Paul Jacobson

The N97 really seems to have had a rocky reception in the USA in particular. I just read a particularly vitriolic review in Gizmodo where Matt Buchanan declared that the N97’s UI is a “crappy half-assed UI, it’s a steaming pile of suck on a slab of garbage toast”. This was fairly typical of the tone of the rest of the post. I’ve had numerous debates with people about the N97 and how it compares to the iPhone which has become the gold standard in many people’s eyes. The discussion inevitably involves me agreeing that Nokia devices really don’t have the same great UI that the iPhone has or even the range of great applications you can find in the iTunes App Store. I don’t think there is any denying that. It is simply an area where Apple excels and the S60 UI doesn’t.

That being said I have been wondering lately about the Symbian operating system itself. I listened to a great interview with Scott Weiss, the User Interface Technology Manager at the Symbian Foundation which is now tasked with developing Symbian and there are clearly some changes coming which bode well for Symbian. Whether they come too late is another question. What I have been wondering about is this: if you look beneath the UI at the operating system itself, is Nokia using a robust, powerful and modern operating system or is it as dated as the UI? The N97 seems to be running a slower processor and have less RAM but if the operating system is lightweight enough to thrive on those more limited resources then users shouldn’t see too much of a problem with performance. Buchanan commented that the N97 begins to slow down when running multiple processes but he neglects to mention that the iPhone, for one, doesn’t run multiple processes at all and all the power of its processor is dedicated to running single processes.

As far as the N97 and the iPhone 3Gs is concerned, I found two helpful comparative reviews in the last few days. Alec Saunders took the N97 and the iPhone 3Gs for a walk around San Francisco and tested a number of features of both devices. I think his post is pretty helpful if you are deciding between the N97 and the iPhone 3Gs so be sure to read it. Another helpful comparative review is this video review comparing the two devices literally side by side:

Also take a look at Michael’s profile page on YouTube, he has also compared the two browsers on the two devices.

The N97 is taking a lot of heat for its UI and given its competitors the criticism isn’t unwarranted. At the same time it will be some time before we see any major changes to the Symbian UI (Scott Weiss spoke in terms of 2011 or so). Hopefully that won’t be too late for Nokia which is losing ground in the smartphone market and will continue to lose ground, especially to Apple which has priced its iPhone 3G at $99 (on contract) in the US. I imagine we will see the price reduction filter through here eventually and the iPhone pick up more fanatics in SA too.

I was chatting to Craig Nicholson and Chris Onderstall at the end of alt.conference the other day about the iPhone 3Gs and the N97. Craig is in the market for a new device and was debating the relative merits of both devices as platforms and in their own right with me. I told him that if I was faced with a choice which device to buy (on contract or cash), I would be very tempted by the iPhone 3Gs. It is the iPhone I have been waiting for Apple to produce for some time now. It still has a couple limitations when compared to the N97 which has quite a bit going for it too. With this kind of competition, Nokia has its work cut out for it going forward.

I posted this one a little too soon so I have edited it a little. The edits are in italics or strikethrough. Sorry about the premature posting!

Ovi.com is Nokia’s answer to MobileMe (formerly .Mac) and a collection of similar services operated by the likes of Google. At least, that is how I see Ovi.com.

Ovi.com is a gateway or portal to a range of services Nokia has created. These services include Share (photo and video sharing), Contacts, Maps, N-gage, Music (a portal to Nokia Music), Files and Calendar. The range of services on offer is, at first glance, impressive and you can easily imagine shifting most, if not all, of your computer-based activities into the cloud. One big advantage of Ovi.com is that many of its services are designed to interact with Nokia devices and enable you to synchronise your device with the Ovi cloud. Unfortunately Ovi.com is still something of a disappointment, at least to me.

Ovi.com is a mixed bag. Each service on the site has its own design and although they share some common design elements, there isn’t a consistent look and feel throughout. Ovi Contacts looks cluttered whereas Ovi Share has a clean look and the swish fishbowl widget displaying media from your library. Opening Ovi Maps or Music will take you out of a consistent Ovi environment and into a separate Maps or Music site. The Ovi.com portal isn’t really a portal but a loose association of services. I was going to say that other portal sites are more consistent in terms of their look and feel but Yahoo!, one of the oldest, has different designs for each sub-site too. I could be a little too critical here but there is something about the inconsistency in the Ovi.com design across the various services that puts me off and suggests it was all put together a little haphazardly.

To add to this the urls for the services are not consistent either. To get to Contacts you click through to http://www.ovi.com/services/contacts?lid=ContactsBridge whereas to visit most of the other services the url convention is servicename.ovi.com (with the exception of N-gage which directs to its own url).

There are also a number of features which should be available and which are simply not. I don’t know if this is because they weren’t deemed important or if the developers simply didn’t have any regard to other services and draw on those services for inspiration and examples of best practices. Examples of these deficiencies include RSS feeds for content shared on Share Online; the ability to scan my contacts lists on other services like Google, Twitter and Facebook and find friends also using Ovi; the ability to replace my synchronised contacts on Ovi Contacts with an up to date version and more.

Of course there is also the perennial compatibility issue. Ovi Maps is not available to people not running a Windows machine. The Nokia Music Store is only accessible to Windows users. This is one of the reasons I am still a little ambivalent about Nokia services. Despite its emphasis on open source and developing cross platform applications, important software like Nokia Software Updater and even PC Suite are not available for non-Windows users. This shouldn’t be an issue any longer and yet I have to bastardise mutilate my wife’s Mac to install Windows for the purpose of running PC Suite.

