Vlad Bobleanta

I do understand that the ‘check in, get points to beat your friends, get badges’ mechanic taps into what we call ‘game theory’ which dictates that if you give people things to do and rewards (even ones without any real value) they will have a natural compulsion to complete the tasks and collect the rewards. That’s great for Foursquare, the mechanic is getting people using their service in droves. But to what actual end? What use is any of this to its users? When I’m on my deathbed am I going to think to myself “what was this life all about? What did I do for the world? Oh, I got the ‘Douchebag’ badge and ten others on Foursquare! I wonder if I can check in at heaven’s gates…

Finally, someone besides me and Tomi Ahonen says what needs to be said.

Location BS. That's what I believe "LBS" stands for.

The future may be bright, but it surely isn't bright for apps that just let you "chek in" to somewhere. Location may get huge, but as a feature, not as an app/product/service in itself.

This has all been said before, but what I mean is that location will (probably) be integrated into more and more services and products, as GPS sensors are included into more and more gear, and locating people/devices is increasingly possible in different manners (WiFi, cell tower, and so on).

But having an app or a service that just lets you announce the world where you are? And then build a database of all the places you've been "for you"?

Not a chance.

It's time these services actually do something with the location data they collect, something other than give stalkers a field day everyday. I'm looking forward to that.

And you know what's funny? This all started thanks to the Nokia N95.

 In his final post, Dan explains that the key reason for closing the site is because, “Nokia have stopped being as creative as they once were.”

Dan goes on to cite bug-filled £500 devices and the Nokia N97 in particular.  The main issue for Dan though was content:

“All the [Nokia] phones ended up feeling pretty much the same due to the tired Symbian OS.”

Dan then points out how Android came from nowhere to version 2.2 in just two years, with the chaps behind it iterating fast in response to user and developer feedback.

Dan finishes his explanation with this statement:

“Other players have moved with the times and Nokia is still dragging it’s heels, you only need to see the large quantity of Nokia fans who have parted ways with the company and moved onto a different platform such as Android or iPhone.”

Dan’s not alone in pointing this out. Micky over at NokiaDNA raised the same issue a week or so ago too.

Give me a break.

First off, this somehow reminds me of Jason Calacanis giving up on blogging. Only to start an email newsletter the contents of which are published as blog posts on his blog.

Or should I mention MIR's own Ewan who closed the site at one point, only to resurrect it as (you guessed it!) an email newsletter, that now gets published on the site, along with other posts?

Why am I bringing up these examples? Because this is a good publicity stunt.
Congratulations, Dan Carter, you have successfully managed to put CoolSmartPhone on the map. Because he conveniently isn't giving up blogging altogether, he's just giving up on Nokia - and the "farewell" post (wait, I have to wipe some tears... done) contains a link to where he'll continue blogging about all things mobile (I guess).

Yeah.
Ok.

I gave up on reading Mashable a few months ago. Maybe I should have written a saddening blog post about it. Who knows, maybe Scoble would've linked to me and made me instantly famous (you know, as good as instant coffee)?

As for the bug-filled N97, this is all a bit disingenuous. Was it bug-filled when it came out? Sure, but then Dan knew this probably not by buying the bug-filled thing, but by trialling it - a feat he was able to accomplish thanks to his blogging activity. And the thing is, even before getting a loaner in, he (and I, and everyone on the Internet) already knew it was buggy. So why would anyone buy a product knowing that it's going to be buggy? Especially a 500-pound product?! Beats me.

As for the "but let's all collectively cry for the average Joe who doesn't know what the internet is" argument, yes, let's do that. But let's not act like five-year olds.

Hey, I know. Now I have a reasonable (?) excuse for why I've been blogging less and less frequently. So, in case you were wondering, it's thanks to Nokia's lack of innovation.

As for the "tired" Symbian OS... let's just say it's really good that there's no second amendment here. Otherwise...

Not to be misunderstood - the point here isn't that you should love Symbian^1 or Nokia or anything. The point is that if you feel something better exists for your needs and your use-case, go grab it. Just don't cry because one company didn't manufacture the exact product you never knew you wanted and hell couldn't even describe if were asked to at exactly the time you felt you needed said indescribable product.

As for Android... funny. Yes, it has moved from nowhere to 2.2 in two years. But that's because it was nowhere to begin with. Get it? You have to root/hack/jailbreak/whatever you want to call it your precious 2.2 Android phone to take a screenshot. Not kidding. So yes, it has come a long way (as has Symbian over the past decade, but hey, the Symbian Foundation is not Google or Apple, right?), but there's still a very, very, very long way to go.

Biggest mistake Nokia made in their Symbian strategy? Not headquartering the Foundation in Silicon Valley. I'm serious.

Has the hype won?

I guess it all depends on how ignorant the subject is. The more ignorant you are, the more chances there are that the hype has indeed won, and the main use-case for your phone is making it make 690 different fart sounds.

And often times I feel that the only thing some mobile bloggers are after is showing off how much they can lick their new device to their friends. Forget trends, understanding the market, helping people make informed (and educated) buying decisions, providing context to news and generally making people think more about these amazing tiny smart devices.

It's all akin to mass hysteria.
And it's not funny. Never was.

So please, Nokia fans, stop acting like you being fans is a religion and God has disappointed you because you prayed for a new toy last night and this morning when you woke up it wasn't there and now you're mad at God and tonight you'll try Allah.

The problem in this narrative isn't Nokia, or God, or Allah. It's your childish expectations. Once you understand this, I'm happy to welcome you to the real world.

Note: The religion comparison also applies to other breeds of fanboys, without a doubt. Yet some seem more satisfied with their God than others.

Last note: It would also be cool, from time to time, to remember that the objects of your fanaticism are for-profit corporations who are driven (by the nature of capitalism) in business decisions by their investors'/stock holders' expectations and not their consumers' (this is fundamental, not necessarily apparent at all times). If you don't like this, perhaps a conversation about our current form of capitalism is needed, but please, stop whining and (hopefully) start understanding. And remember, "understanding" something need not be equal to "agreeing" with said thing.

