I never had this opinion. I would always look at how easy an operating system lets me fulfill the tasks I need to fulfill, including the initial learning curve, therefore I chose Windows on computers and iPhone on smartphones. I hate having to configure stuff all the time. I hate how the Android OS makes me click on way too small buttons and phone makers try to combat this with bigger screen sizes. I hate when I have to make way more clicks or text input to get anything done. And I really don’t like when the web browser stutters or I doubletap on a paragraph and it zooms to the sidebar. All pretty small things (yeah, rewriting the UI elements isn’t really a small thing), but if this were different, I’d definitely chose Android. And if Windows Phone gets more powerful and easier to use than iPhone, I’ll choose that one. I really don’t care about religion. And I never advised anyone to pick an iPhone “because everyone does” or “because it won”, and this is my only plea in this whole post: when you’re advocating for Android, please don’t mention that more copies were sold, as this has nothing to do with the quality of the hard- and software.

photo credit: kevindooley

As this post might have religious comments, here’s a disclaimer: I like iPhone best among smartphones, so in your opinion I’m a fanboy – no need to mention that again. I also love customization in my phone from time to time, so I’m jailbreaking – but I also didn’t miss it much when there wasn’t a good jailbreak available. And for the pricing: since here in germany the T-mobile monopoly fell, iPhone is not too pricy anymore – so leave me alone with “I can’t pay for it” – if you can pay 500€ in two years, you can also afford 600€.

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I don’t think being “anti-capitalistic” about this matter helps, as this announcement is not about throwing lesser money around, but throwing it in a better direction than before.

Microsoft for the rescue! For Microsoft, this is the best way to get their operating system (which really seems to be pretty good!) onto devices, as most devices run with the cheaper Android and Microsofts main problem with WinOS7 is that users just have not seen it in action anywhere. I saw it on a developer’s device at work, and it looked pretty impressive. But Microsoft cannot sell their own device, as they just have never produced phones and don’t have the retail backend that Apple has. So for Microsoft it’s a no-brainer, as they need to have a critical mass of phones out there. Meanwhile I guess that the “strategic partner thing” means that the fees for Nokia will be a lot smaller than for everyone else. (Just FYI: Microsoft takes these fees because they want to guarantee that devices using WP7 will be uptodate and get the fitting drivers ASAP, using their own engineers for that. Besides making money.)

And what would be the alternative solution for Nokia? Close all their factories, give their money to the stockholders and leave, saying that it has been a nice dominance of the world market but now they’re tired and want to go back to making tires? (Yes, they made tires.) Certainly not. After all they still have a really big name that will make customers buy their phones again – no matter what the software is called today (consumers only think of the device brand, not about the OS brand). When the customer sees that the Nokia phone has nicer graphics than the iPhone and the HTC phone, he’ll buy the Nokia phone.

That said, I can only applause both corporations. They have made a good move. They just need to make sure it’s not the last good move, as shipping will count and not big agreements. They need to work hard and fast to generate some serious competition, else at least Nokia is doomed.

P. S.: Another point about Microsoft: they have a lot of elite programmers on their team, and its the old windows core that slows them down. I believe that the developement of WinPhone7 will be going much faster than their development in the PC OS.

photo credit: Arty Smokes (deaf mute)

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• + There’s the possibility to create a WLAN. Yay!
• + Looking at the 2 year costs, it was about 30% cheaper, which is nice.
• - Scrolling is much more unfluid. Makes reading on the web when scrolling is involved much more of a hassle.
• - The browser loading times were not that good.
• - There is no anti-smudge-screen. This actually makes a big difference.
• - Sometimes reactions on pinching is stuttery or just too late.
• - I never know which button I need to press if I want to get back.
• - The camera sucked. The flash is much too bright and the pictures look like crap. To make a shot you needed to press the trackball.
• - I didn’t understand the structure of the applications list vs. the widget screens. I guess the organisation was strange because my father made it so, but why are those two separated?
• - The phone got very hot while just browsing and using google maps.
• - The icons of the applications sucked.
• - The few applications I launched looked kind of “not ready to deliver”.

photo credit: Jesus Belzunce

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E-Mail

Have at least three different e-Mail accounts.

• One for work, use that on your work computer(s), but never on private machines.
• One for real communication. Keep this e-Mail-Adress as sectret as possible, never use it to register for anything (I only use it for the most trusted and important sites) and only give it to friends. Everytime you get a mail on this account, you may want to read that. If you have a smartphone, you should use ONLY setup this address on the device.
• And one for everything else (this will attract spam, so I often call it my spammail
  ). I have one mail account that I just use for everything on the web and it goes through several spam filters before it lands only on my primary private PC. Don’t check for mail on this account more than once a day.

