You know me, I don't like to complain

Convergence. I like to see it.

Thing is, most of the all-in-wonders out there seem to be deficient in key aspects of their design or delivery, making it all but impossible to even predict when the best in show can be represented in the smallest amount of space. I end up carrying a lot of things with me in the course of an average week, never mind traveling.

I realize that this isn’t really a matrix. I may end up adding one into this document in the near future. I wanted to create one, then started wondering how to best do the tables in Textile markup, and then got bored and started writing instead.

Options

• Sony PSP for games, photos, and videos
• Archos 604 WiFi media player.
• Nokia N800 tablet for large-frame browsing, presence, messaging, Xterm, full IMAP email, music, podcasts, videos, photos. Bluetooth keyboard makes for a nice webstation, can work with Bluetooth GPS module as well. Portable VoIP device.
• Nokia N95 mobile phone for calls/messaging, light email reading, light browsing, music, podcasts, shooting 30fps 640×480 mpeg4 video, taking still photos at 5 megapixels. Navigation via the built-in GPS.
• iPod 10GB original, old-school with mechanical wheel, capable of killing a man at twenty yards. 20 hours of playtime via 3rd-party battery.

Personal entertainment, organization, and communications needs are met typically by a handful of devices, or a few discrete devices that can work together. So what are the options I am currently confronted with when packing my bag?

Sony PSP

Pros

• First-rate gaming.
• Vintage gaming available via emulation.
• Good video playback, but must be managed via 3rd party software.
• Good audio playback, but must be managed via 3rd party software and iTunes.
• Good photo viewer, but must be managed via 3rd party software and iPhoto.
• Good battery life, great display. Easy controls, good UI.
• Has an RSS reader and web browser that is difficult to use due to bad input methods.

Cons

• Video codecs are limited.
• Requires 3rd-party software to encode video for the PSP from the Mac.
• Can’t use iTunes to manage video content due to strict formating and codecs.
• I’d rather not use iPhoto.
• Network media playback requires LocationFree base stations and other equipment. I don’t know what LocationFree is, but I think it is Japanese for “Sony is Hemorrhaging Money and Needs More Now”.

The Sony PSP is my favorite device for playing games while traveling. It has a great display, good battery life, and easy-to-handle media (UMD and Memory Stick Duo Pro) that can be beat on in your carry-on. It has fantastic sound, a passable web browser if you want to read Google News or do simple searches, and in my case, 4GB of storage for movies that have been manually encoded specifically for the PSP.

I hate that I have to manage a separate library of videos for one device. It would be even worse if I didn’t have my media on a network filesystem, but used iTunes to manage it all—I am much happier with an Xbox Media Center machine ($75 from eBay, Craigslist, EBX, etc) that can play network media in a wide variety of formats. It’s also a lot quicker to play content and scan/skip through things compared to other offerings out there.

If I want regularly move media onto the PSP or an iPhone, iPod Touch, or whatever else, I am going to get stuck maintaining multiple libraries of “encoded for X” media. Great.

Archos 604 WiFi

Pros

• Great video player, supports many codecs and formats.
• Can be used as a PVR with an adapter.
• Can be used as a voice recorder with an adapter.
• Can have a nice tabletop stand and charging adapter if you get the adapter.
• Has a small version of Opera on it and can be used as a browser, kind of.
• Plays xvid, dvix, mpeg4 video I throw at it with ease.
• Can just drag and drop videos in the Finder.
• Spare batteries aren’t expensive.
• Plays network media great over WiFi.
• Can browse and mount SMB/CIFS disks. Awesome.

Cons

• No video playlist. Really. This drives me nuts.
• UI is clumsy.
• Doesn’t thumbnail and index videos in sub-directories. Only top-level files.
• UI is clumsy.
• WiFi connection seems picky at times.
• Battery life sucks. Hard.
• Nickle-and-dimed for things like a stand. Cables. PVR functions. Voice recorder. They sell everything as a separate option.
• Video can be formatted in a variety of ways, but large-format videos may need to drop in resolution to playback on the device.
• USB data cable charges device way too slowly.

