bradKELLETT

I see it all the time – some new blog post detailing how to sync your Google calendar and contacts to somewhere, usually to the iPhone, using some new 3rd party service or crazy trick. Many people suggest NuevaSync to sync directly to the iPhone, or using CalDAV to get your calendars to iCal so they can be synced through iTunes.

Fact is, they are missing a key feature of Google apps that lets you sync to a lot of places, including the iPhone, directly and with push updates – Google supports Microsoft Exchange for both contacts and calendars.

With the Exchange support, you can get push updates to any device or application that supports Exchange, including Outlook on the desktop and the iPhone with v3.0 software and above. It doesn’t get around syncing to iCal (unless you’re already on Snow Leopard, which supports Exchange out of the box), but it’s damn good for mobile devices.

Here are the instructions for setting it up on the iPhone, and you can use the server settings from there to set up any other device/app that supports Exchange.

Schmap.com, a local city guide and travel information provider, is all set to launch a very sexy looking iPhone interface in public beta on Monday. The Schmap iPhone interface encompasses the company’s City Guides and Local Search services, plus a unique feature that auto generates maps when the iPhone is turned sideways.

The Schmap guys were nice enough to pass on to me a code that will let you access the Schmap iPhone interface before it launches on Monday. To get a sneak-peek, browse to http://schmap.com/iphone on your iPhone and enter the access code 724627.

I have been using the new Brightkite location-aware social network (invite-only at this point) a lot over the last few days, and one of the very common questions I hear is how I do check-ins from my mobile phone, since at this point only U.S. carriers are supported for their SMS service. The (not so) secret is you can send MMS messages to email addresses with most Australian carriers (Vodafone seems to be only exception here), and Brightkite gives a personal email address for every account to send commands to.

Once you have an MMS compatible handset, simply:

1. Log in to Brightkite and select Account settings from the left of the screen
2. Click the Mobile tab
3. Scroll to the bottom and find your unique account email address, program this into your phone or remember it
4. On your mobile phone, create a new MMS message
5. In the To field, instead of putting in a phone number, put your Brightkite email address
6. Put the standard SMS commands into the body of the message. These can be found in the Brightkite help, but the basic ones are:
   • @placemark or @full address to check-in
   • !message to post a message and attach it to your current location

Using this method also means you can post photos to Brightkite from your phone. To do so, just add the photo in the body of the MMS message, and the text you want to go with it in the Subject field.

Enjoy, and feel free to add me as a friend over on Brightkite.

Like many, I have been watching the news related to Google, among other’s, announcement of the Android mobile platform and the Open Handset Alliance. Until today’s release of several videos demonstrating the UI and parts of the system itself, there was not a lot of meat to get excited about. Now, I am filled with cautious optimism over Android.

After viewing this video in particular, one can see that at this point in the development cycle, it appears as though Google is looking to pull in the best features of Windows Mobile and the iPhone UI. On first inspection, Android looks most like Windows Mobile, especially the home screen. Once the device is in use, however, a very ‘smooth’ quality reminiscant of the iPhone can be seen. The browser especially is obviously modeled off Apple’s efforts, though there is a lack of finish at this early stage.

The most interesting and exciting part of Android is the level of openness. The iPhone is a great product, but like many Apple releases, it is basically Apple’s way or the highway. Sure, Apple has now announced an SDK for third party applications, but it is an afterthought, rather than Google’s release of an SDK months before devices are in the hands of customers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone, but should Android provide the same slick UI elements on an open platform, I will switch in a second. Many features demonstrated on Android so far are available on other handsets, such as Google maps, but with Google’s announcement of a $10 million competition for the best applications, I am looking forward to seeing what can be done. Particularity, I am keen to see where developers go with the built-in OpenGL support. Already Google has shown some pretty cool features, though, like Street View in the Maps application.

What I am really curious about is where this leaves the Apple/Google relationship. Google is basically releasing the best competitor to the iPhone, despite Eric Schmidt serving on Apple’s board, and Google taking a large part in the development of the iPhone. I was surprised at Google’s involvement with the development of the iPhone originally, considering its love of all things open, and this proves my point in a way.

Indeed, if Android shapes up to be the open version of the iPhone as it is appearing as at this early stage, there might just be an iPhone for sale out of my place.

(Yes, an update. I know it’s been a while, but I will try to blog more regularly.)

While I understand Google had to do a lot behind the scenes to ensure that actions mapped into Gmail properly, it has been a long wait for long-time Gmail users like me to get IMAP support in Google’s mail product. I’ve been using Microsoft Exchange for email for a while, but with my reshuffling of jobs, I found I no longer need the advanced features that it provides. Instead, with the new addition of IMAP access (a necessity in my books), I decided to save myself the money on Exchange and switch to Google Apps, and as such, back into Gmail.

This decision left me with a conundrum – how to get my bank of email out of the clutches of the MS empire and into the supposedly less evil Gmail. While my mailbox is not the largest around, weighing in at around 2GB, this was still a daunting task. IMAP support certainly made this easier, but finding the right application to do the move proved difficult.

I tried Outlook 2007 itself, Mozilla Thunderbird, Entourage, and Eudora with varying success, from Outlook’s constant timeouts on the IMAP connection, to Thunderbird ending up with messages without subjects or senders due to Exchange mangling headers. The solution came from an unlikely source: Windows Mail.