Unfortunately, an early prototype made its way to someone that wasn’t supposed to have it, and his early first impressions of the device and its software spread like wildfire. Buried deep down in the blogger’s salacious headlines about the software not being ready, was the most important point. This is a very early, pre-production prototype with dated software that is not yet ready. So the site’s comments that the software ‘felt premature’ is probably one of the more blindingly obvious things you will read this year.

Also interesting is this comment from Hary on the post linked above:

"This time, Eldar’s review has done more damage to Nokia.

Reason: People have had high expectations from Symbian^3 hoping it will be a turn around for Nokia.

Eldar’s review that Symbian^3 is disappointing, has spread like fire, especially US blogs like engadget, intomobile, gizmodo all having big negative headlines and leaving no stone unturned in their negative publicity directly or indirectly.

Infact, Reuters(a renowned site) is siting Eldar’s blog post as the 1st review of the device and mentions that it failed to impress. Not only Reuters, but other analysts too. (Here is the link to Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idCNLDE63Q14J20100427?rpc=44)

That is the reason why Nokia’s stock has taken a downfall in last 2 hrs on NYSE.

That is unacceptable. Nokia must enforce strict measures against the said blogger, you can’t let this happen with your every device. N900 was also leaked by same person and several other models too.

Also I believe that that preview of N8 was purposely distorted by the blogger. Reason: His review of X6(Which was also a prototype) was much different than N8. He kept on saying in his review on X6 that this is a prototype version, so he will pass his judgment after having the real release.

Nokia has to step up measures, OPENNESS cannot have unlimited freedom so that anyone can come and screw you and you say that we are OPEN, we don’t mind it."

So.
That whole N8 preview over on Mobile-Review (still Russian only) thing.

Eldar was usually neutral toward Nokia, though his love of all things Samsung has always been quite obvious.

This, however, wasn't a review. It wasn't a preview. It wasn't even a collection of personal thoughts. It was unfair.

And I suspect he shorted NOK right before hitting "Publish". Or he should have. I know that's what I would've done had I written such a wonderful piece, and had I had his 'reach'.

As for the Gizmodos and Engadgets of the world... No one should care anymore. I think their biases are more than obvious by now. It's their right to lick their iPhones at night. Get over it, and just unsubscribe. It's healthier that way. Believe me.

As for the heart of the matter. Yes, Nokia have an amazingly bad track record at "firmware stablity upon launch" for their high-end stuff. And this hasn't first happened with the N97. In fact, I think the N97's shipping software was way more stable than the N95's. But let's not forget that this is the same company that had a senior executive admit those mistakes and say they won't happen again.

So, while I understand the anger of those who purchased an N97 the day it came out, I think we need to all collectively chill.

And see.

I think they deserve that.

After all, they've just announced the world's first phone that has a camera sensor bigger than a standalone camera (bigger is better, trust me).

As for Symbian^3, if you expected it to be Android, you're an idiot. If you expected it to be the iPhone OS, you're an idiot. Don't like the UI? Fine. Go buy something else. Just stop saying incredibly stupid things about the world's most mature smartphone OS. Because that makes you look stupid. Maybe not to the rest of your ignorant peers, but to sane people.

The mobile world is a competition, ok? If every OS was the same as the next, what the hell would the point for having more than one OS be?!

Symbian doesn't fit you? Cool. Try something else. I'm not saying Android is shit every second blog post. And that's the difference.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. The battle for control over conversations and the silo of discussions is done. Any blogger who believes that they can control the conversations and prevent discussions in far-flung social networks is deluding themselves. And yet, every few months, a new innovation, be it comments in Google Reader, or something like this, freaks the old guard out.

Jeff and Steven's comments are mirrored by Josh Schnell, who in a guest post for Tamar Weinberg on Techipedia cries out that Content Aggregators are Killing Content Creators.

Here's the reality: Conversations have moved to where the reader wa nts them to be - and the best content creators shouldn't care if they get to have conversations on their content in any of these networks. The best content creators and the best Web brands shouldn't care about what people may say on their SideWiki, any more than they should panic over reviews that happen on Amazon's Marketplace or in the iTunes store. People are entitled to their opinions and their commentary, and any further efforts to try and force people to have these conversations in a single place should be extinguished.

Strike one there for Louis Gray. Thing is, I read both Jeff Jarvis' blog and follow all the different online presences of Steven Hodson, and I appreciate both of their opinions and insights, usually. But this...

This reminds me of "old/big media" and their desperation caused by the online (r)evolution of their business.

Stop it. Just stop.

The era of "look at me, I have more comments per post than you do" (hence, *cough* more AdSense and/or referral money, right?) has turned into "look, I have more Twitter followers than you". And we all know how, when (puberty) and with what particular comparison this all started. So go brag about Twitter followers, and stop saying that comments are of any real use to anyone other than the blog's owner. Because they're not. I'm sorry that people may start building you statues anywhere else on the internet, but you'll just have to live with it. And I bet Mike Arrington will be happy to know he (or his team) won't have to delete all idiotic comments aimed at him anymore.

So just grow up.

Or perhaps, Jeff and Steven, you'd rather I invite you by when I'm discussing your thoughts with my friends, offline? Or should we just record the whole thing and post that as a comment on your blogs? Would that do? Is that "fair use"? Does it tingle your egos enough? Or will you call that copyright infringement, like some other individual would want you to?

The big buzzword for the past few years in the blogging kingdom has always been "conversation". See, this is not really a blog post, it's a conversation starter. Heck, let me even end it by making the entire final paragraph into a question! Because I care so much about you, the reader. So come, come to my blog and comment, since I value your insight so much... No, it's not about the pageview... Or the ads you may click on while you're there... No, no, my dear reader, it's all about you. It's not about me making a living out of this because, well, it's easy, oh no... One day, when you grow up, you'll be a blogger too. You can be just like me. It's all about you, see? Never about me.

