Serious Mobile’s new home

Hello dear friends! This is the new home of Serious Mobile http://seriousmobile.wordpress.com/

Over the next few days I’ll be making posts on either http://seriousmobile.blogspot.com or here (seriousmobile.wordpress.com). Please do not forget to update your bookmarks here as this will be the permanent home for Serious Mobile for the foreseeable future.

Within the next few months I’ll be updating the name of Serious Mobile (name to be determined), but I’ll be stating the name change in each post when I’ve decided on a new blog name.

Thank you everyone for stopping by, commenting, and sharing your ideas as well has taking the time to read some of mine.

Enjoy your mobile lifestyle and don’t forget to share your adventures & findings as you continue to be mobile.

Nokia at Mobile World Conference 2009.

I'm sure those of you that casually read my blog with no time to post, stop by because you wish to see some insight beyond what the other blogs post about devices.

I'll briefly tough on the devices this week not really about the obvious specs of course. But there is more than meets the eye that many are missing even amongst the popular and favorite forums (Symbian-Freak, AllAboutSymbian, Howard Forums, etc).

Nokia announced the E75 - an incredible QWERTY-Slider that allows for use of a Numerical keypad when you want it, while a full qwerty-keyboard when you NEED it. Nokia Messaging will come pre-loaded as part of the firmware; something I hope to see in an update of the incredibly popular, solid, and worth every penny the E71. However, there is something beyond the specs that the E75 offers that others are missing.

The E75 is a great thin qwerty slider and will do quite well with those consumers or professionals that work with personal Email (Gmail, Hotmail, YahooMail) or corporate email (Exchange ActiveSync or Lotus Domino).

What I like best of all is this allows users to charge the device with the MicroUSB port (Nokia missed this in the E71!) and the wall charger (2mm connector) so that people don't immediately through out their existing chargers. Nokia really should make a list of the small chargers that shipped with other devices available to potential/new buyers of the E75 so that waste piles are not filled up with charging.

PS: Canadian citizens are more intuned with helping the environement; however not enough companies are making electronics disposable enough. Major cities in malls should have a deposit box not only for phones, but also for batteries & chargers as well of Nokia phones. Make the barcode readers under the batter of phones readable so that phones are accepted into these automated Return/Recyclable bins - and the holographic image on official batteries readable for the same purpose. This should be done in All Capital cities in the Canada, USA, UK, and in China and Japan.

Offering a small incentive to users returning old products; working phones ($25-50 relative to country currency), non working phones($10), and batteries & chargers ($5-10) would change the environment significantly. Of course research into this idea is needed; placing a return bin in major malls in capital cities would work. This will this help the environment (global waste sites), and changing perception of how we dispose of our electronics.

OF course cash will not be dispensed but a credit to debit/credit accts to be issued or a voucher for purchasing software compitable with their future/existing replacement Nokia device or towards a future Nokia device purchase (phone/tablet/accessory). Voucher redeamable in Official Nokia Store or online in respective regions. Vote if you like this idea.

Nokia Ovi Store!

Its finally here! What all S60 heads have been waiting for, complaining for and envious of other platforms! Something that "Download!" has been lacking in.

A True mobile applications store front!

I've spoken out in the community about such a store being more than just an applications database and store front. I've even tried to get the community to work on such a store and submitt it to Nokia; but alas I don't have the charm to invoke such passion in others. However it DID garner interest from an executive from Symbian-Foundation.



Now this application store has particular interest to developers in the industry. First Developers & users can follow along on Facebook site "Ovi Publishers" http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=126684805051 and also register for access at https://publish.ovi.com/ in order to submitt your applications to take part in the 30/70 (70% revenue for each sale directly paid to developers)! This is HUGE!



What makes this application store unique is that it uses an intelligent database engine to recommend applications based on your geographical location, suggest apps based on your previous purchases and also based on your Ovi friends purchases - Even if their native languages are different from your own (app you purchase is in your prefered language set on the phone).

