I have been thinking about this subject lately, after using a BlackBerry Torch 9800 as my work phone for a few months.  I like the device a lot, but there are certainly some rough edges and some places where there is a UI conflict between touching the screen and pressing the buttons. At the same time, I am using both an iPod Nano 3G, and a couple of iPod Touches. I used to have SonyEricsson Symbian-based P900, P990i, and G900 smart phones which also were combined touch/press devices with a stylus.

I think it is clear that using a physical keyboard is preferable to an on-screen keyboard for typing serious amounts of text.  On the iPod, entering a URL or search term in a browser just feels fiddly, compared to the ease of composition with the physical keyboard on the
BlackBerry.  To me, I cannot get over the feeling that an iPod Touch or iPhone is really best as a consumption device, but that a BlackBerry is a superb creation device.  On a BB, I can type quite long emails, while an iOS device feels more appropriate for the occasional short messages.  To me, this is an important aspect, as I tend use the smart phone as a two-way email communications device.

The slide-out keyboard solution on the BB Torch (and many other phones from many different vendors) seems just right for this, giving you a full-screen device for reading tasks, with a full keyboard when needed.

On my old G900, I used T9 with a 0 to 9 keypad, and that worked surprisingly well.  A problem both with the BB and definitely with an on-screen keyboard is the fact that using it single-handedly is very hard.  On a screen, you do not get feedback from your fingers where you are on the keyboard, and the full keyboard of the BB is a bit too small to reliably use with a single hand.  I noted this in my G900 review three years ago, and it still holds true. The G900 looked like this:

Since a primary use of our iPods is gaming, I have noted some different UI principles for games.  There seem to be one class of games where touch makes perfect sense, like Angry Birds.  Press and draw to load, swipe to move the display, pinch to zoom – perfect and logical. Another class of games are obviously ports of mouse-based games, like Plants vs Zombies.  In such games, the touch screen is essentially used as it was back in stylus-time. It is just another way to generate single-point clicks.

Finally, we have the category of games that really would work best with a physical controller, like PacMan. Displaying a four-way control key setup on the screen does not get close to the right feeling.

I think the SonyEricsson Xperia Play was a brilliant idea – imagine an Apple device with that little built-in game controller.  Seems that SonyEricsson has not quite managed to execute on the idea, but in an ecosystem that generates variation like Android, this kind of device should have a place.

However, I have a hard time seeing the swiss-army-knife design of a phone having both a slide out keyboard and a slide-out game controller. Would be neat, but mechanically I don’t think it would work very well.

On to navigation.  The idea of touch gestures (in particular swipes) to navigate around the UI as popularized by Apple in the first iPhone is great in many ways.  My youngest child has used it since she was two, and it just works quite naturally.  However, there are still cases where a plain old navigation key works better. And having both is best.

Holding a device in one hand and scrolling a web page is faster on the navigation key on my BB than using touch on an iPod. The old G900 was even more efficient, just hold the down key – no physical motion needed at all. The iPod would be so much better if it could just have a scroll wheel on the side or something so you could use it one-handed
for reading without having to put a finger on top of the screen (and quite often accidentally clicking links in the process).

I also like the menu key on the BB (and on my old SonyEricsson phones), as a way to quickly get to the most important functions. This seems hard to emulate on a touch screen in a good way. In their touch-enabled phones, BB has tried it with a press-and-hold action – if you press down on the screen, a little action palette opens. Which does not quite work for me.

Another great advantage of some well-choosen physical buttons is that they offer immediate access to certain functions.  On a touch-screen device, I find that you have to dig through several steps to get into any function.  Home screens with most commonly accessed functions in all honor, but a direct key to dial a call or activate the camera is faster.  It cannot support all functions, obviously, but it lets you bring up the most common and important functions quickly. This is an aspect where my iPod Nano is much better than an iPod touch. On the iPod Nano, you can have it in a pocket and just hit the device to move to the next song or pause. On an iPod Touch, you have to look at the screen and find the right spot to hit.

On the other hand, the Nano would have been even better with a couple of buttons to increase/decrease volume rather than the scroll wheel. When out running, having to hold the things in both hands to make simple adjustments is really annoying. It also does not work with gloves on, which is a big problem with all touch device as well as touch-wheels – they require naked fingers, which is annoying in a climate where gloves are on for at least half the year. As I said before, someone should put a design center in Luleå or Novosibirsk or Alaska, and then see what kinds of devices come out.

A full keyboard like the BB also have the nice property of providing many points of access to shortcuts.  It might seem quite backwards of me, but I like the speed of action you get with the keyboard shortcuts in the BB email application. It has a lot in common with classic computer UIs, actually. It is hard to afford immediate access to 20+ functions on a touch screen without creating a very cluttered interface.  On the other hand, a touch interface done right makes it simple to access system-level things quickly by just touching the status icons on the screen – you get out of the application faster than if you had to use the keyboard to navigate up to some button.  For some reason, neither the iOS devices nor the BB does this right, while my old SonyEricsson smartphones all let me access detailed status by hitting the battery icon or network icons.

