Tom Hume

So, this little fellow turned up today, courtesy of one of O2s agencies who are running a scheme for a few bloggers. You might therefore consider that, based as it is on a freebie, this review is liable to bias. I can reassure you in the name of journalistic integrity that after 8 years doing this mobile thang, there is little that excites me less than a new phone turning up. Mind you, even if I hate the thing I'm still giving it exposure - oh I dunno, I'll give up thinking about the moral minefield I'm in and just go for a gander.

So, first impressions: the packaging was nice, and opening the box itself quite enjoyable, in a not-quite-Apple-but-nearly way. The device comes with a reasonable range of cables (headphones - with a double-headphone adapter, quite cute - a dock which O2 have christened the Nest and another which I presume is an FM antenna).

The phone itself is a reasonable piece of industrial design: the styling is reasonably nice actually, in an early Star-Wars aesthetic (cf. rebel alliance cruiser interiors, stormtrooper uniforms), and whilst I'm not a big fan of clamshells as a form factor, it fits neatly into my trouser pocket and I don't have the justified "shit-my-keys-will-scratch-it-to-death" fear I get with most phones. It feels slightly plasticky, though some of the promo material spins this as being "light" - which isn't unreasonable I guess.

The main feature of the phone is its external display, which lights up the casing with a digital readout: cute-ish, even if it gives the whole device the feel of an 80s alarm clock (double the feel of an 80s alarm clock when it's nestled in its erm "Nest"). I think it might be genuinely useful to have the name of callers turn up on this display when the phone rings, let's wait and see.

My big fear about any new phone which is positioned as a slick piece of industrial design is the UI: post-RAZR I actually shiver when I see a handset which looks half-decent, because this tends to imply the interface inside (more important once it's out of the box and you're trying to use the darn thing) has been starved of attention. Initially, I have to say I think my fears are justified: whilst the UI is reasonable attractive (and it's nice to see a handset making good use of all available resolution without cloning Nokia), the menu structures are a little bit iffy, some of the options are downright bizarre ("Enter Object Mode" when browsing a WAP page? What monkey allowed that terminology to be kept in?), and the whole thing is just slow enough to annoy me.

It's a small thing, but if the keypad felt more responsive I think the device would feel way better. Right now it suffers from the same faults as some of Nokias Series 60 devices: press a key, wait half a second, get to the thing you wanted - that's just long enough to be dissonant. A suggestion from Mr Hopper of FP was that perhaps the pretty yet faintly annoying animated wallpaper was slowing the whole thing down, but try as I might I can't work out a way to disable said wallpaper (only replace it).

There are a few nice features lurking in there though, and I was really chuffed to see the National Rail service from Kizoom (easily the most useful WAP service to me) preloaded onto a home-screen menu. This kind of integration of portal content with the on-phone menu structure is really good to see happening out-of-the-box; it's not exactly a leap forwards technically or design-wise, but it's useful nonetheless and ought to happen more often.

The "daily wallpaper" feature, which purports to automatically download new content regularly, also seems cute - presuming it gives me stuff I want, and actually works. I'll keep an eye on this one.

The inbuilt speakers are, I think, the best I've heard on a phone (not that I use mobiles for listening to music much) - they might appeal to a generation that insists on blasting music out of its handset as it lurches around cities. The camera is basic (2 megapixel) but decent, and screen quality is good. Colour use within the UI is a bit inconsistent, but where it's done well it works really nicely, and the whole thing seems coherently O2 somehow (where some operator-branded handsets get a little schizophrenic).

Cocoon claims to sync with macs, but it didn't show up in my Finder when I plugged it in and I got a load of error messages in /var/log/system.log. Not great.

So, so far: I give it 6 out of 10. Not bad for an operator-branded device, and version 2 (or even this one with a firmware upgrade that speeds it up a bit) has potential to be a reasonable device. In its current form I'd see it competing quite effectively with the Motorola RAZR, as a reasonable stylish device that has a UI you can actually use.

