I’m looking at Switching from Cingular Blue (the old AT&T side) since customer service has become pretty hostile for those that won’t pay to convert over to Cingular Orange. Since Cingular is burning their bridge with me pretty fast, that really only leaves T-mobile for GSM service in my area. For any of you on T-Mobile in the US (especially those in the Silicon Valley area), can you answer a question or two for me?

What do you think of “T-MobileWeb?” Is it really $6/month for unlimited data? That seems remarkably lower than the competition. How has the throughput been?

How has the whole T-Mobile experience been for you? good customer service? good overall coverage? good roaming partners?

EDIT:

Thanks for the comments! I had remembered their being some funkiness with Flash Lite and T-mobile. Alessandro filled me in:

Ciao Justin,

the $4.99/mo is just WAP browsing, if you develope Flash Lite app that access the internet they will block you. You need the $19.99 unlimited internet access. Also this plan is both for EDGE/GPRS depending on which phone do you have.

Alessandro

Conclusion: At $20/month for the data service that I would need, and another charge for the SMS/MMS my total would be about the same. My co-workers that have used T-Mobile warn me that coverage on Yahoo!’s campus is also less than optimal. So, it looks like I am going to just have to suck it up, pay my $20 and convert from Cingular Blue to Cingular Orange. At least I don’t have a locked phone any more.

While in Hong Kong for Macromedia MAX, Greater China, I picked up one of the Nokia N90s. The new line of Nokia’s cost a pretty penny, but are not just another small increment on the 6000 series. There are many, many new elements, that I have not seen previously on a Nokia phone. Some are great, others have left me a bit annoyed (well, more than a bit).

I have had six Nokia phones and over the years I have collected more than my fair share of Nokia chargers. This has been one of the things I have liked best about Nokia, consistency. On the flip side consistency has also surfaced as slow product evolution and lack of innovation. With the N90, they have gone in directions like the clam-shell design, hi-res screen, and pivoting everything, but at the same time they have violated some of their key consistent points like a new charger tip, and a different screen size.

Deltas:

The most notable difference on the phone is immediate. It is a clam-shell/flip design. There are certainly other Nokia clam-shells including the Nokia 6260 (remarkably similar), but they are rare enough to be worth mentioning anyways ;).

The camera is 2MP, and is on a pivoting section at the hinge of the clam-shell pointing off to the side of the camera, not pointing out the back like every other camera. The camera uses Zeiss optics, and has some nice new features like aperture speed controls.

There is a second LCD screen that is for info display on the outside. This is fairly common now for clam-shells, but is all part of the new clam-shell model. On the external screen you can get caller info, apply profiles and go into camera mode. You can also set a screensaver and control the brightness for this screen.

There is a second joystick and a new Action Button on the side that are primarily used when the phone is closed or in camera mode. When the phone is not in camera mode, the action button activates voice commands (a good features I’ve missed from other phone brands). In camera mode you use the action key to focus by pressing down halfway and to shoot by fully pressing.

The power connector is new, and a bit smaller. You either have to buy a handful of dongles for all of your old chargers ($7-$10USD each), or new chargers ($20 each). Also, if you use a USB charger, the tip is also not going to fit. While this tip is new, you will pretty much be stuck with the dongle :(. Luckily you do get one dongle in addition to your charger in the box.

The USB port has a cover now. I passionately hate the Nokia USB PC software, so that port is meaningless to me anyways. After a week though, the cover has ridden up a bit and I have found my self re-seating it a couple of times.

Once you open the phone, the changes continue. The main screen is occupies the same real estate as the other series 60 phones, but the screen resolution has been increased by doubling the pixels on each axis (previous 176×208, now 352×416. New applications and vector Flash files look amazing in hi-res, but old icons, and old applications look blurry when pixel doubled. if you have ever run an LCD screen at not optimal resolution, you know what the experience looks like.

The upper portion of the clam-shell can also pivot, much like the camera section. When pivoted, the screen goes into landscape mode, and there are even new soft key that are only usable when in this mode (the regular soft keys are on the bottom portion of the clam and are often inaccessible when in the pivoted mode. This mode is only used for images and video though. pivoting the upper clam-shell will take you into the camera by default unless you are in the gallery application. If you are in on a call, going into this mode will automatically shift the audio from the earpiece to the main speaker.

