Blue Phone for the Elite

This time, I want to share my joy.
While it's only a part of my user experience, Macs had and will always be (hopefully) taking some 'warm place' in my heart.
But there used to be some 'gotchas' for an advanced Symbian smartphone users like me.
There are simply no PC Suites at all, neither from Nokia, nor from Ericsson, not from other UIQ/S60 licensees as far as I know.
Well, "good riddance", I can hear you mac users say. "What's not there you don't need (only want?)" Not quite so.
It's only that the most "painful points" are closed on Mac, with the help of iSync and the Modem Scripting for GPRS.

(I should note here that iSync is able to reconcile all your devices in one go, be it Palm and 2-3 phones plus add .Mac account - all those sources will have the same data after you sync them in a single pass, just press one button.)

But the third most "painful" point for us 12-button peddlers is, of course, the text input.
Now, I don't know about you, but I hate T9. It works (kinda) but then again in my N95 half of the times I use it - it has wrong Input Language, and it's not easy to switch between the keyboard layouts.
Think of trying to enter some Russian in Nokia Maps - and your default input is English.
It takes a serious trouble to travel all the way to the Phone Personalization and back. Sometimes I just give up and curse.
On another note, entering contact names should not have T9 on by default.
There are many use cases like those... but we diverged.

Anyway you look at, typing on your Mac is much faster than on your phone.
So there you have - the need for some "serious" messaging application, right on your Mac where you have "the digital hub" (sorry Nokia, the "multimedia computers" are mostly "for the geek of us").


And BluePhoneElite delivers!




I should confess I've had a "long-term relationship" with this program before I could make my fairly weighted judgement and present it to your attention. This envolved seeng it develop, helping it develop, filing all kinds of suggestions, trouble shooting etc.
The good part about that the now you don't have to bear through all this.
The products is ready. And I highly recommend it. This is what many PC Users dream of - but for Mac Users only.
No bloat, pure meat. Yet very extendable and it has plug-ins and scripting.

The functionality of this product differs a lot from the Nokia offering.


First of all, it's an online product. You don't have to press buttons to "Refresh" the list of SMS, calls etc.
You have the freshest view as long as your bluetooth connection to phone is not broken.....

Secondly, it's a multivendor offering. You can have many phone from many manufacturers connected and working at the same time. When you want to send a message, simply select the right phone from the drop-down list.

It's like iSync - no matter what your hardware, you'll have the best features available.
And no need to put tons of bloat from every phone maker. (Heh, good part about this rant is that Nokia does not yet produce "bloat" for Macs)
Thirdly, you have the calling functionality thru your Mac!
You can use Mac's headset (or speakers/iSight mic) to do voice calls.
Just like Skype, only really via GSM/CDMA.


Once you get an incoming call, a nice window pops up, with the number, name and the contact's picture from your Mac's Address Book. Incoming Text messages are also popping up, giving you options to Reply of Forward them.
There is a nice capability to enter text notes for each voice call, made or received. You can type during the call as well as after the call.
The only pieces missing are MMS support and there are some minor UI "misconceptions", like the Device Folder grouping in Message Center, or showing all the same Recent Calls in every phone's context menu.
Those can be easily adapted to, and if there are enough user requests, I believe it also can be changed.
I personally believe that the future of this program's UI is adding back the unified calls+messages centre, but per each phone, so it would not have the current Mac-centric view, where every known call or message is shown on all and every phone. Add the invocation of those by double-clicking the phone's icon and I'm done!

My experience also shows that the developer support is exceptional! I usually got friendly responses for every of my e-mail within just a few days. As a small company, Mirasoftware does it's best at providing meaningful answers, support and bug-fixes. A bugfix within a week - I would like Nokia to try and match that!

A very nice touch is that they always provide an exact bug-fix list with every release. For those who like to see what changed, it's indispensable.

Another nice feature is reading the phone book directly from the phone when you address a message or a call, and no, you don't have to hit "Refresh" to get the newest version. As long as you have connection, BluePhoneElite2 has the synced version in cache.

The product costs 25 USD and is well worth the money. A time-limited trials are available for you to make sure you have the features supported. Sending a support request even during a trial is no problem, and there are all the chances that (in rare case of issues) you'll get the bug-fix and will have the "green light" to buy.

And so did I !

N.B. N95 is fully and perfectly supported.

Why I killed iTunes

I have been using iTunes since 2001 (version 1.0) on a Mac, and since it came out - on a PC, too.
I killed iTunes on my PC and here's why.

First of all, I do not posess Apple's "closed source" systems like iPod or iPhone.
This effectively frees me from the need of iTunes - because I do not have to sync those. Nevertheless, iTunes seemed to be the best music jukebox system out there, on any platform. But 7 years have passed, and things have changed...read on.

Secondly, there's no iTunes Music Store operating in Russia (of course, this being a major reason to my first point. A big pity, I must say, I was longing for a way to get those free Album Art covers for all my CD-ripped goodness...
GimmeSomeTune stopped finding the right stuff, for some reason.

