Smartphone buying decision

[mbraun]

Hi everybody,
i am looking for a business smartphone (no much interest in multimedia, except camera to "take notes"), and would like to have chinese simplified handwriting recognition + dictionary on it.It should include several devices, that are usefull to me:
-mobile phone (GSM),
-PIM,
-GPS,
-Camera,
-WLAN.
-I will NOT use windows (Mac / Linux user).

So none of the the devices on pleco.com would completely fit my need.

The one that most fits, is the Nokia E90 ... except it does not have touchscreen and pleco.

Will there be no solution to have all these functions in ONE device? Might there be a solution for the future, will say within up to one year?

Any advice will be appreciated.

 

[mikelove]

There are no phones on the market that currently meet all of those requirements; you can get everything except the WLAN using a Palm OS-based Treo smartphone with an external (Bluetooth) GPS receiver, but the only smartphones that support Pleco and have all of those features are running Windows Mobile.

We're working on an iPhone version of Pleco, though - no specific release date for it as yet, and it will likely be missing a number of features from the Palm/WM versions (like the document reader we're adding in version 2.0 on those platforms) since the iPhone's lack of a stylus / clipboard / direction pad make some things difficult to translate over to it, but assuming the rumors about built-in GPS in the next-generation iPhone are true that should give you all of those options.

Also, StyleTap are working on a Symbian version of their Palm OS emulator software; since it's not out yet we haven't been able to test it with Pleco, but in theory that would allow you to run Pleco on a touchscreen-equipped Symbian phone; the Sony Ericsson P1i for example has all of those features you mention (though again you'd need to add GPS with an external receiver). The only hangup is that there's not currently a Mac OS synchronization package available for Symbian, though Mark/Space is working on one and it looks like some people have had success syncing Symbian phones with Linux.

 

[mbraun]

Hi,
thanks for your inmediate and detailled reply. Trying to get a realistic solution, will have to do it maybe with 3 devices.

a) get a cheap device on taobao only to run Pleco - having it in the office only

b) Buying a Nokia E61i (or Imcosys if it ships a camera soon) for allways carying with me (i want to use wireless on airports etc)

C) Get a simple GPS (i only need altitude and coordinates) to have in the car.

Its a pitty, that in these modern times there is no good selection on things people actually need.

 

[renovator]

Hi:

How about the HTC Diamond which is just in the process of launching now? I have been looking at this smartphone as an upgrade from the IMATE product I am now using. It appears to me this phone has all features OP is looking for which are similar to my requirements.

Please advise.

Thanks

 

[mikelove]

mbraun stated in the original post that Windows-based phones were a no-no, so the Touch Diamond is unfortunately out. But in general it should be fine for running Pleco, we haven't done much testing with 1.0.3 on Windows Mobile 6.1 but 2.0 runs fine on it.

A lot of Mac/Linux users do carry Windows Mobile phones, though - we get emails all the time from Mac users wanting help installing Pleco on a WM phone from their Macs. By mobile OS standards Windows is actually well-designed, the interface is much less confusing than Symbian's (though still not quite achieving the zen of Palm OS), and it's also currently the easiest mobile platform to write software for which means there's a big and healthy third-party software market.

But if you're uncomfortable with supporting Microsoft I can certainly understand that, and the solution you've described makes a lot of sense, though you might want to consider an iPhone instead of an E61i since that would at least let you consolidate two of those three devices in the future (and possibly all three if the new iPhone does support full GPS).

 

[mbraun]

thanks for keeping on the discussion.

I would not mind giving some money to Microsoft. But there is the issue, that in many places of this world privacy is not respected, and so i will never entrust my personal information to an OS like Windows.

Actually i have not done much of research on this, and it is also just one of different factors for the buying decision - so i think by avoiding microsoft i might get e better deal concerning this issue.

What do you guys think?

 

[renovator]

I don't understand the privacy concern. Our company is 85% OS windows based throughout our operations in China, India and the US. We are a very, very private company. So private that we do business internationally without any banking lines of credit as our company won't even furnish financial statements to a bank due to lack of confidentiality trust. I am not aware that in all the years we have used Microsoft products that a lack of privacy has caused us any problems whatsoever.
What exactly are you afraid of?
you can always:
Manage "cookies" in Internet Explorer
Disable AutoComplete to stop Windows from displaying previously typed words in drop-down lists
Erase your Recently Opened Files list
Delete Media Player's list of recently played files
Delete Internet Explorer's extensive "History" of your visited Web sites
Delete items listed in Media Player's Media Library
Blind Carbon Copy when mailing to several people
After a while you will probably find this a nuisance to do and will stop as the advantages of just working normally in Microsoft products outweigh the "privacy problems" that I don't believe you will ever have.

For the past 30 years one of my companies has been in the mailing list business and we have an incredible amount of information on individuals, their purchasing habits, lifestyles, etc., mostly all developed long before the web even existed. Information is available, traded, and rented through so many sources today that there is no such thing as total privacy for an individual.

That is my 2 cents worth

 

[mikelove]

mbraun - fair point on privacy, but I'd hardly say Microsoft is alone in that; there's a whole new market in forensic / data retrieval solutions on iPhone, for example, and the security infrastructure in Palm OS is extremely weak / easy to hack. Symbian uses code-signing, but it's designed more as a way to protect carriers' networks than to prevent malicious applications from accessing user data - the most heavily protected APIs on a Symbian phone all seem to deal with networking (or media DRM).

Just about every mobile platform has high-powered encryption software available for it, though, you could easily get something for Windows Mobile which supported 256-bit AES and that would protect your data pretty effectively as long as the software was well-designed (didn't save / cache passwords etc) and there wasn't a keylogger or something installed on your phone that would grab the password when you entered it. Which would be a lot harder to conceal than on a regular computer, since the storage space usage would become noticeable pretty quickly.

Honestly, though, if you're really concerned about protecting sensitive data you should not be keeping it on a mobile phone, or for that matter any network-connected device; ideally you'd want something with no wireless capabilities at all, like one of the pre-Bluetooth-era Palms (a Tungsten E, for example, if you can find one with a battery that still works), but certainly not one with WiFi or a cellular antenna. Aside from the manufacturer hooks/backdoors that are built into most mobile phones, putting your data on a device that's always connected to a network makes it incredibly easy for a malicious program to steal that data, whereas on a device with no network capabilities there's no way anyone can steal your data unless they have physical access to the device. So that multi-device model you've described makes a lot of sense - a cell phone on which you don't store any personal data except perhaps for some non-sensitive contact numbers, and a non-cellphone PDA on which you can keep more sensitive data. There's also a social-engineering aspect to that approach, in that someone who sees you carrying two devices is probably going to assume that the newer / more expensive / wireless-equipped one is the one that's worth stealing/confiscating/etc.

renovator - we're pretty much all Windows-based here too and in 6+ years of selling software we've never had a significant privacy/security problem with a Windows system. And yes, an awful lot of data is publicly available anyway, unfortunately.