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.

Nokia N97 mini: SlideIT and LightNotePad

(Prescriptus: I finally fixed Blogger's formatting bizareness: There is a button for "remove formatting", which finally returns things to nice, simple HTML. I have no idea why, after I copied the text from a plain text file, it was messy, complicated and wrong HTML in the first place.)

Part of the challenge faced by smartphone manufacturers is how to get text from the user's mind onto the screen. The N97 mini has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but it's only really average in quality and sometimes you just can't be bothered.

There may also be better options.

So let's look at this, shall we: How do we get text into the phone, and where do we put it?

Text entry

Take the very shiny SlideIT keyboard.

Like the somehow more famous Swype, you draw a line connecting the letters of the word you want - in order, obviously - and the software works out what the word is. It's like supercharged predictive text. You can also tap out words and then add them to the dictionary from the keyboard instead of having to drop into another dialogue first.

And it works really well and I'm not sorry I paid for it - although I wish it had dropped in price before I paid up. There are paths that cover quite a lot of words and there are subtleties of usage which you learn over time to improve prediction, but you can also tap out letter-by-letter and be offered predictive suggestions as well as the option to add or delete that word from the dictionary. These blog posts were mostly written using SlideIt.

It is, indeed, very shiny and quite the most relaxed way of entering text I've ever used on a small screen. But its integration with the system leaves something to be desired.

When called it doesn't resize the window you're entering text into but floats over it instead, which inevitably means that it's going to end up covering the text, and quite quickly.

Luckily, there's a button to switch it between top and bottom of the screen, which is a functioning workaround but still feels like a last minute "Oops, we really should fix that!" kludge.

However when you switch the phone to landscape mode the SlideIT interface changes to have its own entry area and replaces the application itself in the same way the system keyboard does.

Unfortunately, although the keys are nice and big in this mode, it introduces an extremely annoying performance bug. The screen has a visible refresh rate. You have to wait for words to be drawn on screen before entering the next one, and gods help you if you want to change the system's selection - it deletes the old word one. Letter. At. A. Time, then draws the new one in.

The grammar model could also do with some work: it automatically capitalises the first word after a full stop, but not after exclamation marks. At least, not always. Generally, when it feels like it. 

It also insists upon capitalising the first letter of some text fields but not all, and refuses to let you capitalise in the middle of a word, both of which make entering decent passwords impossible. You have to disable it, even on the N97 family where the hardware keyboards don't work, by launching a separate application - you can't do it from within the keyboard interface itself.

It would have been nice if they had put the word "Symbian" in the dictionary for the Symbian version.

And one more thing - I CANNOT get it to give me "this". At first I thought I was just being a victim of a particularly common path, but then I found out that said word wasn't in the dictionary. "This," wasn't in the dictionary.

So, of course, I added it.

The next time I needed it, it had disappeared. I had to add it again. And again. It has become a saga in its own right.

The final problem is that it doesn't work with the two programs I most often need text entry in - Gravity the uber Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client, and LightNotepad the barely-adequate-but-best-choice text editor (see below). Which leaves me at the T9 entry. And that's really, really annoying.

On the the whole however it really is a very cool system, and really would make the difference between me living with a touch only device and me throttling someone.

Text Editors

As far as I'm concerned, every computing device needs a text editor. It's the ultimate basic tool. With a basic text editor you can write letters or emails away from a word processor or an email client, replace a note book, take phone numbers or addresses or other contact details easier and usually faster than using the device's contacts application, and even use it as an ebook reader for device agnostic formats like pain text or html.

So what's available on Symbian? Stuff all, actually.

The built-in Notes application can handle large quantities of text, but that's about it. There's no find, no undo (which has already made my life unpleasant) and this is how you get files in or out to work on them: 

• In: open in the built-in file manager (or select "Open with system" in Xplore), which thinks it's dealing with an email attachment and asks if you want to save it to Notes.
• Out: you can't "export", you have to "send". Yes, send via bluetooth, MMS or email, but not actually dump it to a text file on the phone's file system. Yes, you have to email it to yourself.

