Paul Jacobson

You either have to love or run screaming from the hype cycle these days, particularly when it comes to Google and its products. We’ve seen it with hype over Chrome OS (which I regard as very limited), Google Docs (in the context of it being a Microsoft Office killer), Gmail and more. In some cases I think the hype is justified. Gmail revolutionised email with much bigger mailboxes, threaded conversations and dozens of innovations over the years. Google Docs is great for relatively simple document creation and innovation but it is hardly going to replace Microsoft Office in the near future.

Where I take issue with the hype is when it comes to Chrome and Chrome OS. I have already written about Chrome OS so I won’t write about that again but I haven’t really written much about Chrome, the browser. Most of the reports about Chrome say that the browser is fast and it is. It is really fast. I have a development version on my Mac and it loads in about 4 seconds. Firefox 3.6b5, on the other hand, loads in about double that amount of time.

One of the big attractions that Chrome has is that it is extensible (at least, the current betas on PC and Linux are – I believe – and the current Mac dev version is). This means that Chrome supports a range of extensions that extend its functionality beyond the basic browser. This was one of Firefox’s big advantages over Internet Explorer from the start and it remains a big plus for Firefox. The extension ecosystem for Firefox is pretty well developed and varied.

Chrome does a couple other things that make it a great choice. One of these things is how Chrome runs each tab as a separate process so even if a single tab crashes, the rest of the browser continues on. Chrome has done really well. As Duncan McLeod points out in a recent post on TechCentral:

In a short time, Chrome has unseated Safari to become the third-largest computer Web browser. Its market share is still only about 5%, but the speed at which it has overtaken Opera and Safari is telling.

I agree that Chrome is a great browser and it sits on my dock alongside my default browser, Firefox. I have lately been thinking about kicking Safari off my dock (applications I remove from my dock are basically the apps I don’t really see as that essential but are not useless enough to be deleted) and sticking with Firefox and Chrome. Whether Firefox will become largely irrelevant and fade away into obscurity as Duncan suggests it might in the coming years, I don’t know. I really hope that doesn’t happen because Firefox is important to us all, even in the face of Chrome. One of the reasons I say this is because of Firefox’s history:

It is important to remember that Firefox was born as an alternative to Internet Explorer which is possibly one of the worst applications that Microsoft has inflicted on Web users for a variety of reasons, not least of which is security and a disregard to Web standards. It rose out of the ashes of the bloated Netscape browser suite (I remember using the first Netscape browsers – I go that far back). I still remember the excitement as Firefox neared a 1.0 release (I managed to convince my last firm’s IT department to let me use Firefox rather than IE) and I have been using Firefox on and off ever since.

Firefox, to me at least, represents a vital movement that works to improve my Web experience. I have been disappointment with previous versions because of really slow load times (it turns out a lot of this depends on your extensions and, besides, just how fast must the browser really be when loading?), relatively slow browsing and even because it has seemed a little clunky compared to Safari’s simplicity. What I have found, though, is that I have become more and more passionate about Firefox despite Chrome. Chrome is interesting, it is fast and it has a big appeal. At the moment it just doesn’t have what it takes to persuade me to give up Firefox. The dev/beta versions for the Mac don’t have a working bookmark manager, font controls in the Mac beta and there are operating system compatibility issues with some of the extensions (that struck me as weird).

On the other hand, Firefox works pretty much the same on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The extensions I prefer will work and enhancements like Weave make for a pretty seamless experience between browsers running on different platforms. To paraphrase Apple (ironically given Apple’s and the Mozilla Foundation’s philosophies), Firefox works. I recently had an opportunity to test a Nokia N900 and one of the apps I installed first was Firefox 3.5 beta for the N900.

Firefox is one of the few modern browsers that supports so much HTML 5. I don’t know if Safari supports HTML 5 (Chrome does) but I believe that IE is lagging far behind. I may be wrong on a technical level but it seems to me that Firefox already supports the next generation of offline Web apps and location based services. Its probably fair to say that it won’t be too long before all modern browsers support HTML 5 but I find it encouraging that Firefox has had some degree of support since Firefox 3.5.

