It's Only a Flesh Wound - Cuts at Nokia

Jason Lackey

Looks like tough times are continuing to happen for Finnish giant Nokia.

In a Press Release, Nokia announced 330 people (230 in Oulu, Finland and 100 in Copenhagen) from R&D will now have virtually unlimited time to spend with Friends and Family.

Although only 2%, these cuts seem to be in exactly the area where the company really needs to be doubling down in, R&D. Recent high end releases from the company, including the N97 and the N97 mini, have been somewhat disappointing. Time spent with an X6 recently has shown glimmers of hope, but also ample room for improvement. Although signals from the company are mixed, it appears that their future high end offerings will be largely based on Maemo, which shows promise but according to reviews seems most appropriate for early adopters and those willing to pay the price of being on the cutting edge rather than fully finished, nicely polished iPhone territory.

They aren't fully alive!

Jason Lackey

Technology is a wonderful thing and sometimes produces some moments of real hilarity.

AT&T’s rebuttal to recent Verizon attacks, which can be seen here, sadly is not one of them. Rather, it is sad, in a kind of #fail way.

Unlike the Island of Misfit Toys, which manages to hit nostalgic heartstrings and be wickedly evil at the same time, although my neighbor here in cubeville has expressed her unhappiness with the usurpation of her childhood for commercial purposes, one could also argue that the original was more or less a commercial effort anyway.

We digress.

Another piece of comedy was AT&T taking their unhappiness with the whole “There’s a map for that” campaign by means of the court. Sure, this is America and we are the most litigious people in the world but sometimes we pass from the questionable to the absurd and this is one. I would recommend more spending on towers and less on lawyers, a sentiment which seems widely echoed in The Valley and on the blogosphere.

Anyway, this brings me to the quote of the day, which is from the judge who got to hear complaints that AT&T did not like the Misfit Toys spot:

"Most people who are watching TV are semi-catatonic, they're not fully alive." said U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten while commenting on the case.

Classic. Wonderfully classic.

Read more at PC World

Bat out of Espoo

Jason Lackey

Performer Meatloaf has a special place in the hearts of many geeks, as he not only appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the seminal late night B movie, but also hit some chords which cannot help but resonate with degenerate teens, which is to say most of them,k which many of us once were. This resonance hit stride with the album Bat out of Hell and some would say the single Paradise by the Dashboard Light was the very climax.

For those unfamiliar, the tune is about a fellow who pledges his eternal love to a girl he is trying to have his way with parked in a car some dark place. Of course, the fellow later changes his mind and tries to find a way out of his pledge of eternal love and devotion.

Reminds me of Peter Schneider, Head of Marketing for Maemo Devices at Nokia when he said "Symbian and Maemo will continue to co-exist,"

Well, guess that depends on how you define co-exist. For example, if it means that devices in the pipeline will ship with the OS they were originally planned to ship with, then OK, but it looks like the end of the line for Symbian is on the N-series is coming quickly if the Maemo folks can be believed.

Of course I expect that they won't break any promises or forget any vows, but it sure sounds like Nokia may be "praying for the end of time" so they can get on with the future of building world class smartphones which, as we have seen, is going to be a real challenge if they stick with Symbian.

Sadly the company does seem to be sending contradictory and changing messages with regards to its platform strategy. Considering the developer flight from Symbian and the rather steep fall in market share, particularly on the high end, it would seem that Espoo needs to make a choice, clearly communicate that choice and get on with life. Far worse then telling people something they don't want to hear is telling them something that they do want to hear but lying about it.

Espoo, go ahead and sleep on it.

A Clockwork Pink: T-Mobile Kickstarts Sidekick Sales Again

Jason Lackey

After the recent, well publicized failure of the T-Mo/Sidekick/Danger/Microsoft cloud , T-Mobile suspended sales of the popular Sidekick and Sidekick LX advanced featurephones. Understandable move.

