So, the Apple WWDC happened on Monday, and the iPhone 3G was announced, as everyone expected. Many of the predictions came true, some didn’t. One thing is for sure, a lot of confusion remains, and some information is still unknown, or at least only partially known. Here I will try to hopefully dispel any of the misinformation, and remove some of the confusion about what was announced, and what remains to be seen.

First, 3G. The phone has high speed connections, and is now worthy of being called a 21st century phone. It was also a requirement for Apple to sell this phone in many other countries, because let’s face it, many countries expect all their phones to be 3G. One thing to remember obviously is that 3G mostly applies to data, not calls. So that’s mostly useful if you are a heavy web user over the cell network, or want to download videos and such.

Then, there’s GPS. That one was predicted on blogs by many people, but some were skeptical. The main issue people bring up with GPS is battery life. For those who watched the keynote, Steve Jobs showed a slide with the battery life times for talk, data, web browsing, and so on… and then he started talking about GPS. It’s likely that this was intentional, because GPS will probably be a heavy hit on battery life.

The form factor stayed very similar. The phone looks very much like iPhone version 1, except for a few minor details. The back is made of plastic, and that’s probably to improve the reception. It may scratch more easily, but it’s probably a good decision since talk quality is more important in the end. The headphone jack is also fixed so all headphones fit, finally!

Firmware 2.0 is also a big deal. Enterprise support, while it may have seemed boring during the keynote, is actually very important for Apple. The main reason people stay attached to their business phone is because of Microsoft Exchange support. Now the iPhone will be just as wired as any other phone, and that will bring in a lot of new customers. The App Store is also a nice addition, and so is the new Mobile Me service.

The biggest surprise came when Steve announced the price. At $199, it’s a big price drop. The original iPhone started at $599, then dropped to $399, and the iPhone 3G is going to be $199. Now the picture is more complex than that. For example, the contract with AT&T will require a more expensive 3G plan, which if counted over 2 years, will bring the price higher than the original iPhone. However, you do get 3G, so it’s still worth it. Compared with some other AT&T plans, such as the Blackberry ones, it’s cheaper.

Finally, the part where we don’t have all the informations is on how the transition will go for people who have a current iPhone and who want to upgrade. What we do know is you will be able to keep your phone number and SIM card. In fact, AT&T will provide a tool to switch your SIM from the old phone to the new. However, you will have to take a new 2 years contract. We know they will force people to activate phones in the stores, so it’s not known if things like Jailbreak will still work.

In the end, is the new iPhone worth it? It depends. Many current iPhone users will line up on July 11, and buy the new one. Apple will get a lot of new customers too with the new features, both in hardware and in software. I personally won’t be getting one, even if Canada is getting the iPhone (along with 22 countries, 70 before the end of the year) for several reasons. First I’m not a fan of contracts. There are rumors that the phone will be available without a contract, but no one knows in which countries yet (not the US, that’s for sure) and rumors say it will cost $800. Comparatively, my $250 Nokia E51 does everything the iPhone does, albeit it doesn’t look as cool and doesn’t have nearly as big a screen. I’m also not a big fan of on-screen keyboards, but that’s a personal preference. I do admit the iPhone is looking better and better, and Apple is now truly a big contender in the field.

Every mobile enthusiasm has it. The itch to buy that next smartphone. To get the latest and greatest as soon as it comes out. I used to have it to. When I had my N73, I wished it would have wi-fi. I waited eagerly for the next, better phone to come out, that would be the perfect phone and have everything I need, in the form factor I want, at a decent price.

Every smartphone I had, I knew I would be upgrading it, sooner or later. I hoped sooner, because that meant a better mobile experience sooner. It’s not for no reason that at every new release, even at every rumor of a possible sighting of a phone that may someday be released, there’s thousands of forum posts, blog entries and discussions started. Everyone dreams of their own little version of the perfect device.

But now, I don’t have the itch anymore. Ever since I got my E51, I haven’t thought about upgrading, or that I may even want to upgrade someday to some new product. If you read my previous review you can see that I gave it a perfect score, and I still stand by it. For me it was and still is my dream phone. The perfect form factor, with every feature that I need, without any extra bloat, or anything to bring up the price past a very reasonable amount.

