Ocasta

It's been a ridiculously long time since I wrote a blog entry. So long in fact that there's probably no one subscribed to the news feed. So what's woken me from my slumbers? I finally cracked and bought an iPhone

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.

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Opera have produced an amazing application (Opera Mini 4 beta) that delivers a browsing experience similar to browsing with the Nokia Webkit based browser. Full page rendering with a thumbnail overview. A technological marvel.

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.

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Nokia released a new firmware version for the E61 yesterday. Upgrading the firmware is a simple process involving my almost retired PC and a the Nokia Software Update program. Well ir should be a simple process but the NSU insists that there are is no new software version for my 3 branded E61. A useful article explains how to get round this. I'd previously tried this but with no success. This time things went better. I tried changing my product code to a generic UK code (0538289). This was better than the installed code and installed v2.618.06.05. That was a step forward but I wanted more. I then tried the one listed in the above article - 0524755. This worked fine and the new version installed successfully.

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

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The E61 is sold as an email oriented phone. I've spent a significant amount of my first week of ownership trying to get an email client that does the job. What follows is a summary of my experiences.

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.

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Apart from a trusty Nokia 3650 that spends most of its time in the drawer, it is the best part of two years since I had a so called smartphone. Back in early 2005 I got a SE K700 and was seduced by small, capable phones. In a way, the K700 was the last of a breed. Since then all Sony Ericsson phones have got bigger without offing me enough reason to change. Through my work I've had access to other phones. If I was to generalise, the Samsung D-600 I've been using for most of the last twelve months is rubbish. There is so much wrong with it I wouldn't know where to start. Recently I have had a Motorola SLVR which at least looks good. Its software leads a lot to be desired.

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.

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Last night an ex-colleague said to me that he envied the resources that Google must have for handset testing to allow it to launch Java phone apps across so many handsets. From my experiences with the Gmail midlet, he need envy no more. This midlet confirms all my prejudices against handset apps and the mass market.

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.

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Last night Google held an open house at their London offices and what a great party it was. I haven't seen so much good and free food and drink since the dot com days. Ah, it takes me back. There was a raffle and I won a bluetooth headset. Thanks Google!

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!

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One of the presentations was from Dennis Hettema from Shotcode. While such tags are technically fascinating I just don't see the business appeal. It's a vision shared by at least two other companies - semacode and gavitec - so I must be missing something.

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.

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I finally found the time to take a look at mod'ing the MT3.2 AtomServer for compatibility with the Series 60 Lifeblog client. In the end it was fairly straightforward to apply the previous the changes, although I did discover one change of behaviour that may or may not be a bug in MT3.2. The MT::App function uri returns /cgi-bin/mt.cgi rather than the uri of the file invoked (in this case mt-atom.cgi). Very odd.

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.

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After over three years focused on delivering on-device software for mobile phones I have recently returned to the server-side. I have not abandoned the mobile arena just handset software.

The problems with commercial software development for phones are well documented: development environment, distribution, operator control, installation, user awareness etc. I've experienced them all. The same problems impact innovative software. While Nokia has to be applauded for Lifeblog or Sensor their development can have made little commercial sense. As with other Series 60 apps only a small number of people actually use them and I can't see that people buy the phone because of them.

Without a significant change in handset design and operator attitude I don't believe that mobile phones will reach their potential as data communication device for anyone other than the techie community. Eventually I hope that a network operator (maybe an MVNO) will decide that there is value and differentiation in providing a fully networked phone. Then our world will change.

After over three years focused on delivering on-device software for mobile phones I have recently returned to the server-side. I have not abandoned the mobile arena just handset software.

The problems with commercial software development for phones are well documented: development environment, distribution, operator control, installation, user awareness etc. I've experienced them all. The same problems impact innovative software. While Nokia has to be applauded for Lifeblog or Sensor their development can have made little commercial sense. As with other Series 60 apps only a small number of people actually use them and I can't see that people buy the phone because of them.

Without a significant change in handset design and operator attitude I don't believe that mobile phones will reach their potential as data communication device for anyone other than the techie community. Eventually I hope that a network operator (maybe an MVNO) will decide that there is value and differentiation in providing a fully networked phone. Then our world will change.

