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Having just ditched my trial Nokia communicator (OK PDA but a crap phone) I'm interested in knowing how the blackberry compares to the Treo .
Anyone tried them?

Are either any use.
alnapp

Its a better phone (if a little big) because of the PDA functions, and the PDA is superb.

And its actually available in the US as the 9290. Nokia are very smooth also can be used as a terminal emulator to plug into a switch or firewall via the RS232 cable it comes with.

And as for the talking thing.... the Nokia has a full and very good speaker phone, so its open on my desk right now. You can do everything while on a call.

- 16MB of RAM is mighty good for a PalmOS PDA without an MP3 player built in. I have a Sony CLIE with 8mb of RAM and an 8 mb memory stick and it's easy to keep memory available with very minimal memory management (ie delete the programs you don't use). No PalmOS devices until recently (ie September) had more than 8mb of RAM onboard.

- The Treo 180 is the "base" unit. The color 270 will hopefully have some kind of expansion. It costs $200 more than the mono unit and color PDA's generally only cost $50-$100 more than their comparable monochrome devices (ie, Palm's color m505 is $70 more than their mono m500; Handspring's Prism is $100 more than their mono Neo, even though the Prism has a rechargable battery). The $200 increase must be coming from someplace other than just the screen: Hopefully hi-res and a SD or CF slot will be included. Handspring's FAQ indicates they won't have a SpringBoard Treo anytime soon... which is a shame, since they make damn nice MP3 player Springboards (with lots of additional memory to boot).

- GSM isn't THAT bad in the US. Maybe it's just because I live on the west coast, where GSM (Cingular, Voicestream, AT&T) seems to be more popular than the alternatives (Sprint, Verizon). And, according to Handspring, a CDMA (and/or other network) version of the Treo is on its way.

- The battery life ain't that bad... the Treo has 2.5 hours of talk time or over 60 hours of standby time [handspring.com]... pretty much the same as my Nokia [nokia.com]. Maybe the color Treo will have a better battery, since color screens eat up batteries faster.

- By the way, for the dummies posting about how "big" the Treo is... it ain't that big. My tiny Nokia phone is 4.3" tall, 1.9" wide, and 4.2 oz. The Treo is 4.3" tall, 2.7" wide, and 5.4 oz. It'll still easily fit in my pocket!

But.. For all-in-one - Nokia should be IT.

I'm a total sucker for shiny sliding things with buttons (I own both of these: 8860 and 8890), and this certainly fits the bill - I want one - but I really have no clue - I mean I have a handspring Visor and I rarely use it - the screen is just too damn small to do much with aside from keep numbers and stuff...

but as long as they keep making shiny things, I'll keep buying them.

now off to get some tin foil.... oooooo

I'm a total sucker for shiny sliding things with buttons (I own both of these: 8860 and 8890), and this certainly fits the bill - I want one - but I really have no clue - I mean I have a handspring Visor and I rarely use it - the screen is just too damn small to do much with aside from keep numbers and stuff...

but as long as they keep making shiny things, I'll keep buying them.

now off to get some tin foil.... oooooo

Further, many newer high-end phones (e.g., the Nokia 8290) have infrared capability. I just have to put my 8290 near my computer's infrared port, put the phone in infrared mode, and my computer instantly recognizes it. Nokia's PC Suite software (and many third party programs) lets you copy entries to and from your phone's address book.

Yes, it's about time indeed.

For those of us using a more sane phone, that's 4817022688084631 (including a single-quote, and it's 10 keypresses cheaper!). (In actual fact, that string will probably work with any T9-enabled phone.)

--

it had better be long enough to reach from your mouth to your ear.

If it's not big enough to have at least a 3x4 grid of spots you press reliably, you're not going to have much fun dialing it (let alone putting in other information).

