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The Mobile Internet Lifestyle

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?


August 9, 2008 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Editorials, Email, Facebook, Gmail, IM, Internet, Mobile, Nokia, Opera, Social, Twitter ·  4 Comments


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4 Comments


  1. Guru Panguji on June 30th, 2008 5:10 pm

    Hmm, I must say that GMail App is just awesome. I prefer Nimbuzz to Fring tho! Nimbuzz really looks and feels like a native Symbian app and it’s snappy, really snappy for regular use!

  2. solnyshok on August 9th, 2008 8:40 pm

    in addition to your programs I use:
    Fring for skype and gtalk. You can setup there 2 gtalk accounts by setting 2nd via jabber.
    Palringo has no voip but allows to connect several IM accounts on the same service, which I use a lot.
    Joikuhotspot for sharing my 3g internet with laptop.
    Utorrentmobile to access my home torrent server – add,remove, pause all, remove all.
    I do this also before connecting to Orb, to access my home files.
    TomTom, GarminMobileXT, GoogleMaps
    Dictionaries
    CorePLAYER and MobiTubia to show cartoons to my kids.

  3. Rahul Gaitonde on August 11th, 2008 6:55 pm

    Solnyshok:

    Have tried out Palringo. Solid application – just liked Fring’s interface better. Plan to try out Joikuhotspot the moment they bring 3G to India – few months from now.

    Forgot to mention Google Maps! Use it whenever I’m traveling around the city.

    Although it isn’t an Internet application, what video player for S60 would you recommend?

  4. Venkat on August 12th, 2008 11:49 pm

    Thanks for the post, Rally!

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