Recent Comments:
Entelligence: What's the future of Nokia? {Engadget}
Dec 1st 2009 7:21PM Flix - doing good hardware is no longer the end of the game, good hardware is tablestakes.
The magic is in the software and this is where my beloved Finnish giant is flailing.
Entelligence: What's the future of Nokia? {Engadget}
Dec 1st 2009 7:17PM Gartenberg - you nailed it. Prepare to face the wrath of the fanbois.
In some ways Nokia shows astonishing cluefulness. The E71, for example, with awesome build quality, long battery life and a UI/OS well matched to relatively humble hardware. Epitome of less is more and most of them end up with nice surprises, like the cameras are actually pretty good for phone cameras (opposite of HTC frex).
Nokia Life Tools - another example of supreme cluefulness. Good to see someone show how well they "get" their market.
However, on the high end we have confusing mixed messages where some say the future is Maemo while others say Nokia loves Symbian to the end of time while yet another fellow comes out of the woodwork and tells Germany's Wirtscaftwoche that they might dump the cellphone business. WTF?
N97 - crap experience with a badly implemented touchscreen UI bunged on top of S60 in a half finished way, topped off by a particularly unresponsive resistive screen. Hardware is stunningly well made though.
N97 Mini - more of the same.
N900 - nice browser, otherwise somewhat rough around the edges in a beta-ish kinda way.
X6 - so much potential here, marred by a particularly crappy marriage of touch screen to S60 (despite actually using a good, capacitive scrren) which makes you wonder if anyone in Espoo has actually used an iPhone or Android or WebOS device in a similar way to how late 70's GM products made you wonder if anyone in Detroit had ever driven a Honda. Top it off with the world's most bizarre SIM slot and mix in some of those fun filled Symbian out of memory errors and you take what could have been a real winner and turned it into a tragic farce.
See a trend here? The hardware is still usually really nice, which is why you see lots of people spewing fantasy about N97s running WebOS or Android.
The world of Mobile is fast paced. Things change quickly. The KIRF tribe sure as hell is not taking the whole summer off like Finland. Look at Moto, how far they fell.
Palm Pixi one step closer to free, now $25 on Amazon {Engadget Mobile}
Nov 18th 2009 1:46PM Hecktr- word is that you should avoid the Pixi. Pre is not bad and is at least reasonably snappy in terms of performance. Two years is a long time to regret buying a cheap phone.
Google-branded phone coming early next year? {Engadget Mobile}
Nov 18th 2009 1:44PM We have seen that Microsoft has been less than a fully trustworthy partner in the mobile space first by the existance of the Pink effort, which effectively betrayed more or less every ally and friend they had amongst the handset makers, timed when faith in WinMo to deliver with 6.5 being a somewhat lame partial reskin and 7.0 delayed until late next year (perhaps far enough in the future to no longer matter, much like the post comet-strike plans of a diplodocus on the Yucatan Peninsula). Then the whole thing was topped off by the final betrayal of their last friend, Sharp, who was going to make the Pink device. An amazing display of self-immolation unlikely to be matched again any time soon.
It would be unfortunate to see Google emulate this rather spectacular augering in.
Sony Ericsson closing four facilities, laying off 2,000 employees worldwide {Engadget Mobile}
Nov 18th 2009 1:09PM Good news for our friends in Redwood Shores. Lots of good people there, glad that office is still going to be around. Makes a great deal of sense, with Redwood Shores being not far from Mountain View and thus the epicente of things Android.
Nokia's Maemo 5-equipped N900 on sale in America for $649 {Engadget Mobile}
Nov 18th 2009 1:05PM Performer Meatloaf has a special place in the hearts of many geeks, as he not only appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the seminal late night B movie, but also hit some chords which cannot help but resonate with degenerate teens, which is to say most of them,k which many of us once were. This resonance hit stride with the album Bat out of Hell and some would say the single Paradise by the Dashboard Light was the very climax.
For those unfamiliar, the tune is about a fellow who pledges his eternal love to a girl he is trying to have his way with parked in a car some dark place. Of course, the fellow later changes his mind and tries to find a way out of his pledge of eternal love and devotion.
Reminds me of Peter Schneider, Head of Marketing for Maemo Devices at Nokia when he said "Symbian and Maemo will continue to co-exist,"
Well, guess that depends on how you define co-exist. For example, if it means that devices in the pipeline will ship with the OS they were originally planned to ship with, then OK, but it looks like the end of the line for Symbian is on the N-series is coming quickly if the Maemo folks can be believed.
Of course I expect that they won't break any promises or forget any vows, but it sure sounds like Nokia may be "praying for the end of time" so they can get on with the future of building world class smartphones which, as we have seen, is going to be a real challenge if they stick with Symbian.
