Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
More stuff can be found at gerikson.tumblr.com.
This old post by Carlo Longino popped up in my vanity feed today, prompting me to revisit my comments on the UK launch of the iPhone last year. It’s interesting to compare and contrast to the situation now.
I can’t help feeling the bloom has come off the iPhone rose.
So Telia finally released pricing details for the iPhone 3G and to no-one’s surprise they basically suck.
There’s no flat-rate data plan. If you pay the highest plan (859 SEK/month) you get 1GB free data. Thereafter the daily data cost is capped to 9 SEK.
If you choose the 16GB model and pay the highest plan for 24 months, you’ll pay 21,400 SEK in total (24,000 SEK if you max out your internet 3 days a week).
Cheapest deal in total is the 8GB with cheapest plan in 18 months, 7,880 SEK. The cheapest 16GB is 8,680 SEK.
In contrast, you can buy a fully unlocked 16GB model from Italy for €569 (around 5,150 SEK) and get a plan that’s better for you.
Here’s an Excel file with my calculations.
Thanks to Emil for finding the Italian price!
Update 2008-07-01: Techdirt reports that Rogers in Canada has even worse iPhone deals (I admit I’m too lazy to any CAD to SEK comparisons.) The interesting thing is that people are petitioning Rogers online to be a bit more reasonable, thereby creating a lot of bad publicity for the company.
Update 2008-07-15: Christopher notes that you’re not limited to the ridiculous iMini/iMidi/iMaxi schemes, you can buy the iPhone using any other Telia plan. Prices are here. However, good luck actually finding a phone….
I firmly believe that posting a reply to an email at the end of a message rather than at the beginning. This is especially important in mailing lists.
I’ve recently re-joined The Gunroom, a mailing list with a pretty high traffic volume. I want to be a good lissun and have been diligently paging down to the end of messages, snipping as I went.
I recently found a Greasemonkey script that automates the scrolling down, setting the editing caret at the end of the message instead of at the top.
The script can be found here for the new Gmail interface. It’s based on this script for the old interface.
Here’s how to enable this feature.
Another script that might be interesting for traditionalists is Gmail Fixed Font.
Someone else managed to snag my (registered) nick on Freenode while I was away. Here’s a way to get it back:
/msg NickServ ghost <yournick> <yourpassword>
/nick <yournick>
If you’re a recent convert to the microblogging fad you may have accounts on both Jaiku and Twitter. It’s convenient to have one service as your primary publishing interface, and to push the updates to the other.
If you prefer Twitter as your primary interface for writing, you can easily import the RSS into Jaiku. Your tweets will be echoed in Jaiku automatically. Just add the Twitter feed in the “Web feeds” section. You can also subscribe to your blog and to Flickr, for example.
If you want to use Jaiku, you will have to use a third-party app called Twitterfeed. Jim has a good writeup here.
Here are my settings:
Now, each time I post a jaiku, a tweet should be echoed to Twitter (unless it’s down of course.)
The technology blogosphere is like a giant dog that is forever chasing its tail - except when it stops to lick its netherparts.
This quote captures the fizzy nothingness that is the Techmeme Leaderboard perfectly.
By ranking blogs on links, not traffic, it reinforces the founding myth of Technorati: It’s not who reads you, it’s who blogs you that matters. And by limiting itself to tech blogs, Techmeme confirms most tech bloggers’ sheltered worldview. Why pay attention to the world outside, or cater to mainstream readers’ interests? The only people worth caring about are the ones already on your blogroll.
Predictably, Dave Winer wants to track the changes to the leaderboard somehow:
A pragmatic question for people who want to follow the TechMeme LeaderBoard — it’s clearly not practical to look at it as frequently as it could change, every 20 minutes.
So what kind of tool do we need to tell us about change? Email notification? An RSS feed for each site? I’m interested in knowing what people think.
For god’s sake, let it go.
Update 2007-10-06: Dave fell out of love fast this time.
So the iPhone has been announced in the UK. This is the first beachhead in the planned global campaign of total mobile domination from Apple. The question is, is the iPhone positioned correctly in the UK market?
I’m indebted to Tarek Esber for his excellent analysis on the relative pricing between the US and the UK. Tarek works with this stuff, I’m just an observer.
As I see it, Apple has two paths to choose to market the iPhone. They can compete on price and features, or they can compete on exclusivity and features.
Features: the iPhone is a great multimedia phone, but in the UK, you can get the Nokia N95 free with the same contract as O2 has announced for the iPhone. Comparing the two phones is a bit like comparing apples to oranges (although Steve Litchfield does a good job doing just that), but feature-wise the N95 wins. The iPhone wins on combined packaging, and looks.
Now, I know even less about the US mobile market than the UK one, but I have the feeling that the iPhone was perceived as being head and shoulders over every other phone on the market. In the UK, you can actually buy Nokia N-series and Sony Ericsson Walkman phones. The emphasis is on small stylish phones, not necessarily with QWERTY keypads.
In Europe, ubiquitous WLAN has arrived, in the form of mobile networks. You can get online from anywhere with a network signal (for a price). The WiFi hotspot market is much less evolved in urban areas than in Northern California. So the inclusion of WiFi in the iPhone is just another feature, not a selling point per se.
The camera is not really competitive, let’s leave it at that.
The multimedia features are IMHO more compelling in Europe, where more people commute by public transport. On the other hand, this also means that disposable income is generally less. It’s a pity that the WiFi features can’t be used for syncing with iTunes.
I believe that the iPhone is a compelling device. The drawbacks (2.5G network, closed platform, anaemic feature set) are balanced by the positive things: innovative user interface, visual voicemail, multimedia features. But pricing it more than direct competitors from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and other manufacturers is a mistake. Apple should have been more aggressive on pricing, and not gouged O2 for such a large share of revenue.
Then there’s the question of timing. The iPhone had an unprecedented launch, the hype level was astounding. Since then, potential buyers in Europe have been bombarded with reviews, but few have actually used the device. Competitors have had time to marshal marketing against it, getting people to commit to a new phone before the iPhone is launched and curtailing the market a bit. Negative views on the iPhone have been spread (Carlo has a good list here). The price has already dropped, and the iPod Touch has been launched.
