First of all, it is awesome that Nokia has brought us Nokia Media Transfer, which is made to sync S60 smartphones with iTunes and iPhoto. I love it.

It will even re-encode video for playback on the handset if you want, which is pretty fun (though I keep most of my video in non-iTunes-appreciated formats) and works pretty well.

But when working with music, it will frequently fail to sync over everything it should, or does so in such a way that the playlists don’t work. The files don’t all appear to get transfered and I don’t really know why. It drives me nuts when I think I have a playlist moved over and then only a couple of songs made it. Alas!

This is still beta-level software and works well enough most of the time. I have 6GB of available storage on my N95 and tell Nokia Media Transfer to use 3GB or so for music and such—I guess more testing and fiddling is in order. I need to find out why it doesn’t move everything over it should. I am also having a hard time finding out where it is logging things, if it even does. Surely it has to be dropping trails around my computer somewhere!

Mobile-review.com Review of GSM/UMTS-communicator Nokia E90:

For its potential target audience, Nokia E90 is a very balanced and reasonably priced solution. It has no counterparts that have made it to the market, therefrom follows its low price flexibility and most improbable price shifts (if only the enterprise audience really doesn’t like it).

And I just got my N95, too. As attractive as the E90 is, I’ll be hard-pressed to give up my 5MP digital camera that fits in my pocket and can upload to flickr from anywhere.

Let me tell you about why I love smart2go from Nokia.

smart2go is Nokia’s free software for speaking to a Bluetooth GPS device on your S60 handset.

A lot of new handsets coming out soon, such as the N95 and the E90, come with integrated GPS modules. And there have been applications for using such a device on the market for quite a while now, but all of them are pretty expensive, so Nokia has been giving us “waypoint/landmark” and general “directional” location software for a few months with S60v3 devices. This has been a pretty clever move on their part, and I’m glad that instead of sticking with a half-assed deployment or “pilot” like they have done in the past, they’ve actually been spending some real resources on this type of thing.

So while I was getting ready for my trip to Chicago with Liz, I grabbed smart2go and installed it, and setup an inexpensive Bluetooth GPS (which I had next-day air’ed from Expansys/MobilePlanet, and wasn’t going to get to my house before we left, so my UPS dispatch told me where I could meet up with the driver, which is pretty nice of ‘em) and started using smart2go.

Now, the local services and such can be searched ad-hoc while in the application, so you can search for places to go eat, drink, and be merry, or find historical sites, businesses based on name, address, or category, things like that. Usually you only get this type of information when you’re paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege, the software is never cheap. But the way Nokia does it is on a subscription basis. You can give them a micropayment of $9USD or something for seven days of access, which is what I did. I then installed the maps using the Nokia Map Loader for places I spend time (DC/VA/NY/MA/RI/IL/IA/CA/UK/etc) and started checking things out.

Since you can get updates and such over the Internet via the WiFi on the phone or the data service from my operator (T-Mobile’s EDGE service in my case) the information is pretty current, though there are a lot of things it didn’t seem able to find that have been around for a while, but I was able to find them by address (which I looked up with Google Maps on my phone), and then set them as landmarks. I put in some of my contacts, since smart2go lets you search based on Contact information on the device.

The navigation part is pretty good, and uses a variety of voices. I went with English(UK) because the woman’s voice is easy to understand and she uses the word “MOTOR WAY” for highways and freeways, which I find charming.

While in Chicago I used smart2go to find the nearest Starbucks. Several times. I used it to find nearby places to eat, grab a snack, go shopping, and to find Levenger inside the Macys on Michigan Ave. I used it to find El stops (though usually asking a person was faster), and to help me see how far of a walk it would be to get between places (which usually meant I took a cab), and all sorts of other neat tricks.

And I’ve used navigation systems before, and handheld systems as well. They are all interesting and some are better than others, such as the Garmin nuvi line. But the idea of using such a thing on a mobile device never really appealed to me until I saw for myself just how nice it was to have, and for one really killer app that I think a lot of people forget about. I know I did.

You can send your current location to a friend, via MMS/SMS/Email, and they can trivially load that into smart2go, and come find you based on their location.

