The occasional scrivener

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….

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.

Original is here.

[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.

Jobs in a press release:

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.

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:

• Telia: SMS cost between 0.69 and 0.75 SEK. (MMS cost more, but who sends those?)
• Tele2/Comviq: you can get a “flat-rate” deal for 500 SEK/month which includes 3,000 SMS
• Telenor: similar to Tele2, but 600 SEK/month.

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.

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.

Looks and build quality

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.

Software

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.

Connectivity

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.

Conclusion

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.

No 3G

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.

Cost

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.

Interface

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.

Tentative conclusion

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”

Telia Go!

• Connection name: Telia Go!
• Data bearer: Packet data
• Access point name: online.telia.se
• User name: None
• Prompt password: No
• Password: None
• Authentication: Normal
• Homepage: http://go.telia.se

Advanced settings:

• Network type: IPv4
• Phone IP address: Automatic
• Name servers: Automatic
• Proxy serv. address: 10.254.254.254
• Proxy port number: 8080

Telia MMS

• Connection name: Telia MMS
• Data bearer: Packet data
• Access point name: mms.telia.se
• User name: mms
• Prompt password: No
• Password: ? (four stars, assuming “None”)
• Authentication: Normal
• Homepage: http://mmss/

Advanced settings:

• Network type: IPv4
• Phone IP address: Automatic
• Name servers: Automatic
• Proxy serv. address: 193.209.134.132
• Proxy port number: 80

Telia SurfPort

• Connection name: Telia SurfPort
• Data bearer: Packet data
• Access point name: online.telia.se
• User name: None
• Prompt password: No
• Password: None
• Authentication: Normal
• Homepage: http://mobil.teliasurfport.se

Advanced settings:

• Network type: IPv4
• Phone IP address: Automatic
• Name servers: Automatic
• Proxy serv. address: 10.254.254.254
• Proxy port number: 8080

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

• S60 operating system
• camera
• wifi

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.

Handling

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.

Software

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).

Connectivity

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.

Picture quality

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.

Summary

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:

• having built-in WiFi rocks
• having two browsers that are almost, but not quite, wholly different sucks.

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:

• 3G
• adequate camera
• extensible operating system (S60)

Things I don’t like:

• random reboots (maybe due to buggy firmware)
• getting a bit long in the tooth
• fscking ugly

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:

• Nokia E61 — full QWERTY keyboard, no camera, S60, wifi
• Sony-Ericsson M600i — “half-QWERTY”, no camera, UIQ
• Sony-Ericsson P990i — QWERTY keyboard, UIQ, good camera, wifi, expensive
• Nokia E70 — QWERTY, S60, camera, wifi, expensive

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…

Dave Winer:

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.

Here’s a Wikipedia article about electrical sensitivity.

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. ;-)

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.)

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:

• Nokia E60: small, full featured S60 phone.
• Nokia E61: a phone with a full QWERTY keypad and its sights set directly on the BlackBerry
• Nokia E70: a S60 “wing” phone with the QWERTY keypad deployed on either side of a screen.

All phones share the following features:

• GSM and UMTS wireless
• Integrated Wifi
• Bluetooth and infrared(!)
• platform-agnostic email push (see Carlo’s thoughts for more)

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.

Screenshots

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.

I got the chance to borrow the Nokia N90 for a couple of weeks. As I already have a 3G phone, the 6630, I thought I’d give it a shot.

At first I was put off by the phone’s size, and the fact that none of my settings would be on it. But it turns out that the latest version of Nokia’s PC Suite is actually pretty good. There was no problem syncing two phones at once, so I just loaded my contacts, calender etc. onto the N90 from my PC.

Another “must-have” app is Wireless IRC. I downloaded a trial version (good for 2 weeks) and could start chatting on #mobitopia on the way home from work.

Physically, the phone is pretty big. Even if it’s only a few millimetres bigger than the 6630 when folded, it gives a much more massive impression. Nokia haven’t been able to design a sleek folder model yet.

Despite the size, the new charger cable attachment it very small — so small and thin it looks fragile. Fortunately, there’s an adapter cable for old chargers supplied with the phone.

The memory card slot is hard to use. You can get the card out, but if you don’t have long fingernails it’s very hard to get it in again. A 64M card is included, same as for the 6630.

The screen is very nice, with a much higher resolution than other S60 phones. Unfortunately, my first impression was that the text in Wireless IRC was blurry. This is an artifact of the fact that Wireless IRC is a “legacy” app, and the text is scaled up to prevent unreadably small fonts.

When using the web browser, the screen came into its own. The text size was smaller, but more of it was fitted onto the screen. Using Bloglines was nicer than using the 6630.

The keypad is larger and easier to use than the one on the 6630, which is not surprising as the physical area is nearly twice as large.