I’d be lying if I tried to argue that Firefox has far more advanced functionality than Chrome or Safari. In many respects it does have better functionality or just functionality other browsers lack but most of the differences are fairly subtle and come down to that classic yardstick: personal preference. Despite all the hype about all the things Chrome can do and will be able to do, it is important to remember that Firefox does most of that stuff. In fact, aside from Firefox’s ACID 3 test results (can someone please explain the importance of this test?) and ring-fencing each tab as a separate set of processes, I can’t think of what Chrome does that Firefox doesn’t do, even if it is a little slower. Just as Firefox has innovated in the past and laid the groundwork for what we are seeing now (including Chrome which I believe to have been developed partly by Firefox engineers), it is going to continue to innovate going forward. We should see Firefox 3.6 release in the coming months (Firefox 3.5 was released just a few months ago) and there are plans for 3.7 and 4.0 in the year ahead.

Another aspect of Firefox that has a big appeal for me is the fact that it is developed by a community of passionate and independent developers. In contrast, Chrome was built largely by Google (the underlying code is open source) and I believe it is being developed to fit Google’s agenda for the broader Web. I think I just have a thing for the underdog and despite being the number 2 browser at the moment, Firefox is still the underdog on the Web that also happens to be excellent software. I believe that having a more independent initiative like Firefox that is not so closely aligned to any particular influencer like Google or even Apple is important. Firefox, in a sense, keeps the industry honest with its commitment to Web standards.

Firefox isn’t as trendy as Chrome and I can see the usual trendy folk on Twitter proclaiming Chrome the second coming of Google and the irrelevance of all other browsers but besides the fact that many of them are probably too young to remember what came before Firefox and the impact Firefox had, Firefox was around and thriving before Chrome and will continue to do so as long as there are people passionate about the browser.

Update: I had a couple other stray thoughts. It took a while for them to return to be processed by what passes for my mind (I may keep adding to this list …):

• Firefox has a working and pretty effective bookmark manager that lets me edit my bookmarks – still waiting for that from Chrome;
• As cool as search being integrated into Chrome’s Omnibar is, Firefox’s Awesome Bar is even better (just add search and Ubiquity and its a no-brainer)

The Ster Kinekor website is an example of where design and functionality part ways and only occasionally meet up again to bum smokes off each other.

The site is practically all Flash with an excuse for an ecommerce engine somewhere in the background. It looks very pretty and makes swooshing noises when you do stuff (well, it probably will in the next version when the marketing person who approved this monstrosity gets the budget for the “swoosh” sound) but when it comes to actually making bookings on the site, well, there it is a great big #fail!

Today is typical of my experience with the site lately. I decided to try using Safari because the last time I used Firefox the booking system didn’t work. I used to find the payment processing part of the site used to just hang in one or the other browser, can’t remember which one. I loaded the site (sort of, Safari seems to be reluctant to load Flash automatically so all I got was a black page and two “Flash” placeholders), picked out the seats I wanted, ignored the prompts to add additional charges to my already heft ticket fee and proceeded to a new tab to pay for the tickets.

It was looking promising until I clicked on the button to pay by credit card and got this gem:

You would think, from the error message, that the payment system had rejected my card but all I had done is indicate, using a flashy blue button, that I wanted to use a credit card to pay. It just didn’t seem to like that idea at all and rejected the very notion that I would pay for my tickets by credit card.

(I tried to book and pay for tickets in Firefox too – same error)

So now I am just going to go and book the tickets at the venue using the self-help terminals and hope that there are decent seats two rows from the front, at least!

I came across this great email tool from Vibealicious a little while ago which works nicely if you have a preference for Web mail apps like Gmail, Google Apps mail and other Web-based email services.

Notify takes the form of an email notifier which Gmail Notifier users will be familiar with (it works similarly). One of the big benefits Notify has over similar notifiers like the Gmail Notifier is that Notifier supports multiple email accounts (although Gmail Notifier also notifies you of upcoming calendar events).

Notify enables users to really customise their email alerts for each mail account, compose and reply to emails within Notify and preview messages. These last two features are only available if you opt to buy a pro license for $10 but the free version offers a range of functionality that makes it a great choice. As a bonus you have trial access to the pro features for the first few days after installing Notify so its a good opportunity to try them all out.

I came across a great tip which you might find useful. If you are a Mac user and you use Web-based email as your primary email option, set Notify as your default mail application in Mail.app’s preferences. This should redirect you to your Web-based email when you click on a “mailto:” link rather than your desktop email apps.

