Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Pocket Tunes is one of if not THE premier audio application for the PalmOS, and I’ve been using it since I bought my Treo 600 over a year ago. Normsoft, the company that makes it, comes out regularly with new releases with new features, all of which have so far been free of charge for me. Most of the updates I’ve seen have been more tweaking of features to make them work better. However, this morning, they have released a huge new feature that will enhance the utility of the Treo (and many other PalmOS devices) for many of us music fans.

According to their site:

I’ve written before about my experiences with Yahoo! Music. Just a couple of months ago, Yahoo! released a new subscription based service similar to Napster To Go and Rhapsody which allows users to listen to any of the 1 million albums in their library on demand on a PC and optionally download tracks onto a compatible portable device all for under $60 for an entire year – a price that seriously undercut the competition.”

While I signed up right away and have enjoyed listening to a lot of music on my home and work computer, I did not have a compatible device. I have an iPod, but because Apple has it’s own iTunes Music Store, it’s unlikely that they would ever make their iPod compatible with a competing download service. It’s much more likely that Apple will simply start up their own similar subscription-based service that will only be iPod-compatible. It’s unfortunate that an open standard can’t be developed so that all devices will work with all services. Already licensing issues mean that certain countries get access to certain albums while others don’t, and of course certain services get access to labels that others don’t. Why do you need to have two seperate devices and subscribe to three different services so that you can listen to three albums that are on different labels? Each label might as well start selling their own proprietary format, each of which you need a different player to listen to. It’s ridiculous.

In any case, I have been looking at each new audio player that’s been announced recently to see whether it would be compatible with Yahoo! Music. But for me the other requirement is that it will play audio books from Audible.com. Unfortunately up until now, the only other device that seemed to play both Audible files as well as Yahoo! Music files was the AudioVox SMT5600 SmartPhone. Since I already have a Treo, this wasn’t a good choice. But my Treo will now allow me to listen to both of these types audio formats, as well as other MP3, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis files, and internet radio (streaming MP3) through PocketTunes, and Apple’s preferred AAC (but not it’s iTunes Music Store DRM Files) files via a different program (Aeroplayer), and RealAudio files with the Real’s player that’s included with the Treo 650. In other words, the Treo 650 (and other PalmOS devices) is, in large part due to companies like Normsoft, becoming more and more a convergence device for Audio (along with the many other areas of convergence).

Now that Audio is becoming is becoming such a major feature of this phone, it’s really key to start beefing up the storage. I have a 1GB card, of which 300MB is already filled up with maps, images, etc. I know one can find 2GB cards, but compared to my 40GB iPod, even 2GB seems paltry, not to mention these cards come at a big premium. I am hoping that at least the next version of the Treo includes an internal 4GB hard drive like the LifeDrive, or better yet, one of the larger 6GB ones that are making it into many of the mini audio players these days.

One thing that you can use many digital cell phones for (not just Smartphones like the Treo 650) is as a modem for your computer. So you can travel around with your laptop and establish a connection anywhere you have a data signal - even in a moving train or car. I actually tried this out first way back about four years ago when I managed to get my old Motorola P280 to connect with a free ISP and connected it via it’s infrared port to my Sony Clie. I remember reading some email trying to browse the web a bit before it crashed. I only tried this a few times because back then the applications were just not very robust and even if they were, the speeds I was getting were glacial.

I never did try this with my Treo 600. I was perfectly happy to have a phone that could do many of the things I use the internet for. Plus I would have had to buy a cable or at least an additional piece of software.

One of the big things I kept hearing about when the Treo 650 first came out was the fact that Dial-Up Networking, or “DUN” (which basically means using your phone as a modem for your computer) was crippled for the Sprint (and later Cingular) versions of the phone. Specifically, you couldn’t use Bluetooth to connect your phone to your laptop. You could still get a cable or perhaps even do infrared, but infrared requires your phone’s infrared port is facing the computer’s, and it’s very easy for this connection to be broken if one moves slightly out of place. A cable of course means extra money, possibly software which costs yet more. Bluetooth is a wireless technology that allows the phone to communicate with the computer from up to 30 feet away. You do, however, need to buy a Bluetooth device for your computer in most instances. I bought one made by Belkin that slips into a USB port on my laptop. They can be had for $10-20 if you look around.

Of course, despite buying an unlocked version of the Treo 650 which didn’t have the limitations of the branded models, I still just never got around to getting DUN working on my phone. So, this weekend I got motivated for some reason and I set about trying to get this working and while I consider myself pretty technical, it really took me way longer than it should have. PalmOne provides a document that will get you started, but you still need information specific to your wireless carrier. In my case it was Tmobile. Specifically you need to know their APN (Access Point Number). For Tmobile in the U.S. it is internet2.voicestream.com. Voicestream used to be Tmobile’s name before they changed it about 3 years ago. Even after configuring everything precisely, I kept getting these vague error messages. Finally, I changed or reset something and at least it was trying to dial, but would tell me there was a hardware failure. I also had issues with comm Ports on my laptop, but eventually got that taken care of. After hitting my head against the wall for a while longer I finally posted a message to a TreoCentral.com forum asking for advice, and a response made me go back and check to make sure my APN was set correctly. Of course there was a typo! I had written “voicestram” instead of “voicestream.” I’m sure many of you techies have experienced this same sort of thing either with your software or hardware configurations: after struggling for hours on something that just doesn’t want to work, finally something occurs to you and you realize that there’s this really simple stupid thing that you’ve gotten wrong. It’s usually something very basic - enough to make you feel like an idiot!

In any case, I finally got it working and the speed did not seem all that bad, although I only used it to load up a couple of web pages. The one thing that concerns me a little is that when I spoke to Tmobile (when getting the proper APN), they told me that when I use this type of connection it counts as a call, not as data. This is a bit problematic in that I have an unlimited data package so I’m used to being able to pick up email, browse the web, etc., whenever I want. I have unlimited calling on nights and weekends, but during peak hours, I really have to watch my minutes. Recently we’ve been going over by a bit, which has resulted in some painful bills!

DUN is great when you really want to see and use the web in all its glory. It’s great to have a hand-held device where you can go check a web page from anywhere and not be encumbered by an actual computer, but there are also times when you really want to spend lots of time reading blogs, doing research, etc., and while you might have to use some minutes from your cell phone plan to use DUN, you also avoid having to pay for Wifi access. Wifi access can be very cheap, of course, or even free - I was getting all of this working this weekend from a Panera, which offers free Wifi at many of their locations - but it doesn’t come even close to how ubiquitous cell phone signals are. I could use DUN in the middle of a lake, or on a moving train, as I said. It can take a while to get set up properly, especially if you make dumb mistakes like me, but it really can be a very nice option for internet connectivity if you don’t mind the relatively slow speeds of 1-2 times that of a 56K modem…

There seems to be a whole lot of confusion out there about the various rates for data communications for cell phones. I know I’ve been confused whenever I’ve tried to tackle the issue of which providers offer what kinds of services for how much. They just don’t make it very easy to get a quick idea of what they offer. Part of the problem is that carriers actually separate data in different ways for different niche markets. You have one type of data that is geared towards their premier youth market that conentrates on text or multimedia messages, browsing WAP sites, and downloading ringtones. Then there is the corporate market that concerns itself primarily with email. Finally, there’s the market for the general internet geek power user where the data is about whatever the phone will let you do, be that instant message, browse the web, check email, stream audio or video, telnet into a shell account, whatever. This last market is the one I’m in and the one that I’ll gear this article towards. Of course I’m not as silly as the marketers are that believe that any of these market segments are at all concrete. There are people who aren’t necessarily “power users” but just want to be able to be “online” all the time to check email and instant message and browse the web. They aren’t necessarily geeks, and they could very well even be some of the youngest customers out there.

Personally, since I bought a T-Mobile Sidekick back in 2002, I have left the older more specifically mobile-phone related data service of ringtones and WAP behind. Viewing WAP sites or email on a 3-line display without images was just painful! Maybe back in 1983 it would have been nice great, but not in this century! Now, smartphones like the Sidekick, the Treo, and PocketPC phones make it possible to have a much more computer-like experience, albeit on a much smaller screen.

I myself am a T-Mobile customer, and have been for several years, but, while I think T-Mobile has some good deals in terms of rates, I always want to be knowledgeable about what the other carriers out there have to offer. I thought I’d make a real concerted effort at actually figuring out what the various U.S. carriers offer at least in terms of a full data service. It wasn’t easy! I don’t know if most of the carriers feel like their audience won’t understand anything technical so they don’t really share specifics about their data plans, or if they are incapable of describing the offerings in plain English instead of marketing-speak which requires clarification, or what. But I had to spend most of my day searching for the real information on various message boards about mobile phones and technology, and even then there seems to be a fair amount of confusion about what the real deal is.

So, anyway, here is an attempt to summarize the data plans for various carriers here in the U.S. A couple of quick notes first:

• I did not look at Nextel for a few reasons. One is that they will be merging with Sprint. Secondly, the only real data-oriented phone they carry is the Blackberry (no Treos, no PocketPC). Third, they are somewhat of a minor player compared to the other big carriers.
• I’m also not going to cover the menagerie of different data services that are not just plain old Internet connectivity (i.e. corporate email packages, video messaging, etc.).
• Finally, all of the prices I list are in addition to any voice plan. In a few instances one can just by the data service and then regular phone calls are charged on a per-minute basis, but most of the plans require you to buy a voice plan for $20 or more, which includes at least some free minutes.

U.S. Mobile Data Rates (c. May, 2005)
GSM Carriers
	Tmobile’s data offerings are initially pretty understandable. You have basically 3 types of offerings:“Unlimited T-Zones” at $5/month“Unlimited T-Zones Pro” at $10/month“T-Mobile Internet” at either $20 or $30 depending on whether you also subscribe to a voice plan or do not, respectively.T-Mobile Internet is what I currently have with my Treo 600. It offers full Internet connectivity. T-Zones, on the other hand, is less clear. It’s supposed to be T-Mobile’s plan for mobile, text-based, websites that use WAP, and the PRO version adds WAP access to a corporate email account. The trick is that these services also have allowed some people to have the equivelent of the $20 plan. However, T-Mobile has started to crack down on this usage by closing the tcpip ports that enable the web browsing, emailing, instant messaging, etc. that are available on the $20 plan. In some areas you may still be able to take advantage of this oversite, but it seems these are becoming fewer and fewer.
	Before they recently merged with Cingular, AT&T was offering an unlimited data plan called “Ulimited Mmode” for $25/month. Currently, AT&T customers are not being forced into Cingular voice or data plans, but are able to keep their existing plans. New customers, though, or even AT&T customers who want to change their plans, only get to choose from Cingular plans.
	Cingular, the other main GSM carrier in the U.S., has an even more confusing data plan offering - at least via the information on their website. They break data into three parts, one for Blackberries, one for PC’s and one for PDA’s. Their Blackberry plans include a 4MB plan for $39.99 and unlimited plan for $49.99. Their PC plans (used with a card that fits in your laptop) consist of the following: $19.99 for 5MB $29.99 for 10MB $39.99 for 20MB $49.99 for 40MB $59.99 for 60MB $79.99 for unlimited data Finally, the PDA plans consist of the following: $19.99 for 5MB $29.99 for 10MB $39.99 for 20MB $44.99 for unlimited data So where do phones come in? Well, in the case of a “PDA-phone” like the Treo 600 or 650, or the Siemens SX66, you can opt from one of the PDA plans above. But there is yet another type of plan that is only shown if you buy a non-PDA phone online. This additional set of data options are called “Media Basic,” “Media Works,” and “Media Net.” While these options are not shown online when buying a non-PDA phone (and perhaps not offered at Cingular stores as an option), they can be utilized whatever data-capable phone you get (with the possible exception of Blackberries since these have their own plans). Here’s a breakdown of these plans: Media Basic: 500KB of data plus 200 SMS messages and 40 MMS messages for $9.99 Media Works: 3MB of data plus 1000 SMS messages and unlimited MMS for $19.99 MediaNet: $4.99 for 500KB $9.99 for 3MB $19.99 for 8MB $24.99 for unlimited data Confused yet? So can you get an identical unlimited data plan from Cingular under the psuedonym “MediaNet” simply by asking for it at $15 less per month than the price that Cingular would otherwise have you pay on their PDA plan (if you have a PDA-like phone)? Well, yes and no. Apparently there is a real difference in that you cannot do VPN connections (secured connections used primarily to access corporate email that’s behind a company firewall) on the MediaNet plans, but you can do this with the PDA plans.
CDMA Carriers
	Verizon offers a $49/month data plan if you don’t get a voiceplan with it (you can still pay per-minute charges for the phone), or $45/month for the same unlimted if you subscribe to one of their voiceplans that come with free minutes (the cheapest being $39.99/month). Also there is a $29.99/month data plan for 5MB per month plan.
	Sprint rounds out the four major players in the U.S. market. It is, like Verizon, a CDMA provider. It seems that Sprint offers an unlimited data plan for only $15/month called the Sprint Vision Premium Pack.