However, after singing the praise of the keyboard and touch screen in union, I must admit that there is a big downside to a combined touch/press device. UI design is harder when you have to both afford a good keyboard-controlled interface and a touch interface. The BB Torch I have suffers from this quite badly – having to afford both touch and non-touch interaction, as well as non-touch versions of the device itself does mean that the UI is not as streamlined and elegant as what you can get on a pure touch device. I often find myself jumping between keyboard and touch as I cannot quite complete what I want to do using just one or the other interaction mode, which really should not be necessary. Only having to think about a single type of input does seem to make things simpler for a UI designers, even if it also sometimes precludes creating truly efficient applications.

Here is how (and for some reason I could not find this in the manual):

• Go to “Options” on the home screen/main menu
• Then to “Advanced Options”
• Then to “SIM Card”:

• In the dialog that comes up, set the phone number and name.

I still wonder why this was not automatic.

We recently got ourselves an iPod Touch, to entertain our oldest child on long trips. It is a brilliant device in many ways, I can understand why people love their iPhones (even though I am very happy with the very different style of the Blackberry phone that I was given by my employer). However, I have found one weird behavior in the music player that leaves me wondering how it got through into the shipping product.

The issue appears in the Cover Flow presentation of music, when I have several songs from different albums – but these albums have the same name. That is most obvious in the case of albums called “Greatest Hits”. I have quite a few of those by various artists, and I have synched only a few select songs from a few of those onto the iPod. In this precise case, there are two songs by  Billy Idol, one by Robbie Williams, and two by Bruce Springsteen (revealing my boring music taste I guess…).

We start coverflow and find an album “Billy Idol” and “Greatest Hits”:

So far so good. Now touch it, and turn it around to see the songs in the album:

This is starting to look interesting. The two first songs make sense… but the three later ones are not by Billy Idol.  When I tapped the third song to play it, the display turned into play mode:

When I then turned the iPod back to landscape mode to see coverflow, things have changed in a strange way. We are still at the same position in the list of albums, but the artist and cover picture have changed to now depict Robbie Williams. Funny. This means that this album is out of sort order (as the sorting is clearly by artist name in this view).

Tapping that album to view the songs on it, we have a very confused display. The album artist is Robbie Williams. The songs are the same as in the first picture above. The small icon of the album cover is Billy Idol, though. Interesting.

To me, this looks like someone at Apple thinks that album names can be used as unique identifiers for certain tasks, such as displaying album covers in Cover Flow. How that fell through testing amazes me, but maybe it only happens if you synch partial albums? It once again shows how hard it is to imagine and test all the odd cases that might happen out in the real world once a product (hardware or software or a combination thereof) is given to real users.

Basically, they stopped working due to a problem with cooling (!). The roads around here tend to be salted in the Winter. The temperatures also often hover around freezing, with the result that you have roads covered in snow-water slush. This slush clogged up cooling fans for the motors and electronics which are located on the bottom of the cars, around the rear axle.

Putting fans on the bottom of a car where things from the road are quite likely to enter would seem totally silly in hindsight. The root cause is somewhat jokingly referred to as the cars being designed in sunny California. There is probably some truth to that, even though all big automakers make sure to cold-weather test their cars in places like Arvidsjaur. However, that is probably too cold to get much of the slush that caused the issue.

Another issue that has been much more publicized is the Apple iPhone 4 reception problems when holding the phone in certain ways. Also obvious when discovered, but not found in pre-launch testing. Some people speculate that this is due to too much secrecy at Apple preventing a shake-out test with many people using the phones every day in the way they would post-launch.

Once again we see that good testing and destructive creativity is needed during the development of products to make them truly great and avoid embarrassing “obvious” mistakes. Tesla and Apple have great product designers and great products – but you seem to also need great testers to really build solid products.

Sounds like this is turning into a testers lament – and I must confess to never having worked as a professional tester, just as an accidental tester with a knack for breaking things.

In the picture below, we have the “Knight’s Castle” kit from 1984 (set #6073). I remember this as being a major kit at the time, one of the dream things to buy, and one of the biggest ones around. Compare it to the new Police Command Center (set #7743) from 2008. The small police station accompanying the large trailer is as high as the old castle, and the trailer as long as the castle is wide. It has about 25% more pieces that the old castle.

Also, note the old small vehicles in the front. Four Lego notches wide, unlike the six-wide police trailer. I remember the highway truck as being one of the magical models of my childhood.

