At today’s Apple’s press conference, Steve Jobs weighed in on his thoughts regarding devices with 4′” or larger screens. I acknowledged their disadvantages while being somewhat more positive about their long-term prospects in my most recent (and last for this rotation) RCR Wireless Analyst Angle column. The larger screen makes it one of the more comfortable Android devices for typing in portrait orientation.

I’ve been using the Droid X since its announcement on a daily basis and like the device. I’ve found that the battery life — a concern on the EVO 4G — has been good enough to last into the evening with moderate usage. This was about what I was seeing with the iPhone 3GS, but the iPhone 4 has trounced that by a significant margin. Of course, the Droid X — like most other handsets — has a removable battery. Among my favorite software features have been the Mobile Hotspot app and the DLNA capabilities, both unsupported features in iOS (although there are several third-party DLNA apps). I also liked Motorola’s suite of widgets (the new, more understated MOTOBLUR).

But the Droid X has its weaknesses. The bottom row of buttons are quite narrow and a bit stiff and the camera button is a bit inconsistent and mushy. The device’s display led me to dread traversing the display’s length for the ever-necessary Back button, which I preferred to the far left as on the original Droid (and not just because of the convenience when using the slide-out keyboard).  The Droid X pays an unwelcome homage to the RAZR by including a camera-hosting hump behind the top of the phone that resembles the infamous “chin” of Motorola’s once best-selling feature phone.

As I noted in my RCR Wireless column, the 4” display of the imminent Verizon Fascinate — based on the Galaxy S platform — will be a more agreeable compromise between screen size (and its screen is indeed extremely impressive) and portability. But the Fascinate will lack a few key specs that the Droid X can claim, including HDMI out and — more curiously — an LED flash. Speaking of which, despite having a higher megapixel count than the iPhone 4, Apple’s handset produces brighter photos with more saturated colors.

The Droid X is certainly a handful, but it’s fairly manageable, at least when you get used to it, at least for those with larger hands.

At launch, Acrobat lacked the ability to embed fonts whereas Common Ground could create a 300 dpi bitmap of a document. That of course was unacceptable for pro use, but I liked the concept for consumers. What’s more, the Mac version of Common Ground could generate a Windows executable with the document embedded. That was a pretty slick trick in the day, but one that would be unworkable today with all the fear regarding virus and malware.

Nowadays, the competition among formats has been replaced somewhat with the competition for readers and editors for PDF. I’ve been using Foxit Reader on machines where Acrobat Reader is either too slow or has been buggy (and yes, Acrobat Reader has gotten better.) There’s a promising new entrant, though, and that’s Nitro PDF Reader. Like the Foxit reader, Nitro’s reader is available only under Windows, but it looks and feels more like a modern Windows program, taking full advantage of Aero conventions and blending right in visually with Office. For fellow Evernote users, Nitro Software signed up as a partner for Trunk, an in-app app store that will offer products that can flow all kinds of content into the multi-platform multimedia note repository.

Uniquely among free Windows PDF readers, Nitro’s PDF Reader includes a print driver to generate PDFs, something that is of course built into Mac OS X and is handled well under Windows by free products such as PrimoPDF and CutePDF Writer, but it’s nice to have the option of one-stop shopping. Alas, if you’d like to combine multiple PDFs into one document, though, you must step up to Nitro Software’s full, professional package. Still, if you’re a Windows user, it’s worth considering as your main PDF reader.

The Bringrr device sits in your cigarette lighter and checks to see if your phone is nearby when you start the car. While the means are similar to those employed forget-me-not phone devices such as the versatile Zomm, the purpose is to notify you when you’ve forgotten to bring your phone rather than that you’ve left it behind. Bringrr also comes in a version that includes a USB charger for said phone or other device.

I have left my phone behind when I’ve meant to bring it in the vehicle on occasion, but it’s been a pretty rare occurrence, perhaps even less often than when I’ve left hone on foot. That said, car trips tend to be longer, of course, making it more of a hassle to hurry back for your personal radio-infused computer, and there aren’t a lot of pay phones on the open road.