I predict that the UK iPhone launch will be much more muted than in the US, and that savvy consumers should hold out for a month for a price drop from O2. You read it here first…
I would have liked to do a full-featured “translation from PR-speak to English” on this, but I lack the talent.
[Engadget] ask: Why not 3G networks?
Steve: “The 3G chipsets are real power hogs. Handset battery life cuts power to 2-3 hours.” … “Our phone has a talk time of 8 hours and that’s really important when you want to use your phone for internet and music. 3G needs to get back up to 5+ hours, something we think well see later next year. … WiFi is way faster than any 3G network. Energy efficient EDGE with better, faster WiFi. That’s why we chose it.”
My comments: huh? My E61 has 3G and lasts as long as any other phone. So does my wife’s Sony Ericsson. The real battery hog for me is WiFi.
I suspect the real issue is O2’s lack of good 3G coverage, and the fact that Apple hasn’t been able to shoehorn a 3G chip into the iPhone. Expect a “1984” moment when they are able to do so, and will introduce a new rev of the iPhone. This will be priced higher, and suddenly EDGE will be really really bad.
Q: What’s the contract length, and does unlimited usage truly mean unlimited?
Matthew [O2 CEO]: “18 months contract. There is a limit: 1,400 internet pages per day would break the deal as part of fair usage agreement.”
Engadget comment: “Wait, what?”
Me: ditto. That comment makes no sense. I can buy some sort of limit, but why not express that in hard megabytes? I’m guessing the rest of the sentence is garbled and won’t try to parse it.
Q: What’s the revenue sharing from data and device sales between Apple and O2?
Steve: “Unfortunately, we’re not going to go into that, but good question!” Laughter. “…Sometimes you get what you pay for.”
Rumour has it that Apple is getting about 40% of the revenue for the iPhone from O2. That’s insane.
Q: Is unlocking a concern?
Steve: “It’s a constant cat and mouse game — we have the same thing with the iPod with music.” Steve looks at Matthew, “Are we the cat or mouse?” ‘We have to stay one step ahead of them.”
The same thing with the iPod and music? It’s not the same at all!
Q: To Matthew, what do you have to do to get your network ready for the iPhone?
“We’re investing in EDGE. As many people have noticed, hey I have EDGE! By launch we’ll be north of 30% and build from there.”
The world has moved on to 3G. O2 is being left behind.
Q: Have you thought about opening the iPhone to 3rd parties?
Steve: “Yes, we’ve already done that with Web 2.0. We’re looking at more intimate apps. But people hold their phones to a higher standard than their PC. The more open you are, the less predictable.”
We’ve heard this before. The iPhone is less open than other smartphone platforms, but the question is if people care.
Q: Do you feel a 2 megapixel would be a concern to European customers?
Steve: “No, the camera is great. More megapixels don’t make a better camera, the iPhone is actually a great camera especially, with great lighting.”
I don’t know how much megapixel figures sell phones, but only 2 mpx sure doesn’t look good on the spec sheet.
Rui:
Underwhelming, and bordering on the ridiculous.
Tarek weighs in with good comments regarding the pricing in the UK compared to the US.
It seems as if Apple/O2 are going even farther than in the US in positioning the iPhone as a premium product. The terms of the contract are rather less generous in the UK than in the US, but this is not reflected in a lower handset price.
JimH in IRC:
the Twitter comments just make me realise how much of a circle-jerk the valley is
Here’s the proof:
During our scheduled maintenance window we experienced some unexpected heavy traffic at 3a[m] P[S]T
3AM Pacific Standard Time is noon in most of Europe. Oops.
What unexpected traffic? Don’t they have historical stats for that?
I got an email from Biz Stone about Twitter this morning, full of guff about the Flash-y emptiness that is Twitter Blocks. It also said something about the downtime:
We scheduled some downtime for the wee hours of the morning but the work spilled over into normal human daytime.
Go on Biz, tell us outside the US what you really feel.
I’m going to migrate to Jaiku now. Thanks for nothing, Yank wankers.
I’ve gotten sucked into Facebook, and so far it looks like it has the right mix of stringentness and openness to make a succesful social network.
Stringentness in that there’s a good deal of reciprocity in who you add as friends, and openness in that you can hook other stuff in (Twitter, last.fm, Flickr etc.)
I’d like the following:
Basically I’d like to interact to web apps in 2 ways: via RSS (Bloglines) and IM (gtalk, ‘cos it’s the least closed system.) Visting a new web page isn’t really gonna do it for me. And email notifications? Please, it’s 2007. Keep email for the squares, let us young one’s get stuff the new way!
There’s a lot of hot air in the States about “unlocking” the iPhone. For me, and for everyone else in Europe, unlocking means getting the device to work with an operator other than AT&T.
However, the recent efforts are concerned with crippling the phone, by providing invalid data to the activation process so that you can use the music player and WiFi, but not GSM voice and data.
You’re essentially getting a $600 iPod Nano with WiFi and a touchscreen. Yawn. Wake me up when we get some real unlocking.
What this illustrates is the chasm between Apple’s image and AT&T’s. People are somehow convinced that AT&T subtracts value from the device, sullying the pureness of Apple’s vision. I think AT&T needs to think long and hard about how they got into this position, and what they can do to get out.
Update 2007-07-05: this article has a pretty good overview about what’s involved in unlocking the iPhone.
Yay! As I suspected, the cabling from our apartment to the backbone in the cellar wasn’t installed. Apparently there are only 24 ports, but 30 apartments…
Anyway, we now have net connectivity. Don’t know how long it’ll last, I tried to set us up with the ISP but they couldn’t determine where I was connecting from. So I’ve taken it up with their support, via email…
Next step: internet telephony.
With 8 hours of talk time, and 24 hours of audio playback, iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other ‘Smartphone’ and even longer than most MP3 players.
