Excellent (and delightfully easy-to-understand) article: "Your Smartphone's Memory - Keeping It Clean, Keeping It Smooth"

We should write posts like this :-)

(Off-topic warning, sorry folks...)

Just finished reading Naked Conversations, a book about "how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers", written by Microsoft's über-blogger Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. I loved it - warm recommendations to all my fellow S60 bloggers - and to everybody who wants to understand what business blogging is all about. The book clarified my thoughts wonderfully, and made me confident that we in Nokia are moving towards the right direction with our S60 blogs.

There is one thing, however, that I don't fully agree with Scoble & Israel: the need to post often. I don't think you need to, if you have already the authority as an information source. For example, my boss's boss's boss started recently a Nokia internal blog (which I think is really cool). He was a little worried that blogging culture would require him to post at least once a day, for which he would not always have time. I replied him that no need: he should write whenever he can, and whenever he has something interesting to say. What happened? The blog has already become one of the most popular blogs inside Nokia.

Looking at it from the other angle, I find myself unsubscribing from RSS feeds from those who blog too often, especially if they babble about things I don't care about. When you are trying to get some cool stuff done, time and attention are sometimes your scarcest resources.

Malcom Gladwell wrote in The Tipping Point that there are three kinds of people involved, whenever ideas spread like epidemics:
- Mavens = those who have and accumulate the knowledge
- Connectors = those who know and talk with lots of people from various social circles
- Salesmen = those who can persuade

I think people such as Steve Litchfield are Mavens, people such as Robert Scoble are Connectors, and people such as Seth Godin are Salesmen. They all have their own distinct writing habits, and I think we need everyone of them in the blogosphere. (Sorry for oversimplifying and categorizing you - I did it with the deepest respect)

I think there are many right ways to blog - not just the connector way.

Thoughts?

If you haven't seen this stuff yet, go and take a look at Steve Litchfield's Smartphones Show. Steve is a well-known Symbian writer and programmer, and the Smartphones Show is his free TV-style videocast about smartphones. So far there are 5 episodes available, and I think the material is excellent. Just don't let the blinking-purple screen credits scare you off ;-)

Good work, Steve!!

(click the thumbnail for full-size image)

Yesterday, I read an interesting article by SymbianOne's Richard Bloor: "Mobipocket: Beyond The Printed Page". Particularly, I liked this section (bold added):

The question "can you really read something like a book effectively on a smartphone screen, isn't it too small?" would seem to one Fabien Hertschuh of Mobipocket is no stranger to. "A smartphone screen has very similar dimensions to a column of newspaper text," says Fabien. "People read newspapers everyday without worrying that the columns are too narrow or the type too small. At first users may find reading eBooks on their smartphone a little odd, but we have found that they soon get used to it. They no longer notice the device, they just read. The huge improvements we have seen in screen quality over the last few year has helped too, making text crisp and more legible."

So far, I had been one of these sceptics. I love real books - the touch, feel, and smell of them - and I couldn't understand why anybody would want to read books from a tiny device screen. But after reading these words, I decided to give it a try. Off I went to Project Gutenberg, the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet, and downloaded the plain text version of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.

First, I simply tried what would happen if I just launch the ebook from FExplorer. My Nokia 6680 opened the book with the built-in Notes application. Not good. Off I went to My-Symbian and downloaded ReadM, a freeware ebook reader application.

As my surprise, it kind of worked! Yes, I should have tried it with a newer device with better display. And yes, I should have downloaded the ebook in html format. But still, it wasn't too bad. I can imagine myself reading something while commuting or while waiting for someone (if I don't have a real book with me, of course).

As you know, the latest Nokia devices have much better displays than my dear old Nokia 6680, my main S60 device. Thinking about that, I really need to upgrade my device soon...

Allaboutsymbian's Rafe Blandford reports an interesting bit from 3GSM: Skype running on Nokia 6680 S60 Handset:

Skype were not willing to answer questions on specific handsets saying only that they were actively working on development for the Symbian platform (both UIQ and S60). However at the 'Do New' booth on the Nokia stand there was a demo of Skype running on two 6680s over a 3G network.

Been waiting for this. Damn the day, I decided to skip the show!

Check out the Allaboutsymbian article for screenshots and commentary.