Now of course I still follow the threads, the discussions about new releases, and I see the new technologies being implemented, but I just don’t have a need for it. This isn’t to say I won’t ever upgrade to a newer phone, because as we all know, 640K of RAM isn’t what everyone will ever be needing in a PC. But now I hope it won’t be for several years. I don’t feel any part of this smartphone could be different or better. The itch is gone.

If you’ve been reading here before, you may know that I’m not a fan of cellphone contracts. Well a local TV program exposed yet another way network providers are trying to get every cent out of users’ pockets: the scam called “Network Service Fees”. You may be familiar with it if you have a contract, it’s that line on your bill that says fees or network access, or something like that, and usually is not a small amount.

Here it can easily be a $7.50 surcharge on a $25 monthly contract. The way it’s worded, you may think, and most people do, that it’s some type of government tax. That’s what the show investigated, and it turns out that’s not the case. Simply look at the full terms or contract on your provider site, and you may find out what these fees really are.

For all four providers here in Canada, these fees include simple things like network maintenance, providing service to rural areas, expending their campaigns, providing services of various types, basically, their day to day operations. It’s just as if your bill included lines saying they have to pay for heating, marketing, and so on, and charge you extra for it. Operating cost is something every business has. It has to be included in the base cost, not charged as some type of extra.

The most ridiculous charge is the “911 surcharge” which, at least here in Canada, can cost $0.90 per month per customer. Yet when asked, the Police department said that only the land-line providers pay them a tax for the 911 service. Cellphone providers do not. So that charge is completely false. What they actually mean is that you pay a surcharge to your network provider so THEY will agree to connect you to the 911 service if you ever need it.

The program ended with the funniest thing of all this. There’s a new virtual provider starting up in the region called Koodo Mobile who spends a lot of marketing dollars boosting that their service has no extra charge of any type. Yet who owns Koodo Mobile? Telus, one of the big Canadian providers charging these fees.

Recently I changed my E61i for a E51. I’ve been using this new phone for a while now and decided it was time to write a review. The E51 was released in November 2007 and is the latest in the business line from Nokia. The company has 2 main lines of products in their smartphones division: the N-series which focuses on high end camera and video features, and the E-series which focuses on stability and connectivity options.

Since I came from the E61i, I’ll start by listing the differences between the 2 phones. The phones are similar in many ways, but the E51 has key differences:

• Lack of a QWERTY keyboard
• Much better form factor (it’s smaller and thinner)
• Dual band 3G (high speed works in many North America areas, unlike the E61i)
• Slightly smaller battery (1050mAh instead of 1500mAh)
• Mini-USB port (instead of the old Pin-port)
• Headset jack
• Visual radio

Hardware

The main attraction of the E51 is the form factor. It truly is a gorgeous phone, solidly built, small and very thin (114.8 x 46 x 12 mm) and available in many colors (I picked black, as shown in the photo). This means of course no QWERTY keyboard, which makes it a no go if you require a full size keyboard. If form factor is more important to you than the QWERTY, then then you won’t find a better size for the amount of features.

Speaking of keyboard, the one on this phone is very nice. The keys seem solid to the touch and are easy to use. The keyboard has the standard number keys, a D-pad (which btw is not to be taken lightly, as someone who’ve gone from joysticks to D-pads, it’s such a huge improvement), a delete key and 4 custom keys. The custom keys link to the menu, calendar, contacts and mail. Also of note is that 3 of those keys can be customized to any other application, which is something you couldn’t do on the E61i.

On the top and sides there are buttons for power, volume up, down, mute and the voice recorder.

Connectivity

This phone is all about connectivity. It has GSM, EDGE and dual-band 3G (WCDMA 2100MHz and 850MHz) which means you get high speed 3.6Mbps data transfers where those frequencies are supported. This means all of Europe, most of Asia, and many of the newer networks in North America (it works fine using Rogers in Montreal).

The phone also has wi-fi 802.11g with built-in support for VOIP. It also has Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP), and USB using the mini-USB cable (with mass storage mode, which is very nice since you can connect it to any Windows PC and it allows you to transfer files right away, without the need to install drivers or PC Suite).

