Yahoo, how could you take away my delicious?

Today is one of the saddest days in my "internet life" for a long time. Delicious.com - formerly del.icio.us - one of the greatest services in the web, and something I'm using every single day for over 7 years now (I was an early adopter of del.icio.us), is being discontinued by Yahoo.

Why will I miss delicious?

1. It let me access my bookmarks from any computer, and from my mobile phone
2. It had a beautiful integration into Firefox - once I was using the delicious plugin, I never looked back to my ancient browser bookmarks.
3. The way it recommended tags, let me select some and add others, was implemented so perfect.
4. I could have a tag "toolbar" or so, and list all bookmarks tagged with this tag in the delicious bar for fast access. This was incredibly convenient.
5. It had a great tag-based search.
6. It was free (which probably was its problem).
7. It worked, for me, for seven whole years without ever crashing, losing a bookmark.

Bye, delicious. I'll miss you.

Oh yes, and Yahoo!, rest assured that the day you'll close down delicious.com is the day I'll close down my Yahoo! account (even if this includes my flickr account). And I hope many others do the same.

Touch screen web geo madness: a review of the HTC Legend. Part 1

I'm proud owner of a HTC Legend for a little over a week now. In this review, I'll not focus on technical details about how its processor, screen, built-in memory compares to the iPhone or to the Nexus One, but how the phone looks and feels in daily operation. Does it feel well in your pocket? Is the display bright enough? Does it operate smoothly? How easy is it really to write (longer) text? How long does the battery last? How well does it sync with Outlook? And do all the built-in gadgets (gps, WLAN) make a difference in real life?

Design

But first the most important question of all: how beautiful is it? Answer: VERY. This is a mindboggingly beautiful device - the single-piece alloy body feels just heavy enough to emanate a strong aura of quality and preciousity. The screen is bright, text and graphics look great on it. This is a phone that is at least on par with the iPhone when it comes to looks. And it's far less common.

That said, let's talk about hard facts.

Idiot Typing 101

"a magical device" - that's how Steve Jobs called the iPad. Over and over. When you use the keyboard of the HTC Legend, this phrase comes to mind. First you'll try to hit the little virtual buttons as good as you can. But the longer you type, the more you learn to trust the truly magical error correction and you type ahead more or less without seriously trying to hit the right keys. Just make sure you roughly hit the right area and the machine will know what you meant. Example: instead of

typing "example", you can type "rcsnpke" - as all letters of the later word are next to the letters of the former word, the phone won't have any trouble detecting what you mean.

... to be continued

The visual Internet, or why the new generations of mobile phones will change our world

It took me only a week of using a HTC Legend to come to a shocking conclusion: the new generation of mobile phones will utterly change the world.

Let me make two claims on what the near future will bring:

1. The visual internet: no more typing. Point your phone camera at anything to find out all about it.
2. Augmented reality: The places in the internet and real locations will turn into one.

These two trends will revolutionize the way we will use mobile devices, and the way we use the internet.

1. The visual internet, or: why a web browser + a camera is more than a web browser and a camera.

Before I was playing around with my HTC Legend, I was sure that "everything on a device" is a stupid idea. A single device can have a good camera, a working media player, a GPS system that does the job, but the best media player, the best GPS device, the best camera will always stay a single-purpose device, so what's the point of having a mediocre media player, a so-so camera, and a not-that-strong GPS system in the same device?

I completely missed that great things can happen if you combine these gadgets inside a mobile phone. And I was not aware of what google can do today. After witnessing Google Goggles (not available on the German android market for the HTC Legend, but available for manual download here), I guess I've seen the future of computing, or at least of search. This future is purely visual.

Here's what google goggles does: You point your phone camera anywhere, press a button, and google goggles will tell you what this is and where you find more information about it. Currently some things work nicely (paintings, pictures of celebrities, bar codes, product images, business cards, bottles of Scotch whisky), others don't (plants, animals), but it's not hard to imagine a not too distant future where e.g. you point at a plant and your phone tells you what this is, how to take care of it, and if it is poisonous, or you point at a car that you find fascinating and it will give you information about its manufacturer and so on.The possibilities are endless, and Google is currently proving that they are up to this daunting task of covering quite everything.

A similar, very useful application, is ShopSavvy: Imagine you're walking through a shop and see something you'd like to buy. But is it worth the price that is asked for? With ShopSavvy, just point your phone to the barcode of the box of that thing, and your phone will tell you the lowest prices in the web for it!

And now imagine what the next generation of software for mobile phones will be able to do. This is the web of tomorrow. Point your phone somewhere and find out all about it.

