Mobile websites v.s. full blown websites

I've been an avid smart phone users since the days of the Treo 600. Yes, I'm that old… In those days the web browsers were quite limited in their functionality. The connectivity was just as limited, no Wifi, no 3G, perhaps EDGE, GPRS was a rule. As you understand surfing the web wit a 30kbit/sec bandwidth - at best, made you look for alternative, lite, versions of the websites you were interested in. RSS versions - if they existed was quite useful due to the limited band with they required from the client.

Fast forward to current day. The handsets available today have multiple connectivity, Wifi, HiSpeed 3G and so on. The screens have increased in size and resolution, some even supports flash. You can check the sites you are interested in from just wherever you are whenever you want. A close friend of me confessed that he regarded a visit to the restroom without his iPhone a waste of time. I have to agree. You check e-mail, Twitter, Facebook. Stock Exchange, news sites, Youtube, Flicker, and many other sites depending on your particular interests regularly as soon as you get a moment.

Many modern smart phones claims that they can browse the full websites, the iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows mobile, they all claim that they can give you the "full desktop web experience". In my mind I don't se that as a advantage - at least not always. Any serious website almost always provide a "mobile enhanced" version of their "normal" website. Unfortunately they have a bad habit of hiding the address. Most often the site name is changed from e.g. http://www.engadget.com to http://i.engadget.com. An increasing number of sites can actually detect that you are using a mobile web browser and automagically redirect you to the mobile version of their website. This have in fact led me to increase the amount of browsing I do on my iPhone. Why? Well, to start with I lose all the blinking, shouting, distracting flash based animations and ads. What a relief. The amount of advertises on the mobile enhanced sites are decreased to a bare minimum. The mobile websites I visit regularly have a better overall design than their desktop counterparts. All news and updates on the site is presented in a clear and effective manner and the whole page loads really fast - with a minimal hit on the bandwith. What not to like ?

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? If I visit the full web site from my computer once, I will visit it from my handheld 20-30 times. No advertises, no website design that draws away your attention from why you came there. Just a clean, effective interface allowing you to do exactly what you had in mind - without any distraction. E.g. the number of Twitter clients on the iPhone is staggering, it's very unlikely that you can't find a client that you like. All major smart phones of today have a native Facebook client. If not - you can use the mobile version of Facebook at http://m.facebook.com.

If you haven't tried i yet - start visiting your daily websites from you smartphone instead. I think you'll be surprised how much clutter and crap you are spared. N.b. if you don't have unlimited data in you contract please be sure to use the WiFi connectivity instead since mobile data over 3G comes with a price tag.

MacBook as new

Less than 36 hours after submitting my MacBook to my local Apple service center I got a phone call that it was ready to picked up. Apart from a minor adjustment of the left side of the top side plastic it was all like new!

24 hours after picking it up I got an e-mail from the Applecare manager who approved the (out of program) repair, asking if I had any problems or everything was to my satisfaction. Wow!

I wish I had had similar experience from other service incidents when repairing other gadgets. Normally a service will take 7-10 days, most often a couple of more days than initially promised, they don't call you when it is ready for pick up, and so on.

I've been a certified card holding member of the Apple fanboy club before and after this experience I'll absolutely continue to be one.

At the moment my shopping list consists of a second hand intel based Mac Mini, a 16GB iPhone 3GS, a 13.3" MacBook or MacBook pro, and a couple of AppleTVs. A substantial amount of money but I don't plan to buy it all at once. The iPhone is the top priority since I need to replace one of the original iPhones in the family.

I've run some 4.5K runs and a 10K run this week. None of them especially fast I have to admit. I felt very low on energy when I did the 10K run - the clock stopped on 1 hour exactly. I have some serious training to do before I'll reach my target time of 50 minutes. I have a 10K race planned for the 8th May so I still have some time.

Hey, this was my second blog entry this week - a first in veery long time!

Cracking MacBook

Spring has finally start to show some good and clear signs of returning after a long, cold, and snow rich winter. Running, length and frequency, is starting to pick up. Last week I ran about 15K which is great and I expect to reach my 30K/week goal in a few weeks. I have a 10K race planned in the beginning of May, so I have a goal.

