Life2go.net Get a life ...to go.

Some 20 years ago I discovered photography using a just barely automatic Minolta XG-M that did not even have auto-focus. I quickly learned to use the camera in "aperture priority" (Av) -mode where I chose the desired aperture size and the camera calculated a shutter speed to go with it - and since I wanted sharp images and shallow depth of field, I always kept the camera on maximum aperture.

That XG-M is long since gone, replaced by ever more advanced and more automatic cameras. Somewhere along the way, I don't remember exactly when or why, I abandoned aperture priority. Most recently I have been using a Canon Digital Ixus 860 IS (PowerShot SD870 IS if you have not gone metric yet) in fully automatic mode. Over the last two years I have developed a complete trust in the cameras ability to chose all settings for me and I have constantly been pleased with the results.

Then, yesterday, I switched to the new Canon PowerShot S90 and all that changed. I put it in auto -mode and went out to take some test images. I pointed at the item I wanted to have in focus and pressed the shutter half way down ... and the focus-box appeared in the lower left corner of the frame, focusing on a rock in the foreground. I tried again, this time the focus box appeared in the upper right corner, focusing on a building in the distance. I scrolled trough the settings again and again but found no way to switch of this "feature" while in auto -mode.

Canon's logic is sound. If you put your camera in auto -mode then you should not have to do anything other than to point the camera in the general direction. In most cases, the camera will do a better job picking objects to focus on than an average user who does not know how to focus.

Since I knew how to focus I obviously had to start using some other mode that auto. I eventually came to realize that what I want is really aperture priority - the same mode that I so loved twenty years ago. Granted, the S90 can not produce those shallow depth of field photos with soft backgrounds, but even so, aperture priority is what I want. All those fancy "aquarium" and "portrait" modes can not change the fact that I want maximum aperture size, shortest possible shutter time and lowest possible ISO rating.

It is comforting to realize that some basic concepts stay the same even though the tools we use develop at an amazing pace.

Or perhaps I'm just getting old and sentimental.

Nokia today introduced a completely new product: a netbook, the "Nokia Booklet 3G". How did the world react? Nokia's share price fell.

Why? How is it possible that this announcement could backfire?

Windows.

I believe there is disappointment that Nokia did not introduce this laptop with some revolutionary new mobile operating system, something that could compete with OSX / iPhone OS.

Nokia wanted to announce a new product but instead they announced that they have no alternative to Symbian, no secret weapon that can turn the company around.

Without an alternative to Symbian, Nokia's phones will continue to look unattractive compared to iPhones, Palm Pres and all the other new and modern smart phones out there.

New phone, new year and same old story.

Last year Sonera, the iPhone carrier here in Finland, got fewer iPhone 3G's than they had pre-orders and had to wait a month or two before supply caught up with demand.

This year Apple had learned from their mistake and did not try to launch the phone at the same day in every country, instead in some countries, such as Finland, the iPhone was launched a few weeks later than in the US.

That did not make much of a difference. Sonera still did not have enough phones as launch to satisfy even the pre-orders. I pre ordered a 32GB black iPhone 3G S but there where not enough of them and I was told I would get one "a few weeks" after the start of sales here in Finland - probably by the end of August.

By then the next model is about 10 months away so I decided to start waiting for that one instead. My 16 GB 3G is good enough.

In fact, since Apple has made every new iPhone OS version available for all previous iPhone models, the old ones are not getting outdated anywhere as quickly as, say, a Nokia phone. My iPhone 3G keeps getting new features - not all the features that the new phone gets - but still plenty. Apple's business strategy is quite original: "keep old products up-to-date" and "make old customers happy". As a previous Nokia customer I am not used to this.

After Nokia released their quarterly results last week, analysts and reporters have been criticizing Nokia and pointing to Apple's iPhone as an example of how to do it right.

According to Bloomberg, one analyst said Nokia needs "the types of devices that people can use to download applications and the kind of devices that people can be interactive with". BBC wrote an article titled "Symbian to develop mobile apps". Nokia executives must be crying when they read such articles. Nokia has been in the App business for something like a decade, allowing third party developers to make applications for Nokia's smart phones long before the term "smart phone" was even in use. Anyone could become a App developer and recieve the free SDK on CD-ROM simply by applying trough e-mail to Nokias developer program. Nokia has been way ahead of everyone else in the smart phone business and yet a lot of people don't even know they even make smart phones.

Nokia executives may be crying, but they are not doing it in public. One former Nokia employee and now mobile industry consultant, Tomi T. Ahonen, however, is venting his frustration with this unjust public judgement of Nokia in the form of a very intense blog posting: Silly Silly Forbes: No its not Nokia's "Motorola Moment".. Very poor reporting.

