Smartphone recommendations?

March 20, 2006 2:31 PM

I've recently started a new job as the tech director for a small company. I have a bunch of websites and servers to keep an eye on, and I'm thinking I need a mobile device that will allow me to keep track of them. What do you recommend?

What I really need is something with a decent browser, as well as a decent keyboard. Mac-friendliness and bluetooth are also appreciated.

I'm thinking a Treo is the most likely bet, but I don't actually know much about them.

posted by o2b to technology (8 comments total)

I use redalert.com and have it e-mail my phone when a server's down. My phone itself is just a Motorola RAZR, which syncs well with my Mac over Bluetooth, and with Opera Mini installed is a slow but usable Web browsing platform.
posted by nicwolff at 2:51 PM on March 20, 2006

Well, it's only tangential, but it might be worth pointing out that only 4 posts lower than this is the "Treo problems with OSX syncing" post....

I'm not clear on what you're looking to do: are you looking to have something where, if you get a page/SMS that says a site is having problems, you can look up the site on your mobile device and view it firsthand? Or more that you'll have custom monitoring webpages that you can pull up and see stats on the sites and performance? The latter will have less demands on graphics and bandwidth since you'll have the ability to customize a 'lightweight' version of those pages. If you want to view a live site, you pretty much need the fullscreen phone/PDA devices; otherwise, smartphones and the like, with smaller screens, could let you easily view your "site stats" page quickly and properly without the expense or size of bigger phone/screen.

There are a ton of phones coming out now, and there have been for some time, that are PDA phones, and might be what you're looking for. They have 320x240 screens, wireless/bluetooth, touch screens and/or keyboards (that slide out, that are on the front, clamshell FF, etc), etc. I myself had a Siemens i700 back in the day, about 2-3 years ago, and while it was useful for having everything, it was also quite bulky (these devices are quite expensive, and you have to keep them in a case or they'll get damaged)- size and portability, not to mention price, may be a consideration for you. There are these HTC devices now, and the Siemens SX66 that will do pretty much all you're looking for such as slide out keyboard, graphics good enough to browse on, Wifi and bluetooth, etc.


Anyway, I'd recommend the phonefinder at Phone Scoop to narrow down your choices by feature. I personally found over time that I hated having the huge ball and chain of a feature-rich phone/PDA, and liked the simplicity of a small, basic phone. However, I'd imagine if you want to geek out, that site will help you determine the right phone/PDA/mobile browser for you by features and carrier...
posted by hincandenza at 2:54 PM on March 20, 2006

Although Nokias are (in my personal experience) the best cell phones, try to avoid the Nokia 6600 series, or at least the 6620. I got mine for the same reasons you seem to want, bluetooth and mac-friendlyness, but as nice as the S60 interface/OS on it is, it is PAINFULLY slow. Trying to do the simplest of things like unlock the phone or browse contacts is severly annoying. So much so that I'm considering selling it.

Nokias are traditionally great, but stay away from this one...
posted by patr1ck at 3:27 PM on March 20, 2006

Agreed on the Nokia's a) being really good in general and b) the 6600s, not so fucking much. Mine is shite. Glad I only paid 30 for it.

The sidekick has a terminal (ssh / telnet) application that works. I used to use it, but more for novelty than for some real application. You could set up the machines to all let you know if something goes awry, and then use the sidekick to ssh into your boxen and see what's up with them. That said, it does not have bluetooth, does not sync with your mac (that is only kinda true... there are some workarounds), and is a chunky form factor.
posted by zpousman at 3:52 PM on March 20, 2006

Hrm. Sounds like you're looking for justification to buy a shiny toy. You don't really need a PDA to look after websites & servers after all.

Nagios is among the best of the open source server & stuff monitoring setups. It will quite happily send you text message alerts, and you can customize the alerts to your liking. No need for a fancy PDA/web enabled phone for that. :-)
posted by drstein at 4:04 PM on March 20, 2006

ditto drstein's comment (the bit about not needing a PDA -- not the bit about the shiny toy).

Depending on your needs / budget / preferred environment, you can also go with something like Mercury's Sitescope or (even more expensive Topaz).

Nice thing about prods like this is that they allow you to define up/down/availibility in business facing terms and maintain a history of the same. Other nice thing is that they allow you to send notifications to groups of people (i.e., your direct reports) when things go down - you'd get a message on your cell, but so would your oncall resources, which allows you to cut out yourself as middleman and therefore reduce mean time to resolution.
posted by gage at 4:16 PM on March 20, 2006

I actually do need the browsing capabilities, I have a number of web apps I need to maintain. :)
posted by o2b at 8:00 PM on March 20, 2006

Aaah. That could be tricky, since pretty much every phone-based web browser is dreadful when it comes to things like javascript. Opera (mobile, not mini) is the best portable browser available and even that breaks 50% of the web apps I use regularly. If your web apps are simple HTML & forms, however, you should be ok.

Anyway, my standard plug whenever anyone asks me for a smartphone recommendation: Nokia 9300/9500 (9500 has WiFi) - great screen (640px wide), great keyboard, bluetooth, wifi, Putty
posted by blag at 3:04 AM on March 21, 2006