Good work Phil - or whoever set up the new S60 Application WishList.

Last time I asked your improvement suggestions in August, and the results were really impressive. You can't believe how widely your feedback was read here at Nokia...

Now, we have built a more structured system for the same purpose, and I think it looks quite promising. Let's see how this new system works, and how we could improve it. I wonder could we somehow benchmark sites like Digg here?
---
ps. I wonder why the S60.com registration page asks for a password, but then gives me a new one.
pps. hey Phil, could you add to the WishList a rating scale? I mean, something like 1 = what a dumbass idea ... 10 = absolutely must-have

Our commander-in-chief Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo spoke wise words yesterday:

"The internet has transformed the way we live our lives and communicate with each other, and we expect it to play a key role in the next phase of Nokia's growth. The next wave of the internet will be to make it truly mobile, creating new ways for people to connect to others and find information from wherever they are. Nokia intends to be at the forefront of this new era and be the company that truly merges the internet and mobility."

Take note.

However, I have a nagging feeling that not everybody understands what this is all about. Here's how I see it:

It's not about Nokia (or mobile world) going Internet.
It's about the Internet going mobile.

And I think there is a crucial difference. Yes, the Internet will change big time, as the mobile world enters the game. But the mobile world will change even more dramatically, as the Internet enters the game. Feel free to disagree.

Bonus links:
- MobileCrunch: Mobility Transforms the Internet: “It’s Happening Today”
- David Wood's Insight 13: Beyond the browser

If you haven't done it yet, check out our From the Floor blog - news and discussions from the Nokia World conference.

As one of my friends from Nokia corporate communications unit said, "It will be interesting to see how this kind of joint event blog with Nokia employees and external bloggers will fly." In my opinion, it has been pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty good, considering that this is the first time we tried one. It seems that we, as a company, are getting better in talking and listening in the Internet era.

And yes, we invited Ed from e-series.org to the event, and gave him a free press pass. (see Ed's kind request, and his loyal supporters here, here, here, etc)

How do you like the blog? How could we improve it for the next time?

Yesterday, there was an interesting comment in SlashDot, referring to a BusinessWeek article that suggested renaming of cell phone:

"Once upon a time, the now-eponymous portable derived its name from the small sections (deemed "cells") into which a city was divided in order to keep voice calls smooth and uninterrupted. Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones, while Wi-Fi and WiMax use ever-growing amounts of network bandwidth. Both make the "cellular" moniker obsolete. Is it time for a new name, or is a rose by any other name still as sweet?"

Mike Rowehl, however, found the comment amusing:

Things get dangerous when people start to assume that the behavior they see out of the four people with whom they share an office in SOMA is the way that everyone behaves. It is most certainly not. I live in Silicon Valley, I know a handful of people with wifi enabled handsets of some form. Taking a look at overall data usage, most of my data still flows through cellular with occasional bursts through wifi.

Mike, I think you missed the point. Even if you don't have WiFi, you might still use "the other functionality" more.

My personal tipping point was three months ago, when I started using N73. Now, I find myself using "the other functionality" much more than "the cell phone functionality". I spend less than 1 hour / day making phone calls and SMS, but I spend much more listening to music or funny podcasts, reading the Dilbert blog while commuting, checking email, etc.

How about you?

Back to the point. I belong to the camp that believes that we need desperately some new vocabulary. Not necessarily "multimedia computer", however, as this term does not have any connotations with Internet or mobility. Currently, I don't have any good words to use. Any suggestions?

Breaking news for the people of Scandinavia.

FON blog says:

Between now and Christmas Swedish, Finnish and Danish foneros can get their foneras for free at FON!

Wow.

Go order yours now, I just ordered one too. Go.

What's FON

FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.

It all started as a simple idea. Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? Exactly, you shouldn’t. So we decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing.

Please spread the word.

Question: How does this relate to S60 applications?
Answer: You do the math.

via ButtUgly

In case you didn't notice, Markus asks:

In case you develop Symbian C++ software, and dind't receive an email from me, please go and respond to the questionnaire here. It takes about 5 minutes, and as you know, we use all the user data we get to make product decisions, so your voice really does count!

Off-topic

Via Marco Casario, I found the Mobile-review.com review of Windows Mobile 6.0, codenamed as Crossbow.

Quote:

As one of my acquaintances (involved in development) said, “Crossbow is a weapon aimed at our competitors”.

Ummm... I guess you are talking about us?