This is the first S60 phone I’ve used with the “ready” or “today” screen, and I found it a bit confusing at first. This is the fourth S60 phone I’ve used, so if I found it confusing I hesitate to think of what first time users might think. This said, the today screen provides nice shortcuts to Contact, Calendar, Messaging etc. This is an improvement over earlier interfaces where you had to press the swirl button to get to the menu.

The camera is the showpiece of the phone, with a 2 mpx sensor and a Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus. I liked the fact that it has a flash. I haven’t been able to see how good the photos are outside the phone’s screen yet. See the reviews linked from the page above for the gory details.

When using the camera, you fold out the screen in a 90 + 90 degree configuration. Access to camera controls is via an extra joystick on the side of the phone. There are also 2 softkeys along the top of the screen, or to the left if in shooting mode. Using these was fairly self-explanatory, but not very “intuitive”. Read the fine manual for the details.

When the phone is folded you can swing the camera housing and use the cover screen as a viewfinder. More discrete than unfolding all the bits and pieces in standard mode.

All in all, this isn’t a phone I’d choose if I had to pay for it, and probably not if I got it for free either. The folding design is not something I like in a phone, and I’d rather pay more money for a real camera than one on a phone.

Prices

• Best price in Sweden: 5 725 SEK (via PriceRunner Sweden)
• Best price in the UK: £502.80 (via PriceRunner UK)

A UMTS Nokia Communicator would rock. Imagine being able to SSH into your screen session via 3G!

Ahem… excuse my geekiness.

Update: I should qualify the above, I think. I spend a lot more time online than on the phone with the 6630. A communicator is a qwerty smartphone married to a S40 Nokia phone. This puts the functionality squarely where I want it: data use and text input. And 3G is fast data that could and should be cheap, at least for modest data usage.

SSH means I can access an online Unix server from anywhere, using the apps (emacs mostly) that I want.

Nathan:

Can’t help but think that there’s some conspiracy on the part of phone manufacturers that they keep producing bigger and uglier phones each with a disjoint set of features. I mean why is it that the 8800 has a camera that’s really not up to par with other phones, and doesn’t take memory cards. Yet promotes itself as having music playing capabilities, yet has <40 megs or so of onboard memory?

Every time you find a phone that you like, you find that it’s got some fundamental flaw in its design, that could only have been left out of the feature list out of spite.

So true.

Incidentally, the Sony-Ericsson K750i he picks is a good choice. S-E rule the mid-market between cheap voice-and-text phones and the more expensive smartphones. For many people, those phones hit the spot with a good mix of features (camera, Java support, music playback), small size, and good design.

Telia’s UMTS network has become nearly unusable these last few days. I can’t connect to IRC most times, and the web gateway times out a lot. I don’t know if they’re experiencing problems or are having a surge in traffic. I also know it’s no use trying to find info on their site, as it’s really crappy and mostly oriented to suckering people into choosing their service.

This has put a serious crimp on my online lifestyle, but on the other hand, I’m at last making progress with The System of the World.

Update: things seems to have sorted themselves out. Must have been a glitch.

It’s a tribute to what I think of Telia that I immediately suspected that they’d cut internet access (except for HTTP). I wouldn’t put it past them at all. And that raises the question: why am I using a provider that I fear and distrust?

I got a pair of Koss Porta-Pro[1] headphones yesterday. They have a great sound, and there’s the additional bonus of not looking like an iClone when walking about.

Also found a quick way to pause the ‘Pod (when answering a call on the phone, for example) — just yank the headphone cord out of the jack, and playback will pause. This is way simpler than unlocking the hold button and then pressing pause.

[1] Koss’ own site is spectacularly user-unfriendly, you have to register to do anything. Use the price comparison sites instead.

Russ slams the iPod nano, and Frank disagrees.

As an iPod owner of just a few days, I can finally buy the hype. The device is cool! I love the storage space — no more fiddling around with 256M when you have 6G. The podcast support rocks. (I’ve started to listen to podcasts too, another thing I’ll have to eat humble pie for…) Having a single device that does one thing well — play audio — is really nice.

Itunes sucks, but that’s another matter…

I’ve been using phones with mp3 players since at least 2001, when I got a Siemens SL45. After that, I’ve used the taco as a music phone. And sure, it works, but it doesn’t work as well as an iPod. And if you factor in the cost of the phone and the likely cost of a memory card that can carry enough songs to be competitive with even a small iPod, you’re looking at serious bucks.

A young person in the EU might have a basic phone for voice and SMS, either one they’ve bought themselves or got as a present. An iPod (or other music player) makes a lot of sense in that it’s something you can wish for as a present or save up to. Asking for a hugely expensive phone is not.

Many people in Sweden get mobiles from work. This is something you need to carry anyway, and often it’s some boring model that doesn’t cost a lot. Getting a dedicated music player for your own money makes a lot of sense then too.

