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I just got a Nokia E65 for my wife. Yesterday I wrote a post where I was asking for advice since I had to quickly find a new 3G phone with a very good signal strength.

According to the advices I got, the Nokia E65 turned out to be a very good choice. Moreover, just by chance my sister-in-law just bought that phone two days ago and the performance in the basement of our house was great (I’m always speaking about the signal reception).

Unlike all the Nokia N series I got from the Nokia Blogger program, the built quality is way better, very solid plastic and very well designed keyboard. It’s pretty clear it’s an E-series, designed while keeping in mind a typical business usage. 

I’m playing with it right now (and syncing my wife’s address book) and after a couple of hours of usage, it’s definitely a thumb up.

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Technorati Tags: luca filigheddu, Nokia, Nokia E65, symbian

Image via CrunchBase

This is what I’ve been waiting for since the release of version 1.5 of Gmail for mobile, the previous version that was completely unusable for me, as stated in this blog many times.

According to Google, many important improvements have been introduced in this new version, such as multiple account management or offline support (that is, create drafts even while no signal is available). In addition, users will experience an overall improvement in terms of performances, new shortcut keys and the ability to configure and use more than one gmail account.

This new version is available in 35 different languages for Blackberry and J2ME-based phones. I look forward to trying it out on my Nokia N95 and to compare it with the new Nokia Email, as I did already with the previous version.

UPDATE: after trying it out, I noticed the “refresh” button disappeared and now emails are automatically updated. Your mobile phone rings too, in order to notify new emails. Cool!

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Been labeled as 5800, it means that it’s a mass market phone and the price has been defined accordingly, that is $390 (in Europe should be around euros 290), unlocked. For a complete set of features, take a look at the official Nokia 5800 website, full of animations, videos and complete specifications.

It’s pretty clear that everyone is looking at it as the iPhone’s rival, even if I expect that all the next high-end Nokia phones will be touchscreen and much more feature-rich. This means that this comparison is, to me, a bit like apples and pears and it doesn’t make much sense, but in any case it ’s something people are looking for.

Who is gonna be the winner? Here are my opinions, broken down in 10 categories.

1) Display

Nokia 1 - Apple 1

The new Nokia phone is provided with a 3.2″, 16:9 - 640×360 nHD display with up to 16M colors. An accelerometer is included, so that the screen automatically rotates depending on the orientation of the phone.

The iPhone’s screen is a little bit bigger (3.5″) but the resolution is less, being 480×320. Not having tried the 5800 yet, I cannot tell you more, but I would say I would prefer a better resolution over a not much bigger screen.

2) Size

Nokia 1 - Apple 0

The iPhone is bigger, on average (a little bit longer 115mm vs 111mm,  thinner 12.3mm vs 15.5mm and larger), that means the Nokia is about 25g lighter. Not a big deal, both of them are portable and designed to fit well in your hands. Having a smaller width, the Nokia should be easier to operate with one hand only.

3) Memory

Nokia 1 - Apple 0

While the iPhone comes in two versions, 8GB and 16GB internal memory, the Nokia is offered with 8GB only through a micro SD card. The latter is definitely a more flexible solution since it’s very easy and relatively cheap upgrading to 16GB, something iPhone’s owners cannot do.

4) Network

Nokia 0 - Apple 0

Both phones are provided with a complete range of available voice and data networks, both GSM and 3G, and both phones come in two different versions for 3G (850/1900MHz and 900/2100 Mhz).

5) Input methods

Nokia 1 - Apple 1

Your finger for the iphone, finger, stylus or plectrum for the Nokia. Even if I prefer my finger for both, many will definitely like having more available options. Here  it’s only a metter of personal tastes. Unlike the iPhone, Nokia provides you with a traditional stylus - handwriting, much common to Windows mobile and Palm users.

6) Battery life

Nokia 1 - Apple 0

Daily usage with each of these phones is a different thing, of course, but according to the technical specifications, the Nokia 5800 is overall better either for voice, data and standby (about 15 to 30% more). In addition, Nokia claims up to 35h of music time against 24h of the Apple iPhone.

7) Camera

Nokia 1 - Apple 0

The Nokia is provided with a 3.2Mpix camera with Carl Zeiss Optics and dual flash. On the contrary, the iPhone mounts a very basic 2Mpix camera, no flash, no carl zeiss, far behind the Nokia’s one despite it is certainly not the top as the one mounted in the N95.