Sadly the company does seem to be sending contradictory and changing messages with regards to its platform strategy. Considering the developer flight from Symbian and the rather steep fall in market share, particularly on the high end, it would seem that Espoo needs to make a choice, clearly communicate that choice and get on with life. Far worse then telling people something they don't want to hear is telling them something that they do want to hear but lying about it.
Espoo, go ahead and sleep on it.
http://thecsr.blogspot.com/2009/11/bat-out-of-espoo.html - cool graphic here
Nokia reveals 2015 vision while struggling with 2009 realities (video) {Engadget Mobile}
Nov 11th 2009 8:51PM Very European, nice touch with Maria having the Barcelona lisp, added street cred.
People are not always fully aware of their strengths and weaknesses. For example, a friend of mine believes he is God's gift to women but instead his primary strength is being a Level 45 Chaotic Nerd in some kind of Evercrack game.
Nokia as a company would really like to become a software and services company for some reason. I guess someone said that software makes people rich or something, so now you have a bunch of people who know absolutely nothing about good software and/or services embarrassing themselves like my friend with his +5 Vorpal Sword. Clueless to the point of not getting that they are clueless.
Let me illustrate - Ovi, for example. When first announced, it didn't work on my E71. Fine, I waited. Then when I tried again I had to go thru some long and painful registration process, which was OK until I hosed the phone mucking around with APNs and had to do a factory reset. OK, back to Ovi. Ooops, you need an Ovi account even to download stupid free stuff like Opera Mini (actually a damn fine browser for the E71, much as it is pretty good even on a RAZR, oddly it seems to suck on WinMo and Android, but life is funny that way sometimes). Turns out that it was faster and easier for me to google Opera and find their download page than it was to use Ovi. Bummer.
Then the whole maps thing. OK, many who are serious about services would put all that crap on the cloud. Instead, how about you mix metaphores and make it such that you need to install a big fat application on your pc and then you have to download area maps and then you have to sideload all this crap onto a phone, oh, shit, where is my cable? Ooops, the desktop thing wants to update itself and oh look it wants to update the client on my phone too....
The N97, although a wonderful piece of hardware, really and truly was a bit of a short bus effort and the short bus aspect of that phone was all software. Seemed like they shipped a beta or something. Wonderful build, great feel, crap phone. Oops.
So, we have these folks who suck so badly that they don't realize they suck. Trust me, you see this kind of thing everywhere, not just in technology. You can see it among sportbike riders up in the Santa Cruz mountains, you can see it in the gym, you can see it at the shooting range. Usually you don't see it at companies with such a long and distinguished history as Nokia, but sometimes you do.
Don't get me wrong, I still like Nokia and wish them the best. My first mobile was a Nokia with a black and white screen and it was built like a tank, one of the best made pieces of consumer electronics I had held, but they have seriously lost it and are going off on a messed up tangent and need to get back to basics and focus first on building good phones again then worry about all this other bullshit. They would kick so much ass with Android but I guess that most in Espoo would rather burn their faces off with a blowtorch than put Android on a Nokia. That sting is pride messing with you.
Nokia's N97 mini gets its shipping papers {Engadget Mobile}
Oct 28th 2009 2:55PM Wonderful hardware, delightfully well built. Sadly the ones I have played with have all had rather dreadful usability issues, some of which are unlikely to go away in 2.0.
This is a very good one to try before you buy.
Novatel MiFi 2200 gets new firmware, now stays on even when you don't need it {Engadget}
Oct 26th 2009 2:40PM This is a great device. I use mine for OTA customer care software demos and it has saved me quite a bit in trade show network connection costs. Recently at Oracle OpenWorld I was trying to show some stuff on AT&T phones at the show in Moscone Center in SF, but although my AT&T phones were showing 4 or 5 bars they were not getting good data connections. With the MiFi on Verizon, not only did my laptop have a connection, but I was also able to use WiFi to connect the AT&T phones and all was well.
With this latest firmware I hope that I will not have to do a "ping -t" to set up my own keepalive. I will however second the observation that the device gets hot and a little flakey if used for a long time on the charger, almost as if it wants some sort of finned heat sink or something. That said, if I hang it by the USB cord in the open air it seems to do better.
My upgrade went well, MiFi is back up and running, management UI is better, settings were preserved.
AT&T's HTC Tilt 2 handled: it's very much a Touch Pro2 {Engadget}
Oct 8th 2009 6:54PM Sad to see some of these things. The E71x seemed a bit of a downgrade except for the cool support of FOTA. The AT&T version of the Kaiser (aka the TytnII aka the Tilt) was fussier than the generic HTC version and now we see this, where what was a pretty good keyboard has been done some violence which did not leave TouchFlo3D unscathed.
Perhaps some day these guys will realize that molesting and gimping handsets just isn't very cool.
