This morning, I went out for my morning trip to Wawa to drop $1.27 on a medium chai. Since my return trip would take me within 500 feet of the Apple Store (Sagemore, if you care), I decided to check out the line situation. While I was there, I took a picture and talked to the guys at the front of the line.

In front of the Apple Store, there were about 25-30 people in line, mostly under the cover of umbrellas, some under the awning of neighboring store, Blue Tulip. The 2 guys at the front of the line have been there since 1:00 P.M. on June 28. Ok, not exactly iLoser style, but still, overnight in crappy weather for a phone/iPod/“miracle device” that you’ll be able to stroll in and casually buy in a few days. That’s dedication.

I then took a ride to the other side of the shopping center to check out how things were going at the Cingular, err.. The New Deathstar, err, The New AT&T. Much quieter there.

At AT&T, there were only 5 (empty) chairs, and a few cars with people in various states of consciousness.

What the heck guys? If Apple’s got enough iPhones to give one to every single Apple employee that’s been with the company longer than a year, then I’m quite sure there’s enough to go around.

Darla has this posted on her site. She credits “Joe” for the image.

Wow. Holy half-truths Batman.

While there are technically no lies on that image, it doesn’t really seem to tell the whole tale. Let’s see..

• GPS and turn-by-turn directions – Yes, it’s indeed true, the N95 has a built-in GPS. During the nearly a month that I had an N95 (and no, it wasn’t a proto), I found the GPS nearly useless. It was unbearably slow to lock on. I’m talking like 5 minutes guys. And the turn-by-turn directions – those cost extra.
• Wireless stereo – A2DP is indeed present on the N95 and is missing on the iPhone, at least at launch. Since Nokia was able to add A2DP to recent N73 firmware releases, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think that we may yet see A2DP on an iPhone software update. Regardless of the device in question, A2DP will drain your battery.
• Second camera for video calling – Since the iPhone is (thus far) only for sale in the US, this is a non-starter. The N95 can only do video calls on a 3G network. The only UMTS band supported in the N95 is 2100 Mhz, not available in the US.
• Video-out port – I believe, like other video-capable iPods that have come before, the video output comes via the headphone jack.
• Removable battery – I’m torn here. Yes, it’s true, the N95’s battery can be swapped, and the iPhone’s cannot be swapped. However, this fails to address the abysmal battery life afforded to N95 users. Less than a day on a single battery? That’s just bad, like on an epic scale.

Kids, there’s room enough for both of you. There are lots of things that both camps can learn from the other.

I’m a big S60 user (work phone is an E65, home phone is an N73). I’m also a fan of Apple products. Neither side has the perfect phone. Fanboi-ism doesn’t help, regardless of what side it’s coming from.

I loved the N95. I hated the N95. I returned the N95 to the Nokia Flagship Store.

What did I love? The convergence. Extreme Convergence, as Dameon calls it. There was a lot to love about the N95:

• Great camera (and I mean great – the best I’ve ever used on a phone, nearly standalone quality)

• Good music player. For a week or two, I left my iPod at home and listened to my N95. It was nice that it had a 3.5mm jack on the side for “normal” headphones. I never bothered with A2DP.

• Built-in Wifi

• Played video from the N95 on a TV a couple of times. It was neato.

There was also a fair bit of stuff I didn’t like about the N95.

• No Access Point Groups – come on, this one’s so easy to implement (and already done in the E-series phones!) and so useful.

• While the music player worked well, the controls were a bit obtuse, like trying to find the “shuffle” feature for a playlist. You have to actually be playing a playlist before you can tell the device to shuffle it. Seems sort of a ham handed way to do it.

• Slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow GPS lock-on. We’re talking in minutes here. I wound up picking up a Garmin Nuvi, which locks on in about 15 seconds if I’m not driving when I turn it on. If my car’s already moving, it takes about 30 seconds.

• Battery life. This was the true deal breaker for me. I just couldn’t take it. If I was actually using some of the device’s potential (not all either!), my battery was out of juice before the end of the day. What was I doing? IMAP mailbox with auto-retrieve over EDGE or Wifi (30 minute sync interval), talking a bit, playing music on the train (1 hour one way), and a bit of web browsing. Maybe a picture a day, on average.

I had shuffled my devices around a bit to accommodate the N95.. My work phone, the E61 is on loan to a friend traveling in Europe. My work SIM migrated to my N73 Music Edition, and my home SIM went to the N95. After the return? I traded in the N95 and left the Flagship Store with an E65, in which my work SIM lives, sending my home SIM back to the N73 ME.

I’ve got an E65 review coming one of these days. It’s probably 90% positive. The other 10% is stuff that will (hopefully) get resolved with firmware updates.

