Symbian recently announced that its OS has powered 100 million phones. That’s not bad – it’s a lot of licences – but then, mobile phones shift around a billion units a year now. But a phone with Symbian isn’t any old phone. It’s a smartphone. A smartphone is a cross between a PDA and a mobile. It does all the typical cellphone stuff that a plain old dumb featurephone does – take and display photos and video, record sound, play music, send and receive text messages and emails, play games, store your address book and calendar, let you load additional applications. Oh, and call people, if you’re a bit of a luddite that way. On top of this, smartphones can browse the Web – not crippled half-assed efforts like WAP and iMode, but the real Javascript-driven, Flash-based HTTPS Intarwebs. That is, if the site doesn’t detect you’re on a phone and obligingly cripple itself so you can’t actually use it. (Well done, Amazon!) Smartphones let you view and edit documents from your PC, run advanced apps like GPS, handle push email from your office complete with attachments, stuff like that. So if Symbian is so good at all this – three times as much as all its rivals put together – how come dumb phones outsell smartphones ten times over? Because a smartphone is a PC in your pocket. I’m on my second. First was a Nokia 7710. And yes, it runs Symbian. It’s a direct descendant of the Psion 5 series of 1990s PDAs: it has a big, near-VGA res screen and pretty much the same GUI as the Psion – and the Nokia 770 Internet tablet gadget, come to that. But it’s a phone, so it has no keyboard. Only the 7710 doesn’t have a keypad, either, so you have to dial numbers and enter texts by tapping the screen with a stylus – or retracted biro or fingernail or chopstick or whatever’s to hand once you lose the built-in one a month after you buy it. It’s just like having a tablet PC, only smaller. It can do almost anything – run VOIP apps or instant messenger, I can write my own code for it, all that sort of thing. And also like a PC, it takes five minutes to boot, slows to a crawl or crashes when overloaded, has a folder-oriented point-and-click WIMP interface and needs to be recharged every night. People see it’s a whizzy phone, ask for a look, and then recoil from the icon-filled double-clicky interface. (Forty-eight apps on the opening screen.) I can send a text in less than half the time on my old 6310i, which incidentally also runs for about a week on a single charge. But it’s so damned useful that I was wedded to it. My life was in there, as it used to be in my Psion. But it was a lousy replacement for a Psion – slow, unreliable, short battery life, no keyboard, tiny hard-to-read screen. It’s also a lousy phone: big, clunky, unreliable, short battery life, slow-running and both complex and slow to operate. But the pairing is hard to resist. Thing is, on my Psion, I could write on the move. I can’t on the 7710. Even if I balance it on my lb80 folding Bluetooth keyboard, merely sustained fast typing is enough to crash the phone. So I bought a cheap old Psion netBook on eBay. Big bright colour screen, great keyboard, gigs of CF, battery life of a week, and surfs the Web via Wifi. It’s great for writing on the move, but it’s too big to carry around just in case I might need it. Next, I replaced the Nokia with an HTC Universal – an Orange SPV M5000, also known as a Qtek 9000 or an O2 XDA Exec or a T-Mobile MDA Pro. Interestingly, the phone and the netBook (strictly, a 7Book, i.e., a Series 7 with a netBook ROM DIMM) share a number of design features: StrongARM-family CPU, clamshell design, miniature QWERTY keyboard, 640*480 VGA-res colour touchscreen LCD, expansion via solid-state cards, wireless networking and infrared, ROM-based OS designed for usage on the move & sync to a PC, including limited file compatibility, and so on. Yet the late-1990s netBook is in almost every way a better, cleaner, simpler design, with a more flexible and pleasant UI. The WinMob device, despite more than twice the speed, nearly 10x the memory and far more functionality – phone, Bluetooth, integral Wifi, still camera + video camera and so on – feels cobbled-together and very poorly designed and integrated. I adore its functionality – it’s a smartphone, camera, MP3 player and usable WLAN Web terminal – but boy does the implementation suck! I had heard that Windows Mobile 5 was finally getting reasonably polished. Yeccch! If this is the polished, refined, 5th-generation product, I really hate to imagine what its rougher predecessors were like! It’s appalling! Understand, I’m not criticizing the form factor of the phone. A subnotebook-sized cell phone would be very silly. It would be better if it was Nokia Communicator