What laptop, tablet, or smartphone to buy? It’s a complicated business

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Chris Cannam

My Dad asked me recently what sort of computer he should buy to replace his ten-year-old HP laptop. And what sort of phone should he get to replace his old Nokia? And while I was at it, should he get one of those tablet things?

There are a lot of possible options at the moment, because all kinds of devices from smartphones to traditional PCs have become broadly capable of doing the same work, and because a whole raft of new Windows 8 laptops and convertibles have just arrived to clutter up the shelves.

Therefore I’d suggest mostly ignoring the nominal capability and specs of any device, and considering instead how it feels to hold and operate and what ecosystem it is part of.

Let me explain, and then give some more concrete advice.

Ecosystems

This slightly absurd term describes a set of services and systems that work together, many of which are likely to have been provided by the company that made the device’s operating system.

Increasingly, when you buy a device, you are making a decision to participate in its maker’s ecosystem: it will make your life easiest if you are prepared to use backup, file and photo sharing, music download, email, mapping, browsing, app installation, and other services all from the same supplier.

For example, if you buy an Android device, you’ll be most content if you also use Google mail, maps, marketplace, etc. Buy a Mac or an iPhone, and you’ll have the happiest time if you use Apple services wherever they exist. Windows 8 and Windows Phone expect you to have a Microsoft account and to use it. If you have two devices, say a laptop and a phone, they’ll get on best if they’re both within the same ecosystem as well.

You can make a conscious decision to mix and match—I do that myself, somewhat, because it pains me to side with any one megacorporation more than I have to—but it can be heavy going. If the idea of understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it appeals to you more than having an easy life, then install Linux and subscribe to no single ecosystem; I’ll be happy to help out. But I’m guessing you don’t really want to do that.

So no, the usual thing seems to be to decide which company you dislike least, then let that one have your credit card details and as much goodwill as you can muster. And that means picking one of: Apple (with OS/X and iPhone/iPad), Google (with Android), or Microsoft (with Windows and Windows Phone).

“Feel”

Modern computing devices, from smartphones to PCs, are increasingly touch-driven (either through a multi-touch touchpad or a touchscreen), portable, and versatile. The way you hold and interact with them does matter.

I’d strongly suggest you start by trying out the best devices you can find from each ecosystem, hands-on, either by borrowing from a friend or in a very relaxed shop. Decide which one you enjoy the basic interactions with the most.

If the design, interaction and animation (and materials and heft, for specific devices) please you every time you pick it up, you’re probably going to be happy with it. If they annoy you, you’re not. If it’s ugly and inconvenient now, it’ll be ugly and inconvenient in five years’ time.

The options

These are the things you can buy at the moment.

Laptops you know. They run either Windows (if PCs) or OS/X (if Macs). Some of the Windows 8 ones now have touchscreens, but not all of them (and nor do any of the Macs).

Tablets such as Apple’s iPad, the Google/Samsung Nexus 10, or the Microsoft Surface are slatelike touchscreen devices in which a separate keyboard is strictly optional (there is a “virtual” one on the screen). They typically run one program at a time, full-screen, rather than having multiple separate windows side by side, and the programs are redesigned for touch rather than mouse operation (the buttons are bigger and they have fewer menus, for example). All software is installed from a central “app store” run by the operating system manufacturer.

Smartphones are small tablets that can make phone calls. Most mobile phones nowadays are smartphones.

Things to bear in mind

A modern smartphone is a computer. It can do practically anything, but it’s sometimes fiddly because of the small size, and it has amazingly awful battery life compared with a classic mobile phone—be prepared to charge it every day. If you buy a nice new phone and make use of it as a handheld computer, you’ll probably find you use your laptop less.

Tablets overlap with both smartphones and laptops. If you have a smartphone, the laptop or tablet is likely to take jobs like “reading long documents, and doing anything that needs a lot of typing”. Don’t buy both a tablet and a laptop, just make sure whatever you get has a good clear screen and you can stand it up on a desk and type with it.

