The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

Probably flowing out of Nokia’s deal with Microsoft, Nokia has started the rebranding of its Ovi products (store, music, maps, etc) to Nokia Services. Good move I say. I never got the Ovi brand, and the company’s brand value has always been in the name Nokia.

The HTC HD2 remains one of the favourities for fiddling with. The phone launched in late 2009 as a WinMo device, with world beating hardware specs. I think it was the first 1GHz device at the time, as well as having the biggest screen at 4.3inches. Now, a year and a half later, its hardware capabilities are still very good.

Now, if you want to make your HD2 sing with the latest version of Android, namely 2.3 aka Gingerbread (Android 3.0 is out I know but is for tablets), then read on. The modding community has been working on various Android incarnations for the HD2, many of which I have experimented with, but for the first time now I think the state of the art is good enough to be used on a permanent basis. Forget about WinMo. With Android Gingerbread your HD2 will be as good, if not better, than the new HTC Desire HD. The latter is essentially an Android remake of the HD2, but runs Android 2.2 only, ha ha.

Take a deep breath and then follow these steps:

1. Backup and format the sd card in your phone.

2. Install Hard SPL (SPL3) a custom bootloader available on XDA. HSPL is required to update the radio and flash custom ROMs to the phone. It is safe to install and can be uninstalled by rerunning the program setup file.

3. Next update to a new radio. Radios and installation instructions can be found at XDA. Be sure to use a compatible version. 2.15.50.14 is a good one.

4. Install MAGLDR bootloader. MAGLDR serves as a second bootloader, which runs after HSPL, and can be used to Flash Nandroid ROMs to the HD2. Download MAGLDR from the forums at XDA.

5. To install Gingerbread on the HD2 first download any of the recent Gingerbread Nandroid ROMs from the XDA HD2 Android NAND Development forum to a PC and extract it. I recommend NexusHD2-Gingerbread V2.5 [Android2.3.3][Kernel: tytung_r8.3].Then perform a soft reset while holding down the power off button until the MAGLDR boot menu appears. Select the “USB Flasher” option and connect the HD2 to a PC using a USB cable. Once the USB connection is established run the Android installer EXE file that came with the NAND ROM to complete the installation.

And there you have it. You are now running Android Gingerbread, recently released by Google for use on the Google Nexus S. RIP Windows Mobile.

You will have to tweak some of the phone settings to get the best battery life. I use the following:

1. SetCPU changes the phone’s CPU clock speed automatically. Get the paid version from the Android Market. If you live in a country that has not yet been enabled by Google for paid apps, check this post of mine on how to enable paid apps. Pay with your credit card. Otherwise google the free version.

2. Ultimate Juice Defender, also available from the Market in paid and free guises, will switch various juice sucking features off and on, e.g. data connection, wifi.

3. Reduce the number of accounts that sync automatically, under Settings -> Accounts, or even disable automatic background sync if you are happy to manually sync your emails.

4. Set the radio to 2g only under Settings -> Mobile Networks

5. Don’t use a live wallpaper

If you have been following my blog you know that I have not posted in a long time. Partly because I got a bit bored with what was happening in the mobile world. In addition I have been using an iPhone 4 and that is so good that I started thinking we should simply all use iPhones. Why bother using anything else? There is no Android phone available today that really matches let alone surpasses, the iPhone. But that was yesterday. Today is a new day. Today is my first day with the new Nokia E7.

Yes, I know Symbian is not nearly as good as iOS or Android, and yes I know I have slagged off the N8 in previous posts. But man the E7 is an awesome piece of hardware. Forget about Apple, forget about HTC, forget about Samsung, forget about Motorola, forget about SonyE. Those okes build boring phones. Nokia’s hardware design rules. The hardware is so good that it makes up for the software. And I don’t know what Nokia has done to achieve it, but Symbian runs and feels better on the E7 than the N8.

I bought mine at Incredible Connection (yes it is freely available in SA) and as soon as the sales person removed the phone from its box, I desired it. It is large and sleek and shiny in an understated classy way thanks to the aluminium casing. The edges are round and smooth, which makes a welcome change from the sharp iPhone 4 edges. The 4 inch screen, an AMOLED capacitive touch screen with Nokia’s ClearBlack technology, is beautifully bright with deep colours, and the 4 inch size hits the sweet spot for me. The 3-5 inches of the N8 is too small for me, ditto for the iPhone’s screen. You can get a 4.3 inch screen on some Androids these days but that results in too big a phone for my liking. 4 inches is perfect. You will notice the difference when you read a PDF using the bundled Adobe PDF reader. On the E7 you can read a page without having to scroll from left to right, while on the N8 the smaller screen size means you have to zoom and scroll, which makes it a very frustrating experience.