There are a one or two things I’d like to see improved on. The one thing that immediately comes to mind is only relevant to the pro version which enables a preview of emails in your inbox. It would be more consistent with the Mac UI if I could preview an item by hitting my space bar instead of right clicking and clicking on the “preview” option. Well, it would be great if the preview option worked too … Update: The preview feature was fixed in version 2.0.7 and is triggered by the space bar like Quick Look.

Google Chrome OS attracted a huge amount of attention and continues to do so. As you may know it is a Linux-based operating system developed largely by Google and which will be released in about a year.

It is touted as the next Next Big Thing and, like many Google products, it will apparently solve world hunger, water shortages, bring about world peace and make it so much easier to do stuff. As things stand now, the OS is designed to run on fairly specific hardware (SSD and not traditional hard drives, for example) and its apps are really Web apps so it seems that you either need to be online or using Web apps that support some sort of offline functionality. Presumably Google will have updated its apps to support HTML 5 offline capability by the time the OS ships or the OS will have Gears support.

A ChromeOS powered device will be light, fast and will be geared for the Web-based stuff many of us do all day without needing a larger device. You could (and probably would) use ChromeOS on a netbook or something smaller and lighter than your usual laptop. All this is great and mobile workers are celebrating but I just wonder why this is so much better than an OS like Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

ChromeOS is basically the Chrome browser as an OS. Google has boasted that there are so many apps available for ChromeOS already because ChromeOS runs Web apps. Well, so does pretty much any modern browser and given that Chrome (the browser) is available on Linux, why not run Ubuntu on your netbook instead? You have all the benefits of the Web apps through Chrome or Firefox and you have the added ability to use installed apps that don’t require you to be online to use them effectively. You could choose between Google Docs or OpenOffice/Abiword/etc. When it comes to IM, you have a number of options available on Ubuntu whereas you are limited to Google Talk or a Web-based alternative on ChromeOS (did I mention apps aren’t really intended to be installed on ChromeOS devices, as I understand it?).

It is possible that Google will optimise its apps for ChromeOS with the result that ChromeOS users will have certain additional functionality or an improved experience but short of that sort of benefit (ok, and a 7 second load time for ChromeOS … does a few extra seconds or a minute or so make that much difference if you are running an Ubuntu netbook?), I think users are better off using a netbook running Ubuntu or even Windows 7 for a little extra.

There are more benefits to using Ubuntu (I’m going to focus on Ubuntu but Windows 7 probably has similar benefits) on your netbook instead of ChromeOS. For one thing I am not sure that a ChromeOS will be able to support much media on the device running it. I haven’t seen a media application which you can use to play some music you transfer or download to the device. I could be wrong. What I do know is that there are a number of media applications in Ubuntu. I also recently heard that Ubuntu users are going to be able to buy music from Rhythmbox on their Ubuntu machines a little like iTunes or something similar.

Ubuntu users have more flexibility with their hardware requirements and a pretty broad selection of applications, both installed and Web-based. There are probably a number of other benefits I just haven’t thought of yet …

Am I just missing something significant here?

Update: Take a look at this post on JK on the Run titled “What ChromeOS Looks Like as a Primary Operating System” to get an idea what the OS will look like when it releases next year. The video is worth watching!

Nokia invited me to be part of a Joburg-based focus group based on its event in Finland titled “The Way We Live Next 3.0” which took place in the last few days. Its video pretty much sets the atmosphere for the event and presents a number of exciting possibilities for future mobile devices:

Rich Mulholland kicked off the session with a discussion about future tech and the kind of thinking we need to truly innovate. He showed us a quote by Alvin Toffler which sets the tone for this sort of thinking:

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Rich spoke about how Nokia saw the need for different phones for different tastes and uses which gave Nokia a benefit in the mobile phone market. He brandished a demo N900 for much of the time which gave me chills (it is a very nice device!). He talked about a possible transition from the laptop/desktop form factor we are accustomed to now to a far more mobile form factor where a high powered version of your mobile device becomes your hub and you connect to available peripherals to take advantage of larger interface options. The bottom line here is that mobile devices are eating away at larger devices’ utility and will make even further inroads as these mobile devices become more powerful and more capable.

The model of building a business model around customers and developing new devices for customers’ needs is giving way to a model that revolves around developers. Rather than develop new devices to fit customers’ needs, create a device that can support a wide variety of applications that developers create to meet users’ needs. Nokia’s strategy has historically been to build a variety of devices although its Ovi Store and devices that support the Ovi Store fit in with the developer oriented model more. Developers still have the challenge of having to develop multiple versions of their apps to fit this variety of form factors and devices. It is still a challenge. Rich said that what Nokia should do is create a handful powerful devices that comply with strict standards that deal with things like screen resolution, location of certain buttons and so on to give developers fewer form factors and specifications to develop for.