I don't mind people making money. Hell, even with Google! What I do mind is hypocrisy. So stop it. And you'll still be here in 5 years. Otherwise... Goodbye... I'm sure you'll be laughed at in the future. So, in a way, you'll still be with us. I guess you can count that as a Win.

It's usually funny to see how people react to the world changing. In some cases, though, you just have to quote Bill Maher and say "but... you're smart! you're actually smart! why, then, why oh why??!".

I think the biggest part is nobody has a unique story and everyone is trying to be a “news” site. BORING.

I don’t sit and think about a blog post for hours.  When catch myself doing it I stop and I start writing or record myself on my iPhone using Voxie (dictation translation service).

If I have an opinion about a topic I write about it.

If I think someone is an asshole I write about it.

If I think some company sucks balls I write about it.

Other then Firefox’s spellchecker I don’t spell check my posts.

One of the biggest things is you have to be willing to stick your pecker out.  Quit being so scared.  Quit trying to be what you think people want you to be and be yourself.

Are people going to disagree with you?  Absolutely!

Are people going to make blog posts about how you don’t know what your talking about?  For sure!

But if you are willing to be yourself and show the world your a regular dumb ass like them, before you know it people will start to connect with you and subscribe to your blog.

I really could not agree more. In fact, I'm trying (sometimes it can be quite hard, believe me) to do all those things. I even wrote about this a while ago.

Being unique is what gets you noticed. Or so I think right now. Check back in a few months, and you might see a post over here saying how wrong I was to think this.

It's a great achievement if you can write in (a) neutral tone, a la old media (at least that's what they preach, ask David Pogue how much they apply that please), Mashable or (most of the time) TechCrunch. It's great that you can master this style. If you work for any of these publications.

If not, think about this for a minute. Why would I visit your blog if I see the same story, written in the same way, as on 'big' publications that I'm already subscribing to? And even if I somehow stumble across it, why would I subscribe? You're bringing nothing new to the party (greetings, Paul Carr, I love your sick joke of a blog title, because it's anything but true).

So be yourself. Other than that...

You're not going to be the next anything. Especially without proper funding. And even with funding, you might fail in becoming a better copy of a model than its inventor(s). There's a nice life lesson to be learned there.

You won't make money online blogging. You will only do this if your content is unique enough to be instantly differentiated in your readers' minds from anything else on the web. And even then, they might have heard of ad blockers. At which point, you can start whining on Twitter and FriendFeed about how these people steal your brain's valuable output. No, wait, you have to already be a web celeb to do that. My bad.

Anyway, even if you do start making money from ads, for a long while it will be a very tiny amount. You'd make a lot more if you worked for any of the 'big guys' in blogging. Or media, whatever.

So what's left? You either come up with something new enough, or you desperately hope you'll be hired at Engadget.

Or, people may start noticing you, as Jeremy Schoemaker described in his post linked above.

But you have to be very patient. Even this may never happen.

Reality sucks, I guess.

And all I can think is, how did these guys manage to set up a system where people pay to drive traffic from one place on Facebook to another place on Facebook? Even Google hasn’t managed to figure that one out yet. I’ve known they (and MySpace) have done this since launching their ad platforms, but it never really hit home until today how brilliant this all is.

All I can think is, people used to (I hope it isn't still happening) pay for "land" on the Moon (or was it Mars?). People will pay for anything, if said anything is properly marketed.

"Brilliant" as this may be for Facebook, I can't help but wonder how brilliant it is for those actually forking the cash for this.

I love the internet too (that's how the linked post ends).
And BananaBucks.

But as I've begun to (re-)dabble in punditry, I think it's telling that private conversations (and the occasional ranting blogger) direct so much vitriol at the people who lead much of the conversation in the world of technology. it would seem the more effective form of criticism is obvious, effective and relatively easy: Just do better yourself.

English isn't my first language, but I'm really not sure of the use of the word "pundits" here, in this case meaning the 'web celebs' we all know and love (?).

Leaving that aside, it's an interesting read, so to speak. And the excerpt above is his conclusion.

So. Here's my conclusion.

"Just do better yourself" is what caught my attention.
Do better at what? Report "news" better than Arrington, for instance? How? How many ways to re-write a press release can there possibly be? How many linkbaiting titles can one possibly come up with? And, in this example, isn't Mashable already doing, well... the same thing?

The general news bits on such blogs - there are thousands of people who can write at the same quality level. At least thousands.

As for the scoops - no one outside the rather limited Silicon Valley tech circle will ever get access to these before they do.

So, wrapping up this example, on one hand, there is no 'better' (for news), on the other hand no one else can be 'better'.

Now. If by "better" Anil meant content of higher quality, which in my view is based on more context... well then, fine.

I'll do it. I'll do better myself.

And you, Anil, shall give me the pageviews. Deal?

Somewhere, somehow, Facebook started evolving into something that wasn’t very desirable. You knew MySpace was going downhill when you logged on one day and saw that you had a friend request from a bottle of Pepsi, or a can of Axe deodorant. With Facebook, it was logging on one day and seeing your mom, and your mom’s friends, trying to become your friend that may have signaled something weird was happening. For others it was the Facebook applications that sprang out of nowhere and quickly turned people’s profiles back into the hideous malformed websites that we all used to remember as MySpace profiles. For me, it was the realization that I was interacting with all my friends in a highly efficient manner that made it just as easy to see what my best friend was doing, as someone who I don’t even talk to, yet accepted their friend request anyway as a gesture of good will.

I never quite 'got' Facebook. I still don't.
I think the UI is overly complicated, thus the UX is horrible. I spend most of my time there (which amounts to 10 minutes every two weeks) trying to figure out what goes where, why is that there, where are the settings for that, are there even any settings for that...

To me, it's confusing.

Yet to 'normal people', you know, the people who haven't ever heard of Jaiku, it seems to work. I have seen numerous friends of mine who normally "visit" the web maybe 10 minutes a month spend hours a day on Facebook.

And watching what they do, I believe the strength of Facebook for the average person is in photos. The ease of use (in that respect only!), the tagging of people... And people (apparently) very much enjoy peeking into other people's lives via photographs.

