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

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.

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.

Review: Tori Amos - American Doll Posse

Bug or feature? Tori Amos' latest album, American Doll Posse, supposedly to be released on April 30, can be downloaded at the (German) iTunes store already. Boldly I hit the "buy" button before I even listened to the songs - THEY might have noticed and pulled the plug before I have the songs on my HD (call me Mr. Paranoid).

This kind of "buy before listening" trust is actually nothing that I would normally grant Tori Amos. Not anymore. Yes, I loved all her albums, be it Little Earthquake, Under the Pink (brilliantly reduced to Tori and her Piano), be it Boys For Pele. I even liked most of Strange Little Girls. But the Beekeeper was BORING. Scarlet's Walk was BORING. Tori Amos was wasting my time with music that somehow had lost the magical ability of creeping into my brain and staying there. I listened to those albums several times, I tried to keep those memories, but they were just boring. BORING (your mileage may vary).

I consider myself brave hitting that "buy now" button in iTunes before listening closely to the songs. :-) And I was rewarded for my incredible bravery. :-) . The album has quite a number of simply great songs. Great Rock songs I might add.

Many of the songs, like Big Wheel, have an irresistable (Piano) rhythm and a kind of 70's flair to it (I was even reminded to Jethro Tull a couple of times, and to Elton John's piano style) but also feature some truly heavy rock guitars. Of course there are also slow songs with the kind of haunting melodies that you're used to if you know Tori Amos.

Unfortunately, the quality of music deteriorates later in the album. Code Red (track 15) and Roosterspur Bridge (track 16) are not the same kind of stuff as Secret Spell (track 10) or Big Wheel (track 2), and once I had arrived at Dark Side of the Sun the old feeling of tiredness of always the same "Great voice, but where's the melody?" feeling set in. Dark Side of the Sun is not a bad song itself, but it's cliché Tori without anything new and without much worth being remembered or actually listened to.

But, as I've written before, the first 13 tracks are well worth the price of the album. Great stuff!

The Nokia N93 Mobile Phone

(my impressions after the first couple of days owning it)

Let's start with a famous quote:

"Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If you take this wise quote seriously, then the Nokia N93 is probably the least perfect phone ever, the embodiment of imperfection. You could take away about 50 features like the photoflash-that-is-also-a-pocket-lamp, the UMTS video conferencing capabilities, the Flickr export capabilities, the viewers for Microsoft office documents, and you would still have a perfectly fine mobile phone.

And the quote is right, the huge and bulky N93 is far away from being aesthetically pleasing, and its huge feature count does come with a huge bug count and a huge amount of spending time looking for that feature that you've activated by chance and want to deactivate again.

But if you're reading this, chances are that you're googling for information about the N93, which means that you are probably considering buying this beast, which probably also means that you're a technology-driven person who will sacrifice beauty for horsepower. Okay, here we go, the N93's horsepower in terms of cool features and how I like them:

Display: the N93 has a huge display with a very nice resolution of 320x200 (like my old Amiga back then :-) ). The display is bright and tremendeously good to read. This holds particularly when I'm using the phone outside on bright, sunny days. Other than all mobile phones I've owned before, the display can be read perfectly well in direct sunlight, and it's actually looking great then. No more trying to get some shade falling on the display in order to make out who's calling.

Ring Tones: apart from the standard Nokia profiles with separate ring tones you can have caller-specific ring tones, you can organize callers into groups and have group specific ring tones, you can set up the phone to say (with synthesized robot speech) the name of the caller while ringing, and of course you can download any MP3 files to the phone as ring tone.

Camera: the N93's camera is probably its most prominent feature. With 3.1 Megapixels, a 3x optical zoom and a Zeiss lens it should be able to deliver the quality you get from lower range digital cameras. This was actually the one of the reasons I bought the N93 - the opportunity of always being able to take a halfway reasonable photo. Do you also remember a lot of situations where you've been in e.g. the most amazing sunset, unable to take a picture? Not anymore with the N93 :-). But does it live up to what it promises? Yes and no. Yes, the pictures it delivers have a 3.1 MP resolution of 2048x1536. Also, in good light conditions, these pictures are, at first glance, quite okay. If you look closer, you'll observe very prominent artefacts, massive purple fringing, and the photo just doesn't look nice and clean as those taken with real cameras do.

a detail of a N93 photo. See how the white areas are not white but speckled with artefacts?

purple fringes, artefacts, and all kinds of issues can be seen in these leafs.

Additional camera features: the night mode leads to a horrible level of noise, about two levels higher than what you get in the highest level of a normal digital camera. You need an excellent noise removal tool to turn them into something you can use (but then there's Noise Ninja). There's also a flash, but I've not yet tried it out too much. And finally, the camera features a good but very slow (2 secs?) auto focus.

Having seen these issues, my first impression after only a dozen or so pictures taken is that
a) yes, there's a powerful camera built into the N93
b) yes, this camera can be used to take photos of a low but acceptable quality.
c) you need a noise removal tool and a good image manipulation tool to improve the picture's quality, and even then you can get to the moment of frustration when you realize that this time you had a camera with you when you ran into something spectacular you just needed to take a photo of, but the photo has just turned bad.