The E7 has 5 stylish buttons, the usual power button on the top, a volume rocker switch on the right, the menu key on the front face, a camera button and the screen lock slider button on the left. The slider button has gained cool features. You can associate specific phone functions with the switch, and if you slide and hold it down for a second or so, the phone’s camera flash light turns on and you can use the phone as a flashlight. Pretty cool.

The camera is flush with the phone, unlike the N8′s one which sticks out. It is an 8MP affair, versus the N8′s 12MP, but 8MP is still industry leading compared with the iPhone and most Androids out there, which tend to use 5MP. The E7 takes good pictures, having a flash is great, and the dedicated camera button is the cherry on top. I see there is some photo and video editing software on the phone also.

When you have finished drooling over the beautifully crafted exterior of the E7, slide it open. Maybe slide is not the right expression, it more likes, jumps open. The screen mechanism is spring loaded and the screen opens up at an angle. The mechanism feels very well made and solid. So does the keyboard it reveals. Nokia has outdone themselves with this keyboard. It is large with 4 rows and well spaced keys. It even has arrow buttons to move the cursor around with. Typing on this phone is joy, and yes I know you can type fast on the iPhone, but you do not, can not, get the physical tactile pleasure offered up by the E7′s keyboard.

And then there is the HDMI output. Very cool. Lets you plug your phone into your TV and play movies from your phone directly on your TV. Of course it is a drag having to copy the movie on to the phone first, so Nokia equipped this phone (and the N8) with USB-on-the-go technology. So don’t copy the movie on to the phone, simply stick a USB memory stick containing the movie into the phone and off you go. When I tried the HDMI movie playing business on the N8 I wasn’t that impressed as the N8 didn’t support enough video formats to my liking, e.g. it couldn’t handle XViD (which my Samsung Galaxy S could by the way). Hopefully the E7′s can do better.

Some other cool hardware features on the E7 include a SIM card slot in the side, non-removable battery, no back panel to slide off, compass, accelerometer, and of course it is a quad band phone, which means it will work pretty much everywhere in the world, even in the US. And of course as you would expect, call quality is good.

Ok, so I guess I can’t ignore the elephant in the room any longer. I have to say something about the software on the phone. As you probably know Nokia has ditched Symbian as its top-end OS in favour of Windows Phone 7, and you can see why. Don’t get me wrong, Symbian is not a bad phone OS – it even has proper multi-tasking – but the interface is old and clunky compared with iOS and Android. And there are few apps, a situation that will worsen now that Nokia has ditched Symbian. For example using the iPhone I can control my Crestron home automation system using an app from Crestron, I can control all the TVs in my house using an app called Plugplayer which connects DLNA compatible media sources to media players. The list goes on. Try finding similar apps that will run on the Nokia. Good luck.

I can’t wait for Nokia to bring out an E7 running Microsoft Windows Phone 7. It will be fantastic. In the meantime, I am using the Symbian E7. I will run the Crestron and Plugplayer apps on my iPad and use my iPhone as an iPod.

HP is clearly meaning business with WebOS and Palm. A few days ago they launched the TouchPad, Palm Pre3 and Palm Veer, all running WebOS! The TouchPad is HP’s iPad competitor, the Pre 3 is the follow-up to the Pre and Pre 2, and the Veer is a tiny version of the Pre 3. Check the pictures below. Initial impressions are good. WebOS looks great on the tablet and the phones.

To top it off HP simultaneously announced they are going to ship all of their PCs with WebOS pre-installed! Instead of Windows! Bad news for Microsoft, as HP is one of the largest pc manufacturers in the world and has been a Windows faithful for many years. But good news for WebOS, as more devices means more incentive for developers to build apps for WebOS. To make development for the various WebOS devices easy, HP also announced a new developer toolkit which will enable development of WebOS apps that are screen resolution agnostic, i.e. the same app will work on WebOS phones, tablets and PCs. Way to go HP.

So anyway my new Motorola Droid Pro arrived just over a week ago. My initial impressions were a mixed bag. I liked the relatively low weight, when compared with my HTC G2/Desire Z, and liked not having to flip the phone into landscape mode in order to type on the keyboard, but wasn’t impressed by the screen, which apart from being as small as the screen on the Palm Pre, was not as bright and clear as I expected. The keys were also surprisingly difficult to type on. They are small and have ridges that are unlike other keypads I have experienced. Guess this will get better as I get used to the phone.

