Mobile

Companies are only just understanding what a smartphone means in today’s world. I’m reminded of this as I watch Nokia Search take thirty-eight seconds to bring me to a Yahoo! search field.

Thirty-eight seconds is more than long enough to forget what you were searching for in the first place. About 63% of that wait is looking at a screen that says “finding search providers,” a search whose choice is never stored by the app, and is performed every time “search the internet” is selected.

But this is where the problem becomes apparent: Nokia Search isn’t really a web search application, it’s a mobile device search. The app launches quickly and happily, and starts returning video, emails, bookmarks and contacts (and more, even) results immediately as you start typing in your terms.

It says a lot that Nokia feels searching your emails/contacts/documents on your own phone is more important than searching the web. Like many smartphone makers, there’s been a strong emphasis on real computing on the mobile up until now. It’s a big marketing point for Nokia (e.g., the “it’s what computers have become” campaign they ran for the original N95), and it’s been a cultural force in the company that’s been evident in much of their concept and beta work. Windows Mobile is entrenched in mobile computing thanks to business & corporate IT interests, and Palm has always walked the line between users and productivity, balancing their original PDA goals with the needs of the mobile workforce.

Me, I just wanted a web search field.

That’s what was missing until now: finding the things that ordinary users would want to do on a “smart” phone, and focusing only on that. This is usually a matter of returns: it’s hard to retrofit a business platform like WinMo or the Blackberry into a “lifestyle” product. Few companies have the resources and freedom to start from scratch. And no one was comfortable with releasing a phone that did less. Why strip out features, or for that matter, sell to those people who “clearly” didn’t want those features?

The iPhone has been instrumental in putting the writing on the wall: it’s not about “doing things on your phone” anymore… it’s about “doing things with your phone.” And it’s a difference that is reflected in the physical shape of the device and how the software goes straight to making something happen for a user. Who tried to reach me? What is near me? What do I need to do next? Just another task this mutable slab helps you do, just more information it can pull for you. Editing a .doc file? That’s the past. Or at least, it’s not the focus anymore.

It’s a bit frustrating to see the Sidekick get such limited acknowledgment in this evolution of the smartphone. T-Mobile turned Danger’s device into a teenager’s phone in the States, from the webisodes that sold them, all the way down to the illustration of a purple-haired woman that graced the Phone application icon… alienating most adult users and preventing them from discovering its breakthrough features, like push email and OTA synchronization to a web portal where you could access & edit your info on the desktop. Even an (even more) affordable unlimited data plan. All “breakthrough” features or services of today.

Yet, T-Mobile’s research was probably right, that only the youth market was hungry to use those sorts of features at the time the phone was introduced. Could the Sidekick have been a breakthrough success like the iPhone? It was a solid enough product to, sure. But the iPhone did what was hard for the newcomers to do — giving the older market motivation to care about smartphones, by riding in on the perfect storm of iPod frenzy. As Jobs put it, it was an iPod, a Phone, and an internet device. The internet device part, in many ways, was the trojan horse of the set.

As much as it seems like Apple has taken over the market, it says much more about how much potential in this market has been opened up now that consumers care about these kinds of functions on their phone — or more accurately, these functions away from their computer. What is wonderful about the iPhone’s success is that we’re all starting to benefit from it. Not only by proving the viability of these devices, but by setting these baseline experiences.

We don’t always need to edit ID3 tags on our devices, we don’t need to actually do video editing on the device, and we certainly don’t need to run a web server on it — and not ironically, these are all features found in Nokia’s Nseries phones. The core uses for a general consumer are clear now, and simplifying software doesn’t need the hard sell anymore since it’s now evident in the world. Providing distinct solutions can take the place of having to make all solutions possible.

And you can bet that Google and Nokia are more than happy to hear that, too.

A funny thing happened to me recently: after being contacted by Nokia WOM World about testing out a N95-4 — The US edition of the N95 8GB — I was then contacted by Shozu to inform me that I had just won one of them by taking part in one of their surveys. (Lesson being, having an offer in a survey works for everyone!) Naturally, I wrote WOM World back to tell them to move on to the next blogger on their list… but of course, I still planned on writing about the differences in the phone. (Again, works for everyone!)

Really, who needs another unboxing/side-by-side photo gallery of these two phones? There are loads of them out there; in fact, here’s the standard vs. 8GB N95 photos you may need to reference for my post, if you’re not familiar with the phones. But like I said, I just plan on writing about it.

(Just to note, there were many changes between the original N95 and the N95-3 when it was finally released for the States, and the N95 8GB models share those improvements. So you won’t be reading much about, oh, the loss of the camera lens cover or the extra memory because the N95-3 had the same adjustments.)

When the phone finally arrived, I migrated myself off the N95-3. While the Switch app in the phone worked great for moving Notes and SMS/MMS between the two, I did not move any Contacts or Calendars data. I let a round-trip through iSync handle that, since I consider my Mac to be the master source of such data, and iSync is such a great app. (I did need to download a new driver for the 8GB from the Nokia iSync page first, but that took no time to do.)

