Nokia gets back in the game

I’ve had a Nokia E71 for three months. It was the replacement for the Toshiba g710  which went very quickly  from being a bit useless to not working at all.

I’d read about the E71 on a number of blogs. It sounded too good to be true. But after all these years in the wilderness with phones that were better at email than voice calls (and by that I mean all the  Windows Mobile phones smaller than a typical family car) and having been impressed the E51 it was time to buy a phone from a proper phone company.

Well, it absolutely rocks.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a phone that’s got much above ‘ok’. The last one I used regularly and actually liked was the Nokia 6100, long since passed onto my mother as I went in search of more gimmicks (she’s still using it just fine). 

It shouldn’t be a big thing but to find a phone that makes and received calls with ease, with a simple address book, with good build quality was amazing after years of crappy HTC and Windows Mobile devices.

But the Nokia is so much more than that. It’s very slim indeed, amazingly small considering it has a big screen and full keyboard, and it has virtually every feature you can think of.

There’s 3.5G, a 2megapixel camera, voice recognition, voice synthesizer, GPS (which works well with both Nokia and Google maps), the good Symbian browser and… really good integration with mail on Exchange server (via activesync). Whilst the email client lacks the full functionality of Windows Mobile, it has all the features I used except viewing folders outside the inbox. It offers instant ‘push’ email, company address look up, attachment opening and, at last, a  flashing light to tell you there is new mail (or SMS). This last feature was always a big advantage (or rather, part of the addiction) for Blackberries.

And, because the keyboard, with it’s beveled keys is very easy to type on, you can really use the thing effectively for work.

Two final, and important, benefits. Firstly, it looks great. Secondly, it runs really quickly. No amount of beautiful design (Apple), or exhaustive feature set (Windows), really makes up for straight-forward performance. But Symbian, running on this device is blisteringly fast in all circumstances. I don’t know now how I ever put up with the lags and glitches on the HTCs and Toshibas. They just don’t happen with this phone.

A few of the downsides

1. A 2.5in headphone jack – why do companies keep doing this? Who has a headphone with that jack?: precisely nobody. So you have to use a converting cable. And when will you definitely not have one of those? That’s right, when your iPod runs out of juice.
2. Vibrate is either on or off. So if it vibrates on ring, it vibrates on mail which is annoying if you get a lot mail.
3. After about 2 months, it started being a power hog (running the battery out after a few hourse, when initially it had run for more than a day absolutely fine). Restoring to factory settings fixed this (even with push email on all day).
4. I’ve had a couple of occassions where the backlight wouldn’t come on at all. (Oh and the Nokia helpline was absolutely terrible in helping with this). Then it came on by itself. I think this is just my unit.
5. On the keyboard ‘z’ is under ‘a’. This is one place to the left of where it normally is which takes a while  (and a lot of typos) to get used to. There doesn’t seem to be any reason that they couldn’t just fix this!
6. The camera isn’t great – certainly not a replacement for a main camera
7. No facebook app yet!

So overall a very pleasant surprise and certainly the best business phone I’ve had. What it lacks in some of the email features and usability of the Blackberries, it more than makes up in call quality. If they can fix some of the niggles (obviously not the hardware ones) with a software update then they’d be really far out in front.

 

A good day not to be working at Android, or Microsoft, or Symbian

I really am not an Apple fanboy. I’ve been as struck as everyone else by the apple fan-o-mania, and the bizarre unwillingness of the converts to find any fault with the jesus phone – even when, it – frankly – sucks.

But I have to admit to being seriously impressed with the 2nd generation iPhone. I have no doubt at all that – if I could get it to work on my company’s chosen network – I would be part of the mob buying the iPhone yesterday.

The move to application platform appears to have been much better managed than when Facebook did it. We’re not stuck with a bunch of useless apps or a bunch of Spammy apps. Instead lots of nice, practical invention about what is possible with 3G, a big touch screen, an accelerometer and GPS. The Exchange implementation (Apple’s own work) is nicely done, and the ease of buying (apart from the very annoying glitches with service at the start) remains very seductive.

