Well testing is well and truly under way and already I have ruled out three devices as unsuitable.
Sony Ericsson Satio:
What can I say? This is touted as Sonys flagship cameraphone using the cybershot brand. Running the very mature Symbian S60 OS with a 12.1 megapixel camera and a strong heritage I expected a lot from this. Sadly I have been extremely disappointed. As a former K800i owner, I know that Sony are capable of producing an excellent phone capable of withstanding a lot of punishment with plenty of features that do exactly what you want of them. With the Satio, Sony seem to have gone backwards and concentrated on reducing costs rather than producing a quality product.
Just looking at it in the box I was surprised at just how cheap it looked. On taking it out and handling it it became even worse. Much of the phone is constructed out of plastic and sprayed with a silver finish to give the impression of metal, but it is done so badly that just by looking you can tell it is cheap plastic. Given a reasonable amount of use, I can see this coating flaking off very quickly. It feels very flimsy and you are scared to handle it too much, as it feels like it is going to fall apart in your hands.
I was unsure about the usability of the phone as it is touch screen only, but given the large 3.5″ screen I felt that there was enough room to have a usable virtual keyboard. The room is there, but the implementation of the keyboard is appalling. It isn’t accurate enough and at times struggles to keep up with a moderately fast typing speed. Even the camera doesn’t save this phone as the 12.1 megapixels do not seem to produce a good image, all they do is make the photo size larger. Given the price tag of nearly £500 for an unlocked version, Sony should hang their head in shame. It feels like a <£50 copy of a much better phone.
OK, my job is not really to provide a mobile phone review, but to put them through their paces and find out how well they manage to provide a desktop replacement service to our mobile users. Immediately this phone failed. We need something that will take some real-world use without falling apart, and as I mentioned earlier this is so flimsy I think you would be lucky to get a few months of use out of it before it fell to bits. The keyboard isn’t responsive enough to use comfortably. It didn’t seem to want to let me access our exchange server to retrieve email and it kept dropping my wireless connection. Using 3rd party tools I could connect to our vpn and then rdp to a desktop, but the frustration in doing so because it kept dropping the wireless connection just wasn’t worth the effort.
Overall Rating 2/10
Palm Pre:
Unable to tell you much about this phone other than it was quite comfortable to hold, felt well built but the keys on the keyboard were too small, fiddly and just seemed to be in the wrong position to use for anything other than small text messages or emails. The reason I can’t tell you any more than that is that when you switch it on it needs a sim card before you can do anything. Most phones that are being sold as a mobile computing device rather than a phone will at least let you get to the rest of the phones features without a sim, you just don’t get to make any calls. Not a major problem you might think, just pop a sim in and away you go.
Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. After inserting a sim card I was presented with a screen asking me to log in with my Palm Profile, or create a new one. Apparently you need a Palm Profile to access Palm services such as phone updates and the phone will not let you use it until a profile is registered with it. I tried to create a profile, which had to include some personal details like an email address, but on clicking finish I kept getting the error message that it couldn’t complete the registration as there was no wireless carrier. This was despite me being able to see a full signal. This could be because we bought a unlocked phone and used an Orange sim card in it, but O2 have the exclusive Palm contract in this country and maybe it didn’t like the Orange network. Registration must take place over a mobile network as you cannot get access to the WiFi settings until it is completed and you can get into the settings menus.
Even if I had managed to register a profile, the fact that the phone needs to be tied to one person renders it unsuitable for our purposes as we need to be able to hand the devices out to whoever needs one. We really couldn’t give out phones that were able to access another persons private details. My rating for this phone is purely based on suitability for our use and should not be taken as a reflection on the phone itself as I have not been able to use it. It may be a very good phone for an individuals use, but it is definitely not a corporate device.
Overall Rating 2/10
Nokia N900:
I was really looking forward to getting my hands on this much hyped ‘mobile computer’ from Nokia. As it is running Maemo 5 which is a derivative of Debian Linux you should be able to do pretty much anything with it. Sadly, it looks like Nokia have jumped the gun a bit and shipped it without giving developers enough time to get things running on it. Currently there are only 126 apps available on maemo.org and none of them provide the functionality we need. Currently there is no full Java support, no VPN support for anything other than OpenVPN, no RDP client, seems to have difficulty connecting to Exchange 2003.
The phone itself feels like a well made piece of kit, and what it can do it does very well indeed. The touch screen is nice and responsive, the qwerty keyboard has nicely sized keys and is easy to use. Everything that is built in is easy to use, and is very quick at loading. As it stands though, in order to get full Java running on it, there is a developer forum that details how you have to ssh into the phone, download a 90 day trial version of Java for embedded devices, extract the tarball, install to a location and then edit config files using vi in order to set the Java class paths. Not exactly user friendly. Much of what this phone will be capable of is let down by similar problems. I downloaded the OpenVPN client from the Ovi marketplace to find that no icon appears anywhere and to use it you must drop to a command line to configure it and run. For a consumer hand-held device having to issue instructions to your end-user along the lines of add the repository, use apt-get install, open vi, open the correct config files and then explain why you can’t just type like in a word processor as vi requires explicit instructions to do anything, this is really no good. From an admin point of view, we would have to do this ourselves before handing them out and then deal with any slight issue the end user might come across as mostly they wouldn’t have a clue how to fix it meaning just supporting the devices would be very time consuming.
When the developers really get going with it and the number of apps increases, along with fixed installers that actually put an icon in place for you and don’t need you to go to command line this will be an astoundingly capable device. End users should be able to find apps to do just about everything, geeks will love the ability to tinker with every aspect of the device and the developers will be able to reach a larger audience without too much effort as they should be able to port their existing Linux apps to Meamo without too much effort. Hopefully Nokia are doing all they can to support developers and get this device up to its full potential. Until that happens it will remain a niche device only useful to developers and those who are interested in computing, but of no interest to those who just want to use a computer with a minimum of fuss.
Overall Rating 5/10
colhawksworth
MalBlack
dannykgv
Martyn Coleman
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