LetsTalk.com Blog

To the test: Check out the new Jawbone Bluetooth headset

Fri, 4 Jul 2008 11:07:03 PDT

We tried out the new Jawbone headset to see what it had to offer. In our tests, we found pairing the headset with a LG Voyager to be a little more complicated than is the case with other headsets. The first pair is super simple because it's ready to pair immediately. However, if you want to pair it to another device you have to press the talk button and the button on top of the headset, too. About those buttons, there aren't any that are visible, which gives the headset its cool, stylish look. However, the talk button is pretty much where you'd expect it to be and there's a little slit in the headset about the same spot where it flashes red and white. The area where the headset really shines is with call quality. We found sound quality to be extremely clear and loud. One caller even commented that they couldn't hear the radio playing in the background. Check out how stylish it is below, it almost looks like leather.

Want to learn more about headsets? Check out our Bluetooth Headset Buying Guide for tips on picking a headset.

To the test: Check out the Motorola T505 Bluetooth In-Car Speakerphone with Digital FM Transmitter

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 09:07:20 PDT

We tried out the Motorola Rokr T505 with a myriad of cell phones including the BlackBerry Pearl, the LG Voyager, and the Motorola Q Global to name a few. We even tried it riding around town on a scooter. It worked great with all these cell phones, which is kind of the point of the Motorola T505. The device is designed to funnel calls from your cell phone through the products speaker or even your car stereo. Pairing it a breeze and when you leave the car the device automatically disconnects from your cell phone, so you don't have to remember if your Bluetooth is on or off when receiving/making calls.

We found calls to be loud and clear on our end whether we used the internal speaker of the device or the stereo (a real plus in convertibles). Additionally, callers thought the quality was impressive as well. If that's not enough for you, you can also play music stored on your cell phone when through your car stereo. When a call comes in the song stops and resumes where it left off when you finish your conversation. But what's my favorite part of this device, the lady with the English accent that announces the phone number of the incoming call. I also like that I can take it from car to car no installation necessary.

Want to learn more about headsets? Check out our Bluetooth Headset Buying Guide for tips on picking a headset.

Deal of the Week

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:07:47 PDT

This week's deal comes from LetsTalk.com's Merchandising Manager, Aaron Horowitz.

What is it? Get a free Sprint Palm Centro and enjoy life both inside and outside of the office! Take advantage of this amazing deal and experience this fashionable smartphone for the masses. The Palm Centro allows you to stay in touch wherever you go through voice, text, IM, email, and web capabilities. The Centro’s touchscreen and full keyboard make staying connected even easier. This sleek smartphone is also an ideal choice for your summer travels, with its 1.3 megapixel camera, 2x digital zoom, and video capture!

How Much? Get the Palm Centro for free out-the-door on all lines, when purchased with any two year Sprint contract.

Why is it such a good deal? The Sprint Palm Centro, which normally retails for $459.99, is free on all lines with no data requirement. You also don’t need to deal with mail-in-rebates because it’s free out-the-door!

To the test: Check out the Plantronics Discovery 925 Bluetooth headset

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 09:07:04 PDT

We tried out the Plantronics Discovery 925 headset to see what it had to offer. In our tests, we found pairing the headset with an LG Voyager to be extremely intuitive. We just turned it on, pressed the main button, and pairing happened almost instantaneously. As for call quality, it sounded pretty good. Callers didn't even know we were using a headset.

There are a couple of "big deal" features with this headset. First, you can pair it with two cell phones simultaneously and send/receive calls from each phone - this is a plus for people who have both a work and cell phone. Also, we particularly like the case that comes with it. It's about the size of a lipstick case and when you leave the headset inside the case you can charge it on-the-go, since it has a built-in charger as well. A definite plus, if you run out of juice while on the road. However, putting the headset in the case is not exactly intuitive. It needs to go in on an angle. Good thing there's a diagram inside the case to show you how it's done.

