The iPod Touch is a converged device; a portable media player and a basic PDA. At the moment it appears to be the younger (and neglected) sibling to the iPhone. It also appears at first glance to be more expensive than the iPhone:

iPod Touch 8GB costs $299, 8GB 3G iPhone to cost $199
iPod Touch 16GB costs $399, 16GB 3G iPhone to cost $299
iPod Touch 32GB costs $499, no 32GB iPhone yet.

Of course the 3G iPhone comes with a two year contract which costs at least $70 per month (without any text messaging package). That means after two months the a 3G iPhone will cost more than the same capacity iPod Touch.

Two weeks ago I was almost sure there wouldn’t be a price cut for the iPod Touch, now I’m not sure.
The iPod Touch is an important device, it is the next generation iPod, a true portable media player with a wide screen and closer to a PDA than any other iPod before it. With the next firmware update, which unfortunately is not free, the SDK will be added. Now third party developers can legally write applications for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. I know of at least one commercial developer with several applications which run on everything from Palm to Blackberry to Symbian devices. They are now developing for the iPhone as well. This will bring some world class applications to both the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Wireless internet on an itty-bitty phone.

Sometime ago I mentioned my current cellular handset of choice - the Nokia E51. Along with many other features it has built-in wireless. Great, you can browse the web at a wireless access point, as well as using EDGE. Maybe I’m spoiled because of the larger screens on PDAs, but browsing the internet on a 2 inch 240 by 320 pixel screen really doesn’t do it for me. Make no mistake, the Nokia E51 web browser is no slouch, and has an easy way of navigating around web pages not meant for mobile devices.

Then I remembered something from the manual (yes, I glanced through the manual, I couldn’t help it!); the Nokia E51 can be used as a cellular modem. The manual describes using a laptop to connect to the Nokia E51 with either Infrared or Bluetooth, and so browse the internet on a bigger screen. I was looking for a more portable solution though.

I have not tried it yet, but I’d be willing to bet that it may be possible to use the E51 as a cellular modem for the Nokia N800 Internet tablet. This may be possible especially since both devices are made by Nokia, even though they have different Operating Systems.

The 3G Apple iPhone was announced with a price drop of $200. It features new apps developed with the official Apple SDK, as well as the Apple SDK or runtime. The new firmware for the iPhone is version 2.0. Existing iPhone owners will be able to upgrade to this new firmware around July 11. Since the price drop of the 3G iPhone is subsided by the cellphone carriers, the monthly plan for the 3G iPhone will be more expensive – between $10 to $15 per month.

It remains to be seen whether the iPod Touch will have a price drop – somehow I doubt it, as there are no cellphone carrier to subsidize the Touch. The apps which are free on the 3G iPhone cost $10 for the iPod Touch. I have seen a lot of rants about this by irate iPod Touch owners in various forums, most of it not repeatable.

As an interesting point, anyone who bought an iPhone after May 27 is eligible for a free upgrade to the 3G iPhone. Since the iPhone has been out of stock almost everywhere for a few weeks, that may be a handful of happy people. As for the iPod Touch users, Apple should not forget them.

Early in May I wrote about the Symbian Operating System which is used in more than 50 percent of the smartphones worldwide.

I decided to have a look and see what was available in the US with regard to a smallish Symbian smartphone, in a reasonable price bracket. It appears that none of the US cellphone carriers currently carry a Symbian smartphone (although there is a rumor that AT&T may be offering the Nokia N95 later this year). This means no subsidized Symbian smartphones, so you pay full price.

Initially I had a brief look at the highly acclaimed Nokia N95. Somehow I had expected that the dual-slider design meant it had a QWERTY keyboard. Instead it had a phone keypad and music controls. Since the N95 is well over $500 (anything cheaper than this could very well be a Chinese knock-off), I gave it a miss and looked for something cheaper.

I found out that I should be looking at the Nokia E Series of cellphones. According to Wikipedia the Nokia Nseries “is a product family consisting of multimedia smartphones“, while the Nokia Eseries consists of “business-oriented smartphones, with emphasis on enhanced connectivity“.

