Nokia partners with Microsoft, adopts Windows 7 Phone

In a much speculated and quite expected move, Nokia is finally moving past Symbian.

Today, an open letter from Steven Elop and Steve Ballmer, both companies declared partnership and vowed to bring "stellar hardware, innovating software and great services" to mobile phone customers.

As I wrote in November, this will be a perfect match between Nokia's hardware capabilities and capacity, and Microsoft's innovative mobile OS and tight integration to most popular desktop environment, Microsoft Windows.

With hardware giant like Nokia in their allies, Microsoft is sure to make a major dent in mobile marketplace. Mobile users will win from improved innovation rate, better compatibility and increased usability, and simpler integration between mobile devices and desktops.

Nokia Ovi suite could be reformed and re-incorporated to bring value to all Windows 7 Phone customers. That would be an important step to increase it's market adoption rate and usefulness.

Vendor-specific social platforms are doomed, that's why Ovi must go beyond Nokia to really succeed and compete with the best.

The deal will invigorate mobile market even more, adding to the battle between Google's Android and Apple's iPhone ecosystems.

It's a great day today for both companies, and I am looking forward to help them improve their act.
I used to be a Symbian fan, but it's been long time to move on.
Nokia hardware was quite competitive, but sad truth is that Nokia simply could not make first-class software for few recent years.
When that is changed and outsourced to a partner as great as Microsoft, everybody wins!

Skype sends empty vouchers to some clients

As a highly original New Year's present, Skype is sending vouchers to some of the clients who had paid for premium services (had balance) and been affected by the failure in December.

Funny part is that some of the vouchers are empty - they contain no code to redeem.

I personally have received a voucher with the code and successfully redeemed the value of $1.

I am sure they should pay more than $1 to the folks who received the joke.

Stay tuned!

Happy New Year and let your presents be real.
SZ

UPDATE: Skype is resending the letters, this time with the $1 code.

Presents from Finnish Santa!

Lo and behold, loyal Nokia customer! Ovi Suite 3 is out!

New and improved are in v3.0.0.284:

- Direct download of songs from Ovi Music
- Greater ease in managing and downloading street maps
- Improved syncing of contacts
- Fresh Home view offering new and updated content from your device
- Splendid full-screen view of photos and videos
- Export of messages for storing and easy viewing on the computer

At the very same time, download of Nokia Photos app is blocked.
New customers have to use Ovi Suite only.
Download of the new version cannot be blocked, it is mandatory for existing Ovi Suite users.
Pre-existing Nokia Photos 1.6.434 is not removed neither blocked. It would still work.

Unfortunately, Photos part of the Suite is not improved with the famous "Timeline" view that was there in Lifeblog and Nokia Photos apps.

One prominent change in v3 of Ovi Suite is the "product placement" of the Ovi services and shops - the music and apps are recommended now at the home page of the app, taking up most space (that was previously used by your stuff). That's quite understandable, and can be useful.

One can separately browse and manage data on the phone and in the Suite. While this gives more flexibility, this can confuse a novice user.

Quite interesting is the new "competition for the customer" between Microsoft's Winows 7 and the Nokia PC Suite. Once you connect a phone in PC Suite mode, a Windows dialog pops up, inviting you to use the built-in features like media sync, files browser or the image transfer.

Nokia Maps can detect if the phone application is running - and it intructs you to close the Maps on the phone, but it cannot detect if you closed the app, and there's no F5/Refresh button; one should switch to another part of Ovi Suite and back to Maps in order to resolve this little stalemate.

Share feature is not improved much, in fact, the most noticeable is the action to download your Share library - this only confirms speculations that Nokia might outsource that Share part of Ovi to someone (yahoo! we're looking for talents!)

Another bug I noticed is that Software Update shows number 3 on the icon, but there is only one app on my phone wanting to be updated (Python, which I don't want).
The number itself might not be correct, it works just as and indicator for you to look there. UPDATE - the number reflected two not-installed apps, they are not visible in updates, but are offered for installation at the home page. A little misleading, that number is...

The Music view is improved, now more resembling Apple's iTunes with the album art inline along the song list. This shows efficient use of the horizontal display dimensions. Generally Nokia Ovi Suite is good at that, better than Microsoft Office.
If only they could fit the Timeline view for media...

All in all, it's a decent update and a timely release for the New Year's holidays.
I only hope that nokians did not have to spend all the Christmas time at work preparing and polishing it!..

Now that have all eggs in one basket, let's see more speedy and astonishing improvements! Thank you Finnish Santa!

Happy New Year to all!!!

Cheers
SZ

Goodbye to Nokia Photos?

For some reason, there's no Photo Service advertised or visible anymore at Ovi.com.

Access via Nokia Photos PC app and Ovi Share and Ovi Suite still works.

What happened?

UPDATE: The photos may go to Y! Flickr.

Patriot Act for all

There's no Outlook Express in Windows 7 anymore.
Say goodbye to your encrypted emails to Assange, people.

Will iOS 4.2 fix slow iPhones 3G ?

In his latest keynote, 20-Oct-2010, Steve Jobs mentioned new upcoming firmware update of iOS to v4.2 which is expected to fix slow operation and occasional delays in UI of iPhone 3G with current iOS 4.x.

If that happens, that would be a major difference to an average vendor behavior -
everyone is so interested in selling the latest models and there's little impetus to help and improve speed of models two generations old.

Could this say that Apple simply cannot keep up with demand for iPhone 4 and decided to try and keep existing iPhone users happy, in the meanwhile?

In fact, here a good tip for the struggling iOS 4.x/iPhone 3G users out there:
1. Sync up with iTunes. Make sure a backup it taken.
2. From the Settings menu, do a hard reset, destroying all data.
3. Connect to iTunes and restore the backup. (Read help in iTunes on how to do that)

I did it last summer and boy it helped!
And then they stole my iPhone...

NB: iOS 4 seems to be picky about fragmented filesystem on iPhone 3G.
It could also be that verion 3 of "OS X" did much better around some flash system quirks. Anyway, a reformat helps tremendously. Especially if you don't load the whole lot of Apps back into your phone...
I think most of iApps out there are just fart.
After year of playing, I don't need more than 6-8 of them.

By the way, why is Cisco so quiet about IOS trademark infringement? Has Apple given each Cisco employee an iPhone? :)

Windows Phone 7 in, Symbian ^ out?

Tectonic changes are happening, friends. Very big, long-awaited stuff. Dinosaur mating.

Not long after ousting Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the Nokia CEO, Nokia hires ex-Microsoftie for that role.

On November 8, Windows Phone 7 is out.
The very same day, Symbian Foundation is "suddenly" shrinks.

It's a very tough time for Nokia.
This year certainly wasn't their strongest.

And the next year will be even worse.
Unless they switch the tired horse.

And looking at the jockey, I guess I know where to bet.