Jeff’s Place

For the past year or so I’ve been using a Nokia E61i SmartPhone. It’s a pretty good general-purpose phone for messaging, email, web browsing, etc. and it’s also, get this, a pretty good phone. It has it’s strengths and weaknesses, like anything, and some things I had to figure out or fiddle with to make it really useful. I also found some pretty good software for it which lets me use it instead of a laptop for all sorts of stuff.

For the 6 months or so prior to getting this phone I had been using a Nokia E62 that I bought from Cingular (now AT&T). I could tell that phone had great potential, unfortunately Cingular apparently neutered the software which, when combined with their really bad (edge) data network made the thing nothing much better than a giant steaming pile of dog shit. I eventually got fed up and found that Nokia had released the E61i with a faster cpu, so I bought an unlocked, non-neutered version from buy.com which turned out to be a good move, and I’ll never buy an advanced phone from a cellular company directly again, the baggage just isn’t worth the few bucks you save.

The E61i is a Symbian S60v3 phone with a full keyboard, color screen, 2mp camera, and scads of other features. It is a 3G phone but only for the frequencies used in Europe, so in the US it works only as an Edge data device. My primary criteria for choosing a phone is really just based on what I need to allow me to do my job, ideally without having to lug my laptop around everywhere I go. This means I need an email client, SMS messaging, web access, and an SSH client. This phone can do all of this (with the help of some third-party software) and much more.

The E61i’s IMAP mail client works well enough, and supports a few key features which make it really the right thing for the job: It can make SSL connections to my IMAP and SMTP servers, and it can use my personal certificate to authenticate to the SMTP server, which allows me to securely send and receive email from anywhere in the world using my personal mail server. After some use the certificate authentication turns out to be a bit of a nuisance because each time I send an email I have to type in the unlock code for the security device so it can open my certificate. It would be nice if there were some way to unlock it and leave it unlocked for a period of time (or until idle for some period of time) so I could send several emails without having to type my unlock code for each message. Importing the certificate is as easy as copying the PKCS12 file to the phone (or emailing it to yourself to get it into the email app) then opening it, the phone will ask for the certificate password and add the certificate to your personal certificate store. If you have not already set up the security device it will prompt you through doing so. You may also have to import a CA certificate if your personal cert is not signed by one of the built-in CA’s, just download the CA cert in DER format (with a filename ending in .cer) and open the file on the phone, it’ll import it into the CA certificate list.

The Nokia IMAP client has a couple really stupid implementation flaws which can make it a bit annoying, particular in fringe coverage areas.

• The IMAP IDLE implementation never checks to see if the server is still alive. It will just stay idle forever waiting for the server to send an update notification. This would be fine if the network were as reliable as your home network, but AT&T’s cellular data network is about as far from reliable as you can get, and the IMAP implementation should take that into account. So the phone just waits, never notices that the server connection is actually gone, forever waiting for something that will never happen. The correct implementation would IDLE for a few minutes, maybe 5 or 10 minutes (or better yet a configurable time), then drop the IDLE and send a NOOP or some other IMAP command to check that the server is really there. It could then either go IDLE again if there server is still alive, or close the connection and open a new one if not. The IMAP IDLE specification in RFC 2177 recommends terminating the IDLE at least every 29 minutes, but even that is way too long for an unreliable network connection particularly where the underlying tcp stack doesn’t reset the connection and there is no keepalive provision.
• The second annoying problem with the Nokia IMAP client is that it downloads the entire folder list every time it connects to the IMAP server, even if it is configured to look only at the Inbox folder. Again, this wouldn’t be a big deal on a fast reliable network, but on a slow unreliable network it results in a lot of packet overhead which can delay the connection startup for as much as a few minutes. I did some network analysis to compare the Nokia IMAP client performance with Thunderbird and found that it took Thunderbird 39 request packets to open a connection and completely download my Inbox, while it took the Nokia client 284 request packets (I have a pretty large folder hierarchy). Again, not a big deal on a fast network, but horrible on a bad network. There is already an option to select folder subscriptions which includes an option to download the folder list, there is no reason to download it every time a connection is established.

If Nokia could fix these two problems (both of which should be really simple to fix) and do some work to make the mail application recover from errors better, the IMAP client would be plenty adequate and would perform well. As it stands it’s passable for periodic use and it beats carrying a laptop around.

There is also an Exchange mail client, which uses Microsoft’s ActiveSync to talk to the Exchange server. This ends up working about the same as the IMAP client but doesn’t have the problem of downloading the whole folder list at startup (maybe because it doesn’t support folders other than the Inbox). It also suffers from connection reliability problems, often not recovering well from network issues, and there is no progress bar or other indication that it’s actually doing something so you have to just trust that it’s working. There also does not appear to be a way to make it not alert on new message receipt — the sound can be set to nothing but the phone will still vibrate when in pager mode and there is no setting that I can find to disable it. The flip side is that Exchange 2003 doesn’t support IMAP IDLE and AT&T’s network proxies have really short connection timeouts so the IMAP connections get killed all the time.

The Nokia web browser works well enough, although the version in the E61i doesn’t do some of the things that the latest web sites need. For example, it won’t play YouTube flash videos, and it crashes when I try to open the Wordpress editor to work on by blog. I understand the next version is supposed to have better flash support, we’ll see. I usually just use it for reading news articles and testing to make sure my web servers are up so it’s not a big deal for me that it doesn’t do everything under the sun.

