Nokia 5800 Tube effect

Hello dear pundits,
As you probably know, Nokia has recently propelled it's beloved and enamoured Symbian-based S60 into a new era - era of analogue control. Analogous control may not be new per se (think of volume knobs, sliders, or even computer mouse manipulators), it is definitely new when applied to, arguably, the most ubiquitous thing on this planet - a mobile phone.

I will delay detailed usability analysis until the time that S60 Touch device lands in my hands, and this is probably for the better sales...
Let's think of it in more visionary way - what this means to the whole mobile market.
Now, here I do not share Mobile-Review's point of view, that this will surely crush the competition (Sony Ericsson UIQ, iPhone, Windows Mobile); neither do I think that devices like Nokia 5800 won't change much of the game.

I strongly believe, and see a reason behind such beliefs, that S60 Touch will change much of Nokia's own game.
It will certainly be elevated from XpressMusic line on to the N-series line of models, and thus will overtake significant portion of the current N-series users.
While it's too early to say much of whether the careful and confident approach of Nokia to creation of analogous control devices will capture many _new users_, one thing can be said right now - the S60 Touch platform will retain many of the current Nokia users.
In this sense, I see it much as a defensive move, not innovation.

And, amongst all of the possible defensive moves, Nokia chose the most conservative approach - not to change the user interface, but rather augment it with a touch screen enablement.
They could have decided to develop a new UI, or to shoehorn Maemo into cell phone devices, but what we see in 5800 is more a strategic move - new Symbian version, new S60 edition, a touch-based control of the old-style S60 UI, and two new features - contact bar and the media menu, which look as "strap-ons" to the existing UI goodness.

I am not trying to say that was wrong decision! That was a very careful and considerate, and wholly in line with Nokia's style - when you've got mammoth legs, move slowly but very assuredly.
Check your every step, so as not to fall and lose existing user base.
This is very considerate of us S60 users.
This is also very considerate of the S60 developers out there.
Apparently, Nokia sees S60 as it's greatest asset ever...
They are not carrying out revolutions a-la Guy Kawasaki, who once said (and still says so): "Kill your cash cow."

There have been previous attempts of Nokia to market touch-based devices, such as Nokia 7700 and 7710.
I don't know what went wrong with S90 - this looked very promising and innovative (for those times) devices.
My pure guess is that S60 had more Nokia people going to vote for them, in a political sense.
Bad luck, I must say. By now they might have been deeply entrenched into touch devices.

Should Nokia have decided to continue with S90 evolution,
There could have been no possibility and no market for iPhone!

Now I myself, personally used SonyEricsson P910i.
It was a remarkable phone, and in many ways that was the top usable device of those times.
I even consider it top usable device of SonyEricsson's all-times line.

It was a great pity and a great looming mistake, that SonyEricsson decided to drop UIQ2.1 and break all compatibility, and develop and debug on top of new UIQ3, which happened to be a flop, mostly due to the extremely buggy P990i.

Come on SE, I wanted hard to get a new phone to upgrade my aging P910i, but I simply could not make myself to buy your new crap.
It is incredibly wise and great that Nokia decided to go their different path, and not break compatibility (at least for some apps), and not to "revolutionize" S60 with completely new interface, which would almost inevitably have it's own sizeable share of bugs.
Here in 5800 we see beautiful evolution - precious time & effort spent on debugging the code is not lost, just the new features added.

Obviously, there have been people (even me) who tried to reason [for many years] for the renewal of the shut-down line of Nokia touch-screen devices.

But only Steve Jobs' voice was heard.

Now, 16 months after the iPhone, we can finally welcome Nokia to the analogue control game.

Would you use your PC/Mac without a mouse?
If in few years I would ask you "Would you use a smartphone without touch-based control?" my bets are that your answer will not be any dfferent.

(Yes, I remeber the old arguments from the DOS guy who would never use a mouse - but where are those now?)
We, humans, are analogue creatures. By nature.

Christmas wishes from N95 S60 firmware

It's Christmas time soon, so I decided to put out a brief series with humble "wishes for improvement", the features that I would like to have as Christmas present from Nokia Santa (if there was one)... well, there's hope... Lapland is there in Finland... :)

The first round is, actually, about things I hate most in my current N95 v30.0.016.

Frankly speaking, S60 firmware team have made great progress in term of both the code stability, speed and power consumption. Kudos to the hardware guys!
You are a reason for Nokia to rock.
But there's not much done in terms of improved user experience.

Sad to say, but almost 2 years have passed since it's flagman phone was out, and some pretty obvious "features", those that derail the user experience from the "happy thoughtless bliss", have still not been fixed.

