The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

Sign up for Seven’s beta program and you can push the corporate email, calendar and contacts of up to 25 people using a single desktop pc. They call it a beta program, but it is really Seven’s way of testing its products before releasing them to its main market, mobile networks who in turn offer Seven in rebranded form to their subscribers. Despite this I have found the “beta” software to be of very good quality. Their support is also excellent, provided via the forums on their website.

Seven supports a number of mobile platforms – Windows Mobile, Symbian, PalmOS (the old one, not the new WebOS) and Android. On the other end of the pipe it supports Microsoft Exchange of course and Lotus Notes. Not that many push email systems out there catering for Lotus Notes, so this is good news for those of us wedded to Lotus Notes for better or for worse. Seven works in always-on mode, so emails come through in real time. Does hit your phone’s battery life, but luckily the software allows you to set quiet times/days during which time email do not get pushed.

Am using it currently on my E90. Have used it on various Windows phones also, as well HTC’s Hero. Only syncs emails on the Hero though. Wish they’d bring out a client for the new Palm Pre, but in the meantime I use Commontime mNotes5 for the Pre. More about that later.

Did I mention that it is completely free? Get it at http://community.seven.com

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.