While travelling in the US I’ve been using these smartphones quite intensively and I have some random thoughts to share, from the point of view of a user.

The N95 is pretty expensive, the BlackBerry is cheaper while the iPhone 3G, now available in Europe, is generally sold at a subsidized price but with an expensive monthly plan for voice and data.

If I was on a desert island (with cell coverage) I would carry with me just the BlackBerry 8310, since what I do more frequently on my mobile is using email and the BlackBerry’s QWERTY keyboard and push is better then any of the other 2 alternatives for that.

For GPS and navigation the BlackBerry 8310 has the best Google Maps version I’ve ever tried. In the US my iPhone had data traffic included and my BlackBerry with extremely expensive roaming charges for data, still it was hard resisting the temptation to use the BB. Whoever designed the Google Maps for the iPhone was not thinking of the user.

The keyboard on the BB is by far the best, next is the iPhone which is slow but doable, last is the Nokia N95. It is absurd to put so much intellect on the Nokia and make it…deaf.

As for music, the iPhone is by far the best, next the Nokia, last the BlackBerry for which music seems to be “glued on”.

To look at pictures the only one that really works is the iPhone, the BlackBerry is bad and the Nokia N95 has the worst software for pictures I’ve ever seen (if you have a lot of pics, your phone will likely freeze). It’s ironic how the Nokia is the best for taking pictures and still makes it so hard to look at both pixs and videos.

To use Twitxr, the iPhone is the best, next the BlackBerry, last the N95.

The iPhone has an awesome display, next is the N95, last the BlackBerry. The iPhone´s soul is the display but that makes it a “spectator” phone. The TV of phones. Great for watching, bad for input.

The Nokia N95 has the best camera and takes great videos. I can film with the iPhone using an app from Installer but it’s pretty bad anyway, the BlackBerry they say it can do videos, I don´t have the latest firmware that does that.

The iPhone is great to watch movies in streaming or from its memory. The N95 is not so bad, on the BlackBerry it’s terrible.

The BlackBerry has copy and paste, the iPhone still hasn’t. The Nokia has it, but I’ve never tried because without a QWERTY keyboard I don’t even bother using it for writing. Predictive text (T9) is not useful for me since I often change language. The iPhone software keyboard can easily adapt to different languages and you can quickly switch from one to the other.

At this point you may be wondering why I am not talking about the many Windows Mobile phones. My answer is because as bad as some features of the Symbian, Mac and Blackberry systems maybe they are all better than Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile seems to be designed with the same philosophy of Windows in general: tons of features that are unnecessary crowd the essential out. Try connecting to WiFi using Windows Mobile and you will see what I mean. Try with the iPhone and you can….breathe. Windows Mobile to me has the same problems as Vista. My take on operating systems is that easiest is Mac, best is Linux, Windows XP is already bad, frequently slow and difficult, Windows Vista is a dead end.

The phone that most resembles a computer is the iPhone, especially if jailbroken. The N95 is the more phone-like of the three. The BlackBerry is in between. If you just want to talk, a Nokia is your best option. The app store does not beat the installer for me. But at some point it may. I just like the freedom of the Installer. The Open Source spirit of the whole thing.

As for quantity of applications, the iPhone is the best, next is the Nokia with Symbian S60 and the BlackBerry is last. But while applications for BlackBerry are really few, most work very well and are very easy to use. The ones I use more often are Facebook and Google Maps with cellphone tower triangulation and GPS. The only app which performs really bad on my BB is Google Talk, which slows everything down.

The BlackBerry is SIM-unlocked, which makes it very expensive, especially when travelling abroad, since you can’t change the SIM with one from a local operator. The N95 and my iPhone are unlocked. The iPhone 3G has not been jailbroken or unlocked yet, but it will be soon.

My iPhone is ok for email with EDGE, WiFi is much better for everything else we will see when I try the 3G one how it works but probably almost as good as WiFi. The problem with the 3G plans, the one in Spain for example is that if you download a big file, say a movie, you kill your data plan which is maxed at 200MB unless you pay a fortune. The BlackBerry has no WiFi and no UMTS so web browsing is always slow, but it’s incredibly good for email. RIM has been able to squeeze GPRS and EDGE and optimize message downloading providing great speeds with little bandwidth. The Nokia N95 has everything from HSDPA to WiFi, but choosing a connection is slow, uncomfortable and the interface is badly designed.

With the iPhone’s headphones you can’t set the volume, with the N95’s you can and this is much better for riding bikes for example which I do a lot. Music on the BlackBerry is just for emergencies.