Whenever I see products like the Modlet, I get to thinking about lighting and why it has been so difficult to get that part of the amorphous home automation market to take off. A huge part of it is, of course, the difficulty in doing retrofit installations. However, Zigbee radios are small. Isn’t there a way to embed them in the base of light bulbs themselves? If heat is an issue, I would think compact fluorescents or certainly LED lighting would alleviate that. While LED bulbs may be expensive, they are a pittance compared to the labor cost for an electrician to come in and install Zigbee controls in every wall switch.

But the branding of the deices will go beyond the model numbers used for the BlackBerry Curve on multiple carriers. Rather, they will each have distinct names and, in most cases, distinct industrial designs. On the verb camp are the Verizon Fascinate and AT&T Captivate while Sprint and T-Mobile have adopted adjective names with the Vibrant and Epic 4G. Yet they are all identified as Galaxy S smartphones.

Having checked out the phones for a bit earlier this week, I have a few early thoughts. First, the screens are very bright and do well in direct sunlight, although they are not significantly brighter than that of the iPhone 4. That said, the extra resolution and screen size of the Galaxy S’s screen enables it to  display more of a Web page without striking one as overwhelming the way the Droid X and HTC EVO 4G do.

By far, the most differentiated Galaxy S is the Epic 4G, not only because of its radio (per its name), but also because of its WiMAX access capabilities, but also because it is the only Galaxy S with a slide-out keyboard. While we wait to see what the Droid 2 brings, the Epic 4G’s keyboard is much better than that of the original Droid’s, and may be the best Android device with a physical keyboard when it launches.

Beyond that, the AT&T Captivate has the most differentiated industrial design, with a rounded top and bottom. The Fascinate and Vibrant are the most similar designs. Each has rounded corners and the Vibrant in particular resembles the design of he iPhone 3G/3GS with its silvery trim. The Vibrant will easily steal the show as the new top of the line in T-Mobile’s portfolio. The Fascinate will need to duke it out with the Droid Incredible and Droid X, but I suspect it will be very competitive with the former as the choice of the mainstream advanced user.

Incidentally, the Fascinate’s branding offers another clue into the quirky rules regarding what gets the Droid brand at Verizon; the device is not the Droid Fascinate. My take now is that Droid is reserved for high-end, exclusive Android phones.

Software

The three most significant new features in iOS 4 are multitasking (albeit Apple’s limited flavor of it), folders, and the universal threaded e-mail discussions, and they all improve the efficiency of working with the iPhone.Multitasking is particularly helpful when you need to switch among more than two apps and especially if those apps were located on different home screens (a scenario that folders also ameliorates). Apple’s approach has its drawbacks. For example, when you return to the e-mail client or a Twitter client, those apps will only then connect to the network and start downloading new messages. So if, for example, you haven’t remembered to switch to that app before entering a place with no coverage, you won’t have access to the latest updates. The upside to limitations like this is enhanced battery life, which I’ll discuss later.

In a release that has done much to alleviate the repeated swiping to move among home screens and e-mail inboxes, the task switcher seems like a throwback. While swiping to the left to access media controls is a good idea, Apple need not have so many screens of recently opened apps, and removing them from the selection row takes too much time and is potentially confusing. Also, it’s not clear why Apple preserves so much of the screen to the near-useless space of the active app when you are in task switching mode. These could all be addressed with simple fixes – devite, say, half or even 3/4 of the screen to task switching and implement WebOS-style flicking away of icons (or, even better, preview screens) to remove them from the app switcher.

My main complaint about the universal inbox is that, while it has greatly reduced the amount of repeated swiping, it hasn’t completely eliminated it. While the iPhone’s new threaded discussion feature is helpful, it inserts an intermediate screen between inbox and message that I’d rather have the option to bring up instead of it always being there. Also, it would be nice to have some indication in the universal inbox of what account the e-mail is fron (as Android provides with its colored bars).

And speaking of e-mail and other smartphone platforms, there are a few things about the BlackBerry that I continue to miss in the iPhone. Foremost among these is the ability to set up auto-replacement text macros to save time typing (an OS-level feature that Apple would clearly prevent third-parties from implementing). Another is full-text search in e-mail. I also often use the “Search Sender” command to quickly call up all e-mails from a given party. A welcome sleeper feature in iOS 4, though, is integrated background spell-checking.