sized and shaped, to be honest, but even so, its tiny keyboard is utterly dreadful, with a remarkable profusion of design howlers. The hotkey to launch IE is right next to the tiny space bar, so every few words you type, you flip into the web browser by mistake. There are no “<" and ">” characters, so HTML is right out. There’s no Control key, so you can’t cut/copy/paste, but there are irritating hotkeys for various programs built right into the main alphabetic cluster. There are 2 pairs of make/break call buttons, which screams thoughtless design. The simplest change would be to move the app hotkeys onto the screen fascia, in accordance with standard handheld PC design. Oh, and bin the duplicate call/hang up keys, while moving the dedicated buttons on the hinge to somewhere accessible with the machine open or closed. There’s lots of wasted space around the edge of the screen it would get them out of the alpha cluster, and with the space thus freed up, the keyboard could gain a Control key, a right Shift key, maybe even an Alt key and a right-mouse-button key like a real Windows machine, and still be more spacious and better laid-out! While I’m at it, the rocker button duplicates the functions of the cursor keys and “OK” key. (Sometimes you hit Enter to select, sometimes “OK”. They’re different. Hit OK in the wrong place, it closes the app. Only the [X] in the corner doesn’t really close the app, it just puts it into the background.) But no, honest, it’s Windows. If you know desktop Windows, you can work this. Yeah, right. And with all this, the smartphone has about half the battery life of the Psion, with a big fat extended battery fitted. I don’t mind that it’s a big, chunky device – I’m a big, chunky guy. I do mind it’s too small to put many of its excellent features to good use, though. So I’m back to square one – carrying 2 devices around. And an MP3 player, too, a phone memory card just isn’t enough. At least I can add new apps to the Universal and the Psion – and I have. I couldn’t on the 7710, though, because it runs Series 90, making it incompatible with apps for Series 60 (the keypad-driven Symbian phones) or UIQ (the touchscreen-driven Symbian phones) and only barely intermittently compatible with Series 80 (the Nokia Communicators, with their smaller, non-touch-sensitive screens with hardware buttons and keyboards). Naturally, Symbian can’t run Psion apps, either, just like Psion 5s couldn’t run Psion 3 apps. Symbian, like its ancestor Psion, does not get the point that an operating system needs to be a platform: something horizontally compatible as well as forwards and backwards, to make a open market worth exploiting. As my colleague Peter Fletcher once put it, it needs to learn the philosophy of kaizen, continuous improvement: that its new products must improve over its old ones in every way, with no retrograde steps. Are the newer successors of the Psion 5mx or Nokia 6310i better in every way? No. A phone needs to be robust, tough and reliable. It is going to get dropped. It will get used in the rain. It will get taken to the pub and banged around. It needs to last for ages, be large enough to be usable but slim enough to fit into a trouser pocket inconspicuously. And it needs superlative voice and data comms, because that is its primary purpose. It must be fast and simple to use, not a morass of menus. A PDA needs a better-than-VGA screen that can rival a laptop PC, a big keyboard that can you can type quickly upon, cheap and capacious storage – ideally solid-state – and basic multimedia. But it must be much smaller and cooler than the skinniest subnotebook and with a battery life to last a long weekend. It needs to do the main core functions of a laptop – office productivity, connectivity and a bit of fun – but without the bulk, the complexity or the power drain. It needs to be simple, fast and very reliable. And these two devices need to talk, seamlessly, so that I can manage my address book on one but sync it to the other, so that in a crisis I can read my email on the phone and pick out a reply. These are conflicting requirements. One device cannot do both well. Either can be simple on its own, but forcibly merge them and this simplicity is lost. I want a Psion 5 with the specification of my HTC Universal: half-gigahertz ARM or better, a colour screen – the one from the Nokia 710 would do nicely – expandable with cheap standard MMC or SD cards but still able to take CompactFlash, sporting USB and Bluetooth and Wifi. It needs a headphone socket so I can use it as my MP3 player – the original had external play/record/pause buttons anyway, all I need is fast forward and rewind and a headphone socket and a volume knob. It only needs to fit into