Quick Takes: Nokia's culture, RIM's interface, and living in the paradigm of engineers

This post is an experiment.  I sometimes run across information that I think is worth sharing, but that doesn't fit into my usual publishing tools.  Generally it'll be something too complicated to tweet, but too simple for one of my usual long blog posts.  I've decided to try compiling those tidbits into an occasional post, which I call "Quick Takes."

Please let me know if you find this useful.

This time I want to talk about the aftermath of the Nokia-Microsoft deal, Android on BlackBerry, wireless insecurity, and WikiLeaks as a model for the future of human society.


More aftershocks from the Nokia-Microsoft deal

In the flood of commentary about Nokia's deal with Microsoft, I ran across three items with interesting perspectives on the deal.  They helped me understand how much work Nokia still needs to do.  If you're interested in the deal, or just in organizational change, I think they're worth checking out...

The engineering-driven culture.  Adam Greenfield, a former Nokia employee, discussed Nokia's culture and explained how it produces wonderful mobile phone devices but poor user experiences (link).  The key sentence:

The value-engineering mindset that’s so crucial to profitability as a commodity trader is fatal as a purveyor of experiences.

When I've written in the past that Nokia needs to learn how to do real product management, this is what I was trying to say.

This is how it feels to have an alliance dumped on you.  Meanwhile, if you want to get a sense of how corporate alliances get built, check out Engadget's interview with Aaron Woodman of Microsoft (link).  Aaron is a Microsoft spokesman and a key player in the Windows Phone team, so you might expect him to know chapter and verse about the plans for the alliance with Nokia.  But he doesn't, and you can feel his discomfort as Engadget tries to pin him down on some details:

Q:  There will be no preferential treatment given to Nokia in terms of the level of customization that they can apply to their devices. Is that correct, or no?
A: So it's an interesting question -- you say, like, preferential treatment, so say more about that. Is that like oh, they can modify...

The reality is that a big corporate alliance is created from the top down.  Senior management negotiates the broad outlines, and then announces the deal (because it's material to both companies and has to be announced to prevent insider trading).  Then the mid-level employees have to painstakingly work out what the agreement actually means.  I believe that's happening as you read this, and that process will probably continue for some months.  Meanwhile, Aaron can't answer most of Engadget's questions because the answers don't yet exist.  I give him a lot of credit for not trying to make up something to make himself sound better.

Anyway, if you see some vagueness from Microsoft and Nokia in the next few months, don't be alarmed.  It's how these things are done.

When is an installed base not an installed base?  I've been delighted to watch the rise of Horace Dediu, a former Nokia employee who has built himself a huge online following through very cogent analysis of Apple, and now the overall mobile market.  Although I usually find myself agreeing with everything he says, I thought he was a bit off base in some recent commentary about Nokia (link).

Dediu plotted the installed base of every mobile platform, and pointed out that Symbian has a far larger installed base than any other mobile platform.  He said Nokia has decided to throw away that installed base:

The disposal of such a large installed base must count among the largest divestitures in technology history and, when coupled with the adoption of the least-tested alternative as a replacement, elevates platform risk-taking to a new level. It may seem bold, but there is a fine line between courage and recklessness.

If all of those Symbian users understood that Symbian was their OS, had purchased applications for it, and felt that Symbian added value to their devices, then Nokia would indeed be taking a huge risk.  But virtually the only people who were even aware of Symbian were the people reading and writing blogs about the mobile industry.

Try this -- go look at a typical Nokia Symbian phone.  What is the brand you see on it?  Start the software, launch some apps.  Do you see the word "Symbian" displayed prominently?

Have you ever seen an ad for Symbian?  A billboard perhaps, or a big glossy ad on the back cover of the Economist?

Maybe a teensy little text ad inside the Economist?  Anything?

Indeed not.  Because Nokia didn't want the name Symbian to be prominent.  Heck, it didn't even let Symbian create its own user interface, let alone advertise its brand.  Nokia made Symbian into anonymous plumbing, because Nokia wanted Nokia to be the brand that users bought.  And considering how things worked out, that was something the company did right.

When I was at Palm and we surveyed mobile phone users, we asked Symbian users what OS was on their phones.  Most of them had no idea.  Among the minority who said they knew what their OS was, more of them thought it was Windows than knew it was Symbian.

Let me say that again, more Symbian users thought they were using Windows than knew they were using Symbian.  I guarantee that hasn't changed in the years since we did our surveys.

So, if Nokia executes its marketing properly, it should be able to flip most Symbian users to Windows Phone easily.  Just grin, tell them it's the cool new Nokia smartphone, and move on.  In that vein, the riskiest thing Nokia has done in the past couple of weeks is play up its deal with Microsoft.  It would have been better to play it down, so Nokia customers wouldn't get a message of disruption.

But I doubt most of them are listening anyway.

If there's anything reckless in the Nokia-Microsoft deal, it's the huge number of things that both companies need to execute very well in order to make it work.  But I think there's nothing reckless about the basic idea of ditching Symbian.


Android apps on BlackBerry?

There have been persistent rumors that RIM is trying to get software that will let its PlayBook tablet run Android apps (link).  Now there's some evidence that they may be looking to do the same on BlackBerry phones as well (link).  This seems like a reasonable thing to do, but I'm astounded that they're only working on it now.  The time to plan the app platform for your tablet is when you're creating the software for it, about a year before it ships.  It's not the sort of thing you dink around with a couple of months before shipment.  And you especially don't tell the public about it right before the hardware launches -- all that does is undercut any chance you had of getting native app development on your platform.


Wireless isn't secure (duh)

This isn't news if you've been paying attention.  For years the security companies have been telling us that wireless networks (especially wifi) can easily be snooped.  I'm not sure why the wireless insecurity story has never gotten much traction outside the beltway.  Maybe we weren't using enough web apps to care, or maybe no one listens to the security companies because they're presumed to be alarmists who just want to charge you $49.95 a year for something that'll make your computer run slow.

