Leo Laporte pre-ordered the N900 - is N900 getting some momentum in USA?

I watched the live video feed of Leo Laporte's radio show called The Tech Guy at http://live.twit.tv and I am also following Leo on Twitter.

It seems that the Nokia N900 has now got a new fan that will talk about it in the USA. Yes, Leo mentioned the N900 on his show in the context of Motorola Droid, iPhone and other smart phones. It has been a long long time since Leo has mentioned a Nokia phone in the same context as the iPhone or an Android phone.

Leo also seemed to have pre-order an N900:
http://twitter.com/leolaporte/statuses/5150111906

I told him that I have been really happy with it and Leo's concern was of the N900 is too big. I assured him that this is not the case:
http://twitter.com/leolaporte/statuses/5150207845
http://twitter.com/kypeli/statuses/5150247732

As I stated in the tweet, the N900 is not big in my opinion. The only thing I could say is that it is a bit thicker than, for example, the iPhone but I take a good hardware keyboard anytime for the price of the thickness. And it is not that thick! :)

The N900 is not sluggish my any means if you use it for browsing, email reading, chatting and with a few application open. When you start to have 9+ application open, the transitions from the app switcher will be slower. But it will be fine once the application gets focus again and is fullscreen.

Now let's just hope that Leo has some good words to say about it when he gets his hands on it! :)

A week with the Nokia N900

The Nokia N900 is probably the hottest new mobile device out there right now. I received my N900 a little over a week ago at the Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam. As you probably already know, Nokia was kind enough to give an N900 for a 6 months loan to every summit attendee so we got our N900s well before anyone else. You can only imagine the amazement in the crowd when Vice President of Maemo Devices in Nokia Mr. Ari Jaaksi announced the news in his key note. Nokia just got 300 very happy community member friends!

I was never a fan of the Symbian OS or the S60 UI. Since early 2000 I only used Ericsson or Sony Ericsson phones, which at the time had in my mind superior UI (they still are nice!). I gave the S60 version 5 a bit of a hope since it looked nice when Nokia introduced it at Nokia World 2007. I thought that Nokia finally got it and could compete against the iPhone and others. Sadly Nokia 5800 XPressMusic wasn't up for it, and still the current flagship model Nokia N97 isn't really in the same league as the iPhone with its UI.

Maemo 5 and the N900 are here to change the game. I can honestly say that this is a device that people start to compare next generation smart phones to and the iPhone looks completely outdated compared to the N900[1].

The conversation
If I had to just pick one thing why the N900 blows my mind, it would have to be the conversation metaphor that the device implements as the messaging application. All SMS, and also IM chats, are grouped be person/receiver in a conversation. Yes I know the iPhone does this too, but the implementation is much nicer. The landscape mode is much more natural to read the conversations in. And as the N900 has a physical keyboard, it feels so nice to reply to an SMS by just sliding the keyboard open and start typing!

Related to Conversations, the built in Email client is very good. I can easily setup GMail account, read my emails from it and reply to them. I also use the Mail for Exchange feature for corporate emails. No problems setting up that either and it works like a charm (without a device lock, thanks Maemo!)

The Browser
The web browser has become maybe the single most important application in today's smart phones. No need to repeat that the browser in the N900 is based on the Gecko engine that powers Firefox too so naturally the page rendering is top notch. But the speed is the thing that is overwhelming. Page rendering is so fast that you can't believe it. And it has kinetic scrolling and will scroll the page, as the iPhone does, while the page is loading.

Also the connectivity implementation has been done in good way. You have the option to automatically connect to cellular data if no known WLAN is in range. If a known WLAN network is in range, the N900 will automatically connect to it and use it for any connectivity needs. Now remember how Symbian implements the connectivity thing. Gee!

Multitasking
I know you probably already know about the multitasking in N900. But no N900 review or blog post would be complete without mentioning it. I could not imagine a smart phone again without at least similar multitasking experience. Really, this is how multitasking should work and it works well. I like it a lot and would call it after the browser the N900's killer feature.