a jacket pocket, so that it can retain a screen that can render webmail clearly with no horizontal scrolling. It can live in a case most of the time, so if necessary, it can have a nifty tablet-style swivelling screen to keep the industrial designers happy. Do this right, it’s also a pocket video player and usable games console for free. Since Symbian has lost the plot, if it ever had it, I guess it’ll have to run Linux. For my phone, I don’t want a colour screen that can’t be read if the backlight is off, nor a camera nor a music player nor “themes”. I want a big bright clear screen that can be read sitting on a desk with the backlight off, showing lots of lines of clear text. I want big buttons operable when walking or strap-hanging on a train – not mini-QWERTY! I want it to reach from my ear to my mouth, because that is the way human anatomy is arranged. I want a battery life of a few days not a few hours. But, because it’s 2006, I don’t just want GPRS and HSCSD, I want 3.5G and EDGE and quad-band. I want fast reliable data as well as voice, anywhere in the world, over USB and infrared and Bluetooth. What I don’t want are hinges or flips or slidey-out bits, because they’re too fragile. Make it big enough for the screen to be readable (ear to mouth, remember) and that leaves plenty of room for a big, long-life battery. Its main functions – phone calls, texting, address book and calendar – need to be blisteringly fast and easy to use. It needs to be slim to fit in a pocket, not a squarish brick. Even Blackberries are becoming like this now, after all. So long as these things aren’t compromised, it can have as many other multimedia toys as the designers’ cocaine-fuelled imaginations can conceive. Teenagers are well-served with lifestyle/leisure devices already. Leave them to it, they’re happy. There is a need for devices for adults, for middle-aged business people with aging eyes and uncoordinated thumbs, who don’t want to wear earpieces like extras from Star Trek. We need simple, efficient, reliable devices that we can get work done with. The future is meant to be an improvement on the past. P. S. All right. If I must have a smartphone, then I want the big bright VGA-res touchscreen of a Zaurus or Universal – or at least the letterbox-shape EGA-res screen of a Nokia 7710. I want keys – the Siemens SX1 had a clever take on this, putting the numbers beside the screen instead of below. Screen-only phones are a pain and so are tiny thumb-boards. Predictive texting isn’t hard. Let’s have numbers! The other buttons – voice dialling or memo, volume control, power on, things like that – can go round the edges or something. Oh, yes, and it needs to work in portrait mode and landscape mode, and switch instantly between them. Recent Palm devices and the Sony-Ericsson P800/900/910 managed this – it can’t be that hard. Even my old Zaurus SL-5500 did it once I switched to OpenZaurus. But really, I think two brains are better than one.
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Right now, I have what I consider the greatest smartphone ever (pending judgement of iPhone). It is the Samsung SPH-i500. It runs Palm OS4 with a standard (160×160) screen. But the real beauty of the thing comes up when you see the thing: it looks like a PHONE. http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&q=samsung+i500…
I’m slightly annoyed about how all smartphones must look and feel like PDAs. Don’t even get me started on WinMo. And, as an added bonus, it has a normal keypad to dial with.
Honestly, I don’t understand what you are looking for. I am not sure you know either.
I have all kinds of smartphones in my office. I believe the Nokia E61 is one of the best ones, and the HTC TyTN is one of the best ones too. Unfortunately the UIQ 3.x devices from Sony Ericsson are unstable and problematic. The Linux Motorola phones don’t really have any additional keys and they are rehashes of the same original hardware design (and there is no SDK). I don’t like the Blackberry UI (or its web browser).
Well, if you mean by that that there is nothing resembling what I want out there, then yes, you’re right.
But if you mean that I can’t tell you what I’d like, well, no.
Actually, as of last night, I want an iPhone ;-), but even so, lovely as it is, it doesn’t do all I want from a PDA and could not.
What I was saying was that the requirements of my ideal PDA and those of my ideal phone are too different for any one device to be both. It’s not possible.
For the PDA:
I want a C21 Psion 5mx: something like a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, but in the form factor of the Psion, and additionally with the same range of apps as the Psion and a keyboard as good as the Psion’s.