Today my subscription had expired, and all of my saved landmarks and services are there, and the existing map data is still available, so the only thing I lost appears to be the searchable services, which is fine when I know what I want anyway, or at least can look up the address. But I have to say, it is awfully nice being able to just type in “Starbucks” and find the nearest one to me. Nokia offers a variety of subscriptions for the service, but I change handsets enough that I’d probably be better off on the weekly and monthly options. I hate that every time I get a new handset I have to re-purchase software that I just bought six months ago. Developers really need to stop using the IMEI of the device to lock software. It is completely insane. Some developers will cut you a break or give you a freebie at times, but most don’t.

Now I don’t know many people with an S60 device and a GPS module. But that is something that could easily change as location-based services become more useful and attractive to people. Having solid mobile search to navigate meatspace with ease makes travel a much easier endeavor for people, and applications like Metro to help you know what form of mass transit you should be taking to get between destinations makes it a trivial task to get around in most cities.

smart2go is a fantastic application. It looks nice, has a good feel to it, and is pretty snappy though a hair slow at times. In all honesty it is probably slow, but compared to how s60 devices were a year ago, it’s hard to find fault with it today. Nokia managed to set my standards much lower than they should be with the 6600, 3650, 3660, 9500, and other handsets.

My only complaint is that when you’re traveling on foot (and you tell it so), it still gets completely spastic if you stop walking. Like, you know, at a Don’t Walk sign. It spins around all confused and trying to re-navigate paths. And when I’m on foot, I don’t need to be told that my next right is 200 yards away. Tell me when I’m about 35 yards away! But that is a pretty minor complaint when the rest of the application and use of it was so polished and easy.

Ultimately, I’m quite pleased with it. And I’m really, really looking forward to the E90. My E70 came through quite well on the trip though, and was an invaluable resource for messaging, capturing candids, and helping me find the nearest cup of cappuccino for my wife. And that alone was worth the nine bucks for the search subscription.

In case anyone at Nokia is reading this, your Chicago store stinks. The pretentious over-the-top video artwork was way overdone, and the staff was really not that familiar with your own product line. One of the people that worked there was pretty knowledgeable, but rather arrogant about it, and acted like he was selling Ferraris instead of Connecting People. I think the overall strategy of being snotty doesn’t suit you. Humanize this technology. Help people be better people. This notion of mobile-tech-as-bling isn’t becoming of you.

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.

Badly.

It used to be that iSync would push over a little binary that ran a daemon to negotiate iSync communication between your Mac and your S60 handset, which dutifully listened for iSync connections and did a sync.

Now, this process has been broken from the start, due to completely obliterating speed dials and contact groups on the handset. It also blows away custom ringers on contacts and groups because it completely trashes the database on the handset with each sync.

There are not many options to mitigate these problems, save the speed-dial problem. You can use a different handset (hah!) or some software for Windows PCs to manage the actual contacts and numbers on the SIM itself, and SIM-dial those contacts with ease.

Once you have your most important contacts put to positions on the SIM you can dial them easily from any S60 handset by dialing “(SIM position)#” which will then pull the number up for you, and then you just hit the Talk (green) button. Works well, it is just very difficult to manage the SIM contacts from the S60 handsets out there. I don’t know why Nokia doesn’t do something about that.

I’ve been suffering in near-silence with the way that iSync thrashes the contact database on S60 handsets for years. I would love to use contact groups to manage my interrupts depending on what profile is active on the handset—you can set the handset to allow people in the Family group to call you after 10pm, for example. But you can’t do that when every time you sync your handset to your Mac the Family group gets blown away. Thanks, Apple.

But once Apple started using SyncML natively from iSync direct to the S60 handsets we lost yet another feature that I was taking for granted:

All day appointments.

If you have an All-Day appointment in iCal, iSync now gets them into the handset as appointments from midnight to 11:59. Yes. And it totally sucks. Hard. Your only option is to stop syncing over All-Day appointments, which makes it awfully hard to check your calendar for vacations, holidays, and when you’re not going to be available for an appointment and you’re surfing your calendar at the Doctor’s office or something.

The handsets prior to S60 V3 can be configured to do things the old-fashioned way with the old iSync agent by changing some of the iSync plists, but the iSync application for the handset doesn’t work on V3 devices and will just crash out on my N73 and my E70. So here I am, with handsets I love except that Apple breaks them when Mac OS X touches them.

