1. Screen quality. iPhone wins, but only slightly over the EVO.

2. Multitasking. All of them do it, but Apple’s system is a LOT easier to figure out and manage. That said, AT&T’s new data plan pricing has left a very bad taste in my mouth. I’m going to have to use the iPhone 4 for a month to see how much data I actually end up using now that I can do things like use Waze for traffic at the same time as playing music on Pandora, or watching live streaming videos from Ustream, etc. The iPhone should be miles ahead here, because of its superior OS, but is only slightly ahead because AT&T is dragging down the experience for me.

3. Battery life. HUGE win for the iPhone 4, which gives up to 40% longer talk times than the 3GS, which is already giving me at least 40% better battery life than the EVO.

4. Application choice and quality. A slight win for iPhone 4. Overall I like apps on the iPhone better and there definitely are more to choose from. 225,000 according to Steve Jobs today. But there are some apps on Android that are better. Google Voice and Google Maps are two of them, which are pretty dramatic. I keep getting complaints from developers about the Apple approval process, too.

5. Feel in pocket. iPhone 4 wins here. It’s thinner and since it’s glass on both sides more pocket compatible.

6. Voice quality. The EVO is a LOT better than the iPhone 3GS, but I wasn’t able to try it out today for a phone call, so we’ll need to wait until June 24th for that.

7. Sexiness. The iPhone 4 wins here big time.

8. Carriers. The iPhone 4 LOSES here big time. AT&T has dead zones where none exist on my routes around the San Francisco Bay Area on Sprint or Verizon.

9. Video and camera. The iPhone wins here by quite a bit. The focusing on the iPhone is better. The quality seems like it is better, but I’ll need to do a head-to-head after June 24th to really know that for sure. The video features are FAR superior on the iPhone, especially the new editing features. I will buy the iPhone for these features alone, so for a video geek like me these are a huge deal. My wife, though, uses the iPhone camera a lot more than I do (I have a pro camera, she doesn’t and she takes a lot of pictures of the kids), so it’ll be interesting to see what she does with this.

10. Video games. The iPhone is already ahead here by a long shot and with its new gyroscope we should see even more apps for the iPhone that are cool and now that Zynga is bringing its games to the iPhone Apple has widened its lead. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure all the haters will remind me it doesn’t play Flash games but, sorry, that train has left the station and isn’t coming back.

11. Tethering. The EVO lets you share your phone as a wifi hotspot and lets other devices use its data plan to get on the Internet. This is wildly cool and how I get my family’s iPads on the Internet when driving in the car. Apple didn’t say a thing about tethering today and I’m hearing rumors that the iPad won’t tether with the new iPhone. So, this is a major feature in the EVO camp. Plus, AT&T’s new data plan restrictions really bug me.

12. Synch and services. Here Android kicks Apple’s ass. The iPhone has to be physically plugged into a computer and connected to iPhone to synch it. With the EVO I never have connected it physically to a computer. I just entered my Gmail address and password and all my contacts, all of my calendar items, all of my email, and all of my applications just showed up. This is a MAJOR advantage to the Android system.

So, will I start using an iPhone again? Yes, but I have the luxury of being able to afford two devices and I’m definitely keeping the EVO if just for the tethering. If I could only afford one? I’d go with iPhone 4 over the EVO. Mostly because the OS is nicer to use (hard to explain all the ways this is so in a short post, so you’ll have to wait for a longer post after I get mine), the video features, and the battery life is dramatically better. But I totally understand why many of you will ignore those advantages because AT&T sucks so much. If voice quality is more important to you than all the toys, the nicer OS, or the video chat, then definitely go for the Sprint or the Verizon.

To the second part of this question. Does Nokia, MIcrosoft, or RIM have a chance to get into the game?

Well, let’s look at the strength’s of each company.

1. Nokia has a ton of market share in low-end markets. That still gives it a powerful voice brand to build off of. Will it matter in the high end game? I don’t think it will, but I’m sure I’ll have lots of Nokia employees telling me why it does.

2. Microsoft has the Xbox and their new phone is coming from the same team. Wired also explained how Microsoft’s Kin and a bunch of services give it a leg into the game. I don’t buy that horseradish, but I can see how many of you will.

3. RIM has the best keyboards and best integration with Microsoft Exchange (still). Corporate IT folks care about both of these. Even Mark Zuckerberg carries a Blackberry to do email on. Until Android matches the keyboard quality RIM is safe. The first Motorola Droid has a dreadful keyboard. Will the next one have a good enough keyboard to let RIM’ers switch? We’ll have to see.

Anyway, Apple is still on top of the mind share mountain and that’s a powerful place, indeed, to be. Look for Apple’s sales and profits to continue to go up. I’m buying three (one for Patrick, one for Maryam, and one for myself).

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VentureBeat has all the details on their survey and other fun things they learned.

OK, nothing really shocking there, but I did sit down for an interview with CEO Jeff Haynie this afternoon.