Video Recording

Nokia 1 - Apple 0

No native iPhone video recording yet, even if the iPhone is capable of playing various video formats. Services lik Qik works on jailbroken iPhones while it is pre installed in any Nokia 5800 phone. In addition you can record videos with the standard Nokia application and make video calls, something not yet possible on the iphone.

9) UI

Nokia 1 - Apple 1

Hard fight here. The iPhone UI is definitely cool and any customer loves it. The Nokia’s one is promising, with the new contact and  multimedia bar (familiar to N-series owners) but not having tried it yet, I cannot say more. What I bet is that Nokia’s interface will be much better in terms of basic features still missing on the iPhone, like the much requested cut & paste or a much better bluetooth integration, with the ability to send all kind of multimedia files trough bluetooth. I would say it’s a draw at this moment.

10) Music

Nokia 1 - Apple 1

To me, another draw here. Nokia is pushing this phone as a music phone tightly integrated with their new online music store. In addition, any XpressMusic phone will come with one year subscription which lets you download unlimited songs (with DRM). The winner? iTunes is certainly a big one to fight but Nokia is the #1 in the mobile phone market, that means a preferred way to push their services to customers and, with that package, easier to make them prefer their store over iTunes.

Being a long time user of Nokia phones and having access to an iPhone (kinda, my wife’s owns it) I’m not surprised by this result. There is much more to say, like audio quality during phone calls (I bet Nokia will be far superior), GPS as well as the internet browsing experience, I bet much better on the iPhone.

Anyway, right now it looks like the Nokia 5800 is a potential winner, more likely to become a mass market phone rather than the iPhone, the latter being much more expensive and not available without a contract in certain markets like the US. In any case, it’s more a metter of how you are going to use it most.

What do you think? How much market share will Nokia get against the iPhone? Please leave your comments doen here.

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In a nutshell, Palringo is a multi platform rich IM client which lets you share text messages as well as voice and picture messages with your contacts across a wide range of IM networks and services. Palringo is available for Windows, Mac OSX Leopard, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone (via the iTunes App Store).

Palringo offers an easy way to share something with your contacts. You can shot a photo with your camera phone and send it to your contacts immediately or you can record a short vocal message and share it with your friends, without the need to make a real phone call.

The installation on my N95 has been very easy. I downloaded the .sisx file on my MacBook then I sent it to my N95 through the bluetooth connection. After I insterted my userid and password (you need to sign up on their website first) the client immediately got connected to the Palringo server.

The interface is clean and very well designed. Among the available services, I added GoogleTalk and immediately all my contacts were available on my mobile.

The chat window is very simple and I found out that it’s not that easy to distinguish between your own messages and those from the contact you are chatting with. A different color would have helped here.

When you are interacting with a contact, the “push to talk” feature as well as the “share a picture” option are available. The push to talk works like a walkie-talkie, you keep the button of your phone pressed until you record a new message which is immediately delivered to your contact. For a picture the story is similar. Really straightforward.

The overall experience with this mobile client has been really positive so I decided to try the MacOSX version as well. I didn’t expect to find an impressive client here, since it’s an alpha version and it’s too young to compete with other IM clients like Adium o iChat itself. Despite my initial thoughts and the client crashed after I loaded it the first time, I have to say I was impressed by this Mac version. You realize it is an alpha, but it is enough to start with.

All that said, mine is definitely a thumb up for Palringo. I expect to see more sharing options available in the near future and I bet there is something going on behind the scenes in terms of business agreements with mobile operators as well as handset vendors. In addition, I see plugins for the most popular IM clients for Windows and Mac (when an Adium plugin?) a more viable option than a stand alone client that is going to compete with all the very popular and widely used IM clients available for those platforms.

Next step? I look forward to trying the iPhone version out, where the user experience promises to be even better.

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I’m personally using it on my Nokia N95 and, as a power user of Gmail for S60, I started wondering what the better solution to manage my emails on my Nokia phone could be. I use Gmail as my primary account, forwarding all my company emails there, so I configured the Nokia client with Gmail and immediately got to some interesting conclusions I’d like to share.

Email retrieval

With Gmail for mobile you have to manually download your emails, pressing the “refresh” button on the main screen. On the contrary you can configure the Nokia client in different ways: push email or periodic retrievals (hourly etc.). Push email is very useful for anyone who wants to feel like a Blackberry owner and in my opinion it is the main innovation Nokia brought to its customers (there are other solutions, though). In addition to this, the Nokia client automatically loads when you turn your phone on, so you immediately receive your emails straight on your phone without having to open the client first.