Finally it also has a standard 2.5 microphone jack, which means any headset with a (small) plug will work in it, which is also nicer than having to deal with the proprietary plugs.

CPU and memory

The phone has a surprisingly large amount of memory with 130Megs of user data memory and 96Megs of SDRAM. As a comparison, the E61i had 60Megs, and non-smartphones such as say the Moto RAZR has 10Megs. This means you can store many more applications, data and also run more apps at the same time. The phone also has a MicroSD card slot supporting cards up to 4GB (although people report using 6GB and 8GB cards fine).

This phone also has a 396MHz processor, which is an improvement over older E-series phones which had 220MHz CPUs. This means everything will run faster. And indeed, browsing menus and starting applications is visibly faster on this device. This has to be the fastest phone I’ve used.

Features

The E51 runs S60 9.2, which is the first E-series phone running this latest version as far as I know. It comes with all the usual S60 features, like contacts, calendar, notes, SMS, MMS, E-mail, Web (full S60 web browser with landscape browsing support), PTT, RealPlayer, Podcasting, Music Player, QuickOffice (read only, but upgradeable to edit mode), Maps (the phone has complete GPS, maps and localization search support built-in if you have a Bluetooth GPS receiver), recorder, Java support, and so on. It also has a FM radio with visual radio support. Plus, since S60 v3 is now a mature platform, the UI is rock solid.

S60 is a very versatile platform and I won’t go into details as to what all the features are or all the applications that can be added. You can basically do as much as you can on any other phone platform, if not more, using the wide array of tools built into S60. When you first turn on the phone there are a large amount of applications that help new users set things up. First there’s the language and time zone settings, then an installer to get any memory card applications installed, and a series of modules visible on the home screen that helps you setup E-mail, VOIP and so on.

Multimedia

The camera on the E51 is the 2MPx camera module that is the same as most other E-series phones. It takes 1600×1200 images and QVGA videos at 15fps. Those can then be stored in phone memory or on the memory card, or sent via E-mail, MMS or Bluetooth. The photo quality is average indoors, so it’s best for outdoor shots.

The music player, video player and gallery are the same ones as previous E-series phones. They are very functional and include all the basic features you’d expect, such as storing images in folders, marking files, copying and moving them, sending them off, viewing them as a slide show, listening to music and play lists, viewing videos locally or streaming (in RealPlayer format only, which is rather rare nowadays) and so on.

Compared with typical phones, the multimedia features are on-par or better, but compared with N-series they are very basic. This is not a phone aimed at high end multimedia users, and you won’t find on-phone photo editing, the enhanced N-series gallery, auto-focus or a flash.

Battery life

Even if it has a smaller battery than QWERTY phones in the same line (1050mAh versus 1500mAh), the battery life is still excellent. You can expect a week of standby time and 4h20mins of talk time. I can charge this phone over the weekend, and if I don’t use it much it will still be running by Friday.

Conclusion

As the latest smartphone in Nokia’s business line, this is a fantastic phone. As long as you don’t need QWERTY, and really this is not a negative, more like a personal choice of large QWERTY devices versus small form factor, this is the best phone out there. Currently going for $300 (without contract) from most online vendors, this phone is perfect for anyone who wants a stable smartphone with the most connectivity options possible.

In my E61i review, I gave that phone a 9.5, and this phone is clearly superior, mainly because of the better plugs, 3G support in my area, FM radio, and a faster interface. In fact, I can’t find any negative so far, and from reading forum threads, it seems to be a favorite from anyone who’ve gotten it. For the audience this phone is aimed at, this is the perfect choice.

Score: 10/10

You may have heard about Android in the past few months. It’s the new Google Mobile OS that they announced last November. Developed as part of a Google led initiative, and backed by over 30 companies including many major manufacturers like Motorola and HTC, the SDK has gotten many thousands of downloads by developers eager to try it out.

2007 was marked, at least as far as news coverage goes, by the iPhone. Will 2008 be the year of the Google phones? Now that Apple has released it’s iPhone SDK also, the race is on to know which platform will come out on top. It’s hard to say yet who will win, and part of that is because both platforms share so much in common. The iPhone itself uses a lot of the same software. The map application, for example, is Google Maps for Mobile on both platforms. The web browser is based on the same open source code. Both support things like Bluetooth, touch screens, and threaded SMS.

