Last week in Rome I took the following pictures with a Nokia 6680:

A mosaic in the Vatican museum with great colours:

...and a nice painting:

Happy New Year!

-BWi.

My father wanted to buy a new phone for the Christmas. He called me to get help in choosing the device. Knowing the result beforehand, I still wanted to test his reaction to my sales pitch:

- You can have a Ford logo on your phone screen (he drives an old Ford Sierra)
Nonsense, I do not need it
- You can open the phonebook, view the calendar, shoot photos and start sending messages with just one click
So what, I don’t need the camera
- You can use the photo of Raili (his new girlfriend) as a wall paper picture
Stop now…

But I did not. Knowing how precisely he monitors the fuel consumption of his Sierra, I promoted one add-on application to him. I failed. He preferred the current pen and paper method.

On Boxing Day, I had the honor of being the first person to call his new Nokia 1100. He bought it at 49 euros, and got even a voucher worth 20 euros when changing the subscription at the same time.

So no success yet in selling a smartphone to this 68 year old, retired ex-salesman who spends most of his time at home sleeping, reading and watching TV. Anyway, it´s exciting to see how the licensee device offering, my father’s needs and my sales pitch will evolve in the coming months

After 5 days in Rome, I can but conclude that mobile devices with decent cameras are becoming a must for many tourists. At the Fontana di Trevi, at the Colosseum, at Pantheon and in the Vatican, more and more persons, including myself, used their mobile devices rather than their digital cameras for capturing moments and places to remember. It guess that there are at least two key aspects why mobile devices are taking over from advanced digital cameras:

1. Ease of use: The cameras must offer fast photographing - short startup times allowing fast shooting; easy zooming; good battery stamina; I also appreciated the possibility to shoot short video clips with a minimum of fuss.
2. Picture quality: It should be sufficient for publishing on web sites or for printing a few selected pictures in standard format. And it is definitely more to it than just megapixel competition...

I appreciated my S60 phone (a Nokia 6680): Often my advanced digital camera took worse pictures (I guess it is also the photographer's fault due to my camera's complex functionality). The night mode, for instance, worked better with my mobile than with my digital camera! ....And my digital camera's startup time was a nightmare. Also the battery consumption was a showstopper at times.

Out of the persons that I saw using their mobile devices for taking photos, a large majority was using devices with megapixel cameras.

In a few days, I will bore you with a couple of sample pics from the trip.

Until then, I would love to hear your opinions about this topic too!

Have a peaceful week-end and/or Christmas!

- BWi

Multitasking is one of the buzzwords of today. You only have to read through a couple of job ads to see that in most jobs, you just have to multitask. But did you know that you can multitask on your S60 device as well? This feature is one the strong points of S60 and it has been around from the beginning. Even though it may not be obvious at first, it really makes using your S60 device a lot more fun and productive.

Using it is very simple. Just press the menu button for a couple of seconds and you get the list of active applications. You can then switch between applications as well as close them (by pressing the "c" key). In other words, you can leave one application open, go to some other application and return via the list.

A couple of examples when I use the multitasking:
1) If I need to send a couple of sentences from a Word document as SMS here's what I do. I open the Word document with Quickword, copy the text I want, open the messaging app and start creating a new message. Now I can paste the copied text to the SMS. To go back to Word document to get the second sentence, I just press the menu key for a couple of seconds to see the list of open apps. Now I just scroll to Quickword, select the sentence I want, copy it, press the menu key for a couple of seconds, scroll to Messaging and paste the other sentence to the SMS message.

2) Suppose I'm reading an interesting article in the internet and want to send a couple of highlights from it to my colleagues. Instead of copying the text, I want to write the SMS simultaneously while reading the web page. Just like in the previous example I use the multitasking feature to switch between the browser and messaging editor.

These are just a few examples. It would be nice to know your favorite ways as well.

Don't be afraid to give the menu key a good long press. It won't break ;-)

As we are approaching the end of 2005, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has contributed with comments and entries to all the S60 blogs; Mktgman, Tommi's blog, and this See into S60 blog.

Looking forward towards 2006, it is already clear that it will be a truly exciting year for the S60 community; Already now, several devices are already announced, representing many different categories; music devices, enterprise devices, mobile TV devices, etc. Also, we will see the S60 3rd Edition devices in action - and I truly look forward to the upcoming discussions here!

For those who celebrate it, I'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and also to everybody a prosperous 2006!

Leaving you with an example of a Christmas theme (EUR 3.99 from Software Market).

I would love to hear about your recommended seasonal themes!

Cheers,

-BWi

Yesterday I spent some time investigating the results of our Smartphone360 study. One of its findings made me rethink of my habits of using my Nokia 6630. During the study, about one third of the panelists never turned their device off for the night! Only a very small share of them turned the device off regularly. I turn my phone off every evening. I know I could put it in the silent mode, and that the alarm clock works even then. But I still turn the phone off for every night.

We had a small opinion poll about the topic during the lunch break. I was the only one not having my phone on at night. Changing the habit may be tough. I got my first mobile in 1990, and I learnt to power off it for the night as the battery, even full, simply did not last more than 8 hours. Perhaps it’s time for me to learn something new after 15 years. But so far I have never forgotten the PIN code for my phone.

Yesterday (which happened to be the 88th Finnish Independence Day), the Forum Nokia Pro Awards were announced. The overall winner was QuickOffice, for their Quickoffice Premier S60 mobile office suite, a great solution for mobile usage. As an example, it is possible to open Office documents/spreadsheets/slide sets that are downloaded as e-mail attachments to the S60 phone. Check out more about it from here. Documents and spreadsheets are easily created and updated. Really good stuff and a worthy winner if you ask me.

Another category winner to note is SEVEN - best S60 Enterprise application, the Always-On Mail 5.0. Again a smart solution for PIM tasks and feature-rich mobile e-mailing. Seven's press release on this.
Also check out the Forum Nokia press release.

It is truly impressive of the wide spectra and huge amount of S60 applications out there... Which ones are your favorites?

-BWi.

Just testing. My apologies if you're reading this!

- Phil