Basically, I see phones and PDAs converging. But there’s still a future for a good music playing device like the iPod.

Some people want to know how long their call has lasted while they are making it. Some have alluded to the lack of such functionality out of the box as “the biggest interface flaw of them all”. (As Jim says in a comment to that post, “If that’s the biggest flaw you can find in the Series 60 interface then I’d say it’s got to be pretty good :-)”.)

It turns out the functionality is included, you just have to turn it on (thanks bob!). Here’s how to do it:

• Open the Log application:

• Open the “Options” menu (left softkey):

• Turn on the “Show call duration” option:

• Done!

Granted, I only know that this works on my 6630, but I’m guessing it’s the same for the 6682.

Updated: you can get screenshots easily with FExplorer.

Matt pontificates on the rumoured iPhone, and concludes:

To be honest, an N91-like device with the iTunes store hookup would probably slaughter the music/cellphone crossover market.

It would also slaughter Apple’s margins. They would have to pay licensing to Symbian (also true with UIQ3), and maybe Nokia.

Plus, if they go their own way and make a “pure” apple phone, they would have to deal with carriers and regulators too. Apple is too small for this. Even Microsoft only provides software for phones, and lets the companies that actually manufacture the phones take care of the hassle of certifying the devices.

The Microsoft way means lots of confusing brand names for the same phones, and a trickle of licensing to Redmond. But MS is the richest company on the face of the planet. They won’t crush Nokia and Motorola now, rightly seeing that the digital living room is more important at the moment. Those pesky phone companies can be bought or out-competed later.

But Apple doesn’t have those kinds of resources.

Also, consider a key use of an “iPhone” — using the stored music files as ringtones. Do you think any carrier would offer this phone on contract, if it’d mean that everyone that bought it wouldn’t buy expensive ringtones over the air?

(Update: found this piece by Ewan that explains the carrier’s position in better detail than I’ve laid out.)

For this and other reasons, I’m betting we won’t see an iPhone (or a phone with viable iTunes support) any time soon.

I ducked into an OnOff store this morning to get some Mini-DV casettes and took a gander at their mobile phone display. Among their Series 60 phones I saw: Nokia 6680, Nokia 6600, Nokia N-gage(!), Siemens SX-1(!!), but not the Nokia 6630 (aka Charlie). Weird.

By the way, the Taco cost 1,495 SEK. I don’t know if that was an unlocked phone though.

Darla reports on the mobile feed reader from MobHappy.

You know what also rocks? Mobile Bloglines. Works like a charm, and keeps your feed reading synced between sessions.

I swore I wouldn’t fall into the new-phone-every-year trap, but damn, the Nokia N91 (warning: Flash) rocks!

4 Gb hard drive, UMTS, Series 60… yum!

But it’ll also be a premium-priced device. The fact that I’m still paying Voda and Telia for two S60 devices is a bummer, but on the other hand both the Taco and Charlie are in use — the N-gage as an mp3 player and the 6630 as my main phone. And both were bargains (between 2,000 and 2,500 SEK).

I’ll see if I can wait for the inevitable price drop on the N91. Or if I should sell my soul to work and let them get me one — maybe being woken in the middle of the night when the database goes down is worth it?

Where the hell is my Taco? I’ve looked high and low for it, but it’s gone. And there’s a 256 MMC card in it that I paid good money for, before MMC cards became cheap as dirt.

Grr.

Update: found it lurking in a jacket pocket.

Russ waxes lyrical about the PSP as a web tablet.

I must say I agree. I played with Niclas’ Flybook yesterday, and it pretty much rocked as a tablet.. But the PSP is smaller, lighter, and has better games. Plus it’s waaay cheaper. I’ll definetely look at one when it’s launched here.

Matt describes the woeful state of N-gage gamitude in the US.

I already feel like the only N-Gage user on the Eastern seaboard though.

This is a pity, ‘cause the N-gage (classic, the “taco”) is still a kick-ass phone. I use mine as a mp3-player nowadays, I’m not really into games.

Darla has a new gig: associate editor at PhoneMag. Congrats!

Russ: morse texter. Old skool.

I’ve hacked together a list of traffic cams in Stockholm for Christopher Schmidt’s traffic cam app for Series60 Python. I’ll post the link to Matt Croydon’s wiki page as soon as I’ve tested it a bit more.

Until then, the data file can be accessed from http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/stockholm.dat.

The images are from Trafiken.nu

The following conventions are used in the tabs:

• C (Centre) for Innerstaden
• CS (Centre South) for Södermalm
• CW (Centre West) for Essingeleden
• S (South) for Nynäsvägen
• E (East) for Värmdöleden
• SW (South West) for E4:an
• N (North) for E4/E18 Norr

I don’t have any links for cameras in Södra Länken, where I spent 30 minutes in a glacial queue this morning.