Now we finally have an applications store front to be proud of.

https://publish.ovi.com/

SonyEricsson tease with Idou at MWC 2009

SonyEricsson Idou



Wow. In classic SE black styling, the pre-release TEASER of this phone - currently with no product # - is definately a sure sight for sore eyes since SE loosing in sales and just rehashing more of their same Walkman line phones.

For many years SE fans have wanted the ability to choose 1 great phone and whether they want a Camera centric or Walkman centric phone. Not since the K750i/W800i did users have this choice; albeit Wotan or DaVinci Server service & software.



This baby, Idou, has it all. GPS, WiFi with UPnP support - and considering W995 Walkman feature phone suporting PS3 compatibility its possible this could to. Also this phone has a 12MegaPixel camera with LED & Xenon Flash! Its said by SE to run "The OS is next generation of Symban" which could mean Symbian-Foundations first release or S60 5th Edition. Considering the unique CyberShot and Walkman GUI layer and capabilities I'm hoping for Symbian Foundation's first Symbian OS release. This device is slated to be released in the 2H 2009 as previously promised by SE.



Its still unclear if the SE will be using their proprietary memory (MSDuo Micro or M2) or MicroSD.

Pictures of SE Idou courtesy of Esato.com and Engadget.com - as I myself could not attend MWC_2009.

Ovi Live - A Blogging Idea for Ovi Services.

Hi Ovi Team,

First of all I'd like you to provide such an excellent service that I'm going nuts on missing out on since I had to sell my beloved E71-2 due to hard economic times. I'll be buying another 3 S60 phones in a 3mth period due to a new job.

I'm hoping that Nokia Ovi Team has considered the idea of end users being able to create a Blog (free or at a very low yearly fee $10US)! This blog will, of course, allow collaboration & creation of ideas and content to be shared from our phones and using Photos, Videos, and maybe music (as background playlist for those visiting our live blogs) from our Shared on Ovi.

Think deeply into this. Calendar schedules can be shared (public/private being seperate - both sync'd to our phones as normal), and used for creating fan meetups, family get-togethers, business meetings, etc. Nokia could use this for new Nokia World and similar event notifications & invites per relevant users in an events region & to those previously participated.

Photos uploaded to the "Ovi Live" blog (my patent idea lol /just kidding), will automatically be sync'd to the users Share on Ovi public media space for archiving. Using geotagging so when clicked by another S60 device on the blog can open up Nokia Maps ;) . Videos with geotagging should also be considered by the Nokia S60 developers and also from Symbian Foundation for the next OS.

"Ovi Live" or "Ovi World" blog will use the beautiful software by Nokia ... Mobile WebServer. This will allow a LIVE and interactive content creation and location aware presence for S60 users across the globe! This is TRUELY "connecting people" as the Nokia slogan stands to represent. Live Feedback, live contact sharing, live photo sharing, Ovi community expansion, and of course keeping in touch with those we love, and sharing the neighborhoods across the world. The saying 'the world is a small place' would indeed be tangible.

For those curious about using the FREE Mobile Web Server please see the following link: http://mymobilesite.net/

For those of you S60 users still not using Share on Ovi, what are you waiting for its FREE and allows syncing your photos/videos/Contacts/Calendar/Notes ALL for FREE:
http://www.ovi.com/services/ (go ahead and create an account, and check your phone under Media to see it sync'd once you receive your SMS from the service). Hope to see you online, my name on Ovi is Jagga.

Should we welcome Blackberry back to S60?

Should we welcome Blackberry back to S60?

Article from Reuters

RIM (RIM.TO)(RIMM.O) created the market for corporate mobile email and its dominant position has protected it from Nokia's attempts to crack the market in recent years.

However, "Clearly, things are heading towards the consumer market and that's where Nokia has its strength," Tom Furlong, head of Nokia's messaging services, told Reuters.

RIM has lately focused on developing its consumer offering.

Many of you are aware of Nokia’s decision to drop support for BlackBerry connect on their E-Series devices beginning with the Nokia E71 & E66, and now the E63. This, initially caused ripples in the S60 community, especially those that worked for corporations that allowed for BlackBerry Connect devices to be used on work corporate BES servers/services. This didn’t pose too much of a problem for those who’s corporate email infrastructure used MS Exchange as Nokia did have free software & agreement licence for Mail for Exchange product.

