I was disappointed when the phone failed to detect my 5GHz Wi-Fi network. This is like the iPhone, but the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Nexus support 5 Ghz, and I had assumed parity for the Razr.

Oddly, bearing in mind its dual core processor, the Droid Razr sometimes seems sluggish compared to the iPhone 4. But the Android user interface is polished and usable, and it has a significant user interface feature that the iPhone sorely lacks: a universal ‘back’ button. The ‘back’ button, like the ‘undo’ feature in productivity apps, fits with the way people work and learn: try something, and if that doesn’t work, try something else.

The Razr camera is currently unusable for me. The first photo I took had a 4 second shutter lag. On investigation, I found that if you hold the phone still, pointed at a static scene, it takes a couple of seconds to auto-focus. If you wait patiently for this to happen, watching the screen and waiting for the focus to sharpen, then press the shutter button, there is almost no shutter lag. But if you try to ‘point and shoot’ the shutter lag can be agonizingly long – certainly long enough for a kid to dodge out of the frame. This may be fixable in software, and if so, I hope Motorola gets the fix out fast.

While playing with the phone, I found it got warm. Not uncomfortably hot, but warm enough to worry about the battery draining too fast. Investigating this, I found a wonderful power analysis display, showing which parts of the phone are consuming the most power. The display, not surprisingly, was consuming the most – 35%. But the second most, 24%, was being used by ‘Android OS’ and ‘Android System.’ As the battery expired, the phone kindly suggested that it could automatically shut things off for me when the power got low, like social network updates and GPS. It told me that this could double my battery life. Even so, battery life does not seem to be a strength of the Droid Razr. Over a few days, I observed that even when the phone was completely unused, the battery got down to 20% in 14 hours, and the vast majority of the power was spent on ‘Android OS.’

So nice as the Droid Razr is, on balance I still prefer the iPhone.

P.S. I had a nightmare activation experience – I bought the phone at Best Buy and supposedly due to a failure to communicate between the servers at Best Buy and Verizon, the phone didn’t activate on the Verizon network. After 8 hours of non-activation including an hour on the phone with Verizon customer support (30 minutes of which was the two of us waiting for Best Buy to answer their phone), I went to a local Verizon store which speedily activated the phone with a new SIM.

Deciding on the contract, I was re-stunned to rediscover that Verizon charges $20 per month for SMS. I gave this a miss since I can just use Google Voice, which costs $480 less over the life of the contract.

The iPhone 4S even has some worse specifications than the iPhone 4. It is 3 grams heavier and its standby battery life is 30% less. The screen is no larger – it remains smaller than the standard set by the competition. On the other hand the user experience is improved in several ways: the phone is more responsive thanks to a faster processor; it takes better photographs; and Apple has taken yet another whack at the so-far intractable problem of usable voice control. A great benefit to Apple, though not so much to its users, is that the new Qualcomm baseband chip works for all carriers worldwide, so Apple no longer needs different innards for AT&T and Verizon (though Verizon was presumably disappointed that Apple didn’t add a chip for LTE support).

Since its revolutionary debut, the history of the iPhone has been one of evolutionary improvements, and the improvements of the iPhone 4S over the iPhone 4 are in proportion to the improvements in each of the previous generations. The 4S seems to be about consolidation, creating a phone that will work on more networks around the world, and that will remain reliably manufacturable in vast volumes. It’s a risk-averse, revenue-hungry version, as is appropriate for an incumbent leader.

The technical improvements in the iPhone 4S would have been underwhelming if it had been called the iPhone 5, but for a half-generation they are adequate. By mid-2012 several technologies will have ripened sufficiently to make a big jump.

First, Apple will have had time to move their CPU manufacturing to TSMC’s 28 nm process, yielding a major improvement in battery life from the 45 nm process of the current A5, which will be partially negated by the monstrous power of the rumored 4-core A6 design, though the Linley report cautions that it may not be all plain sailing.

Also by mid-2012 Qualcomm may have delivered a world-compatible single-chip baseband that includes LTE (aka ‘real 4G’).

But the 2012 iPhone faces a serious problem. It will continue to suffer a power, weight and thin-ness disadvantage relative to Samsung smartphones until Apple stops using LCD displays. Because they don’t require back-lighting, Super AMOLED display panels are thinner, lighter and consume less power than LCDs. Unfortunately for Apple, Samsung is the leading supplier of AMOLED displays, and Apple’s relationship with Samsung continues to deteriorate. Other LCD alternatives like Qualcomm’s Mirasol are unlikely to be mature enough to rely on by mid-2012. The mid-2012 iPhone will need a larger display, but it looks as though it will continue to be a thick, power hungry LCD.