I don't usually post just to link to another article, but in this special case I want to draw attention to Paul Goldings post. I was just in the process of writing an entry about the same buddy centric view of communication when I read this. It really is the way forward for the next generation of mobile phones to present information to me about my personal network.

The Buddy Paradigm isn't one way - its not just about communication initiation. It is also the ideal presentation for activities I want to know about - missed calls, messages received, updated blogs, new photo posts, late trains etc. all displayed through one simple interface. I also think its one of the missing pieces that will enable mobile social networks to really take off in a big way.

I just came across a link to Symella, Gnutella for Symbian phones. I can't for the life of me work out why anyone would want this. Maybe there's a secret world out there I don't know about where mobile data is free. Paying for my downloads is expensive enough without paying for other peoples too.

No, wait. The operators will love it. They get to charge two people for each byte of data transferred. Brilliant!

Over the last twelve months a lot has been written about social networks (e.g. MySpace, OurMedia) and community driven sites (e.g. Flickr, OhMyNews). Everything I see is Internet and desktop centric.

There's a world out there whose primary data terminal is or will be, a mobile phone. I don't see the mobile equivalents of these sites or well thought out mobile interfaces for them. Maybe I've missed them. There's no shortage of how to write blog entries or post photos from your phone, but very little evidence of any thought on how best to participate (rather than publish to) online communities.

Perhaps all the US, desktop centric companies and developers just don't think about such an existence. Maybe there there aren't enough handsets with good enough data and browser capabilities in circulation yet? Maybe I should stop hypothesising and start doing something about it.

Please tell me I'm wrong and that there are some great mobile centric community sites out their.

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Tomi Ahonen has it in for the US pundits that think e-mail is the killer app for mobile data. Paul Golding is pretty down on it too. I wouldn't rush to sell my shares in mobile e-mail companies (if I had any), there's still plenty of money in selling it to the gen-x'ers.

If SMS is so dominant is there any future for IM on phones?

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I have many digital personas. My blog, my CV, my Flickr photoss, my LinkedIn account etc. It looks like Nokia are going to give me another one with Sensor. Sensor is a Bluetooth-based social networking program. While not a new concept, the execution looks good and the fact that it will ship with Nokia Series 60 phones should improve its chance of success where other similar apps have failed. If you have the time its worth viewing this presentation on its development.

From the looks of it you can select a template, enter some text, add some pictures/sounds and publish your profile. Other people running the same application and in Bluetooth proximity can then find it and view it. While this sounds like a blog editor it isn't, its more akin to a web page publisher. There's no history, no archive.

But I want it to do so much more. I want to be able to share my profile beyond Bluetooth. I want to publish it to job sites, Social Networks, dating services and to conference attendee lists. Of course each of these might require a different view of my profile so I want to be able to control what I publish to each audience. It would be good too if I could write and publish my blog entries with it too.

If I'm going to publish my phone's content to a wider audience I want to use just one application to do it with not two (Lifeblog & Sensor). There's no need to use a different application just because the audience is different. Of course the published content maybe served to different people in different ways (Sensor for Bluetooth, Movable Type for the Web), but I only want one application to control what I publish.

There's an argument that asks why I need to publish at all. I view publishing as the act of making the decision of who sees what. Where I publish too and how it is accessed are different questions. I might just publish to my phone and serve my target communities from there (given IPv6, 3 or 4G and free data transfer).

So while I welcome Sensor and wish it well I do so in the hope that it is only the start of enabling me to manage all my digital personas from one place.

Further Reading on Nokia Sensor: Per Persson

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While Flash Lite on Series 60 is exuberantly welcomed by thousands of Flash developers (and T-Mobile) the rest of us shouldn't get too excited, yet.

This is after all Flash Lite. It is based on Flash 4 not the more recent 6 or 7 that we are all familiar with on the desktop. It wont be replacing J2ME as the developer's language of choice anytime soon.

When it comes to writing on-phone applications it has some sever limitations. Where a programmer might find the J2ME sandbox limiting, Flash Lite offers nothing more than a means for invoking external Symbian programs. There isn't even any means of writing to options or preferences locally. This might be OK for permanently connected devices where a server can be used for high scores, but in a world where disconnection is still the norm it just doesn't cut it. Anyone for games without persistent high scores or a sound off option?