Then there are folders, and Apple has done a good job here although it would have been relatively easy (from a UI perspective) to allow (at least) 12 apps per folder by dynamically moving the folder icon to the top row when it is in opened “mode”. One interesting bit of trivia  is that you can have multiple folders with the same name; iOS won’t complain as folders are mostly cosmetic and not part of the hierarchical file path that they are in Mac OS. (This is amusing to me because it is the way folders first worked on the Macintosh and its original MFS file system.) Anyway, just as it was a hassle to move icons around screens before (and still is); iTunes needs to step up its game here), rearranging them into folders can be tough at first, but the effort is definitely worth it and easier to maintain in the long run.

While many have complained about iOS 4 on the 3G, I tried it on the 3GS before getting te iPhone 4 and it is an excellent and worthwhile upgrade to that device.

Hardware

The iPhone 4 has always been one of the most striking phones in the market, and the iPhone 4 indeed takes it to the next level. The glass back is in a class of its own, the overall feel is more study and dense, and the buttons respond more crisply. I have warmed to its flatness that’s a throwback to the original iPhone although I still preferred the feel of the humpbacked 3GS in the hand. The ability to now position the phone on its side has some practical benefit, although video viewing is not one of them, and it doesn’t seem in Apple’s gimmick-averse nature to add a kickstand.

Probably the feature that Apple has talked up the most on the new hardware is the new high-resolution display. I’ve found its improvements to be relatively subtle most of the time except for when viewing small text, where it pays dividends. Having recently seen both the Droid X and the Galaxy S phones, moving to a 4.3” display could be overwhelming for many consumers, but Apple could definitely and probably should take the iPhone to 4” to display more information on the screen. One thing’s for sure. The iPhone’s IPS LCD is incredibly bright, and more than held its own as I put it side-by-side against the “Super AMOLED” display of the Galaxy S with both at full brightness. While I did not try this outside, though, the Galaxy S did very well in direct sunlight.

The iPhone 4 is noticeably faster than the 3GS, although not as huge an improvement as the 3GS was over the 3G. But by far the most incredible boost in the device is battery life. Whereas I’d generally reach the 20 percent mark at about 4 pm and struggle to make it to 8 pm without a recharge, the iPhone 4 is registering about half full well into the evening. The iPhone 4 stands unassailed at the intersection of rich functionality and long battery life.

The iPhone camera’s improved camera and high-definition video capture are also welcome improvements. It’s somewhat paradoxical that Apple, which has opted for such a tightly-controlled approach to commercial music and video syncing via iTunes, just allows good old drag and drop to manage personal photos and videos (in contrast to the Flip camera’s FlipShare), but I’ll take it any day. The camera does much better in low light and the flash certainly helps in cases where it’s required. I was very pleased with the video capture and iMovie really makes the iPhone the best personal video solution among smartphones — and maybe beyond — in the market right now. I have encountered two issues, though. HD movies can take quite a bit of time to save, and there have been a few frustrating occasions where the digital shutter has simply refused to open, leaving me stuck at the opening frane of a James Bond title sequence..

I’ve not done any head-to-head comparisons with the 8 megapixel cameras of the Droid X or HTC EVO 4G yet, but intend to do so. The other feature I’ve not yet tried is Internet tethering, but I do wish Apple would allow mobile hotspot functionality via Wi-Fi versus relying on cable or Bleutooth.

I’ve had limited opportunity to try out Facetime given that both callers must be in a Wi-Fi hotspot and have iPhone 4’s for it to work. It is a fun and natural way to communicate that in many ways makes more sense on the go than at home, and has tremendous potential particularly if clients surface for other platforms, which I expect will happen. Hopefully Apple and AT&T can get this cleared for 3G next year.

Finally, there is the famed antenna issue, and I frankly have not had any issues with the iPhone 4’s reception. It has been much better than that of the iPhone 4. As an Apple product manager told me in reference to AT&T, “The’y’re getting better. We’re getting better.” I was able to maintain a phone call on the iPhone for the first time while driving through New York’s Midtown Tunnel, something I’d only been able to do previously on Verizon and Sprint phones.