Here’s the session description:

The communications market has been evolving to fixed high definition voice services for some time now, and nearly every desktop phone manufacturer is including support for G.722 and other codecs now. Why? Because HD voice makes the entire communications experience a much better one than we are used to.

But what does it mean for the wireless industry? When will wireless communications become part of the HD revolution? How will handset vendors, network equipment providers, and service providers have to adapt their current technologies in order to deliver wireless HD voice? How will HD impact service delivery? What are the business models around mobile HD voice?

This session will answer these questions and more, discussing both the technology and business aspects of bringing HD into the mobile space.

The panelists are:

• Jan Linden, VP Engineering, GIPS
• Jim Machi, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Dialogic Corporation
• Doug Makishima, COO & VP of Mobile & Personal Communications Business Unit, D2 Technologies, Inc.

This is a deeply experienced panel; each of the panelists is a world-class expert in his field. We can expect a highly informative session, so come armed with your toughest questions.

As Linley Gwennap said when he predicted the acquisition a month ago, the fit is natural. Intel needs 3G and LTE basebands, Infineon has no application processor.

Linley also pointed out Intel’s abysmal track record for acquisitions.

Intel has been through this movie before, for the same strategic reasons. It acquired DSP Communications in 1999 for $1.6 Bn. The idea there was to enter the cellphone chip market with DSP’s baseband plus the XScale ARM processor that Intel got from DEC. It was great in theory, and XScale got solid design wins in the early smart-phones, but Intel neglected XScale, letting its performance lead over other ARM implementations dwindle, and its only significant baseband customer was RIM.

In 2005, Paul Otellini became CEO; at that time AMD was beginning to make worrying inroads into Intel’s market share. Otellini regrouped – he focused in on Intel’s core business, which he saw as being “Intel Architecture” chips. But XScale runs an instruction set architecture that competes with IA, namely ARM. So rather than continuing to invest in its competition, Intel instead dumped off its flagging cellphone chip business (baseband and XScale) to Marvell for $0.6 Bn, and set out to create an IA chip that could compete with ARM in size, power consumption and price. Hence Atom.

But does instruction set architecture matter that much any more? Intel’s pitch on Atom-based netbooks was that you could have “the whole Internet” on them, including the parts that run only on IA chips. But now there are no such parts. Everything relevant on the Internet works fine on ARM-based systems like Android phones. iPhones are doing great even without Adobe Flash.

So from Intel’s point of view, this decade-later redo of its entry into the cellphone chip business is different. It is doing it right, with a coherent corporate strategy. But from the point of view of the customers (the phone OEMs and carriers) it may not look so different. They will judge Intel’s offerings on price, performance, power efficiency, wireless quality and how easy Intel makes it to design-in the new chips. The same criteria as last time.

Rethink Wireless has some interesting insights on this topic…

Each hardware and software has stronger and weaker points. The Apple wins on the subtle user interface ingredients that add up to delight. It is a more polished user experience. Lots of little things. For example I was looking at the clock applications. The Apple stopwatch has a lap feature and the Android doesn’t. I use the timer a lot; the Android timer copied the Apple look and feel almost exactly, but a little worse. It added a seconds display, which is good, but the spin-wheel to set the timer doesn’t wrap. To get from 59 seconds to 0 seconds you have to spin the display all the way back through. The whole idea of a clock is that it wraps, so this indicates that the Android clock programmer didn’t really understand time. Plus when the timer is actually running, the Android cutely just animates the time-set display, while the Apple timer clears the screen and shows a count-down. This is debatable, but I think the Apple way is better. The countdown display is less cluttered, more readable, and more clearly in a “timer running” state. The Android clock has a wonderful “desk clock” mode, which the iPhone lacks, I was delighted with the idea, especially the night mode which dims the screen and lets you use it as a bedside clock. Unfortunately when I came to actually use it the hardware let the software down. Even in night mode the screen is uncomfortably bright, so I had to turn the phone face down on the bedside table.

The EVO wins on screen size. Its 4.3 inch screen is way better than the iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen. The “retina” definition on the iPhone may look like a better specification but the difference in image quality is indistinguishable to my eye, and the greater size of the EVO screen is a compelling advantage.

The iPhone has far more apps, but there are some good ones on the Android that are missing on the iPhone, for example the amazing Wi-Fi Analyzer. On the other hand, this is also an example of the immaturity of the Android platform, since there is a bug in Android’s Wi-Fi support that makes the Wi-Fi Analyzer report out-of-date results. Other nice Android features are the voice search feature and the universal “back” button. Of course you can get the same voice search with the iPhone Google app, but the iPhone lacks a universal “back” button.

The GPS on the EVO blows away the GPS on the iPhone for accuracy and responsiveness. I experimented with the Google Maps app on each phone, walking up and down my street. Apple changed the GPS chip in this rev of the iPhone, going from an Infineon/GlobalLocate to a Broadcom/GlobalLocate. The EVO’s GPS is built-in to the Qualcomm transceiver chip. The superior performance may be a side effect of assistance from the CDMA radio network.

