Paul Jacobson

Nokia has dropped a bombshell and will be offering free turn-by-turn navigation on its smartphones. This is according to a Reuters report which I found via Engadget. The report is apparently based on a release of some kind from Nokia which I haven’t been able to locate yet Update: This news seems to be part of a broader Ovi Maps announcement. There is some great coverage on GigaOm.

As the Reuters report pointed out, this is bound to have an impact on more traditional GPS device producers like Garmin and TomTom. I’ve been using Ovi Maps on my N97 for navigation and it is excellent, when it works properly. The maps are more appealing, visually, although it can be a little difficult to search for and find places. That being said, Ovi Maps just keeps getting better with each release and I have seen an update that is still being tested internally which will make Ovi Maps an even better navigation option.

Nokia has been promising some pretty interesting location-based stuff using Ovi Maps as the core application for those services. It could make a huge difference to how we use location in our day to day activities so I hope it can pull it off and execute well. Nokia is facing increasing competition from Google and Apple, both companies have arguably more compelling devices based on more dynamic and appealing user experiences. Upcoming Symbian updates could change perceptions about Nokia’s products, though.

I am curious to see what happens next. Ovi Maps look better than Google Maps but I find that I can locate places a lot easier on Google Maps on my N97. Google Maps doesn’t look as good and we don’t have turn by turn navigation here in South Africa just yet but I think that will change. When it does, South Africans will have yet another option. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google roll out turn-by-turn in time for the World Cup either.

I’ve had a Nokia N900 for a couple weeks now. Initially the idea was to try it out and share my thoughts and experiences but with the understanding that the N900 would not be available in South Africa for sale. That changed shortly afterwards and I received word from Nokia’s Tania Steenkamp that the N900 is going to be on sale in South Africa in the second quarter of 2010, thanks to efforts by Nokia SA’s general manager, Mathia Nalappan, to have stock allocated to SA.

I adopted an Andy Ihnatko approach to the N900 and switched to it from my N97 completely for the first few weeks. I put my N97 back in its box and did everything on the N900. I posted my initial experiences to a FriendFeed channel which I embedded in my first post and, as you can see, using the N900 was a mixed experience. Rather than using devices like the iPhone or Android devices as a comparison, I used my N97 which is/was Nokia’s flagship device. If you are familiar with the current Symbian UI, this video is a great introduction to the much improved Maemo 5 UI:

As you can see from the video, the N900’s interface is pretty different to Symbian devices. In fact, it is a real improvement and one of the reasons I am really going to miss the N900 when Nokia prizes my fingers open and takes it back.

From a hardware perspective the N900 feels solid (I’m not going to rehash the specifications so take a look at thedetailed specifications on the N900’s site). Its viewable screen area is roughly the same as the iPhone/iPod Touch and wide than the N97’s screen. The N900’s screen resolution is fantastic. Everything looks sharper and richer on the N900’s screen (according to the Nokia blog, the N900 has a 267 pixels per inch pixel density, compared to 165 PPI on the iPhone 3Gs and 210 PPI on the N97).

The device feels more substantial than the N97 and, as small as it is, you can definitely feel it in your pocket. It feels compact and substantial. I think about the E71 when I think about the N900’s build quality.

Like the N97, the N900 has a fold out keyboard but unlike the N97, the N900’s keyboard is flat, relative to the screen, and a little more compact. I had the usual finger confusion when I started using the N900’s keyboard and kept typing the wrong characters because my fingers were used to a different layout. I eventually got used to the keyboard and while I don’t think I type as fast on that keyboard as I do on my N97, it works pretty well. You can also enable an onscreen keyboard if you prefer not to slide the physical keyboard out all the time (or at all) but I found the onscreen keyboard a little confusing (it isn’t very intuitive).

The camera is important to me because I tend to use my mobile phone’s camera a lot. It is, after all, the camera that is always with me. The N900’s camera is almost the same as the N97 (5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens/es) and easily a replacement for your little point and shoot.

One aspect of the device that really impressed me is the GPS capability. The N900’s GPS locks pretty quickly and while I don’t know if this is due to the N900’s ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor doing the necessary work behind the scenes that much faster but it is a welcome improvement over my experience with the N97. The GPS ties in with the camera and geotags photos really nicely. The only time I had a problem with the geotagging was when I had no network signal at all! When you take a photo, it will be tagged with your location on a local, regional and national level. You have the option of limiting the geotags or removing them altogether.

