Nokia E71 or iPhone 3G ?

I am looking for a fresh replacement for my faithful Samsung i600. Or may be not... The i600 somehow never made it to the front page, but it is really hard to beat. I know there are a number of people who just cannot imagine "Windows on a mobile phone". But the i600 is one of the best Windows Mobile implementation ever. Of course it can hardly be considered as a great success, as it took Microsoft ten years or so to arrive at this point, while the system still has its shortcomings. But it does work and delivers what is important for me: QWERTY keyboard in a small package plus basic Web browsing and excellent implementation of an email client, together with push capability. The Windows Mobile email application has been finally sorted out in version 6. The 6 has brought the forever - awaited HTML email support. Plus it can natively import personal certificates, necessary to read secure / encrypted email messages.

So what is the i600 lacking and why I consider upgrading it? Well, basically there are three points on my wishlist:

1. The US 850MHz GSM band. i600 is a tri - band GSM (900, 1800, 1900) plus one - band UMTS (2100) phone. Going to the US, especially outside metropolitan areas, I have no coverage. The 850MHz band would definitely help here.
2. Built-in GPS. Even without GPS, Google Maps is a fantastic application. But it really shines with GPS. With quality maps and search available globally for a mobile phone, a GPS receiver is a serious option to consider. Will help with navigating to the nearest Sushi bar in Barcelona or to Strawberry Fields in the Central Park.
3. Good, iTunes - compatible, music player. Some time ago I decided to use iTunes library as a foundation for all my music. It started with an iPod (obviously), the I developed a multi-room audio system based on the Infrant / Netgear ReadyNAS running Slimserver that in turn powers a number of Logitech's Squeezeboxes. Unfortunately I have not found an easy way to synchronize my music (that is managed by iTunes) with the Windows phone, so I am still carrying an iPod Nano with me... Converging the Nano with a phone would be welcome...

Last week I managed to put my hands on the Nokia E71. It is almost a perfect device. First, the build quality shines (pun intended), the stainless steel gives that feeling of confidence. Second, the QWERTY keyboard is very good. Very easy to get used to, much better than my current i600. The layout is very good as well. All the necessary @ and // are well exposed. Entering national characters works very well too, finally the support for Polish language seems to be working without a glitch. The display is very good too. Perfectly readable even in a full sunlight. GPS works flawlessly too - I even did not bother to find the supplied Nokia application - went straight to http://m.google.com and downloaded the Nokia - compatible client application. It connected to the GPS immediately and showed both my position on the map and a satellite view of the area. Then I went to the email application. Nokia has something called Nokia Mail for Exchange. It is based on the licensed Activesync protocol. Installation was easy and in three minutes I had the E71 fully in synch with my Exchange Inbox, Calendar and Contacts (all 793 of them). Push email started working immediately as well. So I went to the final test - secure email. I transferred my personal certificate to the Micro SD card in form of a PFX file. Clicking it within the file explorer application installed the certificate on the phone. So far so good... Even too good to be true... but the email test failed. Encrypted email in the Inbox just showed as a subject line and a S/MIME encrypted attachment instead of decrypted body. I played with this for two hours trying different Google queries and different settings. No luck. It just seems the current implementation of Nokia Mail for Exchange does not handle secure encrypted emails. Bad... I am not 100% sure about this, as I have found neither "Yes the E71 does support S/MIME" nor "Sorry, the current version of E71 does not support S/MIME" statement... But so far this seems to be a big con balancing the impressive number of pros related to the Nokia E71.

Next up to the test will be the iPhone 3G. I know it will handle iTunes music better than Nokia :). There are two questions remaining: does iPhone support S/MIME in the Microsoft Exchange scenario and how good (or bad) the virtual keyboard is... There are a number of opinions regarding the latter. Some people say it is fine, some hate it. The E71 with its "real" QWERTY has a big advantage for heavy texters like myself. I guess I will have to judge it myself...

