While deciding when to call my sister I thought about using some of the Skype minutes they keep threatening me to use or lose.  I never use Skype very much, and in the past have only used it for calls to land phones.  It’s great for over-seas stuff as far as pricing goes, and just as nice for out of province/country.  Anyway, the thought of pulling out my old USB Logitech headset (the over-the-head phone operator design) made me cringe, and I think that’s the reason I don’t use Skype.  But then a strange idea came over me …why can’t I get a phone that looks like a phone but works with a computer?

Oddly enough, the roomy gave me an old 70’s phone to pass along to Goodwill on my next visit.  It was sitting on my desk and I was earlier trying to decide whether or not to keep it for some reason, when the idea of putting the handset together with the USB headset might be worth a try.  So I started right in …first cutting some cables, then deciding to solder the phone lines to the USB contact board, then not getting any sound from the ear piece (the mic worked fine) which meant I had to strip the ear piece from the headset to fit into the handset.  An hour or so and some bad soldering skills later (the ‘pen’ type iron sucked and I didn’t have any of that stuff to absorb solder with) I had my very own retro USB phone.

It works great!  It’s also been done as well, and Skype even markets new phones with the retro handset.  But mine’s the best I think …it’s made with love and borne of the desire for the past with the convenience of the future.  It’s also beige.  And who in their right mind would think of buying a boring looking beige handset?  Personally, I think that makes me cool.

Maybe.

The Beige Retro USB Phone ...the coil even comes with a kink!

]]> http://theplatform.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/htc-hero-review/ Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:45:33 +0000 Tim http://theplatform.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/htc-hero-review/

One of the best Android handsets yet

What: HTC Hero

How much: Varies, but Orange and T-Mobile both have the Hero for free on a £30/24-month contract (rebranded as the G2 Touch on T-Mobile). Or you can buy it outright (SIM-free) for about £370 from a number of online retailers.

To my long-suffering Aussie friends: you should be able to buy it outright from an online retailer for about A$580 (seeing as no carriers have picked it up).

In the US there are two CDMA versions of the Hero platform: Sprint offers it in a different (blander) shell, and Verizon offers yet another mild variant renamed the Droid Eris.

The good: HTC Sense UI adds a lot of polish to Android OS; excellent usability; access to thousands of Android applications; solid hardware design; aggregation of contacts and linking to Web services is good; build quality is excellent.

The bad: The launch firmware was buggy and slow (make sure you update to the latest version from HTC); same basic hardware platform as the cheaper Magic; no Mac OS support for HTC desktop software; contact aggregation doesn’t give enough options for managing contacts or choosing which to sync; the customised version of Android means HTC takes longer to keep up with “official” Android platform updates.

Buy it if: You want one of the most polished Android devices on the market, or one of the best smartphones.

Don’t buy it if: There’s no real deal-breaker here, unless you want to wait for one of the new Snapdragon-based Android handsets, or you prefer a proper keyboard.

Summary: HTC has been steadily improving its Android handsets with each iteration, and the Hero is easily the best so far, eliminating most of my quibbles with the Magic and adding a huge amount of polish through its Sense UI. The software is the highlight, offering loads of customisation options, excellent usability and expandability through the Android Market. As I write this, with the latest firmware version the Hero offers one of the best smartphone experiences available. In fact, I was really sad when HTC asked for the loan version I was using back. However, you’ll need an unlimited data plan, because like all Android handsets it’s constantly transferring information over the network.

Software

There has been a real proliferation of Android handsets since I reviewed the HTC Magic a few months ago, and it’s become much more difficult for manufacturers to differentiate their devices from their competitors’. HTC has done so by customising the Android UI with its own Sense UI, which I think is a significant improvement on the standard Android build (as seen on the Magic). The Hero I reviewed is running on HTC’s modified version of Android 1.5, but the work HTC has done is a really impressive demonstration of how much Android can be improved: it’s very pretty and the extra functionality really makes the Hero stand out from its competitors.

Sense ties all of your Google contacts and Facebook contacts together, and can link to Flickr profiles. What this means is that you can easily see all of your interactions with a person, check their status, contact them or view their photos all from one place. It’s a good idea and works well for the most part, although it does take some time initially matching some contacts with their Facebook profiles. I would really like to see better control of which contacts are imported from Google: the Hero insisted on downloading all of my Google contacts, resulting in dozens of random email addresses in my phone contact list – it would be better if I could select a group of contacts to download to the phone.

I also had trouble when adding new contacts to the phone: the Hero saved them as “phone contacts” on the handset and wouldn’t sync them to Google. You can select this when creating a new contact, but you can’t change them after the fact. There is also no ability to merge duplicates on the device, so contact management is all done on the web.

These are my main complaints about the Hero’s software. Otherwise the experience is almost seamless, whether it’s downloading and installing apps from the Android Market; taking and uploading photos to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr; setting up email addresses; using the Calendar; Google Maps; installing widgets on one of the seven (!!) homescreens… it all just works.

In fact, it’s pretty much the smoothest phone user experience I can think of (bearing in mind I am not an iPhone user). It’s won a few awards from gadget magazines and industry groups, so it seems I’m not alone in thinking so.

The Hero is slightly larger than a BlackBerry Curve 8900

Hardware.