Who’s the winner?

PRICE: in terms of price, T-Mobile wins for GSM (probably, now that Cingular’s $20 plan looks expired), Sprint wins for CDMA, and is also the cheapest overall if you don’t care what type of communications protocol the carrier uses.

OTHER: There are of course other factors that enter into the decision other than price. Coverage, quality of service, support, and speed are all factors that you should take into consideration. Support and Quality of service can be pretty subjective, though, based on individual experiences, individual stores or regions of the country that may have better support than others, etc. I can’t imagine making a suggestion in that regard without some seriously large studies to back me up! But speed and coverage a lot easier to look at.

But first a quick aside to explain the current and future protocols being used to send all this data back and forth:

• CDMA currently uses a Data protocol called “1xRTT” which supposedly can clock around 144kbps, or about 2.5 times that of a dial-up connection. The next version of CDMA Data will use a protocol with the moniker “EV-DO” which is capable of much faster average speeds of 300-500Kbps with bursts as high as 2.4Mbps. GSM carriers have been using
• GSM uses a protocol called GPRS, which is generally a lot slower at only 30-70Kbps, or approximately dial-up speeds. It’s follow-up technology is called “EDGE” and is 2-4 times faster than its predecessor at 100-200 Kbps, but still not nearly as fast as EV-DO.

Why even mention about these “next generation” protocols in a piece about the current state of things? Because some of these providers actually have next-generation networks at least partially in place and as well are starting to sell a few phones that can actually utilize these faster speeds (most importantly “PDA Phones” or “Smarphones” like the Treo 650). There are of course other protocols being developed and even implemented (UMTS and WCDMA) but these have yet to really be offered to customers in the U.S. although they have in other countries.

So, lets go over what the current state of things is regarding data speeds for the various carriers:

U.S. Mobile Data Speeds and Coverage (c. May, 2005)
GSM Carriers
	T-Mobile has said that they will be building out their EDGE network in 2005, starting to offer it in select metro areas. I have indeed tested my connection in the DC area and found that EDGE is available here, at least in some spots. I have also heard of reports that it is available in New York City and Atlanta. T-Mobile also has a new map that lets you get a graphical representation of their coverage down to the street level, although it says nothing about GPRS vs. EDGE.
	Cingular (this applies to AT&T customers as well) already has a national EDGE network built out with great coverage seen in this map.
CDMA Carriers
	Verizon has been working on building out it’s EV-DO network for a year or two and apparently has around 20 metro areas supported so far: http://www.evdo-coverage.com/evdo-umts-hsdpa-coverage-map.htmlHowever, at the moment, there seems to be some confusion as to whether EV-DO will work with any handset that supports it. This PC Magazine Article seems to indicate that only laptop cards and a few Verizon, EV-DO is not available on any phone that is supposed to support EV-DO out of the box, but rather only via their laptop card and a few select Verizon handsets that are not PDA-like phones and so are locked down in terms of what they can connect to and how. So until there’s some additional confirmation (say from folks who buy the Verizon version of the Treo 650 which is supposed to be out any day now), you might want to hold off if this speed issue is the main thing attracting you to Verizon.
	Sprint has announced they will be building out an EV-DO network in 2005, apparently starting with a number of unnamed metro areas. Sprint contends the roll-out will be fast due to working out an easy upgrade path from current equipment, although they only announced in December that a contract had been signed with equipment makers. Sprint’s EV-DO page currently says that the roll-out will begin mid-2005. Sprint has an interactive map of where its cell towers are, but doesn’t really distinguish between what kinds of service those towers provide. There is no word either whether Sprint’s version of EV-DO will work with any old EV-DO-capable PDA/Smartphone, so again we will have to wait and see…

So, who’s the winner now? Well, if speed is your main concern, than probably Verizon’s EV-DO would win at this moment if you happen to live in one of those metro areas. Of course Verizon’s unlimited data plan is the highest of all the carriers at $45 (or $50 without a voiceplan). If you are looking at only GSM carriers (and many users will only look at GSM phones due to their ability to work internationally and for the convenience of SIM cards), than it’s a tough call. On the one hand Cingular beats T-Mobile hands down in terms of its very built-out EDGE network. But when it comes to price, it’s a little less clear, due to Cingular’s mixed up data policy. It may cost you the same, but it also may cost you double of what T-Mobile costs (and maybe more if you can take advantage of the $5-10 T-Zones plans, although that’s become unlikely). However, Cingular’s $39.99 gets you an extensive higher-speed EDGE network, so some for whom speed is key, will gladly pay the premium of an additional $20 per month for a doubling to quadrupling of data speeds. This difference, though, will continue to erode as Tmobile adds more coverage for EDGE (which is already available in some areas).

As I wrote, these things are not simple and they aren’t cut and dry. As well they are a moving target. While T-Mobile may look like not the best bet right now, in six months who knows, maybe they’ll surprise everyone and build out a lot of their network very quickly and give Cingular a real run for their money. Likewise, maybe they will close the loophole of their T-Zones and Cingular will cut back their data rates and make them more comprehensible (one basic all-you-can-eat plan) and will become much more competitive with T-Mobile. At least for February of 2005, this is the best snapshot of the various choices one has for mobile data connectivity. It will definitely be interesting to see how this changes over the coming months and years! I will try to keep these charts updated as new information becomes available on new plans, new coverage, etc. Of course if you find any inaccuracies in what I’ve written, feel free to enlighten us!

UPDATE (April 28, 2005): Recently I discoverd that low and behold I had EDGE via my Tmobile account! So I felt that an update to this entry was in order. I went ahead and updated the data speed table above to reflect this and some additional information about Sprint’s EV-DO roll-out, and also provided links to a couple of new coverage maps. I’ve also reworked the last couple of paragraphs in the text to reflect some of this news as well.

UPDATE (May 3, 2005): There’s been some talk over at Treocentral about data rates and using some of the information, I did some more digging and was able to update the tables above, specifically the section on Cingular data rates as well as Verizon’s data speeds and coverage.

A thought occurred to me on my way to work today listening to an Engadget podcast where Phil was reporting from Mobius. The problem I see currently with smartphones is that they can be held hostage by the carrier. They have a lot of functionality that has nothing to do with communication, true, but carriers can affect everything from when phones come out to what kind of hardware they have. This is done partially based on marketing or partnering agreements, and partly on what these companies see as their bottom line.

That’s all fine and good, you say? Maybe. We have a system of capitalism which means that money is the primary measurement of gauging anything. If phone companies can’t make money, they can’t be in business. Of course this is true, but just as many other industries have done in the last 5-10 years, the mobile phone industry has been consolidating. Verizon was one of the first when Bell Atlantic Merged with Vodaphone back in was it 2000? Then Deutche Telecom’s T-Mobile bought Voicestream a few years ago, and finally Cingular just merged with AT&T. Now it’s official that Sprint will be merging with Nextel, at least if the merger is approved by stockholders and the FTC. There’s even talk that Verizon might want in on this deal. If that happens, then T-Mobile would be puny compared to the others in the U.S. market and so would probably be gobbled up Cingular. So in a year or two we could basically have two mobile phone companies in the U.S. – one for GSM and one for CDMA.

Don’t get me wrong, a certain amount of consolidation is good for the consumer, but in general the less competition, the less hard a company has to work to win or keep you as a customer. You may consider 2 companies enough competition for each other, but the fact that they use different mobile technologies that are imcompatible means that consumers will have to buy new phones when they switch from one to another. This isn’t a huge problem if you paid $50 for a little cameraphone with rebates, but what about smartphones that start at $300?

The decisions that these companies make are not always in the best interest of the customer, but rather of the company and its stockholders. Often this does benefit the customer, but sometimes not. I’ve had first-hand experience with some of these decisions with T-Mobile’s Sidekick II. First and foremost, and the reason that I dropped the phone eventually, was the refusal on T-Mobile’s part to offer a solution to synching your phone data with MS Outlook or other personal information management tool, despite the fact that such a solution had been created. This was, as far as I can guess, a marketing decision. T-Mobile decided their target market for the phone wouldn’t be interested in it. Of course there were lots of people who bought the phone who didn’t exist in this target market and all of our pleas were just ignored. But even within this target market, there was a decision to cripple the ability for the phone to either record audio or to use recorded audio as a ring tone. You could listen to it on the phone – say wav file as an attachment to an email, but you couldn’t use that as a ringtone. This was much more a business decision. As phone companies have been forced to continually lower their rates for just talking due to COMPETITION, they have been seeking other sources of revenue, and ringtones is one of these. They concluded, of course, that if they allowed people to create their own ringtones, they might not be able to charge $2 for 15 seconds of “music.” When the Treo 650 came out a few weeks ago on Sprint, we learned that it would be available ONLY on Sprint for the rest of this year, and possibly until at least February, 2005. This was some kind of strategic partnering deal that Sprint and Pa1mOne must have signed. Admittedly this is better than the complete stranglehold of exclusivity that T-Mobile has over the Sidekick, but it still, I think, is bad for the consumer in general. Then we hear that Sprint would disable the Bluetooth functionality so that users could not use their 650 as a cellular modem. There was an uproar causing Sprint to say that there would be a patch to download which would remove this restriction, but this is nothing new. This kind of policy has existed for T-Mobile and Voicestream before it for years, mainly because they sell their own cellular modems for laptops and charge extra rates for these. Finally, the whole issue of why Wifi has not been made available for the Treo, I’m sure, is due in large part to Pa1mOne’s wanting to be in good standing with carriers. Let me explain. First of all, Wifi capability for a smartphone means that you could potentially use it to make voice calls via internet telephony/Voice Over IP. This of course, would mean that you would circumvent the whole model of minutes for cell phones and could significantly cut down on the number of those minutes. You wouldn’t even be using the carrier’s data network, but rather some other person’s (or your own) internet connection via wifi. While rates have gone down significantly over the last 10 years, they are still not low enough to where making this loophole available wouldn’t strip the companies of a decent amount of revenue. After all, if you go over your monthly allotment of minutes by just 15, you could end up paying a couple extra dollars per month. Multiply that by a few million, and you see how big a deal it could be. Smartphone manufacturers could certainly sell unlocked phones for at least the GSM carriers and they could be usable whether your carrier sells you that phone or you buy it from some guy in Indonesia. However, CDMA carriers like Sprint and Verizon do not use sims, the chips that you can move from phone to phone and thus use any compatible phone, at least they don’t yet. But even if they did, it would still be hard to find the phone in mainstream retail channels. The carriers stores themselves wouldn’t sell them, of course, but neither would places like Best Buy or Circuit city, or Radio Shack, which partner with various carriers to sell not only phones but service contracts. I’m sure their partnership agreements give the carriers a right to tell them which phones they can and can’t sell.

