Engadget is pissing me off all over the place.

I read a lot of news.  I read an abnormal amount of mobile phone news specifically.  Kind of how I started writing here in the first place.  Everyone who reads news online usually has a handful of sites they use for reliable and up to date news.  My morning reportoire includes MobilityDigest.com, WMPoweruser,  and Engadget.  Engadget is by far the largest of these sites (backed and owned by AOL/Time Warner) so they typically have the biggest news leaks out of the three.  I usually follow their Mobile World Congess coverage and other major press events.  None of this bothers me.  What does bother me is the enormous ground-dragging brass balls those guys must have to present themselves as a total mobile news source with this kind of obvious app prejudice.  

Now I know that Windows Mobile is the red-headed stepchild of most mobile blog sites out there (with obvious exceptions) but this kind of bias makes me want to post-natally abort the people making the decisions for this site.  Every single WinMo handset that has a review they’ve actually done has always trashed Windows Mobile for its archaiety and non-finger friendliness.  They also trash the Marketplace for its lack of apps, when anyone who has a WinMo phone for more than a month knows the Marketplace is not your source for Windows Mobile Apps.  Let’s look at it like this:  Imagine if you counted every WinMo software distribution site as a marketplace in and of itself.  Then you have a competition where it’s not the number of apps in your marketplace, but the number of marketplaces you have.  The division of these distribution companies maybe confusing to anyone unable to work Google.com with any sort of success, however at the same time division is important to anyone who’s rocking 8 pages of fart apps with no folders (yes, I’m looking at Apple even though I know they introduced folders in 4.0, but the limitations are stupid.  Only 9 apps in one folder?  Just plain fail.)  Each one of these marketplaces offers a significantly different assortment and approach to app distribution.  Anyone who has used FreewarePocketPC.net’s OpenMarket can tell you that it’s not a bad thing.  Plus when you open up your freaking eyes to the multitude of software distributors (XDA and friends included) the whole app count war that Engadget and the rest of the mobile media perpetuates is overwhelmingly in WinMo’s court; Not just on quantity, but quality as well.

The other thing that makes me want to burst into a hellstorm of rage and angst against Engadget for is their clearly doubled standard for the “glorious” iPhone 4.0 software which allows for “Multitasking.”  Then they drop their engorged testicles in your face with this claim of no multitasking for Windows Phone 7.  How is it these two OS’s use the same system for memory management and a major tech news site fails to notice this?  I’m not buying that, or your Steve Job’s stroke-off you’ve got going on over there.  Their terrible bias extends even into the sad state of affairs Palm suffers from.  In this they say that one of Palm’s problems is “The Pre is looking pretty dated. You need new hardware.”  They go on making fools of themselves by saying “The trend of WVGA displays and faster, more efficient CPUs (hello, Snapdragon) is clear, and you can’t afford to sit on the sidelines with a device which is over a year old by many people’s standards.”  How are they not dogging on Apple for all these failures as well.  They’ve basically had the same phone design since before they had a phone, i.e. this.  Looks like the only thing required for Engadget to like a handset is sales, and if that’s the kind of reporting you want to do then screw you too.  I, as a techminded gadget connoisseur, do not want to to have the quality of gadgets souly equated to their sales numbers.  I don’t care if a three year old can use it.  I don’t care if there are 300,00 apps or whatever number they’re at now.  I want my gadgets to do the most stuff for the least amount of money.  I know my needs are different, yet equating every phone on the market to the iPhone despite it’s limitations, and even then downplaying said limitations is weak journalism at its best.  I’m not asking Engadget to change their whole site, or even the majority of their coverage, but in the spirit of every Eastern religion I can think of:  Balance dudes.  Calm the fanboyism down a tad and maybe you won’t have to turn comments off by default because your readership has devolved into Steve Jobs loving, Fisher-Price computer-using simpletons (trust me I’m being nice.)  So please, Engadget, I like news and you do a half-way decent job of covering it, but please quit trashing my mobile phone operating system of choice, and highlight its successes.  And give us a freaking app so I don’t have to load your pictureless mobile site.

And as a side not if anyone ever wants to search Engadget, you definitely shouldn’t use the crappy AOL search they’ve got going on.  I know they probably don’t have a choice, but in researching for this article I had to resort to google website search here.