Anyway, it seems to me that the story is now popping up all over the place.  In December the Wall Street Journal ran a series on the information collected by mobile apps (link), this week The New York Times ran a story on the third party tools available to hack wifi hotspots (link), and a professor at Rice University posted on the types of data his class could sniff from his Android phone (link).  A surprising find -- two apps unrelated to location services were broadcasting his GPS location.

Why is this significant?  The mobile operators plan to offload traffic to wifi to reduce network congestion.  If those networks turn out to be insecure, the operators might be blamed for security breaches that result.  Or if more wifi networks are restricted due to security fears, the operators might find it harder to do that offloading in the first place.  Bottom line -- it is risky to depend on someone else's infrastructure as part of your core product.


WikiLeaks: Human society as designed by an open source engineer

O'Reilly ran a fascinating review of Inside WikiLeaks, a new book describing how WikiLeaks operates (link).  It reminded me of some thoughts I had after I heard a talk by Ward Cunningham, one of the creators of the wiki (link).

Most of the social structures in the world today were designed by two groups of people, religious leaders and lawyers.  The religious leaders gave us governments based on moral codes and hierarchies; the lawyers gave us governments based on laws, property, and checks and balances.  In both cases, the people creating the system built into it their own worldviews, their own assumptions about human nature.  The assumptions were so fundamental that I think they didn't even realize they were using them; they just baked them into the system.

Wikipedia, WikiLeaks, and movements like them are profoundly new because they attempt to structure society around the social assumptions of a third group of people: engineers.  And not just any engineers, but open source engineers.  That culture believes in the rationality of human beings and the existence of absolute truth.  It assumes that if the same information were available to everyone we'd be able to settle all disputes through logical discourse.  And it is intensely hostile to authority structures, because by definition they're assumed to get in the way of free discussion.

WikiLeaks is an attempt by that culture to restructure society.  I know that sounds crazy, but here's a quote from the book:

In the world we dreamed of, there would be no more bosses or hierarchies, and no one could achieve power by withholding from the others the knowledge needed to act as an equal player.

If you want to see this idea taken to its logical extreme, check out the short story "The Ungoverned" by science fiction author Vernor Vinge (it's online here).  I'm not saying that's the world we're headed for, but I think we'd all be foolish to assume that WikiLeaks will be the last attempt at open source social engineering.

I think it's actually just the beginning.

Nokia: An Excess of Cleverness

I'm looking forward eagerly to Nokia's strategy announcement this week.  Although Nokia is not highly esteemed in the US, most of the rest of the world recognizes it as an enormously important company: a brilliant manufacturer, a symbol of status and affluence in the developing world, and a source of great pride to its many fans in Europe and elsewhere.  If Nokia could combine its strengths with better execution in software and smartphones, it could be a formidable force in the computing industry as a whole, not just in mobile.

In anticipation of the new strategy, I wanted to share a few thoughts on why Nokia has struggled with the intersection of phones and computing, and what it might do to fix the problems. 

A couple of disclosures first:
--Several years ago I did a consulting project for Nokia.  I've also met with them, I have had a lot of briefings from them, and I know several people who work there.  No inside information from any of those sources has gone into this note.
--Before someone posts a comment saying so, yes my views are colored by the place I live, Silicon Valley.  Your paradigm may vary.

As is often the case for big successful companies, I think Nokia's strengths are also its weaknesses:


Strength 1: Nokia focuses very well...which can lead to denial of reality 

Nokia has a very intense, delivery-focused culture that has enabled it to pursue strategies with awesome focus and determination.  Over the years, the company has transformed itself from a paper mill to a rubber boots company to a video monitor company, etc, etc.  I can think of very few modern firms that are capable of that sort of huge transformation.

But I think that same determination has also sometimes enabled Nokia to live in denial of reality.  As an outsider who has dealt with Nokia a lot over the years, the company often comes across to me as the opposite of a learning organization.  Rather than getting inquiry and questions, when you discuss an issue with Nokia you tend to find that there is already an official Nokia answer to it: self-assured, hermetically sealed, and often sounding slightly condescending.

When Nokia was on a roll and executing beautifully, that self-assurance was entirely justified.  As somebody once said, "it's not arrogance if you can do it."  But as the company faltered, I think its belief in its own specialness and power led it to resist making changes that would have happened at most other companies several years ago.  This deepened Nokia's problems.

A quick look at the company's financials tells the story.  In 2006, Nokia was on a roll.  Its revenue was growing nicely, and it had operating profits of about 12% before taxes.  But starting in 2007, Nokia hit a wall.  Its revenue flattened and then fell.  Despite the revenue problem, Nokia held its R&D, marketing, and administrative spending almost steady in Euro terms, increasing them as a percent of revenue.  It's as if Nokia believed four years of revenue stagnation were just a temporary glitch to be endured rather than a fundamental problem that had to be fixed.

(Note: Fiscal years, all figures in $millions.  The numbers above and below were restated from euros to dollars.  I also excluded miscellaneous revenue and expenses, and one-time charges, because they distort the trends.)

To give you an idea of the impact of Nokia's slowdown, here are a couple of comparisons to Apple.


First, revenue...


Yes, Apple is now a bigger company than Nokia in terms of revenue.  That alone is pretty astonishing to me, and I'm sure it irritates the folks at Nokia, since they routinely bristle at this sort of comparison (link).


Here are expenses (R&D, marketing, and administration) as a percent of revenue.  Lower is better.


Apple has done a nice job of holding its expense growth below its revenue growth.


And here's the payoff:  Operating income


Financially, Apple has just plain run away from Nokia.


When Stephen Elop was announced as CEO of Nokia, people made a lot of hay about his background as a Canadian.  I think that was the wrong bit to focus on.  To me, the most important element of Elop's background was the ten years he spent in Silicon Valley.  I wondered what a Silicon Valley guy would think when coming into a company and seeing financials like these.  I believe the reaction would be horror: "Why didn't you people panic back in 2008?"  The accepted wisdom here is that you just don't let expenses stay high through four years of declining revenue.  That lets the problems fester.  Nokia is now a bit like a patient who has delayed routine medical treatment for so long that he ends up in the emergency room needing surgery.