So, what’s the solution? To be honest I’m not exactly sure. I’m a little pessimistic, especially with all the mergers. There are a few possibilities that I see that could make all of this moot, but how realistic they are I have no idea. One possibility which I think is least likely is the making of cellular communications into a regulated utility. Already we have seen some municipalities like Philadelphia agreeing to make Wifi available for free to all its residents and visitors. The importance of the internet as a resource for almost everything from communication to information has accelerated in huge ways and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, making it so critical a service that people will demand ubiquitous access. Even President Bush has hinted at free access for everyone being an eventual goal. But the telephone became an indispensable thing last century and what happened toward the end? It got deregulated! Not that regulation is necessarily a good thing, since it’s been known to hamper innovation. Another possibility is that an upstart might come in and one-up the big guys to provide something far more innovative than what these others could see. When companies merge with each other, they can often get so bloated that innovation is also hindered. We’ve seen this with airlines and Jet Blue, we’ve seen it with DSL and Covad, and we’ve seen it with the phone system and all the upstart VOIP providers like Vonage, Broadvoice, etc. You never know when one of these upstarts will come out of the woodwork and provide some new cutting edge technology like Wimax or a satellite-based system that makes cell towers irrelevant. While I’d love for something like this to happen, I can’t count on it, simply because these increasingly mammoth companies can throw all kinds of money at lawmakers to set up hurdles and roadblocks that make the innovators ability to offer these competitive service next to impossible. Yet another possibility might be that we start seeing some upstart electronics manufacturers offering devices that do everything, wifi, voice, etc., but these companies simply do not approach the carriers and sell only through the internet. I’m sure there are already cases like this, but as the percentage of the population who uses the internet grows, and the percentage of those who use CDMA phones (primarily in the US) decreases as countries like China and India become the dominant consumers, we may yet see such manufacturers become just as successful as the current major players like Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Erickson, and Samsung.

Which of these might happen, or which combination or other possibility that I haven’t even considered, I can’t say, but while things look somewhat bleak at the moment, you never know what could happen as new technologies come out, or new visionaries appear that can think up new ways of doing business most of us couldn’t imagine.

The web browser that comes with my phone, the Treo 600, is not a bad browser at all, at least compared to other alternatives. Many phones simply have a “WAP” browser, which can only display text, and not much of it at that. You cannot go to a regular web page with such a browser, the webmaster has to intentionally create a WAP version of the site. Even with my T-Mobile Sidekick, a device made for surfing the web among other things, one can’t get to a lot of sites because the browser won’t support JavaScript, Java Applets, or other such browser technologies. So when I got my Treo 600 I was delighted that Blazer, the browser that comes with the phone, was able to get to most sites and display them properly.

Being a web developer I’ve had the blessing of being used to higher-speed internet for a good 5 years now, maybe a little more. So using a mobile phone, especially one that uses the now aging standard of GPRS for its data communications, feels like going back in time. The fact is that GPRS only communicates at modem speeds. Thankfully, many phone browser solutions out there use what are known as “proxy servers” which serve as an intermediary between your phone and the website you want to view:

1. Your phone sends the proxy server a request to see a web page at GPRS (slow) speed
2. The proxy server, which is connected to the internet via a very fast connection, then retrieves the web page in an instant.
3. The proxy server then parses through the web page code looking for ways to make it smaller in size. So, for example, it takes images and shrinks them, and takes certain things your phone’s browser can’t display anyway, and gets rid of them. So a page that might originally be 100K in size shrinks to 10K or less.
4. The Proxy server finally sends the shrunken page back to your phone at GPRS speed.

So, in this way, the effective retrieval speeds for web pages are a lot faster than what a modem would offer, although it still can often feel a lot more sluggish than my T3 at work, or even a home DSL or a cable modem connection.

MyTreo.Net is one of the sites out there that I go to from time to time to talk about the Treo and to see what the newest hot programs are. They are unique, I think, in forging relationships with many developers so that the developers can put out their unfinished product to a select group of users and can then get feedback within the MyTreo message boards. This is how the new Chatter Email app has been handled.

In the same way, a Japanese company called Mobirus which has had an alternate web browser out for a while called Xiino, has been using a similar relationship to get a new version of their browser out in a condition that will suit Treo 600 users. I’ve tried their beta version of this browser out just a little and I can say that it is much faster than Blazer. It renders pages a little differently, opting to shrink graphics down so much that the page looks very similar to what it would look like on a regular screen. The problem is that because the Treo’s screen is so small, these images become tiny. While this isn’t a problem with some pages, many pages use images as navigational buttons. If they have text on them they become illegible and they are also hard to select. I also had a problem with some images just not coming up. Nevertheless, this was just released to the community and it looks like Mobirus is very active in attacking any and all issues that people are having, so I suspect a much more polished product will be available fairly soon.

I do sometimes feel like all this work will be made irrelevant within a fairly short period of time – a year or three? – since technology is such that there’s lots of leapfrogging going on. It could just be a lot sooner than we think that there’s ubiquitous ( and I mean really ubiquitous) high-speed wireless access in addition to devices that use flexible polymer screens that can be rolled up or folded into one’s pocket, but when unfolded can be as big as a standard monitor. I guess at least until then it will make a lot of people’s experience a lot better, it just seems sad that all this work will be made irrelevant one day. But I guess that’s true of a lot of things in technology and you can’t let this become a barrier to providing interim solutions. After all, something in how Mobirus gets their browser to work so quickly may yet be useful in some other application that we simply can’t predict right now. Well, maybe Mobirus can.

I’ve recently started using a new mail program that seems to satisfy almost all of my email needs for a phone. It is still in beta, but works very well and should get even better as the developer fixes things and hones it according to users’ suggestions. The program is called Chatter.

I bought a Treo 600 from a friend back in June and have been looking for an email application that would work in a way similar to my old phone, a Sidekick, and/or the famed corporate RIM Blackberry. These devices use a couple of features that make remote email retrieval really work well:

“Push” is a term used to denote that your email arrives at your device by the server sending it rather then you specifically telling your device to go check for email. One advantage is that you aren’t wasting time and battery power checking if there’s no new mail. An even bigger advantage is that when mail gets received by your mail server, it shows up on your device almost immediately. No waiting for the 5, 10 or 15 minute interval when your phone is set to go check for new mail.

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is just a method of communication between a mail server and your computer or phone, the “client.” In essence, with IMAP your mail program becomes a type of viewer of information that resides on the server. Many people use a different protocol, called POP, which normally retrieves your mail to a local machine or device. The problem with this is that once it’s retrieved off the server, if you home to read it on ANOTHER device, you can’t. With IMAP everything is kept online on the server and can be accessed my as many different methods as you want simultaneously. So I can be viewing mail on my desktop at work, go out for a walk and see the same exact mail on my phone. Everything is synchronized. If I send email on my phone, it gets put in my “sent items” and when I get back to the office, it’s right there in the folder named “sent items.” If I read a new message on my phone, it gets marked read on the server so when I get back to the office and look at my mail on my PC, again, it shows it has been read. And so forth. What this means is that you don’t have to worry about managing mail from one place to another. Everything is saved in a central location so whatever you do on whatever device you’re using, it’s immediately visible on all other devices. This may not seem like that big a deal to some, but for those of us who actually hold onto old email and want to keep a record of both sent and received mail, it takes a huge amount of the work and thinking out of the process. Back a few years ago before I knew of ways to get an IMAP account, I had to transfer a large outlook data file up to my web server each morning, download it when I got to work, then repeat the process for the trip back home. If I forgot or was not able to transfer stuff, I would have to open two outlook files simultaneously so that I could transfer the mail that wasn’t synched from the previous period. Now all of that becomes irrelevant!

The Treo was not made for these types of technology from the ground up. The PalmOS5 operating system that runs on the Treo does not do multithreading, so it has a hard time doing more than one thing at a time. There are probably a good dozen or so email applications out there for the Treo and I’ve tried many of them. They all have their advantages and disadvantages for the most part, and that’s probably why there isn’t one dominant one. But soon there may be, as you shall see. Here are a run down of the major contenders:

Palm’s Mail App: this is the program that comes with the Treo. It only does POP, but it is one of the few that can actually check for mail in the “background” – meaning while you are doing other things with the Treo, or while the Treo is “off.”

Versamail: PalmOne makes this application, which does IMAP but not push. It works reasonably well except that for the Treo, you really should be able to use the 5-way navigator buttons, but Versamail doesn’t support those yet. So you end up having to take out the stylus to do anything, and this becomes more effort than its worth. Another problem I have with Versamail is that there isn’t good product support. There are no online forums, and you have no idea when new versions might come out that would fix something. This is kind of a pet peave for me, but I really appreciate it when I can talk to the developer in some way.

MailWave: this is a new mail program that has some promise – it does IMAP and push, but as with most of the push solutions for the Treo, it isn’t real push, but a workaround using SMS. What happens is that Mailwave sits between your mailserver and your Treo. It actually retrieves your mail first and if it sees something new, it sends a text message to your phone. This has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that even if your phone isn’t getting a data signal, it can still receive these messages. The main disadvantage, I’ve found, is that these messages aren’t very reliable. Sometimes they come in immediately, sometimes they take 20 minutes or more, and sometimes they don’t come in at all. This may be a problem with T-Mobile’s implementation of SMS, or the local networks around here, who knows. The other issue is that if you are like me and receive a lot of email, you get barraged constantly with messages popping up on your phone which you then have to click ok to clear. Finally, the cost of Mailwave can get prohibitive – instead of charging a one-time fee for the application, they charge a monthly fee of $7. After 10 months, you’ve already spend more than the most expensive of the mail programs save for the truly corporate solutions. Mailwave does, unlike all but the corporate solutions, allow one to actually synch one’s calendar events if one Exchange account, like the Blackberry does. I’ll address Exchange in the Corporate Solutions section below. Program no longer available.

Snappermail: up until recently this was one of the better pop email programs. It outshines most of the programs out there because it has great support for both html email and attachments, which you can view or download via the program. A few months ago Snapper introduced a beta of its next version which included IMAP support. I have been primarily using this beta for the last month or so and it has worked fairly well for me. The two disadvantages are that when you send a message it doesn’t synch to your sent folder on your account, so you have to send a bcc to yourself and then manually put it in your sent folder when you get back to your PC (though some claim that their IMAP accounts have been smart enough to put it there automatically).

Corporate solutions: there are a number of high-end corporate applications/services out there that that are targeted at businesses more than individuals. They often involve installing applications on the server itself, and so really can only done by someone who has access to that server – in other words a systems administrator for a corporation. These solutions tend to be very pricey and aren’t a matter of simply installing a program on your phone and voila! But, these also have the advantage that they can synchronize more than just your email. Like the Blackberry, they can synch your meetings and other events, your tasks, and your contacts from your Exchange server. Exchange is a Microsoft product that hosts email, event/meeting information, tasks, contact info, etc. for individuals and companies. One normally sees Exchange servers in large companies, but one can also set up a personal Exchange “account” only for your personal use at various Exchange hosting services. Microsoft Outlook is the normal way you access all this information, but one can also access it via a web browser. The ability to get at this information via a phone, and have it sync with the server on a continual basis is what has made the Blackberry such a critical device for so many companies out there. RIM, the company that makes the Blackberry, is in talks with various device manufacturers, like PalmOne, to produce software for these devices. So we may yet see “Blackberries” which aren’t the actual “Blackberry” device, but something completely different like the Treo, just running Blackberry software. Until then, the other corporate solutions out there include Visto, Seven, and to a lesser extent Mailwave.

