MobileViews Blog

Just for fun I decided to score my iPod touch, TyTn Windows Mobile 6 Pocket PC, and Dash Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone on 10 features. The highest possible score is 3 and the lowest is 1. So, a higher total is theoretically better than a lower one.

If you look at the scores, you might guess that I carry the TyTn Pocket PC around most of the time. Unfortunately, that guess would be wrong. I always take my Dash Smartphone out with me if I am only carrying one device. And, if watched me wander around my home, you would probably see me using the iPod touch.

The reason is that the my unscientific scorecard did not place weights on the ranked features. When, I am running around town, the most important features to me around the voice phone, one-handed use, RSS reader, PIM, and Email. When I am at home the most important features are web browsing and reading (but not writing/responding to) email. Email is a tricky one because when outside of the home I want one device that I can use for both reading and writing email. On the other hand, when I am at home, I just need to be aware of email and can wander over to a desktop or notebook computer to actually compose a response.

The Pocket PC (touch screen) probably trumps the Smartphone (non-touchscreen) with its unweighted score when outside of the home. But, once weight is placed on one-handed use and (a feature I did not rank) durability, the non-touchscreen Smartphone wins. I hated using my phone in the rain when I used a Pocket PC Phone Edition device. I felt that the touch screen technology was just too fragile. The Smartphone, on the other hand, seems to be tough enough for most outdoor weather conditions.

The big problem with the iPod touch and iPhone for my personal use is that they don’t have a physical thumb keyboard. As, I’ve mentioned many times before here, I still can’t type comfortably on iPod touch’s screen keyboard. That is why I never use it to reply to email or tweet on Twitter.

There is no perfect mobile device for me yet. So, I’ll continue to use a couple of best-of-breed devices in different situations for now.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, US mobile carriers really seem to dislike texting. T-Mobile is raising its rates fro 15 cents/text to 20 cents/text. It was as little as 10 cents/text about 18 months or so ago. However, it might be a good thing for T-Mobile subscribers who want to break their contract to go buy an iPhone 3G from AT&T Wireless. According to this RCR article…

T-Mobile USA subscribers get an out: Carrier raises texting fee

…this may constitute a material change of the contract you currently have and lets you get an early out of their contract without paying termination fees.

Have a Samsung or Motorola Windows Mobile phone and want to try out the QIK streaming video service? I have 500 invitations to give away. Here’s how to get one. Check the QIK phone compatibility list before asking for an invitation though…

QIK sign-up and compatible phone list

After you sign-up at the link above, send an e-mail to mobileviews(at-sign)qik.com. Type in the same phone number you used during the web sign-up process in the subject line. QIK will send an SMS message to your phone with the download link after you approved.

I usually get all kinds of UIQ press releases that I don’t care about. The one time there is a UIQ related news item I DO care about, I don’t get anything. Figures. I read this on Brighthand and went over to Nokia’s site to find the press release.

Mobile leaders to unify the Symbian software platform and set the future of mobile free – Foundation to be established to provide royalty-free open platform and accelerate innovation

The gist of the press release is that Nokia is buying all of Symbian (it already owned a big chunk of it) and is creating the Symbian Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola and kicking in its UIQ (which used to stand for User Interface Quartz – I can see why they got rid of that part) UI into the mix. And Docomo (Japan) sounds like it will contribute its MOAP(S) (Mobile Oriented Applications Platform).

The big news though, IMHO, is that Nokia says they plan to Open Source this mix under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. I guess this is reaction/preparation to/against the Google Android phone platform.

It is a long haul to get phone OSes off the ground and into the market (just as Microsoft or Google) though. So, I don’t expect to see anything from the Nokia Foundation until 2010 or so at the earliest.

I think I noticed the macro switch on my TyTn Pocket PC Phone Edition (aka Professional Edition) when I got it last year. But, I never tested it out until this week. While the TyTn’s digital camera is better than most Windows Mobile device cameras I’ve tried, it is still hampered by a cheap lens. And, the macro feature suffers because of this. The macro photo of the leaf looks relatively sharp here because it is a resized down from the original 2 megapixel image. The original image looks quite blurry.

Still, it is a nice feature to have. I’ll play around a bit more with distance, lighting, etc. to see if I can figure out optimized techniques for its use.

Yesterday I said that Windows Mobile’s real competitor is Google Android. WiMo has already conceded defeat to Apple’s iPhone in the consumer space. Why? How? You and I, as individual consumers, have not been the target Windows Mobile customer since 2003. As soon as Microsoft’s marketing became phone-centric, the target customers became enterprises running Exchange Server and the mobile phone carriers. Microsoft’s recent purchase of Danger (the firm that sells the youth-consumer-centric Sidekick phone) muddies the picture even more. How are Windows Mobile and the Sidekick related? They sure don’t share the same operating system or run the same applications. They have completely different market focuses. This can only serve to confuse their marketing efforts going forward.

