N900 Do I or don't I?

I have been an N810 user for over a year where I originally made the purchase of the device as I was disappointed using a converged device like the E90 as there were always issues browsing the web. I thought the idea of going back to two devices with a less powered mobile phone and using this to tether with the N810 would be ideal. Although the N810 was a good device, from being used to a converged device for a number of years the idea of carrying two devices again was daunting. Further while the N810 was good for web browsing it was slow. In the end I ended up hacking the N810 to utilise the internal 2gb of SD space to allow me to install more applications but ultimately it has been gathering dust and is either used as an ebook reader for my emagazine or if I want to tinker. The last word 'tinker' is quite important because in reality this is all I can do with the device.

There aren't really any productivity applications out there other than abiword and gnu sheet for business use. The mail client although been upgraded is still crap not being able to really view html pages. The web browser does work but is slow and the replacement fennec browser again is really slow. This coupled with the poor battery life, terrible multimedia support without encoding to a usable video format and poor low volume don't really sing any kind of praises for the device. Yes, I can carry it in my pocket, it does have a keyboard but the design of the keyboard as a slide does not work for me. Further there is a sudden lack of syncing either to exchange or google. For exchange the recommendation is to use OWA but why do I want to log into a web browser to read my email. For Google sync there is a client of which needs installing and again it is somewhat cumbersome. However I had always thought the marrying of the N810 with a phone would be a good idea.

This leads me onto the N900 of which this concept is now a reality. But... The battery is smaller than the N810 where realistically you would only get 4 hours from an N810 on constant use. The screen is resistive where after using the N810 it is usable but capacitive would be great. But again, because the device does need a stylus you cannot exactly have a capacitive screen although someone is working on a stylus that will work with one. 32gb of storage is good, but how much of this like the N810 can we use to install applications? the N810 could have upto 32gb with micro sdhc cards, but the actual storage space with the internal flash ram, the swap file and preloaded OS meant you were still limited. The camera at 5 mpx is great, HSPA built in is great but again and little things like USB charging are welcome.

But wait a sec..... haven't we been here before with the N97 - the flagship device? Now there is the mini N97 again all of the N97 problems pre packaged in a smaller tin.

I currently have an HTC Magic, a welcome relief to S60 and I have been amazed of how much I am enjoying android. Later in the year the Palm Pre will hit the UK, again another device that I have tried with the SDK emulator and like but let down through lack of software.

So getting back to my question, part of me wants to order the N900 to see if it is what I have been looking for. The idea of a mobile computer with telephony rather than the other way around is for me the correct specification. However, recent Nokia announcements and hype such as the N97, 5800 and S60v5 and through previously owning an N810 are seriously putting me off. Lastly the N900 will cost £499 to order - that's half a grand.... I can go away for this, pay my mortgage and bills for one month or even save it. I was stung last year being eager to get the I8510 another all singing all dancing phone in spec but let down with bad firmware and support from Samsung.

Nokia will no doubt fix any problems the N900 quickly as they appear or at least there is the maemo community to do the work for them. This in itself will help the device become successful.

But overall, I think through writing this piece that I will wait as Q4 has many other things that will be happening. There was once a time I would have pressed Buy Now for example the Nokia 9500, E90, E71 and E63. But now I am more wise and frugal I will take a back seat let the cloud of hype surrounding the launch settle and wait to see what actual users are saying rather than the spin machine.

I may be wrong but ultimately that £500 can stay in the bank earning a little interest then when and if an opportunity of the ultimate device shows itself I can consider a purchase.

Copilot Live on Android

I will be posting an initial impressions blog of my HTC Magic in a few days but this morning I was using the phone for sat nav and it was a major failure. On my normal route to work a road was closed where I was forced to go another way. Because I was not familiar with the area I fired up my Co Pilot Live 8 Sat Nav on the HTC Magic and this is where it began screwing up.

For some reason it insisted it needed setting up again with my local language, choice of voice navigation, imperial or metric measurements then to accept the disclaimer. The last time this happened I managed to select maps of Italy that required a complete reinstall. Considering I was using the sat nav at the weekend why did it do this?