The Hero has all the standard specs you would expect on a phone at this price point: Qualcomm 528MHz CPU; A-GPS; HSDPA; WiFi; 5.0MP camera with autofocus; capacitive touchscreen; 3.5mm headphone jack (yay!!). It doesn’t stand out from the crowd in terms of specifications, and in fact the Qualcomm MSM7200 chipset is starting to look a little long in the tooth compared to the Snapdragon and Cortex A8 chips starting to appear (HTC’s flagship WinMo device, the HD2, runs a 1GHz Snapdragon chipset). But the hardware does the job, running nice and smoothly for the most part.

The industrial design and build quality are both rock solid. I really like the angular shape of the Hero, and the form factor sits comfortably in the hand or in the pocket. The screen is not huge, or especially bright and colourful, but it does the job.

The 3.5mm audio jack is a really welcome addition, as it means you can use the Hero as a media player without fumbling around with a pointless adaptor. The music playback software is excellent on the Hero, and sound quality to my ears was adequate (though not mind-blowing, it is good enough to stop you carrying a dedicated media player in most situations).

The camera is… ummm… well, it’s useless in low light because it lacks even an LED flash. In broad daylight it’s good enough to snap the odd pic, but not replace a dedicated camera (there are many better camera phones on the market).

Images taken with the Hero are usable on the web, but dynamic range, colour and sharpness could all be better.

Battery life is quite respectable compared to equivalent handsets. you will still need to recharge every 24 hours, but that’s not bad considering how much data the Hero sends and receives.

I guess that’s about all there is to say… I really like the Hero and have recommended it to a few friends who have also been very happy with it. By no means is it perfect, but it’s definitely one of my favourites at the moment.

Nokia’s research and development team have kicked it up a gear with an attractive “aeon” concept phone showing up in the R&D section of the company’s website. The most prominent design feature of aeon is a touchscreen that stretches over the full surface area of the phone, similar to BenQ-Siemens’s Black box concept phone we saw recently.

Currently mobile technology isn’t quite up to realizing this fantasy, but we’ll sleep better tonight knowing that at least one of the cellphone industry’s biggest names shares the same dream as we do — BenQ’s dream didn’t count, unfortunately.

It is being reported in the Nokia Users Forum that a new camera module is now being fitted into customers Nokia N86 which are suffering from lens scratching problems.

Both the N97, and the N86 have been criticised by owners due to the camera lens cover sitting too close to the glass, and causing dust and dirt to be ground into the surface, causing scratches which are affecting the quality of the photo’ being produced.

It would seem that Nokia have made some design changes to the updated camera module to hopefully eliminate this widespread problem.

The photo at the beginning of this post is of my N86 which is only a few days old.  This would suggest that all new N86 are shipping with the update already in place.  This may not be the case with some branded handsets, as the operators are more likely to buy in bulk, so may take a little while longer to filter through the supply chain.

You can easily tell the difference between old and new, by the fact that the new module has a square opening built into the camera glass, rather than a round opening in the older units.  The photo below is of the older unit.

It would seem that this update is beginning to become available to the Nokia Service Centre’s, so if you are affected by this problem, be sure to check that they will be putting the new unit in your device, before sending it in for repair.

[Hat Tip: Nokia Users]

Have you been affected by this problem?  Let us know in the comments.

Ok, I admit it.  I can’t stand the N97 any longer.  It has tested my patience almost every day.

Not just the N97 though.  Oh no.  Symbian 5th Edition, which is the OS running on the N97, is equally to blame in it’s current guise.

So it’s time to look for something new.  A step forward?  Some would argue, a step back.

I plain and simply do not get on with touch screens.  They may be nice for browsing the web, but pretty much useless for me in every other way.

I popped off to the Nokia Store, and after much deliberation, picked myself a Nokia E52, and here is my mini review.  It’s only a mini review, as I only had the device for a few days, before I had to return it.  More on that later.

The Nokia E52 is a primarily business focussed device, running Symbian 3rd Edition OS.  It has a great feature set, with lots of nice software, backed up by a hardware engineering masterclass.

The E52 is quite literally a stunning piece of design.  In it’s beautifully formed frame, weighing only 98g, it houses 3G (HSPA), WiFi (b/g), EGPRS and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity.  It has a 3.2 MP camera, standard T9 keypad, 2.4″ QVGA screen, and also lugs around the monstrous, but legendary, BP-4L 1500 mAh battery.  How on earth Nokia managed to fit all this, into a gorgeously slim and light chassis, barely bigger than the actual battery itself, is beyond me.

For the full specification sheet from Nokia, CLICK HERE (PDF)

In the box (contents will vary dependant on region) you get, micro USB charger, a convertor cable so you can still charge it will any of the older style Nokia chargers, USB sync and charge cable, headphone/headset combo, and all the instructional paraphernalia.

For an in depth tour of the Nokia E52, you really need to watch Rafe Blandford’s video of the E55.  They are essentially the same device, just with a different keypad.