The first smartphone I came across was the Nokia E61. It has a “Blackberry” look to it, and a QWERTY keyboard. There is also a Nokia E61i, which is an update to the E61. It has a 2 megapixel camera and an improved design. The Nokia E61 looked promising until I compared its size with the Treo. Then it looked uncomfortably wide. The Nokia E61i was also over $300, a bit more than the $200 to $300 price range I had in mind.

The E90 Communicator I discounted because of it’s price and the fact that it was a brick.

Then I came across the Nokia E51, quite an unlikely looking smartphone. A candybar style phone without a QWERTY keyboard, it is easy to use just as a phone. Delve into it’s menus though, and this is a powerful business tool which can browse the web or read your emails to you. Compared to a Windows smartphone, this one flies!

In my previous blog I referred to the Psion series 3. The earlier Psion Organiser (Organiser not Organizer, as it was the name given by the British company Psion in the 1980s) is considered to be the first PDA , according to this Wikipedia article.

From the same article, “the term ‘PDA’ was first used on January 7, 1992 by Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Apple Newton.” By then Psion had already released the first of the Psion 3 range of personal digital assistants, which featured a QWERTY keyboard and a database, a word processor, a spreadsheet with charts, world times and more. Unlike the Newton, the Psion series 3 was a clamshell device.

Jumping ahead a few years, Microsoft also had a Clamshell PDA, the Handheld PC. It was not called a PDA because it could not actually fit in a pocket. Wikipedia says of the Handheld PC:
“A Handheld PC, or H/PC for short, is a term for a computer built around a form factor which is smaller than any standard laptop computer.”

Several of these devices are still in use today, and I found this one for sale on Pricegrabber – the HP (Hewlett-Packard) Jornada 720 PDA. Among its specs is this gem: Microsoft Office (including Access database).

See if you can guess what tech gadget this is:
(the answer is partway down the page for those who aren’t into guessing games or would like to cheat):

It is a device which could probably be called a mobile computer.
Its specifications are:
Clamshell design with a QWERTY keyboard.
Can create and edit Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets and synchronize with a PC.
Can print directly to a compatible printer.
Can connect to the internet to check email.
Multi-tasking operating system.
Voice recorder.
Touch screen.
Memory card expansion slot.

So what is it?

It is not the Sony Clie PEG-UX50 PDA, although from the specifications above it very well could be. It isn’t the Nokia E90 smartphone either, as the E90 lacks a touchscreen.

It is a handheld computer known as the Psion Series 5 which was released in 1997 (last century!). An article on the Psion Series 5 on Wikipedia has a lot of information, as well as an article on All About Symbian comparing the Nokia E90 Communicator with a Psion Series 5 (it also has a number of pictures comparing the two devices). Eric Lindsay has pages and pages of information on his website “Epoc and Psion Palmtops” about the full range of Psion palmtops over the years.

The most interesting thing I find about this PDA is that it was used instead of larger notebooks and could run for 35 hours on two AA batteries. Also, the EPOC Operating System which it ran eventually became the Symbian Operating system.

In the first “Best for Mobile Browsing” blog posting I got side-tracked after blogging about the Motorola A780 and the iPhone.

Apart from cellphones there are several other mobile devices which can be used for web browsing. The not-dead-yet PDA handheld is one of them. The Blazer web browser on the Palm TX has a number of fans, but I’d label it as average. Almost all Windows Mobile handhelds (previously known as Pocket PCs) like the HP iPaq 110 and HP iPaq 210 have Wi-Fi, and of course PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer). Opera for Windows Mobile was not free the last time I looked, but it was still worth buying for the improved browsing experience, with tabs. The iPaq 210 has a 4-inch, 640 by 480 pixel “VGA” touch screen display, so would be quite decent for web browsing.

Then there are the products made specifically for web browsing, as well as having a host of other features, the Nokia N800 and Nokia N810 Internet Tablets. These are still pocketable (jacket pocket not shirt pocket) mobile devices. Both have around 4-inch, 800 by 480 pixel resolution touch screens, and run a Mozilla-based browser with Ajax and Adobe Flash 9. The web browser allows zooming and full screen mode, as well as multiple browser windows.

So what is the best mobile device for browsing the web? By mobile device I’m excluding small notebooks and tablets which run Windows.