Want to learn more about headsets? Check out our Bluetooth Headset Buying Guide for tips on picking a headset.

Calling all DJs - show off your skills on a cell phone

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 08:07:28 PDT

Have a hidden or maybe not so hidden DJ talent? It's time to release your inner DJ. Check out the new contest at Tonemine.com. The idea is that you mix your own ringtone, share it with others in the community, share it on your favorite social networking site, accumulate the most votes to win a BlackBerry. Check out the details in the video below and then enter the contest.

Handsfree driving laws go into effect today: Find out what it means to you

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 06:06:56 PDT

Today, the new driving laws for the state of California go into effect, which means that the way Californians talk and drive is about to change. While there are a lot of details involved in the new law, here are some of the highlights:

Drivers pulled over for using handheld wireless devices while driving and fined $20 and $50 for each subsequent violation. (Note: Additional fees can apply)

Violations have no adverse effect on drivers’ insurance premiums.

You can't have both ears covered while using a Bluetooth device, which means you shouldn't be using stereo headsets with your cell phone while driving.

Drivers under the age of 18 can't use a cell phone, pager, laptop or any other electronic communication or mobile services device to speak or text while driving in any manner, even hands-free. However, drivers under 18 will only be cited if they are pulled over for another driving violation first.

We'll have reviews of headsets all week here at PhoneTalk, as well as provide helpful tips for using a cell phone while in the car. In the meantime, check out our Bluetooth Headset Buying Guide for tips on picking a headset.

Anticipating the next ten years of smartphone innovation - Part 2

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:06:24 PDT

Now, in Part 2 of this special guest post from Symbian Executive Vice President of Research David Wood, get a glimpse at what could be the future of smartphones.

Symbian’s understanding of the probable evolution of smartphones over the decade ahead is guided, first and foremost, by the extraordinary insight we gain from the trusted relationships we have built up and nurtured over many years with the visionaries, leaders, gurus, and countless thoughtful foot soldiers in our customer and partner companies. As the history of Symbian has unfolded, these relationships of “customer intimacy” have deepened and flourished: our customers and partners have seen that we treated their insights and ideas with respect and with due confidentiality – and that has prompted them to share even more of their thinking (their hopes and their fears) about the future of smartphones. In turn, this shapes our extensive roadmap of future enhancements to Symbian OS technology.

To provide additional checks on our thinking about future issues and opportunities for smartphones, Symbian is inaugurating an essay contest, which is open to entries from students at universities throughout the world. Up to ten essays will win a prize of £1000 each – essays need to be submitted before the end of September, and winners will be announced at the Symbian Smartphone Show in October. Essays should address the overall theme of “The next wave of smartphone innovation”. For details of how to enter the contest, click here.

As a guide for potential entrants, Symbian has announced a set of six research sub-themes, which are also areas that Symbian believes deserve further investigation in universities or other research institutions:

Device evolution / revolution through 2012-2015: The smartphones of the future are likely to be significantly different from those of today. Although today’s smartphones have tremendous capability, those reaching the market in 2012-2015 are likely to put today’s devices into the shade. What clues are there, about the precise characteristics of these devices?
Improved development and delivery methodologies: The dramatically increasing scale and complexity of smartphone development projects mean that these projects tend to become lengthy and difficult – posing significant commercial challenges.
Success factors for mobile applications and mobile operating systems: What are the factors that significantly impact adoption of mobile software? What can be done to address the factors responsible for low adoption?
Possible breakthrough applications and markets: The search for “killer apps” for smartphones continues. Are there substantial new smartphone application markets waiting to be unlocked by new features at the operating system level?
Possible breakthrough technology improvements: Smartphone applications and services depend on underlying technology, which will come under mounting stress due to increased demands from data, processing, throughput, graphics, and so on.
Improved university collaboration methods: What are the most effective and efficient ways for universities and Symbian to work together?

Click here for lists of questions for each of these sub-themes.