Now, I said earlier that I actually returned the E52 after only a couple of days, hence this being a ‘mini’ review.  I had to return the device because of callers reporting an echo (ie, they could hear their own voice) during calls.  Now, I must stress that this may well have been a faulty handset, BUT, on digging around on the internet, I’m not the only person who reported this.  The fault also didn’t manifest itself in every phone call, only maybe 25% or so.  Granted, it doesn’t seem like a wide spread problem, but ultimately I decided to return the device.

So, in line with this being a mini review, I’ll outline my pro’s and con’s that I found with the device, to help you decide.

Pro’s:

• Great engineering and build quality
• Amazing battery life
• Great software set
• The V22 firmware was very stable
• No ‘lag’ noticed in the menus
• Surprisingly good camera, both still images and video
• Best T9 keypad I have ever used
• Superb call quality (apart from occasional echo mentioned above)

Con’s:

• Questionable use of some materials, for instance, light plastic used in the bevel
• Stiff to operate D-Pad
• Hard to read key legends
• No podcasting or internet radio applications
• Slightly awkward to use call send and end keys (Very easy to hit menu or backspace keys by accident)

So there we have it.  My small summation of what I felt about the E52.

Ultimately, I took it back to the store, and changed it for the N86, so stay tuned for my full review on that device.

DROID sales in the USA and the robo-promotional ads from Verizon has boosted Android sales, so much so that hits on my blog have started to double since the new phone went on sale.

Stats are good – Top searchs on Best Apps are going to my posts for Top Android Apps and 2 top Android apps from Google.

Samsung today unveiled plans to launch a new mobile software layer in the hopes of bringing high-end, smartphone-style apps to a broad range of its handsets. The question, of course, is whether it can lure developers to the platform.

Samsung’s bada – which means “ocean” in the Korean company’s native tongue — is an open platform designed to allow developers to create full-blown mobile apps for handsets that may not run a traditional smartphone operating system. While Samsung isn’t disclosing many details, bada is described as a software platform — not a competing OS — that rides atop the company’s proprietary phone software, and that could run on top of Linux. The manufacturer is releasing a full SDK and Samsung handset simulator, and plans to woo developers at a conference next month in Seoul, Korea, with events in London and San Francisco to follow in January.

But those developers have an ever-increasing number of attractive platforms on which to build their apps. Apple’s (s aapl) iPhone dominates the smartphone app space, of course, but Google (s goog) is gaining traction in a big way with the recent launch of Verizon’s (s vz) Droid initiative, and Research In Motion (s rimm) is building out an app store to serve its massive customer base. What’s more, those vendors are luring developers by dangling millions of dollars in prize money.

Described by one Samsung executive as the company’s “landmark, iconic new platform,” bada will launch for developers next month and will make its commercial debut in handsets in the first half of 2010. Apps developed using bada will be available through Samsung’s Application Store. As the company noted in a press release:

“By adopting Samsung bada, users will be able to easily enjoy various applications on their mobile,” the manufacturer said in a prepared statement. “Samsung bada also offers an easy-to-integrate platform for mobile operators so that mobile operators can provide unique and differentiated services to their customers.”

While the thought of yet another mobile platform may seem ridiculous, the strategy at the heart of bada is compelling. As GetJar has proven, there’s a substantial demand for apps by users who don’t own high-end smartphones. If bada can help developers address a broad base of handsets simply by making a few small tweaks to existing smartphone apps — which is no mean feat — it may gain traction with the kingmakers of the mobile realm.

Here comes the Droid:

And then here comes the response from Apple followers:

Touche!

IMO…I think Verizon is at the bottom of a big uphill battle.  First off, for all the things its Droid allegedly does well, their website is a big ol pile of blah.

Sony Ericsson delivered a blow to Microsoft on Tuesday when it unveiled its latest Xperia handset, which unlike its Windows-powered predecessors is based on Google’s Android operating system.

Called X10, the flagship smartphone comes with a new Sony Ericsson-designed user interface that aggregates the user’s contacts and communications from the likes of Facebook and Twitter into a single address book.

The system is akin to HTC’s Sense interface, and Motorola’s Motoblur interface, both of which feature on the respective companies’ new Android phones.

“It’s time for Sony Ericsson to put more focus on the smartphone market and Android is a good platform for them to do this,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

source: http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=450402&mail=128&C=0

The worldwide handset market appears to be coming out of its funk, but that’s not entirely good news if you’re a phone maker. The top five worldwide manufacturers saw a combined 7 percent year-over-year decrease in handset volumes during the third quarter, according to a report from Deutsche Bank this morning, with 228 million handsets shipped. But the shrinkage was a vast improvement over the previous three quarters, each of which saw double-digit percentage declines from 2008 volumes. The figures indicate “a sign of renewed growth for next year,” Deutsche Bank analysts said, but that maturation could lead to brutal price wars and thinning margins for manufacturers.

Deutsche Bank’s numbers mirror last week’s reports from IDC and Strategy Analytics that indicate the market is finally turning around. Strategy Analytics reported a 4 percent year-over-year drop in worldwide phone sales during the third quarter, and predicted a 3 percent annual increase during the fourth quarter. Much of the expected growth will come as phone makers slash prices to blow out older inventory and make room for newer, more lucrative hardware. Nokia (s nok) cut prices across its portfolio a week ago, and Deutsche Bank reported a 1 percent drop in the average selling price of handsets worldwide. That trend is likely to ramp up as we enter the holiday season and new handsets such as the Motorola (s mot) Droid and BlackBerry Storm 2 come to market.