To me, the most interesting aspect of comparing Lego sets is that it is a very good illustration of the economic growth that we have seen over the past 30 years. In relative terms, Lego sets have become far more affordable. Average income has certainly increased faster than the price of Lego, and my kids have quite a few more pieces to play with than I did at the same age. The nice thing with comparing Lego buying power with my childhood is that it is a product that is mostly “the same”, unlike comparisons involving electronics…

What Thomas is showing is just how efficiently today’s economy manages to hide complexity from consumers (users). That toaster is just there on the shelf at a very low cost. If you take it apart, you will note that it is made from plastic which has been moulded to shape, and various bits and pieces of steel and copper wires. At that level, you feel that you could almost build it yourself. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg. What the toaster project reveals is the next level of abstraction and information hiding going on: that copper wire contains an enormously complex process in its making. From ore extraction, energy production to fuel the process, copper foundries, factories converting raw copper into wires, and a huge logistical machine to move things around.

In essence, we have a very nice example of information hiding and abstraction. As a user of the toaster, I do not need to understand how it works, and I do definitely not have any idea of the huge chain of suppliers leading up to its presence on my breakfast table.

That’s where are going with computers, but it is going to take time. Today, most users are fairly well shielded from how computers really work. Until they break down, at least. As programmers, we are less lucky. In practice, most good programmers end up understanding at least the basics of assembly language and the memory hierarchy of the machine.

What is hidden today is mostly the innards of the silicon. I have no real idea of how a processor works at the level of transistors and electrons. I don’t have to care about that, while any computer user fifty years ago probably had a decent understanding of the electronics. If nothing else, that was how you investigated hardware faults and actually built computers in a factory. Before integrated circuits, the electronic bits were much more exposed.

I think the current trend towards virtualization in the IT space and virtual platforms in the system design space is showing that the abstraction stack we are using in computing is getting deeper and more opaque. It takes some getting used to, but in the end, we have to realize that most computer programmers will be like the toaster user. All they want is a virtual toaster that toasts virtual bread in a way that lets them do their job.That is: write software that really does not care that much about the particulars of the hardware it is running on.

For the designer of a toaster (or even worse, the manufacturer of copper wire or the oil producer for the raw materials for the plastics), this takes some getting used to. We have to accept that in many cases, a simple abstraction is sufficient to help programmers get moving. There is no need for perfect timing accuracy or all the details of bus transactions. As long as what comes out is sufficiently similar to toast (a virtual toaster spitting out candy would be a bad abstraction), most users are happy.

Brian Bailey touched on this in a blog post following DAC, called “Accuracy does not imply accuracy“. Same idea as the toaster: you have to accept less detail, more abstraction, to get somewhere useful. Not everyone needs to go back to basics… and doing so tends to be counter productive in the end.

It is late now, but I think I will have toast and jam for breakfast tomorrow. Writing this got me hungry.

Try 5000 km. I was in middle Sweden.

Here is a screenshot of the mislocation:

I think the culprit is that the 3G coverage for Telenor around here is less than ideal, and the phone backed down to GPRS. As soon as 3G coverage got back (i.e., I moved a few meters indoors), I was back to a more reasonable location:

Funny.

I guess that should tell us something about being overreliant on technology. Sometimes downright weird things happen when you pile on enough software and protocols and servers.

Or it is just a hint that despite the warmth of Spring finally arriving around here (there is still snow and ice to be found in the deeper shadows of the forests), my phone has decided that it is time to hint at a vacation in a warmer climate.

Actually, the Chariot company calls the device we have an “infant sling“, and in function, it is very close to how a baby seat for a car works. The baby is secured by a harness, and sits in a suspended seat that absorbs bumps in the road and keeps her above the somewhat cold seat (we have had one of the best long winters in a long time here, it is still around zero Celcius at the time of writing, and we have about a decimeter of snow out in the garden).

Installing it required some physical force, as apparently the carrier had warped some since we bought it. There were also a fair number of threadings of various cords in very particular patterns. It took a couple of hours in the end (somewhat due to the help I got from the big brother of the baby in question). The result looks like this:

We have used it a few times now, and the baby seems to be accepting it just as much as the regular stroller or car seat. Since it is forward-facing, it is best if big brother is there to keep her company. The general rule that we have learnt is that up to about a year of age, children should be facing their parent when taken for a ride. But an elder sibling seems to be a perfectly acceptable replacement.

On the Chariot site there is a note about not using this seat for biking — but what is the point of it then? We will use it for short trips, so I think there is no harm here.

Anyway, it is a highly recommended item.

