Forum: General Topics

I hope I'm not abusing the forum by posting this question here.

I'm considering getting a new phone, and since TMJ compatibility is my primary requirement, I thought I'd ask your opinions.

Here are my expectations:
1. * TMJ is a must of course *
2. good battery life
3. small size/weight
4. decent display size/resolution would be a plus

I know that the last three may contradict each other.

What should I be looking at ?

Hi Guys,

Chris, I agree about touchscreens - although I'm fairly pleased with the touchscreen capabilities in TMJ, I do find on the Nokia 5800 that the lack of precision with the touchscreen makes it difficult to do anything quickly! With a normal phone like my W910 its easy to use TMJ one-handed whilst walking along, but the Nokia is harder to operate unless standing still and using two hands!

Shchenka, are you still using a Nokia N95? In many ways this may already be one of the best phones for TMJ, though I must admit I'm not too keen on the Nokia interface (I prefer Sony Ericsson), and I've heard the battery life isn't too good.

As far as manufacturers go, my TMJ testing is largely limited to Nokia, Sony Ericsson and BlackBerry, so I'd definitely recommend sticking with one of these is possible.

Have you considered a BlackBerry - this may depend on whether you have any need for the other features that they offer (eg email in particular)? I find my 8900 to be very stable and reliable, with pretty good battery life and a fantastic screen (its not massive, but works well in sunlight and has a very high resolution - 480x360). On the downside its a little larger than a 'standard' phone, the GPS is average (though I use a bluetooth one anyhow), doesn't have 3G, and the graphics seem a bit slower than my other phones (eg the 3D vector maps on the Nav screen [5] can be a little sluggish in very detailed areas like central London). Older BlackBerrys are even slower, so definitely don't go for anything other than the 8520, 8900 or 9000+ series. The new Bold 9700 series is probably best!

My initial reason for switching from Sony Ericsson to BlackBerry was to extend TMJ support on BlackBerrys, but otherwise I would have stuck with Sony Ericsson. Like Chris with his W610, I still like using my W910 - being a slider phone like the N95 you do get a biggish screen in a fairly compact phone. A couple of friends have now got the W995, which might be worth looking into. Spec-wise its very similar to the N95 (ie Slider phone, GPS, WiFi, good camera, etc), though being newer it may be slightly more powerful, and possibly a little more stable running TMJ. One further benefit with Sony Ericssons (and also BlackBerrys) is that they allow full 'un-prompted' access to the memory card, so the raster and vector map cache can be stored on this (Menu/Settings/Debug/Set Map Cache Folder), allowing a virtually unlimited cache size.

Hope that helps - good luck!

Cheers,
Stephen

Actually I've not found the 5800 screen to be too good in bright sunlight - its 640x360 resolution is great indoors but is much worse than the BlackBerry outside. The never-ending fingerprints on the touchscreen don't help either - I'm continually having to wipe it clean!

The 5230 does look good value, although personally I'd miss the wifi on the 5800. I've got it on Vodafone Pay-As-You-Go so any internet access (including very briefly using the Assisted GPS) instantly costs 50p a day, so testing using the wifi as home is very useful. Annoyingly the Assisted GPS can't use Wifi, but otherwise I've found it reasonably good (probably better than the BB8900), but still nowhere near as good as an external bluetooth device.

My own choice would be the SE C903. Its screen is 'only' 320x240, but thats perfectly fine for TMJ - in fact the text on the online raster map tiles on the hi-res BB8900 and 5800 is almost too small to read anyhow!

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Stephen

Cheers Stephen.

P.S. My experiences from running the N95 (yes, still using it but I think it's close to 3 years now)
Overall a very decent phone but:
1. poor battery (I tend to carry 2-3 spare batteries on me)
2. with over 2 cm, the case is on the thick side (and I do care, carrying it in my pocket)
3. builtin gps flakey (I use BT all the time)
4. no HSDPA (would eat more battery, I know)
5. and not stable with TMJ :( (killig TMJ or restarting itself despite the recent firmware)

Surprisingly, the available similarly feature-packed SE or Nokia phones tend to be larger not smaller after 3 years of technology development, hence I start looking towards Samsungs.

As for the blackberries, well, I usually carry my notebook in my backpack anyway :)

Slightly off the topic, regarding maemo, maybe the java stack could be supported by the Jalimo ( http://www.jalimo.org/ ) on Linux mobile devices. Not the Android, though, which uses its proprietary vm.

Yes, I stumbled across that Jalimo site too the other day, though was confused as to whether it was a J2ME or full J2SE platform.

In principle a Java SE version shouldn't be *too* difficult to create from the existing J2ME codebase since this is essentially a subset of J2SE as it is. I'd imagine the main complications would be with the connection-handling APIs (ie Web connections, Internal GPS, Bluetooth, File system etc), so it'd depend which of these have standardised J2SE versions. Somehow I suspect that the various manufacturers would each have different implementations, which could make a cross-platform version difficult! It would certainly be nice to have access to the full J2SE Graphics system - the J2ME is rather basic to say the least!

Cheers,
Stephen