Smartphone, n.: A device with not quite the lot

Picture this: you're shopping for a new luxury car, and the salesman is explaining that the seat can be adjusted in seven different ways via the one control and it can save settings for seven different people, and the steering wheel can control the radio, gears, cruise control and climate control, and it can steer itself between the lines and control distance to the car in front via radar, and...

Then you notice that it doesn't have an interior rear-view mirror and the wing mirrors are adjusted manually. The salesman looks baffled and says "It's got mirrors, doesn't it?"

That's how I feel we're being treated by smartphone manufacturers.

Item: HTC still hasn't worked out how to build a decent loudspeaker or camera.

Item: Nexus S, built by Samsung to be Google's next developer phone, doesn't have a memory card slot.

Item: my current shiny, with which I am still mostly very happy, the Nokia N900, doesn't have a now-and-even-when-it-was-new standard magnetometer to go with its not having MMS inbuilt and the version of Ovi Maps installed not having any facility for storing bookmarks.

Seriously, what are the thought processes going on in their heads?

With the iPhone, you knew you weren't going to get a feature until Apple was good and ready to give it to you, and that's a perfectly fair and reasonable decision.

With Windows Phone 7, they appear to have deliberately decided to cripple it by denying it memory cards or cut and paste and, well, at least they're being consistent.

But nobody else has that explanation. Even when you get the hardware it may not be activated - the N900 has FM transmitters and receivers, but there was no radio software in early firmwares to use the receiver.

Then there's Samsung, who produced one of the best mobile phone cameras in the i8910 but haven't put anything remotely as worthy in any Android phone.

Then you have screens. Motorola came out with the XT720, which had all the potential to be a great tablet phone, with good speaker and even good camera. And a screen so mirror-finish you can't use it outdoors in sunlight.

Even Nokia have been guilty of this, perversely removing the sunlight-friendly transflective layer from the N97 mini.

There appears to be a "95 per cent" attitude in the technology world at the moment. Apple gives you 95 per cent of the features you want, but does them really well. Everyone else tries to give you all the features, but only gets it 95 per cent correct.

Only one company seems to have the commitment and meticulous dedication to engineering perfection that even justifies a label like "flagship" and they're such control freaks I couldn't justify giving them money even if I could justify their prices.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony.

It's been a truism for a while now that Nokia doesn't release new phones when they're finished - you need to wait for a couple of firmware releases for that.

At the same time, the hardware set of top Android phones is the reason I've bought two more Nokias in a row. Samsung and Motorola are getting very close to convincing me, but Motorola have done stupid, unfriendly things with locked bootloaders - preventing custom firmwares while not committing to prompt and guaranteed updates themselves - and Samsung goes and does something like the Nexus S with no card slot and an average camera.

What I want is an N900, next generation, all updated and upgraded hardware, maybe the N8 camera (we can dream), still the keyboard, and Maemo 6, not MeeGo. And now that's doomed forever. Do I think the first MeeGo device will be worthy, and complete?

Don't make me laugh bitterly.

In praise of hackers and modders

(Edit: I called the i8910 the Omnia Icon in Australia. Actually, that's a winmob device. The i8910 is the HD Icon. Which doesn't sound any less stupid.)

Before I start, let's get a little something out of the way, first:

A hacker is someone who tries to take things apart in order to understand them, and fiddle with them in order to improve them.

A cracker is someone who tries to break things in order to break them for fun and profit.

Right, moving on.

Here's the thing: The world relies upon hackers to advance. Engineers? Hackers, if they're any good. The spirit of "What would happen if..." and "Hey, how does that work..." drives productive creativity and improvements.

Scientists? Hackers, by definition. Hackers of reality and of life.

But the term is a computer one, and it's computer programmers who fiddle who I want to talk about now.

All programmers, if they're any good, are hackers. They want to know how somebody else did that cool thing, they have to chase down bugs in their own code, they're dissatisfied when they see something functioning below-par. They'll sooner spend two days building a replacement than twenty seconds being frustrated.

And they make really cool toys for the rest of us.

Commercial software is built by waged hackers with deadlines and managers. Open source software is built by hackers, some of whom have wages and managers while they're doing so.