I would recommend a nokia 8290 as the cell phone of choice. At least where i live, you can get this phone if you are using voicestream cell phone services. The 8290 has a built in IR port which can save you some money. Rather than hooking up a pc card and plugging a cord from the laptop to the cell phone, you can place a laptop next to the cell phone and it will transmit data.(Almost every older apple powerbook has a IR port built in.) This phone is also very nifty as it is nice and small. Be sure to check with the company that you are getting the phone through that it's the 8290, not the 8260 which lacks the IR port.

I would recommend a nokia 8290 as the cell phone of choice. At least where i live, you can get this phone if you are using voicestream cell phone services. The 8290 has a built in IR port which can save you some money. Rather than hooking up a pc card and plugging a cord from the laptop to the cell phone, you can place a laptop next to the cell phone and it will transmit data.(Almost every older apple powerbook has a IR port built in.) This phone is also very nifty as it is nice and small. Be sure to check with the company that you are getting the phone through that it's the 8290, not the 8260 which lacks the IR port.

I would recommend a nokia 8290 as the cell phone of choice. At least where i live, you can get this phone if you are using voicestream cell phone services. The 8290 has a built in IR port which can save you some money. Rather than hooking up a pc card and plugging a cord from the laptop to the cell phone, you can place a laptop next to the cell phone and it will transmit data.(Almost every older apple powerbook has a IR port built in.) This phone is also very nifty as it is nice and small. Be sure to check with the company that you are getting the phone through that it's the 8290, not the 8260 which lacks the IR port.

I would recommend a nokia 8290 as the cell phone of choice. At least where i live, you can get this phone if you are using voicestream cell phone services. The 8290 has a built in IR port which can save you some money. Rather than hooking up a pc card and plugging a cord from the laptop to the cell phone, you can place a laptop next to the cell phone and it will transmit data.(Almost every older apple powerbook has a IR port built in.) This phone is also very nifty as it is nice and small. Be sure to check with the company that you are getting the phone through that it's the 8290, not the 8260 which lacks the IR port.

Okay, well, good thing you said the 6160*M*, otherwise I would have whap'ed you silly... note to others... the standard xx60's typically arn't data capable... that is... the 5160 and the 6160 are NOT data capable, given, there may be some way to hack them as convential phone to conventional modem, BUT no cable exists to do this that I am aware of. Anyways, luckily the 6160m and the 6160i are data capable... and so is the 7160... which I just recently got. Now, I don't have a laptop or a PDA so I havent tried this yet myself, however, I have investigated the possibility thoroughly -- thats why I bought the 7160, I wanted to be ready for future use.
I checked the Nokia site for the 6160m and I did not see anything regarding PC connectivity other than something simply stating these models were capable of this. With the 7160, however, it came with a PC Connectivity guide in addition to the details that are in the standard user guide for the phone. I suggest you start by checking this out, it may be similar -- however, the guide says it is in reference to Palm OS 3.3 -- I dont know how different things are between 3.1 and 3.3. You can see the manual at http://www.nokiausa.com/fonesync/7160PCguide.pdf
Basically it comes down to configuring the Visor/Palm for the Nokia as a standard modem, and making sure you are using that configuration for your connection. Of course it also means using the DLR-3 or DLR-3P cable (Nokia 51xx/61xx/71xx to 9 pin serial) to an appropriately wired/configured cable/adapter. From what you said, it sounds like you (or your Visor) is still trying to use the configuration for the Circom modem to establish the connection, which isn't what you want to do since you're using the Nokia as the modem. If doing what I said above doesn't fix it, maybe try to remove the Circom modem so that it's not confused, if you don't already have to for the cable connection.
If none of this works I suggest trying at least one of the following: 1. Contact the Store where you got your phone/service or the service provider directly 2. Contact Handspring or surf around their website to see if you can pick up any tips 3. Contact Nokia -- you can find their tech support info somewhere on the website... and they are very good as is the website... or, at very least they try... I called them before I even got my phone. 4. Surf around the Palm website, maybe you can pick up some tips, ideas, or maybe even software 5. Try newsgroups, to start with I might suggest alt.cellular.nokia
Or, you could always try sending me a visor or palm, and I'll try to figure out your problem in more depth.... ;) No, actually seriously... if you appreciated this... wait... hmm.... aww, gee, I just really want to be able to hook up my phone to a PDA or old laptop to do exactly what you are talking about.. 8(
And to the guy who suggested SoftGSM... sounds like an interesting idea... except the Nokia xx60's are TDMA phones, not GSM. I believe most/all (Nokia) GSM phones are data-capable... or at least the network is inherently, although like you say... apparently there is a need for this software in some cases if you dont have the hardware... BTW, the Nokia GSM phones are the xx90's.. and there might be others, but in the 51xx, 61xx, 71xx families these are the ones I know of.