Business Class Calls

I was traveling a little bit last week. A number of destinations across Europe. Waiting at the gate at one of the airports I contemplated various business models of airline industry. On short intra - continental routes the 2.0 airlines are taking over the traditional 1.0 business. Simplicity. Boarding an Easyjet flight at my hometown Krakow airport takes 15 minutes. No check - in (done online at home). Just pass the security and you are on board. No registered luggage (they cleverly have the carry - on limit twice as high as their 1.0 competition) means getting out at the destination airport is even faster. But they gladly sell various options and addons. Like seat preselection or priority boarding or flexible reservations. Seems like Value Added Services? You bet...

On the other hand the 1.0 model on inter - continental flights holds well. Especially first / business class idea of selling 50% more legroom at 300% the price. OK, you get extra glass of sparkling wine with that but really... More and more people are willing to pay huge premium to be treated better. The longer the flight the more chances business class will check in completely full. A number of times recently I tried to use my frequent flyer points to upgrade, but unfortunately the business class was already full of passengers paying high premium...

These observations brought me to the point of business class telephone conversations. Yes I still do complain on call quality. Sometimes it is very good. Especially in areas with good 3G coverage. Like Stockholm underground :) But sometimes it is awful, especially when you are at the edge of a 3G coverage or your call traverses a long path with many transcoders and voip interconnect links along the way. And still most conversations are limited to this 3kHz bandwidth we had 10 and 20 and 100 years ago... Despite my high end service plan I fell like I was squeezed in the economy cabin. Isn't it time to offer a higher class, especially for those long lasting, long distance calls? Airlines have first, business and economy. Trains have first and second. Cisco reaps a fortune for their [high quality] Telepresence systems. Thinking of Telco 2.0... why not repeat this model in mobile telephony? People will pay. A lot. So... who will be the first?

iPhone: Waiting For 3G

Very, very mixed feelings related to the second generation iPhone. It is dubbed "3G" but in fact this is the 2nd generation device. 3G means it can use WCDMA/UMTS/HSDPA networks in 850MHz(US)/1900MHz(US)/2100MHz(EU) bands. 3G has been a hype for a long time... essentially since 1999 when the first deployments took place and Qualcomm (the pioneer of the underlying CDMA technology went "over the rainbow" after the World realized everybody is going to license Qualcomm's technology).

Now, as we have some perspective of almost ten years, we may try to evaluate some pros and cons of 3G (technology and networks) in context of the 2G (meaning second generation) iPhone:

• 3G delivers fast mobile data transmission. This is what we have been all waiting for. With HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and HSUPA (Uplink) the current real world speeds come close to the speed of 802.11b WiFi. Most operators advertise 7,2Mb downlink speed, but this is usually true only for the radio part - the backbone links to Node-B's (the base station transceivers) are usually slower than that. And for 7,2Mb to happen the cell you are in should be empty. But still in the real world I often see speeds approaching 2Mb/s. That is not enough for a high definition video streaming, but is just fine for heavy web browsing. With connection speeds exceeding 1Mb/s often the bottleneck is the application processor - you need a fast Intel chip to render web pages fast enough to keep the packets flowing. I have not done any scientific tests, but the iPhone CPU seems to be too slow to benefit such speeds. Possibly this is why Apple advertises it as "twice as fast" suggesting real user experience is more or less comparable with 256kb/s link.
• 3G allows to make video calls (this is a standard functionality of 3G handsets). But iPhone cannot do this. Certainly this is a software - only issue, so chances are Apple will upgrade the phones in future. Of course you will not be able to make face - to - face video calls, as iPhone lacks front - facing camera, but it also may be Steve Jobs just does not believe in video calls. And he has reasons, as video calls has not picked up in volume as a service. With 64kb/s bandwidth the video quality is not stellar and facing a phone with loudspeaker turned on strips users of their privacy. I just do not see people making face - to - face video calls in public transport for example. It is still not clear to me at this moment if iPhone can make a person - to - machine video call - such as to a video IVR. This does not require a camera on the handset, and this type of video calls are much more popular. For example your bank may present a menu in visual form, not forcing you to listen to long IVR calls. Or your service provider may let you simply place a video call to YouTube and air instantly what is happening around you.
• 3G brings us (finally) better voice quality. Instead of aging narrowband GSM codecs, 3G handsets may use more modern AMR standard, and when the network supports a TrFO mode (Transcoder Free Operation), you will hear the difference. New iPhone owners report much better audio call quality. It may be partially due to better hardware (speaker, microphone etc.) and partially due to higher bitrate AMR / TrFO mode provided by a 3G network.
• 3G brings a lot of improvements to network operators. The most important is the higher capacity in densely populated areas and just after that is the complete elimination of TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) transport in the core network, being superseded by Ethernet / IP-based transport for both signaling and media.
• And finally: there is a price for all these improvements. 3G handsets draw a lot of power. Unfortunately battery technology has not advanced fast enough. That is why the new iPhone has a switch to turn 3G off (essentially becoming equal to the first generation iPhone). And according to the tech specs, it should be advertised as "Twice as fast. Half the price" but "Twice as fast. Half the battery life" instead.