In the interview Haynie explains why his developer platform is a lot faster to develop on than building apps in Objective-C (developers use standard web technologies, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, along with its own API, named Appcelerator Titanium, that is easy to call from JavaScript to do a variety of functions. You can watch a video where they explain more about how this works.

Basically Appcelerator is a competitor for Adobe’s AIR framework/app system but one that delivers onto the iPhone (and, within a few days, on the Apple Tablet, or whatever it’ll be called).

Yes Haynie is taking advantage of the Apple news, even before it happens, but I gotta appreciate that in a CEO.

Finally, in his survey they found that most of their developers see lots of opportunities for the Apple Tablet outside of the kinds of scenarios already discussed. We talk about these at length in the interview, but while gaming will be hot they see opportunities to develop new apps in entertainment, productivity/business, social networking, and education.

Ahh, Apple Tablet Hype Week continues…

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Since then, technology and gadget bloggers have been in a frenzy not seen by me since the iPhone was first announced. I’m not about to get into the many details of Google’s Nexus One phone–I’m going to take a different angle, below–but you can read all about the unlocked Android phone, here, here, and here. Oh, and here’s what it looks like:

So, what’s my take on this?

The media frenzy!

OMG! I don’t know how much Motorola and Verizon spent trying to hype up the launch of the recent Droid phone, but that publicity doesn’t compare to what Google has accomplished over the weekend.

How smart was Google? It handed out free phones to Google employees, either didn’t tell them to keep quiet about it, or actively encouraged the discussions, and let the details slowly leak out. All weekend long, I’ve seen post, after article, after post hit the web. Right about now, everyone that doesn’t own an iPhone is currently drooling over becoming a Google Nexus owner–and there are probably a few iPhone owners feeling the same way too!

Perhaps Google has realized that it’s just not that good at artificially creating excitement with its own advertising. The company became the world’s #1 search engine via word of mouth. Could it own the world’s #1 cell phone the same way?

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<a href=”http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo” target=”_new” title=”Future Vision Montage”>Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

Now as reported by Gregory T. Huang, Craig Mundie gave some more insights on the Future Vision in helping to kick off Microsoft Research’s 10th annual faculty summit. These were the top five takeaways from his talk:

1. It’s all about the natural user interface.

Today’s devices are able to understand voice, handwriting, and touch commands better than ever before, but nobody has really put it all together yet. Advances in computing algorithms will lead to software that is “better at anticipating what you might want.”

2. It’s time for the digital assistant—but fear not, real assistants.

In a demo, Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz talked to a “robotic receptionist” (on a screen) to schedule a meeting. The software used machine vision to track Horvitz’s movements, gaze, and orientation to the screen, speech recognition to understand what he was saying, and speech synthesis to communicate back to him—all in real time.

3. It’s not all about the cloud.

As we move to continuous, contextual awareness, the idea that we can time-share these things is not practical. Processing, communication, and integration with any other software needs to be done locally, not by a remote server in the Internet cloud. – clearly countering the Google approach to the cloud.

4. It’s four devices, not three.

Mundie outlined four types of devices in his broader view of computing: phones, laptops, desktops, and something he called “specialty computers.” These are handhelds specialized to do certains kinds of computationally intensive tasks, like environmental forecasting, medical imaging analysis, or even delivering prenatal care in rural regions of a developing country.

5. The room is the successor to the desktop.

In the office of the future, there will be high-definition displays on walls, a keyboard projected onto a desk surface, gesture recognition software that lets you move things around on a digital whiteboard, a digital assistant on the screen, a video conference with a colleague with interactive graphics within the video screen, and so forth.

This Microsoft vision is certainly an impressive display of what may well be available.

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The North Hall was in-car audio and mobile audio and devices, which was less well attended and, to my interests, less interesting. More amazing cars and lots of “booth babes” who were dressed exactly as they’d been for the almost cliché mechanic’s calendars they’d posed for in the first place. And lots of guys eager to pose for photos with ‘em, arm firmly in place around their barely clad waists.

We took a break, then went to the Las Vegas Hilton’s own convention area for the International Gateway, which was exclusively representing companies in China and Hong Kong. Lots and lots of tiny booths with an amazing array of gadgets, gizmos and gewgaws, and every company hoping to find someone to distribute their products in the United States. This makes it a bit frustrating when you see something cool and realize that it might never be for sale through Best Buy, Wal-Mart or even Amazon.com, but it’s fascinating to think that two shy Chinese women who are hiding out in their tiny booth might well representing a two-thousand person strong manufacturing powerhouse in a far-flung province of China.

Anyway, on with the photos!

A typical scene of chaos at the more popular area of the Consumer Electronics Show 2009, this shows you a portion of the huge Microsoft booth space, with Motorola’s familiar “M” logo and a portion of its booth on the left. Behind Motorola was Intel, so the triumvirate was well represented in this area of the show. The most interesting thing that Microsoft was showing off? Windows 7. There were a lot of people from Microsoft demonstrating the Zune, but not many attendees were stopping to see what was going on.

