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Yesterday evening, at a beachside dinner organized by our investors, True Ventures, I sat at a table full of relatively young entrepreneurs (I’m pretty sure I raised the average age by a few years.) Most of us had iPhones — both old and new — and most were Twitter users.

So it should come as no surprise that we all had an opinion about Twitterrfic, an iPhone client for Twitter. To sum up everyone’s thoughts in one word: horrific. Scrolling through messages should come naturally; it doesn’t. And the UI manages to leave you feeling about as satisfied as a cup of noodles warmed with hot tap water.

But we won’t have to use it anymore, for Twinkle by Gogo Apps, previously a jailbreak app, has just hit the iTunes Apps Store. Its UI is remarkably intuitive and easy to use. As John Gruber writes, “It’s an interesting contrast with Twitterrific — even ignoring cosmetic differences, the two apps take significantly different UI approaches.” I think that’s an understatement.

The best aspect of the service is the ability to find a person using Twinkler near you using the LBS feature of the iPhone — though currently it doesn’t seems to be working. This could turn Twinkle-Twitter into a social experience, a simpler and easier version of other complicated LBS-based, friend finder applications.

I like how one can quickly look at all direct messages in a separate window. In fact, there are numerous little things that I find appealing about this app. For instance, it takes just two clicks to start following someone on the feed. Sending private messages is easy and looking up profiles is even easier. What I don’t like: Not having the ability to quickly see replies.

My Rating on this iPhone app: 4 out of 5.

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SK Telecom, the South Korean carrier who till now has frittered away hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get a toehold in the U.S. market, was rumored to be looking to spend a few billion to buy Sprint, in partnership with some private equity firms, according to news reports based on a CNBC claim. That rumor caused some furious activity in the shares of those two companies.

Now there are rumors that SK Telecom and Spring were looking to partner on technology. The whole thing is just too curious, and the company spokespeople for both of them are staying mum.

Sprint has about 52.8 million customers, but is having a tough time holding onto them. The company recently merged its WiMAX effort, Xohm, with Clearwire to form a new company that attracted $3.2 billion in financing from Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner and others.

SK Telecom owns 17 percent of MVNO Virgin Mobile, which recently acquired Helio at a throw-away price. SK has sunk a lot of money into Helio. Both Helio and Virgin use Sprint’s network.

And on a related note, Helio’s store in Palo Alto shut down today, after setting what must have been a new record for being devoid of customers but still opening its doors every day. Rumor has it that employees at Palo Alto startups would make bets on whether or not any customers could be spotted in the Helio store. I guess the only ones who didn’t get the memo about people not caring about Helio stores was the management.

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The iPhones have been unboxed and torn down, so now it’s the Wall Street watchers’ turn to tally up who won and who lost among the companies that provide chips for the envy-inducing device. The big winner is Infineon with four chips, including GPS and 3G radio. Little-known chip firm TriQuint also won, with three power amplifiers inside the phone. Wi-Fi was once again provided by Marvell, but Broadcom scored low, with only a touchscreen controller and no GPS (which we had been expecting).

Most impressive was that the phone contains 19 high-value chips. For silicon vendors the iPhone represents an opportunity to push high-margin chips reserved for high-end smartphones into the average cell phone. Readers of this blog may take a BlackBerry or Nokia N95 for granted, but middle America or even Europe doesn’t always see the point. But if housewives and teens clamor for iPhones, chip makers will cheer.

That’s because the iPhone, in addition to making wireless broadband consumption more accessible to people, will drive smartphone adoption. And smartphones can contain up to six times the amount of silicon found in an entry-level phone. Despite TI not having a large presence in the iPhone, Bill Krenik, CTO of Texas Instruments’ wireless division (the second-largest wireless chip company behind Qualcomm), says the adoption of the iPhone is a good thing for chip makers everywhere.

“It’s a lot more fun to build iPhones and other high-end products than a simple voice-only handset because there’s a lot more design sophistication and exciting features like high-end graphics, but from a business angle there’s more semiconductor content for us to go after,” Krenik said. “There has been a lot of negative sentiment about what more can you really do on a phone, but we’ve ignored that.”

David Carey, president of the firm that conducted an iPhone teardown, Portelligent, said part of the risk point for the wireless industry was that everyone was satisfied — that nothing that would lull consumers into a more feature-rich phone. “If the iPhone does sort of capture the public’s imagination, it’ll have a direct impact on whether the cell-phone industry is a growth market for the chip business, or it stagnates,” he said.