Having said that the most important iPhone upgrade has happened in the application software layer. My favorite is Microsoft Exchange Activesync compatibility. I live on Exchange push email. And Exchange is my full backup of all data I have on a phone. So actually I may try one once they are available down here (at least three networks in Poland are going to introduce iPhones soon). Hardware - wise the 3G iPhone (or "version 2") is not that groundbreaking. According to the Law Of Version 3, the next one should be worth signing your soul to the devil. A while ago I suggested it may be based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform. Will see... I also do hope the next version will use the technology called VEE (Visual Enhancement Engine) by Quicklogic. This may actually bring back the battery life...

Voice Again

I have discussed voice (as a channel and application) a number of times here. Particularly voice, and the quality of voice communications in today's telephony, as we are almost at the same (hint: poor) level as we were hundred years ago. We have Web, movies, video calling applications on our handsets, yet our voice is still transmitted using narrow band codecs sounding similar to the rotary wired phones our ancestors used over the past century. Yes, there is light in that tunnel... 3G mobile networks introduce a number of enhancements here, especially the TrFO (Transcoder Free Operation), where transcoders are eliminated from the communication path, improving the overall quality a lot.

But there is more to voice than just person - to - person conversations. Voice is the most natural "interface" we use everyday. At least communicating with people. For person - to - machine conversations most of the time we use a keyboard (person - to - machine) and a display (machine - to person). QWERTY keyboards are awkward by design and screens in general are Gutenberg technology from the 15th century. So why can't we just speak to our gadgets and hear them back? The answer is simple - we have not mastered (yet) the process of converting speech to text, and that is the necessary step to let machines understand what we want from the. I should say we have not FULLY mastered this process, as there are many successful applications based on speech, available to consumers.

One such example is the speakerphone system I use every day driving my car. It works based on a very limited dictionary it can understand (a few commands plus digits and names recorded by a user), but it works very well:

• (me) Dial number
• (machine) Number please...
• (me) six - zero - nine
• (machine) six - zero - nine
• (me) three - one - five
• (machine) three - one - five
• (me) three - six - six
• (machine) three - six - six
• (me) Dial!
• (machine) Dialing...

Not very sophisticated, but works in so - called "speaker - independent" mode (any person can have such a dialog without any prior "training"), and works flawlessly, delivering me (as a driver) a safe and convenient way to dial phone numbers without touching anything or turning my eyes away from the road.

Las week Google introduced the voice search feature for Google Maps for Blackberry. Yet another important development. According to the blog, Google (obviously) uses its voice recognition technology developed for the original voice search product - GOOG-411. To quote the abovementioned blog "using your voice to search for businesses is super useful in situations when you can't type, when the name of the business is long, or when you're not sure how to spell it."

Voice recognition is still in its early stages of development. And the problem itself is very complicated. Suffice to say it takes a company like Google to move it forward just a bit. But with the continuous increase of computing power and accuracy of the algorithms we will be experiencing the rise of many more voice - based applications. Care to share some ideas?