Under the various covers there have also been some interesting changes. The N90, like the 6680 has a door on the right side for swapping the MMC card (half-size SD Cards. available up to 1GB right now). For the 6680,opening that door immediately disengaged the card and all applications on the phone were shut down. On the N90, you can choose to swap memory cards through the profile manager. Opening and closing that door have no software effect any more.

In the Battery area, the major difference is that the sim card does not sit under the battery any more. It is now inserted at an angle into a slot right next to the battery. I guess theoretically you could now swap sim cards without powering down the device, though I don’t know how recommended that is. The battery seems the same as before, but strangely, I got two batteries with my phone this time.

my opinions of these changes

Good

The hi-res screen is large and beautiful, and really makes the partnership with Macromedia all the more valuable. My Flash content built for the low-res screens overall transitioned beautifully, with only some suffering in the bitmaps.

The camera takes lovely pictures that are much richer than my previous cell phone picts. The auto Flash seems to trigger more intelligently than on my 6680 which almost never fired. I also get some on-phone image manipulation tools like cropping and filters.

When everything is pivoted, the phone feels more like a camcorder. It is pretty slick to experience. You hold the base of the phone sideways almost like a gun handle with the action button now faced towards you. The upper part of the clam can now pivot to let you move the phone anywhere and angle the screen to your comfort. And lastly, you can then vertically pivot the camera to pan up or down.

When open the phone feels enormous (in a good way) but when closed is almost exactly the size of my 6680. I’m a big person, so generally when I hold a cell phone to my ear, the bottom of the phone is still several inches up my cheek from my mouth. With the N90, I have the earpiece at my ear and the microphone is actually an inch directly out in front of my mouth. I have to imagine that this should allow for a microphone that can be less sensitive and not pick up as much sound from the surroundings. I still need to ask people I call as I call from noisier spots.

Bad:

That twisty pivot camera is cool, but it is a major mixed blessing. Both of the pivots swivel very easily–too easily. No matter if the camera is closed and the keys are locked, if the thing pivots, the camera is on and sucking battery power :(. Since I keep my phone in my pocket, it happens all too frequently. It is awkward to constantly pat down my pocket to “close my camera.” *cough*

Anyhoo, the more awkward element is when I am talking on the phone. If the top part of the clam-shell pivots, the phone goes into hands-free mode. I think it is trying to go to a video call, but strangely, pivoting back does not put the audio back to the earpiece though! To switch back to the earpiece you have to press one of the softkeys. However, if you have another call on the line, the switch between the lines softkey is the same key and overrides the switch back to the earpiece.

I discovered this when I called someone, got their voicemail, then had them call back mid-voicemail recording, knocked the earpiece while looking at the caller ID and got the whole thing on the external speaker. By the time I was done, it was only a miracle I hadn’t hung up on my friend and had a bit of a hissy fit ;).

Thinking though of the earpiece, it is actually strangely positioned. I love the fact that the phone when open is huge, but the earpiece is positioned as high up as possible. When I hold the phone naturally to my ear I can’t hear anything. I have to drop the phone about half an inch. This is a whiny gripe I realize, but I do keep answering the phone and hearing nothing until I remember.

Ugly:

The ugly category is for the bugs that are already starting to rear their ugly heads.

I seem to be getting the exact reverse battery issue from my 6680. Now my battery is overly optimistic. Last night my phone registered full battery strength before the beginning of the Harry Potter movie. Like magic two and a half hours later my phone was completely depleted. Not quite ready to believe that my phone was affected by the evil of the deatheaters, I was at a bit of a loss. No warnings, no nothing. When I got home and hooked it up to the charger we were back in business. The phone also reported back in about an hour that it was fully charged. I’m sooo not convinced.

Trying to configure my phone, I discovered that my phone has been prone to crashing and re-starting as I navigate the options of some of the system configuration applications. Not much more to say about it. Just crash :).

Truthfully I think there is more, but man, this is a loooong post and I want to hear your stories

It is time to say goodbye to the 6600 series of Nokia. I enviously drooled over people’s 6600’s. I have fond memories of the 6620 on which I built my first Flash Lite apps. The 6630 seemed a popular choice around the office, but the love affair ended with the 6680. It was a gift, so I have bitten my tongue more than once about it because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. As it goes off to the pasture to maybe be brought back out for presentations, I do want to share my issues and thoughts about the device.