Carey has seen the total space devoted to silicon inside a cell phone shrink as the radios and applications processors became more integrated. Qualcomm and Freescale offer such integrated platforms, while many handset makers still offer an integrated brain and radio for cell phones, even on their higher-end phones like the Samsung Instinct (although phones like the Instinct still offer plenty of other opportunities for chip vendors). Carey points to HTC, Motorola, LG and Samsung as handset companies who tend to consolidate silicon, and offers Nokia and Apple as examples of firms that separate the brains of the phone from the communications chips.

The move toward better integration is the norm in the industry, but despite the rise in the number of cell phones sold and an increase in the sales of wireless chips, it has led to lowered prices per unit. In 2004 when iSuppli started gathering data on the topic, about $23.77 was spent on silicon inside each handset on average. That number dropped to $18.65 in 2007. The wireless chip players are relying on handset growth to keep their sales on the rise — and hoping for next-generation features they can convince consumers and handset makers to buy.

GPS is one such technology gaining in popularity on high-end phones. The iPhone has it, and many software companies are actively trying to make programs and offer services that take advantage of it. Other technologies waiting in the wings are mobile television, which would require chips from Qualcomm in the U.S. or those from Dibcom or Samsung in other countries, and HD video that would require higher-end applications processing such as that offered by Nvidia’s APX 2500 or Texas Instrument’s OMAP 3. Regardless, the iPhone might do more than make semiconductors fun. It may keep chip vendors happy.

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Updated, see last paragraph: For a long time there were quite a few rumors about Google making a Gphone, its own hardware device. In the end it came out with Android, a software platform that it is promoting in partnership with 50 odd companies. The platform is still under development, so to speak, as Mountain View-based search company works with partners to iron out the kinks. As we reported earlier, it has hit some speed bumps.

Android, however, shifted attention away from the possibility of Google making its own hardware. Looks like that plan to make Google-branded phone hasn’t been dropped entirely, according to The Hollywood Reporter. One of their reporters is attending Allen & Company’s Sun Valley Retreat for media barons and he attended an impromptu press conference held by Google co-founders Larry Page & Sergey Brin along with CEO Eric Schmidt.

The trio of Google execs also used the opportunity to talk about the inroads the company is making with its own branded mobile phone as a replacement for the iPhone, as well as the Chinese market and how they’re treated there — and even Google’s inhouse educational programs and the salaries and potential of teachers.

The report, I admit is awkwardly worded but I wonder if any of the other reporters actually picked up more details from the tattling trio. It is not clear from the report if all the talk is about Android or if they actually mean a GPhone.The Google-branded handset is a bit like the Abdominal Abominable Snowman - much talked about but rarely seen. I emailed the press hotline and will wait for some clarifications.

Update #1: Michael Arrington says that San Francisco-based The Ammunition Group might be designing the new phone.

Update#2: Peter Kafka checked with some reporters in attendance and found out that there was no specific talk of a handset.

larry: we have android phones obvioulsy. I know that there’s a hypothetical google phone
eric: they’ll call it the google phone no matter what you call it. we’re just going to have to deal with this

Google, still hasn’t replied to our request - it is the weekend after all. 

Photo courtesy of our mates at Gizmodo via Googlified.

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Ever since Apple put out its Software Developer Kit in March, game developers have been racing to create titles for the presumed market victor. But how much of a demand for them is there really? Based on the data from Cellufun, AOL’s designated mobile game portal since April, quite a lot. The company just told us that compared with other phone owners, iPhone gamers are generating four times the number of page views on Cellufun titles and double the time playing. (That’s an average of 21 minutes of game play and 65 page views per iPhone player session, compared to 11 minutes and 15 page views for sessions on other phones.) Pretty impressive, given Cellufun’s 5 million monthly uniques and 70 million page views. If the numbers are just as good for other game developers, expect to see the iPhone game catalog get a lot bigger soon.

Image credit: www.Cellufun.com

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While we laggards in the U.S. are still celebrating the FCC decision to (finally!) up the classification of broadband speeds to a lazy 768 kilobytes per second (but, hey, that’s up from 200 kilobytes per second) and lamenting our coming bandwidth caps, the Brits are prepping for a broadband boom.

The UK regulatory agency Ofcom is planning to release a regulatory framework in September to guarantee a financial rate of return on fiber rollouts in the UK. According to a story in PCAdvisor, Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards said at a conference that there had been a “step change” toward the idea of investing in fiber.

“Ofcom favours a regulatory environment for the next generation of networks and access that both allows and encourages operators to make risky investments, to innovate for the benefit of consumers and, if the risks pay off, for the benefit of their shareholders too.”