If you don’t like that this device doesn’t have video playlists, one workaround I’ve found is that if you tell it to play on repeat or shuffle, it will play the contents of a folder. This means you can’t keep everything in the top-level Movies folder, or it will mix and match all of them, or keep playing continuously after it plays the things you really wanted to. I use my Archos 604 as a table-top radio and network video player, which it excels at. The battery life sucks something fierce, so it isn’t really a good contender for travel, though it holds so much (mine is 30GB) you want to believe you could watch it all without carrying seven spare batteries.

Not much I can say about it other than that. You have to buy a small group of accessories to get the Archos you want, and then you will have to pay a few extra bucks for codecs that don’t come standard. They’re cheap and let me work with formats I am comfortable with.

I wouldn’t carry it around to play music because it’s heavy. But it is a very reasonable video player on a nightstand (or driving a larger display such as a repurposed old monitor with yet another adapter) without taking up much room and having local storage as well as pulling things off the network, which puts its effective capacity over 2 terabytes in my house.

Nokia N800 Tablet

Pros

• Great browser (Mozilla browser in OS 2008 and 2007 as an option)
• Great IM (XMPP/Jabber/GoogleTalk!) and presence.
• Good audio player though is very aggressive about managing the library.
• Good video playback in OS 2008. Still requires strict formatting, however.
• Talks to my mobile phone to get Internet service even when away from WiFi.
• Can manage content on my mobile handset!
• Great display for indoors.
• Works with most wireless access points.
• Virtual Thumb-board is the first of its type that doesn’t make me want to cut my head off.
• Can work with SIP, GIzmoproject, Skype as a telephone.
• Xterm with honest-to-goodness openssh.
• Has a (gimmicky) video camera for video chats.
• Email client, even though it sucks, supports S/MIME certificates.
• Regular headphone jack.

Cons

• Bad display for outdoors (N810 is the patch for this bug)
• No QWERTY keyboard built-in (N810 is the patch for this bug)
• Email client is just so terribly disappointing. It’s worse than Eudora. Hell, I bet Eudora does real IMAP folder sync now, whereas the Maemo mail client takes half-assery to previously unknown heights. After seeing the S60 email client “evolve” over the last few years, I wonder if software engineers at Nokia even use email.
• Third-party software is missing the target on email.
• Wish I could video chat/audio chat via my XMPP server.
• “Invisible” presence doesn’t work with Apple’s jabberd.
• Presence support limited: no preference settings for the priority of the tablet instance.
• Video playback is finicky and Nokia’s software for Windows to encode movies sucks. Refuses to encode everything I throw at it, even though it can thumbnail the samples. Weird.
• People IM me there even though I’m “away” and I don’t see it for a day because my tablet doesn’t get used every day.
• No good way to manage media and other content on the device. Drag and drop filesystem-level stuff is nice as an option but it’s the only way to do it right now.

Email on the N800 sucks unless you’re using webmail. And then you can’t use the nice notification options on the N800 since the built-in email client is well integrated with the rest of the device and provides nice feedback upon receiving new messages. And OS 2008 has improved message alerts as well. Application itself just stinks. No IMAP folder sync, no subscriptions, no folders at all in fact, only your Inbox, and it doesn’t do a live sync with the Inbox, either. It treats your Inbox as if it were a POP inbox. Claws Mail is the best choice at the moment for IMAP, and it does full IMAP service, but needs significant improvements on the UI for Maemo devices (such as the N800, N810, N770) to really be a solid go-to.

I have been playing with RoundCube webmail mainly so that I can have access to my mail folders when I’m on the tablet.

There are a lot of developers doing things on Maemo (the Linux-based platform that runs the Nokia Tablets) that are very exciting. Some really creative people out there solving problems this little gizmo is ideally suited for. Network video playback is possible on the device though I haven’t figured out just what the thresholds are for the formats, nor do I know all of the codecs that are supported in OS 2008 yet. It has good battery life, though you need to micro-manage it a bit to get the most out of it. The N800 shares a charger with my N95 meaning less wall-warts to carry around, and OS 2008 has added an alarm clock. I used to carry a Grundig am/fm/shortwave travel radio with clock and alarm in my luggage. Can shave those 20 ounces off my travel weight just from a software update. Nice.

