I’ve wanted to write for a while now a quick note on the usefulness of this device, namely because Amazon had the price down near $220 which was on par with an iPod Touch.  At $220, in September of 2010, I feel that this phone is still a pretty great bargain, and also relevant in the current market, depending on the circumstance.

Con: the bleeding edge

It’s clear to say that anyone who wants to be on the bleeding edge of technology might want to shy away from Symbian^1 at this point in time.  Android has a lot of clout, as does iOS; and while Symbian gets the job done, it’s certainly not working at the same level as these other platforms in terms of tech glam.  I’d argue that in many cases, though, that doesn’t particularly matter.  Android 2.2 is out now, as is iOS 4.. though many current Android devices aren’t even up to v2.2, and an iPhone this year will handily be beaten out by next July’s release.  It’s a bit of a losing cycle, unless you are willing to shell out loads of cash at regular intervals.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, though it’s important to keep it non-pathological, and to keep an eye on the bank account lest it quickly drip away.

To me, at least, Symbian signifies utility.  Battery life is generally quite good.  Games generally aren’t that good.  Stock systems, such as free turn by turn navigation, media capture, and phone call quality are all great.  Third-party apps which allow you to make farting sounds in various semi-tones; or to access web content which wasn’t adapted for the mobile web properly, aren’t quite as easy to find.

I do have a feeling that Qt is going to help launch Nokia forward; and Meego + Symbian^4 has promise in being able to get towards the fads that other manufacturers are cashing in now.  Again, however, I don’t think any of that particularly matters.  My 5800 doesn’t have that sky gazing app or the new game with 3d graphics.. though I can still get to that Wikipedia article in quick time, navigate to a friend’s house even sans a 3G connection, and keep in touch over any networks that I’ve joined.

Back to reality: subsidies and wallets and data hogs

At the end of the day, what matter most is how much cash is coming out of the wallet in order to help us live richer, not poorer, lives.  In the US, carrier subsidies are mostly king.  It’s rather insensible to drop more than $200 on a phone, when the Samsung Galaxy S is $200 on a two year contract, and AT&T offers $15/month data plans for 200MB.

Now here’s some math: take $15/month over the course of two years, and that comes up with $360.  $360 was previously the base premium which moved the data plan from $15/month to $30/month over a two year contract for the privilege of having a smartphone.  At that point, the $200 phone was realistically $560.

Today it’s possible to save that cost and keep the $200 phone nearer $200 by staying under 200MB/month (on AT&T).  I’d be interested in seeing the numbers on that, per user and perhaps per platform.. though I have doubts any of that will be released.

Good WiFi / 3G data management is quite important in this case; and in my case, being around WiFi I was able to cut out my data plan entirely with my Nokia device by entirely disabling the 3G connection from my SIM.  Calls and texts came through fine, though any bits and bytes were WiFi alone.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen this advertised for any platform, though I wish it were pushed more often.

My point here is that it’s important to add everything up.  A $200 contract phone can easily rocket up past $500 for a replacement.  That’s a rather significant discount, added in strictly because there’s that much money and more coming into their pockets via the monthly service payment.  Early termination fees are likewise rising up for similar reasons.

Conclusion

I don’t know that at this stage I’d personally recommend going into any Symbian^1 device for more than $240 unlocked.  There’s a lot of movement in the mobile space right now, and whatever is out today will be surpassed in a short number of months from now.  All this flash is rather interesting, though I’d like to stress the importance of stepping back and keeping an eye on the wallet with a broader perspective of the market as is.  It’s easy to get sucked into the hype, and sometimes harder to see the cheaper less sexy piece of electronics that might do everything you’ll need and more.

The process was simple; the benefits, well worth it.

There are a number of guides out there which can tell you the process, though this particular forum post from nokia5800forum.com served me particularly well.  Please check out that top post, though the long and the short is that you run one program which changes one bit of information on your phone; and from there you can use the Nokia Software Update software to move on up.  Ovi Suite for some reason didn’t see the update, ergo the need for NSU.. though all told it was a 30 minute exercise that I wish I had done months ago.

There wasn’t all that much wrong with v40 for the 5800, though v51 adds some significant improvements.  Namely, the phone is rather bit snappier and some clients are improved.  The Sync application allows for automated Ovi Syncing; the Music Player is updated; the camera operation is faster; and Web, the default browser, is rather significantly improved.  Casual users might deaden my enthusiasm a bit, though I’m personally quite impressed, and I would encourage anyone else who is out of warranty to go through the procedure and see for themselves.

