My boss suggested to me that I should go with Tero (our chief architect) to one of the key trade shows during this spring.

Which event(s) are you going to? Which event should we go, if we want to see the best stuff and meet the coolest people from Symbian/S60 ecosystem, and from mobile industry in general?

3GSM? CeBIT? ...?

Robert Scoble says that trade shows are boring, and that you can read all the same stuff on Engadget in real-time. So far I have, but I think you have to experience it at least once yourself...

Don't you just love to be a product evangelist when the results look like this? InfoSync World's top five favorite Smartphones are:
1. Nokia N70
2. Nokia N90
3. Nokia 6680
4. Nokia 6630
5. Orange SPV C600

Can't help smiling :-)

Reminds me of Guy's Golden touch:

“How can I get people to evangelize my product?”

The short answer is called “Guy’s Golden Touch.” You might think this means, “Whatever Guy touches turns to gold.” If only this were true. The actual definition is, “Whatever is gold, Guy touches.”

Need help? Got questions? Grunts, rants, or raves that you want to share with Nokia or with fellow Nokia users?

Well, today it's your lucky day. Or actually, your lucky day was already in last November, when Nokia launched the Nokia Support Discussions Board at http://discussions.nokia.co.uk

The introductory post says:

Welcome to Nokia Support Discussions. This service was launched at the beginning of November 2005 on the Nokia UK website, and for the next few weeks we'll be gathering feedback and refining the service before bringing it to other Nokia websites. We hope you find this a useful tool for sharing tips and ideas with other Nokia phone owners - just register to start posting.

And the guidelines say:

Nokia Support Discussions is a meeting place for Nokia product owners. Here you can discuss Nokia products, ask for assistance and help other people by providing solutions.

These boards are also a feedback channel to Nokia and people from many different Nokia departments actively follow these discussions. Constructive feedback and criticism is valued and always welcome.

I know many Nokia people who listen or participate actively in these discussions. One of Nokia's product managers actually told me that writing there is quite addictive, and that she has spent quite a many evenings answering questions and sharing tips&tricks anonymously.

I prefer blogging. At least until the day comes, when I accidentially write something stupid, and the lawyers and other corporate trolls throw me into an Elbonian jail...

---
Ps. this post was a little off-topic, sorry. I'll try to behave better in the future.

Ladies and gents, let me introduce our brand new S60 blogger Jukka Eklund. He just started his S60 Multimedia blog.

Jukka works for our S60 Multimedia team, who are the guys and gals behind the built-in S60 multimedia applications, such as Camera, Gallery, Music Player, Radio and RealPlayer. Jukka understands much more about technical stuff than I do, and he also understands quite a lot about the concerns of developers. So I think he complements really nicely our blogs team.

Let's give a warm welcome to Jukka!!

Björn wrote in November about Nokia's Active idle, and Darla asked are there similar apps available for older S60 devices such as the 6630. I mentioned Active Desk and Active Today from Cibenix. Now we have another contestant: Best Desk from SmartphoneWare.

I have been playing around with it, and thought of posting my thoughts here. Well, Steve Litchfield from Allaboutsymbian just reviewed the application in detail. I don't have much to add, and I guess I shouldn't be competing against real product reviewers such as Steve anyway...

Folks, we have a new kid in town.

Let me introduce Phil, who just joined our S60.com blogs team, and took the main responsibility of developing the blogs. Welcome Phil to the club!!!

I just had a chat with Phil, and he is really willing to take our blogging experiment to the next level. So now it is perfect time to give us feedback. Go and write your comments to this entry in the See into S60 blog.

I would also like to hear your comments about this particular blog. What has been good, bad, or ugly? What kind of stuff you would like me to hear more, and what less? Should I keep writing this blog, or am I just another bozo who rather should just shut up?

(continuing the Yahoo Go Mobile discussion)

Allaboutsymbian / Evan Spence wondered:

CNet points out that the client will be pre-installed on Series 60 devices in ten countries (but handily doesn't say which ones).

I asked this from Nokia's main Yahoo contact, and he pointed out to Nokia's earlier press release from April 2005:

Nokia is the first handset manufacturer with Symbian-based products to distribute Yahoo! services for consumers in such a large number of European and Asian markets, including Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Spain and the United Kingdom.

I would assume that operators can define whether they want the app in their own variants or not. After all, they are also Nokia's customers.

Esa talked two months ago about our Smartphone 360 study in his post "Speaking about S60 user study". Back then, the results were not publicly available. Bummer.

Now (in a weird way) they are: as part of Jan Feller's presentation slides "How Consumers Really Use Smartphones" for a course in Helsinki University of Technology.

Check out also what Russell Beattie and Simon Judge say about the results.

I find this kind of feedback extremely valuable for us developing S60 applications. Thanks again Kari&Antti for this study - great work!
---
Update 13 Jan 2005: I got an email that the link to the presentation slides doesn't work anymore - thanks Ian for the tip! The presentation slides are now available on request only.

I am probably the last person on earth to report this, sorry. I guess bloggers are not supposed to have vacations... :)

Anyway, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Go last Friday, including Yahoo! Go Mobile client for S60 devices. The application lets you use many (most?) of your existing Yahoo account features, such as email, instant messaging, and uploading photos.

Go and download it now!

Here is the the list of compatible devices, although I am a little unsure how well it works on older devices such as Nokia 6600.

You can read more from CNET News.com and Business Week, and check out the comments from Allaboutsymbian, Russell Beattie, Christian Lindholm, Charlie Schick, Darla Mack, and This is Mobility.

I think the application is absolutely great, and this kind of stuff is the way forward. So far I have only one complaint: to get enough free memory for this app, I had to delete most of my messages...

What do you think?

Related reading:
Nokia press release: "Yahoo! goes mobile on Nokia smartphones", April 26, 2005

If you want to save $10 or 8€, go grab yours now! (thanks Marco)

disclaimer: I am posting this from a full-day workshop with angry people looking at me, no time to test it myself...
--
Update 5 Jan 2006: As Alessandro said, the free offer was valid only for a day. From now on, money talks.