What intrigued me is that Rich is a N900 fan (I think it is fair to say that). Rich sees the N900 as being pretty close to the platform ideal he believes would be more successful for Nokia (Nokia seems to agree based on the video above). This is telling because Rich is generally pretty critical of unsatisfactory user experiences.

Our next presenter was Nokia’s Patrick Henchie who started by taking us through recent developments in the Nokia/Symbian ecosystem including the Calling All Innovators competition and Symbian going open source under the Symbian Foundation. Maemo 5 and the Qt framework also make for a potent combination (Qt itself enables some pretty interesting cross-platform development which we are starting to see on Symbian and Maemo devices).

Patrick spoke about Nokia Maps (free and you pay for turn by turn directions) as well as the Nokia Maps Player that gives developers and users options that look a bit like Google Maps embedding and development options.

Location based services is a category of services that is attracting a lot of attention and for good reason. It is going to be a very exciting space and Nokia is probably going to have a range of good looking, powerful services. We will apparently see Nokia’s new lifecasting/lifestreaming app when the N97 mini is launched in early 2010 and that should begin to usher in more of a location-based experience for users.

As I mentioned above, I got to spend a little time with a demo N900 at the event and while I am a little cautious after my rollercoaster ride with my N97, the N900 looks pretty promising. The one thing I like is that it supports multiple calendars and given my fetish for contextual calendars and multiple Google Calendar accounts, support for all of these calendars would immediately put Maemo ahead of Symbian for me (as well as Android for that matter) as a productivity device. Add to that the Evernote application and a Maemo device like the N900 starts to come close to obviating my laptop when I go to meetings or go out of town for short trips. There are still a few limitations but my attachment to my laptop at those times would be somewhat diminished.

Its always a little difficult to predict what will happen in the future. I do think we will see more powerful mobile devices start to take away from laptops and desktops but exactly how we will use those devices and what form those devices will take remains to be seen. For the time being, there are some very interesting trends!

This post has been an idea in my head, bouncing around while I debate what to write about my Nokia N97. I was hoping I could tell you that the phone performs even better than I expected, satisfies all my needs and is undoubtedly the best phone ever … like, ever! Sadly, I can’t do that. I should probably begin with what my expectations are of my device. For one thing I want my smart device to plug into my contacts and calendar and sync with them as effortlessly as is possible. I don’t want to change processes that work well for me although I am open to new and better ways of working.

The Nokia N97 is a great smartphone and Internet device, it really is. It is the top of the current Nokia range and can do just about everything smartphones these days can do (and more) in terms of raw functionality. At the same time, the N97 is somewhat disappointing to me given my initial expectations of the device. I was hoping the N97 would become my one device that I carry around with me and which takes care of my communications, Internet connectivity and media needs. It only really caters for some of these needs adequately.

I am not going to talk too much about the N97’s UI. It isn’t great, there’s no denying it and anyone at Nokia or Symbian you speak to will likely agree that the current S60 user interface is dated and due for an overhaul (expected around 2011). The iPhone 3Gs and Android devices have far more modern interfaces that look terrific. All of this emphasis on the UI did get me wondering about the underlying Symbian operating system and from what I was told, it remains a robust and effective mobile operating system today.

I decided to approach this post from the perspective of an N97 user. I don’t own an iPhone and as I pointed out previously, I have always been a Nokia user. I am also a Mac user and that tends to skew the experience for me. I think I would have a better overall experience of the N97 and Nokia devices if I was a Windows user. It almost goes without saying that I don’t know everything about my N97 and what I can do with it so you may find yourself going “Yes, but, if you look at this menu and click on this setting you can do that thing …” in which case, please comment below or drop me a note and correct me.

Pros and Cons, briefly

To begin with there are a number of things I like about the N97:

• the slide-out keyboard is pretty good although the angle seems just a little off to me;
• the camera is the best I’ve had on a mobile phone and takes fantastic photos in decent lighting (although not so great photos in dim to low light);
• Maps 3 which beats the pants off Google Maps on this device (this is one of the applications I would miss most if I ever stopped using a Nokia device);
• the over-the-air software update application (not news to iPhone users but this is a boon for Mac users who can’t use Ovi Suite yet); and
• the widget framework.

