What’s on a Blogger’s Phone?

Zach from Symbian in Motion tagged me in the latest meme, “What’s on a Blogger’s Phone?” Zach is curious as to how I am adjusting (and perhaps compensating) for the iPhone’s lack of true applications based on what I run on the N95.My standard set of apps on S60 has not changed in quite a while…

  • Jaiku Mobile – I love the beta… and I am sure you will as well when it’s finally released to the greater public. The beta lets you see status for your contacts, update your location, post and reply. Essentially all the things you’d expect and miss in the release version.
  • Gmail Mobile – right softkey. Just wish it would do attachment sending and respect my preferred identity when sending mail.
  • Google Maps Mobile
  • Epocware has been a standard part of what I use. Their suite of Handy apps are well designed and look great too. My favorites are HandyWeather, HandyClock and HandyTaskman.
  • I really like Shozu, though it’s been a problem for me on the N95. The official release is out and seems to work fine, but people are still reporting incompatibilities. To me this biggest drawback is only being able to upload a 10MB video file which is (not so) surprisingly small on the N95.
  • On the WiFi capable devices I tend to install either Gizmo or TruPhone. I’ve got them both plugged into GrandCentral to simplify things, though honestly VOIP is more because I can, than because I need. 99.9% of my calls happen on the cellular network when I am mobile.

 That’s pretty much my standard set of apps to install. I use the Camera a lot to take video and still shots, review in Gallery and also find myself using the Calendar, Browser and Nokia Maps a fair bit though all of these are standard on the device. The iPhone is a new beast. No way to install anything and only Safari as a path to run something more robust. So far this has not really been that much of an issue for me, though I’d really like to get at least a chat client going. The mobile web apps I’ve been trying work nicely but have no notification sounds, so you have to constantly check to see if something is new. 

  • m.jaiku.com is my door into Jaiku on the iPhone and it works really well on EDGE or WiFi.
  • Unfortunately there is no way to get the Gmail mobile app running on the iPhone… without Java and a way to install, you need to choose either the web UI or POP download. I hate POP, but it’s the path I’ve chosen. I’ve yet to set Gmail to archive what gets popped and use the iPhone to review, desktop to manage. I like the looks of the iPhone email application, but wish there were some more advanced settings to choose an account when sending a message or perhaps adjust the reply to field at the very least. Once we have file system access I’d expect the mail client to change so attachment support for something other than mailing a picture (only from within the Photos app).
  • Google Maps is awesome! I use that frequently – in fact instead of sending an SMS To Google as I’ve done many times, I simply search and then either bookmark or add the result to my address book. This is very cool!
  • Weather and Clock are easily handled by the default app widgets. I’d love to have more than one countdown timer and would apprciate some louder sounds for alarms, but these work very well regardless. There’s currently no need to view my memory utilization or launch apps more quickly on the iPhone since there are no low memory issues and launching is two-clicks.
  • To “upload” to Flickr, I just email the pictures, but the iPhone strips EXIF data (if it even captures it in the first place) and scales pictures to 640×480 which is smaller than the original. I find unless I want to do a quick image blog post I’m uploading to Flickr less via mobile. I do sync my images back to Aperture which is great and works out of the box. No need to install the Nokia Media Transfer tool, which I did not mention above, but is required to sync / download images from your Nokia to your Mac.
  • Photos is a very impressive application and my 3yr old figured it out within moments. I have well over 700 images synced from Aperture and she loves to flick through them – as do I actually. The display is phenomenal and really shows off your pics!
  • iPod – I’ve got podcasts and a few albums loaded and find I use this more than I have ever on a mobile phone though perhaps an obvious outcome as an iPod syncs so easily with iTunes. I’ve been using Pzizz to generate some sleep patterns for the past week as well and have been enjoying.
  • From within Safari… I’ve been checking out AppMarks, Leaflets, and Digg and Mowser iFeeds to find good stuff to use and read. I also like the NYT and BBC River of news sites to see the latest headlines, though at least in the past 24 hours, the news reading on Leaflets is more appealing. I’ve tried the chat apps – BeeJive, FlickIM which are both nice. BeeJive lets you do more than AIM, while FlickIM has a way to track down links to either YouTube or movie trailers with a /youtube [movie name] or /movie [movie trailer] in a message. This feature is super cool actually and something I think others will likely copy.

 

On all my devices I tend to spend a good amount of time on Google Reader mobile and have bookmarks for certain tag folders so I can quickly drill down on topics of interest. I’d like to hear what Bryan Sawler is up to on his mobiles… He’s a mobile developer and I know has both an iPhone and a Nokia or two handy.

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