I'll write another post once I've had a chance to use it for a few days...

Social mapping: "we are on the verge of enjoying services made possible only when information is matched automatically to location. Maps on our phones will always know where we are. Our children can’t go missing. Movie listings will always be for the closest theaters; restaurant suggestions, organized by proximity. We will even have the option of choosing free cellphone service if we agree to accept ads focused on nearby businesses."

A bit happy clappy, but there's probably something in there...

Ericsson still likes the WAP word: "The system does do exactly what it says on the label. It allows mobile internet sites to bill for content. So if you have a WAP phone – and a GPRS or 3G connexion – it can bill you for services all paid for via your mobile handset.

...

So what's the big difference between WAP Billing and the well-established Bango? Global reach seems to be one advantage. Once you're integrated into the system, you can sell things to 0.5 billion users in 10 countries.
"

Can anyone point me to more information about this? I can't find anything on Ericsson's site. And as far as international reach is concerned, isn't this the big thing that Bango offers? I'm not a huge fan of Bango personally (thanks to the fairly horrible user experience it offers - which admittedly they've recently started to address with better templated pages), but it doesn't seem to be outclassed by Ericsson from what I can see.

Julian and William are discussing J2ME on Ecademy - apparently the games industry have gotten fed up and are going to sort it all out for us. I'd reply there if I could, but haven't been able to post into the forums for a few months now... so here we go:

"My understanding is that this will be a NATIVE game architecture, that is compiled code not a VM. The fragmentation not only increases costs, it reduces innovation. The performance penalities of running game code in a VM is another issue that is being addressed here."

Well, if they fix it tomorrow - which they won't - we'll have 3-5 years before whatever magical pixie dust they eventually release gets out there in large enough numbers to be worth bothering with. If this is a problem for you, either get out of mobile for a few years, or learn to deal with what we've got today (that's rhetorical - I realise that you're doing the latter William ;)).

Julian writes: "Less cynically, a common development platform, and a more open environment would reap huge dividends for everyone."

Actually, I think fragmentation creates opportunities. Look at the number of independent J2ME games developers, and compare to the number of small independent Nintendo DS developers out there. Given the disparity in screen sizes, keypad layouts, and processor performance, "write once run anywhere" was always optimistic. It should be, it was a marketing slogan after all.

Personally - I think it's easy to underrate the position we're in today. It is possible to develop, test, and launch a new game across 80 handsets in about a month. That strikes me as a massive approvement on the situation 5 years ago, when you couldn't even get dev kits or write software for the vast majority of handsets, full stop.

stevenberlinjohnson.com:: "It was simply a sign of something that was probably obvious already: there's nothing cool any more about having an iPod. That's not to say it isn't an incredible product. It's just hard to defend the cool factor when the President apparently has two of them..."

Actually, I'd argue that it's when things stop being cool that they start getting interesting. For me, this was the case with mobile phones: when they were something special that yuppies lugged around with them in the 80s: boring. When everyone you knew had one: interesting.

Ditto microprocessors, puzzles, and the internet.

This one just had me sniggering out loud on the train: augmented animals. I want kittens with lasers, goddammit!

Boz has a photo of monkeys running outside his house in India...

Monkeys will pay for porn.

Via Mr Jones, a post concerning games where peace, not conflict, is the aim:

"Once we have a game system where the player is trying to maintain peace through a series of interesting choices (the same as one would make war in a typical Real Time Strategy), we can make things more complicated. What if the player not only needs to maintain peace, but also needs to be in a dominant position over the other players?"

One of the "aha" moments I belatedly had about 3-4 months after a group of us started playing Go, was the idea that efficiency is important in tallying up final scores: you get more points for capturing the maximum ground with minimal pieces. Or to put it another way (and given how err "undeveloped" my Go-playing skills are, I may be completely misunderstanding things): you win more by minimising direct conflict.

Foot-based interaction with games; after extensive research I can confirm that it is possible to enjoy a game of Donkey Konga playing with your feet ("Louie Louie" on Chimp setting)...