Chatter: this brings me to the final application and the one that really prompted this whole blog entry. Chatter actually was developed a while ago but was called IMChatter. It included some limited instant messaging capability, IMAP support and Push. However, like Mailwave, IMChatter sat between your mail server and your device and would do a lot of server work. Thus you couldn’t give it large mailboxes because that would tie up Chatter’s bandwidth. I believe you also had a monthly subscription fee as opposed to an upfront cost. You also had a get an account from the developer and this could take a while. I actually tried it out a month or so ago, but found that it made my Treo so sluggish as to be unusable. Support also seemed unreliable as messages on the discussion forum on the program’s website were not being answered. HOWEVER, Marc Blank, the developer of IMChatter, recently unveiled a new version of his application, renamed simply “Chatter.” This application is still in beta, but Marc seems very responsive to user input. There is now a forum on Treocentral specifically devoted to this development and Marc is a regular participant. The new version does not slow the Treo down and the interface is much nicer, and works better with the 5-way navigation buttons on the Treo. Messages synch perfectly and immediately and the push is true push. The notification screen when this happens only shows up if you aren’t in Chatter itself and goes away if you don’t do anything. You can also turn it off. The one thing that it doesn’t support is attachments, although according to Marc this is to be added as soon as early September! The price for Chatter, once it comes out, is also very low for such a complete solution at only $20. No recurring fees. This seems like the holy grail that some of us power (but budget) email users have been waiting for.

You would think that having been blogging for over a year and using a Treo 600 and before that a Sidekick I would have caught onto moblogging already. Perhaps its because I don’t go on a whole lot of trips and when I do go on trips I often bring my laptop and can post blog entries.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “moblogging” is short for mobile blogging and involves posting blog entries, often with images, but not necessarily, from your mobile phone, which is much more portable than even a laptop. Then again, taking pictures on your digital camera, downloading them to the PC, then emailing them, especially if you normally take them in RAW format, can be a very time-consuming process that works against the whole idea of blogging while on travel.

While I’m sure people have been doing this for a few years now (that is sending images and blog entries from their phone), it really hasn’t caught on until this last 6-12 months due to camera’s on phones either not being very good, or not even existing! In fact, my Color Sidekick’s camera, even though it was much better than the old one on the Black and White Sidekick I had initially, still produced a pathetically bad picture. It was only when I obtained my Treo 600 a couple of months ago that I had at my disposal a camera that I could actually bear to look at its 640 x 480 images (0.3 megapixel). Even so, they are pretty darn small and poor quality compared even to my first 1.3 megapixel camera that I got back in 2000. Suffice it to say I can’t wait until then next version of the Treo comes out which rumor has it contains a real 1 megapixel camera. I would be happy with just a half a megapixel (or 800 x 600), but I’ll take a full MP, as long as it doesn’t seriously tax the processor. I’m just afraid that pushing up the resolution too much may require many more seconds to record an image, thus making it hard to take very many pictures in a given period of time, so you could miss out on a bunch of great shots. A secondary issue for some may be the text entry process. Most phones are horrible at this and it will take you forever just to write a sentence. More specialized devices with keyboards like the Treo, the Blackberry, and the Sidekick, have keyboards that allow for much easier typing, although still not as easy as a full-sized keyboard.

In any case, after getting my Treo and starting to explore the wide world of applications out there, I came across a category of blogging tools. I tried a couple out, but didn’t get all that far. The ones I tried out really only let you send plain text and maybe upload an image, but you couldn’t submit html which would allow you to create links. Of course, I’ve only played with a couple of these, so I still need to do a lot more searching. In the mean time, I heard about these moblog sites that are specifically set up for mobile blogging. I found probably a good half dozen of these sites and culled this number down to a couple that looked like they were nicely polished, slick, and had lots of features and which you didn’t have to pay for – or at least there was a free account option in addition to payed premium account options. Those two moblog sites are Buzznet and TextAmerica.

My idea was to pick one and take pictures on my recent trip to North Carolina and send the pictures. Of course, things were just too busy before the trip and during to figure out which site would work best, so I ended up just deciding to take a few pictures and then wait till I got back and had a bit of free time to explore these sites more. Now that I’m back, that’s just what I’m doing:

Buzznet – So far, Buzznet is free, but will supposedly be unveiling a paid service in the future which will affect what they offer for the free account. Their interface to me is a little more intuitive and it’s less JavaScript-intensive which just means that I might be able to access it via the web browser on my Treo as opposed to TextAmerica which might not work. Their user pages (where your photos show up) look a whole lot nicer than the default you get with (the free version of ) TextAmerica. The one problem I’ve had with Buzznet so far is that it seems to be slow, both when you go to their site, but more importantly in actually posting images. When I posted a test image to both sites via email, the one TextAmerica image came up immediately whereas I had to wait a couple of minutes for Buzznet to display it. Then I tried a couple more and nothing happened! Eventually – like 20 or 30 minutes later – I got replies from Buzznet with some error messages, but then when I checked the images were finally visible. Another downside is that Buzznet only allows you to post 10 images per day and 200 per month (for now), The other not so great thing about Buzznet is that there’s very little in the way of support. They have an FAQ and some help information on some of the screens, but this doesn’t amount to much. There are no support forums or a support page, or even an email for support. This is really important in my opinion and a company that doesn’t set up a support infrastructure to help their users and for their users to help each other is, I think, shooting itself in the foot. The one thing that makes Buzznet usable for me, though, is that they let you syndicate your content very easily. They provide feed files in a bunch of different formats and also provide a JavaScript tag that just lets you embed the content. Here, though, we again come to the weakness in not having adequate support info: apparently you can customize how your content is formatted where it’s being syndicated, but there’s no information on how to actually modify the feeds or the JavaScript. Nevertheless, the default is decent enough that I have added it to the right side of my blog here. If you don’t see it, scroll up or down a bit and you should see the last 5 images from my Buzznet moblog (I’ve only put two in so far as of this writing). You can click on these images to get a title and more detailed description. What I would like to customize is just to be able to include the title with the image here on the right…

TextAmerica – TextAmerica seems to have a lot of strengths where Buzznet is weak and visa versa. As mentioned, the initial image I posted came up immediately after it was sent. The main pages and the admin pages are very slick looking, but individual moblog pages seem very plain in comparison. For some, this may actually be preferable, but not for others. Unlike Buzznet, TextAmerica has extensive help information in their user guide. In addition to this they have an FAQ, and moblog hosted by their technical support person which includes updates on features and fixes as they are made. Finally, they actually have someone you can IM with questions to get immediate help (although when I looked this screen name was not logged in. The free service comes with 25MB of storage, enough for at least 500 small images, and a lot more if they are compressed enough. Unfortunately, going up one level to the paid service will jump you up to $7/month. This provides a bunch of additional features, twice the storage and additional bandwidth. The main thing that I wanted to do, though, has eluded me so far with TextAmerica. They say on their FAQ that there is code available that will let you syndicate your moblog, but they don’t provide it there and a search in their userguide also turned up nothing, so for now this pretty much eliminates TextAmerica as far as I’m concerned, but I am going to try to get in touch with them to see if I can get this code from them to syndicate here.

There’s something else that these sites offer for some people which is just as important as the functionality of posting your pictures – a community. People get to link to each other, label themselves as friends of another user, comment on their entries, etc. - genuinely picture-sharing sites. While definitely an interesting function, and very useful for some, it isn’t really something I want to use it for. I have a blog here at blog city and do all my writing here, so why have another just for photos? My inclination is to basically stick to one host for everything. I know people who have blogs, Livejournal journals, moblogs, and more where you can find their various kinds of content. To me, though, it’s a lot easier if I have a central place to go to for everything and I think easier for others as well. So why would I then go to another service for moblogging? Well, while Blog City, my blog host, does have SOME of the functionality of a moblog. I can email text entries from my phone and have the show up in my blog. I can also email an address at Blog City with an attached image and it will show up in my photo album. But unfortunately so far you cannot post an entry with both text and an image in it via an email with an attached photo and some text, which is what you would need to emulate the functionality of a moblog. I’ve contacted Blog City and as usual they were very receptive about the idea, but who knows how hard it is to implement and thus when (or if) it will. All I know is if it is offered then I can actually ditch the separate moblogs and use Blog City exclusively, which would be a whole lot simpler!

As you can tell, I am still really feeling my way through this whole phenomenon, and I may be missing a lot of things that some moblog veterans out there may be shaking their heads at. All I can say is – please correct me! Anything that I don’t have right, or that’s incomplete, please enlighten me (us) as to what the real deal is. If you have additional suggestions or corrections, I want to hear them!

Update: I finally got ahold of the TextAmerica support person via AIM and they said that syndication was only available on “upgraded” (read paid) accounts. Free accounts do not provide this, so I think it looks like Buzznet for now unless I come accross another moblog host that was previously unknown to me that provides even more for free…

Many of you have read about my love-hate relationship with T-Mobile’s Sidekick and its lack Outlook synch capability. Almost a year ago I had gotten tired of waiting for the ability to synch my contacts, calendar, and task list with my Outlook data and tried out a Blackberry for a few days. Alas, although the Blackberry synched effortlessly with Outlook, it was missing other critical features, some of which could have been gotten at significant cost, but others not for any price. I went back to the Sidekick.

More recently, on the Sidekick Yahoo! Group that I started, someone who seemed to have some inside information suggested on the Sidekick said that in order to get Outlook synch on the Sidekick we would have to let T-Mobile know that we wanted it. Apparently such a capability was available and being offered by other carriers, but T-Mobile had yet to implement it for some reason which was unclear. Unfortunately, T-Mobile is the exclusive carrier of the Sidekick throughout most markets in the U.S., and so most people here could not simply take their Sidekicks to another carrier who would give them the features they wanted. Anyway, this user’s comments motivated me to create a petition to help garner more publicity for the lack of synch and hopefully to show how desirable a feature it was. While the petition itself did not get a whole lot of signatures (around 150 at last count), it did garner some press. More importantly T-Mobile finally came out with their first official statement regarding synch, and it held out no hope that they would ever offer it for the Sidekick!

Right around this time, a friend offered me his AT&T Treo 600 at a price I couldn’t refuse. Luckily one can find information about how to “unlock” the phone on the internet and soon I was using it with my T-Mobile account. I was able to try the Treo out a little before actually buying it, and after about a week, I finally decided to give up my Sidekick after over a year and a half with it in favor of the Treo. What follows is a in-depth comparison of the two devices focusing on the areas I find most crucial to a phone with internet capabilities. Obviously many people will not share my priorities and so my decision is only that - my decision. I’m not recommending or suggesting everyone opt for a Treo 600 over a Sidekick, but hopefully this comparison will provide you with enough useful comparitive information to make your own decision on which phone would be a better choice for you.

To summarize my main criteria, Outlook synch was of primary importance. All Palm devices, going back to the first ones from close to 10 years ago, have always had synch capability, and eventually Outlook synch once this Microsoft product gained some popularity. As noted, the Sidekick doesn’t synch nor does T-Mobile suggest it ever will. Secondly, there are literally thousands of applications for the Palm platform, with new ones popping up all the time. This open development environment promises to erase most of the limitations that the Treo has. The Sidekick has less than 20 applications that one can buy (or if savvy enough download), and this very closed development environment is suffocating. One of the central applications on these devices is the web browser. The Treo’s browser supports JavaScript, which many sites require in order to be viewed. The Sidekick’s browser does not support JavaScript. Finally, the reception on the Treo 600 is significantly superior to the Sidekick’s. Of course the Sidekick has some important things going for it over the Treo which I now miss, but, as I said, the tremendous amount of third-party software and services available can expand the Treo’s capabilities way beyond what it comes with out of the box. Some of these advantages to the Sidekick include a better keyboard, a larger screen, push email, better instant messaging, better multitasking, a great online no-brainer backup system, and overall a more elegant user interface.

History: The Sidekick came out first in October of 2002 in a monochrome model. In June of 2003 a color model was introduced which was basically the same except for the capability to take slightly better pictures via an external camera, slightly expanded memory capacity, and of course, a color screen. Also a tri-band model was introduced a bit later but this was sold mainly in European markets. Handspring has made various Treo models for years, and their latest incarnation, the Treo 600, came out in October of 2003. It was the first Treo to have a faster ARM processor and the latest OS5 PalmOS operating system software, which allows for more complex and faster applications.