The iPhone is by far the best phone to surf the web, look at pictures, listen to music… everything but writing. If it had a physical keyboard it would be the best on all aspects. The BlackBerry has the best mouse/keyboard integration. Using your fingers as a pointing device is an interesting concept in the iPhone but it forces you to always use both hands. This is not the best solution when you’re in some situations, like when I’m holding my son in my arms. If you are left with one hand the iPhone is almost impossible to use. Not so the others.

To use FON the best smartphone is the iPhone. The N95 has a Symbian FON connection manager which is reasonably good, but the iFon application wecreated for the iPhone is the best in ease of use. The BlackBerry can’t access FON networks.

To sync with a Mac or PC, the iPhone wins, next the BlackBerry, last the N95. The N95 has more advanced features but the iPhone and BlackBerry are easier and faster to use.

The N95 can now sync with iTunes, but the iPhone is still the easiest to sync with iTunes and iPhoto. I don’t think the BlackBerry can talk with iTunes although somebody told me it does.

To save money the best is the N95 with which you can use many VoIP apps. Next is the iPhone that now has a very good Fring application (also available for Symbian devices). The worst is the BlackBerry that can’t run any VoIP app. My thing though is that I speak very little on the phone. I use them for almost everything else.

As for design, the iPhone looks better then the others, but it’s so slippery that it fell twice from my pocket. The N95 looks good and is reasonably sized. The BlackBerry is the most useful but the worst looking. My kids would not want to be seen with a Blackberry. They refuse to hold it.

The N95 gets an additional score for JoikuSpot, the software that lets you turn an HSDPA connection into WiFi and use your phone as a hotspot for PCs and other WiFi devices. The BlackBerry can’t act as a modem, and the iPhone if it can I haven´t seen how. The N95 is great as a modem via Bluetooth or USB.

The BlackBerry has the best battery duration, while the iPhone’s power consumption is terrible. They say the 3G iPhone improves on this. On the N95 it depends on what you do with it but batter life is a problem.

The N95 has the best external speaker, next the iPhone, the BlackBerry last.

To avoid accidental calls (your phone dialing numbers or contacts by itself) the worst is the BlackBerry, that loves to call your contacts while in your pocket, even if it has autolock. The iPhone and the N95 are better at avoiding those embarrassing moments in which you accidentally spill the beans.

Searching for a contact is terrible on the iPhone, ok on the N95, best on the BB.

The N95 also has some things that maybe of help. In Europe and some parts of Asia it has HSDPA which is better than 3G. It has radio if u like radio. The iPhone instead has some great apps to listen to internet radio over wifi in the Installer and on the App store as well.

The 3G iPhone is sold unlocked in some countries such as Italy for 500 euros which is not a crazy price. The Nokia N95 is also sold unlocked for the same price. BB is not cause is tied to a BB server somewhere.

I already blogged about the great time I had at Google Zeitgeist this year. Every year GZ gets better and better — hard for Nikesh and his team to top this year´s event– and this was partly thanks to the great Gala dinner on Monday.

While the sessions, speakers and panels during the day where more than stimulating and fun, the gala dinner was just amazingly organised. During dinner artists performed and all of them were incredibly talented: some of which you can see in the video my son Tom recorded. What do all of those artists have in common? YouTube made them famous - some of them have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views on YouTube (Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion –in shares– in October 2006).

Those are the artists which performed that night:
Beardyman (beatboxer from Brighton - viewed over 2.5million times on YouTube)
Billy Wingrove (UK´s top professional football freestyler - viewed over 7 million times)
Felix Zenger (beatboxer from Finland - viewed over 5 million times)
Flawless Street Dance (urban street dance team - viewed over 40.000 times)
Freestyle Skaters UK (as the name says: freestyle skaters)
Joss Loner (pianist and singer - the 10th most subscribed to German musician on YouTube)
Mehmet Kekec (combines street dancing with spinning balls)
Mia Rose (musician - 3rd largest following of musicians on YouTube of all times)
Nathan “Flutebox” Lee (beatboxing while playing the flute - viewed over 100.000 times)
Secret Wars - Grafitti Artists (a cross between a live art exhibition and a grafitti battle)
Vagabond Crew (breakdance - viewed over 10.000 times)
Yuri Lane (plays the Harmonica while beatboxing - over 13 million views)

I’m Pietro, I work with Martin and I’m guest blogging about this year’s Menorca TechTalk as Martin is very busy running the whole event. Guests spent four days in Martin’s farms in Menorca and had a great time. Yesterday there was a talk opened to the public, with entrepreneurs giving informal presentations on topics ranging from the state of the Internet in Japan to the differences between Europe and Silicon Valley when running a startup.