With this in mind, my conclusion of the N93's camera is actually very positive: although it can not compete with even a low-level digital camera, it's a real camera ready for taking real photos in an acceptable resolution. And if I've before missed 95% of the opportunities to take a great shot I'll now miss about 0%, and I'll even have a good photo afterwards in about 40% of the cases. That's quite an improvement :-).

Video Camera: supposedly very good, also with Adobe something Elements video manipulation software included, but I've not tried it out as I'm not so much into taking videos.

Let's come to the next section...

Networking: yes, you can connect this camera to quite everything, in at least five different ways.

• Infrared: works fine, as with most cameras.
  
• Bluetooth: works perfectly well, was able to set up a bluetooth connection between my notebook and my camera in 5 minutes and to transfer a song without any problem.
• WLAN: works, but is more tricky than I'd want to have it. You see, I can get it to connect to my WPA protected Airport WLAN by always selecting "WLAN" when starting a tool, and always typing the password again. But setting up an access point just does not work, and I've not yet found any other way to avoid typing that password again and again each time I want to browse the web or check my e-mail. Oh well.
• USB: connect the USB cable that came with the phone to your PC or Mac, and you get several good options to synchronize your N93 with the computer, from the easy "N93 as an external disk, like a card reader" to a highly advanced PC software suite that enables you to sync your data. As expected from USB2, the connection is fast enough to even sync large music libraries.
  
• UMTS: I consider that as a "nice thing for the future when I'll have an UMTS contract".
• Network applications:
  
• web browser: good browser, does the job really well
• e-mail: adequate e-mail program, but doesn't allow me to just peek into my mailbox but keeps the headers of all mails in the mailbox. That's not what I want, particularly given gmails approach of "just keep everything".
  
• uploading images directly to Flickr: worked out of the box (but make sure you read the specific flickr page about that - your normal Flickr user/password won't work). Of course, if you upload images directly from the camera to Flickr (that was amazing...), you lose the chance of applying the massive noise reduction and photoshopping you typically need to do to remove artifacts and stuff.
• Lifeblog: spooky. Do people actually use that? The idea is that my N93 records everything I do - every SMS I get or receive, every image I take, and offers me a button to upload my whole "life as seen from my N93" to a blog. Never tried it.

So all in all networking, connecting to other devices, is something the N93 can do quite well.

Music: The N93 offers two ways to listen to music (probably plus connecting to some streaming web services):

• upload MP3 files (supposedly also AAC, not tried this yet) to your N93 and use the built-in RealPlayer to listen to them. Quality is very good via the headset, acceptable with the speakers.
• use the built-in radio to listen to FM radio. Also good quality, and you can use the speakers to listen, which is something other Nokia phones can't do (of course you still have to plug in the headset which is used as the FM antenna).

The N93 meets my music needs, although the limitation of 2 GB for mini SD cards that you can plug in is a bit disappointing. And it's no match for my iPod.

Business Functionality: this is a section where the N93 shines. It offers

• an excellent integration with Microsoft Outlook (and probably others), where e.g. the whole meeting request incl. room and complete descriptions are synced as well as many details of the Outlook contacts.
• MS Office document viewers that let you see your most important Word/Excel/PPT documents on your phone.
• small helper applications like a timezone-aware clock that also allows you to add multiple other time zones and a currency converter (that you have to set up yourself :-().
• ... and of course all the connectivity that you might need (see above).

Very impressive, and working beautifully.

Games: what about games? Well, I have only tried the built-in games, which are okay but nothing too special. From a pure hardware point of view, the N93 is able to pull off excellent games. With a 333 MHz processor, stereo sound and a 320x200 display it should be able to deliver decent games. But: I doubt that there ever will be a market for N93 games (too few units sold), and that the phone keys are adequate for gaming. So we'll probably have to live with Java games and/or Symbian S60 games. As long as someday there will be a good neural-net based Backgammon for the N93, I can live with that.

Conclusion: what do we have here? A "can do it all" mobile phone, a Swiss Army Knife that does everything, but nothing as good as specific tools (digital camera, iPod, Organizer). Still, the unique thing here is that with a single - albeit a bit bulky - device you get everything. Sure, for my next vacation I'll take my camera, because I know I will want to take photos. And similarly I'll take my iPod with me when I know I'll probably want to listen to a lot of music, just as I'll take my notebook with me for office applications. But in all those situations where you want to shoot a picture without having a camera with me, where I'm longing for some good music, where I need to know my next appointments, I can get quite far with my N93 and a good 2 GB mini SD card (which costs me another 60 Euros - the 128 MB card that is included isn't sufficient at all). The incredible feature count comes at four costs, though: 1) the phone is huge; 2) the phone is expensive; 3) the phone is buggy as hell (crashed on me about 5 times in 3 days of usage, in simple situations like switching to camera mode when the display was locked), and 4) frustration when you know that feature is there, but you can't find it.

If 1) and 2) are no problem for you, and assuming 3) will go away with later versions of the N93 firmware and 4) by just getting used to it, then this is a good mobile phone for you. I'm quite happy with it.