Form Factor: the form factors of the two phones are not hugely different. The Sidekick is about a quarter inch thicker and longer, but the Treo is just a bit wider - that is if you align them to match. Also, the Sidekick kind of bulges in the middle, which makes it combursome for some people to use as a phone, although I never had an issue with this personally.

The Screen: the Sidekick’s screen is noticeably larger, as well as in a ‘landscape’ or wide-screen format as opposed to the Treo’s perfectly square screen. This aids in displaying some web pages which are already being cramped way more than what they were probably designed to handle. Also the Sidekick screen, being wider, can hold more pixels, and it does in fact - 240×160 as opposed to the Treo’s 160×160. Finally the Sidekick’s Screen can display 65 thousand colors as opposed to the Treo’s three thousand. I can’t say the color difference is very noticeable, but having red-green colorblindness, maybe I’m not the best judge! What I do know is the extra resolution of the Sidekick does make a difference in being able to have more readable text and better layout for web pages. The one advantage of the Treo’s screen is that it is touch sensitive, so you have a whole other set of inputs to get it to do what you want instead of relying on the navigational buttons or keys. The other nice part about the Treo’s screen is that it is very bright but also has a dimmed view which still gives off enough light to see it in a dark room. The Sidekick’s screen’s backlight is either on or off and even while on it is less bright than Treo’s dimmed mode, but still perfectly viewable.

Treo:
Sidekick:

Keyboard: the Sidekick’s keyboard is truly one of the best out there for a phone or PDA. It is comfortable, with enough space that I never hit a wrong key. It is a normal qwerty layout so those of us who are touch typists can get pretty quick with it. The Treo’s keyboard, while admirable for the small amount of space it occupies, simply is not big enough to handle extensive amounts of typing. Ok, maybe having it for a couple of weeks is not enough time to judge by, but I definitely have a lot more trouble with mistyping than with the Sidekick, and I have pretty small hands. Then again, I’ve read reviews of the Treo from people who claim to have big hands who find the keyboard just fine, so go figure! Part of the problem, I think, is that it requires more effort on the Treo to actually depress the keys than on the Sidekick. But also, there’s just less room to put keys, because of how the Treo is laid out – in a more vertical way whereas the Sidekick is horizontal. Because of this, the only characters you can get to come up on the Treo’s screen without having to do somehwhat awkward key combinations are the letters of the alphabet, a period, and a carriage return. On the other hand, there are a bunch of workarounds which make this situation much less of a negative than it would have been otherwise. First, there are a number of applications you can download that can aid in typing, including one called TextPlus that allows you to type coded shortcuts to produce longer words, programs that actually suggest whole words or phrases based on the few letters you start to type and then insert them on command, and another called KeyCaps600 that will let you hit a key twice in order to type the character you normally would have to use that more cumbersome two-key combination to produce. There are also numerous external keyboards you can buy that will work with the Treo and give you something approaching full-size keyboard for a PC (albeit in a small package perhaps a bit smaller than a laptop’s). Of course much of the software and all of the external keyboards will cost you, so take this into consideration.

Treo:
Sidekick:

Other buttons: the other buttons on the Sidekick include a scroll wheel and three buttons that select, exit, and go to the main menu/launch screen. Pressing these buttons in certain combinations will disable the keylock, or enable it, bring up a dialogue box to mute the Sidekick, and other basic functions. The scroll wheel is used like a cursor key or a mouse’s scroll wheel to move between different menu items, form fields, paging up and down, moving to different applications in the launch screen etc. The Treo equivalent to the scroll wheel is a “5-way navigator” which is a circle that you can press in 4 directions and a button in the middle for making selections. This works pretty well except that not all applications (third party ones anyway) support this button, and so in some case you will have to use an included stylus to tap on the touch screen or just tap it with your finger. The Treo also has for buttons that have always been part of palm devices. They are shortcuts to main applications like the phone, the calendar, etc. However, you can reassign them so that they go to whatever application you want. There’s also a button to turn wireless mode on and off, which is useful when your data connection has gotten hosed and you need to reset it. Another button lets you mute the phone with a click instead of having to do this via a software interface. And finally there are volume buttons to increase or decrease ring volume or talk volume. The volume, mute, and wireless on/off buttons are not available on the Sidekick.

Reception: for a phone, this is obviously one of if not the most critical aspect. If you don’t have reception you can neither talk, nor can you do anything on the internet. The Sidekick has gotten notoriously poor reception from the beginning - at least on T-Mobile. I can’t count the number of dropped calls I experienced, or how reception would be at four bars one moment, and zero the next, while sitting perfectly still on a park bench. Part of this is due, no doubt, to T-Mobile’s network quality, but not all of it, since other phones I owned and used with T-Mobile’s service did not have the same problems. In fact, the Treo does seem to get much better reception in the same places that I had very poor reception with the Sidekick. While it can still be flakey, going from zero bars to 4 and back in a few seconds, it tends to hold a better average signal and for longer. One example of this is that I not only have a phone signal, but a data signal 80% of the time at work with the Treo, whereas I was lucky if I could get a signal 20% of the time with the Sidekick. Of course people who spend all their time in a four-bar area will probably not care, but when you do venture out with a Sidekick, watch out! The other aspect of reception is how many “bands” your phone has, because this has an affect on where you can use it. Phones for Sprint and Verizon use a protocol called CDMA that is used mainly in the U.S., so if you get a Treo model from one of these companies than the number of bands you have aren’t really relevant. However, GSM phones (through T-Mobile, Cingular, and AT&T) can work in other parts of the world if they support the right bands (frequencies). The GSM Treos for these carriers are “quad-band” meaning they support all the GSM bands that are in use in most countries throughout the world, so if you want to use your phone outside of the U.S., you can do so fairly easily, although you may need to contact your carrier to arrange for it and you will definitely have to pay pretty high per-minute rates that don’t get to come out of your free minutes. The Sidekick that is available in the U.S. is only a single-band model that only works in North America. Unless you have managed to get your hands on a tri-band model, which I don’t believe is available in the U.S., your Sidekick will be useless throughout most of the world.

Build quality: I have no way of objectively measuring this, all I know is that I had to replace my monochrome Sidekick once and my color Sidekick twice. I know many who went through half a dozen replacements or even more. Of course you don’t hear a lot from people who haven’t had problems, that’s just the nature of complaints. I have heard rumblings from some that they had to get replacements for their Treo as well, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent as the Sidekick. I haven’t had any problems with the Treo yet, and the one I have is getting close to six months old. The previous owner is not someone who treats his gadgets with kid gloves either.

User Interface: the user interface of the Sidekick is definitely one of its nicest benefits. Danger, the company that designed it, consists at least partially of Apple expatriates, and Apple has a reputation for great design. The Sidekick uses a program “launcher” that shows a semicircle of icons which rotate on and off the screen and into “focus” in the middle by a scroll wheel so that they can then be started by just pushing the scroll wheel like a button. All the programs run in a nicely multitasked environment. You can go into the web browser, choose a site to go to, then go read email or send some instant messages until you are notified that the browser has loaded your site at which point you can go back and view it while people continue to send instant messages, etc. You can get notified like this for new email, new instant messages, and new loaded web pages, no matter what application you are currently using. The Treo, on the other hand, was not built with this degree of multitasking, although you can duplicate some of this with some third party programs, just not out of the box, and it’s not as elegantly implemented. The Treo comes with the standard Palm launcher, but you can download many others which add more style and functionality. Do any of these equal or exceed the only one available for the Sidekick? That’s a matter of taste, of course, but I find the Sidekick’s launcher simple, elegent, and very slick. The launcher may not even be that critical depending on how you use the phone, since on the Treo you can assign shortcuts to any key on the keyboard. Want a shortcut to your web browser, just assign it to the ‘W’ key and then all you need to do is hold that key down for a few seconds and voila!

Built-in Applications:

Web Browser: the Sidekick’s web browser does a decent job at displaying web pages. This is partly due to a proxy server technology that Danger uses which shrinks images down and strips some incompatible code to make the pages come up faster and with few if any code problems. Unfortunately, the one big problem with the Sidekick’s browser is that it doesn’t support JavaScript, and believe me, there are quite a few sites that simply won’t work without JavaScript support. The Treo’s browser, called “Blazer” does support JavaScript, and so with it I can now get to my bank account information among other critical sites which I couldn’t with the Sidekick. Blazer out of the box doesn’t render pages as fast as the Sidekick, and many people, including myself, get a skewed view of its speed. But T-Mobile does offer a proxy server which does basically the same thing as that for the Sidekick, they just don’t advertize this very well. Once you set the proxy to this server, pages come up just as fast if not faster that the Sidekick. I just did a test with Yahoo!’s main page and it took the Sidekick 38 seconds to load and Blazer only 27!

Instant Messenger: the Sidekick’s instant messenger feature is an extremely accurate replica of AOL Instant Messenger, and AOL is the only messenger service it supports, although you can alternately set it to use AOL or ICQ (which is now owned by AOL), but not both at the same time. Again, there are applications in existence which will allow you to communicate with the other services, but T-Mobile does not offer these to their customers and who knows if they ever will. The Treo doesn’t come with any instant messenger software, but there are several you can download for an additional cost. Several of these can access multiple services simultaneously. The nice thing about one of these, Verichat, is that even if you don’t have a data connection via your phone, it provides a facility to keep you logged in and if someone sends you a message it will be forwarded to your treo via an SMS text message, which doesn’t require a true data signal to receive.

Email: The Sidekick is the only device outside of the Blackberry that I know of that offers push email out of the box. “Push” means that when someone sends you an email, the server actually goes out and finds your phone (like a telephone call) and “pushes” that email to your phone. Thus you generally get emails almost immediately after they are sent. The Treo does not have this capability and so it has to be either manually told to go and check for new email, or with some mail programs set up to go check on scheduled basis. The process of fetching this new mail can also take a while, depending on how you are doing it. There are some programs out there that get around this limitation to one degree or another. For example, with a program called “TreoHelper” you can set your email service to actually forward your email to your phone’s SMS email address and then each time you get an SMS (which does get sent out in a push method) it optionally will force your email program to go check for new mail. It’s not nearly as elegant as true push though. There are companies out there that do make a true push solution for the Treo, like Good Products, and its been rumored that Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry, are porting their software for use on the Palm platform. There are also different ways to retrieve email based on standard protocols like POP and IMAP. The Treo’s included mail application only does POP, but there are several third-party tools that let you do full IMAP synching, synching with exchange directly, and Lotus Notes as well. The Sidekick is a bit less streightforward. The Sidekick comes with its own email account which has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that if one doesn’t have an email account, you get a free one, and if you have other accounts, you can pull alla of these into one central Sidekick account easily. The disadvantage is that you have to configure these various email accounts to get pulled into your Sidekick and that means POP, which means that your email on the Sidekick will not be in synch with the email on these other accounts. The Sidekick is supposed to support IMAP, but when I set this up with my IMAP host, it only retrieved the mail like POP, it did not actually synch things the way true IMAP would – deleting the files off the server as you delete them off your device, etc.

Personal Information Manager (PIM) softare – Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc.: These applications provide the core organizational/practical functionality for both corporate users but also those of us who have pretty busy lives outside of work and just need a good way to keep everything in your head. These utilities on the Sidekick, while functional, are somewhat basic and have some truly crippling limitations in certain cases.

