If Google’s Android OS is open source, why is the company going after an Android developer? Because not everything that you think of as Android is actually open source.
CyanogenMod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ is an alternative, unauthorised, third-party version of Android for Android phones. As Android is an open source operating system, why has Google hit the developer behind it with a cease and desist letter? Because the Google Maps, Android Market, Google Talk, Gmail and YouTube applications on Google’s own Android builds are Android apps rather than part of the OS - and they’re not open source. That means Google has every right to tell the developer behind Cyanogen that he can’t distribute them as part of his build http://androidandme.com/2009/09/hacks/cyanogenmod-in-trouble. Google told Intel the same thing back in the spring when it was trying out Android on netbooks. Search, and the apps powered by search, are where Google makes its money and they’re not open source and you can’t use them without permission. Parts of the Android SDK are proprietary as well.
Microsoft has never seriously gone after the developers on sites like XDA Developers who create ‘cooked’ ROMs for  Windows Mobile devices. That might be because Microsoft makes its Windows Mobile money by selling licences to the phone manufacturers. There’s also the fact that many of the XDA developers work for phone manufacturers and mobile operators and have a fairly good understanding of what you don’t want a phone to be able to do - as least as far as the phone network is concerned.
The mobile networks have a rather ambivalent attitude to open source on phones. On one hand, anything that makes it easier to make powerful phones cheaply is good, because it costs them less to subsidise. Plus open source should make it cheap for developers to create apps for the platform. This is a big change in attitude because an open, easy to configure, easy to develop for platform is also very scary for the operators because they’re paranoid about a rogue - or just badly-written - app or phone taking down the phone network. That’s why the OpenMoko phone - a truly open phone - never got very far; the operators were just too worried about having it on their network.
Vodafone’s support of the JIL platform in the 360 launch shows that the networks have realised - with a lot of help from the iPhone app store - that having lots of apps on a phone is a good thing. The reason Windows Mobile looks so far behind in the app space isn’t that it’s hard to develop good apps for - although the mix of screen resolutions and Compact and Micro Framework versions certainly doesn’t help. It isn’t just that it’s too complicated to find, install and uninstall apps (I can’t find a good version of Spider solitaire from a site that I trust and I can’t find a way to get Windows Live off now that I’ve realised that having Hotmail on my phone isn’t worth it if it’s going to slow down the mail interface this much). It’s also that the over-cautious operators held back the first wave of app developers by insisting on lengthy certification and approval systems.

The operators are a lot more confident now (although there were still some nerves at the Vodafone 360 launch yesterday -  “Is opening up our network services like this a good thing?” asked one spokesperson rhetorically; “we hope so!”). It’s also interesting that despite being a member of the Open Handset Alliance, instead of following Motorola down the Android route Vodafone has put MotoBlur-competitor Vodafone People onto the LiMo platform instead. Linux Mobile (and Maemo and Moblin) aren’t just different flavours of Linux from Android (which Google says is built on the Linux kernel, but is not actually Linux); they’re Linux-based mobile operating systems that Google doesn’t control.

Handset manufacturers and operators like Linux phones for lots of reasons. They like open source for lots of reasons. But for an industry that contributes as much to UK GDP as the oil and gas industry, few of those reasons are connected with the philosophy of openness that draws developers like Cyanogen.

–Mary

Three years ago, when WiMAX looked like the best way to get faster mobile data, the then head of Vodafone made a point of stating the obvious at the Mobile World Congress; the networks would rather stick to 3G, the HSPA enhancements and eventually the ‘Long Term Evolution’ standard because evolving your network may be painful, but it’s better than ripping it out and putting in a brand new one, especially when they’d need twice as many base stations to provide the same coverage. But if HSPA and LTE didn’t show signs of showing up and speeding up to match the 100Mbps WiMAX promised in the long term, the convenience wasn’t going to stop the networks abandoning 3G.

3G speeds have been creeping up ever since, from 1 to 3.6 to 7 and now to 14.4Mbps. On the face of it that sounds faster than the average 2Mbps DSL connection in the UK; faster even than the 8Mbps you get on a faster exchange. But there’s a dirty little secret about most mobile broadband connections. It’s not just that the quoted speed is always a theoretical maximum and just as you never get a gigabit of data a second over gigabit Ethernet, you need to take off a quarter to a third from the maximum speed. It’s not just that the actual speed is shared with everyone else using data on the same cell; it’s that the speed quoted and the actual speed delivered are both only the speed to connect to the base station - not the Internet. And a surprising number of 3G base stations connect on to the Internet over 2Mbps DSL (and remember; you’re still sharing that speed with up to 50 other users in the same cell).