Then the icing on the cake it already had my route in from the weekend (several stops) and insisted on routing me to these destinations. Trying to clear each one out (it has to be done indivdually) resulted in slow menus, bad response and general sluggishness as it was trying to calculate the route at the same time I was trying to clear it.

ALK need to put a cancel route button on the first menu page and get the above issue sorted to ensure the product is a success. Like always, when it works it is great but on this occasion it was a major fail.

The idea of using a combined phone and PND (personal navigation device) is appealing as there is only one piece of equipment. But when there are other factors of the phone such as bad software or rouge processes hogging it this can seriously affect the navigation part. It is at this point why I like stand alone PNDs preferably built into the car as they only do one thing but these do cost a lot.

So for the interim I will have to grin and bear the pain if it screws up again....

A photo from my HTC Magic

The first picture taken on my phone. Can anyone identify the beetle and how to get rid of it?

The android cometh....

I have recently got back from holiday where I used Garmin maps on my E75 to redirect me around the traffic enroute to home. Garmin with google maps and occasional use of Ovi Maps was great on holiday for getting about. A quick lookup on google maps to find places then using the postcode in garmin to get me there by car. Or using the same postcode in Ovi maps for walking navigation. One wonders why we ever need maps. Well, due to the lack of 3g coverage and because I hadn't preloaded the Ovi Maps I still either needed a paper map or the preloaded Garmin maps.

On the journey home it was different because my phone required 5 manual reboots because Garmin kept freezing. I had even removed all of my memory hog applications to give it room to breathe with no luck. It worked fine taking me to my destination using this strategy until we neared the location. A swift stop and reboot fixed this, but why did I need 5 reboots yesterday. For this reason I love dedicated PND (personal navigation devices) They only do one thing of which is navigate and rarely crash. Whereas smartphones of which includes UIQ,S60 and windows mobile all have fits. If someone calls you they frustrate whether to take the call or carry on navigating to the extent they stop doing both. Then they rarely switch back to the navigation application after handling the call.

Finally I decided when I got back that I would look for an alternative device again. Whilst the E75 is a good device recent issues like this, the device slowing down (I only hard reset it 2 weeks ago) and now the slider is wobbling and the chrome surrond broken. I need a break from it so again its a good opportunity to try the competition as it will probably take a few weeks to repair, then its the usual 6 hour reinstall. I had bought 3 plastic surround cases to protect the phone but they all broke so off it will go back to the shop over the next few days.

I had rejected the thought of an android device earlier this year as there is a lack of space available to installed applications. However after listen to a recent podcast it is now possible to installed applications to the sd card if you either root the phone or installed an application to assit with this process.

Looking at the equivalent androids applications that I use on s60 the only missing ones are sms and call filter and an accounts manager like flying money. However I didn't have time to survey the homebrew libraries to see what is available there.

Looking at the phones for a little extra than a G1 I could get a G2 and recently the HTC hero is out. On reading about the hero, HTC have bastardised the Android OS for the better, but it does mean when Googke update Android you will not be able to update it OTA (over the air).

For this reason I decided to go with the G2 ie, Vodafone branded HTC Magic. I have ordered all of the accessories and it should be here over the coming days. There are several applications that I need to buy such as an Exchange sync, Ms office editors and sat nav but hopefully can test these beforehand.

The cupcake Os aka android 1.5 now looks more mature and it is possible to root (jailbreak) the phone. However there may be issues purchasing applications from market. But as usual these are all challenges ahead.

At this time I cannot comment if the device will last me. I had thought the E75 would have done but I have already said I am tiring of this. My 5800 is going on Ebay to part fund this purchase and possibly either the E75 or E90 but alas I do like the last device a lot. Nokia have really missed the boat with s60v5 so I seen no point hanging onto the device. 8 months on it is still slow, severe lack of ram and clunky to use. The G2 may well end up the same as my first iphone of which lasted only 2 months.

Later on in the year the E72 looks promising and the Pre is just around the corner. I have tinkered with the Pre Emulator and am imprest with the UI, how easy it is to set up and the general feel when using WebOS.
However there is a serious lack of applications available of which doesn't seem to be increasing in number. I am beginning to think until either the device reaches the rest of the world or if we wait another year, like android. Only then will we see more applications.

