The Curse of Silence

I've just heard about a potential virus effecting S60 phones, dubbed 'The Curse of Silence' This is sent in the form of an SMS and it stops further functionality of SMS and MMS on the infected phone.

Has anyone received this? Apparently the only way to restore the phone is a factory reset.

I'm reading: The Curse of Silence

I Broke My Phone!

Unbelievable, after all that time deciding and finally choosing the Nokia N82, I've broken the camera! The lens cover does not activate the camera when opened; I cannot activate it through the menu either, as the sensors think the cover is still closed. All that opens is the front facing camera.

I've had to send my phone away for repair, and if I'm lucky it will be back by the weekend. Having just recently sold a few old phones on Ebay, all I have left now is the Nokia 6600!! Now, when this phone launched (Four years ago? Five?) I loved it, an excellent handset for its time. Problem is, that time isn't now. Oh, how spoiled we have become with mobile technology.

So, the 6600. No WiFi, no HSDPA, poor quality screen, no decent music playback, poor camera (but at least it works!) and so on.

How will I cope?

I'm reading: I Broke My Phone!

A Christmas Gift from Nokia

One weeks free navigation for Nokia Maps is on offer from Nokia, just click on this page and enter your mobile number. Could be useful for that long trip to grannies for lunch, if the motorway gets closed, I suppose? Or finding your way home on New Years Eve?

Merry Christmas, all.

I'm reading: A Christmas Gift from Nokia

I Choose The N82

I've been giving some serious thought to which phone I should buy next. I've not been using Nseries for a while, I've been off using handsets from Sony Ericsson and Samsung, fine handsets in their own right, I guess, but not for me.

Recently I've been using an E51, which is a great handset, but I was getting itchy for something new. As it turns out, my choice is anything but. I was thinking of going retro, with either the N80 or the N73, but although the appeal was there, I decided it wasn't worth it. I left myself with a choice between the N82, or getting one of the really nice Eseries phones, either the E66 or E71.

The E71 is a fantastic handset, a friend recently nominated it his 'handset of the year'. One of the major pluses of the E71 is the reported battery times. It has always been one of the important points for me, on any phone, is the quality of the battery. But finally, with this phone, I am just not sure the QWERTY keypad is for me. Very fickle I know, but sometimes it comes down to the minor points when choosing a phone.

The E66 is a good alternative to the E71, with a more standard form factor. Reviews are quite harsh when commenting on the battery life with this phone, but it is still overall a fine looking handset, with plenty to offer. The build quality on the E66 and E71 also feels top drawer, really solid and feel like they are built to last.

Thing is, after a lot of thought and some useful suggestions in the comments a few posts back, I decided the phone I'm gonna stick with is the N82. I picked one up the other day to use whilst deciding what phone to get, and I guess that has influenced me. Ever since the first day I used the N82 I have been impressed with its all-round feature set. Quality in all areas, camera, GPS, Web, Email, acceptable size, with an acceptable battery life too. The keypad can become frustrating, especially when composing long emails, but that is not enough to detract from the quality of the phone.

I had looked at newer Nseries phones, like the N96, but I am not liking that phone. Too buggy, (Yeah, I know I can update when new firmware releases, but still, poor showing from Nokia with that phone) and the build quality is just so cheap and plastic. The Eseries phones are streets ahead in this regard.

So, N82 it is. But I honestly feel with the better media features now on Eseries phones, and a superior build quality, active standby screen plugins, etc, my next purchase may be Eseries.

I'm reading: I Choose The N82

Nokia, what HAVE you done?

Ok, so I've been away from the Nseries market for a while, so there are lots of updates that are old news to some that I'm only just finding out for myself. A lot changes in a few months, it would seem. In my deliberations on a new phone and checking for a good deal, I managed to pick up an N82 cheap, second hand but in excellent condition. Just needed a new screen cover. At least whilst deciding where I'm going to go long term, either E or N, I can remind myself just how good the N82 really is.