Not Vodafone; backhaul matters, says Vodafone CTO Jeni Mundy. “The pipes we put into the cell sites are key for anything you want to do on the Vodafone network or going out to the Internet; the bandwidth of those pipes is critically important and we’re absolutely doing not just a base station upgrade, we’re making sure we put the right backhaul in place to carry that traffic.”

In this case, rather than a single 2Mbps line, each Vodafone base station has eight 2Mbps E1 fibre connections adding up to 16Mbps of bandwidth. That’s courtesy of the deal Vodafone did last spring to connect to BT’s 21 Century Network and it means there’s slightly more than enough backhaul to deal with the incoming connections.

Vodafone’s press release about the launch was far more honest than most discussions of mobile broadband, which often suggest that no-one could tell the difference from DSL. Instead of trumpeting that Vodafone has the first 14.4 network in the UK, it pointed out “whilst 14.4 Mbps is the theoretical peak rate, customers can expect to see typical speeds of anything between 1 and 4 Mbps with a practical maximum speed of 10.8 Mbps.”

Mundy was equally frank about what that actually delivers: “As you improve the speed it works in two ways. If you look at the purest end, you can get up to 10.8Mbps -but in reality, few users get all the bandwidth. Where you have a number of users, we’re able to have those users further away from the cell because we’ve got more capacity. We can either have a broader cell coverage area or a much higher speed for single users, so you get advantages either way and the smarts of our technology will optimise that to maximise the benefit for users at any one time.”

The 14.4 network is live in the “busy areas” of London, Birmingham and Liverpool already; other areas - like London suburbs - will have the faster speeds by next March and Vodafone estimates that 80% of the 3G handsets and dongles that currently connect to their network can use the faster speed. And for once, a faster speed really will give you a faster connection.
-Mary

Finally, another Android manufacturer steps up (though they don’t want you to know yet).
Motorola is sending out invitations for an event on September 15th that are deliberately mysterious; “Unfortunately, we are not able to give you any more details at present”, says the email; “however, over the coming weeks we will be able to reveal more”. Given that the invitation has the Android robot log on, it’s a fair bet that this will mark the UK announcement of the Motorola ‘Morrison’ and ‘Scholes’ Android phones. The rumours say both will have keyboards and large screens; Morrison looks like an old HTC design with rounded corners (or, say, a much thicker iPhone with a slide-out keyboard) , Scholes looks more like a Sony Experia, with bevelled edges. Rather more important than the case are what the phones will offer over HTC’s Android range, what Android means for Motorola - and what Motorola means for Android.

Back in the day, with the StarTAC, Motorola invented the mobile phone, then watched Nokia take the market away. The RAZR was the definitive feature phone, back in 2004. As Motorola needs more than one successful handset a decade to stay in business, they’ve tried every phone operating system - including going back to Symbian after abandoning it. None of them have turned into signature devices that sell like the iPhone and the BlackBerry and those billions of Nokia handsets (not to mention all the million-selling Windows Mobile devices HTC has come up with). The Android phones come out of a project that was rumoured to pit Android, Windows Mobile and a couple of other smartphone operating systems head to head; Android - or the hype around Android - won that battle. Just as HTC has said half of its handsets next year will be Android devices (a plan that’s unlikely to get the company any more photo opportunities with senior Microsoft staff), Motorola thinks Android will put it back on top. Er, only if the phones are any good.

Good, for an Android phone, has to include running all the Android apps that are on the market for the HTC devices. The Australian company that planned to make the second Android phone ever dropped the idea when it realised the smaller screen it planned would mean problems with apps that expected the same screen size as the G1. Windows Mobile developers and handset makers have dealt with this for years, with multiple screen sizes and resolutions and it’s rare to find software with a button hanging off the bottom of the screen; iPhone developers will have to cope with it if the rumoured Apple tablet really does run iPhone apps on a bigger screen. Windows developers can get a nasty shock when they look at their apps on a netbook and discover key buttons are hidden by the Windows taskbar because they just don’t fit on screen. Part of being a platform is making it easy for developers to put their code on every device and form factor that runs the OS. If the Motorola devices don’t have the same screen resolution as HTC Android phones, we’ll see how well Android enables multiple screen sizes. If they do, that only postpones the question; with so many handset manufacturers dabbling with Android, competing with HTC is going to mean trying different device sizes and styles rather than just making cosmetic changes.

