Developers often over-develop. A grand example for this are the various twitter widgets available presently for Android. They take a lot of space, and they show new tweets, plus they let you update your status. While this might sound to you like a good minimum functionality being offered, it’s in fact over the top.

Except the fact that they take lots of space on the desktop (usually 1/2 of the allowed desktop), showing new tweets by having to press the “next/previous” buttons to scroll in them, and then pressing two-three more clicks to update the status, it makes the whole thing *redundant*. It only takes a SINGLE click (via bookmark desktop link) to load the brand new (and very functional) mobile page of Twitter, which has full functionality, fits more posts per page, and it provides an input box right on the top of the page.

The HTC Hero widget is a bit better than the rest of the Android Twitter widgets since it allows for flicking through the tweets instead of previous/next buttons (they wrote their own code obviously, since Android doesn’t have flicking widget API support), but it still doesn’t offer @ mentions or DM info, it’s very slow to refresh for some reason after I request it to (it takes up to 1 minute here!), it doesn’t use the whole desktop full screen (so there’s lost real screen estate, limiting the amount of posts you can read on a single view), and besides, it’s only available on HTC Sense phones only.

HTC Hero’s huge, slow, and cumbersome Twitter widget:

Screenshot by MobilitySite

To make the long story short, all these people who have developed these complicated and convoluted twitter (and facebook) widgets, are on the wrong usability-wise. I’m sure consumers THINK that this is the functionality they want on their desktop, but in reality, it makes their workflow more difficult than it has to be. Android allows to put bookmark links on the desktop, so all they have to do is add the link to the Twitter’s mobile page. This is a way-faster and more efficient workflow than using twitter via a widget!

Make no mistake, I do want a Twitter widget, but this has to act ONLY as a (1×1 icon sized) notification widget, not as a full-featured client. Sure, Android already has a drop-down notification system, but a widget is more visual, and requires fewer clicks/flicks to get to. Here’s a rough idea of what I’m envisioning:

I can pay $100 (via Paypal) to any Android developer who can implement this (which is of course a symbolic amount rather than covering the true cost). It shouldn’t be ultra-difficult to develop it, it’s definitely much simpler than the rest of the Twitter widgets out there. Here are some pointers of how I wish this to be implemented:

1. Make the widget vector-based (or whatever scalable format Android supports). Basically, design the background graphic, the font size, and the font-spacing in a way that scales well from a 2.8″ 320×240 screen to a 4″+ 1280×720 screen.

2. Clicking the widget loads a pre-selected third party client. The settings of the widget should be a separate app appearing in the main Applications list. The UI for the prefs should look like the main settings of Android (various options on a black background). A few other widget developers that I know have taken this approach too rather than loading the prefs from within the widget itself (especially since we’re dealing with a 1×1-sized widget).

3. The prefs panel should include the following options one way or another:
a. Username/Pass login & logout buttons (secure login please)
b. Update interval
– 15 minutes
– 30 minutes
– 1 hour (default, less than that has battery life impact)
– 2 hours
– 8 hours
– 24 hours
c. Preferred client (to load on click)
– mobile.twitter.com web site (default)
– Twidroid or Twidroid PRO (if installed)
– Seesmic (if installed)
– TwitterRide (if installed)
– Twit2go (if installed)
– Twoid (if installed)
– Twitta (if installed)
– m.twitter.com web site (older, WAP site)
d. Refresh (forces a refresh, restarts the update countdown clock)
e. Reset tweets to 0 (in case we already read the tweets elsewhere)
f. About info

4. When you click the widget to load the preferred client, the widget’s timeline/mentions/DMs go down to 0, and the refresh countdown clock restarts.

5. If there’s a Twitter API that tells you when was the last time Twitter was accessed with any client, take that into account when downloading & counting the widget’s new tweets.

