卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

I was writing recently about losing my Nokia 6708, and was talking about it off-line with Niti. One of the annoying things about it was the lack of a password, meaning that the handset can be sold on and re-used by whoever’s got it now. The only security measure available was for the SIM card, not the phone itself; we were wondering why such an obvious and needed feature wasn’t available for what was quite an expensive smartphone.

Happily, my new iPod does have password-protection, so at least if this goes AWOL, no-one will be able to benefit from it…

Anyway, I read an article today on Virtual China, about a Chinese-designed phone that seems to be pretty well-protected, with fingerprint-ID required. This is the CECT T100 (heh, sci-fi fans will be smirking at that). By the way, beware the CECT website - every link seems to open in a new window, and they have horrible background music on every page. But if they can’t do web design, their phones seem to be done very well - to me, it’s a reasonably nice-looking phone, with an interesting set of features that will suit the Chinese businessman on the go! (Not necessarily what I would want in a phone myself, but it features streaming TV and Karaoke as well as the usual multimedia features). Most important, though, is the biometric access control. Pretty cool…

When China Tech News reviewed the T100, the comments list seems to indicate that it already has a substantial global following; the most common query is about the lack of a manual in English. This suggests to me that people are buying it from Chinese suppliers based on its design, but that the company isn’t actively marketing it outside China.

I know from my time living in Beijing that the phone shops are very well-stocked with locally-designed handphones, and it would appear that their quality is just getting better and better. China definitely seems to be innovating fast in this sector, and once they start making a serious effort to market internationally, they would seem set to transform the market - particularly as here in Asia there’s none of this ridiculous locking of handsets to one particular network, as I read about in the US and Europe…

I’m just acting as part of the echo-chamber here, but this article from Ogilvy suggests the rollout has begun, and will really impact from next year. Cool.

A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was pretty happy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.

Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now - especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.

Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:

• a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
• mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything

I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work - constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy - are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinking about quite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasy modus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were - to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!

So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…