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Why Phone Features Matter

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

I’ve blogged previously about the HTC Hero, which has been the first Android device with which I’ve spent any time. I still like the device, but have fundamentally ruled it out as a primary handset due to the absence of a tactile keyboard; while I can type on the on-screen keyboard, and find the auto-correct works well, I just know that when I need to use my phone as an e-mail sending device, my productivity on it would be about 10% to that of the Blackberry.

For about four weeks now I’ve been using my latest Blackberry, the Bold 9700 and as expected, it works well for me. It feels much lighter – although equally robust – than the Bold 9000, and the primary UI difference has been the optical touchpad that’s replaced the white trackball. I was concerned this wouldn’t be very easy to use, as I’ve found previous models with the touchpad to be off-putting, but after around 30 minutes it felt like an old friend.

However we are in the QA phase for a Blackberry development project at the moment, and it’s been an opportunity to revisit the Hero while the Bold spends time in the testing pool. And I have to mention that one simple little feature has dampened any residual love I have for HTC. And it’s a timing issue.

The Blackberry has some clock-related features that I use every single day. Like auto on-off, which as you’d guess can turn the device on and off automatically at set times each day. But it also has an alarm clock which will wake the device up when it’s time to really wake up. While the Hero has an alarm clock application, a simple test last night saw the device sleeping soundlessly. I suspect that it’s something to do with Blackberry’s “we never sleep, not really” architecture – as most RIM users will know it’s non-trivial to turn a Blackberry off, as it goes into some resting type of mode. Unfortunately there’s no great analogy in HTC land, so when the ‘droid device is off, it’s off – and so effectively was my alarm clock this morning.

Some would consider this a minor issue, but for a handset that acts as a lifestyle accompaniment, this is a major black mark for the Hero, and yet another reason why I’m sticking with RIM.

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HTC Innovation – the Hero rocks

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Earlier this year we bought a T-Mobile-branded G1 from the US, simply to allow our engineering team an opportunity to check out Android in all its functional glory. The handset physically arrived in the office while I was in Europe, so it was with some surprise when I returned to Brisbane to find the handset back in a box on top of our testing device cabinet.

To be clear, our office is full of mobile enthusiasts and early adopters – but unusually pragmatic ones  – and the G1 just didn’t really float anyone’s boat. It did see some use, as one of our iPhone-enamored colleagues carried it around for about a month as a second device, but when said colleague sheepishly entered my office earlier this month to confess he’d accidentally “bricked” the device while performing an upgrade, nobody queued up to ask me to buy another Android device.

(And in the spirit of full disclosure, while our engineering team have personal tendencies towards iPhones, we are doing a big project currently on the Blackberry, so any new handset requests have been for RIM devices of various form factors and software revisions).

Anyway, on Sunday I was browsing Sim Lim Square (or “Nerd Nirvana”, as a friend refers to it) and decided to haggle a bottom-floor vendor down on a HTC Hero. I’d seen Stefan Rust’s device in Hong Kong in October and liked the look of it, and also witnessed a Mobile TV demo in the offices of an Asian MNO that looked superb – the phone literally transforms into a personal HDTV viewer.

So new purchase in backpack, I traveled to Kuala Lumpur, where I had commitments earlier this week.

I’d purchased a Maxis prepaid 3G card for around MYR15 in a local mall, bought a couple of MYR10 topup vouchers, and worked out that the daily price of mobile broadband is MYR8 (less than AUD$3 – a bargain). At dinner on Monday night I sat down with some friends and, by the time our mains were served, I’d initiated and completed a complete sync of our Google Apps mail, calendar and contacts data. Which, given how attuned I have been to using software like the Blackberry Desktop and Nokia PC Suite (or even iTunes) to push initial data to handsets, I found stunning.

As I became more familiar with the device UI, the more impressed I became. Google Market is quite useful, and well-populated with free applications. The widget-based approach allows complete flexibility and personalization, and while on the subject of personalization – the “local” weather display is just so simple that it’s stunning.

I’m still pondering whether I can use the device for any serious e-mail input in the same way I make use of my Bold 9000, but that’s symptomatic of the touch screen in general (and the same reason I never got my head into an iPhone). But as a complete package – and noting HTC’s rebranding as HTC Innovation – this is really an innovative device, and one that I’m going to play with as a personal handset for a few weeks.

