DISQUS

Micro USB is designed so that the connector in the (relatively cheap) cable wears out, rather than the socket in the expensive phone. This is because the spring contacts are in the connector rather than the socket (as they are in Mini USB.

IMHO this is a really good idea. Micro USB also looks set to have much wider adoption when it comes to phones than Mini USB ever had. Whether it takes off in other applications (e.g. digital cameras, portable hard drives) remains to be seen.

Palm Foleo anyone?

How does this device work from a spectrum licensing point of view? Presumably it uses standard GSM frequencies so you need a license to actually use it.

The Softbank network is UMTS - it's the only network European phones can roam onto in Japan.

Their 2G network is PDC but as mentioned above that's being phased out. Japanese phones don't switch between 2 and 3G networks as UMTS phones tend to in the rest of the world.

I think what most people are missing is the fact that there's a fundamentally different design philosophy behind the N95 and iPhone:

The iPhone is a 'companion device', as the original Palm Pilot was. You can't even start to use it before you activate it by attaching it to a computer. The N95 on the other hand is a stand alone device - you could use it without ever connecting it to PC.

Now of course the iPhone user interface (and hardware specifications) are such that it could be a stand alone device, however many of the things people like about it (e.g. being able to restore every setting onto a new device) rely on it being a 'slave' device.

Some would no doubt regard a move backwards that the iPhone is dependent on a PC. On the other hand maybe this is what people actually want as no mobile device is really very good at data entry compared to a PC.

Palm understood this and went on to sell a lot more PDAs than Apple and Psion. Perhaps Apple has also realised this with the iPhone.

I've never thought this was really the right solution to the problem. The problem is not the TLD, it's that you have to type the URL on a numeric keypad.

In Japan (by far the most successful market for mobile internet) most adverts now feature a 2-d bar code ("QR-Code"). This encodes the URL, so all you have to do is take a photo of it with your camera phone and you're on the website. The URL can be fairly long, and the TLD used doesn't matter. As for enforced standards, you'd hope any service that cares about their mobile presence would do some serious compatibility testing anyway.

I was quite pleased to see my N95 came with an application for reading these codes, but it's not much use until it becomes a standard feature on other phones. I'm surprised nobody is really pushing QR-Codes here - they make casual mobile internet use much less hassle.

John