Do you use Voice over IP on your smartphone and if so, what do you think the benefits are?

I tried a few times, but for some reason never did it again...

After looking at the various features on each of the flagship smartphones for each major mobile platform the scores came up as follows- TyTN II: 83, N95 8GB: 93, iPhone: 83, Centro: 85.

So, by that reckoning the N95 8GB is the best with the Centro in second place. It is strange that if I was asked to rank them I would still go for the N95 in first place, but with the TyTN second, iPhone third and the Centro last. This shows that it is not always the individual features that make up a good smartphone, but rather how well they are put together.

The TyTN II is a corporate powerhouse that makes no attempt to be fashionable, but relies on flexibility and a feature set that will enable you to communicate quickly and efficiently. It does everything well, but nothing in a way that makes you sit back and actually enjoy the experience.

The N95 8GB on the other hand does almost everything very well and is as flexible as a smartphone can get. For me personally a QWERTY keyboard is something I want because I email a lot when away from the office, but I have to concede that this is the best smartphone I have used to date from a flexibility point of view. The entertainment is excellent, the phone side is as good as it gets and if you are prepared to compromise on PIM and extra software this is highly recommended.

You all know about the iPhone and what it can do. It does some things very well indeed, but some of the PIM features are lacking and the communication set up is poor. I can understand the beauty of the iPhone interface and do appreciate it, but I am still not prepared to call it a smartphone just yet.

The Centro should be a laughing stock, but it is not. If you do not need MS Exchange and want a smartphone that does the basics well, then the Centro represents good value for money. Work still needs to be done on the battery and reliability, but this is a definite improvement from Palm.

So that’s it, the battle of the big boys is over for another year. I am sure many of you will disagree with my assessments but that is what should happen. We all have different views on what makes a smartphone great, but remember my views are more important than yours (that was a joke by the way:))

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then the Chinese are the first too declare their appreciation of Apple’s iPhone design; with several of their own variations and anapparently a new incarnation appearing every couple of months.

One of the first to market iPhone clones comes from the major Chinese mobile company CECT. Their groundbreaking offering was the P168 followed by the more recent P168+ with the slide unlock bar – just like Apples signature feature. From first look its somewhat like comparing its build to a fake Rolex, you’d think this was an iPhone until a closer examination. It’s exactly the same feeling you would get if you had ever seen or handled a Rolex up close: the physical weight, fine detailing and finish give it away all too quickly. But from a distance there’s no real way to tell. Many casual glimpses of it and people will think it’s the real thing and even up close I had several friends think it was in fact a real iPhone as they had nothing besides television advertising to compare it with.

And there’s good and bad reasons for it not being exactly like Apple’s expensive and sought after phone.

Firstly all the major plus sides: Its tri-band which means you can pretty well take it anywhere in the world and it will work. You can stick your own MicroSD card in it and swap-it as you like. It’s packaged with two batteries that can be easily replaced by the user.
 
Likewise it has two slots for SIMs - so two numbers can be used in one phone and switched back and forth as you need it – very handy for work.

Most importantly however is the fact that it’s totally unlocked and that you are not tied into loathsome contracts as iPhone users have discovered that will inevitably spiral in uncontrolled costs adding massively to the phones bottom line. The P168+ works with normal contract SIMs as well as any pay as you go mobile services.

My P168+ arrived in a non descript package from Hong Kong via Ebay. I decided against a bidding war and last minute snipes and just paid the extra 10 bucks difference and do a buy-it-now, after all I didn’t get any tech or toys for Xmas and this was the closest thing too it this year. Are all the boxes in the Far East made in the same place? 

Not a stupid question really but an observation as this is the one of a few items I’ve had that came in pretty well the standard issue fold open cardboard box with molded plastic inlay. In this case it was black and minimalistic but everything was included as well as a USB mains charger as the phone can either charge direct from the Mac/PC or off a wall socket.