Contacts: the Sidekick’s contact application lets you enter up to 2,000 contacts, which is enough for the vast majority of users, but I suppose for some users, especially salespeople, it would be a limiting factor. The Sidekick has distinctive ring capability, but you will only be able to use the ringtones that T-Mobile offers. You can’t import your own creations. You can also assign one of about a half dozen or so icons representing various kinds of people (a brunette woman, a dark-skinned man, etc.) to a given contact. I was able to assign a few of these before it became pointless. How distinctive can you get with a half dozen faces (most of which will only very vaguely represent the real person)? You can specify a note for a contact – my normal use for this would be directions to the person’s house – but unfortunately the note can only be 255 characters long, which is really not that much to work with. The Treo’s contacts application on the other hand lets you use as much memory as you want so you can have as many contacts or as large a notes field as you want within the constraints of your free memory. It allows you to assign not only distinctive rings to your contacts, but you can also assign a picture to as many as fifty “favorites.” These pictures can be imported via the camera, or from digital images you might have on your computer. While this doesn’t seem like it would be all that amazing of a feature, more of a bell or whistle, it is very helpful because your brain (or at least MY brain) can understand who is calling from an image in a fraction of the time that it takes me to read the actual name off the caller id. All you need is a glance and your phone can be halfway accross the room and you can still recognize the face of someone you know instantly. There’s even a third party application called LightWav that eliminates the built-in limitation and lets you assign pictures and even video clips to all of your contacts, even if you have 10,000 – given sufficient memory of course!

Calendar: the Sidekick’s calendar is your basic calendar and works pretty much as expected. Again, the notes field is limited to 255 characters, so it really can’t be used in a more advanced way – say to include meeting minutes within a meeting event, or to take notes so that you can later look up a meeting and read what was said. The Sidekick lets you assign icons to various events, but they are only viewable when you go to the event, not in a day, week, or month view of all events. Moreover, you have a very limited number of icons at your disposal, so you end up using ones (if you use them at all) that aren’t really only distantly related to the type of event. The Treo’s Calendar is also pretty basic, and doesn’t even include icons, but it does have more views than the Sidekick’s and has a different type of event called a “floating” event which combines a check-off field of a task with an event so that if it doesn’t get checked off manually on the day it’s scheduled for, it keeps showing up on subsequent days until checked. Also, the Treo doesn’t have the same text limits as the Sidekick and, as with all of these built-in applications, one can buy many third party applications that can expand them to an incredible degree.

Notes and Tasks: again, the basic theme here is that both devices have pretty basic functionality but the Sidekick has some crippling limitations on the size of the text fields, whereas the Treo doesn’t and can also be greatly expanded in functionality with the use of third-party applications, albeit usually at an added cost.

The Phone: a phone is a phone is a phone, right? Yes and no. For the most part, this is true. Both the Treo’s and the Sidekick’s phone interface have minor issues which are a little annoying but for the most part function as they should. Mainly the difference is with the reception, which as noted the Treo wins hands down. A couple of other items of note here include the fact that the Treo has a speaker phone while the Sidekick does not, although the Sidekick’s volume can get so loud that its easy to hear someone on the other end of the line even in fairly noisy environment – I mean not just if you’re the one talking on the Sidekick but if it’s your friend whose talking on it and you’re near him.

Third Party Applications: as I mentioned earlier, the Treo has thousands of third party applications. After all, the PalmOS operating system has been around for close to ten years! The development environment is very open and people are developing new applications for it all the time. Unfortunately, the Sidekick has a much more closed environment and hasn’t even been around for two years yet. There are developers creating applications for the Sidekick, but they can’t just publish these and let people download them because there is no way for the average Sidekick user to download an application onto their device without going through T-Mobile’s tight controls on what they decide they want to offer or not offer. The Sidekick has a system called the “Catalog” which presents applications (and ringtones) that T-Mobile has hand-picked to either sell, or in a few cases to give away. Although the Catalog has an easy interface so that all one has to do is navigate into it, pick an application and then choose “buy,” it also makes it impossible to try out an application before you buy it, something that’s almost universal in the Palm universe (as well as in the world of personal computers). If you do buy a program and then something goes wrong with your Sidekick and you have to get it replaced, you’ve also lost the application and have to buy a whole new copy of it! (* correction! Apparently I was mistaken about this, you can redownload the applications if something goes wrong and you will not be charged) There are currently all of 8 applications in the catalog and half of them are are games. Other than the games there is an SSH client, a calculator, an alarm clock and an application to retrieve AOL mail if you have an AOL account. On the other hand, if you have some technical abilities, you can actually sign up as a developer for the Sidekick and you will then be able to download third party applications to your device outside of T-Mobile’s tightly-held Catalog system. This, supposedly, voids your warranty, but no one has reported being refused a replacement when something goes wrong with a Sidekick that has been opened up to enable downloaded applications that aren’t in the Catalog. Nonetheless, the steps involved in modifying the Sidekick to do this and the actual process of downloading and installing these applications is by no means easy. Even when you do get it working, you find you still have only about 50 downloadable applications total, with a big chunk of these being games. No doubt some are very useful and expand the device greatly, but still no where near the amount that the Treo can be expanded without nearly as much effort. A few killer apps (for me anyway) that I now have access to on the Treo that I didn’t on the Sidekick include Audible Manager (for listening to my Audible.com audio books), Pocket Quicken, Pocket Tunes (listening to MP3’s), blogging tools which allow me to post blog entries (including pictures) with just the Treo, Quicksheet, which lets me view Excel files, and I am seriously looking at a mapping/GPS software and hardware.

Operating System/Architecture: the Treo uses Palm OS5.2, which is based on the popular Palm platform that’s been around for close to 10 years. It is stable for the most part, but certain applications can sometimes cause problems requiring resets. You can install new applications by simply transferring them onto the phone via a “hotsynch” which just transfers the files over a USB cable (or infrared or a modem or wifi). You can also tell it to transfer directly onto the external memory card if that’s available, allowing for extra room, however most applications can’t actually run off the card, but rather have to be transferred at least temporarily to the main memory or RAM of the Treo. The Sidekick runs a proprietary operating system that is Java-based. It is very stable and nearly impossible to crash. As noted, Tmobile has kept a tight reign on application development and very few applications have made it out to the general public, unlike the Palm platform’s thousands of titles. While the Sidekick cannot be expanded in this way, it does have some interesting advantages over the Treo in terms of data management. Basically, the phone works as a portable container of various kinds of data that it mirrors or synchs with Danger’s server. This client-server relationship has a third wheel – that of the “Desktop Interface” which is a web portal to the data. This enables one to view, add, change, and delete all of your data (contacts, events, tasks, notes, photos, and email) on a web browser connected to the internet. The advantage is if your phone has lost power or is out of signal range, or you left it at home by mistake, but can still get to the internet via some other method like a modem, or a terminal in a cyber cafe, or your office network, etc., you can immediately access all your data. This client server model also makes backing up irrelevant. You simply have a permanent copy of your data on Danger’s servers and even if your phone is lost, destroyed, or loses all power, the second you have a working Sidekick again and type in your username and password, all of your previous data as well as all your settings from web bookmarks to distinctive ringtones to shortcuts are all re-synched and its like nothing ever happened. The Treo, comparatively, is a pretty much stand-alone device. If something happens to it, you’ve lost your any data and program settings that you’ve added or changed since the last time you performed a hotsynch. There are utilities that do times backups either to your computer via hotsynch or to an external memory card, but most of these come at an additional cost.

Camera: the camera for the color Sidekick is fairly limited at 320×240 pixels, or a scant 1/12th of a megapixel. What’s more, there is some horrible distortion around the edges of the picture where the camera seems to lose focusing capability. Camera phones are generally not known for their quality, but the Sidekick’s is probably toward the bottom end. The camera is also external and so ads to the dimensions of the camera. It’s small enough that it can fit on a keyring, though, which provides added entertainment if you get into the habit of twirling it around your finger on the lanyard that comes with the Sidekick, as I used to do obsessively. The other limitation is that for the Sidekick you can only keep 36 pictures in memory total. You can save these onto your computer at any time in order to free up these slots for taking more, but it just doesn’t give you a lot of room before you have to “reload” so to speak. The camera is also an extra cost at $39.99. The Treo’s camera is built into the phone, and takes a much better picture than the Sidekick’s, mainly because of its higher resolution - about 1/3 of a megapixel (640×480). Some people actually have gotten some excellent results with the Treo’s camera, even when printed on 4×6 paper, but don’t expect anything close to what you would get from a dedicated digital camera. You have no exposure control, so things get blown out easily, especially on the Treo. The Sidekick’s camera can’t take anything in low light, while the Treo generally pushes the CCD sensitivity really high and that just results in more digital noise. With the Treo you can take as many pictures as memory allows, and you can offload them onto an external memory card which will give you considerably more capacity. One thing that will give you a quick boost is to decrease the jpeg compression of the Treo camera with a third-party program called Qset. The default compression is set to 65%, but setting it to 90% gives a considerably better picture while not increasing the file size significantly. Here are a couple of shots of the same scene:

The above was taken by the Sidekick and was only modified in Photoshop with Auto Levels.

This photo was taken by the Treo, then changed with Auto Levels in Photoshop, and then finally resized DOWN to be the same size as the Sidekick’s. As is expected, the picture looks clearer due to its higher resolution, however, it is also overexposed. There are supposedly ways to avoid overexposing and other limitations of the Treo’s Camera, but I haven’t learned how yet.

This photo is the from the Sidekick again, but this time it’s been blown up a bit to be a similar size to the Treo’s native resolution as seen in the photo below:

The clarity difference is a bit clearer in the larger images, as well as the Treo’s overexposure.

Battery Life: The Treo is rated to have a much better battery life than the Sidekick, but it’s hard for me to judge at this point. I try to keep it charged as much of the day as possible. The one advantage the Sidekick has in this department is that you don’t have to have the backlight on whenever you are using it. The Treo, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell, has to have at least a low-level backlight on when you are doing anything with it, even using it as a phone. Of course, you can shut it off, but then you can’t see the screen so can’t do anything, and you can’t shut it off while you’re on a call.

Accessories: many more third party manufacturers are out there making accessories for the Treo than for the Sidekick. There are a few cases for the Sidekick, the external camera, a wall charger and a car charger, but that’s about it as far as stuff made specifically for this device. Other than cases, chargers, and syncing cables for the Treo, you can find external keyboards, headphone adapaters that let you listen to music as well as carry on phone conversations with the same set of standard headphones (not hands-free type), there are devices that let you send the audio of the phone to a car stereo (or home stereo for that matter) via radio transmission. You can even hook up a GPS mouse to the Treo and have it serve as a navigator in your car.

Cost: this is one category which the Sidekick wins hands down. The Sidekick retails for $300 with a new service contract and currently has a $50 rebate if you buy it through T-Mobile’s website making it only $250. If you already are a customer of T-mobile you will probably pay $300 unless you have been with them long enough to qualify for a loyalty credit amounting to at most $75. Currently you can get the Sidekick from Amazon.com for just $69.99, including various rebates, but you have to be a new customer to T-Mobile to do this. In the past, these rebates have allowed for even lower prices on the Sidekick, but always with the caveat that you have to be a new subscriber. Current T-mobile customers will not be able to buy the Color Sidekick for under $225, unless you find it probably used or refurbished on eBay, Amazon Marketplace, etc. As I’ve said, applications for the Sidekick are still scarce and don’t usually cost more than $5-10, so don’t expect to spend lots of extra money on these. Of course if you are a ringtone fiend, you could end us spending $50 or more, especially if you get some of the more expensive ones that can be as high as $4 a pop. The Treo is a whole different story. It is offered now on all major U.S. carriers, and each has a different price. If you want to buy a Treo without signing up with a new carrier, you can expect to pay between $550 and $700 retail, although I have seen discounts for as low as $450. If you do switch carriers, you can get some significant discounts as with the Sidekick. Amazon.com, for example, will, as of the writing of this piece, sell you a Treo 600 for $299 through Cingular, $369 through Sprint, and $499 through AT&T. T-Mobile does not sell the Treo directly so you must go directly through PalmOne to get it. Verizon has just started selling the Treo to it’s business customers, and theoretically should start selling it to consumers as well eventually. As far as additional harware and software for the Treo, one could easily spend in the hundreds of dollars, exceeding the price of the Treo itself. This is the other edge of the sword, an even sharper edge at that! One can expand the Treo in great leaps and bounds over what it comes with. Some of these have a great bang for the buck, like some of the freeware or shareware that only costs $5-15. But even with these lower-cost items, it starts adding up after a while. I’ve already spent more on software and accessories than I did on the Treo itself, although I got the Treo highly discounted from a friend). Some of the additional software and hardware that I’m looking at would push this to three or four times the price of the Treo! Out of the box, the Treo does a great job, and one can add some critical functionality for a fairly low price, but it is a slippery slope! When individual programs are fairly cheap, your resistance to buy isn’t all that great, especially after using it for a few weeks and finding it extremely useful. So, while all of these applications are a big benefit, they do end up expanding the total cost of the device significantly, this additional cost (as well as the additional cost of the Treo itself over the Sidekick) will prevent a significant chunk of the market from opting for the Treo over the Sidekick. When the new models of both of these devices come out in the next 1-5 months, the current models should be discounted further, which will at least make the devices themselves more comparable in price, but of course the additional software and hardware for the Treo won’t get any cheaper!