Elop's now-famous memo on Nokia's problems speaks volumes about the company's culture (link).  Assuming the memo is real (I am taking the word of the press on this), Elop likens Nokia's situation to jumping from a burning oil derrick into the North Sea -- where, as anyone in the Nordic countries would know, you can die of hypothermia in minutes. 

What does it say about the employees' resistance to change that the CEO feels he has to be this alarming? 


Strength 2: Nokia manufactures wonderfully...which produces sterile, inartistic smartphones

Nokia is one of the most efficient manufacturing companies on the planet.  Very few western companies have ever withstood an all-out assault by China Inc, but Nokia, a company from high-cost Finland, has also been for years the world's lowest-cost major producer of phones.  Elop's memo says that cost leadership is now under threat, but still it's an unbelievable accomplishment that ought to be studied in every business school worldwide. 

But the same manufacturing-driven culture that turns out great, cheap feature phones by the dozen breaks down when asked to craft an intricate smartphone in which overall system integration is the most important feature.  Nokia designs phones using a manufacturing-like process in which different groups create features in parallel.  So (to make up an example) one group might do the user interface, another the mail app, and another the browser.  That's very efficient for creating lots of phones quickly, but it means it's very difficult to integrate all of the pieces together closely so they produce a great user experience.  The best smartphones, like the iPhone, are designed holistically, with all of the pieces coordinated together.  A product manager controls the process and can enforce compliance with the product vision.  This process is much slower and less efficient than Nokia's, but when you're creating a product with a lot of software, it ensures that everything works together well.

Apple can get away with this less efficient process because it produces one phone at a time.  Nokia has 89 different phone models available currently in Europe (link).


Strength 3: Nokia makes fantastic plans...over and over and over again

Nokia has for decades been able to hire the brightest people from a very bright country, Finland.  After meeting a lot of Nokia employees, I can tell you that it probably has one of the smartest workforces anywhere.  But all that intelligence has produced an analytical culture that breeds complicated plans elaborately fleshed out by committees.  Its history in the last decade is a series of wickedly clever, logical strategies that were so complex and took so long to develop and implement that they were often obsolete before they came to fruition.  It sometimes seems as if Nokia has been crippled by an excess of cleverness.

I'm reminded of a short story by science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke, Superiority.  In it he described a society that lost a war by continually focusing on the new weapons that were about to come out of the labs, rather than mass-producing the ones that it already knew how to build.

To make matters more difficult, Nokia defined almost every major company in computing and telecommunications as its enemy.  At one time or another it has decided that it needed to dominate or defeat Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Google, the entire handset industry, the network equipment suppliers, and of course the mobile operators.  Even the US government tries to fight only two wars at once; Nokia has been fighting at least five.

There are so many examples of Nokia's busted plans that I don't know where to start.  The Symbian adventure, in all of its permutations, is an obvious one.  Nokia has gone through a number of different organizational structures, each of which was supposed to optimize it to compete in the new world of computing and internet.  But the one that sticks out at the moment is Nokia's venture in tablet computing.

Don't get me wrong, I do know the differences between an iPad and an n900.  They are dramatically different devices that reflect profoundly different design philosophies.  But both were designed for a similar high-level goal -- to make computing and web access mobile.  Nokia shipped its product first, more than three years ago.  Apple shipped last year.  Apple is selling seven million units a quarter, while n900 sales are what, a few hundred thousand?  Nice, but not a new industry.  I know Nokia has learned a lot, and has built a lot of infrastructure, but at some point you have to generate revenue rather than just having a great learning experience.


What do you do, Mr. Elop?

I think the biggest challenge facing Stephen Elop is that he needs to preserve the strengths of Nokia even as he undoes their effects.  Expenses have to come down, but at the same time he needs to invest in innovation.  The company must keep its manufacturing strength, even as it adopts a design philosophy that undercuts manufacturing efficiency.  People at Nokia have to be free to innovate independently, but when left to itself the Nokia culture tends to seek consensus and compromise.

I suspect that given all these changes, even motivating the Nokia workforce may become a challenge.  The Nokia people I've talked to love the company and desperately want it to get better.  But nobody could live through the last few years without getting a bit burned out.  Now the CEO says your home is on fire and you need to jump into freezing water.  Would that memo motivate you to work harder, or would it motivate you to work on your resume?  I was discussing the memo with several of my old friends from Apple today, and one of them joked that the message to employees was, "Everybody come to the communication meeting Friday!  Oh, and you might want to pack up your personal belongings and bring them, just in case."  On Friday, Nokia's people will need to see a carrot -- an attractive, plausible vision for the future of the company -- rather than just a stick.

I'll be watching carefully for that vision.  We're hearing rumors that Nokia is planning to shift away from its current operating systems and build on top of Windows Phone 7.  I doubt that's the full story.  For one thing, Nokia can't completely cut off its current software and switch to something else; there would have to be a long transition.  Besides, in the Nokia earnings call last month, Elop dropped some hints about his plans.  He talked about maintaining two platforms, one aimed at the mass market and another at the high end.  He said Nokia's biggest challenge is at the high end, so that's where I would expect a change is most likely.  Elop also went out of his way to praise the QT software layer, so I would be very surprised if it's killed.  If Windows Phone is in Nokia's future, I think we'd see it at the high end, paired with QT.  So we'd get a hybrid OS with Microsoft's plumbing and Nokia APIs. 
   
That would be a bold move, but it's also extremely complicated.  I remember when Palm tried to build its future on Windows Mobile, and gave up in disgust a couple of years later when Microsoft licensed Palm's innovations to other phone companies.  How would Nokia restrain Microsoft from doing the same thing again?  Elop worked at Microsoft, so I'm sure he has some ideas. 
   
Overall, it sounds like a high risk strategy, almost wickedly clever.  Exciting stuff.  And yet I keep remembering how Nokia's other wickedly clever strategies have worked out.

Note:  I've added more commentary on the Nokia announcement here.