I used a SkyTel pager for a few years. The technology was fine, but the customer service sucked so hard that you could just call their 800 number, put the phone handset in a bell jar, and create a laboratory-grade vacuum in under a minute. I may have received a bill that was correct once, but if so, it was by accident.

I eventually just got a PCS cellphone, and pretty much ignore the cellphone part. It's cheaper and it seems to work just as well.

I also hear good things about the blackberry but I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet.

I just suffered through this and did all the research. My specs started with the phone. I felt that if I was to have this phone with me 24x7, it had better be easy to live with. In reading about the different phones, I decided that I like the Nokia 8290 & 8260. The 8290 is a bit more feature rich (more colors, IR data/fax port, config and backup computer program, voice dialing), but both of them had the important 2-way text & email messaging (late-night pages are better than phone calls IMHO), reminder features, etc. The most imporant feature is that you have all of the above in an incredibly small size. It's just a bit bigger than a pager. It has great power management that keeps it alive for quite a while. The antena is built in, thus, I just carry it around in my pocket instead of having something permanently attached to my hip or something poking me in the wrong place; it's very easy to live with. I prefered the 8290 but decided on the 8260 because it featured tri-mode (analog 800, digitial TDMA 800/1900), which I suspected would give me better coverage when traveling. Most of the 8290's super cool features come from being a GSM phone. GSM is inherintly digitial and widely used in europe, however, it's not going to be installed where I travel.

Once you decided on a phone, you then see that you have a much eaiser time finding a service provider. I found shopping for this service (and phones) highly irritating. There doesn't seem to be a single store that carries more than one voice provider. This made comparison shopping highly difficult. Having just been layed off, I learned the problem of using your work cell phone for a contact. I decided I would buy the phone, but the new company pays the monthly usage. I wanted to be very conservative with the phone price, and the phones I was looking at are expensive. Being in southern california, my choices were PacBell (8290) or AT&T (8260). I may have been able to order the phone and set it up to use sprint or verizon, but either way, I wouldn't get any nifty discounts on the phone upon signing up. I decided on At&t, because I was getting a phone for my wife at the same time, and I n the needed the most discounts.

There are many hidden fees and plans. First, they want you to stay local to their antennas (so to speak). Everytime you connect using some other network, they don't make money. Because of this, they tend to offer different sorts of plans: local, regional, national, international. All of the plans give you so many minutes to start with (and the more you spend/month, the better the deals). The local is ment to be more affordable. The big money maker for them is the hidden fees. When you aren't using the local network, they call it "roaming". When you "roam" they tend to add another $.35 to your per minute charge. In addition, if you roam out of your state, they'll tack on another $.60 per minute. Oh, and if that call you're making is long distance call, they'll add $.15. If you get the cheap plan, be careful. The regional plan takes away the first roaming charge. The national plans tend to take away all the roaming charges and usally throw in long distance, but their regular per minute charges will be sightly higher (expect a minimum of $.35/min). I also checked up on pre-paid. To summarize, per-paid sucks -- it's only good if you're of horrible credit or want to be anonymous. I decided on the cheapest local plan for my wife and the "digitial one rate" national plan for my self (since work is footing that bill).

