I'd avoid the first version because I told myself it wasn't 3G. When the 3G version came out the contract on my trusty E61 had long passed its sell by so I really had no excuse.

Overall I like it. Perfect? Not by a long way.

The best handheld computing device available right now. For me, yes.

The best mobile phone? That category doesn't exist. The world is far more complex than that.

After about a week I realised that what I was using was a 21st century Palm. It's icon drive, single tasking (for all intents and purposes) and has a touch screen. I loved my Palm V & Sony Clié but lack of phone and the insistence on sticking with a stick out arial for the one with a phone meant it languished in the cupboard long ago. By the time a decent phone/palm came out I was working with Symbian devices so tried those. You know, I really wish the iPhone had the extra programmable hard keys along the bottom. Give me a touchscreen keyboard over graffiti anytime. It would be nice if companies like Textware Solutions could replace the standard key layout with their own though.

Ignore much of the negative stuff out being bandied around the webosphere. Compared to any Series 60 phone I've ever had the iPhone just works. Switching between 3G and wifi works like it should. The screen quality and size instantly blows you away. Only a 2MP camera? Just how big a photo are you going to email or web upload over a 3G link?

Would I like a bigger camera, more memory, better battery life? Of course. But I also want simple sync with iTunes, easy app install, a great email client and oh, that screen.

But is this really the best way to help phone users navigate around pages larger than the screen? On my Nokia E61 the thumbnail looks relatively clear. On a Motorola L7 I can just about identify the screen areas (Left menu, middle content etc), but if I visit an unfamiliar Website the thumbnail doesn't help me find the information I'm looking for at all. As for vertically and horizontally scrolling the L7's tiny viewpoint around a large web page on the L7; the horror, the horror.

So what happens when I turn it off. I'm left with a smartly rendered page with no assistance to help me navigate around. Is this better than using the built in browser and a content adaptation service such as the one launched by Vodafone recently? As I say its rendered very well, it scrolls faster than built in browser (at least on a phone like the L7) and it probably uses less data traffic; but I don't think this is enough to crack the mass market. I'm sure the mobile geek community will rave over it, but I think that the big breakthrough in presenting normal Web pages on restricted phones is still to come. Maybe Opera Mini v5.

The upgrade process unfortunately lost the default 3 theme. A well design theme that worked well. I'll have to try some others again. The other unfortunate side affect was that the ? have / swapped over. Annoying, but I can live with it. The upgrade has fixed some of the problems I'd noticed before.

• The Services Browser works with the 3 today page. The Internet page of this usually (but not always) displays with lots of broken image links.
• The Gmail contacts screen is no longer keypad only.

Further details can be found at E-Series

Series 60 Messaging. Is it really two years since I last used a Series 60? The email client in the Messaging application seems to have hardly changed. Its support of IMAP and POP3 is adequate and the one line display summary is fine. However in use its short comings quickly become apparent. There's no intelligence in there. The header or whole message approach just doesn't cut it. Auto-retrieval sort of works, but I've had it retrieve deleted messages, old read messages appear as "new" and the worst is when it just stops retrieving. The font size when displaying messages is too large too.

Mail for Exchange. All the E61 blogs recommend this client. It integrates well with the phone and does a reasonable job of intelligent content fetching. But, and its a big but, it only works with Exchange. Sure Mail2Web is free, but its not my company's email provider. I don't want to and can't forward all my work email to an external mailbox. My experience with M4Exchange indicated that the auto-fetch was heavy on battery life. The phone died in about half a day. I did like its peak and off-peak settings for auto retrieval. If you use Exchange or don't mind creating yet another email account, Mail For Exchnage is worth a look. However, for me its unusable.

Profimail. Another application that seems to have hardly changed in two years. Its problem used to be with coping with large amounts of mail or many IMAP folders. I don't want all my mail on my phone, but I do want access to it. Downloading my current mail used up my trial before I got to find out if its IMAP handling had improved since I last used it. The colour scheme is an acquired taste.

Movamail. A Java based mail application that was simple to install and configure and was happily retrieving my IMAP based mail very quickly. Everything is done via MovaMails own server so they can compress the mail before sending it. I imagine that the client app is kept small too by not having to have inbuilt POP3 or IMAP support. This server centric approach does have a down side. If I'm out of coverage when I start the app - no mail. Rather than a standard menu system Movamail uses a very attractive dialog driven approach. Unfortunately the attention paid to the presentation of these is not carried through to the program where the inbox view is particularly poor. In use it presents headers and retrieves an initial mail fragment well. I find it annoying to be constantly asked whether I wanted more text or entries to be retrieved on scrolling - just do it for heavens sake. One of the risks of the Java approach is integration with the phone. For instance, new mail doesn't appear on the standby screen and I cant choose a sound from the phone. MovaMail does at least read email address from my Contacts. I just did it wrong. I couldn't find away of editing its mistakes either. I finally gave up with MovaMail when it crashed during mail retrieval.

