I recently remembered an event that took place last year and realized that sharing it will be of benefit to our readers on Mobility Nigeria. This post is about a unit of Nokia E71 that I purchased from a reputable store in Lagos. Prior to this purchase, I had used three different E71 units and they were all purchased from this same store.

You may be wondering how I could have used that number of the same phone in such a short time. What happened was that people would see the phone with me, fall in love with it, and then offer to buy it off of me. And so, I would sell, buy another unit – and then go through the cycle again.

Anyway, I picked up this particular E71 from my trusted phone store. It had the I-cell warranty seal and also had a “Made in Finland” stamp on it.

Cutting to the chase, I put my SIM in the device and powered it up. As is my custom, I changed the phone network setting option to UMTS, meaning the phone would connect to only a 3G network. When I did this, I noticed that network signal disappeared on the phone.

Thinking that this was a temporary network problem that would be resolved soon, I decided to leave the UMTS setting unchanged. By the evening of that day the phone was still not picking up a 3G signal.

I made a few calls and discovered that 3G network was very alive on the phones of my friends. I began to wonder about things. Restarting the phone several times made no difference.

Finally, I was forced to pick the manual and read. Imagine me reading a phone manual! Unthinkable! But given the circumstance, I didn’t have a choice because I needed an explanation for what was happening. Right on the first page of the manual was the answer to my question.

The manual stated that the 3G frequency of this particular unit was WCDMA 1900, which is only available on the American continent. This meant that here in Nigeria the phone in question could connect only to GSM/GPRS/EDGE but was unable to use any of our 3G networks. The 3G band deployed in Nigeria is WCDMA 2100, not WCDMA 1900.

I was completely stunned. Having got spoilt with 3G speeds, not to mention 3.5G, how could I go back to anything less? I just couldn’t believe this was happening to me. Also, I asked myself why I-cell would import phones that are incompatible with our 3G band here. Are they even remotely aware that these are the sort of things they should check before bringing any phone to the country?

Did I learn anything from that experience? Yes! If anything, I began to check the frequency band before taking any phone from any store.

If you don’t want any nasty surprises, you should too.

Convergence makes a lot of sense. Though it has its disadvantages, it has more going for it in an environment like ours.

Last Saturday, I was part of a discussion about the benefits of having private internet access. One of the key problems raised was that of the terrible power supply situation in the country. Someone pointed out that a monthly internet subscription becomes wasteful when there is no power supply to put the subscription to good use.

Of course, I did not need to mention that even with a power generator available, the subscription is still largely under-utilised, and even then the extra costs of running a generating set are just obscene.

I pointed out at that discussion – waving my Nokia E90 in the air – that only those of us who use connected mobile devices really put our subscription to full use – regardless of time, location and availability of public power.

If you need internet access, I recommend that you strongly consider a mobile device and internet subscription. This makes sense financially and functionally.

The E90, for example, in all its glory is cheaper than a laptop and gives you longer hours of usage on battery than a laptop does.

There are places where it would be foolish to take a laptop to e.g. your friend’s wedding, yet no-one would bat an eye-lid at seeing your communicator there. We must also not forget those outdated eateries that want to tantalize you but post bold signs that read: “The use of laptops is not allowed in here“. Of course, my E90 gets in all the time and gets used too. They are really clueless; aren’t they?

After church service on Sunday, a group of us were chatting and someone asked for the location of a cultural centre in Lagos. He needed to find his way there that afternoon. None of us present knew. But Google did – and my communicator was available. In a few minutes, he had the address he was looking for. Thank God for mobility!

The problem of text input is largely resolved on devices with QWERTY-layout keyboards. Copy and paste functionality exists on many of them, and most have capabilities to read and edit Office documents. The majority come with the ability to read PDF files as well. These things are computers – albeit very handy ones.

Honestly, if you are not a programmer, graphics designer and the like, you are on a budget and need an internet device and connection, instead of shelling out for a PC/Laptop and getting a fixed internet connection, you can have a single device with access to internet access anywhere.

Usually, people are hesitant in considering that some mobile devices can serve effectively as PC replacements. For what most people use their PCs for, many mobile devices are more than qualified as PC replacements.

If you have questions on this, I’d be delighted to help you sift through the maze of mobility to narrow down your search for the right device for you. So, post your questions below!

One of the beautiful things about the Symbian S60 OS (operating system) is that it is an open OS platform for mobile phones. By open OS platform, I mean that the OS allows for applications developed by a 3rd party to be run on the platform. These (third party) applications can now be installed onto a phone powered by the OS to either improve functionality or add a new function altogether to the phone running on the OS.