I don’t accept that services and software can’t be written for multiple platforms. I do understand that Windows is, by far, the dominant platform of choice but there are increasing numbers of Mac and Linux users who would like to take advantage of Nokia’s desktop software and even update their software (that being said, many higher end devices will soon be able to update their software over the air). I don’t like feeling like something of a second class citizen because I chose a Mac and not a Windows machine. Nokia needs to address this sooner rather than later.

Returning to Ovi.com, I believe that the portal/platform has tremendous potential despite its failings. The Ovi Store has come under fire lately and I believe that its initial troubles belie its potential as a significant player in the mobile services business. The rest of the services on Ovi.com are decent enough for most and at the same time disappointing for a vocal few.

I have been a Tumblr user for some time now and I was skeptical when I heard about Posterous and read what some of its fanatics were saying about it. As far as I was concerned it was a lesser Tumblr clone with one or two interesting features. Certainly nothing that would convince me to stop using Tumblr as my ad hoc blog/mo-blog tool.

Tumblr, for those who don’t know, slots in somewhere between the likes of Twitter and FriendFeed and conventional blogs. It is a sort of stripped down hosted blogging platform that lacks some of the functionality you may be accustomed to in WordPress. Tumblr has a number of predefined post templates for normal text-based posts, photos, videos, audio and even chat transcripts.

It is pretty well suited for posting items you may find online using a bookmarklet and, at the same time, it is a pretty attractive blogging engine in its own right. I have been using Tumblr to share interesting things I find online and the occasional blog post that doesn’t fit in with my main blogs for various reasons.

Posterous has received quite a lot of attention since its launch in mid 2008. Most of its praise has been about its simplicity and how new users can create accounts easily by simply sending their first post to post@posterous.com. Of course they can also create an account on the site itself but this method of creating an account makes it really easy for someone who lacks regular access to a connected laptop or desktop to start posting on the go using an email capable mobile device. Users then have an opportunity to establish a fixed domain using their preferred user name on the site itself.

At first glance Posterous looked to me to be a lesser Tumblr copy. It lacks any real customisation options (Tumblr has a number of themes you can choose from as well as the ability to customise your sidebar) and its posting interface is pretty simple compared to Tumblr’s predefined options. Tumblr has also made it possible for 3rd party blog editors to interface with Tumblr so I can post to Tumblr using most of its predefined content types. Unlike Posterous, Tumblr also has a number of discoverability tools like its directory, trend monitor and a map showing real-time posts according to where their publishers are in the world. Of course I can also post to Tumblr by email or even by mms using a secret email address for my account. With all this in mind I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about Posterous.

At the same time Posterous was getting so much attention I felt I had to take a second look. I created my account by posting via its email option (unlike Tumblr which uses unique email addresses to post, Posterous uses post@posterous.com and a list of pre-approved email addresses – Posterous contends that it can foil spoofing attempts) and then claimed my unique domain. I discovered that not only does Posterous allow me to republish my posts to Twitter (which Tumblr does too) but it also allows me to repost to a number of other services including Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook and more.

I initially thought this was “nice … but nothing special” until I started using the option. I only have my Twitter and Facebook accounts connected at the moment and I am contemplating adding Flickr too but I started to appreciate the benefits of the autopost option when I realised my posts were filtering through to my Facebook stream and that I actually like that. One way to use Posterous is as a mobile blogging engine/here-is-some-interesting-stuff-I-just-saw service and being able to autopost to Facebook just enriches my stream there. There are a couple other little things I started to like a lot about Posterous including direct Google Analytics integration and how it has been added as a photo upload and posting service to Seesmic Desktop as an alternative to TwitPic which I have used on occasion.

As with any of these services, the proof is in the posting so I created a couple test posts on both Tumblr and Posterous to see which service suits me best. I started with a post from my mobile phone which I submitted by email (I can’t verify the email address my mms’ would come from so Tumblr has the edge when it comes to mobile submission because I can submit using email and mms whereas Posterous is limited to email). My email had multiple photos from a recent family lunch at Mimmos in Norwood:

My Tumblr post only contains a single image from the batch I emailed in.

On the other hand my Posterous post not only has all the photos I emailed but it has created a neat gallery for them too. The manner in which these two services handled my photos was apparent in FriendFeed too:

Both services use bookmarklets to post content you might find on the Web. The Posterous bookmarklet is said to be pretty flexible so I tried both of them out (Tumblr post here and Posterous post here):

Tumblr’s bookmarklet doesn’t have the slick embedded look that more modern bookmarklets seem to have and it is structured according to its content types. As you switch from one to the other using its tabbed interface, the content you could publish changes to suit the content type.

The Posterous bookmarklet looks much simpler and it allows users to grab content from a site and create a rich post on Posterous. I am still trying to get the hang of this so my test post was pretty simple.

Using both services has disabused me of the notion that one is better than the other. I like Tumblr’s more developed customisation options and its pre-defined content types. On the other hand Posterous handles multiple images and integrates into other services far better than Tumblr. I also really want to use both services so rather than duplicate all my posts I am thinking about using Tumblr for Web capture stuff and Posterous more for my mobile and TwitPic-replacement posts. Or I might just mix it all up. You will get to see all my posts on FriendFeed anyway so it probably comes down to picking the best service for the content I want to post or just how I feel at the time – the choices we have is one of the things I love about social media.

So what do you think?