Joi Ito started with a speech about the Internet in Japan, where the mobile Internet is now growing faster then the Web. Japan is more advanced then Europe or the US but is moving towards a dangerous direction, with mobile operators controlling traffic and getting a huge cut on profits from Internet services running on their networks, thus disincentivating entrepreneurs and startups.

Jacob Hsu (CEO of Symbio) and Thomas Crampton (now based in China and working with Next Media) talked about the Internet in China. Thomas focused on what he called propaganda 2.0, while Jacob talked about the many opportunities in the country, especially for the companies that can build a good relationship with the government.

Andrew Mclaughlin (head of Global Public Policy at Google) followed with a speech on how he sees the Internet in Europe and underlined the danger of some recent EU’s directives extending old media regulations to the Internet. Micheal Wolf (former President of MTV Networks) gave a very interesting speach on the future of television, which in his vision will involve shorter formats and worldwide releases at the same time.

Marko Ahtisaari from Blyk gave us an update on how this ad-funded mobile operator is growing as a media company, offering users aged 16 - 24 free or very cheap mobile telephony while letting brands reach their users with very targeted messages and engage them in conversations.

The session ended with an improvised panel with Zaryn Dentzel, who moved from the US to Madrid to start Tuenti, now the biggest social network in Spain, Loic Le Meur, who moved from Paris to Silicon Valley to build his latest startup, Seesmic, and Ola Ahlvarsson who runs Result, helping other companies going international. Zaryn told us how moving to Spain proved to be a great opportunity, although he runs the company with an international team. Loic talked about the differences in starting a business in Silicon Valley, how some things are easier, like getting a meeting with a potential business partner, but some are harder, like finding engineers, as companies compete to attract the best talent. Ola gave a very interesting speech about the different kinds of entrepreneur, that he categorized into 6 models.

Last February I turned my Lenovo PC laptop into a Lenovo Mac and many readers told me what I was doing was illegal. Well, if that was illegal, what about the incredible offer from Psystar everybody has been talking about in the last few weeks? Here is a video on TechCrunch, long but worth watching, showing how Leopard runs smoothly on this PC, as does on my Lenovo laptop. This OpenComputer is much more powerful then a Mac Mini and at the same time is also much cheaper.

So this is my question… are clones good or bad for Apple? Will Apple prohibit them? I don’t think so, because even if they won’t let companies bundle Leopard with clones, users will always be able to buy it separately or get it illegally and install it on their PCs. Pandora’s box was opened with Apple’s shift to Intel processors.

Even if many of my readers believe clones are bad for Apple, I think clones will be instrumental for Mac OsX to get really popular and Apple much more valuable as a company. If Bill Gates has become the richest man in the world with PC clones, I don’t see why the same shouldn’t happen with Apple. Maybe clones are better then proprietary systems simply from the point of view of shareholders.

Those of my readers who bought Apple shares, like I did, last January, when I suggested to buy them at $134, could sell them today at $178. This means that if one of my readers bought $100.000 in Apple stock at $134, now he can sell them for $132.000 and get a 32% return, not bad after 90 days and reading a blog post!

With clones Apple will sell more copies of OsX and more software. It’s like piracy for Microsoft. Microsoft fights piracy but piracy is what made Windows a real global standard. Those who can pay do, others don’t. They get it illegaly but still use it. Opposing piracy is one of the reasons FON supports free software (in my company we use almost only open source software). Piracy hurts open source with its best advantage, being free (gratis).

Clones are part of the ecosystem and will incentivate Apple building better products. Let’s not forget the iPhone was a total commercial failure until it got hacked, and hacking is quite close to cloning.

Thanks to Seesmic, the start up founded by my friend Loic Le Meur and in which I’m an investor, you can now leave video comments to my posts in my Spanish and English blogs. Loic was one of the first to leave one!

Leaving a video comment is very easy, you just need a webcam, click on the “Or add a Video Comment with Seesmic” link below the comment’s text box, login or subscribe to Seesmic (if you’re not already) and record your video comment.

While getting comments might get a bit more complicated in video, as I often read them from my mobile, I’m sure I will appreciate seeing the face of the people who comment on my blogs. As a blogger, reading anonymous comments is like chatting in a room without light… video turns the light on.

Think about cars! Think about how much pollution we could save the world if we started sharing cars in a systematic and organized way. This is what start ups like PickupPal or Zimride (makers of the Carpool app on Facebook) are trying to do on the Web. These are great ideas, trying to make carpooling really effective by solving some of the key issues behind it: trust (people fear sharing cars with strangers) and critical mass (you need a good number of trips in your system before users might consider carpooling a reliable alternative for their transportation needs).

