sense includes handsome, large widgets with extra features that go beyond the vanilla Android experience supplied to everyone by Google (GOOG). So the Hero looks and behaves somewhat differently. For instance, a contact page in the address book application consolidates that contact’s Facebook and Flickr accounts. The music player and photo album look better, and the Hero with Sense can use Microsoft’s Exchange service to synchronize mail, calendars and contacts.

Sense also offers something called Scenes—entire collections of sets of screens and apps, either canned or customized, that can change the phone software’s look and feel. With just a couple of clicks, you could switch between a work-oriented “scene,” that prominently features apps such as a stock tracker and your work email, and an entertainment-oriented scene filled with the music player, photo album and other apps.

As with Sprint’s Palm (PALM) Pre, the Hero’s price is a bit deceptive. To get the phone for $180, you must remember to mail in a rebate form worth $100. At purchase, you have to put up $280. On the other hand, Sprint’s monthly fees can be much cheaper than those for other carriers. You’ll have to pay at least $70 a month to use the Hero, the same minimum fee that AT&T charges iPhone owners. But Sprint’s fee, unlike AT&T’s (T), includes unlimited text messaging and unlimited free calls to any mobile number on any network.

The Hero’s hardware isn’t especially beautiful. It’s a dull grey, noticeably thicker than the iPhone, with a smaller screen and six buttons plus a trackball, which adds another navigation option to the touch screen. It’s the same length as an iPhone, but is a bit narrower and lighter. It comes with just two gigabytes of memory, compared with eight gigabytes on the $99 iPhone and 16 gigabytes on Apple’s $199 model, though the Hero’s memory, unlike the iPhone’s, is expandable via a hard-to-reach slot under its removable back cover.

One big drawback is battery life. Sprint is only claiming up to four hours of talk time for the Hero, versus five hours for the Pre and iPhone. But, unlike the iPhone’s, the Hero’s battery is removable. Another drawback: I sometimes found the touch screen unresponsive, requiring multiple pokes at an icon.

On the plus side, the Hero has a much higher resolution camera than the iPhone’s or Pre’s—five megapixels versus three megapixels.

It also functions as a video camera, and in my tests, both still photos and videos I took looked very good. Phone calls, even on speaker phone, were clear and strong, and the phone has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in addition to Sprint’s high-speed network, which in my view is better than its reputation. Web browsing was adequate.

HTC’s Sense gives the Hero seven screens on which to place apps, versus Android’s standard three screens.

And, in addition to the standard Android apps and the 8,000 downloadable apps from Android’s Market app store, there are a variety of large, beautiful HTC “widgets” you can use. The downside of these is that they can occupy an entire screen.

The most impressive widget is called People. It’s an address book in which each contact’s page features a scrolling bar at the bottom with icons that allow you to see that person’s most recent Facebook status, photos from Facebook and Flickr, plus emails and text messages she’s sent to you and recent calls between you. This is somewhat similar to Palm’s Synergy feature, which is also based around people.

Overall, I found the HTC Hero to be the best Android phone I’ve tested, and a worthy competitor to the iPhone, the BlackBerry and the Pre.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090930/sprints-htc-hero-may-be-your-scene-in-smart-phones/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090720/yahoo-home-pages-over-the-last-15-years-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-really-ugly/ http://allthingsd.com/20090720/yahoo-home-pages-over-the-last-15-years-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-really-ugly/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:59:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=16077

Tomorrow, Yahoo will officially unveil the latest redesign of its homepage, an almost complete rejiggering of the look and feel of one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.

The latest launch comes after about a half-dozen redesigns the homepage since Yahoo was founded, the last one in 2006.

You can read the full story of the new page here, but BoomTown thought it might also be instructive to take a look at what has come before it, seeing how the Yahoo (YHOO) front page has evolved since 1994.

Incredibly, that was 15 years ago.

Personally, I like 1994 and 1995, which were clean and clear with big font sizes, due to Yahoo positioning itself as a directory of the Web, although the 1995 logo and swirly buttons are wacky.

The one from 1997 is also an improvement, in the same list theme.

But in 2000, the whole page suddenly started bloating badly, with too much color and too many links.

Weight gain continued in 2002, and the page got even more colorfully confusing with ever-smaller font sizes in 2004.

The 2006 version was, thankfully, much simpler, but still a packed-out mess.

That new incarnation from the Silicon Valley icon, which you can see above, is a more back to the basics in style.

The latest launch, which Yahoo had previously said was coming in the fall, rolls out today for the hundreds of millions of users in the U.S. and will be extended to France, the U.K., Germany and India later this week.

Here are the screenshots of all the Yahoo pages in order, from 1994 to 2006 (click on the images to make them larger, and please excuse some blurriness–I got these shots from Yahoo):

1994:

1995:

1997:

2000:

2002:

2004:

2006:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090720/yahoo-home-pages-over-the-last-15-years-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-really-ugly/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090626/rimm-product-line-more-frankenberry-than-crackberry/ http://allthingsd.com/20090626/rimm-product-line-more-frankenberry-than-crackberry/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:00:53 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=20342 With the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS in stores and the myTouch 3G, T-Mobile’s second Google (GOOG) Android phone, headed to market, is the Research in Motion (RIMM) product lineup beginning to look a bit dated? Which leads to another question: Has RIM’s success made it too complacent?

GC Research analyst Tero Kuittinen believes it has. In a research note Friday, Kuittinen described the company’s Blackberry product range as “shopworn,” noting that even the new Blackberry Tour is quite close to the aging Curve in look and feel.

“We are concerned about the autumn and winter Blackberry product range–RIM seems to have made a deliberate decision to rely on incremental improvements in mid-range and low-end models instead of bringing advanced features aggressively to cheaper devices,” Kuittinen writes. “Considering how competitive the smartphone market is getting, we believe this cautious approach may begin backfiring in the autumn and particularly during the Christmas season.”

Kuittinen goes on to question the logic of the company’s new flip phone initiative, wondering why the company is rolling out its 8230 clamshell at a time when consumers are so enamored with large display devices like Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and the new Palm (PALM) Pre. And that’s a great question because, well, the contract phone bestseller lists at most carriers aren’t exactly overrun with clamshells these days, are they?

“Overall, RIMM’s expansion to flip phones is ill-timed, and the Tour line lacks kick and the low-end improvements are minor at best,” Kuittinen concludes. “It is the combination of these three simultaneous factors that leads us to believe RIMM may have become lulled into complacency by the stellar success of the Blackberry devices over the past couple of years. The year 2009 is a tough period to let your product development program spin its wheels.”

Hard to disagree with that assessment given the handset launches we’ve seen so far this year. But perhaps the Storm 2 will prove Kuittinen wrong on that account. Perhaps it will even raise the bar a little. But even if it does, will that be enough to invigorate the entire product line? Kuittinen doubts it. “One major big-display phone launch, in our opinion, may not fully offset the slight malaise afflicting the rest of the Blackberry range in the autumn,” he concludes.

Below, our D7 Interview with RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090626/rimm-product-line-more-frankenberry-than-crackberry/feed/ 2