For most people that have the 6680 or the 6681 (US version), it has been the best of the series. For me though it was exceptionally buggy. While I like to stay current on my phones, I still probably wouldn’t have bought my new phone had the 6680 been less of a nuisance. But for the bugs, the phone design was fantastic. For the record, my bugs were:

Nokia 6680 bugs

• The memory card corrupted two weeks after getting phone. Lost lots of picts, ringtones and pre-installed apps.
• The Phone either random restarts or shuts down without warning (even with a locked keypad in my pocket).
• The battery level was not polled properly. It would show drain appropriately, but when I charged the phone I would have to restart it in order for it to reflect the actually remaining charge.
• The network time setting would periodically just change my time. Until I figured out what was going on I overslept once, and missed an appointment another time because I was completely off on timing. I live in the GMT-8 time zone. The phone would get the local time in GMT-8 and for some reason would display the correct time. Later it would re-poll and get the time again but think it was expressed in GMT 0 so it would subtract 8 hours off the correct time.

By far the most annoying was the battery issue. You charge your phone a lot and to have to restart after each charge is highly frustrating. I’d often look at the battery meter and not believe it so I would end up restarting just to be on the safe side.

The clock issue was pretty important to me since I use my phone as my alarm and HAVE to be able to rely on it. I don’t know if the problem was the cell, the carrier or the phone, but considering I had issues in British Columbia, Alberta and California, the phone is the common element.

The issues didn’t all happen at once either. The memory card issue happened about 4 days after I got it, the restarts are just random, the battery issue started about a month and a half after getting the phone and the time issues started just shortly after Daylight Savings Time changeover.

All of this adds up to a pretty unreliable experience and I have been getting increasingly fed up with the phone. While in Asia I played with one of Bill Perry’s phones and decided that it was the one for me. The Nokia N90 was just too interesting looking and I really do prefer a clam-shell design, so I was hooked. I was planning to look around online for the phone when I got home, but right there in the Hong Kong Airport, there is was sitting prominently as the feature display in an electronics store. Of course this meant I had an extra carry-on, but that’s ok

I’m about done with my initial review of the Nokia N90 (after using it for one week) and will post it shortly. It is already very very long and likely to get longer before the end! Hopefully some of you will find it useful.

Looking for the U10 cradle (sold separately unfortunately), I did see that Best Buy has the 1GB U10 for $175, normally $250. The 512MB is also on sale, but I noticed that it has already sold out!

BTW, I forgot to mention Johnathan Duran’s Macromedia Developer Center article on creating a game for the U10.

Have a happy Turkey Day!

I just got an iriver U10, the media (music, video, flash) player with the quirky but fun user interface where you actually press the front plate of the device to move through the UI. The UI is actually a Flash Lite 1.1 SWF and is customizable in lots of interesting ways (both official and unofficial).

For those unfamiliar with the device, go to the U10 demo page and click experience>>simulation to interact with a emulated device (since the UI is Flash the can pretty much just use the same SWF on the site as on the device). Just keep in mind that the version you see in your browser is much bigger than the actual device. The screen resolution is much higher on the device, so it has to be displayed larger on the monitor to show the same number of pixels. The device screen is 4.5 cm wide but is 320 pixels wide (the screen is quarter VGA).

Flashified:
The U10 comes with a variety of Flash Lite 1.1 games pre-installed on it from some of the emerging Flash Lite development studios. I did think it was interesting that the category on the main menu did say “Flash Games” rather than just “Games.” I’ve never thought of consumers really recognizing Flash as a brand for their gaming experiences. A game is evaluated by how good it is and the circumstances under which you play it (console, cell phone, browser, PC, etc.). Any way you put it though, the games are clever, pretty, and certainly stand out over the pitiful attempts at games on the iPod.

Audio:
So with “pitiful” and “iPod” in the same sentence, let’s quickly move to talking about what the device is really for, the audio. I’m blown away by the U10. There is way more bass than the iPod which I never knew I was missing until plugging my headphones into the U10. I don’t even have the bass boost turned on and I am completely content. There is also plenty of power to the audio. I’m currently playing a song at 23/40 volume, and it will drown anything else out. I have to go much higher on my iPod to get to this point.

I can play MP3s, and also windows media files like those used by the non-iTunes music services like Yahoo! Music Engine. But to move beyond a 1:1 relationship with my iPod, the U10 has some other nifty features like an FM tuner, a voice recorder (amazing quality), internal recording capability for the FM tuner and for the line in jack (when attached to the cradle).