Steve Litchfield: “Nokia Python’s Flying Circus”
Guido van Rossum: “Too Much Fun with Python on Nokia Phone“

Via Erik Smartt's blog.

All you casual programmers - go and show us what you can do with Python!!

Many of the latest Nokia S60 devices, starting from N70 and N90, support speaker-independent name dialing (SIND). Err... what does that mean? Well, it means that you don't have to pre-record voice tags anymore (relief!).

To try it, first go to the Voice Commands application and activate it from the "Profiles" folder. Then, just press the voice commands button, and say a name from your contacts list.
- N70 - press and hold the right soft key
- N90 - press and hold the joystick (camera capture button)
- Compatible headsets - press and hold the headset key

Voila!

The spoken feedback is generated with text-to-speech (TTS) technology. What is additionally cool, the voice recognition adapts to your own voice. The more you use it, the better it gets :-)

Good initial feedback

So far, the market feedback has been mostly positive:
- MobileToday on N90: "The voice dialing feature is also very good"
- PC Magazine on N90: "Speaker-independent voice dialing worked fine, although we were disappointed there was no way to digit-dial by voice"
- GSM Arena on N70: "Excellent voice dialling"
- infoSync on N70: "We're thrilled to see Nokia finally introducing speaker independent name dialling - which performed expertly except for an expected decline in recognition in increasingly noisy environments."

Of course, our dear competitors have also interesting speech applications. For example, Microsoft boasts its Voice Command application for Windows Mobile, and Samsung their speech-to-text functionality in SGH-p207.

One of Nokia's advantages over competitors' solutions is that our voice recognition and text-to-speech supports all S60 languages. This means our solution works with your native language, not just English. If you are from USA/UK, you might not care. But for the rest of the world, this means a great deal.

Long wait for speech recognition breakthrough

Since mid-80's, industry analysts and other self-proclaimed gurus have forecasted a breakthrough for speech recognition. The breakthrough has always been supposed to happen "during the next 5 years". Alas, this has not happened. We don't shout commands to our PCs, TVs, or microwave ovens. Why? Maybe the applications or technology platforms have been wrong. Or maybe the technical challenges have been too difficult.

Could mobile devices (such as Nokia S60 devices) signify a new beginning in speech recognition&synthesis?

Gartner seems to believe so:

Speech recognition for text entry will remain relegated to niche status, due primarily to user challenges in learning a new working style. However, applications for mobile workers and consumer telephony will drive increased use for application control, which will feed back to desktop use.

Source: Gartner Research, Jackie Fenn, "Speech Recognition on the Desktop: Still Niche After All These Years", 9 December 2005.

Of course, nothing will happen overnight. Voice UI is a new concept for the users. We don't know how to interact with machines with speech. And the technological challenges won't disappear overnight. But the users are learning, and the technology is getting better. Consequently, I believe we will see a slow and steady development in Voice UI area.

Give feedback to our Voice UI developers!

Please give your comments about this functionality - directly to the developers! What have you liked? What have you hated? How do you use the voice commands? How would you want to use then? How could we make it better?

I'll make sure the developers will listen, and if possible, reply to your comments directly.

Disclaimer: this blog is under a creative commons license, and the lawyers have written some legal disclaimers, which mean that we are free to improve Nokia devices based on your feedback. I won't promise any trophies for great improvement suggestions, except public praise and maybe a nice little t-shirt :-)

This week's hot topic in S60 applications was without doubt Nokia's announcement to release Python for S60 to open source, through SourceForge.net (PyS60).

This is absolutely great. Why? Because for a casual programmer, Python is very easy, while native Symbian coding is more difficult. Or that is what I have been hearing - I'm not a programmer... Anyway, if you agree with Symbian's David Wood, Python is "poised to potentially play a significant role for smartphones".

Recap:

Erik Smartt: "It’s finally official ... Congrats to the team and everyone who’s helped make this release possible! I look forward to hearing feedback..."

ButtUgly: "I understand it wasn't an easy process, but it's good that it's finally done ... These new platforms do make smartphone programming a lot easier."

Guido van Rossum: "Yay Nokia!"

Nokia internal email: "Yes!"

Bonus links:
- Jurgen Scheible's Python for S60 tutorial
- PythonForSeries60 wiki
- Forum Nokia Python for Series 60
- Forum Nokia discussion boards / Python for Series 60