Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Russ gave me a bluetooth thumbpad he was playing around with for his media PC at one point. It’s this odd little keyboard that was supposed to be used for a mobile phone:

But we had been fooling around with it for use with the N770 and N800 devices. Turns out it works quite well for the N95, and Putty in particular. The keyboard is really small too, easily pocketable if you’re wearing something with a bunch of pockets. Like say a motorcycle jacket. W00t! Bye bye tank bag, hello SSH connectivity. One of my big concerns moving away from the E61 was that I can’t really SSH out of the N95 without carrying a big keyboard with me. This should work however.

Problem is the makers of this little thing seem to have disappeared. Fortunately it looks like Targus is producing them now, so you might be able to wander into a random BestBuy or Office Depot and snatch one. Russ ripped the phone clip off his, so I’m not sure how that part of it works out. But the functionality of the keyboard with the apps I tried was great.

Prompted in part by Dennis’s review of Opera Mini on the N95 at WAPReview I snagged the latest Opera Mini on my N95 and tried it out side by side with Webkit for one of the more challenging sites I try at times. My test site is Bay Area Riders Forum, the forums area in particular. Mobile browsers tend to have some real problems with discussion board style sites like these ones.

Both of them did better than I expected. I’ve tried the site a few times from other browsers and different versions of these browsers and I remember having a lot more issues. This time I was able to login, use the popup menus to get to the thread views I wanted, and generally things worked out quite well.

First off, the Webkit based browser that ships with the Nokia. Using the page overview mode you can see that it does a really good job of fitting sections of text to a layout that you can read as a single column on the phone:

It keeps the overall format of the page intact enough that you can tell what the layout really is though. I didn’t expect it to do that as well as it did. I had the font set to the smallest I could get it to go, however it seemed like it still really wasted a lot of space. For instance here’s a shot of reading a section of that article:

For me, that’s tremendous text. There’s quite a bit of wasted space there it seems, and reading is pretty much constant scrolling.

So compare that to the Opera Mini 4.0 version. There’s the map overview, which is the default when entering into a page on mini, which I actually think I like quite a bit:

The same article in Webkit takes up two screens. The fonts are much smaller and the layout seems to be more compact:

That’s a zoomed view of the same section as Webkit, it just includes some of the page from both before and after. This is just one example of course, but from the poking around I think I agree with Dennis, Opera Mini seems to be doing a fantastic job for the N95.

There are a few tiny details in the mini version that kind of wowed me as well. For instance when scrolling up and down the view of a thread in the forums the different levels of responses are indented by different amounts. Each section in both mini and webkit uses the full width of the screen so that it’s easy to read. In webkit you have to follow the level of indent yourself as you scroll, I expected that. In mini however as you scroll up and down it automatically follows the indent level for whatever you were lined up to automatically, both when zoomed in and in overview mode. I didn’t expect that at all, and it makes reading something like that forum that much nicer. Now that’s some intense attention to detail. Excellent job by the Opera Mini folks again.

ShoZu on the N95 is pretty slick. There’s an option to enable the built in GPS to attach geotags to the photos, and then Flickr puts the photo on a map for you. Nice and slick. The option to upload appears right in the camera app. The GPS is quick, and the network is pretty much instant.

There’s another service called Locr that provides geocoded photo uploads as well, but I couldn’t get it working for some reason. Probably something I screwed up, just not sure what. And I like that the ShoZu uploads go to Flickr, that’s where I would really like them anyway. Those 5 megapixel images are just insanely big aren’t they?

Russ gave me back the N95 I tossed at him after MobileCamp. I just got done syncing it up using iSync drivers actually provided by Nokia, how novel is that? I grabbed a few essential apps I needed to try out right away, like Google Maps for mobile which now uses the built in GPS on the N95, and Agile Messenger. There’s somewhere north of a billion features actually built into the device itself, and there are a bunch of services I’ve been meaning to play with or try out that I didn’t both with cause my E61 didn’t have a camera. I’ve been using Nokia S60 devices for a long time, and there’s stuff in here that I’m pretty sure isn’t going to really make it into many of the consumer focused reviews out there. So here it goes, a total geeks review of the N95.

