Thomas S. Nielsen's blog

A few tips to consider when you buy your next cellphone.

1. Smartphone or cellphone?

Are you going to use your phone for more than texting and calling? Then you want a smartphone. With a smartphone you can surf the web, watch videos, run apps and more. If you are just going to use your phone mainly for calling and texting, you can go for a normal cheap cellphone.

2. a) Cellphone

When you are getting a normal cellphone, your choice is both easier and more difficult. It is easier because almost any phone works, but more difficult because you have more to choose from.

I would recommend that you check what menu system and features you like the best first, then choose a phone with that system based on price and design. That way you get a phone you like to use, in your price range. Remember to check the cell plan when you look at the price! A “free” phone is not free if you pay $70/month for two years.

2. b) Smartphone

Now this is where it gets interesting. Personally I got very strong opinions on this market. First of all you must consider that you are going to have this phone for at least a year, most likely two years or more. That means you should put a lot of consideration into what platform you choose.

Unless you are using your phone mainly for work, I would stay far away from Windows Mobile devices. I would also recommend iPhone and Android devices ahead of Symbian and Blackberry. To make a possibly long answer short: If you like the iPhone and are comfortable with the restrictions it comes with (no backgrounding apps except IMs and other simple tools, no porn apps, etc), go for it. If not, check out the different Android devices.

Android is Google’s entry into the smartphone market. It has a good user interface and lots of apps (second only to iPhone). Being supported by Google means that you most likely will get lots of free updates to your software, adding new functionality. If I wasn’t already on the iPhone platform, my next phone would very likely be a Google Nexus One or the Motorola Milestone (Droid in the US).

Google Nexus One

3. General tips

Above are my opinions, and they should be good guidelines for most of you. But the most important is that you do the following before making the final decision:

• Try different phones! They vary greatly.
• Pay attention to ease of use. If it is difficult, chances are that you are only going to use it when you absolutely have to.
• Check out the availability of apps (smartphone). You might miss just that one important feature, and find out that all other smartphones has it but yours.
• Consider the monthly fee when buying. It is most likely more than half of the total price that you end up paying.

Feel free to ask questions in the comment section.

Happy shopping!

As a part of my experiment to get more visitors, I have SEOed my blog. SEwhat? Search Engine Optimization. The art of making Google happy sure all the search engines are indexing your site in the best possible way.

The point of this is to get higher rankings, which (hopefully) translates into more hits on your site. Since part of my traffic already is coming from Google, I hope this has a visible effect.

How I did it
There are many ways going about SEO, in fact there are even tons of books about the subject. SEO can be your work if you are good enough. I am not, so I did it the easy way. Since I use WordPress for my blog, I just installed and configured the All in One SEO pack plugin.

If you haven’t got a clue at all about this, you don’t even have to configure it, the default config does wonders to your site ranking (or at least the developers of AiO SEO say so).

I am excited to si if it helps getting more hits through google. -10 internet points to the first person going to this page through Bing.

Statistics 16.09.09

A short update in a break from my studies: Here are the first results from Google Analytics. When I startet the experiment, I had close to no visitors. The graph shows a healthy start, with a double in visitors the third day.

My goal is simple: As many as possible. Can I go beyond 100? 1.000? 10.000? I don’t know. Let’s try. I have also seen that most of my traffic so far is from Facebook, Twitter and Google. Apparently many people like my cinnamon rolls. Direct traffic is also a measurable part of it, probably mostly me and my friends.

I have more tricks to come, but I will try to spread them out during the experiment. For now I am sticking with twitter and facebook, trying to let you share my blog with the world.

Google Analytics

The third stage of my visitor experiment is about getting statistics. I have already set up a basic stats page, but I want more info. Therefore I have now installed Google Analytics, a tool I’ve used in almost all of my previous website projects.

Google Analytics gathers a lot of important statistics for your site: Where did they find your site? What did they search for to get there through a search engine?

All of this can be used to further target your work towards sites you know give you visitors.

I will be sure to update if this information proves valuable.