I’ve never owned an actual digital camera, but over the past few years I’ve taken thousands of digital photos. The first device that I had with a built-in digital camera was the Palm Zire 71. It had a very basic VGA-quality camera, just 300K Pixels with 640×480 resolution support. The image quality was so-so but since I had the Zire 71 with me all the time, I could take photos practically everywhere I went.

Since then I’ve had a succession of PDAs with cameras, as well as smartphones. I had a look at my iPhone’s photo album the other day, and found that I had just over 1,000 images in the Camera Roll. Those 1000 photos were taken in a period of one year, meaning an average of 3 a day.

Compared to other smartphones, the iPhone’s camera is strictly in the middle-to-low end. Just 2 megapixels and very limited functionality. With my iPhone always in my hand or in my pocket, though, it meant that I used it a whole lot more.

So what’s in my Camera Roll?
- photos of my family (mostly the kids)
- screen shots of iPhone apps and website
- various parking lot shots (so I remember where my car is)
- traffic jams
- food
- anything goes (landscapes, clouds, events)

I’m constantly amazed by how much of my daily life is captured by my iPhone!

PC Magazine has a great article with pointers on how to take better iPhone photographs, as well as some camera software recommendations.

There’s a lot happening over here in Barcelona, where I’m attending the Mobile World Congress. It’s been a lot of walking and talking for me, so I haven’t been able to capture a lot of news for the blog. Here are some of re highlights for the past couple of days, which I thought would be interesting to share.

1. First off, mobile operators and device manufacturers have finally agreed to support a common standard for mobile chargers! I wrote about this a couple of years back. The standard chosen is Micro USB, so the charging port can also double up as a sync / accessory connector. The major manufacturers, including Nokia, are supporting this effort. Hopefully Apple will join the bandwagon as well. I’m looking forward to the day of having just one charger for multiple devices, and a more efficient charger at that.

2. The conference sessions so far have been interesting. The next evolution of GSM/HSPA and CDMA/EVDO will converge to LTE ( Long Term Evolution). Apparently this will happen sooner than we think, with Verizon in the US taking lead with some early deployments this year and next year. In a couple of years, we’ll be experiencing mobile broadband as fast as fixed broadband today.

3. Yesterday (Wednesday) there was a good presentation from Google. Their Latitude location-based system has been a great success, reaching a million users in just a week. Latitude allows you to view your friend’s physical location, and vice versa. Google also demonstrated location-based voice search. If you search for “weather”, for example, it will show you the local weather according to where you are. Most promising : offline Gmail, which we have seen for the desktop, will also be available for mobiles. We saw this feature on the iPhone and Android G1, which were identical. We also had a glimpse of Google Maps on the Palm Pre, which was written using web standards.

4. Acer is planning to bring the “netbook effect” to the smartphone market. We’ll see a lot more devices from them this year. I’ve seen the devices, which are pretty decent. Unfortunately I can’t say much about them at this point.

5. A certain giant company is working on a platform that embraces apps for other platforms, which is exciting if done right. I’m under NDA on this one, so no details!

So, I survived 11 days with just my first generation iPhone as the sole computing and communications device. The iPhone was my companion during my break over the Eid holidays. How did it fare? Here are my impressions.

Communications

Despite the name, the iPhone has never been particularly great as a phone. The built in Address Book / Contacts app lacks the support for standards like vcard, which makes it difficult to share contact information with other phones. In terms of call quality, I would rate the iPhone as “just ok”.

Where the iPhone really shines is in email. My main personal email account is at Gmail, with Yahoo Mail as a backup. Both accounts work very well on the iPhone’s Mail client. With Gmail, I would sometimes fall back to the web-based version since it has more features such as email searching, tagging and starring. The iPhone also worked flawlessly with my Exchange server at work, including Calendar synchronization.

Productivity
I have to admit my productivity went down tremendously, after all, I was on holiday Aside from using email to track goings-on at work, I didn’t do much except write a few blog posts using WordPress on the iPhone. Without cut and paste, blogging is quite limited especially when it comes to doing links.

The iPhone is missing a full fledged Office suite (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations). The built-in viewers are fine for most documents, but there is no editing capability. I’m just waiting for the day that Documents To Go or QuickOffice is released for the iPhone!