Nokia decided shortly after denouncing internal corporate messaging infrastructure support (Nokia IntelliSync Mobility Suite) and BlackBerry Connect support that they’d be focusing on the lucrative consumer market.

"With the Nokia messaging service, we are going after consumers, we are not going head-to-head with enterprise e-mail. We are trying to put mobile email to the masses, masses of people around the globe," he said.

"The service is up, people are utilising it, we are getting good traction and good follow up," Furlong said, adding the company expects to announce its first revenue-sharing agreements with operators for the messaging service within few months.

Since December 2008, Nokia’s focus on the corporate messaging collaboration service has taken great strides that the S60 community is beginning to see the benefits of; especially when it comes down to the bottom dollar in the this age of slumping markets and low finances.

IN TUNE WITH BUSINESS SENTIMENT

Nokia dropped development of its own corporate email product last year, choosing to partner with Microsoft (MSFT.O) and IBM (IBM.N) instead while focusing on developing phones for business users to better challenge RIM.

Nokia says the two deals enable it to mobilise close to 90 percent of corporate emails without any extra investment from corporations.

"I think that probably the dominant theme in 2009 in enterprises is going to be -- do we have to be spending that much money on that service," Furlong said.

I’ve already blogged about IBM Lotus Traveler, and so far a few reports on the web by Kevin S Pettitt are showing favorable results by this FREE corporate solution for S60; not just E-Series devices!

The other factor that was key to dropping the Blackberry platform altogether was the availability of a much less expensive alternative that still provides the essential "Blackberryesque" features of push email integration with Lotus Domino. I speak of course of Lotus Traveler, which this week was released along with Notes/Domino 8.5. Version 8.5 of Traveler marks a major milestone in the competitive landscape for push email, as it extends its reach to cover millions of Symbian smartphones (aka Nokia S60 based devices) and will put tremendous pressure on RIM considering Traveler is a free add-on to Domino.

The Blackberry TCO gets even more expensive when you want to hook it up to Domino because of the Blackberry Enterprise Server costs. If you do need to go with Blackberry and want to at least avoid the hassle of setting up and maintaining your BES, you might consider the Shared BES offering from Prominic, the wonderful people who host my Domino servers for mail and apps. Prices are inclusive of licensing and start at $150 for setup + $30/month per device (1-2 devices) and drops to as low as $20/month for 11+ devices. They also offer dedicated BES. About $400 per month, plus $10/month/device.

For me [Kevin S Pettitt] these costs would top $500 in the first year alone, which in addition to AT&T's extra charges make the $400 price tag of my unlocked Nokia look pretty reasonable. Of course, you do have to install Traveler somewhere, and it only runs on Windows (Linux Please!). I'll have to check with the Prominic guys to see if they might offer a "Shared Traveler Server" at some point, since my own hosted servers run on Linux. Right now I'm using a spare machine in my home office to serve as the Traveler server. Any way you slice it the expense compares favorably to the Blackberry/BES solution.

As you can see the costs are getting to be pretty favorable from the corporate perspective, and even more so from an end users perspective considering most corporations allow for OWA (Exchange) or iNotes (Domino Web access) and begin to heavily offload the costs of mobile email & collaboration to their employess [incl device costs, data plan costs – corporate price plans still in place, and device upgrade costs]. When end users consider that the Nokia E71, E66, and E63 allow them to keep their work and personal lives separate yet contained and manageable on 1 single device, and the plethora of applications available to them – true productivity applications then its going to be a better cost to implementation and less cost to support the RIM BlackBerry infrastructure and solution.

Fear not for those of you that just ‘must have BlackBerry Connect’ as a solution to your S60 devices.

When focusing on partnering with Microsoft and IBM for corporate mobile email, Nokia last year dropped support for the Blackberry email service, but Furlong said Nokia users would in future be able to use the service again.

