We’re a few months away from having the thing released here, but in the mean time there’s the iPod Touch which is most of the iPhone without the phone. Since the bit I’m interested in is the web browser and the Internet features - it’s ideal so I got one for the team for R&D.
I pointed it at one of the sites I’d optimised for mobile devices following recognised best practice (e.g. Luca Passani’s Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web) and was not hugely surprised that it rendered the desktop version as my mobile detection didn’t pick up the User Agent.
A quick tweak to get it to spot that ‘iPod’ is a mobile device and … Safari throws an error.
It turns out that Safari Mobile doesn’t support xhtml-mp!
So to get an iPhone friendly version of a site you can’t use your mobile version and keep it xhtml-mp. I see Facebook have a mobile version using xhtml-mp, and a special iphone version without a doctype.
Do I feel a return to the bad old days of browser sniffing and multiple versions of sites? Oh dear!
Time for a new phone I thought, and I’ve been hankering for something a bit more high tech for some time. So having been reading about iPhone vs N95 I thought I’d find out what the computer has become.
First impressions - compared to my old K750i it’s big, but then it’s got that lovely big screen. However it’s been living in my pocket quite well for a few days now, so I don’t think it’s too big.
It’s a new interface to learn - I had Nokia before my last two Sony Ericssons and loved it and moaned about having to learn the SE, but you get used to things don’t you? Accepting that I still have to learn keyboard shortcuts etc. the current issues I have are getting confused with when the keyboard will lock, and the text entry could do with a preview of what the next button press will do. And the camera takes too long from going ‘click’ and freezing the picture, to actually taking the image and storing it (I suspect something in the order of half a second?), so you often miss what it was you were trying to shoot - especially in lower light.
Of course my main interest was the Internet browsing, and it was … underwhelming. I really don’t agree with the apparent trend to try and get mobile devices to render normal web pages on small screens. It’s a bad compromise, and will do nothing to encourage websites to make an effort to improve their rendering for lesser browsers. So it tries to render full pages, with a zoom function and a cursor, but it’s still a mobile device with a small screen and vastly reduced input device. And they’ve even removed one of the most useful features of phone browsers - using the keyboard hotkeys for fast navigation. Point it at a site optimised for mobiles, and I’m sure it’s great (although I haven’t yet found a shining example).
This is my initial reaction after not enough time - I will explore more as I’m very keen indeed to partake in helping the mobile internet evolution progress.
I was fascinated by the GPS functionality, having read so much about that’s the way mobile devices were going to go - and I was frankly very disappointed. It takes an age to get the GPS functionality lit up and knowing where it is, and it’s very flakey. And I don’t know that you can automatically geotag pictures. It may be the future, but it’s not here yet from what I see.
I haven’t yet explored the music / video / 3G features yet - I’m rationing the excitement.
I hate the commercialisation of phones - demo games, subscribe to additional features, constantly having to worry what doing anything will cost you. But I suppose it’s the price you have to pay for subsidised handsets etc.
Found this app which really makes me wish my phone was 3G with a bigger screen - MGMaps - it’s a Java app that runs on most mobile phones (those supprting J2ME at any rate) and allows you to access Google Maps Yahoo! Maps.
Runs on my K750i but it’s painfully slow loading the bitmapped images. Once it does though it’s a nice interface. Very useful if you’re stuck without a map - if you know where you are (?)
Now all I need is a phone with 3G and GPS - hmmm. a Nokia N95 perhaps?
Postscript: Following instructions on mgmaps and markus.brosch.net I got mgmaps going on my PocketLoox PocketPC - and in the process got the IBM J9 Java/Midlet runtime going on Windows Mobile 5 - what fun!
I happened to be passing Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom site which I delve into every now and then, and read with interest his revisiting of predictions on the iPhone some time after the release, and having been using one. Now I haven’t had the oppotunity to play with one yet, and as described elsewhere I’m less than impressed with Windows Mobile offerings.
“As for the iPhone overall — hardware, software, user experience — I remain completely satisfied and even in awe in some instances. The deeper I dive into the UI, the more I’m impressed with decisions made at every level within the experience of using it. Simply stated, this is one killer device.”