Device:

The device is very fun with its unique form factor, and really cute cradle (picture at the top). It is really small, and really light. You can even hang it on your work badge. I’ve been very pleased at the battery life, and some of the small things that the device does to hint and make things more intuitive.

My only issues with the device though are the memory (the U10 is sold as either 512 Mb or 1 Gb). That is consistent with the other Iriver devices, but pales in comparison to the iPod storage sizes. Unlike my iPod, I’m certainly not going to be carrying every song I’ve ever owned around with me at all times. Also, the USB cable looks EXACTLY like my HP USB cable for my Pocket PC. I was initially excited thinking that I could just charge it with the same zip-linq cable as I use for my iPaq, but alas HP and Iriver have both added little notches so that the cables will just not fit into each others device. perhaps they aren’t the exact same cable, but I can’t think of a reason they each shouldn’t be using some standard anyways.

More to come as I use it more and make some content for the device.

All I can say is “wow!” I had a really great time. The conferences were a lot bigger than I expected (MAX Korea was about 1/3 the size of Anaheim’s MAX conference), and I met a lot of great people, both attendees and many of the speakers that i know of, but have not actually met before. If you’d like to see some of the pictures from my trip, check out my Flickr Set.

The flight was no where near as bad as I thought it would be. Singapore air is definitely a nice airline! I was in coach, but with 60 movies and 100 TV shows and video games on demand, I was able to keep myself occupied. After 13 hrs, I got to the Seoul airport and all nervousness mentioned in my previous post evaporated. At that point I was too busy looking at everything. I loved comparing design, gadgets, and even the differences in the posted public warnings. Pretty much everything is labeled in English (If you’ve been to Canada, the amount of English is similar to what you would find for French in Canada (non-french parts). I had no trouble getting around whatsoever.

The first day of the conference was good. I went to the keynote and a few sessions that day. My presentation was the next day, so I did have some free time to myself. I was planning on going to Yahoo! that day, but I didn’t really have that much time, so I poked around the area for a while. Part of the time was spent in the large department store Shensegae which was filled with all manner of interesting things (mostly western), but the appliances section, and grocery store were definitely interesting and different.

In the evening, Macromedia took the speakers out to an amazing Korean dinner. There were so many different things on the table that it is easier to set the table in the kitchen and bring it out fully set! There was also dancers and singers to keep us entertained, but I think the most amusing of the groups was a highly traditional looking music group that played western music like “unchained melody.”

Later in the evening, several of us went out for drinks and to see more of the city. When the group ordered a pitcher of beer at a local restaurant, this is what arrived. It had bubbling dry ice and LEDs. It was quite the production :).

The following day was my session on “Advanced Flash Lite Development” featuring the Flickr Search that Jesse Wolfe and I worked on. By the time I started speaking though I had removed about half my slides from Anaheim (I gave a similar presentation there). Unlike in California, there were two simultaneous interpreters translating my talk into Korea. I’d say about 75% of the audience was listening to that rather than the English version. It was quite a shock to all of us just how slowly we needed to speak to allow for the translation time! I took a couple of courses on Spanish simultaneous interpreting, so it was a novel experience to be on the speaking side of that equation.

From there, a group of us went back to the Airport to catch our flight to Hong Kong for the next conference.

Some random fun(ny) things from Korea:

I’ve been trying to get my hands on a Samsung MMI phone that runs Flash Lite as the UI for quite a while. Wouldn’t you know that when I went to the cell phone rental counter at the airport, I would get an MMI phone It is quite beautiful. I love my Nokia phones, but I might go to Samsung if those phones become available in the US at some point.

I fell in love with the Korean writing system. Korean is amazingly intuitive. I picked up a book at the store on the writing and pronunciation and read it during my flight to Hong Kong. By the time we landed four hours later I was actually able to sound out some basics. While I still need to work on memorizing the vowels, the consonants are written to make linguistically related sounds have similar characters, and many are actually indications of how to position your tongue (according to the book — but it does seem to bear out for about half the consonants). If you want to read more about Korean, take a look here.

Orange Juice was a funny thing to order with breakfast. my breakfast entree was around $11, but the OJ was $13. It was good though

Holy bejesus, airports in Asia are enormous (at least Incheon and Hong Kong Airport). You can buy anything in them, and they go on and on and on. O’hare now just seems “quaint.”