And then there's the ones producing not the major product, but the improved version. The one you have to work to get. The operating system that works the way it should have done, if only the company producing it hadn't had commercial obligations or, well, deadlines and managers.

I had a Sharp Zaurus SL5500 for years. It was unabashedly a toy when I got it - a chunky PDA with a QWERTY keyboard and a Linux operating system which satisfied my twin desires of having a cool toy, and being able to type lying in bed. Laptops are too clumsy, too bulky, for lying on your back jotting down thoughts and chasing ideas. Oh, and an ebook reader for Project Gutenberg classics.

Being Linux, an open-sourced system, built using a variety of also open-sourced toolkits and projects, it was only a matter of time before OpenZaurus arose, flexed its muscles, and started producing an alternate, community-built, better-performing, less rubbish software platform.

Okay, buggier as well, but that's the price you pay for development.

I have no idea how many times I reflashed that poor device with new updates, but by the end I could do it in my sleep and it was probably a contributing factor to its eventual, inevitable, demise.

Eventually, however, the SL5500 was replaced with the sexier (black) SL6000, and then the C-series came out with a mini-laptop form factor and a swivelling screen and all the sex appeal that chunky SL5500 never had, and development on the now rapidly aging devices slowed and then stopped, lingering bugs left untreated.

At the same time, my progression through mobile phones landed me at a device with a big colour screen and enough of a java platform to run ebook readers, and then I found a text editor for the phone, and the Zaurus was doomed. The next time I actually tried to turn it on, no amount of hard-resetting, battery-replacing and fiddling would produce the merest flicker of life.

That phone was replaced with a much more powerful one running an open-standards operating system called Symbian with an open-standards interface called S60.

And that brings us neatly to my point, really, because we are now in the realm of smartphones which are more powerful than dedicated PDAs or even laptops of years gone, and one of the defining points of a smartphone is that you can upgrade it.

Which, of course, decent companies do on a regular basis - buy a top-end or even middle-range Nokia and you can confidently expect a new firmware version to bring speed, battery life and functionality improvements every other month for a year or more.

But some don't and, occasionally, others take up the slack.

And then there are those which invite it.

Google's Android operating system is Linux, customised. Which, to geeks and hackers, is like walking into a lion enclosure waving a chunk of dead goat over your head.

While companies pander to network operators and take special note of commercial agreements, hackers cheerfully take the code, rip out the rubbish, port across a cool toy from the next release, drop in something else to fix what everyone except the distributor thinks is a problem, and hey presto! You void your warranty but, frankly, the advantages outweigh that.

If you use an HTC device running Android, you really should be using Cyanogen's replacement ROMs.

Motorola managed to alienate a large community of current or potential users, me included, by preventing this practice on the non-USA Milestone.

It's healthy to have people like this keeping the big boys on their toys.

But let's return to Symbian. The platform, used by nearly everyone but championed by Nokia, who bought S60 and dominated the ecosystem to such an extent that they, in my amateur opinion, damaged its competitiveness, has its roots in 8-bit greyscale devices running for two weeks on a pair of AA batteries, and has been evolving healthily ever since, becoming the most resource-efficient, flexible and potentially powerful of all smartphone systems without, at the same time, really extending itself.

It can support network protocols that are still in the laboratory, but read the international press and you'd get the opinion it's doomed, dead in the water, rubbish, horrible to use, out-dated and slow, part of which relates to S60, which quite frankly is old and has always demanded a little effort to use it properly, and part of which is Nokia being parsimonious with hardware, relying on the efficiencies of Symbian to keep costs down while still providing class-leading functionality.

But then there's Samsung. Unlike Nokia, who cut back on hardware and then spend time and effort optimising the software, Samsung produce truly mighty devices and then just sort of... forget them.

The current king of Symbian, the most powerful and the most impressive, is not the all-singing N97 family but the one-piece Samsung i8910, variously known as Omnia HD (because it was the first phone able to shoot HD video) or, in Australia, the slightly nauseating HD Icon. Great 8MP camera, great stereo speakers taking up each end of the device, great big 3.7" capacitive toughened glass AMOLED screen, 600MHz processor with full graphics acceleration and oodles of RAM.

But the first release had crippling problems, and since then it's had, well, a couple of firmware updates, but not what you'd call love, care and attention from momma and papa in Korea. The C: drive, where the operating system lives, is so small that a couple of system updates fills it. And the discerning smartphone power-user these days demands updates, currency, movement, dammit!