With the ability to get 8GB+ flash cards for the N800, and with OS 2008’s improved video playback, the N800 could easily be the best device I own. It can’t play games very well, but mobile Linux hasn’t ever been a real contender in mobile gaming anyway. I would be delighted if there were a strong suite of emulators for game consoles, though the input options are so limited on the device I don’t know how someone could really pull that off. Would be very happy to see some games that utilize the touchscreen, making them specifically for Maemo devices. Think of it as an open source Nintendo DS waiting to be born.

The people that do Freeciv for Maemo are my heros and I hope they have the time to get it working on OS 2008 soon. Fantastic game.

Nokia N95

First of all, I also have an E61i. I switch handsets pretty often because I’m impatient and fickle. The E61i is awesome for email, though the S60 email client isn’t anything special. I usually carry the N95 however, because it is a better music player, has a built-in GPS, and shoots great video and takes great photos.

If I am going away from home and expect I will not be near a computer very often for email and such, I’ll probably opt for the E61i. In almost all other cases, I’ll prefer the N95.

Pros

• Great sound quality on calls.
• Good keypad for Tegic T9 texting and very light email.
• Very good camera, great video shooting for a mobile device.
• Navigation software is great.
• Browser is WebKit based. Quite good for a mobile handset browser. Same core as the iPhone browser.
• Plays back some video, but I haven’t messed with it much.
• Nokia’s Media Transfer software does great with photos, music, close integration with iPhoto and iTunes.
• Real headphone jack.
• Great display.
• If I had Windows, I’d probably really like LifeBlog.
• Stereo sound on-handset with support for aac, mp3, wav, makes for some creative ringtone options. I’m currently using the Sonic Screwdriver from Doctor Who. Because I’m a huge dork.
• Can do SIP calls via WiFi.

Cons

• microSD is a pain to deal with.
• N-series devices store things differently from E-series devices, so flash storage swapping between them can be a pain in the neck.
• Battery life sucks. I have an N95-1. I hear the US-targetted N95s are better.
• WiFi on the N95 is not as nice as E-series devices. No fail-over to EDGE from WiFi, so you have to manually specify which connection to use.
• Music player is overly aggressive, mines your entire handset and storage card for “music files” which may be WAVs from the voice recorder.
• Java games suck. I paid $8 for Line Rider and it stinks. I’m bitter.
• Email client is limited.
• No S/MIME and certainly no GPG/PGP.

As an organizer, S60 devices suck. I’m not going to go off onto that train of thought right now though. The N95 is a great device for listening to music, making calls, messaging, taking photos, and shooting video. It isn’t as good as an actual camera, but I am having interesting results in playing with creative photography using the N95. Mainly just to do it, but it is quite viable under ideal conditions. The navigation software is pretty darn good, though it will not speak the names of streets, it will show you on the map what they are, and gives directions well (“Turn right,” etc) and I use it in the car frequently, or even while on foot. The software has gotten better since the last time I wrote about it.

the iPod

Pros

• Street cred in spades because it is Rev A (hollah!)
• Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. I’ve thrown it into walls, stepped on it, never skipped a track once.
• Full-size Firewire port.
• Big battery life.

Cons

• No video.
• No photos.
• No phone calls.
• No browser.
• No Bluetooth.
• It’s big compared to iPods these days.

Wishlist

I wish the music player on S60 devices like the N95 was better. I wish it could do snazzier glitz like coverflow, or even reliably show album covers.

I wish there was a snap-on gamepad module for the Nokia tablets that enabled me to play games on that device as well. I think there is enough video and CPU to drive an SNES emulator, for example. I’m not looking for PSP-quality games, but something more engrossing than BreakOut would be welcome. Someone could come up with an ad-hoc multiplayer version of anything and I’d be happy at this point. Freeciv is great but requires a lot of setup unless you’re playing solo.