Google has the advantage of being device neutral. Android is a software platform, so it will be implemented on an array of phones from many companies. Both low end and high end phones will be able to use the same interface, and have access to the same applications.

The iPhone however came out first, and has the power of the Apple marketing machine behind it. While Google is a name that’s just as known, since they aren’t making the actual devices, who knows how much hype each manufacturer can put out for their respective Android-based devices.

I think in the end the consumers will benefit from the increased competition. It’s obvious that with such close offerings, each company will be pushed to improve faster, and bring out more innovation to stay ahead. It’s too early to say if 2008 will be the year of the Google phones, but one thing I’m certain is that this year will see just as much development in the mobile arena than last year did, if not more!

New products are rarely released worldwide. This is especially true in the mobile world. Phones appear in one region of the globe, then the rest of us get to wait a few months (if not years) to see it. The iPhone, for example, was the hottest phone of 2007, but only in the US. It’s still not available anywhere else.

Those delays can be understood, since companies have to prioritize based on stock and manpower. Market studies can also make them think that it’s not worth their bottom line to sell an item in a country if the demand might not be there. I do have to wonder why some companies go even father, however, and actively prevent products from being bought or shipped overseas. Product restrictions, DRM, or lack of support shouldn’t be the standard, it should be seen as a poor business practice.

There is no reason, for example, that a company would refuse to service an item that it sold simply because the item was purchased in another country. If a cellphone is bought in Hong Kong, and brought to Canada, then the company will often request that the owner contact the office in Hong Kong. Worse, this still happens when the phone is finally being sold locally.

What really pushes the boundary of understanding behavior, and the point of this article, is when this starts to happen with software. The main one which annoys me right now is the Microsoft Windows Live Messenger. You may recall in May 2007, when an official MSN client was found on the MSN China site. At first it worked globally, but soon they restricted it to China and Taiwan only.

Almost a full year later, this restriction is still in place. While we have dozens of third party applications available on various phones that can connect to the Windows Live system, they still restrict their official player. Is it to force people to use Windows Mobile devices to have an official client? Who knows.

Now today I found out they have yet another client. This time it seems they followed in Yahoo!’s footsteps and made a full featured client for Live Mail, Messenger, Search, and so on. But what do we see? It’s only available to European countries. Sigh. Who would have thought Microsoft was a US company.

I’m sure there’s a reason, presented to management, behind closed doors, which must have made alot of sense at the time. But the reality is people will just use third party clients, or find some hack to use it. And what this means is we get partial support of the features, or people go to other services such as Yahoo! or Google. I would think the goal of free services such as Instant Messaging and web mail would be to get as many people to use them as possible. But apparently the hardware model is just as used in the software domain. And it’s a damn shame.

The speed of innovations in the smartphone market is almost exponential. Just five years ago smartphones were almost nonexistent, and most people didn’t even have a cellphone. In the past few years we’ve made huge progress. Last year we went from the mobile web to the full web. This year VoIP was the hot topic, with a series of software packages being released for various smartphones. Wi-fi and 3G fast Internet speed is now a common feature, and so are high resolution 3MPx cameras.

The same is true for mapping. GPS is now becoming more common and with the Google Maps mobile client, even without it anyone can get directions and see maps. Positioning is going to be a standard feature and integration with Bluetooth devices expands its capabilities.

So now that we know where we’re at, what’s next? Well in my opinion, in the short term we’ll mainly see Internet related advances. For example, Google Docs currently doesn’t work with mobile browsers, but if they fixed that, it would bring all your web based documents on the road. IM clients could also use some love. Right now the situation is rather poor, with a series of third party applications that more or less support various IM protocols. I’d like to see the official vendors fully support smartphones, with emoticons, file transfers, video chat and so on.

In the longer term, I see the mobile applications themselves becoming more complex. This depends mostly on hardware advances, since any kind of complex process requires more CPU and processing power. For example, advanced picture editing right on the device, allowing people to edit their photos right after they take them. Same thing for video.

