Does Nokia Have The Guts?

Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber referenced this article at Engadget about the future of Nokia.

Gruber:

Count me as a Nokia pessimist. I think their leadership lacks the balls to move ahead strategically.

He may very well be right, but Nokia has been in a similar position before, and – like Apple – they had to hit rock bottom before bouncing back.

Nokia has been around since 1865. In the past century-plus, they have made everything from tires to cabling to toilet paper. In the 60’s they got heavy into electronics and telecommunications and later TVs, PCs and eventually mobile phones.

By the late 80’s, they still had a sprawling product line, but no real identity – they had been around so long, and produced so many different products, they were the Finnish equivalent of General Electric. Sure everybody knew who they were, but they weren’t dominating any markets. (I still remember visiting the Helsinki Zoo in 2001 and seeing a paper towel dispenser with “Nokia” written on it in Bell Bottom. They hadn’t made paper towels in probably forty years or more.)

In 1988, Nokia’s CEO, Kari Kairamo, committed suicide. The company went into mourning for a time and, soon after, the new management determined to focus their product line on mobile phones and infrastructure. They divested everything else. Imagine GM only making the Volt from now on. That’s how radical it was.

But that singular focus gave them the strength and momentum to dominate the mobile phone market for more than a decade. To the point where in the early 2000’s, there were rumors of Nokia putting Motorola and Ericsson out of business (at least the mobile phone business).

Now, a scant nine years later, Apple is the rising star. RIM is the established leader in business phones. Android is making interesting inroads, and Windows Mobile is scooping up whatever it can get. (I honestly don’t know how well the Pre is doing.) More and more people are buying smartphones over the cheap/free feature phones that are Nokia’s bread and butter.

Nokia is still producing a majority of the phones purchased in the world, but they’re essentially disposable, and their efforts at the mid- to high-end have been also-rans at best (I know they make some quality smartphones, but nothing that’s really made headlines in the past six or seven years). Their platform strategy is ancient and fragmented (Symbian? Maemo?), and their hardware designs are pedestrian.

They need to do what they did twenty years ago (minus the suicide, of course): step back, focus, divest and innovate. Essentially the same thing Apple did with the return of The Steve.

The only problem is that Nokia has a dominant position in the mobile market right now (and all the legacy/support problems that that entails), whereas Apple was barely hanging on  to a few percentage points of the PC market in the late 90’s and could afford to make a break from the past to move forward.

Nokia management had the balls to do it twenty years ago. The question is, do the have them now?

I worked in the Nokia Enterprise Systems division for six years. If their management during the years of 2000-2005 reflects their management now, I have to agree with Gruber – I’m pessimistic.

They had no strategy, no long-term vision. They thrashed back and forth between supporting competing product lines in a single division. The one thing they did really well was lay people off.

It would be a shame for Nokia to fail, in whatever measure, because they are such a big part of the fabric of the Finnish culture (at one point they employed 1% of the population – think about that). I hope the executives can see the writing on the wall and make some drastic changes before it’s too late.

Three Gee Yes!

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for one week now (yes, I did buy one on the first day they were available, but I didn’t wait in line for it – the AT&T store here in east-nowhere had plenty) and I’d like to share with you my impressions.

Now I’m not going to go on and on about the faster response due to the hardware, although that is impressive, or the fact that upgrading from a first generation iPhone to anything with 3G and GPS is awesome. Nor will I sing the praises of Copy and Paste, although the inclusion of them is of course the long-awaited cherry on the top of the iPhone Sundae.

No, better people than me have written about all these things.

What I want to talk about are some of the lesser publicized benefits of drinking the 3GS Kool-Aid.

Play It Again

On the Edge version of the iPhone (not sure how this worked on the 3G) if you were listening to music (or, more likely in my case, a podcast) and paused it, probably using the button on the earbuds, there was some period of time during with clicking the earbud button again would un-pause the audio.

I never figured out how long this was, but if you waited too long (definitely 10 or 15 minutes was too long) nothing would happen and you would have to dig the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, go back to the iPod application and hit the play icon to start it up.

With the 3GS, the play/pause functionality on the earbuds seems to have no timeout. This, to me, is the equivalent of your car stereo starting up at the same spot every time you turn on the car, versus resetting to some idle state if the car is off for more than fifteen minutes.