"We are in the interim period of time when we have dropped support ourselves, and Blackberry is readying support for their service on Nokia devices," he said.

When it’ll be available is unclear at the present time, as we’ll have to wait for an official announcement from RIM to collaborate this news.

Interview comes courtesy of Tarmo Virki, European technology correspondent, Reuters.

Lotus Traveler on E71 insights come courtesy of Kevin S Pettitt of Lotus Guru.

Round table with Nokia Vice-President - Anssi Vanjoki

Round table with Nokia Vice-President - Anssi Vanjoki

Eldar Murtazin of Mobile-Review.com had an exclusive interview with the Mr. Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia Vice-President. This interview evoked lots of thoughts for all readers while providing great insight.

One particular question that Eldar Murtazin posed to Nokia Vice-President - Anssi Vanjoki was VERY interesting and enlightening.

Speaking of the financial crisis – will it force Nokia to revise some of your plans regarding new products or market strategy?

A.V. Actually the economic downturn means that we have to speed things up, and instead of freezing some of our projects we need to do exactly the opposite. We have to make sure that all these new services and products launch on schedule, so we are focusing on getting everything done rather than postponing some of our solutions. Another thing about economic downturns is that it's exactly the time when new winners are built and we really want to be among them.

Nokia has not only the expertise, the programmer coder base, but also the finances to deliver low, mid, and top-tier devices and perfect or deliver new services that enable these Web2.0 (Internet & collaboration) devices. Yes Nokia isn't the largest & most powerful phone manufacturer in the world for no reason. Nokia is about Connecting People.

Over the past few years Nokia have been really pushing some of their new products on the US market. Will we see any changes in your US policy down the line, with the financial crisis raging out there?

A.V. I think that we will just continue with our strategy, although a bit faster than before, now that we have invested into a product development center based in San Diego that makes phones for the US alone (we have just started developing two products for Verizon, and more are to come for AT&T), so we are making great progress there, step-by-step.

This is an amazing BRIGHT star in the North American solar system. This brings great news to the delight of the North American marketplace as well as to S60 Ambassadors based here. With more presence of Nokia products - especially on AT&T and Verizon - it give us the ability to better highlight devices to potential users; especially with a subsidized pricing model that presents more value to end users. E71x just being released by AT&T; roughly 2 months after Rogers Wireless shows their efforts in earnest is working to Symbian & Nokia's favor. The Nokia 6555 flip is a great low range offering on AT&T as well.

However, why was there no mention of Rogers Wireless in the North American initiative? Why is it only the US market ever concerned or conceived as a potential marketplace? Does Eldar know that Nokia & Rogers have a strong relationship? Previously Nokia 6620 & 6682 being released here 3yrs ago, and recently Nokia N95-4 with 9 months of GREAT sales success and 3 months with Nokia NGage & Nokia Maps being a collaborative effort of features released to end users on Rogers?? Surely this NGage announcement is a milestone enough for Nokia not to forget.

There is one small segment of Eldar's interview that had me completely in disagreement. It was more of a question that I'm sure needed to be fielded to evoke the correct answer. Today's internet is NO LONGER about Search! This is so 4 years ago and to think that the worlds largest search engine and service provider's core business is around this is ludicrous. Here is a few recent events to back up my claim before I post the article question from Eldar. All the following quotes can be found from Google Finance.

Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc May Walk Away From Search Deal-Reuter
Thursday, 30 Oct 2008 10:00pm EDT
Reuters reported that Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc could announce a decision to walk away from their search deal by the middle of next week. The two Internet companies have so far failed to reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on implementing their search advertising partnership. The deal, which allows Google to sell advertising for some of Yahoo's online advertising space, has drawn fierce criticism from advertisers, who fear higher prices.

Yahoo! Inc. Announces Termination Of Services Agreement By Google Inc.
Wednesday, 5 Nov 2008 10:32am EST
Yahoo! Inc. announced that Google Inc. has terminated the advertising services agreement the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!'s proposed revisions to address the DOJ's concerns.

