Spring Clean

Yesterday I made the drastic decision to get rid of all of my phones except the following:

• n900 - I am still interested to see how this develops
• E63 - a nice cheap phone that is being used as my work phone
• 5800XM - I am keeping this as a sat nav

I am getting rid of the following because I want a nexus one and an ipad later this year but here is a summary why:

• HTC Magic - Great android starter phone but limited on specification
• HTC Hero - Compared to the magic this is a breath of fresh air with the sense ui but HTCs lack of Android OS updates has shocked me. The magic is already on 1.6 whereas the Hero is 1.5 and newer applications I want to use are on android 2. HTC will update the Hero in march 2010 to Android 2 but my fears of not rolling out frequent updates where correct and as such I am abandoning non Google based Android handsets. I am of the opinion HTC either want people to upgrade to their new HTC Desire or Legend to use Android 2. Whilst this is their prerogative they have in effect stuck the two fingers up at existing owners. March isn't too far away but I believe this is a sign of things to come and I don't want to be party of it At least with a google phone I am guaranteed more frequent updates as Google develop the OS. SenseUI on the hero is great but does not bring that enough benefit to keep me on Android 1.5
• N810 - I now have the N900
• E75 - A great work horse but the 5800XM will now fill that position as being a back up device. The E75 is kind of phone you would either take out at night or away as the hidden keyboard really does make it look like a normal boring phone.
• E90 - A great communicator and specification on a phone on par with the E75. I a sad to see this go but I really haven't used it for for over a year.
• Palm Pre - There is a lot of potential with WEBOS but like the first generation iphone as there are no applications, the hardware is becoming long in to the tooth and now other phones such as the N900 and Hero with SenseUI no integrate with other social networks there is really no use for synergy. Should there be more applications that are more productive based I may look at WEBOS again. But for now, my conclusion is, it is nice to use but there is no substance due to lack of applications.
• Palm Treo 680 - An old phone I had just lying around doing nothing. Again, nice OS and lots of applications but long in tooth for me.
• BeBook Ereader - Not a phone but it will be replaced with the ipad or an android equivalent. I have not really used it and whilst it great on battery power I don't read many ebooks. Further its PDF support is limiting on the emagazines I read in that it is slow and does not render the pages well.

The replacements:

• Nexus One - To replace all of my phones with its larger screen and Google android based OS. Because I have already purchased a lot of android applications I can quite easily port them over to the new phone.
• Ipad Or an android equivalent - I am interested in a tablet device after using the Archos Android Tablet where the Ipad has caught my interest. However with the Dell Mini 5, ICD or a Tecra based Android tablet there will be others to look at.

Although 2010 might end up as 2009 with me purchasing many devices my intention ebaying the old devices is to fund the new purchased but also ensure I am not collecting clutter. I should hopefully have the nexus one within the next couple of weeks so will no doubt end up posting about it then.

Cross mobile platform exchange syncing with repeating events.

Back in the old days I used to sync a nokia 9500 and a Sony Ericsson P900 with outlook over a cable. I was pretty confident in that it worked and all appointments and events including repeats where duplicated correctly on each phone. It wasn't until my permanent move to linux that I needed to find a cross platform solution that didn't rely on a PC.

I had always used exchange and had found the S60 and windows mobile exchange syncing to be fine but there could be issues with duplicates or missing entries. I would then spend valuable time tweaking them until they appeared on both devices correctly.

Recently I have expanded the syncing to an android based HTC Hero, Maemo n900 and WEBOS Palm Pre. I have always sought to have a devicer with exchange syncing.

Today on looking in my n900 calendar a recurring birthday hadn't synced. I tried a full resync then extended my search to my other devices to see which one it appeared on. My E63 and Palm Pre synced the event fine bit both the hero and n900 hadn't. Further investigation on the E63 revealed the repeating annual event was started in 1994.
Now whilst you may argue just delete and recreate the event I was determined to get to the root of the issue.

The reason for starting in 1994 was because my old Psion 5 allowed me to create a start date for events and as such would advise me how old the event was. Hence I could work out some one's age. The P900 also allowed me to do this.