The only reason I am using Notes at all is that SlideIT doesn't work with most non-system software - when I've finished a chunk of text, I select the text on screen and copy it across to LightNotePad. Unless it's too much, and it doesn't all get copied at once. I have a sneaking suspicion this is due to SlideIt not a system limitation, but I keep forgetting to check.

Then there's DEdit. If you have a non-touch Symbian device, stop looking now. Jbak's text editor is incredibly powerful and has more features, keyboard shortcuts and options than I got close to using.

And it has one very, very useful feature. It can remember your location in a file, and go back there when you next open it.

This makes it an almost complete basic ebook reader if you're desperate, and is invaluable if you have large files.

And it doesn't work in Symbian with touch. Jbak's other invaluable tool the TaskMan task manager does but DEdit hasn't been updated in a while and I'm afraid he may have lost interest in it.

Or, probably more likely, it would be a huge effort to make all the keyboard hotkey combinations work on touch and he hasn't, or hasn't finished, or won't.

I was most upset when I found out I would have to search for a replacement.

Without paying slightly stupid sums of money for a mobile office suite, which would be complete overkill not to mention potentially less actually useful, I only really found one alternative - LightNotePad. The "light" part may refer to its inability to handle files greater than 200kb, which goes beyond short story territory into small novel.

It's fairly basic. It has a find function, a page down button but page up using the green key (which launches the phone dialer at the same time, whoops) and, very useful, the ability to set a bookmark for the file.

No undo, however, which is slightly annoying.

You may think I'm being a bit obsessive with this bookmarking feature but navigating through a file on a small screen can become tedious in the extreme and you can save yourself an enormous amount of time by not having to do so.

And besides: there's ebooks. (quick note to say; on Symbian, if you do want an ebook reader: ZXreader. It's a Russian site, so use Google Translate or something. I use Google Chrome or Chromium, which detect the non-English and offers to translate it for you, very seamless).

I started off being astonished there was such a small selection, but I'm forced to concede I shouldn't be. The number of people who want a text editor on a handheld device and don't want it to read Microsoft formats is, in all honesty, very, very limited.

Dammit.

Nokia N97 mini: Pity they stopped before finishing it

After two years and no little agonising (look back over this blog's archives if you really want to know) I ended up, thanks to a ridiculously cheap contract which is technically cheaper than buying it outright, but amortised over two years, I have a Nokia N97 mini (Nokia site).


The main reasons for buying, apart from the price, being that it has a good camera, OK speakers, mature OS that I already know, the almost certainty of regular firmware upgrades into the next year, and doesn't actually fall down on any criteria, whereas all other contenders fell down badly on at least one or two criteria. 


Not great, but pretty good everywhere.


And that's how it presents: Not the smoothest, fastest or prettiest, but consistently powerful and has so much functionality built in it's almost complete out of the box. 


But, me being me, I just have to start picking holes the moment I pick it up and turn it on, and have to keep finding holes the longer I use it. See my "Notes from the N95" series if you doubt my nit-picking tendencies.


I shall, for the moment, draw a veil over the time taken to refresh each screen or to change between portrait and landscape and back, because if I start mentioning that I may start crying, and I want to finish this.


Some of the Mini's problems are obvious, like not having a sunlight friendly transflective layer on the screen. But would you really expect charging to be a problem?


It is.

I have a powermonkey, a rubberised little beast of an external power source which made my infamously small-batteried N95 approximately twice as useful and became indispensable to me.

It doesn't work with the mini.

I was to discover that both the N97s are "notorious" for being "picky" with chargers, some people having trouble with genuine Nokia accessory chargers.

This does me not a happy bunny make.

 Powermonkey, however, are brilliant. I sent them an email saying "Got one, love it, doesn't work with my new mini, is this a known problem?" they sent an email back asking for my address so they could send me a new microUSB tip, in case that's the problem. No demand for proof of purchase, just "here, have a new tip, see if that works." Customer service win.

It's long postage from the UK to Australia, so I haven't received it yet.

I shall now mention the stereo ear buds that came in the box. They are, in all but one crucial respect, rather nice. In fact, much nicer than the set that came with my N95.