Conclusion

Unless they’ve been experiencing some of the antenna issues, those who stood on line to obtain the iPhone 4 are likely very pleased with their purchase. Those with 3GS devices can achieve a lot of the benefit by upgrading to iOS 4, but the increased battery life and improved camera capabilities of the new iPhone makes it an enticing upgrade for heavy users, and one will likely become a .compelling one as Facetime spans 3G and more devices. While Sprint and Verizon battle back with screens that boast larger screens (and at least in the case of the EVO 4G, challenged battery life), the iPhone’s smaller footprint and superior integration will likely still prove menacing to them for most mainstream users.

In looking at some headsets recently, I had a great conversation with Travis Bogard, executive director of product management and strategy at Aliph, makers of the excellent Jawbone line of headsets. Travis shared that Aliph views the evolution of the headset into something that wil become such an everyday wearable aid that it will be a constant audio companion even when

Today, however, there’s still significant backlash against wearing your headset all the time. That leads me to question where people who use headsets put them when they are not wearing them. Manufacturers take great pains to design a headset around the shape of an ear, but that makes them somewhat awkward to store anywhere else.

Sure, a breast pocket is a safe bet but other clothes cavities don’t work as well. They bulge in shirt pockets and could take a lot of abuse in pants pockets. Few headsets come with their own protective cases; the high-tech charging one of the Plantronics Discovery 975 is an exception among current products. I recently tried a $6 generic case I bought of eBay to store a headset. While the case accommodated the headset fine it adds quite a bit of bulk. Ideally, I’d like to see cell phone cases redesigned to include a small add-on for the Bluetooth headset or a design tha could clip securely t a belt. Those would probably be the best alternatives to the unique design of the LG Decoy.

Panasonic SVP Bob Perry noted that while HDTV is really the only choice available in retailers, that is not the case in terms of your audio output choice. Indeed, the audio component attach rate is challenged in the living room and more so in bedrooms where the placement of multiple speakers is tricky. Furthermore, the positioning of the television may be less conducive to creating an immersive audio experience and consumers may be consuming different content in the living room as well.

Still, here’s an interesting contrast. When you buy a top-of-the-line digital SLR, it comes without the mediocre popup flash, assuming you’ll invest in a better external one. However, even top-of-the-line televisions still come with mediocre speakers.

The event also included a pre-screening of Disney’s forthcoming Prince of Persia. The movie really has no tie-in to the device, unless the Evo has a heretofore unannounced time rewinding feature (which I would gladly pay a premium for only to go back in time and no longer need it). Sprint will offer the sleek superphone – with its large screen HDMI out, dual cameras (including one 8 GB one)  and HD video capture features — for $199 with a two-year contract starting June 4th, a few days before Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference where the company has released new iPhone models in the past.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion regarding Sprint’s data plan for the device, which I’ll refer to as “Simply Most Things”. The Evo 4G will require a $10 per month surcharge for uncapped 4G (and 3G).  You’ll also pay handsomely for its vaunted eight-device hotspot feature which is a $30 per month add-on. In contrast, Verizon throws in mobile hotspot functionality on the Pre Plus for free.

All told, on top of Sprint’s relatively low prices for other services it’s not a bad deal although the hotspot premium is excessive. At the event, I heard someone note that the hotspot pricing is designed to appeal to those replacing their home broadband with WiMax, but I doubt many Evo 4G buyers will use the device that way. I’d rather see a $20 per month 4G surcharge that included mobile hotspot features.

One of my main concerns regarding the Evo 4G, was battery life, particularly after encountering disappointing results with Sprint’s Overdrive hotspot in 4G coverage areas. A Sprint represented said that if you’re streaming video, you’ll get about two hours, but more typical voice and light Web access will yield eight to ten hours. I still don’t think we’ll see even that, but even the seven hour range would put it within reach of other recent Android devices.

The visuals and usage scenario depictions are effective; the narrator’s voice is more gruff and the music is harder-driving. The copy never directly answers the question of what the iPad is, but instead starts out with a number of its attributes. including the kinds of media it supports. Among those are “more books than you could read in a lifetime" which sounds like a challenging statement. (You never hear cable companies hear that they offer more shows than you could watch “in a lifetime” and they even carry a network called Lifetime). All in all, it extends the iPad’s original messaging around form and function while downplaying any definitions. This should play well to those who would appreciate the device, but doesn’t do much to push the fence-sitters. I expect we will see advertising more aimed at that that next wave as the iPad app library grows and diversifies from iPhone app offerings.