In my Nokia E71, I noticed a time skew of around 2.5 hours (GMT+8-GMT-5.5 ?) when I switched on the phone after landing in the local airport. I thought the time synchronization hasn’t happened yet and waited. However, instead of correcting itself, the skew kept on becoming big and eventually it was 7 hours ahead of the local time. All my alarms, reminders would go off in the middle of the night waking us up even before we have actually slept

I turned off and on again my phone couple of times and still the problem would not go away. Now, it was showing time as per GMT+7 time zone. At this stage, I wondered if it could be the operator issue and looked at my other mobile (iPhone) which was also setup to auto-update from mobile operator. There were no issues and the phone synced well and it always showed the correct local time.

At this stage, I started to wonder what could be issue ? there were 4 combination possible – home mobile network, roaming mobile network, phone model / manufacturer and time zone differences. I did a look up table. My Nokia E71 is on Starhub Network in Singapore, and was connected to the Vodafone IN network automatically and was showing GMT+7 time zone time. My iPhone is on SingTel in Singapore and was connected to the Airtel network automatically and was showing the correct GMT+5.5 time zone time. My primary suspect was the mobile operators’ algorithm in sync roaming mobile phones. Initially I thought, perhaps my mobile phone is in GMT+8 so there was a bug in time synchronisation and the network was pushing GMT+8+localtime. However, this was not the case as well. It was pushing down GMT+7+localtime. This left me with the only possibility of Singapore being registered as GMT+7 in the network operator. Incidentally, the natural time zone of Singapore is also GMT+7 (see natural time zone of singapore). Any way, all is theories and I don’t have any concrete solutions.

If you have experienced such issues and know of an possibility, do drop an comment.

The striking difference between Nokia’s Symbian offering and Linux offering is that Linux devices were positioned as tablets meaning that they cannot connect to cellular infrastructure. They can be used at Wi-Fi hotspots or connect to cellular infrastructure using a mobile phone over bluetooth connection and access the internet. These restrictions reduced the market size for Nokia’s Linux based tablets since you need an additional mobile phone to access the internet on-the-go. Recently at OSiM world conference, Nokia has promised it would add 3G support to the network stack of its Maemo Linux OS. This is really significant for Maemo although it lags behind other Linux-based Mobile OS such as openmoko, limo and Android.

Let us consider a scenario on how you will be able to replace your mobile phone with a Maemo5 or other internet tablets. Mobile phones connect to the cellular infrastructure using both voice and data protocols. Voice evolved first (as you know) and 3G HSPA has been recently added to the infrastructure. At the same time, the rise of IP telephony is staggering. There are dozens of companies that are using SIP to provide IP telephony service to end-users. Current limitation for these users is that they need either a hardware SIP phone or a soft SIP client on their desktops. For usage on a mobile phone, the end user needs a high-end so-called smartphone. This again limits the market size.

Let us now merge the upcoming maemo5 platform with the SIP phone and compare it with the current smartphone. With 3G supported by Maemo5, users will be able to buy only data-access plans (instead of voice+data) from mobile operators and use a soft SIP client to get voice functionality. In Singapore, level 3000 series or 3xxx xxxx are being deployed as IP phone numbers. I subscribe to pfingo; there are other companies as well.

Armed with a micro-computer aka tablet and with SIP connectivity over 3G networks, I am truly autonomous and will not miss my trusty mobile phones. Shall we call this CIP Phone ? in short for CELL IP PHONE ?