For the phone:
I want a Nokia 6310i, with 3G and Wifi, plus a bigger higher-res screen, more flexible UI, more customisability and masses of memory, which can seamlessly sync to any kind of computer – Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever – via USB2 or wirelessly. It should, in essence, be a phone with an integral high-capacity USB pendrive. I don’t care if it has a camera or colour or MP3 or any of those things, as long as it’s big and solid and robust and fast and easy to use, small enough to fit easily into a pocket and runs for ages on its standard battery.
Neither is hard to do. The technology is here today and quite widespread. But nothing like either exists.
Why not?
For the PDA:
I want a C21 Psion 5mx: something like a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, but in the form factor of the Psion, and additionally with the same range of apps as the Psion and a keyboard as good as the Psion’s.
Wait for the Nokia E90.
I want a Nokia 6310i, with 3G and Wifi, plus a bigger higher-res screen, more flexible UI, more customisability and masses of memory, which can seamlessly sync to any kind of computer – Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever – via USB2 or wirelessly. It should, in essence, be a phone with an integral high-capacity USB pendrive
Nokia E60.
The Communicators were not a patch for the Psions in terms of ease of use, flexibility or power. No touchscreen, /lousy/ keyboard, tiny, cramped design constrained by the phone form factor and a smaller, lower-resolution screen. I’ve not yet seen an E90 – it’s not out yet – but of these, the only one that I know it fixes is the screen res.
I’ve only had a 2min play with an E60. It’s a nice little device, but its keypad and joystick-based navigation method is, for my money, considerably inferior to that of the old 6310. I also find S60 more awkward to navigate than old dumb Nokia phones. But yes, it is indeed close!
I hear what you say, and although I might not agree 100% with the detail, I totally agree in principle. I started using portable devices (for want of a better name) with the Psion Organiser II (XP first and then the LZ64). Despite the fact that they were the epitome of brick-like and never even dreamt of growing up to be a phone, I really loved them. Believe it or not, I could even do basic word-processing on the LZ64!
As things moved on, and skipping many years, I had the Nokia 9110 followed by the 9210. Again, they served their purposes reasonably well.
Now I start to think again about wanting a device which doesn’t do “everything” but does plenty. A phone, yes, enough smarts to be able to run “proper” GPS software in tandem with my little bluetooth GPS receiver, the ability to have a browse of the internet without feeling I am squinting at the web through a letterbox slot, do some email, type a simple document and read a PDF maybe. And then perhaps the ability to add some additional stuff if I want, a couple of games for a long flight, a few MP3 tracks perhaps.
I also agree that these devices should sync seamlessly with a PC (even, one might hope, if that PC happens to run Linux).
I don’t need a camera, but if one *must* be included, it has to be at least 2 megapixel to make it worth the waste of space.
And the interface has to be both intuitive and practical for a 40 something with short, stubby fingers.
You’re not about to find any devices to match the Psion 5mx for pure usefulness; and the build quality is second only really to it’s older brother, the 5… I’d settle for an updated version (esp. given that all the software is getting a little dated for it,
) and a phone that’d nicely interface with it… and Linux support.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Yea and what can the iPhone bring to the market that Symbian or any other Mobile OS doesnt have yet? Seriously, i wrote it already ( http://blog.2blocksaway.com/2007/01/11/the-iphone-why-it-is-and-wil… ) and I stand by this, Apple is too late, at least with this model of the iPhone and the specs of it. It looks cool but what else? The new S60 3rd edition has the rotating icons as well, so what?
classy, ease of use, itunes, mac osx, incredible screen (166 dpi), 8GB, touch screen, no fixed keyboard, videos, wide screen, from apple. Need anything else?
edit: do you really think that the nokia can compete on all fronts with the iPhone?
Edited 2007-01-10 22:18
Even if it manages to compete against other smartphones, the fact of the matter is that the market for smartphones is really just a niche. And it’s no wonder: $499 is a lot of money to pay for a phone. Apple is counting on people who would otherwise be thinking about buying a separate iPod and phone to purchase the iPhone as a unification device. Since the device isn’t available publicly, it’s tough to tell how much value it adds over separate iPod and phone devices. It has been my experience that so-called “convergence devices” tend to be lesser cousins of the devices that they sought to replace; that is, apprentices of many devices and masters of none. Apple does have a good track record on industrial design; however, Apple isn’t immune to the realities of hardware tradeoffs. Economies of scale can only be stretched so far. Time will tell, though. I wouldn’t bet against Apple’s success, but “success” miht be pretty underwhelming if the reach is relatively small, compared to the larger market for phones.
