Paul Jacobson

Its my wife’s fault, really. Frustrated with the persistent unavailability of the Nokia X6 which she had her eye on for several months, she switched to a BlackBerry Storm 2 (her first choice was the Bold but the MTN store she visited didn’t have any in stock). BlackBerry devices hadn’t really interested me until she brought her Storm home with her and I took a look at it. In the time that she has had it, we’ve stopped sms’ing each other and switched to Google Talk instant messaging instead (free for her and a lot cheaper for me). I’m not too sure what the parameters are but free on-device data is pretty appealing in itself.

When it comes to my next mobile device, I’ve been pretty fixated on an Android device, largely because an Android phone will allow me to access all of my calendars and other information from my Google services on the device. That is a big productivity win for me because I’ve been reliant on a series of reminders and mobile Web-based access to my calendars to see a full picture of my day till now. I’ve used Mail for Exchange on my Nokia devices and while its kept my contacts in sync, calendar support is very limited. I used my wife’s iPod Touch to test that OS’s support for multiple calendars across Exchange and while I read that I should be able to add all my calendars and keep them in sync, when I set the device up, it just didn’t seem to work as I’d hoped.

That said, I decided to wait a couple more months before doing anything to see what the new HTC Bravo (aka the Desire and closest we’re going to get to the Nexus One in South Africa) will be do and perhaps even the next iPhone iteration. I am not a fan of the degree of control Apple exercises over its devices but the iPhone is an excellent device on the whole.

Still, BlackBerry devices and services started to appeal to me more and more. I received some great feedback about the Storm 2 and the Bold (9700) from some of our sharpest tech journalists. I like the touchscreen Storm but the Bold has received more accolades and seems to be a preferred device. I then discovered that, using Google Sync, I could synchronise all my Google calendars for one of my Google accounts (I have a Google Apps account for work and my personal Gmail account – both have a set of shared calendars so accessing either calendar gives me a view of all my calendars) together with my contacts. Mail is taken care of using a Google mail app/add-on for the BlackBerry that seems to add quite a lot of Google Mail functionality. That capability really got my attention and prompted me to reconsider what it is I want from a mobile device.

I realised that I use my phone primarily for various forms of messaging including email, IM, sms, Twitter, Facebook updates and, more recently, Foursquare. My Nokia N97 has the latest version of Ovi Maps which, in my opinion, is probably the best maps application around. I can do almost all of those things pretty well with a BlackBerry (with the exception of Ovi Maps which would be a real loss if I moved away from a Nokia device). BlackBerry’s App world seems to be fairly well stocked but it isn’t a match for the iTunes App Store or even the Android Marketplace but it may just have what I need. I should also point out that I use my phone largely for business purposes and the fact that most of my clients (and friends) have BlackBerries makes it a logical choice from a communication ease and cost perspective (it really seems that everyone has a BlackBerry these days).

One big issue for me was the unavailability of the Evernote app for the BlackBerry locally (I tried to download it to my wife’s Storm and was told that the app isn’t available here). This is a big issue for me because I am a fairly heavy Evernote user and want a device that supports an Evernote app. If the BlackBerries were blocked from accessing that app locally, that may just push me towards an iPhone or Android phone after all. Fortunately, Joe Diedericks over at MyDL came up with a solution which may just do the trick.

So all of this pretty much leaves me thinking that a BlackBerry may just be a device for me. Its UI isn’t as good looking at the iPhone’s or Android phones’ UI but in terms of raw functionality, it is pretty impressive. Add benefits like free messaging and a cost benefit begins to emerge. Nokia does have some pretty good messaging devices. The current Stuff magazine actually has a comparison between the E72 and the Bold and the E72 comes out on top, although it seemed to win by a fairly narrow margin. Unfortunately Nokia devices don’t have the free data benefit or the tight messaging integration that the BlackBerry platform seems to have. The N900 does have fantastic messaging integration and if it would allow me to sync my calendars properly, I’d give it serious consideration despite the absence of a free data option. Unfortunately I just couldn’t get it to sync my calendars properly and that is important to me given how I work.