Current high end devices already have 400MHz and 600MHz processors. When we have desktop class 1GHz processors in those things, with big enough flash cards to be used as RAM, that’s when mobile software will really start rivaling desktop applications. While we may not see a Photoshop or GarageBand running on our phones quite yet, in two or three years I can definitively see that happening. With decent touchscreens those types of applications would make perfect sense on the road.

In the past five years we went from black and white phones doing calls and SMS only to full featured smartphones. In five more years I can easily see mobile devices becoming as powerful as our current computers.

Well the iDay came and went, now that we’re 2 weeks after the launch of the most over-hyped, over-mediatized phone ever, how did it fare? Well it did sell a lot, more than 500,000 just in the first weekend. Reviews came in from every possible source, and it was pretty much exactly as we had expected.

As I thought, many of the negative points got mentioned in the reviews, like the lack of a real keyboard, the price, the non-removable battery, the 2-years contract needed, and the lack of any third party software support. Some new things got found out, like the fact that if you have bad credit, AT&T will actually offer a pre-paid plan. Overall most reviews were positive, and since then people have been actively working on hacking it to enable even more features.

In the end it pleased a lot of phone users, but it’s of little interest to me, other than for the impact it will make on longer term phone development. Apple always has an effect on the industry, by proving that something can be made sleeker, easier to use, so we’re sure to see many more copies in the months to come, and user interfaces for phones in general should take a hint from the iPhone.

As this will probably be the last post on the subject, the reviews all over the web covered every possible feature of this device except one, so I have to ask the ultimate question to end this post: Will it blend?

I may not agree with John C. Dvorak often, but in this case, I have to agree with his latest editorial. iPhone buzz is out of control. Now I know, with a company like Apple, it’s easy to be quickly categorized as an Apple fan or an Apple basher. So let’s take the New York Times latest review of the iPhone. Their article has been linked in countless blogs and touted as “fair” by both sides. They have an actual unit, and have been testing it, and are writing a review of the actual phone, unlike 99% of the hype articles that we find in the media these days. Yet let’s see how even they have a tinted view of the whole phenomenon.

It starts with this quote: “The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed. It’s substance; it’s style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones.” I knew about the basic lacking features (no removable battery slot, no MMS support, no Java support, etc) but it does things no phone has ever done before? That’s news to me. Let’s read on: “once the phone goes on sale this Friday, you won’t sign up for service in a phone store, under pressure from the sales staff. You will be able to peruse and choose a plan at your leisure, in the iTunes software on your computer.” That can be good or bad. It’s less stressful to pick up your plans at home, but I can just see the nightmare all the CS calls will be. Now at least we know why an iTunes Music Store subscription is required.

“Better yet, unlimited Internet service adds only $20 a month to AT&T’s voice-plan prices, about half what BlackBerry and Treo owners pay.” That’s good news for future iPhone users. We knew a data plan would be required but the fact that they will be getting a special low price deal is good. Of course one has to wonder why a Treo or other smartphone user on AT&T should have to pay more for the exact same data plan.

“On the iPhone, you don’t check your voice mail; it checks you. One button press reveals your waiting messages, listed like e-mail. There’s no dialing in, no password” That’s a great improvement. But let’s face it, the iPhone didn’t invent that. The reason phones don’t do that is because the technology for this has nothing to do with the phone itself, it’s all based on how the network operate. The reason the iPhone can do this is because AT&T agreed to install special servers to convert voice mail into digital audio files then push the files to the phone. This is already possible with third party services, but it will be integrated and out of the box on the iPhone because of the unique partnership AT&T agreed on, not because of new technology breakthroughs.

“The Web browser, though, is the real dazzler. This isn’t some stripped-down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser; you get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen.” This is one of the major points the hype focuses on, and this review takes care to talk about it. Of course the fact that this browser is doing exactly the same thing as Opera Mini has been doing for a week, or that the S60 browser has been doing for more than a year, is nicely forgotten.

“Free live traffic reporting, indicated by color-coded roads on the map.” Again, I thought this was a review of the iPhone? This is simply one of the many features that the Google Maps mobile Java applet has had for a long time. This is exactly the type of buzz that makes it so easy for people to be taken into the hype. Mixing features of the phone with things that other third parties provided, such as the network or Google.