>classy
I’d say, looks like a toy.
>ease of use
S60 is very easy to use.
>itunes
That monstrous piece of software paired with DRM infected music store? Thanks, no.
>incredible screen
480×320? Nokia 7710/Communicators have had 640×320 displays for years, upcoming E90 will feature 800×352.
>8GB
There are already 8Gb smartphones on the market, Nokia N91 for instance.
>edit: do you really think that the nokia can compete on all fronts with the iPhone?
Apple should try to compete with Nokia, not vice versa. Currently, with that expensive iPhone gadget they hardly can.
Edited 2007-01-10 22:36
that incredible screen won’t look so incredible once it gets smudged and scratched from touching it all the time. And macos x is pointless if there won’t be any apps available. iPhone will be closed like a danger sidekick
i just read your blog! wow…. dont you love the internet! now we all can be armchair know it all…..yea!!!!
look…. in know these iPhone got all your panties in an uproar! but seriously….. your way of life is not threatened!!!! i guarantee that! please… by all means… continue using your nokia, or your treo, or your winphone! i mean, those phones seem to have the spec that the iPhone does not! so obviously…. the iPhone cant be as good… right? so just press on…. have fun!
BUT…. down the road a bit…. say 2….3…4 years… when the iphone and its siblings have captured HUGE market share while the competition seamingly has better specs….. just remember to admit that you were a wee bit short sided… and may have been a bit to emotionaly involved with the anti apple crowd!
5 years ago…. about 42,455 (approx) experts out there said… “the iPod is a failure…..mark our words…. it will suffer the same fate as the mac…”
we all know haw it really turned out!
damn i love the sound of a toilet flushing!!!!!!!
The problem , or the advantage that the iPod had was that at the time it came, there were a lot of mp3 players, all with their own niche and none with the iTunes ease of use. Plus the player was simplistic and nice. stylish. the iPhone is entering in a market that is saturated, there are WELL established entities. I think your analogy should be with Zune and microsoft.
Must… resist… fanboy-gadget-troll…
Well, as someone getting that upset from a simple blogg comparing two devices you should back off. Most of us dont care a bit how many iPods Apple have sold or what the experts predict in terms of market shares and profits, but evaluate these sort of devices personally on the basis of functionality and durability. Bringing a new gadget to the market, don’t make the old ones perform *worse*. Are you suggesting the Nokia or the Treo would suddenly turn into unusable crap overnight for someone who’s comfortable using them when the iPhone is released? Get a life.
My Palm T|X is just as semi-functional/crappy now as it was a year ago, regardless where the competition is these days. At least it was cheap
What it brings is ease of use, ease of sync and a multitouch, finger-driven GUI. But mostly, it’s about the UI.
Existing phones’ UIs all suck. Apple is the world leader in UI design. Result: $$$$!
Blackberry Pearl owns all. I just ditched my Treo for it, and couldn’t be happier. The UI isn’t very snazzy, but it is efficient and businesslike. It’s also smaller and lighter than a RAZR, and it doesn’t feel like carrying a brick. The iPhone does make it look like an abacus, but these days paying 500-600 bucks for a phone seems insane, though I did pay 450 bucks for my old Treo. $200 does get you a lot of phone these days. What the Pearl gives you would have been unthinkable 2 years ago.
I am honestly amazed to read that. I’ve played with several models of Blackberry. Written all over them is the fact that they’re American and Americans don’t really understand cellphones, because they never took off over there the way they did in the rest of the world. (Because of the USA’s broken mess of multiple incompatible competing mobile phone networks.)
The Blackberry is a pager on steroids. Its UI sucks even worse than most, it has a mad, near-unusable keyboard and it doesn’t do much. (If you think it’s usable pocket QWERTY, do yourself a favour, go play with a Psion 5 or Revo sometime. Prepare to be amazed. If you think you need QWERTY to enter text quickly, watch a Eurasian teen using T9 predictive text input at 40-50wpm without trying and better than twice that if they’re good and putting some effort in. Prepare to be amazed again.)