I wasn’t surprised when the phone prompted me for a code to unlock it. My supplier, CA-Cellular, warned me that the phone was locked to Verizon, and that they will email me the unlock code. When the code arrived a day later, I was however surprised when entering it failed to unlock the phone. A few email exchanges later I received another code from my supplier, which also didn’t work. I then bought my own unlock codes through Swiftunlocks, but knew I had a problem when these guys sent me the same two codes I had received from my supplier previously. With the aid of Google I soon discovered that the anal suits at Verizon have implemented a sophisticated locking mechanism that changes the lock codes continuously over the air. So apparently the only way to get the code is to phone Verizon and ask pretty please. Except they won’t give it to you if you are not a Verizon customer, which of course I am not, living in South Africa. So I had to send my phone back to my supplier, and am now waiting to see if they succeed in unlocking it. It has been more than a week, so am getting worried…

Don’t know about you, but I think these restrictive business practices are really irritating, out of sync with customer sentiments, and am convinced that they don’t result in the outcomes the providers are seeking. Why lock the phone to your network? If the customer wants to buy a contract from a particular network he will. And a willing customer is the best kind. You know why I don’t have an iPhone 4? Because once I have replaced my normal sim with a micro sim, it makes it that much harder to use another phone again. Apple clearly went the micro sim route as a way to lock in their customers. This kind of strategy can work in the short term, and possibly even for a long time, but at some point it will back fire. Look at Egypt. Mubarak’s customers have had enough of being locked into a single party dictatorship, even if it has been benevolent to a degree. They want freedom of choice of their service provide aka government. Take note Verizon, and Apple. Upshot of all this is that I am still using my HTC G2, and am still happy with it. I know I have called it boring in a previous post, but it is a good phone. Excellent keyboard, fast processor, Android 2.2. Everything works well on it, except that it loses cellphone signal from time to time in places where other phones don’t.

It has been more than a month since my last post. Sorry for that. Moved house, been on holiday, kitesurfed, now I am back. Not that much has changed on the smartphone front during this time. Still waiting on the release of Nokia’s new qwerty slider the E7, although having had the N8 for a while now, I doubt that the addition of a physical qwerty will be enough. Compared to iOS and Android, Symbian^3 is pretty pathetic, with or without a keyboard. O, and I see there are a couple of Windows Phone7 phones available in SA. Too early to buy a Windows phone I think. Not nearly enough apps and developer support for Microsoft’s new phone platform.

I have also been using an HTC Desire Z aka TMobile G2 for a month or so now, so expect some comments in future posts about this phone. Or maybe not. It is good, runs Android 2.2 and has excellent qwerty keyboard, but is somewhat boring. So maybe I won’t have much to say about it.

Now the Droid Pro looks a lot more interesting. I haven’t got one in my hands yet, but hopefully will soon. It is the first Android phone with a candy bar form factor and fixed portrait qwerty keyboard a-la Blackberry. Motorola is clearly taking aim at Blackberry with this phone, especially when you look at the activesync enterprise features loaded on the phone.

The Pro has a 1GHz processor so I expect it to be very nippy. Screen is a bit small for my liking at 3.1 inches but that is the trade-off to get the fixed qwerty I guess. Should be great for one handed use, and will also be great to not have to flip the phone landscape every time you need the keyboard.

It is also a true quad band phone with support for GSM and CDMA. So you can use it in the USA (CDMA) and the rest of the world (GSM).

Will let you know what I think of this phone soon as I get it.

Having used the N8 for the past week I have figured out that there are three reasons, and only three, why you should consider getting Nokia’s new flagship phone. Of course if you already have an N8 you will know what I am talking about.

I raved about the hardware in a previous post, so I am not going to repeat mysefl. Suffice to say that it is a beautifully made phone.

But lets look at the reasons why you should not get one, or why, after only a week, I am no longer using my N8 (It is for sale by the way):

Symbian^3

The latest version of Symbian is better than the previous ones, but is still light years behind the competition (Android and iOS). The user interface is not nearly as slick and polished. It is still clunky in places. You still have to double-press in places and single-press in others. The browser still does not wrap the text to fit the screen when you zoom in. And it is not completely compatible with pre-Symbian^3 versions of third party software. Nor is it completely stable. I had lots of crashes, and after one of the restarts some rapidly changing blue numbers appeared in the top right corner of my screen, and stubbornly refused to leave. Resetting to factory settings got rid of it temporarily only. Eventually I gave up trying to remove the numbers which was ok while holding the phone in portrait mode as the numbers were in the top right corner, but when I flipped to the phone to landscape, the numbers appeared slap bang in the middle of the screen. I got the impression that the N8′s software needed more work.

I hope that MeeGo is going to finally get Nokia’s software to the level of Android and iOS, because Symbian ain’t gonna do it.

Text input

This is one phone that cries out for a qwerty. Yes, I know the E7 is coming. The on-screen keyboard entry is painful. Not nearly in the league of Android or iOS. If you get an N8 you absolutely have to get Swype. There isn’t a version available for the N8, but there is one for the C7. So, login to Ovi store on your PC, set your device to C7, locate Swype, then send the link to your phone. Unfortunately Swype only works in landscape mode on the N8, and the Swype keyboard takes too long to appear when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape, but it is still the best way to enter text.