They have little rubber cups over them that fit really well in your ears and effectively isolate you from the outside world ( although my God does eating toast echo in your head), the cords seem stronger and the control is a very attractive unit, as opposed to the ugly chunk of the N95's unit. And when I plugged it in, I got a message saying to use the phone microphone. Not an actual full hands free, then?

Specific moments of fail (or, on twitter, #fail):

• system settings and email settings both appear as an application called " settings", which makes life interesting when you're trying to assign a shortcut and you have to choose from a text only list;
• in old S60 3rd Ed, settings dialogues that had multiple pages had visible tabs. In 5th, there are tiny little arrows instead, very easy to miss. Fail;
• this is more a design thing: when you select a text field to edit with the soft keyboard, what you get is the keyboard replacing the application you're in with its own sort of scratch buffer, instead of just popping up and resizing the application. You get the full amount of existing text and I suppose it neatly deals with the problem of badly designed applications, but it looks incredibly amateurish;
• The screen lock switch. Easy to use, but the cheapest and tackiest piece of design and manufacturing on the whole device. It actually rattles;
• it gives you a message to "unplug charger from wall to save power" whenever you unplug phone from charger. Annoying enough. But, it gives you the same message when you unplug a USB cable. Can't it check, and realise that would be a stupid message to give?
• there is no transflective layer on the screen, making it all but invisible in bright sunlight. News flash, Finns: some of us live in countries with bright sunlight, and would like to be able to use your phones outdoors. Particularly the rather excellent camera you provided, which can't be properly aimed if we can't see the screen;
• I think I have just diagnosed one of the worst offenders of lingering-even-after-dead RAM hogging. Nokia's own Podcaster. The one they declined to donate to Symbian. I wonder if I've now found out why? I was having hideous problems with running out of RAM to the point where the only way to get the image gallery to load was to reboot. And everything has improved suddenly, and the only change I can identify is that I switched to the development, official Symbian Podcatcher, which is also better designed and nicer to use;
• The home screen keeps crashing, and needing to reload. Please note, it has received two firmware updates since release, already, and it's still happening.

So, after all that, what is the single biggest thing the mini needed to be a truly great phone?

Double the RAM. It really is that simple. The screen is unnecessarily annoying in direct sunlight, the lock switch is a little cheap, it could have done with at least one more firmware generation before being released - possibly three.

But the single biggest issue with it is performance, and we all know that the single best way to improve performance of any computer is - more RAM.

It just runs out too damn easily. It has 128MB, and that is just not good enough. It has about 40MB free after booting, and that drops pretty quickly.

The benefits of the most mature and sophisticated multi-tasking mobile device operating system start to disappear when applications running in the background start closing down every time you run something interesting in the foreground - the HOME SCREEN keeps crashing, and that's just stupid.

If Nokia had given this thing 256MB, it would have made the WORLD of difference.

As it is, it feels like yet another own goal, nearly-there effort. And that bites when you're a customer trying to use it the way it could be used.


Next time: third-party software.

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.

Nokia really, seriously, desperately need to work on their sense of timing, the bastards

I was walking through my local shopping centre yesterday afternoon, hunting down a dry-cleaners I knew was there but I knew not where, when I passed the Crazy Johns shop.

What to my wondering eye should appear but a hastily printed flyer stapled to the front of their catalogue, advertising the immediate availability of the Nokia N97 Mini.

Yes, those callous, casually cruel bastards from Espoo have finally condescended to launch the Mini in Australia, months (it only feels like years) after the rest of the world.

The Mini is the N97 with most of the bugs fixed. Slightly smaller, it lacks the camera shutter cover (which sounds like a step backwards, except the original N97 design scratched its own lens) and the largely superfluous (it's a touch-screen!) directional D-pad next to the keyboard. It's comparable in size to my N95 - slightly slimmer, slightly taller, massively bigger screen, proper QWERTY keypad, hardware two generations further on, software at least two generations further on.

And now it's available in Australia.

It was, in fact, so new that the latest catalogue needed an update stapled to the front. It was, in fact, so new that the bloke I spoke to left work on Friday not knowing that it would be there when he arrived on Monday. It was so new that, as I type, it doesn't even appear on their website. It was so new that when I asked them if they had a demo model, he pulled out a box and turned on a proper one, because they didn't have one of those fake models they stick to the wall with elastic for customers to hold and say "Yes, that's a phone, with buttons." Which was nice.