Thus, it comes down to a cheap but quality phone (because of mail-in rebates), and $60/month that my work will pay. Don't forget to search for hidden fees, like a cancelation fee or call forwarding fee. Watch out for full minute rounding. Full-minute rounding is where if you make a call lasting a minute and one second, it's billed as two minutes. Very evil, unethicial practice, that every provider except nextel uses (I actually like nextel quite a bit, but their cheapest account was unafforable for me). Also, try and go with someone like At&t that will give you a guarantee. Here's a summary of what I spent...

Nokia 8260 [grey] $200, TDMA/analog Network Activiation $ 25 Digial One Rate $ 60/month 450 minutes / month included additional minutes @ $.35/min long distance is an additional charge of $.0/min regional roaming, additional $.0/min national roaming, additional $.0/min (the ultimate domestic call would be $.35/min) 1 year term (commitment), $120/cancellation upgrade without pentalties full minute rounding It would be nice of them to through in a satisfation guarentee Features (free, but you have to ask for them): Call Forwarding $ 0 (need to find out per min charge) 3-way calling $ 0 Voicemail $ 0 2-way text messaging $ 0 Discounts: mail-in rebate for nokia 8260 purchase -$50 mail-in rebate for sign-up > $28 -$75 mail-in rebate of on-line sign-up -$50 see... http://www.attws.com/general/offers/clickfordetail s.shtml#50rebate when I called, they said they could match it no shipping or handling no tax no other hidden fees

Good Luck!!!

I just suffered through this and did all the research. My specs started with the phone. I felt that if I was to have this phone with me 24x7, it had better be easy to live with. In reading about the different phones, I decided that I like the Nokia 8290 & 8260. The 8290 is a bit more feature rich (more colors, IR data/fax port, config and backup computer program, voice dialing), but both of them had the important 2-way text & email messaging (late-night pages are better than phone calls IMHO), reminder features, etc. The most imporant feature is that you have all of the above in an incredibly small size. It's just a bit bigger than a pager. It has great power management that keeps it alive for quite a while. The antena is built in, thus, I just carry it around in my pocket instead of having something permanently attached to my hip or something poking me in the wrong place; it's very easy to live with. I prefered the 8290 but decided on the 8260 because it featured tri-mode (analog 800, digitial TDMA 800/1900), which I suspected would give me better coverage when traveling. Most of the 8290's super cool features come from being a GSM phone. GSM is inherintly digitial and widely used in europe, however, it's not going to be installed where I travel.

Once you decided on a phone, you then see that you have a much eaiser time finding a service provider. I found shopping for this service (and phones) highly irritating. There doesn't seem to be a single store that carries more than one voice provider. This made comparison shopping highly difficult. Having just been layed off, I learned the problem of using your work cell phone for a contact. I decided I would buy the phone, but the new company pays the monthly usage. I wanted to be very conservative with the phone price, and the phones I was looking at are expensive. Being in southern california, my choices were PacBell (8290) or AT&T (8260). I may have been able to order the phone and set it up to use sprint or verizon, but either way, I wouldn't get any nifty discounts on the phone upon signing up. I decided on At&t, because I was getting a phone for my wife at the same time, and I n the needed the most discounts.

There are many hidden fees and plans. First, they want you to stay local to their antennas (so to speak). Everytime you connect using some other network, they don't make money. Because of this, they tend to offer different sorts of plans: local, regional, national, international. All of the plans give you so many minutes to start with (and the more you spend/month, the better the deals). The local is ment to be more affordable. The big money maker for them is the hidden fees. When you aren't using the local network, they call it "roaming". When you "roam" they tend to add another $.35 to your per minute charge. In addition, if you roam out of your state, they'll tack on another $.60 per minute. Oh, and if that call you're making is long distance call, they'll add $.15. If you get the cheap plan, be careful. The regional plan takes away the first roaming charge. The national plans tend to take away all the roaming charges and usally throw in long distance, but their regular per minute charges will be sightly higher (expect a minimum of $.35/min). I also checked up on pre-paid. To summarize, per-paid sucks -- it's only good if you're of horrible credit or want to be anonymous. I decided on the cheapest local plan for my wife and the "digitial one rate" national plan for my self (since work is footing that bill).