However, that small inconvenience is not really something to be bothered by. Any hardware-based login solution will have that, and the yubikey’s fitting into something you have anyway for getting in to places (you keys) makes it very logical. What could have made it even better had been if you would have activated it using a key-like turn rather than the somewhat bland keypress that does not produce any kind of haptic feedback. But I can understand that a twisting design like that would be an order of magnitude more expensive to produce, and probably another order of magnitude less durable…

It is also striking how well this system works compared the incredibly clunky login and signing facilities used by ICA Banken. There, you have a piece of hardware which is way larger than a key, into which you slide your credit card. Then, to log into the bank and effect a payment of a bill, you do:

• Type in customer number
• Type in PIN code
• Put your card into the signing device
• Press “login”
• Copy 8 digit code from web page to device
• Type card PIN code into device
• Copy 9 digit code from device to web page
• … enter data for bills …
• Bring out the signing device again
• Insert card
• Press “sign”
• Copy 8 digit code from web page to device
• Type card PIN code into device
• Copy 9 digit code from device to web page

I really think the “sign” step adds no security in practice, and most other bank systems I use seem to agree with this: once past login, no need for additional confirmation. I think that makes sense, and that the sign stage is here more as a warm fuzzy feeling kind of thing.

If it wasn’t for the possible constraint that the ICA solution has to work on public computers where you have no access to USB ports, I think a yubikey-based solution would make all of the above so much easier. The genius of the yubikey is really that it removes the “type in numbers from hardware device” from the login steps, which really is something that there is little value to having each user do every time they effect some kind of secure operation. If all banks used a yubikey, I think the world would save many thousands of people hours that could be used to have fun, be with the family, and other more beneficial uses.

The immediate impression is that is impressively small!  Compared to a standard USB memory stick, it is significantly smaller, and most importantly, very thin. This means that they can be sent in a regular envelope in the mail, since it is about as think as some folded papers. It also helps when you put it on your key chain, I guess. I don’t know if I dare do that yet, since my pocket tends to be fairly crowded with heavy sharp keys that could well scratch the innocent little  Yubikey. Here is a picture of the key along side a Sandisk Cruzer USB memory stick:

When it is attached to a computer, the little button ring lights up. When the computer is asleep, it pulsates nicely too.

Driver installation was automatic on my Vista machine, showing up as a human-interface device with no particular characteristics. That is the very idea of the Yubikey: it is a USB keyboard as far as the computer is concerned, which is amazingly simple and clever. Here is what Vista says about it:

In use, the Yubikey is still a bit of challenge to me, for one simple reason: the button feels hard to get pressed in the right way. It seems that I have to push pretty hard and for a long time to activate, and then I want to hold the key with my other hand too so that I do not break it at the point where it is connected to the computer.

Apart from that, it is a beautiful device, and compared to the security solutions I have with my various internet-based banks, it is much easier to use. No codes to type in, no 9-digit numbers to type into online forms (that is what ICA Banken currently requires you to do, copy a nine-digit number from a security device into which you insert your bank card…).

So overall, I really like the Yubikey, and it will be interesting to see how it lasts, physically, as I start taking it with me everywhere.

Update: The Yubikey does work to have on a key chain, I have started doing that and so far it works in the sense that it does not affect the physical size of the chain much. There is also some logic to the use mode of inserting the key from the key chain into my computer to “unlock” secure functions.

In the end, it turned out it was really dead easy!

The steps are the following (please refer to this guide at iLounge for more background and details):

• On the new machine, start iTunes and authorize it using user iTunes store account.
• Make sure the folder you use as your iTunes library folder is within the Windows standard user data places, like the default location inside “Documents\Music” on XP and “C:\User\username\Music” on  Vista. It needs not be in your user’s hierarchy, I had mine in the shared hierarchy and that worked fine.
• Consolidate your iTunes library, using the iTunes 8 File-Library-Consolidate Library option.
• Copy everything in that iTunes library folder to the corresponding location on the new machine. In my case, this was the folder called “Shared Music” in the “Public” part of the file system.
• The iTunes database is separate from the storage of files. On Vista, it was located in User\Username\Music\iTunes. This is easy to find, as it is created when iTunes is started. After locating it, simply replace the iTunes folder on the new machine with the one from the old machine (without iTunes running!).
• Start iTunes on the new machine, and all your data and music should be there!

For me, this worked on the first try. The key thing that I had to do was the consolidation phase… there were some files outside of the managed iTunes folder that needed to be copied into it in order to make this work completely.

Here is what I saw, see how BBC and SR P1 Ekot stand out:

After some web searching and poring over www.wordpress.org, I managed to find a utility that would indeed customize my feed for me. The aptly named “Feed Image” plugin does the work needed, and it seems to allow both an icon for the feed and a larger banner for title. I have used the same image for both, as I saw no effect of any setting for a while.

But yesterday, I noted that on my phone, I finally got the custom image working! And it is also working in Firefox, finally. I do not know what has changed or what has timed out in the meantime, but now it does seem to be working.

How it looks on my phone:

And in the Firefox RSS display:

Mission accomplished.

Notes on SonyEricsson G900 Screen Capture

To take the screenshots on the G900 phone, I used the freeware program “TOSC version 0.3“.The download location that works is the link in this blog post: http://www.saxoft.com/wordpress/2006/11/08/tosc-v03/.

