He says that both were connected to the same Wi-Fi network, but the possibility didn't occur to him that he might have to manually configure the web browser to use the already established Wi-Fi connection, which is a poor design choice, if true. He also says he didn't disable cellular data to be absolutely sure, because turning that off apparently also turns off Wi-Fi.

In his later test of the two phones, iPhone's EDGE to Bold's 3G, the iPhone still comes out on top, "albeit by a reduced margin," which definitely points to some rendering slowness on the Bold's part. He's going to re-run the Wi-Fi tests to be absolutely sure they were performed correctly. Takeaway: The Bold does render pages more slowly than the iPhone, but it's not draggy enough to go get a snack while you're waiting or anything.

With both running on Wi-Fi and a cleared cache, in a test using Slashdot, the iPhone is actually able to open an entirely new page before the Bold finishes with the first one. The Bold renders everything correctly, it just takes a looooong time to do it. The Bold's got some fairly heavy duty hardware though, so an update from RIM could always give the browser a jolt. [Mobile Computer Mag via jkOntheRun]

Price seems to be the blurriest bit of info, possibly because it isn't totally set yet. For instance, TmoNews, who has a more proven record, says it might be $150 for upgraders. (One scenario: It's $150 for pre-orders, $200 for eligible people with new two-year contracts. But that seems a little overly complicated.) Monthly plans will be $35 w/ unlimited data/messaging or $25 for unlimited data/400 messages. Most of this sounds about right—not too far off the mark, anyway. [TmoWorld]

The bottom line is that email services on consumer phones are getting better all the time, and you can still pick up a phone like the Blackberry Pearl with email at a value that makes wasting money on a second gadget like the Peek unnecessary—even if the service is stellar. So, what do you think—does the Peek stand a chance? [Peek via Silicon Alley Insider]

It has a Centro-style keyboard, except bigger, and it feels good, but not great. The flush touchscreen is about as responsive as previous offerings and the 320x320 resolution looks bright and crisp. The 3G internet operates at full speed and call quality is nice and clear. Other features like GPS seem on par with that on the 800w, though Palm's own chat-style SMS interface is missing this time around. Palm is selling the phone without a carrier, opting for the unlocked route (win!). And like the Palm 800w, the hardware seems more than adequate to run WIndows Mobile 6.1. Check out the pics, and check back soon for a full review. [Palm@Giz]

The full leaked list (including cities recently launched):

Baltimore - Aug 18th
Houston – Aug 19th
Minneapolis – Aug 20th
San Diego – Sept 15th
Los Angeles – Sept 16th
Phoenix – Sept 16th
Sacramento – Sept 17th
Portland – Sept 18th
Seattle – Sept 23rd
San Francisco – Sept 24th

The remainder of the list of rumored 2008 cities is the same group from April:

Atlanta
Birmingham
Chicago
Dallas
Denver
Detroit
Kansas City
Memphis
Miami
New England
Orlando
Philadelphia
Tampa
Washington, D.C.

Almost there, urban T-Mobilers. [Cellphone Signal via BGR]

The photos were found on a new iPhone shipped to the UK, and one of the pictures was even set as the home screen. Aaaaaaadorable! [MacRumors Forums]

Insiders always start by attacking Motorola's corporate culture, formed decades ago when radio was the company's bread-and-butter. Motorola made its bones building end-to-end systems—not just hardware, but the infrastructure that supports it. That, in turn, has led to a culture in which engineers reign supreme, and are allowed to sneer at their more right-brain-inclined colleagues. Marketers? Designers who focus on usability as opposed to circuitry? At Motorola, they're peons.

"There's this amazing wealth of engineering talent, but there's no system for harnessing that talent for the good of the consumer," says one former Motorola executive. The men in the R&D labs are permitted to indulge their flights of fancy, many of which center on fine-tuning antennas to optimize reception. Meanwhile, no one pays much attention to more prosaic fundamentals such as reliable software.

Another Motorola departee told Gizmodo that the company group charged with consumer research has been marginalized by the engineers, who dismiss its concerns—and, to a large extent, its very existence—as inconsequential. "With the engineers," he said, "there's this attitude of, "I create—what do you do? You pick out colors?'"