Operators want (perhaps need) to be able to control their destinies and one of the best ways to do that is to own and manage the infrastructure that their businesses depend on. Some wireless operators, such as Sprint, have been a bit more optimistic with regards to leaving their fate in the hands of others, but generally the guys who are serious about the subscriber experience want to have all the variables under their immediate and direct control. Of course, in some ways this makes the iPhone a bit of a slippery slope offering (ending in the land of dumb pipes) from the snake in the garden of Eden as so much of the end user experience is controlled by Apple, but then again there are some who would say that for the most part the portions of iPhone end user experience that actually work would be those controlled by Apple and not AT&T, but that is another story.

Which brings us back to T-Mobile. We have seen that Microsoft has been less than a fully trustworthy partner in the mobile space first by the existance of the Pink effort, which effectively betrayed more or less every ally and friend they had amongst the handset makers, timed when faith in WinMo to deliver with 6.5 being a somewhat lame partial reskin and 7.0 delayed until late next year (perhaps far enough in the future to no longer matter, much like the post comet-strike plans of a diplodocus on the Yucatan Peninsula). Then the whole thing was topped off by the final betrayal of their last friend, Sharp, who was going to make the Pink device. An amazing display of self-immolation unlikely to be matched again any time soon.

So, after all this T-Mobile kickstarts sales of the Sidekick devices again. It is certainly nice to see such loyalty in these times, particularly when so much reputation is at stake. I like T-Mobile, they remind me of Virgin or Southwest, a plucky competitor that "gets it" and tries harder. Their support people are great and actually seem to be alive, engaged and care that your phone works. Just somehow I cannot quite purge the scene from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when Alex has booted Dim into the water and feigning the offering of a helping hand to pull the flailing Dim out of the drink, instead slashed his hand with a knife.

Viddy well, droogies, viddy well.

Cupertino, you have a problem! Er, uh, nevermind....

Jason Lackey

Last Friday the 13th, old rabble rouser Om Malik got bored and decided to give the fanbois a stir, which usually makes for an entertaining, if somewhat shrill, Friday afternoon on the web. In his post on GigaOm, one of the cooler blogs out there, Om stuck a stick in the ant hole with statements like "Apple is blowing it" and "....big a disaster as Dell’s DJ MP3 Player" topping it off by making sound earth shatteringly important when Joe Hewitt, once of the Facebook engineers, announced in effect "screw you guys, I'm going home" with his tweet "Time for me to try something new. I've handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I'm onto a new project."

Well, if Apple is blowing it then I would like to blow it too. Big time.

Sure, there are issues with the App Store approval process and the invisible hand of Steve may be more of an iron fist than a velvet glove but at the end of the day the iPhone and the App Store have created more opportunity and greater riches than any other phone ever and things are only going to get better.

One of the guys who used to sit a couple cubicles down, Zvika Ashkenazi, left InnoPath and went on to become an iPhone developer, founding his own company MobileAppLoader, which has been surprisingly successful with early profitability and close to zero startup costs. He is but one of many and one of the reasons that so many have been able to repeat the MobileAppLoader success story is that the Apple App Store brings a mighty large installed base to the table, with close to 27 million devices in the field and that number growing faster every day.

Critical mass has been achieved, the atomic nuclei splitting asunder and spewing forth neutrons in a cascading shower of market dominance. Regardless of how many mobile developer stars, heros and primadonas evil Steve of Cupertino upsets, there will still be more hungry to tap into that lucrative market. Finally, a single place to get your fart apps and ebooks and all sorts of other good stuff. Unlike Ovi, it works. Unlike the Windows Phone annex, there are actually apps in it, unlike the Android shop there are 100,000 choices. Many who dream big would be ecstatic to have "failed" this badly.

So, is the App Store perfect? Of course not, not even close. It has, however, forever changed the game in fundamental ways and has made it easier for more developers to get a bigger piece of more and bigger pies than any other mobile software storefront has - ever. While it sure is fun to complain of the arbitrary, hamfisted and sometimes just wierd behavior of the App Store, it is also important to remember that a lot of the idealist rhetoric we used to read about in Wired Magazine about the power of ones and zeros to uplift and empower is exactly what we have in action at the App Store.