Unfortunately the N97 starts to lose its sheen when I get down to the nitty gritty of my day to day experiences. Unlike my E71 and a host of other Nokia devices, there is still no iSync plugin which means I can’t sync my N97 with my MacBook and update my contacts list and calendar on my device and vice versa. This presents a challenge because much of what I do each day and with my phone depends on up to date contacts and calendar information. I haven’t actually sync’d my N97 since I got it and although there are options available, none of them really seem to put a smile on my face. I have this nagging sense that to truly commit to the N97 I would have to make some serious changes to my productivity processes and systems.

Messaging, messaging

The phone’s Mail for Exchange support does go a way towards alleviating the pain of not being able to sync with my MacBook and I’ve thought about ways everything could just sync with the Google cloud where much of my stuff is. It is do-able, I imagine, but I just haven’t had the time to sit and figure it all out and get it working. The last time I used Mail for Exchange was on the pre-release N97 I used at the end of May/beginning of June and that made quite a mess of my calendars and contacts so I need to psych myself up to try it all again.

The built in email application is pretty basic so one of the first things I did was replace it with Nokia Messaging. That was a bad idea. Nokia Messaging has an improved interface but it installs to the phone memory (distinct from the 32GB drive) automatically and without giving you the option to install it elsewhere. This is a problem because it doesn’t take a lot of mail to take up all the available phone memory and start crashing the device. To add to that pain, I also received an email from Nokia informing me that my Nokia Messaging subscription had been terminated because one of my devices was transferred to someone else. That is a great security measure but I don’t know which device is the culprit. In any event, I had by that time decided to kick Nokia Messaging and go back to the default. Thankfully Nafisa reminded me about the Gmail app for the N97 and that works pretty well for me.

My new media device? And what about all those apps?

I was also hoping the N97 could take over from my iPod as my primary media device and while Nokia Multimedia Transfer does a decent job transferring content across using a sort of iTunes bridge and the Nokia music app works well, the device doesn’t so much sync as shuffle media around. I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks and I haven’t figured out yet if my N97 would carry on from where I left off, leave a marker of some kind where I stop and then allow iTunes to continue from there. I have transferred some media to my N97 and the 32GB of drive space does come in handy!

When it comes to applications I accept that the iPhone and Android devices have better applications, for the most part. Just the same I can still do what I need to do with my N97 and the apps that are available. The widget framework is a little buggy and stops working if it gets annoyed with me but turning the phone off and on a couple times seems to sort that out. The Ovi Store has great potential and I’ve had pretty good experiences downloading and installing apps on my phone using the Ovi Store app. In fact the first app I bought through the Ovi Store was Gravity which is a great Twitter app that really is worth €10 to me. The Ovi Store doesn’t have nearly the variety of great apps that the iTunes store does but I think it will improve in time.

There are other things that niggle (the battery indicator can be a big fat liar and I often find myself with no charge left in the middle of something) and just as many aspects of the phone that I really like (the swooshy call answer thing is nice, as is the touch screen experience – even if it isn’t as good as the iPhone with its capacitive touchscreen). If you look at the N97 in isolation, it is a great device. It really is. When I look at the N97 as an essential device in my day to day life, I can’t help but still feel a little let down. The experience isn’t as good as the hype I built up for myself in the last few months.

Alternatives, for what they are worth

When I look at the iPhone and Android phones like the HTC Hero, I become even more aware of what is missing from the N97 in terms of the general user experience. It does go beyond the UI though. I don’t see the N97 ever integrating with my Mac nearly as well as the iPhone will. That level of integration is important because my workflows begin with my Mac and move outwards. Using Google services for email, calendaring and so on does make it easier to work more productively but the inability to sync my calendars the way I have set them up, for example, gets in the way. In fact, when I consider the services that are most important to how I work, Android devices take on considerable appeal but I do ask myself whether going with an Android device wouldn’t be committing to another platform and modus operandi that is dependent on my using Google services.

As well as the iPhone will integrate with my workflows, I can’t help but feel that I would be sacrificing a number of things that my N97 does well and that I have come to rely on. Nokia Maps 3 with its guidance is an example of that functionality the iPhone just can’t match just yet. That being said there are more and more apps for the iPhone and probably also for Android that enhance those devices to a point where they will do everything the N97 does and more.