The engineers could theoretically be kept in check by corporate managers, but few suits are bold enough to act. A Motorola insider noted that long-serving managers have "deity status" at the company—no matter how many of their products flop, they never suffer repercussions.

The RAZR, a design victory as much as an engineering one, only came about due to the gumption of chief marketing office Geoffrey Frost. Following the RAZR's overnight success, Moto commissioned an in-house team to research the company's next step. Countless hours were spent pulling together focus-group studies and carrier feedback, but it was all for naught—the research was simply ignored by Motorola's top brass. "They have this attitude of, 'Well, I've built phones for 20 years, I know what I'm doing," says a frustrated member of that team, who noted that once Frost died in 2005, there was no one left with the chops and political capital to route around Moto's stick-in-the-mud managers.

Motorola's managerial bumbling has resulted in severe cultural malaise—a condition made worse by the mobile unit's location in the deep Chicago suburbs, hardly a place awash in creative energy. (Few 22-year-old design wunderkinds are willing to forego the Bay Area in favor of Libertyville.)

Keep in mind, too, that Motorola was the birthplace of Six Sigma, a methodology meant to eliminate product defects. But Six Sigma was created in 1986, well before the era of ubiquitous cellphones; its focus is engineering, not end-user experience. The methodology is therefore unequipped to address many of the shortcomings that have irked so many customers.

Take, for example, the navigation joystick on the ill-fated first-gen ROKR. It looked cool and worked as intended, but not without minor headaches: The joystick was a hair too sensitive, making it too easy to scroll past your music selection. Or take the Q—relatively powerful, but why in heaven's name didn't it auto-capitalize address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste? Sure these may strike you as minor details, but minor details make the difference in a competitive handset market. And Motorola's aging quality-control program wasn't designed to catch such annoying foibles.

Six Sigma and its companion product-development methodology, dubbed "M-Gates," both stress caution in the name of quality. But when it comes to innovation, there's certainly such a thing as too much wariness. In planning its software path after the RAZR's smashing success, Motorola knew (to its credit) that its Synergy OS was antiquated. But instead of developing a worthy successor, the company decided to wait around for Windows Mobile, ostensibly because it was a sure thing. Big mistake, as we all now know. Motorola next turned to Linux, which has never lived up to expectations. That's left the company scrambling for replacements, a panic that has led to the striking of numerous deals with potential software partners—"throwing darts at a board," as one former Motorola employee put it. It's also meant that different generations of the same phone end up running completely different software—the RAZR2 3G, for example, runs on the old P2K OS, while the 2.5G variant uses Linux. Both are painfully slow.

Motorola can still find the way forward—this is, after all, a company that's long done wondrous things in the lab. Surely it can figure out how to make its software work more fluidly, or realize that consumers actually care about such "trifling" issues as external volume rockers and intuitive menus.

Ex-employees are nearly unanimous in stating that bringing on Sanjay Jha as co-CEO (and designated handset-division savior) is a reasonable gamble. It's been clear for months now that CEO Greg Brown is in way over his head. "He has no idea how to run a consumer electronics business," grumbles one critic, adding that Brown's previous job was at an enterprise software company. While Jha is well regarded for his operational prowess and sheer intelligence, it's worth noting that he's fresh off a 14-year run at Qualcomm. Did chipmaking really prepare Jha to address the needs of Joe Sixpack consumers?

Our contacts contend that Jha's rescue plan needs to focus on two important areas—one technical, the other cultural. First, the company needs to streamline its wireless development, so that phone models are designed in conjunction with one another—thereby ending the lunacy of different generations featuring different (and inadequate) software. Second, there needs to be a reconciliation between the engineering heroes and the consumer research folks, who are currently out in the wilderness.

That can happen if Motorola opens its eyes to the very real design problems that plague generation after generation of its handsets. But does the company's leadership have the will to really shake things up? Some curmudegeonly engineers and managers are going to resist with every fiber of their beings. May the Force be with you, Mr. Jha.

Gizmodo columnist Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and author of the Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II.