6. The widget should be free to download via Market worldwide, and open source (same license as Android itself). The widget should not ask for more system permissions than it actually needs to operate. Host it at Google’s code depot, and make an effort to get it included by default on Android by following their code guidelines (it’s a long shot, but you never know).

7. Keep it lean. You don’t need to download the actual messages for example, only get the unread numbers. Test well for memory leaks, crashes, CPU/battery probs, or breakage with new Android/Twitter API versions. Be responsive to bug reports. No new functionality is needed, except maybe adding new twitter clients in the supported list. Only do that for major & popular apps, so the app might not need updating more than once or twice a year overall after it’s deemed “stable” — which is a pretty good deal maintenance-wise.

So, any takers? Please email me if you’re interested, before you start working on it.

Update: Android developer Stu King will start working on it Jan 1st. Thanks!

If we were to liken the various smartphone platforms to wives, this is what we would probably get:

- The iPhone
The iPhone wife is a very beautiful one. She’s tall, and she’s always taking care of herself. She’s the perfect woman to go out with and show off. She’s an accomplished professional, and a good house-keeper too. However, she won’t let you do everything you want to do: she won’t allow you poker nights with your friends, and won’t allow you to share anything with others. She’s very controlling, but after 3 years of marriage you are already addicted to that control. There’s a way to get her give you more freedom by occasionally shouting at her, but this can attract the wrath of your mother in law. Not recommended.

- The Android
The Android wife is a versatile wife. She’s able to accomplish a lot of things, she’s smart, she’s open to all kinds of discussions, and she’s good in bed — a cool gal overall. Problem is, she’s pretty ugly, and most of all, she’s messy. The only way to get past the situation is to think of your wife — and introduce her to your friends — as one of the dudes. Then the pain gets easier.

- The Windows Mobile
The Windows Mobile wife is one ugly cougar. She’s married to a 25 year old, and he’s her virtual slave. He stays with her because she’s rich, she has connections, and a lot of amenities at her huge house. He has even developed a blind-folding fetish because it was the only way to not look at her while having sex. He can’t wait for the day she dies.

- The WebOS
The WebOS wife is a handsome wife, almost as good-looking as the iPhone wife. However, she’s retarded. She can’t do much by herself, and when you need something of her, you need to talk to her like you are talking to a child. Every time you go out with the iPhone wife and her husband, the WebOS wife keeps reaching and touching the iPhone’s wife shiny dress. The iPhone wife pulls back, but the WebOS wife gets all close to her again. A very uncomfortable situation to be in for a husband. Not to mention that the iPhone wife will keep boasting about her accomplishments over dinner, while your own wife still keeps drooling over the shiny dress and laughs when no one else is. Doctors say that there’s potential for intellectual growth there, but it might take time. Hang on in there.

- The Blackberry
The Blackberry wife is a very religious wife. She brings the most money in the house with her two jobs. She takes care of the house, the paperwork, the cars, the children. At first glance she sounds ideal, but then you will have to put up with her ideals, her need to donate thousands of dollars per year to the church, and the fact that she will only have sex with you only once or twice a month since she’s tired most of the time. Sometimes you ask yourself why you put up with her bullshit, but on the other hand, having everything taken care of is pretty nice too.

- The Symbian S60
The Symbian wife is a middle-aged wife that’s never happy with her appearance. She has had nose jobs, and boob jobs, and lip jobs. You keep telling her that she’s fine the way she is for her age, but she keeps wanting change — a change that’s usually for the worse. Every time she comes back from one of these surgeries she forgets stuff. She forgets all your history together, she even forgets how to cook, how to do the bed, how to give a good blow-job. Her identity crisis is what makes you consider getting a divorce, but she gains you back by saying that her next surgery will make everything alright, with minimal fuss.

Editor’s note: My husband says that I am an Android wife.

What the hell? Is this the worst day of my digital life?