The evolution of the “smartphone” concept itself is particularly important. Whereas successful smartphones have mainly been portrayed so far as “phones first” and as “communications-centric devices”, they are nowadays increasingly being appreciated and celebrated for their computer capabilities. Some of our customers have already been emphasising to end users that their latest devices are “multimedia computers” or even instances of “computer 2.0”. Personally I prefer the name “iPC” (short for “inter-personal computers”) as a likely replacement for “smartphone”. Whereas Symbian’s main technology challenges in the last ten years tended to involve telephony protocols, our main technology challenges of the next ten years will tend to involve concepts from contemporary mainstream computing.

The scale of the future opportunity for iPCs dwarfs that for smartphones, just as the scale of the opportunity for smartphones dwarfed that of the original PDAs. But there’s nothing automatic or easy about this. We’ll have to work just as hard and just as smart in the next ten years, to solve some astonishingly difficult problems, as we’ve ever worked in the past. We’ll need all our wisdom and ingenuity to navigate some radical transitions in both market and technology.
Here are just some of the ways in which devices of 2018 will differ from those of 2008:

From the WWW to the WWC: Nicholas Carr has written one of the great technology books of 2008. It’s called “The big switch: rewiring the world, from Edison to Google”. With good justification, Carr advances the phrase “world wide computer” to describe what the WWW (world wide web) is becoming: a hugely connected source of massive computing power. Terminals – both PCs and iPCs – are increasingly becoming like sockets, which connect into a grid that provides intelligent services as well as rich data. The consequences of this are hard to foretell, but there will be losers as well as winners. The local intelligence on the iPC will act as a smart portal into a much mightier intelligence that lives on the Internet.
Harvesting power from the environment: Efficient usage of limited battery power has been a constant hallmark of Symbian software. With ever greater bandwidth and faster processing speeds, the demands on batteries will become even more pressing. Future iPCs might be able to sidestep this challenge by drawing power from their environment. For example, the BBC recently reported how a contraption connected to a person’s knee can generate enough electricity, reasonably unobtrusively, from just one minute of walking, to power a present-day mobile phone for 30 minutes. Ultra-thin nano-materials that convert ambient light into electricity are another possibility.
New paradigms of usability: Given ever larger numbers of applications and greater functionality, no system of hierarchical menus is going to be able to provide users with an “intuitive” or “obvious” guide to using the device. It’s like the way the original listing “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” – which formed a hierarchically organised set of links, known as “Yahoo” – became replaced by search engines as the generally preferred entry point to the ever richer variety of web pages. For this reason, UIs on iPCs look likely to become driven by intelligent front-end search engines, which respond to user queries by offering seamless choices between both offline and online functionality on their devices. Smart search will be supported by smart recommendations.
Short-cutting screen and keyboard: Another drawback of present day smartphones is the relatively fiddly nature of screen and keyboard. How much more convenient if the information in the display could somehow be conveyed directly to the biological brain of the user – and likewise if detectors of brain activity could convert thought patterns into instructions transmitted to the iPC. It sounds mind-boggling, and perhaps that’s what it is, in a literal sense. Nano-technology could make this a reality sooner than we imagine.

If some of these thoughts sparked your interest, I suggest that you bookmark the dates 21-22 October in your diary. That’s when Symbian will bring a host of ecosystem experts together, at the free-to-attend Symbian Smartphone Show, in London. It will be your chance to hear 10 keynote presentations from major industry figures and over 60 seminars led by marketplace experts. You’ll be able to network with over 4,000 representatives from major handset vendors, content providers, network operators, and developers. To register, visit smartphoneshow.com. Much of the discussion will focus on the theme, “The next wave of smartphone innovation”. Your contributions will be welcome!

Anticipating the next ten years of smartphone innovation - Part 1

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:06:44 PDT

This week celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Symbian, so we asked Symbian Executive Vice President of Research, David Wood, to provide thoughts on the evolution of the OS and how far it still has to go. His post will appear in two parts. Tomorrow, we'll get a peak at just how much more we can expect from smartphones.

