How often do you sneakily play a game, visit a social networking site or do something else that you would not normally be allowed to do at work? Of course I would never do such a thing (cough).

How much have you spent on mobile software in the past 6 months and what platform are you using? I am guessing that iPhone users buy the most titles, but that other platform users maybe spend more.

Are you seen by friends and colleagues as a ‘nerd’ when it comes to smartphones, and are you often asked for help by other people? Fair to say I am…

Do you have a lot of data on your smartphone that you rarely use? I must admit to having lots of photos, videos and files that I rarely refer to, but I just like having them with me. Yes, I am a mobile hoarder. Are you?

Smartphone users, and in particular BlackBerry users, are contactable by email, voice, text and instant messaging 24 hours a day if they allow themselves to be. I have been the victim of this recently and finally realised that the more I make myself contactable, the more I am contacted. It is a vicious circle that will grow and grow if you continue to respond to enquiries and one which is hard to stop once it has started.

It hit home to me the other day following a two hour meeting in which mobile use was (surprisingly) expressly forbidden. I came out of the meeting room and was greeting with 7 missed calls, 5 voicemail messages, 15 new emails and 3 BlackBerry PIN messages- AAAARGH!!!

I tend to respond to most enquiries because that often saves them either being escalated or simply resulting in duplicate requests and this seems logical. However, human nature dictates that if you help people they will come back for more help, and if you help them in a positive way they will come back time and time again. Like an ever growing digital snowball you will soon be inundated by enquires and questions and it will never end, unless you end it yourself.

It would be daft to blame the smartphone, but it is a tool which large companies can use to ensure your continued attendance in and out of the office. They know you have a smartphone and some expect it to be turned on all of the time. Without wishing to sound paranoid, it is without doubt a problem that is affecting more and more people and the smartphone is central to that problem. Turning it off is much harder than simply pressing a button.

Which PIM function do you refer to the most in a normal day? Obviously email is top for me, but the calendar and memopad come a close second (and third).

There has been a lot made of the corporate credentials of the iPhone and Android devices recently, but I just don’t get it. There is a reason why RIM dominates the corporate sector and it is not just the email platform it provides.

If I was buying smartphones for my company there is almost no choice outside of BlackBerry, and the reasons are many fold-

Battery life- without doubt the battery performance of BlackBerry devices are way ahead of the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, but WM still does fairly well within the corporate sector. Symbian devices also have stupendous batteries on board and this has given them some anchorage within the corporate world.

Speed- the inclusion of hardware keyboards is seen by many corporate people as necessary when dealing with large volumes of emails. I’m not starting the whole hardware v software keyboard debate again, but it is a fact that many consider this to be the case (rightly or wrongly).

Contactable- corporations need to communicate with their staff all of the time, if possible, and call quality alongside a good battery help with this. So many smartphones have call quality and power too far down the specification list for them to do well in the business sector.

The fact is that many business people require the ‘phone’ part to be a significant factor in a smartphone yet most smartphones forgo this in favour of big screens and lots of apps. The focus on new features to capture the consumer market often gets in the way of building hardware that does the job for seriously busy people. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is a huge flaw in the iPhone and Android model at this time which if addressed could make one of them the biggest smartphone platform of them all.

Here’s an example- RIM sells many more smartphones than Apple and is a competitor that is easily exploitable because the OS looks outdated and is not as flexible as it could be. If Apple released two iPhones this year, one for consumers and one for business, it could clean up. The business centric model would have a much better battery life, a hardware keyboard (not completely necessary, but preferred by many) and a leaning towards better call quality and more business orientated features.

If the above could be achieved I would be a business iPhone user in a snap and so would many others. It would take time for the move from BlackBerry to happen in a big way because it is so entranced at the moment, but this seems to be an obvious target market to me. Have I missed something here or do you feel that the current iPhone is capable of doing well in the corporate sector? If you do, explain to me why not one person I know at work or within the customers I deal with uses an iPhone for business. Strangely, many of them own an iPhone for personal use…

What activity do you never undertake on your smartphone? Updating PDA-247 is the main one for me- the Wordpress app just isn’t good enough yet on the BlackBerry (and there is no image editing) and the lack of multi-tasking on the iPhone is a problem, even though the app is much better on that platform.

The entire iPhone smartphone range is in effect one phone. OK, we have the 3G and 3GS, but they are so similar to each other in the minds of the majority that people still just see the iPhone. No other mobile operating system is supported by one phone and I can’t work out if this is an advantage or a disadvantage.