The Media player
There are of course two sides to the media player; content and transfer.

iPhone does the transfer pretty nicely with its proprietary protocol (which Apple also defends, which sucks). The N900 has solved this issue with a way cooler, and IMHO bettert, solution. You connect the N900 to any PC in mass storage mode and you are ready to go. You drag the files you want to the device, unhook the device from PC and the meta crawler in Tracker will find, index and extract meta data from your files! It is very fast so as soon as you open the media player all your new files will be visible in the UI.

About content. Well, it plays MP3s and that's about as much as I have tested it. No surprises there :) UI is intuitive, but I won't go in any details about it as you probably can read and see the UI screenshots somewhere else.

But the video playback will blow your mind. The device supports, out of the box, DivX video playback which means that this is the ultimate portable video player! The Tracker will index and extract data from the files and you can watch them right on the device without any conversion needed. Wow! Did I mention that the screen is gorgeous and you won't have any problems watching the videos on the screen.

And you will also be surprised that after I watched 1.5 hours of DivX on the device, it still had 2/3 of its battery power left!

Compared to S60 v. 5.0?
So what about S60 then? No matter how much Nokia would like us to believe that the N97 is their N-series flagship device, this baby will outperform the N97 in every way possible.

The home screen(s) are much more configurable and developing new widgets for the home screen is quite easy if you know C programming (no need to learn a mystical breed of Symbian C++).

The keyboard is superior to the N97. It has so good tactile feedback that I have no problem writing emails with it.

But foremost the UI is intuitive! No more miles deep menus with the features hidden behind some odd Options-button. No more settings hunting behind several applications or setting menus. No more idiotic, useless dialogs ("Are you sure you want to visit this secure web page?" "YES! I just entered the URL myself!" "Are you sure you want to leave the secure web page?" YES!!!"). No more unresponsive icons or scrolling. Gaah, I hate S60 UI.

Final thoughts
This is a very good device. Overall sleekness shows everywhere, the UI is very polished, UX has been given a lot of thought and last but not least, it is very fast and responsive!

Even though I got now one for free for 6 months I would have bought one for myself anyway. And also, after the 6 months are out and I will need to return the device to Nokia I will buy one for myself. I can't find myself using the 5800 XPressMusic phone anymore after this.

This is a game changer in so many ways as the iPhone was. Although people will still continue praising the iPhone over the N900, I can only say that one phone is not for everyone but for true mobile device hard core users, the N900 is the way to go.

[1] "It completely kicks much of the iPhone 3GS experience into touch. It makes the iPhone look like a Fisher Price ‘My First Phone’ with it’s multi-tasking brilliance." - http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2009/10/absolutely-blown-away-by-the-n900.html

Disclaimer: I work with Maemo but not as a Nokia employee. I have not worked with Fremantle in any way nor have I ever owned, extensively used or had the chance to explore the N900 or its UI before Maemo Summit 2009.

Why Nokia 5800 (aka. "Tube") sucks.

...and most of the S60 phones in general.

Ok, so my previous post was a long time ago with high hopes and desires for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. As we all probably already know it is the first touch screen phone by Nokia. I've had mine now for two months and despite my previous post, my high hopes and dreams, I am now going to tell you where, in my opinion, the Nokia 5800 sucks most.

Please note, when I say "sucks most" it doesn't mean that I think Nokia 5800 is a bad phone. It is, after all, the best S60 phone out there. Unfortunately that is not a huge accomplishment after all the even worse S60 phones out there.

• No proper bookmarking for music or podcasts.
  
• No on demand album art download.
  
• Bad response time in the music player control buttons.
  
• No "play all songs from this album/artist/genre/year". You always have to go through the "see all songs of this artist/album/genre/tag". Elementary usability.
  

All in all, this should be a music experience phone. Take an iPod or SonyEricsson W-series phone and put the music player experience from those into the S60 music player. The music player in the 5800 is the same crappy as they have in S60 3.2.

• The browser. The Webkit browser in S60 is just SLOOOOOOOOW to render pages. End of story.
  
• Panning usually doesn't work. This is related to the previous point. While the page is loading, you cannot pan the page. The page loads slowly => usually you cannot pan the page smootly.
  

