S60 Open to new features

I got E60 few weeks ago and been using it as primary phone. I must say, I’m quite happy about it. Nice look, small and has excellent hardware backward compatibility i.e. old size power plug (most of the new Nokia devices have new small plug) and RS MMC. Last Sunday I realized that this phone is even cleverer than I thought. Daylight saving time started in EU and I was well prepared and changed phone clock already on Saturday evening because I’m using the phone as alarm clock. Phone alarm clock alerted as it should. Later on that day I found out that I’m living in wrong time. Phone clock was 1 hour wrong. It had changed its clock automatically! Very nice feature indeed, but I had no idea it’s going to do that. I think we have to do some finetuning to this feature. Maybe reminder, note about this automatic function day before would do.

My last writing was about regulation. There has been interesting regulation talks in EU level this week. EU plans to reduce intra-EU roaming fees drastically.

Finland has been very unusual mobile phone market in Europe. Only in Finland and Italy phone subsidies haven’t been allowed. 1.4.2006 Italy is left alone when bundling phone and subscription is allowed for 3G phones in Finland. Elisa was the first operator to announce its plans.

Let’s do some number crunching for Elisa’s packet for Nokia 6630.

Take your S60 phone out of the pocket. How do you know it is S60 phone? Many people don’t know they are using S60 phone. You might ask, why they should know that it’s S60 phone? If we think 3rd party application market and compatibility, branding has to be visible in the product (SW) in a consistent way. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense to advertise "Designed for S60".

Shipments of Nokia 3250 have started this week!

S60 devices with WLAN are coming to shops soon. You might be interested recent development around WLAN. Spanish company called FON provides shared WLAN for consumers. The idea is that you can share your bandwidth from your access point to other users and you can connect into the global network of “foneros” who are sharing their access point.

What if we live in a world with 2 billion mobile phones, with current operator-manufacturer balance and we would have only voice communication, no SMS, MMS, mobile email etc. Then someone has a great innovation called text messaging so that users can send 160 characters messages to other mobile phone users. How would market success be? Probably there would be an operator in US which thinks this is not a good service because it would lead to less phone calls and decreased revenues. Operator requirement would be: No text messaging. Then there would be couple of vendors and they would have different non interoperable specifications in first phase, but they promise to have interoperable version in couple of years. Then there would be many operators in Europe and Asia using these proprietary solutions but there wouldn’t be interoperator text messaging services.

It took 10 years to make SMS a great success. I think it is very long time. Currently results are expected faster. Would it be possible to create similar success in current market situation? I think answer is yes, but road would be totally different. 10 years probably wouldn’t be enough to reach 100% penetration for the service. Lesson learnt, well I don’t know…You tell me.

Today is International women’s day. Congratulations to all women! IWD is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women. In China women working in state own companies get half day off. Finland was the first European country accepting women’s right to vote. Maybe Finland could be the first European country to give half day off on IWD.

It’s also my birthday. I’m getting old and middle age is approaching. Life expectancy of Finnish male is 73 years. Middle age is then ~37. Couple of years to go.

Google launched computing booth at Heathrow airport on last November. Providing network access at the airport is nothing new, WLAN is there, and you can easily buy some airtime. There was something new in this Google booth. Google provided laptops and free access. Hey, what’s the business case?

There was an exellent hint on Russell's blog. You can download free Flash Lite 2.0 player from Macromedia by following this link. Seems to work.