Asus Transformer

Proper keyboards are available for every kind of tablet: you can always get something you can either plug in or attach wirelessly. But convertible tablets (with a keyboard stand included, like the Asus Transformer, right) are nice too. They’re very like laptops to use and can be folded up and packed away the same way, but you can also pull off the screen and sit on the sofa with it. Most run Android.

There are also small tablets, but… While the iPad, Nexus 10, Transformer series, and Surface are in the 10-11″ diagonal range, there are also several in the 7-8″ range like the iPad Mini or Nexus 7. The small ones are natty and better for carrying around, but less good for sofa-surfing and can’t really replace a laptop.

If you’re buying an Android device, look for Android 4 or newer and get a Google Nexus if you can. They sell a phone (the Nexus 4), a small tablet (Nexus 7) and a big tablet (Nexus 10) and they’re all pretty good. Being Google’s “own” devices, they have good compatibility and more updates. You can’t generally get them through mobile network contracts though.

Don’t buy an Amazon tablet. The Kindle Fire series are really designed for only one thing: consuming content from Amazon.

If you’re buying a Windows 8 laptop, get one with a touchscreen. Windows 8 makes very little sense without a touchscreen. You can still use a mouse as well.

Windows 8 is extra-confusing because of the existence of both Windows 8 and “Windows RT”. These are essentially the same, except that Windows RT can’t run any “legacy” Windows software apart from Microsoft Office: it only runs touch-optimised full-screen apps from the Windows app store, of which there are not all that many available yet. Windows RT is found on tablets and some laptops. It’s a perfectly capable operating system, but there’s a big risk of disappointment if you want to run arbitrary Windows applications from around the internet and discover too late that you can’t.

So the range of applications available matters, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Off the top of my head: Apple’s iPhone has the most apps, then Android phones, then the iPad, then desktop operating systems (Windows, OS/X), then Android tablets, and in last place Windows Phone and Windows RT. Numerically the difference from first to last pretty big, but it can be oversold: in practice you won’t find many things you can’t do, nor run out of new stuff to try out, on any of them.

You can safely ignore any review in which the star rating appears to be correlated to how fast the computer’s processor is. That’s practically irrelevant nowadays. Do test how smoothly the screen scrolls and zooms though.

Don’t forget to check whether you use any software that absolutely must continue to run on whatever you replace your laptop with. In most cases, all you need is software that does the same sort of thing (it doesn’t have to be exactly the same software) but you don’t want to get caught out if there’s anything specific you rely on.

The whole mobile-network contract business is an extra layer or three of bafflement that I can’t really help with. I generally buy hardware unsubsidised and stick a pay-as-you-go SIM in it.

Some suggestions

Give each of the ecosystem contenders a test run, and then, from the options below, pick the phrase you most agree with and read that bit!

(Although by the time you’ve given each them a test run, you may well already know what you want. That would be a good outcome.)

I’m totally ignoring price here, although sadly the most interesting options almost always turn out rather expensive.

“I really like the way the Apple things work” Well, that was easy. If you’re dead set on having a laptop or you want as much flexibility and control as possible, then you want a MacBook Air (probably the 13″ size, although the keyboard is just as titchy as the one in the 11″). Otherwise, get an iPad and forget about the laptop. Either way, buy the laptop or tablet first, then think about phones (the phone to get is obviously an iPhone, it’s just a question of which one and that basically comes down to price).

“Windows 8 and Windows Phone appeal to me, and I don’t think of Microsoft as an objectionable enemy” You’d probably find a Windows Phone 8 phone (any one, though the Nokia Lumia 920 has the most lovely screen) and a touchscreen Windows 8 laptop a good combination. Look at the Lenovo Yoga 13, which is a fine laptop that I predict will sell half-a-dozen at best because of the weird way it’s being displayed on a stand in the shops (the screen flips back to make it resemble a large and heavy tablet, but it’s really a laptop). Or consider the Samsung Series 5 Touch laptop or possibly the ATIV SmartPC convertible. Although Microsoft’s Surface RT is a beautiful object that I’d like to recommend, it isn’t yet quite the laptop replacement it thinks it is. There’s a Pro version due out in a few weeks that might be worth a look, though.