So the andoid finally cometh to me.... But how long will it stay?

Profimail Issues

For an email client on all of my 4 symbian phones I use Profimail because it provides a desktop like experience, is highly configurable and support rules for filtering. I have been using it for over a year and pride in using it over the standard nokia email client including the new nokiamessaging client.

The number of issues with nokia messgaing over the past months have had me laughing at people who use it and the number of times it failed. However today we the profimail users were the ones to be laughed at.

For some reason we could not collect email for the majority of the day and we were getting weird connection 300/301 errors please contact the application vendor messages. At one point I had a blue screen of death (BSOD) which whilst common in windows was most unwelcome on the phone. But I had to laugh at least I didn't need to reboot.

Anyway the issue was because the software we had purchased couldn't connect to the registration server to see if we had a legitimate version. Apparently there is an option to have his removed but you then lose the portability of being able to move the application to a new handset.

Eventually at the eleventh hour after the forum here was clogging up with message and after several emails the application began working. LCG responded with the email below:

Dear customer,
we acknowledge that our registration server was down today for few hours, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to you.
We tracked and fixed the error. We'll also put more failsafe code into future version of ProfiMail, so that any problems on our side don't harm you as customer.
Once again our apologies, and hopefully you'll love to use ProfiMail in a future.

Best Regards,
Lonely Cat Games Team

So it turns out there is no acutal redundancy available in their Registration server which effectively means the application will stop working. Why on earth it needs to check in with this server each time I collect email especially after I have paid for the software is beyond belief. Then there lack of acknowledging there is an issue either via the forums or using facebook or twitter is very poor.

Being in IT I know you get engrossed in the issue at hand but you also need to remember your customers as we are the ones who pay you.

The issue of checking the license each time reminds me of the WGA issues in Windows. It is a shame when a company needs to police the ones who have purchased the software. I appreciate they have to look after their interests but there are better ways. When I purchase the software they have my imei so they can supply a key. They could even employ a check each time an update is completed to see if the install is legal. Lastly, they could even use twitter with NAGIOS or provide a simple web page providing server update statuses.

Whilst I could use other email clients available to me I will still continue to use Profimail for its featuresn and hope that they change both the way they treat their customers in not providing updates of issues and that the license check is permanently removed or a alternative is found.

Multitasking or switching

I can recall the first time I used a HP UNIX computer at De Montfort University back in 1991. The screens were huge at 21" where for back then both these machines and screens would have cost thousands of pounds. The workstations themselves had a RISC processor and 32mb of ram and a hard drive. Previously I had used a PC with Windows 3, an Atari ST and Apple MAC. All except the atari could run multiple applications concurrently but unless you had enough memory on the PC, like the apple mac it would task switch. This meant the application in the foreground would run and other applications in the background would sit and wait until they were brought to the front to continue processing. Windows had a 386 enhanced mode which would allow mutlitasking and you could set the priority times for dos applications. The HP UNIX boxes at university could multitask properly with all of the applications. I could be compiling, on IRC, doing FTP downloads, emailing and possibly some text editing all together over a 9600 baud link that was shared with several 1000s of computers at the university. Back then I could see the benefit of multitasking and when Psion brought out the 3a I eventually got my first PDA (a psion 3c) and was running many applications at once.

I recently posted on twitter that I run 12 applications concurrently on my phone. I also had to chuckle when I read Engadget where the editor was struggling to do several things on his iphone. Possibly if he had several phones with him he would have been able to accomplish his tasks more easily and quickly.

If I look at my usage I will always focus on the one task and occasionally switch between applications if I know an email has arrived or twitter has updated. But there are times such as when I am using flyingmoney to reconcile my accounts whilst the web browser is open. Or, if I am in the middle of doing something else and I don't want distrurbing then my call handling software will take control - all happening in the background and without the need to close down applications.

Apple's recent idea of using push notifications is good in principle but after hearing that people are stopped in the middle of their current task. They then have to manage the notice, then can carry on. But if they receive for example several messages they have to deal with each one separately whereas I can just ignore them.

There are many reasons why we should not multitask because not focusing on one task makes us unproductive. Reasons not to multitask. I find having the flexibility of being able to do several things together I can still focus on the task at hand and switch as the need dictates.

