links for 2009-05-31
31 05 2009 Comments : No Comments »Categories : links
In which I eat crow
30 05 2009Sometime after I attempted to buy Twittix from the Ovi Store and blogged about my poor experience with them, @shbib pinged me on Twitter and suggested that the problem actually lay not with Mojosmobile or Twittix, but rather with Ovi Store. Specifically, it seemed that Ovi Store was sending out the wrong version of Twittix (the demo version) to people who had in fact paid for the whole version. More than slightly incredulous how such a thing could happen, I nonetheless did indeed forward my receipt from the Ovi Store to the address suggested and sure enough, 40 minutes later I received a response (on a Saturday, no less!) with the right version attached.
At this point of time, I’m not sure who is at fault: is it Nokia which made a mistake with Ovi Store, or is it Mojosmobile that uploaded the wrong version. What is clear from this event is that a lot more work is needed on Nokia’s part to make the Ovi Store the kind of welcoming, easy to use and universal marketplace that it aspires to be. The steps needed are relatively straightforward, but the time for execution is very short. Let’s see what the new week brings.
Categories : bug, nokia
What future for Symbian?
29 05 2009I was taking a look at the release plans for the next few releases of Symbian, when I started to wonder about the possibility of Symbian becoming a more portable system than it is right now. So I wonder what the answers are to a few questions:
- Can end-users backport whatever release of Symbian is current to an older phone? I’m thinking, in particular of my Nokia N80, which other than being memory challenged and slow, both of which can be rectified by optimization, would be an excellent device to run new releases of Symbian on. Or, can the E71, another phone that has made quite a splash, be upgraded to the latest version of Symbian when it is released?
- Are there any non-technical reasons that Symbian could not be used elsewhere? For example – one of the crazy ideas I had a few years ago was a digital photo frame that ran Symbian; could a manufacturer use Symbian with no restrictions as one might use, say, Linux or BSD?
- How much help will the Symbian Foundation give to these porting efforts? I assume that they have an interest in seeing Symbian everywhere – how will they help to increase the number of platforms that can run Symbian? For example, if I wanted to develop a camera that had WiFi and ran Symbian, would there be hep available to develop such a specialized Symbian release? Could it be updated every six months as new releases of Symbian were developed?
- Related to the above, can Symbian be taken apart, module by module, so I could only take what I wanted? And will the Symbian Foundation develop them to basically run in the absence of any other unrelated modules, or will the release basically be “this is the whole thing, it runs as is, good luck!”
I’m intrigued by the new Symbian, but I find myself wondering what the future of Symbian might be, even as open-source software, since Symbian is now competing with a number of free or close to free mobile operating systems: Android, Moblin, LiMo, and Nokia’s own Maemo come to mind. And we’ve seen how quickly new operating systems like Android have collected applications, while the latest version of Symbian (Nokia’s S60 5th Edition) is still struggling with a shortage of software. This is despite the insular nature of the Android platform which requires significant reworking on the part of developers to run problem free on Android. I’m still hopeful, right now, that Symbian has a long future ahead of it, but as the English say, Symbian lives in interesting times.
Categories : future, nokia, symbian
The egg hatches – Nokia’s Ovi Store
27 05 2009Yesterday was supposed to be Nokia’s big day. After losing market- and mind-share to nimbler, newer competitors like Apple, Research in Motion and Google, yesterday was supposed to be the launch day for Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to RIM’s AppWorld, Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store, as well as Microsoft’s upcoming Skymarket. All of these essentially boil down to something I’ve been saying for a while, starting with my experience with Maemo 4.0: you can build all the potential into the platform from the get-go, but if you don’t provide end-users with an easy way to access the potential through applications (not packages!), there’s no point in building that potential in. So, I woke up yesterday, eager to try out the Ovi Store and, boy… what a day it was.
For the first 16 or so hours, though, I was sure that the Ovi Store was going to fail just because people would give up on trying to use it. After the first 16 hours, I am sure that it will be a modest success, but only if Nokia steps up and monitors the content far more carefully than they have to date. A chronology of my experience is after the break, but the main takeaways thus far:
- Nokia needs to monitor its content more. Far too many fraudulent and bogus applications are making it into the list of applications. Nokia’s reputation is suffering and will continue to suffer as long as Nokia does not play a more active role in removing demo applications masquerading as the real thing. (For example, MojosMobile should be banned from ever putting an application on Ovi Store again.) I, for one, will never purchase another application from Ovi Store again, since I have no guarantee of receiving what I expected and there is no way to request a refund.
- Nokia has done an admirable job of abstracting away the different hardware, screen type and other such issues. I am duly impressed. Some would rather have every single such detail available, but these people are the exception and not the norm, as long as all the applications, whatever the format, end up in the same place, or in a logical place for the application, as appropriate. In fact, the more that this is abstracted away, the better.
- Nokia needs to tweak the UI some. I can’t think of a single reason that I would want to enter letters and other non-numeric characters in my credit card number or security code fields; entering the date was an exercise in madness. Ditto the discoverability of categories.
- Launch day means lots of traffic. Nokia should have better planned the launch day of the Ovi Store and brought far more server capacity online than it had.
But so far, I’m modestly impressed – even in its early days, there looks to be a lot of promise. That’s not to say it was all fun and games though; chronology follows after the break, and it’s mostly negative.
Categories : analysis, annoyances, bug, nokia, review