The goal is to help ISPs compete against the coming threat of wireless broadband from 4G cellular networks. Such LTE networks can reach speeds of up to 150 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up, although those in the telecommunications industry think it will likely start out at 20 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up. Either way, it looks like a competitor to a fat pipe into the home, and apparently many in Europe are eager to ditch their existing fixed-line service provider, be it for voice or DSL.

The framework might help the UK better compete with its neighbors; France, Germany and Sweden all have much faster broadband speeds and lower pricing, according to data from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Given the demand for data, anything that helps get the fiber buildout rolling is good news for web publishers and consumers.

UTStarcom, an equipment maker whose trajectory of fortunes resemble that of a bouncing ball, today announced that it was getting out of the handset business altogether. It stopped making handsets a while ago, but today it said it was spinning off its personal communications division, “selling the handset distribution business to Personal Communications Devices Holdings, a newly formed entity controlled by AIG Investments.” It will get about $240 million for the unit, with a $50 million earn-out option.

The move shows that the handset business — be it manufacturing, distribution or sales — continues to be a money-losing proposition for me-too players whose core competency is not mobile. UTStarcom was known for its broadband access business, and it expanded into too many categories hoping to grow big, real fast. Its report card is at best a C-minus thus far. Don’t believe me — check out their 5-year stock performance.

The relative success and cult-like popularity of Asus’ Eee cloud computer has helped raise the level of interest in what’s being called a new class of computers. Some call the new machines ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs), others have labeled them Netbooks, and many are safely referring to them as handhelds. It’s hardly a surprise that the PC powerhouses — Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Dell and dozens of others — have gone running after this opportunity.

After using one of the so-called Netbooks, it has become obvious that they really need to go back to the drawing board and rethink how people are going to use these devices if they want to participate in the next big shift of computing.

So far, all they have done is cram traditional notebooks into smaller, maybe-lighter-to-carry bodies. They’re neither good for computing nor for communication. To me, the dozens of models being touted seem like a genetic experiment gone wrong, a fact that was brought home when I tested one of the most talked-about devices: Hewlett Packard’s HP 2133 miniNote.

The miniNote is being introduced into the educational market and will cost between $499 and $1,199, depending on the configuration. It looked like a promising device and I was quite eager to try it out. However, my excitement didn’t last very long. In fact, barely three hours after trying out the device, I decided to pack it in. Why? Not because it was underpowered, or the keyboard was too cramped, or the screen made you squint.

On the contrary, the Via C7-M processor makes the machine capable of easily handling all sorts of tasks and the keyboard was actually quite nice and sturdy to use, though it’s not advisable to use it for typing out long documents. The keyboard reminded me of the Powerbook 12, which had one of the best keyboards on a laptop. (For a more in-depth review and discussion of features, I recommend jkOnTheRun.)

So if those aren’t the issues, then what’s the problem? Many, if you ask me. It is a little too heavy — 2.7 lbs — for an ultraportable, especially if you factor in the fat extended battery you need to run this thing. It runs Windows XP and no surprise, takes too long to boot up. (There is a Linux version, but I didn’t try that.)

More importantly, in less than an hour it was generating more heat than my first Macbook Pro, aka the oven. It is not as if I had dozens of apps open. All I was using was a simple Internet Explorer. (I have not installed Firefox yet.) Maybe it’s a problem with the pre-production demo unit, but if it’s not, then the issue of heat is a dealbreaker for me, and it should be for other people as well. Any highly mobile device whose primary function is to surf the web should not become a kitchen appliance within an hour. It would be virtually impossible to use it on one’s lap.

So after playing around with the miniNote this weekend, I came up with a checklist of features that should be a must in a machine that has to qualify as a cloud computer (or whatever you want to call it.)

1. Instant On
2. Doesn’t generate too much heat.
3. Minimum 5 years hours of battery life.
4. Must feature at least four communications options: WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth & Wireless Wide Area Network connection to, say, an EVDO or HSPA Network.
5. Less than three pounds (batteries included).
6. Screen size of 3.5-8 inches (wide-screen proportioned)
7. The primary function of the computer should be cloud-based activities that can include everything from listening to live music, reading blogs and watching videos. Writing research reports or cranking out spreadsheets isn’t the primary purpose of these machines.
8. It should cost no more than $300. This isn’t a computer; it’s a communications device. It should really be an on-the-go device. It is a device for the moments when your cellphone isn’t enough, and laptop is too much. An iPhone should qualify.
9. Its innards, ports should be geared for Internet-based activities — from making calls on Skype to consuming RSS feeds — though it should be able to handle external peripherals.
10. In the future it should move away from the keyboard and have a touchscreen interface that allows one to sift through large amounts of data (or web pages) quickly, as cramped keyboards and touchpads can be hard to use.