Notice that the attendees are predominantly male here at CES too. That’s probably true of the demographic of consumer electronics buyers anyway, but still, is there even one woman in this picture?

This is a simple idea and I hope that they can get some traction in corporate America: it’s a button that you push when you’re walking away from your computer that puts it instantly into sleep mode, which saves about 80% of the electricity that it’d otherwise be using with a screensaver, etc.

They were one of many companies offering simple and effective green solutions to help us all use less power with all our gadgets and gizmos, and it’s an important step for all of us to consider. The Ecobutton guys also pointed out that compared to running a computer 24×7 for a year, simply pushing the button to have it instantly go to sleep for 10 hours/night would save you over $100 in electricity costs.

One of the most talked about things here at CES is the LG mobile watch. As you can see, it’s like a tiny iPhone curved around your wrist. My take? It’s another early concept product that might be of interest to a small number of very early adopters, but they’ve got a ways to go before Dick Tracy will be ready to charge one to his Paypal account.

Even more ironically, check out this picture from a tiny manufacturer in the Hong Kong area of the International Gateway:

In case you can’t read the signage, it says: Cell Phone, Digital Camera, Music, Video, Bluetooth. And bling! Sweet!

This was astonishing, the Samsung very thin screen prototype screen. It really is just as thin as you can see in the picture, and it’s a bright, gorgeous screen. They wouldn’t say how much one of these babies would cost since they’re not on the market, but it’s more than you and I can afford. For now.

In ten years, you can imagine a roll of this screen substance being one heck of a fascinating wallpaper material that’s actually a wall-size screen. Or a set of tiles that you slap on a wall, add a quick wooden frame, and have an instant art display system that just happens to double as a bright HD video monitor. I want one NOW!

Speaking of rolling things up, though, check this out:

They asked me not to take pictures of this, but fortunately it was after I’d already taken this shot. Again, imagine having a spare keyboard in a tube on the bottom of your backpack, bluetooth enabled, and when you need it, you flip it out onto a table and just start typing. Heck, maybe you could pair it with the mobile phone / computer wrist watch!

I told you we saw cool cars, right? Here are some of the best:

Yes, that’s the car from Back to the Future, the slick DeLorean. Too bad the company imploded, these are now quite the collector’s item.

Not sure how tricked out this is, but you gotta admit, this is one nice lookin’ Nissan Z. My son would go bonkers if I drove up in one some afternoon after school.

Check this one out too: it’s an old Ford (I think? Can someone tell me the specs on this car design?) that they’ve completely gutted and rebuilt as an all-electric vehicle. Yes, believe it or not, this lowrider that’d fit in just fine in East LA is a zero emissions electric car. I have no idea about the price for this conversion, but what a great idea!

It’s hard to get a sense of the scale here, but each of these screens is at least 52″ across and it’s a literal mountain of TVs arching over the Samsung booth here at CES. It’s incredible, and the processing power needed to have it all work at the same time, even with separate line sync and such (we got a briefing on how these work from Thomson Digital Advertising a few days ago).

I’ll end with something cute: what girl wouldn’t love these Hello Kitty accessories? My 4yo would flip for ‘em if I could somehow bring them back to Colorado with me.

Anyway, that was the end of the second day of CES for us. We then went to a great Affiliate Summit West speaker dinner, followed by a wonderful behind-the-scenes tour of Cirque du Soleil’s “O”, followed by seeing the show itself. Fabulous. Photos and narrative to come!

Don’t miss our CES Flickr Stream too, for lots more photos — including of the “booby” mouse pad — and snarky commentary.

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If you wish to envision what may be possible with your cell phone, then it’s intriguing to watch what is happening with your automobile. Miniaturization is rarely a major challenge so the transfer from automobile to cell phone is entirely doable. Look at these examples to see the possibilities.

Sam Abuelsamid tells us that Ford’s new navigation system helps you find low gas prices

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, Ford will be showing off their latest in-car communications systems including an updated navigation system. The system set to debut this summer on the new Lincoln MKS and includes a new Sirius Travel Link system. Among other things, the Travel Link system has the ability to get fuel price data from stations in the area. It can even be set up to automatically give you directions to the station with lowest gas price.

…

Ford is answering the call with the best technology solutions from companies like Microsoft and SIRIUS, connecting customers with mobile devices, important information they need on the road and bringing the experience to life with the latest in navigation technology and branded audio.

Seyth Miersma reports that the Australians Are Developing High Tech Holden Cop Car. It’s almost like a James Bond car, 2008 model.

The Holden police car contains voice recognition software that let officers keep their hands in place on the wheel, as well as cameras that can beam the action in real-time to communications centers. There’s also an automatic license plate recognition camera proficient enough to scan 5000 to 8000 cars in a 10-hour period.

Which of these functionalities comes to your cell phone first will be influenced by market demand and supportive technology. However full voice control of your mobile device seems a strong contender.

Related: The Keyless Cell phone

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