1. Augmented reality, or: why a web browser + a GPS receiver + a compass is more than a web browser and a GPS receiver and a compass.

(... and maybe a camera)

Imagine you're in the center of a crowded city. You're hungry, and there are several restaurants close to you. Which one to choose?

Today you have to find out the name of each restaurant, do a search for them, check the results. That's okay, but not fun.

Now imagine that your phone knows your location, knows exactly where you're looking, and if you lift your phone it will show the camera view, but augmented with information from the web, e.g. a number of stars between * and ***** for the average customer opinion on the respective restauraunt, possibly with links to more information.

That's a commonly cited use case for augmented reality. It's easy to imagine dozens of others. Basically, wherever you are, you've got all the internet knows about the places around you ready at your fingertips.


The bad news is that somehow none of these cool augmented reality apps are available for the HTC Legend right now, so all I can do is theoretisize about it.

Sony Ericsson G900 Power User Review

About this Review

I'm sure there are a lot of Reviews on the Sony Ericsson G900 out there in the Web by now. But these are typically from professional reviewers who spent a few hours with the device prior to writing down their thoughts about it. I'm writing this review after using the G900 heavily for a bit over a year now. I've "upgraded" (I'm writing this in quotes because from pure tech specs it's not really an upgrade) from my much-loathed Nokia N93 in June 2008, and since then I'm using my G900 for:

• Syncing with my PC / Microsoft Outlook 2007 to have about 100 contacts and my calendar incl. meeting rooms and meeting text that contains dial-in numbers.
• Playing backgammon with the amazing BGBlitz.
• Many short calls, some long (1-2h) calls with phone / headset.
• Taking a few photos, using the music player and the radio.
• Surfing the web via WLAN (unsucessfully).
• Installing the latest (and unfortunately final) OS update.
  
• And a few exotic things like creating an Excel sheet on the phone, transferring it to my Mac via Bluetooth.

I'll cover all these topics in detail.

The Basics: Sending and Receiving Calls, Contact Management, Appointments

The basics of a mobile phone (at least one used for business purposes) are, obviously, calling, knowing who to call, and having an overview of your daily meetings. The G900 handles these tasks quite well (and unlike my N93, it didn't shut down all the time).

Installing Sony Ericssons Sync Software on a PC (Vista) works smooth, the initial sync runs smooth as well, and slow - shockingly slow, in fact. Plan an hour of time for it unless you only know two people and have one meeting a year. Later, syncing the changes in my calender takes about 5 minutes and runs in the background without requiring much attention, so apart from wondering what my PC and mobile phone are doing with all that time, it's a minor nuisance. The only complication is that I have to check the sync log after each sync to find out if my mobile phone has run Amok again (happened 3 times so far) and created duplicate appointments on my PC without reason, and deleting them again on the PC. But this seems to be a common kind of hickup on many mobile phones and PDAs.

Please note that there is no (ZERO) sync software available for the Mac. All you can do is transfer files.

Once everything is set up and synced, you can take a look at your calendar which is only one convenient click away. All appointments are synced with date, time, full location, full list of participants (except for th organizer), and the full message body except for attachments. Excellent! The calendar has all the typical features like adding appointments, switching between day/week/month view and so on. The only minor quibble I've got about it is that you can't really see ow much time which appointments take up and which time is free. If you have a two hour meeting at 10 am, the calendar will show "meeting (10:00 - 12:00)" at 10 pm and then show a couple of empty lines until noon instead of drawing a two-hour rectangle around the calender (like outlook does). This makes it a bit tricky to find out how exactly I'm going to spend the next hours.

All contacts are sycned even with their contact image, so if you've added images to your contacts in Outlook, you'll see their face when they call you. Even nicer!

Calling, well, works. Battery life is okay, reception and sound quality are good, the speaker doesn't work so well, the headset does. One big gripe: without the headset, the phone gets very warm after about 20 minutes of talking; after an hour the phone is real hot. This shouldn't happen. With the headset I've not noticed this effect, though. And in real life you want to use your headset for long calls.

Overall, the G900 does a good job in this department. The amount of data synced with an appointment is the highlight here, the phone getting hot in long calls its biggest issue.

Playing Backgammon (and other games)

I have to confess I'm playing Backgammon against the mighty BGBlitz in every free minute. All that is needed to use BGBlitz is a reasonably fast processor + Java implementation. The G900 delivers a solid performance here; also more CPU-challenging games should run fine. But don't dare to compare it to Nokia's powerhouses - my N93 beats the G900 by a factor of 3-4 in terms of pure Java performance.