Software on the phone

I think I have already complained about this in a previous post, but some of the software on the phone is plain crap. Especially the Quickoffice Adobe Reader. I found it impossible to read documents with this software. It is too slow to zoom in or out or scroll, and it doesn’t support kinetic scrolling, which means you have to somehow grab hold of the very thin scroll bars on the side of the image and try to drag them. Good luck with that. And then Quickoffice wanted money from me before it would let me view a Word document. What’s with that?

Social networking

Twittering and Facebooking on older Nokia phones like the N97, was rubbish. You had to resort to third party apps such as Gravity. Symbian^3′s social networking is a major improvement on that. There is now a single app that serves up Twitter and Facebook, which is good, but it provides no notifications of incoming tweets for example. Compare this with any one of a hundred free Twitter apps on the Android market, who will all provide you with background updates and notification, all displayed in the notification bar at the top of the screen on an Android phone. Different topic, but notifications in Symbian^3 is an inconsistent mishmash affair.

Calendar

Yes I know not many N8 users will be interested to know that the calendar does not have the ability to store/display meeting participants. E7 users may be interested in this though.

Nokia Mail

The new mail app is much better than the old built-in messaging app (the latter is still used for SMSs). It serves up reasonable looking HTML format emails, but I had on-going problems in downloading attachments. Sometimes the phone would wait minutes before starting a download.

OK, ok enough already. If you still want an N8, here are the three reasons to consider one:

Camera

The camera kicks ass with 12MP and a Carl Zeiss lens. Half-press the dedicated camera button and it locks the focus. It takes beautiful pictures and it takes them quickly. The only thing it lacks is optical zoom, but then so does every other cellphone camera, except for a nasty LG phone I saw the other day.

HDMI output

You can plug this phone straight into your HDMI equipped TV, which means you can watch videos and even youtube on your tv, streamed from your phone. This is seriously cool. The N8 is home entertainment system! Pity it doesn’t support all the popular video formats. It doesn’t do xvid or divx, go figure. The Samsung Galaxy S does. More about this phone in future posts.

Price

The third and final reason to consider getting an N8, is if you can get for free it may be worth it. If you going to have pay for it though, you can spend your money better.

There you have it, three reasons to get an N8. Actually there is a fourth reason – it is very good for playing games, and I mean 3D games like Need for Speed and Avatar – but I didn’t feel like changing the title of my post.

The built-in email client on the Nokia N8 is good, very good actually, especially in its rendering of HTML format emails. But it is let down by the document viewers on the N8. And this goes for other Nokias and Symbian smartphones in general. Quickoffice on the N8 is good enough for viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, but you have to pay extra money to get it to work properly. And the supplied PDF reader, also from QuickOffice, is a shocker. Instead of using the precious screen real estate to display as much of the document, it uses easily a third of the screen for menu buttons and stuff, with no full screen option. And forget about kinetic scrolling, you are lucky if you get to scroll at all, and when it does move, it jumps in big sections. And it is slow. It is unusable. You could give PDF+ a try, which is available at a price in the Ovi store, but I have been using it for a few days and still have to find one pdf document of mine that it can display properly on the N8. Have emailed the developer so will see what happens with that.

Enter Mobile Documents. This a push email solution for Symbian (also for Android soon I hear) with a difference. The email functionality is similar to Nokia’s mail app, but it is its ability to display documents that sets MobileDocuments apart. It uses its own servers to render the document and streams it to your phone. Viewing is fast a-la-blackberry and document size is not limited to the phone’s capability. To top it off MobileDocuments lets you access and edit your cloud-based documents, e.g. I can access my GoogleDocs documents, edit them and save them back to my Google account.

Check it out. It is in beta at the moment and you can sign up for unlimited free email addresses to be pushed to your phone, including your corporate exchange server emails.

If you think the N8 is good looking you will be blown away by the C7. Launched recently by Nokia with much less fanfare than it did with the N8, the C7 is a sleek looking stainless steel and glass encased phone with a 3.5 inch AMOLED touchscreen. It runs the same Symbian^3 as the N8. Comes with an 8MP camera (12MP on the N8), 8MB storage, three metallic colours and unfortunately no HDMI port. What a beauty.

I heard via the grapevine that someone in the UK has made it into the Guinness World Book of Records for the fastest typing on a mobile phone, using Swype on a Nokia N8.

Swype was recently released via Nokia Beta Labs, but for S60 5th Edition not for Symbian^3/N8. There is a way to get it onto your N8 though, go to store.ovi.mobi/content/58438 with your N8 browser to bypass the Ovi Store device filters and download. Some people are reporting success while others are reporting crashes with Swype on their N8s. I am definitely going to give it a go. Soon as I can find a N8 to buy in South Africa.