The big unanswered question is who is the market focus for the Google Android based phones? Unless it syncs with Exchange Server or Lotus Notes, it is not the enterprise (at least initially). Google’s multi-mode reference designs (touch and non-touch screen devices) may cause the same mind-share fragmentation that Windows Mobile’s touch and non-touch reference designs do. Given a variety of hardware vendors (again like Windows Mobile), it is hard to imagine that Google’s phone will directly compete or impact on iPhone sales. It will, however, have an advantage in the US by not being locked to a single mobile carrier (AT&T Wireless). My guess is that Google’s phone will take market share directly away from Windows Mobile and what is left of the Treo Palm OS based phones (are new Palm OS phones still around?). So, the follow-up question is: How much damage will the various Google Android phones cause to Windows Mobile smartphone sales? My guess is: A lot. If the Google-based phones are even half as easy to use as the iPhone, half-as compelling, and syncs reliably with the Google cloud services (calendar, contacts, mail, etc.), it will be a huge seller. Just imagine if Google adopts Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads and goes after ActiveSync/WMDC, the lack of media playlists, the slowness of going from app-to-app, and other WiMo weaknesses. It could get brutal in TV commercial-land.

Air travel used to a relatively pleasant experience decades ago. It has become a darn right onerous task in recent years. I’m expecting airlines to install pay toilets on flights any day now Airlines are merging, shutting down, reducing flights, and all kinds of other activities that make catching a flight a statistical probability rather than a given these days.

If you have a web-enabled smartphone and a data plan, this site might come in handy when you are traveling by air. Check it out…

Mobile.FlightStats.com

Just read about this on Slashdot and went to see the site myself…

PDA’s Banished To Oblivion This Half Term

While I can appreciate the reason for the apparently opt-in ban, it doesn’t make sense to me. I think it is a good idea for kids and parents to all carry phones to keep in contact when separated (either by design or accident). I also use my phone’s camera a lot. We’ve always had fun at theme parks with phone, digital camera, GPS, and all kinds of other e-gear that have actually enhanced the experience IMHO.

I just read somewhere (sorry, I can’t recall the reference) that Craigslist is the most viewed site on mobile devices. From what I can figure, this is the address for their mobile site…

mobile.craigslist.org

The image at the top of this blog is pretty much what this site looked like on my iPod touch. Clicking on any link results in a reasonably mobile friendly page. But, I had a hard time reading the main cluttered page on my mobile device. Is there some other mobile friendly page on Craigslist that I missed?

I usually don’t mention a service I haven’t tried yet. But, I’m almost ready to hit the sack and don’t want to start playing with anything just now. And, yet, this service seemed interesting enough to blog it as a kind of reminder to myself to try it out tomorrow.

kwiry (which I suppose is pronounced “query”)

…is a free service that helps you jot something down from a phone and lets you retrieve the results from a desktop web browser. They push the idea of text messaging queries to the service. This caused me to lose interest at first. However, reading on I noticed it also lets you send the query via email too. My phone plan only includes a handful of free text messages. But, my email is free (unlimited data). So, that is a much better fit for me.

It apparently somehow ties in to Twitter (another favorite of mine) and other social network services. So, I’m definitely going sign up and take a closer look at it tomorrow.

Good night, all!

I noticed that Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta became available for two of my Windows Mobile 6 smartphones (non-touch): The Dash and the the Vox. None of my professional edition (touch screen devices) are supported by this beta release. After bad-mouthing the Go 2.0 release and suggesting it go away if the Microsoft-Yahoo merger happened (which it will not now), I have to say that 3.0 Beta looks and feels a lot better. It is still extremely slow after testing it over both EDGE and 802.11g WiFi connections. However, the navigation seems to make more sense now (though I still have issues with it) and the Widget technology looks reasonably good. It looks like Go Widgets are stored in the cloud since my widget add-ons moved over to my Vox after adding it while using the Dash. Go 3.0 is a much sticker app than 2.0 was. And, I’m giving it a tentative thumbs up. It is staying on my phones for the time being.

Quick! Name a web service that is as flaky as a bowl of breakfast cereal that doesn’t seem to generate hate even though it seems to be down half the time. Did you say Twitter? I learned about Tiny Twitter from Mobility Site’s Jack Cook. There are versions for Windows Mobile (native code) and Java-enabled phones. So, I downloaded the Windows Mobile Smartphone (Standard Edition) version (there’s a separate download for Pocket PCs — Classic/Professional Edition) and tested it on an HTC Vox smartphone. The one thing that might bother you at first is that you don’t see your own tweets in the display as you do on a desktop or even Twitter’s mobile web site. You do, however, get a richer Twitter experience using this freeware client than you do with Twitter’s mobile friendly website.