I am honestly amazed to read that. I’ve played with several models of Blackberry. Written all over them is the fact that they’re American and Americans don’t really understand cellphones, because they never took off over there the way they did in the rest of the world. (Because of the USA’s broken mess of multiple incompatible competing mobile phone networks.)
Er, Blackberry is made by Research in Motion, which is a Canadian company. We haven’t *quite* become the 51st state. Yet, anyways.
The Blackberry is a pager on steroids. Its UI sucks even worse than most, it has a mad, near-unusable keyboard and it doesn’t do much. (If you think it’s usable pocket QWERTY, do yourself a favour, go play with a Psion 5 or Revo sometime. Prepare to be amazed. If you think you need QWERTY to enter text quickly, watch a Eurasian teen using T9 predictive text input at 40-50wpm without trying and better than twice that if they’re good and putting some effort in. Prepare to be amazed again.)
The blackberry was not designed to be a cell phone originally. It’s purpose originally was to be a two-way real-time messaging device; that was, is and always will be it’s raison d’etre. In fact the blackberry was to the paging/messaging market what the iPod was to the mp3 player market. Phone functionality was an after-thought but eventually became an integrated part of the design. Sort of like plugging a gsm chip into an stylish MP3 player.
Teens may be fine with it, but convincing an executive to use predictive typing on a numeric pad simply is not going to happen.
Personally I’m not a fan of the blackberry, but my gf is married to hers. The interface is less than perfect (although the scroll wheel is something I got used to pretty quickly) and it’s not entirely intuitive to use. But it simply cannot be touched as a messaging device; there are alternatives, I’ve tried some of them, but blackberry still cannot be touched.
And that’s what it boils down to; people don’t really buy blackberries to play music or watch videos.
Canadian: eep! All right, fair call, my bad. Apologies.
Not designed to be a phone: yes, I know, that’s why I called it a “pager on steroids”. Pagers pretty much disappeared in Europe in the early 1990s. I couldn’t believe how long they stuck around in the US.
I’ll agree regarding their messaging abilities, though.
As for texting via keypad: I think you’d be surprised. Even my 70-year-old technophobic mum is happily texting now. She can’t get her head around email or the Web or computers in general, but texting she’s mastered. No, she doesn’t use predictive text – few people over 40 I know do – but almost everyone I know in their mid-30s or below are fast, competent predictive texters. It is ubiquitous now; people I know who despise mobile phones and never speak on them carry one around to text with.
The Pearl is completely unlike the huge qwerty Blackberries you are thinking about. Look it up. I would never dream of carrying around one of those huge things that are the size of a slice of toast. The Treo was too big for me, that’s partly why I ditched it. The Pearl is about the size of a Moto SLVR, maybe a bit smaller. A Psion 5 is gargantuan in comparison, and hardly pocketable.
The Pearl has Suretype, which is the midpoint between qwerty and T9. 2 letters per key, in a qwerty layout. The predictive software is really good, way better than T9. Like T9, you just have to not look at the screen and trust that it figures out what you want to type, which I find works about 98% of the time.
By the way, I’m not American, so I know exactly what you mean.
No, it isn’t, and I’ve not only tried one, I’ve helped a friend looking at smartphones to decide to buy one. I stand by all my comments about Blackberries; they were written with the Pearl very much in mind, and I was just waiting for someone to point out how different they were. They’re not, very. The text input system is clever, but it’s no Tengo!
Fair enough, and I do see your point. But I think the difference between you and me is of how we define “pocket”. I would hardly call a Psion a “pocket” device. It’s more of something you would carry in a backpack or a man-purse. A Psion or a Nokia 7710 is unacceptably big for me. I want to carry my phone in my pocket and forget it’s there. I understand that I’m going to make some compromises as far as text entry.
If you think the Blackberry keyboard is useless, you should sit in any public bus or train in a major American city and watch those business executive types type out their emails at 50 wpm like a European teen on ecstasy. That goes for both the big qwerty Blackberries as well as the smaller Suretype ones. I could never get too fast on the Treo: the keys were too small and I kept hitting 2 or 3 at the same time. I’m sure I would type at near my full size keyboard speed on a Psion-like device, but then I wouldn’t be able to carry the thing like it was a phone.