Bookmarks copied over but they did not show up sorted the way I had them originally, and as you may know, reordering bookmarks is extremely cumbersome in S60 because of its mark-then-command model combined with the Bookmarks commands being in a sub-menu. S60 menuing is almost always contextual, so I did not understand why some of these commands weren’t surfaced higher once bookmarks were selected (This is a subject for another post, however).

Now that I was up and running, I was struck by how similar they are overall. The screen is bigger, but only slightly so, and while I did feel like the screen was now easily equal-to (if not better) than one on an iPod classic, it didn’t feel so superior to the N95-3’s that it made me say wow or anything. It is definitely nicer to look at, to be clear, but it’s just a modest increase. I think some people say that it has a new daylight-readable screen, but I would have to take their word for it. It was a little easier to read, maybe, but in most of those situations there still is enough overall light and glare to make the screen hard to read, like any other electronic device in the sun. So while there is a little more heft to the N95-4, there was no major moment where I really felt like I had a totally new phone in my hand — the feel is that close. For obvious reasons.

The other big hardware difference are the keys on the face of the device. While the tactility of the keys are vastly improved over the N95-3, they are smaller and more cramped, making them a little hard to press accurately. This may be something I get used to, because I had similar reactions to the -3’s keys when I first got it, but they no longer get in my way.

The directional key is the most improved, finally feeling like its edges are raised enough to get a thumb on it quickly and move it easier. The center button also feels taller and is easier to press. Overall, gaming on this phone will get a little boost over the N95-3 because of these directional key improvements.

The menu and multimedia keys are also rounded and raised, which helps since they are much smaller. This is a big difference from the N95-3, where these buttons were treated more like negative space within the perimeter of the other buttons on the phone’s face. I miss those larger, flatter keys mostly because of the differentiation of feel and what that meant (these were modal buttons whereas the others were commands) but again, not a problem… just a preference.

However, I do think the soft keys are too small. Really. Most of the times I hit the soft keys to accept dialogs or unlock the phone and I don’t actually believe I pushed them, because they just don’t “give” enough when pressed and I don’t feel like I pressed on them directly.

On the whole, that was it. Most everything else was improved, and they were really the small software touches that a new firmware might have brought to the N95-3. For example, podcasts would now remember their playback point if you stopped them earlier. No more would I need to memorize a timecode and fast-forward through an hour to get back to where I was. And I even like the new panel system that the multimedia key launches. However, there are still bugs that have been left undone, such as requiring a data connection when reading downloaded RSS feeds: if there is an embedded photo, the phone will try to connect, but if you cancel, the Web Feed application QUITS. It doesn’t just let you read the feed WITHOUT PHOTOS.

The biggest thing to note is that is has Flash Lite 3, which means Flash Video support in the browser. However, leaving Flash fully-enabled made the browser crash on almost every Flash-heavy page I visited. Changing it to “images only” still allows you to click on Flash embeds and play the file in-page or in the Flash Player app on the phone, which worked much better. But desktop oriented Flash on a phone sized device is just not satisfying and not a good experience — choppy, slow, wrongly sized. For the desperate it will work, but it’s more of a back-up “just in case I have to access a Flash-driven site” type of feature. But it’s honestly just not that useful or necessary a feature.

I have yet to fill up the -3’s memory card, so doubling my card into 8GBs of built-in storage hasn’t been a notable change to me at all. Really, I have never swapped multiple memory cards into any device. I buy one card per each, be it a Memory Stick Duo for the PSP, or my CF card for my SLR, and it stays in the device all the time unless I’m transferring files to my computer and I couldn’t find a USB cable. I’m also not one of those people who travel with two or three cards for a device, so the fact that the N95-3 has a MicroSD slot wasn’t more valuable to me in comparison to a phone with non-upgradable storage.

So overall: the N95 8GB is a great phone, but it’s only a modest upgrade from the N95-3. You’re not going to miss out too much except for the software updates, which could still come to -3 if Nokia ever gets their ass in gear. It comes down to the memory card most of all, and if you have money invested in MicroSD, then your choice should be pretty clear.

More to come.

Responding to the idea of a PSP-branded Sony Ericsson phone, the head of Nokia games said at a recent press event:

I’m not scared about anybody. The real question is how do they do it? Can they create a link between the PSP games and a phone? Can they do the multiplayer and online stuff? We’ve been doing this for two years and it hasn’t been easy.

So again, Nokia is showing us why this revival of N-Gage still doesn’t have us feeling more confident than their first go at it.

Nokia is having problems with N-Gage because they are a phone company first (cramming a gaming platform into a device that isn’t natively designed for it) and they have almost no gaming experience except for the original N-Gage devices which were considered failures by the gaming industry.

If they are not scared, it’s because they looking too closely at the engineering challenges, and are thinking that Sony Ericsson would try to do this by themselves.

But any PSP-branded phone would like be a PSP… with, you know, a phone. Sony Computer Entertainment wouldn’t want to fracture game development, and there’s definitely other reasons why they recently launched the ability to download titles from an online PSP Store. Just look to how download-only titles on Xbox Arcade or Playstation Network work on their respective consoles, and you can see how a small-screen PSP phone with no UMD disc could co-exist with a “big screen” handheld PSP console.