The manual as ever, was rubbish, in teeny print and black and white but it’s all there. Some clever bods on Ebay have realised that there’s so little first hand information on these phones that they can actually sell downloadable version of the manuals for a few dollars. Most information can be found for free on the squids masters P168 forum at unsurprisingly: squidmaster.freeforums.org

Out of the box the first thing you notice about the P168+ is that somehow the company managed to get an image that almost identically matches the iPhone fish. How and why they bothered are two questions as yet unanswered but wallpaper images can be loaded into the phone for different functions including start up and shut down as well as displaying your phone number and a custom message too. I personally left the fish greeting and went further and hunted down the iPhone’s ringer to complete the simulacra’s illusion.

The main obvious difference between the fake and the real is the numbers of physical buttons located bellow the screen. In this variation there’s five as opposed to Apple’s single. Now this is a good illustration between the design methodology of the user interface: it has too many steps to do functions or be greeted with countless options when a simple large YES/NO would suffice. This maybe a bias I’ve picked up from being with Apple’s vs. Windows machines over the years but its not necessary to have so many steps to do each function as opposed too the simplicity of use that graces Apple’s original.  This annoying aspect of the phone will re-appear throughout all of it’s features bar it’s side mounted buttons which can be used for navigation in certain applications.

Turning the phone on via the red phone handset icon on the front immediately illustrates one of its more robust features – it has quite decent loud sound; and in fact 6 speakers built in – one on each front corner and two top back. This makes it possible to listen on speakerphone and also hear any MP3s if you’ve misplaced your headset or keen on annoying the kids in the back of the buss.

While the built in speakers are actually surprisingly good, the mic / headset earphones are absolute rubbish and need to be replaced at the first possible opportunity. Thankfully there are two options; a Samsung compatible pair or a standard 3.5mm stereo jack connector that allows you to plug any pair into the phone. If your good with a soldering gun you can even make them yourself recycling the included crap headset.

The phone will remain locked when on unless you slide the red tab from left to right.  You can then either use one of the five touch sensitive icons – home, letter, book, phone or music or the real buttons on the bottom of the phone. The sliding touch sensitive mechanism isn’t as fluid as Apples by any stretch but does work.  In general the touch sensitive surface does work well enough even if a bit laggy at times.

The home key or button will replace the fish screen saver and bring up the five different categories down the left hand side of the screen – AV Zone, Personal, Entertainment, System and Email. After loading a 2GB MicroSD card and selling off my old 1GB iPod shuffle I was primed to make this as my new MP3 player. Now given that it’s a 320x240 colour screen, for some reason the designers have opted for a silly little portable MP3 player within the window – complete with mock earphone wires coming out of the top. At the same time while the play button is large enough to take an average fingerprint, the other controls are decidedly teeny and the setting for random/shuffle etc are best if you have pointy nails. To adjust the volume on screen you do need to use the built-in stylus, but thankfully at this point the left sided controls also double a volume control.

Now the music isn’t automatically played from the MicroSD card, it needs to be added or subtracted from the play list. Tragically only one play list can be had a time. In the List function you can add and remove the songs as well as add them too your ring tones. The player will pause and go to sleep when you invoke another of the phones functions or if there’s a call coming in or being placed. Play list size is down to folder file limit on 240-ish of the memory card. With a better pair of headphones this is a rather basic but functional MP3 player though nothing as flashy as Apple’s wizzy animated song record library feature.

My P168+ came with a 256MB memory card loaded with a few unknown Asian songs and equally unknown pop videos. Its supported formats are 3gp from the Blueberry and MP4 but both only in highly scaled resolution about just under half 320/240 at best and then they still both look pretty rough.  Mp4’s are on average twice the file size of the 3GP and have a slightly better detail to them in comparison.
 
Controls are basic and the video can be scrubbed through and the screen rotated with the hit of a button. Two other almost pointless features are still frame capture and speed control. What would be far more useful is full 320x240 video playback at 30fps but that maybe down to the phones processor.

