FIC upgraded the hardware of OpenMoko, and some nice upgrades are in. However, they still didn’t go for a quad-band phone, with EDGE. It’s still triband with plain GPRS. These guys really need to get a clue. Just because in Asia EDGE is not very popular doesn’t mean that it’s not in the rest of the world — their focus is the whole world anyway.

Occasionally I’ve been asked which phones I believe they have the best usability. I’ve tried over 30 phones in my time as a reviewer in the past 3 years, so here’s my opinion on what’s intuitive:

Sony Ericsson’s non-smartphone OS tops the list, with Series60 from Nokia being close. Everything else in that market is mediocre IMO. In the touchscreen market, iPhone kicks everyone’s ass. PalmOS and Windows Mobile can kinda compete because they have been in the market longer than anyone else so they have fixed some mistakes over the years, but overall, Apple got it right, right off the bat. The funny thing is, that I consider UIQ having the worst usability of all touchscreen systems I ever tried (even worse than some half-baked Linux systems I’ve seen out there). Sony Ericsson bought UIQ this past year. And they went from having the best smartkey OS, to the worst touchscreen OS. Nice going SE.

UPDATE: A video grabbed by the Viewty, downloadable higher quality VGA version here.

I will be reviewing the Viewty on OSNews in a few days, it’s an interesting competitor to the iPhone. Is it as good though? Here’s a screenshot from the touchscreen system, rendering OSNews in windowed and fullscreen modes. The browser used is a 2005 version of Obigo (the company behind Obigo is out of the browser business for a year now btw).

F_ck you both, Motorola and HTC. Both use the mini-usb port for headphones port on their latest phone models. So a few months ago I bought two Motorola converters (mini-usb to 3.5mm audio jack). So when I tried these cables on my new HTC Kaiser, they wouldn’t work. Apparently HTC uses a different internal wiring. Why?!? Why make the freaking lives of the consumers so difficult? I am not ok at all to use the mini-USB port for audio (which is also shared with data and charging, so you can’t do multiple things at once), but when there are such incompatibilities between different manufacturers even when using the same kind of port, I just want to throw their phones out of the window.

I think I will be using the iPhone from now on as my main phone instead of my HTC PocketPC. Except Apple, a small glimpse of hope from Nokia’s S60 team and the non-smartphone line from Sony Ericsson, no hardware manufacturer out there has a clue how to create a good cellphone experience. The PocketPC OS is not bad, but HTC pisses me off all too often.

They do the same mistake that I did. They try to recreate a desktop environment on a mobile device by shoving as much information as possible on a single screen. Apple proved with the iPhone that this not how it should be done. If someone can’t easily and precisely hit a widget with a finger instead of a stylus, then it’s a useless UI — as far as having a future-proof product is concerned. To me, these interfaces are just arcane now. Even Nokia is preparing huge widgets for S60 4.0, because thankfully, they get it more than these Linux devs, Trolltech and of course, Motorola. The paradigm has shifted from designing text/widgets as small as they can be comfortably read, to as big as they can be comfortably be hit by a finger. And get this: a well-designed UI, like the iPhone’s, can fit almost as much information in it as the traditional touchscreen designs. Bigger widgets doesn’t necessarily mean less information on screen.

“Sony Ericsson and Motorola, Inc. have announced a definitive agreement under which Motorola will acquire a 50% interest in UI Holdings BV, the parent company of UIQ Technology AB, which is currently wholly owned by Sony Ericsson. Under the agreement, Motorola and Sony Ericsson will work together and jointly invest in the development of the UIQ open user interface platform.”

And this is the official death knell of Motorola. Not because UIQ is a bad platform (actually it is, but that’s not the point), but because Motorola simply doesn’t have a fucking clue of what it wants. They see that the “smartphone future” is the actual future, but they open 100 doors and follow all of them, spreading money, resources and creating consumer confusion instead of picking one technology, sticking with it, and properly develop it instead of fucking around with zero enhancements (like their Linux phones for example).

They announced two different paths with Linux and now they open a new one with UIQ. This is clearly a company WITHOUT A PLAN. This company has nothing to do with Nokia and their S60, or Apple and their iPhone, or even HTC and Windows Mobile. They just throw the net and are hoping for a good fishing day. But one day their money and luck will run out.

I received yesterday the front-runner phone for Windows Mobile 6, HTC’s Kaiser. An excellent phone as I have discussed here before, but it sure lacks a normal audio jack and camera flash. The keyboard is not easy to type, while the phone goes bananas if you try to dial while you are in landscape mode. Apple would have never released a phone with such an obvious bug, although on the other hand, Windows Mobile 6 does a whole lot more than the iPhone does.

“Short summary: we are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices.”

Blah, blah, blah… Blah, blah, blah… I don’t see why mobile Firefox will work while Minimo has failed. I mean, the thing is a memory hog, with optimizations or without. It’s an architecture and culture issue, and that’s not something that you can change easily in a project/company.

I must say that Christian Sejersen joining the project is a good move though (previously JBQ’s boss). There’s a lot of work ahead of him.

Google’s Mark Pilgrim makes an excellent point that if you want Apple to open up the iPhone platform, stop buying it. However, the other way to achieve the same thing might work as well. The iPhone is so popular, that people simply demand more out of it.

For the first time, cellphone users who previously didn’t even care about buying a PDA or a smartphone, now they want applications on their iPhone. This is a good thing for the industry and the consumer, and no matter how much AT&T and control-freak Steve Jobs himself might push Apple to keep things closed or offering their SDK to their partners only, eventually they will open up.

So the unlocked iPhone v1.0.2 arrived yesterday. The same day that the v1.1.1 firmware came out. Kind of ironic. Anyways, I don’t have plans to upgrade to 1.1.1 as it could potentially brick my phone (I have no idea which unlocking mechanism my supplier used so I am literally with tied hands).

The v1.0.2 works with the Greek Vodafone SIM I put in it (it uses the AT&T network here in US). I love the interface, although some new features will hopefully be added on v2.0. Overall, this is a great device.

What I didn’t like, even more than the bricking danger, was the fact that iTunes doesn’t let you use your iPhone in manual syncing mode. This sucks big time for me. I have about 15 GB of music that I really like (and that’s not counting the overall of 36 GB of legally-bought music we have in this house), while the iPhone has only 8 GBs. I need to manually add/remove songs from it, like I do on my 4GB iPod Mini. But Apple won’t let you do that with the iPhone. I have to create playlists and crap all the time. What if my PC dies and I lose my iTunes library? How will I be able to *remove* or simply *keep* stuff in the iPhone as it only keeps/removes whatever is in your PC’s hard drive the next time you sync? This pisses me off royally, much more than re-lockings and non-SDKs.