samsung

It appears to me that phone manufacturers are releasing new mobile phone models at a quickening pace. It used to be that you could have a phone for over a year without it looking dated. However, in the iPhone Era, if you bought a phone 6 months ago, you are already two years behind the times (even if the phone you bought was an iPhone). The Age of the Disposible Mobile Phone is seemingly incongruous in the increasingly environmentalist milieu of western society. However, I am certain that when someone finds a way to make money by selling a "Green" phone all of the other phone makers will jump on board. For now, though, we will have to content ourselves with the cycle of "man, I need a new phone" to "just bought a new phone joy" to "look at that guy's newer phone envy" to "damn, why am I stuck with this Zack Morris phone" and back to "man, I need a new phone".

One just-released phone that I am looking forward to trying out is the Nokia E71. Personally I am a big fan of phones that feature WiFi, GPS, full qwerty keypads, and sleek Scandinavian styling--what is not to love? Another great reason to love this phone is that it is now supported by EQO.

You may or may not have noticed, but we have added a whole host of new phones to our supported list of the Nokia, Sony Ericcson and Samsung varietals.

Peter

We at EQO are in a continual pickle when it comes to Samsung and LG phones. We would love to support them all, but there are just too many for us to get our hands on. To make matters worse, neither have developer programs that are of any use. Thank you Nokia and Sony Ericsson for being so helpful!

We currently only support a small percentage of the estimated 47 billion different Samsung and LG models out there and we need our user's help to support more. If you are interested in helping us support your phone, please send us an email to beta@eqo.com providing your phone model, country, and mobile service provider. If we think there is a chance that EQO Mobile will work we'll help you try EQO, which will hopefully lead to us officially supporting your phone. Helpful beta testers will have the chance to win EQO Prize Packs, in addition to the tremendous honor of being the first to use EQO Mobile on a particular model. We thank our users in advance for their kind efforts and hope to hear from you soon!

Cheers,

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

Recently I asked those in the EQO community with unsupported phones to let me know if they were interested in testing EQO for us on their handsets. Since then I have received dozens of responses. The majority of the requests that I have received have been for Palm devices. Unfortunately for these rabid Palm fans, we are not planning on supporting any Palm OS devices in the short term future (althoughI can say that we will be supporting Windows Mobile OS Palm devices very soon).

My campaign for more supported phones did have one giant success, largely in part to Tim McIntyre, who never gave up in his testing of EQO on his Samsung U600. For this triumph, Tim will be receiving an EQO prize pack! Congratulations Tim!

If you have a Samsung U600, sign up! If your phone is not on the supported list (and it is not a Palm!), please send me an email at peter@eqo.com and I can help you get testing.

Peter
EQO Customer Support

There are currently 265 different phone models that work with EQO. That may seem like a lot of phones; however, there are probably about a kajillion different phone models out there today (and the list just keeps on growing). We do test as many phones as we can get our grubby paws on, but it would be impossible for us to test everything on the market.

There are minimum requirements for EQO--your phone needs to support Java applications (J2ME, MIDP 2.0 to be more precise), your phone needs to have a max .Jar Size of at least 220 KB, and you need to have full access to mobile data--but if you have a phone that is not on our supported list, and you think it should be, please let me know at support@eqo.com and I get you set up with a suitable file to test out on your phone.

Peter
EQO Customer Support

Currently we at EQO only support a small percentage of the estimated 47 billion different Samsung models out there. It is tall task to test EQO Mobile on every Samsungs mobile, but that doesn't mean EQO Mobile won't work on your phone. Just because we at EQO can't get our hands on your particular model, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to use EQO Mobile. If you are interested in helping us support your phone, please send us an email to support@eqo.com providing your phone model, country, and mobile service provider. If we think there is a chance that EQO Mobile will work we'll help you try it out, which will hopefully lead to us officially supporting your phone. Helpful beta testers will have the chance to win EQO Prize Packs, in addition to the tremendous honor of being the first to use EQO Mobile on a particular model. We hope to hear from your soon!

Cheers,

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

This past week I read an Engadget Mobile post indicating that Samsung is the "most favored phone brand in US". Seeing as I am not partial to Samsung phones, I have not been able to get this article out of my head ever since I read it last week. I continually ask myself the question, how can this be? I do not dispute that Samsung makes attractive phones (some very attractive) that work well for their intended purpose. And I am not at all a Samsung hater, but I just don't see how they are "favored". They match Motorola in sex appeal (but lack the marketing might), the base functionality of a Samsung device usual pales in comparison to that of a comparable Nokia, and not much compares to the snappy Sony Ericsson UI. That being said, I feel that Samsung's American success can be attributed to one key factor, American carriers stock more Samsung models, kudos to their sales team. The bottom line is Americans use Samsung phones because they are sold Samsung phones, possibly for some of the reasons I mention below:

1. Samsung makes a lot of CDMA phones, Sprint and Verizon are big CDMA carriers (check out Nokia vs Qualcomm)
2. Samsung phones are cheaper in general and USA carriers tend to offer fewer high end services requiring higher end phones (compared with Europe/Asia)
3. The American smartphone market is Blackberry and Windows Mobile dominated, hardly a Symbian (read Nokia) device in sight.
4. American carriers and Samsung share the same attitude towards third party software developers...

I hope you picked up a hint of bitterness on that last point. These past few months, I've been trying to figure out what devices we at EQO can support with our upcoming service. Thanks to the great developer sites provided by Nokia and Sony Ericsson and the pretty good one from Motorola, a glance at a spec sheet tells me all I need to know. Conversely, I've found no useful developer content online for Samsung. Both the Samsung Mobile Developer Club and the SMCS (whatever that is) appear to be officially sanctioned, but neither are of much use. I'm of the opinion that Samsung will never garner as much fervor until they embrace third party application development, starting with a good developer site. At the very least, I will remain bitter until Samsung emails me back.

Recall my mentioning that I am not a Samsung hater. I have an A706 from Rogers and a privately acquired E900 that I find quite delightful and cooperative, shame I had to buy them to find out what they can do. If anyone has any accurate sources of Samsung device info, I'm all ears.

Note to prospective EQO users with Samsung phones: if we don't support your device its not for lack of want or trying. We just can't get our hands on every Samsung phone out there, not even a good chunk. However, we are very encouraging of user involvement in our Samsung endeavors. If interested, send us an email to support@eqo.com and we'll work with you to prove whether or not the new EQO Mobile will work on your device. I look forward to hearing from some of you.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist