Archive for January, 2008
I�d read many reviews of the F700, all singing its praises, some claiming vociferously that it was the iPhone killer! I think not. I spent a week using an F700 and here�s a summary of what went wrong:
- Installed PCStudio and the drivers to sync up with contacts, calendar and all the things you�d want on your �Ultra Smart� device to do but no. It would recognise the phone 50% of the time.
- Once it did recognise the phone the options are to sync with Outlook or outlook express. No no no no no. It would fail every time. A little Googling and it turns out it just does not work. There is a strange phone editor that sort of allows you to import by hand but it would not import all numbers. All the names are there but some numbers are missing. Of course you only find this out the hard way.
- I thought it must be the software that shipped with the phone, it is new after all but looking at Samsung Mobile�s support site it tells me that there is (0) software available, (0) User Manuals, (0) software updates (0) FAQ�s and (0) Tutorials.
- There�s no voice dialling, this is pretty important to me and the Vodafone Web site tells me there is voice dialling. No there isn�t.
- Vodafone also claimed for some time up to launch there was to be a 5 mega pixel camera but it launched with 3. This wouldn�t bother me so much but from pressing the shutter button to it actually taking the photo is 4 seconds.
- I could almost live with all of the above but the UI is terrible and the use of the big screen is poor. It will only show a few lines of a list in portrait or landscape mode and the touch screen is just annoying. Sensitive scrolling may have helped but there is one scrolling speed. Fast. I found myself looking for a Blackberry style wheel.
Redeeming features:
- The fabulous slide out keyboard. I used to have two phones, a K750i, nice and small for general carrying around and a Blackberry for when there�s the need for QWERTY keyboard type things. The F700 is both a suitable trouser size and has a really usable keyboard.
- The screen is big, there�s no denying it.
So what�s the answer, did I get an iPhone instead? No. The iPhone�s the opposite of the F700, UI is superb but for me the hardware isn�t quite there. I compromised on the keyboard and went for a Nokia N82. Now I�m happy to say I am as pleased with that as I was displeased with the F700.
Of course all this does point to the need for something like Android�
I have the dubious pleasure of working in Canary Wharf at the moment, which means I have to endure the Jubilee line from Waterloo station every day. Anyone who has done this trip will, I am sure, share the dreaded moment when you arrive on your overground train and make your way to the Jubilee line, not knowing what the state of the trains will be.
Some mornings you can get to the platform easily, some mornings they have closed most of the barriers and you have to jostle for position in the ticket hall, and some mornings you have to queue on the escalator. Either way, you know that when you actually get to the platform there will be huddles of people near each door waiting for the next, already packed, train to come in so a couple can squeeze on. Some days I have waited for 6 trains to go past before my turn in the sardine can.
In true commuter style, I have discovered a number of alternative routes to be used when the conditions get bad. Most of the time the route is longer, but as long as you are on the move, it seems better.
Now wouldn’t it be good if I knew the state of the trains beforehand – this way I could make my route decision before getting stuck.
Whilst thinking about this I came across what seemed like the answer to my problems on the TfL website. I found I could enter my regular journey details and they would text me in the morning at certain time telling me of any delays. Great – I could finally make my decision. I chose my time and registered for the service, which was nice and simple to do.
Now, they only send a text when there is a problem. So the alloted time passed without incident on the first day and I proceeded to a packed but usable train. Working well so far. Next day was the same. This was good, no more decision making.
On the third day, cracks started to appear in this previously helpful service. My phone beeped as my train was drawing into Waterloo – a text from TfL! It informed me that there were major delays on the Jubilee line. That was it, decision made – I would go the long way. Then, seconds after receiving the text, the guard on the train came on the intercom – ‘We are pleased to announce that there are no delays any of the London Underground lines’.
Oh dear. Who was I to believe? I decided that TfL would know best and went the long way round. Arriving smugly at work I announced that I had avoided the queues. A colleague looked surprised and said he had been there at the same time and had no problems. Hmmm.
The same scenario has since happened a few times, sometimes the guard has been right, sometimes the text has been right. So the system has been rendered useless for giving out information.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a mobile site where you could check the train times in real time and get information on the train frequency and maybe even a photo of the platform to prove it! These are the sort of areas where mobile phone technology comes into its own – where you need information on the move to enable you to make decisions.
Until this arrives, I continue making a random decision, based mainly on the weather and whether I fancy a walk across the bridge with a coffee or not.
In the end, and after my much deliberation, I went for the Nokia E61i as my new phone. I always liked the Nokia E61 which was my main phone for most of last year and once you’ve got over the form factor well the E61i is a natural upgrade path. I did ponder over the iPhone, but �269 is just a little too much as an inital payment, when I can get better hardware for “free”. Oh but the UI is so sweet. A colleague got me interested in the Samsung F700, but thankfully I didn’t since the same colleague took the phone back after a few days, as it was pretty deficient in several ways (such as poor PC synchronisation, bad use of the big screen and poor support from Samsung). Maybe Samsung’s software issues will go away when they start building on top of the Android platform. This is not too far in distance since Android is leaving the virtual world and becoming a reality as EU Edge demonstrate with a deployment of Android on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760. The $10million purse for the best mobile apps should also help things along. I’ll find out more at Google’s Android day in London this Thursday.
