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.

That’s about it. Other than that it’s a phone.

Another exciting conference from Carson Workshops - I’m all booked and looking forward to it. Lots of big names - should be a blast!

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’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…

OK, I’m so cross I’m inspired to blog!

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!

A suprising number of spare seats have started appearing, but I’m hanging in…

Mark Flanders, Adobe, run through of Flex and a plug for Apollo. Very interesting, would like time to play, but not inspiring yet. Perhaps it’s too early in the morning. Impressive examples of performance increase going from ActionScript 2 to 3. If I was an ActionScripter I’d be excited.

Chris Wilson from Microsoft, with a great background to his time at Microsoft (he’s been working on IE since 2.0!) trying desperately hard to persuade that they’re ‘passionate about standards’ - yeh, I think he convinced me. Great quote from his boss when they were developing IE7 and fixing loads of things and finding that as a result a lot of sites broke … “I’m really concerned we’re breaking stuff in the name of goodness and that all users and developers will walk away with ’stuff’ broke”. Which led to the mantra “Don’t break the web”. With great power comes great responsibility! Oh, and confirmation of something I’ve been trying to tell my guys - “It’s not technically possible to have EXACT multiple IE versions on the same machine” - use VirtualPC instead.

Khoi Vinh nytimes.com, some good UI / design stuff, but I’m a geek so I snored. Actually I didn’t - I caught the odd great quote to thrill and impress people with every now and then, probably my favourite “if you’re going to offend anybody, offend experts not beginners”.

Now for the good bit - Simon Willison on OpenID, and I got absolutely, stupendously excited about it, and reslised why all anyone was blogging about yesterday was Kevin Rose’s announcement that digg were getting behind it (damn, I didn’t write that did I, because it didn’t mean anything to me then). OK, I get it now, and it’s going to be HUGE. So later netvibe said they’re doing it, and openoffice.com but I don’t know if anyone noticed. Anyway, much to play with, and I’m going to do something with it because it’s a Good Thing.

What else - Google docs and spreadsheets - sorry, just a bit too smug for me.

Some nice open mike spots - how to run a Virtual Office, JEDI or Just Enough Documentation for Interaction (=Agile Documentation) very cool and I’d love to take that back to work. And opinions on Web2.0 hots and nots.

The one I came for - Daniel Applequist from Vodafone on the future of mobile - I was hoping for a bit more I think but because I’ve done wuite a bit of research myself (and perhaps been polluted by Luca Passani) I didn’t hear anything new. Never mind. A plug for vodafonebetavine.net which should be investigated.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP with a great bit of history, and a preview of what I’ll be doing tomorrow morning (If I remember which workshop I booked) i.e. benchmarking and profiling, and a great little bit on exploits and a few things I hadn’t seen before. Great guy. And some good quotes for a presentation I’ll be doing in a few months on Open Source Software.

Moo.com - why print isn’t dead, and a classic case of a great idea run by people who love their product. As they say their product (business cards) is 300 years old, and many, many people are doing it. The way they do it, and the community they’ve built up, and it’s a great story.

Finally, a spirited presentation about openoffice.com who launched a beta version of their new interface today.

So favourites - Rasmus was great, Moo was enjoyable, but I’m still buzzing about OpenID.

It’s not often I actually have to get my hands dirty and code real sites, but in this instance, a) there was noone else free and b) I fancied the challenge.

Soupercan! is a tongue-in-cheek site developed at work as a bit of fun and to run some relatively harmless experiments in viral marketing.

Doesn’t mean that the visual I was given was going to be easy to build though! Man I never knew how much I wouldn’t miss IE6!

Check out the cheeky use of jquery in the ’send to friend’ box, SWFObject embedded flash movie, and an xhtml-mp mobile friendly equivalent.

How much fun can you have with one page?

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.

Now who did I lend the Loox to?

It’s only on loan, but I’ve got a Palm Treo 750v to play with for a week or so - it’s a smartphone running Windows Mobile - the immediate difference from my PDA is that it’s also a phone - 3G GPRS can be used for connectivity. It’s a smaller screen, and has a ‘real’ qwerty keyboard. Oh, and no WIFI, which means I feel guilty using up any transfer.

Even if I had the chance I don’t know if I’d want to keep it - it doesn’t sit as well in my trouser pocket as my K750i, and not as nice to use as a PDA as the Loox. And now I’ve fifured out how to get the phone to provide GPRS connectivity to the PDA - I didn’t blog that did I? Use *99***1# as a number for the ‘modem’ to dial and it uses GPRS - I get the best of each role, but with two devices.

I wonder if I could get hold of a Qtek 910?