In this area the phone is a weak comparison to the iPhone but then maybe not to other mobiles on the market that also sport video functions. The by now very old Sony Clie NX73 had better video playback and that’s well past its retirement age. Interestingly I couldn’t get the video I had previously encoded for the Clie working on the P168+. Comparing it to my Archos AV500 and its left in the dirt as the Archos has video in and out along with a 100GB HD. Really the only thing on the P168+ that comes out well enough to watch are cartoons like the Simpsons, anything else reminds me of trying to watch ‘Twister’ on the small TV mounted on the back of the airline seat. I did show it to a salesman at an O2 store and he thought the video was very good.

The camera is sold as being a 2 million pixels when its in fact just a standard VGA 640x480 which can also double as a webcam when connect to a PC with the supplied charging USB cable. This maybe a “tell” of where the camera came from given its very low resolution and its extremely slow reaction time to both light levels, motion and focus and the fact that it suffers from extreme chromatic abberration. It’s fine for quick reference snaps and not really of worth for anything else. Though the shear rubbishness of CCD/lens means it could accidently fall into the category of “artistic style” like the overy trendy “LOMO” camera. However it does offer some controls over size, colour and exposure along with a self-timer and a multi-shot capacity. Although if your going to take that much care in taking a photograph then you might as well as use a real camera if one is too hand.

The right hand side single button can be used to take photos quickly rather than navigating through to the Camera icon but for some really tedious reason it insists on asking if you want to save it each and every time. Surely memory is cheap enough (£9 2GB) not to bother questioning whether one needs to save each as you go? It also slows any shooting down in with such a cumbersome user interface.

The next category of functions is Personal, which includes the Phonebook, Messages, a call History and an Organiser. The Phonebook has all the major features one needs and can read numbers off the SIM or for more advanced information the fields are stored on the phone itself. However there’s no immediate way to send the entire list to another Bluetooth suited device like another phone or more usefully to back it up to a PC or a Macintosh. Once entries are on the phone then it all can be accessed by either of the SIMs if you are using two in the phone. Individual caller rings and photo’s can also be set up too if deemed necessary.

Messages cover the basic SMS, Multi Media Messaging, Chat and connection to your providers voice mail server. Broadcasting to groups is possible but not tested. Call history is detailed and includes a GPRS Counter but with no way to monitories it so that you have an up to date count on how much your spending using the service. 

Organiser has all the basics – a calendar, to do list, alarm and a world clock which given the lack of sensitivity of the touch screen and the size of the map is very tricky to set. Mine is still on Lisbon for GMT as I can’t nail down London on it.

Core too the P168+ is of course the touch screen and this is the way all numbers are dialled or text is entered. The keys dotted around the phone are really just shortcuts. When writing a text a small qwerty keyboard is displayed on the bottom 1/4 of the screen with the fish motif greyed out behind it along with blue lines like a note book. You definitely need the built in stylus to tap out your message or enter your data as the letters are simply too small otherwise. I found this too be a pretty fast process compared to normal multi click keying on a mobilephone’s keypad and now really prefer it in over the old process of SMS’ing. Too access other characters for your SMS there are two small icons on the right hand side of the keyboard that bring these up but they could be grouped into better selections of more useful characters.

One thing that does become apparent pretty quickly when either reading or entering text into the phone is the question of why is there no real options to change the text font or sizing. There’s certainly a possibility to get a lot more text onto the width of the screen than is currently available. This comes up again in the E-book reader as well as the website browser which is even worse for that. 
Curiously when looking at some WebPages that display much smaller text its obvious that words half the size are easily readable – so why not have these options throughout the phone? One guess is that since it’s a Chinese phone, this is the character size that is optimum for that language. Another trick would be to have the phone read html files of your own ebook or data on the MicroSD card and that way it would be possible to optimise the formatting and the character size. So far I’ve not figured out how to do this although it would be a handy kludge.

Usage of display space and clean user interface is another thing that lets the phone down even though the general hardware specifications and build is pretty competent and robust for such a low priced clone.

The telling blue rule lines that appear when SMS’ing could be an attempt for guidance when doing hand writing recognition. Yes it will do this but besides being widely inaccurate way to enter text is also slower to draw out each character than to simply tap it on the virtual keyboard. Writing out a complete word does not work either and it will convert it down to one inaccurate letter. There is a learning mode that gives you possible options for your scrawl but I decided it was more effort than it’s worth. It’s not a feature I would ever use again.