“There’s no memory-card slot, no chat program, no voice dialing. You can’t install new programs from anyone but Apple; other companies can create only iPhone-tailored mini-programs on the Web. The browser can’t handle Java or Flash, which deprives you of millions of Web videos.” I think this fairly describes the negatives that the phone has. To be fair, no mobile browser supports Flash and that isn’t the fault of Apple but the simple fact that there is no port of the Flash application that supports web based files yet. However the fact that no third party applications, not even Java applets, can be installed, is a design decision from Apple, for better or for worse.

“The two-megapixel camera takes great photos, provided the subject is motionless and well lighted . But it can’t capture video.” That’s surprising. While a 2MPx standard phone video never looks great, at least the feature is there on other phones, and people who really want to take videos can, even on phones with low end VGA cameras. I don’t know why the iPhone can’t take videos when the vast majority of phones have been able to for years, but it seems like an unnecessary lack of feature.

“The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo. two minutes.” This is another surprise. Yes, EDGE isn’t the fastest around, but I use EDGE myself and I browse the web. I never get anywhere near those speeds. I can load most web sites including those inside of 30 seconds on a full featured browser. Now to be fair I’m not on AT&T, so I don’t know if the issue is with the phone’s software or the network, but those speeds don’t seem right to me.

“Apple points out that unlike other cellphones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates.” Another piece of twisted reality from Apple PR. Most smartphones can be updated, that’s called a firmware update. You usually connect your phone and click on the update button on your PC software. Some phones can even be updated over the air, from the phone itself.

I think their conclusion nicely displays why the iPhone brings out such strong emotions amongst many smartphone users: “But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years.” So after showing that the iPhone brings absolutely no feature that isn’t available in other phones, but lacks many basic features that most phones have, it somehow deserves the title of the most sophisticated piece of electronics in years. Right.

In the end I think the iPhone will be a big success. As with most Apple products, it looks sleek and easy to use. This review did confirm that the software mostly delivers, and typical Apple users will most likely be satisfied. But let’s be very clear, the iPhone isn’t any type of revolutionary device, and doesn’t provide any brand new technology, but brings restrictions that we should be moving away from in this day and age, not going head first into, such as network restrictions, and imposed contract plans. It will probably bring a lot of users into the world of mobility, and provide a pleasant user experience to many people who were frustrated by their current device, and I can respect it for that. But the hype is ridiculous, and the amount of twisted facts completely unnecessary. Shame on Apple for that.

Every few months that same old rumor comes back up, that Google is about to announce a “Google Phone”. The last in this long series was just yesterday, when the latest LG phone was announced to be bundled with Google applications. With a name so high profile as Google, this is surely not the last time we see that famous phone name in the media.

What many news sources don’t get, is that Google is a software company. They don’t do hardware, and there is no reason for Google to start making a phone. Not only would the cost of going into the phone market be huge, but it would actually restrict their user base. By making Java clients and mobile portals for their services, they ensure that anyone with a cellphone can use Google. That’s always been the way they’ve done things, and there’s no reason to think it will change. There will be no true Google Phone on store selves anytime soon, but you could make your own.

Google is probably the company that’s the most present in the mobile space, which is interesting since they don’t actually produce any mobile hardware. But with their many services, almost all of which now available on the go, any manufacturer, carrier or even mobile user can create a Google Phone. The only requirement for this experiment is to have a handset with Java support where you can access the Internet (unlimited data plan helps) and install third party software. Almost any unlocked phone works.

1. The first application to get is Google Maps for Mobile. From that you can browse maps, get directions, do local searches and get traffic reports.
2. Then get the Google Mail mobile app from your browser to download the Java client to access your email directly from Google’s servers.
3. Now it’s time to connect to the web. If your device has a decent browser, that’s plenty good, or if you want the full web experience download the latest Opera Mini.
4. Change your homepage to http://mobile.google.com so all the Google services appear right away, then you can access the news, your calendar and do searches from there.
5. Lastly, install one of the many Google themes out there such as this one, and put all the applets we installed on the main menu of your phone.

An optional step would be to print out a Google stamp and put it on the front of the phone, for complete and total integration with the online service, and there you go, your very own Google Phone. Next time, we’ll make an iPhone!