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Blogging by Blackberry

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

I’ve downloaded the Blackberry Wordpress application, to check out how useful it is for mobile blogging.

At the Wordpress end I only had to enable XML-RPC access; download and running the device application was trivial. I guess that if you are reading this post, it worked!

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Black to the future

Monday, October 12th, 2009

I’ve posted here periodically about my enthusiasm for Blackberry, specifically the Bold 9000 that I’ve had since the beginning of the year. One of the reasons I held on to my old 7100 for so long was that I was waiting for Telstra to release a NextG Blackberry, which they finally did. And then I was mulling over whether to get the Bold or the Storm, a decision which was ultimately made for me by Vodafone’s exclusivity with the Storm in Australia.

Of course, during this period I didn’t use the 7100 as a primary device – at least I hadn’t for quite a while. Instead I’d revolved through the Locatrix handset de jour – whether it be an iPhone, N95, or whatever – as my primary handset. The Blackberry was only a secondary device, for the sole purpose of e-mail. And then in February I migrated to the Bold as my sole device, and its been mostly a happy marriage.

However I have been travelling so much this year and – quite belatedly – working with local SIM cards to reduce roaming costs wherever I can. This has meant, however, that I’m accumulating a shed full of “other” numbers which I maintain active, and use whenever I’m in the relevant country. This week, for example is a HKCSL 3G prepaid service, which I’ve had in my trusty E51.

Ironically, this has meant that I’m back to a dual-device personality – being as attached to e-mail as I am, the Blackberry is usually in my pocket. But locally working with the Hong Kong number – we’ve got an office DID here now, so its how I’m connecting with the team in Australia to save money – I’m carrying and using a second phone. As a primary device, this week, anyway.

So ironically, it’s Black to the future – despite my passion for the Blackberry solution, it’s still not meeting every use case I come up with.

So any plans for dual SIM devices, Research in Motion?

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My Personal Handset Museum

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Running a company like Locatrix, it’s no surprise that we usually have a few handsets laying around the office. Quite a few, in fact. But earlier today I decided to dig up the select dozen or so that have been my “personal devices” over the past decade. They look like this:

Ten years of mobile handsets

Ten years of mobile handsets

 In order, we have (top row L-toR):

  • Motorola V3688: in it’s day this was a tiny, absolutely lusted after little handset. I bought it after enduring a couple of years working in Asia and having my colleagues at Compaq laugh at my Nokia 2110 (the original brick). It was a dual-band device (900-1800MHz) with a dinky little screen, but it rocked.  This handset later survived immersion in a backpack filled with water (a leaky bottle while hiking). We just dried it out and turned it back on.
  • Motorola LSeries+: this was (I believe) the first tri-band (adding 1900MHz) device sold in Australia, acquired solely so I could roam in the US. I got this around 2000, and soon after changed domestic (Australian) networks simply to get cellular roaming in North Carolina, where I was spending time each quarter. This phone and the V3688 shared a charger format, which meant I could charge up both at home overnight or at the office. These devices collectively served me well until 2003, when I upgraded to…..
  • Nokia 3650: my first Series 60 device, colour screen, and the dodgiest ever release of Nokia’s PC Suite software. I once tried to sync my address book to it, filled the memory, and then couldn’t delete address entries due to insufficient memory. This device survived being used as a crash test dummy for original Locatrix Series60 demos – we developed CellID location technology similar to that used by Google Maps today, just four years too early! It also bounced at least once out of a cycling jersey at around 40km/h, and still works today – proving its resilience. 
  • Motorola V600: this briefly served as a personal handset, largely because it ran a J2ME variant of our software and had a nice screen. I remember sitting in Changi airport using the 3650 to take a photo of an error message on the V600 so I could e-mail it to our developers for debugging. Good times….
  • O2 XDA II Mini: my first, and thus far only foray into Windows mobile for personal use. ActiveSync worked way better than the Nokia PC Suite, so for the first time I had contacts, calendar items, tasks, to-do lists and even Outlook mail on my handset (or I did, everytime I could get it to the USB port on my ThinkPad). This device had an SD slot so I EBay’d a WiFi card which was of occasional use; I tried an early version of Skype for Windows mobile on this device but the CPU was too slow to decode audio in a helpful way.
  • Benefon TWIG: Benefon were clients of ours for a while, and I still have a boxful of these things. TWIGs were kind of neat – with integrated GPS and full PND functionality – but with not one but three Xscale processors onboard it was pretty easy to drain the battery. In theory PC syncing worked, in reality it didn’t. But I carried this for a year or so, often in conjunction with…..
  • BlackBerry 7100x: I wanted to try out a BlackBerry, and this has to be the best mobile bargain I ever got – I picked this up for around $200 via online auction. It was a grey-market device, originally packaged for the O2 retail channel in the UK, so I had to search around for the appropriate software upgrades. But having live e-mail on a portable device for the first time (this was around 2005, I think) was a revelation, and something I could probably never live with out. (Well I could, but there’s a reason they call these things Crackberries).  This device survived as a secondary handset for me until early 2009.
  • Samsung SGH-A501: In October 2006 Telstra launched their 850MHz HSDPA service (”NextG”) and so I joined the third generation.  Selecting 850MHz instead of 2100MHz meant that their handset vendors spent the next nine months or so playing catchup, and the first four devices launched were limited to ZTE, Motorola, and Samsung.  PC software that worked (sort of) for syncing and you could use it as a modem (maybe 1 or 2Mbps via USB). This is the handset I had when we first launched Uandme™ (later re-branded Whereis® Everyone), so it got used for hundreds of demos.