Incidentally, the GPS test revealed that the screens are equally horrible under bright sunshine.

The iPhone is smaller and thinner, though the smallness is partly a function of the smaller screen size.

The EVO has better WAN speed, thanks to the Clearwire WiMax network, but my data-heavy usage is mainly over Wi-Fi in my home, so that’s not a huge concern for me.

Battery life is an issue. I haven’t done proper tests, but I have noticed that the EVO seems to need charging more often than the iPhone.

Shutter lag is a major concern for me. On almost all digital cameras and phones I end up taking many photos of my shoes as I put the camera back in my pocket after pressing the shutter button and assuming the photo got taken at that time rather than half a second later. I just can’t get into the habit of standing still and waiting for a while after pressing the shutter button. The iPhone and the EVO are about even on this score, both sometimes taking an inordinately long time to respond to the shutter – presumably auto-focusing. The pictures taken with the iPhone and the EVO look very different; the iPhone camera has a wider angle, but the picture quality of each is adequate for snapshots. On balance the iPhone photos appeal to my eye more than the EVO ones.

For me the antenna issue is significant. After dropping several calls I stuck some black electrical tape over the corner of the phone which seems to have somewhat fixed it. Coverage inside my home in the middle of Dallas is horrible for both AT&T and Sprint.

The iPhone’s FM radio chip isn’t enabled, so I was pleased when I saw FM radio as a built-in app on the EVO, but disappointed when I fired it up and discovered that it needed a headset to be plugged in to act as an antenna. Modern FM chips should work with internal antennas. In any case, the killer app for FM radio is on the transmit side, so you can play music from your phone through your car stereo. Neither phone supports that yet.

So on the plus side, the EVO’s compelling advantage is the screen size. On the negative side, it is bulkier, the battery life is less, the software experience isn’t quite so polished.

The bottom line is that the iPhone is no longer in a class of its own. The Android iClones are respectable alternatives.

It was a tough decision, but I ended up sticking with the iPhone.

The certificate is dated December 28th 2009, the same date that the first smartphone was certified for 802.11n – the LG Veri/VS750. The VS750 Wi-Fi appears to be more advanced than the Samsung, since it is certified for short guard interval and WMM Power Save.

While these are the first phones to gain Wi-Fi certification for 802.11n, they may not be the first to market.

These are the drops before the deluge. Questions to chip suppliers have elicited mild surprise that there are still no Wi-Fi Alliance certifications for handsets with 802.11n. All the flagship chips from all the handset Wi-Fi chipmakers are 802.11n. Broadcom is already shipping volumes of its BCM4329 11n combo chip to Apple for the iTouch (and I would guess the new Apple tablet), though the 3GS still sports the older BCM4325.

Some fear that 802.11n is a relative power hog, and will flatten your battery. For example, a GSMArena report on the HD2 hack says:

There are several good reasons why Wi-Fi 802.11n hasn’t made its way into mobile phones hardware just yet. Increased power consumption is just not worth it if the speed will be limited by other factors such as under-powered CPU or slow-memory…

But is it true that 802.11n increases power consumption at a system level? In some cases it may be: the Slashgear report linked above says: “some users have reported significant increases in battery consumption when the higher-speed wireless is switched on.”

This reality appears to contradict the opinion of one of the most knowledgeable engineers in the Wi-Fi industry, Bill McFarland, CTO at Atheros, who says:

The important metric here is the energy-per-bit transferred, which is the average power consumption divided by the average data rate. This energy can be measured in nanojoules (nJ) per bit transferred, and is the metric to determine how long a battery will last while doing tasks such as VoIP, video transmissions, or file transfers.

For example, Table 1 shows that for 802.11g the data rate is 22 Mbps and the corresponding receive power-consumption average is around 140 mW. While actively receiving, the energy consumed in receiving each bit is about 6.4 nJ. On the transmit side, the energy is about 20.4 nJ per bit.

Looking at these same cases for 802.11n, the data rate has gone up by almost a factor of 10, while power consumption has gone up by only a factor of 5, or in the transmit case, not even a factor of 3.

Thus, the energy efficiency in terms of nJ per bit is greater for 802.11n.

Here is his table that illustrates that point:

The discrepancy between this theoretical superiority of 802.11n’s power efficiency, and the complaints from the field may be explained several ways. For example, the power efficiency may actually be better and the reports wrong. Or there may be some error in the particular implementation of 802.11n in the HD2 – a problem that led HTC to disable it for the initial shipments.

Either way, 2010 will be the year for 802.11n in handsets. I expect all dual-mode handset announcements in the latter part of the year to have 802.11n.