On the subject of photos and sharing, the N900 has much improved sharing options over the Symbian Share Online app. There are configuration options for services like Evernote, PixelPipe, Flickr, Ovi and other services for the N900. The Evernote option particularly appeals to me and it doesn’t seem to be available on the N97 (strong possibility I just haven’t figured it out or found the configuration file). The N900’s share functionality works really well to boot and its very easy to use.

One of the N900’s best features, from my perspective, is the Conversations app. This is the N900’s messaging hub and it combines sms and instant messaging updates into a single conversation for each contact. It is brilliant and it annoys me that the Conversations app isn’t available for my N97.

You can connect to a number of popular IM services including Skype, Ovi, Google Talk, Jabber and SIP in Conversations and both sms’s and IM messages from your contacts will merge into a single contact-based conversation. You can also set your availability status in the N900 like most IM apps and, when you are online, you can also see which of your contacts are also online or available. IM integration extends to the address book where you have the option of contacting your friends via sms, email, IM and good old voice telephony (oh, if you use Skype, you can also call them via Skype from your N900 – haven’t tried this though).

Another favourite is the N900’s Mozilla based web browser. It is a full browser, not a pared down mobile browser and that, oddly, takes a little getting used to coming from my N97. Instead of loading mobile versions of some sites, the browser loads the full web page. This makes it possible to access your favourite sites on this little device and have a pretty good experience at the same time. You can also install a Firefox beta version but I found myself going back to the Maemo browser for most of my Web browsing. Take a look at this video, below, for an introduction to the browser:

Real geeks are going to love some of the geekier apps like the terminal app that comes with the device. There are a couple other geeky apps you can install which I don’t really understand or appreciate nearly as much as a geek who believes that Alpine is the best email application on the market today.

Overall this device is a great device although it isn’t without its shortfalls. I will write about some of those shortfalls in a follow up post in the next day or so.

You can find my N900 pseudo-review post right here but feel free to continue reading and read my initial thoughts too.

I picked up a Nokia N900 yesterday to test for a couple weeks. I’ve been looking forward to using one of these devices for a while now and what I saw at the recent Nokia forum event excited me a little more. It is really important to point out that the N900 is not due to be available in South Africa at all. These devices haven’t even been approved by ICASA. Although the version I have is a retail version, it is one of 3 in the country and is purely for limited review. (see below for an exciting development) My approach to the N900 is to use it to get a sense of what Maemo as an operating system can do compared to S60.

Update (5 December 2009): I received some exciting news from Tania Steenkamp at Nokia SA last night. Nokia SA’s GM, Mathia Nalappan, has managed to secure N900 stock for the South African market. Nokia SA expects stock to arrive in 2Q 2010! I am going to post a more substantive review pretty soon. I have been using the device as my day to day device since I received it from Nokia.

Below is a FriendFeed channel embed (yup, FriendFeed is still around and the best service I could think of for what I want to do in this post). My plan is to post updates as I go and probably round up with a more complete post later.

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 received this release from Nokia’s agency, Fleishman Hillard this morning which may be of interest to Nokia users. You can read a little more on the Nokia Conversations site too.

Global announcement from Nokia – Nokia identified a potential product quality issue with certain chargers manufactured by one of its third-party suppliers and as a result has initiated a charger exchange program for a limited number of chargers of certain model types manufactured by a single third-party supplier during a specific time period are within the scope of the exchange program.

For more information, including how consumers can check to see if their chargers are part of this exchange program, Nokia has established a website. Consumers are asked to visit http://chargerexchange.nokia.com.

Please see the PDF attached below which explains how one would identify an affected charger.

I just saw a line in a post on the Android Community site that caught my attention:

We all know Microsoft was the biggest player in the mobile OS arena for a long time, not because WinMo was the best, but because it was a lonely business in the past.