Mac os used to task switch where background tasks used to stay still until they were brought to the foreground. Whereas windows applications would in a round about way multitask but not really properly until windows 95. Before Windows I also tried Os/2 which was definitely more grown up. As some of you are aware some of this technology underpinned Windows Nt. I also recall seeing a piece of software called Deskview X which would allow you to run concurrent Os way back in the early 90s and I decided back then that this would be useful but was sadly too expensive for me. It is only in the last few years with virtual machine technology that has allowed me to do this properly. I would envisage that we will also will be able to do this on our mobile devices in the near future.

Many commentators have been knocking Nokia for the S60 UI saying it is outdated and not as intuitive or elegant as the iphone. Whilst there is some degree of truth behind this, I do believe that the UI of S60 can and will evolve into something better if not comparable to the iphone. Again symbian the underlying OS like the iphones OS both are very powerful, can multitask if allowed and are very robust. Whilst I would welcome changes in the S60 ui I would hate to see it limit the devices just like the iphone has, to the extent that it was too simple and it reduced the functionality of not being able to multitask. While I understand Apples approach in trying to limit the number of applications running to ensure the consumer experience and battery life are not affected. Should this ever happen to Symbian then I will be moving to another platform.

In a way the current mobile market is like history repeating itself. In the early days the Psion was the technical superior device. Because it did not evolve and change as the consumer wanted colour screens and form factors such as the palm this could contribute to Nokia's and ultimately Symbians stagnation. At this moment in time I will avoid the word downfall as both Nokia and Symbian are larger players in the market than Psion ever was. They are making structural changes to their organisations and to the partnerships for example the Symbian Foundation, Nokia and Intel partnership, Maemo and QT, Open sourcing (not Saucing.) and Horizon for application development. But what we are not seeing are new and innovative devices just rehashes of old technology.

Nokia have always had two major lines of products with E series and N series. These at some point in time may converge but again I would hope to see that any converged devices whilst simple to use, still allow power users to multitask and work with the machines internals and not like the iphone where the walled garden approach is nice to look at but you are not allowed to stray beyond the fence or walk on the grass.

The E75 still lives on

It has been over a month now and I am still using my E75 and it is going strong. Even with the v10 firmware the phone is solid. In hind sight I have made the right decision to avoid both the E97 and Omnia HD. It also proves how mature s60v3.2 is to provide a good user experience.

I have read many reviews of the N97 and all have commented saying the build quality of the phone is exceptional but actually using the phone is bad.

I have already blogged about the low memory even before the device came out and I was right. After using the 5800 of which like the N97 is not for power users. Probably in 6 months time when there have been several revisions of firmware the n97 might be worth reviewing especially when the price comes down.

What surprised me recently with the omnia hd was samsung actually have released new firmware. Even after owning the i8510 for 6 months, getting rid of it and then 6 months later there has been no firmware. Because of this I no longer will have a samsung as I cannot afford to spend a lot of money on a feature rich handset which has faults and never gets fixed. A chap I am following on Twitter has an Omnia HD. Being an avid E90 user he thought the N97 was a joke so got the samsung. He is having issues but is persevering.

Looking back over my phone choices over the past year the nokia E series have been the best in terms of build and stability. It is just a shame Nokia cannot release a converged device composed of the e series build and stability with the high end features of the n series.

The E75 is quick to respond, has a good camera for stills and video, great for messaging and is comfortable to type on.
Everything I have thrown at it works and it continues to surprise me that I have actually found a good work horse. Okay, there is no wvga, no touch, no stereo speakers and no 3" screen. But after having and trying several devices with this configuration and being disappointed. What am I missing? Just the hassle of these not working.

When I had my E90 I thought wouldn't it be great to have a smaller device with an integrated keyboard. That's why I got the 5800 but I soon got bored because of its limitations. The E63 and similar formats are great to use but a little bulky. Then enter stage left the E75. Both the size and hidden keyboard make this phone an ideal form factor.

My only criticism is qvga where I didn't think it would bother me. I do get sick of scrolling or squinting when trying to read. If there was a device with a full screen and then a slide out keyboard then that would be the next one to consider.

But until that time the E75 is still the choice.