“I use a few Google services already, and I’ve tried at least one Android device I thought was nice to use” An Android tablet convertible like the Asus Transformer series can in principle replace a laptop quite well. Try one out, but if you’re thinking “hm, maybe Android might work” it’s probably cheaper to give it a go with a phone first. Google’s Nexus 4 is the obvious choice if you can find one.

“Those touchscreen laptops and tablets are all a bit small, I like my bigger PC” There are some reasonable touchscreen laptops with somewhat larger screens, including several from HP like the Envy TouchSmart 14. I hesitate to recommend one because I’ve actually never seriously used Windows 8 with a touchscreen on a larger screen. It might be a bit tiring. Do try it though.

“This is still all too complicated” Then stick with what you’ve got. The new Windows 8 machines have only just come out, and everything will look a bit simpler in six months’ time when the disasters have subsided and the new-fangled things have got cheaper.

What would I do?

If: money was no object; I had no corporate loyalty and lacked my affection for open Unix-type systems; I wanted to be able to do anything except programming; I didn’t have a laptop, tablet or smartphone already; and I didn’t mind if my phone was too big to fit in a small pocket… I’d buy a Nokia Lumia 920 and a Lenovo Yoga 13.

That’s because I like the Windows 8 look and feel, the different Windows 8 devices work well together, and both of these are attractive well-made objects that are a pleasure to use. I’d pick the Nokia over the otherwise excellent HTC 8X because of its better screen and camera and the inclusion of Nokia maps with navigation.

But in real life, I couldn’t afford that. If I wanted to keep the price down a bit and avoid being too locked in to any one ecosystem, I’d look at a Samsung Series 5 touchscreen laptop and a second-hand unlocked Google Nexus S phone from eBay. But I would go and have a play with a Surface RT tablet in John Lewis first, just in case. It’s a nicer physical object, for all its limitations.

And if money was the object—if it was the main thing that mattered, but the other conditions were the same—I might buy the entry-level full-size iPad and nothing else. It’s much cheaper than a touchscreen laptop and has a lot of software. I don’t really go for the visual design, but it’s cheaper than the alternatives I do really like, the basic interaction and feel are fine, and having all those apps available counts for a lot.

Of course, being a typical human creature I’d really do none of the above. I’d just buy whatever I happened to like the look of on the day and rationalise it afterwards. I trust you’ll do the same!

Updating into oblivion

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Chris Cannam

I updated my Nokia 700 today. It’s an unlocked, unbranded phone running Symbian Belle, that was advertised as having OS updates in February and April this year—but those updates never arrived. I eventually lost patience, and made the updates using underhand and possibly illegal tools.

In an earlier post I said that I wasn’t too bothered about OS updates. For the most part that’s true. I don’t mind that my Android tablet (the original Galaxy Tab) hasn’t had an update since Android 2.3. I appreciate that Samsung gave some sign of having actually looked into whether an update would run well on it and decided that it wouldn’t. That puts me in a better position than friends with the iPhone 3 who had their devices rendered into sludge by an iOS update too far.

But Nokia—they really worked hard at winding me up. The February update didn’t just piddle about with the core OS, it also added some applications that I was genuinely interested in trying and that couldn’t be installed any other way. The April update didn’t mess about either, it actually increased the phone’s CPU clock speed. (How? Why was it lower to begin with?)

And for UK unlocked devices, they had two product codes: evidently the good and the bad. The good got the updates, and I had the bad. The bad didn’t get the updates.

So having waited until late July, I lost patience and re-flashed the thing.

I’m a bit cross about it because of, well, being put to such lengths and made to feel like I actually cared, about something so trivial.

On the other hand… a Nokia 700 with the latest Belle FP1 is a really nice phone. It’s hard to stay cross for long.