My phone, the Nokia E61, has 9.5 hours of talk time. I’d say it’s a smartphone, I can do email, browse the web, and it has 3G data and wifi. No camera, but I can use third-party applications!
I’m sure that the iPhone is a great device, but it still falls short in some areas.
(Thanks Jim for the idea and the links.)
Russell Beattie is back with Mowser, a mobile browser and search tool. It uses server-side tech to optimise any site for mobile usage, although if the site already has a handheld CSS profile that’s used instead. Here’s this blog through Mowser.
I haven’t had time to play with it much yet, but I’ve made sure to add it to my bookmarks on the E61.
So no sooner have I been sucked into the Twitter-verse but I found out about Jaiku which sometimes feels like a knockoff but arguably has more features.
They have a S60 client in beta, which compares favourably for me to Twitter’s SMS-only posting. On the other hand, Twitter’s IM posting is mighty convenient. Jaiku hasn’t got one yet.
As of now, it’s easier to post to Twitter and have Jaiku pick up the comments via RSS (see this post for a good description). The reverse is not true, as you cannot easily grab RSS feeds from Twitter. However, there are workarounds. Jim Hughes writes about one here.
And that’s not even mentioning yet another nano-blogging service, Loopnote.
For now, I’m going to stick with Twitter but use Jaiku as a feed aggregator for stuff like Flickr and del.icio.us. If you wanna stalk me Web 2.0 style, grab the feed from gerikson.jaiku.com.
May the best time-wasting service win!
I can’t believe I’ve been using Twitter for less than a week and I’m already addicted. It should be illegal.
Well, at the moment it’s down and I’m going cold turkey.
mIRGGI is a native-code IRC client for S60 3rd Edition phones (like the Nokia N73 or Nokia E61). The previous IRC client of choice for S60 phones was WirelessIRC, but that app hasn’t been updated for the latest software revision.
mIRGGI looks like it has potential, although it’s in beta right now. I’ve tried v0.2 and v0.3, installing a new version is as simple as installing the new .sis file. It works just fine on my E61.
Part of the (to me, dubious) appeal of services like Twitter is that you can be connected to your network’s every update via a cellphone using SMS (aka. text messaging). Apparently in the US you pay for recieving texts as well a sending them, which is mindboggling to me but has led to the rise of package deals for texts. This is something that I noticed in the UK too, last year.
Now, SMS is a cash cow for Swedish operators. This makes sense, as they charge around 0.7 SEK per message but don’t guarantee delivery or anything like that. It’s good margins. I’ve looked at the big operator’s sites cursorily, but couldn’t find any mention of texting packages. The closest was 3 who had free texts within their own network. 3 is a special case though. They’re aggressively pushing data services, and have developed a J2ME app for MSN IM which is obviously in direct competition against SMS.
Of course, 0.7 SEK is about 1 cent or 0.5p, and not that much, but if you send a lot of messages it adds up. Having a bundle that you can use without worrying about the marginal cost would probably help services such as Twitter and others establish themselves in Sweden.
Update: I surfed around and found the following deals from Swedish operators:
Noteworthy is that there are no “add-on” texting packages that you can add to a cheaper voice account. This would obviously be interesting for people on a budget who want to use their phone more for messaging. The operators seem to think that voice and messaging use scale proportionally to each other.
Matt points to the new mobile MSN portal page. At first I thought he was referring to the IM network, which is what “MSN” means in Sweden, but it was their front page portal thingy. Does anyone still use those?
According to Matt, you need a PDA to view it properly, but I found it viewable in the E61’s browser.
The URL is hardly mobile-friendly, though:
http://beta.mobile.msn.com/device/en-us/default.aspx
You can get away with just using http://beta.mobile.msn.com, but it’s still a lot of characters. I thought 4-level URIs were passé, but apparently in MS-land, the more dots in your URI, the better.
I guess this could be a half-decent starting page for a mobile browser, but it still feels rather underwhelming, as well as being a few years too late.
Update: I tried the page out with a Sony Ericsson “featurephone” (the W900i, and it was basically unusable. The weather and stock displays were cut off, so you could only see one location or exchange.
Another issue which I can’t really be bothered to investigate is whether you can customize your page so that you don’t waste valuable screen estate on stuff that doesn’t interest you. This is so obvious so that I’m simply assuming you can. If not, it’s lame beyond the ken of man.
Update: there are no invites left. Sorry!
I’ve got one invite to Joost left. First to comment will get it!
I’ve had my E61 for a month now, and even though the usage patterns haven’t been really typical it’s time to try to get some thoughts down on how I feel using it.
I still like the looks and size of the device. It’s rather flat and broad, but it has to be to handle the qwerty keyboard. The screen is gorgeous — I love the wider-than-tall aspect ratio.
The keypad is rather cramped but useable.
The body has a fair amount of metal in it, which is nice. Despite the fact that the battery cover is manganese alloy, it’s developed a slight creak that manifests when I type. Also, the right softkey is niggly like a loose tooth.
My keypad backlight doesn’t work, this may be due to a hardware issue with the light sensor that I need to investigate.
Overall, not bad for the price point.
I miss a camera, and I’m kind of bummed that I didn’t wait for the upcoming E61i.
Battery life is pretty good. I’ve got a charger at home and one at work, and I keep the phone plugged in religiously, so maybe I haven’t really stressed it.
Speaking of the battery charger, the charging port is the ridiculous “ant’s penis” 2.5mm new-style one that Nokia is foisting upon us with the newer smartphones. I’m always afraid it’ll break in the phone.
For my geeky self, putty is the killer app. It allows me to ssh into my server and check email, get onto IRC and keep up my blog. The combination of screen and apps like emacs and irssi makes my dreams of 1999, when I was working on a skunk-works mobile for Ericsson, finally come true. A handheld wireless terminal for accessing a text-based console.
Maybe not for everyone.
Email is a selling point for this device. I held off getting it until work upgraded to Microsoft Exchange 2003, which makes mobile email with this device possible.