Roll on HyperX. Yes, it's possible to produce custom firmwares for Symbian. Generally, this hasn't been needed, and it's presumably tricky enough that people haven't tried. But for a megaphone like the i8910, hoops were, as the saying goes, jumped through. And even people who normally run a mile from the innocent suggestion that hacking a phone to customise the home screen might not mean the end of the world, have dipped their toe in the water and declared themselves impressed.

I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung sell a few more i8910s thanks to HyperX. I may very well, in the next month or so, be one of them.

Raise your glasses to the hackers and the modders - we wouldn't have got this far without them.

Android versus Symbian. Fight!

While I am struggling with the question of whether I replace my current Symbian smartphone with a resistive touch-screen Symbian phone (N97 mini) or a capacitive touch-screen Android phone (Motorola Milestone), I thought it was about bloody time I made a list of vital functions and tried to find replacement Android software, before making the jump.

This is prompted by Steve Litchfield's flawed but interesting similar comparison on All About Symbian between the N97 and the Google Nexus One (that link points to part two, which includes the link to part one).

I'm not listing "top functions" here, I'm listing functions: Everything I use my phone for. Any replacement for the N95 has to be able to do everything I use it for, otherwise: No deal. I'm skipping little things, unless there's a big problem or there's a serious reason to prefer one platform over the other.

Also, I'm only really focusing on Nokias where Symbian is concerned, for two reasons - I know the most about their options, and their history with S60 (they own the company, which helps) gives them a decided edge over the likes of Samsung and Sony-Ericsson.

Address book

Thanks to tight Google integration - advantage Android

Calendar

See above - advantage Android

Email

See above - advantage Android

Camera

Built-in. Obviously, superior on Nokias given their traditional edge and Carl Zeiss optics, but with rapid software development I'm willing to risk a Motorola Milestone.

Advantage Symbian - not only Nokia, but Samsung and Sony-Ericsson are punching hard, here. Samsung's Android phones have been sub-par in the optics department so far, but SE may pull off something great.

Podcasts

Finally, the first interesting comparison. Nokia has the edge here for quite some time, with their own Podcast application managing, downloading, and playing podcasts on most of their phones. The third-party Escarpod, despite the fact that its apparent rapid development has not been associated with any actual new releases, has benefited other Symbian phones.

On Android: Google Listen, obviously. There have been reports of bad instability, and poor user documentation, but there is development. Also, Beyond Pod, My Pod, Doggcatcher ...

Advantage Android, only because Listen integrates with Reader, so you can manage podcast subscriptions easily on any desktop.

Loudspeakers

Nokias are variable - the N95 was brilliant, the 5800 better, the N97 family apparently not so.

HTCs are famously shit, but the Milestone was a pleasant surprise when I heard it briefly. That long gold strip of speaker doesn't seem to be only show.

This is probably a draw.

Ebook Reader

Symbian - Mobipocket Reader, which hasn't been developed since Amazon bought the company (hmmm... I wonder why not?), and QReader, which just hasn't been developed in a couple of years, and most promisingly, the Russian ZXReader (link through Google Translate).

Android - Aldiko. FBReader (which I first used years ago on a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500). AReader. Yep, promising enough.

Draw.

Audiobook Reader

More than just a music player, audiobook readers need to be able to remember exactly where they were in any given music file, and play even more formats.

Symbian - Nokia Audiobook, which is no longer developed and relies upon one specific format, with a desktop PC helper application, and PlatySoft's Scheherazade, which needs Python. Scheherazade goes one step further than just remember locations - it automatically rewinds a few seconds after every pause, helping you catch up to where you where last. Very nice, albeit with Windows 1.0-era interface non-graphics.

Android - Ambling, BookDroid. Good start!

Draw.

Text editor

Symbian: DEdit is fantastic.

Android: Text Edit, apparently. Kote-Lite. And bonus points for GDocs, allowing access to Google Docs documents via a download-edit-upload system.

I'll go with draw, here.

Twitter

Symbian: I bought Gravity, and it really is the premier Symbian/S60 application at the moment, also acting now as a Google Reader reader, and Facebook.