Jam and Edge

It was almost comical, a few months after the iPhone came out, everybody suddently became specifically aware of the noise that GSM signals caused when interfering with audio equipment. I remember sitting in the meeting room at work, with severn or eight people packing iPhones and the conference call speaker phone sputtering the whole time.

The worst part, though, was that I had to put my phone into Airplane Mode whenever hooking it up to the radio in my car. This is probably because the radio (and the car) is somewhat old and doesn’t have the shielding necessary to deal with today’s electronic interference. But still it was a pain.

With the 3GS (and I assume the 3G), this all went away. Sure, I still get some interference, but a) it happens so infrequently and has such short duration that it is easily ignorable and b) the 3G interference noise is so much less offensive than the Edge noise.

The Edge interference noise was usually louder than the volume coming out of the stereo and, at least in the areas I tend to drive through, was “on” more than it was “off”. It was so bad that driving the 3 minutes to my allergy shots from work, I couldn’t leave the phone’s GSM radio on because I wouldn’t be able to listen to anything without the interference killing it.

The 3G interference noise is much quieter, and on some level, it also just sounds like the data is being passed so much quicker, which is probably why it doesn’t last as long. It’s like listening to a 9600KBaud modem connection noise versus a 2400 Kbaud.

I’ve driven to and from work and all around town this week with the 3GS plugged into the car stereo, and the noise has been on the order of a few seconds per day, versus 30+ seconds for every minute on Edge.

And lest you think that I’m an anomaly, I don’t live in a major metropolitan area (proof: right down my street is a place that, until recently, had a sign outside that said “Taxidermist/Beauty Salon”) so my 3G coverage should not be any better than most places around the country.

I’m Ready For My Close-Up Mr. Damille

But the most surprising, and coolest, thing about the 3GS is the camera.

Of course this was a major weakness of the original (and 3G) iPhone. Even though it had 2.0 Megapixels (which, coincidentally, is the same as my decrepit point-and-shoot Canon camera) the tiny optics and lack of exposure and focus control made it only useful because it was the one camera you always had on you. My pictures were consistently blurry and lint-covered. Not to mention over/under-exposed.

The 3GS not only has a 3.0 Megapixel camera, with focus and exposure controls (to some degree) which actually work pretty well, but it adds video capability.

You all knew this already. But there is one feature of the video camera that deserves special mention.

How many of us have, when we first got hold of a digital camera that shot video, rotated the camera 90 degrees to capture something in portrait aspect ratio, only to find, upon importing it into the computer, that neither the camera nor the computer could compensate for that, and now you’re stuck with either fixing it in some high-end software like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, or watching what you recorded with your head tilted at a painful angle?

I mean, the cameras are smart enough to rotate still photos 90 degrees, but they don’t seem to understand how to do that with video.

Engineers at Apple must have run into this because they hooked the video camera into the tilt sensor of the phone, so that if you turn it, it still plays back right-side up. This is one of the many touches that make me think that Apple could dominate the camera market if they a) wanted to, and b) hired enough optics experts away from Canon and/or Nikon.

All Is Not Well

There are, however, a few missteps, as there always are, even with Apple.

First of all, the iPhone 3GS does not come with a dock to set it in while charging/syncing. I don’t know if the 3G came with one, but the Edge one did, and I used it daily. Apple charges $29 for one. Is anyone going to pay that much? I’m not.

The next one is probably a fluke, but the power adapter that came with my phone doesn’t work. I did the whole combinatorial testing suite (old adapter, new cable; new adapter, old cable; etc) and came to the undeniable conclusion that my power adapter does not charge.

So I called up the AT&T store, and using the imperfect choices on their menu, got shunted over to Apple’s support line. Apple’s tech support guy took fifteen minutes and a consultation with a “technical specialist” to tell me to go to the AT&T store for a replacement part.

You’re probably smart enought to predict that when I got to the AT&T store, they said I had to go to the Apple store, since AT&T doesn’t stock replacement parts. So now I need to trek over to the Apple store, which is much farther than the AT&T store, to get it replaced.

I haven’t heard any other reports of anyone’s adapter being DOA, so like I said, this is probably just a fluke.

My third complaint is about the shape. The rounded back of the 3GS (and 3G) is problematic. The Edge phone had a nice flat back that remained stable when you pushed the home button while it was on a tabletop.