This June, Symbian is celebrating its tenth anniversary. As someone who has been a core member of Symbian’s executive management team throughout these ten roller-coaster years, I’d like to share some of my personal reflections on the remarkable smartphone innovations that have taken place over that time – and, in that light, to consider what the next ten years may bring.

It was on 24 June 1998 that the formation of Symbian was announced to the world. The industry’s leading phone manufacturers were to cooperate to fund further development of the operating system known at the time as EPOC32 (this name dates from the inception of the OS, four years earlier, inside the UK-based PDA manufacturer Psion). The funding would enable the operating system to power numerous diverse models of advanced mobile phones – known, in virtue of their rich programmability, as “smartphones”. The news echoed far and wide. In time, the funding repaid investors handsomely: more than 200 million Symbian-based smartphones have already been sold, earning our customers substantial profits. It’s not just our direct customers that have benefited: a fertile ecosystem of partner companies is sharing in an ongoing technological and market success.

But there have been many road bumps along the way – and many surprises. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the degree of difficulty in actually bringing smartphones to market. We time and again under-estimated the complexity of the entire evolving smartphone software system – mistakenly thinking that it would take only around 12 months for significant new products to mature, whereas in reality the effort required was often considerably higher. To our dismay, numerous potential world-beating products were cancelled, on account of lengthy gestation periods. Or, when they did reach the market, their window of opportunity had passed, so their sales were disappointing. For each breakthrough Symbian-based phone that set the market alight, there were almost as many others that were shelved, or failed to live up to expectations. For this reason, incidentally, when I see commentators becoming highly excited about the prospects of possible new smartphone operating systems, I prefer to reserve my judgment. I know that, just because an industry giant is behind a new smartphone solution, it does not follow that early expectations will be translated into tangible unit sales. With ever-increasing feature requirements, operator specifications, and usability demands, smartphone software keeps on growing in complexity. It requires tremendous skill to integrate an entire software stack to meet a rapidly evolving target. If you pick a sub-optimal smartphone OS as your starting point, you’ll be storing up more trouble for yourself.

Another surprise was in some of the key characteristics of successful smartphones. In 1998, we failed to anticipate that most mobile phones would eventually contain a high quality digital camera. It was only after several years that we realized that the “top secret” (and therefore rarely discussed) features of forthcoming products from different customers were actually the same – namely an embedded camera application. More recently, the prevalence of smartphones with embedded GPS chips has also been a happy surprise. Mapping and location services are in the process of transforming mobile phones, today, in similar way to their earlier transformation by still and then video cameras. This observation strengthens my faith in the critical importance of openness in a smartphone operating system: the task of the OS provider isn’t to impose a single vision about the future of mobile phones, but is to enable different industry players to experiment, as easily as possible, with bringing their different visions for mobile phones into reality.

As a measure of the progress with smartphone technology, let’s briefly compare the specs of two devices: the Ericsson R380, which was the first successful Symbian-powered smartphone (on sale from September 2000 – and a technological marvel in its day), and the recent best-seller, Nokia’s N95 8GB:

The R380 had a black and white touch screen, whereas the N95 screen has 16 million colours
The R380 ran circuit switched data over GSM (2G), whereas the N95 runs over HSDPA (3.5G)
The R380 supported WAP browsing, whereas the N95 has full-featured web browsing
The R380 had only a small number of built-in applications: PIM, and some utilities and games
The N95 includes GPS, Bluetooth, wireless LAN, FM radio, a 5 mega-pixel camera, and a set of built-in applications that’s far too long to list here!

Another telling difference between these two time periods is in the number of Symbian smartphone projects in progress (each with significant resources allocated to them). During the first years of Symbian’s existence, the number of different projects could be counted on the fingers of two hands. In contrast, at the end of March 2008, there were no less than 70 distinct smartphone models under development, from all the leading phone manufacturers. That’s a phenomenal pipeline of future market-leading products.