It's like that real-life fascination with being presented photo albums. I never, ever understood this, but I saw almost everyone around me quite enjoy the experience.

It could still have been a place for me to hang out. In time, I would have got past all the UI quirks, and maybe I would have enjoyed some good conversations over there, especially since it's a lot better at handling those than the media darling Twitter. But good conversations can't take place there.

Because the thing that started Facebook's transformation into something that wasn't very desirable is, in my opinion, apps.

They're silly, useless time wasters. And I don't think anyone actually enjoys them. Or at least I hope so. These start lowering the value of the overall experience, they might even soft-spam (I invented that right now!) your notifications area... it's all downhill from there.

It's a pity. I think Facebook would have been an interesting place to connect to less geeky friends. IF it had no apps.

But this is just my take. Read Stefan's, linked above, because it focuses on an entirely different perspective. Which is very interesting and worthy of a read.

now the company's tackling another need by offering rudimentary banking and money transfer services by way of the handset. Noting that of the four billion cellphones in the world there are only 1.6 billion bank accounts, Nokia's so-called Nokia Money service will bring electronic money management to some areas of the world for the first time -- a customer need only know the phone number of the intended recipient to send a payment.

Rudimentary.

I would not have written this (go ahead, say I shouldn't have anyway) had it not been for this word.

Rudimentary.

How exactly is being able to transfer money only needing the recipient's phone number rudimentary?

The whole 'making the phone your wallet' thing has been tried over and over again. No one got it right to this day.

This is not that.

And this does not compete with PayPal. It can't.

Let me tell you a little something. I live in a "developing nation", and PayPal is next to useless to me because I can't get money from PayPal to my bank account. Only the other way round.

Rudimentary? Why, because it requires no computer, no bank to go to, and will be as easy to use as SMS?

Yeah, that's really rudimentary. All things in "developing nations" are. Take my 50Mb/s completely unlimited, un-capped, and un-filtered internet connection for $13/month.

Oh, and one more thing (I just love doing that!). Nokia's services for the "developing nations" (yeah, I hate how it sounds, so I'm going to keep repeating it) are unrivaled, unmatched, whatever you want to call it. And they won't be for years to come. Because while everyone is so focused on a certain state in the US of A, some companies understand where future growth comes from in this technology business.

Another day, another ignorant article about high definition. This time it's Peter Bradshaw, film critic for Guardian.co.uk, claiming Humphrey Bogart would have any cameraman approximating a "high definition" effect thrown off the set. Blatantly ignoring the fact that movies of that era were made on 35mm film with more resolution than even 1080p Blu-ray can display, Bradshaw claims that instead of a HDTV, viewers would be better off with a standard definition projector and DVDs.

It's becoming very fashionable, it seems, to have opinions, in public, about things you don't know, don't understand, haven't ever used and so on.

Someone please stop them all.

There's no doubt that, when given a laptop in a lecture setting, most people surf the web, check email, or play video games. Their attention is lost and they've checked out. Of course, there's an assumption that technology is to blame. The only thing that I really blame said technology for is limiting doodling practice for the potential future artist (and for those of us who still can't sketch to save our lives). Y'see - I don't think that people were paying that much attention before. Daydreaming and sketching (aka "taking notes") are not particularly new practices. Now the daydreamer might just be blogging instead.

My frustration at the anti-computer attitude goes beyond the generational gap of an academic conference. I've found that this same attitude tends to be present in many workplace environments. Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we're talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.

A very interesting insight over at Apophenia into the so-called generational conflict between the younger, hyper-connected individual and the (usually) older, less-of-a-computer-power-user type.

And I agree that dismissing it as something generational is missing the point. Sure, older people might be more inclined, let's say, to belong to the latter category, but that is only as a result of their upbringing and what surrounded them through it. And the difference between that and what surrounds your average young person growing up right now (or 5 or 10 years ago, and so on).

But other than that it is a matter of choice, in my opinion. You choose your attitude towards this, the attitude doesn't choose you because you fit its demographic.

My take? Never settle for anything, no matter how good (or complete) it sounds. No, don't settle for the information in the brochure. Google it. Wikipedia it. Ask your Twitter followers. Start a discussion on Friendfeed. Get as much information as you can, from as many sources as you can, in order to then let your brain do what it was meant to do: make sense of it all. I don't believe our brains are there just to remember stuff we've been told at some point. No, the ability to filter is there, built-in, so why not use it? Why settle for someone else's conclusions, when you can have your own?

For today’s jaded technical press and pundits, anything less than 100% adoption, overnight, is a colossal failure. Which is kind of like saying that this year’s Star Trek was a flop because 268 million Americans didn’t go see it.

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s news (literally), PC World summarized a new report by IDC analyst Al Gillen, which predicts that Windows 7 will account for 75% of units shipped in 2011 and will achieve total world domination within three years:

Windows 7 momentum will translate in 2013 to the new OS accounting for 95% of the operating systems Microsoft sells to businesses. That percentage is up from 90% forecast for 2012.

What, not 100%? Losers.

A-ha! So it doesn't only happen when Nokia is involved. A very entertaining read, thanks to Ed Bott, though honestly I don't know whether I should be amused or outraged.

Come to think of it, the way most (by pageviews, if not accuracy of reporting) of the US-based 'blogosphere' relates to whatever Nokia does is starting to look disturbingly similar to the treatment they seem to always have in store for Microsoft.

I guess hating is the new black.

Silly.

I don’t know what your problems are, but look, I had 3 and I came through it. I believe my strength came from the fact that I never hid those disadvantages, on the contrary, I shouted on the roof whenever I could that I was lebanese and a pharmacist, I also emphasized on my gender more times than I could remember. By acknowledging them, I was able to build an identity that is even more unique and more unforgettable than many others. 10 days ago, during Nokia World 2009, it became clear to me that I was now picking up the fruits of this strategy: when you’re the only girl in a room of 15 male bloggers, the impact is much easier to make, on everyone.