In the bottom row (L-to-R) we have the more recent workhorses:

  • Samsung SGH-A701: I acquired this as an upgrade to the A501, primarily due to super screen size and resolution (which was really nice for mobile demos, and still looks good today).  Just before the 2007 Mobile World Congress (then still called 3GSM) in Barcelona I hurried out to buy a 2100MHz W-CDMA Samsung when it was pointed out to me that the early “NextG” devices were unlikely to roam onto non-850MHz networks, which would make demos overseas painfully slow. Things have changed now, and most of the Telstra-branded handsets seem to happily roam between 2100 and 850MHz.
  • Nokia N95: Let me be clear, I absolutely loved this handset, and in many ways still do. Easily the best camera-phone ever made (or that I used), this was the original N95 – 2100MHz W-CDMA (no 850MHz) and for the first time the Nokia PC Suite seemed to work really well. Yes, you had to upgrade all the time (both PC software and handset firmware) but having Google Maps and the integrated GPS helped me in Europe dozens of times.  One downer – and a real blight on Nokia – is that between the 8GB and 16GB (or whatever it was) they changed the form factor of the battery cover.  Why would you do that? When one of our employees broke the battery cover we had a heck of a time finding a replacement (because Nokia Care sent us the wrong one). But I really miss having a decent camera on my phone (Research in Motion, are you listening?).
  • Apple iPhone: These weren’t yet released in Australia when I bought this handset in Hong Kong in December 2007. I had barely brought it back to Australia when it was forced to survive (literally, without a scratch) a cycling incident which left me with a fractured pelvis and three broken ribs. For some reason I reverted to the N95 and passed the iPhone to the Locatrix developer pool.
  • Nokia E51: We had an E61 lying about the office, and it was suggested to me that RIM made a Blackberry client for Symbian that promised I could consolidate my dual-handset life, and still maintain e-mail access. I never succumbed to the temptation of the Blackberry Pearl, because Telstra kept promising an 850MHz-compatible Blackberry. I never managed to get the E51 Blackberry client working either, I suspect because mine wasn’t acquired through the “official” Telstra channel. I did at times have Telstra (and RIM) personnel attempting to assist me with this, in the end I gave up (thank heavens for my 7100x).
  • Blackberry Bold 9000: I’ve written elsewhere about my infatuation with the Bold, so I won’t go on – suffice to say that I’ll probably spend a year or more happily working away on this handset. I really, really like Google Sync, and the only two letdowns have been the Blackberry Desktop Suite (which I now don’t have to use, thanks to Google) and the piddly, awful camera. I can even live with the battery life being not so great, but please, by the time I buy my next Blackberry PLEASE HAVE A DECENT CAMERA!

I’ve tried other handsets – again, an occupational hazard of this business is that we get to see a lot of handsets – but none that I’ve otherwise been inclined to say “Oh, I’ll use that” and make it my own. Other than the above I also have a Telstra USB modem that disappointingly doesn’t support non-Telstra SIM cards while overseas, so I’ll probably try to a obtain a Huawei 3G dongle sometime. There’s also the 2100MHz Candy-bar Samsung that I’ve occasionally used, but haven’t for quite a while.

And that, folks, is my personal handset museum!

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