Joy of Gadgets

More on Windows Mobile versus S60: the personal information management (PIM) parts of the phone. Again, I will be comparing the Nokia E61 to the HTC Mogul Qwest lent me for review.

Disclaimer: I work for a competitor of both HTC and Microsoft in the smartphone space. That being said, my day job currently has nothing to do with smartphones. This is my own opinion.

I have used S60 devices for a number of years. The basic PIM functionality has not changed all that much in that time. No surprise, since the S60 PIM clients go back a couple of decades to EPOC, from which Symbian itself evolved.

Windows Mobile’s PIM functionality is based on the gold standard PIM for the desktop: Microsoft Outlook. Outlook itself has only been around a little over a decade, but it’s basic functionality also has not changed all that much across the versions either. On the Windows Mobile side, the PIM functionality in Windows Mobile 6 looks exactly the same as it did on Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, which I had on a Dell Axim X30.

The calendar in S60 stores appointments, the contact list stores pretty much any piece of information you want to enter (though not all the fields will sync with, say, Mail for Exchange), and the To-Do List lets you keep track of what you have to do. Windows Mobile is pretty much the same way.

I prefer the task list view in S60. The view is far more compact: one line per item, complete with date. The task list in Windows Mobile takes two lines per item to get that information.

The calendar functionality between the two is very similar, but there is a clear difference between S60 and Windows Mobile: in the “alarm” functionality. When a meeting or task is scheduled for an alarm in S60, you are given an alarm at the appointed time. If you hit snooze, you will be reminded every 5 minutes for a half an hour unless you hit Stop. In the case of Windows Mobile, you can pick a certain number of minutes to snooze the alarm for, though it does take a number of extra key presses to activate this functionality.

The contacts application in S60 is fairly straightforward. You are presented with a list of names in your contacts. You can type some letters to narrow down the list. You can click on a contact and get their details. You can edit details. There are a couple of cool things in the contacts–things you can’t do on Windows Mobile, or at least not with this HTC Mogul:

• Assign Ringtones to specific callers.
• Set a default for calling, texting, video calls, MMS, email address, VoIP, and Push-to-Talk
• Send the contact via Bluetooth, email, MMS, or text message
• Customize the name of a particular field

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing the Windows Mobile contact manager has that S60 doesn’t is that the listing of contacts includes a telephone number in the name listing. However, it’s the same number of clicks to make a call from the contact manager in either S60 or Windows Mobile.

Another key part of the PIM functionality is the idle screen on the phone itself. In S60, this is called Active Standby. On Windows Mobile, it’s called the Today Screen. I will cover that in another post as that is a topic in itself. Zach over at Symbian in Motion covers it better than I could. However, there is one thing I like about S60 that I’m not sure how to accomplish in Windows Mobile: list the actual unread emails on the Today Screen. On S60, I can get up to 3 messages showing (sender and subject).

The final verdict: S60 wins for me, mostly because of the contact management. Tasks and Calendar are about equal in my mind.

I’m almost to Inbox Zero on Google Reader. Here are a few things that caught my interest this weekend:

• You Might Be A Web Worker:  It’s not about your “lifestyle.” Well, maybe it is. But it’s definitely not about whether you work for a large company like I do or you work for yourself. It’s about how you view and use the web to get things done. I would go so far as to say it’s not even about being a “Web Worker” but rather having the web being an integral part of your work and play, which it certainly is for me.
• Full versus Partial RSS Feeds: I am not into partial RSS feeds. In fact, with a couple of exceptions, I basically do not subscribe to sites with partial feeds. I like full RSS feeds. Ads in the RSS feed, so long as they aren’t obnoxious, are fine with me. I just wish I could figure out how to get MHonArc to output a full RSS feed for FW1-Gurus.
• Twitter is Better than Digg: I have to agree with Jeff Pulver: Twitter is better. It’s more immediate. It forces people to be concise. I am also more likely to see recommendations from like-minded people, thus a greater chance I might actually like what is being recommended.
• Digital Media Archival a Challenge: With all the new data formats and the ever-increasing progress of technology, I have to wonder at what point all those pictures we took will simply not be readable. Maybe I’ll go through the CDs my wife burned and reburn them to DVD. And then I’ll have to reburn them to something else. I also have to wonder if the conversion process the studios are going through will introduce “lossiness” into the process. Did they store the data in an uncompressed format? If not, expect some extra “artifacts” to be introduced in the conversion process.
• DD-WRT Going Down the Sveasoft Path?: This guy clearly has it out for the folks at DD-WRT, who make alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54GS and other routers. The guy at the linked article claims that DD-WRT is starting to do some of the stuff that Sveasoft did with their “open-source” firmware, namely do some questionable stuff with other people’s code. I admit to not having verified all of this on my own, however it did give me a reason to try a new firmware I had been hearing about: Tomato. I loaded it on my WRT54GS. The interface is a lot nicer, or at least a lot less “bloated.”