Keeping organised with your Nokia

GLOBAL – Being disorganised is SO last year. This year is about getting things in order and being as efficient as possible. For us anyway. That’s why we’ve put together a little guide to how you can make this year a productive one, right from your own mobile phone. Find out how you can get organised with your Nokia, right here. Read on.

We’re hoping last year was a great year for you and we’re here to help you make this year an even better one. With some useful advice and tips on how to make the most of your phones native software, plus some help from the apps that await your attention from Ovi Store.

1. Ovi
Setting up an Ovi account is the best way to get the most of your Nokia phone. Once you’re set up with your free account at Ovi.com, you’re phone is only a few clicks away from any service Nokia have to offer.

2. Email
Pre-installed on all Nokia devices, it goes under the name of Nokia Messaging and it’s the first thing we do when setting up a new phone. With support for Ovi Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Google Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and many other POP/IMAP accounts, as well as corporate accounts using Microsoft Exchange, you’ve got access to ten personal email accounts. Instantly connecting your phone to any/all of your inboxes.

3. Ovi Store
For those apps that aren’t already installed on your phone, it’s the best and quickest way to get apps. Shopping at Ovi Store is as simple as clicking the icon and browsing through through thousands of apps and games.

4. Sticky Notes Touch
No organised person would be complete without Stickynotes. You write little things down and stick them on your wall to remind you to-do something later. Sticky Notes Touch lets you jot down tasks quickly, onto a virtual cork noticeboard.

5. Ovi Maps
Ditch the A-Z or the other route planners you browse on the net before you leave the house. Switch on Ovi Maps on your phone and you’ve got instant navigation – with turn-by-turn directions – to anywhere in the world. For free, forever.

6. Multiple alarms
If you wake up at 5am every morning, bringing yourself to reset that alarm every night is the last thing you want to do. Set up a repeating alarm so that you only need to set it once, leaving the phone to do the boring repetitive bit by itself. Navigate to the Alarm section of your phone, add your new alarm time and choose which days you want the alarm to sound. Job done.

7. Ovi Contacts
Personal data is the number one thing people care about most when something goes wrong with their technology. A phone can be replaced, but the phone numbers held within can be lost forever. Ovi Contacts can grab all the phone contacts from your phone and store them online, forever. Syncing your phone over-the-air with the server from time to time will keep this list up-to-date and keep your contacts safe and sound.

8. Social
Being organised doesn’t just mean being on top of things at work, your social life also needs organising too. You don’t want to forget someones birthday do you? Social keeps you up-to-date with your friends’ activity – through their status updates or tweets – and lets you download events they’ve organised on Facebook right into your phone calendar and comes built-in with new Symbian devices.

9. Quickoffice Pro 6
Do some of your work on the hour-long train journey home, so you can spend some more time playing with the kids or shooting zombies in that new game you’ve got. Whatever you prefer. Quickoffice Pro 6 turns your phone into a portable work desk, enabling you to go through those accounts and finish that presentation for the next morning.

10. Memory Status Touch
After a while and a good few months down-the-line, you might notice you’ve filled all that storage space on your phone with apps, games, music, videos and photos. Memory Status Touch, helps you keep an eye on the memory of your phone so you know when it’s time to do some house-keeping, to remove some of that old content.

Get to know Mobile Documents

GLOBAL – Email delivery to your mobile phone is becoming very popular. Emailing from your phone has plenty of benefits, but what do you do with those emails that are 20MB in size, with some high-res images or 30 page PDFs? Mobile Documents by VISIARC, offers email retrieval, via The Cloud. Read on to find out more.

Emailing on-the-move, via a phone, is a great way of keeping in contact with anybody in the world. Especially if you’re waiting for that important email from work telling you you’ve won that new contract, or something. However – up until now – opening large emails on your Nokia phone has not only been time-consuming, but also costly. Downloading a file of 65 MB, just to find out that the information inside isn’t really relevant, can end up costing you lots of money. So you could log onto a PC and download the files that way, but that’s not always possible when you’re on a train, plain or anywhere else. Mobile Documents opens up your email as a normal email client would, but within the email it’ll show you the attachments all laid out with details of how large the file is, how many pages, the type of document and a thumbnail of the document itself.
Setting up Mobile Documents

First on the agenda is to download the app. This app’s currently in Beta phase, which means it’s still in development but is nearly ready. Beta apps give you the opportunity to play with an app before it goes live, so some changes will be made when it finally graduates. Download from Nokia Beta Labs, or the Ovi Store. We noticed that you have to install the app to the C drive, as installing to E meant the homescreen widget didn’t find Mobile Documents. Install complete, you’ve got the freedom to browse the demo on your phone. We’d recommend you try the demo first as it’s a good way of knowing what the app is all about without setting up your email addresses, that comes later.

Happy with your tutorial and want to continue setting up your email accounts? Go back to the main screen and enter your email address to sign up for the full version, which is still free. During setup, you’ll need to assign your email account with a pin number, for added security, which we think is a good idea.
Homescreen widget setup

Find an empty slot on one of your homescreens and long-press on the screen. Select the plus symbol, scroll to mail and your mailbox will ask you to select which email account you wish to use. Now you’ll notice you have the Mobile Documents logo next to your email address, selecting this will mean all your mail will now run through the Mobile Documents client.
Viewing attachments

If you receive a large email with attachments, open it up and scroll to the bottom to find the attachments. Pressing on one of these attachments will bring up a menu with the options; View, Read, Copy and Download.

View, opens a preview of the document with the ability to flick through the pages from left to right. This is great for selecting what you actually want to view from the document without having to download it first.

Read, transcribes the document for you and gives it to you in the simplest form. If you’ve got a PDF or Word document, Read will give you the text version.

Copy, allows you to copy that file to your clipboard and Download, does what you’d expect. It saves it to to your phone for later use, if you so need it.