I had enrolled for the “automatic refills” payment option with AT&T’s “Pay As You Go” plan last February. The auto-refill worked once in May, and when it was supposed to refill my account last week automatically, it DIDN’T!!!! What the hell is going on here? You setup the fucking thing to automatically refill $25 per 3 months, and it does that correctly once, and then it doesn’t??? How do you even make something like this work only once?

I will be calling them tomorrow morning, because right now they are closed (IMO, they should be having support people 24 hours a day, but hey).

Worst shit ever. I am really pissed off these last two days. Between Apple, AT&T, and Vegas crashing all the time on a time-critical project, I just feel that I want to head for the mountains and never come back to “civilization”. I hate its guts. I feel like when having PMS, times 100.

Update: AT&T doesn’t know what the hell happened. I show up as auto-refill on their computer, and then I am not. Their rep has no idea what happened, but I have my suspicions. Judging from their pay web site, I smell that they now require an SSN number to accept your credit card, while it wasn’t the deal before. The problem is, there are a lot of people in the US without SSN, because US has run out of supported numbers (US now gives SSNs to new residents only when it absolutely has to). AT&T never sent me an email, SMS, or called to let me know of the new requirements. They just stopped auto-refilling my account, while I thought they were doing so. And because of that, I lost all of my roll-over balance that my account had (about $14). Conspiracy theory anyone?

So today I got an unlocked iPhone 3Gs, from a Canadian store (that was for a unit agreed to get acquired a month ago btw, before my decision to stop my Apple purchases a week ago). It came with firmware 3.0.0, and I went ahead to upgrade to 3.0.1. I wasn’t afraid of activation, since my iPhone 2G works just fine with my AT&T prepaid SIM card (the voice part at least). So when I got it, I simply put it on iTunes to update its firmware, and when it would ask me for a SIM card, I would just put in my AT&T one.

Well, things didn’t exactly went as planned. The iPhone 3Gs got activated all by itself, and I was wondering why. Well, when opened the SIM tray there was another fucking SIM card in there!!!! The Canadian store forgot their FIDO sim card in! The Fido sim card didn’t work in the US, so I really thought that this was just a bare iPhone that I received. But it wasn’t. The Fido SIM activated the iPhone with the Fido network, with a SIM that doesn’t really work anyway (at least in the US)!

So I go ahead, and I do what I have to do: jailbreak and unlock the phone. The jailbreakiness and unlockiness of the 3.0.1 firmware worked, and my AT&T card was recognized. So now, I thought, if I restore the firmware again, and not keep any data, it should default back to the AT&T network and won’t be locked to Fido anymore. I thought, I would be able to use the iPhone 3Gs as I do with my iPhone 2G, which doesn’t require special activation as long as I am on AT&T.

But this is not how it works.

Once you have activated an iPhone ONCE, then the iPhone’s “default clean slate” is not “clean slate” anymore. It’s now FOREVER locked to the FIDO network, and it now requires jailbreak/unlock EVERY TIME you upgrade the firmware. If the Canadian store had not made the mistake to put the FIDO sim in there, then I would have activated the iPhone with the AT&T sim card for the first time, and so it would be “locked” to the AT&T network instead (which is what I wanted). Every time there would be a new OS version out, it would just work.

Don’t get confused. There are TWO kinds of SIM locks on the iPhone. One kind is the “easy” lock, which is what the hackers are hacking at, the one that lets you use any SIM. But the other lock, is the REAL fucking lock, which is NOT MODIFIABLE once you have activated the iPhone with a certain network. That lock is much more lower level, and part of the baseband/radio firmware, and not the OS firmware. And that’s a part that no hacking tool can touch, except Apple’s own tools that are not freely available (unless you know of one that can really flash the actual baseband firmware of the iPhone, and not the OS part).

