The 2009 Intel Developer Forum: Mobile Electronics Hands-On Highlights and Humdrum

I’m still digesting everything I absorbed this week at IDF, as well as digging out from all the other daily cyber- and physical-correspondence that queued up while I was conference-focused, so stay tuned for a series of writeups to come starting next week. However, for now, I thought I’d share some impressions on a few battery-operated devices I had a chance to test while on my trip.

A 32 GByte Microsoft Zune HD showed up right before I took off for my road trip to a weekend in San Diego prior to heading back up to San Francisco on Monday. As such, I had a chance to give it quite a workout over the past week. It sync’d up with my Dell laptop just fine; I’d automatically been prompted to upgrade my copy of the Zune software from v3 to v4 before the unit arrived. And upon initial device connection, I was subsequently prompted to update the device firmware from v3 to v3.1. I copied over a bunch of tracks, both DRM-free and subscription-based (therefore DRM-inclusive), and I subsequently pulled a few more albums’ worth of material from the Zune Marketplace through the unit’s built-in Wi-Fi facilities. I also downloaded (but have not yet run) all of the available applications for the device.

There’s a lot to like about the Zune HD. Its Nvidia Tegra-fueled graphical user interface is slick and (largely) user intuitive. Its built-in web browser works well and brings the device to feature-parity (at least on this particular feature) with the iPod touch. The OLED display is crisp, except in direct-sunlight usage environments when it gets washed out. It feels sturdily constructed, and its form factor and weight make it easy to stick in a shirt pocket and tote around. Its battery life is excellent. And its HD Radio facilities are very cool…San Francisco-area station 103.7 (KKSF ‘The Band’), for example, simultaneously broadcasts two subchannels’ worth of material, and my reception across the FM spectrum wasn’t noticeably degraded by the potentially signal-blocking and multipath-creating tall buildings around me.

But…(there are always a few ‘buts’, aren’t there?)…

• There are annoying playback gaps in-between DRM-inclusive tracks, presumably due to DRM decode latencies. I have two prior-generation Zunes, a 4 GByte flash memory-based unit and an 80 GByte HDD-based model, and neither one exhibits this flaw
• Speaking of prior-generation models, I’m more than a bit flabbergasted that Microsoft is end-of-lifeing them in conjunction with the Zune HD introduction. Apple still has, in addition to the iPod touch, the flash memory-based iPod nano and HDD-based iPod classic. Why isn’t Microsoft following a similar multi-product, multi-price point, multi-feature set strategy? Among other things, my ripped music library barely fits in my 80 GByte unit; shoehorning it into a 32 GByte model isn’t feasible.
• And speaking of my prior-generation experiences, as cool as the Zune HD’s touch-enabled user interface is, I really miss the physical buttons of previous-generation models (much as I wouldn’t trade the physical keyboard of my T-Mobile G1 mobile phone for the virtual-only variant in the follow-on MyTouch 3G). I do a lot of listening while I’m in the car, and the need to constantly look down at the unit’s display in order to adjust the volume, advance to the next track or otherwise manipulate the stored content archive is annoying not to mention dangerous.
• Finally, Microsoft needs to get its partner network fired up and cranking out cases, screen protectors and other accessories. The current dearth of such things is bizarre.

Late yesterday afternoon when nearly home, I got stuck in mostly-stopped traffic for over an hour going over Donner Summit, due to highway 80 road construction delays. I’d exhausted the material stored on the Zune HD, and my other Zunes were buried in back-seat luggage, so I decided to try streaming audio through my iPhone’s cellular data facilities. I fired up Pandora and was pleasantly surprised at how good the resultant experience was. Keep in mind that we’re talking about a remote rural setting here; T-Mobile hasn’t upgraded its regional network beyond archaic, low bit rate 2G GPRS yet! And high mountain peaks in the area also tend to cause cellular signal impermanence. With that all said, my playback was almost completely glitch-free; not particularly high fidelity, mind you, but between the ambient road noise and the fact that I was using an FM transmitter to mate the iPhone’s headphone jack to my car’s sound system, the sound quality was acceptable. Admittedly, too, the Pandora app’s audio decoding, coupled with the always-active cellular data subsystem, depleted the iPhone’s battery at a noticeably rapid rate. To wit, I’m annoyed that I can’t seem to be able to couple the iPhone to a ‘cigarette lighter’ battery charging unit without injecting unacceptable noise into the handset’s audio output.

Unfortunately, my iPhone-based GPS testing wasn’t nearly as positive. I’d printed out San Diego-to-San Francisco Google Maps directions before leaving on my trip but later decide to take a different route to the City By The Bay. My San Diego friend has real-time turn-by-turn GPS capabilities built into her BlackBerry, so inspired by her example I decided to follow a similar navigation path, beginning in Silicon Valley. Everything was fine until I exited the freeway and entered downtown San Francisco, at which point the GPS completely lost its mind, forcing me to pull to the side of the street and call my destination for directions. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that since my iPhone 3G is jailbroken, I’m running the donations-accepted xGPS instead of a commercial package. But I don’t think that software is the problem; instead, I believe that the iPhone’s GPS hardware lost satellite lock due to the close-proximity tall buildings that surrounded me. Similar-or-not results feedback from those of you in similar usage situations is greatly appreciated.

Happy weekend, everyone!