One of the great features of Mobile Documents is that you can send any of the attachments you’ve already received, onto somebody else without having to download the file. Because all this data is never actually downloaded in the first place, you’re simply passing the information from the server to the other recipient, this is called Cherry Picking.
Cherry Picking

Open Mobile Documents, select the email account you wish to send an email from if you have more than one, and compose new mail. Start with adding the contact who will receive the email. Next, press the screen below the subject line. This is the box you’ll need to type your message in. Once you’ve typed your message, press Add Att. at the bottom of the screen and it’s here that you can browse any other email – from any email account you’ve set up- and add an attachment straight into your message – without ever downloading it onto your device. Pressing send will send the email instantly, from The Cloud.
Document Support

You’ll be able to retrieve most documents that get sent to your inbox, as there is currently support for a variety of Word documents and image files;
.jpg
.png
.pdf
.doc
.ppt

Currently Mobile Document is available for the Nokia N8. Download it from Ovi Store, or Nokia Beta Labs However, remember as it’s a Beta app, it may be a little rusty around the edges.

Nokia Reader 1.0 beta (Nokia Beta Labs)

A simple and easy-to-use push-enabled RSS reader.

Five health and fitness apps for the new year

GLOBAL – With the Christmas festivities over, it’s time to put away the sherry and throw out those mince pies and start working at reducing that extra weight we’ve put on over the past few weeks. Saying and doing are two different things, though. We’re here to support you through this tough time, with some handy apps that will make the process a little easier to achieve. We’ve got five apps that you’ll want to load up to keep you on track, from Ovi Store.
2011 Resolution Reminder

Making a list of what you want to achieve in your fitness-filled year is the key to success. Without actually really writing it down, it’s all too easy to forget and pretend the six-pack you desire can wait until next year. It’ll never happen. 2011 Resolution Reminder has a really simple interface, pressing + Add resolution does exactly what you would expect. Once you’ve added a couple of things you want to take care of this year, you can now add reminders to them to help you not forget. Pressing the clock item next to one of the listed items lets you set a time and a day to remind you. You can choose every day, just one day a week or just on the weekends, so you’ve got the flexibility to choose when it’s convenient to do that task. Find yourself one week in and feeling proud that you’re sticking to the resolutions? Hit the Share on Facebook button to tell all your friends about it.

Speedhero Football Lite

Kicking a ball with your friends in a park on a Sunday morning is a fun way to burn off some of those unwanted calories. So is just kicking a football as hard as you can. Install Speedhero Football Lite, place your phone on the ground a few feet away from the ball and give yourself a long run up to the ball. Run to the ball and give it the biggest kick you’ve got and this app will give you the top speed of your shot*. Using sound recognition technology, this app listens to the speed of the ball, or more accurately, the sound of the thump as your foot hits it. Clever stuff. This free version offers you ten hits and if you want to continue using it you’ll need to purchase the full version; Speedhero Magical Games, for £8.00.

*Please don’t try this indoors, outdoor use is essential.
Wellness Diary

Having a diary to keep track of your eating habits and exercise routines is a must if you’re to ever truly beat the bulge. Wellness Diary keeps a record of your height, weight, BMI and the types of food you eat in any given day. Most of it you have to manually update, as there’s no way an app can know what you’ve eaten otherwise. The steps counter is something I found useful, as I’ve no idea how many steps I take in a day, apparently the average should be 10,000. Knowing I now take about half of that, generously, leaves me with the desire to walk more. And with it being the easiest type of exercise, we’re sure you would like to start your training-regime with something as simple as walking.

The Vitamin Widget

If you’re trying to cut back on the sweets and want to start eating more fruits or vegetables, you’d probably like to know what are the benefits. This app is a database of most of the common fruit and veg you’re going to see in the supermarket and gives you details on what vitamins they contain. Really quite useful if your trying to control the intake of certain vitamins such as vitamin C, it is flu season after all. The smoothie section of the app is a good little add-on, as it tells you how mix your favourite fruits into near-liquid form for easy consumption. You can even share and upload you own recipes, but you’ll need to create an account for that, which is free.
Sports Tracker

If taking to the streets with running, cycling or roller skating is your thing, Sports Tracker is a great way of logging your workout. Create your profile, select the New workout option and you’ll be taken to the workout page. It’s here you’ll see the clever bits, like distance you’ve travelled, your pace and even a map of your route using the built in GPS on your phone. If you’re fortunate enough to own the Sports Tracker heart rate transmitter, you’ll even be able to keep an eye on your heart rate on the phone while your doing your exercise. Workout complete, you can upload all the training session’s details to the Sports-Tracker.com server or even your friends on Facebook.

Getting started with Nokia Big Screen

Fans and owners of the Nokia N8 will be all too aware of its multimedia capabilities. Taking superb photos, shooting high-def videos and listening to your music library is all very fun on your own, but what if you want to share them with friends? Nokia Big Screen lets other people share your experience, on your TV set. Find out how, and why this is a must-have.

In the olden days, people huddled around a projector to watch slides from somebody’s holiday and it was a whole family affair. These days it’s slightly different. We’ve moved from projector to passing around pieces of paper with photos on them, to – as of late – passing our digital cameras around the room to share our images. Until now that is. Nokia Big Screen allows you to share your holiday snaps with everyone, in one go, at the same time.

Currently residing at Nokia Beta Labs, it’s an experimental app that’s aimed at showcasing the best features of the Nokia N8 and it does that well. Log into Nokia Beta Labs now using your regular Nokia account, download the app and we’ll talk you through it.

Once installed, there’s no need to do anything else on the phone. Find your HDMI adapter from your box (CA-156), lift the cover to the HDMI port on the Nokia N8 and plug in the cable. Plug in a standard HDMI cable into the back of your TV and plug the other end into the CA-156. You’ll see the TV spring to life and within a few seconds you’ll be looking at a menu screen, with thumbnails of your image collection cascading down the screen and the option to select Videos, Music, Photos, About and Exit on the left.