I must say here that the Symbian S60 OS is not the only open platform available. There are obviously others, like Windows Mobile, Android, etc. In order to install applications for any of these OS you must get applications that are compatible with them. Even within a particular OS community, there may exist different versions and care must be taken to ensure that the application being installed is compatible with the particular version of the OS in view.

As I mentioned in the second part of my review, the Nokia 5800 is powered by the Symbian s60 5th edition OS. Nokia says the 5th edition has backward compatibility with 3rd edition. In other words, applications that work on s60 3rd edition should also work on the 5th edition.

As such, after I got my 5800, I set out to install my favorite applications from the 3rd edition. It wasn’t long before I discovered that only a few of the applications developed for 3rd edition actually work on the 5th edition. In fact a majority of the applications that were really useful to me do not work. On launching such apps, the phone simply freezes and it has to be rebooted to get it working again. I hope this is not what Nokia meant by backwards compatibility.

It is not uhuru yet for Symbian s60 5th edition devices, so don’t go expecting all your old applications you used on the E71, E90 or N96 to work on your 5800 just yet.

Thankfully, a few developers are beginning to develop applications specifically for the 5800 and I hope that in the near future there will be more than enough applications for s60 5th edition.

Opera’s State of the Mobile Web presents the statistics for mobile web usage from January 2008 to January 2009 – and the fastest growing mobile web countries are Armenia (with over 2800% growth), followed by Nigeria (with 1854% growth).

According to the report, which is based on usage of the extremely popular Opera Mini browser for mobile phones, other notable countries include: Egypt (1391%), Philippines (570%) and Kazakhstan (419%).

Nigeria is still not in the top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage (ranked by # of unique users). Here’s that list:

1. Russia
2. Indonesia
3. Ukraine
4. China
5. India
6. South Africa
7. United States
8. United Kingdom
9. Poland
10. Germany

But at the current growth rate that Nigeria is pushing, it shouldn’t be long before the West African country shows up on the Top 10 list – and probably climb all the way to the top. Nigeria is currently number 12 on the Top 35 countries (unique users) list.

With a huge chunk of the country’s geographical mass now being covered by fast-growing GSM networks, internet access has reached many hitherto unreachable places for the first time in Nigeria.

And with more people owning and/or having access to mobile phones than PCs, the mobile internet is set to be the next big thing in the country. Nigeria has a population of over 150 million people, most of whom have no access yet to the internet.

The full report is available at: Opera: State of the Mobile Web report.

A few days ago, we published a news item on the release of the latest version of the Iris browser, developed for WinMo devices. The statement from TorchMobile about the new release reads:

The Iris Browser is an advanced, high-performance and versatile Web browser application for mobile and embedded devices. Based on the WebKit rendering engine, it is specifically designed to function in resource-constrained environments. It brings the full Web experience to mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, portable media players, Ultra-Mobile PCs and other embedded devices – in a fast and user-friendly manner.

I have taken the browser for a spin over the last couple of days, and hereby present my review:

The default homepage is a custom page by TouchMobile that includes a search box. Tap the “Navigate” softkey on the right, and choose “Show address” to pop up the address bar at the top of the screen. Other options include “Home”, “Back”, “Forward”, “Stop”, and “reload”.

The left softkey is labelled “Page”, and under that menu are options to access bookmarks, history, zoom, tabs, set screen view, tools, and options (settings).

The browser allows the opening and running of up to 4 tabs.

Under “View”, the options to choose include: Mobile Mode, Desktop Mode, and Column Mode. Then there’s a full screen option applicable to whatever mode you choose.

Personally, I am comfortable the most with Column Mode. In this mode, the entire page is fitted into the screen and you only scroll up and down. This is by far the most user-friendly way to browse on a mobile device. The other modes will leave you having to scroll horizontally to read page contents.

When a page is loaded, by default you get an overview of the whole page, really zoomed out so you can see the entire page. You then zoom into the section you want to read.

Zooming in can be done by simply double-tapping on the section you want. It works well. Alternatively, you can use the left softkey to access a Zoom menu.

But in all modes apart from Column Mode, zooming in messes up usability, because the content you have zoomed into is not fitted to the width of the screen. To read text, you have to scroll horizontally. This is a no-no. My advice: stay in Column Mode. Don’t touch the dial.

Iris offers a nice page transition effect, with the pages sliding in and out and dropping in and out.

The History function is neat. You get three images of the pages in history on the screen at any time, and you can simply move through your history with finger swipes. Tap the central image and that page loads.