I know, I know, we geeks are all so adaptable to anything, but as a pro with an "eye for UI" I still refuse to adapt and still I go reminding all you S60 PM and the coders alike - this is what will make S60 (and so my N95) User Experience very much better:

1. Access Point preferencing, please Santa!
We still have to answer to each bloody application, which bloody AP to use.
Please please please Nokia, make the system-wide panel of preferenced Access Points, and the future strategy of each app is to either (a) respect the system AP pref, or (b) well, there's better be no (b)...remove all AP settings from zillion places in zillion applications (N-Gage, VideoCenter, E-mail etc).
So far, only some WAP bookmarks in browser need a separate AP, and of course MMS sender/receiver.

2. Don't lock my phone, please Santa!
Like I already ranted here, there are smarter ways to know if your keypad needs to be locked.
For a start, unlock the phone if any cable is being inserted (the phone is not in a pocket or a bag, it's in the hands),
then, keep the phone unlocked if it's being charged (it's surely not on the go, either).
In other words, think of ways to keep the phone accessible...
To skip keypad autolock in such situations would be nice, for example.
This would let the user implicitly lock the keypad, if so desired.
The current behaviour makes usage of phone in home/office fixed locations miserable - just to read new SMS fast we need to click 4 times (two for unlock, one to close confirmation, one to show message).
Keypad lock/unlock confirmations are a nuisance! They hug my workflow for 2 seconds! I feel punished.
Why we need them at all, when the key sign in the upper panel is the indicator already?

This is pretty burdensome and counter-intuitive. Imagine sliding your finger to unlock iPhone, and then boom! 2-second modal dialog to confirm...yuk

I would very much appreciate it if you'd unlock the keypad for me, when I insert a USB cable or an Enhancement, so that I could choose the mode RIGHT ON. Me and you know I can't insert something when my phone is in my pocket (and thus, under danger of erratic key presses).

And while you're there, please make an option to switch off connection warnings in all apps which use network (MOSH, Download! etc).
I don't like to be pestered by warnings, that's the Microsoft Way...









3. Permit my signed Java, please Santa!
With all those certificates, there's a reason to think that it did filter out the unwanted (malicious) unsigned programs during installation phase, and now we have only perfectly legit java MIDlets installed.
Now, what with pestering me out with incessant requests for permission of network access etc?
I know, you know, that Opera mini has to get the network, otherwise no fun. I know, you know, that it was signed with a certificate for all those access things.

Then why there is no persistent permissions for my installed java applets? A simple checkbox would let the phone memorize my trust settings and do not ask me every launch. In fact I do believe in defense-in-depth, but are we not paranoid here? Maybe we can let signed apps do the things they want?

4. Lifeblog will Sound, please Santa!
Lifeblog is the best thing that happened to S60 in all it's time.
It is the focal point of data aggregation, and the underlying interface for Ovi services, it's the technology which can (and should) be adapted for every phone, maybe even merged with Search 4.0 functionality.
There is support for Sound Recordings in Lifeblog. You have to start them from the Lifeblog, and they appear on the Timeline, and they get synced with Ovi or PC Suite, and they go to your PC!
But - when you make recordings straight from Voice Recorder app, LifeBlog does not see those sound files.
Come on, this is an omission. Should be fixed, IMHO.

It would make great sense to include the 'normal" recordings in Lifeblog, and not force the user to create them in Lifeblog, thus separating and isolating Lifeblog from the data which is already generated.

How many of you created at least one sound rec from within Lifeblog?

For ex. when you take photos straight from the Camera, or send SMS straight from Messaging, Lifeblog sees them all.
But not when you make the Sound Recordings. This eventually leaves a lot of sound bites out-of-sync, you never see them on PC, unless you do the hoola-hoops jumping to get them specifically via some other process (hunting down, copying, deleting ...yuk)...
Would be wiser to join them into the Lifeblog circle of things.





5. Lifeblog will Note Me, Santa!
Now, I had written previously about Notes sync here, and the dead is still not done. I have also filed bug requests during PC Suite beta 6.85 and 6.86 about incorrect timestamping of Notes during sync. Nothing changed so far.
This time I will speak from the firmware team perspective - how to treat them on the phone.
And I mean the Lifeblog strategy and features here.
Right now - we have two sets of Notes - the ones on the phone and the one in LifeBlog.
Lifeblog notes can be created, seen and managed only in Lifeblog. I think this is the second most important Lifeblog problem - since the rest of your "normal" notes in elsewhere, and so - kept out of normal Lifeblog sync cycle.
Timeline is the best presentation you can get, to see things in a time-sorted order.
Here it would be very nice to see the Notes that we already have on the phone, and not to force us to create new ones from arcane Options menu.

How many of you created at least one note in Lifeblog? I doubt there are many such geeks...

