This article was originally published in March 2005 on Mobile Africa

The need for Nigeria to bridge the digital divide and improve internet penetration has been discussed for years. The need is immense and it looks like our leaders are yet to really identify any clear means of doing so.

My opinion is that the coming of GSM mobile technology to our shores about 3 years ago opened up a new vista that can help bridge that chasm significantly and speedily.

The American Model
Mobile data is not a big hit in the US because most business premises and homes are already wired or connected wirelessly.

The Japanese Model
The Japanese model is definitely something we can learn a few lessons from. The Japanese – adults or kids – are probably the most connected set of people on this planet. And this is because of data via mobile phones. As a matter of fact, the Japanese mobile industry is driven not so much by voice traffic as by data on CDMA, i-Mode and 3G platforms especially. People access their mails, make online payments and access a wide range of information via mobile phone data services.

Which Way Nigeria?
Here in Nigeria, our environment and present circumstances are just right for mobile data to be a big hit. Very few homes around the country have any form of Internet access. Even scarier is the fact that most business offices have no form of internet access as well.

The cost of acquiring a PC and subscribing for internet access alone is so unthinkable for the vast majority of people and businesses that it is clear that is not the way to go if we are serious about catching up with the rest of the world in cyberspace. Add to that the pathetic fact that one would also need to purchase and maintain a power generating set to be able to put one’s PC and internet connection to any productive use, and that case is lost.

Enter GSM Data
The average mobile phone on the market is either CSD-enabled or GPRS-enabled or both. Every network on ground in the country provides at least WAP access, and in other cases full internet access. In my opinion, most people with a mobile phone are walking around with the world in their pockets. All they need do is harness the potentials of their devices and network services.

Networks & Pricing
It is clear that the mobile networks need to work out subsidized tariffs for data calls (in the case of CSD) and connections (for GPRS). This will encourage the average Joe to put those data facilities to regular use.

Current trends show that at least 2 networks in Nigeria are driving GPRS-based data to be taken up my a huge chunk of their subscribers. A 3rd network appears to intend to limit GPRS services to “premium” customers, an action that will be tantamount to shooting themselves in the foot, if I may say so.

Possiblities
It is amazing what information is available on such a simple basic platform as WAP. Subscribers can do Google and Yahoo! searches, access and respond to mails, check currency exchange rates, stocks quotes, update themselves on news from around the world, and join worldwide discussion forums. In particular, these forums are veritable learning centres where we can tap into free and useful information that drive today’s world. As a network administrator, I even found a WAP site from which I could ping my clients’ hosting accounts to ensure they are running fine, and a couple of others from which I can run domain name searches! Even WAP is no longer as basic as it used to be.

With the advent of full websites that can now be accessed via WAP, the limits on WAP are fast fading (visit www.mobilitynigeria.com on your WAP 2.0/XHTML mobile phone to comprehend this). Of course, there are more and more phones being released with full Web browsers, further expanding the horizons of mobile data.

Conclusion
It is my submission that our country needs to take a serious look at how we can harness the power of mobile data in moving forward. In particular there is an urgent need for mass enlightenment of our population in this matter. Maybe, just maybe then we will truly be using what we have to get what we want.

For those who are in need of reliable internet services and mobility is a factor, WiMax services are currently available in Lagos, Abuja and Port-Harcourt.

WiMax is a non-line of sight standard for delivering broadband internet to end users. Usually, all that the subscriber needs is a plug-and-play modem, and he can connect to the internet within coverage area.

ISPs in Nigeria offering WiMax at the moment include among others: IPNX (iWireless), DirectOnPC (Unwired), and Swift.

Nokia has released an updated video of its upcoming S60 Touch user interface. There’s no doubt that this was inspired by the much loved, much-hated iPhone. There’s a lot of cool, sleek stuff in there. Check out the video:

I have been an advocate of convergence for years, and I have been very vocal about it. When I say “convergence” I mean the convergence of mobile voice and data. In layman’s terms, that’s having your voice, SMS, and internet needs met on one single mobile line.