One part which is absolute tops is the Mail for Exchange integration in my Nokia 5800.  MfE v3 (grabbed from the Ovi Store) is quite slick, certainly steps ahead of Nokia Messaging and the stock Nokia Email client.  Sync works beautifully, so far, and it was quite simple to set up.  There’s also support for setting vacation messages within the client itself, which I really particularly like.  No HTML support, though for me that’s a bit of a boon.  I don’t want images or Comic Sans in my email; I want to read some text, be able to access attachments, and be done.

Fast and easy

All in all, SlideIT works quite well.  For text messages, Jabber chat, email, and note taking, the slide-to-type mechanism is crazy fast, and easy on the joints, etc.  Prediction is quite good, and you can add in your own shortcuts and words to its dictionary.  It also falls back to a multi-tap type keyboard, for URLs or other text that doesn’t fit well into the predictive format.  I’m also running this on my Nokia 5800, which has a rather narrow and small resistive touch screen; and yet that’s hardly a problem.  As long as you get pretty close to the letters you want, the predictions will do the rest.

Via a very simple application, it’s also possible to easily switch between the default Nokia keyboard, and the SlideIT system.  I haven’t done any hard tests, though it doesn’t seem to be eating up gobs of RAM or other  system resources, either, which is positive.

In my usage, I’ve almost always used the horizontal keyboard.  It doesn’t look all that pretty, though it isn’t awful and covers at most half the screen.  You have two options for placement: at the bottom, or at the top.  In horizontal mode the keyboard takes up the entire screen, though it also wins by having a rather large area for the input preview, as compared with the paltry few lines in Nokia’s default landscape keyboard.

Compatibility / stability

On the whole, SlideIT is quite stable.  I have had a rare case where the default music player crashed when editing ID3 tags, though I wasn’t able to repeat the problem and I’m not entirely convinced it was SlideIT’s fault.

Sadly, there are some applications which refuse to use the SlideIT keyboard.  Gravity seems to resort back to the Nokia input no matter what; as does the official Qt-powered WordPress application.  I’m not sure why this is, though I suppose that in Gravity the messages cannot be all that long; and in WordPress, I can compose some text in the Notes application and then copy and paste.

One final trick is that when composing text messages, the character limits don’t show up when using the SlideIT keyboard, as they do with the Nokia default.  For SMS, which splits at 160 characters, the “solution” is to go to Options -> Objects, and realizing that the number of bytes is the number of characters.  160 and below is one message, etc.

Furthermore, the hardware keyboard in the N97 and similar devices are entirely disabled when using SlideIT, which I imagine would be rather frustrating for anyone with those devices.  It’s not clear if this will be fixed with future versions, though currently, buyer beware.

Conclusion

All told, SlideIT is, in my opinion, a steal at $3.  Even at $7, I’m very glad I made the purchase, though I can certainly see that it wouldn’t be for everyone.  I do hope that Dasur, the creators of this software, continue in its development, and potentially resolve what few issues still remain.  My fingers are happier, and typing is now that much less of a chore.

On the technical side, this is a huge step up.  Many sites are non-trivial, requiring a number of steps, and, more importantly, some reasonably obscure structures.  The tweet button also looks very nice: subtle, and entirely functional.

Twitter’s scope

The first competitor that comes to mind is Digg; yes, Facebook is also in the mix with its Like count, though the Digg count has been around for years now, and was, in my mind, the starter of the second run of website counters.   Furthermore, Digg launched its own shortening service more than a year ago; and as of today we now have t.co, Twitter’s crazy short domain name.

I’m not sure where Digg is headed, though they seem to be having a lot of trouble this past year.  I’m currently in the alpha, and I can’t say it either gets me excited or gets me to visit the page any more than I had.  I do hope they can pull it together, though with Tweets superseding Diggs, the future seems to be headed for the.. bird.

Then there’s Facebook, which has had its Like Button for months now.  Realistically, the Tweet Button is more in conversation with this particular element, albeit with JavaScript and HTML5 rather than a single URL with GET variables.  I’ve gotten less fond of Facebook by the year, and that Twitter is now again taking over this realm I’m much happier to teh bookface.

Future reach

This particular story is about aggregation, and about integration.  To me, the next step seems to be going back towards Digg: having some function whereby a URL can be prepended by t.co, for instance, which would start a Tweet with the appropriate URL link and title.