Touchscreen is supported.

Photos, Music, Videos

First, I've not taken a single video with my G900 so far so I can't comment on this category. Camera: Sony Ericsson brags with 5 megapixel. 2 good megapixels would have been better. But as it is, even my first "Canon Digital Ixus (US: Powershot S100)" with a whooping 2 megapixels, released back then in 2000, delivers much clearer, sharper, better images than the G900. So this is a crap camera, just like the N93's camera was crap, and probably every other mobile phone camera is crap. When will somebody finally come up with a phone with a camera that's actually usable? I don't ask for much. Make it as good as a 9 year old low-end consumer cam. That should be possible, right?

But yes, you can take pictures, and if you take a shot of somebody, chances are you'll recognize him/her on the jpeg. Sometimes you have to photoshop a bit because the image has a strong blue tint, and the "click on the touchscreen where you want the focus" feature is nice but fairly useless. It's a camera. Sort of.

Music is implemented well. The media player plays MP3s and DRM-free AAC files, and other than the N93 (which only could play one AAC at a time) it does that really well. The music player is a fine piece of engineering with lots of good functions (like listing the next random songs if you want, selection by all MP3 tags, nice integration into the "standby application" (the screen you see when no other app is running), good background playback. You can't do that much better.

The same holds for the radio - it shows a sorted list of available stations, has all the normal functions, and you even can place not only a radio shortcut on your standby app, but even a shortcut for a certain station.

Surfing the Web (via WLAN)

So far I've not been able to connect to my Apple Airport Extreme WLAN with my G900. My Mac: no problem, my PC: no problem, my PS3: no problem, even my PSP: absolutely no problem, my N93: no problem. But my G900 performs incredibly poorly, hangs all the time, sometimes so deep in the system that I have to remove the batteries. Shit software (and yes I do have the latest firmware).

Installing the latest firmware

A symbian phone like the G900 is a complicated thing, more like a computer than like a phone. Thus it's important that you can get access to the latest firmware with the latest bugfixes. I did that for my G900, and the whole process worked like a dream. Good job, Sony Ericsson.

Too bad that S.E. has canned the G900's UIQ Symbian team so the G900 is now discontinued already. You shouldn't let this disturb you too much, but it's annoying. There still are bugs in this phone, the performance might be better, but this won't be addressed. Ever.

Exotic Things

The G900 can do a number of nice things: it can let you edit Powerpoint slides (VERY crummy), and excel sheets (very convenient and good to use), and of course word texts (okay). You can transfer those later to your Mac or PC via Bluetooth or by syncing. You can also view PDF files in a fairly good, albeit slow viewer. And you can do a billion other things like currency conversions, use your phone as a flashlight, voice recording, ...

General Impression / Usability

The G900's UIQ Symbian operating system is a fine system that does the usual things (run a couple of applications at the same time, allowing to switch between them, show stuff on the screen) really well. REALLY well. The menu system is well organized - I'm sure the G900 has as many features as the N93 had, but I actually find them. :-) And the touchscreen really makes life much easier (see my other post about that).

Build quality is good; my G900 has survived its share of being dropped without a problem (again: unlike my N93). And the ratio "features / volume" is amazing. If you want a lot of functionality, but don't want to drag around a huge bulk, this is the phone to get.

Why every mobile phone will have a touch screen by 2010

After using my Sony Ericsson G900 for a few weeks, it's time to make a bold statement:

By 2010, every mobile phone will have a touch screen.

Why? Basically because my G900's touch screen converted me from a "hm, a touch screen, that's probably toy stuff that nobody needs" mobile phone user to a "touch screen is essential" mobile phone user. Here are my impressions from using a touch screen in more detail:

1. Text on touch screen buttons is vastly superior to text above phone buttons. Let me guess: your phone, as almost all phones, has two or so general purpose buttons above the number pad that are mapped to "okay / cancel", "send / cancel", "menu / custom action", ... depending on what you currently do with your phone. There's text on the bottom of your mobile phone's screen that tells you what those buttons do. In the G900 (and probably every other touchscreen phone), this text looks and works like a button. Once you've used this touch screen buttons a few times and then you're actually forced to go back to an "old style" phone, the old mechanism feels awful, ancient, unbearable. Honestly.