Firstly there are a number of factors which influence the quality of web browsing. The actually web browser engine, physical screen size, screen resolution, bandwidth and ease of navigation all play a part in the browsing experience. On the “Mobile browser rendering” webpage by Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones, a series of tests performed in 2005-2006 were used to compare mobile web browsing software.

Normal cellphones – in other words cellphones without extra large screens, non-converged mobile phones, non-smartphones – generally have the worst browsing experience. This is usually due to small screens coupled with rather average browsers and bandwidth. Usually with these cellphones you can only browse to the sites which the carrier allows you, via text menus. In contrast I’ve seen the Motorola A780, not much bigger than most cellphones, but which runs Linux with the Opera Browser. You can go to any webpage, and pages are rendered really fast. This is a good mobile browsing experience but the cellphone is a smartphone.

Of course I cannot mention browsing on a smartphone without mentioning the iPhone. With a screen measuring 3.5 inches diagonally and resolution of 480 by 320 pixels, running the Safari browser, it naturally has an advantage when it comes to mobile browsing.

While doing research for a blog about smartphones, I came across some figures which blew the whole idea for my blog out of the water. The Symbian Operating System is not very well known here in the US, with roughly a 5 percent market share of smartphone sales. However, Symbian smartphones make up well over 50 percent of the smartphone market worldwide. RIM (think Blackberry) is in second place worldwide, and the Apple iPhone in third place with 6.5 percent. (Figures from February 2008 report by Canalys and
“Canalys, Symbian: Apple iPhone Already Leads Windows Mobile in US Market Share, Q3 2007” from Roughly Drafted online magazine) .

The Symbian OS is a proprietary operating system, designed for mobile devices. Note that it is Symbian and not Simian. Symbian is jointly owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens, and Samsung. (see Symbian OS article in Wikipedia).

An example of a smartphone which runs Symbian is the Nokia N95 Smartphone. The N95 is loaded with features: 5 Megapixel Camera with flash, FM Radio, MP3 Player, Video Capture and playback, voice Recorder, productivity applications and web browsing. The N95 is expensive as no US carrier has picked up the phone. However, since it is unlocked and Quad-band, it can be used on any GSM network anywhere in the world.

In my last blog posting I mentioned passwords and Biometric Security. One thing I failed to mention was strong passwords. You don’t only need passwords for your computer(s) at home and at work, you probably also need passwords for numerous websites which require a user name and password.

Microsoft has a set of guidelines on strong passwords here: “Strong passwords: How to create and use them“, which not only covers what a strong password is and how to create one, but also how to use passwords and some general security tips. The article has six steps to creating a strong, memorable password, which is important, as it doesn’t help if you create a strong password and then cannot remember it.

I particularly like the “Password strategies to avoid” section, as they are very important, and bear repeating here:

“To avoid weak, easy-to-guess passwords:

Avoid sequences or repeated characters. “12345678,” “222222,” “abcdefg,” or adjacent letters on your keyboard do not help make secure passwords.

Avoid using only look-alike substitutions of numbers or symbols. Criminals and other malicious users who know enough to try and crack your password will not be fooled by common look-alike replacements, such as to replace an ‘i’ with a ‘1′ or an ‘a’ with ‘@’ as in “M1cr0$0ft” or “P@ssw0rd”. But these substitutions can be effective when combined with other measures, such as length, misspellings, or variations in case, to improve the strength of your password.

Avoid your login name. Any part of your name, birthday, social security number, or similar information for your loved ones constitutes a bad password choice.

Avoid dictionary words in any language.

Use more than one password everywhere. If any one of the computers or online systems using this password is compromised, all of your other information protected by that password should be considered compromised as well. It is critical to use different passwords for different systems.

Avoid using online storage. If malicious users find these passwords stored online or on a networked computer, they have access to all your information.”

The main problem of course with multiple passwords is how to remember them. Microsoft suggests writing them down on pieces of paper. I would use caution with this method and keep written down passwords in a secure place. Keeping your work password under the mouse pad at work is asking for trouble.

You could of course buy a HP iPaq hx2795B PDA, which has a built-in fingerprint reader, and store your passwords on it.