Not so with the 3G varieties. I understand that they had to increase the thickness of the middle part of the phone due to increased hardware so the tapered the ends give the illusion of thinness, but I’d rather have a slightly thicker phone all the way down than try to type on a weeble-wobble.

My last complaint is perhaps not unique to the 3GS, but I haven’t tested it on any other platform. And it’s sort of one of those “problems you’d love to have” kind of things.

You see, my company operates a Wifi network. I’ve had my Edge iPhone connected to it for at least the past year. It’s nice because when I’m in part of the building where reception is good, bandwidth was noticeably better than Edge speeds.

Now that I have access to the 3G network (such that it is on AT&T), my throughput on 3G anywhere in the building is faster than the best throughput on the corporate Wifi. So, I told my phone to ignore that Wifi network. Done and done.

Or so I thought.

Every time I open up Mail, Safari, or any other net-enabled application, it asks me if I want to join the very network that I told it to ignore. What was the point of ignoring it?

If anyone knows how to stop the phone from asking me to join this network, please let me know. It’s kind of annoying.

Until then, I’ll keep hitting “Cancel” every time it comes up and enjoying my 3GS speed demon.

Well that just made it worse

For around 2 months or so now I’ve had this little half bubble under the screen protector for my iPhone. I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but today for some reason I decided I had to get rid of it.

Of course I’m at work, don’t have any other screen protectors on me and nothing that’s remotely useful to clean the screen properly, yet I did it anyway.

Good news is, the original ½ bubble is gone. Bad news, there’s 6 new ones that took it’s place.

I’ve given up on it for now, I have more screen protectors at the house.

But it’s going to drive me nuts looking at it between now and then.

Wrong Numbers 2.0

The other day, I had the weirdest SMS conversation. It’s not often I get a “wrong number” SMS, other than the annoying ads from MEdia Net. But when I get a “Hi!” from an unknown number, I get curious. Heck, I’ve got a bunch of friends on Facebook that might not be in my contact list yet.

But this was not one of them, apparently.

I feel like I just stumbled into the middle of a Craigslist meeting gone wrong. I sure hope the guy found Karen’s correct number.

Then again I don’t know many single black men. Do you think he’d be my friend?

Rough Edges

Speaking of the microphone on the Apple earbuds, there is one design change I would put to them: lose the hard edges. Just give the mic a tapered top and bottom. Because right now whenever I’m walking somewhere while listening to my iPhone, the edge of the mic constantly catches on the collar of my jacket, tugging at my ear.

Apple of my Ear

For all their faults, Apple’s stock earbuds are the most comfortable audio devices to ever grace my aural canal. I never thought an ear bud could be that comfortable – all through the Walkman years of the 80’s and 90’s I resisted anything that went into the ear, which makes it difficult to listen to music while riding a bike, let me tell you (they didn’t have those cool wrap-around-the-back-of-the-head ones then).

The first earbuds I used for any amount of time were the ones that came with my first-generation iPod. They were fine, but just a touch too large, so if they were in for longer than an hour or so, they would meld with my ear, which I didn’t feel while it was happening, but when I took them out, would feel like my ear canal was coming out with them.

And, of course you needed to use the little foam covers which eventually got lost or torn, requiring many replacement pairs.

The ear buds that come with the iPhone, though, are so comfortable that I can (and often do) leave them in all day at work, without even noticing they’re in there. So much so that I’ll accidentally try to scratch (okay, pick) my ear, forgetting that they’re occupied by little white blobs of plastic.

I’ve had my iPhone for a year and a half now, and I’m on at least my third pair of Apple earbuds. During this time I have also tried three kinds of non-Apple earphones (bud, in-ear, on-ear), none of which had the comfort of the Apple buds.

The first pair died because the plastic outer layer of the cord became detatched from the plug end, eventually causing the wires to be exposed and then to tear. I tried staving this off with electrical tape, but the rubber/plastic of the outer casing seems to resist adhesion.

The second pair is still functioning, but they look sadder than a dachshund whose dinner has been given to the cat: the protective sheath on the plug end has disintegrated, and the rubbery rings around the ear buds have completely eroded. I only keep them around as a backup.