More importantly, being able to share content from mobile devices has to get easier, one way or another.  These systems tend towards that, though still depend on the particular site to implement the button.  Blogger had a “Blog this” toolbar button, and it seems we’ve forgotten this type of functionality in the mobile space.  There must be some web-standard way, too, which does not depend on a platform-dependent app/toolbar/addon/etc.  It’s rather meaningless without widespread adoption, which is why it’s more sensible to have this in the hands of an established community with a large userbase.. though I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see where this all leads.

I’ve been using the Sony Reader Library via Windows 7 for a while now, and today I found a new bug: while attempting to sync to my Reader, the application would hang on a particular book.  After trying a number of different things, I found out that it was not the book which was listed that was causing the problem, but the next book in the library.

For some reason, the link to the location of the book on disk was corrupted; it showed up just fine in the Reader Library, though clicking on the book resulted in an error saying that it could not locate the file.  I removed that book from the library, added it in again from its location on disk, and then the Sync operation worked without a hitch.

I haven’t had too many problems with the Reader Library software from Sony, though clearly what they need to do in this case is to alert the user that there is a problem, and what that problem is.   Hopefully this will be fixed at some point, though the pace of updates is currently very slow.

Today, however, Amazon revealed their third version of the 6″ Kindle, with a Wi-Fi only version for $140.  Notably, too, the battery is larger, reportedly lasting up to a month; and they also are packing in a new e-ink display which is supposed to garner better contrast and faster page turns.

DRM improved?

Perhaps I’m a bit late to the party, though I did find on Amazon’s website a certain section labeled “Downloading to Multiple Devices,” which reads in part:

Content purchased from the Kindle Store can be downloaded to your Kindle, or Kindle compatible device, as long as you’ve registered the device to the Amazon.com account that purchased the Kindle content. There is no limit on the number of times a title can be downloaded to a registered device, but there may be limits on the number of devices (usually 6) that can simultaneously use a single book.

That means you can download and read your books on any Kindle device you own as long you’ve registered each device to the Amazon.com account where your Kindle Library is stored.

Personally, this sounds like a big upgrade.  A year or so ago, it was the case that certain titles would only be allowed to be downloaded a certain number of times.  That meant that with multiple devices, generations, etc., the content which you paid for would no longer be yours. Tying the purchases to the account, and having the with “no limit” to the number of downloads sounds like a great step up.

Closing remarks

I personally have no reason to want to stray from my Reader.   It serves me well, is still great for my eyes, and still does have a touch screen which the Kindle series lacks.  Even so, it seems as though Amazon is slowly getting their act together, and I can see that the case may be that they win this e-book stuff in the end, especially if they keep good hardware at such low prices; as well as a reasonable system of DRM to allow your content to actually be your own.

Dell prefab machine went down, so it needs a replacement.  The only sane replacement system has a BIOS password which I don’t know, and a root password I also don’t know.  Only solution: use a root SSH key to access the system on a particular network (static hostname) in order to make required changes.  Boot bare, non-complete system with old, functioning IDE disk, since all other systems are SATA only, in order to find configuration details, including YP, LDAP, NFS, etc. settings.  Make appropriate changes on new system, and move back to a new static IP.  Find extra USB keyboard, since new machine has no PS/2 ports and the only PS/2 to USB adapter on hand wasn’t functional.  Take deep breath; because there was actually a lot more to the situation than the above, though it wouldn’t be good to put those parts on the Internets.

I’m impressed with myself that I got this all sorted out in less than 3 hours.. but good lord did it take some patience and innovative thinking.

This particular move is potentially a sad change, for those who were previously consuming more than 2GB of data per month on their data plan.  Indeed, for 3GB/month, it’s now $35/month; for 4GB, $45/month, etc.

Realistically, though, I think these changes are for the greater good.  $15/month, from $30/month, means $180/year in savings, assuming it’s possible to stick under the 200MB limit.  On a two year contract, that $180 instead becomes $360.  It’s easy to miss that number when the phone itself is somewhere under $200, a bit more than half of that two year difference.

Changing user habits

Fundamentally, this move is less about the savings which AT&T is trying to ply to its users, and much more about shifting user behavior for their networks.  I have an AT&T account in Boston, and the data network is rather slow; the voice is often unreliable and I get a variety of dropped calls.  Boston, however, seems to be faring much better than San Francisco and New York, where the density of mobile data users is much higher.