TOSC puts the captures as png files on the top level of the memory stick memory in the phone:

Annoyingly enough the PC sync file manager software for the G900 will not display files, only folders. Thus, on the phone, I used the file manager to move the files to the “Pictures” sub-directory and only then could I copy them from the phone onto my PC for further use in this blog post. Or I can send them to the PC over bluetooth, which was a more convenient solution in the end.

From the comments on that blog and discussions with iPhone users that I know, it seems that MMS is a feature that is not receiving the love it should from mobile phone users.

If someone does not know it, MMS is basically richer short messages between mobile phones, where you can add pictures, sounds, and animations to the basic text of SMS. When MMS arrived I felt it to be a “why?” feature, but today, I really appreciate it.

Lots of iPhone users, and Apple as a company, seem to consider MMS a poor man’s email. “If you want to send a picture, use email and then you can pick it up on any client etc. etc.” is a common sentiment. However, this is not a correct understanding of what MMS is for. It is a different modality than email, it is a fast immediate messaging service whose purpose is to show a picture on another phone for immediate appreciation. Not a mechanism to send well-taken digital photos for long-term storage at the recipient. Email does not achieve the same universal delivery into the pocket of the recipient that MMS affords.

For me, MMS is all about short immediate picture communication. Like SMS, but with pictures. Me and my family use it to send short “postcards” to each other, and when you have children and grand parents, it is really ideal. On vacation, all people bring their mobiles, but most people (outside the core tech crowd) do not check email that regularly. MMS is really “instant delight” in this manner.

Also, the simplicity of MMS compared to email makes the interface much simpler to implement. Take a picture, add a caption, and send to a mobile phone number. Email is always more complicated and slower.

MMS also roams better when travelling internationally: an MMS typically carries a decent cost per message, where email would entail data roaming charges that tend to be horrific, still today. Looking for Wifi is often not an option when you are in smaller towns, out in the mountains, in France (it is still hard to find useable public Wifi connections there for some reason), and similar places.

What is also interesting is the effort of the mobile phone network to really deliver MMS messages to everyone, even those without or with limited MMS-capable phones (older models). For example, my wife’s dead basic Nokia lacks a camera and refuses to accept particularly large MMS messages. What happens then? First, the phone tells her in an MMS that “you have a new MMS message, but this phone cannot display it”. Then she gets an SMS saying “to read your MMS, go to this website and enter this code”. Pretty good as a workaround for a lacking phone capability (and likely what an iPhone user would see as well). But as long as pictures are phone-sized, it works well to send her a greeting over the phone in this way.

She wondered why the network was so nice to her, and I think the explanation is pure money: the more people can receive MMS, the more people will send them… and sending MMS is a good source of income to the networks. So having a fairly easy-to-use workaround makes eminent sense.

So, I really like MMS and I find it and SMS  to be one kind of communucation, more immediate and direct, while email is asynchronous with typically quite long delivery times. MMS and SMS together fill a useful niche, quite different from email and phone conversations in my arsenal of messaging solutions.

The bike light

When I got my new bike, I was told that the lights on it were automatic. So they would turn on when it was dark. That was understandable and useful enough for the front light which runs off of a generator. But for the battery-powered read light it seemed completely stupid. So it would detect “hey it is dark” and turn on during all dark hours, quickly running out of batteries. Or so I thought. Initial tests of the auto function did indicate this. The light turned on immediately when set to “auto”. However, when I asked the people in the store where I got it, they told me that it also had a shake sensor. So when I just waited some 30 seconds after the bike was stopped and still, and in the dark, the light did turn off. Impressive, in all its simplicity! There has to be some little eight-bit machine in there to do this… I guess.

The bar code scanner

Also known as the “Motorola MC17 Retail Mobile Computer”, which is one of the gadgets you use to scan your shopping yourself. This generation of devices, with fancy colored screens, have just been put into use in my two local supermarkets. I have managed to crash a few of the previous generations of devices (a small child that bites or licks the machine is apparently not within spec), and then I always had to go to customer service and get a new one. They would manually tell the central computer that my shopping was now done on a different device. Obviously, these systems are based on a central computer that tracks what all customers have scanned, and all prices. Before I realized this I was a little curious how all of that data could fit into each little device.

Anyway, one of the MC17s crashed on me the other day in the store, without any interference on my part (or my son’s). But unlike the previous devices, this one then cleanly rebooted, came up — and presented me with my shopping again! So they have managed to add just a bit of robustness to the system. Which did impress me some, based on previous experience.

Conclusion

So score two for the good guys, I must admit that there are things out there that just do work, even when sceptical not-so-old curmudgeon like me thinks they are just ripe to fail in some way.

But that was not so easy. I quickly realized that ActiveSync was pointless for me, since the setup I have for my data is not “everything on the corporate server, period”, which is the usecase ActiveSync is built for. But when I told ActiveSync to stop synchronizing certain categories of data, that lock it had put up still applied it turned out. With no way I could find to turn it off. So suddenly my phone just did not want to synchronize with my PC.