Controlling Nokia Big Screen

Once you’ve plugged in your Nokia N8 to you TV, you’re faced with this new interface and you’ll see at the top of the screen you’ll be notified that your phone is searching for a Bluetooth device. This is where you have the option to connect controllers such as a Bluetooth keyboard or a Wii Remote, as your method of controlling the on-screen features. Connecting via bluetooth is a great way to flick through your phone’s content while sitting back from the comfort of your couch, without feeling tethered to the TV by the cable. Using the navi-pad on the Wii Remote, you navigate through the features. The A button selects whatever you want to select and the B button underneath is your back button.
How to connect the Wii Remote

Attach your Nokia N8 to your TV using the HDMI cable. Wait for the screen to display your phone’s content and the green bar at the top of the page to display “Searching for remote controllers”. Now press and hold buttons 1 and 2 on your Wii Remote, until you see “Connected to Nintendo RVL-CNT-01″ in the green bar at the top of your TV. You’re now set to use the Wii Remote as your controller.

You don’t have to use a Bluetooth controller to use Nokia Big Screen, but it certainly makes browsing content easier. If you choose not to use Bluetooth, the screen on your Nokia N8 will have changed to a very simple controller, with a four-way directional pad, an OK button, back button and a power off key. Very simple to use.

Features

On your TV, you’ll be able to browse through the media stored on your Nokia N8. Using the menu on the left, you can view your Videos or your Photos, in stunning high-definition. Selecting one of these options takes you to a separate page where you can scroll through your snapshots or mini-movies, enabling you to share those holiday moments with anyone who wants to see them.

Selecting Music takes you to your music library in much the same way you’d see it on the device. With the albums – including album art – stacked side-by-side, scrolling from left-to-right lets you painlessly search for your favourite band. Hit play, return to the photos page and browse your images, while still listening to music playing in the background.

Here’s Timo Pääkkönen from Nokia, showing Nokia Big Screen in action.

What we find cool about Nokia Big Screen is that it works on any TV. So that means you can plug into your friends’ TV, your parents’ TV or the widescreen set at the local pub. Should they allow it, of course. Pop the Wii Remote in your bag and you’re set to impress, wherever you are.

Nokia Big Screen is currently available for the Nokia N8 and for the upcoming Nokia E7.

So which were 2010’s Must-Have Apps?

The folk over at Ovi Daily App have, for the second year running, hosted the Must-Have App of the Year Awards. Starting back in December, they asked you to vote for your favourite apps from Ovi Store, in six different categories. Votes came to a close last week and the winners were announced. So in case you hadn’t heard, join us to find out who won.

You could say, last year was Ovi Store’s year. In April, the store was pumping out 1.7 million downloads per day. Downloads continued to rise throughout the months and by December, users were downloading more the 3.5 million pieces of content on a daily basis. So it’s no surprise that Ovi Daily App decided to acknowledge the developers behind the apps and give you the chance to do so too. Voting meant that the most popular items from Ovi Store would get the title of Must have… and you – the voters – would win a Nokia N8 if you guessed all six winners correctly.

So, on to the winners of each category.

Game Apps – Doodle Jump

Playing as a green alien, with what looks like a trumpet for a nose, your aim is to reach the sky and jump as high as you can. Controlling your movements by tilting the phone to the left or the right, make this game a joy to play. Don’t over-tilt though, or the Doodler (that’s the name of the character) will fall off the platforms and your game is over.
Social Networking Apps – Gravity

Mobile phones at their most basic function, are made to help us communicate with other people. Gravity does this really well, in that it lets you join all your Social Network profiles in one place, meaning less time clicking into different apps and more time talking to the people that matter in your life. It has all the features you’d expect to find when using these services online, like photo sharing, status updates, current trends and checking into certain locations.
Music Apps – Shazam

Music lovers rejoice. Never forget that new track you heard during the day. Let you phone listen to it, tell you what it is and even download it straight to your phone through Ovi Music Store. Full track or album details will be saved in the app as Tags so you can come back to them later, to find out the latest tour info on the band.
Utility Apps – JoikuSpot Wifi Hot Spot

Transform your Nokia phone into a WiFi hotspot. Let everybody around you share that generous data plan you’ve been given by the network – or use it for your own laptop when there’s no WiFi. Other phones connect wirelessly to your phone, browse the Internet, costing them nothing. A great example of sharing technology.
Business and Productivity Apps – Mobile Documents

If you’ve got an email account – which you probably have – there will probably come a time where you’ll pick up your phone, open your mailbox and look at the huge document somebody has sent you. How much will it cost to download that 300mb PDF, or how long will it take? Mobile Documents enables you to view your sent documents, without the need of downloading them. It’s cloud-based technology at it’s best.
Entertainment Apps – TouchNote

With the age of digital technology, often comes the demise of the old analogue technology. Sending a postcard is something we used to do when we were kids right? Wrong. Well, still right, but you can continue to send postcards using this app. Take a photo using your camera phone and Touchnote will transform it into a physical card and deliver it to anyone, anywhere. Nice for when you’re travelling the world and can’t wait to get back to upload your photos.

So there we have it. Six apps that have been voted for by their users, winning a great title of Must have… app. Head on over to Ovi Daily App for more details, and don’t forget to let us know what you think of these winning apps.

NB: The Daily App team are still waiting for the winner of the fully-loaded Nokia N8 to claim his/her prize. They’ll be announced as soon as that happens.

Top Ovi Store games and gamers

Proper games on mobile phones have been a godsend for commuters, kids and, well, everyone else, too. But which games have topped the charts on Ovi Store in the latest count? And, more intriguingly perhaps, which countries put the most time into mobile gaming? Hint: I’m British and mostly proud of it, but I’m not sure that the results below represent our finest hour…

The new generation of Symbian devices has seen a real shift in the numbers downloading and playing mobile games, thanks to a better Ovi Store perhaps, but also better games and the graphics acceleration built into the devices. But which are the most popular on the new devices? Here they are, according to the latest figures from the stats-fiends at the Store:

Need for Speed Shift HD
Angry Birds Lite
Marble Maze Classic
Galaxy On Fire
Skiller WallBall
KORa Deluxe (Not available in the UK – is it good?)
Bounce Boing Battle
Cube Touch XXL
Air Hockey Touch – Free
Soccer Bounce

The full version of Rovio’s Angry Birds retains its title as the top paid game.

But what of the top countries for gaming? Well, according to the stats we’ve received, which tracked only Nokia N8 users, it goes like this. These are the countries that downloaded the highest percentage of the total number of games:

UK 13.3 percent
India 10 percent
Italy 7.7 percent
Germany 6.6 percent
China 5.5 percent
Russia 5.2 percent

The UK is in the number one spot for something, for once! But we’re a tiny country compared to most, so I wonder why we’re such big mobile game consumers? My guesses:

We’re relatively well-off, compared to a lot of the world, so more smartphones generally.
We got the Nokia N8 fairly early compared to some countries: the results may change a lot in the coming months.
A lot of us, especially around London, have long, boring commutes on public transport.
Unlimited, flat-rate data contracts are now pretty standard.
According to the information I’ve been able to gather, the UK is already a nation of heavy computer and console gamers.

Any more reasons you can add to the pool? And Indian readers, what’s your excuse?

Moodagent by Syntonetic (Nokia Beta Labs)

Moodagent is an automatic playlist engine that knows your music. To make a playlist all you have to do is set the mood sliders or pick a song and there you have a playlist. An improved version of Moodagent is now trialing at Nokia Beta Labs: http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/moodagent

Is Symbian dead? And if so, who killed it?

"We should declare victory and go home."
--Apocryphal quote attributed to George David Aiken

I hesitate to write anything about Symbian, because it's a great way to get branded a parochial American, or an Apple fanboi, or a "member of the US-protectionistic mobs braying for blood," to paraphrase a comment from a tech discussion forum in the UK this month.

But there's been a huge cloud of smoke and very little light in the recent online discussions of the changes at Symbian. Is Symbian dead? Is it stronger than ever? What's really going on? I wanted to see if I could make sense of the announcements. Besides, there are some important lessons from the Symbian experience, and I'd like to call those out.

Here's my take on what's happened: The business entity called Symbian was originally designed to prevent Microsoft from controlling the mobile OS standard, without having Symbian itself seize control over the mobile phone companies that funded it. In that task it succeeded. However, as a company run by a consortium, Symbian's governance was politicized and inefficient. This left Symbian woefully unequipped to compete with Apple and Google. A different approach was needed, and Nokia's new management has finally come to terms with that. As a result, Symbian as an organization is now defunct, and Symbian as an OS is becoming background infrastructure that has little relevance to the mobile platform wars.


To explain why I reached that conclusion, I have to start with a quick refresher on Symbian's history, for readers who haven't been following it closely...

There are two things named Symbian: Symbian the company and Symbian the OS. Some of the confusion this month was caused by people mixing up the two things. Symbian OS began as EPOC, the operating system used in Psion's handheld devices. EPOC was spun out of Psion in 1998 as a separate company called Symbian, co-owned by Psion and most of the leading mobile phone companies of the day, led by Nokia. The idea was that all of them would use the renamed Symbian OS in their smartphones, enabling them to put up a unified front against Microsoft, which they feared would rule the smartphone market.

Over time Nokia came to be the dominant manufacturer of Symbian OS phones outside of Japan, largely (in my opinion) because the Symbian phones made by other mobile phone companies didn't sell well. Eventually the other mobile phone companies no longer wanted to pay for a joint venture that was mostly just supplying software to Nokia. Linux was gaining momentum as a free, open source mobile OS, so the Symbian partners, led by Nokia, decided in 2008 to convert Symbian OS into an open source project. Nokia hired most of the Symbian engineers, and gave away their code through the foundation.

Symbian the company was replaced by the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit tasked with managing the open source process and encouraging other companies to sign up to use the software. The idea was that Nokia, the other Symbian licensees, and a growing hoard of academics and developers would work on various parts of the OS, contributing back their modified code to the shared base. The move to open source kept some level of engagement from several other mobile phone companies, most notably Samsung and SonyEricsson.

But both companies continued to have poor sales for their Symbian phones, and this fall they announced that they had no further plans to use the OS. That left DoCoMo in Japan as the only other major user of Symbian. Nokia was stuck with an open source foundation that mostly just supplied its own software back to it. That wasn't going to be viable. So earlier this month, Nokia and Symbian announced three significant changes:

--The Symbian Foundation is being dramatically scaled back to "a legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property, such as the Symbian trademark." (link). In other words, it's just a shell. Symbian is now truly Nokia's OS. Nokia will plan, develop, and manage the Symbian code base, and distribute it directly to anyone who still wants it (presumably DoCoMo). You can read a biting commentary on the changes here.

--At the same time, Nokia reaffirmed an announcement it made in October that it is focusing all of its application development support on the Qt software layer that it purchased several years ago (link). Qt will now apparently be Nokia's one and only application layer, deployed on both Symbian and the upcoming MeeGo OS being codeveloped with Intel (link).

--The EU is putting 11 million Euros into a new organization, called Symbeose (which stands for "Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe"), which will help fund the development of advanced Symbian OS features, including asymmetric multiprocessing, dev tools, memory management, image processing, video acceleration, speech to text, mobile payment, multimedia formats, and embedded systems beyond mobile. There are two semi-conflicting explanations of what Symbeose is all about. Some people say it's aimed at turning Symbian into an embedded OS that can run in all sorts of devices (why Europe needs that instead of Linux is unclear to me, but you can hear some discussion of the wrongheaded North American mobile paradigm here). Others say the intent is to resurrect Symbian OS as a smartphone OS used by companies other than Nokia. In a presentation, Symbian Foundation said the investment is intended to "combat mobile device and service homogeneity exemplified by Android and iOS" (link). Apparently taxpayer support is needed because Nokia isn't willing to pay for some infrastructure needed by other phone companies (link). A Symbian Foundation employee explained: "I would say that the main focus of the developments will be advancing existing, as well as building new tools and services relevant for smartphone manufacturing at the beginning of the manufacturing process. We want to make it easier for any manufacturer to take the Symbian codebase and develop new smartphones" (link).


