life goes mobile · 2006-08-13 19:24

Disclaimer: yes yes, my standard disclaimer still applies. But in the spirit of full disclosure – I work for Nokia, Nokia paid for my phone, and Nokia pays my phone bills.

A few weeks ago I got a Nokia E70 (and a 770, but that’s mainly another story). I had been lusting after it for a long time, especially when friends and colleagues had prototypes. It’s a phone, sure, but it runs S60 (but 3rd edition, which I’ll come on to), has 3G, wifi, the latest Nokia OSS Browser, a really cracking screen and a fold out keyboard.

The story actually starts probably a year ago. After enough server crashes, I decided to farm out as much of my online life to network and web services. My holy trinity is pretty much Gmail, Bloglines, and Flickr. I was never one for deleting, sorting or archiving email. I far prefer the leave-it-alone-and-good-search method of retrieval. I also needed access from multiple machines, with remembrance of flagging and reading. This is where network-hosted services really shine. I use Bloglines as I can read news far faster on it than any application I’ve found – two-pane reading, and auto-mark-as-read, plus folders, just makes Bloglines fantastic. The only improvement I would like is search through your subscriptions, as I often want to retrieve something I just saw out of the corner of my eye whilst scanning. Flickr is for fun, and also to keep tabs on what people are doing, and very asynchronous communication. I’m able to keep up with more friends on Flickr than I ever was with email.

Anyway, whilst the new browser can almost read the actual websites (it stutters on the sheer volume of Javascript on a Flickr page, also on Backpack – who knew a sort-of-wiki page needs to be nearly 500k?), all 3 of these services have mobile versions of their service (Bloglines, Flickr, Gmail), and actually all of them work really well. I can fit over 20 lines of text on the E70 screen, which makes reading easy, and because the pages are so simple, you can speed scroll up and down.

The flip out keyboard also changes use from a mainly passive receptive mode, to a more responsive two-way use. Gmail on the E70 is just fantastic – you may find me slightly less uncommunicative on email now. The hard thing has been remembering I can flip out the keyboard – it’s ingrained to T9 for text messages.

Other apps also really shine with the screen/keyboard combination – Putty is now available for S60 3rd edition, which by default shows over 40 lines of text onscreen at once. Agile Messenger is also out, but I must say it’s not quite up to scratch for IM – it doesn’t deal with all IM services very well (which, if you’ve tried to IM me and got no response, is probably the reason). Shozu is also out in beta, but I’ve found it to be a memory hog, and it often just doesn’t work. It also goes nuts occasionally, especially in the comment viewer. I hope this will be ironed out soon.

Speed is a slight issue – particularly turning from vertical to horizontal and back again. The other issue is the spectre of S60 3rd edition. I can see both sides of this: I’m glad they’re implementing things sooner rather than later to stop apps corrupting each other and writing over anything on the device, but the need for developers to pay more money to get more access to phone internals (notably the address book and cell ID), plus the whole need for programmers to send things away for testing and signing, really scuppers a lot of the really interesting applications that were just starting to emerge for S60 (see Aaron’s various apps for Python as an example). My other grumble is that the wifi implementation is a bit kludgy, and isn’t really designed for sniffing and connecting to whatever free wifi is available.

So, I’m very happy. I hope I don’t turn into one of those Blackberry junkies (note I have nothing that alerts me to new email, and so far I’ll confess to not picking up my work email on the phone). It’s quite insane being able to look at and use normal websites on my phone. Oh, and the 2MP camera is really good, even though it’s not got autofocus. It does need cleaning though, as there’s no lens cap, and super-annoyingly, there’s absolutely no way of turning off the camera sound.

Today I’ve started out trying soonr, as there’s now a Mac client. Kinda weird browsing my hard drive from the phone, and then downloading mp3s and playing them on the loud phone speaker (as though I’m some yoof at the back of the bus annoying everyone). I must also get the mobile web version of Backpack as a bookmark, and start using it in earnest again.

The big question is: do I really need a laptop anymore? Yes, for work, just for Outlook, Visio and mainly Powerpoint (though there is a crazy Powerpoint-esque application installed on the E70). I might feel slightly less tethered though.

Buy more shiny nokia phones, or something. It’s like living in the future.

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