The move shouldn't be all that surprising if you kept up with the 700 MHz spectrum auction earlier this year. During the auction, Cox dropped $304 million for its piece of the wireless pie. Esser noted that the company plans on investing a total of $500 million in wireless spectrum before all is said and done. No doubt they will need every penny (and probably more) if they want to make a mark in the highly competitive wireless business. [PC Mag]

"Here honey, this is the new iPhone!"
"Why does it say Windows Mobile on it?"
*CHOKES HER*

Apologies for the spoilers. [Gemini Division via Screen Junkies]

0:02: Main menu is contained in a drawer that slides from the bottom of the screen
0:08: Multiple home screens can be flipped with touch gestures, a la the iPhone
0:20: Icons can be dragged from the main menu to build customized home screens. Dragging to the menu drawer trashes the home screen shortcut
0:38: Dialer screen, followed by the call behavior. Calls can continue in the background, and all functions that don't require data transfer can work concurrently (This is currently a software regulation, as 3g networks should theoretically allow for simultaneous voice and data usage).
0:53: Ongoing calls and other notifications can be accessed by dragging the taskbar down.
1:20: Browser displays Gizmodo. Rendering is quite good, page navigation is a fairly intuitive rehash of current touch-control schemes. It's not terrible good at guessing column widths during double-tap zooming, but seems very usable. Preview magnification feature is useful for smaller screens or text-heavy pages.
2:22: "Tabbed" browsing feature lays out a grid of pages, with previews
2:45: Google Maps app. As you can see, this is among the more polished apps, and will feel familiar to anyone who has used Google Maps on the desktop or mobile devices.
3:30: Google Maps Street View.
4:00: Home screen include widgets (Google Search, a clock and a picture frame are the only ones for now) that can be dragged around the home screen(s).
4:23: The music apps relies on a panel of icons (a recurring theme in Android)
4:30: Message composition is unremarkable, but there is no sign of an on-screen keyboard at the moment. This could be a customization catered the the first round of Android phones, at least one of which will have a slide-out keyboard.
5:12: The camera naturally doesn't work in the emulator, but there are currently very few options in its menus.
5:50: Wallpaper switching. This is one of the few areas where Android excels aesthetically. Wallpaper scrolls as home screens are switched, but at a slower rate that the icons. This creates a convincing illusion of depth.
6:11: The home screen can also be modified via the system menu, where you can choose to add applications, widgets and shortcuts, as well as change the wallpaper.

It's hard to pass judgment on Android in the condition it's in. What's there is impressive, but there are so many glaring omissions, at least from a consumer standpoint. There is a fantastic system for managing ongoing calls and system messages (via the pull-down taskbar) but no apps to take advantage of it. Email and IM would suit such a configuration beautifully, but neither is included in this release. And seriously, where is the calendar? The organizer? A video app? Youtube support?

Sure, these things could be left to the developer community, but Google already has messaging, email, video and calendar services, so it's reasonable to expect that they be included by default in Android. Before a public release, Android should at least possess a feature set comparable to your average candy bar phone, courtesy of Google, so that the eager open-source development community can devote their effort to creating new, innovative apps and modifications for the OS.

Objections aside, the progress is promising. In terms of usability, Android is much easier to navigate and customize than virtually all other mobile solutions. With a few more apps, Android will be a clear choice over Windows Mobile, skinned or not. You can download the SDK and play with the emulator yourself, if you want. Just a word of warning, though — explaining to your family or significant other that you're testing an emulated prerelease of an upcoming mobile OS is about as hard as it sounds. [Google Android, Android on Giz]

Update: As people pointed out in the comments, the download goes to the old 6.0 ROM for some reason. Probably a mixup by HTC, so it should be fixed soonish?

[SDK Download and Release Notes Thanks Jeff!]

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Wikime: Hands down my favorite app of the week, Wikime takes a location reading and then queries Wikipedia's large list of geotagged articles, showing you info relevant to where you are at that very moment. It pulled a huge list of great articles for my Brooklyn neighborhood, and it's customizable to search within a given radius or search non-English Wikipedias. Awesome stuff for touring, or just learning more about your city, especially if you live in a large metro area with lots of tagged articles. And it's a buck.