It would appear that both the hero and n900 exchange sync cannot cope with this. On changing the repeating start date to 2009 the event synced on all devices. I tried this also with an event from 2003 where I had an issue and again changing this to 2009 allowed it to sync across all devices.

Whilst birthday functionality has now moved from calendar back into contats it is amazing how something so little can cause an issue. It shows how mature both the webos and s60 exchange is compared to the newer platforms. Lastly it also proves that all exchange solutions are not 100%

HTC Hero

Due to delays in the n900 and the lack of software both in this and the Palm Pre application catalog I decided to purchase a HTC Hero.

There was some hesitation wondering if I could easily transfer my original HTC Magic software over where kind soles on Twitter indicated this should be easy.

I opted to get the sim free version from carphone warehouse. Setting the phone up took a couple of hours as I had over 100 applications to reinstall. Thankfully from entering my Google credentials the app market recognised what I had purchased and allowed me to download and reinstall the apps again.

Overall I am happy with the phone and find it a lot more responsive than the magic. This is no doubt helped by the additional RAM available for the Hero.

The other difference is the application installation space is smaller than the magic.

However the changes that HTC have done to Android including built-in exchange support and the sense UI make this one hell of a phone. Also the multi touch on the browser is great and really should be standard on Google Android now

Whilst ota updates are not supported yet, the current rom seems stable and it is good to see what Android can do when you give Android some track with which to accelerate by not being restricted by Google.

Long term there is potential but the snap dragon based Android phones are looking more appealing over the pre and n900.

Compared to the Hero these will certainly have some catching up and overtaking to do now the Hero has set the pace on that track.

E90

Well after some deliberation and the recent issues with the 5800XM I have blown the dust off my Nokia E90 (over 18 months old), reflashed it and then spent three days reinstalling it after two bundled attempts.

The previous atempts failed due to the memory card where I had similar issues to my 16gb card. I had previously used the 16gb in the 5800 but it would not work and became corrupt. A similar issue happened in the E90 the first time. I then tried a 8gb card and the same issue here happened.

Looking at both card they were both class 2, so I tried a class 4, 8gb card on the third attempt and everything now works. When I had the class 2, 8gb card in a N95 it slowed the response of the phone right down. So the moral is, class 2 for devices like ebook readers, cameras or mp3 machines. Class 4 for pdas or mobiles. The 16gb has gone in my camera and the 8gb in my N810 for extra storage.

The E90 is like holding a shoe to your ear when making calls. However it has lots of memory, quite fast processor, can multitask, has a keyboard, large screen, gps, 3.2 megapixel camera, stereo, ad2p, wifi, bluetooth and ip telephony, Whilst the 5800 has all of this minus the hardware keyboard, the 5800 really slows down when doing too much.

You may ask what have I got running on the phone:

Push email
Ip telephony
Gravity for twitter
Push sync to exchange
Sms filter
Call filter
Call recorder
Sms gmail sync

Even with this running it still leaves enough ram for web browsing, blogging and the odd phone call.

The iphone can only do one thing at a time according to apple, however when I jailbroke my 2g iphone I was running ssh, php, web server, call notification software in the background and other apps in the foreground.

I have heard that apple will be be allowing push notifications to the phone where by rather than the phone periodically checking for updates or having a constant connection to the server, apple will notify the phone when something has updated so the phone can connect and make the updates. If this works, it will be a new way of doing push notification and will reduce on data being transferred from having to keep open a constant connection.

So whilst I have been looking for a phone that does everything I want I have had it for the past 18 months stuck in a drawer!

However, looking at new handsets at the moment the contenders are now E90, E71 , N97 or the palm pre. Matt Miller reports the keyboard on the N97 is poor in comparison to the E75 the device he is now favoring. You cannot use a virtual keyboard to input on the N97 as there is no software keyboard unlike the 5800, so you have to flip open the device. Whilst like my E90 I have to do this in order to type it would be good to see both options available like on the N810.

So whilst I am waiting and reading the reviews, I am typing this blog using wavelogger on the E90 as I know I have the yardstick in my hands. Should there be another communicator announcement from Nokia then the N97 will be ball parked until the communicator comes out for comparison.

As the phones cost a lot it will be worth the wait as they do stand the test of time - or at least me!