What do you guys think? If you have your own checklist of features or thoughts about this evolving market, I would love to hear from you.

Meanwhile, please check out these related posts from our archives.

• Can ultraportables grow ultra fast?
• Nvidia joins the ultramobile computing party
• The unintended consequences of OLPC
• Will Eee PCs upend the portable pricing market?
• Is Linux the OS of Ubiquitous Computing?

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Updated: A few months ago I speculated that location-based services and the infrastructure they require were headed for a major upswing in 2008. My optimism was based on a sharp increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions taking place in the sector. But lately I’ve been feeling like I may have been too conservative with my outlook for the location-based services revolution.

The main reason is the ubiquitousness of mobile phones; the sheer number of them that get shipped each year guarantees LBS a huge audience. Of course, in order for LBS to be on mobile phones, we need applications, which is where I believe the iPhone plays a vital role. Its large screen and built-in GPS (and now its 3G speeds) enable and encourage truly interesting LBS applications. The subsequent success of independent applications makers — Pelagao and Sense Networks, for instance — will in turn push other platform owners to find interesting LBS applications, too.

Along with the iPhone, some of the newer devices like the LG Vue, the Samsung Instinct and about half a dozen others will serve to radically increase interest in LBS services. That will force the current device makers — namely Garmin and TomTom — to consider opening up their ecosystems to applications that offer more than just maps and traffic services.

As if the rise of cell phones-as-personal navigation devices weren’t enough, Microsoft yesterday announced plans to offer an embedded operating systems for PNDs, aka Windows for GPS devices. Welcome to the first day of the rapid commoditization of the GPS device business. And while it may look like Microsoft’s just trying to get traction for its mapping service, I think this is a bit more disruptive than that. It’s the culmination of the three major technology trends of our times: cheap computing, inevitable connectivity and the easy development of software to put it all to work.

For car makers desperate to add value to their vehicles, Microsoft is providing yet another way to offer a navigation system on the cheap. Beyond the auto market, however, the new operating system is going to prompt dozens of Asian manufacturers to build cheaper PNDs, which will hurt the volumes of the market’s two biggest players quite drastically.

Indeed, Garmin and TomTom need to figure out a way to add more intelligence to their systems. Custom versions of their devices aren’t enough — they need to embrace the concept of connectedness. One way would be to buy Silicon Valley-based Dash Navigation, which has a connected device that puts Internet data to very good use. Here’s what I wrote about them back in December 2007:

The Internet is not just about the browser, but rather it is about data and how one can use it to build clever products. I think Dash, much like Amazon’s Kindle and RCA’s Small Wonder video camera, is part of a movement that is breaking Web 2.0’s browser shackles.

Yesterday, I asked the company if they were worried about Microsoft’s foray. CEO Paul Lego responded to me via email, saying:

“As you know, with the Dash Express we are already delivering all of these kinds of connected features and more in a very integrated way. In fact, with our new API, we have an open platform for the car today…We welcome innovation and look forward to seeing how these features get expressed by other PND vendors, including those that adopt this new Microsoft platform.”

Those are fighting words, but I’m sure even he knows that despite having raised $42 million from well-known VCs, his startup can’t play the hardware game and may need to partner with the bigger device makers. After all, Dash needs to worry about the cell phones-as-PND platforms, too. One way or another, this is going to be a market to watch, one that promises lots of innovation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

I played with the demo version of Samsung’s consumer-oriented iPhone killer in April and found it fun, but maybe a bit too much gadget crammed into too small of a space for me. It’ll be out on June 20 with a $200 price tag on the Sprint network, and today reviews appeared in a variety of places. David Pogue points out that the Instinct is long on features and short on polish when compared with the iPhone; Walt Mossberg agrees, saying the hardware is nice, but Apple’s software beats the Instinct’s hands down.

The lack of zing in the Instinct is a shame, and it shows how hardware and software can combine to create a novel design or a novelty design. The touch experience on the Instinct is a novelty design. It’s what Samsung calls a haptic touch screen, which means it vibrates when a user touches in a command. Pogue calls it gimmicky and he’s right, but I liked it anyhow. However, it’s hard to think of ways to integrate that vibration into features that push the Instinct to go beyond the constraints of a modern cell phone.

In contrast, the iPhone’s novel use of accelerometers and software give it the ability to orient itself (something the Instinct can’t do). That’s a feature that provides a similar Wow factor as haptic touch, but also can be used to change that way games are designed, turning the movement of the device into a type of joystick. That’s novel. Regardless of its novelty screen, people will buy the Instinct and it will certainly follow the iPhone in bringing touch as a user interface to the masses.