However, after updating the phone to the latest firmware, I am not sure I can deal with that Homescreen! What a mess!

It is a long term bugbear of mine, the fact that Eseries phones have the option to add or remove items on the Homescreen with the plugins, and Nseries cannot. It is so silly. I like the active standby shortcuts, I don't like lines and lines and lines of text all over the place.

Like I said, this may not be news to some, but I am left with a real dilemma now. Do I hate the Homescreen that much I would buy a different handset because of it? As much as it seems petty, I just might.

I'm reading: Nokia, what HAVE you done?

Decisions, decisions.

So, I've been looking into getting another phone, after my foray into the world of the non smartphone, as I mentioned in the post below.

I had been tempted to go retro.The idea of reliving 'the good old days' with an N80 or an N73 was very tempting. The N73 was always my favourite phone, the all round balance of features and performance was spot on, for a phone of it's time. However, I'm spoiled with phones these days that include WiFi, GPS and HSDPA. It's also a contributing reason to why I decided not to go for the N80, as tempting as it was. Poor camera, no GPS, no HSDPA, and I think the mists of time are clouding memories of a really poor battery, too.

So, I'm left with four options, either I stick with my Nokia E51, look for an E71, E66 or go for the N82. The Eseries are strong contenders, and apart from the N82 I can't see any Nseries worth having. Maybe the N95 8GB could slip in as a contender, giving me 5 to choose from.

Decisions, decisions.

I'm reading: Decisions, decisions.

We're back..... Sort of.

It's been a long while since I had anything to add to this blog. In the time I've 'been away' I have tried many phones. (Such is the life of a mobile geek, just when you think you are happy with a handset, another comes along to entice you away!) Chiefly among the handsets I've used has been the Sony Ericsson C905 and the Samsung Tocco. Nice phone in their own right, but it takes a lot to please me, and they just didn't make the grade. So, I find myself right now at a bit of a loose end. I want a new phone, but what should I get? I've narrowed my choice down to 6.

I could go retro, and pick up a Nokia N80. It's not something I've been hankering for, I was just in a shop the other day that sells second hand phones, and I saw an N80 on display. Amongst the memories of dire battery life, I also recalled the quality of that handset. Seriously. Poor camera apart, the N80 could hold its own against many of the phones on the market today, despite being around two years old.

If I'm going to go retro, why not go back to the phone I had when I started this blog? The Nokia N73 has lawys been a favourite of mine, one of the best handsets for balance of features ever. Quality camera, NSeries functionality, and an excellent battery life. Again for slightly nostalgic reasons, the N73 is a consideration.

Alternatively, I could go for a Nokia N82. There's nothing nostalgic in this option, the N82 simply remains my favourite phone of all time, I'm still not 100% sure why I traded it in. I guess I just wanted to see what else was out there, but there's nothing I've used that comes close to the near perfection, in my opinion, of the N82. At the moment, despite my nostalgic dreaming, the N82 remains favourite.

Unless...

I go to the dark side! Actually, I'm kind of already there, and it isn't that dark, to be honest. I'm referring to the Eseries, so nothing too drastic. But, I'm supposed to be an Nseries fan, I shouldn't be harping on about Eseries phones, surely? Well, it's not really the multimedia things that get me going, it's the functionality of S60. And there are some options on the Eseries, namely homescreen plugins (yup, I'm still banging that drum!) that you just don't get with Nseries phones.

I've looked at the E71. Functionality wise, this phone is top drawer. It has all the connection options covered, isn't as ugly as the E61 was, feels well made, looks good, and apparently has a battery that like, goes forever! This phone is a strong contender for my next purchase, but there is one drawback. That QWERTY keypad, I'm just not sure that is for me.