Who’s going to buy Samsung or HTC’s offerings now, when this is available on the market? Where has they invested? Well the hardware’s OK and pretty fully featured and nicely put together, but it’s the user-experience where they’ve made a real effort. Apple continues to work out some of the most complex ergonomic problems with taste, efficiency and style. People at Android and Microsoft must be wondering if they’ve got what it takes to make up the difference now.

 

Yeah but no but

Does my new Toshiba G710 have GPS?

The new Toshiba FAQ page for the product (released about a month after the device itself) helps clear it up:

Can I use any navigation application with the Portégé G710?

Although the Portégé G710 is GPS enabled, it is not possible to use any standard navigation software on the G710. Details on which navigation packages are compatible with the Portégé G710 will be available soon.

That’s a ‘no’ where I come from. Perhaps details on how to stop it making large bleeping noises when you answer calls will be released at the same time, and news of Lord Lucan.

Come on Toshiba. Even Microsoft wouldn’t go that far.

 

Grading on a curve (Toshiba G710 review)

We had a mini-trial of different smartphones at work. I was lucky enough to be given a Blackberry Curve for a few weeks. For my money, the Curve has it all: the pearl navigation is easy to use, GPS which works really well, the software itself is responsive and easy to learn, having a full keyboard makes it realistic to compose long messages, and the call quality is pretty good.

Then the trial ended and I had to go back to the HTC Vodafone 1240 – a WM5 device that suffers all the worst problems of the platform – huge call lag, over-designed animations which slow the whole interface down to a snail’s pace, really unintelligent pre-emptive text support.

So, the Toshiba G710 looked like a great halfway house: presumably a better processor (because its Toshiba), Windows Mobile 6, the pearl to get around, a full keyboard and GPS.

Well it’s been a bit of a let down. The GPS for a start doesn’t work at all. once again WM 6 feels like it is trying to run before it can walk, with common, painfully slow animations and transitions between pages, and noticeable lags when answering and making calls.

Yes, IE is a far better mobile browser than BB’s own, and setting it up with Exchange is certainly easier but otherwise the curve is better in all respects.

Call quality is ok, although the maximum volume is insufficient for noisy settings. the pearl is nice most of the time but too sensitive to vertical movement in some key interfaces, making it – at times – quite hard make the correct selection.

The case is small enough to go in a jeans pocket, and the keyboard is good and quick to type on, but not always able to accept all inputs which is frustrating. The side buttons cannot be programmed (a nice BB feature), and there is no headphone socket – forcing anyone who wants to use the device as walkman to carry around the crappy supplied mini-usb-connecting headset.

So overall, good, but certainly not great, and not up to the quality of the Blackberry.

 

Why

In the last three years, for reasons escaping interest, I’ve had eight ’smartphones’. (Orange HTC SPV C600, Blackberry 6230, Blackberry 8700, Blackberry Pearl, Vodafone v1240 (HTC), Vodafone v1415 (HTC), Blackberry Curve, and currently, a Toshiba G710. 

It’s an interesting market in any case. Have a look at Expansys, if you don’t think there’s a lot going on. Not least of which is the proximity (in price and functionality at least) of ultra mobile laptops and PCs. It used to to be the case that smartphone’s seemed reasonably priced because they were mini-computers. that doesn’t seem as relevant with the EEE or OLPC in the market.  

It’s also a market that’s technically early and difficult to understand.

Before we’ve even seen Android (Google’s version of the platform), we’ve got sophisticated offerings from Blackberry (Research in Motion), MIcrosoft (various flavours of Windows Mobile), Apple (who’ve not even made a computer you can really use for business yet but seem remarkably ambitious about getting it to work on their phone) and even Nokia.

This is all happening in a market where EVERYONE has a mobile phone and the manufacturers of all phones are seriously uping their game and converging on the Smartphone market.

So, I’m a geek. I’m interested in how these things work and how they will end up taking over consumers’ lives. This blog will be reviews of devices, discussions about software and strategy and observations about adoption. I’d love to hear your thoughts.