So basically, between the stupidity of the Canadian store to leave their fucking SIM into the phone, the stupidity of Apple to lock things in such a way, and my laziness to put my SIM in the phone immediately after arriving instead of waiting for the firmware upgrade, I am now left with an iPhone that can only be used with the jailbreak/unlock combination. Each time Apple releases a new firmware, I have to jailbreak/unlock the phone manually, and honestly, I rather not since I shouldn’t have to (since I use an AT&T sim, and AT&T doesn’t really mind). I am simply against jailbreaking because it’s just not safe. But now, I have to fucking use it in order to be able to use the phone. And no, don’t suggest to me to buy an iPhone with a full AT&T contract, because I simply don’t need such a contract — I barely do 5 phone calls a month. But I still want an iPhone, and I still want my prepaid sim. This should have worked.

I put the biggest blame on this situation on Apple, because locking phones this way SUCKS GOATS. I hope someone taps Apple’s ass, to feel how good a locking really is. Apple is THE ONLY company that could have bring REVOLUTION to the industry by saying “no” to the carrier-manufacturer phone locks. Apple is successful and big enough to give the FINGER to any carrier that demands locked phones (at least starting with iPhone 3G). But noooooo! Apple WANTS its EXTRA BUCK that it gets from the carriers by locking the phones like that. So instead of bringing revolution, Apple brings me headaches instead.

After Adam and Thom, I will be putting a break on my Apple purchases too. I have already promised days ago one more Apple iPhone review to a third party store, so when I am done with that too, it’s over for me as well.

Apple is quickly becoming the new Microsoft in the eyes of the people. The funny thing is though, that Apple was always like that, it’s just that people outside of the Bay Area didn’t know all of the juicy details most of us residents know. You see, Silicon Valley is a small place. You will be surprised how small it is. Word goes out easily. So while I might not have been blogging or reporting much about small tidbits that I happened to hear over the years (in order to protect my sources), the truth is, Apple never had a good name as a workplace/business in the area. Not before Steve Jobs came back as a CEO, and certainly not after.

But I guess, the cat is out of the bag now.

Between the crude iPhone application authorization process, the no-background processes allowed, to selling only locked phones (something that’s pretty illegal in other countries and I hope it would be here too), it makes me loathe what Apple is doing. They have created the best smartphone experience, they started the true smartphone revolution with the iPhone, but at the same time they try to limit progress in other areas.

It’s not a coincidence that the un-approved, and previously approved by Phil Schiller himself, iPhone apps were ALL Google Voice-related (I think there were 2-3 Voice-related apps un-approved, plus the Google Voice official app that was unauthorized from the get-go). The hard work and sweat of these developers, all went to waste. It’s more than obvious here that AT&T is behind this plot. You see, Apple has nothing to lose with Google Voice, if anything, Apple has everything to gain from it (it makes their phone more useful)! But AT&T is the one who has everything to lose. Google Voice allows for free US-bound calls and dirt cheap international calls (just $0.02 per minute for US to France/Greece), which of course, puts AT&T’s business at risk.

What Google is doing with Google Voice is nothing but progress. They have the bandwidth, so they go with it. AT&T on the other hand, is nothing but a new RIAA/MPAA, scared of the new realities that technology brings! They can’t, or they don’t want to, change their business and/or technologies, and so they fight against the new kids on the block, who use technology in a more flexible way.

Put that in addition to what AT&T did to my iPhone last month: they cut off my EDGE support. My iPhone is LOCKED to AT&T, and it is NOT jailbroken. It is as vanilla as it goes. The only difference here is that I didn’t buy the iPhone from AT&T at the time, as I only needed to use their PayAsYouGo plan (since I do not do more than 4-5 calls per month).

Think about it. AT&T blocks NO OTHER cellphone-maker for that plan! They single-out the non-AT&T-bought iPhones, like they are a plague, EVEN if they might be as vanilla as they get. THIS ALONE can be used for a class action lawsuit. I had no plans contacting EFF about it, but be sure I will do so now, after the latest Google Voice fiasco. There are too many things to hold a grudge now, I am afraid.

In the meantime, I have emailed Apple with feedback about their practices, and I suggest you do so too.