OK, that makes me want to give one a spin - perhaps they are worth the hype. But then I want to get my hands on a Nokia N95
I’ve not been keeping up with the news as much as I should have, nor my R&D, which is why I’ve missed until now the news that dotMobi have appointed Andrea Trasatti as Director of Device Initiatives (how many people claim that as their job title?) with the goal of developing a ‘global mobile phone database for developer community’
Andrea certainly has a suitable pedigree - having been co-founder of WURFL, an active participant in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative’s Device Descriptions Working Group, and I’ve used some of his PHP code in my tinkering with mobile device detection. In his inaugural blog posting, he says “We don’t want to re-invent the wheel, but we want to learn from past experiences and then try to make some steps forward. When the meeting started everyone had a number of ideas that did not really seem to work out very well with each other. I have to say that after two days drawing on a blackboard, talking, writing notes and sharing ideas, we have come to a very interesting solution. … I am very excited about all the features we have thought so far and I am confident that most developers will be BLOWN AWAY by the software that we are going to build.”
I’ll follow this development with interest - but my first questions are ‘What will this do that WURFL doesn’t?‘ and ‘What will this mean to WURFL‘?
I have to say I’m immediately suspicious of a corporate entity trying to do something in an Open Source sort of way - it may get swallowed up in bureaucracy, or it may be that the commercial drivers make it a great tool.
Boring post perhaps, but we’ve got a few more phones on trial - I’m trying to persuade them that Blackberries are hard work - we don’t run Exchange Server and the grief we have to go to getting emails working on those things…
We’ve had much better results with Active Sync on WindowsMobile devices. Last time I has a Vodafone v1605 (for the FoWA 2007 event - it was great as a PDA, but not a very good phone), this time I’ve borrowed a Vodafone 1210 which is more phone sized but still runs Windows Mobile.
So it’s the same width and thickness as my K750i, about half an inch longer - it’s phone sized. Quite confortable in my pocket, it looks neat, and so far battery life has been acceptable. I’ve not used it much as a phone yet - I wouldn’t call myself a power user - but the few times I have it’s performed quite well, so it qualifies as a phone, and I’d be perfectly happy to carry it around.
We got Active Sync talking to our Kerio mail server without much hassle, but we’ve got the hang of that now with WM5 devices. Yes, it handles email well - perfectly capable of reading emails, and if you can bear the restrictions of using the numeric keypad to type in (it does t9 predictive text, but what phone doesn’t?) it will send too.
The keyboard restrictions and the reduced features of the Smartphone edition of WM5 limit the things usefulness as a PDA - but it’s a phone so who cares?
The Internet browser worked as expected, quite useable given the limitations of the screen and keypad.
My main bugbear - it’s not got a camera.
Given that though, if I wanted a phone with email, it’s a definite contender. But there are still a few more to try…
I’m sorry, I may not have been paying attention, but why is the Apple iPhone such a big deal?
Yes it does email, and lets you browse the web and take pictures, but so do most phones. OK it’s in a sexy Apple designed case, and has a natty user interface, but there are many other damned sexy phones out there too.
It now seems even the OS is being kept under wraps - if you want to put an app on the phone develop it as a web app - much as you would with any other phone.
I’ve had a few phones in the past - each gaining in sophistication on the previous model - an experience I’m sure I share with many people. The phones are now trying so hard to be more than just a phone - email, pda, mp3 player, modem …
I’ve currently got a Sony Ericsson K750i which was quite cool when I got it (aren’t they all?) and it did a job. But I always regretted putting the bloody CD in my computer to install the ‘PC Suite’ - the computer has run like a dog ever since - it never did what it said it would do (sync stuff up etc.) so I basically gave up - and stick to treating the thing as a phone.
But the little joystick nipply thing first stopped going down, then stopped period. Common problem I gather. I ‘acquire’ a spare phone and go to try and copy all my settings, contacts, ringtones, games etc. from one to the other - so I’m back in the world of the PC Suite and now I’m REALLY CROSS!
Whoever came up with the idea of mobile bloody phones and tried to make them clever?
I wish I was one of the few who refuse to use the frigging things!
It surprised me how relieved I was last night when I took my SIM card out of the smartphone I had on loan and fired up my usual phone - normality returned, and there was almost a sigh of satisfaction.
It’s hard to pin the blame on any one aspect of the newcomer - it was a bit too big, it wasn’t a very good phone (usability of that side was terrible) nor was it a very good PDA (screen res was only a quarter of the Loox - 240×320 instead of 480×640). The 3G GPRS was impressive, but even though I wasn’t paying the bandwidth I still felt guilty and longed for guiltfree WiFi.
Having said that I feel the experiment was a success - I now know I’m happier with a phone being a good phone, and a seperate PDA.
