cellular | SysNet consulting

Rethinking the box

Submitted by Gil Freund on Tue, 2010-07-13 00:02

Two excellent articles in All About Symbian:

Ewan Spence questions whether whether Symbian needs a new user interface
Steve Litchfield goes against the trend that puts the touch screen as the best phone interface.

To this, let me add my two cents worth.

I like my N900 for what seems like the wrong reasons:

Resistive screen. Possibly because of the I am a Palm veteran, I find I like having a stylus handy, mainly for sketching, but also allowing for higher density applications or checklists.
Hardware keyboard. Maybe Fat fingers; maybe a history with Psion and the E61; maybe the need to actually see whats on screen without the virtual keyboard hogging all the space.

Apple and Android developers would benefit from those articles. Nokia should pay more attention to them as well. If I understand it correctly, Nokia would benefit from having both MeeGo and Symbian with distinctive hardware and interface.

Whither Nokia

Submitted by Gil Freund on Mon, 2010-07-05 22:15

Anssi Vnajo, Nokia's new head of Nokia Mobile Solution issued a battle cry. As seems to be usual with Nokia, it's a rather confusing one. Is Nokia going the Symbian or the MeeGo path? My take, is that it's going both ways. Symbian for the smartphone, MeeGo for the mobile computing. The confusion is that both platforms might actually be the same hardware. This leave both Symbian and MeeGo (and Meamo) advocates unhappy.

The closing of Symbian-Guru and World of Nokia blogs, as well as Randel Arnold's open letter to Ansii Vnajo, echo this sentiment. Nitish Kumar and Richard Bloor try to provide some perspective for a developer and end user point of view, respectively.

Year of the iKiller

Submitted by Gil Freund on Wed, 2009-12-23 21:00

This year will be the year in which all consumer electronics will be judged in the shadow of Apple.

This is not the Android you are looking for

Submitted by Gil Freund on Tue, 2009-12-22 21:00

The Google Phone will most likely be remembered as the spaghetti phone. Whether of not this is a reference device for Google and other developers, or an actual device aimed at consumers or carriers is not relevant right now. It will be relevant when Google will find it to be relevant.