Neat, thin form factor, excellent screen, expandable storage and replaceable battery, physical buttons all well placed. Yes, it’s immaculately built… in Hungary, where Nokia laid off most of their workers at the end of last year.

With Belle FP1 and the faster clock speed, it’s smooth, straightforward and enjoyable to use. Sure there are some extra things I could still do with (integrated notifications of new email for example) but it’s for the first time a phone I could actually recommend to friends who liked the size and construction… running on an operating system cut adrift in February last year and effectively canned with Nokia’s last round of layoffs.

There aren’t as many good apps as on other platforms, but it does have a number of smooth Qt-based ones, including a few very slick and useful apps from Nokia, and it’s an attractive device for a Qt developer like me to think of developing for… if only there was an ecosystem around it and if only future devices were compatible… and if Nokia hadn’t abandoned Qt in their platform strategy twice, once with the switch to WP7 and again when refocusing on S40 a month ago.

Yep, the 700 is a wonderful example of what might have been.

I’m tempted to buy another as a spare, just because I like it so much and its future is so plainly bleak. I wonder how many of the services on it would stop working if Nokia went under?

Nokia: “You know, we might be in a spot of bother after all”

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Chris Cannam

(All over the internet for the last couple of days, but for best subhead I must link to the Register.)

Being a contrary type, I recently bought a Nokia 700. You can see it on the top of the pile in the photo on the right.

It runs Nokia (Symbian) Belle, an unevenly-supported platform that started at a disadvantage and is now to be abandoned by a dying company. The software is not this phone’s high point, though it’s better than you’d expect from that description.

The hardware is fantastic. It’s just the right size, shape, and construction. I resisted the iPhone and friends for years because they were so clumsy, but the 700 is small and thin enough to fit in any jeans pocket while still being entirely manageable with the Swype keyboard. (There are small Android phones, but they’re all horrible.)

And it’s a more beautiful object than any other phone I’ve seen. It isn’t any nicer to hold, or more practical: there are Android and WP7 phones that are better in the hand, and the 700 has no parallel lines in its design and so is impossible to balance satisfactorily on any edge. But it has the air of a weird tablet passed to us by aliens in its thinness, lightness, solidity, and amenability to single-handed hold and operation.

What Nokia Did Back Then

The way Nokia made their mark, back when mobile phones first became popular—in the mid to late 90s—was by producing desirable hardware with a recognisable operating system.

Nokia pioneered the idea of a consistent operating system for phones. They made a series of devices all working in much the same way, at a time when others were producing new interfaces for every device, and they had a sensible and comprehensible structure for information and functions on screen.

Nokia quickly became the phone you could actually understand, while producing the desirable hardware that made them the phone you yearned to own. This is just the combination we see in Apple now, and it’s the combination that Nokia lost sight of during their years of pushing capable but complex Symbian systems.

Of course, Nokia have now managed to pull Symbian back into a position where ordinary people can enjoy it—four or five years too late.

Our Frightful Infrastructure

I had never used Symbian before buying this phone.

I had used Windows Phone 7, and I liked it. So I could see where Nokia were going and why.

I knew that the WP7 ecosystem is entirely owned by Microsoft. You get your new phone and switch it on; you’re asked to register a Windows Live account (or whatever they’re calling it now); and you’re entirely managed within Microsoft’s network of services. Music, games, video, support services, what have you: it’s all Microsoft.

What I hadn’t realised was just how much infrastructure Nokia already had around Symbian. You get your new Nokia 700 and, as soon as you try to do anything acquisitive with it, you’re asked to register a Nokia account. You use entirely Nokia services for music, games, video, support services, and what have you. And they work quite well.

As an ignorant observer, I had thought that Nokia was deferring to Microsoft in these services because they didn’t have them already. I now realise the switch to Microsoft services is simply a change of landscape. They already did have all of these things working fine.

But the way Nokia ran these services was terribly labour-intensive. Their dependency on mobile phone carriers meant they had to organise separate billing and delivery plans several times over for every region. Delivering OS updates appears to be an almost impossible task: my phone is still waiting for updates that Nokia announced, and I know that other editions of the same phone received, over four months ago.