The entertainment category on the phone is a misnomer on the P168+ as there is only one sad little puzzle game and no options to add any more or any other applications for that matter.  However you can load your own images if you like shifting squares around a 3x3 grid. This is where you will find the Service section where you set up and also access the Internet via the GPRS connection. If you take this phone to your local mobile store or too a branch of the mobile company they’ll look at both you and it curiously, scratch their heads, shrug and give up. Thanks to a poster a SquidMaster's P168 Forum we now know that the P168+ shares the same GPRS and MMS profiles as the Nokia 2610 and if you go to Nokia’s site in Germany as the link was given its possible to have their website send the settings direct to your phone via a self loading text message. This trick is also likely to work with Orange, Virgin etc directly if you tell then you have a Nokia 2610.

To use the Internet simply go into WAP and connect. You may want to set the settings differently to allow for sluggish connection times so your not logged out before even logging in.

The one most wanted feature from various message board reading is a better Internet browser as what’s provided does just about work but is incredibly wasteful of screen space with wide scroll bars and very large text. Entering text fields works by clicking on the space offered which then switches over to the keyboard mode where you can enter the data, then ‘Done’ to enter it on the website. This feature could have been done so much better and really needs to be sorted out for any future versions.

Multimedia covers both basic sound and images applications, most of which are to novelty oriented to be of any real use. The Image Viewer has several options and some file management and browsing style but is very slow and lags. When it displays an image it overlays navigation, scale and rotation icons on the photo which makes it an unpleasant way too look at your photos’ even though that’s pretty unnecessary as the left had side buttons will forward/reverse through the shots. The trick is also to get your images onto the MicroSD card in the right format and the only way I succeeded in that was to open an included image in a photo editor, note the size and JPEG formatting / compression and then bulk apply to my portfolio images I wanted to carry around with me. The Photo Editor appears to be there to add speech balloons, frames and text while the Image Tile just does that but is useless.

Aptly titled ‘Sound recorder ‘ is the more promising feature for this category to record well… sound. Having a Dictaphone within your phone for memo taking or even recording your calls is a really good idea yet the functionality is down to just on and off when it could be much much more advanced and thus much more useful.

Meldoy recorder is a little midi composing application to make your own ring tones and whatnot and only really useful when your annoyed there’s only one crap game and need something on the phone to twiddle with.

The Extra’s are a sub category, which includes basic although very useful things like – calc, switching the SIM, unit converter as well as two small health apps and the Ebook reader. Again the fixed format of the font and display lets the E-book reader down and it is likewise pretty limited in the file types it will read. You can also access the Bluetooth settings in Extra’s such as pairing the phone with Bluetooth stereo headsets and FTP access. It will not support the Bluetooth Internet browsing base station.

System – Settings covers all the basics for any advanced phone like this like phone set up, network, sound effects along with an option to restore everything to the original factory settings. In this are area it also provides options for a customiseable User Profles – meeting, outdoor, indoor headphones as well as Bluetooth and power saving modes. Shortscuts are just that.

File management is all to do about looking and accessing the contents of the MicroSD card you’ve installed in the phone. While you can open and look at media files from the card directly, for some reason it doesn’t take you into the associated application. For example and image will load and display on the screen and that’s it. Likewise with an MP3 file will just play it once but you are treated to an animated GIF of a little man dancing. Besides loading the media file you can also forward, rename, copy and all the usual file management tools although these all the same options displayed when accessing any file within the other applications.

Mail is the last category on the left hand navigation bar and one that requires a specific style of account with you phone provider and POP details from you ISP. As I’m on pay as you go I have not delved into this function although it is there and does work according to posters on the P168 forum. Mind you given the limitations of the text display on the phone then in my opinion it may work but is let down by these core issues of text display size.

Apples and Oranges

There’s two ways to look at the CECT P168+, either by itself as an inexpensive PDA styled phone or directly up against an actual iPhone from Apple. Now if you compare it from a purely technical point of view next to Apple’s creation then it falls pretty flat on its face.
 