Although smartphones have come a long way in the last ten years, the next ten years are likely to witness even more growth and innovation:

Component prices will continue to fall – resulting in smartphones at prices to suit all pockets
Quality, performance, and robustness will continue to improve, meaning that the appeal of smartphones extends beyond technology aficionados and early adopters, into the huge mainstream audience of “ordinary users” for whom reliability and usability have pivotal importance
Word of mouth will spread the news that phones can have valuable uses other than voice calls and text messages: more and more users are discovering the joys of mobile web interaction, mobile push email, mobile access to personal and business calendars and information, and so on
The smartphone ecosystem will continue to devise, develop, and deploy interesting new services for smartphones, addressing all corners of human life and personal need
The pipeline of forthcoming new smartphone models will continue to strengthen.

It is no wonder that analysts talk about a time, not so far into the future, when there will be one billion smartphones in use around the world. The software that is at the heart of the majority of these devices will have a good claim to being the most widely used software on the planet. Symbian OS is in the pole position to win that race, but of course, nothing can be taken for granted.

Get Loopt in...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:06:54 PDT

A while back, I wrote about a friend finder service available on Boost Mobile cell phones called Loopt. The idea behind the service is that you can find out where people are physically located on your cell phone. In order for it to work, you both have to be Loopt members and opt-in. The service is now available on many Verizon Wireless phones and can be accessed directly from your phone via the Get It Now/Tools On The Go menu. If your cell phone supports the feature it will appear as an option in services you can download. Takes the guess work out of it for you. The service costs $3.99 a month.

Symbian's place in the smartphone market

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:06:56 PDT

This week celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Symbian, so we asked Bloggers around the Internet to tell us their thoughts on the OS, how far it's come and just how far it can go. Our next post comes from David Cassel. To read more from David, check out the Tech.Blorge.

In 2001, I interviewed Symbian's CEO, Colly Myers. He was intensely committed to cellphones — he was using an Ericsson R380 smartphone — but he said he hoped someday to have the option of using a fold-out keyboard.

Myers envisioned a future with more processing power on phones and a lot more development for the mobile platform, I read later. At the time Symbian was locked in a battle for survival with Microsoft — and less than a year later, Myers resigned suddenly.

It's a different world now. Fold-out keyboards are plentiful, cell phones can play full-color video — and Symbian has the dominant smartphone operating system. In 2006 Symbian announced they'd reached a milestone — 100 million Symbian smartphones, shipped to over network operators. (Ironically, this was two years after the the first reports of Symbian worms like Caribe). But the biggest threat to Symbian now isn't Microsoft — it's Google.

In the short-term, Symbian is secure. Android hasn't been released yet, and its final release date is still hard to nail down. (The last rumor I heard suggested September of 2008.) Even then, Android will need to grow a community of developers. Android ultimately needs a critical mass of users, developers, and installations — and I can't see that even starting to happen until sometime near 2010.

Remember that Symbian enters this battle with a head start of 100 million phones. That's important, because ultimately the prevailing operating system will be determined by a handful of key players. Symbian can still boast that they're the industry standard — and if nothing else, there's an inertia that works in their favor. And Symbian's developers have to be happy knowing that they're developing for such a huge user base.

That's the good news for Symbian. But the bad news is the cell phone market is definitely changing. It's always been competitive, and Symbian has real worries that an Android developer will someday create a killer app that Symbian can't replicate. Apple's iPhone also raised the expectations consumers had for the interfaces on their phones. (And the iPhone even started a growing backlash to "closed networks," with Congressional hearings and vocal opposition from Google.) So there's a feeling of flux in the market.

But right now, Symbian's dominance seems secure. In "Internet time," 10 years is a century. So let's hope the next "century" brings even better experiences to the cell phone consumers of the future.