While razor-thin margins are nothing new for manufacturers of bargain-basement feature phones, signs of a price war are already evident in the smartphone market. Apple lowered the bar and boosted sales with its $99 iPhone, prompting Verizon Wireless to drop the price of most of its smartphones to $100. So while 2010 may be a year of recovery for the handset industry at large, it may not be a great year for some manufacturers.

Acer Liquid Snapdragon

Acer has gained remarkable traction in the last few years: The Taiwanese PC vendor recently overtook Dell as the world’s second-largest computer vendor (after Hewlett-Packard (s hpq)) and it said its third-quarter net profit of $107.8 million would have been even higher had it not been for shortages of some components. Laptops and netbooks accounted for 73 percent of Acer’s revenue during the most recent three-month period, and the firm said it expects shipments of those devices to ramp up by 10-15 percent in the fourth quarter.

But Acer also entered the smartphone business this year, and said today it expects to sell 10 million units by 2012. Dell is following Acer’s footsteps into mobile with the Mini 3i, a touchscreen smartphone that appears headed for the Chinese market. But the computer vendors face some serious hurdles as they move into the phone business. Both are betting heavily on Android, a platform that — while gaining obvious momentum — is already being adopted by a host of entrenched mobile OEMs. As newcomers they will need to offer a simple, intuitive user interface, a challenge for even established handset manufacturers. And it appears both companies are targeting the ultra-competitive market with devices in the $350 range (before subsidies).

Apple (s aapl) proved that a newcomer can move the needle with an innovative, user-friendly handset sporting a slick OS, but it’s not clear that either Acer or Dell is developing anything that can compete with the iPhone or other new superphones. While there may be opportunities in China and other emerging markets, the computer vendors will need to produce stylish, innovative handsets at eye-catching price points to make much of a dent in the smartphone market in the West. And that’s something even the world’s largest OEM has had difficulty doing.

The handset market will have much to be thankful for this holiday season, according to new reports out this morning from IDC and Strategy Analytics. IDC said manufacturer shipments increased by 5.6 percent in the third quarter over the previous one as promotions of older devices at lower prices — such as the $99 iPhone 3G — propped up demand. While the 287.1 million handset shipments were down 6 percent from the same period in 2008, the quarter-by-quarter increase in shipments indicates that carriers and other retailers are expecting a better holiday season than last year, according to IDC.

Meanwhile, Strategy Analytics is predicting a 3 percent increase in global shipments in the final quarter of 2009 over the year-ago period, reaching 300 million units. The increase would mark a return to positive growth for the first time since the third quarter of 2008, the market research firm said. Shipments in the three months ended Sept. 30 fell 4 percent from a year earlier, indicating an upswing after an average year-over-year decline of 11 percent over the previous three quarters.

Those figures are music to the ears of OEMs, of course, which have suffered through a brutal few quarters as the worldwide economy tanked. But they also indicate a huge ray of light at the end of the tunnel for operators, as even cut-rate smartphones require ARPU-boosting data plans. And vendors are hoping to build on that demand with new smartphones such as T-Mobile USA’s myTouch, and the Droid (s goog) and BlackBerry Storm 2 (s rimm) from Verizon Wireless (s vz). All of which should lead to a very merry holiday season indeed, for both manufacturers and carriers.

I’ve just been using my Independent iPhone app to catch up on the news and I saw an ad for the new Toshiba TG01 Windows Phone.

Normally I don’t click on the ads but something made me want to check this one out. Tapping the ad opens up the Safari browser and I was looking forward to a nicely laid out site that would fit my iPhone screen properly and be easy to read. Surely this wasn’t too much to expect from a mobile phone ad in a mobile app? Wrong!!!

This is what I got instead.

Not only is this not a mobile optimised web page, it’s for the wrong phone! The ad was for the TG01 and the web page shows the G710, which is a year old. Hey, at least it’s still a Toshiba handset with Windows OS, which is better than Kia managed recently http://bit.ly/3sulwr.

Motorola’s (s mot) free-fall in the mobile phone space it once dominated continued in the most recent quarter: The company’s wireless revenues fell 46 percent to $1.7 billion during the period as its market share eroded to a mere 4.7 percent. And while Motorola managed to surprise investors by turning a $12 million profit, the plunging handset sales were just the latest in the stumble in the company’s slide toward irrelevance.

The company has joined the crowded Android bandwagon in an effort to reverse its fortunes, and it’s sure to receive a boost from all the hype surrounding the upcoming launch of the Verizon Droid. In the meantime, we have an answer to Om’s year-old question about how low Moto can go: very low indeed.

So what really happened to Mobile TV?

Four key factors that have prevented growth.

1) Poor handset support

Regardless of a slip in market share, Nokia remains the dominant force in the handset market. Certainly in Europe, the network carriers are looking to Nokia to deliver a strong line-up of Nokia DVB-H handsets in order to gain mass-market adoption of mobile TV services. However, this just hasn’t happened. Finland’s finest seems to have gone a little cold on the technology.