Why there was such need for note data fragmentation is quite unclear.
Would be wiser to join "normal" notes into Lifeblog circle of things.
This would make the Lifeblog the powerful all-absorbing one-stop technology for all user content, except for web/e-mail and 3-rd party.
Integrate Search 4.0 into that - and we have a killer app, nothing similar exists on competitor symbian-based products (Apple has Spotlight and iMovie/iPhoto/iSync)
Also please Santa, make a LifeBlog app for my Mac! I still have no automatic way to backup my messages and notes and sounds there. (OK I know that one's too much to ask by Christmas, just count me in for the Ovi Mac Suite beta)

6. Better Podcasts, Santa!
There are few deficiencies in current Nokia Podcasting application.
One of them is the the podcasts titles stop scrolling as soon as I start downloading at least one podcast. This makes selection of some other podcasts to download impossible, if the podcasts have long titles. A good example is our Mobile-Review site.

Second drawback is that there seems to be some sync lacking between Podcasting app as such, and the Music Player's "Podcasts" section.
Since you can play podcasts in both places, but each of them keeps it's own DB of podcasts status - "played" or "not played" statuses are separate in both apps for the same track.
This makes up for user confusion when you see tracks as "new" although you've actually heard them all...

This is explained by the following scenario:
(a) You open Podcasting download two podcasts (podcast1, podcast2) from, say, "Voice of S60"
(b) Now you can see the Yellow (unplayed) status of both podcasts in the Nokia Podcasting apps
(c) Going into Music Player now, you can find both podcasts in the "Never Played" section
(d) Play the podcast1 in Music Player, and you see it disappear from "Never Played" in Music Player
(e) Going to Podcasting, you still see yellow color of both podcasts, as if they never played.
(f) Play the podcast2 now in Podcasting, and see the color change, and the icon change to black checkmark
(g) Going back into Music Player, you still see the podcast2 in the "Never Played" category

I should notice here also that Podcasting app handles Russian (and maybe other international) titles well (ex. Mobile-Review),
but the very same podcast titles looks as boxes in the Music Player, which, apparently, uses a different code to render MP3 titles.








Can't you Santa do some code re-use? :) I simply can't read it like that!


[update] There's also difference between Podcasts and Music Player in marking listening position.

Music Player (not Podcasts!) marks the place where you left off/stopped playback in each podcasts, and gracefully resumes playback, should you try to play a podcasts which was not "rewound" or listened to the end.

Podcasts, on the contrary, makes you start from 0:00 every time, which annoys me because I expect I could play podcasts while I manage them, download new episodes, navigate directories.
Seems like to do this, I have to leave podcasting and start Music Player instead.

All said, would it not make sense to disable playback option in Podcasting, once and for all?
Or... make that option switch to Music Player instead?



Such are my humble wishes to Nokia Santa, if there was one. I do not ask just for myself, neither I need more Nokia hardware.

Just please "play nice" with those "dumb" and "tired" users like me, will you, please...? :)

SDHC 4G Flash corruption on N95 Lifeblog [updated]

I found out a very unwelcome behaviour of on-the-phone LifeBlog in my Nokia N95.

It corrupts the flash file system (FAT32) on my 4G microSD.

At first I thought that this could be either Camera app, or the Gallery app, or the LifeBlog app.
My normal workflow would be to take N95 out of my pocket (keypad locked), open the camera shutter, look to see if the Camera started [if not, curse and close and reopen, up to 3 times], then take some pictures, press Back, optionally go to lifeblog to see the photos from there, then close the camera shutter and put the phone back into pocket. If I needed to see photos in more detail, I would usually go to Gallery, but on most occasions I pressed the right soft button which was assigned to Lifeblog.

And I noticed that with such workflow I lost many photos. On the worse occasion, I lost 98 photos out of 212 taken.

The symptoms depicted below.





These photos were seen OK by the Gallery, but only before I opened LifeBlog and it started to build thumbnails needed.
Of course, I did not stand still there and I browsed to the left or right in the lifeblog while it did the preview building, but should it corrupt the filesystem because of that???

As a result, the whole folder of the previous day was lost, and some corruption occured inside some today's photos. From a technical standpoint, seems like it corrupted the huge 4G FAT table while doing FS operations. Neither Camera nor Gallery exhibit such nasty behaviour.

Needless to say, I am stopping using the LifeBlog on the phone until Nokia clear up the problem in future firmware updates. My current f/w is 21.0.016.

Oh and yes, I checked my microSD card on PC, and reformatted it already 2 times, but problems still appear (are being introduced into perfectly working media gallery) only after LifeBlog!

[UPDATE] All this behavior was only due to Kingston SDHC card, which are, according to N95 User Guide, not listed as compatible. Also of note, that there are classes of SDHC cards, like class6 or class9...
The higher the class, the faster is the card. The effect of flash memory classes on operation inside N95 is not yet studied.
There's no SDHC-specific warning in manual, so take my post for it.