Windows Mail is the replacement to Outlook Express in Windows Vista, and was able to import email directly from the Exchange server through Outlook, then upload it to Gmail through IMAP. While the process was slow (around 10 hours for all my email), it managed to get the job done perfectly, without any timeouts and with the complete messages intact. I did not expect much from Windows Mail, but it pulled through in the end, and if Thunderbird wasn’t so damn good, I would consider using it as my full-time email client.

I now have Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar plugin syncing to my Google Apps Gmail and Google Calender, complete with all my email and calendar entries from Exchange. I still fire up Outlook and use the wonderful RemoteCalendars to pull down my Google Calendar for syncing with my iPhone and other devices, but other than that I am totally satisfied with the free alternative to Exchange.

This review was originally slated to be published on MobileBurn, but scheduling difficulties meant we had to pass it over. It could be of use for some though, and it is a pretty great device, so I thought I would publish it here. Read on for all the details. Note: Click on the photos to enlarge. When I get a chance, I will add a few more live shots. Continue Reading

I have held off from blogging about the iPhone here much thus far, but I am going to chuck some opinion out there. This is not just about the iPhone though, it is more about how the industry needs to react because of it.

Let me say this right off the bad: the iPhone is not a device I would buy myself. It is an influential device that will do fantastically in the market, that is for sure, but its omissions are too deal breaking for me. They are also things that could have been easily remedied by Apple, and I am sure they will be fixed in a second-generation product, but for now I will do without a device that can’t record video, use 3G networks and A2DP headphones, and other things I appreciate. But more on my actual iPhone pros and cons in a future post.

What the iPhone has achieved though, is forcing the industry in general to rethink the whole user interface paradigm. Touch sensitive devices have long used a stylus, and are only now evolving to use the finger. This fact, combined with the swishing, swirling, and sliding seen in the iPhone’s UI make it a much more organic device, one that consumers may find easier to ‘relate’ to.

On top of this more organic approach to UI design, the iPhone’s interface just looks so damn good. Sure, Windows Mobile is functional, S60 is pretty, and so on, but the iPhone interface is sexy. User interface design cannot take a back seat to device design any longer, and Apple has shown us that an attractive physical design can be accompanied by a functional and attractive UI design.

While other manufacturers may not have to play catch up to Apple with technical specifications, they definitely need to with UI design. Verizon’s new Motorola Q9m features a fun circular UI enhancement, and devices like the LG Prada and HTC Touch are certainly steps in the right direction, but the iPhone just integrates everything so nicely; this is what Apple does best.

The iPhone is not the device it could have been, but for UI design, it is revolutionary. If manufacturers take nothing else away from the iPhone release, I hope it at least forces them to take a step back and reevaluate the user interface experience.

I hear a lot of talk from people about the fact that the traditional ‘dumb phone’ will eventually be deleted from the market in favor of smartphones. While this is a valid point of view, I don’t entirely agree.

Sure, smartphone hardware and software are getting cheaper and easier for manufacturers to produce, but I think there will always be a place for non-smartphone devices in the market. Simplicity is key here – not everyone needs the full features of a smartphone, and while that remains true non-smartphones will always be produced, regardless of how cheap it becomes to make smartphones.

I have seen a trend over time of a general rise in the technology level even in cheap handsets, which is an obvious repercussion from the reduced cost of the components that make them. I wholeheartedly agree that even cheap handsets will eventually come with big, high-resolution screens and other treats, but I doubt that all handsets will become smartphones. The PIM features in non-smartphones have come a long way, and have reached a point where they will accommodate most users; transitioning to a smartphone user interface will do nothing but add a level of complexity that will ultimately drive the market away.

I am all for the advancement of technology, but only if it suits the needs of the consumer. There will have to be a radical change in the usability of smartphones before they truly become mainstream, perhaps the introduction of a ‘dumb’ mode that removes things like the ability to install new applications and the more complex PIM functionality would be beneficial. For the foreseeable future though, I think there will still be the constant flow of new non-smartphone devices.

I was reading an article on Pocket Picks the other day, wherein they reported that figures from Q Research indicate that 71% of 11-20 year olds would be happy to receive advertisements on their mobile phones so long as they were targeted to their interests. This actually surprised me a little, and would have been unheard of in generations past.

Younger generations are far more open to advertising in general, probably because of the way it is always in their face, and has been since birth. Sure, advertising has been around for a long time, but older generations would have had far less and in far fewer places, making them far more resistant to its introduction these days.

The fact that youth are more open to advertising is aided by the way there is more commonly something in it for the viewer. Schemes like Virgin Mobile’s ‘Sugar Mama’ allow users to earn free minutes on their phone accounts for viewing mobile advertisements, which makes it feel like the viewer is getting rewarded, making them want to view more ads. The company showing the ads will then get more advertisers interested, making it a win-win situation, provided the company being advertised finds leads as a result.

I do not believe this trend will stop, and I think that advertising will become a more pervasive part of our lives. This may upset some people, but for the next generation, it will just be a fact of life.

I was contacted the other day by one Ori Katzin, who shared his detailed impressions of the recently released Samsung SCH-U620. With his permission, I am going to share his thoughts with everyone here, as it is an interesting real-world perspective of the handset. Click below to view the full text. If you wish to contact Ori, please send your message to me through the usual means and I will forward it to him.

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