Update:In retrospect, I'm not comfortable with a client app taking login data and storing it (and copies of my email) on a remote server without a clear warning and my explicit agreement.

GMail. At last a phone that the GMail app installed on and worked. My first impression was good being presented with an attractive, clean and easy to use UI. Rapid header retrieval, automatic fetching of messages and entries as I scrolled all worked well. The GMail app doesn't try to download all my email yet it does let me search all of it. It seems to read my phone contacts too. Its primary weakness is that it unsurprisingly it only works GMail. It also doesn't do rich formatting of email contents (which mobile client does?) and has a maximum size of email that you can read annoyingly truncating it at that point. Its other weaknesses: no auto retrieval, no IMAP support and always displaying URLs as links through the Google transcoder. I'll definately continue using this application to read my GMail, but not my work email.

Update: There is one other problem with the GMail client on the E61. On contact search only the numeric pad works making search useless if you have more than 30 or 40 people. Luckily I dont initiate much mail via GMail and rely on Reply.

Three Mail. I'm fairly sure that Three's mail package is based on Seven's Personal Edition. This application relies on a deskyop connector running on my PC. I have two problems with this. Firstly, I want a mobile mail solution. I don't want to have to rely on my PC being turned on when I'm not at home. If I'm away for a short period of time I expect the machine to sleep. If I'm away for longer I'll turn it off. The second problem is that I have a Mac and cant find a redirector for it. End of trial.

So after many downloads and installs I'm using the standard Series 60 Messaging app for for my work email. Its really not very good, but the opposition isn't either. All I want is:

• My recent or selected emails on my phone (efficient memory use)
• Search access to the rest
• Fast, reliable and battery efficient auto-retrieve
• Efficient use of the large amount of screen real estate
• IMAP support
• Attachment download
• No PC Desktop connector!

Blackberry really doesn't have anything to worry about if this is the best the smartphone developer community can do.

I finally decided to change contracts and get a new phone. I chose a Nokia E61. Sacrificing a camera, the screen and keyboard will hopefully give me a highly mobile computer as well as a phone. First impressions are highly favorable. The screen is excellent, Wifi was easy to set up and the keyboard is very usable. The phone is not without its faults, most of which are already well documented around the web.

The biggest single fault with my experiences with the E61 must lie with Three. There is clearly a well know bug that prevents either of the phone's Web Browsers from accessing the Three's Planet3 services. If you don't know better then your internet experience miht end there. Several people have returned their phones at this point. Rumour has it that the flash upgrade of the E61 fixes this, but the Nokia Software updater refuses to update Three E61s. However, when I downloaded Opera for Mobile I could access the Today page (just) and through this discovered the URL for the Internet service home page (http://mobile.three.co.uk/sdf/internethome). Once I had the URL for this then I could reach it from either of the other browsers.

Playing with the E61 this weekend has given me quite an insight into the development of phone sotware over the last two years and I'll be posting my thoughts and experiences with a number of applications over the coming days.

For a number of reasons I was looking forward to trying the Gmail app. Unfortunately, so far I have been unable to do so. My first attempt with a Motorola SLVR first failed when entering the download URL the browser failed to display the page at http://gmail.com/app. This isn't uncommon with the SLVR and trying again the next day did show the page containing the download link. Download and install completed without hitch and I entered my username and password. I was asked if I wanted to connect to the data network, select yes and waited. The next message to be displayed was that the network was unavailable and I required a data connection to use the program. I have a data connection, I just downloaded the app and haven't moved. Returning to the browser surfing worked fine. Handset 1 failed.

Onto handset 2 - a Samsung SGH-D600. Download and install seemed to work well, as did startup and account info entry. Then something magical happened. My phone reset itself. This isn't a one off, it does it everytime I try to sign-in with the app. In my naivety I thought that Java ran in a sandbox and couldn't affect the device. How wrong I was.

As an early adopter and part-time geek, I gave the app more time and attention than many would. So I have no Gmail midlet to try - I don't know how it compares to browser access. Don't get me wrong. I don't blame Google one iota for this. There are too many phones and too many firmware release to truly test an app before it gets to the customer. I still wouldn't want to be in a company that relies on client applications for its revenue.

So last week I forgot to record an episode of The Shield. The best series of the best show on TV and I didn't want to miss it. iTMS US has The Shield for sale. but due to archaic distribution and licensing agreements Apple can only sell these in the US. Since I live in the UK, I'm not allowed to register on the US iTMS. If you've ever tried you get blocked when you need to enter details of a credit card issued in the US.

A quick web search and I discovered what many people probably already know but I'll share anyway, there's a loop hole - iTunes Gift Cards. Buy a US gift card from an online supplier, get a friend in the US to buy one or stock up on holiday. Once you have the PIN you can then register on the US store without a credit card.

The result was that I happily bought and downloaded my missed episode. Now, do I buy the rest of the series and skip needing to wait a week for the next episode?