I tried it out for several years, and I got my fingers burnt.

Badly.

As those around me know, data takes precedence over voice for me. I do more online than I could ever do with voice or with SMS. That would have been no problem, except for the fact that every now and then data services on one network or the other would simply go absent without leave. Then I would have to switch to another line (and network) to have access to internet on the move.

As such, most people around me keep wondering why they cannot reach me on the line they have. This cycle has gone on for about three years now – from GloMobile to Celtel, and now MTN. Just when people were ready to certify me deranged, I found the solution to my protracted problem – I gave up on convergence!

I simply decided that it was in the best interest of my stability and sanity to separate my voice/SMS needs from my mobile data needs. So, at the moment, I have mobile data via MTN GPRS/3G and voice/SMS via Celtel. Regardless of how MTN packet data behaves, my voice line will stay the same from now. My data line can change and somersault all it wants, and go round from MTN to Reltel to Visafone or no-phone. My family and friends will at least relax, knowing that I have not gone off the deep end.

Sigh.

Introduction
This is my first CDMA smartphone. This is my first Palm OS smartphone. This is also my first touchscreen device in how many years. I have had it, used it and tormented it for two weeks now, under the extreme usage patterns all smartphones that God deems fit to send my way are subjected to. Two weeks is good enough, and I hereby present my detailed review of the Palm-powered Treo 700p.

In the course of this review, I will often make reference to the Nokia E61i, comparing features of the Treo 700p with its own features. Why? In my two weeks of using the Treo, I keep subconsciously comparing it with the E61/E61i in many ways. Can you blame me? I used the E61 for over a year, and have used its sibling the E61i for a couple of months as well. It is just inevitable that comparisons show up.

Treo 700p: A Quick Checklist

1. EVDO with backward compatibility with CDMA 1x.
2. Palm OS Garnet 5.4.9
3. 1.3 megapixel camera still and video capture.
4. QWERTY keyboard
5. Bluetooth, Infrared, and USB connectivity
6. Blazer Web browser and Email client support
7. 62mb shared memory + SD slot (up to 4GB)
8. 1800 mAh Li-ion battery
9. 312 MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor
10. 2-inch 320 x 320 transmissive/reflective LCD touchscreen with finger or stylus input

Form factor, Display
The 700p is a candy-bar device with a large screen and a full QWERTY keyboard. The device itself feels a little bulky because of its thickness. In reality, it is smaller in length and height than many available devices in its category e.g. the E61i. The E61i is merely thinner. Anyway, the thickness gives a sense of bulk.

Having said that, the 700p is handy and pocketable, and I had no usability issues with its form.

The display is a 2-inch, 320 x 320 pixel piece of work that’s slightly smaller than the display of the E61i (2.5-inch; 320 x 240 pixels). The screen brightness is awesome when set to its maximum setting. Of course, you can expect an extra hit on battery life should you do that. I find that a half-way setting is bright enough in both daylight and at night.

Text Input and Navigation
The 700p gives you the best of two worlds: a QWERTY keyboard that works well, and touchscreen functionality. The touchscreen allows you to use an included stylus or your fingers. There is no handwriting recognition capability. As such, text input is really via the keyboard, while the touchscreen is an awesome aid to navigation, selecting/copying/pasting text and images, etc.

One of the most marvellous features on the Treo is the assisted text input. The phone saves whatever text you have inputed before, and suggests the nearest match to whatever word you begin typing. Neat feature that comes in handy when inputing web forms and the like.

Multimedia
The 700p comes with PocketTunes music player built-in, and plays a range of audio formats. I noticed that it does not play midi and AAC files though. Of course, MP3 is supported. PocketTunes lets you setup playlists, and to repeat or shuffle your songs. You can play your music in the background while carrying out other tasks.

The built-in Pics&Videos application handles the display of images and video playback. In viewing images, you can view them as a slideshow and attach background music to play along with it. There are also a couple of transition effects to select from e.e. fade, cross-fade, dissolve,etc.