I’d love to know what people think about the BlackBerry platform and the Bold in particular. Everything I have read is very positive. I have a tendency towards touch screens since I got my N97 but going with a BlackBerry may nudge me to update my aging iPod with an iPod Touch and the app ecosystem that comes with that (I really want to be able to use the OmniFocus app and take my tasks on the road with me without having to open my laptop to accomplish anything). That also opens the door to the iPad but I really need to see one of those in person, see the price tag and get some real world feedback.

In the meantime, please let me know what you think? I have a tendency to focus intently on what I am looking at and sometimes need a little help pulling back and looking at the bigger picture.

Image credit: OrigamiPod : Let’s start! by hawkexpress, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives 2.0 license.

I received a heads up from G-Connect’s agency, Emerging Media, about a special offer for the holidays a couple weeks ago. You may know that G-Connect is one of the broadband providers I use although mostly while I am on 3G. I use Afrihost as my main provider because its ADSL is cheap and can accommodate multiple concurrent connections. That being said, I often think my G-Connect connection is faster than my Afrihost connection when I do use G-Connect ADSL. I don’t know if it is actually faster but it certainly feels that way. If you are interested in my thoughts about these two providers in particular, check out my post about them.

Anyway, the special offer is pretty appealing and probably an attempt to deal with the explosion of ADSL providers offering prices even lower than Afrihost’s R29/GB although with mixed results. Here is part of the press release I received:

Adding even more fuel to the debate around the price of broadband Internet connectivity in South Africa, WirelessG has launched a promotion on their G-Connect product that sees it slashing pricing on ADSL, Wi-Fi and 3G Internet access by as much as 59% between the beginning of December 2009 and the end of January 2010.

The preferential pricing is available as part of a promotion the company calls its ‘30-Day Broadband Pass’ and as its name suggests, differs from the company’s G-Connect prepaid Internet offering and offers users the opportunity to get substantial discounts of between 39% and 59% on all access mediums while having a cap of up to 9GB for only R200. The effective price on ADSL is as low as 2.2 cents per MB while 3G is 28 cents per MB. However, when using this convergence bundle users will be required to consume their entire data allocation within 30 days of its purchase.

“While the promotion won’t see any data capacity rolling over from one month to the next, as is the case with the existing G-Connect product , the big win is that the offering is unlimited in the sense that existing and new users can purchase as many of these ’30-day passes’ as desired. They will further have the freedom to access mobile and fixed line networks which will be a specific requirement in the festive season with users travelling to holiday destinations. With this kind of product, families can hammer the networks at prices almost half of their existing bandwidth costs”, explains Carel van der Merwe, CEO of WirelessG.

“We believe that the promotion will do wonders for opening the market’s eyes to what’s possible with substantially larger data capacity limits and more cost effective pricing,” he says.

“This exercise will also give us and the market a view of what’s to come in the near future,” he adds.

Van der Merwe says that the ‘30-Day Broadband Pass’ promotion can be done due to the ease of use of our service and is a result of a temporary set of price reductions. “It is not designed to mislead the market, but to offer something special to satisfy the need of the December to January holidaymaker,” he says.

This announcement follows last week’s G-Connect price drop where the normal G-Connect ADSL rate was lowered by 29% to as low as 3.5c per MB. Prepaid users will therefore also qualify for lowered rates regardless of whether they purchase a ‘30-Day Broadband Pass’ or not.

G-Connect could do a couple things to improve its service, generally speaking, including its hit-and-miss Connection Manager which can be pretty temperamental. If you are away from your usual ADSL connection over the holidays and your mobile provider is still ravaging you with high mobile data costs, take a look at its pricing and this special offer. It may be worth your while.

Fact: we have expensive Internet connectivity compared to most of the developed world. You can throw a stone at a story about connectivity in SA without grazing a mention of the costs here compared to, say, the UK or the USA. Thankfully we do have developments like the Seacom cable, the upgrade to SAT-3 and a bunch of cables coming down the west coast of Africa which will boost the available bandwidth almost exponentially. We may even see Telkom drop its prices and increase caps and transfer rates … just maybe!

In the meantime we have a couple options that are better priced than most and offer pretty decent service. I used to be a loyal Axxess DSL customer but when it failed to take steps to reduce its pricing after G-Connect dropped its pricing to between R45/GB and R49/GB for ADSL access and Afrihost launched its limited duration and special R29/GB offer, I decided to switch.