The Archos is awesome for playing videos due to its bigger display and good output options, but it falls on its face because the battery life is terrible and the device is too big to put in your pocket. Even your coat pockets will bulge with it in there. I’d much rather pack the PSP, which can carry music, a few specially encoded video files on Memory Sticks and a few games as well in the same cubic inches that the Archos demands.

The Nokia N800 tablets are surprisingly good for a device that offers a lot. They nailed mobile browsing without question, and their media player options are decent on the audio side and still too picky on the video side but each software revision gets better and better there. In fact, with a portable Bluetooth keyboard, an N800 is a very serviceable webstation, capable of using Backpackit, Writeboards, Google Docs, and more. I have to experiment more with the video encoding options since OS 2008 has made it a bit easier to deal with, but so far the N800 is the most impressive device out there in terms of features and extensibility.

What it still comes down to is a matter of priorities. The PSP is great at games, but second pick for video. The N800 is great for browsing and Internet radio, but stinks for email. I can do light browsing on my handset, but can’t use snazzy web20 ajax shenanigans with the WebKit browser on my N95. The Archos can play just about any video file I throw at it, but it feels like I’m carrying something very useless and brick-like in about 2 hours after I pick it up.

So while we are still converging, we haven’t had that convergence yet. As of yet we’re still at proof-of-concept. The options for managing mobile content are still largely weak and incomplete, and while you can get a device that does everything, you’re still limited to picking which two or three things you want it to do well.

I’m not going to die if I’m disconnected however: there is something to be said for disconnecting from the email servers now and then and putting my presence to Away. It’s been a pretty relaxing Thanksgiving Holiday due to such simple actions, and good technology should provide simple discrete choke-points for interruptions and noise.

When it comes down to it, I think I’d rather have separate devices communicate well with one another rather than a handful of devices that claim to do everything. Why can’t my N800 tablet be the display and user input device for my mobile handset when it is around, for example?

I hope that this is where things are headed. It just doesn’t seem very likely to me that anyone can get “the best” of five worlds and fit it all into one device. So coming into 2008 I still don’t have a silver bullet device that does everything I want it to, or my expectations and demands are far too high. I haven’t decided which yet, but I have decided that I need to streamline my harem of devices, and fast. I have been trying to strip out extra clutter lately everywhere I can find it, and my backpack is a fine place to tackle next.

I don’t know what will end up making the cut just yet, but I may be hawking some things at low low prices! soon, provided I can admit to not needing it. Convince me.

I’ve gone back and forth on mobile email. I’ve had several different varieties of the BlackBerry device, used a GoodLink’ed Treo, and after taking a long break I’m trying to get back into using mobile email sanely.

I was having a hard time doing this on my N73, so I thought I’d pick up an E70 instead.

It has WiFi, Bluetooth (of course), the S60v3 OS, a 2MP so-so camera, and a SIP client (untested so far), and also the Apple WebKit-esque browser and runs a wide variety of software for the S60 platform.

Mine isn’t operator locked and branded, so I don’t have to worry about not using self-signed certificates for network services and application installation.

So, we have my Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase, which lives in my back pocket most of the time, or in my front pocket with a big bankroll I get from all the donations I keep getting via PayPal for writing consistently great product reviews. Hint. And the Nokia E70, and a Nokia N73 for size comparison. And, what the hell, I tossed in a BlackBerry 7290 as well.

The E70 has a very serviceable keyboard.

The keypad in “phone mode” is quite solid and good. I really like it a lot, actually. The keys feel solid and the joystick feels better than the one on the N73. There is also a button on the side for activating the Voice Recorder application, which I think is pretty awesome. You apparently can retask it for a push-to-talk application if your operator supports it. T-Mobile USA doesn’t support much of anything, so I’m not holding my breath, and honestly the day I take a push-to-talk on a phone from anyone is the day I throw myself off a bridge.

Folding out the E70 reveals the keyboard, of course.