To recap:

• iSync eats contact groups.
• iSync eats custom ringers for groups and contacts.
• iSync eats your speed-dials (but you can use SIM dialing of course)
• iSync eats your all-day appointments and breaks them into 24-hour appointments.

It is absolutely infuriating. You’d think I was asking for a pony, but I’m not. I just want working synchronization to modern handsets.

To advance the vision of mobility while developing real-world applications, Helsinki, Finland-based Nokia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today opened a joint research facility, the Nokia Research Center Cambridge.

Woo! Not the first mobile company to setup shop in New England and certainly not the last. Cambridge is also home to the Orange Imaginarium:”http://www.orange.us/index.html (good gravy I love that word.)

I would love to be able to recover an appointment based on subject or location, and to recover contacts based on the Notes I assign them in Address Book (I like to apply a ‘tags:’ field to my Contacts to let me search for contacts on my Mac and would be delighted if this would carry over to my mobile as well!)

Mobile Search does that, but it has a pretty limited and weird UI and doesn’t run in high-res mode on the Nokia N90. They also don’t have a version for S60 3rd Edition devices, probably because they don’t want to pay money for a signature on their code. They could probably get some extra money if they’d make a high-res version and be able to pay for the code signing.

I’m still using SyncTunes to manage tracks out of my library onto the 1GB RS-MMC card in my Nokia N90 and I’m glad that Nokia is finally coming around and actually treating Mac users with something that at least resembles respect.

Baby steps from Nokia, but very welcome.

Killer.

The new iSync natively supports the Nokia N90, so I am not using the PhonePlugin that I found for it in order to sync.

Additionally, it now natively supports the Nokia S60 sync application, so it probably doesn’t need the iSync application installed and running anymore on the device. Syncs are faster and they appear to also be more reliable. I also like that since it is using the standard sync services from Nokia, you can actually see the status of your sync on the device.

I routinely change things up, get new devices, but I always seem to come back to S60. I think this is largely because the devices are just so damned usable and functional, especially when compared to BlackBerry devices, the Treo, UIQ devices such as the Sony Ericsson P910 and the like.

Some of the built-in applications on the N90 are quite good. For example, the email client is fantastic. It supports IMAP, IMAP-IDLE, and email gets pushed to me as fast as my BlackBerry ever got it. I have no complaints there, really. The input device doesn’t even bother me that much because a lot of my email when I’m mobile is consumption anyway, and I rarely have to type out a huge edict or anything unless I’m at a desk. Even the built-in browser is quite good. I have also installed Opera and Opera Mini but honestly I use the built-in browser most of the time.

But like any smartphone user, I have managed to accumulate some favorite applications over the last month that I feel are very useful, so I’ll be outlining them in this post.

This post is a doozy. Get comfortable.

Crypto and Security

If you use secure IMAP, SMTP, Jabber, or any other service, you’ll be constantly annoyed by being asked if you really want to talk to your server. I can’t afford the hundreds of dollars for a full-fledged cert, so we use a self-signed one.

I had a minor problem getting bothered about my server certificate, but once I had John setup our CA cert in DER format for me, it was all golden. That’s the trick, really, you have to make sure you send it over in DER format and the N90 picks it up. That same certificate however will not work on my Nokia 6600, nor his. There is some sort of problem with older S60 devices—the 9500 I have can also import that certificate, as can a Sony Ericsson P910. Not sure what the deal is with the 6600, but I’m running current firmware as of two weeks ago on it.

Personal Information Management

The N90 doesn’t have the “wallet” application that the 6600 and other handsets had. This sucks, because all of the third-party ones blow, except for Splash ID, which isn’t under heavy development and only runs low-res. I really like the Splash developers and wish more people wanted to buy their Symbian products, especially Splash ID. I’d love a great solution in this space. Seriously, I looked at all the available products right now and they either stink or just don’t cut it. They’re ugly, they’re cumbersome, and they’re very limited. The best of the batch is a freeware application called Pins which is great for what it is but doesn’t run high-res and doesn’t let you change or set arbitrary fields.

I want an application that can securely store PIN numbers, account numbers, passwords, clothing sizes, ID numbers, and other information. Make it good, make it sexy, and I’ll gladly buy it. Maybe the good people at Symsource” will try to snag this market.