I’ve been using G-Connect on and off for a few months now since Emerging Media sent me a SIM card and G-Connect gave me some credit to try the service out. Setting up the account on my laptop was easy with some terrific support from the G-Connect helpdesk. I focussed on the 3G access at first and it worked really well. It wasn’t until I moved away from Axxess that I started using the ADSL connectivity too. While I’ve enjoyed using G-Connect, the sign-on mechanism is a pain in the butt at times. Sometimes it just won’t connect me to the network but the support guys are terrific and I’ve had them call me a couple times with suggestions and to follow up with the support query. There are a couple pros and cons when it comes to the G-Connect service:

• Pro’s
• Pretty fast transfer speeds;
• Unshaped bandwidth;
• A single account for your ADSL, wifi and 3G connectivity;
• No commitment and your balance carries over month to month; and
• Excellent support (the support team are persistent).
• Con’s
• No concurrent connections;
• Cumbersome sign-on mechanism

I heard a couple reports about terrible customer service at Afrihost but the limited duration and special offer was too cheap to ignore. I decided to sign up and try it out and so far I have been pretty happy with the service I have been getting. I initially signed up for a 20GB service at R580 (compared to R490 for 8GB at Axxess) and I am moving up to a 50GB service next month at a cost of R1 450 (compared to the R1 475 I paid Axxess for 25GB). I occasionally have connectivity issues that seem to resolve themselves after a few minutes. As with G-Connect there are a few pros and cons:

• Pro’s
• Pretty fast transfer speeds;
• Up to 5 concurrent connections;
• Minimal commitment, you can cancel at around a month, I think (this is pretty standard);
• Excellent price and if you buy during the special you lock that price in
• Con’s
• Shaped bandwidth;
• No bandwidth carry-over so use it or lose it;
• Reportedly dodgy customer service (although I haven’t had any problems)

At the moment I use both G-Connect and Afrihost. Afrihost is my primary DSL provider but I have credit with G-Connect for when I can’t use Afrihost for some reason or I am out and about and MTN 3G is half GPRS (happens fairly often lately). I also maintain a 1GB data bundle on Axxess as a kind of “in case of emergency break glass” option but I don’t see myself going back there in a hurry. Granted the Afrihost pricing is not sustainable but the R49/GB price point seems to be where ADSL should be priced these days and Axxess’ refusal to revisit its pricing or make any effort to communicate with its customers about its pricing puts me off (Axxess doesn’t seem to be on the social media map and that says a lot to me about the company’s desire to engage with customers).

Of course it is worth mentioning Internet Solutions itself for a number of reasons. For one thing it is the underlying provider that powers Afrihost (as well as Axxess). Another reason is that IS has its own consumer offering called Plugg. Plugg’s offering isn’t terribly appealing from a price perspective. At R79/GB (apparently the price has been or will be dropped to around R65/GB) it is just not an option despite it potentially being pretty zippy due to what I understand are low contention rates (excuse any terminology mangling – I am trying to remember what smarter people in the know have told me). Plugg’s pricing is partly due to its relationship with its customers which it can’t really undercut without causing some trouble (those providers should be cutting their prices but that is besides the point, it seems). Instead Plugg is going to look at ways to really improve the value it adds to connectivity by adding a couple other services and options down the line. The fact that Plugg is an IS product automatically makes it worth watching but until there is better pricing and/or a more compelling offering there are better choices.

While I am talking about IS products I also want to mention its Mobility product. This is a corporate product and analogous to the G-Connect service in that it encompasses wifi and 3G access outside the office. It is a lot more than just connctivity and includes a really comprehensive management system that grants network managers a fine grained level of control over who has what level of access to which network. It seems to be a pretty powerful option for corporates who want to give their people the ability to work remotely and at the same time control how they do that and even how they interface with the corporate network. I haven’t used much more than the 3G connectivity on my phone (like G-Connect you can provision your SIM to run on the IS network rather than your usual provider). I just couldn’t figure out how to get the 3G dongle working with my MacBook for some reason. This mention really doesn’t do the offering any justice. I just wanted to mention it here as a powerful corporate option that also comes with some competitive pricing.