I would also like to see some quality in basic functionalities:

• The IMAP email client is buggy. It simply won't show me the latest messages from the university IMAP mail server. Cannot figure out what to do next. Maybe the number of messages in the inbox is too great for the client - I don't know. Bad!
• Bluetooth dies usually at least once during my 2h commute to Helsinki by train when I use it as a modem for 3G connectivity. A remove the battery -reboot is required.
  
• A tap on the icons in the main menu doesn't launch the application. The icon indicates that a press was registered on the icon and the vibra tells me also that the phone registered my tap, but the application doesn't launch.
  

Some integration, please?

• Why (oh WHY!?) is this phone not supported by OVI.com?
• Lack of applications. Why does not even Nokia support S60 5.0 in their new beta labs S60 apps?
  

Most of the issues I listed above are more or less usability nagging, but they are annoying in any case. In these times when the iPhone dictates good usability and is basically the benchmark for what users nowadays expect from an UI, it is quite frustrating to get this 10 year old legacy stuff from Symbian. Yes, there are several good usability improvements as well! For example, I like alot the new standby screen and the the new menu structure.

I just hope Nokia will get back into the game with the N97 with even more improvements to the S60 UI - good luck! :)

Is Nokia "Tube" my next phone?

Ok, so the rumors are out: Nokia is about to release its first touch screen phone (in years) with an upgraded, modern S60 user interface. October the 2nd is around the corner so let's wait and see what it holds for us. I still have my SonyEricsson K610i as my main phone and I am looking to upgrade it. But none of the phones have really impressed me so far. I have had my opportunities to play with other Nokia phones, mostly S60 3.1 and 3.2 but I hate the old version of the S60 UI. If Nokia has managed to pull of a decent modern touch based UI, I think Tube has what it takes to replace my SonyEricsson.

Tube's specifications (again, according to rumors) are really impressive; 3.2" touch screen with 640 x 320 pixels, HSDPA connectivity, 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, A-GPS, Wifi and, most importantly for me, a 3.5mm headphone jack. It should also be shipped with a 8 GB memory card and this makes the phone my perfect MP3 player as well. See, I am also looking to replace my current 1GB iPod Nano (1st gen) with something else and I really want to be able to use my phone as an MP3 player as well. But I don't want just an ok MP3 player in my phone - I want an MP3 player in my phone to replace my current one!

Looking at the specs, I really can't understand what the fansboys are whining about that this would "only" be a mid-range phone. Come on! What do you expect from a phone? How is some N96 or N85 any better than Tube, based on the rumors floating on the Internet? Nothing in the specs point to anything mediocre in this phone. True, it looks a bit plastic, but if the build quality overall is good I wont complain.

Overall, Tube is looking quite good, but I am really worried about the UI. I say again; S60 3.2 UI SUCKS big time. Nokia really has to pull this one off and I am sure Nokia feels the burdain. Tube is automatically compared to the iPhone and its slick UI. I really hope the UI in Tube is polished and works well, fast and logically. Then I think Tube will be my next phone.

Whenever it is available in Finland that it. Let's wait and see. Fingers crossed.

Pictures from Maemo Summit 2008 in Berlin

I took a few (could have taken a lot more...) pictures from the Maemo Summit 2008 held in Berlin 19.9.-20.9.2008. You can see them on my Flickr page: http://flickr.com/photos/kypeli/sets/72157607472568981/

Thanks again Maemo and Nokia for giving us a great summit!

Re: Engadget "A few more details confirmed on Nokia's next-gen Internet Tablet"

Engadget calls the photo of "leaked specs" of the upcoming Maemo 5 device from the Maemo Summit as a "spy shot". I can only think that Engadget had to add this make it seem more mysterious.

Engadget, That picture is not a spy shot! I attended the Maemo Summit in Berlin and the summit was open to anyone willing to walk in, without any NDA requirements. I have a photo of the same slide on my camera. Do you want that too? There is nothing in the powerpoint slide that you didn't hear from other sources during the summit or otherwise was already known from OSiM World.

Engadget, check your sources.

My Master's Thesis

Master's Thesis
Originally uploaded by Kypeli

One final time. This time with covers and all :)

P.S. get it here: http://www.johanpaul.com/thesis_johanpaul.pdf