In the first story, coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, EE Times is reporting that:

A blue-ribbon panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain agreed that the best recent advance in the mobile telecommunications user space came not from a mobile telecom company but from Apple Inc. — the iPhone.

Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing for Adobe, cited a study showing that 77 percent of iPhone purchasers described themselves as “very satisfied” with their user experience

Going even further than that, AppleInsider today published a story about how Google said it has seen

50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset — a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data

So despite the fact that the iPhone is only on sale in 4 countries and is significantly outsold by Nokia et al handsets, the vast majority to Google from mobile devides is from the iPhone.

Why is this? Because Apple made it easy to do. Not only that, they made it a fun experience (turn the device, the page reformats to the new orientation, two finger zoom, etc.).

The iPhone/iPod Touch user experience is so far ahead of anything the competition (Symbian, Windows Mobile) are producing that it will take them several years to catch up. If, in the meantime, Apple can add features like Bluetooth, and 3G and sign deals with more mobile operators they have a strong chance of becoming the dominant handset manufacturer as well as the dominant mp3 player.

demand paging (!), so 30MB plus free RAM after booting, faster operation, N-Gage game store previews and portal stub, new camera software, integrated Search, new Welcome apps and more

You can check your firmware version by entering *#0000# on your phone and you can update using the Nokia Software Updater .

However, sometimes even if you do have the most recent firmware, the software updater can’t update the phone. This is usually because there is a version of the firmware on your phone specifically for your mobile operator. This typically has some aspect of the phone’s functionality disabled (i.e. the SIP stack).

To get around this you can download an application called Nemesis Service Suite (NSS). This is an application which allows you to change the product code of the firmware version on your phone.

I found the following list of product codes for generic (non-mobile operator altered) firmware on Nokia-N95.net along with more detailed instructions on changing the product code:
0534841 EURO1 – Sand
0534842 FRANCE
0534843 ALPS
0534844 EURO2
0534845 TURKEY
0534847 SCANDINAVIA
0534848 BALTIAN
0534849 RUSSIAN
0534850 UKRAINE
0534851 CIS, Bulgaria
0534852 EURO3
0534853 BALKANS
0534854 GREECE, CYPROS
0534857 ISRAEL
0536058 BELARUS/MOLDOVA
0534833 SINGAPORE

0536062 EURO1 – Plum
0536063 FRANCE
0536064 ALPS
0536065 EURO2
0536066 TURKEY
0536068 SCANDINAVIA
0536069 BALTIAN
0536070 RUSSIAN
0536071 UKRAINE
0536072 CIS, Bulgaria
0536073 BELARUS/MOLDOVA
0536074 EURO3
0536075 BALKANS
0536076 GREECE, CYPROS
0536079 ISRAEL

Once youhave edited the firmware’s product code, you can now run the Nokia Software Updater once more and this time it will update the firmware on your phone.

Be aware with all these hacks that there is always the possibility of bricking your phone and always back up all your info before updating your phone.

To say that I am underwhelmed with the device would be putting it mildly!

The N810 is an internet tablet. It has a browser and a radio and GPS built-in. It accesses the internet over wifi or using your phone as a modem over bluetooth. Sounds cool enough, so why am I unimpressed?

A number of reasons. First off the maps for the GPS are terrible. They don’t include many Irish addresses (including Rushbrooke, the townland I live in) and the GPS application doesn’t plot routes either – one of the most useful functions of a GPS device, I would have thought.

Next is the low memory of the device. I was trying it out yesterday when I got a message that it couldn’t open the Welcome program because there wasn’t enough memory! I closed one of the running programs and the Welcome program opened no problem. I only had around 3 applications running at the time so I was surprised that this consumed all the RAM on the device.

The UI is really clunky. I mean really clunky! In this regard I have been spoilt by my iPod Touch experience.

It is slow opening/running applications and the browsing experience is painful compared to Safari on the iPod.

The display doesn’t change orientation if you turn the device through 90 degrees.

It is a brick – big and heavy. Am I likely to carry this and my N95 with me when I am traveling? I don’t think so!