Inbox

The inbox of the Gmail client looks similar to the web version. Navigating through your emails is a very fast process as well as opening a message. In addition the interface is clean and easy to use. There are some widely used functionalities that are easily accessible from some keyboard shortcuts, like deleting (7), starring (*) or replying (4) a message (and many others features too). On my N95 you can see almost six email headlines all at once in the inbox view, not bad but neither too much for me.

Nokia’s Inbox is more similar to the Outlook one instead (i.e., to a traditional email client in general). You can see ten headlines at least (very useful) and when you highlight a message more space to show the subject is made available in the message list. You can order your emails by date, subject, sender, flag, priority and attachment and choose what field to be shown in the list view (messages are grouped by date, too). Keyboard shortcuts are also available and some actions can be performed directly from the message list, like replying to a message (in Gmail you need to open it first). There is also a useful contextual menu that can be activated by pressing and holding the “enter” button in your phone when a message is highlighted.

My choice? I prefer the Nokia’s approach, but the Gmail’s one still remains very clean and usable for most users.

View Pane

The threaded view of Gmail is something I find very useful in the web version but navigating the emails in the mobile version is not that easy, in particular when the thread is very long. Moreover there are some actions you can’t do, like copying some text to paste it in other applications, viewing the quoted text in a reply to another message as well as many links within the message are not clickable.

The approach of the Nokia client is more traditional but, in my opinion, much more usable. When I reply to a message the original text is easily accessible and all the actions mentioned above can be easily done. I think the Nokia client is, again, the winner against Gmail.

Compose Pane

No comparison, the Nokia client is again more complete and offers the final user a more extended set of features than the Gmail one. Add the ability to use your phone’s internal address book (mine is usually synced among my Macbook, N95 and Gmail), something you can’t do on Gmail, and it turns out the Gmail compose window is too poor for any email heavy user user.

Battery

The downside of using a push email client on your phone is that it drains your battery very quickly, especially if you receive, like me, a lot of emails. At the same time if you choose to sync your email manually, then you can save battery and it looks like the two email clients perform alike. Alternatively there is a very useful option by which you can tell the client to disable sync when battery is lower than 20% or 5%. Anyway most power business users wouldn’t renounce to the push email feature, so battery still remains a problem for the Nokia client, hopefully to be sorted out in the near future.

Connection

Something I found annoying with the Nokia client is that you have to choose the data connection you want to use once for all in the settings section. If you want to change it, the client needs to authenticate again in order to work properly. With the Gmail client instead you can choose your favorite connection anytime you open the client. For both clients I’d have preferred the ability to choose my profile so that I can easily switch from my home/office wifi connection to the 3G one while I am on the go.

Flags

Both on Thunderbird and Mail.app on my Macbook when I flag an email using IMAP, the correspondent email is “starred” in Gmail. I find this feature particularly useful since I use to read a message on the mobile version and, if it is important, to apply a star to read it  later. I can do that with Gmail mobile as well while unfortunately flags are not synched when I apply them to a message in the Nokia email client. For me this is a must-have so I hope this feature will be added in future releases of the client.

Bugs

I just want to highlight one bug for each of the clients. Gmail: the more you use Gmail for mobile v1.5, the more it becomes unstable and takes too much time to load. After one week of heavy usage, it could take more than one minute to load. Very bad.

Speaking about Nokia instead, the most annoying bug I found out is that anytime it loads, it turns the “standby mode” on even if you turned it off (i.e., the overlaying menu’ on your screen, something I usually turn off in any Nokia phone).

Price

While Gmail is completely free of charge, the subscription fee of the Nokia one is still unknown. We have to think that Nokia is not offering an email client only, but a push email service strictly tied with the client, so that I expect a fee very similar to that they are already charging for the Nokia Navigator. Is it fair? I think yes, and users will decide if it’s worth it.

Conclusion

Both client are very usable and the interface is clean and fast in each of them. At the same time, I have to say I’m loving the new Nokia client, especially because it seems Google is not investing into the Gmail for mobile too much, leaving some useful features out of the client and they still haven’t solved some very annoying bugs which afflict the latest v1.5 of the software.

If only Nokia would add the synchronization of flags, this client would be almost perfect for me. Nokia Labs, can you hear me?

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Technorati Tags: E-mail client, gmail, luca filigheddu, Nokia, Nokia N95, push email, S60 platform

One of the trends I’m observing is how those services are leveraging their existing infrastructure, investments and developments by offering a white label solution to big companies which want to up-sell new innovative services to their huge potential user base. It’s nothing more than what some mobile carriers are already doing worldwide with the so called MVNOs, but with “VoIP” and “new services” in the middle.

