Touch screen interfaces for smartphones are definitely the in thing with cellphones now, especially since Apple wowed users with the iPhone and took a sizable chunk of the cellphone market in a short period of time.

Yet there are still some “old but good” cellphones around which are very usable.

The smartphone under the spotlight is the Nokia E61. This smartphone lacks a camera to make it more friendly for corporate environments.  It runs Symbian OS 9.1, Series 60 third edition, The phone has a candy bar design and a full QWERTY keyboard. The cellphone is quite wide, but fortunately not too thick. It features a generous size screen (320×240 pixel resolution), which is not a touchscreen, obviating the need for a stylus. Instead there is a mini joystick right under the screen. The menu system would be familiar to anyone used to the S60 series OS. Personally I found myself hunting around in sub-menus to find a particular  Wi-Fi option. Once used to the menu layout, navigating around the phone becomes a lot easier.

CNET’s review says the Nokia E61 “boasts a vibrant and sharp screen” . . . “ a full array of wireless options (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UMTS)The Symbian smart phone also has good call quality, a speakerphone, the ability to view and edit Office documents, and robust e-mail capabilities.“

Microsoft today announced a new product for Cloud Computing, called Windows Azure, which is going to be a cloud-computing platform, or cloud computing Operating System.

Cloud Computing is a buzzword I vaguely understand, so I looked around for a definition of it.

Firstly, Cloud Computing has nothing to do with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

There were over 150 articles on Cloud Computing on Knol (Google’s answer to Wikipedia).

Sam Johnston of Australian Online Solutions wrote:
“Cloud Computing is the realisation of Internet (’Cloud’) based development and use of computer technology (’Computing’) delivered by an ecosystem of providers.”

The next definition, from Kirill Osipov, seemed to sum it up nicely:
“Growth in adoption of software delivered over the Internet resulted in the situation where people depend on Internet for services that enable everyday activities like document editing, photo sharing, banking and so on. To the users, the computing and storage resources needed to power the service software exist in the “cloud”, that is the users are spared the details of where and how the software actually runs.”

In my previous blog entry I quoted from Dian’s GottaHave blog, and will be doing it again, as she gave an interesting reference to in her Blog “Ultra-Low-Cost, Ultra-Mobile Computers, Part 1“: “..Expectations from some companies are that you’ll do your computing “in the clouds,” relying on free services from Google and a hundred other dot-com companies to give you productivity applications and maintain your data.”

Just for reference, the Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing is here.

On Wednesday this week the Google Phone, also called the T-Mobile G1, was finally released. Two of my blogging colleagues have already mentioned the T-Mobile G1. It is one of the many iPhone competitors, but more importantly, it comes from Google, a company to be reckoned with.

As Dian mentioned at GottaHave: “The G1 runs best on T-Mobile’s 3G network“. So the G1 is the phone, and 3G is the name of the network – in fact it refers to a 3rd Generation data network. The previous generation data network was called EDGE, and not 2G, which just adds to the confusion.

Of course, the G1 is not the only 3G phone around. There’s the AT&T Tilt, 3G iPhone and the Palm Treo Pro Smartphone along with a whole long list of other cellphones.

Reviews of the T-Mobile G1 Google phone have been mixed, with some reviewers saying that the phone is only for “early adopters”. They do admit though that it is only the first Google Android phone – that is the first phone to feature Google’s Android Operating System. Unlike the Operating System on the iPhone, Android is “Open” – The Android Developer community has a large say about the applications on the G1, not Google.

I’ve just got back from a much-needed vacation. Prior to leaving,  I had heard the horror stories about iPhone users getting massive bills after accidentally leaving data roaming on while traveling overseas, so I phoned AT&T Customer Support. After all, the cruise we were taking had ports of call mainly in Canada. According to Customer Support, I could make or receive calls on the cruise ship itself, but that would cost me $2.49 per minute. Even if I received a call and didn’t answer it, I would still get charged. The same applied for Visual Voicemail. Onshore in Canada, it would cost less to make a call : 79c a minute, but data roaming was still expensive.

I took my iPhone with me anyway, as it is a cellphone after all. In the packing space allotted for my gadgets I also took a few handheld gaming consoles, including a Sony PSP (an underrated device, according to PC World) and a Nintendo DS. Of course I took my main handheld computer, an aging Palm Tungsten C, as well as its designated replacement.

I really missed having the full functionality of the iPhone. Since most of the cruise was spent out of the US, I didn’t turn it on often, and when I did, data roaming was off, and it was in “flight mode”. Wi-Fi was available in the public lounges of the cruise ship, but that was not cheap either.

The first thing I did after getting back from vacation was to turn on the iPhone with all data services activated.

While was paging through the latest catalog from Best Buy, I came across some very interesting digital cameras. Now digital cameras are not really my thing unless I’m actually shopping for one, which I’m not. What caught my eye about these cameras was how tough they were. The first one, an Olympus Stylus 8.0 Megapixel Digital Camera is shockproof up to 5 feet, waterproof down to 10 feet and freeze proof down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Its larger sibling, the Olympus Stylus 10.1MP Digital Camera is shockproof up to 6 foot 8, waterproof down to 33 feet and freeze proof down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. It is also crush proof up to 220 pounds.

This got me thinking about Notebooks, and whether there were any tough ones. The Panasonic Toughbook came to mind. Even though other manufacturers also make ruggedized laptops, the Toughbook are the ones that come to mind when thinking of a heavy-duty portable computer.

The Panasonic Toughbook W7 is an Ultraportable ruggedized laptop. The Toughbook W7 is rated to survive a 1-foot fall, which doesn’t sound like much compared to the cameras mentioned above, but laptops are generally full of moving parts and have delicate LCD screens.