As early as last year the warning signs were there. Nokia’s head of internet services admitted that DVB-H wasn’t taking off in the way the company had hoped, and that customers seem more interested in downloading content than watching broadcasts.

It’s a classic game of chicken and egg. The carriers want Nokia DVB-H equipment before they make infrastructure investment and Nokia wants the carriers to invest and commit before they offer move product.

Today only a handful of Nokia device include built-in DVB-H compatibility. Nokia do provide an external antenna to a wider range of devices but that seems far from optimal. Even the N97 – one of Nokia’s biggest handset launches of the year, shipped without DVB-H as standard.

2. Mobile Broadband

Mobile Broadband has been the surprise success of 2009. This has had a direct impact on mobile carriers’ Mobile TV aspirations. Both services are data hungry and many carriers have reported aborting their Mobile TV strategies to save on network bandwidth and allow mobile broadband to grow.

The trend towards data bundles and all-you-can-eat price plans will continue to strain network resources. Experts predict 3G traffic volumes are set to increase by a factor of 20 by 2015.  A major tier one Mobile TV launch would undoubtedly require significant network investment and traffic prioritization strategies to mitigate the potential impact of network latency on the user experience.

3. Handset Category

DVB-H compatibility remains a feature almost exclusive to the smartphone and high-end feature phone segment. The technology has yet to find its way into mid to low-end devices . This will be critical to gaining mass-market acceptance, especially within the high-growth markets of Brazil, China, India etc.

4.) Downloading / side-loading

Who needs broadcast content when you can download and watch at your convenience?

Unlimited data plans have removed the number one barrier to data adoption – bill shock. This has opened the flood gates to users proactively seeking out their own multimedia content and downloading it to their device.

The practice of side-loading (transferring content from another device, principally a PC, via cable, Bluetooth, SD Card etc) also remains a strong channel for getting content onto the mobile handset. The practice has traditionally been leveraged for the management of music content, with consumers syncing up their playlists through brand-name and OEM proprietary music stores and library consoles. The practice is now extending to include audio-visual content.

I guess we’re all anxious to hear how this unfolds. Apparently, research by the World Health Organization reveals that handsets ”can” lead to cancer.  The research by WHO which went over a period of 10 years has found crucial evidence that shows that heavy mobile users invariably posses a higher risk of being affected by brain tumours in the latter stages of their lives.

Related Links
Cancer Cell Phone
(Mirror.co.uk)

Mobile phones cause brain cancer, says World Health Organisation
(computerweekly.com)

Global study into mobile cancer link
(News.com.au)

Mobile Phone Cancer Risk Confirmed
(phonesreview.co.uk)

Recently the blogosphere has gone a bit crazy, excuse my lack of hyperbole about the Android platform. Was this ‘Android’ supposed to do battle with the iPhone?

Just because no operators or manufacturers have openly commented about their smart phone sales figures doesn’t mean its bad news. Looking at the number of Android powered phones out now or due in the next 2 months shows a lot of promise

• HTC Hero – some bloggers say it’s the best Android yet
• G1 – the funny one with the flip out keyboard, still only with T-Mobile
• Magic – Vodafone took this and the Android platform global
• Tattoo – coming out again to Vodafone before xmas
• Motorola DEXT – a lifesaver for Motorola – probably the phone that saves them. Reviewers go crazy about its Moto Blur interface

As well we know that Sony Ericsson have robot phones coming and the other manufacturers have been toying with this platform.

As far as smartphones go though – Nokia admitted recently they have lost some of their steam to Apple and have not being able to come up with a device that is just as iconic. Some sales figures for Q2 2009 still show Blackberry as the most popular Manufacturer.

So for Xmas will you want an Android?

Ever since the N97 was released I’ve seen a fair amount of owners complaining about terrible battery life.  Typically not even lasting a full working day without the need for a top-up along the way.  It is all well and good having one of the most capable smartphones on the market today, but if the battery life is so bad that you are afraid to use some of it’s features, then you must ask yourself, what is the point of having it in the first place?

Whilst we must not overlook the possibility that there will be some N97’s (and lots of other devices) that will arrive at their new homes with a potentially faulty battery on board.  This is an inherent problem with the process of mass manufacturing, limited amount of in-factory testing, and the relatively volatile medium of batteries in the first place.

However, we must also take into account that there are area’s with your device that you can quite obviously cut back on power hungry tasks, without having an effect on your productivity to any given degree.

Taking the N97 as a case in point, lets start with the new widgetized homescreen.

Now, having widgets on the homescreen is a new feature for Symbian.  I am personally a great fan of them.  We need to strike a balance though.  Some of the widgets for the N97 will need access to network data (be it WiFi, or GSM, it’s not relevant in this particular case) in order to function.  For instance the Facebook widget is a cool item, and seeing how Facebook is immensely popular, I’m sure is a very common item on many owners homescreens.  It lets you see at a glance your 3 most recent friends status updates, and whether anyone has poked or sent you a message.  On the surface this seems brilliant, but I do question the need to know ‘instantly’ (and this is the focus here) whether one of your old school pals from 10 years ago is going out to wash her car.  Will your life be more complete by knowing this frankly quite useless status?  Probably not.  Will your life be more complete by knowing, right now, that 7 of your work colleagues have poked you?  Probably not.

