Smartphones

If you're Yahoo, looking at a landscape where Google Search and Microsoft's Bing app pretty much have search sewn up, how do you get noticed? You try something a little eccentric.

The free Yahoo Sketch-a-Search app does what the name implies, letting your fingertip inscribe a shape on the map that will become your searching area. Maybe you want to avoid a certain area, or search for businesses in a wider pattern. Pressing the green button on the graphically rich interface engages the map, and you're free to doodle away on the native Google map. The location-aware app preloads your map based on your current location, but you can easily switch to a different city.

Searches are limited to restaurants, coffee shops, and some hotels for the moment, but Yahoo plans to expand to other local categories, like gyms, gas stations, pet stores, retail shops, and even real estate, like apartments. You can filter search results by star rating and restaurant category--we expect to see this expand when the categories grow.

Just for fun, we tried defining a search area in the shape of stars and letters of the alphabet. The app's algorithms failed to identify any searches in the area. Although that's a ding in our eyes, it's not very realistic that anyone will actually need to seek Moroccan eateries in an area shaped like the letter J. Right now, Sketch-a-Search covers only U.S. cities, but Yahoo plans to include the UK, Canada, and parts of Asia in future.… Read more

No one enjoys being locked down to a carrier contract, but it's often a necessary evil to get discounted prices on handsets. However, if you refuse to be tied down and can afford to get an unlocked phone, two of the top devices that money can buy are the Nexus One and the HTC HD2.

Both smartphones offer high-end features, such as luxurious touch screens, 1GHz processors, and advanced cameras, so, naturally, we had to throw the two into the Prizefight ring. See who comes out swinging in our Nexus One versus HTC HD2 prizefight.

CNET's cell phone crew has been on the ground in Las Vegas covering CTIA 2010 since Monday, and, boy, did we have plenty to cover! Here's a brief overview of the news that broke on the first day of CTIA 2010:

Palm Pre Plus, Pixi Plus headed to AT&T

AT&T snags a Dell Android phone, the Dell Aero

Nextel goes Android with Motorola i1

LG Remarq is LG's new eco-friendly phone

Kyocera launches the Zio M6000, Kyocera's first Android phone

Verizon unveils the LG Cosmos

AT&T execs want more spectrum… Read more

Just to get it out of the way, Mozilla had no official news to share at CTIA 2010 in Las Vegas. That didn't stop us from catching up with Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile, to lay a finger on the pulse of Firefox's browser for mobile phones. (After all, why should Opera have all the fun?)

Mozilla continues to actively develop for Nokia's Maemo/MeeGo platform, the host of the first-ever Firefox for Mobile 1.0. The problem is that Firefox is far from being widely available in its cell phone-friendly form, extensions and all. … Read more

Back in February, we read between the lines of a joint Skype and Verizon announcement to deduce that a much-coveted Skype app for BlackBerry was in the works. On Tuesday at CTIA 2010, the two companies took the podium again with a hard release date to share. Luckily, some Blackberry--and Android users--will only have to wait until Thursday to get the new Skype Mobile on their smartphones.

We say "some" phone owners and not "all" because at launch, Skype Mobile will only be available for nine handsets on Verizon's network: the BlackBerry Storm series, Curve series, and Tour; and the Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris, and Morotola Devour, (which also launches Thursday in Verizon stores.) Skype and Verizon anticipated expanding the app to other phone models and platforms in the future.

We got a chance to demo Skype Mobile after the press conference. As far as features go, it's slimmer than Skype on other mobile platforms, sticking to the bare basics of calling and instant messaging. One unique implementation lets you import contacts from the phone's native address book, a plus. Other than that, the app shows your Skype Mobile history and can update the status and mood you broadcast to others. However, you'll be disappointed if you look for goodies like file transferring, SMS, and Skype voice mail support at this stage.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--To no one's surprise, Sprint kicked off CTIA 2010 here by announcing its first 4G phone. The HTC Evo 4G is not only the carrier's first WiMax cell phone--previously the carrier only has offered 4G laptop cards and the Samsung Mondi--but also the first commercially available 4G handset with a major U.S. carrier. The Evo runs Google Android OS 2.1; finally, a new Android phone meets the world with the latest Android OS available.

From the outset, the Evo is an attractive touch-screen device that closely resembles the HTC HD2. We got a taste of the Evo's candy bar design when photos of the HTC Supersonic leaked in late January. And in the end, the final product doesn't stray far from those initial impressions.