I’ve been in touch with Nokia support several times about failed music downloads and missing OS updates, and they’ve never been able to tell me anything useful about what was really going on. The system has been creeping past its operators on both flanks.

Can Nokia recover?

No. Though everyone is saying that, so I’m hardly original.

Nokia have clearly discarded Symbian, which seems to be both expensive to run and without a place in the market. (I wonder how long the services for my lovely phone will keep running for.)

That means they have only two totally incompatible platforms to manage, instead of three: S40 running Mobile Java, and WP7 running managed .NET code.

WP7 is not going to succeed for Nokia. I like it, but not only does it look like a hard sell for consumers, it’s also an operating system that people talk about more than they talk about the phones.

What I mean by that is: Nokia are trying to sell phones with a nearly two-year-old operating system called Windows Phone 7. Delightful though it is to use, it has no very immediate appeal to consumers in terms of immediate visuals or capabilities so the publicity talks about the operating system rather than simply presenting the phones. We know that the phones are running Windows.

Meanwhile, Microsoft are already talking up Windows 8. Anyone in a position to influence reluctant consumers is probably already thinking of WP7 as a strange and not necessarily compatible predecessor of Windows 8, whatever that turns out to be. (We’ve seen a lot of Windows 8, but it’s proposed that it will run on phones as well as PCs and tablets [isn't it?], and we haven’t seen any of that yet.)

Nokia are in the awkward position of betting their entire business on explicitly promoting an operating system that seems to have been already superseded by its producers.

No, I think they’ve had it. It’s been a long time coming, but I just don’t see the way out. Let’s hope I’m wrong, because it’s terribly painful to watch a strong European company fall apart because they couldn’t understand the nature of competition from a formerly minor American rival. Damn it.

“Papermill” and paying for apps

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Chris Cannam

Ryan Bateman writes an interesting piece about Papermill, an Android client for the Instapaper offline web-page reading service (via Daring Fireball).

What makes it so fascinating is the inclusion of actual numbers for both sales figures and (estimated) time spent on development. The results look rather depressing for any developer who likes the idea of providing a straightforward product and charging a reasonable price, rather than using backhanded mechanisms such as in-app sales or advertising.

One subjective point, though: I had never heard of this application, and at $4 it’s the sort of thing I might well pay for myself (as someone who does pay for Android apps).

But:

To get started all you need is an Android 2.2+ device and an Instapaper subscription account. A subscription account costs $1 a month and allows you to use third-party applications (such as Papermill) with your Instapaper account.

So to evaluate Papermill, you not only have to pay for the app, but also go and set up a subscription payment for Instapaper, which is a separate service from a different provider. And Google give you 15 minutes to get a refund if this combination doesn’t work out. (I suppose at least you can get a refund.)

I’m not really surprised that few people actually get around to doing this, no matter how little the sums involved. I think perhaps commentators are making the mistake of assuming most people have already used Instapaper.

Meanwhile in his linking article, John Gruber writes

Apple may never release a new non-high-end phone, but they do have mid-range and low-end smartphone models: the iPhone 4 and 3GS.

The 3GS costs £319 off-contract: that’s about three times what I would think of as a low-end smartphone.

At last, a PC with a decent screen resolution

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Chris Cannam

Pity it’s so small!

I’ve been longing to see a resolution as good as 2048×1536 on a flat-panel 14″ laptop or 19″ desktop screen. Clearly it was possible, but it never arrived.

Perhaps that’s because the one company that seems to take an interest in these things nowadays (Apple) has a desktop operating system that won’t let you change the font size.

So there’s never been much point in their making a screen with such a high resolution, because you wouldn’t be able to read the text—unless the screen was huge… and a huge screen needs to be widescreen or else it’ll be too tall to scan by eye easily… and so here we are, surrounded by rubbish monitors. Hey ho.

No, the last time anything at all comparable was available, it looked like this:This 19″ screen, from about a decade ago, managed 1920×1440. That’s looking pretty good by now.

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