Using Facebook is a good idea: millions of users, a chance to know more about drivers and discover personal connections that might give users enough reasons to trust each other and share a car. There are other carpooling websites, less Web 2.0, like GishiGo, eRideShare, CarpoolWorld, CarpoolConnect, iCarpool and SharetheRide, and they all contribute reducing CO2 emissions, while helping users save money. Find the one that best suits your needs… and share!

Journalists sometimes portray WiFi as the enemy of operator based mobile services.  But if you take a look at this email I got today from AT&T you will see that what we reply at Fon is true.  That mobile operators are concerned about apps that use a lot of data and prefer that traffic to go over WiFi.  Even with HSDPA if people start downloading 300 MB movies for the iPhone network costs are unsustainable.

This is why WiFi has a role to play alongside GSM/3G and other mobile technologies.

Yesterday Fring released an iPhone version of its great mobile VoIP and Instant Messaging application. This is the first native application providing real VoIP on the iPhone, via WiFi, of course. Fring is compatible with Skype, MSN, GTalk, ICQ and Yahoo! and provides calling and messaging to your friends on these popular networks. It also provides VoIP calling using the SIP standard, so you can use any VoIP provider to call for very cheap rates using WiFi.

Fring works very well on the iPhone thanks to the great WiFi support Apple built into it (one of the best connection managers around, choose a network and access it automatically the next time). Fring has been available for a while on Nokia phones, but WiFi support built in those smartphones is less sophisticated, so Fring had to add several features like WISPr, to connect to already known hotspots, and its WiFi roaming feature, to let you automatically switch from a WiFi network to another, or from WiFi to 3G.

The best way to use Fring on the iPhone is of course with iFON, FON’s WiFi connection manager for the iPhone, which scans available WiFi networks and automatically connects you to FON signals, without having to enter your login details. So when you are abroad you can use your iPhone to easily find a FONspot and call home via Skype or SIP.

Call quality with Fring on the iPhone is very good, better then on Nokias in my experience. Instant Messaging is of course another great addition to the iPhone, a much needed one. It’s very intuitive and the iPhone’s huge multitouch screen offers a very good experience. You know already about the iPhone’s keyboard, you get used to it and you’ll still be faster then with T9.

Fring stays active while the iPhone is in sleep mode or if you press the “home” button on your iPhone and do other things with it. This way you always get notifications when you receive an instant message or when a call comes in.

You can install Fring only if your iPhone is jailbraked, but this is just a pre-release. Once the final version will be ready it will sure be available on Apple’s App Store for every iPhone out there (in June, when the new firmware will come out).

Here is a video my friends at Fring just made to present this release

We are happy to report that at Fon we have raised $9.5 million in a C round. Our current valuation which unfortunately I can´t disclosed has been the best valuation so far. This does not mean that we were not hurt by current market conditions which are pretty bad for start ups (Fon was founded in February 2006). Our leading investor in the round was a US Venture Capital arm of Sistema, Russia´s leading telco but our usual suspects, Google, British Telecom, Digital Garage and of course your blog writer participated in the round.

What are we going to do with the money? Launch Fon in Russia, launch the Fonera 2.0 (the fonera that uploads and downloads stuff to and from the internet while you are doing something else with your laptop) and develop the fonera 802.11n for an end of the year launch.

Unfortunately we will also have to do all this spending less money because this market forces us to do so. We already cut losses at Fon from $1.3 million per month to $800K per month in the last half year and we achieved this through cost reductions, a great reduction in router subsidies and increased revenues with high margins. We plan to do more of the same in the future and my target is to be losing half a million per month by June and to break even by the end of 09. And yes I do know that I should not be telling any of these things because we are a private company but if this blog is of any value to entrepreneurs I believe I must share them with you.

Bottom line: tough market forces you to think harder about everything you do but we are very happy to have closed this C round.

Following a tip from one of my readers (thanks Daniel!) I just got Apple’s Os X Leopard running on my Lenovo PC laptop, that same laptop that first got me into Ubuntu and then Mac, after it suffered a major crash while it was running Windows.

Now thanks to the fact that new Apple computers are based on Intel hardware I was able to install Os X on my Lenovo, which has the same CoreDuo cpu as my MacBook. If you have the right hardware you can try to do the same following the (quite) simple steps you can find in this useful post. The process consists in downloading a disk image, burning it to a DVD, making sure to follow the steps in the readme file before proceding with the installation.

The only things which are not working on this LenovoMac are WiFi, the integrated webcam and the Sleep function. A part from these issues this new Mac has been running fast and stable so far. The WiFi issue is clearly bad for me as CEO of Fon but I am sure I will be able to fix it.

What I wonder is why are there no more people turning PCs into MACs.