Still, there are limitations on this browser. One of them is flash support. A visit to Youtube and attempting to watch videos resulted in a “Get the latest Flash player” error message.

Besides that, it loads images well, gives you the option to save them, save pages, search through text on pages, and also track your internet usage.

Iris handles secure sites well, and I was able to login to my bank’s internet platform.

The Iris browser is a good job. It leaves Mobile Pocket Explorer in the dust (which is not saying much), but it also gives Opera Mobile a run for its money. I’m not sure which of the two I prefer yet; just a few days is too little time to choose between these highly capable browsers.

Thumbs-up to TorchMobile. But while the browser proves itself capable, I am not too sure that what it offers redefines the mobile web as the developers claim.

The Nokia 5800 is not a very eye-catching phone, design wise. But it is not an ugly phone either. It’s just that it is not one of those phones you see for the first time and you immediately fall head over heels in love with. As for materials, besides the display, the phone is all plastic.

I must say here that being made of a plastic is not that much of a disadvantage to the 5800. The phone feels very solid in the hand, something that has become somewhat of a signature for Nokia.

The next point I will make is really something personal and I doubt that most people will agree with me on this – but coming from a long usage of various smartphones, most of which are relatively on the big side, I find the 5800 too small for comfort. Perhaps I need a change of orientation from believing that smartphones are supposed to be big. Finally on the redeeming side, the set of accessories in the sales package will make almost anybody happy.

Music
The Nokia 5800xpressmusic, as the name suggests, is a music-focused phone and it does the job perfectly well. In fact this phone is the loudest speakerphones I have ever heard. It has two speaker grills positioned on the lower part of the left hand side of the device. The sound production of the pre-packaged earphones is the best I’ve used as far as earphones that come in the sales package are concerned.

Camera
For those who are looking for an out-of-this-world camera phone, I am sorry to inform you that the 5800 won’t meet your need in that area. In these days of 8 megapixel and 5 megapixel camera phones, the picture quality of the 3.2 megapixel camera on the 5800 is at best average. With very good lighting conditions the 58000 manages to take good photos.

Mobile Computing
Now to the Smartphone part of the device. The phone runs the new symbian s60 5th edition operating system. While on the surface this new OS resembles and at times behaves like the previous version, a lot of things have changed and the most ardent s60 faithful will be thrown a bit using the phone for the first time.

For instance, the way to get SIM contacts on to the phone’s contact has changed a bit. I found myself fiddling and fumbling for a while before finally finding my way around. (Please note that I lack the patience to read manuals in order to learn how a phone works). One thing I can assure you however is that after an hour or so of playing with the phone, you will find that the phone is really simple to use and highly intuitive.

Being a touchscreen device and with me coming from my experience with the Samsung Omnia, I was skeptical about typing on the 5800. To my greatest amazement I didn’t encounter any of the problems I faced with the Omnia during typing. There are four different typing methods the 5800 offers and all the four methods work well. In fact you won’t feel the absence of physical keys using the 5800 for typing. Kudos to Nokia for getting it right in this all-important aspect of the phone.

All in all, I find the Nokia 5800 a good phone.

Mobile applications developer, TorchMobile, have released a new major version of their mobile browser, Iris. The browser is built on the popular webkit engine and is available for WinMo 5 and 6 devices.

From the TouchMobile blog:

There are many surprises waiting inside, including support for the Flash Lite ActiveX control, big performance gains, reduced memory usage, preliminary RSS and SVG support, the highest Acid3 score of any shipping mobile browser, and HTC accelerometer support.

Yomi has downloaded a copy and is currently putting it through its paces on the Samsung i900 Omnia. His review should be available tomorrow or the day after.

In the meantime, you can download your copy too.

Mobile World Congress 2009 threw up a number of efforts by major manufacturers to explore the world of solar-powered mobile phones. Those manufacturers include Samsung, LG, and ZTE.

Samsung has a touchscreen device named Blue Earth. LG’s teaser is yet to be named, while ZTE has dubbed theirs Coral 200. Of the three, ZTE’s offering is targeted at the low-end market.

The concept of solar-powered mobile phones is a good one. If you live in Nigeria, like I do, where public power supply is embarassingly and frustratingly pathetic, I can imagine that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look in that direction. Stop worrying about forgetting your charger at home too!

1. Voice
The ubiquitous voice is what almost everyone uses their mobiles for. Being mobile means that your customers can speak with you whether you are in the office or on the road. But you knew that already; didn’t you?