Ahonen argues, with an excruciating amount of text, that Nokia is more innovative since Nokia had a number of technical firsts, such as 3 megapixels for the camera in 2006 while Apple reached 3 megapixels only this year.

It is not innovation to outdo your competition by picking a more expensive camera sensor from a Taiwanese component manufacturer's product catalog. It might make your phone better, but it does not make you innovative. In fact, having superior hardware does not guarantee that your phone is viewed as the better one.

Nokia may use five megapixel sensors in their phones and Apple only three but look at the giant photo site Flickr and their camera statistics and you'll see that the iPhone is far more popular than any Nokia phone for taking pictures and this thanks to the iPhone's innovative user interface.

Apple came late, with no experience in building cell phones and they used the same components that Nokia had already been using and, quite simply, built a better smartphone. THAT requires innovation.

Every cell phone manufacturer buys pretty much the same parts from the same component manufacturers and uses the same subcontractors to assemble all these components into phones. The difference is the operating system. Apple built a new and modern mobile operating system and an innovative user interface.

And OSX brought a lot more than usability simply by being modern such as a simple environment for software developers wanting to make those famous Apps. Yes, it has been possible to build applications for Symbian phones for years but if you start reading what Symbian developers are saying you will soon see that it is very difficult because Symbian is, in many ways, outdated. Developing Apps for the iPhone is, in comparison, fun. The large number of Apps for the iPhone and the low number for Nokia (despite years of work) is one of the reason the iPhone is looking so good. And the list goes on: how simple it is to install new software, how effortlessly the iPhone switches between 3G and WiFi when available, the share joy of actually browsing the web when you have that pinch motion for manipulating the page...

Innovation is a new way of doing something and building a new operating system with a great number of new and better solutions to old problems is innovation. The iPhone's famous ease of use is certainly the result of great innovation. Unfortunately, Ahonen repeatedly claims that "innovation has nothing to do with usability" and he is unable to see that usability is, in fact, the result of very innovative work - perhaps the most innovative work anyone has done in the mobile industry in the last few years.

Ahonen is right about every single thing he writes that Nokia did first and Nokia certainly has a history of innovation. Today, however, Apple is the one with an innovative phone and Nokia is the one with an old fashioned smart phone. From a user's point of view, the iPhone is quite unlike anything the competition can offer even though the technical specification might be similar.

Photo: Running a third party Telnet App on my Nokia 9110 to connect to a remote Unix server over a GSM data connection to the internet in 1999.

When you hold the Nokia N97 in your hand and look at that new home screen, you get your hopes up. Then you press the home button and realize that underneath, it is just another outdated Symbian S60 phone.

I had the opportunity to test the N97 for a few hours today and despite some bright spots, I came away disappointed.

The camera is great and there is a shutter button right where you expect to find it, allowing you to use it like any normal point-and-shoot camera. Apple could learn from this. The new home screen allows you to add a few tiny widgets, displaying for example your latest Facebook status - a noticeable improvement that will breath new life into this and coming Nokia phones. The touch screen works, but Symbian S60 was simply not designed for finger based touch screen navigation so the experience is not enjoyable. A slide out Qwerty keyboard sounds great - I'm a long time Nokia communicator user and just love the keyboard in my Nokia E90 - but the N97 implementation is poor. They keyboard is no where near what you have in the Nokia E90 and not necessarily any better than a Blackberry/Nokia E71 -style mini-qwerty thumb board but it takes up much more space.

The screen is in theory great but the user interface doesn't make very good use of it - often the text is either big enough to be read from the other end of the room or microscopical to the point that it can hardly be read at all. The icons and buttons often feels way oversized besides being plain uggly. With Symbian devices having all kinds of screen resolutions and sizes, designing a user interface is quite challenging and so far the result is unimpressive.

Apple and the iPhone has been criticized for not allowing third applications to run in the background - Apples own applications can run in the background but not anyone else's.

The reasoning is that the iPhone experience would suffer since background applications would easily slow down the phone, eat trough your battery and - worst case scenario - make the entire system unstable and unreliable.

Other smartphones, such as Nokia's Symbian based phones have allowed third party applications to run in the background and my personal experience is that they slow down the phone, eat trough your battery and does make your phone unstable and unrealiable resulting in spontanious reboots several times a day at worst.

But not allowing third party applications to run in the background does limit the usefullness of the iPhone. Instant messaging applications, for example, are not very attractive when you have to keep that application running in the foreground the entire time and if you start another application to do anything else for a while, the IM is shut down and you are logged off and unable to receive any messages.