Computer and gadgetwise there hasn't been much happening. The iPhone 2Gs in my family is starting to show their age, the batteries are not holding charge that well anymore and one is having stability issues and is crashing about 3 times each day (to my youngest daughter's irritation). I will probably buy a second hand iPhone to replace hers and have the batteries exchanged on the other two.

Computerwise, I must increase the storage of my souped up PowerMac G4 since I'm almost out of storage on the media disk. I use this machine to synchronize my AppleTV and I would hate to start deleting old movies to add new ones. I have some plans to build a media solution with one AppleTV connected to each TV and perhaps have one by the main stereo and add a 17 inch TV there as well, replacing the Kodak Photoframe and use as a jukebox with the stereo. But this will be a substantial investment, three AppleTV's, one 17 inch TV, and adding 802.11N for increased bandwith for the more modern devices that supports it.

The PowerMac G4 is ancient and not very energy effecient so it should probably be replaced with an intel based Mac Mini. It's just a question of time before the PowerMac will die one way or the other since it is an ancient "sawtooth" model, about 10 years old by now.

About a year ago Apple decided to acknowledge the problem with cracks that could develop at the hand rests on the plastic MacBooks. Since my had those cracks I instantly called Applecare and they acknowledged the problem and I got a ticket number to use when I submitted the laptop to an Apple service center. I contacted my local Apple dealer and they needed about 10-14 days for the repair. I decided to hold off the repair for a while since I needed the machine. Suddenly a whole year had passed. I called Applecare. The MacBook was now over three years old and because of that it was out of the repair program. A manager at Applecare decided to let me have the repair only because I had reported it within the correct time frame. Very, very kind of her!

This monday I went to my local Apple Service center again. I told them that it was OK to repair the MacBook, gave them the ticket number and serial, and the contact information to the Applecare manager. This time the repair time was calculated to 36 hours!! I haven't yet picked up the machine today but I surely hope that they will be able to fulfill their promises. Even if it will take another day to have it fixed - it will be ok too.

Disaster ( nearly...)

Again I note that I haven't been very attentive to my blog... Too bad since I have received some e-mails from readers that actually found my writing interesting and had told me that they would follow it. Sorry about that - sometimes reality dictates what you can spend your time on.

Why the dramatic headline, you might ask? Actually it isn't as bad as could be assumed. My iPhone 3G is broken. And I couldn't find the receipt. And the one year warranty would run out January 6th. Luckily I had had a previous warranty exchange and the receipt from that had all the serials, IMEI numbers, purchase dates and stuff. So I could submit the phone for a repair/exchange.

What had happened to the phone then? Well, the 30-pin connector only gave a decent connection on about 2 cables out of 6 for syncing or charging and even those could easily be disconnected. Either had the 30-pin connector become loose or simply been worn out. I cleaned the connection but no change. In the process I also discovered that a small crack had started to develop in the plastic in one of the corners at the connector. Off to the mall with what documents that I had and submit it for service at the Swedish equivalent to AT&T -Telia. In Sweden, as in most European countries, we have no Apple Stores. They accepted the phone without any problem - in fact they were very friendly. It would probably take about 10 working days before I got it back and according to the sales rep I would receive a brand new phone.

So now I'm "stuck" with a Nokia E71 as my main phone and a 5th gen iPod Nano 8GB for music and video. The E71 isn't a bad phone - far from it. It has a whopping 1500 mAh battery which seems to go on forever compared to the iPhone, it multi tasks, it has a physical keyboard, camera with auto focus and decent video capabilities. But - the screen is really tiny, it doesn't sync with iTunes on my MacBook particularly well (hardly actually), the company Outlook mail service requires manual synch (not the phones fault though...), the quality of 3rd party applications is in many cases questionable even though they are always more expensive than their iPhone counterparts, the native Facebook application is medieval compared to the one on the iPhone and you can't control the music player with the button on the headset. And the call log still stinks - I can't see what phone number a particular caller used if he has more than one number in my phone book. The built in mail message client for SMS and e-mail is ancient compared to the iPhone and the browser isn't much better - slow and lots of redraws during rendering.