One of the more interesting tidbits to hit the Web in the last few days was this video posted to GigaOm featuring Symbian’s executive director, Lee Williams, who made some very pointed comments about Android and Apple in the context of Symbian as an open source operating system:

While his confidence in Symbian is admirable and it really is an open source platform that has a number of good things going for it, I felt a little uneasy about his comments. To paraphrase a line from Hamlet, Williams doth protest too much about Android and the iPhone OS. Yes, Symbian is open and its membership is diverse but I just don’t see news about a host of manufacturers who have adopted Symbian as their platform of choice.

On the other hand we have seen a host of new Android devices announced in the last few months alone. And remember, Android is an open source platform too (although some of the Google apps on Android devices are proprietary). In fact, developers are drawn to the open platform and the open Android marketplace (certainly a lot more open than the iTunes App Store which a growing number of developers are becoming unhappy with due to its byzantine approval process).

The Ovi Store has a number of really nice apps which I’ve installed on my N97. Their UI is a welcome departure from the clunky S60 UI and yet the Ovi Store just doesn’t seem to be taking off quite as fast. Now this is despite Nokia’s dominance globally (yes, even if you count the USA – I think). If you add to this growing frustration with delays in firmware updates and some time before we see a meaningful change to the Symbian UI, I wonder if Nokia is going to be able to maintain its lead in high end devices going forward?

So what does that quote at the beginning have to do with all of this? Well, Microsoft was the mobile device platform leader in its day. Nokia has a lead on its competitors now. It has more of its devices out there running Symbian variations than its competitors. The challenge it faces is maintaining that lead in the face of growing demand for better UIs. While there is a lot of hype about the iPhone and its revolutionary UI and apps, I see Android being even bigger in coming years. The devices seem to be cheaper, the UI and its variations are terrific and more and more major manufacturers are producing Android devices including Sony Ericsson which is expected to announce a new device next week. Sony Ericsson is a Symbian Foundation founding member too.

History tends to repeat itself and Nokia could find itself on the receiving end this time around if it doesn’t up its game soon.

Update: It turns out clearing the cache in my phone’s browser cleared about 10MB of data on the phone memory. Solved that problem.

Sigh. This is one of those days it is a little difficult being a Nokia user. I have been using my N97 since I figured out how to configure Mail for Exchange on the device to the point where it became usable for me again. I say “again” because it wasn’t my first attempt to get the software working. It was the first time I got it to work though (which is probably more about me than the software).

Anyway, from that point on I was a N97 fan again. Sure my expectations were a little lower. The N97 is not the device I once imagined it would be but with Mail for Exchange working it wasn’t too bad. There are a lot of features I like and a number I don’t but what has really gotten me excited is the direction Nokia seems to be going with its location-based services and the devices it is producing to support that. I especially like this one video (despite the fashion which is way beyond me and my decades old fashion sense):

It took me a while to realise that the video features a N97 and a N97 mini as well as multiple ways of interacting via Facebook. Nokia seems to be moving at a pretty brisk pace acquiring companies like Plazes and, more recently, rumours about its Dopplr purchase. This direction Nokia seems to be moving in has me more excited about my N97 than I have been for a couple months now. If only the phone didn’t have a huge memory leak that has rendered it practically useless.

I’ve been getting error messages lately about low memory which increasingly lead to something about Mail for Exchange running out of memory, automatic retrieval being disabled and a red warning icon that just screams “oh crap, oh crap, oh crap …!”. My phone memory has dwindled away to the point where there are a couple hundred kb left and the phone stops responding. I removed apps that were installed on my phone memory as well as a host of photos which made their way on to phone memory despite me firmly instructing my phone that anything that could possibly be stored on the 32GB main drive be stored there. Today my efforts came to naught and my N97 stopped doing anything but giving me the abovementioned “oh crap, oh crap, oh crap …!” error message.

There is good news and that is a version 2.0 update to the N97’s firmware introduces a few UI and usability improvements.

(also take a look at this review video from the Nokia N97 Forum)

Reviewers who mention the update talk about the system wide kinetic scrolling. Ok, that is nice but what I am really interested in is better memory management and the phone memory that will apparently be given back to me when I update. The rest of the features are irrelevant if the phone doesn’t have enough memory to keep running.

Version 2 is due next month (hopefully the beginning of the month) and it is likely to be an update you will need to perform using your PC rather than over the air. The bigger updates seem to only have the option of updating via PC for some reason.

Sigh.