Communication

The built-in IM client on the N90 uses IMPS (or Wireless Village). This would be great if anyone actually used it. There are some free, public, IMPS services out there and some of them even have gateways to other services, such as AIM and Yahoo!. But honestly, until IMPS takes off, if it ever does, you won’t get the fun stuff, such as seeing contact availability and presence right in the Contacts application or being able to initiate an IM with most people from the Contacts application either. This is a shame.

My operator, T-Mobile US, has an IMPS server but they only use it to shuttle messages to AIM for some devices. They do not give you any means to just use native WV with it. This sucks. But really, its okay, because seriously, I don’t know anyone, personally, that actually uses IMPS on a regular basis. Today, IMPS is one of things that you try out once or twice because you can and then you try to forget you ever saw it.

So what you need is a great IM client. The best one, hands-down, is IM+ from Shape.

IM+

Not only does IM+ support the high-res display of the N90 and look outright pretty, but it also talks to all the major IM services, and also supports Jabber/XMPP natively as well as a separate profile for Google Talk. Personally I get onto AIM via my Jabber server (I’m using Apple’s Jabber server in OS X with the Py-AIMt transport—can’t get the MSN or Yahoo! transports to work yet!) which is nice because my friend Eric has written us a nice Jabber-Moo transport so I can also chat on the hellyeah! networks moo via Jabber, and this includes when I’m mobile.

I already said that I love the built-in messaging client for email, but if you want a more traditional desktop-style email client, the best option out there, without a doubt, is Profimail.

Profimail

I didn’t buy Profimail for S60. I bought it for my UIQ-driven Sony Ericsson P910, but I was kind of disappointed with the UI on it. I didn’t like that you had to use the pen for everything and I also didn’t like that you couldn’t use the directional controls of the scroll wheel to select, activate menu items, and perform operations.

The S60 version is much more polished, however, and certainly is a very robust IMAP client. It supports full folder management and you can move messages between folders with ease. If I wasn’t so strict about how much mobile email I really needed or wanted (it is more of a distraction much of the time) I’d probably own it, but the UIQ version kind of bummed me out and didn’t do them any favors on getting me to think I needed another license for the S60 version in spite of my firm hand towards mobile email.

Profimail is quite easy on the eyes, also runs high-res on the N90, and does a fantastic job if the built-in client isn’t enough for you. I recommend it hands-down for S60 devices, but have strong reservations about their UIQ version.

the Mobile Office

Quickoffice Premier

Quickoffice Premier is a fantastic way to view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on the go. I send files I want to read or review to my handset via Bluetooth File Exchange on my Mac, and can zap them out when I get home for editing.

PDF+

PDF+ lets you open Acrobat PDF files, of course, but supports tons of handsets and also lets you rotate the display. It is very nice, though quite expensive for what it is. I’m still playing with the Beta that expires in May, perhaps by then I’ll have gotten hooked on it.

Honorable mention: Adobe Reader is very limited, but is free, and lets you search PDFs as well as view them direct on the handset. That is about all I can say about it, because it isn’t especially fancy. I’m glad Adobe is dipping their feet in the pool with this application but they really need to commit to S60 and other smartphones if they’re going to make a difference in the mobile market (not counting Flash Mobile, of course).

I will use a PDF viewer to view output from the web that I save as a PDF and these usually don’t work out so well. Documents by and large are fine with both, but PDF+ certainly allows for more flexibility and is ultimately better than Adobe’s product. But the price. Ugh. If it was $19 USD, they’d have me on the hook for sure. Even that seems a bit high for a single-format document viewer, but they are better than Adobe, so who knows what that is worth.

eBooks

You’d think that the display of an S60 device is too small for eBooks. I find that I really enjoy having a library in my pocket, especially being able to carry digital versions of my prayer book with me. I also loaded up a ton of other relevant literature and read them in iSilo.

iSilo

iSilo is handy for taking just about any webpage, TXT or HTML-formatted materials and cranking them out into very mobile-friendly formats.

My only problem with it is that sometimes it formats things weird, but this probably is user-error more than anything else. Documents that have centered text, such as the Principia Discordia, end up being aligned off the screen in iSilo. I can’t seem to figure out why it would do that. I haven’t tackled that issue in a while. It is annoying, but iSilo is a great document viewer regardless, and they have tools to create the appropriate files on a Mac, which most other eBook applications lack.