Droid’s Angry Red Eye – An Opportunity Lost?

Jason Lackey

This piece originally appeared on TMCnet.

Well, Sanjay Jha needed to deliver a home run with the Droid, and by all accounts he did. Unlike the past couple years, people are finally talking about Motorola and they are talking about things other than what a fine phone the RAZR was or how the company is bleeding to death in a sea of red ink. Handset news and blog sites have been verging on “all android, all the time”. Verizon has come out with their first memorable ad in recent history (check it out) and finally there are people talking about Moto in something other than funereal tones.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if they haven’t blown it.

Huh?

Yep, I get the feeling that they may have blown the launch and shot too low. Let me explain…

So, I get the angry red cybernetic eye. I like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, gadgets, widgets etc. I also get the stealth fighters and the missile bombardment stuff in the ad. I like bombs and explosions and things that go boom. I am a macho gadget fetish geek and I am their target demographic and they nailed it. My heart is filled with lust for the glowing red eye monster.

The problem is, the person in the next cube over, we’ll call her Sandy, isn’t. As a matter of fact, she is repulsed and turned off by the whole thing. Sandy understands technology and mobile in general better than many of the engineers who build it. She is clueful and “gets it”, but the ads with the “creepy red eye” and all the violence are for her a huge turn off. Personally I would love to see an ad where Kimbo Slice takes on the Get a Mac guy but there are a whole bunch of people who would not.

Early adopters, hardcore geeks and macho techno supremacists are of course interesting folks and they usually want smartphones. They want badass high spec smartphones and are willing to pay for them as well. But if we are really trying to do an iPhone killer, they are not the target to shoot for. The target that the iPhone has so successfully hit is broader - the intelligent person who perhaps didn’t realize that she really wanted a smartphone, but once she has tried an iPhone found herself hooked because suddenly the power of the Internet and a meaningful Appstore was available in a pocket able form factor and it sure was cool. This is not the person who is going to be chasing after geek superiority looking after more CPU - this is the type of person who wants her technology to help her get things done and on this front they have missed the mark.

I guess Droids are from Mars and iPhones from Venus.

Now, how about that cute little green Android, where did he go?

Down at the Old Brick and Mortar

Jason Lackey

I snuck out of the house for a little bit to spend some time down at some Brick and Mortar stores, which is always a fun thing.

In a piece published on TMCnet (available here) I wrote about how I thought that Droid was being pitched wrong and that the Angry Red Eye of Droid was not going to help sell the phone to females. Of course, over the weekend when I was at Best Buy hoping to get my sweaty hands on a live demo machine. While the Best Buy phone guy was trying to get the device activated (guess inputting *228 is harder in some cases than others) one of his coworkers, a young female, heard the word "droid" and scurried over with some excitement to check it out. Exception that proves the rule?

A further exception proving the rule was the quality time I spent with an AT&T Tilt 2, aka the HTC Touch Pro 2.

I have a special fondness in my heart for the original Tilt, which turns out to be an awesome Windows Mobile Demo phone.

The Tilt 2 is without a doubt the finest Windows Mobile device I have ever used. If you have for whatever reason decided that you must have Windows Mobile then the Tilt 2 is not going to disappoint. Big screen, responsive UI even in Touchflow 3D mode and the best mobile keyboard I have used, for those who don't mind a big hunk of technology bouncing around in pocket, this is a fine choice for a phone.

Not perfect, but a solid and well executed example of the breed.

In a way, it is sad to see Windows Mobile finally hit its stride with some of the new 6.5 devices, as it seems to be a platform which has lost its steam and mindshare, sort of like a really bright velociraptor at the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

Then again, all this may be of little relevance. I am increasingly often seeing parents pacify their kids with iPhones and iPod touches. The thing that stands out is that even children find these devices to be intuitive and pleasurable to use. They want them, they like using them and it can be hard to reclaim the device as the child often seems reluctant to give it up.

Now, try that with a nice S60 device and let me know how hard it is to get it back from a 4 year old.