PC Suites revisited

Hello my patient reader,

In a previous blog entry "An Ideal PC Suite" I expressed my vision and hopes for a better PC Suite - and Nokia delivers! What I mostly wished for, is "smart auto-sync" feature, is at the core of the Nokia LifeBlog application!
If you never heard or tried the application, now's the best time to do so. Honestly, I believe this app has all the potential to become a key component of the upcoming Nokia Ovi stuff.
It lets you have and manage offline copy of your phone's content - all the MMS, SMS, photos and videos. On a horizontal "Time roll", easily scrollable!
LifeBlog-compatible phones stamp all new items with smart "location tags" that let you differentiate between cell network areas. You can later rename those tags - say, after city names - and with a simple click in LifeBlog you can see all items that were created in that same area! At the very rough, you automatically get a new location for every country you've been in while using the phone.
The LifeBlog UI "scrolls like butter"! It's a true "Nokia iLife", highly usable and very easy to learn. Amazingly enough, you may use it straight off the phone, no PC required! Capture and blog online, on-the-go.

There's more exciting news - there's now a new "Nokia Photos" application, delivered as part of N-series PC Suite 2.0
This one has also a very good UI and it allows you to import all your pre-existing photos from either a hard drive or a cell phone, should you want to use it as your photo organizer.
Nokia Photos has a Timeline View, which looks very much like the LifeBlog.
Here's one important thing to notice about those apps.

They do not require you to have a phone!!!

You can use them just as your digital life organizers.This strategy mirrors what Apple, Inc. has done to iTunes - you may use it without an iPod, just for ripping/storing/playing/burning your data.
Once you get used to a blissful user experience, you might as well start looking out for a compatible device, to streamline your "digital life management" experience even more ;)

Of course, these new applications allow you to upload the content to your blogs!

Those apps are essentially the Nokia i-Apps. If this is what Ovi will be like, I am all in!

The only strange thing is that those "web accounts" need to be set up independently in both programs.
Another small issue that I noticed is that LifeBlog does not correctly "play" animated GIFs in MMS. Such graphic files take single MMS slide, but this slide should not be still. On a phone they play fine.

Did you notice there are many Nokia PC Suites out there?
There are "normal" PC Suite, which work even with S40 devices (the moest recent version is 6.85). There are also E-series PC Suite (which I have not yet seen), the Vertu PC Suite, the PC Suite Express, and, most importantly, N-Series PC Suite (most recent version 2.0).

The battle of PC Suites continues!

I took part of a Nokia PC Suite Beta test for version 6.85.
Of the 3 errors I reported, none were fixed.

I still hope for the next version
I uninstalled 6.85 and downloaded another flavor of Nokia PC Suite , aka N-Series PC Suite. As the name suggests, this would work only with Nokia N-series smartphones.
It features a very slick black 'batman' design and cool in-focus transitions. It worked really well for me and never crashed once. It has less clutter on main page since the main page is broken into 4 categories: Music, Photo/Video, Internet, and Tools.



The good part about it is that it did away with kludgy Nokia Media Player which became almost dysfunctional in the latest 6.85 release. The media player of choice is now ... ta da!...the Microsoft Media Player 11 (which was not a hard choice on PC, I suspect).
Now there's hope for playability of stuff...
BUT (there must always be "but") - the N-series does not have the corresponding messaging part - you can not send SMS/MMS, there's no browser entry for your phone in Explorer anymore. Once they add the missing functionality, there's no turning back for me.
Meanwhile - I came up with another idea regarding PC Suite UI - why They have not changed the INTERFACE much, they changed the LOOK. IMHO the less of "interface" we have, the better. For instance, is there really a need for the main window since we have the same apps in the systray launcher?
Could not they have moved

"5 new messages"
"3 missed calls"

- notifications into the Windows system tray notification area?
You'd click there and see the messages and the Call Log.
Windows has the API just for that. I hardly foresee users keeping the main window open just to see the new SMS.

(6.85 rants)
The new and controversial (from usability standpoint) feature of 6.85 is the small messages pane in the lower left corner of the main window. In few seconds after start, it shows you the three most recent SMS (and only short parts of them).
You may click and close the pane, though.
This feature look like "blind innovation" and it brings only questions:

"Why only three?"
"Why only SMS (not e-mails)?"

If you'd get serious to read more behind those short excepts from SMS, you'd click into the area, and PC Suite would still bring you to the Messages entry in the windows Explorer. You'd have to click once more on the Inbox hive to see the message list. One more double-click and you finally see the whole message.
The fact that there's still no decent UI to the communicative core of the product is quite amazing.
Completely usable and convenient solutions is what we all need. They should take preference in development resources, not those ad-hoc, not-well-thought out, features, that look like they're there just to show off... Otherwise the product may fall down sick of 'featuritis'...I never wish this to happen to a Nokia product.