Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Of course this is very subjective, but some of these tips might be useful for you too.

I was in a pickle recently trying to select the best phone to buy that would be more modern and advanced than my current one and that would be the best fit for my application development efforts. I need two phones for that, so I can send messages between them etc. Also, my older phone has lots of bugs in the MIDP implementation, so it's often hard to determine whether I made a mistake or the phone did.

I looked at the following phones, where I list the platforms supported:

Sony Ericsson K800
* CLDC 1.1 / MIDP 2.0

Sony Ericsson M600
* CLDC 1.1 / MIDP 2.0
* CDC 1.0 / Personal Profile
* Symbian OS / UIQ 3.0

Nokia E61
* CLDC 1.1 / MIDP 2.0
* Symbian OS / Series 60 3.0

I went for the M600 based on the following:
* It's got support for CDC, and I need to evaluate both Symbian OS and CDC for future projects (primarily corporate). Nokia supports CDC only on Series 80 devices at the moment.
* It's very small and slick and can be used as an everyday phone, even though it's really a smartphone with alphanumeric keypad. It's way smaller than the P series phones by Sony Ericsson, and the keypad is arguably better too. The E61 is also larger.
* Programming for UIQ and Series 60 is very similar.
* 3 Sweden currently offers K800 and M600, but not E61, with the "3Bomben Friends" sub that gives me free voice, SMS and MMS within 3's network. As my other phone is also using a 3 sub, I don't have to pay for the mountains of messages I will send while developing and testing (it's topping at 3000 messages though). The Friends sub is clearly not intended for this use, but I don't mind.
* Both M600 and E61 are real smartphones with larger high resolution displays and tons of office applications, including document viewers etc, so I will probably use the M600 as my base phone.
* The touch screen enables me to develop applications that benefit from it.

I'm not saying M600 is ideal for all developers:
* K800 has a camera (and a pretty good one), so if you develop multimedia applications in only MIDP then of course K800, or one of the many S60 phones with camera, is a much better choice.
* E61 has a slightly more advanced MIDP support, including Location, that I regret M600 doesn't have, and the Series 60 dialect of Symbian OS is way more prevalent than UIQ. It also has Wi-Fi. See note about Bluetooth PAN below.

Regarding the lack of Location support: I'm surprised it's taking so long to get Location in Java, considering it's so critical for many mobile services like mobile search, maps, media tagging etc. GPS is not needed for mobile search: In cities where the distance between base stations is short Location would still be quite useful.

The phone will arrive in a day or two, so I might write some more about it then. The software has been upgraded at least once since the phone was released, so I hope it will be smooth sailing in terms of using it.

The reviews I've read have been positive, even though some considers the keypad to be suspect with its left/center/right-press function.

Here are a few M600 reviews:
All About Symbian - Sony Ericsson M600i
Review GSM/UMTS smartphone Sony Ericsson M600
Sony Ericsson M600 QWERTY Smart Phone Revealed
Shiny Review: Sony Ericsson M600
My-Symbian.com - Sony Ericsson M600i review


Update 20060906 1.30 am:

I changed from "3Bomben 59" to "3Bomben Friends" on my existing sub too, so now I can effectively use my two phones as walkie-talkies, by handing over one of the phones to someone I will confer with for a longer time, unless they also have "3Bomben Friends". There's a start fee of $.10 per call, but after that it's completely free (up to 50 hours a month, which is a lot). Interesting concept, and a scenario 3 probably didn't consider. The only real cost is $1.40/MB data. As Java applications are so small I have so far not been able to generate much data traffic. When I start using this for Outlook e-mail and such I know the data cost will become quite noticeable, but still manageable, considering overall the phone cost is now a small expense compared to everything else. I cancelled my fixed line sub due to this, so it will from now on be mobile telephony and VoIP for me. I already use Skype a lot for business communication. Especially internationally of course.

It's possible to set the M600 up for Bluetooth PAN, which means I can communicate data wirelessly and cost-free at least in-house. I have a "100 meter" Bluetooth USB dongle, so I can that way emulate a WLAN at home or at the office.