nokia

It's a harsh world in the smartphone land. Nam Yong of LG followed in the footsteps of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo of Nokia. Both lost their positions due to low profits of their companies high end smartphone. Low, that is, when compered those of Apple and Android in general (for Nokia) and Samsung (for LG).

The US tech journalists seems to be happy to bash Nokia with anything from calling them the McDonald's of phones to putting the blame on putting too much emphasis on hardware design, and, of course, believing only a gringo can save the poor Finns. One has to cross the pond to get some more balanced views, even from non Nokia fanboys.

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.

If you had the misfortune to upgrade to the latest version of Mail for Exchange for your Nokia smart-phone, and you are using Google Apps, you might have come across this issue.

The main problem is that Google recommends using the latest version (which is 3.0), while noting that the best supported version is 2.9. On the Nokia site (or rather, the OVI store), the only version available is 3.0. If you upgraded to version 3.0 and were lucky enough to have version 2.9 images around, you need to uninstall version 3.0 (loosing the configuration) and reinstall version 2.9.

The second issue is that there is no direct way to report this issue and get a response from either company. In Google you are led to a forum, with a lot of nice people, none are official Google employees. Google might be listing, and might not. In the OVI store you can comment on an application, but only if you install it directly to you phone from their site. As I downloaded it to my Mac, and I did not feel like re-installing it and un-installing it again, I could not comment.

I am attache the version 2.9 of the SISX files with this post (Nokia, if you have an issue with this, let me know....).

Another option is using the SyncML protocol for contact and calenders, and IMAP for mail.