Android: Twidroid is the famous one. There are many others.

A simple numerical count would give Android the advantage here, with most of the Symbian ones crude or java or half-baked, but... damn, Gravity's good! Draw.

News - Google Reader

Symbian: See above - Gravity.

Android: Frankly, the web-based WebKit interface is great, but, yes, there are apps.

Draw.

Facebook

Symbian: Look, I use the web interface, I use Gravity's incomplete but largely sufficient feature. With a 5th Edition touch-screen device, there is an official app.

Android: Oh look, there's an official app.

Draw.

Foursquare

Not important - only just started using it, not sure I will continue to do so.

Symbian: Oh look, Gravity! Unfortunately, that means firing up my Twitter and Facebook access as well. Although I would usually take the advantage to check in on those, the extra data usage does add a little bit of cost and a little bit of time. If I had a huge data plan and a huge battery, I would leave Gravity running. But I don't expect either of those things.

Android: Being an American service, there's already an official app for Android, but not Symbian.

Advantage Android, for having a specialist app.

Mapping/GPS

Symbian: Nokia's latest partly-bullshit announcement of "free navigation for everyone", available on new phones, gives them a really serious advantage in off-line usage, provided you buy a new phone that isn't the original N97, which has (well, okay, mostly had) serious problems.

Android: Google Maps is free, of course, and does navigation for free, and does voice navigation in the USA and will no-doubt be expanded. But, you need a data connection, which means data costs and a signal - not always possible out in the fun bits of the world where the good biking roads are. However, there are commercial apps, and there are solutions like MapDroyd for offline map viewing.

Advantage Nokia/Symbian. You can't beat having on-device, offline maps and voice navigation from a specialist, giant GPS company which provided maps to GPS device manufacturers and was purchased by Nokia at a cost of about US$10billion.

Conclusion?

The actual communication functions are an on-paper win for the Google integration of Android, and a couple of extra native apps.

The camera on a Nokia is a known quantity, and superior.

Everything else appears to be evenly matched, with only my own experience with Symbian giving that platform a real edge.

But hey, isn't the fun of playing around with a new device half the fun of owning it?

Balanced against this, as well, is the fact that Symbian is going through a major shift with the introduction of Symbian^3 this year and Symbian ^4 soon after bringing about a complete binary incompatibility, making life interesting for developers and their consumers.

Oh, and one more thing: Although Symbian is the most sophisticated and advanced OS under the dated S60 UI, and although that dated S60 is still an extremely efficient way of getting things done after learning it, it's beginning to seriously bore me.

Android is just a more exciting platform at the moment.

Oooh, the shiny! Ooooooh, the SHINY!

This is a rambling tale of two superphones.

I'll use that term, obnoxious as I may usually find it, to highlight the fact the I am not talking about mere smartphones, with good hardware and maybe a specialisation or two, but the cream of the crop - two of the premier mobile devices on sale today.

From Finland, the N97 Mini. One of the best 5MP cameras on any mobile device, all the trimmings in the form of GPS, magnetometer, accelerometer, Bluetooth and high-speed everything, stereo FM transmitter, a big touch screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and the latest iteration of one of the most flexible, evolved and powerful mobile operating systems - Symbian with the S60 user interface. Oh, and it has full, free, offline GPS navigation, something which did nasty things to Garmin's share price. The N97 mini, slightly more compact than the N97, has a more useful shape, was launched with decent firmware, and has better internal memory configuration than the infamously disappointing but slowly improving-in-firmware N97. Not the absolute flagship for Symbian - the Samsung i8910 is still a bit more impressive, even without a keyboard or Nokia's S60 tweaks - but pretty damn near.

From America, the Motorola Milestone - the non-USA version of the Droid, with different radio hardware. 5MP camera, everything else, gorgeous screen, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and the newest and fastest-growing kid on the block, the open-source, Linux-based Android operating system from Google and, this being Google, an awful lot of functionality depending upon being online - maps, for example. The Milestone, when it was first released with Android 2.0, before Google trumped them with the HTC-built 2.1 Nexus One, was the absolute flagship of Androidness.

Problems? Well, the S60 5th Edition on the N97 Mini is a kludge, the screen is an unfashionable resistive (pressure sensitive), instead of capacitive (which uses the galvanic effect to measure the electrical conductivity of your skin), and Nokia have a not entirely proud history of using the efficiency strengths of Symbian to not entirely hide them skimping on CPU and RAM.