Compare the size of the N810 with the N95 below

to my iPod Touch with the same N95

I have most of the same functionality with the combination of the iPod Touch and the N95 as I do with the N810 and the N95 for a fraction the pocket real estate!

And given that the iPhone Developer Kit is being released in the coming weeks, my iPod Touch is likely to become even more useful!

On the plus side it has an Internet radio!

Is there some useful functionality of the N810 that I am missing?

The competition is to create flash lite games for mobile phones and there is a top prize of $10,000 and a total prize fund of $25,000!

Mobile phone gaming is going to be a huge area and Flash Lite would seem to be an ideal delivery mechanism.

Adobe have a page on their site listing the mobile handsets which support Flash Lite.

Good luck to all the participants

While 50,000 may seem like a modest number,

“These initial phones are not going to be for sale,” Benjamin Schachter, one of the [UBS] analysts who worked on the report, said in a phone call earlier today. “These are going to be available for developers only to understand how the software works.”

There’s all kinds of speculation about the Gphone and the business model which will come with it. Some are postulating that it will be free but will display ads.

There’s no news yet on if/when it will come to Europe.

The mobile space is a no-brainer for Google though. Of the 6.billion people on the planet, only 1 billion have easy Internet access. Google’s long-term intention is to use these phones as a cheap way to Internet enable billions more people.

MaxRoam initially offers a sim card for your mobile phone which you use when roaming. The sim card costs €29.99. You can add multiple numbers to the sim card so that, if you live in Ireland, for instance but visit Spain frequently, you can have Irish and Spanish numbers mapped to the phone. You give the Irish number to your Irish contacts and the Spanish number to your Spanish contacts and everyone is making low cost calls.

This is great. €29.99 is about 1/10th of my last Vodafone bill when I was abroad!

Where it is even more impressive though is when you are in Spain (again, for example), receiving calls, the cost is far lower than receiving calls using your standard mobile operator.

Consider the Spanish MaxRoam charges

Now compare them to the Vodafone costs (I choose Vodafone as they are my mobile operator)

If I send or receive texts in Spain on Vodafone’s network they charge me 49c (on any other Spanish network they charge me 65c). With MaxRoam receiving texts in Spain is free and sending texts on any network is 37c.

Call charges with MaxRoam are similarly cheaper. Receiving a call is 25c (per minute, I assume), making a call is 33c p/m. Vodafone charge 29c p/m to receive call, 59c p/m to call within the EU €1.19 p/m for calls to the Americas and an eye-watering €3.19 per minute for calls to the rest of the world.

I choose Spain for this example ‘cos I have family living in Spain and go there regularly but you will get similar numbers for other countries.

What I am not clear on is when you are in another country, are you locked to a particular local mobile provider or will any work.

I know Pat well and while he’s a lovely guy, I know he’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart. If Pat can charge these low rates and still make a profit, how much are the mobile operators coining in?

Whoop their asses Pat!

UPDATE – In Pat’s post about the launch he says:

What we will do is put YOU first, here’s my mobile +353872049121, if we leave YOU down in any way call me up and give me a piece of your mind.

And renowned Technology writer David Pogue gives MaxRoam a great write-up in the New York Times.

Now that’s impressive.

The three mobile operators mentioned are T-Mobile of Germany, Orange of France and O2 in the UK. According to the article:

The operators are set officially to announce the partnerships at the IFA trade fair in Berlin at the end of August

The article goes on to say that

[Apple] will continue the roll-out elsewhere in Europe next year, when it will also launch in Asia

Damn! I realise it is unlikely but is there any chance the UK O2 launch will include Ireland?

Seemingly a short-circuit, while charging can “in rare cases” cause the battery to overheat and “dislodge”.

