/ 3 June 2005

Which phone wins the battle?

What is it with people? Would you go up to complete strangers and rummage around in their handbags or wallets? Would you walk into someone else’s office and idly pick up his or her diary, flip through it and read various important entries?

If you’re a sane, polite member of society, chances are you wouldn’t. Why, then, do people feel compelled to treat others’ cellphones as an open book, and think that it’s okay to scroll through the menu, fiddle with the buttons and even (yes, I have seen this) read through the messages?

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I had been playing with a Blackberry and promised to come back to you once I had done a bit more rigorous testing on it. I have.

In the meantime, I have also had the chance to try out the Nokia 9500 — a new-generation smart phone that oozes a stylish charm and screams “Open me, open me” when you look at it. And that’s probably why I’ve encountered this invasive trait among almost everyone I’ve met.

It got to the point where I would write lewd SMSes to myself and leave them open on the phone, so that when people picked it up they got to read about what an imaginary friend would like to do to me using a bottle of chutney, a box of cherries and an overripe banana.

(If you can’t figure it out, look for me in your nearest pub and pick up my phone.)

So, apart from being attractive to snoops, do these phones have anything else going for them? As it turns out, they do.

Blackberry: All pleasure?

The Blackberry 7210 is one of two models available in South Africa at the moment. A compact little bugger, the phone offers a full QWERTY keyboard, a clickable scroll wheel to take you through various options on each screen, and what is effectively an “Escape” key that does all but get you out of embarrassing situations.

While the keyboard is cool, it does mean that you have to forget everything about thumb-typing your way through an SMS using predictive text messaging, and learn instead to two-thumb type — and to spell for yourself (yes, no more teaching your handset rude words like “chutney” and “overripe”).

The “always on” internet connection means your e-mails flow through to you wherever you are. You can appear efficient and committed as you hit the “Reply to all” button from the beach, your car or your bed, impressing your boss so much that he won’t mind the extra couple of hundred bucks that pop on your bill at the end of the month. This brings me to an answer to frequently asked question number one: yes, your e-mails are still sent to your computer and deleting them off your Blackberry doesn’t mean that they are lost forever.

The phone has a good battery life (although not as good as the Nokia) and having occasional short bursts of charge seem not to bother it too much. It charges quickly through your USB port, meaning you don’t have to scurry around in your hotel in Helsinki half-naked while looking for an adaptor (it happens, I’m told).

A bit of a novelty for me is the ability to turn off the phone without turning off the handset. This means that you can write SMSes, e-mails or notes to yourself while on a plane without worrying about bringing an Airbus down to Earth.

But the phone isn’t all pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Some elements are fiddly and annoying — like the fact that the backlight only comes on when you press either the tiny, well-hidden light button (easily missable when you’re groping to find the snooze button at 6am) or the power button (which pulls up the phone menu — not helpful when you’re groping to find the snooze button at 6am).

The menu isn’t as intuitive as that of the Nokia. You have to dig around a bit to find what you want, but you get there eventually — unless you’re looking for cool ring tones, in which case you can abandon your search. The days of having your phone render forth a burst of Happy Days Are Here Again when your bank manager calls are long gone. The Blackberry has little or no choice.

Then there’s the “spam in your pocket” issue. If you’re someone who gets 30 e-mails a day extolling the virtues of a little blue pill that’ll keep you going through the night with the extra four inches you bought from that Russian who has just been waiting for your call, then you may not want the level of intrusiveness the Blackberry can generate. Because once the flow starts, you can’t make it stop. The e-mails just keep coming and coming. It’s almost as if … never mind, you get the picture?

My biggest gripe is with the local packaging that contains no manual; you’re thrown into the deep end and just have a short guide to the different buttons and a start-up guide to help you through the maze of figuring out your new phone. What this means is that, to find keyboard shortcuts and other tips and tricks, you have to resort to Google and the online community. No bad thing, just a bit tiresome.

So what of the Nokia?

The Nokia 9500 is a great phone, there’s no two ways about it. Yes, it has traded some of the more basic features (like the ability to increase call volume while in the middle of a call) for some more elaborate ones (like the ability to tap into your nearest wireless network and ride on its coattails to surf the web or check your e-mail), but fundamentally it is a good thing.

Its design is a paradox. On the one hand, it is sleek and stylish. On the other, it is still pretty bricklike, reminiscent of the early Nokia phones (minus the little hard-wired aerial). It fits into your pocket surprisingly snugly in its closed state.

The buttons on the inside keypad are bevelled outwards and so are pretty easy to find and get used to. They’re a little too far apart to employ my rapid-fire thumb-type technique, and they’re a bit too close to properly touch-type, and getting used to them takes a while. Using the phone to type e-mails and SMSes, though, does highlight one of its major shortcomings — no predictive text messaging. This seems completely counter-intuitive. Why would Nokia choose to abandon the technology that has revolutionised — among those I know, at least — text messaging? Bizarre.

The phone is great for the mobile executive, giving you access to spreadsheet and presentation software that makes it (relatively) easy to view documents while on the move. Don’t throw away that laptop just yet, though — editing or creating presentations on the phone is rather cumbersome and not for the faint of heart. It has extensive messaging capabilities, including the ability to become a portable fax machine. (Remember faxes? They’re what we used to send before we got e-mail.)

The phone is dead easy to use and configure. Logging on to a Wi-Fi network at home or at the airport is a cinch, surfing the web a pleasure. You can connect using Wi-Fi or GPRS or by making a simple dial-up connection, each with a different set of advantages and downsides. Once you’re up and surfing, the screen and Opera browser more than easily handle most websites, even if in some cases they take a little bit longer to download than is comfortable.

The Nokia is a great business tool, but not the friendliest phone on the market. Again, you have to prioritise what you’re after from your handset, and then decide if this is the one for you.

So which phone wins the battle? Would I be really annoying if I declined to commit to one or the other? Too bad — that’s the route I’m going to go.

I love my Blackberry, it has become my phone of choice and the one everyone else has to beat. I’m looking forward to a few upgrades and enhancements, but for now it works for me.

I’m not writing the Nokia off, though. It is rapidly becoming every executive’s latest trinket and is a powerhouse in your pocket. Should you need one, that is. And if you’re just trading dirty e-mails about chutney, then using the Nokia is just showing off. It keeps the nosy bastards away, though.