I’ve also looked at Mobipocket Reader but honestly it’s kind of lame that they don’t have a way to create content for it on the Mac. Also stinks that it isn’t high-res but I love their rotate feature. The only problem is that on a clamshell device like the N90 that can rotate, the best reading position would be to use the handset as if you were in video mode, with the display oriented towards you and sideways.

This would give the most space and a very comfortable reading position as well as easy navigation through a document. I kind of wish the web browser could also be used in this way. iSilo doesn’t even let you rotate the display at all, but on the N90 you don’t want that feature when you have to contort yourself to hold the handset to read things sideways like that.

Where in the Hell is ReadM?

I’m putting up the Bat Signal here. ReadM was my favorite on the 6600 but I can’t find its homepage anymore. I’m not sure if it is even being developed. I remember it being fantastic.

I am leaning towards converting all of my eBooks to raw HTML so that I can read them in high-res. It just seems silly to play around with eBook readers when I could just convert the vast majority of them into HTML easily enough. Until then though, iSilo is my favorite.

File Management

The built-in Gallery application is great for music, photos, and videos. It really is. But for all the other files and such I needed a way to move things to/from a card and out to another device or computer. I routinely use my mobile phone as a portable storage device of a sort, sending documents and data to my handset instead of carrying yet another device.

FExplorer

The best file manager, hands down, is FExplorer. You’ll forget you even have a file manager supplied by Nokia once you get this. Additionally, it lets you browse the Inbox to zap those files you send yourself back out into a computer. I used to use Forward for that, but it seemed silly to keep using that when FExplorer does that and more.

It also lets you compress your memory to recover memory from badly behaved applications and manage running tasks on your smartphone. Very handy one-stop shopping. It is the SMan of S60.

The only downside is that this application is ugly. It doesn’t run in high-res. But really I don’t need something super sexy for a file manager. I just need it to work and be useful.

Honorable mention: Profiexplorer, part of Profimail, is a very nice file manager but doesn’t have the useful shortcuts and ability to move multiple files in bulk. Forward is a nice way to redirect things out of your Inbox into other devices but most file managers do this now so it isn’t a must-have these days.

Multimedia

I use the built-in Gallery application to manage photos, videos, and music. I think it is a great fit. It is elegant, lightweight, and simple. It also supports m3u playlists so I can edit playlists on my computer and send them over. I still copy my music using a card reader (I have a 1GB RS-MMC card) and there are a lot of utilities for OS X that let you manage music on removable storage. I do it by hand but there are much more elegant ways these days.

I haven’t used any other video players other than the stock RealPlayer. RealPlayer is probably the most idiotic video player I’ve ever used on a desktop, but it isn’t awful on S60. This is in no small part because Real Player isn’t crazy bloated on S60. I wish that Apple would just release QuickTime Mobile and save us all, but until then, I stick to Real Player.

Real Player does play 3GPP/MPEG4 video, and there are even a few XviD/DivX video players out there like SmartMovie but I don’t have much desire to watch video on my mobile when I also have a PSP, which does the job beautifully with a very nice display. For short videos, you’re probably just better off converting to MPEG4 in FFmpeg or QuickTime Pro and viewing in Real Player.

The built-in stuff is so good and useful without being in the way that I’m loathe to mess with success. Nokia nailed media. I am completely uninspired to download the other players out there.

Quick gotchas:

• It doesn’t like some of my ID3 tags. They are fine in iTunes, but my N90 doesn’t like some Albums or Artists and lists them as Unknowns.
• If you go to Music and select a track, it will only play that one track. I think better behavior would be to start from that track and go on to the next. This is resolved by making a playlist and playing that. But c’mon—I know I have one playlist just for that reason.
• No support for protected AAC. I know I know, but someone needs to say it. Your iTunes Music Store purchases can’t be played on an N90 unless you re-encode them as MP3. Nokia should be going to Apple to get support for this.

Sync to the Mac

I use this conduit for iSync. It works great. My N90 syncs more reliably than my P910 ever did, and the N90 isn’t even officially supported by Apple. Rock on.