Just think of it this way: SCEJ can provide a PSP platform with hooks for telephony, which they may already have begun with the latest Skype support, and Sony Ericsson does the cellular engineering and design around it.

There’s no expectation that this phone be Symbian, Java, BREW, or anything of that ilk, and after seeing Apple’s success in starting fresh, why would Sony want to stick with the old, especially with this brand? After all, this is a company that has made not one, but two mylos!

Nokia, however, is entrenched in S60. They don’t have an SCE, or similar division with 12 years experience, to fall back to when it comes to video gaming. And they continue to think there is a serious audience interested in gamer points and online matches on cellphones when phones have yet to provide any hits bigger than Tetris or Bejeweled — the stuff they’re working so hard to perfect may not actually be what those players want.

Which is why they should be scared, or at least concerned.

Yahoo! has been pushing their new mobile application, Yahoo! Go, for some time now. I decided to try it, since I use Yahoo! a lot for movie information, and the promise of a rich Flickr client was tempting as well.

However, after a few uses I realized that the WAP/mobile HTML site — accessible via wap.oa.yahoo.com — is still superior for me for the one thing I access Yahoo! the most for: Weather.

Just look for yourself.

wap.oa.yahoo.com

Yahoo! Go

The two screens represent the maximum amout of data I can get about the day’s weather from each system. That’s right: Strong Storms is all that I know when using Yahoo! Go. I don’t know that the winds could be damaging. I don’t know that those storms run through both day and night. In fact, I don’t know any differences between day and night forecasts. The simpler application has more useful data than the “more useful” application. Not to mention…

wap.oa.yahoo.com

Yahoo! Go

I’m not even getting my local forecast. I’m getting the conditions in from who-knows-where, probably Central Park, 7 miles away. Bizarre.

I like Radar.net. I really do. But I’m kinda torn over the whole service.

On one hand, Radar has more flexible group control and treats pictures like forums. That’s really cool, because it’s become clear that Flickr is not really optimized for this sort of behavior. Let’s say you post 40 photos from vacation, and you get a comment on several of them. You’ll have to visit a special page or two or use the RSS feed to find out because those photos may no longer be on your main page, and they don’t get marked up in any special way. But with Radar, those photos pop to the top, sort by most recently commented on. Instantly, you know when there’s a conversation happening. That’s what they’re optimizing for, and it’s perfect for mobile picture blogging. You can get a number of different alerts, from IM notifications (making it a bit like Twitter for MMS, as some people have been calling it) to email alerts that can be sent daily, weekly or even every-other-day.

On the other hand, Radar is private. Like, no-peeking private. No one can get in and play around with the site’s capabilities unless they create yet another online account. Certain modes of invitation involves some arcane-feeling “invite codes.” All the activity is hidden, and extra effort is needed to convince people to join up. And since it’s totally private, certain features like RSS go missing. If it’s a mobile picture-blogging experience they’re after, it’s not quite complete, since regular blogging has a very public face to it, and folks who do start private blogs leveraged the publicity of the public users to lure their friends into the habit. There’s really no lead to follow when first browsing the site, and it makes it a harder sell than it needs to be.

I think of Flickr as a community of photographers, not a discussion system. I’m happy when people comment on my photos, but I don’t expect it to be anything more than some feedback about the photo itself. It’s not a message to me, it’s a message for the next viewer. Even today, I will find comments or notes on old photos that I’ve never seen before — It’s just not visible enough or real-time enough. In the end, I use it as an online iPhoto.

I don’t want to take my lovely 10 MP DSLR photos and cram in a bunch of 1 or 2 MP flashless cameraphone shots. They’re just two different things to me, and I desperately want to keep them separate. Radar is almost exactly what I wanted for this, but the problem is, will anyone show up?

(Current score: 2 of 11 invites accepted)

Sometimes I’m amazed at how much Nokia “gets” being in the mobile domain, and I wonder why they haven’t made a bigger dent in the American market yet.

Take the Nokia Sports Tracker for example, which comes to us from the Nokia Research Center which just got a brilliant highlight in BusinessWeek that’s worth reading:

This option alone says a lot. Here’s how the NRC describes this application:

[This] is a GPS based activity tracker that runs on S60 smartphones. Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored to your training diary. To be able to use [this] application for real, you need Nokia S60 3.0 phone with Bluetooth GPS device or Nokia S60 3.0 phone with integrated GPS.

And this is just the surface of what they do. On the flip side, as Jan Chipchase, one of their exploratory human behavioral field researchers — who recently spoke at the TED conference on the mobile experience — says in the BusinessWeek article:

Let’s talk about a study we did last year on how people share objects. You can relate this to mobile phones. They’re basically designed as personal objects. But if you look at usage in Africa, increasingly the phone is shared. A family might have one. A village might have one, or someone who runs a phone kiosk in a village might have one. We’re thinking about how we could redesign the mobile phone and the communication experience to be more suitable for sharing.

These are truly smart people who really are looking to enhance the mobile experience and you gotta applaud them.

(via textually, e-series)