The solution I came up with borders on the desperate: by completely removing the program from the phone (using the uninstall control panel on the phone) I got my synchronization back.

The only snag is that happened to move pretty much every event on my calendar that was posted as a whole-day event back one day. Which is kind of annoying and took a while to fix — especially the recurring occurences for all my friend’s birthdays and similar important recurring events had moved. Exasperating!

But now it works.

Edit: inserted a couple of updates after a couple of more days of use.

The G900 is a continuation of the P800-P900-P910-P990-P1 line of Symbian + UIQ phones from SonyEricsson, and it was pretty much the only choice that I found reasonable as a replacement for the P990i. The Nokia phones using S60 are very smart from a user-interface and design perspective (a colleague of mine has an N95 that is a very very impressive machine, the way it does podcasts is really nice, for example). But they cannot synchronize certain aspects of calendar data from Outlook that I have come to depend on. Some people consider the Apple iPhone 3G the crown of phones, but it has several severe drawbacks. First, it is only available on Telia, and I have no intention of changing carriers. Second, it lacks several must-haves in any real phone: MMS and the ability to use it as a 3G modem over Bluetooth, for starters. And anything with Windows mobile in it is disqualified just since they tend not to make very good phones.

So it was down to the successors to the P990. The P1 is a year old now and does not feel like a real improvement. So the only choice was really the G900. It also had the interesting property of being a mid-range phone rather than a high-end business phone, making it very cheap with an extended contract (like zero kronor).

Overall impression

I really like it.

All the old functions are there, and many new.

It feels much faster than my old P990 (which it should be, I know some of the people who worked on the phone and the hardware is faster and the memory is much bigger). It is smaller and handier, and the subtly redone user interface is really much better overall.

In many ways, it feels like the P990 ideas done right, trimmed down, and deffed.

Navigation

In these days of full-face touch screens, I must say that I think the combination of a classic phone keypad with a touch-screen interface is the best compromise. I like having physical buttons to push, and a classic 0 to 9 keypad with a marked middle key is the best for quickly typing out SMS messages or dialing numbers with a single hand (for example, while biking). A virtual keyboard does not let you do that as easily.

But where a plain keyboard falls down, the touch screen really saves the day. It makes navigation of complex things very easy, and lets the user interface be richer than what it had to be if limited to what is easily controlled with a four-way keypad. Note that most of the UI of the G900 is navigable with only the keypad, which really makes this a one-handed phone most of the time. It also gives you additional ways to type text, including handwriting recognition and an on-screen keyboard.

The Sony-style rocker wheel on the old P900 was really cool and useful, but the P990 dropped that flat by limiting it to up-down, and also having a four-way keypad. That made the P990 quite confused, as there were several ways to achieve the same thing, which is actually not a good idea in a phone. The simplicity of a single four-way controller as the main and always-present navigation system really works well!

I guess this is where the touch-enabled Nokias are going as well, and I think that it is a pretty good solution. The old R380/P800/P900/P990 openable “flip” kind of tried to achieve the same with a big screen, but having just a fixed keypad and a screen above it is a very good simplification that offers consistency and simplicity throughout the user interface — even if it makes the screen a bit smaller than it was on these older phones.

The main screen with its panels (quick contacts, RSS feeds, customizable quick links, most recent messages, photos, world clock, etc.) that slide by if you press left or right works really well! It offers a very convenient and visually attractive way to get to the most important functions quickly.

Connections

Just works. 3G and GSM work as they should, obviously. No HSDPA, but regular 3G is sufficient for most things a phone can do currently, seriously. The Wifi is incredibly good on this phone, though. Very very fast, and very good at picking up that it is in range of a known base station. On my P990, I had to manually connect it every time I got home. The G900 just figures it out itself, which makes a world of a difference in smoothness and ease-of-use.

The USB synchronization works. But it is a bit annoying that the Sony Media Organizer software wants the phone in “file transfer” mode while the PC Suite synchronization and backup software wants it to be in “phone” mode.  And this cannot be switched from PC, only from the phone.

Smart Phone Functions

Calendar, contacts, tasks are like on the P990. Which means: very good, and with nicely functional synchronization. These parts are what keeps me on SonyEricsson and UIQ, as they are hard to beat.

The notes application has been redesigned, and you can now put drawing on top of text — but we have lost the ability to change the pen color, which my three-and-a-half-year-old son sorely misses. Changing the color of the note paper is not as much fun as putting a red tongue on a drawing of a monkey.

There is an active sync client that can make the phone itself synchronize to our office Exchange server. However, the usefulness was limited by the idiosynchratic way that I have my personal data setup: some things are stored locally on my computer, which means that I need to do a local sync with my PC anyway. But it did work well when I tried it, and had I set up things differently, not having to connect USB to my computer to synchronize data could be pretty handy.

