Technovia

The two form factors for phones

Davey Winder on the BlackBerry Bold versus the iPhone:

"Having lived with an iPhone for some time, and being in possession of relatively fat fingers, I beg to differ. It is all too easy to slip up on the virtual iPhone keyboard and not get rescued by the often irritating auto-correct system.

The tactile feedback of a proper, albeit shrunken, keyboard makes for more efficient text input even for the fat fingered amongst us."

Davey makes a good point. I'm a small-fingered guy, and I'm now at the point with the iPhone's on-screen keyboard where I can thumb-type as well as I could with my old BlackBerry 8800. But for lots of people, the iPhone keyboard just doesn't work for anything other than hunt-and-peck with a single finger, which makes it much slower than a BlackBerry.

That's one of the reasons that I think the smartphone market will shake out to two main forms, and probably two manufacturers: the keyboard-less iPhone-style design, which focuses on browsing and video; and the keyboard-based BlackBerry-style, which is more focused on email and text. Which is right for you will depend not just on your needs, but also your fingers.

Another option for a mini notebook

jkOnTheRun reports on a new Mini-notebook from Lenovo, the IdeaPad S10. This looks pretty similar to the MSI Wind/Advent 4211 which I recently bought, but has an option for a 160GB hard drive and a price tag of either $399 or $449 depending on configuration, which would make it a cheaper alternative to the Wind.

There's such a lot of interesting activity in this area, and I really hope that Apple gets off its backside and decides to offer something for the market.

Two things I need to see in MobileMe

I've been a .Mac subscriber since the day the service came out, and despite the various moves from free to paid, I've stuck with it all the way.

MobileMe, the service's successor, was pitched as "Exchange for the rest of us", which is something that really excited me. I've had an Exchange account on my personal domain for a while, and got used to having the capabilities it gives you.

So I was eager to try out MobileMe. But, sadly, it's proved to be a bit disappointing. That's not only because of its well-documented early problems, but because there are a couple of things missing which I really would miss if I switched away from using Exchange.

Reliability

There's no doubt that MobileMe hasn't had the best of starts in terms of its reliability. There is the oft-cited 1% who have had no email. There have also been various other gremlins in the system, such as the one which robbed me of all but three of my Address Book contacts. Thankfully, I had a backup - Time Machine saved me.

With a service such as MobileMe, reliability isn't optional. Even if I'm not using it for business, I can't afford to lose my calendars, address book and email. It needs to be there, 100% of the time, with no if's or buts.

Better email

One of the nice things about .Mac (and its successor) is the personalised domain. Basically, give it a domain name, and it will use your MobileMe web space for it. It's all highly-intergrated, and works very well.

Except for one thing: it only works for web traffic. If you have email at that domain, you're out of luck - Apple does nothing with your mail exchanger records, which means you won't receive email to an email address at your personal domain.

To put it bluntly, this is pretty lame: this, after all, is a feature which Google gives away for free in Google Apps for your Domain. To pay and not get the same from MobileMe is pretty poor.

UK BlackBerry Bold to come with Skype

At least it does on 3:

"3 Mobile will be preloading their BlackBerry Bolds with a Skype client to make use of the integrated WiFi for cheap VoIP calling."

I suspect that this will be the same deal as the 3 Skype phone, i.e. Skype-to-Skype only with no SkypeOut, but even so it's a pretty nice idea.

TUAW gets the details of the next-generation of .Mac

.Mac and Me rumors: TUAW inside look at Apple's next-gen service:

"MobileMe is slated to include a host of new features, which we alluded to early in May; in addition, there will be new web interfaces for all aspects of MobileMe -- calendars will look just like iCal, Contacts will look just like they do in Address Book, etc. This is similar to the way .Mac Webmail works today, though we've heard that the new interfaces will be much snazzier (yes, that's a technical term). Apple should also be updating the .Mac dependent applications (iChat, iWeb, iPhoto etc.) to work with the new service. The new service will be backwards compatible with .Mac protocols for the time being -- so developers will not have to rush out updates as soon as they hear the official word.

MobileMe is scheduled to be available sometime in late June/early July. We have also heard reports that the latest build of the iPhone beta firmware (2.0) has already undergone revisions to handle the new MobileMe service. Some of the features of the service on iPhone will include: over-the-air syncing of contacts, calendars, and photos."

If this report is correct, it answers the two issues that I've had with .Mac and the iPhone: The lack of decent web interfaces on .Mac, and the lack of OTA syncing on the iPhone. Happy happy joy joy.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, .Mac

Jaiku: Not yet out for the count

This pleases me immensely. After a heated conversation on FriendFeed, Jyri posted a quick note on the Jaiku blog to let people know that the service isn't dead, isn't mothballed, and is being actively developed:

"Also, contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too. Thanks for sticking with us!"

This is really good news, as I really like Jaiku. Now here's hoping for an iPhone client in the pipeline, too... :)

iPhone versus BlackBerry Bold

The iPhone Blog has produced a video comparing the iPhone with the forthcoming BlackBerry Bold. I'll leave it to you to guess which one wins...

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, BlackBerry

U.S. mobile phone sales: BlackBerry up to 5th, iPhone, erm, nowhere

NPD Group's latest survey of the U.S phone market shows an overall 22% decline in sales and 7% decline in revenue over the first quarter this year. Interestingly, the big winner is RIM, whose BlackBerry phones took it to fifth place in the list.

18 May 2008

This is just a quick entry to test out the blogging capabilities of the new TypePad clent for the BlackBerry. It's ok, although not as fully-featured as I'd hoped. More on it tomorrow.

Legal SIM-lock free iPhones being relocked?

If you're one of the German owners of SIM-lock free iPhones purchased during the brief period when Apple was legally required to sell them, it might be worth holding off from the iPhone update. According to a thread on Apple's support forums users are finding that the 1.1.3 update relocks the phones - so watch out.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, iPhone