I’ve been around long enough to see many blogs and writers rise incredibly fast, and fall even faster. Plus, we’re now at a time where it takes one original article, a Twitter identity and a couple or retweets to become known. The success is much more easy than it has ever been, but don’t fool yourself. There are a thousand others who also have an original article, a Twitter identity and some retweets You have to find in yourself the will to continue despite the tough times, as well as the originality to differentiate yourself form what the others have to offer.

Rita El Khoury shares her blogging story. A very interesting one.

Now I'm known for taking a rather more 'pessimistic', people would say, approach to handing over advice to would-be bloggers (not that I am one, let's get that straight). I'd say I'm a realist more than a pessimist, but anyway, Rita's take is much more optimistic than mine could ever be.

Which, I guess, is rather easy when you have succeeded. It's a great accomplishment that she describes, at least in my opinion, and I'm really happy to read what I know is a true blogging success story. And I do agree with the points she makes in the first paragraph of the excerpt above. Turn what you perceive are weaknesses into your strengths. And just keep going.

But, I have to add a couple of things. You have to be ready for the possibility of nothing good ever happening even if you keep going for years. My opinion now is that you shouldn't attempt writing if you don't enjoy writing in itself, and also the subject(s) you're focusing on. It also helps if you don't know what AdSense is. Or are able to make yourself forget.

Also, one original article and a couple of retweets... are absolutely nothing. Trust me. I know.

As for the thousands of people creating original content... I don't know where they are. I'd really like them to exist. But honestly what I see most in smaller blogs is just the constant strive to out-Engadget Engadget. And I'll say it again: drop it. It will never happen. Don't be 'them', be yourself. Whatever that means. I for one am sick of reading press releases in blogs. I subscribe to PR feeds for that, you know?

Congratulations, Rita, and keep up the good work!

See, blogging is not easy. I don't mean the ideas you have, or the content. I mean the act of blogging. Of inserting images, videos. Spacing. Bolding or italicizing text to make it more readable. Linking to previous posts of yours as much as you can (thanksalot, Google). Linking to sources and other blogs covering the same thing. And let me not even try to go into getting pictures and video for the review off the phone and to the computer, and such. All of these are activities that are not necessarily in a direct relation with the content you wish to produce, but nevertheless things that "have to be done". Things that always took me at least 3x the time the writing itself did. 

This is not good. All the blogging platforms and clients are anything but intuitive. All were designed in an age when "blog" was a word maybe 500 people knew. This has to change, but sadly, to this day, it hasn't.

Hell yeah, I just quoted myself. But it was for a good cause, I promise.

In essence, the excerpt above is why I chose Posterous.

Why Posterous is my new blogging platform.

Yeah, you read that right, blogging platform.

Because to me, that's what it is. Lifestreaming? I don't know about that. I also don't know why you can't use Wordpress or Blogger or any other blogging platform for that. But hey, some people like the term. And like to praise themselves for leaving blogging. In favor of lifestreaming. While still blogging from time to time. In a lifestream.

No, that doesn't make sense to me either, but then I'm not the next guy trying to invent and subsequently own a buzzword of the day.

And in my view, blogging should die. I said it's dead at some point on Twitter (before the cool kids did, but that's another story). Well, sadly, it's not yet.

By blogging I mean the process of actually writing a post. The process that resembles what I've described above (in the quote). Sure, not all blog publishing is made equal, you say. Windows Live Writer, you say. Direct ftp publishing, you say.

All the same, I say. It's too complicated to blog when you just feel like it. When you have an urge. When you read something you like so much, or hate so much, that you feel you just have to write an opinion about (it). You can't 'blog' for 10 minutes. You have to 'blog' for (the time it takes to write the post)*(at least 2). If you care about actually having readers, that is.

This happens because we use such antiquated publishing systems.

That is all. That should change.

And while it's not 100% different, Posterous is leading the way towards this change. Mark my words. It will happen. And these guys, knowingly or not, are at the forefront of something that will take probably a few years to fully develop, but will.

See, I dream of writing a post in plain text. And then the 'platform' will sort out that if I wrote an @someone, and said Twitter in the same sentence, that's a Twitter handle. And auto-link it. Similarly, when I reference, say "Engadget's post on the iPhone" in should do an iFrame-y inline search of posts on Engadget about that. So I can choose what the link is just by clicking. Not copying the link and pasting it. If it sees an empty line above and under something that is not a sentence, it should understand that that's a sub-title and bold it or something. I could go on.

Till that day comes, Posterous lets me publish by email. And just throw it links to videos or images, which it then automatically embeds in the post. Or I can attach anything. Again, automatically embedded. And, in this case, hosted.

I'm writing this in Posterous' bookmarklet. Which allows me to select some text from a web page, which it then quotes, as above, with a link to the original thing. And underneath, I can write this mess I'm doing.

It's not 100% intuitive yet, this new blog publishing era I'm talking about, but it'll get there. It has to.

So here I am, hosting my blogs on a lifestreaming platform. LOL.

Oh, and one more thing about Posterous. I love that there are no themes and no customization options, no plugins, no html editor, no nothing. I really hope they keep it that way.

Why?

Because this imposed, forced simplicity is what brought Twitter where it is today. I'm all for customization in general, but not of anything related to what I write. I like to customize my OS, my browser, the apps I use. I don't, however, enjoy wasting countless hours or days even 'designing' my blog. Or my Twitter page/profile. Or anything else like this. Why? Because I don't care. And if this possibility flat out doesn't exist, no one will care. Which makes the content more visible than the 300 AdSense units in the sidebar.

And one more one more thing. To comment, you can sign in with Twitter or Facebook. Enough said.

Welcome to my new blog network, all residing on Posterous! (see sidebar for details)

---

And now, a few very little feature requests for the awesome guys running Posterous. Please add the ability to create links in the sidebar, a more prominent RSS feed icon/link, the ability to remove or make the Posterous logo smaller, and the ability to add your own logo.

I think that will do.