Look at Rebtel with EasyMobile (but I know for sure there is more coming out soon) or FreshTel with Tesco. FreshTel, for example, is a new player operating in the Australian market that I knew during the VoIP World 2008 in Dubai since I was sitting at the same rountable with Rhonda O’Donnell, their CEO. They signed a big deal with Tesco, a Wal-Mart competitor, to provide their customers with a mobile VoIP solution. How long will it take for WalMart or similar groups to look for similar solutions to be sold to their huge audience?

I’m pretty sure there is more coming out from players like, for example, the no-boundaries mobile operator Cubic Telecom and I expect to see something similar coming from other players like Truphone or Fring. The point here is to bring user experience at its best. Customers of big shopping groups like Wal-Mart are mostly “normal” people who look for something cheap and easy to use, without having to struggle with software installation or handset’s configuration.

In this perspective a solution by MaxRoam, Rebtel or Sim4Travel (by Truphone) would fit better with that audience and are more likely to succeed than other services which are more complex for an average user. Most people are not early adopters of new technologies so all the mobile VoIP companies that want to jump into that business through those channels must keep this aspect well in mind.

Besides, I stated many times and I firmly believe that the #1 concern for any mobile VoIP player must be the usability and the overall user experience delivered by their services. They can offer the cheapest rate ever, but It becomes useless if a “normal” person needs to attend a software engineering class to install their software or needs to buy a $500 phone to use it (mmm… how many “normal” people have a Wifi access at home?).

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The standard email client of any S60 device is (IMHO) the worst part of this operating system. I never used it and any time I tried, I gave up after a few hours.

Now it seems they are getting serious about email clients, releasing a new mobile email client that brings email on your Nokia S60 phones to a new level. It’s clear that  if one of the best applications of the Apple iPhone is, in my opinion, the email client, Nokia must do something to try to compete with that fantsatic user experience Apple made available to us.

Even if it is still a step behind the Apple client, the new Nokia email client is something that you can finally use and enjoy. Moreover it supports push email, so I’m now receiving all my emails on this client as soon as they arrive (and it is IMAP, so if I do something on this client, changes are synched with my GMail web version).

The user interface is clean and nice and any operation can be performed very quickly. You can configure this client with an email account only and you can configure this as soon as you are subscribing to the service. Major email services are supported but corporate emails are not available yet. It’s not a problem for me since I have all my email accounts forwarded to Gmail in order to leverage its powerful spam filter.

If you want to try it out, just go to this link and follow the instructions. You’ll receive an SMS with the link to download the application. It is completely free but a subscription fee will be applied as soon as the service will be out of beta.

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Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple iPhone, E-mail client, email, gmail, iphone, Nokia, S60 platform

This move doesn’t surprise me at all. Previous models such as the Nokia N73 and the Nokia N93 didn’t have a complete SIP stack on board so VoIP was not allowed on those phones (as I reported last year while testing those phones).

At the same time, unlike E-series (typically for the business market), where VoIP seems to be on board in the latest models too, N-series are targeted to the consumer market like Truphone or Gizmo (to name some), that are not “friends” of the carriers which Nokia makes agreements with (Om points out the fight between T-Mobile and Truphone which took place last year). Is it a sort of “protection” for Nokia? Hey mobile carrier, my phones protect you against those new mobile VoIP services… are you happy?!?

Om’s post highlights other interesting points about this subject too, it’s really worth a read.

Technorati Tags: gizmo5, luca filigheddu, Mobile, n78, n96, Nokia, om malik, truphone, VoIP

That said, we realized that the Nokia 93 performs much better than the Nokia N95. The N95 is almost unusable with no signal 99% of the time. The N93 instead, seems to be much better, with 1-2 signal bars.

Did anyone have the same experience ? Any idea to improve the performances?

Technorati Tags: luca filigheddu, Mobile, n93, n95, Nokia, signal strenght

(image from TechCrunch)

I wonder what Nokia is doing. Did they realize that installing apps for your smartphone (iPhone) is now easy for everyone and not for geeks only? Did they realize that all iPod users are likely going to become iPhone users? Did they realize that something HUGE is happening out there?!?

I look forward to seeing the market shares of these companies in one year time… I bet we will find many surprises.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iphone, luca filigheddu, Mobile, Nokia