Heh, I prefer the mindset that we at Nokia/S60 are here to create cool stuff for the people of earth, not to kill our competitors. But that's just me.

Flickr says:

These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.

Via Ring Nokia, I found an open letter to Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO of Nokia: N73 Update - Email to Nokia's Chief Executive:

Dear Sir

I am writing to you to seek your help in improving the customer support from Nokia, particularly in relation to the Nokia Software Update (NSU) service, and also your Customer Support service. I would kindly ask that you ask one of your people to look at the Nokia Discussions web pages relating to Software.
...

Somebody, please look into this. However, I don't think it's Mr. Kallasvuo's job to read and comment to discussion forums, or to help our customers directly in this kind of cases. Nor it is the job of us S60.com bloggers to offer generic customer support or bug-reporting service.

I wonder what is the best way for Nokia to address online complaints. Honestly, I don't know. But I guess we are learning.

About Nokia Software Update service, it might not be perfect yet, but I think it's a damn good start. Don't you prefer having an incomplete system out there, than not having this at all? Anyway, I don't know what the actual problem is. I updated my Nokia N73 last week myself, and it worked like a charm.

Nokia Software Update people: why don't you start a blog? I think it could be valuable for the end-users, for your team, and for the whole Nokia. I'm not 100% sure would it work or not, but it could be worth a try...

During the last couple of months, the world has gone mad:

- First music video was shot with Nokia N93 (old news)
- First EP music album was recorded with Nokia N80 and Alon Dictaphone application. Just listened to it, and it was actually pretty good. (via Darla Mack)
- Dozens of blogs focused on Nokia or S60 have popped up - so many that I can't keep up anymore. The latest addition was Stefan Constantinescu's Ring Nokia, with 47 Nokia-related posts during the first two days of existence. Stefan says:

Nokia USA is headquartered in the state of Texas, not more than a 30 minute drive away from my house. I requested a tour of the facilities but have been denied. Let’s see what magic this blog can do.

Update: note that the picture is not about Stefan - I just bought it from iStockPhoto to spice up the post.

Continuing the off-topic Monday...

A couple of days ago, I started to read a book called Convergence Culture written by Henry Jenkins, the famous founder and director of MIT's comparative media studies program.

There was a wonderful passage that I must quote in full:

Much contemporary discourse about convergence starts and ends with what I call the Black Box Fallacy. Sooner or later, the argument goes, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go).

I don't know about you, but in my living room, I am seeing more and more black boxes. There are my VCR, my digital cable box, my DVD player, my digital recorder, my sound system, and my two game systems, not to mention a huge mound of videotapes, DVDs and CDs, game cartridges and controllers, sitting atop, laying outside, toppling over the edge of my television system. ... The perpetual tangle of chords that strands between me and my "home entertainment" center reflects the degree of incompatibility and dysfunction that exist between the various media technologies. And many of my MIT students are lugging around multiple black boxes - their laptops, their cells, their iPods, their Game Boys, their BlackBerrys, you name it.

I wonder if this trend of "increasing black boxes" is going to continue or reverse. After all, the future is created piecemeal, not in one go.

Off-topic

There are two debates going on, which I find quite boring. The first one is about Web 2.0, and the other about 4G.

Truth is, neither Web 2.0 nor 4G really exists. They are just words that somebody has invented, to have some simple vocabulary to talk about the complex world. That's why there is no general agreement what these terms really mean. And there never will be.

As the wise men say, when a finger points to the moon the fool looks at the finger.

Good news. UK operator 3 not only announces flat-fee data pricing, but also bundles all the imaginable Internet goodies to the same package. They call it X-Series, and the first actual devices are Sony Ericsson W950 and the Nokia N73.

In essence, they are leaving the walled garden model behind.

More details:
- X-Series website
- X-Series blog
- ZDNet: U.K. mobile firm to offer flat-fee access to Web
- AAS: 3 launch X-Series on Symbian phones - flat rate mobile broadband
- Mobhappy: 3, Oh How You Make Me Feel Conflicted

Dear Santa, let this be the beginning of a trend.

ps. somebody from UK, please write an in-depth review about the user experience! Especially, I'd be interested which device in 3's portfolio provides the best Internet experience...

I just updated the About this blog page. The old version, which I wrote in November 2005, said this blog would be an experiment that I would write for a couple of monts.

Seems that we have already talked with each other much longer than that.

Thanks everybody for all the great conversations so far! I hope you have liked it too.