Of course, Motorola isn’t only competing with HTC’s Android phones; leaving aside all the other smartphones on the market, there are still those Windows Mobile devices HTC dabbles in, like the Touch Pro2. I’ve been waiting for this since February and using it for the last few weeks - and it was well worth the wait. It’s got a big screen and a beautiful keyboard and intuitive, easy to use touch gestures (and yes, that is the first time I’ve ever been complimentary about TouchFLO).  It’s fast - I think faster than the 1GHz Toshiba TG01 for a lot of what you actually do on a phone. And it’s clever; you get the phone equivalent of Reply All to email - you can pick and choose multiple people and make your own conference call. You get the PIN for a dial-in conference call up on screen ready to type in. And when you turn the phone over, it turns into a speakerphone with really good speakers - and a mute button for when the cat throws up in the middle of your call and you don’t want anyone to know you’re working from home.  If the Motorola handsets have anything half as useful or innovative, they’ll be well worth a look.

And actually, we don’t need to wait until the 15th to find out what Motorola has on offer; the US event is five days earlier, so the main news will be the price and the operator for the UK.
-Mary

But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary

It’s probably about buying market share and reducing the competition that drives down prices, but there’s a new problem for mobile operators to think about these days - bandwidth and backhaul.

No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else  connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical  connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…

Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.

T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary

Q. How do you get 4000 people to start developing for your mobile platform?

A. Give them all a phone.

No, that’s not a riddle - that’s just what Google did this morning at its IO event here in San Francisco. After a keynote that majored on the future of the web - specifically on HTML 5 - and only touched on some of the features in the upcoming “Donut” release of Android, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra unveiled not just one more thing, but three more things.

The first was the return of the Android Developer Challenge, this time with the added appeal of user votes. I’m not quite sure how The Web’s Got (Developer) Talent would televise, but the folk at Google seem to think that they’ve got the software needed to manage a large scale user driven voting process. Certainly tools like Google Moderator seem to have the user voting process working well - and it’s been heavily stress tested by hosting a White House electronic town hall meeting.

The second was a box that would be given to every attendee at the event, a box that would contain details of the Android SDK.

The third was what else would be in the box: an unlocked Android phone running the 1.5 “Cupcake” release. It was what Gundotra called his “Oprah moment”, not giving away a car, but more than 4000 3G devices with a month’s unlimited data (and a far chunk of voice).

It was quite an impressive giveaway, especially when the phones turned out not to be the familiar G-1, but the new G-2, the HTC Magic, which was unveiled at MWC in Barcelona in February. By the end of the afternoon most of the developers in the conference centre were clutching their boxes, and the 3G bandwidth in and around the Moscone Center was starting to get a little thin…

Of course it’s going to take time to see just how well Google’s bet pays off, but it’s certainly one of the more interesting gambits - and even more interesting considering the tough financial constraints many developers are under. If having a device to test code on is the difference between working with Android and working with Windows Mobile or iPhone, then Android will certainly pick up a hefty new constituency.

I suspect that Google will be watching the number of Android SDK downloads very carefully over the next few weeks…

–Simon

What’s the difference between me walking down the hall, head down and totally absorbed in reading email on my BlackBerry because I didn’t stop to do it before I left the hotel room (well, the coffee is downstairs), and Jim Balsillie co-CEO of RIM walking down the hall so absorbed in reading email on his BlackBerry that he doesn’t hear me say good morning? Mainly that he has the good manners to have a member of staff walk with him so he doesn’t walk into anyone; I’ve never noticed anyone leaping out of my way to avoid getting trampled because you simply don’t notice when you’re that absorbed but I have taken some sudden swerves in railway stations to get out of the path of an oncoming commuter with their eyes fixed on their device so I assume it works both ways.

If your users carry BlackBerrys you can give them a little more to get absorbed in by rolling out the new BES 5. you’re going to want to; if the automatic failover for redundancy, manual failover for maintenance and 64-bit support don’t grab you, you’ll like the full Web-based remote admin (although it does need ActiveX in the browser). They’ll like email flags, being able to file messages and manage folders and - if you enable it - better access to fileshares behind your company firewall.