You see, this is why I'm mad:

I'm paying $49/month to Vodafone. Thanks to Vodafone recently rejigging their bill (long overdue, I may add, and just did), I have been able to determine that the reason I need to pay $49, for $350 worth of "value", instead of $29, for $150 worth of "value", is data charges. I am being charged more for mobile data, which I use sparingly, than I am for SMS messages and calls.

Which means, I calculated, having been prompted to do so by my nearest and dearest getting an E71 on a $29 plan (for which I may yet forgive her), that I can replace $49/month with $29/month plus a $5/month data bundle.

Which makes $34, which is $15/month less than the two-year contract I have nearly reached the end of.

This makes me slightly sore but hey, two years ago I got an N95 for nothing, so I can't complain too much (N.B.: Some people say that it is actually, long-term, a better idea to buy a phone outright and go on the best month-to-month plan/prepaid for you. Quite apart from the fact that I couldn't have afforded an N95 when I got it - not in this case, it wasn't. I got the better of this deal).

However.

I could, at the same price, get an N97 Mini which is, let's be honest, worth at least twice as much as an N95 would be if were new, now.

Or, I could buy any phone I liked (a friend has an Android Motorola Milestone - touch-screen, sliding QWERTY, 5MP camera - which he will sell me for $600 when he gets a different model that works on Telstra's NextG HSDPA network), and pay less, per month.

You see, this is why I hate Nokia. Not because they've made such a very desirable piece of kit available cheaper than I had any right to expect, but because they've made my life difficult.

Plus, there's this:

$49/month, for 24 months, is $1176, which is not much more than the phone's worth.

$34/month, for 24 months, is $816. The difference, you will see immediately, is $360. Which is not what the Milestone would cost me, or indeed anything else capable of replacing an N95. Unless I get really lucky on eBay.

Yet, please note, I'm not sure I want another Symbian device. I may want to play with Android for a while. I may want to explore a different ecosystem that is not driven by a company I personally don't trust to build services or developer communities, no matter how competent and even brilliant they may be at designing the devices.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I have taken a deep and abiding dislike of Nokia, for this week.

Stay tuned for some musings and thoughts on the N97 Mini itself.

Are Nokia confused, or taking the piss?

Nokia unquestionably build some of the most comprehensively specc'd, durable and versatile mobile devices on the market.

They have no real sense of style, and they are in the uncomfortable position of having the most advanced, specialised, sophisticated operating system sitting under the most dated user interface (well, except for Windows Mobile. I keep forgetting that abortion exists), but if you buy a high-end Nokia you will lack for little, and even get a stream of firmware updates for at least the next year and a half.

However, they are showing a baffling inconsistency in their "portable computer" cant, and they have steadily driven me towards jumping ship to an immature Android, rather than put up with their frustrations any longer.

The thing is, they give you all the power needed to have an entire multimedia computer and journalism/blogging/art platform in the palm of your hand, and then forget about it when they build their own services.

Like their notoriously unreliable, buggy and unfinished launch firmwares, they're 95% serious about how powerful their own devices are.

The biggest example of this is in their support for installing software.

On any decent mobile computer, you can go to a website, browse it, read the details, download the installation file, install it, job done.

There is no question, here, on how "decent" Nokia's devices are: There's at least one blogger, in India I think, who doesn't own a PC and who updates and manages their blog entirely from their N-series Nokia.

So why can't I download Nokia's own software straight onto the device?

Example #1: Beta Labs

Nokia beta labs. In general, a great idea. A place for software to be trialled in the public sphere, for feedback and bug reports to be given, and for nice little utilities to be given an outing that would otherwise not make it.

In fact, one of my most-used programs, Nokia Audiobook Player, only ever existed on Beta Labs, and has been discontinued by the engineer responsible. (If anyone is looking for a more flexible audiobook player, that doesn't need everything to be converted into a different format, try Platysoft's Scheherazade).