Video playback is smooth and sharp, though the player tends to use less than the full size of the screen. I’m not sure why this is so, but usually, the video plays in the center of the screen and has lots of black background framing it.

I must add that the 700p’s loudspeaker is nowhere near as powerful as that of the E61i. It also has a clear lack of bass in the overall sound output.

Email
Email on the 700p is an area in which the E61i is beaten hands-down. Auto-retreival. Email displayed in HTML format. Plus, beautiful handling of attachments, and better use of screen estate, ensuring that you can see more at a go.

And the clincher: s60 mail clients have a very annoying habit of turning auto-retrieval of mails off when they run into a network problem and cannot connect. Usually, the user is unaware that auto-retrieval is off. On the 700p, it does not matter what connection problems show up, the client will resume auto-retrieval as soon as a connection becomes available. Bye-bye to watching over email like a hawk.

Internet
The 700p’s built-in web browser is named Blazer. And it has got a lot going for it, though it has a few limitations. First off, it does not work (at least on Reltel) without configuring a proxy server with it. Once configured however, it is fast and versatile.

Blazer handles posting content, logins, and secure access with grace. You can also download files through it, and it is both a Web and WAP/mobile browser. On the E61i, there were two separate browsers for Web and WAP access respectively.

Blazer lets you save bookmarks, save pages for offline viewing, and lets you set how large a cache you want or need. You can disable images, disable style-sheets, use it in Optimised Mode (in which you never have to do horizontal scrolling) or in Wide Page Mode. It also lets you connect to a VPN.

If you are visiting a page that you like, Blazer lets you send the page address to a friend via SMS. Beautiful. Like Opera on desktop, you can set Blazer to always load the last page you were visiting the last time.

The touchscreen functionality aids web browsing, letting you select text and images to copy/cut and paste text as you wish. This was something I missed on the E61i, and I’m certainly glad to have it again.

Blazer’s niggles:
1. you can’t start scrolling a page till a sizeable portion of it has loaded
2. it appears that there is a limit to the size of web pages that it can handle. In browsing some very large pages, I get a “page too large to be downloaded” message, but the page actually loads anyway.
3. can’t open multiple windows on it

Besides those niggles listed above, Blazer is a fast, versatile browser. Highly recommended.

Operating System and Memory
The 700p runs on the Palm operating system. The user interface is clean, simple and definitely less complicated then Symbian s60. It is difficult to lose your way around the UI. There are dedicated buttons for a number of applications. In all, I have seven (7) favourite applications setup to use these buttons.

After the firmware update I ran, switching from one application to another became smooth. It is now significantly faster than what obtains on the E61i.

I have 62mb of space to play around with on the 700p, and with a 1GB SD card, that’s more space than I have use for.

Multi-Tasking
Arguably the greatest handicap of the 700p is its limited multi-tasking capabilities. It multi-tasks in several areas, but much of it is hidden from the user. For example, if you are typing a memo and switch over to the phone mode to make a call, when you come back to the memo application, its still open and in the state you left it earlier.

Again, email checks in the background while you are playing music and doing something else. However, there is a sense in which keeping the user from harnessing the potentials of its multi-tasking capabilities is limiting. Most applications do not have an option to exit. You just open whatever else you want to use.

In Symbian s60, for example, there is the option to see all running apps, close whichever you want to close, and select which you want to use. I miss that a little, I must admit.

Organizer and Office features
The phone has elaborate organizer applications for managing contacts, calendar, tasks, memos, and alarms. The Office applications suite is by DataViz Documents-To-Go, and is very versatile. It beats what is currently on the Symbian s60 devices, allowing you to edit documents and retain their formatting.

The calendar application is also miles ahead of what is on s60 at the moment. No questions. There are alarms, repeated tasks, and a beautiful agenda view that allows you to set a background image. The agenda view shows you your appoitments, tasks, alarms, new mails, etc. Very comprehensive.

