What’s the difference between Opera Mini and Opera Mobile? With Opera Mini, the cost-saving compression is always turned on. There are computers located in cool locations such as Iceland that squeeze the webpages down before sending them in smaller (and thereby cheaper) packages to phones. This also enables less-capable feature phones to view full webpages, where the built-in browser can’t. Opera Mobile has cost-saving features too, but here one can turn them on and off, making the browser more like the Opera Turbo feature in an Opera desktop browser.

Learn more about Opera at www.opera.com.

SAN FRANCISCO – On Monday morning, Microsoft officially announced Windows Phone 7, a long-overdue reboot of the company’s smartphone OS that offers some compelling features to Office junkies, Xbox gamers, and anything-but-iPhone customers.

With Microsoft launching a full broadside–ten phones by a variety of manufacturers on dozens of carriers–it’s another example of Apple seeing stepped-up competition in the mobile arena. And Cupertino may be in a far less advantageous position than it was just a couple years ago, especially when it comes to dealing with the carriers, who now have no shortage of other smartphone platforms to turn to.

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, smartphone design had grown largely stagnant. It was hard to argue with Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s proclamation that the iPhone was five years ahead of the competition–and this was before you could whip out the “there’s an app for that” card. The iPhone was both a line in the sand for good mobile phone design, and a battle cry for the little guy turning the tables on the carriers: It featured no AT&T branding, came preloaded with none of the usual carrier bloatware, and even got AT&T to change its network to handle new phone features like Visual Voicemail.

But it isn’t 2007 anymore. The iPhone revolution has been quickly mimicked by Android, yielding a seemingly unending barrage of new phones, available among all major U.S. carriers. Though it’s not actually the most popular mobile OS yet, there’s no denying that Android has some serious steam behind it. When you add in the likes of Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry OS 6, the fight for the mobile space only becomes more contentious. Times have changed, and lots of smartphones have caught up to Apple–or, at the least, gotten close enough to tip the scales for millions of potential customers.

Steve Jobs said at the company’s September music event that Apple has sold 120 million iOS devices in four years, and the iPhone makes up the better half of that number. But Google announced that it was selling “about 100,000″ Android devices a day in June; in August, that jumped to 200,000 a day–that’s a 100 percent increase in sales in just two months, and that was during the iPhone 4′s launch.

In order to keep its early lead, Apple could very well be the one forced to swerve. Talk is swirling once again of the iPhone leaping to another carrier in the U.S. However, when that happens–note that I didn’t say ”if”–something’s gotta give in this million-dollar game of chicken: either Apple will have to relinquish some of its control over the iPhone’s experience, or a massive carrier like Verizon or Sprint will have to make the same concessions that AT&T did in 2007.

Plus, the competition has been more than happy to bend to the carriers’ whims. Lots of Android phones feature carrier bloatware that cannot be uninstalled. During its Windows Phone 7 unveiling, Microsoft announced a game that will be exclusive to AT&T devices at launch. Until recently, Verizon had exclusive rights for the Skype app for Android phones. And many of these handsets feature carrier co-branding, often on the device itself, and sometimes in the OS or apps too.

All of this adds up to creating a less-than-desirable position for Apple at the bargaining table with the carriers. The iPhone is an undeniably hot item, but it becomes an issue of balancing how badly the carriers want to put up with Apple–forking over the power and control they have long been accustomed to–with how badly Apple needs an alternative carrier to AT&T.

With Android’s incredible growth rate, Microsoft’s shot at getting back in the game, and RIM building new software for phones and a new tablet, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple conceded in order to break free from AT&T. As Jobs has stated in the past, working in the ph

SAN FRANCISCO – Here’s more evidence of Android‘s meteoritic rise to the top. According to market researcher Gartner, Google’s fledgling open-source mobile operating system, barely a blip on the wireless radar a year ago, will grab the No. 2 spot in global market share by the end of 2010. Even more stunning is Gartner’s prediction that Android will rival Symbian as the world’s top mobile OS by 2014.

Certainly, Android phone manufacturers (and fans) will welcome Gartner’s four-year forecast, which doesn’t offer today’s leading mobile OS vendors, Research In Motion (RIM) and Nokia, much to celebrate.

A Black Eye for BlackBerry

BlackBerry-maker RIM takes the hardest punch. RIM, which owned almost 20 percent of the global mobile market in 2009, will see that share nearly halved to 11.7 percent by 2014, Gartner predicts. And Nokia, which sells millions of Symbian-based phones (particularly in developing countries like India) won’t be thrilled by the forecast either. Symbian, which owned nearly 47 percent of the global market in 2009, will plummet to around 30 percent four years from now.