I would say that this speaks ill of Apple’s build quality, but I do use these things literally daily, many hours a day. I listen to lots of podcasts, and I like to use them for any phone call longer than thirty seconds. In fact, I’m eagerly awaiting the iPhone 6th Generation that just feeds audio straight into my brain, so I can be constantly connected, with the music gently fading away if a call comes in, or somebody starts talking to me. Then I can dispense with ever having to purchase another headset or car stereo.

The latest generation of ear buds from Apple has a distinctly different feel to the rubber coating. As Gruber noted, it’s more rubbery, and feels more durable. I hope these will last longer than previous ones. But I’m sure that will just reveal the next weak point.

In the middle of this, I also tried some non-Apple headphones, although I didn’t spend too much on them, as I don’t want to blow $100 on headphones and then not use them because they’re uncomfortable.

Let me also preface this by saying that I probably have overly-sensitive ears (not in terms of hearing, but in terms of tolerating foreign objects in them). Just being at the bottom of a 10′ swimming pool is almost too painful for me. I’ve even had to ask a flight attendant to ask the pilot to depressurize the cabin a bit so my head didn’t explode.

I bought a pair of Sony MDR-NC6 Noise-Canceling headphones. They have very good sound, but their noise-canceling ability seems a bit lacking. I did try them on an airplane ride, and they do cancel out some of the engine noise, but in any other environment, it seems like all it’s doing when you flip the switch is boosting the volume.

Also, they are very uncomfortable – the hard speaker is very noticeable underneath the thin foam padding, so I can’t wear them for too long.

Next, I tried a pair of Sennheiser CX 400 in-ear headphones. I really wanted to like these – the noise blocking and bass response is phenomenal. As far as iPhone compatibility goes, they came with an nice short cable, which attached to my Griffin SmartTalk iPhone adapter with built-in mic.

The main problem with these was comfort – I just can’t wear in-ear headphones, my ear canals are way too sensitive. I could only stand to keep these in for a few minutes at a time, no matter which size tip I put on.

I also tried a pair of Sennheiser MX760 ear buds. Like the previous pair, they had a nice short cable which can plug into the Griffin adapter (more on the adapter in a second), but these are bud-style, not in-ear. Sound reproduction was adequate, but I wasn’t expecting perfection at this price point. Again, the problem was comfort. The buds are just too large for my ears, especially when the foam covers are on (which they need to be, because the buds themselves are nasty hard plastic.

I really tried to give these buds a good shot, wearing them whenever possible. But when the Griffin adapter started flaking out, I threw in the towel and went back to the Apple buds.

Even before it crapped out, though, I did find the usability of the short-cord-plus-adapter combination to be inferior to the almost-perfectly placed microphone on the Apple buds. The placement of the Griffin mic required clipping it to my shirt (and the clip was very weak, so it didn’t want to stay put), while the Apple mic just hangs right near my mouth.

I’ve heard good things about the V-Moda Vibe Duo in-ear headphones. I’d like to try them out, but I don’t want to spend $80 on another pair of phones that will just get tossed in a drawer. Does anyone have a pair they wouldn’t mind getting my earwax all over?

WeatherBugs

I’ve been using WeatherBug on my iPhone for a week now, because it gives some more details than the standard Weather app. But lately I’ve been getting these “severe weather” warnings a lot:

Since when is no rain considered an advisory condition? It’s not like I live in a draught zone. We just had rain last week.

The worst part is you can’t get rid of the little number badge on the WeatherBug icon:

And I don’t know if my OCD can handle having that there.

Conspicuous by its Absence

With all the hoopla surrounding the iPhone 3G release on Friday, I think one very important missing feature has gone unnoticed, and one that I’m not sure third-party developers will be able to adequately cover. And it’s one of the most egregious omissions from the iPhone’s repertoire.

Most of the features that were missing from the original iPhone platform had some good reason for their absence. Either they affected battery life (3G, GPS, Flash), or they involved proprietary software (Flash, Java), or it was not obvious how to do in the new Touch user interface (copy/paste), or perhaps they just didn’t get to them in time, but they came in an update (iTunes store, App Store, etc.).

But there’s one feature that was missing from the iPhone, and still is, and yet is on every other phone you can buy today – not just smartphones, mind you, but the crappy “feature” phones you get for free with service.

It’s not that difficult of a feature. It’s been around forever. The iPhone has plenty of power to handle it. And the UI for it would not be a challenge.

I’m talking about Multi-Media Messaging.