As to why it took so long, I don’t think it did, really. The chips only started shipping this year, and there is a manufacturing lag between chip and phone. I suppose a phone could have started shipping around the same time as the latest iTouch, which was September. But 3 months is not an egregious lag.

Rethink’s Matt Lewis cites improved performance and usability as driving forces, plus a change in the attitudes of carriers towards hot-spots. Wireless network operators now often have captive Wi-Fi networks and can use them to offload their cellular networks.

The upshot is a prediction of 300 million dual mode handsets to ship in 2011: 100% of the smartphone market plus high end feature phones.

The attach rate of Wi-Fi will continue to grow. By 2011 the effects of Bluetooth 3.0 will be kicking in, pushing Wi-Fi attachment towards 100% in camera phones and music phones in ensuing years.

The main new feature is the Alternate MAC/PHY (AMP), that lets Bluetooth piggyback on Wi-Fi for high speed data transfers. The way it works is that applications write to the traditional Bluetooth Profile APIs, and connections are negotiated using the traditional Bluetooth radio. But then for high-speed data transfers the system switches to a direct peer-to-peer Wi-Fi session. This enables things like bulk syncing of photos from your phone to your PC, or streaming uncompressed CD stereo audio to wireless loudspeakers.

I wrote about Bluetooth AMP before, wondering why it retained a dependency on Bluetooth radio. The answer is that in idle, listening mode waiting for activity, Bluetooth is more power efficient than Wi-Fi, while Wi-Fi is more power efficient for bulk data transfers. This makes Bluetooth’s other next big thing, LE (formerly Wibree), an interesting complement to AMP: for power efficiency Bluetooth devices will reside in two modes, very low power idle mode (LE), and Wi-Fi mode when transferring data.

The Bluetooth 3.0 specification talks about 802.11 rather than 11g or 11n, since 802.11n is not yet ratified, but some of the companies involved will be supporting draft 802.11n anyway.

From an industry point of view there are several interesting aspects to this announcement, among them:

• Atheros’ ascendence. Atheros, a leader in Wi-Fi, only recently got into the Bluetooth market, and currently only plays in the PC Bluetooth market. It dabbled in headset Bluetooth and got out, and has not yet announced Bluetooth for handsets. So Atheros is a minor player in Bluetooth, eclipsed by CSR and Broadcom, and several others. But Kevin Hayes of Atheros was the technical editor for the 802.11 Protocol Adaptation Layer of the Bluetooth 3.0 specification, and Atheros supplied the video and the demo of AMP at the 3.0 announcement event.
• Potential movement of Wi-Fi into feature phones. Handset makers slice the market into four main segments: ultra low cost phones, basic phones, feature phones and smart phones. Wi-Fi is now pretty much ubiquitous in new smartphones, but effectively absent in all other types of cell phone. But feature phones have music and cameras which generate exactly the data that Bluetooth 3.0 was designed to sync with PCs, so Bluetooth 3.0 provides a motivation to handset manufacturers to add Wi-Fi to their feature phones. This will vastly boost the Wi-Fi attach rate in 2010 and beyond.
• Another nail in the coffin of UWB (Ultra Wide-Band). In its original conception, AMP was to use WiMedia’s flavor of UWB. Later Wi-Fi was added to the mix, and now UWB is absent from the spec. UWB has so far failed to meet its performance expectations, and rather than fix it the WiMedia Alliance threw in the towel in March 2009. I suppose it is possible that the few companies still toiling away on fixing UWB will eventually overcome its performance woes, and that it will get adopted into the Bluetooth specification.

AT&T has a large network of Wi-Fi hotspots where iPhone users can get free Wi-Fi service. The iPhone VoIP announcement indicates that AT&T may be rolling out voice over Wi-Fi service for the iPhone. It will probably be SIP, rather than UMA, the technology that T-Mobile uses for this type of service. It is likely to be based on some flavor of IMS, especially since AT&T has recently been rumored to be spinning up its IMS efforts for its U-verse service, which happens to include VoIP. AT&T is talking about a June launch.

An advantage of the SIP flavor of Voice over Wi-Fi is that unlike UMA it can theoretically negotiate any codec, allowing HD Voice conversations between subscribers when they are both on Wi-Fi; wouldn’t that be great? The reference to the “Voice over IP service” in the announcement is too cryptic to determine what’s involved. It may not even include seamless roaming of a call between the cellular and Wi-Fi networks (VCC).

AT&T has several Wi-Fi smartphones in addition to the iPhone. They are mostly based on Windows Mobile, so they can probably be enabled for this service with a software download. The same goes for Blackberries. Actually, RIM may be ahead of the game, since it already has FMC products in the field with T-Mobile, albeit on UMA rather than SIP, while Windows Mobile phones are generally ill-suited to VoIP.