There’s also a Voice Memo, Calculator and extensive contacts application.

Connectivity
On the network front, the 700p offers CDMA 1x and EV-DO, the latter providing much faster data thoroughput. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to test EV-DO out, as Reltel isn’t offering that yet.

On the device connectivity front, the 700p offers Bluetooth, infra-red, and USB cable. No; there isn’t Wi-Fi on this device.

Bluetooth allows dial-up networking, file transfer, audio headset usage, and PC synchronisation.

Infrared works too for file transfer and synchronisation too.

USB cable works for PC synchronisation as well. In addition (and this is cool), when connected to the PC via USB cable, the phone is being charged through the cable.

Battery Life
The 700p comes with a 1800mAh Li-ion battery. That’s a large one. I expected much more from it, but so far with intense – and I mean intense – usage (almost never leaving my hands), I need to charge it twice daily. Note that I have been constantly tormenting the phone through the last 2 weeks. I’ve been installing and trying out lots of software, testing out those softwares to determine whether to keep them or not, and updating here and there.

As such, my experience so far certainly cannot reflect the real battery performance of the device.

I’ll probably be able to give a more accurate battery life after the initial love bug wears out and I return to my regular usage patterns. But so far, my impression is that the battery life is not as good as that of the E61i.

Games
If you’ve ever played SkyForce, you know that it is a top-notch game with sound effects, great graphics, and beautiful maneuvres. I downloaded and installed the demo version of SkyForce to the 700p, and had a go. Verdict? Excellent. Gameplay was smooth and there is no sense in which the 700p handled SkyForce different from the E61/E61i.

With that, I am satisfied that the 700p doesn’t lack in the gaming department.

Camera
The 1.3 mega-pixel camera produces good pictures and video shoots. I’ve never paid much attention to the quality of the camera on my devices, so I really cannot give a head-to-head with the E61i.

3rd Party Applications
Plenty. I have BibleReader fromOliveTree, and the Palm version leaves the s60 version in the dust! I have installed GoogleMaps as well, and you need to see the sharpness and performance. An unlimited data plan as I have on Reltel certainly makes a big difference.

In addition, I have installed a dictionary, file manager, compression utility, backup application, and more. There is a huge catalogue of Palm applications – freeware, shareware and paid -out there to choose from.

Conclusion
That’s my detailed review of the Treo 700p. My evaluation of the device? It is a great smartphone. Yes; it is different from what I am used to, but I have already come to love this device.  The 700p is a beautiful and effective mobile office tool.

The Treo 700p that Reltel packaged for its subscribers is a Sprint-customised device. It carries the U.S. carrier’s logo, name and branding on both its hardware and firmware.

After the Reltel internet techies configured my new Treo 700p for internet access, the guy who attended to me demonstrated how it works. To my surprise, the browser he opened was Opera Mini, and guess what version – v2.x.xxxx! Consider that Opera mini is now on version 4.0.9800, and you can understand how waaaaaaay back that browser installed by Reltel must be.

Anyway, I immediately took him up on this, asking about the built-in web browser, Blazer. He responded that the built-in browser could not be used, with the rider that “this is the way the phone came“. As such, to enable subscribers browse the internet on the 700p, Reltel had to install Opera Mini on the device (why they chose such an old version still beats me!).

Of course, that sounded like nonsense to me. If Opera Mini and the built-in email application could connect to the internet, it sounded absurd that the browser wouldn’t be able to do the same.

One of the first things I did on getting home was to upgrade Opera Mini to version 4. This was no problem. Opera Mini 4 on the 700p works, but with issues. The IBM Java VM on the device (which enables installation and running of java applications) can be quite unstable. The consequence is that browsing on Opera Mini is a laborious task. Besides the sluggishness, every now and then, Opera Mini simply freezes up, and the phone has to be reset. Bad. Very bad. Especially for someone like me who practically lives on the WWW.

