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.

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.

Backgammon for Mobile Phones: BGBlitz 2 Go

What's the point of a mobile phone without solid backgammon software running on it? The answer is - of course - that there's no point. You can make phone calls (rarely fun), write short messages (very rarely fun) or download ring tones (certainly no fun). See? Almost all the fun you can have with a mobile phone (apart from participating in the mobile phone throwing world championships, maybe) has to do with playing a good game of backgammon against it.

Not long ago, in the "dark age of mobile phone backgammon" that is the time before November 1, 2006, it was very difficult finding a good backgammon for a mobile phone. I'm owning a Nokia N93, which is actually a pretty decent mobile phone in terms of tech specs and capabilities, but the only backgammons I could find for it were ones that certainly don't have a neural net in their heart and that don't seem to support n-game tournaments (which, together with the doubling cube, add another level of strategy). Poor me.

But now the dark ages are over, there's "BG Blitz 2 Go", a Java Backgammon available for many mobile phones. And it has all the features I need.

BGB2GO is actually the "smaller brother" of BG Blitz, a world class backgammon program for PCs and Macs, so rest assured that it knows all the rules including e.g. the Crawford rule and that it plays a strong game of backgammon together with good intuition about when to double.

Feature check:

• plays money games or n-game tournaments (n can be set up in the preferences)
• plays according to all rules (well, that's a basic one)
• includes an optional "tutor mode" that warns you in case of blunders and can show you the strongest move.
• shows you the 5 best moves together with their equity (after pressing "7").
  
• doesn't seem to show you the volatility of a position.
• shows you the pip count if you want.
• automatically executes forced moves for you.
• has a couple of differently looking boards that do their job well.
• offers great statistics (I need those!) about your performance against the game, incl. matches won/lost, points won/lost, longest winning/losing streak.
• has a three (?) playing levels. Expert is strong and fast on my N93; even doubles in complicated positions don't take a second.
• has an outstandingly good "position memory" that is so important for a mobile phone game. Leave the game to do a call or something, come back later, and find your match in exactly the state that it was in before.

How strong is its playing level? I frankly don't know. Why? Because I really like that tutor, and listen to its advice now and then (whoops I can hit this blot, didn't see that...), so my playing strength is unnaturally enhanced. Still, it feels weaker than Jellyfish or BG Blitz on the PC / Mac, but not by much. Even with the tutor turned on I'm right now trailing by 5:9 matches (5 point matches). Without the tutor I'd probably be at 3:9, against the best programs that would probably be 1:9 or 2:9 max.

But rest assured that unless you're a champion BG Blitz 2 Go is a great opponent for you; I've had tremendous fun in some of those 14 matches so far, and I'm looking forward to the next matches just as well. Backgammon is great for a short game in between, and BGB2Go is the best Backgammon you can possibly want for your Java enabled mobile phone.

Right now the authors seem to be collecting a compatibility list; there's 22 known mobile devices on which it is known to work, including e.g. the Nokia 6230(i), the Sony Ericsson K800i and many other recent Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones (for details check the compatibility list - the German one seems to be much more up to date than the English one).

Pricing: there is a free demo version that will randomly quit every 2nd game. The license costs €12,95.

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Some time later: I'm still very happy with BGBlitz 2 Go. So far I've won 10 matches, lost 16, but I'm leading with 112:97 points. I like it a lot that you can just leave BG Blitz 2 Go, and when you come back you continue your game in the same position as before.

Highly recommended.