Update: Kroc wrote on Twitter that “I think you peeps should create a charter that defines “iPhone fixed” and publish it“.

Here’s my list, in this order, for Apple:
1. No more locked phones. Phones should also be able to be purchased at full price, with no ties to any carrier. Subsidized phones with a contract should also be unlocked.
2. Authorization denial of iPhone/iPod apps should be restricted to malware/spyware/buggy apps, and to illegal apps (e.g. a Nazi-related app). All other apps should be allowed to go through to the Apple Store. Sexual-related apps should be allowed, but with age verification or warning.
3. Allow background processes on the iPhone/iPod, as long as they are don’t seem to be compromising the system (e.g. battery life, system software, towers). The iPhone is not a real smartphone without background processes.

For AT&T (and ANY other carrier):
1. Stop dictating to manufacturers what software they can put in there and what they can’t. It’s not your job. It only becomes your job if your towers are compromised. Otherwise, SHUT IT.
2. No more locked phones. Period. You can still subsidize phones, but they have to be unlocked.
3. Allow EDGE/3G/GPRS for all phones. Artificially limiting the non-contract-bound Blackberries and iPhones, is unacceptable, even if I am willing to pay up your crazy prices ($10 per 1 MB of data transfered)!
4. Allow “PayAsYouGo” calls from Europe and other places within US (e.g. the Ukiah area in CA, USA). It’s *unacceptable* to not be able to use my phone when I am on vacations (I am blocked from calling out in these areas), even if I am willing to pay up your crazy ass prices!

Finally, if Apple can’t design protection to open the app CPU without compromising the radio CPU, they need better engineers. The notion that the towers aren’t designed to deal with faulty clients is just bullshit. Who would design a client-server system where the server trusts the client?

I was somehow invited into the Google Voice beta, and I am loving it. It works, it’s cheap, and under some circumstances it can make telephony cheaper for some people, e.g. college kids.

Having a single number to be called in and never miss a call since it rings on all of your available phone numbers, having spam detection, free SMS, free Voicemail (accessible via the web, either with speech-to-text or via direct audio), and even free call-in on VoIP, well, all these features are really cool. Especially since a few years ago I left VoIP behind. I have now paired my Gizmo5 SIP number to Google Voice, and it works wonderfully well. I have a free call-in from around the world, without paying a dime. And if I want to call out, I pay nothing for calls in the continental US, and only $0.02 per minute for France/Greece. This is dirt cheap, cheaper than any VoIP operator, let alone actual carriers!

In the past, one had to use IPKall if he/she wanted to use a free call-in number with VoIP SIP, but this didn’t always work well, as they delete your account if you don’t use it after a few weeks. With Google Voice, there’s no such fear.

I believe the following plan could work for many poor people or college kids. Here’s how:
1. Get an unlocked cheap Nokia S60 smartphone with VoIP SIP WiFi support. You can get one for $200.
2. Get a free Gizmo5 VoIP SIP account/number.
3. When you eventually get your Google Voice invite, “pair” it with your VoIP SIP number (follow the instructions on Google’s page, you must not include the +1 prefix in order for this to work).
4. [Optional] Get a $25-per-3-months “pay-as-you-go” SIM card from either T-Mobile or AT&T, so you can call out too if you need to. Alternatively, you can buy call-out credit from Gizmo5, which is much cheaper ($0.04 per min), but that would mean that you can only call-out when connected to WiFi.
4. Give everyone your Google Voice number. Your VoIP # will now start ringing (and your cell # too, if it’s also paired).
5. When you are visiting others who have a landline, e.g. your old folks who might not have WiFi in their home, you can temporarily pair their phone number with your Google Voice too, so you won’t have to use your cellphone at all (Google can also ring your incoming calls on both phones).