The battery is used in the following Nokia phones:
Nokia 1100, Nokia 1100c, Nokia 1101, Nokia 1108, Nokia 1110, Nokia 1112, Nokia 1255, Nokia 1315, Nokia 1600, Nokia 2112, Nokia 2118, Nokia 2255, Nokia 2272, Nokia 2275, Nokia 2300, Nokia 2300c, Nokia 2310, Nokia 2355, Nokia 2600, Nokia 2610, Nokia 2610b, Nokia 2626, Nokia 3100, Nokia 3105, Nokia 3120, Nokia 3125, Nokia 6030, Nokia 6085, Nokia 6086, Nokia 6108, Nokia 6175i, Nokia 6178i, Nokia 6230, Nokia 6230i, Nokia 6270, Nokia 6600, Nokia 6620, Nokia 6630, Nokia 6631, Nokia 6670, Nokia 6680, Nokia 6681, Nokia 6682, Nokia 6820, Nokia 6822, Nokia 7610, Nokia N70, Nokia N71, Nokia N72, Nokia N91, Nokia E50, Nokia E60

Nokia have set up a web page where you can check to see if your battery is one of the 46 million affected batteries – however, the page is not functioning.

When I entered the 26 digit number from the BL-5C battery of my Nokia N70 and pressed Submit, as instructed, the page simply refreshed with no information on whether the battery needs to be replaced or not.

I assume that means the battery is not affected but a piece of text confirming that would be nice.

UPDATE: – This site is not related to Nokia in any way. Please don’t leave details of your battery here. I have no way of telling if your battery is faulty.

However, reading FrankP’s experience with 3 Ireland’s mobile broadband offering I think I’ll hold off on going the 3 Ireland route for mobile broadband for now.

I spoke to Frank this morning after reading his post and I asked him about the speed of the connection – he said:

1288 kbps right now

yesterday it was 504 kbps when I checked

10th it was 612 kbps / 1141

9th 334 kbps

8th from 30 to 70kbps

This is quite a bit different from the promise on the 3 Ireland Broadband page:

speeds of up to 3.6Mbps – smooth surfing guaranteed

Is Frank’s experience with 3 Ireland unique or have others had similar issues?

Paul Giltenan of Choice Communications has promised me a review O2 broadband modem to trial so I’m looking forward to seeing how that works. I wonder are O2 customers having similar problems – they are, after all, using the same Huawei usb modem.

And if this is a more general problem than 3 Ireland Mobile, should Comreg be getting involved? Of course we all know the telcos find Comreg about as intimidating as Bambi.

I have read a lot about how great the iPhone is but I hadn’t seen any until last Friday; and then I saw three!

I was at a lunch in Cork with Britt Blaser and Sean O’Mahoney (amongst others). Both had iPhones.

I had a chance to try the phone out for myself and see just why people rave about it. It is spectacular.

Later that day I met Patrick Collison. Patrick also had an iPhone.

He was meeting Damien and myself. During the meeting he had to leave us briefly to collect someone. He left his iPhone for us to play with. It really is an incredible phone (although Patrick, after about 25 minutes the sound deteriorates on calls to the speaking clock in Hong Kong ).

There is no question but that Apple have re-defined the mobile phone.

Twenty of the hottest new startups from around the world will announce and demo their products over a two day period at TechCrunch20. And they don’t pay a cent to do this. They will be selected to participate based on merit alone. In fact, we’re even offering a $50,000 cash award and lining up other in-kind services and awards from a generous group of corporate sponsors.

There were over 700 submissions from 26 countries so making it to the last 100 finalists was a considerable achievement. In fact, as far as I know Pat’s is the only Irish company in the final 100. Well done Pat – go for it boy!

I have spoken to Pat at length about their new Roam4free product set due out in the coming weeks and if they deliver half of what Pat is promising, it will set the mobile world on its head.

The phone does indeed appear to live up to the hype with a game changing interface. There are, of course, a few issues with the phone (more of which later) but it has to be remembered that this is version 1.0 of the phone and many of those issues will be ironed out in the coming months. Can anyone remember the first version of Windows Mobile and just how terrible that was? With that in mind, what Apple have done with their first phone is indeed creditable.

Nokia and Microsoft must be very concerned now with the appearance of this new player on their territory. Especially since the phone’s interface beats anything they have ever produced!