I’m not too impressed with it though. The included app (Mail for Exchange) only looks in your Exchange/Outlook inbox, there’s no way to access subfolders. If you’re a heavy filtering guy like me, this can be frustrating. However, if mobile email is important to you, you can work around this by keeping all the important stuff in your inbox.
The lack of subfolder access is annoying because you can’t archive read email, forcing you to do this at the desktop or drown in an ever-growing inbox flood. I’d love to know if this limitation is general for Exchange mobile email or if it’s only present on Nokias.
Another issue is the fact that some emails simply don’t appear in the correct order. I’ve gotten mail on the device that are replies to emails that I didn’t get until later. Maybe this is because I use scheduled syncing instead of true push email.
A big annoyance is that you can’t accept meeting invitations.
All in all this means that the E61 is OK for checking if there’s something important in you inbox, but you still have to manage your email manually at your desktop.
I haven’t tried the media apps or the “productivity” apps, due to lack of a large enough memory card for the former and a lack of need for the latter.
3G performance is good. I’ve been using wifi where I can get it (basically at home). Wifi coverage is worse than you might expect in Stockholm, I really think 3G has killed it as a viable business, and most private access points have drunk the security kool-aid and enabled WEP or WPA encryption. But most of the time I can’t find any hotspots. I can almost always get a 3G signal though, which is enough for most surfing.
Bluetooth works fine for syncing with the Nokia PC Suite, although I’ve found it to be a bit flakey sometimes, forcing me to search for the phone to reconnect. There’s an IR port too, and you can use a USB cable.
I really like this phone, the only thing I’m missing is a camera. I like the keyboard and find that the added size of the phone is an acceptable tradeoff for it.
Being recently blessed with a free Fon router, I spent some time researching how to connect to it with the Nokia E61’s wifi.
The problem was that I simply couldn’t connect, event though I had the correct password set. Googling turned up a tip, which seems to work.
First, you can’t create an access point directly from the WLAN discovery tool (Menu -> Connectivity -> Conn. mgr. -> Availab. WLAN) if the access point is encrypted. You have to go into Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Access points and define a new one there.
Now, according to this post, the Fonera uses one transmitter and quickly switches between the 2 SSIDs it broadcasts. By turning off the automatic power save in the E61, you can “lock” it to the SSID you want (which is the private one, in my case).
Turn off the power save like this:
Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Wireless LAN
Press Options and choose Advanced settings. You’ll get a warning, which I duly read and noted. Continue, and choose to disable the Power saving feature.
Note that this will probably drain your battery if you use it for push email. Just keeping a screen session up in putty drained by battery in one evening.
So I finally got my Nokia E61 today and have been playing with it a bit. However real life has intruded so I can’t really say much about it just yet. Some things are nice, others are more frustrating. More later.
Here’s a list of gripes Jim and I are maintaining. Here are some setup links.
Updated 2007-01-11: revised cost estimates.
Apple’s iPhone has been announced, to the surprise of many and the delight of many more. It certainly looks like Apple have pulled another winner off, like they did with the iPod. I’m not a mobile pundit, although I’ve been known to play one on TV, but here are my thoughts.
This is a biggie at first sight, but I don’t think it’ll be a deal-breaker for the intended audience. Wifi will take care of the high-bandwidth needs. GSM has lower power requirements and smaller physical footprint.
Personally, I wouldn’t buy a phone without 3G.
It’s expensive. The famous reality-distorsion field has everyone
saying it’ll cost $499 for the 4GB model, $599 for the 8GB. But these
prices include a two-year commitment to Cingular. I’m in Europe and
don’t really know how much such a commitment would cost, but I’ve
heard that $50 a month is not unknown. If we’re generous and say that
$25 goes towards subsidising the phone, that works out to an unlocked
price of $1,200 for the 8GB model. I’ve seen speculation that the subsidy from Cingular will be in the region of $200. This would give an unlocked cost of about $800.
That’s insanely expensive. The Sony Ericsson
W950i
is comparable to the 4GB model. It’s music-centric, has 4GB flash
storage and a touchscreen. It costs 4,950 SEK ($700) unlocked in
Sweden. I’m predicting that the Nokia
N95 will cost between 7,000 and
8,000 SEK, and that phone also can give the iPhone a run for its money
spec-wise.
Update 2007-01-14: Amazon.de is taking preorders for an unlocked iPhone. Cost for the 8GB version: €999. Hat tip: Gruber.
Time will tell if the touchscreen interface will work in practice. Here are my question marks.
Fingerprints will be an aesthetic issue, although they can obscure content if you’re unlucky. More important will be one-handed operation. Can you use the phone with your thumb? Another one is touch-typing, obviously hard to do. Not to mention that this is not a phone for blind people.
Part of the appeal of the iPod is that you can switch songs and adjust the volume etc. by feel alone. This doesn’t seem possible with the iPhone.
The one thing people seem to be most enthused about is the visual voice-mail application. This is a nice idea, and kudos to Apple for developing it. The rest of the handset makers should be ashamed of not pushing something like this themselves.
Pros: cool design leaves other handset makers looking dated and derivative (I’m looking at you, Palm), interface rethink is welcome in a fragmented industry.
Cons: Price! No way I can afford this phone. Network specs and camera are dated already.
Questions: interface responsiveness, power drain.
MobHappy have a good list of more comments. Head over there to see what the big boys think.
These are the access points on my Nokia 6630, noted here for future reference.
“Telia SurfPort” and “Telia MMS” are new settings that I got via SMS the other day. Apparently Telia thinks I got a new phone when I changed my subscription terms.
“Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Access points”
Advanced settings:
Advanced settings:
Advanced settings:
OK, so I think walking through a downpour the day before yesterday finally brought matters to a head regarding getting a new phone. The “4” and hangup keys are dead, except when the phone spontaneously dialled the number 4 speed-dial. A new phone is not just a good idea, it’s practically imperative.
(Curiously we do not have a single working phone in the house, despite the family being on it’s third or fourth generation of handsets.)