By the way, thanks for pointing out Tengo. I hadn’t heard of it. It does look clever, but at 5 letters per “key” vs. 3 for T9 and 2 for Suretype, wouldn’t the word prediction accuracy suffer?
The differential between wanting a phone to be tiny and pocket-sized and wanting a PDA to have a usefully large keyboard and screen is, of course, what my article was originally about!
I do understand that many people want tiny little gadgets. However, what is often forgotten is that lots of us *don’t* like them and find them fiddly and hard to use. I found the form factor of my Psion pretty much ideal and it fitted into a jacket or waistcoat pocket with ease; mine went virtually everywhere with me.
A phone needs to be fairly small, but not too small. It needs, I submit, to reach from ear to mouth, and for a growing proportion of the world’s population, its screen and keys need to be readable by 40+ year old eyes and usable by big blunt clumsy fingers and thumbs.
I’m sure you’re right about Blackberries across the Pond, but the USA & Canada are only a small part of the world population – and the rest of us are getting by better with smarter phones!
However, a phone-sized PDA is compromised. A PDA needs to be bigger than that. It needs to do a lightweight version of the job of a small laptop, which rather mandates its size and shape.
The era of the shirt-pocket don’t-enter-data-sync-it Palm-type PDA is gone. They have been subsumed into phones. Fair enough.
But the era of the bigger, handheld-PC, Psion type of PDA is /not/ gone. They could be more useful than ever, for email and web and music and as cameras and movie players and all sorts.
A smartphone is a kind of PDA; make it too small and it becomes less useful, not more. The iPhone looks like a very good compromise.
But I still want my modern Psion!
as a palmos dev, I can only say treo 680. cheaper and way better than 650. easy to learn gui, full qwerty keyboard (yes ctrl,alt,menu keys included). dunno about linux/blackberry but it is better than symbian/windows mobile. The best thing is the “palm zen” philosophy f.e. every app should (and almost all do) to the state they were closed.
Browser: Palm680/RC1 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D053; Blazer/4.5) 16;320×320
Not played with a 680 yet, I confess, but I have tried the 650 and 600.
Good at what they are, but I’m sorry, nearly 10y ago, I was using a PDA with full preemptive multitasking, a 640×240 greyscale touchscreen and a pocket-sized QWERTY keyboard that I could do near-touchtyping speeds on with only hours of familiarity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_5
Launched 1997.
Fast, stable, ultralong battery life, about 100% reliable – by far the most reliable GUI computer I’ve ever used – user-programmable and with a big 3rd-party aftermarket of hardware and software.
Any and all Palm devices seem like a *big* step backwards once you’ve had all that.
I moved to crackberry because I didn’t think the 700p or the 680 were enough of a step forward from the 650 to justify getting them. I love my 650, it has served me well, but it was time to move on.
The Blackberry OS is not as elegant, UI wise, but is considerably more stable. Add to that multitasking that actually works, unlike Windows Mobile.
Curiously, what I couldn’t give up was Palm Desktop. Believe it or not I sync my BB with Palm Desktop.
I watched the iPhone videos again and suddenly noticed how little it actually does, and how little actually is required! Compare this to Windows Smartphones, It’s insanely hard to find *anything* there, and accomplishing a task in a certain way doesn’t guarantee it can be done again the same way. You have tons of little programs, utilities, all the junk which normal people don’t understand or use, and working out the settings is a nightmare – I’m specifically talking about network settings and, as an example, setting a WPA2 encryption scheme. It mustn’t be so hard, because stuff you don’t use becomes just a filler and a major disctraction. Don’t know how other mobile OSes fare on this regard though. Maybe they’re easier to deal with.
the Symbian phone is a smartphone, the WinMob is a dirty bi+ch phone and the iPhone is a dumb blond phone.
Have any of you used the Treo 750 yet? How does it compare to the TyTN?
Amazon has an Amazon Anywhere application which is basicly just a connection to Amazon’s site.
It probably (I don’t know) isn’t the same site you mean, but I’ve tried it on my N73 and I find it quite useable.
Edited 2007-01-12 11:17