Android has a plethora of phones already available from the likes of HTC, LG and others and a range of OS versions that are starting to get in the way of each other. This means that more users can have the form factor they desire, but that some will get just a little bit narked at soon having a phone which does not support the latest OS version. In the case of Android it is good and bad because more phones means more sales, but Google needs to get a handle on the number of revisions coming out.

Symbian has more phones than any other and they do cover almost every possible form factor. From QWERTY front faced devices to touch screens you can buy whatever you want, but the OS is either disliked or bought by people who do not care what OS they are using. I have little doubt that in the case of Nokia, multiple phones is an advantage.

RIM also makes a variety of smartphones, but only the Storm varies greatly from the Curve and Bold range with the Pearl adding something more phone-like to the mix. In reality the BlackBerry phones are on the whole too similar to each other to be classed as a varied range, and I’m not convinced that just producing one very good phone would not be an advantage.

In the case of Apple, the iPhone is ‘the iPhone’ and the lack of variety plays well in creating an iconic status for the phone. If Apple was to produce a variety of keyboarded and touch screen iPhones something would be lost, although I would still like to see this happen. I think that the one phone model for Apple is a huge advantage, but the others have no choice and will continue to attack from all sides to generate market share.

Graham came up with the folloing nugget on 247 yesterday- “Years ago I owned an old Morris Minor. If the battery went flat you could start it up manually by cranking the engine a few times with something called a ’starting handle’. (Younger readers might want to google this!) On numerous occasions I have seen people trying to bump start their cars. I usually think, ‘It’s a shame they don’t still build cars with starting handles.’ A few months ago my son’s car battery died. He couldn’t bump start it as it is an automatic. I couldn’t drive out to help him because I had spent the evening in with my wife and Jack Daniel. My son had to call out the RAC and I thought, ‘It’s a shame they don’t still build cars with starting handles.’

I held off upgrading my Treo for a long time because I was looking for something to match the capabilities of the Palm PIM apps. Now I have come to the point where I have realised that it is just not a priority for manufacturers. I bought a Hero not to replace my Treo but to complement it. It seems I am destined to always carry two devices around. It used to be a Palm Pilot and a dumb phone.

I dream of that day when one device will do everything I want but I am realistic: it may never happen. I am not frustrated though because I still think that my Treo is a really cool device. The problem with rapidly advancing technology is that we lose the wonder of the moment and are always looking for the next best thing. If you had said to me even 10 years ago that I would be able to carry round in my pocket something that powerful I probably would not have believed you. I will probably always wonder though, ‘Why don’t they still build cars with starting handles? Why don’t they make devices with PIM functionality at least equal to Palm’s?”

How do you rate your phone for the following categories (out of 10): battery, speed, call quality, entertainment and PIM? My ratings are below for my current phones-

BlackBerry Bold 9700: battery 10, speed 10, call quality 9, entertainment 2, PIM 7.

iPhone 3G: battery 6, speed 7, call quality 5, entertainment 10, PIM 5.

There are a group of people like me who require specific things in a smartphone above all else. For me it is decent communication ability (email and calls) followed by PIM and easy data entry. These are what get me through a day when married with good battery life and an overall fast system speed. PIM is essential for me and one of those features that are rarely put up the top of the list by manufacturers. This comment from Graham sums it all up-

“Treo 680

In a meeting last night. Entered an appointment on my Hero. What a convoluted process that was. Love Android but the calendar is an absolute mess. Where’s the progress?”

The progress is in big screens, gaming, fancy interfaces and that’s about it. There has been little progress in battery times, data entry and overall speed. So much is crammed into the latest smartphones that the basics are ignored and PIM is at the very top of the ignore list.

I understand that most people don’t need a PIM system that is capable of driving an exceptionally busy schedule (because they don’t have busy schedules) and Murray summed up this in a recent article on Palm-Mac-

“I hope however that I never get to the stage where a pre-requisite of any new device is how quickly I can add a Calendar entry as that would indicate either my work is starting to take over my personal life or less worryingly, my memory is starting to go. How do folk need to record so much stuff in a Calendar, I don’t get it? I have at most 2/3 entries per day as that is all that tends to happen in my daily life. I don’t know, perhaps they are entering stuff like …7am: have a cup of coffee, 1pm: have lunch…I live in perpetual fear of my life becoming so overrun with work related stuff that I need to record it for fear of forgetting it.”

This point is shared by 99% of people on the planet, but it does not look at the fact that we all have different lives and different jobs and that people should not be blamed for their lives being different.