I visited The Phone House and looked at the Nokia E70 and the N80. These were shortlisted due to the requirements of
However, the N80 is rather pricey, and from what Tarek says, not worth the money. I didn’t like the E70 keypad.
After reprioritising I’ve decided on a Nokia E61. The QWERTY keypad is appropriate for data use, which is basically what I use the phone for anyway. The lack of camera bothers me a bit, but I hope to invest in a real camera soon which takes much better pictures anyway.
The E60 will also enable me to test the Exchange integration that’s planned for the new cluster here in the EU. We need to decide which phones we support so as to keep down on configuration efforts.
I looked at some prices online, but figured that the combination of long delivery times and lack of flexibility in pricing made a visit to the brick and mortar world worth it. I’ll try to get a deal with my current provider where I pay a certain amount each month to pay for the phone. And I’ll be more careful about letting it get wet in the future.
Update: I wrote the above yesterday, today the phone works! Yay!
I’m still going to get a new phone but it’s not as urgent as it was
I was planning on writing an in-depth review of the N93, but as time went by I realised that first, I’m really not that good at writing reviews, and second, the more I planned to write the less incentive I had.
So I’ll just jot down the things that hit me when I was using this phone, both pros and cons. For links to more reviews, check out Jim’s Nokia N93 wiki page.
The N93 has not improved on the N90’s most noticeable feature, the
humongous size. This size is dictated by the barrel of the
Zeiss Ikon Zeiss Vario-Tessar zoom lens positioned
atop the hinge of the flip.
Unlike the N90, the barrel is fixed in position. Instead, the display can now be flipped up in widescreen display mode. Other modes are standard upright flip and camera view mode, which emulates a handheld digital movie camera.
The phone is decked out in matt black and chrome and the styling is more Samsung than Nokia. This is accentuated by the mass of little plastic flaps covering the Pop-port and the memory card slot. This latter has an additional function of providing a knurled rest for the index finger in camera view mode. Overall, the impression is more of ugliness than exclusivity.
The outer display is much smaller than in the N90, and doesn’t provide a handy way to preview incoming calls and messages. On the other hand, the phone has gained a vibrator mode, much appreciated.
The inner display is the new standard S60 QVGA with lots’o colours. Rotating between upright flip, widescreen flip and camera mode worked OK most of the time, though I had a freeze-up at one point.
The main navigation pad is rather shallow and I missed the centre button more than a few times. On the side of the phone there’s another d-pad (much smaller) which is used in camera mode to access menus and options.
Battery life is good, I barely lost 2 bars during a weekend taking photos and surfing via wifi.
The N93 is running S60 3rd edition, which I don’t know enough about to comment except to say that some apps won’t even install on the phone, if they’re compiled for earlier versions. This affected Wireless IRC, which ran in compatibility more on the N90 but didn’t even install on the N93.
There are no less than 2 web browsers on the phone. The new “Web” is much more full-featured than the old “Services”, but the icons are nearly exactly the same. On the today screen (the default display) Web is part of the row of icons running along the top. If you press the application button (the “swirly button”), you’ll find Services smack dab in the middle of the icon grid. In this view, Web is buried in the the Office folder. The two browsers work differently and don’t share bookmarks, yet the only difference is a slightly different icon. Confusing? You bet.
Navigating backwards in Bloglines mobile didn’t work that well using Web’s new thumbnail mode, but it was pretty easy just clicking on the “Back to subscriptions” link to return to the list of feeds. Navigation using the d-pad is much smaller than jumping from link to link like you do in Services, but it was sometimes hard to navigate between small posts as you tend to overshoot.
Stuff like marking posts as saved worked fine in Web.
I didn’t really spend much time outside Bloglines so I can’t really say how the phone rendered other pages (including this one).
The Pop-port is situated on the side of the phone (there’s a lanyard anchor at the bottom). This makes is pretty hard to use headphones due to the bulk of the device. I guess you can use widescreen mode to watch movies, in which case the placement doesn’t matter as much.
The phone has wifi, which rocks! I couldn’t create an access point for the office network, which uses client certificates and stuff, but it worked like a charm at home. Surfing is super-fast and you don’t have to worry about data charges.
The phone asked which access point to use when starting an internet application, and in that list you could choose to search for wireless networks. I didn’t have time to wardrive, but it sure makes it more attractive to use web and email if you don’t have to pay through the nose for 3G. Wifi is definitely a must for my next phone.
The package includes an A/V-cable so you can view videos on a TV. I planned on testing this but never got around to it.
This is, in my opinion, the most disappointing feature of the phone. The still picture quality is simply not as good as you’d expect from the lens. We have a Contax SL300R T* which also has the Vario-Tessar lens. I took two pictures of the same subject with the Contax and the N93 (click through to see the full-size images):
Considering that the Contax is getting rather long in the tooth, I would expect the images to be comparable. The difference may be more aggressive JPEG compression on the N93.
Shutter lag is very noticeable. The little LED flash is ineffectual.
Considering that the lens determines the camera’s size and overall ugliness, it’s difficult to justify owning this phone as long as the pics are as disappointing as the above.
The Nokia N93 is a big clumsy phone with a lot of features but which doesn’t live up to its promise as a premium imaging device. Redeeming features are the new operating system, web browser, and connectivity options, but these are also available in smaller phones from Nokia.
I got the chance to borrow a Nokia N93 from work over the weekend. I’m trying to be more focused in testing this than I was when I had the Nokia N90.
Having said that, I can say the following:
More to follow.
In December, I will have paid off my Charlie and can buy a new phone with a good conscience. But what phone should I get?
Things I like about Charlie:
Things I don’t like:
So I want a smartphone (Symbian or Windows Mobile?) with 3G data and a better camera. I’d also like to try a phone with a QWERTY keyboard.
Candidates now are (reviews from The Register:
I may take a look at Windows Mobile phones too, depending if I can get my hands on them.
Treo or Blackberry? Considering that both are as common as leprosy here, they’re not in the running.