There are some very useful applications included with the Nokia E61i phone basic software package, including an Acrobat reader which seems to work well (I’ve yet to find a document it couldn’t handle, but I do not use it extensively), the QuickOffice suite which will open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents for viewing. I think there is an add-on package or license which will allow editing of those documents. I’ve used it for viewing docs and it works fine. I might use an Excel-like program for keeping track of my golf score or something, but it hasn’t been an issue yet so I haven’t bothered to look into it.

The phone also claims to support an IPSec VPN client, I went as far as to download the instructions for setting it up but have not yet gotten around to trying it. The only reason I’d need a VPN client is to manage a few windows machines, but I do so little windows work that it just hasn’t been an issue.

In addition to the stock software there are some third-party apps which really make this a full-function device:

Putty SSH client: The SSH client allows me to connect to the networks I manage with a small terminal client to tweak settings or diagnose problems. I can get to all of the Linux and Solaris servers I manage, and all the switches and routers and other devices, no matter where I am. I’ve even fixed network-down critical problems, taking just a few minutes out of my golf game It requires running PuttyGen externally on a windows machine (or the equivalent with openssh) but once the keys are downloaded to the phone ssh key authentication works. The latest version adds the ability to define a list of servers to connect to, each with it’s own settings profile, just like the windows putty client. This one tool alone makes my life a ton better and lets me get out to the golf course far more often than I would be able to without it.

Google Maps: The mobile Google Maps client is now a native Symbian application and works great, including real-time traffic data for many areas. The maps and satellite images download quickly, it has a great search capability, and the maps are actually accurate. The latest version also includes a cellular-based location feature for phones which do not have an internal GPS receiver, or will use an internal or Bluetooth GPS receiver if one is available.

Gmail: The Google Mobile GMail client for Symbian is actually a Java program, which makes its startup a bit on the slow side but it works well once it’s started. I don’t use it much but it seems to work well.

IM+: From Shape Services, the IM+ instant messaging client will connect to all the major IM services, just like Pidgin or Trillian on a linux system. I have my yahoo and google accounts configured, it automatically connects, has all the normal send/receive functions, allows customized sounds for the various events, etc. I don’t use it a lot but it works well. This is not a freeware product like the others but the low price is well worth what you get for it, and they regularly release new versions with added features.

Remote Desktop: Also from Shape Services, the TSMobile program is a java package which runs the RDP protocol so you can remote desktop into windows machines. Not surprisingly this is really sluggish on an Edge connection, and the keyboard interaction is sorta funky, but it works in a pinch and is worth the $35. I use it in combination with some ssh tunnels to get into windows servers even when they are behind firewalls, but the ssh stuff gets a little hairy and I can really only do it because I have a Linux server on a public network that I can bounce the connections through.

There is an OpenVNC port to Symbian, which I’ve tried to use but had issues getting the mouse to work right. The VNC image works well, but without mouse support it’s not very useful. This could very well have been my problem, I didn’t get very far trying to figure it out and decided it didn’t really matter.

The E61i’s camera works pretty well, the image quality is quite good considering the small size of the image sensor and lens. I see a lot of people complaining about the quality of cellphone camera images, but I don’t really expect that any cellphone with a tiny image sensor and fixed lens could ever compare to a real camera. It seems to me that if you want really good quality images, you should use a real camera. A cellphone camera is useful for random photos and off-the-cuff stuff but come on, who really expects to use their cellphone to take professional quality pictures?

The color display is remarkably good even in bright sunlight, and it’s plenty bright with it’s backlight at night. The only issue I have with it is common for most LCD displays: the polarization on the display panel ends up conflicting with the polarization in my sunglasses, at certain angles the display appears to be just black. Turning it a quarter turn gets rid of the problem.

I’ve tried playing with the IPhones, and they’re cute and all but I just can’t type on the things. I use ssh from my cellphone a lot, no way could I survive with a cutesy phone with no real keyboard.

At the end of the day, the biggest problem with this phone actually has nothing to do with the phone itself, it’s AT&T’s crappy data network. I know it’s tough to build good huge networks, it’s what I do for a living, and I realize that the cellular network is going to be flakey sometimes by its very nature. But some things are inexcusable, like way-too-short connection timeouts, broken proxy servers, and broken DNS servers. I had hoped that the onslaught of traffic from the first IPhone release would either coincide with a network upgrade from AT&T, or would result in so much bad press and complaining customers that they’d be forced to fix it. Unfortunately I haven’t seen either happen, and now a year later the IPhone-3G is released and I find myself again hoping that AT&T will have either a fix in place, or be forced by market pressure to do something about their network. It works, yes, but run a head-to-head comparison using something like a youtube video to compare AT&T vs. Verizon and it seems that VZW kills AT&T pretty cleanly. But, AT&T is the only viable US GSM provider (sorry TMobile…), so for people who need a phone that works both in the US and elsewhere there really is no other choice.

Next up: The Nokia E71, Nokia’s updated follow-on to the E61 which includes 3G support for the US frequencies (both AT&T and TMobile have FCC approval) and the feature pack 1 update to Symbian S60v3. It’s supposed to hit the retail channels at the end of July, I already have one ordered from buy.com.