Doodads and Whatnot

My mobile phone took a trip to the ground a couple of weeks ago so I’ve been looking at potential replacements. There are a few things I really keen on my next phone having:

• Bluetooth
• 3G network support
• iSync Support (including Address Book photos)
• A decent web browser, preferably Nokia’s WebCore based browser.
• Good support for 3rd party applications.

Seems fairly simple, given a well defined list of “must have” features, to find a suitable phone right? Well it turns out that searching for certain mobile phone features is more than a little difficult.

The search

Deciding where to start looking was easy enough. The desired features limit choices to the higher end Nokia phones. I headed over to Nokia’s Australian site to see what they had that fit the bill. The site has a handy flash based tool to help you filter the available models based on the features you want.

The problem is that it doesn’t allow for choosing between different types of the same feature. For example, you can filter out models that don’t have a “Web Browser” but there is no way to choose between phones with modern browser with features like what you’d find on a desktop and page mangling browsers that only support WAP or some kind of HTML light. There is also no option of filtering based on things like support for third party applications, etc. Poking around the site a bit more turns up some slightly more useful pages such as the Business phone comparison but they still lack the details a nerd really wants.

What do you really want

Since Nokia’s site is so useless are far as detailed searching goes I went to the Series 60 browser website to see which phones are listed as supporting it. The list isn’t long, in fact at the time of writing it only lists 8 phones most of which don’t interest me as they have features that annoy me such as qwerty keyboards or bizarre form factors. The common element between these phones is that they use the 3rd edition of the Series 60 operating system. This narrows down what I’m looking for but the problem is the same as before: there is no site that offers searching for a phone based on the operating system, much less a specific edition.

So I’m left with going through the product pages individually to find out the details I need. Not difficult but annoying.

What about other brands

The Motorola SLVR L7 and RAZR v3i both looked promising at first but it seems that support for Motorola’s phones in iSync is very poor and if you want to use Bluetooth for syncing it is completely absent in some cases. This probably isn’t Motorola’s fault but it stops me from wanting any of their phones. The really odd thing about this poor support is that Apple chose Motorola as a partner for iTunes on mobiles.

What does this all mean?

None of this is a big deal but it reenforces something: geeks really are a niche market. The details I’m looking for aren’t hidden but they aren’t made easy to find either.

It also seems that people are still buying phones based upon “checkbox” style features, e.g. they want a phone with a “web browser” but they don’t really care what type. This doesn’t matter of course but it’s annoying if you do care and have no way of separating them. Then again lots of people are probably still choosing a phone by walking into a sore and taking whatever looks good and comes with a plan they want.