2. SMS
SMS (text messaging) can be a powerful tool in maintaining effective customer service. For example, SMS can be used to deliver instant notices to your clients and customers.

It can also be used to notify single customers of important issues should a need arise. SMS can be used to congratulate a client on his/her birthday or any other special day.

3. Mobile Internet
With a GPRS/EDGE/3G/3.5G connected phone or smartphone, you or your field workers can access information e.g. over Google or email round the clock and when on the move.

Mobile internet can also serve as your primary (or backup) internet connection at the office, seeing that bundle packages are now available at good costs.

Do transactions online, do social networking and more – all on the move.

4. Scheduling
Phones have served faithfully as efficient personal organisers for years. Most recent phones (even the low-tier ones) have built-in alarms, notes and calendars. Use them!

5. Grab Information
Record that business discussion in audio format. Or you are driving and see an inspiration scene; pull out your camera and take a snapshot, so you can have reference material later. The option of recording video is there as well.

6. Storage Media
With many phones having external memory card slots and potential card capacities of over 8GB, your phone can serve as a storage media. Use bluetooth, infrared or USB to store those documents or files for reference when you get back to your desk.

7. View and Edit Office Documents
Not only can you store your Powerpoint, Excel and Word files on your phone, many business phones and communicators come with MS Office viewers and/or editors. So, you don’t have to wait till you get to the office to review that document. keep busy while caught in the traffic.

Conclusions
As you can see, there’s much more to phones today than the average user considers. I once ran my entire business operation from a Nokia 9500 communicator and later an E61. And I had excellent results to show for it.

Honestly, its a possibility that I left something out, though I suspect that whatever it is would fall under one of the above categories.

Get smart with using your mobile phone. No point wasting the potentials of a device you spent that much on.

Going down memory lane about a year to three ago, one remembers a handful of websites owned and run by Nigerians that were dedicated to the cause of mobile phones and services.

One of the very earliest was the MobileNigeria discussion forum at www.mobilenigeria.com, which was later shut down by its administrator so as to pursue the Nairaland dream.

Then there was GoSmartMobile.com, a personal project of Yomi Adegboye, one of the foremost voices in the field of mobility in Nigeria today. The site was a hit, even attracting the attention of a few top officials in the telecoms sector. Unfortunately, the domain name was lost in a painful domain renewal crisis.

Phonerism (www.phonerism.com) showed up, also a personal project of a mobile enthusiast. Today, that site too is down and off the playing field.

GSM Today (www.gsm-today.com) was a very successful website in its days. It was owned and run by well-known GSM enthusiast, John Sagai Adams who is based in Abuja. While Yomi Adegboye’s GoSmartMobile.com focused more on mobile data, GSM Today was grassroots-oriented, providing everything from tips on how to activate voicemail to how to make money from GSM technology and services.

Sadly, GSM Today is no more functional. Like the others, it has been consigned to history.

What is happening to websites dedicated to mobile technology? Why do they show up, flourish, then just drop off the cliff? Are there any other mobile-oriented websites run by Nigerians out there, and what are the chances that those too won’t end up as history?

AliretaMobile now has the following phones in stock – and yes, we still deliver to any location in Lagos, in addition to all the other benefits of purchasing your phones from us.

Nokia 7100

Sony Ericsson W302

Comes with external speakers included in sales package

Nokia E63

Sales package includes 1GB MicroSD

Nokia 5800

Touchscreen smartphone

Call 08062167275 or 07028828791 to place your order.

Zain Nigeria is in the news a lot these days. The mobile operator is offering Nigerians free, unlimited browsing via packet data (GPRS/EDGE/3G/HSDPA) on its network.

Great move in our opinion here at Mobility Nigeria. What spoils it a little is the scanty 3G coverage at present. It seems odd that it took Zain this long to launch 3G/HSDPA and then the coverage is so, so scanty.

As such, many are left with good old, creepy-crawly GPRS. You hit a button and stare at the screen for 45 seconds to 3 minutes before the next page loads. No; I’m not talking about GPRS on your laptop or desktop, but on a decent phone browser. And this is in Lagos, not Kutuwenji.

Of course, we eagerly await wider 3G coverage, especially in core economic areas like lagos and Abuja. Then Zain would truly have arrived on the mobile internet scene.

Need a break from internet bills at the moment? Grab a Zain SIM, send SMS in the format, “internet sonyericsson P910i”, to 232, save the settings sent to you by SMS, and start browsing.

In addition to browsing on your phone, if the phone has a built-in modem, you can use it with your PC. Alternatively, you can shell out some change for a USB modem at the nearest Zain centre.