There are five key announcements that will be important for developers:

• Availability of the Nokia Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.0
• Individuals can now register as Ovi Publishers
• Public beta of Nokia signing Symbian apps for free
• Availability of Nokia Smart Installer for Symbian
• Ovi Store intake for Qt apps

The Nokia Qt SDK allows cross-platform development for both Symbian and Maemo devices. Qt applications will also be supported on MeeGo, when it arrives. Creating C++ applications is quicker and easier than with previous development kits, and there’s a new, faster simulator included and additional APIs for mobile development. Forum Nokia cites the example of Shazam, who said, “It took us a year and a half to get our application developed to our full feature set on Symbian classic. Within 3 to 4 weeks we were able to put together a prototype working on Qt.” As well as Windows and Linux versions, a beta version of the Mac SDK has also been released. They are available for free from the Forum Nokia Qt section.

The announcements also make life easier for independent developers, who can now register as Ovi Publishers and distribute their apps worldwide through Ovi Store. Previously, you had to be part of a specific company or business. There’s a one-time fee of EU50 to register and apps can be submitted that are written in Qt, Symbian, Java, Flash Lite and Web Runtime.

Signing Symbian apps for free means that developers once again reduce their costs, which makes producing Symbian apps for Ovi Store more appealing. Historically, developers have had to pay and wait to have their apps Symbian-signed as part of the approvals process. Nokia has started a beta programme waiving this fee and introducing measures to halve the time required for signing.

The Nokia Smart Installer means that developers can send out their applications as a package without worrying too much about what parts of Qt need to be installed on users’ phones. The installer detects what files and libraries are needed by the app, looks to see what’s missing on the device and then downloads them automatically when you come to install it.

Lastly, the Ovi Store intake means that developers can upload Symbian apps for the Nokia N97 mini, Nokia X6 and Maemo apps for the Nokia N900. The Nokia N8 will be supported from release, with additional – older and newer – Nokia devices supported in the future.

This evening, at the official N900 meet-up in London, the Maemo marketing team revealed that Nokia plan to drop Symbian from the entire ‘top end’ N-Series range of handsets in favour of Maemo by 2012.

Finally, but still semi-officially, someone has the guts to put Nokia's plans into words. Plans that were really not that hard to figure out, mind you.

So, what is this?

An interesting experiment for Nokia. While doing this tomorrow would certainly make sense from the "we-must-appeal-to-Scoble" perspective, doing it "by 2012" (which, this being Nokia, probably means the end of 2012) is a lot tougher to understand.

By then, Symbian what, ^5, will be available? Is that still not good enough for high-end devices? Probably, but since I'm rather sure it hasn't yet gone into *any* development phase, how would anyone know that?

Again, strange, but expected. And even though Nokia might deny this tomorrow, I'm pretty sure it IS their actual plan.

Oh, and also expect S30 to disappear around the same time. Completely. Disappear. I'm hoping S40 will too (it really needs to), but that probably won't happen as it will be replacing S30 in the low-end. The same way Symbian will be replacing S40 mid-end. Get it now?

You know what's funny?

This ensures Symbian will be the #1 mobile OS (by sales - no, not by number of fart apps, thankfully) for at least 5 more years. Although no one will tell you that.

Why?

It will rule the mid-end. You know, the second best selling tier after, you guessed it, the low end, which basically offers no 'smart' phones.

As for Maemo... It's an interesting project, and I'm still waiting for version 6. And for a browser that doesn't advertise itself as being built on "Mozilla technology". And for portrait mode. And for it to be, you know, a proper smart*phone* platform. That, right now, it isn't.

But hopefully this time next year it will have become that.

Will it be too late?

It may actually be too early. But more on that on another day.

Now go, you've got 9567 "Nokia is ditching Symbian, which is dead and buried" very, very, smart posts to read elsewhere.

Opening MaemoProject.com takes us to this screen. Nothing seems to happen for a long time, then around the 9th minute something does and a penguin(?) appears on the table for a second. The trick is to click on the Penguin when it appears, thus giving yourself a chance to win a N900 or the BH-95 headset (I’ve never heard of the BH-95, have you?). Next, simply enter your name and email address and hope that you have won.

Vaibhav Sharma cracked the code and solved the mysterious clues I've given you in the previous two posts. Kudos, Vaibhav!

On a side note, BH-95 might be BH-905 with a typo, or a new, yet-unannounced headset, we'll see.

And a warning: the penguin comes and goes pretty fast, and if you don't click on it in time, the counter will reset and you'll have some more waiting to do.

Good luck!

Click!

October 9, 2009--Espoo, Finland--Nokia today announced the creation of the official Qt port to Maemo 5 and published an initial Technology Preview release. This port to Maemo 5 means that developers can now use Qt to target the upcoming N900 device and also ensures that applications can be easily ported to all Qt’s supported platforms including the next Maemo 6 release as well as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

The Qt port to Maemo 5 is designed specifically to work within the Maemo 5 environment, which will power the upcoming Nokia N900 device. The port itself will be based on Qt’s upcoming version 4.6 and is scheduled for final release in Q1 of 2010.

“With this announcement and our upcoming port of Qt to the Symbian platform, we will quickly see Qt established as a leading framework for mobile application development. Developers will be able to use Qt as a framework to create powerful native applications and with Qt's Webkit integration, it also provides them with a platform for creating web applications and services,” said Sebastian Nyström, Vice President of Application Services and Frameworks at Nokia. “Qt’s support for Maemo 5, Maemo 6, Symbian, as well as Windows Mobile makes Qt the most sensible choice for developers looking to target multiple devices and achieve the broadest reach with their innovations.”

This port of Qt will incorporate the community-driven ‘Qt for Maemo’ project that was created as result of substantial contributions and enhancements. The community project provided a strong foundation for building the official port, and because of the open nature of the project, Nokia was able to base the official port on this code. The change from a community port to an official port was necessary to ensure that applications developed with Qt will be compatible with both future versions of Qt, future versions of Maemo, as well as Symbian and the other platforms Qt supports.

Developers looking to support the Qt port Maemo to Maemo 5 are encouraged to visit http://qt.gitorious.org and participate in its further development. Since May 2009, Nokia has received over 400 contributions into Qt and Qt-related projects, which has helped ensure that Qt remains a stable, robust framework for developers to innovate on.