The only thing I would like to see from Google Voice is an actual VoIP SIP protocol that they host themselves. This way, I would be able to call-out with their dirt cheap rates without having to go through Gizmo5’s (somewhat crazy sometimes) servers and higher rates. If this ever happens, I would like Google to make absolutely sure their SIP servers work with the Nokia VoIP phones. And why not, write a good Android SIP client too (not third party, but part of Android, so it’s well integrated).

Another feature I would like to see is the ability to say to the system “if I receive a call between 11 PM to 11 AM, put it straight on voicemail” (update: the option exists in the advanced menu of each paired phone). I might then put up my Google Voice number on my blog, and ask people call me directly with their video editing questions. I get about 10 emails daily about video tech support, and honestly, I rather talk than write…

This is NOT cool.

I just realized today that upgrading to firmware 3.0 with my iPhone 1st Gen, it killed my data connection with AT&T. I am on a PayAsYouGo plan since I use my phone very rarely. I don’t need to be paying a full contract when I do 1-2 calls per month (sometimes not even that). What I do a lot though, is use WiFi for my various data needs.

Not that I was using their EDGE connection much, which costs $10 per 1 MB (I am not that rich to throw away money at that pricing rate), but it was nice to know that it was there if I needed it. My iPhone was originally an unlocked device, but since AT&T doesn’t require activation anymore for its PayAsYouGo customers, I don’t bother unlocking it or otherwise hack it. I just use it, locked to AT&T’s service.

But this is not enough for AT&T it seems. They now disable the GPRS service altogether to those who don’t have an iPhone-specific account. They try to do what they do with Blackberry: if you don’t have a Blackberry-specific account, you can’t use their data service (and T-Mobile does the same shit as well btw), not even if you do want to pay them the crazy $10 per 1 MB rate.

The iPhone is a fully capable phone and this restriction is simply artificial and unnecessary. I find all this very disturbing, and I can’t wait for a time when people will be able to buy unlocked phones by default, like in many European countries.

There is a workaround to re-enable EDGE, but I don’t want to have anything to do with their stinky service anymore, so I won’t even bother. I will just use my phone even less now.

Some people are whining online that their smartphone doesn’t last for more than 1-2 days without recharging, while their 5 year old phone could last over 5-6 days before need any recharging. This is a fallacy. The new phones have better battery life than the older ones.

Consider this: Phones like a Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc. come with many media and internet-heavy applications. It’s now customary to check for email, to check Twitter, to check the internet-updated Weather app, to check stocks, sync between the phone and various online accounts many times a day, to check some RSS or web pages, to use Y! or Google maps. And on the side, play some music, quickly visit youtube, and maybe even watch a small TV episode while waiting on the bus.

All these things are features that you couldn’t do 5 years ago. At least not in a way that would be pleasurable. 5 years ago, you would check your voicemail, your SMS messages, and just do voice. And that was about it. No wonder you could do over 5 days in battery life.

What changed is HOW we use these phones. We now use these phones as mini-laptops. And yet, we expect them to have the same battery life as they had when they were dumb bricks. I am sorry to say that battery technology doesn’t move as fast as software tech does!

And then there’s the other thing. On platforms that allow background apps, the third party application designers only care about their little app and not the whole device. As long as they can invoke a network ping or connection when you are not looking to sync something, they are happy. Very seldom these app developers think what would happen if there are 5 (or 10) background apps installed and doing their own thing whenever they damn want. The user will see a big drop in battery life, and will place the fault at the phone manufacturer instead.

In conclusion, be objective when you are damning a manufacturer of bad battery life. Maybe there’s something you can do to better the experience (short of inventing a new kind of battery altogether).

The iPhone is indeed the most successful phone or PDA model ever, it seems. Apple now has 16.6% of the worldwide smartphone market, and almost 10,000 apps in their AppStore. That market share chart is very old (pre-iPhone 3G), and I expect that the iPhone by now has well over 25% of the smartphone market.