For Android, however, the news is grand. Not only will it nudge RIM out of second place by the end of 2010, but it also run head-to-head with Symbian within four years-each with a 30 percent share. (Gartner gives Symbian the slight edge, however.)

Open Source Rules

The mobile market will favor open-source operating systems (i.e., Android and Symbian) over single-source platforms such as Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. While mobile sales for Apple and RIM will continue to rise, they won’t be high enough to boost the platforms’ global shares.   Apple, for instance, will have about 15 percent of the market by 2014, a half-point drop from today, says the forecast.

Gartner is the second research firm this week to predict a rosy future for Android. IDC also forecasts that Android will rise to second place by 2014, although it expects Symbian to retain a comfortable lead–33 percent to Android’s 25 percent.

The Wildcard:   Windows Phone

One notable difference between the Gartner and IDC forecasts concerns Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. Gartner predicts Windows Phone will be an also-ran in four years with a meager 4-percent share, while IDC gives Microsoft’s OS a healthy 9.8 percent of the market-just a point behind iOS, in fact.

The disparity is strong indication that no one really knows how mobile customers will respond to Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s new OS slated to debut on several third-party handsets within weeks.

SAN FRANCISCO – This week, research firm Gartner announced that by year’s end Google’s Android will rocket past both Apple’s iOS and Research in Motion’s Blackberry in popularity.

While the report that Google’s smartphone OS will claim 17.7 percent of worldwide sales by the end of 2010–an astounding leap from the 3.9 percent it had at the same time last year–has grabbed headlines, Android’s speedy ascent should come as little surprise. Its multivendor business model brings iPhone-like capabilities to a variety of smartphone models and wireless carriers, allowing consumers myriad choices for their mobile experience.

In addition to its broader selection of devices and carriers, Android’s open platform offers customizable features and a breadth of applications for each manufacturer, carrier, and user to tailor the OS to their individual needs. This versatility clearly makes it an attractive option for those who don’t want to be locked into Apple’s walled garden, particularly corporate customers seeking a platform they can readily tailor to their business environment.

That versatility should help Android continue to make inroads in the business world. And though Android in its earliest incarnation had been commonly dismissed as an option for business professionals, Android 2.2 has made strides in its enterprise applications, bringing beefed up Exchange support and stronger security features, including the ability for IT administrators to remotely control passwords and wipe devices.

Despite these developments, Android still has a way to go before it’s an ideal tool for every business. It still lacks a decent option to encrypt removable media cards, which will certainly blacklist if for businesses trafficking sensitive data. And in its present version, it can’t yet match the administration features of the BlackBerry. Meanwhile, RIM’s roll out of BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express–a free, slimmed-down version on its lauded mobile administration system squarely targeted at small businesses that allows them to deploy up to 75 BlackBerry devices without any additional software or user license fees–indicates that the BlackBerry won’t easily be toppled from its perch as the go-to mobile device for businesses.

And, of course, the Android Market still lags far behind Apple’s App Store in its selection of downloadable software.
Still, Android’s popularity will undoubtedly continue to grow and a rumored 3.0 version to arrive later this year will likely bring more significant improvements. But it’s going to need an even more sophisticated suite of enterprise tools if Android devices are going to be embraced as a corporate as well as consumer smartphone.

SAN FRANCISCO – If you have an iPhone, this experience may be familiar: Your phone shows only a bar or two, and either you can’t make a call or the call you do make is so scratchy and garbled that the person you’re calling can’t understand what you’re saying. Meanwhile, right next to you, someone on a different AT&T phone connects without a hitch and chats away happily. I decided to informally test whether there’s a solid basis for that common gripe. My findings: The two iPhones I tested had lower rates of connecting successfully and had poorer voice quality in AT&T low-signal areas than did two non-Apple AT&T phones that I tested under the same conditions.

I tested four phones on AT&T service in two cities over three days. I drove around San Francisco and Los Angeles comparing the performance of the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS against the performance of the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 and the Pantech Impact in voice calls placed at roughly the same time from areas where coverage from the AT&T network is less than optimal.

What I found was surprising. Calls on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS failed to connect or dropped in midcall far more often than did calls on the other two phones, and the iPhone calls that connected successfully sounded marginally worse than calls placed with the BlackBerry and Pantech phones.