I am not even going to attempt to read what’s currently marked as “new” in the RSS reader. At least not right now. I am, however, going to go through what I’ve been meaning to get to for a while and highlight a few older things here:

• GAIM wen Pidgin, yah?: As a result of an ongoing, secretive trademark dispute with AOL, GAIM has now been renamed to Pidgin. Seems like a fitting name for an IM client, if you have any clue what pidgin is. Having lived in Hawaii for a few years, I am all too familiar with Hawaiian Pidgin.
• Why Cell Phones Aren’t Allowed On Planes: Two people: Big-Time Bob, and First-Time Betty. Listeners to KenRadio know who I’m talking about.
• Keep Internet Radio Free: The folks at Pandora remind us that new royalty rates are about to go into effect. This link will allow you to craft a letter to your Congress critters that will be faxed to them free of charge.
• Pink Floyd TV: Ok, it’s just links to stuff on YouTube, but hey. It’s Pink Floyd!
• Skype For Mac 2.6 Improved: The “typing” indicator caught me off guard the other day. That addresses one of my Skype complaints, and it even worked with someone using a PC version that didn’t have this feature. Skype’s PR folks get an F, though. They didn’t tell me about this version even after I expressed an interest to them.
• What Kind of Computer?: For me, it’s more than just one or more computers. It’s mobile devices such as my Nokia handsets and now the Internet tablet.
• Why the Nokia N95 is Better than the iPhone: Most importantly, you can get it today.

That’s the stuff older than a week. I’ll have to come back and do the others later.

I seem to have joined a small, but rather active circle of people on Twitter, which for lack of a better description, is a kind of group chat over SMS, web, and IM. The basic idea is: you send in an update over SMS, web, or IM (AIM and Jabber-based services are supported). Friends who are “following” you receive this update over SMS, web, or IM. When your friends want to, they will send in their update. You can become friends of people without following them.

One thing that happens on Twitter frequently is that some people are friends with people you aren’t. They will send out an update in response to a friend you’re not a friend with. It may kick of another round of conversation, or an exploration of that friends “friends.” Suddenly, you might add them as a friend and start following them. Before you know it, you’ve got a lot of friends.

One of the more powerful things about Twitter is that you can send in updates over IM, SMS, and the web at any point in time. You can choose to receive updates over IM, SMS, web, and RSS–yes you can get your friend’s twitterings in an RSS feed. You are not tied to a single location or a single client, making moving between access and update methods simple. Of course, you’re not really “logged in” in the same way that an IM client logs into AIM, so you don’t exactly have “presence” information with Twitter like you do with AIM and the like.

I think with a little tweaking, Twitter could become a contender in the crowded IM space. They differentiate themselves by making their network more open on more platforms. They keep it relatively simple. It’s only text. It uses tools you already use. And it doesn’t try and do too much. A much smaller, nimbler application Twitter is.

Anyway, onto the meat of this article: how I use Twitter. I receive my updates via SMS on my mobile phone. However, given how many updates I’m starting receive on my phone, I was starting to get the “too much noise” feeling. Not to mention an astronomical increase in my SMS usage. I decided that “Direct Messages Only” was a better approach. The only thing: I miss out on instant updates. Fine, I don’t want to be distracted. But if I have a moment, I’d like to check in my peeps on Twitter and see what’s happening.

I tried loading the Twitter web page on my phone to check in, but it takes way too long to load. However, I recently remembered that my Nokia N Series phones (and my E Series phones) have a built-in RSS reader. I simply visited my “with friends” RSS feed URL on the Nokia phone and it automatically sucks it into the feed reader application. Any time I want, I can update that RSS feed and get the latest information.

With this, I now have the ability to talk to a large group of people anytime I want to over SMS. I can go about my day as normal during the times when I’m busy and check in when I’ve got a free moment, either from my phone or via the web. I only get interrupted with direct messages. I only push and pull information at my leisure. I’m not constantly having to quiet an incoming SMS.

Do you guys use Twitter? What do you think?

Right now there are three ways to access some portion of Skype over your mobile handset: iSkoot, EQO, and Soonr. At least with the phones I want to use, all Nokia Series 60 3rd Edition (i.e. Nokia E Series), and the desktop I use, a MacBook, they suck to varying degrees.