In the final analysis, what I buy will probably be influenced by what the carriers are offering for Christmas. Considering that the phones above are business-oriented I doubt that they’ll turn up in holiday promotions.
Update 2006-09-11: this looks interesting, if it wasn’t so goddamn ugly…
I [know] that the River of News method of reading news is vastly superior to the hunt and peck method. On mobile devices it’s so much better that it leads to an AHA moment for everyone who tries it.
I’m not really disagreeing with Dave on the use of the River of News for tethered or desktop news. To each his own. But what I don’t understand is the contention that it’s vastly superior in a mobile context.
Mobile screens are small, and scrolling is a pain (at least with my device, a Nokia 6630. I imagine a Blackberry is better in this regard).
My Bloglines blogroll is a mix of different blogs, roughly lumped together. In my mobile, I’ve set it so that only feeds with new or updated entries are visible. This is a good filter.
While I’m on the move, I usually avoid blogs I know are likely to have long entries in them (for example Joel on Software and Mark Dominus. Instead I nearly always check out Techdirt and James Robertson. I sometimes read Winer, but as his blogging style is to telegraphic and so heavily involves links to outside pages, I prefer to use Bloglines on the desktop to follow all the links.
So when I have 5 to twenty minutes free time, I can choose whether to read those blogs that I know from experience are appropriate for the mobile screen and the amount of time I have available.
A river is great if you can sit still and watch it flow by, fishing up interesting items. If I’m on the move, I prefer to “hunt and peck”.
A recent entry on Scripting News:
Try reading the mobile versions of these popular weblogs on your BlackBerry, Treo, or web-enabled cell phone.
[snip short list of the usual suspect A-list blogs, optimised for mobile and hosted on scripting.com]
Not bad, eh? We’re getting somewhere, it seems. “;->”
Yeah, we’re getting somewhere. Back to 1995 or thereabouts. I’m guessing Dave is taking the RSS feeds and using that to generate a stripped-down version of the sites in question.
This is essentially a hand-crafted aggregator. I’m betting Dave will graciously convert your site if you ask him nicely. But I’m already reading “popular weblogs” as well as my own and other, not as popular in Bloglines Mobile. Works like a charm, and guess what? It’s based on RSS.
So Dave should love it, right? But nooo, Bloglines is a traditional “paned aggregator” and doesn’t use the “river of news” model that Dave advocates. So he essentially pretends it doesn’t exist.
The sad thing about this is you’re supposed to bookmark these sites in your mobile and surf around just like in the bad old days before RSS. Instead of using his own invention to make this work, Dave Winer is reinventing the web of a decade ago, Times New Roman and plain white backgrounds and all.
Update: Dave continues with his busy-work. Elle says it better than I can.
The local metro company here in Stockholm has zoned certain parts of their buses and carraiges as mobile-free, info in Swedish here.
You’re not allowed to take or make calls or have an audible ringtone in these zones. Data usage such as messaging or browsing is OK, which is great otherwise I’d have to, like, read a book or something.
This seems like a good compromise between an outright ban and letting people yak away at will. It’s sad that this is needed though.
Representatives for disabled people were disappointed that a total ban wasn’t enforced, this to help those over sensitive to electricity. Frankly, I would imagine that if you’re allergic to electromagnetic radiation, a subway powered by electricity is not the best environment for you. Even if the primary power is from direct current, the lighting fixtures aren’t, and there’s a lot more of them in a carriage than there are mobile phones.
Dave Winer updates his mobile site pda.scripting.com. About time, it was pretty useless before.
Interestingly, I doubt many modern phones (and “PDAs”, if anyone is using them anymore) would have problems rendering the HTML version of (Scripting News)[http://pda.scripting.com/], making a dedicated mobile site rather moot.
Another thing is that blogs have RSS feeds, and RSS feeds can be read in aggregators such as the excellent Bloglines mobile version. I seldom break out of bloglines while I’m on the road.
Basically, I don’t read blogs on the web anymore, I use my aggregator.
So if Winer wants to do something more relevant for the modern PDA user, he could write a mobile aggregator.
Whoah! Apparently he has! But only for specific sites (guess who’s…). As Josh remarks:
Congratulations, Dave. You just invented Bloglines Mobile. ;-)
My old email provider home.se is moving to a new platform and are disabling the mail forwarding feature that was in place earlier. This enabled me to just forward all emails sent to that address to my Gmail account and have everything in one place.
Now this is no longer possible. I suspect that the email forwarding feature was a problem for them as they couldn’t display ads in the webmail interface for the users that had that enabled. So I don’t think it’ll be back.
I can access these emails via POP, so this raises the question: how can I enable the “import” of these emails into Gmail via POP? Two possibilities present themselves:
use a POP client (like spit Outlook) and create a rule that simply forwards all received emails to my Gmail account
code a little script that grabs the emails via POP and sends them
on, using cron for example to schedule it.
The second option is the most fun of course, but it would be cool if there already was something like this out there. Any ideas?
I’ve been reading a lot about SMS.ac lately. They sound like a scummy company with a litigious bent.
(See Mike’s post for background.)
[in progress]
Note: iTunes doesn’t make it easy to get info about podcasts out of the app, so this list is updated by hand.
Dave Winer has an elevator pitch for OPML blogging. What he means by “OPML blogging” is managing your weblog in an application, the OPML Editor, that enables you to choose whether to post an entry as a single sentence (or two) or in a more structured way with a title.
I can see the point. Sometimes you just want to post a link, or a quote, or an observation. That’s why I implemented my post-by-email feature to this blog. Any mail sent to an address with a certain subject line gets appended to that day’s observations post (if the file doesn’t exist, it is created.) The title of the post is always “Observations”. I got this idea from Fredrik Lundh, though I don’t think he posts via email.
I have a command-line version, but I usually just email from Gmail.
The cool thing about this approach, and the reason I call it a moblog application, is that I can post from my mobile phone via email. Granted, this doesn’t happen often, but it’s nice to be able to have the feature.