That’s all instant gratification of a sort, which appeals to the lizard brain. After the other CEO of RIM, Mike Laziridis, introduced BES 5 and celebrated ten years of BlackBerry (and 25 years of RIM) and Bob IBM of RIM showed off some very IBM-centric predictions about the evolution of enterprise collaboration based on smartphones and contextual information (which would have been visionary a year ago and now are just documenting established trends), ex-Disney Imagineer and US intelligence service CTO Eric Haseltine talked a lot about the lizard brain and how to take advantage of it to move your company in the right direction, because it isn’t going away any time soon.
Concept cars matter to the car industry because they show you a physical object you can imagine using rather than describing a service you can’t. The concrete, visual, tactile, tangible prototype appeals to the other big part of the brain, the visual and processing area. And given that in every enterprise the urgent trumps the important and most decisions are the emotional lizard brain arguing with the rational brain, you can do with getting more of the brain on your side.

At Disney Haseltine worked on the Park PDA; back in the 90s this was a handheld device that did everything from video conferencing to games. Of course the killer app wasn’t any of the big concept ideas; it was the text message that told you where in the park Mickey Mouse was so you could go get a photo of your kids with the rodent. Your smartphone can do a lot of that today, but Disney still does great business selling the Pal Mickey; a gadget that knows when you’re standing in line for a ride and likely to be bored, buzzes to offer your kids a secret message and uses a proximity sensor so that when they hold it up to their ear it can whisper at them about the ride they’re queuing for.

Haseltine’s point isn’t so much that your big idea is never go to match what users actually want but that the sooner you can give them something to try out, the sooner you’ll find out what they do want - and then you can use that to move a little further in your long-term direction, supported by users who are getting what they want as well. The people who will be most likely to take the time to try your prototype and give you useful reactions are not just the early adopters but the ones who are actually suffering in some way because they can’t do what they need; there’s always more incentive to get out of the discomfort zone.

And for support, don’t turn to executives or the formal development process; he suggested looking to the counterculture, the “underground informal rebel alliance who think the bureaucracy doesn’t get it”. Every company has them, and if you’re in IT you’ll probably have quite a few working with or for you. They’re going to be doing some unapproved skunkworks projects, so they might as well be something that suits your agenda.

His favourite recent example is the billions of dollars that the various US intelligence agencies spent on knowledge management and collaboration tools which had the same success as any other KM project; utter failure. (When we first watched Criminal Minds we assumed the show didn’t want to reveal the sophisticated IT the FBI must be using; I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that a technical analyst who could retrieve information from a variety of sources is something most FBI teams only dream of). Over at the CIA, a handful of agents got together and set up a completely unapproved and doubtless career-limiting copy of MediaWiki. Helped by the fact that a third of CIA officers are now what Haseltine calls “the Facebook and MySpace generation” (no figures on how many CIA agents are actually on Facebook), Intellipedia became something of a  sleeper hit, delivering the knowledge sharing all the formal systems never managed.

Smartphones came into business the way that PDAs and PCs did; because users who thought they would be useful just started using them and demanding that IT support them; social networking and IM arrived the same way. The best way of getting some control over whatever comes next is to be involved in bringing it into business; your counterculture revolutionaries will be in the thick of that and if you can give them enough rope to drag your agenda along you could kill two birds with one stone.
-Mary

