The Nokia N75 has surfaced once again, this time on Cingular’s rebate forms.

Screenshot:

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The document contains no information about the release date or the offered plans.

There was a time when I was interested in this phone, but not anymore. An S60 flip is tempting, but with the N76 coming out, I think I’d rather wait for it.

Krisse from AllaboutSymbian has a great article on Unlocking Mobile Phones and why we all should go for SIM-free phones. Its a great article and definitely worth a read.

My take on on the whole contract issue:

I don’t like contracts and I’m not in one right now. I think that unlocked phones are great. They free you from contracts and allow you to choose providers at will. But a sim-free environment is not so rosy for your providers. Why?

• ARPU - Average Revenue per User
• Churn - Number of users leaving the company’s service
• Cut-throat competition

Without contracts, the main way for a service provider to attract customers is pricing and offerings. But with an open standard like GSM, there is no sustainable competitive advantage, technology wise. So companies begin pricing wars, and start under-cutting one another. As users keep switching providers, churn increases. And high churn will definitely reflect badly on the provider. Under-cutting doesn’t help much either. It ultimately will reduce the ARPU a company gets from its users. I understand that the consumer ultimately benefits from this, but for a healthy industry, both sides must be happy. The relationship must be symbiotic.

I’m beginning to see this happen in India too. About 2 years ago, when I was still in Mumbai, the market was dominated by sim-free phones and prepaid calling cards. GPRS carried a flat-rate fee for Rs. 99 and sms was dirt cheap. But this January, when I visited India, I saw locked phones on the market. Rates for extra services have gone up and contracts are being introduced. Carriers like Airtel and Hutch are selling subsidized handsets which people are buying. Why? because they’re cheap. In all honesty, if T-Mobile offers me a free phone for the Get More 39.99 plan, I’d take it, because the way things are, I’ll be paying 39.99 anyways, even if I buy an unlocked phone. And that’s the general mentality. A normal customer doesn’t gain much with unlocked phones.

I think a completely sim-free market will always start moving to contract and locked-phone market. I think this is due to the fact that operators will continue to try and undercut and get one - up on each other for market share and users will continue to move between carriers as this happens. Eventually, a time will come when market share will increase significantly, increasing operating costs, but ARPU will not, and to make matters worse, there will be no barrier to churn. This will cause operators to then start exploring options of generating more ARPU and reducing churn which will give rise to a contract-based system.

Steve Litchfield from All About Symbian has written a javascript-based interactive grid to help choose Symbian phones based on specific criteria.

Select the features you need in your Symbian phone and it will show you the recommendations at the bottom of the page.

Link: 3-Lib interactive Grid

Nice work! I’m sure this’ll make the process of choosing symbian phones a lot easier.

In my previous post, I talked about how it was possible to share any content from your S60 phone. This post details the entire process of setting up and configuring Raccoon on your S60 device.

Where to download:

Read the instructions from the Nokia Research site.

Make sure you apply for a Raccoon ID first. By my experience, it takes about 1-2 days to get the ID. Save the email containing the Raccoon Id.

There’s a wiki with some FAQs that you might want to read as well.

Also check out the Cool Stuff section to see its usage in the real world.

Installation and set up:

You will need to install the Raccoon bundle if you don’t have Python installed, otherwise downlaod the standlalone zip file and install all 3 sis files.

Once Raccoon is set up, use Y-Browser (or similar) to head over to C:/Data/apache/

The ‘conf’ folder contains Raccoon’s configuration files. The ‘htdocs’ folder is the default display folder for Raccoon.

Inside the conf folder is a file: httpd.conf. Move it to your pc as we will be editing it.

Do not try to edit the file on the phone!

Make a copy of the file on the pc!

On your pc, look for the line that says DocumentRoot. There should an address that says “C:/data/apache/htdocs”. Change it to the folder you want to share. For e.g. it could be: “E:/Sounds/digital” or simply “C:/” or “E:/”. Remember to use / slashes and maintain formatting of the original file at all costs.

Once that’s done, move the file back to C:/data/apache/conf and replace the old one.

Using the app:

Fire up Raccoon. Once it loads,go to Options -> Settings and enter your Raccoon ID and password. Once that’s done, Options -> Start w. Connector.

This should start up the web server.

When you receive your Raccoon ID, you will also receive a link in the email.That is your personal mobisite. Open it in a browser and the contents of the directory you shared should now be visible.

If you’re good with html, then add a few web pages to that directory to make things prettier!

I don’t have a Raccoon ID yet:

No problems, you can still use Raccoon, but only on your LAN. That’s why Raccoon has the ‘Start w/o Connector’ option as well. You can still use Raccoon to share data between multiple computers in your home.

Apache is highly configurable and you can even set access permissions, passwords to multiple files and folders. If you’re interested then definitely head over to Apache’s web page and take a look at how it works.

Netvibes has launched a mobile version of the netvibes homepage. the page can be accessed at http://m.netvibes.com

Create a ‘mobile’ tab using the web interface first and add the content viewable on the mobile phone.

The list of supported modules is shown up here.

Screenshots gallery:

Somehow, this product failed to impress me. I’ve been a netvibes user in the past and I liked the modular structure of their web product. However, the mobile product is nothing like its web counterpart. The features like iCal addition and Weather tabs are good, particularly the email retrieval feature, but they aren’t really lucrative, particularly for most smartphone users.
The current layout makes you scroll too much, since the feeds are displayed in its entirety. I wish they’d atleast adopt a Google Reader - like layout:

It would help a lot, imo.

If I were part of the netvibes team, I would definitely take a look at WidSets. Widsets currently offers modularity similar to the web product that netvibes offers.