Apple have announced that the phone will be updated over the ‘net – similar to how the iPod’s firmware is updated one assumes. This will allow Apple to quickly address faults or bugs found in the phone’s software as well as adding extra functionality.

David Pogue, after outlining all the phone’s strong points in detail goes on to point out some of its flaws –

So yes, the iPhone is amazing. But no, it’s not perfect. There’s no memory-card slot, no chat program, no voice dialing. You can’t install new programs from anyone but Apple; other companies can create only iPhone-tailored mini-programs on the Web. The browser can’t handle Java or Flash, which deprives you of millions of Web videos… it can’t capture video. And you can’t send picture messages (called MMS) to other cellphones.

Apple says that the battery starts to lose capacity after 300 or 400 charges. Eventually, you’ll have to send the phone to Apple for battery replacement, much as you do now with an iPod, for a fee.

Then there’s the small matter of typing. Tapping the skinny little virtual keys on the screen is frustrating, especially at first.

Two things make the job tolerable. First, some very smart software offers to complete words for you, and, when you tap the wrong letter, figures out what word you intended. In both cases, tapping the Space bar accepts its suggestion.

Second, the instructional leaflet encourages you to “trust” the keyboard (or, as a product manager jokingly put it, to “use the Force”). It sounds like new-age baloney, but it works; once you stop stressing about each individual letter and just plow ahead, speed and accuracy pick up considerably.

Even so, text entry is not the iPhone’s strong suit. The BlackBerry won’t be going away anytime soon.

The bigger problem is the AT&T network. In a Consumer Reports study, AT&T’s signal ranked either last or second to last in 19 out of 20 major cities…
Then there’s the Internet problem. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, going online is fast and satisfying.

But otherwise, you have to use AT&T’s ancient EDGE cellular network, which is excruciatingly slow. The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo. two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.

These drawbacks may be deal-killers for some people. On the other hand, both the iPhone and its network will improve. Apple points out that unlike other cellphones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates. That’s good, because I encountered a couple of tiny bugs and one freeze. (There’s also a tantalizing empty space for a row of new icons on the Home screen.) A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T’s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.

But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.

In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”

It is funny to see Techmeme going wild over a story which I broke over 36 hours ago!

Come on guys, that’s old news. Try to keep up.

The first thing which strikes you when you pick up the N95 is how light it is. It is quite bulky (99 x 53 x 21 mm), so you expect it to be heavier than its 120g.

The next thing which hits you is the quality of the 2.6″ screen. At 240 x 320 pixels and up to 16 million colours it is the same resolution as my E65 but because of the larger size, it just looks way better!

A lot has been written about the poor battery life of the N95 but I haven’t found that to be the case. That may be because the N95 and the E65 use the same battery and I am used to its short life (!) but I suspect it has more to do with my not having the Wireless Scanning enabled.

The one time the battery levels did drop sharply was when I was following my Twitter Stream over 3G (instead of the usual WLAN at home).

The GPS application which ships with the phone is of limited use as it can never seem to find the satellites!

I tried a Fring call using the Skype client on the phone today to Conn O’Muinechain but the call quality was appalling and we had to revert to a normal call. This is more likely a problem with Fring, or Fring’s Skype implementation than the N95.

The camera in the phone takes very high quality pics (see photo below) and video but be aware that the 160 onboard memory will run out quickly. You will need to supplement it with a Micro SD memory card (it supports up to 2gb).

The bi-directional slider and the way the screen flips from portrait to landscape automatically is very impressive.

Overall, the N95 is a lovely phone and if I could afford it…

All the operators are using the same Huawei external USB mobile broadband modem. O2 claim that unlike their competitors, their version will have drivers for Windows Vista when they launch.

The data for O2 is speculative as their offering won’t be officially launched until July 2nd but their roadmap, according to O2 spokesman Kevin Heffernan, is to ramp from an initial 3.6Mbps to 7.2Mbps by year end and then 14.4Mbps next year! Also, initially they were to roll out with a 6Gb download cap but it is now looking increasingly likely that this will be revised up to 10Gb.

