Paul Jacobson

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!

I’ve had a MobileMe account for the last year and a half (pretty much since MobileMe launched as the .Mac replacment) and the time has come to renew it. I was initially going to renew my subscription (€65 or around R730 for the year) and I wonder now if I should.

The main appeal MobileMe has had for me is the ability to sync my contacts and calendars with a cloud-based service that comes pretty close to my MacBook experience. I initially used the photo and video sharing service and stopped that in favour of my long-standing Flickr account, Vimeo and Facebook (although I prefer keeping Flickr and Vimeo as my primary photo and video sharing services rather than Facebook). I was briefly tempted to can my Flickr Pro account but quickly realised it is a far better photo sharing service than MobileMe is.

I started using iDisk to backup my data (the 20GB allocation on MobileMe is quite a bit) and although it proved to be a bit of a pain to backup to the service (connections kept dropping), it was reasonably effective as a way to gain access to key files online. I started exploring Jungle Disk and decided to use that as a primary cloud-based backup service and because it runs on Amazon S3 (I’ve linked it to my S3 account) it costs me about $2 a month for the basic service plus my data usage at about $0.15/GB stored and $0.10/GB uploaded). I currently have about 18GB backed up and intend backing up a fair amount more than that going forward. A total backup would cover about 190GB at the moment.

I have also started using Dropbox for smaller file transfers and backups and the free account I am using comes with 2GB of storage. Dropbox is pretty competitive when it comes to larger amounts stored compared to Jungle Disk. The 50GB service costs about $10/month and a similar amount uploaded and stored would work out to about $12.50 just to get the data up to S3. You still add the basic $2 fee to that for Jungle Disk. Of course once the data has been transferred the monthly cost drops to about $7/50GB which isn’t too bad. A total backup of pretty much all my media and documents would probably cost me just under $20 a month to store using Jungle Disk (not counting the initial transfer cost).

Now when it comes to my calendars and email, I use a combination of Gmail and Google Apps accounts and keep my Mac synchronized using Snow Leopard’s Exchange support. The only downside here is that I can only keep one contacts list sync’d at a time online and on my N97. I don’t see how to keep multiple Google contacts lists sync’d using my MacBook’s address book. I run my email using IMAP so my email accounts are sync’d between my phone, the Web and my MacBook.

Ok, so putting all that into some sort of perspective, here are the options I am using:

Of course the chart is simplified. Dropbox and Jungle Disk can also serve as photo and video storage services (and do). Dropbox could also theoretically serve as a photo and video sharing service too but there are better tools. I also haven’t mentioned other media sharing services like Picasa, Zoopy, Blip.tv and others. I just prefer using Flickr and Vimeo at the moment for what they do.

Now, if I don’t renew my MobileMe subscription I lose iDisk (and along with the option of retrieving stuff stored there via a planned iPod Touch or possibly a future iPhone); the calendar and contacts synchronization that so closely parallels my desktop experience and the generally excellent level of Mac integration. I also save myself the €65 cost. I just wonder if I am being penny wise, pound foolish by dropping MobileMe.

What do you think?

Update: When it came down to crunch time I decided to renew my subscription. I am a little ambivalent about my choice but a couple considerations tipped me over the edge:

• The prospect of losing my username and having to come up with yet another one – I am trying to be as consistent as possible with account usernames for various reasons;
• MobileMe may well feature a little more prominently in my future when I upgrade either to an iPod Touch or to an iPhone (jury still out on this one although I am tending towards an Android phone one day) so it makes sense to keep the account; and
• While not a key issue, MobileMe-Mac integration is brilliant and not to be taken too lightly if there are other reasons to hang on to the account.