They’re vastly different phones with only a passing superficial resemblance too each other. P168+ is plastic and cheap and Apple’s is a solid supurbly designed piece of computing. Now imagine the impossible; that the iPhone didn’t exist and you were to judge the phone on its own next to similar mobiles with the same price bracket then surprisingly, it would do rather well thank you very much. For the Ebay list price with shipping or £95 or UK online shops £109.95 you get a decent working phone with a lot of features only found on really high end mobiles that cost several times the price. Not only that it’s also TriBand, unlocked and batteries/memory can be swapped as needed. Mention the service contract to an iPhone owner and they’d likely go white and break out in a cold sweat.

It’s been a scant eight or so months since the iPhone’s launch and those copycats in China are furiously working away on their own variations. Each version of the iClone they make improves a bit and the P168+ is one of about 5 at last count and so it won’t years before they produce something that will surpase the iPhone on functionality, features and pricing. Till then I can only afford to upgrade one more time to the HiPhone before waiting for Apple to open up to a broader market or a true iPhone killer clone appears from China.

Mark Bennett - blackice (at) pavilion.co.uk

Issue 72 of PDA Essentials is now available to buy and includes an exclusive review of the HTC Shift, 50 tops applications and accessories for your handheld plus a look at the 'iPod PDA'.

The decline of the mobile software industry is an excellent write up from Michael Mace- "Back in 1999 when I joined Palm, it seemed we had the whole mobile ecosystem nailed. The market was literally exploding, with the installed base of devices doubling every year, and an incredible range of creative and useful software popping up all over. In a 22-month period, the number of registered Palm developers increased from 3,000 to over 130,000. The PalmSource conference was swamped, with people spilling out into the halls, and David Pogue took center stage at the close of the conference to tell us how brilliant we all were.

It felt like we were at the leading edge of a revolution, but in hindsight it was more like the high water mark of a flash flood. In the years that followed, the energy and momentum gradually drained out of the mobile applications market.

The problem wasn't just limited to Palm; the level of developer activity and creativity that we saw in the glory days of Palm OS hasn't reappeared on any mobile platform since. In fact, as the market shifted from handhelds to smartphones, the situation for mobile app developers has become substantially worse." Thanks to Justine.

If you are thinking of trying something new, expansys has two Sierra Wireless Voq Smartphones for under £20. They are a bit outdated but could work as a backup device.

"The Voq professional phone is a new class of mobile phone that offers a flip-open QWERTY thumbpad and easy-to-use software solutions for business users, including secure, serverless, always-there e-mail.

Supplied with a 30 days warranty period.

Based on the Windows Mobile™ 2003 software for Smartphone, the Voq professional phone incorporates the best features of your current mobile phone, a messaging device and a PDA – in one.

View your documents, view pictures and files, send a fax, play a game: Download and try software on your Voq professional phone. VoqMail Personal and Professional Editions let you stay in touch with your own private e-mail, and your secure work e-mail wherever you go.

myVoq software is a unique software application that makes it easy for you to search for information (on your phone or on the web), store it, and send it to other people. Combined with the Voq flip-open QWERTY thumbpad, myVoq software saves you time and effort."

Today's free eBook is The Blackwood Oak "Damien could see that the biker and his girlfriend had pitched their tent among the trees, about fifty yards up the hill from the picnic area. It was an orange two-man ridge job, well-used and a little faded. They’d chosen an awkward spot, away from the other campers. But with the flysheet unzipped they’d have one of the best views in the whole valley, right out across the lake to the wooded hills on the other side.

He took the keys out of the pickup and swung the door closed as the biker walked toward him.

“Damien Ryan,” he said. “Ranger Service. What’s your problem?”

The biker seemed embarrassed. He was about twenty-five, a couple of years older than Damien and a bigger man all round. He wore a white T-shirt, with the upper half of his motorcycle leathers peeled down to his waist. Presumably so he could wash. Certainly not so he could shave..."