The point I am trying to make is that, do you need to know this information immediately?  Couldn’t it just wait until you next log into your Facebook account from either your mobile device or your computer?  Maybe I’m just being cynical because I’m not a heavy Facebook user.

It’s not just Facebook though.

I am actually questioning the fact of all the frequently updating, data intensive widgets that are available for the N97.  You need to weigh up whether battery life, or access to this data is more important to you.

Obviously the more data you have passing through your device, the more battery power is going to be used.

To this end, I only have one widget on my homescreen (as you can above) that has access to data.  That is the Nokia Messaging one.  I have decided that from my own personal stand-point, email updates are important.  Tomorrows weather, Facebook, the stock markets etc etc are not.  So I have decided that having more battery life, is more important, to me, than these items.

Now, bringing Nokia Messaging into the battery eating argument is going to have even more of you up in arms.

Push email is all well and good.  Though it’s not for me.  Setting Nokia Messaging to receive your email ‘soonest’ is a sure fire way to demolish any milli-amps being stored in your device.

I find that setting Nokia Messaging to check for messages every hour is perfectly adequate for me.  If for any reason I am awaiting an important email, I can quite simply change to the battery munching ‘soonest’ setting.

Just incase anyone is interested, I have included a screenshot of my Nokia Messaging settings for reference.  With these setting, I can usually get 2 days of use out of my Nokia N97.  This includes a fair bit of internet browsing, some sort but frequent phonecalls, and the odd spattering of text messaging.

What tips do you have for saving your battery life?  Let us know in the comments.

WIF is currently attending Informa’s Mobile Web & Applications 2009 conference.

I was hoping to live blog, but (typically) there’s little-to-no mobile coverage so my mobile broadband dongle is useless and I refuse to pay the conference center’s ridiculous wifi charges.

So the following is an extract of my notes, summarizing some of the most interesting / pertinent / salient points made by the speakers.

THE COST OF MOBILE DATA – HEADING TO ZERO?

Chris Wade, Chairman and CEO, ShoZu

• The all-you-can-eat data plan is in jeopardy. Bandwidth on networks is already limited. Which carrier has the bravery to make the change?

Unknown Panel Participant

• Content providers want mobile data [transport] to be free to the consumer. That’s unrealistic, the carriers will respond stating that they subsidize the handset, they paid for the spectrum, they pay for customer support. But there must be a middle-ground.

Ray De Silva, Head of Enabler Commercial Partnerships, Vodafone Group

• There’s no expectation among our users that mobile will ever be free.

Nora Goodman, Executive VP, Finally! TV Studios

• We should be careful using the word ‘free’. The internet has done a disservice to an entire generation by making so much content free. Artists, developers, whomever, are creating all of this great content and not getting paid for it. Is that what our forefathers intended? “Work, work, work….and don’t get paid for it.” Thankfully the mobile application / content market is resisting this.

DISTRIBUTION OF CONTENT & APPS

Benjamin Mosse, Director AP Mobile, Associated Press

• The walled garden still exists, we see it every day. We can’t put our app on certain carrier portals because it’s free. This has to stop. Just because it’s free. it doesn’t mean you should say no to it. Just because it doesn’t earn you any money, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value to your end-users.
• Some carriers want to be media companies. Business success is all about core competency. It’s taken us 160 years to get it right. How successful will the carrier be as a media company?

THE EVOLUTION OF THE MOBILE WEB

Ray De Silva, Head of Enabler Commercial Partnerships, Vodafone Group

• Mobile Web 1.0 was defined by MO/MT SMS, PSMS, shortcodes etc. Mobile Web 2.0 is about delivering a more compelling user experience. For example, bearer detection, data bundle look-up, roaming check (both to prevent bill shock) and handset configuration checks.
• Delivering a convenient payment mechanism is key [to monetizing]. Conversion rates for big brands using mcommerce: Credit cards deliver 10-20% conversion. Single click billing delivers 30-70%.
• If a user wants to access data-heavy content (like BBC iPlayer), the network should be able to detect data tariff status to avoid bill shock and upsell where necessary. It should also know what bearer the user is connected via and dynamically change the file served accordingly [to improve delivery speed]. Finally it should know if the user is roaming [again to prevent bill shock].

Mark Kortekaas, controller for BBC Audio & Music Interactive and BBC Mobile.

• Your content history should move with you. If you access BBC iPlayer on the mobile device, it should know that you’ve already watched a programme on your PS3 interface or notebook.

Nicholas Heller, Strategic Partnerships, Media & Publishing, Google

• Google’s advertising model works equally well on the mobile; CPM on the mobile platform is comparable to fixed web. We are now looking to embed ads within apps, based on app-type. This will will include click-to-call / click-to-coupon and is very compelling to advertisers and our content partners.
• We are betting on Moore’s Law and the growth of feature-rich handsets. The mobile web benefits from the unique properties of the mobile device. For example a mic (voice search), GPS (location searches), camera (image overlays).

Ariel Seidman, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search

• Voice search [on the mobile] doesn’t really solve a big problem. Two-word searches are very fast to type and the privacy issue [of reciting your search] is huge.