And whatever happened to Colly Myers? Legend has it that a friend later asked him a random question — what was the word for a baby herring? Myers messaged the friend with his cellphone — and then realized he'd discovered a business opportunity. In 2004 he started "Any Question Answered," a British SMS service which now boasts over 1,450 researchers.

I hope he also finally got a fold-out keyboard....

Cell phones in action: Use a 3G AT&T cell phone as a wireless modem for a Mac

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:06:28 PDT

We hear a lot about 3G cell phones and all the services they have to offer. We wanted to see just how well it would work if we paired a 3G cell phone with a Mac via Bluetooth and used it as a wireless modem. So we took a Samsung SGH-A737 cell phone, signed up for an unlimited data plan, paired it with a Bluetooth-enabled MacBook Pro, and put it to the test. Check out the results below, and if you want to try this at home, see our How-To on the topic.

Note: Although we used a Samsung SGH-A737 cell phone in the video, it’s best to use a 3G HSPA smartphone.

A brief history of Symbian

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:06:12 PDT

This week celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Symbian, so we asked Bloggers around the Internet to tell us their thoughts on the OS, how far it's come and just how far it can go. Our first post comes from Derek Kerton, who provides a pretty good Symbian overview. To read more from Derek, check out the The Kerton Group.

The Symbian OS is probably a mystery to readers of the LetsTalk blog. US smartphone users are more familiar with PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry OS devices. But while we've been tapping away on our Treos, Tilts, and Pearls, the rest of the world has been witnessing the steady progress of Symbian.

The story of Symbian actually runs deeper than the ten years it has been called Symbian. In 1980, a company called Psion began making desktop productivity software for PCs. By 1984, the company launched its first handheld computer or PDA. By the late 80s, Psion had built the EPOC OS to run their PDAs. Through the years, Psion offered a number of full-featured handheld computers, leading to the 1994-97 creation of the 32-bit EPOC OS.

Around the same time as the modernized EPOC OS was ready, other PDAs were hitting the market, such as the popular PalmPilot from inventors Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. The first Windows PocketPC devices were also coming out from Compaq and Dell. The writing was on the wall that these powerful PDA OSes would someday all be integrated into devices with radios (or radios integrated into these PDAs, if you wish). The European mobile handset (Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens) crowd were prescient in spotting this trend, and realized that they did not like the PC market case study wherein the hardware was commoditized, and the OS layer (Windows) ended up capturing all the profits. They feared a repeat with their hardware and mobile Windows OSes, or Palm, or whatever.

Instead of becoming the next Compaq, Gateway or Dell, led by Nokia, their strategy would be to mutually embrace one mobile OS, to make sure it had scale, and to make sure it was not dominated by one player, or even worse, Redmond. Thus, in 1998, a consortium including Siemens, Motorola, Ericsson, Psion, and eventually Panasonic and Samsung bought Symbian and spun it out from Psion.

Thus, the goal for Symbian was to be the dominant smartphone OS in the world, to provide a reliable alternative to MSFT or other OSes, and to offer low, reasonable licensing costs that wouldn't squeeze the hardware vendors out of the profit equation. And by every indication (despite the obscurity here in the US), Symbian has succeeded: In 2007, Symbian had 67% of the smartphone market by shipping volume, compared to MSFT's 13% and RIM's 10%.

So what can I tell you that's interesting about the Symbian OS. Let me go to a bullet list to make this concise:

It was designed from the ground up to be used on small devices with limited resources. It is robust, seldom crashes, cleans up unused memory, and stresses reduced power use.
Runs on ARM processors, where one processor chipset can drive all smartphone and radio tasks.
Provides a Java VM environment
The OS is standardized, but the UI layer is intended to be designed by the handset vendor to allow product differentiation.
With its flexible UI layer, Symbian appears on many phones that you might not think of as "smart". Many phones without extra large screens or keyboards still run Symbian.