So why the the Nokia E61i then?
The Wifi support is great. I would love to see better wifi hoping functionality, such as utilising the access point groups to define my preferred access points in order and better support across all the apps. I seem to spend a bit of time in each app switching between access points, but at least connection is pretty solid once set up. Wifi usage does help reduce my Vodafone data usage which is capped at a less than attractive 120Mb per month.
With the E61i, the synchronisation of email, contacts and calendaring is pretty seamless. I’ve got it hooked up to our Zimbra server using the Nokia’s Mail for Exchange client (which you can clearly use for Exchange if you have that). I went for syncing my contacts via my mac with iSync because (i) I was playing around with iSync at the time and (ii) it lets me sync my contacts without an internet connection (e.g. when I’m travelling abroad). You’ll need to download the iSync plugin for the E61i since it isn’t provided by default. With the E61i I really can have my email, contacts and calendaring kept in sync between my phone, mac and zimbra effortlessly.
The E61i has also thrown in a camera which is a nice addition over the E61. Don’t expect too much from the camera, but it’s enough for my purposes which are general taking photos of whiteboards and quick photos on business trips to send back to my wife.
The UI is intuitive and quick – the ability to configure the shortcut buttons allows me to get to what I want to quickly. The screen and keyboard are fantastic – I can easily read my inbox and write messages whilst in queues and on the move. Of course the mobile browsing can pretty much read anything out there and do a reasonable job on it, whether I’m using the default browser or opera mini.
So all in all a pretty handy device whilst I’m out and about (or even at home but don’t want to flip out my computer to read my mails). And with a bluetooth headset I don’t have to put the brick that it is to my ear.
Judging by the size of the recent thread on the momolondon mailing list, the thorny issue of testing mobile websites is a hot topic.
There are many different software solutions around which will allow you to deliver markup to the myriad of devices currently available. Development for traditional, HTML based, websites has always been made more difficult as the different browsers interpret the markup in different ways and there are many tweaks needed to get the site to display correctly on all browsers. Interpretation of the standards, particularly CSS, seems to vary immensely (especially when some people, large companies based in Redmond for instance, seem to invent their own standards!).
This problem is multiplied many times over for mobile site development. Device independent rendering software solves a lot of the issues of screen size, memory limitations, paging etc – but what appears to be correct markup renders very differently on different devices. In my previous job, at a company that made device independent software, we had to make a large number of specific modules for certain devices to get round some of the stranger problems, one example that stands out is a device that would only display a whitespace after an anchor if you put three nbsp’s followed by a space.
Every device (even from the same manufacturer) seems to have different quirks displaying the markup but most of the problems occur in the different CSS implementations. Manufacturers either intentionally leave bits of the spec out or implement it incorrectly.
So, once you have your markup correct you have to start testing on a large number of devices to ensure your new big idea is displayed correctly. What’s the best way forward? There are several options:
- Buy every device and test each one
- Use emulators
- Use a service such as DeviceAnywhere
- Find a cheap way to hire lots of people to test on their own phones
- Automate the testing process
- Ignore it and hope everything is OK
Clearly buying every device is not an option given the number that exist and the rate of change. Normally devices are broken down into 5 or so different categories based on capability which gives a smaller sample size, but this can still be a large number of devices.
Emulators have their uses, but are not adequate for testing. Most of the emulators I have used are not accurate enough to test on and I have seen some that let markup through that crashes the real device.
Services such as DeviceAnywhere provide the actual devices to test on through a web interface, this is the best way of getting to a large number of devices but it is still time consuming to test on them all, and it can get expensive. There is also limited coverage at the moment so you can only test for a limited number of geographies. For a good overview of all the services available hop over to an article by an ex-colleague of mine, Tarek
If you know a lot of students you might be able to get some good testing coverage, but this would be tough to organise. A new service could address this problem, Mob4hire is like a social testing network which could be useful. There are also a number of options for this in the Far East, but network coverage could be an issue.
The holy grail here would be automating the testing process, but this is certainly a far off, if not impossible dream. You can automate testing the markup and this is useful for regression testing but you cannot automate looking at the display on the phone to check it.
If you think ignoring the problem and hoping it will be OK is the way forward, then you are probably in the wrong industry.
I would like to have been more positive in my first blog for bemoko and to reward you for getting this far with the answer to testing on mobile devices. Unfortunately I can’t provide that answer but bemoko has a lot of experience in testing sites that have been produced and, while it’s not perfect, a good strategy can be built to give a decent testing coverage using a mixture of the methods I have outlined above.
Found a great little cafe on the edge of the Marina in Dubai where they give you free wifi in exchange for buying smoothies and homely food. Thankfully it’s out of the SkypeOut blocking zone that my hotel seems to be squarely located in – some sort of monopoly imposed by the dominant telco. Got a chance in amidst the evolving building site around me to watch Steve Jobs’ keynote address detailing Apple’s progress in 2007 – they shipped a pretty impressive 2,000 iPhones a day in the first 200 days. Apple’s marketing might has really helped to bring the Mobile Internet to the forefront of many people’s minds lowering further the technology barrier to well and truly enable the Mobile Internet.