Apples solution to this problem is "background notification". Apple has created a small application that runs in the background of your iPhone with minimal impact on the processor, memory and battery and this application can receive messages on behalf of any other application that is "background notification compatible". I bought BeejiveIM, an IM that supports all the popular protocols such as Windows Messenger, Gtalk, AIM and so on. Now, even if I don't have BeejiveIM running, if someone sends me a, for example, Windows Messenger message, it is pushed to my phone using Apples background notification system and a small pop up screen on my phone shows me the message and I can press "view" to start BeejiveIM and directly start typing my answer (I can choose how I want to be alerted).

The system is a bit complexed. When I log into my IM accounts using BeejiveIM, I am actually logging in using the BeejiveIM server somewhere - this way, when I close the iPhone application, I am still logged in on the Windows Messenger network from BeejiveIM's server. If someone sends me a message, the BeejiveIM server receives it and and forwards it directly to the BeejiveIM applicatio on my phone if it is running. If the application is not running, the BeejiveIM server sends the message to Apple's server which in turn pushes it trough to that small background application running in my phone and it displays an alert to me.

In other words, if you make your own iPhone applications, an application alone is not enough to make use of background notifications, you need to have your own server infrastructure that is running 24/7 that can forward messages to Apple for further delivery over the push system to individual phones. This is going to separate corporate players from hobbyists in the app market.

Granted, background notifications can not fully compensate for not being able to run software in the background - a GPS route tracker for example does not benefit from this but has to be actively run all the time to work. But many applications can benefit from this solution.

My experience with push notifications is that it lives up to Apple's promises. It has a surpassingly small impact on your battery life and messages appear on your phone within seconds. This is really a great service and it really gives the iPhone yet another technical advantage, a major one, over its rivals. End users might not fully appreciate how great this is - from their point of view things just work the way they expect - but software developers will appreciate it. This means even more effort being put into developing software for the iPhone and that is a loss for all of Apples competitors. Apples competitors simply do not have anything like this to offer their developers and there is no indication that they are even contemplating anything like it.

The iPhone 3.0 software is finally available and for me, one of the most important (and until now uncertain) features is the ability to tether - to use your phone as a modem for your laptop when you are out and about. Your laptop connects to your phone using Bluetooth and then your laptop is able to make use of the phones 3G or GPRS connection to connect to the Internet.

Every Nokia and Ericsson phone I have had since Bluetooth was invented has supported this out of the box but not the iPhone 3G and that was one of the few disapointments back when iPhone 3G was introduced. Now this has been fixed. Still, it was somewhat uncertain if Sonera (the operator I use here in Finland) would take the opportunity to block this ability in the iPhone since Apple offered them this option. In other phones here in Finland the ability to tehter just exists and operators can not block it, but in the iPhone it can be blocked by the operator. For example AT&T in the US has blocked tethering in the iPhone.

Fortunatelly, Sonera has not blocked tethering and it works beautifully. I just pared the phone with my laptop and chose "connect to network" under Bluetooth on my Laptop and I was connected to the Internet. The iPhone simply flashes a blue banner at the top of the screen indicating that tethering is in use. Compared to how incredibly difficult this was on a Windows Mobile device (see HTC Universal as a Bluetooth Modem), I have to say Apple has implemented this feature perfectly.

Palm Pre is finally available although only on one carrier in one country so it will not make that much of a difference. Still, it is great to see another brand new mobile operating system (Palm webOS) out there - this is putting additional pressure on Nokia and Microsoft to replace their aging operating systems Symbian and Windows Mobile.

All the smartphones out there uses the same components and offer pretty much the same features - the difference is the operating system as well as the related Software Development Kits (SDK) used to make applications for these operating systems. The iPhone 3G uses the same graphics processor as the old Nokia E90 but you would not guess that if you where looking at them side by side running games - the iPhone shines compared to the E90.

We now have three modern operating systems for smartphones: iPhone OS, Android and webOS. These have all appeared during the last two years. They are all Unix based (Android and webOS are Linux based and iPhone OS is based on FreeBSD).

The proprietary BlackBerry OS has been around since about 1999 and isn't really that modern anymore but the real dinosaurs are Windows Mobile that was initially released in 1996 (as Windows CE) and Symbian that has been around on mobile devices since the late 1980s.

Although I have absolutely no inside information, I am certain that Nokia has teams trying to make an entirely new and modern operating system from scratch to replace Symbian. Obviously it isn't easy but they have to - you can not keep updating an operating system with an outdated architecture. Eventually you have to build a new from scratch. Nokia does have a Linux based operating system, Maemo, that they use in their internet tablets and I am sure they are evaluating how well Maemo could replace Symbian in their high end phones.