Apart from that I'm still impressed with the build quality and the size of the unit.

This is my second day the second time of being without an iPhone since October 2007 when I bought my original iPhone in NYC. So far I've had the following issues: The E71 has a 2.5 mm head phone connector, the car has a 3.5 mm plug - no joy using the E71 as a music player in the car. The TomTom maps of the E71 are ancient (surprisingly how much the streets are changing over a couple of years...)

Well, that's about all for the moment. I intend to keep this blog updated with my observations while the iPhone is being repaired.

An update

Ok, what about a short update about everything mobile. Let's start with the quickest one. My Nokia E71 finally received a firmware update, 300.xxx.yyy - thank you for that Nokia, what took you so long? The camera software gave some improved quality which was fine. There were some new applications installed like a Youtube client and some other additions and improvements but no major changes. Overall, nothing that made me change my opinion about what phone to use as my main handset. At the moment the E71 is on the shelf with no SIM card and turned off.

I bought the Nokia N95 for slightly over two years ago and the battery showed very clear signs of being worn out and loosing charge very rapidly even under very slight use. The battery door had also been broken. I found a web shop and bought a 3rd party 900mAh battery and a complete new back side for the N95, now in black instead of the original sand colored. At the moment the N95 is almost looking as new and the black back side is a great improvement. The battery capacity is also as good as new, the original battery being a 950mAh which is 50mAh more than the new battery, but I doubt that I will ever notice the difference. Currently I have my private SIM card in the N95. I've also bought a new wired headset for the N95 with controls for the musicplayer, replacing the original headset shipped with the phone which had been broken.

The iPhone 3G receives a thorough workout every day. Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, texting, Navigon, calender, browsing the web, playing games and listening to music, podcasts, and audio books. So far I haven't even considered changing away from using the iPhone as my primary phone. I'm quite satisfied with it.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Best phone!(?)

Hi Everyone,

Long time no see! Well since last it hasn't happened a lot. But I think I have reached a final (?) decision about which phone should be my main phone. For the time being at least.

I've looked into specifications, stand by times, functionality, applications, games, synching and many other smaller details when it comes to choosing between a Nokia S60 phone and an iPhone 3G. When looking solely at specifications both the N95 and the E71 are superior to the iPhone in many areas. Ever tried running a Twitter application in the background on the iPhone? Right, it isn't possible (if you don't jailbreak it). Works perfectly on the Nokias, in theory at least...

Why only in theory? Well there is one small problem - available RAM. When Symbian OS runs out of available RAM for running programs the OS takes a good look at what unused applications can be terminated to free up RAM so you can load that big website without problem. And what do yo know? suddenly you have no Twitter application running in the background - but you aren't told and the only way to check is to load up the application list. Something you don't do at a regular basis. The same goes for any application that you'd like to have up and running like Location Tagger and Podcasting. This is mainly a problem for Nokia S60 devices with limited amount of RAM, e.g. the N95 with 64 MB RAM. The E71 with 128 MB RAM doesn't suffer from this kinds of problem at the same rate.

In this era of social networking any platform that hasn't got a native Twitter and Facebook client is in my point of view somewhat inferior to those that have. Symbian has several great Twitter applications but no Facebook application. You must use the mobile website equivalent version, which in my opinion doesn't provide the same level of user experience, it's simply too slow and awkward to use in my opinion. The iPhone has several Twitter clients, many of them free, a native Facebook app, LinkedIn (really needs an update), and Yammer just to mention a few.

Shooting video and photos the N95 is still the winner - 'nuff said. Even with the latest firmware upgrade the E71 is still not performing that much better than the iPhone 3G with OS 3.x. Before the firmware 300.x.x update of the E71 the photo quality was really miserable - even when using the autofocus. If you concentrate on holding the iPhone absolutely still when releasing the shutter button the photos are now really sharp, clear and well balanced - especially if you avoid having direct light shining in the camera. The 3.0 update really made a difference here. If you don't need to shoot video or a photo in low light conditions the results of the iPhone camera are actually quite acceptable in my opinion.