US Judge Gives Initial OK To Google Inc.-Publishers Pact-DJ
Monday, 17 Nov 2008 09:07pm EST
Dow Jones reported that a federal judge granted preliminary approval to a $125 million settlement between Google Inc. and authors and book publishers in lawsuits over digital copies of copyrighted books on the Internet. In an order U.S. District Judge John E. Sprizzo in Manhattan initially signed off on the settlement, in which individuals and institutions will be able to buy online access to copyrighted, out-of-print books through Google. Free access also will be provided to public and higher education libraries under the settlement. A fairness hearing, in anticipation of final approval of the settlement, is scheduled for June 11, 2008.

Here is Eldars question with Mr. Anssi Vanjoki's response; which I might ad is so on point for the direction of Nokia services.

Today’s web environment is more about content search rather than anything else. However, Nokia offers only very basic search capabilities on this front, and it’s clear that you will need to step up your efforts here to remain competitive. What are going to do about your search engines?

A.V. While there are some old-time players out there, that have been around for a very long while (like Google), we believe that Nokia isn’t that far behind in this field, it’s just that we had to start from a totally different position. Speaking of the modern search engines, they aren’t complex at all – to put it simply, they are all about indexing the whole world, every web page and resource. But when we get to coordinates and relationships between people, the algorithms required to carry out semantically important, intelligent searches are still not here, and naturally, we are investing significant resources into this field in an effort to make our vision of the future come true, where Nokia will be coordinating the whole world. And it’s obvious there is no way we can achieve that with technologies as primitive as indexing – we need to invent a way to tie up the user’s real life relationships with his virtual life and this problem is of a completely different scale.

You see, the future of the internet is not simply about search else every mobile device now would be entirely focused around that old concept. Sure every device has it but its NOT the "killer app" nor a major focus. Nokia is going better than that. Nokia's concept of the Web2.0 is for Creation, collaboration, and moving of data. Anything is considered data. Pictures, Videos, A monument, GPS data, eBooks, Music. Now Lets say your on a trip to visit the Taj Mahal. During your trip you take photos & videos and upload them to Ovi & your other community services - Flikr, etc. Although a picture is worth a thousand words, the GPS data embedded compiles those words into a story! Now your blog entry, or memoirs of your trip tell more, along with music tied to the Indian culture, the history of the Taj Mahal - video of the Taj Mahal with pictures tell its elevation, height, and with Notes from the tour guide tells MORE of tis history showing about its creators, reason for being created, place among nearby historical structures, and place in modern day structures of its home city & people. This is creating web2.0, and collaborating amongst users will to browse & experience your content. The goal of web services is to be what Brainiac was to Cryton in the Superman comics. Basic Internet search is what we have with Google's search site. IF Google has moved into Maps, Google Apps, and now Google Books & Financial data; search will always be there, but its no longer the driving vision of the internet that it once was.

Lastly, I'm ecstatic over their current silence - Nothing I can talk about - regarding Video as a service and offering!

Video uploads to Ovi
Ability to share over a WLAN/HSPA connection (LTE providers awaiting the fruits of such a service). Downloading or renting movie, cartoon, and special broadcast content. HBO is PRIMED for such a business partnership. Video is PERFECT for a rental service - with specific episode, movie and TV show downloads. Not ALL video content users wish to completely own although it would be nice. I'd like to see Disney, HBO, Pixar, CNBC, Reuters, BBCNews, and other content providers around the world - ESPECIALLY in other countries and languages partner with Nokia. Nokia's video service can be unique because with a partnership with BBCNews - users can contribute to their local content wiht their Nokia S60 N/E-Series phones. Nokia could go further and allow user created content to be uploaded to their service - or even to Youtube and similar services for a sharing fee with a percentage payable to N/E-Series users that create the content to be shared.

The biggest benefit for such a service is if Nokia begins to utilize 3D Video encoding/decoding chips in future products; especially ones that support 4:3 & 16:9 aspect ratio's with XVGA recording (30fps) and TV Out at such a resolution to a TV or HDTV.

Those are my weekend thoughts. Please feel free to comment on them here.