The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

Symbian is toast, at least for Nokia’s future top of the range devices. Maemo is the new Symbian. First used in Nokia’s internet tablet in 2005, the brand new N900 runs the latest Maemo incarnation. Looks very sleek, and with Mozilla as its web browsing technology, should be yum. Like just about every other new mobile OS, e.g. Palm WebOS, iPhone OS, etc, Maemo is also based on Linux. The latter may not have succeeded in dislodging Microsoft Windows from its pc throne, but it is a clear winner in the mobile world.

Ditching Symbian on its high-end phones is probably a good move on Nokia’s part. Symbian is solid, but old, and still can’t probably handle rich text format HTML emails. It also falls short in many other areas such as web browsing and on-line video. The latest Symbian adaption for Nokia touchscreen phones like the N97 and Express Music falls way short of the competition in terms of its user interface. Anyone that has used either of these phones will know about the confusing way in which you have to double-press in some places and single-press in others.

The best feature of the N900 is arguably its 3.5 inch 16 million colours touchscreen. But why another resistive touchscreen Nokia? It is time for a multi-touch capacitive screen. Everyone else has one, even Winmobile! I can understand that the Fins don’t want to take their gloves off, but it is warm where I am. No gloves here.

My Palm Pre downloaded the new 1.3.1 version of WebOS over the air, installed itself, and the phone still works. Pretty impressive given that the download was nearly 130MB and that the phone did the download by itself in the background. It took 2 days. Hard to know exactly how much the download cost, but probably not much less ZAR130.

1.3.1 contains a long list of improvements, one of them the ability to manually configure the mobile network settings for MMS. This is great as I should be able to send and receive MMS messages once I have configured it. The settings for my mobile network MTN are:

• APN : myMTN
• Username: mtnmms
• Password: mtnmms
• MMSC: http://mms.mtn.co.za/mms/wapenc
• MMS Proxy: 196.011.240.241:8080

The Amazon Kindle is the best thing since the smartphone. There is nothing more convenient than deciding 11pm on a Saturday night that you must have a certain book, and 5 minutes later you are actually reading it on your Kindle.

f you don’t have a Kindle yet, buy one. If you have one, then you will be interested to hear that Amazon has released a software update for your ebook reader. It will be sent over-the-air to your Kindle if you are in the US or if you own one of the new international versions, otherwise you can download it from Amazon to your pc and zap to the Kindle via usb. The update comes with two important improvements:

1. Improved battery life. A improvement of 85% was mentioned somewhere. I am already getting about 2 weeks on one battery charge (I’m not using the wireless connection), so am expecting 3-4 weeks with the update.
2. PDF support. I have been getting all my books from Amazon, but with the new update will be able to get books from anywhere and load them on my Kindle, as long as I can get them in PDF. Nice very nice.

Yes I know this blog is called Get Smart(phone), but the Kindle is very smart and I have one, so I had to mention this story. The Kindle and its current and future rivals such as B&N’s Nook, are game changers. They are going to do for/to books what ipods and digital music downloading have done to cds.

If you live in South Africa like I do, you can now buy an international version Kindle directly from Amazon for around $300 + shipping or from a local on-line shop such as Wantitall for ZAR3000. The new PDF ability means that you will be able to get lots of books, especially the classics, completely free from many websites, but if you want to buy the latest bestseller from Amazon you will pay in the region of $10/ZAR75. Assuming an average price of ZAR200 for books printed on paper, by the time you have read 24 $10 ebooks you will have made back the money spent on buying the Kindle. Starting to look like a no-brainer to me.

The movers and shakers in 2005:

And in 2009…..

I bought O2 German-version GSM Palm Pre a couple of weeks ago from my trusty importer and on-line cellphone retailer Ca-Cellular www.cacell.co.za. The keyboard layout is qwertz not qwerty, but I have been following the Palm Pre’s journey with interest for a long time so wasn’t going to be put off by one misplaced key. Been a Palm fan since way back; still take my Treo 650 out of its box from time to time; and have high hopes of WebOS and the Palm Pre/Pixi.

Have been using the Pre for a couple of weeks now, and have mixed feelings about it. More about that later, but I was just wondering if my Pre could be the first one in use in Africa? Wonder how I could find out.