Here is the first problem: Nokia recently, completely out of the blue, released a new firmware update for the N95, to v35. I waited a while, cautious, then went ahead and installed it, and in general it's been good - slightly improved free RAM, speed and stability.

As a result of which, I needed to reinstall most of my applications. This included the improved calculator, which was ripped out of the S40 dumb-phone platform and made available for phones based on the S60/Symbian smartphone platform because, frankly, the native calculator sucks.

I downloaded it, I installed it, and I got: "Invalid certificate error". WTF? Nokia's own application won't install on one of their phones? Did they perhaps forget something in the new v35 firmware?

But, moving on, here is problem the second, and here is the big but:

They recently redeveloped the website, and it was, in general, good.

But where, I ask you, is the download link?

For example, I tried Here and Now, which purports to provide details of nearby movies, events, etc., taking your location from reception tower IDs.

I could not find a download link in the entire mobile Beta Labs website. I had to go to the full size version for that. And fuck you too, sir.

Oh yes, and then there's this: "the client will not be available for download after the Beta Labs period ends. The client will be preinstalled in selected devices."

I see. So Nokia haven't learned from the backlash against removing Podcasting from the E-series devices, and they're determined to minimise customisation and make a mockery of the "portable computer" concept.

Example #2: Windows-only upgrading

Next up is Nokia's baffling insistence that if you don't use Windows, you don't count.

Although newer phones can do Over The Air (OTA) upgrading of firmwares, the older varieties relied upon Nokia PC Suite, which was only available for Windows and which didn't work under systems like Wine on Linux or Apple's OSX.

Even if you don't need a full firmware upgrade, you'll be stuck if you want to do something as simple as upgrade Maps.

Nokia Maps, now renamed Ovi Maps as Nokia tries to convince everyone that they're becoming a services company, has had some major upgrades over the years, culminating in the current 3.3 version which will do offline navigation for free.

(Note: Nokia announced it as "free for all!" but that's a bald-faced lie. It's available for five or six brand new devices, and even the N97 had to wait. It can be installed with varying degrees of success on other devices, but don't hold your breath for official support if your phone is more than about six months old. They're like that).

So how do you go about installing it? Well, you need Nokia Maps Loader installed on your PC.

No, despite the fact that this is a single program we're talking about, it's not available on their still-not-finished Ovi Store, and it can't be downloaded by itself.

You have to download Maps Updater, which, at 20MB, is nobody's friend.

But wait! There's more! It won't even install, let alone run, unless you have PC Suite installed.

Which, you guessed it, means even more download. I could go into how bad the reputation of PC Suite is for being huge, buggy, and capable of slowing your computer to a crawl, but I might cry.

So: Fuck you, Nokia.

Even if you do get through all this, and get Maps updated on your device, you will find out that the actual maps themselves aren't included. You will need a network connection to download them as needed, after which they will be available for future usage.

You may as well use Google Maps for Mobile instead.

Actually, you can pre-install all the map files using, you guessed it, your PC. But the device will not, itself, upon being run for the first time, say "Do you want to download all the maps for your region/country?" which, considering that it's possible for your PC to do it, should be possible.

No. It won't. Not even, apparently, the absolute latest and greatest devices. No, they're still stuck with relying upon a laptop which could quite easily cost less than they do.

Does this make sense? Is it sensible? Does it represent a commitment to truly delivering a complete mobile experience?

No to all of the above.

What it is, is incredibly, incredibly, annoying.

What I want from a smartphone is what I want from a computer - a good hardware platform and an open software platform that supports me while I customise it into the best tool I can.

Nokia makes the hardware, alright, but although Symbian is an open-standards platform, Nokia isn't. Podcasting is just one case in point where their product managers have annoyed their customers, with no apparent way around it except to go elsewhere - in this case, to Escarpod which, thanks to Nokia not donating the source of Podcasting to Symbian, is being submitted as an official app, and best of luck to them.

On the other hand, there is a thriving developer community building up around Android, which is itself a platform ripe for development and customisation, as people like Cyanogen are demonstrating.

Now, if only Android had a great camera phone...

For those of you who have a Symbian phone and get driven to a rage by things like having to sign applications before installation, or have a Linux or Mac computer and need to do backups, go to Symbianism.blogspot.com. It sadly hasn't been updated in a while, but it's still the best collection for resources on how to liberate what should never have been locked.