We were surprised when it didn’t ship on the original iPhone. But the rest of the package was so lickable that we figured it would come soon in an update.

Here we are, a year after launch (18 months after the original keynote announcement), and it’s not even planned in the big 2.0 software update. This is patently absurd. I’ve got luddite friends who don’t even know how to work an iPod who try to send me pictures of their cat via MMS and I can’t receive them. Don’t think they don’t give me shit about that.

(And don’t tell me that I can go to www.viewmymessage.com to see whatever it is, because I’ve gotten that message twice and it hasn’t worked either time.)

Certainly, when everyone is using an iPhone, or other email-enabled smart phone, this will become less of an issue. But in the real world, 95% of the world has SMS/MMS as the main or only messaging system on their phone.

As I said before, this shouldn’t be technically challenging for Apple. The iPhone already stores, sends and receives pictures (via email, at least), and it has QuickTime player, so attached audio or video files should be playable.

The UI should be fairly straightforward. If you get an MMS in the SMS application, there could be a button or icon to press that would view/play the attachment. I just don’t see the problem.

You may argue that some third-party developer will come up with an MMS application. And well they might. But there are some problems there, too.

First, Apple has created a perfectly good iChat-style SMS application. It should be trivial for them to add MMS capability to it. It would be probably impossible for a third-party to add functionality to that app. They would need to write their own.

Second, I don’t know if the iPhone SDK provides the kind of access to the cell network needed to support SMS/MMS, so it may or may not be possible for a third-party developer to do.

Third, any third-party app would either need to replace the SMS app entirely (like Adium replaces iChat for many people), or work in conjunction somehow. I don’t know if MMS messages come across a different pipe than SMS messages (I don’t think so) so you’d have to be able to specify which app would handle which types of messages, and that seems like a level of configuration that Apple has (rightly) been avoiding with iPhone.

While I’m very happy to get all the updates we’re going to get with v2.0 (I’m not going to rush out and buy a new 3G iPhone) I’m disappointed that I still won’t be able to receive (or send, for that matter) pictures of my friend’s cats. And isn’t that what the mobile Internet is all about?

Withdrawal

I forgot my iPhone today. I just left the house without it. Didn’t even realize it until I got to work.

You never know how much you’ll miss something until it’s gone. These are the ways I missed my iPhone today:

• my right thigh vibrated every so often, like a phantom phone call. To be fair, this has been happening since my days with Nokia phones.
• I finally figured out how to check my voice mail remotely. Of course, I had never changed the password, which means it was still the seven-digit phone number. Talk about insecure.
• I finally won a game of Solitaire on the iPod, since I couldn’t surf the web in the bathroom.

Please, let this never happen again.

Gymtrakker

The process of software development is slow sometimes. Especially when the day job and taking care of the house get in the way.

Having said that, my progress on the Gymtrakker program could be much further along if I hadn’t hit the roadblocks I have.

The last time I wrote about this, I had figured out that the wireless surround speakers had been interfering with my wifi. Soon after I wrote that post, I upgraded my computers to Leopard, which broke my app in several interesting ways.

First of all, Leopard ships with PHP5 instead of PHP4. That took some figuring out.

Then, I realized that not even PHP5 is turned on by default. Easy enough to turn on.

Then I ran into the database problems. PHP5 on Leopard is not compiled with PostgreSQL support, only MySQL.

Which would be fine, since I had written the whole thing to be database-independent* and only had to do a few tweaks to the db interaction layer to fix the entire app, except that I wanted to move my Gymtrakker server to my G5 tower from my MacBook Pro and there was no pre-built binary of MySQL for PowerPC Macs running Leopard. So I built it myself using these instructions.

But it still didn’t work. And no one I know has been able to fix it, so I’m still figuring out what’s going wrong.

(NOTE: I originally drafted this post a few months ago, and still haven’t gotten back to figuring this out. Funny how life gets in the way.)

*I don’t like using the word “agnostic” when it comes to technology, because it’s inaccurate. The true meaning of “agnostic” means “something that we cannot know” from the greek “a” – “without” and “gnostic” – “knowledge”. When used in the religious sense, it truly means “we cannot know whether there is a god or not”. But it has been diluted to mean “I don’t care whether there is a god or not”, and hence in the technological sense, “I don’t care which technology we use.” I disagree with this use of the word, although I agree with the sentiment.