I don’t add pointless stuff to my smartphone calendar because most are work related. For example last Thursday consisted of 5 conference calls, 3 meetings and 7 tasks that needed to be completed that day- most were automatically added to my BlackBerry by my work server, but amending these appointments throughout the day as priorities change is a hugely frequent task for me. Being able to do so without fuss when running to a meeting makes a big difference on a busy day (which most are) and having a smartphone that makes this process difficult also makes a big difference, but not in a good way.

The point I am trying to make is that the iPhone and Android platforms are great at so many things and that 1% more effort (probably less than that) will open up the platforms for people like me who need really fast PIM usage and in particular a super fast calendar. I don’t need to add an alarm to have a cup of coffee, but even if I wanted to it should be easy. Graham is right when he asks where the progress is- there is no reason for Apple, Google and the like not to make some of the PIM tasks easier. It’s almost as if they feel that by doing so the devices will somehow become less desirable. The fact is though that they would open themselves up to even more people than now, even if it only another 1%.

Are you open to changing your mobile operating system if the right phone comes along? I am a definate yes to this because no OS is the best and none is that far ahead of the others for me not be able to look forward.

No matter what happens in the smartphone industry, Palm has always been there with headline grabbing activity (good and bad) which keeps the brand in the spotlight. Without doubt the leader in early PDA usage and again the leader in early smartphones usage, but one which never failed to kicked itself where it hurt time and time again.

The early PDAs, and especially the operating system, were practical and well designed which quickly grew a large user base that could look no further than Palm OS. The V series showed an understanding of style and this was the very first PDA to attempt to make the genre fashionable. Despite the presence of Sony, Palm continued to gradually improve its product, but eventually followed Sony in certain areas and we ended up with PDAs that could perform multiple tasks albeit with some issues. The same applied to the early smartphones, all of which had substantial problems, and all of which were soon overtaken by competitors. If I look back at my own experience with Palm OS products the overall impression is one of almost perfect, but not quite the full ticket-

Palm V / Vx- a PDA which was beautiful to look at and great to use. The same applied to the m500 series.

Palm T series- the T3 was ridiculously good at the time and despite some battery issues was about as complete a device as you could hope for at the time.

Palm T5- a utter disaster in my experience. Highly unreliable despite the presence of a decent hardware setup.

Treo 650- a great, great phone with a huge battery and superb data input. The lack of dbCache memory was a big problem for many power users.

Treo 680- should have been great as well, but the battery life was a killer for anyone who actually needed to make phone calls.

All of the Windows Mobile phones from Palm followed similar lines and never quite stood out from the crowd.

Palm Pre- a superb OS married to average (at best) hardware. Battery issues persist and the overall build quality is less than stellar. The inability to offer all of the third party apps to people outside the US irks some of us and rightly so.

The fact remains that Palm is sitting on what is potentially the best smartphone OS in the market and that the word ‘potential’ is what dominates here. Palm has not realised the potential and has concentrated far too much on the OS. Good software needs good hardware and vice versa- forget one and you may as well forget both. I still believe that Palm could do very well indeed, but it is sad to say that it is more likely that it will be swallowed up by a competitor who sticks some better hardware behind the OS. Is that such a bad thing considering Palms record on hardware delivery? I think not.

And then Carel came up with some more reasons for the current problems- “I’m not a marketing or logistics expert, but why didn’t Palm enter new markets when earnings started to fall in the handful of countries the Pre is currently available and instead offers the Pre with HUGE discounts? Why do they offer an improved Pre in the states but still announce the old one in France (rumors say the Pre is about to be released in France soon) and the rest of the world?

Why isn’t there any kind of ETA for other countries? Although i thought it was 8 months….the Dutch Palm site is telling the Pre is “available soon” for over THIRTEEN months. There are some people on their marketing department who should look for another job. When I buy an unlocked Pre only a handful of applications (150+) are available….most of them not very useful.

I was a Palm fan for over 10 years but it’s hard for me to understand what they are doing. I even bought myself an “unlocked” German Pre a few months ago but it was a horrible experience. Palm did accept my Euro’s when I bought my device but refused any help (No 3rd party apps and No data connection and very hard to setup in a not supported country) because I live in a “not supported” country. Luckily the shop I bought my Pre had a return policy.

So it’s not a surprise for me Palm is having a hard time.”

What function(s) on your smartphone have you never, or very rarely, used? It’s still the voice recording feature for me which I have used a couple of times in my whole life.