I actually had the first Symbian phone released to market, an R380 from Ericsson. It was a very cool device at the time, with a monochrome screen that was partially covered by the keypad. Flip the keypad down to expose even more screen, bigger than anything else in its day. There were a number of applications built-in, but to be honest, the whole thing was a little glitchy. I still used a Palm Vii as my main PDA. One of the main problems was that connectivity was still through dial-up Circuit-Switched Packet Data, so the integration of PDA with cellular network was weak. I think I still have this phone in a box somewhere, since it failed to sell on eBay...

My latest Symbian phone, a 2007 Nokia N95 is a very different experience than my R380. This device is a powerhouse smartphone with media, camera, video, 3G networking, Wi-Fi, PIM, down-loadable apps, bluetooth accessories, and a bright colorful screen. The N95 truly is a handheld computer, and to Symbian's credit is rock solid, and quite responsive. Can't remember ever having to "reboot". But the UI (or I should say UIs, since it seems to have two) is confusing, and the lack of touch-screen interface is a negative.

The handset vendors all treat their Symbian partnership differently. Support from Nokia has been unwavering, although they recently bought Trolltech, a Linux OS vendor. The other minority owners in the consortium are less religiously dedicated to Symbian. Motorola seems to support any mobile OS that is well-known, and seems keen on Linux. Ericsson (now Sony-Ericsson) has wavered back and forth on the strength of their commitment to Symbian. There seems to be a little rift in the group that Nokia is too much in control.

But the original 1998 motivator for Symbian's existence - a vendor-owned OS to compete with MSFT - is very much still in effect, if not more so. The Windows Mobile platforms have moved (excruciatingly slowly) towards offering a stable, robust alternative, but in true MSFT fashion, you can never write them off. The main threat that I see to Symbian's existence would be the possible success of Android. Although hardly a foregone conclusion, Android as promised would obviate the need for Symbian as an open, cheaply licensed, fully functional Smartphone OS. If Android is massively successful, it would not "beat" Symbian so much as make Symbian redundant.

Yet let's not get ahead of ourselves: it will take more than spin to knock Symbian out. Android is currently a batch of promises, where Symbian had delivered on its promises. Android currently ships 0 units, Linux variants are still a tiny fraction stalled by variation in implementations, MSFT has quality and control issues, Blackberry is a one-vendor OS, and Palm... Meanwhile, according to ABI Research:

"77.3 million Symbian smartphones were shipped in 2007, 50% more than the 51.7 million shipped in 2006"
Symbian has 67% of the smartphone market - no small potatoes
This year's MWC cellular confab showed 4 new Nokias, one new LG, and one new Samsung Symbian phone
"Symbian’s share of the overall handset market grew from about 5.1% in 2006 to 6.7% in 2007"
10% of handsets shipped in 2007 were smartphones, compared to a projected 25% in 2012

And Symbian doesn't need to maintain 67% market share to meet its goals. The main goal is to avoid a third party company from gaining a monopoly on the mobile OS business. So long as there is choice and competition in the marketplace, that goal is assured.

The bottom line is that, even though we in the US don't know it well, Symbian is here to stay. And as more handset vendors sell directly to customers, and as Nokia continues to invest in penetrating the US market, we should expect to become more intimately connected to Symbian in the middle term.

Symbian Turns 10

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:06:54 PDT

A decade ago, I worked for a magazine called Mobile Computing and my beat was cell phones. At the time, the most exciting thing about cell phones was that they were becoming more and more portable. You could carry them in your purse or pocket pretty easily and the displays were all monochrome. Texting wasn’t popular back then, but it was still limited to 160 characters. The killer app of the day was getting stock quotes sent to your cell phone and still you had to be a bit savvy to even do that. Around the same time, the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) garnered all the excitement: there was Palm, Psion, and Windows CE (which eventually turned into Pocket PC and later Windows Mobile). Ten years ago, that was the cool technology beat. There was so much that could be done on a PDA, and about the only thing you could do on a cell phone was make a call. And then, ten years ago today, I went to a press event that would change the way we thought about phones.