Entertainment
The iPhone did surprisingly well as an entertainment device. While it did a decent job with the usual iPod functions (audio and video), my iPhone got much more use as a gaming device. My kids constant fought (with me) for a quick game of Cro Mag Rally and Cubes Lite.

What did not surprise me, was how much I used the iPhone as an ebook reader. I managed to read 2 ebooks back to back over my break. I think the iPhone form factor is just right for ebooks. After all, it’s more or less the same size as the Palm V. I’ve never been a fan of larger tablets like the Kindle — if a device is not pocketable, it wouldn’t be with me everywhere, and it wouldn’t be as comfortable for long use. With something as small as the iPhone, I can catch a quick 10-15 minute read without getting any strange glances.

Earlier this week, Forbes showed that the iPhone is now more popular than a Kindle as an ebook reader. This was based on the download figures of just one ebook reader for the iPhone, Stanza.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very satisfied with how the iPhone has performed. As I have mentioned before, the only frustration that I had was the inability to update my content over the air. With WiFi Hotspots now common, it would have been very easy to download the latest podcasts directly to the iPhone. Hopefully Apple will soften its stance on third party applications that mimic iTunes.

To the question : “Can the iPhone function as your computer?” The answer is “Yes, but not all the time.”

It’s been 10 days since I last synced my iPhone with my iBook. This has caused me a lot of nervousness, especially when back in my Treo days, I used to back up daily to my SD (Secure Digital) card.

The iPhone doesn’t have an external memory expansion slot. All backups would have to be done via USB cable or over the air. Since I didn’t bring my iBook on my trip, I’m left with very little options.

Looking back at the data I have on the iPhone, most of it has a copy on my iBook. I’m not worried about my media files — music, movies and podcasts all have copies back home. This applies to all my third party applications downloaded from the Apple App Store.

My email is all backed up “in the cloud”. In my iPhone, I have set up Gmail, Yahoo Mail and my Outlook email in the Mail app. All three email services are hosted, so a copy of my email is on a server somewhere. My Calendar is also synced with my Outlook.

If I had Apple’s Mobile Me service, I would have been able to sync up my photos over the air as well. What I do is email the best of new photos to Flickr and Facebook so I have a couple of back up copies. Recovering these photos in event of a crash, though, will not be straightforward.

I use Zenbe Lists to manage my to do lists. Zenbe can be synced to a server as well.

For Notes, I use the built-in Notes app on my iPhone. I back up using a manual way, that is by emailing the notes to my Gmail.

Overall, I am quite surprised by how much data is already placed “in the cloud”, ie in a server somewhere on the Internet. All my important data is already periodically backed up, protecting me from a catastrophic crash.

The iPhone has been a rock solid performer so far. There have been several app crashes (notably the Mobile Safari web browser, which I use heavily) but thankfully no system crashes.

I’m sure I will feel very relieved when I finally get home and sync my iPhone in a couple of days. In the meantime, I’m not (too) worried about losing any valuable data.

Today is the sixth day of me using my iPhone as the only computing and communications device. So far, the iPhone has done a fantastic job as a media device, especially when it comes to entertaining my kids.

My fifteen-month old daughter has a favourite episode of Sesame Street, which she has watched several dozen times over the past few days. The episode somehow keeps her calm and quiet, which translates to some peace to me and my wife!

My six year old son is discovering some of the games I have on my iPhone. His favourites are Cro-Mag Rally and Cubes. Tap Tap Revolution is also a great game for kids, since it has an innovative two player mode.

I have been using the iPhone as a media capture device. The built-in Camera application is strictly no frills but it does a decent job of taking photos. Uploading photos to Flickr and Facebook is also quite easy using the email method. As for video, I have been using Cycorder which is available for jailbroken iPhones.

Other than reading my ebooks, I stay updated on the latest news feeds using Google Reader. I have also managed to catch up on my work and personal email, although it has to be done discreetly since I am technically on vacation!

So far, I’m very happy with the iPhone’s performance. The only time that I miss a desktop/laptop is when I want to download podcasts. Other than that, the iPhone has met all my needs, even helping my wife Google recipes at the last minute.