Expandability: Because the Treo takes SD memory, you can greatly improve its storage capacity, enabling you to store a hundreds of songs, or thousands of pictures on a larger card. I can download a bunch of Audible.com audio books onto the device, totaling dozens of hours worth at the higher quality setting on just a 256MB card.. The Treo is also supposed to be able to read SDIO cards, which enable certain types of hardware functionality, such as high-speed wireless internet (WIFI), or GPS, but from what I’ve read, most of these cards require more voltage than the Treo can provide. The Sidekick, unfortunately, does not really have any expandability, unless you consider the external camera an expansion. It does not take any external memory.

The Future: yes, this is a review of how the current models compare, but there’s been a lot of buzz recently about the new models of both of these devices, so I thought I’d touch briefly on this because it might just change your decision. The FCC recently approved a new Sidekick model which is currently being referred to as the “Sidekick II.” Here are the main new features/improvements that have been determined by the various Sidekick internet forums, including the Sidekick Yahoo! Group and Hiptop.com, although none of these have been confirmed as of the writing of this piece:

• Better build/Reception – the new model will be made in Japan by Sharp, who has a lot of experience making consumer electronics of decent quality.
• Better Camera – a built in one this time with the same resolution as the current Treo camera plus a flash and a mirror to help compose self-portraits.
• Built-in speakerphone
• Additional buttons for gaming, volume control, answer and disconnect
• Slightly redesigned keyboard for use with T9 input.
• Thinner (but slightly longer) form factor – the swivel screen will also pitch up a bit pointing more towards the user, rather than staying at the same angle as the rest of the phone.
• Smaller, redesigned scroll wheel – the current scroll wheel has been known to break.

Notably missing are external memory, bluetooth, and infrared.

Pictures of the new Treo (variously known as the Treo 610, Treo 660 and Treo Ace) were recently leaked and various rumors have it debuting as early as this month but probably not until August or September at the earliest. It is rumored to have the following new features:

• Thinner form factor
• Better keyboard - soft keys and curved
• A much faster processor
• Bluetooth support
• Better screen - 320×320, 65,000 Colors
• Better camera – 1.2 megapixel plus Video capture capability
• Additional buttons including answer and disconnect
• New and improved web browser

Notably missing are Wifi capability, better keyboard, and more internal memory.

A final note: I really enjoyed my time with the Sidekick. It was at times enormously frustrating, but the device is undeniably very elegently designed. It’s just limited in so many ways and the kicker is that Tmobile has held it hostage and won’t let developers the fredom to publish what the market demands and bring the Sidekick to a new level The number of programs out there for the Treo make up for some of its limitations, even if some of these are still less in elegance as compared to what the Sidekick has out of the box. My main thought here is that the sky’s the limit with the Treo. There are so many great developers and companies out there creating new applications all the time. But the Sidekick is basically the same device that Tmobile and Danger introduced almost two years ago. Yes, software upgrades have helped some of the functionality (it didn’t even have cut and paste functionality for the first year it was around), and the color unit added color. A few applications have given us more functionality, but that’s about the extent of the improvements. T-Mobile’s refusal to have an open development environment for the Sidekick as well as their refusal to offer Outlook synch, has driven me away, and I know many others. In my opinion Tmobile views the Sidekick as a cool device for teens and twenty-somethings that don’t have schedules and only care about instant messaging, ringtones, games, and a cool-looking/sounding phone. They’ve felt it necessary to alienate everyone else who might have slightly different priorities but still love the Sidekick and could be using it for everything they need from a phone and a PDA. But then, if some of us old fogeys are carrying around the Sidekick, it won’t be as attractive to an 18-year-old, right? Of course I think they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. Now that I have a Treo, I can take it to Cingular/AT&T once my contract is up and Tmobile has lost not only me, but my wife and father-in-law as customers on their family plan That’s over $100/month including data services that T-Mobile would forfeit. With the Sidekick, because of the special servers involved, you have to stick with Tmobile as your carrier – it simply will not work with another GSM carrier in the U.S., with the exception of Suncom in a few markets in the Southeast. I am having a lot of fun with the Treo, and I’m liking it more and more, but I just wish that the decision was purely based on it being a better all around phone as opposed to it being about how to avoid a carrier that has clamped down on features for a device it offers for some arbitrary marketing decision made by a clueless executive.

Being a long-time internet junky and more recently a progressively obsessed cell phone geek, I decided to buy a Sidekick (made by Danger) from Tmobile back last November, just a month or so after it came out. For those who don’t know much about this device, briefly it is a phone but also an internet device – it pushes email to you live like a Blackberry. It also lets you browse the web - not just the bare bones text-only wap sites that you see for most cell phones but full web pages, although you can’t view JavaScript, Java, Flash, or online videos. It also lets you send and receive instant messages in an interface very similar to AOL’s Instant Messenger. It has other features as well, but lets leave it that for the moment.

After 5 or 6 months with the Sidekick, the reception for the device started going downhill. It got to the point that I was probably losing even more hair than I would have normally just from the frustration of the constantly dropped calls, reception going in and out from perfect to nothing in a matter of seconds without so much as moving the phone an inch.

On top of the reception issues, my other main problem with the Sidekick was the lack of syncing ability. You see, the Sidekick has these PIM (Personal Information Manager) functions, like MS Outlook – a calendar, to-do list, notes, and address book. They are somewhat basic compared to Outlook and have some field length limitations which are annoying (for example notes fields are very short), but the most annoying part is that you cannot synchronize these tools with Outlook or any other program you might be using on your PC to keep track of such data. Danger has at least enabled you to import your data in a limited way into the device, but it is an awkward and painful process - not something you’d want to do on a regular basis. With other devices like Palm Pilots, PocketPC’s, and even other cellphones like the Sony Ericson P800, one can sync with Outlook out of the box with no problems. If you update something on your PC, it gets updated on the phone/device on your next sync. And visa versa. Such functionality has been around since the first Palm Pilot – has it been eight years already??

There was a press release on Danger’s Home Page from August of 2002 (a couple months before the Sidekick even went on sale) saying that they were partnering with Pumatech to create a syncing program that would be coming “soon.” Rumor had it that this sync program had actually been developed and was working, but still now, over a year later, it has not been offered to consumers! Why not? A questionnaire went out to some people this spring asking people how much they would pay for such a product. So perhaps they were unsure about how to market it or whether there WOULD be a market for it. You see, Danger or Tmobile, or both, originally had the idea that their market for the Sidekick was teens and early 20-somethings. I think their assumption was that this group was mainly interested in cool ringtones, emailing pictures and IM’ing with each other. So my question is why did they even bother with the PIM apps to begin with? But as the discussions on hiptop.com show, there are more than just teenyboppers with no responsibilities who just want to use their Sidekicks as ways to pick up potential one-night stands (although it seems like there are indeed plenty of these types as well). There are some of us who are net-savvy but also are a bit older and have schedules to keep, things to do, and we already have long-term monogamous relationships that we don’t plan on supplementing

Fed up with this situation, I finally broke down last Friday and bought a RIM Blackberry 7230. Blackberries are very well known in the corporate world. They have been around for at least 5 or 6 years, but until recently they were only data devices. Not too long ago they added phone capability and this summer they came out with their first color unit, the 7230 (7230 is the Tmobile version whereas the 7210 is the AT&T version). Blackberries are built more as a tool for the business user, so synching with Outlook (and others) is a given. Email is the prime application it is used for and RIM markets a special server that integrates with Microsoft Exchange so that corporate users can even synch their email between their device and their corporate email boxes. The 7230 also has a web browser which I had heard could view regular html pages.

So I bought the 7230, and was able to synch with all my Outlook data very easily. Great. Then I started playing with the device. The first thing I noticed was that I was not able to go to a normal website. I could log onto Tmobile’s “T-Zones” wap service, but even there I was confronted with a lot of problems viewing pages. So I went looking for some sites that discuss the Blackberry. The largest Yahoo! Group about the Blackberry seems to be pretty dead (I never did get an answer to a question I posted), but another forum on PDAStreet.com was pretty active. Reading through recent messages, I found out that while html browsing was possible initially, just before I got the 7230 it was turned off by Tmobile.

Let me briefly explain a couple of different ways that people use the data features of the Blackberry. Up until fairly recently, the Blackberry was really ONLY a corporate device. It was not marketed towards individuals but to companies. It was not a consumer device. In order to use it to get email, you needed to set up a “Blackberry Enterprise Server” or BES on a machine on your network that was connected to your Exchange server. More recently, Tmobile and/or RIM decided they wanted to start expanding their market to the consumer and so set up a facility whereby they could pull their email from any internet ISP that could be reached with the POP protocol (most can). This type of account is called a “Blackberry Web Client” or BWC. So where’s the problem, you ask? Well, the BWC only provides for email connectivity. The BES provides this, but it also provides a kind of home base for users to download third party applications that can do all kinds of things – like IM’ing, web browsing, etc. Most of these third party apps need the functionality in a BES in order to run. The BES also lets users browse web pages normally even without third party tools. However, if you don’t belong to a large company that buys the expensive BES and makes it available to you (in other words you are a consumer without the funds or equipment to run a BES on your own so you must rely on Tmobile’s hosted BWC), you are in essence getting a much lesser device than the same one that a corporate user who has access to a BES is getting.

From what I’ve heard, the reason for this could be cost. To transfer full web pages to the device with all the images, etc., the bandwidth required can be costly. In fact, there are indeed third party hosting services for BES so that you can subscribe to one as opposed to setting one up yourself or having your company does it. However, the cheapest of these hosting services seemed to be at least $25/month. As it turns out, the unlimited data plan for the Blackberry is $30 as opposed to $20 for the Sidekick. So you would basically need to pay at least $35 more per month in order to use the Blackberry rather than the Sidekick in order to get similar internet/data functionality. Also add to this the cost of the third party applications that are already built into the Sidekick and this starts to become a hefty premium.

In terms of usability, both devices have their own strengths and weaknesses. Although the Blackberry is nicely designed and made, I found its user interface to be a bit clunky sometimes. Perhaps I am just used to the Sidekick, and so I was bound to not have the easiest time initially. For one, it seemed like there should have been a “select” button. Pressing the scroll button acts as one in a sense, but it also serves the dual purpose of bringing the menu up. On the Sidekick the scroll button just selects and there is a separate menu button. You can use the “return” key on the blackberry to accomplish the same thing, but it is just one of the many tiny keys on the keyboard and so is not as easily accessible. I was trying to operate the blackberry with one hand (because I read a review that said you could do this) and getting frustrated. I then realized that I usually use two hands for manipulating the Sidekick, but even using two hands for the blackberry was sometimes awkward. Both the alphanumeric keys as well as the buttons on the sides of the blackberry are much smaller than the equivalent on the Sidekick, and I have small hands - I can imagine it must be much harder for those with average let alone large hands!