Gaming, well not much to say there that hasn't already been said. The iPhone is truly a great gaming platform with an ever increasing catalog of low priced high quality games in every category. Sid Meyers Civilization, Bejeweld, PinBall Dreams, Sims 3 - I can make the list go on and on. Comparing that with the Nokia N-Gage platform - nah, I don't think I'll go down that route. Just let me say that simple Java reworks for the S60 platform doesn't compare that well with native applications on the iPhone.

When we are discussing the Office side of things the iPhone loses a bit. The built in support is only for viewing documents that has been mailed as attachments to the iPhone. Comparing that with the E71 that has built in editors for MS Office documents and can handle them through the regular file system. There are applications for editing Office documents in the iPhone AppStore but they still are a bit clunky in some areas even though it is a safe bet to say that they will improve over time. At this point in time - the iPhone is clearly inferior to the E71 if you have the need to edit and create Office documents.

So to conclude:

Nokia N95

I've really tried to like this phone, and believe me when I say that I do - under certain circumstances. It's a great phone for vacations and parties when the great camera/video really takes good photos. When it comes to playing music and videos, well, let me put it this way: If you have been accustomed to the iPhone/iTunes environment with it's simplicity in synching podcasts, music, applications and video, everything else is a bit kludgy in my opinion. Synching the N95 works, no doubt about that, but Apple's solution does it that much better. Playing games should be great, but it isn't. Why? Take a look at the D-Pad. Look at the keys o the left and to the right of the D-Pad. Imagine playing an action packed game where timing is essential. Ooops I hit the multimedia menu button instead of the D-Pad left. I do it, my kids do it, and when you have done it a couple of times you just grow tired of it and quits playing.

When discussing the keyboard of the N95: The keys are quite good to press with good tactile feedback. But they are clicking, a lot, especially on the right side where the slider is a bit loose as well and contributes with some more clicking. I've checked that with Nokia and they claim that the slider is within acceptable limits. The standby time isn't that great either. Listening to music, surfing, downloading some Podcasts, making some phone calls, working in the calender, well if you last a day you are really lucky. My N95 has the habit of once in a while run down the battery from a full charge to complete emptiness within a couple of hours. And that is with no special applications loaded in the background and just lying around at the usual places in the house. I have a background from using Treo's for quite some years and being used to a full qwerty keyboard and then starting to use T9 is a constant source of irritation even if you use predictive text input. One other sore area is the lack of decent support of HTML e-mail. The built in Message application handles those as attachments so you'll have to open them via the webbrowser. This is soo 1990. Nokia provides a new HTML based e-mail application in beta but it defeats the purpose of having all messages handled by one application. Clumsy solution. Integrate HTML support and push out an improved version of the Messaging application with the next firmware update.

E71

The E71 is a different phone in some areas compared to the N95. There are more RAM, it's more solidly built, has a qwerty keyboard, great standby time, and a smaller form factor. On the downside we have a smaller screen, crappy camera and no multimedia buttons, neither on the device nor on the headset. It is a beautiful device which will run forever with it's gigantic 1500 mAh battery but having to access the media player applications directly to pause the music/film when you need to talk to someone isn't to my liking. The small screen makes it a bit hard to watch films, especially if it is subtitled. As a business unit - and a BlackBerry killer - it's the given choice of the three but it still lacks from many of the same areas as the N95 when compared to the iPhone. Actually the qwerty keyboard is at times the worst point of the phone. Try to enter a phone number from your memory when driving. It is close to impossible to hit the right keys. I know - I've tried - and yes, it's legal to drive and use a phone at the same time in Sweden. When texting, answering an e-mail or editing a document - it's a great improvement over the N95. Depending on your preferences the keyboard could even be better than the touch screen keyboard of the iPhone. The E71 has basically the same Messaging application as the N95 with no integrated HTML support which just plainly sucks. The omission of threaded text messages is also unbelievable. Handspring introduced that in the Treo 600 years ago.