Still no category sync in the N90. No hack to work around it. Sometimes iSync will completely obliterate your speed dials and Groups you made in your mobile phone. It is completely stupid and Apple should be ashamed of this shortcoming. iSync is all I’ve got, however, so its what I use. I would love to see a better sync solution for S60 (and S40, S80, and UIQ devices for that matter) for the Mac. What we have is just absurdly lacking in polish.

Syndication

So many feeds, so little time.

LiteFeeds

LiteFeeds is great. LiteFeeds also has a nice snazzy web interface to let you browse feeds, so they are totally worth watching. I also wrote about them in Nokia Smartphone Hacks and BlackBerry Hacks, they have a very good service that beats the others out there, and really I like the way they think. Perhaps the folks at Newsgator should consider trying to make an acquisition there.

NewsGator

Speaking of, I am hooked on Newsgator and their mobile front-end. I love that I can keep all of my news in sync whether I’m using NetNewsWire, a browser, or my mobile. They earn big points there, though their mobile interface needs some work, and their CEO wrote me and asked for some feedback and I gave it and then I never heard back. Which is kind of sad because I really hoping that they’d like my ideas.

I thought my suggestions were elegant and useful, but perhaps they were not. Or the guy is just busy. Who knows.

Connectivity and Oddities

I use PuTTY to login to hosts via SSH over the Internet. I don’t make a habit of it on a device without a qwerty input device, but it does well in a pinch and I have done my share of server diagnostics and maintenance off the N90.

I’ve seen some emulators for NES and such, but again, I offload most of my video and mobile gaming onto my PSP. It is a great device for those types of things, naturally.

For handsfree usage I’m using an SE HBH-600 and a Plantronics Discovery 640 (photos). I don’t know why but after using the Plantronics I can’t do a Bluetooth sync without power cycling the handset. I don’t know if this is a bug with the N90, the headset, or both.

For listening to music I use a Nokia headphone adapter so I can use my Shure E2C’s. The Nokia headphones stink, in spite of having a mic built-in. I don’t feel like I can take them anywhere because I know they’ll fall apart. They just feel like junk. Nokia now makes a better headphone adapter than what I’ve got, with a Mic on the adapter so you don’t have to take off your headphones to answer an incoming call.

Wishlist

Like I said before, I want a better version of Splash ID and I don’t care who makes it. I’d like it to be them but I understand why they don’t want to sink more time into it. I’d like it if it could be synced to a Mac as well so I could do input of passwords and such on the computer without having to use the phone UI.

I’d also like a better IM client that does Jabber very well. IM+ is the best right now, but really it could be a lot nicer. I’d like better presence/instance support, for example. There are a lot of ways mobile IM could be improved.

I wish S60 had better task management. It is somewhat moot however because even if it did, it still wouldn’t sync right to iCal on my Mac, so this is why I use my hipsterpda instead for task and project tracking. It is just faster and more elegant. I will be documenting my bitchen GTD kung-fu workflow soon, which will also show off the capabilities of the N90 as a capture device for expired index cards and the like.

I wish Apple shipped their IMAP server with the IMAP-IDLE module in place. That would prevent hacking to make IMAP-IDLE auto-push email.

I wish the high-res display on the N90 was the same as the high-res display on other S60 devices so that developers would be more motivated to support it. Most of the applications I use most support it. The others do not, and it always makes me cringe when I realize that everything will be a little big and fuzzy.

I wish del.icio.us didn’t look like crap on a mobile browser. I wish I could collapse my tags completely out of the way.

Light list? Blame Nokia.

The only reason this list is so short and light is that either my PSP flat-out kills it for gaming and entertainment, or that Nokia hit home runs with a lot of the standard applications on this device to not warrant getting another solution. The N90 is a great handset, and the S60 OS has come a long way in the last two years. The browser is good, the mail is good, the gallery is good, and really there are only a few gaps that needed to be filled or enhancements worth looking at.

Most mobile video and such aren’t worth the time in my opinion because once the “hey I can watch a video on my phone,” high wears off you realize you’re watching a video on a 2-inch display like a spaz. So its great for video messages and such, and short clips of your cat, but watching a full length movie or TV show? No thanks.

I reserve the right to edit this post to reflect changes at my whim, or as events warrant.