The first question on almost everyone’s mind is normally “Oh yea, how fast?” Normally because they’ve seen the info that Om posted about the N95 he tried out a few months ago. Well here’s what I got:

Not sure what testing service Om used to get his 400 kilobits, I used dslreports.com to get mine. We both used the N95 tethered via Bluetooth to a MacBook Pro. The other variables being that he was probably in San Francisco and I’m in San Mateo, and that he was using the device when almost nothing else existed that could be using the 3G network. Note however that the latency is very low for a cellular network, and the subjective feeling is that it’s absolutely blazingly fast compared to using the E61. Some of that while I’m on the device itself is because the processor is a lot faster in the N95. But even just comparing tethered E61 to tethered N95 and taking device speed itself out, the difference is noticeable.

And if you’re a proper geek, you need to be thinking “How can you live without a keyboard? Are you some kind of horrid backwards quasi-geek? How the hell are you going to SSH with T9 you tard? Use triple tap? You’re insane, I can’t listen to you!” And you would be right, for the most part. I’m expecting to really really, or perhaps even really really really, miss the QWERTY keyboard from my E61 when it comes to some of the things I do frequently on my device. So one of the first things I did after installing Putty was use the wireless keyboard app (it’s under “Office” on the version I have, cause… umm, just cause it is) to connect the phone with my Stowaway
Bluetooth keyboard. And much to my surprise it worked the way I expected it to. Start up VIM on my server and edit a few files, yep, seems to work. Action shot:

I’m a big fan of scripting languages on devices, and there’s been a kick ass pys60 project that provides a python interpreter for S60 devices. That went on pretty quickly, and I thought there was a module I could use for accessing the built in GPS from Python. But apparently Nokia has crippled themselves with this security certificate bullshit. Apparently I can’t install the module unsigned, even with my device set to install all. I need to resign the code with some tool I’m not at all familiar with. Nice that someone has managed to plug the hole Nokia shot in their foot. But it would be even cooler if they didn’t shoot themselves in the first place. Cause there are only so many hours in my day. And while I would be happy to hack some GPS Python goodness I just don’t have the time to read up on even more tools unnecessarily placed in my path. Boo!! Hiss!!! Horrible job, clue up folks. This device just got about half as useful to me as I had hoped it would be.

One of the things I was looking forward to now that my device has a camera again, was fooling around with some QR Codes. So I used the QR Code generator to whip up a link to m.thisismobility.com. The folks at MobileCamp mentioned that the N95 shipped with a QR Code reader already. Yay!! So I looked around on the device. Not in the main menu or under tools or applications. So it must be built into the camera application, right? The camera app wasn’t automatically picking up QR Codes when I held them in front of the camera (the most acceptable option), or identify them in the captured image and present me with an option to follow the link (the close second most acceptable option), or automatically popping up a new menu option to use the data in the image (the third reasonable option), or providing anything like a “send to QR Code scanner” in the send menu (the fourth reasonable option). Nope, eventually I found a separate dedicated Barcode application in the “Office” folder. The app seems to be tied into nothing else except the web browser. And it generates an unconfigurable horrible noise when it finds a barcode. Probably somewhere around the 300th way it could be done, and found well south of the point where we cross from sanity into insanity. Man, I was hoping that Nokia providing a barcode scanner in their devices presented the possibility to increasing their use here in regions where they’re not popular already. Doesn’t seem like it however.

Doesn’t sound good huh? Russ gave me back the phone and said even though I didn’t want to like it, I would after playing with it for a while. Not the case. I’m not mad at Nokia any more at least, cause as it turns out I would have been mad to pay so much for this device if they managed to sell me one. What I’m seeing here is relatively little value added by the integrator. The N95 is a grab bag of the coolest stuff you can toss into a phone, but no real cohesion or innovation (besides being willing to put out a phone that costs as much as a laptop). Just a grab bag of features, not a unified device. Still, it does have some sexy features, and I’m sure I’ll play with it a bunch. I just wouldn’t suggest paying the retail price. Maybe that’s why they’re giving the things away at so many events.

Here are some screenshots (taken using a fantastic bit of freeware called Screenshot 2). The Nokia portal is starting to look pretty decent, this is what the default homepage looked like:

And how the browser renders the mobile version of my blog:

The version of Google Maps that uses the internal GPS: