George Chen DOT COM

Some quick notes and thoughts about the new Apple iPhone (and the impact on the mobile industry):

• The "it’s not 3G" complain — typical 3G UMTS speed is around 300Kbps while EDGE (iPhone) is around 150Kbps. That is "good enough" for basic Web browsing and defiantly enough for email. Beside, there’s always the built-in Wi-Fi. I have plenty of usage in the UMTS land (both Asia and Europe). 3G is not as fast as you think. This also leaves room for HSDPA (3.5G) and iChat video upgrade as a feature in the future.
• Asian character input would be interesting (especially Chinese) with the lack of stylus.
• The full touch screen system is a usability concern – especially "blind dialing" while driving. 😛
• Some people dislike Cingular. One has to understand, all wireless providers are "evil", yet Cingualr’s GSM network is much more "open" compare to Verizon / Qualcomm’s CDMA system. Case in point, I can freely use my unlocked 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) Windows Mobile device on the Cingular network — as long as I have a valid data plan with Cingular. I don’t think you can do that on Verizon’s network.
• Wireless data plan is expensive. Not true. $20 bucks all you can eat from Cingular (Note: this is also the same high speed UMTS plan if your phone supports it. Cingular doesn’t care if your phone is  2G, 2.5G, 3G, or 3.5G. The settings are the same).
• I feel really sorry for Nokia’s N800 developement team. Orz ; ;
• J2ME support on iPhone will be very interesting for games and Yahoo! Go 2.0 obviously. No mention in the keynote.
• The iPhone is a smart phone – which leaves plenty of room for the next, lower price point product in the future. Think "iPhone Nano" or "iPhone Shuffle" (random dialing? ^^). At the same time, "non-smart phones" are getting better and better. Sony Ericsson’s K800i is a great camera phone with tones of well executed features. Would love to see Apple’s take on a K800i
• Apple rarely does any pre-announcement, but sadly, pre-annoucment is a norm in the handset world. Looks like Apple will follow that in the future.
• Apple did great with the Safari browser, but it’s still a huge pain to view a regular Web page on the 320×480 screen. I think "browse" is ok, but "interact" with it will be pretty bad. iPhone further highlights the need of "mobile optimized" Web pages that are context driven. I am not talking about the old WML/WAP pages here. I am talking about W3C’s mobileOK type pages. Of course, following the standard is not enough but that’s where we should get started.    

I am glad I can finally talk about Yahoo! Go 2.0.

I worked on this for the last year, and it’s officially out today. Long nights, crazy hours, work though multiple holidays… you name it… Not to mention my frequent trips to Hamburg, and Berlin.

Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the first Yahoo! "globally developed" products. We have designers, engineers, and product management working in Sunnyvale, London, Hamburg, and Berlin to make sure it gets done. Other Yahoo! products are either developed at Sunnyvale that get localized, or local product got picked up by the "mother ship". I know this since I have been at Yahoo! for many years.

Yahoo! Go is also unique in another regard. It probably is the most ambitious J2ME / MIDP application you see today – anywhere from jar size, code complexity, to the logistic of putting this all together. This is a landmark mobile application and service. Other people just talk about the possibilities of mobile, but I think the team went ahead and "did it".

There are many many areas we can improve (and we will), but now it’s the time to celebrate the launch of this landmark product.

Congratulation everyone!

I actually got this book as a gift from my boss. The full title is Designing for Small Screens Studio: Mobile Phones,
Smart Phones, PDAs, Pocket PCs, Navigation Systems, MP3 Players, Games
Consoles. Plenty of color pictures, global stats, screen size mocks, and case studies. If you are new to mobile design or interested to learn more about the subject matter I highly recommend this book. It’s published in April of this year with plenty of cutting edge mobile and device related design here.

Since I got the O2 Atom, I had become a fan of Windows Mobile 5.0 device. Although Windows Mobile 5.0 still looks a lot like Windows 95, but on the functionality front, it’s matches what I need.
My replacement of the O2 Atom is the HTC TyTn. TyTn got a lot of press coverage since it’s first introduced. (I think) it’s the first 3G mobile device with "world support" – HSDPA support in the US, UMTS (slower version of HSDPA if you will…) around the world.

I have been using TyTn for the past few days with interesting results. Cingular (my wireless carrier) has a decent HSDPA deployment in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you are currently on Cingular’s data plan, your settings will be "forward compatible" with the device. Means buying a HTC Tytn, get 3G service in the US of A.

HTC Tytn + Cingular’s 3G network is indeed impressive. In one speed test, I got up to 370kbps throughput, that’s half the speed of my home DSL. In real world usage, the combination of Tytn and Cingular network is a little mixed.
I have had very good results with high quality streaming content such as MSNBC Mobile (full screen QVGA), but poor experience with general Web surf (both Opera Mobile and IE). My guess is Cingular’s (legendary) poor DNS support cause the poor performance. Facing with multiple HTTP request from the browser, the whole experience just seems slow. On the other hand, since streaming of video content is just one request, the performance tends to be more stable.

Back to physical device itself, Tytn is nice but a little on the chunky side. The slide out keyboard is similar to what we have seen coming from the past HTC Windows Mobile. The physical buttons are nice, (browser access, email access, ok/confirm button, etc.) but got placed too close to each other or too small to be useful.

Tytn + Cingular 3G network while not perfect, it gives us a chance to see what’s possible when mobile broadband internet is finally here.

Is this a phone? A PDA? A MP3 player? TV remote? The answer is a MP3 player. It’s the T-19 by Teclast.  I like this on going trend where a digital device that could be anything. Software is what makes this device unique.

A female coworker today told me why she likes the Razr that she has (which is actually a test phone for work). The obvious reason is the nice slim design, but the other surpising reason to hear is that her long figner nails will not get caught between the keys.

I was at Hong Kong, and Germany recently (both are prime 3G markets) and I have yet to see anyone using their 3G handset making video calls.

People are not doing it out of one reason – Privacy. Calling someone, at the core is a very private activity, and video call removes that privacy. Making video call (especially in public places) means you have to talk pretty loud and the people around you will also hear very clearly view of who you’re talking to and what the conversation is about. Unless you are a street performer, video call over 3G network will never be a good experince.

Meh. It’s dead. I think. Or did the battery just freaked out? Last night I installed the new MS .Net framework on the O2 Atom then I decided to uninstall it… Surf the Web a bit on the Atom then went to sleep. Woke up this morning and I couldn’t turn on the device. I am not saying it’s MS to blame, but I really like the O2 Atom and it sucks to lose it and go back to my older phones. ; ;

Tried soft reset. Tried hard reset (which I know I will lose all my data). Still no go. There’s some weird buzzing sound and motion going on with the device when it’s plugged into the USB port or the AC. Don’t know it has to do with the fact I am using the unofficial 2nd ROM update… but I think I might have fried the device. ; ;

I rarely use a mobile phone more than 6 months. In the past
18 months, I have used Sony Ericsson s700i, v802se, Nokia 6680, Sharp v703sh,
and the latest one is the O2 Atom… um… PDA Smart Phone. Since I have been doing
Mobile design for the past 7-8 months, I can
claim to people (or to the IRS) these shinny new phones are part of the work I
do. Gotta have it.

I was at Hong Kong for a
week, and I had no plan to pick up a new phone; although I did spend some time in
the Smartone/Vodefone store and play with the Sharp 903sh. It’s a nice phone/3
mega pixel camera, but it’s a bit big when you actually hold it in your hand.

I met up with a co-worker of mine at Hong
Kong one night during my trip, and he’s currently using the O2 Atom. I took his phone/PDA
and played with it a bit. It felt so small in my hand, and the screen is great. In fact O2 Atom is currently the smallest Windows Mobile 5.0 device out there. It’s defiantly
not your corporate Treo – it has style. Style itself is not enough to
convince me to purchase the device (contrary to popular believe). I’ve
finally decided to purchase the device since my friend told me it has built-in 802.11 support as well.
Yes, it’s a GSM phone and also a broadband IP based device.

O2 Atom is ultra popular in Hong Kong and it’s pretty much out of stock even in the Shopping Paradise Hong Kong. I have
checked various Fortress, Broadway, and Thai Lin, and I’ve finally picked one
up at Thai Lin in Mong Kok. I picked up the English version so I can use CE-Star on it to read Chinese and Japanese Web site – instead of getting
the full Chinese version operating system.

The industrial design is sweet – shinny piano black just like
the new iPods. The camera is super slow before the firmware update. Since the
latest firmware update, the device has been treating me good.

To get the most out of O2 Atom, you really have to be a pretty
serious geek. Getting Opera, Real, and Skype installed are the first steps.
Firing up the 802.11 connection and use it like a Nokia 770 is also a must try. Here’s the thing
about the O2 atom – it’s better than the Nokia 770 since it’s smaller and it
has a phone built it – which the 770 lacks.

Windows Mobile 5.0 is a blessing and a curse at the same time. Yes it’s darn powerful especially if you want to browse real Web sites and deal with media files, but it also has crappy UI just like regular Windows. XP is pretty good these days, but Windows Mobile 5.0 UI is like Window 95/ME.

I do have a few issues with the device. ActiveSync sucks and
I have yet to figure out how to synch it to my work laptop via Bluetooth. Sync
via USB cable works, but I need to do some fancy configuration since ActiveSync
is not friendly to most security applications (think firewall, com port problem
blah blah). Also, O2 Atom is not a “smart device” in terms of the network – it can’t
switch between 802.11 and GPRS automatically. In fact, in an area with weak
802.11 signal, it will use your GPRS profile to connect to the Net instead.

Over all, O2 Atom is pretty impressive. It has a camera,
it’s a PIM that sync to Outlook, you can run a lot of mini Microsoft apps
(think Word, PowerPoint, Excel), it’s a smart phone, it has wireless broadband. It handles internet streaming like a dream on both GPRS and 802.11.
What’s missing? I guess it would be a front/secondary camera, and the support
of HSDPA/WCDMA type 3G network… but I do believe cutting those features out is a
conscious decision. We’ll see a full 3G version of Atom sooner rather than
later.

Side story here: Christian was in the office yesterday, and of
course, I have to show off the new toy. Even he is impressed
with the small size and the fact it has 802.11 built in. He asked me if I have
Skype installed. I said "Yes, but I have no one to talk to on
Skype." -_-;