S60 Open to new features

Well done, Tommi. Shows that you listen to the feedback. Of course nowadays releasing a beta is risky as all the pesky bloggers immediately review them and post their opinions for the world to see (when they perhaps should really just sent their comments to you only). And the world usually does not differentiate between beta and final; heck, some of the bloggers, even, mention the beta status only in passing and often seem to forget it by the end of the story themselves..

first off, GREAT pic. :)

Second, great job handling the situation. You put it out there (which is what Beta Labs is for), heard the feedback,and made the decision not to subject users to more. Greatness.

I'm sure you read my rant on the thing, but honestly, I'm using it (I uninstalled the old one, actually) but I'm not a huge fan.

A few things you didn't mention in your response:

1. Nokia Photos - I have gotten an error every time, I suppose cause I'm attempting to import Lifeblog stuff. This needs to be fixed. A major part of PC Suite, to me, is multimedia syncing (pics, vids, etc).

2. Make it run as LIGHTWEIGHT as humanly possible. I think this is key, especially for an app that I'm supposed to (and do) leave running on my machine 24-7. I shouldn't even be able to notice that it's on.

Whatever you need to do to get that done is worth it. If it loses some of its slickness, so be it.

Posted by: Ricky Cadden | September 17, 2007 04:35 PM

Its great to see that the N-series Team is listening to feedback. Looking forward to the next release.

Good "crisis" management, congrats! Mr. Beta is much wiser now! Thanks for listening!

Really well done. I can't believe that Nokia can move this fast now.... :)
Can't wait to see the improved NSeries PC Suite 2.0.

Good move, its good to hear Nokia are listening! Installed yesterday but quickly ran into problems, slow bloated software...now spent an almost an hour getting rid of dozens of "applications" from my vista OS! Please a simple media transfer interface is what we want not an re-invention of every type of media application , think OSX and elegant design!

Well, well, well...

I think Tommi you made the politically correct decision, BUT I am afraid only politically...

I must start with saying: I did not test the thingy and I cannot test it now... for a month (why?)

So many of you say it was wise to widraw so quickly...

I am not so sure about that!

I see a very dangerous trend here. A few bloggers set a tone - mostly about size and small improvements + their great visions of what PC suit should be - and users echo it here and there and resonate to extreme comments... E.g.: about the unsupported Mac, which is simply not true...

In my view these would be three tickets in a ticketing system:

1. Extream size, please reduce it.
2. High system requirements, proposed to reduce it.
3. Application fails to start with the following setups: ...

... and we could continue testing, I mean those who want...

Will Beta lab's input be about a few bloggers setting a tone and the others singing after?

Or are you actually inerested in individual reviews. Or is this gona be a few days test for all Betas, then the plug is pulled?

What has happened:

1. PC-suite released
2. Bloggers screem about size and that some features dont work out of the box. (they do not even try to tweak around to find the reason and fix it, they just scream... no sysem description, no detailed reports...)
3. People scream about size and some Beta type problems...
4. Beta labs steps back and pulls the download ...

So is this really a wise step or just chicken out?... I say again, politically - to cool things down - it was correct, technology wise and for the testing process, well there I have doubts...

Let me paint a future I am afraid of after this:

1. Testing stops for a month...
2. Option to exclude .NET from download will be provided, one more choice to make for testers...
3. Bloggers will be happy, their voice is heard.
4. Ordinary users might be puzzled with download choices.(or we could just exclude .NET analphabets from the testing)
5. Testing might run on several versions (and type of installations) of .NET in the future and could complicate the test.
6. We gain nothing more than some hard disk space, and only loose time and complicate the evaluation of the testing...

Finally a question to put things in perspective:
1. Would you - who screamed - would have done so if this was about a Beta of a new game? (350 Mb is nothing in gaming)

well, I didn't think so...

A final question for Tommi:
Why did you pull the plug on the testing? Are there technical reasons, or shall I be satisfied with the political one? (which would acctually do...)

Ok, one more:

How about Bugzilla becoming the Betalabs ticketing tool? (like for Maemo)

Aron,

To be fair, I don't think as many of us were upset about the filesize as we were the general stability of the application. Nokia Photos will not open for me. I still have the app installed and am using it. Luckily, the sync portion works fine. The parts that they added do not.

Also, the idea that if it was a game download is irrelevant, because it's not. It's a syncing application. It should be lightweight and run on nearly any pc, not just uber-spec'd ones.

Posted by: Ricky Cadden | September 18, 2007 12:38 AM

Hello Ricky,

Thanks for the quick comment!

I do understand that it failed your expectations and you gave voice to that experience. My problem is that I cannot try it now.

My goal with the game question was to point out that handling the size of the Beta is not an issue these days. I do not know why the .NET frame work was boundled but I would have been interested to learn that from the developers, when suggesting otherwise...