So, I could consider the E66. Now this is a smart looking phone, and it actually looks like a phone, too! Nice slide design, all the features of the E71, still feels well built, I could see myself using this phone and being happy to do so. I'm unsure about the battery with this one though, some reports have been less than promising. But I'm still tempted.

My last option is just to stay with what I've got. Kinda boring, really, it's so much nicer to be choosing something new, when quite honestly I have a perfectly adequate phone already. Currently I use the E51. Nice slim phone, with HSDPA, WiFi, excellent S60 functionality, good battery life, fits nicely in the pocket and it just works. No claims are made about anything spectacular, but it just gets the job done.

Although Nseries has always been 'my thing' none of the new stuff appeals. I think the fact I'm even reminiscing of the old stuff is indicative of the recent releases. The N78 is not particularly nice, and the N79 seems to be an N78 rehash with a better keypad. As for the N96, it's a right dogs dinner, it just feels nasty in the hand, cheap plastic rubbish. And I don't do touchscreen phones. I always felt I didn't, my experience with the Tocco (nice enough phone for what it is, just not for me) proved as much.

So, decisions, decisions.

I'm reading: We're back..... Sort of.

Nokia: Running in molasses

Every time I think about Nokia and Symbian, I can't help picturing a man knee-deep in molasses, running as fast as he can. He's working up a sweat, thrashing and stumbling forward, and proudly points out that for someone knee-deep in molasses he's making really good time.

That thought came to me several times during a briefing day that Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation held recently in San Francisco. A recurring theme was a deeply earnest discussion of how big and complex their business is, and how proud they are that despite the complexity they can make forward progress. For example:

Charles Davies, CTO of the new foundation, pointed out to us that Symbian OS has about 450,000 source files. That's right, half a million files. They're organized into 85 "packages," all of which have been charted out in a diagram that will be posted soon on the foundation's website. Davies was proud that the diagram is in SVG format, so you can zoom in on it and see that "this is an architecture that's not just a plateful of spaghetti."

The diagram looks a bit like a plateful of very colorful spaghetti (although in fairness to Charles, that's true of every OS architecture diagram I've ever seen). Anyway, the big takeaway was how huge the OS is.

Davies talked about the substantial challenges involved in open sourcing a code base that large. He said it will take up to another two years before all of the code is released under the Eclipse license. In the meantime, a majority of the code on launch day of the foundation will be in a more restrictive license that requires registration and a payment of $1,500 for access. There's also a small amount of third party copyrighted code within Symbian, and the foundation is trying to either get the rights to that code, or figure a way to make it available in binary format.

Those are all typical problems when a project is moving to open source, and the upshot of them is that Symbian won't be able to get the full benefits of its move to open source until quite a while after the foundation is launched. What slows the process down is the amount of code that Symbian and Nokia have to move. I believe that Symbian OS is probably the largest software project ever taken from closed to open source. If you've ever dealt with moving code to open source, you'll know how staggeringly complex the legal reviews are. What Nokia and Symbian are doing is heroic, scary, and incredibly tedious. It's like, well, running in molasses.

Lee Williams, Nokia's software platform SVP who is moving over to become head of the Symbian foundation, picked up on the theme of massiveness. He said the OS is on 200 million devices, with 200 device types shipped and another 100 in development. With support for five different baseband modems, seven different processor architectures, symmetric multiprocessing, and a broad set of displays, "your options are dramatic and huge."

This sort of infrastructure is needed, he said, because IT, telecom, and the Internet "have merged almost completely.... It's the perfect storm of convergence. There's almost nothing it can't eat or it won't use." He compared its importance to the creation of movable type, color palettes, and the Renaissance.

He noted that some people think the Symbian Foundation is a response to Android and other competitive moves, but said the company can't move that fast, and actually the change was in the works long before Google announced its software.

