Paul Jacobson

I just received a press release from Emerging Media about an exciting product G-Connect has announced and which is getting a lot of attention on Twitter so far. The interesting bits from the press release (Update: check out background and some more information after the break below):

Sub-Saharan Africans will soon be able to connect to the Internet pretty-much anywhere they are – even while on a domestic or long-haul flight – thanks to a new technology announcement from WirelessG, the company behind SA’s first converged, pre-paid Internet product, G-Connect.

While the technology that will enable in-flight Internet services is depending on Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approval, it will be provided through an exclusive agreement with US-based Row 44 who is already successfully offering in-flight Wi-Fi Internet to Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and in 2010, through Norwegian Air Shuttle. After extensive testing in the US, the first complete set of hardware will arrive in South Africa shortly. This will be used to setup a ground-based proof of concept (POC) here in South Africa to test the complete solution including the Satellites that will be used for the commercial product.

…

Carel van der Merwe, CEO of WirelessG, says the company is already in negotiations with local airlines, and while the solution is already in POC phase, no information is being released as to which carrier will launch the service first.

Because Row 44’s in-flight broadband system is satellite-based and leverages the extensive Hughes satelllite network, WirelessG and Row 44 will be able to provide African airlines’ passengers with uninterrupted high-speed connectivity in-flight, no matter where they fly—including flights across multiple countries and over water.

WirelessG has successfully integrated its converged billing platform to this new technological environment. This platform, which has undergone extensive testing against the WirelessG converged billing service, will connect via satellite to provide a full range of Internet services such as web browsing, email access, VPN connectivity and web-based SMS.
Van der Merwe says the new solution will dovetail perfectly into G-Connect’s current converged Internet solution and extend the ADSL, Wi-Fi hotspot and 3G Internet access currently on offer from the service into the cloud.

The in-flight Internet service will be available to all passengers on participating flights for a fee, while G-Connect users can benefit from the service as they will be able to use their current G-Connect accounts onboard the aircraft.

“With the G-Connect sign-up process being free of cost and contracts, we are expecting many travelers to utilise the advantage of our in-flight offering,” says van der Merwe.

I don’t have any bandwidth figures (apparently pretty close to hotspot speeds) yet or even prices (update: take a look here for an indication of pricing) for the airborne service (they should be comparable to international inflight broadband prices – Virgin America charges between $6 and $13 depending on flight duration and device type). While this is certainly an exciting development and it bridges the connectivity gap for travellers, I wonder if it is such a great idea for some people, people like me.

I am online practically all the time and getting onto a plane forces me to disconnect and take a break from the flurry of information I expose my poor, under-equipped brain to each day. A flight, as comparatively boring as it can be, is also a forced break and an opportunity to take a break, listen to some music, read a book or magazine (or lots of both using an Amazon Kindle, perhaps) or even get through a full email inbox before the next email avalanche hits. Now that we will have inflight broadband, we are faced with the temptation to stay connected. Having this capability also creates an expectation that we will use it and stay connected to our work, clients and the connected world at large.

I don’t know about you but I’m not so sure that this is such a great idea. At least not for me. You can bet your bottom Zim dollar that I will use give it a go and run a speed test every time, just to see how fast I can do stuff in the air. Beyond that I can see myself turning off the wifi most of the time unless I am on a longer trip and can’t afford to lose the time.

On the other hand, this offering does make G-Connect an even more compelling option for me when I am travelling. I already use it almost all the time when I am out (I still use an IS wifi hotspot account when a hotspot is available) and this will make it even easier for me to connect and remain connected. I may be somewhat of an old fart when it comes to my forced disconnect time but you can be darn sure I will be bitching if I can’t connect when I absolutely have to get something done online!

As Mike Stopforth pointed out (and as you can see from the title of my post), the hashtag on Twitter for the discussion is #gconnectinflight.
Read more…

I really like the “Getting Things Done” methodology and while I am still reading the book I think I have picked up enough of the methodology to create a fairly workable productivity workflow. The methodology itself is fairly straightforward and the challenge is making a concerted effort to do what you need to do to integrate it into your day to day life. You can implement GTD using a couple folders, pen and paper but I like to have everything digital so my weapon of choice is OmniFocus. I bought a single license about a year ago for $79 (I was silly, I should have bought a pre-release license for a lot less) and that investment makes it worthwhile spending time with OmniFocus getting it working for me.

I’ve just spent a little time this morning looking at how I have been using OmniFocus (or not, which is the problem). I started by watching an introductory video I have in iTunes (don’t know where that specific video is online but here are the OmniFocus tutorials). I have a number of folders, projects and tasks in OmniFocus already but when I opened OmniFocus in the past my eyes just glossed over and that isn’t very good. The system you use to manage your tasks needs to be user friendly and even fun if you are going to keep going back to it.

I noticed that one of the things I was doing was creating folders for specific clients, unhelpfully labelled projects within the folders and then all my tasks. I decided to change that straightaway and ditched my old folders and poorly named projects and created new ones. One of the things I was doing in the past and which I am now remedying is that instead of treating projects as overall goals, I just gave them case names. This was a little too bland and non-descriptive so I have given them names as if they are goals (which they are, really) and all the tasks in those projects are the incremental steps towards achieving the goal (as I understand it, this is the whole idea). As you can see the from the image to the right, I created a little demo project to show you how I am setting up my projects and tasks. Please feel free to give me pointers. The screenshot below is what you’ll find in the project “Show Steve the light”:

I don’t know if I am describing the tasks well enough so it is very much a work in progress. OmniFocus is fairly flexible and I am still messing around with perspectives and views to get my lists set up in a way that works for me. I am also about a year overdue on a decent review session so I am going to set aside a couple hours to sit and do that. Working as an attorney makes it vital to be on top of what is going on in my files because there are a number of things I need to deal with and many of those are time sensitive. The time sensitive tasks go into my calendar (I can schedule stuff in OmniFocus but I’m not sure I want to put those tasks there … what do you do?) and the general tasks will go into OmniFocus.

I think the big challenge, for me at least, is developing the discipline to look at OmniFocus when my day begins and keep referring back to it as the framework for my daily activities. While I have a fetish for developing these sorts of systems, my challenge is remaining engaged in the systems I develop. I also get a little lost in developing the systems and I forget to actually get the work done. Creating a new GTD workflow isn’t the same as actually getting that stuff done.

I thought I’d just share some of my thoughts about this as I go here. Please feel free to share any tips, tricks and processes that work for you. I am still pretty new at this and am always interested in ideas that can help me become more productive.

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.