The Alternate Universes

One aspect of the phone that is either very cool or pretty inconsistent, depending on your point of view, is the fact that two major components of it have their own special user interfaces.

The media player functionality is lifted from the Walkman Symbian phones, and looks very much like what you would find on the W900 walkman phone or a Sony PSP. It is pretty cool. But completely different from the main phone applications and UIQ user interface. I have also tried it with some podcasts, and it works very well and is definitely not noticeably inferior to my stand-alone iPod. If only it could synch with iTunes… where I have myself to blame for locking myself into the convenience of the Apple software-hardware system.

Update 2: Below paragraph rewritten after some more use and experiments.

The camera functionality is also completely new compared to the P990, and works much better. But it is also done in its more camera-like style, and looks more like the regular SonyEricsson camera UI found in their feature phones. It has nothing in common with the main UI, except that it uses touch in a fairly neat way. I have not tested any Cybershot phones, so I don’t know just how similar they are, or if they have similar capabilities. Sufficient to say that it is way better than the camera interface on my old P990. The five-megapixel camera itself is actually pretty good, at least out-doors. An interesting use of the touch screen is that you can use it to point to a point on the screen to use as the focus point for the camera. Not sure that I can use it for much, but it is nice to see the abilitlies of a touch screen being taken advantage of. I really think 10-key-keypad plus touch is a solution for the future.

Update: here is an example photo taken with the camera, click for full resolution.

One could complain about this lack of consistency, but the net result is pretty good. And in some way, it might make sense: if this thing is trying to be a phone, a PDA, an MP3 player, and a camera all in one — why not specialize the subinterfaces for each particular function? That might actually make it work better, compared to trying to keep the same style across these very dissimilar functions.

The Huh? Things

As with all modern feature-packed phones (and other devices), some things are just plain weird. On this one, the strangest is the presence of a special key on the keypad that can only bring up the notes application. WHY? I have not found any way so far to reprogram it to something a bit more useful — like RSS feeds or the web browser, for example.

Update: I still think that having a non-reprogrammable key for notes is a strange priority. But the notes app is actually pretty good. It worked very well for me when I needed to jot down some thoughts while strolling a baby-stroller through town with a sleeping child in it. I used to carry a note-it pad and pen, but the phone is actually a useful replacement. Especially with predictive T9 input that does Swedish and English at the same time — very simple, very useful, quite impressive that it works as well as it does.

One odd thing though is that the text layer of the note can scroll up and down and be longer than the screen, while the scribbled graphical notes are on a fixed-size layer that does not scroll. So it is hard to combine text and drawings. It seems to be either-or in practice. Even the old Palm could let you draw images larger than its screen!

Last of its Kind?

A final solemn note is that there seems to be some risk that the G900 is the last of its kind… rumors are abound that SonyEricsson will not make any more UIQ phones. This could be because of Nokia buying all of Symbian, and killing UIQ to keep development focused on their own S60 platform.  Alternatively, SE will not want to use a software stack so much under the control of a competitor. Or, SE simply decides that it does not have the resources to keep developing this line of phones, in addition to the OSE-based feature phones and the windows mobile-based Xperia X1 and its follow-ons. The Kista office that has done most of the Symbian UIQ phones is definitely being shut down — so there are a bunch of experienced smartphone developers out there if anyone needs some! Too bad that times are tough right now, never fun to see good engineers out of work simply because of general bad times.

Are people really be that different in their uses of technology and expectations on how things work just from being brought up in the era of the Internet and the mobile phone? Where I was brought up in the era of none of the above? Even though I was writing a book about the Internet back in 1995, I am not the kind of net pioneer that today jumps on every latest fad and wants to try it out.

But the reason I am blabbing about about this is a recent event that really brought home to me just how perceptions are changed by the changing face of technology.

It is the attitude that my three-year-old son has when it comes to television. When we are watching childrens television together, and a program he likes ends, he immediately says “again”. Also, if he needs to take a break in the middle of a live show, he will ask for the remote to press “pause”… which you obviously cannot do on a live feed (module feeding it through our PVR, of course).

For him, the normal case is watching recorded programming where you can repeat, pause, and select programming. For me, when I was his age, we had to wait for the children’s programming to come on, and then watch it then and there. We had no VCR, no home theater, no way to repeat.

This expectation really shows how our expectations of system behavior are shaped by our initial experience. I appreciate being able to record and watch shows at any time (especially 1,5x speed is very handy for interesting shows when you are short on time). But I see that as a nice new feature, not as the normal case.

So I would dub my son part of the “pause” generation, brought up with DVD, PVR, and remote controls that steer the display of everything on the television display.

Another sign that it is getting colder is the reaction of consumer electronics.

The plastic in the cords for my earpieces for my iPod gets noticeably stiffer when temperatures drop down towards zero, and the touch wheel tends to work worse in colder conditions. Not to mention trying to operate a touch wheel when wearing gloves. Most times, it just does not work at all.