Symbian executive vice president for research David Wood made an important keynote speech in Symbian Smartphoneshow last October. In his speech, he listed six "horsemen of the apocalypse" challenges "standing in the way of smartphones fulfilling their promise".

The first one was fire.

Here's the slide he used:

Now, Techmundo is reporting that his E61 is heating up:

I just notice something, first with Symtorrent, and now with Podcasting. With the wi-fi on and and the E61 downloading stuff, the battery is quickly drained. So I do the logical thing and keep the phone plugged in while downloading updates, but the back plate gets warm. And it gets warmed alot. I just want to know if this is normal. Any of you guys experience this? Normal charging doesn’t warm up the phone, but the wifi-download-charge combo seems to, and I just worry that it’s frying up my battery or worse.

Let's take these warnings seriously.

Bonus link: Coming soon: Your mobile is on fire

Carlo from Mobhappy spots an emerging trend: Okay, So That’s Three Times People Have Used Video Calls…

Back in August, Martin noticed two otherwise average-looking people making video calls, and now, Ewan’s spotted some teenage girls doing it as well.

Is this a trend, or just some isolated incidents brought together by the magic of my RSS reader? I’m still yet to see anybody use video calls outside a trade show demonstration.

Hehheh... At least I haven't seen non-Nokia people making video calls yet. Have you?

I love the Cluetrain Manifesto. This iconic declaration about marketing in the Internet era was published already in April 1999, but I didn't read it until 2005 - just before joining the global conversation by starting public blogging. I loved it then, and it is still one of the most powerful and most insightful books I have ever read, despite its occasional naiveness, and prophecies that have turned out to be inaccurate or plainly wrong.

Now, Michael Mace has written a great post to his Mobile Opportunity blog: The Cluetrain Manifesto revisited, in which he goes through the original 95 Cluetrain theses, pointing out the parts that work and parts that don't. Worth reading.

Even better, he goes on:

Over at Rubicon Consulting, we've been trying to combine the best ideas of the manifesto with our own thinking, to create a short document that companies could use to guide their online communication. You're welcome to check out what we've written; we'd appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Cluetrain 2007: Ten Commandments for Communicating with People Online - go print it and give it to your boss.

Now, I'm waiting for the stormy response from the blog pundits...

Now, this is interesting. Rob Dickinson, the former lead singer of Catherine Wheel - and cousin of Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden - has published the music video of his song "Oceans", which was fully filmed with Nokia N93.

The end result looks pretty impressive, check it out:

"Oceans" by Rob Dickinson

The making of "Oceans"

Great work, Rob! Now, my friends, go and buy a truckload of his records. And Nokia marketing people, please keep Rob loaded with latest Nokia gadgets in the future ;-)

Note: based on what I heard, Nokia didn't pay anything for this video. Which is pretty cool.

Via: Eugenia's rants and thoughts, AAS, and N93 WOM World.

Once again, there is an excellent article over at Mobile Opportunity: Symbian unloads UIQ, and the mobile apps situation gets clearer -- and uglier. Interesting comments, too.

Darla is raising again the discussion about Nokia warranties: Nokia N95 - Globally Warrantied or Not?

The saga started already last December, and Darla's post is still #6 hit if you search "Nokia warranty" from Google.

I have no comments - just wanted to raise attention to the issue, as (I hope) many important people are listening.

Uh-oh. The results of our quick poll about ringtones look pretty worrying:

Now, don't take the results too seriously. The respondents (= our beloved S60.com blog readers) are far from average earthlings - they consist mostly of early adopters, Nokia/S60 enthusiasts, and Nokia employees. One could easily dismiss the results of the poll as totally worthless.

Still, I think somebody should do a real study about this - do people of earth hate Nokia Tune this much? I'm no expert on branding etc, but somehow I feel it's not a good idea to have a widely-hated tune as a brand element.

Any Nokia branding people listening?

Ever since Nokia announced the new S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1, I have kept hearing this question from everywhere: "Can I upgrade my Nokia Exx/Nxx to Feature Pack 1?"

I couldn't find any official Nokia statements about this, except these comments from S60 FAQ:

What are S60 Editions?
S60 platform release versions are named as Editions. Editions include all the main features of the release. The latest S60 release is S60 3rd Edition. S60 3rd Edition includes all the main features of the S60 2nd Edition plus some new features.

What are Feature Packs?
Feature Packs include features that are additional to Edition. Feature Packs may also include device specific features. For example, S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2 introduces WCDMA technology into S60 devices.