2. Instant access to the secret meaning of strange little status icons. Do you have a reasonably feature-rich phone? Then you certainly have encountered the following situation a few times already: You look at your phone, and find a little icon in your status bar that you've never seen. You do not know what this icon does. It might be a reminder for something you don't konw. It might be a hint that an expensive/security-issue-prone/battery-eating feature of your phone is currently turned on. You see the icon, but you have no clue what to do to get rid of it. In other words: you're lost. Example: according to the user guide, my G900 has 24 different icons that might pop up on the status bar some day, probably a few hidden ones as well. I know maybe 10 of them, and I might guess from the icon maybe 5 others. That leaves 9 icons that would lead to confusion and irritation should they ever appear... But with a (well implemented) touch screen this is not an issue. In the G900, touching one of the icons will bring you to the right application. Touch the Bluetooth icon and you can turn off Bluetooth. Touch the message icon to get to your message inbox. This makes the status bar fundamentally more intuitive and usable than without touchscreen.

3. Well...

I could write about G900's handwriting recognition (which really is the toy that nobody needs), or I could write about the cool "scribble your notes with your stylus" functionality (another toy, although I actually use this a lot). I could write about how nice it is to just touch an appointment in the calendar to see more of it, and to "double touch" it to get to its details. But actually in real life the two features above are the true killer-features that cause me to state the bold statement about touch screens in 2010.

I'm not getting old. Phew! (Knowle West Boy by Tricky)

Over the last months, a horrible thought kept creeping into my mind: Am I getting too old to enjoy fresh music? Am I finally turning into one of the oh-so-many people who can go on for hours about how good music was in the (insert time when the respective person was in his teens or twens), and how stale today's music is by comparison, and that there is not even a single good song anymore, well, except for a few... If you are above, say, 35, you should know this kind of discussion. And I always felt happy that somehow I still manage to keep contact with music even though I'm past 40.

But then cam 2007/2008 and brought me a few albums that are supposedly very good and groundbreaking and oozing today's lifestyle. And I didn't get them.

Let's take Burial's Untrue, for example. This album is averagely rated 90% at metacritic.com, the best album of 2007 there. "Untrue is complex, stark, tender, blurred and breathtaking. Burial has managed the impossible and improved on his faultless debut." they said. I bought it. And still, apart from a strong memory of horribly (horribly horribly) cheesy vocals, this album has not left any trace in my memory after the three times I endured the whole album.

Then came The Field: From Here We Go Sublime; exactly the same story. 90% at metacritic, BBC writes "This is one of those rare albums that makes you wonder how you ever got by without it.", being electronic music it should be exactly my piece of cake, and I simply don't like it. At least I do have some memories left (my memories are somewhere between "sounds like Philip Glass sounded a few decades ago" and "does this ever get different").

Actually, while writing this I'm briefly listening to The Field's "Silent". I had to endure the same beat with nearly zero variation for over two minutes; only then it added a couple more samples. Guys, in the good old Punk days entire tracks lasted 2 minutes! Currently I'm at 5:18, and it seems the song has used up all its samples. I expect to endure more repetition with minimal variation for another 3 minutes. Don't get me wrong - the sounds that The Field are using in this albums are great and interesting. There's just way too few of them.

(and I tried to like Portishead's Third for a few minutes, but listening to this Album in Summer just doesn't work... Maybe I'll get it in November :-) ).

(turning my trusty iTunes back to good music...) But then came Tricky, released Knowle West Boy, and restored my trust in my music memory again. I listened to this album only once now, and I still remember most of the songs! Yes! What a feeling :-). For me this album shows that complex layers of sound and strange samples in electronic music and interesting (dare I write catchy) music doesn't contradict each other. Blues, rap, punk, Trip Hop, harmonicas and trumpets, harps, reggae rap, long pauses and wild drums, cheesy Jean-Michel-Jarre synths, cellos, quite everything our musical universe has to offer can be found in this album, and they fit so well together as if they were designed for precisely this music.

So if you're also desperate for some fresh music, then don't hesitate and get Tricky's best album since Maxinquaye, and, in my personal count the best album of 2008 so far.

Review: Sony Ericsson G900

Another year, another mobile phone... Ok, I confess, the Nokia N93 was not the best purchase of my life. On one side, its power is still unbelievable. It runs Doom and BGBlitz (the best Backgammon you can get for mobile phones) blindingly fast (and its Java Benchmark results still keep amazing me). So why am I replacing it already? First, it is just too bloated. A monster. Second, it lets me do about a thousand things that I never find again in its weird menu system. And third, and most importantly, it keeps crashing on me, sometimes five times a day. It crashed on me when closing the lid or when twisting it to turn on the camera. It crashed while sitting in my jacket's bag, so I missed calls, it crashed and crashed and crashed.

Well, time to get another smartphone that is just released to the market to get me some more funny crashes :-).