Although pricing has hardly plummeted while bandwidth caps and transfer speeds have rocketed, we are seeing some very welcome relief when it comes to pricing and the flexibility to switch from provider to provider (well, assuming you weren’t nailed down by Telkom or some other larger provider). Even at R49/GB ADSL is becoming much more affordable and providers like G-Connect and Afrihost are putting some pressure on their competitors to do better. I would love to know the number of users other DSL providers lost when Afrihost announced its special offer. That must have been noticeable. I’m pretty happy with my current choices although what I’d like to see is improved upload speeds. That is the next big thing, I think.

You’ve heard about the amazing Nokia E71 and you may be thinking about getting one for yourself. It is a terrific phone, for sure, but it has just been superseded by the new Nokia E72 which is even better (all existing E71 owners … I feel your pain).

The E72 boasts a number of improvements over its year old cousin including a 5 megapixel camera, support for download speeds of up to 10.2 MBps over HSDPA and a new optical navigation key which seems to bring the scrolling experience that much closer to the Blackberry’s trackball. It gets better. The audio jack is the standard 3.5mm jack and the phone runs s60 3rd edition (feature pack 2 – the same version the E75 runs). It also comes with Nokia Messaging for a better email experience.

There is some pretty exciting instant messaging integration built into the device too. According to the Nokia press release:

On top of these developments, for the first time, owners will be able to set up instant messaging (IM) accounts provided by Nokia Messaging direct from the homescreen. In just a few steps, device owners will be able to connect to their favorite IM accounts such as Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk and Ovi, amongst many others.

These new IM features are complimented by Nokia’s range of email solutions with a lifetime license for Nokia’s mobile email and IM service, Nokia Messaging, as well as onboard clients for Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler. Accessing popular accounts such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Ovi Mail and thousands of other email service providers is simple through improved on-device email setup, with the same easy to use UI integrating all of the owner’s corporate email accounts as well.

It feels like just yesterday that I got the E71 and as fantastic as the device is, the E72 looks even better. This slim device is an even better business tool and the only gripe I have right now is that the space bar is so small. I have been trying out the E75 and will post a review soon but if the E72 performs the way I think it will, it will beat the pants off both the E71 and the E75.

Update: I received the E72 datasheet from Nokia yesterday:

One of the challenges presented by advancing communications tools like our smartphones is that it is so easy to do a lot of our work pretty much anywhere we are connected to a data network. Mobile phones made us easier to call and increasing data coverage makes it easier for us to remain in contact with email, instant messaging, social networks and the likes of Twitter. My E71 has software installed to make it easy for me to send and receive email pushed to my device using Nokia Email, keep in touch on Twitter using Gravity and message my contacts on a variety of instant messaging services using Nimbuzz (I haven’t reinstalled Fring since I got my phone back from repairs). I can be totally connected. The reason why this all presents a challenge is because it is so easy to forget to unplug from our work and take a break from it all.

This was the theme of Nokia’s E75 launch event yesterday at the Skin Sense Day Spa in Rivonia yesterday. It was all about work-life balance and how the E75 is a device that is geared for helping you achieve that. I can see how Nokia tries to market the phone partly as such a device but mostly I think it is more important to develop better habits than it is to pick a specific device. That being said, the E75 has functionality which does make it easier to close the office door.

The launch event started with a talk from Clinton Jacobs from BMI-Techknowledge. I tend to be a little skeptical of industry analysts. They seem to position themselves just ahead of the mainstream adoption curve so they retain some degree of plausible deniability in case their vague predictions turn out to be false. I sometimes see them as pseudo PR people who subtly create markets for stuff under the guise of research.

Clinton Jacobs from BMI-Techknowledge

Clinton spoke about his research and observations on the work-life balance and mobile devices and services generally. As technology evolves we can expect to see greater convergence on a number of levels, including devices themselves. There is also an increasing blurring of the lines between work and leisure.

Social networks and messaging tools are increasingly available on mobile devices in more meaningful formats. That being said, no single device will satisfy all needs. There is a trend towards fewer devices that meet most of our needs. Converged, capable devices have applications as thin clients for Web applications, location based services, in unified communications and in cloud computing environments.

Jacobs spoke about cloud computing and virtualisation trends as having potential. This shouldn’t be news to anyone using social services online in any meaningful way and his comments about these two trends was a reminder how ahead of the curve the SA online community is.