This applications point is very important too. 10,000 apps in just 6 months in unprecedented. Think that it took Windows Mobile 6 years to get to 20,000 apps, and PalmOS about 7 years for 30,000 apps. And if you want to laugh a bit, think that it took Nokia 3 years for its S60 3rd Edition platform to get… 600 apps. Remember, S60 phones are actually very popular, but there are not many apps for them! And the reason why 3rd Edition S60 has such a low number of apps available is because, as I have said many times in this blog, Nokia broke binary compatibility with S60 2nd Edition (that already had 2,000 apps at the time). Binary compatibility is very important and Nokia is paying for it for these stupid decisions that continues to make. They seem to never learn, and this is why they will go bye-bye eventually from this market. Their new touchscreen platform is a bit of a joke too, as I blogged in the past.

Google’s Android has quite a few apps too, possibly in the hundreds by now, and it’s already deemed successful. But this fragmented “app market” that doesn’t have a single store, is a terrible idea in my book. Personally, while I like the idea behind Android very much, I don’t like the Android UI and the current HTC phone at all. The funny thing is that our landlord’s office manager couldn’t wait for the G1 to come out, only to sell it a few days after he got it. He also hated the UI, and he couldn’t deal with the shitty HTC phone design (he couldn’t type correctly because of the oversized right side). He got a Blackberry right after that, he sold it within 3 days, and he’s back on the iPhone. The iPhone offers the best user experience hands down indeed.

The only thing bugging me is the kind of apps that Apple doesn’t offer us in the iPhone and third parties can’t fill in these blanks. And because of the various SDK limitations, the iPhone apps are mostly games and other useless crap.

Best news of the day. I have being blogging and reviewing for over 2 years now in various cellphone articles about how bad UIQ’s performance and UI was and is. Sony Ericsson said that UIQ “didn’t attract the operator, manufacturer or consumer interest needed to stop it from failing.” Well, how was it supposed to do that when consumers were ready to throw up on the phone with that appalling UI?

Update: Ooooh! Look at the fanboys! My blog post made them angry! Bwahaha!

Well, look guys. What I wrote above is what comes out of my heart. I don’t lie. I don’t try to make things sound better than they are just so I be more likable. I don’t care if you like me or not. I simply write exactly what I feel. Please be advised that I’ve owned not one, not two, but THREE UIQ devices over the last 2.5 years. The UI just sucked and I always regarded it as the worst of the major phone OSes. The UI felt like it was designed by 10 year olds. The usability simply suffers at all levels compared to most other touchscreen smartphones.

And you know what was the last beating UIQ took for me? Let me tell you. For a year now my brother in Greece was asking me for a touchscreen phone. I told him I had the P990 (with the latest firmware in it and some additional commercial software in it too) and that I would give it to him. He couldn’t wait for it. In August, at last I reunited with my little bro and I gave him the phone. Two days later, his reaction was this: “Eugenia, you wouldn’t be angry if I give the P990 to my friend Alex, would you?” I asked him “why?”, and he said that he would have preferred either Windows Mobile or PalmOS. And get this, my brother was already familiar with UIQ (he used to own a UIQ 2.1 phone in the past), so this wasn’t a bad initial reaction on his part. He just didn’t like the interface.

This was the last nail as to how unfriendly UIQ was. At this point it became apparent that it wasn’t just my idea anymore, it was real, and it was spreading. Others hated its suckiness too. UIQ just didn’t inspire anyone to use it religiously more than a few hours after the initial curiosity. The UI just never felt right. And so I write about it. Deal with it like grown up men, instead of how Ares, owner of the UIQblog, deals with it. He wrote on his blog that I “need serious treatment”, and he earlier wrote on my own blog that I am a retard. Yep, that was his insightful reply, that I am a retard. My guess is that Ares hates seeing his little pet blog project going down because Sony Ericsson is killing the product. It pisses him off. And he takes it on me. It’s easier that way instead of facing the truth about UIQ I guess.