It takes a little getting used to, and honestly I don’t think I’m as fast on it as the BlackBerry but this is mainly because the BlackBerry has amazing autotext functionality that S60 does not. For example, if you hit space twice on a BlackBerry, you get a period, if it thinks you’re typing an email address because you’re in a field that says “Email Address”, a spacebar will put in a ’@’ for you. Little things like that and only having a little bit of travel in the keyboard makes the E70 seem a bit too spread out. And if you have small girlish hands like I do, the E70 is a cinch to thumb on, but if you have bigger hands, the proximity of the keys and the shallow travel in the keyboard will be problematic, as the keys are very close to one another without the distinct separation between them that the Treo and ‘Berry have.

Some weird things about the keyboard are they rearranged some keys a bit. I have no idea why they did this other than to be easier for people to reach commonly used symbols, but if you’re making a QWERTY device I think people expect to have the symbols in the right place. On the other hand, having no room for / + = and ” as well as commonly used accent characters in a small space was surely hard to pull off, and since you’re looking at the device and its keyboard anyway, it doesn’t really annoy me too much. The keys are in the vicinity of where you’d expect if they’re not exactly there, and you don’t spend much time hunting around. It isn’t like you’re going to touch-type on this thing.

So, why mobile email? And why on S60 instead of the BlackBerry or a Treo?

Will, simply put, I like the S60 OS a lot better at the end of the day than the Treo or the BlackBerry, and if I wanted BlackBerry email I could get that on the E70 anyway, and the PIM functions on the BlackBerry are archaic and the GoodLink’ed Treos have a disconnect between your server-side PIM functionality and the built-in functions which makes synchronization a bit of a pain in the ass if you’re not using Outlook and Exchange.

I use IMAP. I like it a lot. The S60 IMAP client has gotten very good over the years, and it even does IMAP-IDLE pushes now, though Apple’s Cyrus server in Mac OS X Server doesn’t support IDLE, so I can’t use that. I have scheduled email checks every 30-60 minutes or on-demand for when I don’t want the interruptions. I like the option to really send emails that aren’t one-sentence long because I’m really just not interested in carrying a laptop everywhere I go anymore.

Another thing I like a lot about the E70? It doesn’t spastically flash LEDs at you like a neon sign outside a liquor store coaxing in the alcoholics with promises of gratification. In fact, in the current firmware, you can’t even turn it on if you wanted to. There is an LED, it just isn’t being used today. No idea why. Don’t care.

So the E70 has two primary modes of operation, one where it is flipped closed and awfully phone-like. The design of this is quite good though it could have been more elegantly designed while still retaining a professional, almost un-interesting appearance. I also don’t like that has such a plastically feel. The upside is that it feels sturdy, not frail at all. And the hinge mechanism for the keyboard fold-out maneuver is solid. You’ll hear no complaints about the feel of that piece from me.

When you crack it open the screen rotates into a different orientation for you, as expected. Apparently the earlier firmware was really slow about this, but the version I’m running (2.0618.07.10) seems to be very responsive to me. There are the odd hangs now and then, and it is my hope that Nokia is still refining the firmware on this device because it is still in the 2.x range, and typical wide-release production firmware is 3.x from Nokia.

Now before we go on a bit, I’d like to tell you that I know I’m using a very strange theme. I like it because it is so odd. It clashes nicely, if there is such a thing. Since it is so easy to do, I swap themes every other day or so and there are hundreds and hundreds of them available and I like mixing it up a bit.

So, with the flip closed and the device in “Hello my name is mobile phone” mode, we have an active standby display that is user-customizable and lets you view a mailbox on your dashboard there, and also assign shortcuts to some of your most used applications.

For those unfamiliar with the S60 UI, the bottom left and right corners are soft-key mappings depending on what application you’re in, or in what context they’re visible. Usually it’ll be things like “New” and “Back/Exit” or “Options” and “Write” when I’m in my IM client, you get the idea.

Now, since I’m lazy, I haven’t redone this screenshot yet. I took it while it was in the middle of re-drawing the screen after opening it up, so this may lead you to believe I was being too kind about the redraw time. I’m not going to lie, it isn’t instant!, but it is quite quick and doesn’t really slow me down any.