Thus, it comes down to a cheap but quality phone (because of mail-in rebates), and $60/month that my work will pay. Don't forget to search for hidden fees, like a cancelation fee or call forwarding fee. Watch out for full minute rounding. Full-minute rounding is where if you make a call lasting a minute and one second, it's billed as two minutes. Very evil, unethicial practice, that every provider except nextel uses (I actually like nextel quite a bit, but their cheapest account was unafforable for me). Also, try and go with someone like At&t that will give you a guarantee. Here's a summary of what I spent...

Nokia 8260 [grey] $200, TDMA/analog Network Activiation $ 25 Digial One Rate $ 60/month 450 minutes / month included additional minutes @ $.35/min long distance is an additional charge of $.0/min regional roaming, additional $.0/min national roaming, additional $.0/min (the ultimate domestic call would be $.35/min) 1 year term (commitment), $120/cancellation upgrade without pentalties full minute rounding It would be nice of them to through in a satisfation guarentee Features (free, but you have to ask for them): Call Forwarding $ 0 (need to find out per min charge) 3-way calling $ 0 Voicemail $ 0 2-way text messaging $ 0 Discounts: mail-in rebate for nokia 8260 purchase -$50 mail-in rebate for sign-up > $28 -$75 mail-in rebate of on-line sign-up -$50 see... http://www.attws.com/general/offers/clickfordetail s.shtml#50rebate when I called, they said they could match it no shipping or handling no tax no other hidden fees

Good Luck!!!

We can credit W3C for being forward-looking, but I expect that CSSMP will go the way of WAP.

Perhaps not. I believe the point of this newly crafted subset of CSS2 is to provide a stable reference for useful functions that ought to be in mobile devices (meaning ultra-portable devices with limited display capabilities, and not meaning laptops which might have better display capabilities than many quite old desktop computer layouts with small VGA monitors which are still in use throughout the world).

This area is of keen interest to me, and after the long agony with simple HTML 3.2/4.0[1]+ and with CSS1 through the still not-quite-totally-there CSS2, any way to avoid any more standards wrangling will come as a great relief to those of us who have to actually do this stuff for a living. I'd imagine that XSLT 1.0+ engines will do much of the actual work, and it really helps to be able to more or less reuse all that existing work with a near-exact subset of CSS2.

Anyways, I'm back (in a few minutes, after a little more procrastination) to figuring out how to most efficiently split up parts of (simple for now) XML documents for later Java/Python XML/XSLT processing, while allowing simpler, more immediate PHP 4.0+ XML processing. Argh ....

Palm/Pocket PC - Capabilities & Reality. Rebuttal from a CasioE100 Owner:

a) Don't compare processors... the Palm does everything quickly and efficiently with 16mhz. The Pocket PCs are 133mhz+....never intended to be an MP3 player.

I have run 'tests' with a coworker who runs a PalmIII/V, we did blanket searches on a 'word' contained in our PIM databases. I retrieved my data faster on every attempt, regardless of 'type'. My device has 16 megs (8RAM/8ROM) with about 5-6MB of PIM data. Admittedly NOT scientific, but it was enough to convince the both of us.

b) Palm Multi-platform friendly. The Pocket PC is all about Windows...iPaq can run linux, and Slashdot runs stories about it regularly).

I have CF Ethernet. To send files back/forth I simply use FTP/SMTP. The Pocket PC does not sync with any Non-Windows PC PIM Software (that I am aware of). I can move files to the CasioE100 without any trouble from _ANY_ TCP/IP capable box.

c) The Pocket PC has painfully little application support. VNC? SSH? Telnet?....generally more expensive than Palm.