There are a few features I was expecting to try in the new PC suite so probably that is why my comment happened to be so bitter... sorry if I have hurt your feelings, it was not my intention! I just really wanted to try it...

Regards!
Aron

@Aron
There was nothing substantially new in the beta than the Nseries 1.6 suite.

The problem with this suite was that it was not even starting. The launcher, in my case, simply did not start after i restarted the pc after the installation.

@Tommi
I would not be surprised if you took them back to the drawing boards. We need a massive optimization to the code.
Also, atleast meet all the features of the normal PC Suite before adding new features to it.

And please support full Vista PIM sync.

Posted by: alsiladka | September 18, 2007 06:14 AM

> Will Beta lab's input be about a few bloggers setting a tone and the others
> singing after? Or are you actually inerested in individual reviews

We are more interested about individual reviews.

But you are absolutely right, a herd/mob phenomenon happens quite often in the blogosphere (that's why some people call it the echo chamber). The same message gets repeated over and over again. Most probably, it's a 100% valid message, but it also tends to silence other valid messages.

Herein lies a dilemma. Which is better, having a (a) closed or (b) public feedback system?

Making feedback system transparent/public inspires people to send insightful feedback. But then again, it also throws fuel on the herd/mob phenomenon.

Frankly, I'm not sure which approach is better, but right now, we are experimenting with the public feedback system - and trying to make it work.

For those interested, here are two books that deal with the dilemma I tried to describe above:
http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9859702-6204910?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190097753&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Herd-Change-Behaviour-Harnessing-Nature/dp/0470060360/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9859702-6204910?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190097772&sr=8-1

> Why did you pull the plug on the testing?

Due to technical maturity: stability problems etc.

Also, we learned that people's expectation level for public betas has been raised, thanks to all kinds of "Internet betas" out there. In the future, we will try to postpone the first public beta release until the software is more stable and mature. (might have closed beta testing before that)

Since it is pulled, my 2 cents.

When it comes back, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make sure I can not have it start each time WIndows starts. My Windows bootup time is critical when I'm in front of customers (e.g. doing presentations), I don't need bloatware at bootup.

Make it so it "CAN" be a service/startup application, but ensure I can easily disable that and only use it when I need to sync/transfer. Don't make me have to start/stop services. If it's not setup to launch at Windows startup/login then DO NOT have any hidden services/background processes. Running PC Suite should bring these up at runtime, when I exit the app it should clean up ALL services/running processes. ONLY if I choose to have the application running at Window startup/login should it keep processed running.

Sorry to be a pain on this, but for me it's OK to much around with startup services, Run list in registry. I'm thinking what do I give my Girlfriend, mom, dad, etc as a phone. They shouldn't have to muck around with the same things either. Alot of my time with getting Nokia suites to works on friends/family PC's is spent with system performance issues due to the entire suite loading at startup/login.

Please keep this in mind with the "lightweight as possible"

I agree about the "internet betas" out there. It seems that a load of web 2.0 apps (bingo!), especially some released by certain Mountain View-based companies, are simply called beta to indicate they are something new, to increase interest, and maybe because not all APIs are ready yet, even though are already impressively stable for the regular user.

Maybe it would be helpful for future tests (and I would like to be able to test early and deal with the nasty bugs and huge size etc just to be able to peek into what's coming) to
a.) clarify really what you consider "beta", what we can expect
b.) to provide some known issues
c.) to provide a discussion forum that is directly linked with the download so that people know what state the app is in and what they're getting themselves into

I think it would be a shame to close down this open feedback process further - I think you simply need to put it into perspective for everyone wanting to try it. If it's an early public beta and people are made aware of it, then I don't think there will be such a mob effect.

Posted by: jennifr | September 19, 2007 10:42 AM

Thanks jennifr, cood comment.

I will try to clarify better the expectation level for each beta in the future.

About the discussion forum(s), I'm not sure. Currently, we don't have enough resources to moderate the discussion and to answer people's questions. Putting a half-assed discussion forum out there might easily backfire.

Thank You Tommi for the answers! I appreciate them a lot!

To Jennifr: I agree with you about the "level of Beta" comment. Maybe the crowd can be educated o become a bunch of nobel price winners... ;-) I am one of the crowd... But seriously, I belive you hit the "bull's eye" with the clearly defined Beta point...

Wow... realy impressive reaction !

Thank you to share your feelings about criticisms, even providing links to comments that "devasts" this release. I'm speechless.

I agree with NickP. I really don't need this program increasing my start up times. Also, I don't need some service running all the time in the background. I wonder why newer and newer versions of programs are just moving to this "load something at every start" and "keep something running all day whether or not it is needed or used" philosophy. It really has to stop and I'd like to see a nice lightweight PC Suite.

A good PC Suite believe it or not sells phones. If I can show a friend how good PC Suite is, you better believe that he/she will be much more likely to buy a S60 Nokia the next time they go shopping for a phone.