Getting online with the E70 is a cinch, I use my mobile operator’s data service (T-Mobile USA EDGE) and it is plenty quick for pulling and sending emails as well as browsing. And the E70 also has a built-in RSS reader, so I can put my favorites or my current high-priority feeds in there but I usually just use NewsGator Mobile web interface, even though I have some gripes about it. I’ll save that for another time.

But when you’re at home, or the office, and have WiFi available, of course it is faster. And of course you’ll want to use that, especially if you’re on metered data service. I have a flat-rate unlimited EDGE connection for USD$19. I don’t go out of my way to use WiFi but I use it at home.

The real reason this device has WiFi though, is for the SIP client allowing for VoIP calls on the handset itself, which is pretty bitchen, though I haven’t had the time to set it all up yet. I’m very curious how well it will work, though from what I’ve read online, people are having good results with it.

The SMS/MMS/Email messaging application is standard fare, though S60 has gotten so much better about this over the years it makes my head spin. It used to be horrifying. It has improved dramatically, actually making email management and triage useful instead of something that makes me want to beat my head against the wall.

Know what I can’t do though? I can’t move something from Inbox to @ACTION. I don’t know why. I think it has to be a bug that you can’t move messages from one folder to another in the S60 email client. It has to be, right? Surely this is something that was just overlooked during QA. That would make this device fantastic as a triage device. In the meantime you could use an application like Profimail though I really like to use the integrated client whenever possible.

The archive function is good, you can copy messages into folders locally on the device, of any variety. By default it only retains X numbers of messages you send out, so you can raise that threshold if you want to archive both sides of a text/mms conversation, or whatever.

I presently have over 900 SMS and MMS messages saved as copies on my handset. I’ve had an S60 device for quite a while. And if you store your messages on the storage card (mine is 1GB) you can move it from handset to handset and always have your same message library available to you. Nice!

Again, I know the theme is a bit in-your-face, but this is the visual indicator and alerts for new emails and SMS messages:

The icons in the grey bar towards the top, in order of appearance are: WiFi » Bluetooth » new email » new SMS.

Missed calls and such will also show up there.

The calendar functionality in S60 sucks. If you don’t believe that, you’re wrong. And iSync on Mac OS X used to work better than it does today, but it has always been flakey. All-day events show up as 00:00 – 23:59 “meetings” on the handset when they’re synced over from my Mac. You can make a proper all-day-appointment (or, in S60 parlance, “Memo”) on the handset, and even sync it back to your Mac and then sync again and have it stick around, but you cannot initiate an all day event in iCal, and have it sync over as a “Memo” on a S60 device.

But I found a really nice-looking and very flexible application that touches the same event database as the standard Calendar and Task application, which uses more of the functionality of the backend engine as well as having a much nicer UI.

To top it all off?

It sees 00:00 – 23:59 meetings as “anniversaries”, which isn’t the same as a “memo”, but it’s good enough for me. No more twenty four hour meetings. I’d like to take this time to shill a bit for the developers and the application, SBSH and Papyrus for S60

Isn’t that nice?

So the vast majority of my tasks live on 3×5 cards along with project materials and all the other things I work on. The only thing I use “tasks” for on my mobile phone are things I want to be reminded of without booking an appointment to do so. This will be things like “Don’t forget to ask so-and-so about blue,” and “schedule time to do whatever”, if I’m not convinced I’ll have it on a card (cuz sometimes I write these reminders on the go and may not have the relevant materials with me).

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “project card”, “context card” or “action list,” you may want to read about how I use track projects and process workflow in my paper on the subject.

I really like the E70 a lot. I think the camera kind of sucks but I like having one for those situations I need to capture something, and I don’t expect Nokia to go all-out on a nice camera for such a device. Indeed, I’m glad it is there at all, and 2MP is about the lowest I’m willing to go anymore, since the N73’s 3MP camera gets very good results.

The 2MP camera is perfect for capturing whiteboards, index cards, notes, sketches, doodles and other things to share, as well as emergency candids.