OK, so that’s my take: I agree with Dave that sometimes you just want to get the stuff out there, without writing an essay. I’m not sold on the application though. Granted, I haven’t used it yet, because as far as I know it doesn’t work with blosxom. But even if it did, where would I use it? I do some blogging at work (on breaks, naturally), some from a windows box at home, and some (like now) from a laptop running Linux. Each of these platforms supports emacs with remote editing via SSH, which is how I usually post. And when I don’t, I can use Gmail from any computer, or use my phone.
So, titleless blogging is cool, and liberating. Using the OPML Editor ties you to one application and one machine, that has to be running Windows or MacOS. That’s not so liberating.
Looks interesting. I’ll hear how it sounds tomorrow when I subscribe to the feed in iTunes.
That reminds me, I have to create a podroll.
This looks interesting, a watchmaker’s blog
journal. Lots of info
about watches and gears and stuff. Pretty interesting. But there’s no
feed! How come? Just an excerpt is enough, if you want to drive
traffic to your site.
Another site that should have RSS is The Luminous Landscape.
Jon Udell suggested in the latest Gillmor Gang podcast that blogs should be seen as the extension and evolution of resumes. If you’re a professional in the English and American sense of the word (i.e. an architect, lawyer, scientist, support engineer etc.) you should write about what you know, what you’ve learnt, and how you work in your blog. After all, any employer worth their salt will do a Google on a prospective hire before asking them to sign the dotted line. It can be embarrassing to know that you posted beginner’s SQL questions on a forum just weeks before applying for that DBA job.
(Jon’s argument is in text form in a blog entry.)
I’m not sure I buy into the argument, though. Most bloggers keep a pretty relaxed view about their professional life. After all, if you spend your work days thinking, which is basically what professionals do, you might want to kick back with a rant on politics in the evening. And even if your employer allows you to blog, would they be happy if you do it during working hours, especially if you’re building your online resume, so to speak?
I’m not sure what my current employer says about blogging. We have signed a Code of Conduct, which is basically a marketing device to enable the mothership to claim that their employees are ethical, or that they have at least signed a paper saying they know the difference between right and wrong. But from what I remember there was no mention of blogging.
We do have an internal blog, where I sometimes post stuff that’s relevant to the day to day work of my department. But that’s more something that fits between a “Staff.All” email and a casual water-cooler conversation with someone from another department. I doubt I could wax lyrical there about the latest trends in ticket tracking and support work. Is this the place for that? I highly doubt it. Like I said, I want to relax after work. Work sucks. I really don’t want to think about it too much outside 9—5.
That said, I do try to keep stuff from wandering way out of line here, because this is my digital identity, so to speak. (I also try to not mention where I work, even though my co-workers obviously know.) I personally find some weblogs fascinating in their mixture of professional writings and things of a more personal nature. And that’s OK, because I do think the line between work and personal life is blurring. Not only in work’s favour, I hope. What I mean is that if it’s OK for me to be online helping out the US team at 22:00, it’s also OK for me to take a morning off to take the kid to the dentist. It’s give and take.
Hmm, this post has the earmarks of late-night rambling. Better stop before my professional credibility is eroded.
Gotta love Russ. A few days after exposing his utter-non-hipness and confessing he doesn’t “get” MySpace he signs up for an account and starts trying to grok it.
I’m pretty glad my job doesn’t involve trying to fathom the fickle youth market. Like Russ, I don’t feel especially old, but the stuff that the kids are into (communities like Helgon and of course MSN chat) is out of my radar. I understand it in principle, but I don’t grasp the finer points. This blog is basically a personal broadsheet, the model is a hypothetical online journal from perhaps the nineteenth century — genteel, feelings under wraps, “stiff upper lip” etc. I can’t imagine letting it all hang out here. That’s not the kind of guy I am.
It should cheer him up that older people have consistently made money from younger ones throughout the ages (or at least since “teens” appeared as a consumer group) and if you just try your best you can probably manage.
At least with the older kids I have some kind of cred. My 5 minutes of manual reading have enabled me to use BitTorrent effectively, which is something my so-called internet literary youngsters have not figured out. But I shudder to think of what kind of fuddy-duddy I will appear in the four-year old’s eyes in about 7 years…
Yeah, I’m getting old, and it sucks.
Lately Engadget’s feed in Bloglines has had a lot of duplicates. I’m sure this is due to the feed ads they’re using, they seem to screw up the “modified” flag of the entry somehow.
I haven’t noticed anyone else complain, however. Is the problem with Bloglines or with Engadget?
Update 2005-12-30: The problem is that Engadget (or Weblogs, Inc) have started to publish the same entries under different URLs. The problem is not confined to Bloglines, either. Below is a screenshot from SharpReader:
I really hope that someone can fix this, the feed is almost unusable as it is.
[This post has been edited. Reasons for this are given below.]
(Warning, most links in Swedish.)
After spamming hundreds of Swedish blogs with misspelled marketing messages, anonymous representatives for the Swedish company “[H— & N—] Consulting” are now mailing misspelled legal threats to any Swedish blog that mentions their name. While we
haven’t been threatened yethave only received a single incomprehensible threat this far, we just want to make it clear that we don’t have any plans, at this time, to publish their name, nor the names of “blogrankers”, “ppckungen”, “betalaperklick”, “carbzone” or any of the other sites run by this company, on any of our sites. — the administration
[Update 2005-11-04: the above has been edited in accordance to the wishes of H & N Consulting.]
[I’m as of this writing number three two in a google for the name of H&N’s CEO, hereafter referred to by the alias “XXX”].
This post by Stattin has been retroactively censored, which shows that the [redacted] XXX has some kind of pull in these matters. One wonders just what he’s trying to hide?
Update 2005-11-04: Someone calling themselves “Blogrankers” has a blog at blogrankers.blogspot.com. The one and only post made there has been removed. There is a cached copy on Bloglines (in Swedish).
There was a mildly interesting flamewar in the comments to the post, now no longer available. Someone calling him- or herself “stev” defended Blogrankers.com there, calling their detractors “Communists”. He used an English idiom in that he capitalized the initial letter of svenska (“Swedish”). Interestingly enough, this same quirk can be seen in the post referenced above.