It really makes one wonder how designers test these things, and whether they really think about common types of weather across the globe. I can see a problem with designing things in a climate like Northern California, where it never particularly overly hot or in any sense cold. The designers just do not naturally experience having to work equipment in minus twenty degrees and snow fall…I think that could lead to some different choices in materials and designs, seriously.

Case in point: last time I was on a skiing holiday, we had pretty nice warm temperatures between minus ten and minus five degrees. The iPod headphone cords were sufficiently rigid at that temperature that you could hear them rustle against themselves and my clothes. Seriously, minus ten is not a particularly severe temperature. I have some friends who design forestry equipment that works in Siberia. Minus forty in the morning. Or try living in nothern Finland or Norway — civilized areas, but you can expect many days of minus twenty (which is a temperature where you can easily be outside given sufficiently good clothing).

I managed to kill the battery of my mobile phone last winter as well, as it did not particularly take well to walking in minus ten-like temperatures while on the phone. Fortunately, the battery could be changed to a new one, which is pretty necessary when using portable electronics in cold weather. I guess severe heat can be just as bad for electronics, it is just rarer for me personally.

Obviously, most keyboards on phones are too cramped to be worked with heavy gloves.

Maybe the consumer electronics industry should think a bit like the automotive people who have to make sure things work between minus 30 and plus 80 (or something similar to that).

I guess this goes into a rant category, as electronics will keep being designed for benign environment and “normal” temperatures. Bad luck for us living in colder climates… or maybe a niche to be exploited. People still look for the classic Ericsson R310s: one of the most rugged phones ever made…

One could think of a similarly toughened music player. And accessories made to work well in severly cold weather for use on skiing trips, Arctic research expeditions, and by Siberian loggers. Huge market here, somewhere, right?

One thing that has always annoyed me is that you seemed to have to have a tow bar (dragkrok in Swedish) on your car to be able to fit a bike mount. And tow bars are not that common, there are several good reasons not to get one, like added cost, not usually available on used cars, and that they compromise crash safety to some extent. But to put my bike on a car it seemed that I had to get one. I was thinking about how to build a bike mount that could actually work on a regular station wagon by making use of the cargo rails, in some clever way.

But it seems I do not have to invent and build and market this thing myself: it is already available! I found a whole set of varieties from a company called Thule when I browsed a biking catalogue recently. Seems to fit quite a few varieties of cars including even the odd sedan! Good to know that they exist if I ever need to carry bikes regularly.

Why is this ability to bike and have a stroller with us liberating? The alternatives to getting down town are:

• Walking with a stroller, which while nice on a summer’s day takes about half an hour each way. So it does not lend itself to casual and quick trips.
• Taking the bus, which means keeping to a schedule.
• Taking the car, which is infinite pain in having to getting the thing out of the garage, loading it up with stroller and child, parking it and paying the 10 SEK/2 USD/hour parking rates (or higher) we thankfully have here in Uppsala. No to mention feeling bad for the environment all the time.

Biking is the perfect mode of transportation in my opinion: fast enough to get you where you want to be, a bike is easy to park compared to everything else, and you get exercise as a free bonus!

So what are the best things about our carrier?

• That it is both a stroller and a bike attachment
• It keeps nice and cozy inside even in the worst cold rain or winter days
• It can also be turned into a jogging stroller or even put on skis!
• As a stroller, it turns on a dime
• Attached to the bike, it rolls very easy, I actually think I am faster with the carrier than with a child seat thanks to the large wheels and good distribution of weight.

What are the worst parts?

• It is a bit big, close to a meter wide, and there are some shops you cannot get inside since it is wider than standard doors (and that goes for the city library too). It does not fit in regular escalators.
• It is pretty poor as a cargo trailer: classic simple trailers have a flat deck made from wood, which means you can just pile on the load. This thing puts all the load on the seat in the middle, so you have take heavy grocery bags and buckle them up in order to get them on the point that can reliably take 45kg of weight.
• Their silly Americanized advertising that is just full of ridiculously fit beautiful young parents biking, jogging, or even going mountain biking with these trailers. That just feels dumb and probably does not correspond to how most of their actual customers look.
• The color scheme could do some with some more interesting colors like grey, black, yellow, orange, anything. The blue/white/red scheme looks a bit old-fashioned (just look at what strollers do with their color schemes):

To get back why I should get a commission on these things: the Corsaire is a real talking piece as you move around town with it: almost every day someone asks we what it is, how good it is, where you can buy one, and how much they cost. I guess that’s why ideas like Amazon’s referral system might actually work on the Internet.

Seems that carriers are coming into vogue these days (along with Christiania bikes). Never saw one when I came to town in 1992. So we ended on a meaningless observation from Uppsala about the nature of the bike population of town.