Yet another great phone to get Mobizines working on

A piece of historical greatness from one of my favourite blogs: Paleo-Future. It's a 1910 description of what a wireless phone would be like.

The text is great and I'll try not to spoil it by giving it all away, but it's worth noting that the inventive spirits of the Washington Post had already figured out what to do with unsightly aerials: it's the umbrella - what you look like when it doesn't rain I dunno, although the article does helpfully suggest that indoors you can attach your wireless telephone to your bedstead.

Presumably there's a USB-Remington interface for printing out text messages, although the built-in MP3 player would require the transportation of unwieldy memory sticks in the form of rolls of wax.

Top 10 Worst Phones (part 2)

As promised the top 5 suckymost handsets...

5. The Danger Sidekick.

Continuing the strange American obsession with souped up pagers, we present the Sidekick. Not a lousy device (seems a little unfair to call it a phone) by any means and it did have one really whizzy feature: the rotating screen. Flick it and the screen spins out. Which is fine so long as you can remember which way the screen spins. Try to push it the other way and...look mum, I've got a wireless screen!


4. The Pogo.

What happens when you get a bunch of web designers in severe glasses in a room with a bunch of hardware engineers. The boo.com of wireless. I might be slightly biased as the Pogo was tenuously connected with a Web agency called Razorfish who have subjected me to some of the dullest meetings ever. Plus I used to work with someone who'd worked for Pogo and every new bit of technology you came across and got excited about was met with a curt "yeah, we invented that at Pogo." Which is impressive the first couple of hundred times you hear it.



3. The iPhone.

Of course it's going to be fantastic. It'll revolutionise everything ever and usher humanity over the edge of the singularity into which technology develops so fast that we mere moderns won't be able to comprehend what's happening. But Steve Jobs won't let us put Mobizines on it (yet, the Apple TV doesn't seem to be very tinker-resistant) so it's therefore no good.




2. Ericsson T39.

It's a WAP phone...with a single line display! Great if you like scrolling but the buttons are sized for a two-year old. Frustration in a clamshell. The T89 nearly made this slot thanks to the irascibility of its pointer thingy (for correct term see this slightly nsfw cartoon strip) but the T89 was colour which had much the same effect on the WAP development community as gravity did on physics. After all before Newton invented gravity stuff kept flying off didn't it?


But my...er, I mean, the jury's least favourite mobile phone of all time is...



1. The Siemens U10.

I have a particular horror of this phone stemming from my time working with the team setting up the UMTS for a large network operator beginning with T. And ending in -Mobile. You could not get it to do anything for longer than 30 seconds before it would "spontaneously power-cycle" as one QA report had it (that's crash to you). It was about the size of the XBOX 360 power supply and despite a generous screen the OS vendor (Motorola) had decided to use a font that was about this big thus rendering the advantage of the big screen redundant. It was like using a large-print book as a phone. Siemens did produce some good phones before their ultimate demise, this wasn't one of them. My job was to pair this beast up via bluetooth with a Microsoft PocketPC device (see Pocket PC, above) and use that to test browsing over 3G. Now, the Pocket PC of the time had a uniquely nerve-jangling chime to indicate that the bluetooth connection was broken, which would require restarting the U10 and the PDA. I used to hear that chime every 5 minutes or so as the U10 would crash, or drop radio power because its battery was low (read: always) or simply forget what it was doing and just shuffle about looking dazed. After a while I was hearing that chime in my sleep. I would happily drive over a road made of kittens and puppy dogs in cute little bows just for the satisfaction of smashing one of these to plastic shards. Bleurgh.



Phew. And relax.

They don't make 'em like they used to. Thank God.

10 Worst Phones Of All Time (part 1)

OK, so the N95 is a lovely piece of engineering, but it's time we celebrated the other side of the coin, the turkeys that wouldn't fly, the phones that should have been codenamed, "but seriously, WTF?"

In order to get in this highly exclusive list a phone needs to have some serious design or conceptual flaw (or simply not work), a flaw that really should have spotted and ironed out. Either that or the phone in question should have been placed in a burlap sack and dropped off a bridge.


In reverse order then:


10. The Nokia 7110

Actually, the 7110 wasn't the worst phone ever. As a phone (for making phone calls) it worked fine, with triband GSM and a really usuable UI. Its reason for getting in the list is that it was the first phone to demonstrate exactly how much WAP was going to underdeliver. "WAP is crap" started with this phone, although that really isn't the phone's fault. The other reason it's here is for the spring-loaded keypad cover which was slick as you like for 1999, but required the owner to hold it at exactly the right angle to work properly. And you had to put up with loads of people telling you it wasn't actually the phone used in the Matrix.




9. The Motorola P7389

This phone came out at the same time as the Nokia 7110 when I was working for a company developing some of the first WAP sites. You could get either the 7110 or the 7389 from O2 and my colleague Ben volunteered to get the 7110. I got the 7389. A week later after missing dozens of calls and still unable to find my texts I swapped it for the 7110.




8. Any phone running Windows PocketPC Phone edition

Just for the genius decision that you couldn't start calls from the missed calls register. If you could find it. Er...but...The new OS is much better (you can let my arm go now, Scott)


7. Nokia N-Gage

Partly for the notion that you could beat Nintendo at mobile gaming, but mostly just for the genius placement of mic and speaker. A whole new internet cult was born: Sidetalkin



6. Motorola V100

It's a pager. Not a phone. You can't fool me, I'm a professional.









...read on tomorrow for 5 to 2 and then I'll do a big countdown in my best David "Kid" Jensen style over CCS's version of Whole Lotta Love (stops, realises that at least half the people in the office won't have the faintest what that is, feels old) before getting to number one!

Dolce & Gabbana Gold RAZR with Eelskin Case

I was just putting together a post on the Prada phone (soon come), when this appears in my blog roll via Digital World Tokyo: the D&G RAZR. Not only is it gold (gold I tell ya!) but it comes in an eelskin case and costs four times as much as a standard RAZR. They are therefore flying off the shelves.

Incidentally the choice of eelskin is interesting as there's an old urban myth that says eelskin wallets can wipe the data off the mag strips on your credit cards. Luckily MythBusters showed that one to be wrong so your SIM data will be safe. In fact they had to go up to 800 Henries or Gausses or something to wipe the data - if Cap'n Hex was here he'd tell me the right term, but he's at Star Trek convention dressed as a tribble.

UPDATE: turns out we had Gold D&G phones in the UK two years ago, but they're now discontinued. A rare case of Japan being behind the rest of the world. Bet we didn't have eelskin cases though.

Big news from Samsung

64Gb worth to be precise, cos that's how big the new SSD hard drives are according to this magisterial post from DigitalWorldTokyo. At the moment these things are only found in the big Windows Mobile devices but with a 1.8 inch footprint (that's a smidge over 45mm) it would fit in the beefier variety of normal phones (yes, Nokia we're looking at you.)


64Gb would take my entire music collection and leave me with just enough space to store my contacts. Now I just need to find someone willing to build an audiophile headphone preamp for mobiles and my perfect phone could be around the corner.

These things will be everywhere soon: according to DGT Samsung is predicting an increase in revenue from $400m a year this year to $6.1bn by 2010. That's like a gazillion per cent or something.