Hopefully, what this will signal is a shift towards more and more people using WiFi over their 3G connections.  Indeed, it was reported months ago at Ars Technica that it’s often the power-saving mechanisms of smart phone devices that are clogging the pipes.  Perhaps having the 3G data disabled more often, or relying on WiFi as a primary access method can alleviate these problems.  I’m sure that’s what AT&T is hoping, at least, and it’ll be interesting to see if any of that actually comes to fruition.

Small plug for Symbian

As anyone might know from my previous writings or other general ravings, I’m a big fan of Symbian.  I’m quite impressed by my Nokia 5800′s support for Destinations, which allows for rather granular access rules for managing WiFi and packet data connections.

I went for months with all wireless data disabled from my phone; it took a few clicks, and then there was no way for any application to access my AT&T wireless SIM for any kind of data.  Anything that needed to get online could connect via WiFi, and my wireless bill for data was $0/month.  I then went back to paying for my packet data connection, and still have the option to decide which connection I want to use on a per-application basis.

It’s a highly-configurable system; and aside from the “how do I use this?” factor for certain users, I wish it were more common among platforms.

Final note re: video

I’m not sure why video via packet data connections is as popular as it is.  My guess is that it’s a novel thing for users, and that the YouTube client on the iPhone has been around for years now.  Until LTE or other future mobile technologies come online, I don’t particularly see the point, and there’s a certain Pandora’s Box aspect to it that I wish it hadn’t came up.  In other words, what I’m saying is that large data usage isn’t all that cool, and systems such as the Twitter API which allows for data compression, or systems such as Opera Mini which reduce data throughput are pretty great technologies.  In a sense, the 200MB limit is a nod towards this direction, and it’ll be interesting to see how the market transforms as a result.

Yes, I said exposure, as though it were some sort of bacterial infection.  There’s a bunch of information on the Internet; the one that caught my eye in a big way was Dan Yoder’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook.  The EFF also has a number of great articles related to Facebook on its Deeplink Blogs related to Social Networks.  I highly encourage everyone visiting this page to dive deeper into these articles, and for those that come in the future.

Look, but don’t touch

My advice to those who aren’t already in Facebook is that it’s best to stay away.  You’ve done alright by this point without it, and there are enough snags that it’s worth keeping away.

For those already in the system, I’m not sure that deleting your account makes all that much sense.  In many ways there is a lot of concrete value in having a Facebook account, connected to your friends and family.

With that said, I do think it’s best to not put any more information into the system, and to remove what Likes you have left.  Think of Facebook more as a read-only system, not as read-write.

Alternatives

In truth, there are countless reasonable alternatives to each of Facebook’s features, and you can rather easily find the same value outside. This may be the time to start a blog, a website, a Twitter feed, a flickr or Picasa account; or, sans all that, to just go back to email as a primary mode of communication.

There are countless other options where you can get out what you put in, without the same threats of privacy or lock-in.  Don’t click on any of the Facebook ads, and if there are people whose content you really like, softly encourage them to put their efforts somewhere else.

I’m not particularly pushing Google, though their Data Liberation Front is a wonderful initiative which puts the power back towards the user.  WordPress, additionally, makes it easy to export all your content in a couple of clicks.  Twitter has an option of protecting your content from anyone beyond the list of those who you accept.

Final thoughts

In the end, I think the solution is by a number of small movements.  With my Facebook account, I may still “Like” someone’s status from time to time, though I’m done with Community Pages or Pages.  I’m no longer letting Facebook import my data from Netflix or Twitter.  I’m no longer going to use its messaging, instant messaging, status updates, notes, wall posts, etc.  It’s up to you to decide where you want to go with all of these decisions, though I certainly do recommend less over time rather than more, in terms of any kinds of Facebook interactions.

I personally feel that face time matters a hell of a lot.  It’s interesting, too, that Facebook is named as it is, when the most of a face that’s visible is a scaled down photograph.  What’s important about the face is in how we figure each other out, and how we pick up on facial cues; as the NYT article mentioned.

In the long term, humans are rather adaptable, as are most creatures.  We can deal with a great deal of a changes, both on the personal and on the larger social level.  In the process of that, however, there certainly are going to be adjustment periods in between, where we falter a bit in adapting to the new set of circumstances.  I almost wish that there was more discussion on the transitions, rather than good/bad polarizations; yet perhaps that hasn’t been studied enough thus far, or it doesn’t sell the story quite as well.

Clearly, access is another large part of the equation.  It’s easy to forget how many people don’t have computers of their own, or even phones of their own, in certain parts of the world.  SMS is certainly huge right now, because it allows for greater access.  With data rates and mobile plans structured the way they are, video chat is most likely going to be a long way off.