Developers looking to learn more about Qt 4.6 should visit http://qt.nokia.com, as a beta release of Qt 4.6, including the Symbian port, will be launched next week at the Qt Developer Days conference in Munich.

Download information
To download the Qt port to Maemo 5 technology preview, please visit http://qt.nokia.com/maemo.

About Qt
Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework. Using Qt, you can develop applications and user interfaces once, and deploy them across many desktop and embedded operating systems without rewriting the source code. Qt Development Frameworks, formerly Trolltech, was acquired by Nokia in June 2008. For more details about Qt please visit http://qt.nokia.com.

Read that in its entirety and you should be able to discern bits and pieces of Nokia's strategy concerning platform support on all its devices.

And here's an introductory video of Qt on the N900:

This should make a lot of developers very, very happy. 

More thoughts on this to come in the following days, stay tuned.

Most of today’s popular desktop music players either directly support Ogg Vorbis or do so through the use of a plugin that is readily available. Unfortunately, by default, the Nokia N900 does not natively support Ogg Vorbis, but Tuomas Kulve is working to change that.

The Maemo Guru, also known as the Symbian Guru, or, in real life, as Ricky Cadden, brings us news of one developer's project to integrate the open source Ogg Vorbis codec into the Nokia N900. More details are waiting for you if you click the link above.

Great news in my opinion. The more codecs available for the N900, the better.

And this is a classic case of Open Source meets Open Source (and become friends). The community is really stepping in and helping shape Maemo more and more each day.

I'm very excited for the future.

Stay tuned.

My advice has been the same for many years: just get the best device today. Forget about the next announced device. You know that adage “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush?” Well, that’s quite relevant here. You will get more use out of a device today than waiting for that ultimate device tomorrow.

And, yes, be ready to see a more desirable device be announced as soon as you buy one today. Just look at the newly announced device, laugh, and know that you will not get it. Because when you are ready to get your next device, there will already be an even more desirable one for you.

It’s inevitable.

Charlie Schick wrote an interesting post on Nokia Conversations (Nokia's official blog) a while ago and I couldn't not write about this because I think the subject is timeless.

The point is we should get used to obsolescence in the mobile world. Things move fast. That's the way it is.

And while I refrain from agreeing 100% with this (being such a mobile geek does that), I do get the point. Actually, it seems I might have 'lived' the point.

I purchased my Nokia N95 in April of 2007, the second day it was available around here. I just had to have it, there was no doubt in my mind.

A few months later, the N95 8GB was announced and subsequently launched, it was basically what the original N95 should have been - all the issues people (well, mainly bloggers) were complaining about were fixed. Did I buy it? No. Would I have bought it if I had not bought the N95 before it? Sure.

Months passed. Years passed. About two and a half years, to be precise, until I bought my next smartphone (a few days ago, actually), the Nokia E55. During this time, there were a lot of devices I craved. And yet I didn't buy any. Why? Well after the geeky crave went away (or at least got to a bearable level), I sat and thought rationally about whether any of those devices would be of much more use to me than my N95. And even if many stroke the "yeah, a bit more useful" chord, none had any feature or, even better, collection of features I just had to have, objectively speaking.

The E55 has 7.2Mb/s HSDPA and HSUPA, a 600 MHz processor (not as relevant as everyone thinks, but still, nice to have), a great keyboard (which is why I didn't buy it's twin, the E52, instead), a digital compass, the BP-4L 1500 mAh battery on board and still manages to be 9.9mm slim. Yum!

Come to think of it, out of the myriad of phones launched in these years, there are only two I feel I'd actually buy. The aforementioned E55 (done) and the Nokia N97 Mini (because its bigger brother is just too big for me, and the Mini's hinge angle is better, and the keyboard seems to have a more logical layout in my opinion). Looking forward to somehow being able to afford that (probably not).

Everything else?

Yeah, a lot of interesting phones had I not had the N95 to start. But I did.

And the funny thing is, I still enjoy using it. A lot. And I still am.

I guess obsolescence is relative, then.

From last year, the first half of 2009 shows that in smartphones, Nokia, RIM-Blackberry and Apple have grown market share. HTC has held steady. In the operating systems, Symbian has shrunk but still commands half of the global market. RIM and Apple are big rivals and growing. Android is a tiny rival and growing. Windows Mobile is crashing and Palm is nearly invisible. I would appreciate it, if future journalists reporting on smartphones bother to quote the facts, not some silly analysis of "market shares" based on Admob stats etc.

You can always count on Tomi Ahonen to set the record straight, when it comes to the mobile world. And here he does that beautifully yet again. If you're not going to read his entire post, I will be angry at you. Seriously.

I hope you have read it all.

Now, I have a few things to add so that when bloggers want to report on something like this again, they'll know what it is they're writing about.

The thing everyone quoted when they recently said that the iPhone has a 40+% market share in smartphones was an AdMob statistic. Let's pause here for a bit.

AdMob is a leading mobile ad network. But what isn't 'leading' these days? Anyway. Their stats refer, naturally I'd say, to the 'content' they serve. Ads, specifically. Now, on the sites or apps or whatnot that have AdMob ads on them, that percentage of visits came from the iPhone and so on.

Get it?

Good.

Now there are always some stats floating around that show that the iPhone is 'leading' mobile internet usage.

This is normal. Remember, when you buy an iPhone, you are REQUIRED to purchase a monthly data plan (absurdly expensive too, in most cases). This is something you probably are made aware of when you make the purchase.

You are aware of the fact that you're paying a bucketload of money per month for internet access.

Isn't it then reasonable to think that you'll use it? I mean, isn't t reasonable for you to say "well, if they make me pay for it, I might as well try it?".

Exactly.

As for what market share should mean (and really does, if you know anything about anything), that's sold devices. Where you can go to Tomi's numbers for reference. Because they're not his. They're quoted from the companies that actually, you know, report on market shares for a living.