As we neared the saddle of the mountain/hill we discovered that all the walkers came up the east side from Dolgellau. From this point we had an excellent vista in all directions. Given the time of day we decided that this was a far as we would go and commenced a fast and chilly decent. This still gave us time to catch an amazing sunset, walk around the old cemetry at Llanfihangel y Pennant and the castle ruins of Castell y Bere. All in all an excellent day out. An area I would heartily recommend to others.

The real purpose behind the open house was to celebrate the opening of Googles glitzy new central London office and to push the fact that Google are hiring a (a or the still isn't clear to me) mobile development team to be based out of London. There were three presentations. Google Europe (Nikesh Arora), Google Technology (Alan Eusatce) and Google Mobile (Shannon Maher). The first two of these were standard fair. Nothing revolutionary or new. Google is big, Google makes oodles of money and Google does tech in a different way - because the problem is big it has to; because the data volumes are huge it can.

The mobile section however was disappointing. Where we should have been overwhelmed with a vision for a Google enriched Mobile world we got the Internet on your phone - advertising, search and more advertising. I though we'd been there and realised that that wasn't what people wanted. Local search is an answer, but to the wrong question. The question is not how do people find the local pizza restaurant but how do they book a table; not how do I post to my blog but how do I make blogging and photo sharing so simple and easy on the phone that the general public use the stuff without even thinking.

I came away with the impression that Google don't get mobile, that they don't understand how it changes the game. They are ahead of some US companies in that they understand that they need to be doing something but didn't convey that they knew what it was that Google can bring to mobile in a way that makes money. Maybe there was some psychology going on and the presentation was a clever way of saying "Help!".

Don't take this as all negative Google, I really did enjoy the party!

The pitch is that using a program on their phone a user can scan one of these squiggles and with a single click connect to the web page or other resource on their camera phone. Isn't it simpler and quicker to ask the user to send an SMS with a shortcode?

Most of the target customer base understands shortcodes and knows how to text. Alternatively they can download and run a Java program that might or might not work on a given handset. On first use I imagine most folks would give up before even getting the midlet on their phone. On subsequent use I bet an SMS is still quicker to send.

There aren't even many adverts that use shortcodes so I can't imagine how small the potential market for these tags is.

If the functionality was built into the phone and camera software then maybe it would work, but until then give me shortcodes.

Fixed now.

This file is made available subject to the usual proviso of using it at your own risk. I have only tested it with a Nokia 6630 running the latest download of Lifeblog.

To install:

1. Download this file. Replace the standard Moveable Type version of AtomServer.pm (this file can be found in lib/MT) with it.
2. Create a directory lifeblog with the normal 755 permissions in the root directory of your blog.
4. Add the entries described in my original post to your style sheet template and rebuild it
5. Configure the Lifeblog client with your username and API password (not the standard password). This can be found on your Author Profile page. The server address to use is http://yourwebaddress/cgi-bin/mt-atom.cgi/weblog/
6. Post an entry from your phone. I'd recommend enabling the Lifeblog Optimise images setting.

Note 1: If you use any other Atom client that needs to authenticate itself, it may no longer work due to changes I had to make to allow the Lifeblog client to do so. If you need this other client DO NOT use this version of the script.

Note 2: If your mt-atom.cgi file is not in /cgi-bin then you will need to edit the AtomServer.pm file. Find the line

my $ATOM_CGI = '/cgi-bin/mt-atom.cgi';

Have fun and let me know of your successes and failures.

After the struggle of Saturday we had a plan - a door opening dash to the back of hall 6 for an explanation and opportunity to play Parthenon from Z-Man comics. Our plan worked perfectly and we had the stand to ourselves. Strangely, Sunday morning seemed very quiet and we needn't have rushed. Part way through the game a German couple we had played Il Principe with way back on Thursday turned up. It was good to see a familiar face.

Parthenon is a game of developing civilizations in the ancient eastern Mediterranean (sound familiar?). This time the emphasis is on trading and investment - there are no people counters at all. Suprisingly for a trading game there was remarkable little player to player trading after Year 1. We were largely playing solitaire against the game system. There are other games that do this and while they aren't my kind of game I thought Parthenon did this rather well. There were plenty of choices of what to build, where to trade and what risks to take for all of us. Although I have the feeling that with repeated play optimum strategies will appear for each nation the random element will keep players alert.

The production uses muted tones and provides lots of card giving good heft value. As I say, not my sort of game, but if this is the type of game your group likes then its worth a look.

After this I tried to get a game of Skyline but failed as my the two German I was playing with became involved in a marital dispute (well it sounded like that anyway, but my German is very poor). So off to the airport

Was this a good Essen? For me this year was as good as recent years. I go to Essen to play new games and appreciate the company. This I did. There were lots of games to try, new companies to discover and old faces to meet. But from my jaded (and critical) point of view there were few games that caught the imagination. If my weekly playing sessions weren't dominated by play-testing I would have bought Indonesia and Kaivai but actually only purchased Railroad Dice 2. As usual I picked up a couple of lighter card games - TaTaTa and (unplayed) Adling Spiel's Zauberschwert & Drachenei with its expansion Helden & Zauberspruche.