Bottom line

Despite all its deficiencies in my eyes, I like the N97. It is a well built device and it generally works well for me. There are probably a number of ways I could tweak the device to fit better into my workflows which I am simply not aware of so any criticism should be weighed accordingly. Then again, there are things that I just can’t do with an N97 that I can do very well with an iPhone or perhaps an Android phone. Using an Android device would ironically mean I would need to change how I do some of the things I do anyway but the growing number of quality apps and the tight integration with the Google services I use could make up for that. The iPhone would undoubtedly fit the best with my MacBook and be the closest to the one converged device I long for but that does come with sacrifices.

For now I am happy to use my N97 and explore ways I can use it more effectively. There are even times I long for my E71 and its slim form factor. On the whole, though, this is a solid phone and it does what I need to do every day. What it doesn’t really do for me is introduce me to even better ways of doing things or better things I can do to be more productive. That potential can be pretty valuable too.

Nokia launched the much anticipated N97 as well as a hot little camera focussed phone, the N86 8MP at a launch hosted at Turbine Hall in Newtown, Johannesburg on Thursday, 16 July 2009. It also made a number of announcements about the Ovi Store and a competition launched for local developers. I captured some of the initial announcements on my N97 and prepared this brief video. You get a sense of how the N97’s camera performs in low light (I was a few metres from the stage) and also what the event was about. Bear in mind this was a media event, hence the pitch.

I covered part of the event on FriendFeed and you can read what I posted below:

This event was pretty similar to the event I attended in Dubai almost 2 months ago. Much of the focus was on the Ovi Store (Nokia’s relaunched application and content store) and devices like the N97 as platform devices. The one central theme is that the N97 is intended to support whatever your specific needs are so it has the capability to run a variety of widgets and applications. The N97’s home screen is the first Nokia device to support these widgets which, as I understand it, are built using open technologies and tools used to develop Web pages and applications rather than some arcane and proprietary code.

Nokia also announced the Calling All Innovators competition for South African developers. The idea behind this competition is to introduce local developers to Nokia’s development environment and tools and encourage them to begin developing for the Ovi Store. The slides and video below should both give you a pretty good idea what the whole thing is all about:

… and the video …

Much of the Ovi Store announcement’s emphasis was on developing local content and applications for a South African audience. This emphasis was pretty much the same as in Dubai where the emphasis was on the Middle East and developing Arabic content in particular. The Ovi Store is a good idea and given that it is so new, it lacks the variety and richness of the iTunes Application Store and similar stores for other platforms. What remains to be seen is whether Nokia can inspire enough developers to create quality applications for the Ovi Store. The revenue split alone should help. I believe developers receive 60% to 70% of the revenue from their content and applications (if they choose to sell them). Nokia also has a pretty substantial potential install base although there are 3 main platforms in use at the moment (S40, S60 – and its two main variations, 3rd and 5th editions – and Maemo). I don’t really know much about the complexity of developing for the 3rd edition variations but it may narrow the field a little. What we may well see is a range of specialised applications optimised for specific Symbian flavours like the 5th edition which runs on the N97 and its predecessor, the 5800 XpressMusic.

The Ovi Store got off to a rocky start and one of the annoyances I encounter from time to time (and other people have raised a similar issue) is the fact that some applications are on the Store one day and gone the next. We were presented with a News24 application in a product demo at the event and I am yet to see it in the Store on my N97. There are a series of permissions based on location and device type but that just adds to the frustration. Nokia’s product range and platform variety is both a blessing and a curse. Sure there is scope to develop for lower and higher end devices in different contexts but are there too many factors to juggle for this to be appealing enough to developers?

Another device launched at the event is the N86 8MP (8 megapixel). This little device packs a pretty powerful camera and while I don’t think the person Nokia brought in to talk about the device really did it justice (she seemed to be a photographer). I won’t go into the device in much detail. The big appeal with this one is the camera which is pretty impressive. I have seen photos taken with it in daylight and the photos are amazing. I don’t know how the camera performs in low light (as good as my N97’s camera is, photos in low light are not so hot) but if it performs well under those conditions this could be a terrific replacement for your usual point and shoot camera.

At the end of the evening we were treated to a pretty spectacular show. Nokia always hosts the best events! I managed to get this video of a performance that tool place right where I was standing. The commentary in the background was pretty amusing too, part of it was from me and Saul Kropman. This performance alone was pretty impressive!