Twitter

As with e-Mail, I use two different accounts.

• One is my main account which I use to follow everything and everyone that interests me. At this moment, I follow186 accounts, and if you’re between these, I really like what you tweet. I use this stream to feed my interest from time to time, but I won’t always read everything. Also, I don’t check in this stream when I have no time or I need to focus. Then I just switch to my private account.
• My private account only follows some few people that I don’t want to miss tweets from or that I know and that I only allow trusted people or people I know to follow. Again, on my iPhone I let this account notify me of @replies and direct messages, but not the “main” account where more often @replies come in.

Another point: Don’t set something up that pops up messages. This is distration you intentionally install. I use Echofon for Firefox on Windows and Mac and set the preference that it doesn’t pop up stuff. Therefore I can see how many tweets are waiting, but I must intentionally klick on the echofon icon to read tweets.

Facebook

I just don’t use it. It is a whole network just made for distration, so I just don’t visit it when I don’t need to. Therefore I feed my twitter account in Facebook so it looks like I’m posting there. And I set up notifications on iPhone for messages and use Meebo to communicate via “Facebook chat” if someone uses that.

photo credit: Big Fat Rat

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Following definite pros:

• The display doesn’t accumulate fingerprints anymore. Big plus. Wonder how they did that.
• The distance to the screen is lower, as the glass on the screen is not that thick anymore. This feels very good, as it feels more like touching the interface directly now.
• The antenna is definitely better than before. I can make the WiFi drop one bar if I use a death grip that makes my hands hurt, but even with that applied I can’t make the phone signal go down no matter what.
• The camera is just superb compared with my 3G or the half year old nokia of my girlfriend. The pictures now definitely look amazing (HDR also helps picture quality) and the video is just very nice.
• The device is very thin. it’s not any lighter, but thinner than the 3G and it feels much tougher.
• Everything just got faster due to the faster processor and the additional RAM.
• The free Belkin case I got for free is very fine and an iPhone stand was included with it. Nice!

This is what I would call “not so nice”:

• The price is still high
• The battery life seems a bit better, but it doesn’t hold longer than two days no matter what. Okay, I use the device pretty often, but somehow I would have imagined more. Update: when you use no geolocation stuff it holds up a little longer. The GPS sucks the battery dry in no time. Over the last night (10 hours), the iPhone lost only 5% battery. Nice.
• Apps still don’t get a chance to put something on the lockscreen. This now is the sole reason for me to install a jailbreak as soon as it’s released – I just want to see my upcoming calender items and my Appigo ToDo items there.
• Many apps still don’t get the multitasking right or their implementors just don’t publish the necessary updates. To put it straight, I even believe that there are only that many iPhone apps out there, because the possibilities were so limited. But I guess that this is a temporary problem and we’ll see more working updates soon.

Nice apps:

• Radio.de is my new favorite Internet radio app. Background music (that sometimes ends after some songs if in the background) is possible and there are 500+ radios available including the main popular German radios that often have their own (non-backgrounding) apps.
• ToDo is still my favorite todolist app.
• Meebo is the only true backgrounding IM client that’s available and working. The good side is that Meebo is really nice. It supports ICQ, Google chat (that also messages if you get a mail there), Facebook chat and a lot of other services that I don’t use. Meebo works in the background and keeps you logged in 48 hours. If you log out or are logged out due to inactivity, you get a push notification telling you so. For Windows they have a notifier that even recognizes that you’re on a computer now so you don’t get notified on your computer AND your iPhone. If you get pinged on windows, the notifier takes you to your conversation in the browser on the meedbo.com website.
• (There is still no latitude client that supports latitude friends. And I tried them all. Till then only the comparably slow Google mobile latitude page must suffice. I’ll update this post if I find something better.)
• This post was written entirely on the new iPhone using the WordPress app. It was only edited for making the lists and adding tags and a picture afterwards.

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A smartphone needs a more expensive priced mobile plan and is very expensive in general. So if you need a smartphone, accept that it will be expensive. Therefore, you should plan ahead what you are going to do with the small computer in your pocket – and if you only find reasons like “oh well I’ll surf the web on the busride”, then I believe you should better buy a book.

Smartphones have the capability to be your mobile data center – and I think this is the main use case. Besides, having mobile E-Mail and other means of communications at hand, like IM or Twitter, is the second biggest use case. After that, you may not forget that a smartphone should replace your MP3-player, your notebook, your calendar, your shopping-lists, the books you carry around and in a very fortunate situation even the netbook you only take with you to do exactly what a smartphone can do for you.

photo credit: andyi

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