STATS

Ray De Silva, Head of Enabler Commercial Partnerships, Vodafone Group

• It’s hard to second-guess the end-user. We have Google search on most of our portals around the world, yet users still navigate to www.google.com because that’s why they are used to [on the PC platform].
• 1 in 5 under 35’s surf the mobile web daily in the UK.
• Smartphone ownership increases data usage x39.

Wandrille Pruvot, Regional Director, Europe, Buzzcity

• The opportunity for data in the emerging markets is huge. There are 400 million mobile users in India with 10 million new subscriptions every month.*

* On this last point I have to take issue. As great as these conferences are for harvesting stats, I grow increasingly angry at the recycling of stats and facts, flippantly included in presentations as a means of justifying a business case. I have no objection to the fact the emerging markets (based purely on their scale) represent enormous opportunity. However, take the above stats about India. Scratch through the veneer and what exactly is the immediate opportunity for data?

Consider that;

a) The majority of users in emerging markets, including India are using entry-level devices. The most populous handset in this market (indeed the world), is the Nokia 1100. That’s a six year old design, first launched in 2003. It has a monochrome display, has basic WAP connectivity but little else. An iPhone it is not.

b) The majority of the 10m new subscribers p/month are coming from rural areas of India. Users in metropolitan areas typically have better phones and more disposable income. In rural areas the reverse is true, they have very little money to spend on anything other than basic connectivity (voice).

Again, I agree that India represents opportunity. But let’s not start building business models on these very generic figures.  A little due diligence please. For the record, I certainly don’t intend this as a criticism of Buzzcity – their presentation was insightful and I’ve seen the ‘Indian growth’ stats a hundred times before!

So I’m sitting here in Starbucks irritatingly eyeing the Macbook Pro user across the way.  He has an advertised 7 hours, or some other random figure of battery life in his laptop, but yet he is sat next to the power socket.  This irritates me, because, as a fellow human being he should automatically know that because I have an Dell XPS laptop I cannot stray away from the 50Hz boog-a-loo juice for more than about 10 minutes.

I know he has seen what type of laptop I’m using, because he had that sly raising of the eyebrows as he saw me sit down.  Every Mac user suffer from this affliction when they come across a PC user.  I know he’s muttering under his breath “I’m a Mac, and that muppet is the PC, in this towns Starbucks”.  Hell, he probably even Twitter’d, “LOLZ, PC just walked in, and I’m hogging the power socket.  Steve Jobs 4eva”.

What do I do?  Well, I do what any self-respecting PC owner does, and put my laptop into ‘Power Saver’ mode.  What this does is clamp the CPU to 800MHz maximum ceiling, dims the display, turns off any unnecessary ports, and a few other bits of trickery that I don’t have to worry about.

Easy.

My laptop battery should now last 20 minutes, instead of 10.  Just long enough for me to drink my coffee, and then head off to the Apple Store.

Job done.

Or is it?

What do I do when my Symbian powered smart phone powerhouse starts to run low in the juice department?  Well, surely that is obvious isn’t it?  My N97 is advertised as a mobile computer.  Therefore it will have a power saver function, just like my laptop, won’t it?

Nope.

What I want to be able to do, is give a quick press of the power button, and then select a ‘Power Saver’ profile.  Wouldn’t this be cool?  Not to have to worry about anything.

It’s 3pm in the afternoon, and I’m worried that my phone battery won’t last through the commute home.  What will I do for an hour on the train?  What will I do to stop me having eye contact with the weirdo sat in seat 12?  Pick up the mangled copy of this mornings The Sun, only to find it’s got the remains of a builders cheese and pickle sandwich smeared between pages 5 and 6?

Of course I’m not.  I want to do something to my phone to ensure that I’ve got enough power to make it through a quick email checking, Facebook browsing train ride home.

I suppose I could turn my phone off until said commute.  That wouldn’t be productive.

I tell you what.  I could:

• Dim the screen
• Turn off WLAN searching
• Stop Nokia Messaging
• Turn off the 3G radios
• Etc etc etc

You get the idea, but the problem is, I have to do all these things individually.  I want a centralized option, where I can tell my phone to do all of these things, without having to muck about for half an hour trying to remember where all the setting are, seeing as the menu structure seems to blooming change, just slightly, on every different Symbian phone I use.  By the time I’ve found the bloody option to dim the screen, the screen, at full brightness, will have already chomped it’s way through a sizeable portion of my already precious milliwatts.

Many years ago, we sent a man to the moon.  Sure adding a Power Saver profile to Symbian isn’t beyond the realms of possibility is it?

Comments on whether you think I am taking rubbish, or “There’s an app for that”, are, as always, welcome.

What: Palm Pre

How much: Available exclusively through O2 in the UK (also Germany, Ireland and Telefonica in Spain). UK prices start at £96.90 on an 18-month/£29 contract, or free on a 24-month/£34 tariff.

The good: Slim and sleek like a river stone; neat “deck of cards” user interface; excellent email client; Synergy contacts management/aggregation.

The bad: Lack of decent applications; weak battery life; keyboard is cramped; 8GB of memory is a bit stingy without an expansion slot. It just feels a bit bland compared to its competition.

Buy it if: You want a smartphone but don’t want to carry a brick.