After about a week of using my Sony Ericsson G900 I'm still much more impressed by the good aspects of this little beauty than I am annoyed by the bad ones.

So let's do the old "the good, the bad and the ugly":

THE GOOD

• The FM radio literally shocked me, so good it is. Worlds separate it from every other FM radio I've seen so far. It offers a beautiful UI, full RDS support, and is implemented in an extremely usable way. It's as if Apple would have done it, that's how good it is. When you start it first it will scan the frequency range and create a list of channels (with the real names), it will show you the current RDS text from your radio channel, and best of all it has an excellent reception too. Great. No, I would never have thought that I would end up praising the radio of a cell phone :-)
• The music player and photo viewer are done just as well. Here Sony's experience with the Walkman clearly shows. It builds up an internal index of all tracks by ID3 tags, so you can easily browse by artist or album; it makes good use of album artwork stored in the MP3s when viewing songs and albums, and offers a good sound quality even with the headset that is delivered with the phone. And viewing photos on the phone is a similarly pleasant experience.
  
• Good camera: this is what nearly prevented me from buying this phone - according to some tests, the camera's images are way overexposed, supposedly they are showing very strong noise. Well, they are, and they are not. This is a mobile phone, not a camera. This is clearly visible in its images. My first Canon Digital Ixus (2 MP) offered better images. But it's nowhere as bad as the evil sensor mess that my Nokia N93 was; The overexposure is there but can be corrected easily; the noise is (in my personal impression) about four times less strong than on the N93. I've not tried that, but I'm sure that with good noise reduction software and a bit of photoshopping you can actually turn the G900's photos to good, normal-sized prints and into beautiful backdrops for your PC.
  
• Excellent calendar / contact support: That was one of the reasons I went for a Symbian phone again: The calendar includes subject, location, and even participants and the full meeting text of every meeting. Great! Contacts also include all phone numbers, picture, address fields, ... - if it's in Outlook, it will be in your G900.
  
• Nice little usability touches (e.g. add an appointment to the calendar after a missed call)
• Good reception, good sound clarity. I've tried a few phones in my flat (where reception is real bad), the G900 is among the best here.
• Good menu system: I like Sony Ericsson's UIQ UI. It offers plenty of personalization features and a clean look and feel. Still, sometimes applications are stored in irritating folders (which you can change); e.g. the FM radio and the music player are in the most different places.
• Nice notes application: This is the best post-it notes application I've seen on a mobile phone (and as I always remember important TODOs when I do not have a PC or a piece of paper with me this comes in real handy).
• Design and build quality: Others call it bland, I like the very low-key, elegant design of this phone. Nothing obtrusive, nothing bragging. Very nice. But of course your mileage will vary. But the statement I can make is: it doesn't look or feel cheap.
  

THE BAD

• No normal headphone jack. Why does every mobile phone have to have its own standard of headsets, forcing you to use low-low-low quality headphones? Well, I'm sure that Ericsson does offer a more-expensive-than-you-think adapter that does this job.
  
• Syncing is slow. I'm using USB to sync my G900 with Outlook 2007. Unfortunately this takes a minute or so with every sync. My N93 (also Symbian based) synced ten times faster (my impression, not really measured) when syncing via IRDA!
• Post-Its are not synced properly. If they are handwritten (i.e. graphics) they are not synced with Outlook, and they are not stored as images or synced with whatever other tool. It's such a great application, so I just don't understand why Sony Ericsson has not at least written a small PC post-it application..
  
• Stores the alarm tone with the appointment. This doesn't sound grave, does it? But it is. Believe me. Promise me: if you buy this phone, IMMEDIATELY change the ring tones to what you like. And only then sync your appointments. I didn't. And had days of fun listening to this "oh, is that a tune from Starlight Express?" tune once an hour or so. But at least I learned to click away appointments real fast :-)
• Battery life could be longer. It could be shorter as well, but you don't charge the G900 once a week or even twice a month, you charge twice a week (with a fresh battery).
  

THE UGLY

• Regularly hangs when connecting to my Airport Extreme base station via WLAN.
• Data sync mode is instable when connected to a Mac. This is not fun when you sync a lot of songs or a huge offline Wikipedia to your mobile phone. Suddenly it hangs. Completely. Forcing a reboot.
• No profiles. I loved the capability of my N93 to let me assign a few people to a group "Important", and create a profile that kept all calls from anybody else silent.
  

Personally, I can live with the bad and the ugly, and I enjoy the good. And most of all I enjoy a phone that weighs below 100 grams and still has 90% of the cool features of those phones that weigh twice as much.