How you use a tool determines what tool you use, which determines how you use it...

I am a big fan of the fact (I'm not even going to call it a principle, concept or idea: It's a fact) that usage determines need.

I'm talking about mobile phones here, but any technology will do.

I, for example, am extremely unlikely to ever buy an iPhone, because recent usage of my  N95 has shown that I need a better camera, stereo speakers, a hardware keyboard, the ability to use it wearing gloves, and a better application finding system than scrolling through multiple screens. Oh, and multi-tasking.

I would also dearly love a QWERTY keyboard, and so when Nokia announced that the E71s replacement, the E72, would have a 5MP camera, I thought Yes!

However...

I have recently got my hands on a BlueAnt Interphone, a bluetooth hands-free phone and intercom system for motorbikes.

I have been using this to play MP3s on the road, thanks to the N95, a power socket newly attached to the bike, and a car charger.

This is where life gets more complicated.

You see, the  N95 introduced a "dual-slider" design, which simply means that as well as the screen sliding up to reveal the number pad, it slides down (and the screen flips to landscape) to reveal four media control buttons: back, play/pause, stop, and forwards.

The thing is, if I put my phone in the map pocket of my tank bag, I have it in front of me, visible through the plastic map window, and, more importantly, I can press the media buttons through the plastic, provided I'm wearing light-weight gloves (which I don't, these days, it being winter here in sunny Queensland, and the morning temperatures getting perilously close to the freezing point of water at sea level).

I am almost certain that I couldn't do the same thing, accurately, with the E72s oh-so-very-compact and optical D-pad.

Which puts me in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, the natural next phone for me is therefore the N86, which is extremely nice and an improvement over the N95 in every way.

On the other hand, I would so very much like a QWERTY!

Damn it, my largely academic desires have become complicated again.

"Predictive text" that actually is.

(This has been updated, because I was an idiot. For some reason, I attributed the software to the wrong company. Ah, the power of Twitter and a company that knows how to use it.)

Some time ago, I got unduly optimistic and went looking for a proper predictive text solution for S60, assuming that somebody had implemented one.

What I found was a couple of commercial betas and vague promises.

But there was one company, Keypoint Technologies, who are Scottish and therefore clever (seriously, have you any idea how many inventions pivotal to the creation of the modern world that Scotland can claim credit for?), that were making a trial of their solution available.

It was called Adaptxt, and I promptly went and tried it, and wrote of my experiences here, just barely over a year ago. It was ... Beta. Very, very beta.

Times move on, however, and programmers keep on working, and Adaptxt became a more mature beta, and it's time to give it another go.

So I am.

How it works, in a nutshell, is that instead of just working out possible options based upon what you've already entered and displaying that much of the first-choice possible word, it shows the rest of that word as well and lets you select it before actually finishing entering it. Which can save you considerable keypresses and, theoretically, time.

In addition, it displays the other possibilities in a pop-up menu, which allows the user to scroll down for a different option. Very nice.

The final piece of prediction is that it can attempt to predict several words in advance, theoretically (there's that word again) allowing you to finish an entire sentence by hitting Select > Select > Select ...

Does it work?

Straight away, my main complaints with the earlier model - not working well with dedit, in which text editor I spend rather a lot of my time - has been resolved. It works just as well in dedit as it does anywhere else. Notice I didn't say "perfectly", but I'll get to that.

There are two major problems left, both of which are hugely annoying.

Problem number one, the easier one to explain, is that it is a truly enormous RAM hog. On my N95, it can use up to about 10MB, which is not only startling for a text entry system, but also highly unpleasant on a phone which has about 20MB free if you're lucky. I opened a support ticket about that, and they assure me that they're working on it.

Problem number two is a little more subtle. You can't chose between the normal case options of Abc (first letter capital, then lower case), ABC (all capitals) and of course abc (all lower case). No, it decides. This is great with "I", and of course it knows about sentence starts, but otherwise ...

