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Posted on 20 Feb 2006 at 14:38

Mark Needham sees sales figures for smartphones used in many interesting ways

N70 in Action

Before damning all Nokia smartphones in the above article as suitable only for chavs with more money than sense, I thought it would be only fair if I first tried one for myself. But all my social prejudices were horribly reinforced after I got my hands on a second-hand N70. The list of names still saved inside the phone sounded like the characters in Bridget Jones's Diary - along with the phenomenal number of Sharons that the previous owner had known, there were entries in the name of 'Slaag' and 'Shazza'. Much worse was to come, though.

I downloaded the Nokia synchronisation software and - or so I naively thought - successfully imported all my contacts and diary information down from Outlook onto the phone. For a while I was quite happy with the device. Its battery life wasn't as good as you'd expect from a Nokia phone, but I came to like the Franz Ferdinand track that our Bridget Jones had set as her ringtone (it was certainly easy to identify in a crowded pub or train carriage). I also liked the idea of the lifeblog software that you can download, which enables you to take photos with the impressive camera in the phone and send these off to a blog site that gets set up for you. I fondly imagined that if I gave this phone to my daughter, she might take a few photos of her and her friends and ping them off to a website where her old dad could check out what she was doing at school.

However, it all went wrong. In the middle of a black-tie dinner, we were short of one person in our party, so I turned to the contacts section of my N70 and typed in his surname. Not there. Maybe I'd misfiled him, so I tried again under his first name. Not there either. This was someone I knew was on my Outlook contacts list on my PC, and who had also been on the Treo 650 I used previously, and on my Palm T5. However, his number was nowhere to be found on the N70. Over the next couple of weeks, I discovered a number of other contacts had just gone missing. I did find one of them filed by the N70 under 'Mr', because I'd clicked the title box in Outlook, but the rest of them seemed to have disappeared completely... Not good enough.

Palm's Future

Many comments are still coming into my email address at feedback@widget.co.uk about the news that Palm is to use Windows Mobile in its next Treo. Ashley Abraham from digitalcity.co.uk said that his company divides by job types: 'We still have many more Palm OS devices compared to Pocket PC - Palm devices are better suited to the creative community and Pocket PC better suited to business types (suits),' he said. He hastened to add this doesn't mean that he's demeaning Pocket PC, but is simply because there are a number of programs available for the Palm community that aren't available on the Microsoft platform. He specifically mentioned the iShell mobile environment for Palm devices for interactive authoring, and Kinoma Producer for displaying Panoramas and Object movies. If Palm isn't updating its existing models fast enough - an allegation that Palm strenuously denies, by the way - Ashley said that he, and by implication the creative members of his company, would be more likely to upgrade to Sony's PSP or a video iPod than to a Pocket PC device.

Not everybody is submerged in gloom at the news that some Palm handhelds will use Microsoft's software. Chris Duncalf, a Palm user and an engineering student, commented that he was unhappy with the way Microsoft Office compatibility is 'mishandled through third-party applications' in his words. 'The news that Palm is now using Pocket PC is a happy one, as I've been very impressed with the solid build of my T3,' he commented.