Apple had to give up on MacOS when they, after several failed atempts, could no longer modernize it. Apple dropped it entirely and replaced it with the unrelated OSX (originally called Next Step). Palm were pioneers in the handheld buisness but their PalmOS operating system originally designed for Motorola 68000 processors running at a few megahertz simply wasn't up to todays challenges. Now Palm has created an entirely new operating system from scratch, the webOS, and it is looking good.

The Palm Pre costs 1680 USD and is considered to be cheap by the US press since the irrelevant sticker price is only 200 dollars. Few mention the 70 dollar per month (the cheapest contract) you must pay for two years as part of the lock-in contract since this is considered normal in the US. The iPhone costs 2360 USD with the cheapest possible contract.

The photo is from a Palm developer conference in 2001 where they talked about the bright future of the OS, their far reaching roadmap and so on. That entire operating system has now been dropped and replaced by webOS - a bold and necessary move by Palm.

Nokia opened their app store "Ovi Store" today. So far, every single piece of news I have seen about the Ovi Store has mentioned Apple - often even in the caption. There is absolutely no question who the leader is and who the challenger is.

The store is very slow now but that is to be expected with a launch like this.

So how does Ovi Store compare to Apple's App Store? Well, Ovi Store is not really an App Store - there are only a small number of applications - but rather a content store with background images, videos and ring tones. My spontanious reaction is "not bad". Not as good as Apple's, but still ok. There are a few good Symbian applications that have lingered in obscurity because there has been no application store for Symbian and hopefully these applications will now see greater adoption. I'm thinking of applications such as JoikuSpot (turns your Nokia phone into a WiFi hotspot, letting you share your 3G connection wite, e.g. your ipod touch, laptop and so on) and qik (live video webcast straight from your Nokia camera phone).

Regarding JoikuSpot, in my opinion one of the most usefull applications for my Nokia: there is a free version (which I am using) and a paid one (costing 15 euros) that have some additional features. Interestingly enough, I could only find the paid one and not the free one in the Ovi Store. The free "light" version is still available at joikuspot.com.

On one hand you could claim that the inclusion of things like background images and ring tones is a good thing and makes the Ovi Store more versatile than Apple's - or you could say it is an attempt to hide the fact that there are so few applications for Symbian. I found 34 free applications for my S60v3 phone and 4 free games. The number of paid applications was 164 and 85 games.

Downloads seems to be taken care of by requesting an SMS with a URL to the download and then you download the application using your browser in your phone. An Ovi Store application for Symbian phones is said to exist for a limited number of Nokia phones. So far, the overall experience is quite less polished than Apple's and no where near the level of integration Apple has achieved. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Still, the Ovi Store is definitively a step in the right direction for Nokia.

Now, let's see how mainstream journalists react - it could go either way: it could be praised as a great step forward for Nokia or it could be dismissed as a failure falling short of what Apple has achieved. It really all depends on if you view Ovi Store on it's own or compare it to Apple.

Mobile Entertainment just published an interview about Ovi Store with Niklas Savander who is head of Nokia Services. Ovi Store is Nokia's application store that will open this month (May 2009).

First of, Savander tells us that there are going to be 20.000 content items available at launch day. Wow, did he just say they are going to have 20.000 applications available for Nokia phones on launch day? No, he did not, he said content items, you know, like RSS feeds, ring tones, background pictures, icons...

To me, it really sound like Savander is trying to play down people's expectations. Take this quote for example:

"This is clearly not an issue when you only have one product. But we’re trying to get to a broader audience than iPhone. The main aim is consistency – there has to be logic even across different devices or when there is co-branding with operators."

To me that sounds a bit like "please, don't expect the Ovi Store to work as well as Apple's AppStore since we are facing so many more problems."

An example of how watered down the Ovi Store is becoming because of resistance from operators can be seen in this quote:

"In every market there will be two variants of Ovi – an open market version and one developed with a partner operator."

This is a customer oriented solution only for those customers who are saying "please, confuse me".

Savander is also asked about how to decide if an application should be allowed in the Ovi Store or not. The question specifically mentions how "other app stores" (=Apple) have been criticized for rejecting applications. Savander begins by answering "anything goes", but then continues more like a disclaimer. He mentions Spotify as an example of a service that could destroy Nokia's music download store, how applications must not make use of too much bandwidth, how violence in games is an issue, issues regarding morality and how each country will have it's own offering "to protect cultural differences". When specifically asked about VoIP, Savander answers "we leave it to the operator to make decisions about what’s acceptable".

In the entire article, I only spotted one positive thing: Nokia's cooperation with each operator means that they can bill end users through their telephone bills (or prepaid cards I suppose). Nokia is not going to be limited only to customers with credit cards and this is going to give them volume.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Nokia is going to be compared to Apple and the AppStore and I doubt the comparison is going to be favorable for Nokia.