Names are generally okay, because they're usually in the dictionary with a capital first letter. But suppose you want to put a capital inside quotation marks, or a regular word is being used as a proper noun, or indeed anything else? How do you force it to enter what you want it to?

There are two ways: enter a new word into the dictionary, or: start a new line, enter the desired word, then go back and join the lines up again.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, highly annoying.

They claim, however, that they're working on that, as well. I have my fingers crossed.

What else doesn't quite work? Well, for me, the look-ahead prediction, which is claimed to learn from what you enter. This is probably, to be perfectly honest, because I will write anything and everything - twitter updates, this blog post, random fiction, emails - all on this phone, which makes predicting what I will type next difficult for me, let alone a tiny little piece of software.

What's brilliant? The dictionary is, get this, user-editable! Learn from this, Nokia!

Is it faster? Well ... Maybe. I haven't actually done any speed tests, but the time taken to examine the provided options, enter more text, scroll, select... Makes it feel no faster than using full T9. This, however, needs to be considered in light of my rather impressive T9 speed. The real advantage of Adaptxt is the key presses it saves, which may not save time but certainly saves energy, and is a lot more relaxing.

Unfortunately, they have, for a while, removed the menu entry which shows you how many key presses it's saved you, how many first-choice options you use, how many second-choice... etc. Which is not useful, but is very cool to know.

Will I continue to use it? Yes. It feels very relaxing, which is an odd reason to have, but it works for me. I will, however, be extremely disappointed if they don't release a new beta, and soon, with some significant updates in memory management and grammar options.

Would I pay for it when it comes out of beta?

That, I'm afraid, will remain to seen.

Notes from the N95: v6

Another, quite short, collection of random notes from the new smartphone, composed on the phone:

AppManager really needs to be able to filter by first letter, at the very least. It's so crude it looks as though they threw it together as a stop-gap and forgot to go back and fix it. "Broken gets fixed, mediocre lasts forever."

No facility to set appointments, memos or to-dos to repeat at set intervals, or to copy. What the fuck? Four years ago, my T630 could do that!

Massive credit, still, for letting you select the previous entry in the T9 options.

How can it lose a wi-fi interface it was using only two seconds ago, and have to search for it again? Repeatedly? This is REALLY ANNOYING.

If I send a txt to a number not in my phonebook, there is no way to then select that txt, and save the number. God dammit.

This is just plain stupid: the N95 has a dual slide mechanism, much hyped at release and re-used in just about every sliding Nokia since, that puts a line of audio player controls - stop, play/pause and forwards and backwards - at the top of the phone, accessed when you push the screen down. This also activates landscape mode. The thing is, although they apparently work as controls in the N-gage (what? Exactly) gaming application, they are otherwise stubbornly linked to the built-in media player. Which means that if you're in a third-party music player, or Nokia Audiobook player, which is a beta application written by a Nokia engineer who realised that if wanted a proper audiobook player he was going to have to write it himself, all that happens when you press one of the control buttons is that the media player launches. This is annoying enough, but what is totally ridiculous is that they don't work in the Voice Recorder application either, and that's part of the standard phone suite, not an add-on! Insanely, insanely, frustrating.

Essential free software installations:

• Jbak TaskMan - The control panel that S60 should have built-in.
• Active File - what the built-in file manager should be.
• Dedit - Text editor - the world's most basic and useful utility. From the same programmer as TaskMan. Clever man, this Russian.
  
• ShoZu - jack of all trades, master of none, but free and comprehensive. Just make sure it's what you want - it's too powerful to just use randomly.
  
• Google maps - less annoying than Nokia Maps, has a neat non-GPS location finding trick using network towers (imperfect, but surprisingly good), and you don't need a subscription to get basic directions, but does use data.
• Free iSMS - bringing Palm's threaded SMS to Symbian, by way of iPhone aesthetics.
• Mobipocket Reader. Because it's just about the only option available.
  

I won't put in Opera Mini, because S60 is good and doesn't need replacing, unlike the built-in file manager. Opera is a nice adjunct, not an essential. N.B.: Most of the controls in S60 Web aren't documented. You'll need to do some googling.

Updated: Why feature-rich social networking clients for smartphones aren't really there yet.