My testing is not meant to be scientific or definitive, but the results raise real questions about the world’s favorite smartphone: Is the iPhone a great personal computing device but a bad phone? Please click the chart below to see average call quality scores (on a 1-5 scale) for all test calls made in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Testing Methodology

I made test calls from seven medium- to low-signal locations in San Francisco; then I validated my results with a second round of testing at the same locations two days later. Finally, I performed similar tests from five locations in Los Angeles. I tested from various locations, including a parking garage, a forest, a train station, a library basement, and a moving bus. I noted each dropped or failed call, and scored each successful call that I made using the five-point Mean Opinion Score (MOS), a scale developed by Bell Labs to quantify call quality. (Please see the “Mean Opinion Scoring Guide”–the rightmost column in the accompanying chart–for definitions of the possible call quality scores, 1 through 5.)

At locations where my first call on a given phone dropped, I noted the drop and then placed an additional call, applying a MOS number to the second call if it completed successfully. Obviously, I couldn’t give a voice quality score to a phone if it failed in both attempts to complete a call at a certain location.

The Dropped-Call Champions

The data point that sticks out in my results is the number of dropped or failed calls placed by iPhones during my tests, especially in the San Francisco tests. In total, the iPhone 4 dumped or couldn’t connect in half of test calls — 14 out of 28 — in low-signal areas. The iPhone 3GS did even worse, connecting only 12 calls in 30 attempts, for a success rate of 40 percent.

Meanwhile the iPhones’ competition in our tests proved far more reliable in dealing with less-than-ideal signal strength. The least expensive phone in our tests–the Pantech Impact–had zero failed or dropped calls in the 19 test calls I placed on it, despite poor cell conditions. The BlackBerry Bold 9000 was also far more reliable than the iPhones, connecting on 18 out of 21 test calls in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Call Quality

I also evaluated the voice quality on calls that connected successfully. In my conversations with a colleague in the PC World office, I listened for things like drop-outs, static, thin or fading voice, delay, and garble, and I gave each call a MOS score based on the cumulative disruption caused by these imperfections over the course of the call.

Here, the results were more favorable to the iPhone, and much closer across the four phones I tested. All four phones earned average MOS score of between 3 and 4 (that is, between “annoying” and “fair”), a range that is said to be typical of calls placed on cell phones.

On average, the iPhone 3GS scored the worst of the four phones in call quality. The 12 calls (out of 30 total) that the 3GS managed to connect and hold received an average MOS score of 3.16 (out of a possible 5). The iPhone 4, with its improved antenna (provided you hold it just so), fared a little better than its predecessor did in my call quality tests. The 14 (out of 28) successful test calls placed on the iPhone 4 averaged a mark of 3.27, also between “annoying” and “fair” on the MOS scale, though again, like the iPhone 3GS’s score, closer to “annoying.”

The BlackBerry Bold 9000 produced the highest-quality voice calls overall in my tests. Calls made with the Bold 9000 had an average MOS score of 3.77 across 18 test calls, putting it near the upper end of the range between “annoying” and “fair.” The Pantech Impact also outperformed the iPhones in call quality, with an average MOS score of 3.61 for its 19 test calls.

Conclusions

The iPhone’s poor performance in my tests could have been caused by myriad things, from the tuning of the iPhone antenna to the amount of network resources AT&T allocates to voice calls placed by iPhones specifically.

Neither AT&T nor Apple offered any sort of explanation. In response to a request for comment, an AT&T spokesperson said merely: “We recommend you reach out to the device manufacturers.” Apple did not return our calls requesting comment.

The iPhone is undeniably a superb device for browsing the Web, playing games, and watching videos. Further, the iPhone 4 clearly improved on its predecessor in microphone quality, speaker quality, and noise cancellation effectiveness, all of which help make voice calls sound great–when cell service is strong.

But at least for now, weak cell-signal zones are a fact of life for just about everybody, whether you encounter them on the road, in your office, or in your living room. Cell signals also tend to degrade when making their way through the walls of our homes, necessitating an amplifier–or in AT&T’s case, a Microcell–that, more often than not, you have to pay for. And wireless operators usually invest in additional cell towers and in radio improvement only when increased traffic levels (which translate into average revenue) are likely to be high enough to justify the capital expense.
While we don’t have the resources to do our testing nationwide, the data I collected in San Francisco and Los Angeles, combined with the anecdotal evidence, is enough to indicate that iPhones may well have more difficulty than other phones placing calls in areas of less-than-optimal wireless service.

If you’re considering buying an iPhone, and phone calls are important to you, it’s wise to take the time to test the phone for as long as laws in your state allow to understand how well the device works in the low-signal areas you frequent.

By Lexton Snol
July 27, 2010

By Jeff Bertolucci
July 26, 2010

By Adam Pash
July 14, 2010