VNC
Telnet
SSH

There is plenty of software available. More than I can even try.

d) No wireless support yet for Pocket PC...To me at least, there's no point getting a media rich Palm device if I can't use it to access the net.
CF Modem that I use togetherwith my phone

e) Cost, Cost, Cost. You can get Palms for as little as $149 ... NEW. Lower costs mean more accessibility to the geeks that write the code. :)

You might have me on this one.

CasioE100: $600
CF Modem: $69 (MS Rebate deal)
CF Ethernet: $180
2 x 96MB CFRAM: $300 ea.
Nokia Cell Phone: $200 (or so)
Having the most technically capable, multimedia, wireless, portable Palm/Pocket (whatever) PC/PIM: Priceless.

NOTE: I bought the device based on what it _CAN_ do by leveraging the OUTSTANDING hardware in a Palm/Pocket PC (at its time 10mos.) ago. I am not a great lover of M$, but their still is no comparing this device to _ANY_ Palm product. Please be realistic and leave the Anti-M$ zealotry out of your analysis.

Nokia USA does sell an older bulkier & heavier GSM 1900 model, the 9000il

Several of my friends and family use a Communicator and it really is an ideal device. I have no idea why Nokia doesn't market it more aggressively in the US. It's really convenient to have fax + phone + Internet completely integrated. I use in to make a PPP connection to my Linux box, login with the builtin telnet client and connect to my other machines via ssh.

Great quality, good features, and usually very inexpensive if you buy it with a service contract. Not to mention that Nokia phones were the phones used in The Matrix

I highly recomend Nokia phones. Check out the 6100 series if you live in a digital area. www.nokiausa.com

• small flip phone (fits in my pants pocket)
• Vibrating ring. (and silent mode)
• Caller id.
• 99 entry phone book.
• No games.
• No internet browser, email, etc.

1. Phones big screens, dedicated toward bringing the web to your hand. Check out the Nokia 7100 series.
2. Watch for more advanced web services to come about. Services like maps, phone directories, and entertainment guides are rapidly moving toward deployment for such services.
3. Bell Atlantic Mobile will soon be offering unlimited use for a monthly fee. This is what will truly get the ball rolling. Cellular phones were executives' toys until the companies started offering free off-peak time, allowing ordinary people to benefit from them. Now cellular phones are everywhere.
4. Phones will get more advanced. Watch for phones with GPS built into them to come out in a year or two.
5. Systems like the Palm VII will become a lot more commonplace, with cellular modems built right into them.

(All prices in USD)

Garmin GPS III Plus receiver (between 350 and 500, depending on where you buy).

Any DVD - no more than $25.

Toshiba TW65X81 or DW65X81 television to watch above dvd's - 4999 for TW, 5800 for DW.

Nokia 8860 - around 800-900

New Car - expensive

Another New Car - expensive

Luxury Car - more expensive

In lieu of computer, please send the TV. I have enough computers.

-m

Look at http://csep10.phys.utk. edu/astr162/lect/light/spectrum.html There is a chart showing the divisions of types of radiation (can anyone suggest a better one?). If you examine the user's manual for the Nokia 6000 series phones (big PDF file), you see that this cell phone uses 1.8x10^3-2.0x10^3MHz.

If you look at the above mentioned chart, you will see that these frequencies fall very low (high?) on the radio spectrum. You will also note that at these frequencies, the total energy is also very low. Also, keep this in mind, the natural frequency of water is in the Microwave spectrum, thus this is bad for you. Above the visible spectrum, the energies get pretty high: this is bad for you too.

In order to prove problems with cell phones, you have to convince people that listening to your radio (not even listening but just being in an area with a radio station), TV, cordless phones, and you name it, is not dangerous for you.

If anyone more knowledgable than can expound on this please do.

~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"