I remember the room clearly because there wasn’t much in it. It was in a loft space down in Silicon Alley (you know, New York’s take on Silicon Valley). There were chairs set up to face a podium that had a back drop of white sheets to highlight the news at hand. Really, it was nothing fancy at all. I think they had coffee, but that was about it. It was the announcement of a new cell phone OS called Symbian. I thought to myself at the time, “OS, shouldn’t that be a PDA?” And, I wasn’t far off. Symbian was an OS that incorporated many of the aspects of Psion and was going to be “open” so anyone could develop apps for it. And get this: one of the first Symbian phones had a touch screen. At the time, I knew I liked what I saw. It had potential. I hoped it would do well. And it has, it’s just not as popular in the United States as it is in the rest of the world. I still like it. Whenever I test a Symbian smartphone, I’m constantly in awe of how many things this it can accomplish with ease and pure style. You won’t always know you’re using a Symbian phone because it’s that customizable, which in my book is another plus for the OS.

So to help celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Symbian, we’ll have posts about Symbian from a myriad of guest bloggers throughout the week. In the meantime, check out how far Symbian has come:

One of the first Symbian phones, the Ericsson R380 (You read it right, it's Ericsson not Sony Ericsson)

One of the latest Symbian phones, the Nokia N96

Deal of the Week

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:06:20 PDT

What is it? Get a free Sling Media Slingbox AV with the purchase of a new PC data card with AT&T service. Whether you need a data card that works with a PCMCIA slot or the new Express Card slots found on newer notebooks, we’ve got a model for you. If you travel a lot and need to constantly be connected to the Internet, a high-speed data card is just the ticket. Once you make a connection, access your Slingbox at home and start watching your favorite shows on your laptop while on the road.

How much? Get a data card free along with a Sling Media Slingbox AV when you sign up for a new 2-year AT&T service contract.

Why is it such a good deal? The Slingbox AV costs $139.99 when purchased alone and we’re throwing it in free because we know what a cool combo the Slingbox AV is when paired with a high-speed wireless data connection. You can learn more about the magic of Slingbox by reading this post.

Option GT Ultra Express

Sling Media Slingbox AV

Q&A: Cell phones for the great outdoors and picking a phone for your parents

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:06:40 PDT

In this installment of Questions and Answers, we give advice on cell phones with large fonts as well as rugged mobiles. Got a question you want answered? Submit your question here. Got something to add to the answers below? Leave a comment.

My mother (86) is losing her eyesight and needs a cell phone with large buttons and a large display. She has an AT&T plan through November. Do you offer such a cell phone? Or can we purchase such a phone and add it to her AT&T plan? – Cheryl

Honestly, it sounds like the best cell phone for your mom is a Jitterbug. These cell phones are designed specifically for these needs. The numbers and text on the screen are larger than most large fonts available in cell phones and the numeric keys are large, well lit, and spaced far enough apart that misdials are highly unlikely. If you don’t want to switch carriers, your best option is to probably go with a Motorola Razr. The numbers and screen are both fairly large by today’s cell phone standards. If you go this route be sure to go into the display settings and increase the font size to Large.

What is the best phone for rugged outdoor use, and text capabilities? - Ron

When it comes to text capabilities most cell phones are pretty much on par, so I’d start with choosing a rugged cell phone and then narrow down your choice based on how comfortable you are using the text input method. For example, maybe you prefer iTap over T9, which are both forms of predictive text that people tend to have difference preferences. As for a rugged cell phone, you can’t really go wrong with a Nextel cell phone since that was one of their original design characteristics. Nextel cell phones can really take a beating and keep on going. However, if you don’t want a Nextel cell phone you should look at the G'zOne for Verizon wireless – that’s pretty rugged, as well.