On the other hand, the Milestone has a suspect camera, and Android is still very much in development.

Now, I have toyed briefly with the Milestone, and find the interface to be more shiny than focused, but definitely cool and swish.

I have also handled an N97 mini, thanks to the fact that when I walked into the shop, they didn't have a fake display model.

The build quality was a sizeable step above my N95 (not really praise, that, let me start again...) The build quality was very good, with no wobbles anywhere, and the hinge on the keyboard rock-solid and snappy. The software environment is two evolutionary steps on from the ones I now know backwards, and the screen, although people complain about resistive screens being a pain to use after capacitive, seemed perfectly fine. The keyboard didn't seem too bad, needing only familiarity to be comfortable, and although I didn't agree with the default menu layout, that's nothing that a few minutes customising won't fix.

The Milestone is a very sexy black oblong indeed, from the clean and industrial school of design, well made and is of course very tightly integrated with all the Google services I already use.

Essentially, then, we have two comparable devices, with slightly different hardware philosophies, one with a software platform I know backwards and already have a solid set of tools for, and one which will be an exciting new adventure.

Symbian has a huge number of applications, some available via Nokia's stumbling Ovi Store, most straight from developer websites. Android has a rapidly growing marketplace and developer community.

Nokia consistently build the most comprehensively competent devices. Motorola put their all into the Milestone.

The N97 Mini keyboard looks a little finger-friendlier, the Milestone has a D-pad for precise cursor placement in text.

The N97 is an N-series Nokia and has an N-series camera with Carl Zeiss Optics. The Milestone doesn't.

So it's not exactly an easy choice.

And here's the three big factors:

The screen - One the one hand, the capacitive screen on the Milestone is more sensitive, and better/clearer/sharper (marginally!). On the other hand, it can't be operated in gloves, through plastic map pockets, or with fingers that are too wet/dry/cold. The N97 can be operated with anything you can push it with, including pens, glove fingers, and through water-proof covers. As I ride a bike, and may need it for GPS, or to control music, this last bit is rather important for me. Even if I get a holder, and it doesn't rain, I can't operate a capacitative screen while wearing gloves. Until someone introduces bullet-proof voice control that works with severe levels of background noise, that will continue to be a big issue for me. And no, I can't afford to buy a separate bike-specialist GPS system that acts as a control centre for phones and MP3 players, no matter how much they may impress me.

Support - Nokia have a great reputation for releasing half-finished firmwares, but a better one for steadily rolling out upgrades. Motorola still need to prove themselves, and the thriving third-party ROM scene that some devices enjoy is questionable for the Milestone.

Services back-end - I use Google, and although I don't trust them to ensure privacy, get everything right, make the best decisions or even not fuck up now and again, they know how to make services. Nokia, well... There are many reasons I don't use anything branded "Ovi" except the built-in mapping software, and the fact that I already use Google is not even very far up the list. Nokia I do not trust to build services at all. Although they have improved quite a lot lately, the web interface to Ovi Maps made me burst out laughing in incredulous disbelief last week when I had a quick look at it.

Now, for the less practical consideration: Android is more exciting. Symbian is a known quantity, very solid, with quirks and issues but something I know will give me a superbly functional device. But familiarity, unfortunately, breeds indifference. The touch aspects will be interesting, for a while, but Android is entirely new, and there will be so much to explore.

There is also the fact that Android is evolving fast, and may soon leave the Milestone behind if Motorola or the community don't keep up the firmware updates, while Symbian is rushing headlong towards Symbian^3, due out this year, which will see a progression towards a complete UI overhaul and a graphic toolkit change that will begin to introduce incompatibilities.

So there's not really much to pick between them on that front, I have to say.

Which brings me irrevocably back to the fact that picking between them is going to be a right bitch.

Price is not really an issue - the N97 Mini is $900-ish, the Milestone $700-ish (through Expansys, Motorola Australia went bankrupt), but go to eBay and you can find either device, claiming to be fully unlocked and Australian-compatible, for $600 plus extras thrown in, like car chargers and screen protectors.

It turns out that although I love having choices, I hate having to actually make one.