I’ve talked about EQO before. Basically a client component runs on your Skype PC or Mac and a client runs on your phone. The client is fairly innocuous, it basically has little user interface of it’s own, instead hooking into Skype via the API and relaying stuff between the mobile phone and Skype. The EQO client on the phone works–if you have a supported handset. I do have a supported handset, after all I lent them a Nokia 9300 so they could make the client work there. However, it’s not a phone I currently use. On the phones it’s not supported on, well, it might work. Or it might not. The screen will look bizarrely misshapen. It’s not usable on the phones I carry right now, so that’s out.

Soonr is something I’ve also talked about before. Like EQO, it requires an agent to run on a Skype-enabled PC or Mac. But unlike EQO, Soonr also gives you remote access to your desktop. You can browse specific files and folders from your mobile phone as well as download content. What’s even better is that the client for this on a mobile phone is simply the phone’s web browser. That’s a bonus, though it makes instant messaging via Skype a little bit of a different experience since you must manually reload the page to see if your buddy sent you anything. I’m also annoyed at the Soonr folks because they have two annoying bugs: the Mac client randomly “disconnects” from the network and won’t automatically reconnect. Also, they have this annoying display bug with contacts that use angle brackets (e.g. a contact named )–a bug that I reported over a month ago.

Recently a new version of iSkoot came out. While iSkoot is like EQO in that it requires some client software be loaded on the phone (and it has limited support for phones, but the J2ME client worked okay on my Nokia E70), that’s it. No client to load on your PC or Mac. It “sort of” runs Skype on your phone directly. However, it only supports the ability to call your Skype contacts. You can see what buddies are online or off, though my experience is that I see different results on Skype on my Mac and on the iSkoot client. When you click on a buddy, your mobile phone is “bridged” to the buddy via a SkypeOut call. You can also make SkypeOut calls from your phone as well, but that results in two SkypeOut calls: one to you and one to your callee. However, this client does not offer any IM–calling only.

Oh well, I guess I’ve got a while to wait before I have a mobile IM solution I can use on my Nokia E70.

Technorati Tags: iskoot, eqo, soonr, nokia e-series, nokia

As promised, the folks from Soonr have released Soonr for Mac OS 10.4. It is now available on their site for download. And while the basic functionality–integration with Skype–works as I expect on the Mac, the desktop integration piece is not 100% “there” yet.

In addition to allowing you to chat with your Skype buddies as well as “call” them from your mobile phone (basically, the Soonr desktop agent sets up a conference call between your mobile phone and the Skype friend–or lets you make another SkypeOut call), Soonr also allows you to access files in certain folders in your system. You can choose which ones are made available to you. You can also utilize Mac OS X’s “Spotlight” feature to find files outside of your shared folders. You can protect access to these files with a password.

The cool thing is that this “remote access” can happen not only over a web-enabled mobile phone, but basically “any” web browser. So now in addition to running Skype on your corporate laptop, you have access to your documents from anywhere. Kind of cool, but when I put my security googles on, this has “Danger Will Robinson” written all over it.

A few flaws I’ve noticed initially: If a contact is surrounded in <>’s (one of my contacts is for some reason), then Soonr won’t correctly display the contact name. It basically prints it “as is.” Come to think of it, that creates, among other things, a potential cross-site security risk. It should be straightforward to “translate” characters that might get translated as HTML into something harmless.

One thing about the remote file access: the agent isn’t very good at scanning the shared folder for updates. So, for example, if I go into my documents folder and create a new file, I can’t immediately go to Soonr on my mobile phone to see if the file is available. Not sure how often it updates, but clearly that is an issue. I also cannot seem to make an SMB mounted filesystem available via Soonr as well. Sure, it allowed me to “select” the mounted filesystem as a shared folder, but I can’t access it via Soonr. These issues are probably related.

Anyway, just having the ability to access my Mac-based Skype from my Nokia E70 is damn cool.

tags: skype, soonr, mobile im

Soonr is another application that enables the ability to use Skype from your mobile phone. Both require Skype and a special agent application to run. Unlike EQO, which requires a specific application on your mobile phone as well, Soonr uses the web browser built into most phones. This is good in the sense that it’s very easy to support a wide range of phones. There is less variation between web browsers on phones than there is in J2ME implementations on phones

Soonr appears to have a lot of the same functionality as EQO. However, there are some downsides to Soonr’s approach:

1. Chat isn’t instantaneous, at least receiving them. This is because you must manually “refresh” the page to see chat updates from the other person.

2. More data is used with Soonr’s approach, which is a concern for people who aren’t on unlimited data plans on their mobile phones.

Soonr also has some other interesting features, which includes the ability to look at other information on your computer desktop such as your Outlook inbox/calendar as well as access other files on your desktop. These features aren’t working on my system, but it is an interesting idea. I do have other methods for accessing this data, so this isn’t a critical feature for me.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what approach ultimately wins.