At dinner, I had a chance to chat with one of the Nokia managers. He was kind enough to let me play around with a pre-release N97 (more on that below), and the discussion gravitated to the iPhone. He told me how excited he is by the many new products Nokia has in the labs but can't talk about yet, and expressed some frustration that people don't understand why it takes time for Nokia to respond to changes in the market. He described Nokia as a giant ship. "It takes a long time to turn it, but when we do..." he said ominously, and then reminded me that Netscape once had a lead over Microsoft before it was crushed.

The problem with talking to the folks from Nokia is that you're never sure what they believe vs. what's the official story they're trying to put out in the market. They're disciplined enough that they can stay on message quite well, and in most conversations they focus on talking about what they're doing rather than asking for feedback or getting into a two-way conversation.

So I'll assume that Nokia was being serious. In that case, let's look at some financials from 1997 (Netscape vs. Microsoft) and 2007 (Apple vs. Nokia):


All figures in millions of dollars.

Don't worry too much about revenue and net income; those are usually tied up by the ongoing operations of each company. The line I want you to focus on is cash. That is your ammunition -- the extra resource available to fund a big marketing campaign, or a new product development program, or an acquisition of an innovative new technology. Microsoft had 46 times more cash than Netscape in 1997, and it wasn't seriously threatened in any of its other core businesses. It could, and did, spend Netscape into the ground.

Apple has about the same cash hoard as Nokia. Much more importantly, Apple can focus that cash on a narrower battlefront. Its situation relative to Windows is relatively safe. Although Microsoft can never be ignored, it is innovating so slowly that Apple can take some profit from its PC business to fund other things. The music player business is also stable; although it's not growing like it used to, no one has come close to matching the integration of the iPod and iTunes. So Apple is free to spend huge wads of cash to establish its new iPhone business. It can pick the countries and vertical usages it wants to dominate, and as long as it doesn't do too many things at once, it can outspend almost any competitor.

Nokia, on the other hand, has battlefields everywhere:
--In mobile phones it's fighting Samsung, LG, and SonyEricsson, and a badly wounded (therefore desperate) Motorola.
--In entertainment smartphones it's fighting Apple.
--In communicators it's fighting RIM.
--In OS it's fighting Google, Microsoft, etc.
--In online services it's fighting Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.

As Nokia EVP Anssi Vanjoki put it recently (link):

There’s a company that says they can index the world; we are going to go deeper - we are going to coordinate the world.

Sweet! He calls out Google and says he'll beat them in their core business. It's a noble effort. I love the company's ambition. But does Nokia have the resources to fight all those battles at once?

If the folks at Nokia really think they are well positioned to crush Apple, they need to go re-read The Innovator's Dilemma. Being big is not a benefit in a rapidly-changing market with emerging segments. A big company can't respond nimbly to that sort of change, and the segments attacked by new entrants are usually too small to justify huge investment by an incumbent. So new challengers like Apple and RIM pop up all around you, you gradually shed little chunks of market share, and you complain that people don't understand how powerful your core business is.

I am not at all saying that Nokia is doomed. They are an outstanding company, with smart people, a great brand, and enormous strengths. But they need to understand that turning the battleship a little faster won't win the war. Nokia's smartphone competitors are not standing in molasses; they won't stay still long enough for the 16-inch guns to be pointed at them. More importantly, the competitors on the services side breed like vampire rabbits. By the time you blow away a clutch of them, three dozen more have hatched and are sucking blood from the other side of the ship.

To succeed in smartphones, I think Nokia needs to start creating the sort of integrated software + hardware solutions that the smartphone winners excel at. And on the services side, it needs to start breeding its own killer rabbits (small entrepreneurial experiments that move fast and die quickly if they fail). So far what I think I see looks like a more design-savvy version of the smartphone business of Samsung (throw hardware at the wall and see what sticks) coupled with an effort to create a 16-inch cannon of services.

That's probably not enough to win in the long run. Nokia still has a lot of time to get it right. But do they really understand what needs to change? I can't tell, because all I usually get from them is monologues on how big their business is and how much cool stuff they have in the lab.

