Form Factor – My one minor “complaint” about the Dash Express is the form factor. It is larger, bulkier, and heavier than most of the other GPS units I looked at buying – specifically the Nuvi series. I chalk the larger size up to the fact that the device has a lot on the inside – aside from being a great navigation unit, it has radios for Wi-Fi and GPRS connectivity. That has to add to the bulk. I am mildly jealous of my friends who have slimmer form factor GPS units, but they’re all envious of the connectivity I have in my unit.

The screen is bright and easy to read, especially at night. A bit more anti-glare treatment would help, though – I sometimes find the screen to have a lot of glare during early afternoon driving if I don’t have it angled just right. I am also really glad that they beefed up the on-board battery in the device – it can now work without being plugged into my cigarette lighter, which is key when I need to charge other devices.

User Interface – Overall, the user interface is clean and easy to use. I like the touch screen functionality and it generally works well. I found typing using the keyboard to be a bit of a challenge, largely because the keys are really close together on the screen and I frequently hit the wrong key when typing. Also, I wish the UI were a bit “zippier” at times – some times there’s a notable lag between key entry and when the device responds to said input. The menu system is easy to navigate and learn.

Navigation Accuracy – Overall, the Dash GPS does a very good job at its core tasks, which are providing good driving directions and accurate time of arrival estimates. There are a few things that plague this device, though. I find that it constantly gets “lost” in the Financial District in San Francisco. I’m guessing this is due to the challenge of getting an accurate GPS signal in tight quarters. I also find that I often wish that I could force the device to find and maintain a GPRS or Wi-Fi connection. There are a great deal more places available via the Yahoo search interface than the device has in its onboard memory. I haven’t yet figured out how to force the device to connect to look up a location. Sometimes I end up using the Google Maps app on my Blackberry to get the address before entering that same address into the device.

Should Dash fear Google Maps and Telenav? I don’t think so, actually. Even if I could mount my Blackberry in such a way that I could easily see it and use it as a navigational aid, it doesn’t beat a dedicated device. However, what is the “killer combination” is having a passenger with a Blackberry. If you, as the driver, don’t need to see and operate the device, having a passenger with a Blackberry who can navigate and provide directions is a reasonable substitute. Until the display and interface for such devices is larger, I think there’s a strong use case for a dedicated device.

Send-to-car is an awesome feature. My favorite feature is send to car. It’s a huge time saver to be able to send addresses for upcoming appointments directly from my desktop computer while I’m working and know that those addresses will eventually show up in the list of navigable places on my device. It’s also cool that I can have friends / co-workers send addresses to the device as well. I do, however, wish that I could send addresses to my own device via SMS – that would be a very nice feature to add.

What About Voice? This device needs a voice interface. It simply isn’t safe to try to interact with the device via a touchscreen UI while driving. A voice interface with some very simple commands like “find alternate route”, “new address”, etc would really help. Bay Area traffic is dynamic and I wish I could safely interact with the device while driving.

Feels like TiVo – This product reminds me a lot of TiVo. Everyone I know who has one (including me) really likes it and tells lots of other people about how much they like it. But right now it feels like the audience for a connected GPS unit is fairly niche. Like TiVo, the company has a business model that combines an upfront hardware cost and a monthly subscription fee. I’ll be interested to see how the business model evolves over time.

Increasingly, I find a lot of my friends who are using Facebook as the place where they keep their contact info up to date. One solution would be for Facebook to open up and let other services tap into that data store to keep their address books up to date. That’s geek-cool, but I’m not sure how many people would want to use it.

What’s cooler, and potentially more powerful, would be to have a Facebook address book application that works on my phone. What I really want to be able to do is “click to call” any of my Facebook friends right from my Blackberry. Instead of having to keep track of their contact information in a separate app, I’d like an app that ties my Facebook friends and their contact info together in a seamless way.

This shouldn’t be that hard to implement. A user could have a simple configuration option where all click-to-call requests from “friends” would be routed to a number of their choosing (cell, mobile, voip, etc).

I think this would be a great way for Facebook to continue to extend their presence on mobile phones and reinforce the value of keeping your contact info up-to-date on Facebook.

In the United States, the mobile web is likely to continue to be about specialized applications and optimized sites rather than general web browsing. Unless someone builds the ultimate transcoder that can take any page from web to mobile seamlessly, I just don’t see a strong case for mobile browsing. If you can get a page to load over a decent-speed network, having it load in a non-navigable fashion is a really disappointing experience. If you’re going to wait for a page to load over a modest-speed network, it had better render properly and be navigable.

I am really surprised that so many articles such as this one focus on the technical and business impediments like data plans and slow networks. These things are very real, but I think the big issue for mass market adoption is really user experience and user interface. If mobile web experiences were cheaper and faster, I suppose people would be more willing to tolerate the poor state of affairs if you don’t have a QWERTY keyboard on your device. But if the interface paradigm were better, perhaps people would think differently about the price and speed issues endemic in the domestic mobile web.

Tags: mobile, mobileweb, blackberry, iphone

I would hate to see Microsoft buy RIM – I think the Blackberry is an iconic device and I’d hate to see a larger company saddle it with all of the bureaucracy, infighting, and internal competition for resources that would saddle the RIM division of Microsoft. Even worse, I’d hate to see Microsoft try to stick Windows Mobile on the Blackberry. Buying RIM would be tantamount to admitting that Windows Mobile just sucks and plain doesn’t work.

