Nokia E90

This is an old model, but I’ve been expecting for it for quite some time.

Now I have one in my hand, it is pretty much what I want for all these years – QWERTY keyboard, wireless and cellular connection, display is big enough, and, phone is big enough . Pity it does not support 3G on AT&T, but I guess EDGE will be good enough since I was on it with my blackberry.

I haven’t found enough software for it, but at least I have putty now so anything else could be delayed (yes, I’m still looking). Now I want a good connection manager (say, switch between wifi and cellular network automatically), some games (boring games to kill time), and I need a good Jabber client (or a multiple protocol client). Sure I wish all these can be free, but I will pay some if they are good.

It’s weird to me that Microsoft has their messenger client on Symbian, while Yahoo and Google don’t have one. If I understand correctly, Symbian is one of the major competitor of Windows Mobile, so what’s the logic behind all these?

There are way too many mobile platforms

Just found that we are having more mobile platforms than years ago – we used to have Symbian, Windows CE series, Palm, Blackberry, and some Linux (not that significant in terme of market share), however, we got iPhone and Android (Linux) in the past two or three years, and now moblin could become another serious Linux player, though it focus on netbook, but who knows, as Android is trying to get netbook market share, it is reasonable, to me, for moblin hitting handset.

Various Linux are NOT the same in mobilel platform as they were on server platform, as you don’t have to deal with user interface on servers. I haven’t done more comparison with Android and moblin, but first guess is that they are using different UI libraries, I just wish I’m wrong.

And seems J2ME/MIDP is still the only way to do cross platform development, I’m just not sure how much “native features” it can handle, such as GPS, game, etc. If I want to do native development, I have to use C++ for Symbian, VB/VC for Windows CE, Java for Blackberry, Objective-C for iPhone, and pretty sure C/C++ for Android/moblin. Thanks god at this moment Palm is no longer a serious player, though it may change in the coming year or two.

So, I will leave mobile development untouched for a while – I did some Windows CE (Wnidows Mobile) development a while back, and tried playing with Java on Blackberry, I will try Symbian or iPhone based on what I’m going to get next (most likely would be Synbian). I will try anything if I can get a simulator around, as well as the company does not limit my applications (stupid Blackberry, I cannot do anything I want without a application key, so I gave up).

Need a bigger screen

Blackberry’s screen seems too small to me and it’s killing my eyes – I’m trying not to read from there too often.

I should try 4″ screen for my next phone, and thinking of the requirement of full QWERTY keyboard, maybe I will switch back to Nokia, or try some Windows Mobile devices from HP.

You know, I’m not a fan of Google or Apple, so their phone is not yet in my consideration, unless someday something significant happens.