O2 are saying that they are positioning this to compete with similar offerings from Vodafone and 3Ireland but if I compare these figures to my current Eircom DSL broadband connection, it is: 3mb, €40 per month (ex VAT), and a 40GB download cap. The biggest difference between the two is the download but I don’t download that much so that shouldn’t be an issue.

As I see it, the O2 mobile broadband product could easily start to replace DSL connections either for home users or for Solo Soho setups. The mobile broadband obviously has the advantage of being mobile so you can take it on the train, for example and work away while traveling! And with Ireland having the most expensive line rentals in Europe (€9 per month more than the EU average), this is one more nail in the coffin of fixed lines here.

O2 are also rolling out an EDGE network which should be fully rolled out by q1 2008 according to Heffernan. This means wherever the 3.6Gb HSDPA (or 7.2 or 14.4) is unavailable, the modem should fall back to EDGE’s semi-respectable 256kb. This is at least twice as fast as GPRS.

Finally, starting in 2008, O2 will start on building a HSDUA network – this will give upload speeds of 14.4 Mbps eventually!

Are DSL’s days numbered in Ireland

• I asked O2 and they said they will be stocking it in a number of weeks and couldn’t give me an idea of a price point. However, I have it from an unofficial source that they will offer it for €399 for the Active Life 250 plan.
• I asked 3Ireland and they told me that it had failed their network tests and so they wouldn’t be selling it for the moment! and
• I asked Vodafone and Vodafone are selling it currently. The shop I was in (Oliver Plunkett St., Cork) didn’t have any in stock but can order it in. For the Perfect Fit 200 plan they sell the N95 for €439.

Online it is available from Expansys for €739.95 and from Mobilefly from €619.32

I’d love to do a review of the N95 and maybe even a comparison between the N95 and my E65 (a bit like I compared the E65 and my old N70 – except more detailed!).

Does anyone know how I would go about getting an N95 for review?

The timing of this is very coincidental as I did an interview with Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi, on Friday which I will be publishing as a podcast on PodLeaders.com later this week.

The online website creator makes constructing mobile aware websites really easy. You can do all the usual stuff like adding links, creating pages, click to call, etc.

The only thing I couldn’t figure out was how to rename the About Us page to simply About!

Zinadoo also offer the ability to upgrade to your own .mobi domain (so I’d be tomraftery.mobi instead of tomraftery.zinadoo.mobi).

Best of luck to Zinadoo with this, it seems like an interesting app in a rapidly emerging space.

I see James has a piece up about Zinadoo as well.

Here is a copy of the photo the N70 took:

and here is the E65’s photo of the same bookcase (in high quality mode):

As you can see from these images, the N70 photo is higher quality! The colours from the N70 are richer and there is a lot of noise in the image from the E65.

The fact that the N70 takes better photos than the E65 is strange given that the N70 was released well over a year ago and the E65 has just come out.

My first impressions of the phone are very positive although I did get a fright when iSync told me it doesn’t support the E65 – eeek, how am I going to synchronise all my contacts and calendars? Fortunately after a quick search I found that Nokia have a downloadable script which will update iSync to synchronise with the E65.

The handset is beautiful (I went for the Mocca model) and the screen resolution is amazing (240 x 320) in a phone so small (105 x 49 x 15.5 mm).

The desktop and keyboard are extremely well thought out giving quick and easy access to the most frequently used functionality.

The phone is also very responsive. Previous Nokia models would take one or two seconds to open a new blank text. The E65 opens it almost instantly.

Where I am based in Rushbrook, the Vodafone network coverage is poor but the E65 seems to handle the low coverage better than either the N70 or the E61. There is a notable improvement in call quality.

The built-in wifi, one of the main reasons I decided on the E65, has been working exceptionally well. Despite working very closely with Truphone support we were unable to get the E61 to receive incoming calls on my US landline number. However, the E65 hs no trouble getting calls on my US number (so far!).

The only downsides of the phone I have found, so far, are the lack of games on the phone and the poor quality of the camera. But, at least it does have a camera. This was another factor in my deciding to buy this model.

Overall, I’m extremely happy with the phone and would recommend it to anyone.