I still have 5 more days to my break; we’ll catch up later.

posted on the move with my iPhone

I’ve just started my two-week break from work, which coincides with the Eid celebration here. I’m taking the family back to my home town. This time around, we decided to leave our notebook computers behind. My iPhone will be my sole computing and communications device.

Preparation
Before going on this trip, I tried to maximize the available space on my 8GB iPhone. I had to get the right balance between music, TV shows, podcasts and applications.

Around 3GB is audio, with the same amount of space for video. My audio content consists of music and the latest episodes of podcasts. Video is mostly TV shows, just a few episodes that I want to catch up on and a couple of shows to keep the toddler quiet.

Applications

Just like when I was using my Treo, I usually plan to make the most of existing built-in applications. On the iPhone, the apps that see the most use are Mail (for Gmail, Yahoo and my Exchange email & calendar at work) and Safari (for catching up on news feeds, doing mobile banking, and everything else).

What about third party applications? Well, one obvious choice is eReader. I loaded up on ebooks to make sure I have plenty on hand to read. Another app that sees a lot of use is Facebook. I use it to keep in touch with family and friends, and to share photos. I use WordPress to update Mobility Mind and also a couple of other blogs.

I have a good selection of games on the iPhone, including Mote Massacare, Texas Hold’em, Enigmo, Cro-Mag Rally.

So far, the first day with just the iPhone has Bern great. I’ll provide updates from time to time on how this set up is working for me.

One day, our phones will do absolutely everything for us. It’s hard to believe how many different functions a basic phone can do, let alone more advanced smartphones like the Treo Pro or iPhone 3G. Phones are already outselling (and replacing) watches and digital cameras. Now, the standalone GPS unit has also lost the battle against the mighty mobile phone.

According to IMS Research, more GPS-enabled handsets will ship this year than standalone navigation devices. Just like digital cameras, we are seeing a split where the standalone devices get more features and capacity while mobile phones take advantage of smaller and cheaper chips. The line gets blurry with high end phones, for example the Nokia N series which sport high 5-megapixel resolutions and custom Carl Zeiss lenses.

I guess it won’t be long before most phones sport GPS receivers as a standard feature. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and also Google’s Android, more software developers and starting to develop useful location-based utilities and applications.

[ via MobHappy ]

There are many things to look forward to today : new iPhone 3G, new iPhone 2.0 firmware update .mac replacement “Exchange for the rest of us” MobileMe and the Apple App Store. Even more exciting is the fact that the iTunes Store is now available in more countries : including Malaysia! If you have downloaded iTunes 7.7, you can choose Malaysia as your iTunes Store country.

Right now, it appears that only Apps are available in the Malaysian iTunes Store, no music, movies or TV shows. Boo-hoo. But wait, why would there be Apps available for the iPhone 2.0 firmware, if there was no official support for the iPhone over here? This definitely means one of the mobile operators will soon be offering the iPhone 3G in Malaysia …

[ via TUAW ]

Opera Software, which offers the free Opera Mini web browser for mobile phones, has released a report on the state of mobile web. Covering the first three months of this year, the report looks at the aggregate traffic generated by 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

The most interesting part of the report is that a whopping 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic. Popular social networking sites visited through Opera Mini include Facebook, Myspace, Orkut and Friendster.

Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb says that “The Mobile Web is the New Hangout“, and I have to agree. Other than email and RSS, the other site that I visit regularly on my iPhone (and the Treo before that) is Facebook. A lot of my friends and colleagues also do the same. I expect the trend to grow, as social networking sites continue to enhance their mobile versions.

If you want to try out Opera Mini, it is available for dozens of different phone models, including the Blackberry, Treo and most Symbian and Windows Mobile phones.

The Official Palm Blog is currently featuring a couple of user stories. One guy talks about how his Centro “does everything”, and another relates the story of Centro-as-a-flashlight.

Long time readers of this blog know that I was a loyal Palm and Treo user for ten years. Right now, I’m very happy with my Apple iPhone. When (if?) the new Treo smartphones come out with the new Palm operating system, I’ll give them a try.

The best place for Palm user stories is PalmAddicts. You’ll get dozens of stories each day — it’s always interesting to find out what new ways you can use your smartphone. What’s your story?