Next on, the built-in Visualizer has changed for the worse. It tends to circle a little bit too much on a very limited subset of visual configs, showing just few tired schemes.
My reliable sources said Steve Jobs mada some orders and it influenced the "randomness" of the config preset selection. Too bad, I still remember how beatiful it was in version 2!..
Version 7 showed some improvement in that part, though, but never again was it soo good...

The User Interface has changed in v6 from very simple and elegant, rounded corners, to somewhat edgy and more aggressively-looking one; the Visuals button disappeared into the menu; button layout changed and I must say it was unpleasant and irritating to accomodate to those unexpected changes.

Startup speed on PC was slow.

But worst of all, was the closed nature of it's sync mechanism (iPod or nothing), which could not help my Nokia N95 to get new tunes! Well guys, I remember v1 was not so! It could sync to Rio and Creative MP3 players, although to a limited set.

Once I installed the new Nokia N-series PC Suite, I could not miss the MTP option - the one that installs the drivers needed for Sync with the Windows Media Player.
The second blow came when I upgraded from bundled WMP9 to the latest WMP11.

IT REALLY ROCKS!

I did not expect this from Microsoft, but they did their homework well!
This player exceeded my expectations in functionality, and gave me a very satisfying user interface.

Very important that now I can sync to Nokia, thanks to the open nature of it's device interface.

This thing watches folders! The functionality has always been in my wishlist for iTunes - and I found it only in WMP11. Now you can simply copy some files into a watched folder and they automatically appear in your WMP Library! The same goes with changes/deletions. Wow!

The usability has increased dramatically since the previous versions.
I have never had high expectations of newer MS releases, but hey! WMP11 delivers!
This one goes against my common rule - never upgrade a Microsoft product until you have to.

WMP11 has a built-in Find Album Info feature - this works most of the time, getting all the info, including the album art.

And since all my music was already neatly packed into iTunes Music folder, I just set the WMP to Watch this folder - and all my music magically appeared inside the WMP Library! Managing music with this feature is a no-brainer. The only loser would be iTunes, if I changed something outside of it.
And then - after a week or so - I found it does not make sense to keep PC iTunes anymore. The competitor is strong enough to stand on it's own feet.
Why would I bother manually re-scanning music folders from within iTunes, to add some newly copied files?

Kudos to the MS Windows Media Player Team!

(My Mac still runs iTunes, though! :)

6 steps to better PC software from Nokia

Hello Nokians,
this is just some free advice, a private opinion from an engineer, software architect, AND a prosumer.
Take it or leave it.
What would I do if I had a chance to change Nokia Way?

1. N-series PC Suite and Communicator Marriage.
(get back Lifeblog moniker)
I would certainly evolve the N-series PC Suite, which currently holds the palm of Usability. The most obvious step would be to add messaging features that the suite currently lacks.

2. Ditch the Video Manager, Music Manager in favor of WMP integration.
Well, the time has come to confess - VM and MM are pure crap.
If I'd wanted so much to keep them I would put in into a niche of S40 Suite or something.

3. Nokia Music Client ("Euphoria") as a WMP Skin/Plugin.
While the current buggy beta is "beta than nuthin", and has the potential to keep the high UI standards of N-Series, I do not want a separate Music Database just to use my music with my phone. Either use the WMP DB, or "become the WMP", i.e. re-engineer it as a WMP Skin or Plug-in.
Knowing the strategy is cross-platform, I would then say - integrate with iTunes Music Folder/DB on Mac, integrate with WMP "My Music" and DB on a PC, and with some popular Linux player, too.
Administrative effort needed to use large music libraries with two players concurrently is not worth using Nokia Music Client, IMHO.

4. LifeBlog becomes the N-Series PC Suite.
With all the search for a "golden formula" of the PC Suite, why not consider ditching the PC Suite for good? I mean, you have LifeBlog, the pieces missing are Sync with Outlook, One-Touch Access, and Messaging.
Everything else is for geeks, geeks can get tools wherever.

I mean, why not nicely tuck all those under LifeBlog's wing and you'd have the iSuite for Nokia Phones!

Just make it ONE Window, ONE UI. Call it OVI/PC, if you please.

Let's think of consumers/prosumers, not mainly geeks. Severe some features in favour of majority. Knowing where to cut is important, remember Occam's.
Otherwise this is starting to look clumsy like Oxygen's Products.

5. Nokia Communicator rehash.
Well, it's just a beta. You have to pedal around it for the view to stay up-to-date.
Please make it sync everything without users having to click around.

6. Well. And. Of course, Fix all the bugs filed for PC Suite :)

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.

An Ideal PC Suite for a cell phone

I've thought hard about different PC Suite products from all the major cell phone vendors, taking into consideration their usability and features.
I also tested them all in real situations.

"What's not right? What's there to add?"

So I finally came up with my own vision of a PC Suite product, and I will share it here.

I will not go into detailed comments on the current status-quo in this arena, instead let's envision how this is to be done.

Why use a PC Suite, before all?
I know many people who do not. Many of them stopped calling me, and then I phoned them only to find that they lost their phone WITH THEIR ADDRESS BOOK!
Omitting unwise comment on their unwise behaviour, isn't there something that does not welcome them to go ahead and install a PC Suite?
Oh wait, then I found out that many of them HAD their PC suite installed!
So what happened? They forgot to sync regularly enough.