Don’t buy it if: You want to play games or download stacks of third-party applications. The Pre isn’t yet a “fun” phone, and it hasn’t proven that it can attract enough application developers to change this.

Summary: The Pre generated an unbelievable amount of hype before its launch in the US in June 2009, and the European launch finally gives us a chance to compare it to some of the heavy hitters available in GSM markets. Unfortunately for Palm, much of the Pre’s thunder has been stolen by competitors with better hardware, equally innovative software and stronger applications. While I found the Pre to be mostly pleasant enough to use, it’s a phone that seems to be waiting for something.  I also found the constant hand-holding of the UI too often led to frustrating usability failures which undermine the experience. It’s not a bad phone, but it’s just not that exciting to use, and I often found myself holding it and desperately trying to think of something interesting to do with it.

Software

The Pre is the first handset to run Palm’s new generation webOS, which is exciting for a couple of reasons, not least because it means Palm can stop producing boring Windows Mobile handsets and start making interesting products. The Pre is certainly interesting, with its applications all written in standard Web technologies (CSS, JavaScript and HTML) which is intended to make it easy for Web developers to design webOS apps without too much difficulty.

In use, webOS is simple and fairly intuitive. There are very few on-screen distractions, and the use of swiping gestures is clever. One of the coolest features is multitasking: you can have heaps of applications open at once and by pressing the single button at the bottom of the screen they all slide into the middle of the screen presented as a series of cards. You can swipe between them, re-order them and flick them off the screen to close the application. Closing applications has never been this fun!

Syncing my contacts and email with my Google accounts and Facebook was fairly painless, but not quite as easy as on Android. The Pre made a valiant attempt at reconciling my Google and Facebook contacts to avoid duplicate entries, but there was still a significant amount of manual tidying to do. Palm calls this ‘Synergy’, and when it was announced at CES it was a new idea, but using it now it just doesn’t go as far in integrating web services with your contacts as I would like. HTC and INQ have both managed to do more impressive things with contacts and web services: to be honest Synergy is a bit of a letdown. It also occasionally stuffs up: while trying to call a colleague the Pre refused to dial his number (he has it entered in Facebook as ‘44…’ rather than ‘+44…’, which confused the network) and I simply couldn’t work out how to dial the number stored in my Google contacts entry for him.

The Pre’s email client is almost great. It handled my two Gmail accounts easily, displaying mail in full HTML with images and wrapping the text to make it easy to read. My only gripe – and it’s not a minor one – is that it doesn’t group messages into discussion threads. This feature is especially important on a mobile client as you really don’t want to be going back and forth to follow a conversation, and even the generic Gmail Java app can do this, so it’s a frustrating omission from the Pre.

The Webkit-based browser is good, and has the multitouch pinch-to-zoom gestures that people seem to love. It reflows text to fit the screen width, which makes it easier to read without having to scroll horizontally (as does the excellent Opera Mini 5). The browser doesn’t support Flash, which means web video is out, but the Pre does have a built-in YouTube app which works beautifully over a WiFi connection. Overall, the Pre’s browser is on par with its main smartphone competitors.

The built-in Google Maps application is – as with most features of the Pre – good but nothing we haven’t seen on other platforms.

The Pre does have a preloaded app store client, but to be honest it needs to grow incredibly quickly, because at the moment there are very few interesting apps. This is a major weakness of the Pre, as it is well below par (if we consider the Android Market, BlackBerry App World or Nokia Ovi Store as roughly scoring par). Compared to the all-you-can-eat buffet that is the iPhone App Store (perhaps unfairly, but this is what consumers are choosing from) the Pre’s selection of apps is like a bread queue in Soviet Russia. Hopefully Palm can conscript a few legions of web developers to improve things, and quickly.

Hardware

As soon as you pick up the Pre, you notice it is significantly smaller than an iPhone, Magic or BlackBerry Bold. It’s sleek and black and shiny. It has a very nice and responsive capacitive touchscreen, a sliding qwerty keyboard and all the standard features that you expect from a handset at this price point. The specs aren’t amazing, but they are good enough to compete with the likes of HTC’s Android line-up and Apple, for the most part.

The Pre has GPS, WiFi, 8GB of built-in storage (but no slot for an expansion card). It has a 3MP camera with LED Flash. It charges and syncs via micro-USB. All thoroughly standard. It has a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, which is one of the fastest currently on the market.

I don’t like the Pre’s qwerty keyboard. The keys are tiny, and difficult to press accurately. Coming from a BlackBerry to the Pre is a significant backward step in typing usability. The keyboard also has an uncomfortably sharp ridge around its rim, which was pointed out in very early US reviews, but Palm hasn’t resolved in the GSM version of the hardware.

Conclusion

What else is there to say? The Pre meets expectations? It provides a decent browser, a good email experience and some neat UI tricks? It’s worth a look if you’re in the market for a new smartphone? This is all true, but if it sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, you’re understanding my feelings about the Pre. It’s inoffensive but unexciting, and when it’s competing at the same price point as much more exciting phones like the iPhone 3GS and a fleet of handsets from HTC, Samsung, Acer, RIM and others, unfortunately it’s difficult to see it rocking too many European or Asian customers’ worlds.

Disclosure: Palm loaned my team a Pre for a limited-time trial duration.