Hmm... No straigt answers. Let me try it with my own words.

Short answer: no, you can't. Sorry.

Long answer: the talk about "Feature Packs" is a bit misleading, as they are not something that you can easily upgrade to old devices, like the way you update Service Packs on Windows PCs. Instead, S60 and its Feature Packs are tightly integrated with certain Symbian releases and your hardware, to ensure the best possible user experience. If upgrading new S60 platform versions to old devices becomes possible in the future, I promise that you will hear about it.

That's all I have to say about that. Now, let's move on, my friends.

When Nokia launched 8800, the press releases proudly touted the exquisitely composed ringtones and alerts, by award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Now, E-Series.org made an interesting discovery: you can now make your own device sound like a Nokia 8800

A few of these amazing sounds are available from Nokia’s website. Just download the clips, Forest Alarm Tone, Zamapar Tone, Dharma Tone and Nokia Tone, transfer them to your device.

Thanks! I just put the Zamapar Tone as my ring tone. Interestingly, I started hearing these ring tones here at Nokia premises today - what a coincidence...

Anyway, now that we are talking about ring tones, I'm sure everyone knows the Nokia Tune. You know, the ta-da-daa-daa, ta-da-daa-daa, ta-da-daa-daa-daa thing.

It's been around for quite a while by now. Just curious, what do you think about it?

The biggest news in the Symbian world today was SonyEricsson's announcement to aquire UIQ.

Later today, Mr Rafe Blandford published his remakable story behind Sony Ericsson and UIQ Technology. Congrats Rafe, I think you start to beat the professional industry analysts in the depth of your articles :-)

Our Podcasting team is giving you an explicit opportunity to give them feature requests. Nice.

Our little WLAN Wizard application is getting press all over the Internet: see e61life, Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility, AAS, Nokia NSeries, N80 Geek, and Symbian Watch. Thanks for your feedback, and for spreading the word!

Download the WLAN Wizard from here. Official description:

Is there a WLAN network out there? The WLAN Wizard will tell you, store it and launch it for you! WLAN Wizard shows the available WLANs in the range of N80 Internet Edition directly on the idle screen and it is possible to start web browsing immediately. WLAN Wizard also automatically creates the needed WLAN settings making WLAN usage extremely easy.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

Now, quite a many people seem to be confused, as the application does not show anything on their active standby/idle screen. Well, it does, but only with N80 Internet Edition. The application does work with all WLAN-enabled S60 3rd Edition devices, only the indicator isn't shown in active standby. The good news is that we can make it work properly also with other devices, but not as a sis file installation. Let's see if you could get some surprises in software updates in the near future ;-)

How do you like the application yourself? Drop a comment, and I'll make sure the developers hear your feedback.

Note: the application might appear on different folders, depending on your device. Check "Internet", "My Own", "Applications", or "Extras". I'm not sure which folder is the right one for which device.

This morning, I received an email from a Nokia customer, who had bought Nokia E70 for himself and his wife, as a replacement for Nokia 6810. He had been extremely satisfied with 6810, and E70 was the natural replacement, as the design was pretty much the same.

Unfortunately, he had now a big problem: the E70 font size was too small, almost unusable for his 50-year-old eyes.

Somehow I feel that he is not alone.

I answered him:

I can't comment anything about devices that have not been launched yet, but already in Nokia N95 (based on S60 3rd edition FP1) the user can select the font size. I just tried it myself, and I think it helps people like you quite much, even though not all fonts are changed. For example, big fonts wouldn't really work in the application grid, due to space limitations.

The bad news is that this feature goes pretty deep in the software, making it extremely difficult to put into E70 software updates. So if you need a S60 based device (=Nokia smartphone) with big fonts, you'll probably have to buy N95 or wait for some other future S60 devices.

Interestingly, he had found that changing the theme to Turquoise already eases up the problem significantly.

So here are my top-3 favorite themes, if you are looking for both good looks and visual clarity:
- Turquoise theme
- igBase white theme
- Pearl Black

Note: make sure you have Tools => App manager => Options => Settings => "Software installation" set to "All" and "Online certif check" to "Off".

What themes would you recommend for people with poor eyesight?

Ladies and gents, our S60 Browser team just started blogging. I know that many of you are really enthusiastic about the browser, so this is a great opportunity for you to learn about the latest developments, and to give feedback directly to the team.

Please subscribe, drop a comment to them, and spread the word in your own blogs!