Wouldn’t you want a netbook that turned on as fast as a phone, but could still run all your Windows programs? Of course it wouldn’t do both at once, but I was half-hoping that one of the HTC announcements at Mobile World Congress last week would be an update of the Advantage or the Shift: a netbook that could dual-boot into Windows. It’s not just impatience; using 3G on a netbook eats into the already low battery life (at a good five hours using Wi-Fi, the battery life of the 6-cell HP Mini 2140 is exceptional). If I could do the Web browsing on the lower-power, better optimised mobile OS, I’d have more battery life left for my meeting later.
I-mate’s Legionnaire/Warrior combo comes close - a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone that slides into a netbook case that’s just the screen and keyboard and battery; the phone drives the screen through its XGA connector and uses the external keyboard. Oh, and works as a huge touchpad as well. The prototype we saw needs some work - CEO Jim Morrison promises the keyboard will be bigger and better - but slap Internet Explorer Mobile 6 or Skyfire (or the Fennec project mobile version of Firefox) on there and you can use Outlook Web Access and Google Docs or remote desktop into your PC. If a call comes in while the phone is driving the screen and keyboard, it automatically switches to speakerphone. And the fully-loaded Warrior ‘jacket’ includes four batteries that give you over 50 hours of use (and your phone comes out charged at the end).
But I do want the power of a local PC as well; I want to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to make panoramas and upload them to Flickr, I want to run OneNote (because without it I’d be a day early or three hours late for a lot more meetings), I want the Semagic client for my personal blog over at LiveJournal, and the ClipMate software that means I never copy something, forget to paste it and have to go look for it again. And OWA is great, but SpeedFiler doesn’t work in it and if I don’t file messages as I reply to them my inbox is a mess (OK, more of a mess than usual). (Oh, and I want to be able to use a 3G dongle, and printers and scanners and all the other peripherals; drivers are the curse of any OS.) My list isn’t going to be your list, but to my mind, the much higher returns for Linux netbooks mean that people want their PC apps as much as they mean that Linux isn’t ready as a mass market user interface.
Pre-boot environments are another option. The consumer version of the excellent Lenovo S10 has a Quick Start Linux environment (it’s the same Splashtop system that Asus has developed as ExpressGate); you can browse and IM and use Skype. But when you’re done, it takes as long to boot as ever. Phonenix’s HyperSpace is a lot more powerful: the Hybrid version carries on booting Windows in the background so you can have a little fun and then get straight to work. But the Hybrid version needs VT, which means a powerful notebook to start with (with Atom you get the Hyperspace Dual, which gives you much the same features but you have to boot Windows from scratch afterwards).
And while these pre-boot environments all cope with Wi-Fi, only HyperSpace supports a 3G dongle and so far only the Option model that AT&T sells in the US (did I say drivers are the curse of any OS?). A netbook that could dual boot into, say Windows Mobile, would come with built-in connectivity. But when I pounced on Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, between the launch of the Touch Diamond2 and Pro2 (which will be my next phone) and  the launch of the Vodafone Magic (I think the magic was persuading Google it didn’t have to look like the Sidekick) he said that the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet - and probably neither is the market. But if netbooks continue to dominate, dropping the price a few pounds and painting them different colours isn’t going to be enough to make a new netbook standout. Putting a phone in there, on the other hand… maybe next year?
-Mary
 

I have triumphed in sleight of hand and prestidigitation: I discovered the easy way to get the back off a Treo Pro every time. Forget the wrist exercises and sheer force I suggested previously.

Place the Treo Pro face down on your left palm. Place the flat of your right hand on the back of the Treo Pro, with your fingertips sitting just above the top of the logo. Press down and in the same motion slide the case away from you, away from the connector at the base. It will slide off easily, and you can stop cursing.

Setting up a Treo Pro is a very smooth experience. No practicing the same silly cut and paste you’ve done a hundred times before (the Windows Mobile equivalent of ‘have you ever been to a Harvester before?’), no interrogation. Magically, it gets both the time and the time zone right -and then asks if you want to always get the time from the network if it’s available. You have to wait about 60 seconds while it configures itself and installs applications, and then reboot. But before you can do any of that, you have to get the back off to put your SIM in.

And you have to do it without resorting to a hammer or a nail file or anything else that will relieve your frustration but sully the shiny black plastic. The manual isn’t as much help as it might be, though it’s useful that it’s online. Palm puts in all its usual good ideas like a physical mute slider and a physical Wi-Fi button, but the back is baffling.

The instructions say put it face down and press with your right thumb in the bottom right corner. You do need to press here, but you also need to press on the other side and push as hard as you can on the base at the same time; eventually the back will give half a millimetre. Renew your efforts and keep pressing in the corners and shoving from the bottom. Finally the back will move a whole two millimetres and spring free entirely. You’re in!

UPDATE

Alternatively, I discovered just as I gave up and changed to the BlackBerry Storm, that there’s a much easier way. Place the Treo Pro face down on your left palm. Place the flat of your right hand on the back of the Treo Pro, with your fingertips sitting just above the top of the logo. Press down and in the same motion slide the case away from you, away from the connector at the base. It will slide off easily and you’ll wonder why it ever seemed impossible.

M