Ok, so it’s been about a week since I got my Nokia N95, and wow, it’s quite a phone. Before we go on, I should mention that up until recently, I was employed by Nokia (in the ES group, not Multimedia, where N-series comes from). That ended on March 17. Consider yourselves disclaimed appropriately. I got mine at the Nokia Flagship Store in NY. The $750 pricetag, while steep, was certainly far more palatable than the $1300+ that other stores are offering, not to mention prices upwards of $1000 on eBay. At least the eBay prices have dropped closer to the Nokia store’s pricing in the past few days. When I got mine, however, the prices were still sky-high.

The specs are very impressive. Rather than bore you with all of them, here’s the highlight film:

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• WCDMA on the 2100 Mhz band, with HSDPA
• 802.11g Wifi
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Built-in GPS – real GPS, not A-GPS
• 5.0 MP digital cam with auto-focus
• Front cam for video calls in 3G areas (i.e. not the US)
• MicroSD expansion slot
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• Dual-slider (slides one way for the dialing keypad, the other for media playback controls)

For the past couple of trips into NY on the train or the bus, I’ve left my iPod at home, in favor of the music player on the N95. It’s a good player, but lacks certain basic features, like the ability to shuffle the tracks in a playlist. Well, either it lacks that function, or I just can’t find it. Either way, if it’s not able to be found, it might as well not be there, right? Otherwise, it works pretty well. Check out the image above to get an idea of what the interface looks like.

The idle screen is pretty much standard S60 v3, with the standard add-ons you’d expect to see – the wifi wizard, integration with the music player, calendar, etc. As usual, you can customize the soft-keys as well as the applications shown in the middle of the idle screen for quick access.

What’s good? Built-in wifi, SIP stack (which integrates with Asterisk with a bit of manual config, or Gizmo with the help of a little application you can get from the Download! application), S60 v3 FP1 browser, IMAP-IDLE support in the mail part of the Messaging app, support for POP3, IMAP and SMTP with both SSL and TLS, as well as every radio under the sun. The 16 million color QVGA screen is quite nice too.

Also included is a new version of Nokia’s “Barcode” application, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It uses the main camera to read barcodes. You can read the barcode in the sidebar of my site with it. So back to the what’s good about it? It actually seems to work this time around. I’ve got Barcode installed on my N73 Music Edition, and while it works, it’s very hit or miss (mostly miss) when it comes to reading a barcode. On my N73, I feel like a bunch of stars and planets need to be aligned, along with some sort of ritual sacrifice to get a successful barcode read. On the N95, that’s not the case at all — it seems to just work. Things that “just work”, as always, make me happy.

Speaking of just working, iSync. While the N95 isn’t directly supported by iSync, there are 2 sources for plugins to make it a “just works” affair. Nokia has made some plugins available, but I chose instead to go with the plugins from the UK-based S60 Themes site, as their plugins work for a wide variety of devices, not just a 1-plugin, 1-device model, like Nokia’s plugins seem to have done. And as always, PC Suite works as well.

What’s not so good? No US 3G bands (850 & 1900 Mhz), battery life, lack of shuffle features in the music player, very slow GPS lock-in. How bad is the battery life? If all I do is make a few calls and leave my mail connected over either EDGE or wifi, I get a bit over 24 hours. If I mix in some web browsing on top of that, just about a day. Throw in a few hours of time on the music player, and I get about 12 hours total. It ain’t pretty kids, but it’s also not the ugliest I’ve seen.

I was also disappointed to find that while my N95 (and N73 for that matter) both work with my Garmin Nuvi 660 GPS for hands-free calling & caller-id display, they do NOT allow the contacts database to be accessed from the Nuvi. Bummer there.

If you don’t need the wifi and/or GPS, go for the N73 or N73 Music Edition. You’ll save a few bucks, get better battery life, give up a bit of screen size, and have 3.2 MP instead of 5. And you’ll keep a few hundred bucks in your pocket.

Everyone’s got push e-mail fever these days. Intellisync, Blackberry, GoodLink, Seven, Exchange Direct Push, you name it, someone’s got a solution. But, did you know you may already have everything you need to get the job done?

Do you use IMAP to get your mail? Check out the capabilities of the server. Does it support the IMAP IDLE command? Chances are that if your IMAP software is recent, it does. Here’s an example:

# telnet localhost 143
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK Dovecot ready.
001 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 SORT THREAD=REFERENCES MULTIAPPEND UNSELECT LITERAL+ 
IDLE CHILDREN NAMESPACE LOGIN-REFERRALS STARTTLS AUTH=PLAIN
001 OK Capability completed.

See that IDLE in the capability string? That means this server supports IMAP IDLE. Ok, great, so what the heck does IDLE do? It’s all about pushing new messages out to clients. Here’s how it works.