As a matter of fact, while at the Reltel office, I had overhead one miffed subscriber complain that Opera Mini had hung up on him several times that same day. That became my experience too. Meanwhile, try as much as I did, Blazer just did not load any webpages. I was at the mercy of Opera Mini, it seemed.

Looking for an alternative browser
Having a browser that freezes and crashes regularly was unacceptable to me, so my first option was to see if I could find an alternative web browser. There does not exist yet an Opera Mobile version for Palm. Neither is there a Netfront version for the Treo (though the same company, Access, makes the Palm OS and Netfront!). I also couldn’t find PocketLink or Eudora (both of them Palm-compatible browsers) to download. But I did eventually find a good browser named Xiino.

Xiino is good and fast, and offers a 30-day free trial usage. After that, one needs to shell out about $29 to get a lifetime licence. I don’t mind paying. But I have done everything I know till now to get to the developers and make the payment, without success. Plus, Xiino did not support secure web browsing, meaning I couldn’t shop online with it or access my online banking accounts.

Getting Blazer to work
Knowing that my 30-day trial of Xiino would soon be over, I set myself to find a way to make Blazer work. While going through the browser menu, I noticed it had an option to use a proxy server, so I got online and found a number of free proxies which I used to test it out. Guess what….

Blazer browsed! I visited site after site: YomiSays.com, MobileAfrica.net, DomainStandard.net, Google.com, and on and on. However, public proxies have their own disadvantages:

1. public, open proxies are not exactly safe; those who run the proxies may not necesarrily be straightforward people, and your data may fall into crooked hands.

2. public, open proxies are very unreliable. Uptime can be as low as 1%. The highest I have seen is about 48%. That means, half of the time, I’d be unable to browse. Sigh.

One of the proxies I tried out was CoDeeN, a private proxy server system created at Princeton and deployed for general use on PlanetLab. Being a private proxy and run by an institution like Princeton, there is a greater level of trustworthiness and reliability. As a matter of fact, it was online and available most of the time I browsed through it.

CoDeeN Caveats: CoDeeN limits the nodes you can access. I couldn’t login to members’ areas, post content, or access secure sites. A notice by CoDeeN explained to me each time that the limitation was deliberate. Of course, in my line of work, that wouldn’t do either. I wouldn’t be able to manage my blog, and carry out most of my web-based tasks.

Problem Solved: Blazer Works
Finally, I decided that the way forward would be to see if I could find any paid subscriptions for a private proxy that’ll give me all the priviledges I needed. Yes; I found a few, and eventually signed up for one for a small monthly fee. So far, I have enjoyed fast access; user logins; content posting, and secure sites access. No complaints (yet).

Contrary to what the Reltel guys said, Blazer works well. I have thrown a gamut of web activities and transactions at it and it has made a good representation of itself. There isn’t one thing I was able to do on the E61i’s s60 Web browser that I haven’t been able to do on Blazer yet (note that I’m still throwing more and more challenges at it, and this is not conclusive; I will give my final verdict in my upcoming Palm Treo 700p review). In some (not all) ways, it is actually more versatile than s60 Web.

So, my advice to Treo 700p users: If you are dissatisfied with the performance of Opera Mini on your device, you don’t have to endure it. Go get a proxy server for use with Blazer.

Instructions

Here are concise instructions for configuring a proxy server in Blazer:

1. Open Blazer, press the “Menu” button, scroll to “Options”, select “Preferences” -> “Advanced” -> “Set Proxy”.

2. Tick the “Use Proxy”, and then enter in the proxy server and port in the provided boxes.

3. Click “Okay” all the way back to the page view of the browser, and then try browsing to one of your favourite sites.

Here are some of the public free proxy servers that worked for me:
1. 128.208.4.99. Port: 3124
2. 63.251.15.23. Port: 80
3. 202.105.182.20. Port: 80
4. 189.38.2.146. Port: 3128

PS: If a proxy isn’t working, it may be unavailable at that time. Like I said, public proxies are not necesarrily safe or reliable. If you need something better, do a Google search for paid proxy services. All the best.