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A few other tidbits from the day...

N97: Second cousin twice removed of the Revo. I got a chance to play with a pre-release N97, Nokia's upcoming qwerty phone. The screen slides sideways to reveal a little keyboard underneath.

The look and size of the device reminded me a little bit of the old Psion Revo, although it's a pretty distant echo. The sliding process of the screen has a very nice feel to it; it's the sort of physical detail that Nokia excels at. Even in a pre-release state, the phone felt nice and solid in my hand.

The software needs a lot more work, but they admitted that. It's a pre-release device. No worries at this point.

As for the keyboard, I thought it was mediocre. The keys, and especially the microscopic letters on them, are a little too small for my taste (I have big thumbs). Typing was slower than I expect on a thumb keyboard. I'd put it about on a par with the Blackberry Storm (that's the Blackberry with the on-screen keyboard). The Storm has bigger letters than the N97, and unlike David Pogue I like the tactile feedback when you tap on its screen, although it is not as good as a real keyboard.

So the N97 has real keys but they're too tiny, and the Storm has bigger keys but they're not real. The tiebreaker is the software -- the Storm is notoriously unstable (it took me about 40 seconds to crash it). I think neither product is ready for the market yet. Unfortunately for RIM, the Storm is already shipping.

The destiny of Trolltech. About a year ago, when Nokia purchased Trolltech, I wondered what they were going to do with it (link). Now we know -- Trolltech's Qt software layer is going to become a graphics layer for Symbian. No word on what happens to Trolltech's other products.

That's nice, but what's it good for? Symbian is adding symmetric multiprocessing to the OS. In a session discussing the change, a member of the audience asked what you'd use symmetric multiprocessing for on a mobile device.

Long pause. "Well, some games use it..." Another long pause.

This is the difficulty of taking a technology-only approach when talking to developers. Although software developers are technophiles, what they really care about is what sort of cool products you can enable them to build. If your feature doesn't let them do something cool, they won't care about it.

(By the way, according to an article here, the benefit will be in performance tuning and battery life -- critical to handset vendors, but sanitation issues to application developers.)

Some alternate opinions. Some other people briefed by Nokia are not as worried as me about the molasses thing. In the interest of balance, here are a few examples:

Commentary from SymbianOne (link).

Fabrizio over at Funambol (link).

SonyEricsson on the event (link). (Never mind, that was a report from 2003. I am so embarrassed.)

I'm reading: Nokia: Running in molasses

Proposition 8 and community review sites: Everyone loses

What happens to a community review site when members of the community use it as a weapon against people they don't approve of? Sites like Yelp and Citysearch are finding out, as users target businesses that supported California's Proposition 8 (the state's recently-enacted gay marriage ban). The results so far are not pretty. They illustrate some of the weaknesses of online reviews, and the complexities of managing a community site.

It's a learning opportunity for any company that relies on online reviews or runs a website that allows user comments. I wrote about it over on the Rubicon site (link).

I'm reading: Proposition 8 and community review sites: Everyone loses

Mobile data: Be careful what you wish for

The consensus around the industry seems to be that mobile data is starting to take off. Text messaging is still the leading data function, accounting for about 65% of total data revenue, according to Informa (link). But Nielsen reports a steady rise in the number of mobile Internet subscribers (link), and a faster increase in revenue (implying that those who do use the mobile web are increasing their online activity). Young people are apparently important drivers in the increase, with 37% of US adults age 18 to 24 using their phones to access the web, according to the Mobile Marketing Association (link).

The cause is supposedly not just the iPhone and other smartphones; what I'm hearing from multiple companies is that web access and other data usage is rising even on feature phones.

This increased activity is creating an uncomfortable problem for some mobile operators: it's apparently overloading their networks. There have been predictions for years that this could happen -- a report from 2005 pointed out that the typical 3G network would be overloaded if 40% of subscribers used video just eight minutes a day (link). It predicted potential traffic overload by 2007. There have been charges that service problems on the AT&T network in the US have been caused by the iPhone (link).