1. Client makes a connection to the server, does it’s login, looks for new messages, all the usual stuff
2. Client sends the IDLE command to the server
3. Client leaves the connection open, server waits
4. New message shows up at the server
5. Server sends client a response to the IDLE command, informing it of the new message(s) waiting
6. Client picks up the message(s)

Ok, so the messages themselves aren’t getting pushed to the client, but a notification to pick them up is, so that’s the next best thing. In fact, most of the leading commercial “push” solutions work in pretty much the same way. Client opens a connection, leaves it open, server says, “hey, there’s stuff here for you”, client picks it up.

I’ve been using IDLE on my Nokia N73 for about a week now, and it works very well. The only thing to bear in mind is the IMAP operation interval. The IMAP protocol provides for a 30-minute timeout. Some buggy clients, like Outlook Express will allow the clock to expire, and then sit there, wondering why no new messages ever show up. Nice job Microsoft. So how does one keep a connection active if there’s nothing to do? NOOP. What’s that? NOOP == no operation. That is, do nothing.

What does this leave out? OTA sync of data like calendar and contacts. For business customers, those are the real magic. Email’s great, but what’s the use if you can’t use it to its full potential because you either lack access to your address book, or need to use more software that requires a connection to a computer to sync the other bits of data you need. For just folks, isync, nokia pc suite, activesync, or whatever will fit the bill just fine.

Bottom line? Leave the expensive solutions like Blackberry and friends to business users. This will serve you just fine & dandy..

Recently, I spent a bit of time with the Cingular 8125 (aka HTC Wizard) and the 8525 (aka HTC TyTN). Both of these devices are Pocket PC phones, running Windows Mobile 5. The 8125 came first, and just recently the 8525 showed up on the scene, stealing the 8125’s thunder, unseating it as the top dog Pocket PC phone at Cingular.

First, let’s be clear. These devices are PDAs first and phones second. Don’t get me wrong, they’re very good PDAs, and offer excellent wireless capabilities. The 8525 carries with it a laundry list of radio types and frequencies supported. Does all this connectivity make for the perfect mobile device? Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Cingular started selling the 8125 just about this time last year, and continues to sell it today. This is despite the fact that late last year, they started selling the newer, cooler, faster cousin, the 8525. These facts aside, the 8125 has a pretty impressive feature set:

• Ti OMAP 195 Mhz CPU
• 240×320 color screen, 64k colors
• GSM 850/900/1800/1900
• EDGE Class 10
• 802.11b
• Bluetooth 1.2
• Slide-out keyboard
• 1.3 MP digital camera
• MiniSD expansion slot

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So recently, Heather’s RAZR started acting up. Ok, not so much the phone as the battery. I was quite satisfied with my Nokia E50, so thought about looking into one of the new Black Metal edition E50s for myself, at which point I’d pass on my existing E50 to Heather. Well, the only places I could find them was at various European stores that I’d never heard of before.

So, I went off in search of a new phone for myself. Having recently had occasion to take quite a few pictures with my phone, I decided that something with a nice camera would fit the bill nicely. I wound up settling on the Nokia N73 Music Edition. Why the Music Edition? It was only a few bucks more than the standard N73, except it came in black and with a 2GB MiniSD card in the box. I was sold. The N73 Music Edition would soon be mine.

First impressions? The packaging was classic Nokia, very well done. In the box, as expected was the handset, a battery (BP-6M), charger, data cable (standard CA-53 pop-port) and a nifty clip-on remote control that has a 3.5mm headphone jack on it. Pretty much standard fare, for a phone like this. (more…)

I’d previously read (and even enjoyed) stuff from Roughly Drafted, mostly about the Zune. This time, RD has gone way back into deep left field. RD’s post about Ten Myths of the Apple iPhone has some interesting perspective, some of which is flat-out nuts.

Let’s examine these “Myths”. I’m only going to bother with the two wacko ones.

1. Missing EVDO, HSDPA, or whatever

Yes, the device needs HSDPA. EVDO isn’t even an option, since this isn’t a CDMA device we’re talking about here. The post would have you believe that high-speed wireless data is a niche product that nobody uses. Tell that to anyone that works at a carrier. They’ll talk to you about rising ARPU. Why is ARPU rising? Data. People want high-speed data. HSDPA is the answer to that problem. EDGE, while a step in the right direction, isn’t the answer. And to the fruitcakes who go on about how WiFi is everywhere and 3G networks will be dead in a year, wha???? Do you live in a Starbucks or something?

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So you’ve got a shiny new Nokia E61, E70, N80 or something like that, and you want to connect it to your Asterisk server, eh? No problem. This is an update to an old blog posting. What’s updated? Now it covers the recently released PR3 software for the E-series devices.

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These guys are just scary. If you haven’t heard about it, go read it for yourself.

How can you get to be an adult and not understand the difference between 0.002 cents and 0.002 dollars?

Don’t get me wrong, not everyone at VZW is like this. The guys I know over there (*not* customer service call center guys!) are good guys and are pretty smart to boot. Maybe they should give basic math lessons to their co-workers.

Currently playing in iTunes: Dani California by Red Hot Chili Peppers