Life is grand

This is tougher than trying to buy a house I tell you. My trusty Nokia packed up a few days ago and since then I have been scouring the interwebs looking for the perfect replacement.

Up till now I have bought mobile phones that did two things and only two things; voice calls and SMS. Up till now that is all I wanted out of a mobile phone. Phones that included a camera, MP3 support, PIM features and such were off my list.

Things change though as the project I am working on has taken a mobile focus. I have begrudgingly realised I had better get with the new century and get an advanced mobile phone.

So far every device I have looked at is compromised in some way. The nearly perfect looking Blackberry 7130g doesn’t have WiFi. The well featured Nokia E61 looks a bit bulky to slip into the back pocket of my jeans. The Sony Ericsson M600i has no WiFi. The Nokia N91 has everything but it is bulky and is more a multimedia phone than a work machine. With sluggish performance the Nokia N73 is out.

There is one phone though that is ticking the right boxes, that is a decent size and it passes my aesthetic test; The Nokia E60.

It has two problems though. Not terribly important but it takes RS-MMC memory cards, why Nokia why? More importantly is that no Irish network operator has one. I can only get it from one of the “SIM free” mobile shops and it will cost me near to €400, which is a bit out of my budget. I am on O2 at the moment but if one of the other networks provides this phone I would swap without hesitation.

So, what phone do you recommend? Here are my thoughts on the ideal phone:

• Fast. The software has to be fast, anything that looks swishy but takes 5 seconds to get to the SMS screen is out.
• Fits in my back pocket.
• Looks and feels good. So many phones feel like they were made from cheap plastic, especially the slider-phones. I like clean, simple lines with a solid, well built feel.
• WiFi, 3G and GSM.
• Email (POP3 preferably) and IM (Jabber/GTalk mainly).
• Memory from 64mb and preferably expandable.
• Good screen.
• QWERTY keyboard like the Blackberry 7130g does it, sharing one key for two letters.
• 3rd party app. support with Java and Flash Lite
• USB.

Features that don’t interest me are:

• Camera.
• FM radio.
• Music support.
• Video support.
• Kitchen sink.

Yes, more iPhone coverage. This time a FAQ from David Pogue who got to play with it; The Ultimate iPhone FAQ.

Here are the ones that caught my eye:

• Can it run Mac OS X programs? –No.
• Can I add new programs to it? –No.
• Does it connect to iChat? –No.
• Does it get onto the HSDPA (3G) high-speed Internet network that Cingular has rolled out in a few cities? –No. But Steve Jobs said a later version of the iPhone will — once there’s enough HSDPA coverage in this country to justify it.
• Does the Web browser support Flash or Java? –No. (No Flash! That bites.)
• Can it open Word and Excel documents? –No.
• Does it connect to standard iPod accessories like car docks and speaker systems? –Yes!
• Will it sync with Outlook? –No.
• Won’t the screen get smudgy? –It does, but you don’t see it except when the screen is off. The one I played with was pretty streaky, but wiping it on my sleeve cleaned it completely.

And a good video of the iPhone:

The more I orbit the solar system of iPhone commentary the more eccentric my orbit becomes. A few hours ago it became so eccentric I smashed into the planet known as The Touchscreen Debate; first rock from the sun, closest to the damning and purifying fire. I burnt up as I plummeted through the thick atmosphere of touchscreen criticism and ended up a cinder in their camp. How can I dial without looking at it? Gestures might help but that isn’t intuitive, you have to learn that. No tactile feedback seems a killer blow, a meteoric impact.

And so I began fiddling around with my Nokia mobile phone, a very basic model which does nothing well but is better than the more expensive, complicated devices which do nothing at all, least of all audio.

I realised I didn’t actually use speed dial. Most of my phone usage is texting, good old SMS. Who speed dials an SMS? I realised I didn’t sit in meetings furtively texting under a table either. The only two times I ever used the keypad without looking was when I was driving, which is pretty dangerous and illegal so maybe it isn’t a good thing we can do that anyway, and when I locked and unlocked the keypad. The latter you can do without looking on the iPhone too, you just drag your fingers across the screen, apparently.