This might be due to simply not knowing the Blackberry well enough, but the menu options seemed too numerous to the point where I had to go hunting for the one I wanted. I came to the conclusion that in terms of their user interfaces, the Sidekick was equivalent to a Mac whereas the Blackberry was more like a Windows PC. I am actually a PC person myself, but do not have the time to do all the tweaking I used to do and so found myself actually annoyed that I had to learn all this stuff to figure out the best way to use the Blackberry. I just wanted to use it and have it be an elegant experience immediately. For those who don’t mind or even like tweaking and playing with different options, etc., this might actually be a plus. Then again, it probably is only tweakable to a degree, so at some point you may hit that brick wall… On the other hand one of those tweakable features is extremely useful and one which the Sidekick could benefit from - the ability to control the font type, size, boldness, etc. You can make it big and bold if you need to, or keep it microscopic if you have such good vision. Of course you can’t change the size of the keys on the keyboard…

The Phone on the Blackberry is one area it outshines the Sidekick hands down. The reception seemed much better in general than the Sidekick with fewer dropped calls, although I did drop a couple in known trouble spots. The Sidekick, as I’ve mentioned, has been suffering increasingly from bad reception. I am not the only one who has noticed this. Apparently it is not even specific to my region of the country. Not only does voice reception fluctuate wildly, but data does as well. Danger is in the process of rolling out an update to their radio firmware that is supposed to help at least the data connectivity, but so far the result reported by the initial group has received it is not very conclusive. With the Blackberry the data connectivity was almost flawless. There were a couple of periods where email seemed to stop coming, but I got the impression that this was due to some issue with the BWC and not the connection between the device and the network, although that’s just a guess. Oh, the Blackberry is also triband, meaning that you can use it internationally, unlike the Sidekick. Both of these devices are somewhat awkward to use as phones that you hold up to your ear, but the Sidekick still seems better in this regard. First of all, it can produce a much higher level of volume than the Blackberry, and secondly you really have to maneuver the Blackberry a lot to get in the right spot to where you get maximum volume. If your ear isn’t positioned just so, the volume will be 10% of the maximum!

When it comes to notifying you of an incoming call the Sidekick comes out ahead, but only to a certain extent. The blackberry has stronger vibration and can also do a combination of vibration and then ringing. The Sidekick’s vibration is on the weak side and at least for now it can’t do both audible ring and vibration together. However, the new update of the OS changes this. The Sidekick’s audible ring, however, is MUCH louder than that of the Blackberry. The Sidekick has polyphonic and even voice-synthesized ringtones. The Blackberry offers about 15 monophonic ringtones, but three quarters of these are just variations (faster or slower) of the same thing – standard electronic rings. Then there are a few songs thrown in, but that’s it. It’s like the phones from a few years ago before ringtones started to get at all fancy. The volume is pretty low as well and I actually missed a couple of calls just walking around a busy supermarket with the Blackberry on my hip as the sound of the store drowned it out. I haven’t seen any way to download ringtones for the Blackberry, although that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Perhaps someone who knows more definitively can enlighten us? But I wouldn’t be surprised if this weren’t possible because up until very recently the market for the Blackberry was the gray-suited corporate world where you are not supposed to stand out with anything two flashy or unique.

In the end, in stratteling the fence between the corporate-leaning, pricey and somewhat bland Blackberry, and the cheaper, flashy, but less reliable Sidekick, I decided to pick the latter. Reception issues can always improve – whether they will or not is another matter – and with the new OS, many new programs will expand the functionality of the device tremendously and at probably a lot lower cost than the equivalent for the Blackberry. I will wait and see how the reception issue plays out and when the cell phone portability law goes into affect on November 24th, I figure I have a few choices. I can go out and try a completely new device like the Treo 600, I can ditch the whole idea of an internet device like the Sidekick, buy a regular cell phone and rely on my laptop with wifi, or even pick up a wifi-enabled PDA, or finally I can hold onto the Sidekick as my internet device but then buy a phone and use that separately, as I know many people do. I would rather not have to carry around more than one device – that was part of the appeal of the Sidekick for me in the first place. It was supposed to be a CONVERGENCE device, right? A PDA of sorts, a phone, and Internet device.

The thing that I think hampers the Sidekick’s success more than anything right now is that they are somewhat under Tmobile’s thumb. Not only is Tmobile a big investor in Danger, but Tmobile is the only carrier that offers it throughout most of the US. If some other carriers were offering it, and investing in it, at least those of us who are fans of the device could have a choice in where to go. Not only could we pick the best value plan, but we could choose the one that was not heavy handed. Tmobile has already been implicated as the reason why one feature that was supposed to go into the new OS will not be there. The new OS will be able to play audio files in a few formats like .wav and midi (no MP3, though). Users can email sounds to themselves and play them on the device. But originally they would also have been able to use these sounds for audible ringtones and alerts. You can see how inventive people can get if they were able to create their own ringtones out of wav files that they could record themselves. But Tmobile probably decided that this was a threat to potential revenue from their selling these. If AT&T had the Sidekick and they decided to offer this feature, I bet that would be the deciding issue for at least a decent segment of the market and they would opt to give AT&T their business instead of Tmobile. But for now, this type of competitive factor does not exist.

Update (May 12, 2003):

Well, it’s now been over seven months since this review was written. I did indeed go out and buy a Color Sidekick, and I will tell you that it makes a big difference in the experience of using the phone when you simply can see things in color!

Tmobile finally released their long-awaited update to the old OS. It contained a catalog of new ringtones and applications, including an SSH client, an old-style LED football game, a calculator, and an alarm clock. Cut and paste was introduced and one can now link to urls within IM’s, or call numbers listed in IM’s or emails. Basically, the OS improved in some basic ways that make it less annoying but still not perfect to use.

Thankfully the reception issues I had for much of last year have largely dissapeared, but it still remains a phone that has a much weaker reception that many others. But if you get a very strong signal from Tmobile where you work or live, this may not be an issue.

As of this writing, Outlook synchronization is STILL not available. It’s pathetic really, but I won’t go on about it - what good will it do? People have complained and complained and now almost two years after it was promised, it still isn’t here.

Also, the “catalog” feature of the new OS had gotten some excitement initially because imlied the promise of new applications from third party developers. No longer would users have to wait for the sluggish Danger/Tmobile partnership to dain to release something new, but instead we could rely on the speed of individual developers. Or could we??? As it turns out we could not. Apparently what has happened is that the process by which a developer can offer a new product has become the loophole. Danger or Tmobile or both have to approve this application is worthy, or perhaps that it won’t crash the sometimes fragile OS, and because of this, after about 6 months since the catalag was introduced we only have 3 new applications, 2 games, and an application to retrieve AOL Email which I believe was developed by Danger itself. Perhaps all three were developed by Danger, I’m not sure.

However, applications HAVE continued to be developed. One can sign up for a developer account at developer.danger.com, download a “key” which will modify your OS to accept new programs, and download some additional tools to actually install these programs. It is not for the non-techie, but with a little patience those of us who consider ourselves half-techies can get things rolling. There are a lot of useful apps and some games as well, and if they were actually available to people instead of just the developers, I think a lot more people would hold onto their Sidekicks. Why Danger and Tmobile want to limit the sidekicks abilities is beyond me. It’s as if they only want to make it good enough to sell x number. They don’t seem to have any wish to compete with the Blackberry, the Treo 600, or other Smartphones. Why? I have no clue.

Apparently some time in the next 6 months yet another new model will come out. It seems to be redesigned in terms of hardward, but not radically. However, the potential is there for much better reception as I believe it is being designed/manufactured by a company with lots of experience with mobile phones. The current Sidekicks were orginally designed as data-only, but then it was decided to also make it a phone. But the manufacturer they used was not experienced in phones, thus the issues with reception.

I have yet to take the plunge in going to a new phone. The Blackberry hasn’t changed really since my review except that there’s a new model out that has a speakerphone. The Treo is entreguing, but it’s price is still a bit too steep for me. So until the Treo 610 comes out, or the next Sidekick, I’ll be happy grumbling at my far from perfect Color Sidekick.

Gizmodo has a few references to phones (from British Telecom, Ericson and Verizon, and Motorola and NEC) that are being developed by various companies that are to have Wifi capability and even designed to do voice over IP. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s just a way to transmit your voice that is not exactly new. Such programs as Microsoft NetMeeting have had this capability for a long time (along with video). I’ve used this technology and was never very impressed with the quality, although perhaps they have made strides with it in the last couple of years. I just wonder if it will be more or less reliable than your average GSM (or CDMA) voice connection. GSM and CDMA do something very similar in that they convert your voice into zeros and ones transmit them through the air to a cell tower which converts them to analog and then sends them along a landline to the other end. Or at least that’s what I think happens. The main difference I see with VoIP is that it does it faster because Wifi is generally on at least a 300kbps line, sometimes a lot higher. Whereas most cell phones still haven’t gotten much past 64kbps. So theoretically voice quality would be better, but then I’m not sure how efficient VoIP is with compressing voice so that it doesn’t take up as much bandwidth as it might uncompressed.

Anyway, these phones aren’t ONLY VoIP, but a combinations of VoIP and GSM or CDMA. Since Wifi networks are still not as ubiquitous (or have the range) of cellular networks, having a VoIP-only phone wouldn’t be very practical! When traveling you’d have to find the nearest Starbucks just to make a call! I’m not even that excited about VoIP. Maybe in a few years it will be the dominant means of making calls when there are Wifi access points on every corner of every block, or sooner if they can increase the range of current (or future) Wifi protocols from the current 300-ft max.

What does interest me much more, though, is just the fact that these phones will have both Wifi and cellular capability. So you will be able to access your email, the web, instant messaging, etc. at pretty high speeds whenever you are near an access point, but you will be able to do the same things, albeit at lower speeds, even when you’re far from any. At least that’s the theory. Whether the devices being built will be able to do this in an elegant way, that’s a whole other issue. I suppose if they are built from the ground up, or have an OS that is modified to account for these two different modes of communications (such as a PocketPC Phone Edition or PalmOS5 or Symbian with the proper hooks), we may have some hope.

It does look like there is a concerted effort in the direction of creating Cell/Wifi phones though, which is great. Of course now that this may be a reality relatively quickly, I can’t help but think of yet other capabilities I would want to throw onto such a device. First there’s GPS. We have just seen the first PDA-Phone with a built-in GPS receiver from Motorola. It’s not actually out yet, and according to the info it’s unclear whether the SD slot is just SD or SDIO (SDIO being necessary for hooking up an SD Wifi card). If it is SDIO, then this might be the most all-inclusive device for a while! The other item on the wish list is a hard drive. Yes, this will subtract battery power and so maybe having a ton of solid-state memory would be a compromise, but solid-state memory is extremely pricey! Lexar’s new 4GB compact flash card is $1,500! Compare that to 200GB hard drives that you can get now for only $100 or so with rebates. Of course notebook-sized and/or external hard drives are more expensive, but not nearly as much as solid state! Why do I want such storage? Well, to go along with the potential multimedia capabilities of the phone – to be able to play video transferred from a TIVO or just display the hundreds or thousands of pictures I’ve taken/scanned. Also, what about my entire MP3 collection? Now we’re really talking convergence. While we’re at it, throw in some TV reception (although I won’t ask for satellite TV just yet, or HDTV), which apparently is a feature that Samsung is creating for the South Korean market. Finally, there’s satellite reception – not for TV but for the phone itself. We have already seen this dual cell/satellite phone capability via the infamous Thuraya sattelite phones that were banned in the War on Iraq.

When will all these technologies merge into one unit? Probably not anytime very soon. But the fact that so many of them are already under development, albeit not in one complete package but rather partial ones, bodes well. My prediction (don’t quote me!), is that we’ll have something with most if not all of the technologies I’ve listed above in a single device within five years. Maybe as little as two. Then again, in two years (let alone five) I’m sure there will be all these new capabilities (mini-hd-dvd’s, wifi/satellite-video-on-demand, holographic projection, and electrode stimulation?) popping up that we don’t even have today which I will then be crying for inclusion into the convergence device. Guess I’ll never be satisfied…