This brings in a Point1 - an Ideal PC Suite must auto-sync smartly.

Sony Ericsson's product lets you set an option to sync each time you put your phone into cradle. What's wrong? The quality of sync and the fault protection.
It's simply not resilient to failures (you take the phone off the cradle while it syncs and you're up to big problem).

So - what is this "smart auto-sync"?
To me, it's when you "set it & forget it". Think of how Outlook(tm) smartly syncs to your Exchange server at work.

You get home, you're offline, and - here's your mail.
This very fucntionality should be at the core of a modern communication product.
You lose your phone - and here are your SMS, MMS, phonebook, media, bookmarks, e-mails, other files, applications. All at your PC.
Right now this is done quite clumsily by either a full backup (takes quite some time, requires launching an app, cannot be done smartly with no user intervention), or by the Syncronise function - this one does not save your media, nor your document files, nor Messages, nor applications, and the feature also must be launched as a separate app.
Think of how Outlook(tm) DOES NOT require you to press "Get New Mail" button each time you want to see new mail.
Right now user has to operate the product all the time...
The answer to this clumsiness - replace the current UI and function with more "daemon-like", "service" behaviour, when you select once - which data you want to have synced to your PC, and the daemon "does the right thing".
You come home - the home PC sees your phone via BlueTooth, connects to it and syncs all your Messages, Contacts, Bookmarks and (if you chose so) - Media, Documents, Application settings. With you touching no buttons. Of course, you might be given a chance to know this is happening - by means of a slight "beep" on your phone.
What you would see on a PC is a rolling wheel somewhere in the System Tray.

So here's the chance to make an even better experience than what's provided by Apple, Inc. and it's products:
iPod can be set to synced when you plug it in.
But cell phones have BlueTooth! The don't even need to be plugged in, so there could be one step less! This would allow for an exquisitely simple user experience.

"Just bring it home!" and voila - you're covered with the newest gen of PC Suite.
Go lose you phone - and keep all the data.
Leave your PC Suite Backup function and all the waiting for fanatics and geeks who like to tinker-shminker with software.
The newest PC Suite would first ask you what to "cover" in the auto-backup cycles when you run the software installation process (right after the device pairing), and then - you might as well forget it's there, but you'll remember and you'll be glad you set everything right (again - smart setup defaults) when you come home crying over a lost or broken cell phone.

And sync the Contact Pictures to Outlook, both ways, already!
Right now the only positive experience I've had of preserving the contact pictures is using iSync on a Mac with SE P910i. Everything else sucks. I'm sorry but it does.
No wonder people rarely use pictures in contacts, it's so easy to lose them.
Apple even wrote an iSync Agent for P910i!

Speaking NOKIA formulas, Backup+Sync+Store Images=AutoSync.
Two icons less, a sea of usefulness more.

So much for a Backup, there are other parts of functionality, like Messaging and Contacts.
What's wrong? Point2 - No offline mode. Unless you sync, you only see Messages and Contacts when you have the phone connected. Yes, this setup allows you to have many phones connected and managed independently, but why no offline mode?
Think of how Outlook would allow you to have offline access to many separate mailboxes and Contacts.
The messaging interface has to be very email-like, with all the usual New, Reply, Forward buttons in their places, so that people find it really convenient to start and use it. On the left - the usual Folder list, with folders like SMS, MMS, Sent, Outbox. Drafts. Integrated with MMS studio, so that when you press New - MMS, you have a chance to select a template, or Insert Objects, or Record Objects on-the-go.

Offtopic: I have heard that a Fly mobile SX210 supports USB webcam mode in the firmware - that's a cool improvement, others might like to follow.

In NOKIA PC Suite the Messages in built into Phone Browser, I think this is a very dubious design solution. Users just don't expect to write e-mails or messages when they go browsing files. Give them a CommCenter, that looks and feels like an e-mail app, and accessible in offline mode.

So what's left? The Internet Connection?
Honestly, I think it should be done without a separate client software, there's no UI needed beside the normal OS UI for a modem connection.
But the reality is - you need proper drivers, init strings and CellOP-specific APN settings. Those are very nicely covered by NOKIA PC Suite Internet Connect applet.
To eliminate the need for it - that would take quite some innovation in cellular operator business.
There could be such phone modem drivers that would be able to read APNs off the phone, transfer their titles to PC and from there (in an Ideal PC Suite) you would just select which APN you want to use for PC->phone->internet access.
MMS messaging would be seamlessly blended into e-mail, with support for HTML-MMS conversion. All accessible from the same single CommCenter window.

Interfaces usability significantly drops if similar parts of functionality are accessibly from separate windows. The common and well-tested approach to this is using "tabs" by the edge of a single window.
With their new initiative NOKIA tries to renew their current S60 UI lineup, by replacing legacy "mesh" design menu with "panes" menu, giving up some screen real estate. This gives user a real "2-D" feel, because the two direction of the 5-way joystick are used complementary to each other. This is a step in the right direction, but only one of the many steps required to rev up the aged S60 UI to be competitive in modern market.