Three Wise Men

Can Twitter replace SMS on cell phones?

Past few days I have noticed that being connected to my home WiFi access point with Nokia E71 cell phone does not drain the batteries as expected. In fact, with normal usage of the phone I managed to stay connected for about 48 hours. I was really amazed. On top of that I was also running twitter client – Gravity set to retrieve new twits and @replies every 15 minutes and retrieving of Direct Messages happened every two minutes.

The problem with Gravity is that it does not close the connection after an update and if you are not near your wireless access point it will use 3G (or whatever you are using) connection. An active 3G connection will drain the battery in four to five hours if you have a good battery, in most cases even sooner.

Twitter pretty much replaced my short message service¹. Now, here is an idea: a push service for Twitter that would be even friendlier on the battery life. Some smart phones already support push services and writing an application for that should be trivial and it was probably already done, right? The whole concept is useful in the situations where people cannot receive your text messages. Either because there is no roaming contract between two operators or receiver has to pay a ridiculous amount of money for outgoing messages and in some cases receiver is charged even for incoming messages².

Properly written mobile twitter client with push support could in fact replace texting completely for all twitter users and in global it would be cheaper for all the foreign communications. In the end it all depends on your subscription plan. For me, there is no flat rate for data transfer but 2GB of data will cost me 12€ per moth and this means around three million messages³. On the other hand with my subscription plan I can send one thousand messages for free and receiving is also free, no matter who the sender is.

Increasing the connectivity and the range of communication between people has been a goal of humankind every since the first proto-language evolved. Today we carry around Star Trek communicators and we are reachable almost everywhere on the planet in a matter of seconds. For instant communication we are missing only one thing – a better battery.

1. SMS, texting. [↩]
2. So much about North American subscription plans … [↩]
3. If the overhead for sending/receiving one message is five times of the maximum message size which is 140 characters. [↩]

Two Weeks of Nokia E71

Nokia E71

Cell phones are something that people change quite often, my guess would be that people replace their them every two years or so. I recently replaced mine. Most of my time I was Nokia user. There was some flirting with Motorola and Siemens, I had one Panasonic too, they all sucked compared to Nokia. Which models did I use? Why did I switch and my first experience with new Nokia E71, read on.

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