Matt has released dict2go, a Python for Series 60 app that’s an interface to the dict protocol. This means that you can easily lookup weird words on the hoof.

As usual when reading Patrick O’Brian, I encountered a word I didn’t know — mammothrept. Having some free time, I used dict2go to look it up:

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :

mammothrept \mam"mo*thrept\ (m[a^]m"m[-o]*thr[e^]pt), n. [Gr.
   mammo`qreptos; ma`mma grandmother + tre`pein to nourish.]
   A child brought up by its grandmother; a spoiled child. [R.]
   [1913 Webster]

   O, you are a more mammothrept in judgment. --B. Jonson. [1913 Webster]

Truly cool. Thanks, Matt!

Take a page from my book and don’t get drawn into “testing” stupid Bluetooth hacks. The only consequence is that your phone will be b0rked for no good reason.

Zainman posted a so-called tip on how to turn off any phone that browsed your phone via Bluetooth. The trick was to name your BT profile "<tab>1<tab>".

He pestered me to try this, and finally I relented. When I changed the name of my 6630 and browsed for it with my N-gage, the BT app crashed. The phone didn’t restart. But when I tried to open the list of BT access points on the N-gage, it crashed again. Obviously the string was cached somewhere and prevented me from browsing for new BT devices.

So now I have a crippled N-Gage. Great. Thanks a fucking bunch, Zainman.

Update: a full reset (key combination *#7370#) fixed this — don’t forget to back up your phone first, this nukes everything.

I’m using a CSS layout with floats (essentially the one described here) which has a number of advantages for me. Chief among these is the fact that I can put all the sidebar content in the physical end of the HTML. This means that if you’re browsing with a text-mode browser such as lynx you get the content first instead of having to scroll down three screens.

However, some mobile browsers are too smart for their own good. They can access CSS stylesheets and use them. In this case, my nice semantically marked up page was all squished up on the screen as the device tried to overlay two divs with negative margins.

Enter CSS Media types. This lets you specify different CSS layouts for different “devices” (screen, print, handheld, aural…). I split my CSS into three parts, common.css, simple.css (the one with the floats) and handheld.css, which is essentially empty right now.

Then I added this to my <head> section:

  <head>
  <title>The occasional scrivener</title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />  
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/common.css" type="text/css">
  <style type="text/css" media="screen">@import "/screen.css";</style>
  <style type="text/css" media="handheld">@import "/handheld.css";</style>

Now my pages render nicely (i.e. no CSS at all) in the following phones:

• Nokia 6630
• N-gage classic.
• Sony-Ericsson K700i.
• Sony-Ericsson P800. Test conducted with the built-in browser, not Opera.

Phones that don’t work include:

• Motorola A925. I think the browser here is a branded version of Opera.
• Sanyo 8100.
• Samsung SPH-A500. Internal browser error.

Thanks to Anthony Eden of dotMP for help researching this.

Update: this wiki discusses designing for mobile devices.

Several new users of the Charlie aka the Nokia 6630 have mentioned the coolness of the Transfer application. This is a little program (Menu -> Tools on my phone) that is sent via Bluetooth to the phone you want to upgrade from. When it’s installed there, it sends all your information (contacts, calendar details etc) to the new phone. Painless.

The docs say that the 7610 and 6600 are supported, but I had no problems syncing with the N-gage classic.

Of course, you can use a sync with a PIM for this, but Transfer handles pictures too.

I mentioned it in the post linked above, but it’s such a nice feature I felt it should get a bit more attention.

Tom links to a post by Clive about the gestural interfaces on a new Samsung phone. Clive thinks the proposed inplmementation is pretty stupid, and I can’t really disagree.

Gestural interfaces have been around meme-wise for a long time (in fact, I wrote my thesis based on a proposed interface). You would think that they’d show up more now that mobiles are getting smaller and smaller. But the Samsung is the first mainstream model I’ve seen so far.

In fact, only one haptic interface has made serious inroads: the ubiquitous vibrate function on nearly every modern phone.

We haven’t really reached the point where the smallness of phones requires a radically new interface to exploit all the features within them.

But as Tom notes, existing interfaces can benefit from fresh thinking:

I mean, why do devices with stylus uniformly have interfaces which require you to stab small areas of a small screen with a small pointer? Why not have them use long, sweeping strokes of a stylus, mimicking the way we write with pen and paper?

“Work in progress”.

The 9300 is my new lust-thang, and I know my dad’s interested in upgrading his Psion to a 9500. This is just a place to store random URLs and info for the time being.

Update: Al reports from Malaysia that the 9300 keyboard is very small, the 9500 is more like the Psion. On the other hand, Christian reports that the 9300 is the size of a 6110. Yay!

Frank tells me that the list price for the 9300 is €600.

• Power Data — flat file database for 9x00 machines
• Series 80 SSH client
• Ewan’s 9500 review (first part)