Photocalc: For folks like me that still enjoy pulling out—gasp—film-based cameras every now and then, Photocalc is a great tool for doing the types of number crunching that we've grown so accustomed to letting our digicams handle that we don't even think about anymore. Even if you shoot mostly digital, this is a fun way to learn a lot of basics like depth of field calculation and exposure compensation ratios that will make you a better photographer, no matter what you're shooting with. $3 [via Gadget Lab]

Beijing Taxi Guide: If you're in town for the Olympics, first, stop reading Gizmodo. But if you're here (we love you too) and you've got Great Firewall Web, grab the Beijing Taxi Guide. It has a searchable directory of over 1,000 popular destinations picked by real people (not Frommers), and offers your cabby big, bold directions on how to get there. It works entirely offline (no roaming data), and will be updated by the devs constantly with new locations. Let's see some location-based searching, maybe? $5

More apps we looked at on Giz this week:

• Tris is Tetris, the best game to play while waiting in line, period. Free.
• Astro Ranch is a Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing clone that's in the works.
• Simplify Media streams your home iTunes library along with 30 of your friends' collections to your iPhone.
• Frotz is a text-based game emulator, for kicking it Tandy style.
• MotionX Poker remains the coolest real-physics dice simulator poker game, but now you can grab those realistic tumbling dice for free, sans game. Great for impromptu gambling.
• And, of course, the painful conclusion to the "I Am Rich" saga.

More news and apps from the novelty bin:

• GoBang Master is a Go/Othello hybrid. $2
• Freebird is the best novelty image app yet. Flash a lighter for Skynyrd, glowstick for Darude, or a candle for that renaissance lutist. Free
• Beer Counter will track your consumption as you get shitfaced. Free
• Box Office, one of our first favorite apps, is now back as "Now Playing" after being mysteriously yanked (probably for a trademark violation with the name). Phew. Still Free.

And here's a category that's been getting a lot of love in the store this week: baby apps.

Baby Tracker: Nursing: Sports timers for keeping track of when junior was last nursed, and on which side and for how long. I am not quite in the mood yet to know if this is necessary or not (some reviewers with more experience are saying it's unnecessary) but hey, if you're going to over-parent, why not do it with an iPhone! Oh, and it has a nice icon. $10.

Bishop's Score Calc: For DIY gynos, you can tell if you're about to go into labor or not with this Bishop's Score calculator. Something tells me, between the doctor and, oh, I don't know, the baby trying to get out, you won't need an iPhone for this information. Eww. $1

Pregnancy Kick Counter: Yep, pretty self-explanatory. Monitor junior as he practices Muay Thai in the womb. $5

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. Have a good weekend everybody.

And at this moment, Dell has 120 engineers completing an iTunes competitor that has one thing on its side: Everyone.

Because apparently, Dell intends to share their platform, allowing multiple services and devices to use it. So if you download music from Amazon, that's fine. And if you want to put that music on your cellphone, alright. DRM will still be an issue, of course, but otherwise their platform doesn't care—according to Business Week, Dell just wants an open market where everyone who's not named after a fruit can get a piece of the action.

Look for the Zing software to be on low-priced notebooks as early as September, with more devices to follow soon. The question that still seems unanswered, at least in our interpretation, is whether or not Dell will be distributing this "open" software to products beyond Dell PCs. And that's a key point if they even want to consider challenging the biggest music distribution system in the world today. [BusinessWeek]

A brainwave measuring technology like electroencephalography records your thoughts, and a speech recognition system would decode the signals into words. The words would then be sent to the receiver using a different system "pointed in their direction." Presumably this is some form of radio, but since it's basically an EEG reading, one could imagine it being sent over the internet or via cellphone. Might even help you cut down on your minutes, but don't let your thoughts wander while you're talking to your girlfriend.

The scientists say that such a system will require a ton of training and will only send very specific messages at first, but over time the system will improve. This sounds like a pretty revolutionary step in communication, and one that will likely lead to many embarrassing results if it is every widely implemented. Would it be worth it to you to read everyone's thoughts if everyone could read yours? [Physorg via KurzweilAI]