While there is definitely an increasingly mobile workforce it is important not to overstate certain trends. Jacobs spoke about smartphones become becoming [Editorial: There are days I wonder how I managed to do so well in English in school with grammar like this!] laptop replacements alternatives to laptops with 3G access [Update: I have discovered that I misquoted Jacobs, he wasn't saying smartphones are laptop replacements, rather that they offer an alternative to laptops with 3G access]. This is typical analyst speak and not entirely correct unless your business needs are relatively limited and you are comfortable working off a mobile device on an ongoing devices. I love my E71 and almost all my mobile devices and as much as I fantasise about working on these small devices, nothing quite compares to my MacBook when it comes to certain tasks. These devices still lack the power, the form factor and the applications to replicate a laptop.

The lines between business and pleasure/leisure are blurring and one consequence is arguably greater efficiency. This may be but what advanced mobile tools do enable is working from more or less wherever you may be (more or less). Clearly there is a need for converged smart devices but it is also important to maintain harder edges between work and personal life. It is far too easy to work wherever you may be so emphasising these differences can be key to reducing the effects of the continuous flow of information.

Mathia Nalappan’s talk

Nokia SA’s General Manager spoke next. I found his talk to be somewhat more compelling. He talked about de-emphasising the device and focussing on the device’s utility for users. Efficiency is extremely valuable and time is a “precious asset”. I can identify with this myself and I am sure a great many business people can too.

Nokia has partnered with IBM and Microsoft and has removed the barriers to freer flow of emails and information. The E75 is the first Nokia device that comes with Nokia Email pre-installed. This is a very useful application that is a big improvement over the default Nokia email application found on earlier devices. What it does is give you the benefit of virtual push email without the need for an intervening service (like Blackberry, for example). Nalappan said that Nokia Email probably supports around 90% of the email providers available. I have Nokia Email on my E71 and it generally works pretty well. The current version has added HTML support!

Data encryption is a standard feature on the E75 and was added in recognition of the need for this capability in business environments. The E75 also comes standard with mobile VPN technology. Other security features include remote and auto locking to help keep devices secure. You have choice of connectivity options and a feature called Destinations (going beyond Maps) which you can use to set access point preferences. So you can set your preference to wifi in your office or home and mobile networks when out and about.

The E71 has screens for personal and business use. The E75 has this feature too. The feature enables you to set which home screen applications and shortcuts are available so you can tell your device to hide business email notifications and only show you stuff suited for your weekends or after hours. It is a handy feature and a nice way to actively switch off from work. Nalappan also mentioned that the E75 can support multiple phone numbers although I didn’t get details from him about this. As I understand it, the phone supports a multiple SIM setup and I believe much of this takes place at the network level.

Nokia’s strategy is to present a wide range of options for consumers. The phones are available now and in black, red and copper and on all networks. I understood that the devices are being shipped to stores now and should be available shortly if they aren’t available already.

My thoughts

The E75 and the E71 are pretty similar in terms of specifications. One of the big appeals of the E75 is the slide-out keyboard which makes typing and messaging a lot easier. I like that the phone comes with Nokia Email pre-installed. This software is a big improvement over the default email application in other devices, including the E71. I tried the beta version of Nokia Email on the 5800 Xpress Music when I had it for review recently and that worked pretty well too.

The Destinations feature appeals to me and I’d like to see that available for my E71 (I haven’t checked yet to see if it is available). If you are looking for a messaging device and you have been considering the E71 (still a hot item for Nokia – can’t stock the shelves fast enough), then take a look at this device too. It isn’t as slim as the E71 but it feels solid and you may prefer its keyboard.

Note: I have uploaded datasheets, images of the E75 and some other interesting information to Drop.io

Update: Here is a great video with some insights into the thought processes that went into developing the E75. I love these videos. It is great to have these peeks into what the product development teams were thinking when they designed and built these devices.

I received a Nokia 5800 Xpress for a follow up review (my original review is here). I have been hearing rave reviews about the phone in recent weeks and I mentioned to Nokia’s General Manager for SA, Mathia Nalappan that I wouldn’t mind revisiting my initial review. Nokia’s PR/communications agency, Fleishman Hillard kindly send me a review unit for a second take and I decided to use the 5800 exclusively while I have it and see how it fits into my day to day activities and how it performs generally.