(Edited to update: See below)

There is a beguiling seductiveness to the thought that, on a modern smartphone where the menu structure may be a little hectic already, you may be able to install just one multi-function client for all your social networking needs.

Have a care, however, should one of these clients try to attract your gaze with a come-hither look.

Jacks of all trades are frequently, as everybody who has ever paid attention to trite sayings well knows, not masters of any.

I have, or have had, ShoZu, Widsets and Snaptu installed, to cover the fairly limited set of Facebook, Twitter and Blogger. I have NOT given these an exhaustive workout, but by the time I'm finished you should see why that's not necessary for me to make my point.

The first problem is that Facebook, according to the folks at ShoZu when I asked them about this, does not release an API for commenting on items, so you're stuck with reading other people's updates, and can't say anything.

Another thing: I demand speed. I don't run programs all day so that I can glance at them when I feel like it, so they have to be fast to start. I don't have an unlimited data plan and, with an N95, I don't have an unlimited battery, either.

Let's get Widsets out of the way first, because I did. It's shiny, yes, but for a program with official support from Nokia, it's a slow pig to start, login and be available. The Facebook widget is pretty, and nice. The Twitter widget, however, doesn't work at all and, if the comments on the websites when I tried it were anything to go by, it hadn't been working for a while now. So, piss off.

Then there's Snaptu. It's java, starts much faster than Widsets, and is very clean and pretty. It's also a network client proper: only the one piece of software is installed on the phone, which makes the footprint small and means that when the program loads, it's available to use and isn't still trying to load data in the background. But it has one fatal flaw, even next to the inability to make comments on Facebook. It can't open links from Twitter. So, goodbye.

Then, and anybody who knows anything about social networking on mobiles will have been waiting for me to get here, there's ShoZu. The swiss-army knife of social networking clients, ShoZu makes available more sites than I knew about, or even wanted to know about. And it's the only Twitter client I've seen (at least, among the free ones) that lets you view individual feeds, not just the whole lot, so if there's someone you really don't want to miss out on reading, you don't have to.

However: ShoZu, being the most powerful of the lot, has the most problems. To start with, it refuses to die. Oh, sure, it has an option for "Run in background" which can be set to "no", but it doesn't bloody work. I've caught the naughty little fucker using my data connection while my back has been turned. ShoZu is a major reason I have KillMe installed.

And then there's the main problem - it's SLOW. Not to start, that's commendably fast, but to load content. It will sit while loading updates for EVERYTHING, and give you absolutely no notice of how fast it's going. Oh sure, it will put a star next to updated feeds, but only within Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever, and it sometimes gets that wrong.

Oh, and I can't seem to get the Blogger posting to work.

Edit: I forgot another issue. Because ShoZu has just so much to download every time it starts up, if all you want to do is load, fire off a tweet and close down (tweet by SMS doesn't seem to be available in Australia, unless I've missed something), it can take a fair old time for the twit to be sent, while it sits in a queue. At least, that's my experience. Another reason why it's only a great tool is you run it in the background, all the time.

To be honest, it would be a great tool if I wanted to run it all the time, (it can even geotag photos if your phone has GPS) or if I didn' have any feeds to download and only wanted to upload to Twitter, Flikr, Picassaweb, or whatever, but I do and I can't afford to, which means it's not the tool for me. It's simply too annoying.

So what am I left with? Well, Facebook's mobile site is actually pretty good, and Twibble, particularly the latest, very new version, makes a great little java Twitter client, because the Twitter mobile website is absolutely pathetic. There are other Twitter clients, and there are even mobile websites which reproduce Twitter, more powerfully.

There is of course a bigger problem here, quite apart from Facebook's mean approach to application developers. Those who try to do all things, must do all things, and spend just as much time on each of them. This is no less relevant in making software than it is in building cars, and sets the bar just as high for programs such as Widsets, where the widgets seem to be mainly developed by different individuals, as it does for programs like ShoZu, where the development effort appears to be much more coordinated and centralised.

Jack-of-all-trade programs also face the problem that if one component is sub-par, witness the Twitter widget not working, you can't just swap it for another, the way you can for a built-up collection of different tools.

They're a nice idea, but not quite there yet.