Thanks.

Scott Weiss of the Symbian Foundation talked about "Open Source and the User Experience" which can now be found here.

 

The presentation is about how we do user interface design and development work, and otherwise improve the user experience at Symbian Foundation.

A very nice slideshow that was presented by Scott Weiss, the Symbian Foundation's UI Technology Manager, at the Over the Air mobile developer event in London on September 26th, is hiding behind the link above.

Definitely recommended reading, dare I say required even.

The Nokia Extra Power DC-11 is basically an external rechargeable 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery. The concept behind it isn’t new: charge your device using a portable, external power source when on the move and when empty you charge it just like any other Nokia phone. The Extra Power DC-11 is one of two external power units offered by Nokia. The other model is the Nokia Extra Power DC-8 which uses either standard or rechargeable AA batteries. While the latter unit is more compact it does require rechargeable AA batteries or the not-so-eco-friendly standard AA batteries. Here at The Nokia Guide, we prefer technology that helps every bit when it comes to our environment and the use of AA batteries, even the rechargeable ones are something we wouldn’t recommend or even consider using. For this simple fact we prefer the DC-11 over the DC-8.

 

                

Devin Balentina has a very good review on his site, The Nokia Guide, of the Nokia DC-11. You can get the basic idea of what it is from the excerpt above, but the full review is very worthy of your time, so if you haven't already, go read.

The title of this post is easy to decrypt if you know Twitter-speak.

As I said before, I'd like Nokia to fit EVERY phone they make with the BP-4L battery, the biggest capacity battery they make, at 1500 mAh.

Seriously, it's amazing. My new Nokia E55 (more on that in a later post) has it, and it broke a record. With my usage, my old N95 (BL-5F, 950 mAh, yes I love battery codes) lasts me for three quarters of a day. The E55 lasts me two and half days. On identical usage. I think that says it all.

So what we have here basically is a BP-4L (I'm guessing, but it being the exact same capacity means it's almost certain) inside a nice casing, with microUSB and 2mm Nokia plugs for connecting it to your phone.

And that's it. You charge the DC-11, then when you're out and about (say, videoblogging your way through a few countries, *cough*) and your phone's battery dies (which it will), you use the DC-11 to charge your phone.

Simple.

And a must-have for any power user that isn't blessed with a BP-4L equipped phone.

I would have killed for this during the N86 Tour.

Also, if you're looking for alternatives, Proporta make quite a few, and I've only heard good things about them.

Technology and traffic shaping have moved on a lot since the millennium, as have customer expectations. You want a prediction? Unlimited data tarriffs will become the norm, probably late in 2010. One network is going to open the floodgates and just go for it as a marketing campaign, and the others will have to follow. The question is which companies are going to stare down each other to be the first to see what happens to their network when they do throw the switch.

Ewan Spence has a great feature/rant/article/post about the concept of "unlimited" data (and, to a lesser extent, phone calls and text messages) in this day and age on the mobile networks.

Now, I have a rant of my own on this, but first, I really think you should click above and read the entirety of Ewan's post. It's so good, it was actually hard for me to decide which part to quote.

Right.

First off, they're lying. Most of them, at least.
Those operators who impose a transfer limit, after which they charge you extra, are just outright lying by using the word "unlimited". Fortunately, it seems there are fewer and fewer of those. We're now slowly moving to a model of "really unlimited, but after X amount of traffic, the speed goes down to something ridiculous, just so you can't say we're lying anymore".

It's more or less the same thing. But you can't say they're lying in this case.

Moving on.

See, the thing I like telling my American friends who complain about dropped calls on AT&T is: they're just cheap.

And mostly, that's it. They don't want to invest.

Sure, there is a point (of people in the same cell connecting at the same time) where it could get messy (and after a certain point condensing a cell doesn't work anymore), but NOT as messy as we are led to believe.

t's quite clear that if, say, all UK operators would just offer unlimited data, and for a reasonable price, their networks would collapse under the load. At least in London. And it's probably the same story everywhere.

But.

I mean their current networks. Their current infrastructure.

I've seen people that I normally consider smart defend the operators on this. "But if everyone would suddenly start streaming stuff or torrenting or whatnot, the network would collapse".

Mmm...yeah. Maybe. But then, 'filtering' or 'throttling' or whatever you want to call it makes sense ONLY in this case, of mobile connections. Yet companies are applying that more and more to fixed connections. And that's insane. And not necessary. So if you as an operator would prioritize 'normal' internet traffic, and set very low priorities to uncommon and bandwidth-intensive protocols, you'd solve two problems. First, the network would not collapse, and second, you'd encourage (coerce, ok) your customers not to try doing those things in the future.

People might hate me for saying this, but I believe it's a simple solution. Again, in the case of mobile networks ONLY.

However, none of this will help if you're not willing to fork out some cash and upgrade your network, work on the cell density and so on.

People in Romania defend the networks' lack of investments for this, but are they not aware that these are the companies (at least in this country), that, for their size, have by far the biggest profit shares compared to their earnings?

What if some of that money went not to the shareholders, but into investments?

I think they hope no one will notice any of this.

Well I do.

Like I noticed when I was in England that in half of Oxford I could not get a decent 3G signal from Vodafone, the UK's most praised network especially for coverage.

It's 2009. That's unacceptable.

Get the money out and do what has to be done. If you do, in a few years (perhaps even months or weeks) data will outsell calls and texts. By far.

And I shall repeat. Network unreliability is NOT a matter of physics. It's, in 99% of the cases today, just your operator being cheap. I'm sorry.

I'm skeptical. I don't think we'll see truly unlimited anything in the mobile world for quite a while.

Because the operators are scared (as Ewan put it), clueless (that they WILL in the end become 'dumb pipes' no matter how hard they fight it) and constantly feel profit pressure from their shareholders.

Which is why the little that they spend of those profits today mostly goes to rather dishonest advertising of this or that new animal-plan.

See, some are still trapped in the Jungle Book.

While we live in 2009.

So let's just patiently form a queue and wait for them to catch up, shall we?