I thought I’d do something a little different for this post and I am going to basically live blog my experience with the phone so you can get a sense of either a) what you may experience picking up the 5800 and integrating it into your life, or b) what a crazy person such as myself gets up to with the 5800 under the guise of productivity. I am going to integrate a FriendFeed channel/post where I will post updates as I use the 5800 and where you can respond, reply or voice some of your thoughts in addition to commenting on this post as usual (entirely up to you). I’d like this to a more interactive experience so feel free to pitch in. I am open to trying new apps or new things with the phone too (within the bounds of reason, the law and my budget). I may post a couple more photos and videos in this post, below the FriendFeed stream so be sure to check back here.

To begin with I’ll give you an idea what kind of user I am. I use my phones to access the Web quite a lot. They are not replacements for Firefox or Safari but very useful on the go. I email, tweet and sms a lot, hence a big reason I opted for my Nokia E71 when I replaced my N73 last year. I take my phone everywhere and I have to force myself to put it down. Build quality has become important to me since I got my E71, as is speed and reliability.

With that intro aside, here I go …

One of the debates that almost inevitably come up when touchscreen devices are discussed is the debate about physical keyboards and onscreen keyboards. It does come down to personal choice but my view is that a combination of a physical and an onscreen keyboard is probably best. A device like an E71 or a Blackberry is great but you can’t match a full touchscreen with the small screen on a device like that.

At the same time there is still something about a physical keyboard that I prefer. I live blogged an event last night on FriendFeed using the 5800 and while my typing speed and accuracy is definitely improving, I couldn’t help but think how much faster I was on my E71. This is one of the reasons I am more excited about the N97 than I am about a future iPhone. They N97 has a physical keyboard (as well as the onscreen keyboard) and that will make full screen Web browsing, tweeting and blogging so much easier (for me at least). It could be that I just need more time with the touchscreen and I’ll see how that goes during the course of the next few days as I continue using the 5800.

Leaving aside typing, S60 5th Edition touch interface works really well. I am still figuring out what I need to double tap and what I can tap once but buttons do what they are supposed to do when I tap them and there is a little fade transition between screens in the home screen that adds a nice visual element to the navigation experience. I like the way the menu options are laid out in applications like the Web browser and when making calls. I keep looking for menu items in the menus and forget about the icon that opens an onscreen set of options using icons. This is when I begin to appreciate a touchscreen device even more. Navigation is that much easier although it still isn’t as smooth as the iPhone/iPod Touch.

You may ask why I keep referring back to the iPhone/iPod Touch. The reason is that I believe the iPhone UI is probably the gold standard at the moment for touchscreen UIs. As much as the iPhone’s hardware specifications disappoint, its software is well thought out, powerful and works brilliantly. At the same time hardware does make a big difference, to me at least. I wouldn’t compare the 5800 to the iPhone (there is really no real comparison, the iPhone is in a different class) but I can see myself comparing the N97 to the iPhone (when I get my hands on an N97 either to review or when I buy one) and saying that the iPhone’s UI is still superior in many ways but the N97’s superior hardware and pretty decent software make it a winner. Of course Apple may yet surprise me if/when it announces its next generation iPhone.

Back to the 5800. I still have the phone for another 2 weeks and I am glad I have been given this opportunity to use it as my day to day device. Looking back at my original review, my views about the build quality haven’t changed all that much but now that I am actually using the device, those issues are less important. If anything the 5800 is a little too small for me and my hands (another reason why the N97 hits a sweet spot for me) and, as I pointed out in my FriendFeed stream, the screen is a little too narrow for me to have a more satisfying browsing experience (it feels like I am missing some screen space).

Melissa Attree has been talking about her 5800 quite a bit and she seems to love it. She is a “marketing and communications professional” and has adopted her 5800 as her business and personal phone. Her comments about the phone got me curious about it again and sparked my desire to try the phone out again. I am glad she did because I am a lot more positive about the 5800 now than I was initially.

I haven’t used the 5800 in place of my iPod yet and I’ll make a point of doing that in the coming days. I have played around with the Nokia music player on and off and the speakers on the 5800 are terrific. I am going to try integrate the 5800 with my Mac using Nokia’s media transfer software which integrates with iTunes and use that bridge to load music and videos onto the 5800. The standard headphone jack means I can use my usual headphones (unlike my E71 which has a smaller, incompatible jack).