Allowing Flash programs to invoke Symbian programs is fine as long as the developer has access to a Symbian programmer, so that rules out most Flash developers. Maybe some opportunistic Symbian developer will produce a library of common functions for the Flash Lite developer. On the downside, external calls are asynchronous. The developer doesn't know when the operation will be complete, which is a pain. Of course allowing Symbian programs to be invoked from Flash pages opens up a huge security hole.

Now the good and bad news is that the press release doesn't mention any time scales. We don't know when Flash Lite will start to appear out of the box on Series 60. It could be as early as the launch of the 3230, but more realistically I expect it will be Q4 this year or Q1 next.

Don't get me wrong. Flash Lite can produce some cool looking UI's but a UI does not a program make. It's only part of the solution. We need Macromedia and Nokia to address it's shortcomings and put in place a framework that would allow good, secure, full-feature phone applications to be developed utilising Flash Lite front-ends. I have idea's on how to implement such a framework, but for now I'll keep them to myself.

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With the release of more new phones yesterday Nokia also published a press release outlining the future of the Series 60 platform.

Series 60 will extend to both volume mid-range and high-end categories, becoming a truly scalable and feature-rich platform.
...
Scalability of Series 60 for multiple device categories will result in maximal number of available applications, maximal interoperability and compliancy.

Clearly this is as much a branding exercise as a technical one. Series 60 has been around for around three years and has the highest profile of all the Nokia smartphone platforms. But as a developer it scares me.

As much as I like the Series 60 phones they have, to date, been a bit of a nightmare as a development platform. In particular the when it comes to cross-platform compatability. My current project has been required to operate across most of the Series 60 range - 3650, 3660, Siemens SX-1, 6600, 7610 & the forthcoming 6630. I know that some of these use different Symbian OS version and are therefore not expected to be entirely compatable, but these six phones supposedly only fall into two of Nokia's Developer Platforms. According to this document compatibility exists within a given Developer platform. I beg to differ.

So far each phone has behaved differently and required code changes. There have been many causes, here are some of them:

• Key features (http support!) missing in Symbian 6.1
• Features not working as advertised (all versions)
• API's changed or stop working between phones
• Memory managment varies between phones

We aren't even doing anything particularly complex - no DRM, no audio, no 3D. On top of that Symbian signing is required for each version we ship. Maybe now you start to see why a greater variety of Series 60 devices worries me.

I don't expect Nokia to fix these problems over night. But if Nokia want the developer community to build applications that work across many Series 60 devices I do hope that they will start to focus on platform compatability (backwards and sideways). When I upgrade my PC from one Windows or OSX release to the next most of my applications continue to work. Even Lifeblog doesn't run on the 6630 I have in front of me.

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I thought I'd chip in with my views on the debate that seems to have kicked off over here. Having spent the last few years working on/with mobile applications I am still convinced that the one box solution does not and will not exist, but that mobile phones (and smartphones in particular) are a crucial part of the computing landscape.

While a phone is easily carried and (for many) always present, if I have a laptop or other computer nearby I'm going to choose a decent size screen and keyboard every time. Give a Blackberry user a desktop computer to read and answer their e-mails and I think I know which most would pick. I've tried reading and writing emails on a PDA, it gave me a headache. This doesn't mean that I would never choose to use my phone for e-mail, just that in some circumstances I prefer to use something more comfortable. The phone is there for when I don't have that more comfortable device. I wrote my GMailChecker midlet so that I didn't have to log on to my computer just to check for email.

Right here, right now the laptop and a bluetooth phone are probably the best mobile solution for our current computing desires. But as much as I love my laptop I can't use it when I'm out shopping or at a bar when I want to book cinema tickets.

The fact that this discussion taking place is indicative of the affect mobile technology is having on the software industry. The internet led many businesses to change their behaviour letting their customers choose the time and place they did business (face-to-face or online). Now its our turn. Users want access to data, services and applications at a time, place and via a device of their choosing. It is up to us (the software developers) to meet that demand.

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