The more I used my Nokia the more I remembered how much I hated the software interface on it. Not the physical interface but the software. Reading an old text takes 5 key-presses and about 7 seconds for the inbox too load. If I want to read the next message I have to press 3 keys to get out of the current one and back into the inbox. Sending a text takes about 7 key-presses (excluding the message) and depends on where the contact is in the list. Scrolling menus is a click, click, click, click, click affair. No smooth scroll, no dragging a finger down a screen or trackpad.

Getting a number from a text into the phone book is a chore. Finding a contact and reading a note is a mission. Visiting a URL, even a bookmarked one, involves so many sub-menus I cannot tell anyone where it is on the Nokia. I have to find that menu again everytime I want it.

Pretty much everything takes more key-presses, more scrolling and more waiting than it should.

The iPhone might not have a keypad but the software on it has the potential to be like the software on my MacBook Pro. Intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, taller than 7 lines of monochrome text. Things that work vertically will work well, things that work horizontally (landscape) will work better.

If I want to enter numbers on my Nokia during a text message I have to hold down the number key for 3 seconds to tell the phone that I want the number and not one of the three possible letters. That makes entering an 8 digit phone number take almost half a minute. On the iPhone I’ll have a QWERTY keyboard and a numeric keypad available whenever I need.

Wait a minute. How can I say any of this when you, me and 99% of Earth haven’t even used the iPhone? Call it a hunch. Call it “I’ve used Apple software and it is more usable.” Call it “An iPod with a tiny, monochrome screen is fifty times easier to use than most smartphones with full-colour, 8 inch screens.”

Call it what you want but Apple know how to do user interfaces. And that is what they have done with the iPhone. They have looked at Nokia, looked at Motorola, looked at even the BlackBerry and laughed so hard they’d almost prefer to be Zune users.

Then they went and put Apple UI know-how on a mobile phone.

That can’t be bad.

Reading Kottke’s roundup of iPhone coverage I was struck by the following comment:

You could have different swipes and taps as a speed dial mechanism…swipe the screen from top left to bottom right and then tap in the lower right hand corner to call mom, that sort of thing.

That is very interesting. A lot of people are complaining that a touchscreen interface won’t let them dial without looking at the screen. Firstly, none of them have even used the iPhone touchscreen. It could be rubbish or Apple might have figured something out. We don’t know.

But gestures would go a long way towards solving that problem. I already use gestures on the trackpad of my MacBook Pro. It works very well and you don’t have to stare at the trackpad.

Will there be custom gesture software in the iPhone? I hope so. Three taps and the pizza joint is dialled.

I am rarely excited by modern mobile phones. They tend to pack too much into an unusable interface and end up being slow at what they are meant for; voice calls and text messages. My current phone is a bare-bones Nokia; it doesn’t have a camera, radio or 3G, it doesn’t double as a PDA or an MP3 player (I have an iPod nano for that.)

This Sony Ericsson W950i though is giving even this mobile-phone troglodyte heart palpitations. It looks good, the flush keyboard is gorgeous (and I hope usable), and has dedicated controls for the music functionality. That is an absolute must, the dedicated controls. It has a lovely 2.6″ touch sensitive screen too. It is also slim opting rather to be wide which is a form factor I prefer (and which Motorola are doing well with in their Razr phones.) It has 4gb of memory, twice what my iPod nano has and apparently will work like a USB drive which makes transferring files a doddle.

A plus is the lack of built in camera. Well done Sony Ericsson for not trying to shove in a crap mobile phone camera.

All in all it looks like a winner. My only reservations are interface speed, voice quality and whether the interface might be too crammed with options. As soon as O2 Ireland get it on their shelves I’ll give it a go.