Bottom line for me is that I can recommend this phone. If you want a more serious business or messaging device this might not be the phone for you but it is worth taking a look at it before you make your decision. I’ll be happy to return to my E71 when I am finished with the 5800 but I will miss the touchscreen enough to feel there is something missing in my mobile experience. I’ll post more thoughts and impressions to the FriendFeed stream and it looks like those posts are being mirrored in the comments to this post (apologies for the duplication).

Google just pushed out what some may regard as the Holy Grail of sync … if it works. Here is the customary tutorial video:

Google Sync offers two way synchronisation for a variety of mobile devices ranging from the iPhone to Series 60 devices to Blackberries (and a couple in between). It offers the ability to keep your Gmail contacts and Google Calendars in sync although not all devices support Google Calendar just yet. Installing the service on my Nokia E71 involved creating a new synchronisation profile which was easy enough. The first time I attempted to synchronise the 1 796 contacts in my phone the processed bugged out with an “Invalid host address” error. Hopefully second time is a charm.

The one big challenge with these services is handling duplicates so I hopefully won’t have too many duplicates jamming up the works because what Google Sync doesn’t seem to have is Plaxo’s De-Duper technology which is, for some, enough of a reason to subscribe to Plaxo’s $49 a year premium service.

Google Sync will also give MobileMe a run for its money. MobileMe has very limited device support and costs about €65 a year (in SA the currency switches to Euros and works out more expensive that the quoted $99). Compare that to broader device support, offline access to Gmail and Gcal and $75 to add double the amount of storage space to your Google Account (20GB on MobileMe versus 40GB on Google).

The next contender is Nokia’s Ovi service. I have seen Ovi as a MobileMe competitor, at least a potential competitor mainly because it creates that link between my Nokia phone and an online service.

Ovi supports contacts, calendar, files and media although synchronising with a desktop is limited to a Windows PC. The interface isn’t quite a slick as its competitors but it does present an alternative to Apple’s beautiful yet limited offerings. Ovi’s pricing is a little high ($80 a year for 10GB or $150 a year for 30GB storage for files), especially when compared to MobileMe but a tussle between these two offerings is more a tussle between the iPod/iPhone/Mac combination and Nokia/Windows PC devices.

Google’s Sync has the potential to overtake these other services very quickly. Gmail and GCal are already widely used and even if you don’t have some level of integration between your desktop apps and these two services (already possible on the Mac due to Google Sync integration into Address Book and a script or something for iCal), all you really need now is a browser and a supported mobile device to keep your contacts and mail in sync and, if your mobile device supports it, your calendar too.

My one big concern, even more so now than before, is whether it is desirable to have a single provider so involved in so many areas of our lives and pretty much in control of this key data we run our lives on? I took a look at my Google Account profile and saw this plethora of Google services I subscribe to:

I didn’t realise I was subscribed to so many Google services. Thankfully my daily work and personal lives only rely on a couple of these but those few key services include my email! That already is a lot of control I have given to Google and even more trust I have placed in that foreign organisation to respect my data and “do no evil”.

Leaving aside the Big Brother fears, Google is fast becoming part of the wallpaper. Google Sync makes my Google Account a pretty compelling alternative to its closest competitor, MobileMe, and at a lower cost. I am already a Gmail user (Google Apps too, several times over) so there is no change of email address there. I can probably switch my extensive photo albums from MobileMe to PicasaWeb when my MobileMe subscription ends in October (which would unfortunately involve needing to introduce my mom and other family members to PicasaWeb just when I had them used to MobileMe’s Galleries) and otherwise carry on as usual. It would cost me a lot less to pay for the extra storage for my Google Account that it will to renew my MobileMe account and should the rumours about the GDrive prove true (after a couple years in the making), that would take care of basic file storage to compete with iDisk (which I rarely use anyway).

I can easily see a day when Google is everything on the Web. It will effectively be the Internet for a great many people and those same people should spare a prayer for its leaders and the hope that they never lose their way and turn on us. That could be very bad. We may have to go back to Yahoo! Mail (I still have my account there … just in case).

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