The massive 4.3-inch display is quite a looker. Its rich resolution and color support make for a pleasant browsing experience. The touch screen also appeared to be accurate and responsive in our brief hands-on. Below the display are four touch controls for the home screen, main menu, search, and backing out of a page. There's physical navigation control, but that's fine since we rely on the touch screen for most navigation anyway.

… Read more

LAS VEGAS--A new Android smartphone from Samsung will be making its way to North America, as well as other parts of the world, this summer. Dubbed the Samsung Galaxy S, the device was introduced at CTIA 2010 and includes features that boast the multimedia and social experience of the phone.

To start, the Galaxy S boasts a 4-inch Super AMOLED touch screen, which we first saw on the Samsung Wave at Mobile World Congress. Unlike regular AMOLED screens, the Super AMOLED screen places touch sensors right on top of the AMOLED screen, which eliminates the need for an additional touch sensor panel, removes air gaps, and improves touch sensitivity. It's also less reflective so the screen should be easier to see indoors and outdoors and has wider viewing angles.

The Galaxy S is ideal for viewing video and photos. The president of Samsung's mobile communications business said that the company will work with content partners to make full-length movies and TV shows available on the Galaxy S as well as e-books and magazines. You will be able to play back HD videos at 720p resolution, and a 1GHz processor is onboard to ensure things run smoothly. … Read more

We admit it: when we first heard that Opera was creating a browser for iPhone, we wondered if the browser company was bluffing to prove a point, namely, to pressure Apple into accepting a browser to compete with Safari. Yet Opera followed through on Tuesday, submitting Opera Mini 5 to the iPhone App Store. Before Opera submitted, we got a chance to play with the final version of Opera Mini on one of Opera's iPhones.

Opera Mini 5 running on an iPhone looks and behaves almost identically to Opera Mini 5 on other mobile browsers, like Java and BlackBerry. The one major exception is the addition of session restore for iPhone, which will reload browsers from the previous session if you need to close and restart the browser. This is an important feature for a platform that runs only one third-party application at a time. Page caching was also notable on the demo version of Opera Mini for iPhone. Pressing the back arrow quickly surfaced the previous page without reloading it from scratch.

As interesting as these details might be, the real elephant in the room--the question perhaps being asked by those who follow Apple's submissions and rejections--is why Opera would go to lengths to submit a browser that has a high chance of never making it into the app store. Apple isn't known for approving browsers that aren't based on Webkit, which Opera Mini absolutely is not. Like many other iPhone apps, Opera wrote the back end of Mini using the Objective C programming language, Opera's founder and former CEO Jon von Tetzchner told CNET, and developed the front end "in our own little language." … Read more

With the recent release of DisplayMate Multimedia Edition for Mobile Displays, a battery of tests to measure the quality of portable screens--and apparently because I'm a glutton for punishment--I thought now would be the perfect time to bring five popular smartphones back to CNET Labs for a down-and-dirty comparison of their screen performance.

The five phones I chose to put through the ringer (ahem) are the Samsung Behold II, the Motorola Droid, the Apple iPhone 3GS, the HTC Nexus One by Google, and the Palm Pre Plus. These five were chosen because of their relative popularity and similar feature sets.

We used three different types of tests to evaluate each phone:

Scientific measurements: We used the Konica Minolta CS-200 ChromaMeter to test the maximum brightness, black level, and contrast ratio of each phone and reported numbers for each of these three tests.

Test pattern screens: We used several DisplayMate Mobile test patterns to test for color-tracking errors, 24-bit color, and font legibility, among others.

Real-world: Finally, we conducted real-world anecdotal testing using 3D games, photos, and a little tool I like to call "the Sun" to test the diffuse reflectance of each display.

All test screens were viewed within each phone's native gallery application. Some phones may handle pictures differently--and even improve them to some extent--outside the application. That said, we believe that testing within the respective gallery applications is still a viable test as this is where most users will view pictures on their phones.

In order to diminish potential repetition, I'll dive right into the details of how each phone performed; if you'd like to know more about our tests, you can binge off nerdy details in our "How we tested" section at the bottom of this article. Please note that this is an evaluation of each phone's screen performance and nothing else. Check out the full reviews of these phones to determine which is right for you. Also, DisplayMate recently conducted a more technically focused evaluation of the iPhone 3GS' and the Nexus One's screens that I recommend you take a look at.

The bottom line… Read more