Ironically, I think that admitting that Windows Mobile doesn’t work and isn’t very good would be a very liberating thing for Microsoft to do. I have no idea how many engineers, product managers, and business development people they have working on making Windows Mobile a viable OS, but I bet their energies could be better directed elsewhere. Perhaps admitting defeat and starting over would allow the company to take a fresh look at building a new mobile OS. Who better to further the future of a closed, single vendor device than Microsoft? I can only think of one company, and they already have the iPhone…

Keep RIM independent unless it goes to a better home. I’ll have more to say on this later.

Whenever I hear people champion the inherent value of “openness” I think about what openness hath wrought. I’ll take a closed, single-vendor solution from Blackberry or Apple where I know whose fault it is when my device doesn’t work over an open device that doesn’t get the job done.

And the guys at Gizmodo certainly don’t seem to feel that the new Q9m from Verizon is much of an improvement over the old black Q I’ve been using for the past few days.

If US broadband penetration tops out in the 50-60 percent range in the near term, that means that about half of the country doesn’t see fit to have Internet access at home. If they can live without it at home, I bet they can live without it on the go as well. Unless prices come down on the mobile data side, I’m not sure why an increasing number of people will want to spend more on an expensive, slow connection?

Without a great low-end device that can expose “the masses” (or normal people) to the joys of data in a cost-effective way, I don’t see why the market for mobile data will grow quickly.

After reading all of the early iPhone reviews, I’m convinved the iPhone team would be nuts to focus on matching all of the high-end features that the Blackberry offers to corporate clients. We already know how large that market is and I doubt the iPhone would grow the pie. The only interesting thing to see is whether a lower-end iPhone with a good data plan and a better network would drive mass adoption. The consumer market has yet to see the combination of a great device, a reasonable hardware price point, a strong nationwide carrier, and a sensible data plan. The closest we’ve seen to that nirvana is the Sidekick, whch I’d argue struggles more from being restricted to T-Mobile than anything else. Cult status is the best you can hope for given that the device is restricted to the #4 carrier in the United States. The Blackberry Pearl is great, too, but I don’t hear anyone making the Pearl vs iPhone argument in a convincing fashion. Apple is in a great position to make this happen, if they focus and get the price point down.

To get specific, I think the device needs to be below $200 in price, with a data plan in the sub $20 per month range for unlimited usage, and be offered on one of the top two networks.

The one wildcard in this whole thing is what major corporations decide to do. If more companies put good, data-capable devices in the hands of a wider base of employees. Putting devices in their hands would also include picking up the tab for the data connection. If this were to happen, we might see something akin to what happened with landline broadband – consumer adoption driven by a combination of low prices and employer subsidies.

Simulscribe’s basic value proposition is very simple. If someone calls you on the phone and you aren’t able to pick up, the caller’s voicemail message gets transcribed into text and I get an email with the transcribed text and a WAV file of the actual recording. It works as advertised, even if the setup process is a bit clunky.

Getting Started
My only real gripe with Simulscribe is the getting started process. To sign up for Simulscribe, I went to their web form, put in my phone number, carrier, and some basic billing information. After signing up, I got an email from Simulscribe with registration instructions. To get the system configured, I had to enter a 14-digit code into my phone to basically enable voicemail forwarding to the Simulscribe service. I then called a number that Simulscribe provided and recorded a new voice greeting for callers and set up my voicebox. My sense is that these steps would have deterred an average user, but the branding on the site leads me to believe that they are really shooting for the smartphone set.

User Experience
When callers try to reach me and get routed to voicemail, they get a prompt that tells them their voicemail message will be transcribed by Simuslcribe.com. After they leave a message, I get an email with both a text transcription of the message as well as an attached WAV file of the actual message. So far, the transcription has been excellent — all of the messages that I have received were transcribed verbatim. My only gripe is that I can’t actually listen to the WAV files when I get the text on my Blackberry Pearl – that option only seems to work well on the computer.

Overall, I think that Simulscribe is a good product. I am not yet sure that I am willing to pay the $9.95 monthly fee (it only includes 40 messages) and $0.25 per additional message. That seems high and I would encourage the company to look at an all-you-can-transcribe fee that would give me more control — sadly, I can’t meter how many people want to leave me messages. Why not bump up the price a bit and give me all I can eat? 40 messages per month just ends up being 1.3 messages per day – that’s not a lot for a heavy phone user.

Update
After a full day of using the service and exchanging several emails with Simulscribe’s customer service, I have to say that they have really good customer service. I would also have to say that this service has solved two other problems that I had basically assumed were unsolvable. First, I have always had to save important voicemail messages to retrieve important phone numbers or as a voice to-do list of people to call back and things to do. I would have loved a better way to manage my voicemail messages other than save the ones that need to be addressed – eventually you run out of voicemail space.

If you use your carrier-provided voicemail service, I think the most kind thing I can say about the UI is that it is not completely broken. Trying to move between messages, search for a particular message, or otherwise navigate the modern voicemail box is just an awful experience. I have been really looking for a better way to index and search my voicemail and to keep messages longer than Cingular’s deletion policies allow. Instead of waiting for someone to design a better voicemail system, I love the fact that the Simulscribe team has built a product that allows me to move from a medium that’s not designed for search and retrieval (my voicemail inbox) to one that is optimized for that (my Gmail inbox). I finally have the nirvana of being able to save voicemail messages and search them just like I do with email.

2.  Now that I am fully re-adjusted to the SureType, I didn’t like the angle of the keys on the 8800. I saw no reason to trade up in terms of device side in order to get a full QWERTY keyboard.

3. If I am going to carry a device that large, it had better have WiFi and a camera. Otherwise, you’re just carrying a big PDA. The best thing about the Pearl is that it doesn’t look like you’re talking on a computer when you take a call.

If you switched from the Pearl to the Blackberry 8800 and want to educate me on why it’s a good idea, leave me a comment.