In the UK, the BBC's popular iPlayer streaming video service is supposedly threatening the economics of even wired ISPs (link -- very interesting article), so it's easy to imagine what it could do to mobile networks if broadly deployed. Supposedly the mobile version of iPlayer for Nokia S60 is set up to stream only over WiFi, but the discussion here (link) points out that restriction is likely to be evaded by enterprising users.

It's very hard to confirm exactly what mobile data is doing to the networks because the operators don't like to discuss this sort of thing in public. But the number of data-capable phones is definitely growing faster than network capacity, so overload is just a matter of time. I've gotten several off-the-record comments from friends in the industry saying that the operators are worried about the problem and are quietly trying to throttle traffic, especially to online multimedia services that consume a lot of bandwidth.

The problem is complicated by the all-you-can-eat data plans that have been adopted by many operators. If you're charging people for the amount of data they consume, their data use becomes self-limiting. But limited plans are unpopular with users, who get practically unlimited data on their PC web connections. When you tell people that they can have the web on their mobiles, they expect to be able to use it like the web they already know.

So the operators are stuck with either throwing out people who use the "unlimited" network heavily, or covertly degrading the quality of their service so they'll stop using so much data. Both practices are very dangerous to their long-term prospects.

The problem is that the people who use a lot of data aren't just the freakish fanatics that the industry would like to imagine them as. They are Internet power users, a group that we labeled the Most Frequent Contributors (MFCs) when we recently researched Internet usage patterns at Rubicon (link). They don't just use a lot of video -- they are generally very involved in all sorts of online activities. Most importantly for the operators, they write the majority of the reviews and user comments posted online.

So, if you kick a power user off your network, or throttle their performance, they are extremely likely to write about you online. Extensively. Where their complaints will be read by most other Internet users. Check out the comments here and here if you want a sample.

Systematically punishing your noisiest customers is not the way to build a sustainable business.


What else can the operators do?

I wish there were some magical formulation that would make users happy and operators financially sound. But there isn't, because the problem is inherent to the way a wireless network operates. And as the installed base of smartphones grows, and video and other multimedia services increase in popularity, the problem is only going to get worse.

The most damaging approach is that one that operators seem to be leaning toward now, covertly throttling traffic. They can probably get away with that for a while, but eventually people online will compare notes, figure out that network performance is being systematically distorted -- and then the class-action lawyers (in the US) and government regulators (in Europe) will be unleashed.

Honesty is the best policy. Ultimately I think there's no alternative to moving to pricing plans that acknowledge the physical limits on the wireless Internet. That, and the operators need to resist the temptation of advertising their Internet as identical to the wired Internet. The MFCs are technically sophisticated, and capable of understanding the need for tiered pricing if it's explained to them clearly and honestly. What causes endless friction is the hypocrisy of calling something "unlimited" and then limiting it.

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Belated thanks to Voip Survivor for featuring my post on app stores in the Carnival of the Mobilists (link).

I'm reading: Mobile data: Be careful what you wish for

The Influencers are dead. Or not.

As we continue to sort through the results from Rubicon's recent research on Internet usage (link), we're finding interesting insights on how the web is developing. One insight is around the concept of Influencers.

When we first looked at the results of the survey, we thought they confirmed the Influencer idea. But after some more digging, our thinking has evolved. There are basically two schools of thought online about the influencing process. Some people say a small group of Influencers drive most consumer decisions. Others argue that the Influencer idea is a fantasy, and that ideas spread through society from random starting points, without a hierarchy.

The evidence from our research shows that both groups are wrong in important ways, especially when the web is taken into consideration. That has big implications for how companies market online, so we wrote about it. If you're interested in learning more, you can read the analysis on Rubicon's website here.

I'm reading: The Influencers are dead. Or not.