While the E70 has a media player and can do videos and audio, I don’t really use those functions that much, and the N-series devices do it better. But if you’re wondering, you can in fact play music off the E70 and use headphones via a Pop-Port adapter or use Nokia’s music headphones, which have a nice mic lead on them so you can listen to music and take calls without unhooking yourself. You can push audio over via Bluetooth or with a card-reader, so you can easily enough shove some podcasts or favorites onto the E70 and take it with you. The memory card lives under the battery door, but not under the battery. This is alright, I guess, but I usually want my memory cards a bit more accessible.

It folds up into a reasonable shape and size while still having a full QWERTY deck available on-demand, and feels like a phone when you’re talking on it, instead of a saucer like the full-format BlackBerry devices. Bluetooth audio seems a bit fuzzy to me compared to other handsets, I’ve tried a few headsets with it and had similar results. The audio quality on-handset is quite good, however. I really like the sound reproduction on this device, and find calls to be very clear and clean.

I’m using a Euro-spec E70, so I’m using GSM 900/1800/1900 on this one. I can’t comment on the US-specific release with 850 in lieu of 900. I don’t know how well it works on Cingular because I don’t care. When Cingular lets me have unlimited unfettered data service for USD$19 I’ll start paying closer attention.

Having an email and messaging device that isn’t obnoxious and with a nice OS under the hood has been really quite pleasant. It has freed me up from my desk a lot, and has allowed me to stay in touch a bit better with people that are important to me, and since it isn’t an office email device, I don’t feel like I’m being taken advantage of by The Man. No work email gets to my handset. I probably would check office email now and then if I could, but my employer doesn’t allow such things unless it is on a company-monitored and supplied device. Nothanks!

Now that the more immediately useful parts are out of the way, I’d like to conclude with a few things for the nerdery:

Yes that is the Python shell. Turns out there is a pretty complete Python implementation for S60, and so I’ve been playing around with that a bit making little widgets and learning more about the language. I have been hearing an awful lot about Python lately and decided I may as well look into it a bit more seriously. I use it a bit for the Jabber to AIM gateway I use and also use Python a bit at home, but never really hacked at it much.

Nokia actually gives you access to UI elements, Bluetooth, the Messaging system and other bits via the Python implementation. It is really quite ready for application development and prototyping.

But of course where there is QWERTY, there is a PuTTY.

So if you’re ever inclined to login to a remote host to do a little troubleshooting, use a proper IRC client, or show off, you can do that too.

I’ll be interested to see how the new Nokia E90 Communicator will compare to the E70. I know I’d like the display a lot better and the camera is much better, as well as having an integrated GPS and Navigation system. So I’ll probably want to upgrade when I can, but in the meantime, the E70 has been a real treat to live with for this past week.

I purchased mine from MyWorldPhone. And I ordered one from CellHut.com, and I wouldn’t ever recommend them to anyone I liked because I canceled that order and they still haven’t given me back my $420. I’m going to have a very strongly worded conversation with CellHut tomorrow afternoon.

Okay. Draft 41 is online.

Let me know if this answers your questions. Relevant sections:

Disaster Recovery for Index Cards

Hands-on Real Live Project Sample

I created a new context for the purposes of this document, really. While I’m out sick with this flu or whatever the hell I have, I created a @sickday context.

Let me know if this answers any questions, or creates new ones.

Draft 41

Several of you have written me and told me that you’ve just placed orders with Levenger. Kudos! Take the plunge! You’ll never know if you can rock this LoFi productivity if you don’t try it, and Levenger sure makes it more luxurious, if nothing else.

This is working-draft number 30 of my GTD LoFi HiFi whitepaper, which is a use-case as well as living document to reflect my implementation of GTD. I like reading about everyone elses, so I hope that someone likes to read mine.

It isn’t perfect, but it will eventually be a completely exhaustive document that outlines how I process all the various inputs and outputs and use GTD to get things done. I made huge headway today. I started writing last night and today I am very pleased with the status of this document so far.

Draft 30 is live, that document will always exist at that location, and will be editted frequently. Please leave comments regarding it in my email inbox or here in the comments.