iPhone 3G

When purely looking at the specifications the iPhone 3G is inferior to both the N95 and the E71 in many areas. Due to that I've tried to switch over to any of those devices as my main mobile unit, but within a day or two, I've switched back the SIM cards and started to use the iPhone again. Why? The camera is inferior, mainly lacking auto focus, the standby time is as bad as the N95, it has no ability to run applications in the background, has no integrated Todo. Many actions requires a lot of tapping around, e.g. new calender or address entry. But in two important areas it shines brighter than any other smartphone. The overall user experience is just hands down the best there is, the UI just makes you happy when using it. The second area is the iTunes AppStore. The simplicity, the low prices, and the extremely large selection of applications in almost every imaginable area enables you to make the iPhone into exactly the type of device you want. And the best of all - not a single Java application with sluggish performance and non-intuitive UI anywhere to be seen.

The touch screen keyboard can be a dog to use at times but as you use it you'll probably have a better experience. You'll still have to look at the keyboard when typing but the benefits of having a really large screen available when not needing the keyboard makes up for that several times over. When you have watched at a full length movie e.g. during a flight you won't mind. If you do use the iPhone for looking at movies or listening to music/audiobooks/podcasts for an extend period of time it is recommended that you buy some kind of external rechargeable battery pack if you intend to be able to use the phone when you are done. That large screen does consume a rather large amount of power...

The large screen is also the source of one potentially severe problem with iPhone as all to many has found out. It doesn't like being dropped on a floor. The glass surface tends to crack. Most often you can still use the iPhone, but it doesn't look good and it will cost you to have it changed if (when?) it happens so be careful!

Conclusion

So in spite of being inferior in some areas and in spite of my efforts of trying to like the N95 I always ends with switching back to the iPhone - I can't help it, I have really tried not to. The overall benefits of the iPhone makes it - for me at least - the best smartphone I have used so far. The good things really outshines the few areas that might be a problem.

Ovi App Store - broken by design???

As you know I have two Symbian phones, an E71 and a N95. Of course I was very intrigued when Nokia opened the Ovi App store for Symbian S60 phones. At last one, good place to look for, buy, and download applications for the Symbian S60 phones. I started to use the web client but it wasn't that nice to use. I managed to get the Ovi App Store client for the E71 but couldn't find the same application for the N95 wherever I looked. I even created a second account for the N95 to circumvent any problems related to "two devices - one account". Nope, I still haven't found any native Ove App store client. I'm quite sure that Nokia would release a client for the S60R3 platform in portrait mode, but I can't find any whatever I do to try and find one. In any case, I shouldn't be forced to go hunting for it, if it isn't the client you are accessing the Ovi App store from a Nokia smart phone the App Store should present you the Ovi App store client application as the first suggested download.

I had used the Gravity Twitter client for a while during the free test period and was seriously thinking of buying it which I did as my first buy on the E71. A couple a days ago the E71 developed a serious problem where I found out that the only way to remedy it was to reset the device by reinstalling the latest firmware (200.x.y in Sweden - where is the 210.x.y version with the improved camera software Nokia???). After I reinstalled the firmware I accessed the Ovi account on the E71 to re-download the Ovi App Store application, Gravity Twitter client and the Skyfire web browser. I couldn't!!! They where there under the headline "My Download History" but I couldn't re-download them. It says Installed, but the only way to get it back on the device is to actually buy it again. I tried to re-download the Ovi Store App, but the got an "Item unavailable" message. I like to be proven wrong here, but I googled around a bit on the problem and sadly, I found out that I wasn't alone.

In contrast I have four iPhones in my family, they are all using the same iTunes store account and I have downloaded some of the applications to more than one phone. No problem to do that. Reinstalled an iPhone - not a problem, just reinstall the applications and you are fine to go.

Sorry Nokia, until you enable the possibility to re-download any previous purchase made in the Ovi App Store, I won't buy, not even download any free app at all! If there is an application that I really like, I will contact the developer directly.

Until then, I'll stick with the iTunes app store!