Update 2005-10-28: Fredrik gets his letter.
Update 2005-11-01: I finally got my letter in the mail, threatening me with up to two years of prison for breaches of the Swedish data privacy law PUL, and my provider with legal proceedings if they did not remove the information. The letter was signed “H & N Consulting” but with no other contact information. The sender address was the same as the administrative contact for the domain “blogrankers.com”.
I agree with Bengt that these guys have no legal leg to stand on, but I am no lawyer. I don’t have time or energy to make an impassioned stance against the injustices of the situation. So I’m caving in to their demands. This also saves the legal community in Sweden a lot of bother they can do without.
I could say it’s scary that a company can use these kinds of scare tactics to silence valid criticism. The scariness is alleviated, however, by the sheer stupidity of their actions. They’ve managed to alienate a large number of influential voices in the Swedish blogging community, who, even if they will censor their posts, will never forget the name of the people who made them do it. I predict that the financial future of the company is bleak.
However, I did make an unwarranted assumption about XXX’s physical appearance. I wrote that he was covered in phlegm. As I have never met the person, this was uncalled for. I have no real way of knowing the what the physical aspect of the gentleman is. For any offense this comment may have caused, I apologize.
Update 2005-11-04: cleaned up and fixed links.
Update 2005-11-06: small edits and clarifications.
Russell knows about the evil stalker blog and outs Jacek Rutkowski as the author. Predictably, Jacek denies authorship:
Russell Beattie in his latest post wrongly identifies author of this blog and motivations that lie behind it […]
It would be interesting to run a author-comparison scan on sentences like that and the normal utterings of Mr Rutkowski:
I have seen lately very pathetic and lame movie “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (strangely it is number one in USA now but it is because Americans love everything British and this claymation movie is British) […]
I know Russell gets up people’s noses and is certainly no shrinking violet, but being the target of so much venom must be pretty unnerving. How someone can summon so much hate for another person whom they’ve never met is beyond me.
That said, I’m glad Russ is cool about it. I would have called the cops.
I’m returning the Nokia N90 tomorrow. I’ll miss the gorgeous screen but not the hefty size.
Nokia sprung a surprise on us today with then announcement of the E-series business phones. You can get the skinny on the devices over at Jim’s wiki:
All phones share the following features:
With a line-up like this, the recently announced Sony-Ericsson P990 suddenly pales. Sure, it too has Wifi and a smartphone operating system, but it’s not part of an integrated business solution that Nokia has built around the E-series. It’s basically a stand-alone device, marketed by a company with a strong consumer focus.
The E-series can be used as VoIP terminals with certain commercial switches — and you can bet that support for open source products like Asterisk will follow. This opens up another line of attack for Nokia trying to gain market share. Think about it: you can have one device that works as a VoIP terminal internally; you can ensure that the mobile worker has access to email and data at decent speeds nearly everywhere; and you can get this product from one company that provides tools to manage the complexity.
Microsoft was supposed to clean BlackBerry’s and Nokia’s clocks with their Exchange server email push component and their plethora of Windows Mobile devices. But these devices are fragmented among almost as many manufacturers, none of which have the clout to make a concerted biz push like Nokia. And as for the server component, we still haven’t seen it where we are (we’re an Exchange shop.)
On a personal note, either the E61 or the E70 can be my dream device. Forget the Communicator; these phones have all I want and more.
So, once again, Nokia has sprung back, keeping everyone off their toes with a really strong product line. I must say I’m surprised at this — I thought Nokia had dropped the ball on corporate messaging and the biz phone market. But this changes everything. It’s up to the competition (I’m looking at you, Microsoft) to up the ante or fold and leave the table.
[Note to self: don’t write future reviews as a series of blog posts — gather all this stuff up and present it in a coherent fashion.]
The N90 has a little joystick on the side of the phone. This is primarily used in camera mode to control the flash, exposure etc., but it has some nice uses other than that. If you have a reminder that’s due, the phone will make a sound and show the reminder on the cover screen. You can use the little joystick to stop the tone or “snooze”.
However, this doesn’t work for incoming Bluetooth connections. You have to flip open the phone to accept those.
Speaking of camera modes, there are two. One is the “camphone mode”, with the screen opened in 90+90 degrees. The other is if you flip the camera housing 90 degrees with the phone closed. Then the cover screen becomes a viewfinder, and you can use the external joystick to manipulate your shots.
Update: you can also read SMS text messages on the cover screen. Cool.
More stuff I’ve discovered about the Nokia N90.
No vibrating call alarm. WTF!? This is worse than useless. If you’re working with headphones and you’ve happened to turn the phone upside down, you’ll miss calls, because you won’t see the external screen flashing. Ditto if the phone is in your pocket and you’re listening to some music.
The pop-port is on the side of the phone, which means that you can’t have it in a narrow pocket when using the headphones.
Image quality is decent, but not great. The pics are better than average for a phone, but they’re still camphone pics.
It’s not very clear how to handle video calls. This doesn’t bother me, because it’ll be a cold day in hell before I make a video call.
The “active” standby screen. This is the first thing you see. The shortcut icons have tooltips.
The main menu.
The images gallery. Pressing the joypad left or right transports you to some undefined place (head and end of image list?). Use the up/down directions.
The browser, with Bloglines mobile. The hi-res screen really shines here.
This is a screenshot from a normal S60, showing the difference in resolutions. The screens are the same physical size.
I tried to capture a screenshot of the phone in camera mode, but apparently the normal keypad buttons are disabled there.
Update: added bullet about video calls, and added a comparative screenshot.
Apparently Google have released a web-based aggregator, google.com/reader. I like gmail, so I thought I’d try this out, even if it seems to lack a mobile interface.
So I uploaded my blogroll in OPML from Bloglines, and waited… and waited… and waited some more. After 15 minutes it still said “Your subscriptions are being imported…” so I decided to let Google Reader cool down a bit and try again later, perhaps in a year or two.