What it means

Symbian isn't dead. It's just irrelevant. After the announcement, Nokia professed its strong support for Symbian OS (link). Nokia has no choice but to support the OS because it's built into the whole middle to top end of the Nokia product line. Given all of the legacy Nokia code written in Symbian OS, the Symbian-based phones still in development, and all of the Nokia development teams who are used to working in Symbian, it would probably take years to flush all of the Symbian code out of Nokia's products even if it wanted to. Symbian at Nokia is kind of like Cobol at IBM -- you're going to go on tasting that particular meal for a long time to come.

But the decision to focus on Qt for applications means that Symbian OS is effectively no longer an app development platform. It's embedded software; the background plumbing that powers Nokia's smartphones (and maybe other embedded systems, if the EU has its way). There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes Symbian irrelevant to most of the folks who talk about mobile technologies online. We don't spend much time online debating which OS kernel a device should use, and that's now the world Symbian lives in. The real competition for developer and smartphone user loyalty in most of the world is now Qt vs. iOS, Android, and RIM. Plus that Windows thing.


What it means for Nokia: Hope. Nokia's app recruitment efforts have been hamstrung for years by what I think was an incoherent software platform story. What should developers write their software on? Symbian native, S60, Silverlight, Qt, Adobe Air, Java...at one time or another Nokia romanced just about every mobile platform on the market. Nokia said that was a strength, but actually it was a sign of indecision and internal conflict. Developers crave predictability; they want to know that the platform they choose today will still be supported five years from now. By flitting from platform to platform like a butterfly, Nokia sent the unintentional signal that developing for it was dangerous.

Many developers did support Nokia anyway, especially in places where the Nokia brand and market share were so dominant that the decision was a no-brainer. But I think their loyalty did a disservice to Nokia in some ways, because it blinded the company to the shortcomings in its developer proposition. When Nokia had trouble recruiting developers in places like Silicon Valley, it seemed to think they were just biased against it. Time and again, I attended Nokia developer events in California where Nokia concentrated on telling people how big its installed base was, and showing off its latest hero device (N97, anyone?). I can see Nokia's logic -- after all, developers in Europe seemed happy. But the reality was that developers in Europe had given it the benefit of the doubt, despite its poor overall proposition.

So the decision to focus on Qt (pronounced "cute," get used to it) is a positive one, in my opinion. This is one of those cases where making any decision is better than the status quo. Qt isn't perfect, but if all of Nokia aligns behind it, any problems in it can be ironed out.

Unfortunately for Nokia, this is just the beginning of the changes it needs to make, rather than the end. Nokia's Qt development tools still reportedly need work (link). And app developers don't just need a coherent technical story, they also need a coherent business story. How do they make money? Although Nokia sells a huge number of Symbian-based smartphones, most of their users seem blissfully unaware that they can add applications. That's why Nokia has a much smaller base of applications than iPhone, even though its customer base is far larger.

To attract more developers, Nokia will need to do a lot of marketing, both in advertising and on the device, to make sure Qt users know they can get apps, and are stimulated to try them out. Nokia has the resources to do this, but once again it'll need consistent and well coordinated execution to make it happen, something that the company has failed to deliver in the past. (For example, spamming people with SMS messages telling them to try other features is probably not the right approach (link).)

To give you an idea of how much ground Nokia needs to make up, Apple iOS has 60 million users and 225,000 applications, a ratio of about 3.75 applications per thousand users. Android is close behind, with 3.5 apps per thousand users. In contrast, Symbian has 390 million users and 7,000 native apps, a ratio of about .02 apps per thousand users. (link). Yes, I know, there are additional Nokia apps written in Java, but that kind of proves the point that Symbian is plumbing rather than a platform.

All of these changes need to be carried out against a backdrop of cost cutting, as Nokia brings its expenses in line with its revenues. One of these days when I get the time I'll write more about Nokia's overall situation, but for now suffice it to say that Nokia is working off the after-effects of several years of growing expenses while revenue was stagnant. Nokia's circumstances aren't quite as bad as the California state budget (if you are in Europe, think Greece), but it's ugly enough to distract from all of the other things the company needs to fix.


What it means for developers: Wait. First, the bad news: The switch to Qt means that current Symbian OS developers who aren't already using Qt will need to rewrite their applications. This is the latest in a series of rewrites that Nokia and Symbian have forced on developers over the years. If they had more developers it probably would be causing a big ruckus right now. The fact that you don't hear a lot of screaming speaks volumes.

The good news is that Nokia may be getting its act together for developers at last. But if I were working on a mobile application today...wait a minute, I am working on a mobile application today. So here's what I'm doing about Nokia: I'm waiting. If Nokia creates a great business proposition for developers and sticks to it, our team would be delighted to support Qt aggressively. Who wouldn't want to sell to a base of 400 million users? But given Nokia's history of whipsawing its developers, we won't take anything for granted. In particular, we want to see if Qt is actually the exclusive development platform for MeeGo, rather than just a secondary option. You've got to show us the consistency, Nokia.


Oh, and ignore Symbeose. I don't know exactly how the Symbeose initiative got started, but to me it looks like the Symbian Foundation lobbied for it for a long time, prior to the recent changes in the Foundation. For the old Foundation, Symbeose made sense, because it was a clever way for a nonprofit to get some OS development done in areas that Nokia didn't care about. But with the Foundation mostly gone, Nokia has no incentive to turn Symbian into a general embedded OS, and in fact it says MeeGo is its OS for use in non-phones. In that situation, I can't picture a lot of other companies committing to build Symbian OS into their products.


Lessons from the Symbian Foundation's demise

I'm seeing a lot of interesting rationalization online about Symbian's fate. For example, Tim Ocock, a former Symbian employee, wrote a fantastic post (link) in which he argues that Symbian was very successful as an OS for phones with PDA features, but was never designed for running browsers and lots of applications. That's a pretty shocking statement, considering how many times I heard Symbian advocates boast about the sophistication of their modern, general purpose OS compared to clunky old PDA-centric Palm OS. Remember, this is a company that until very recently was bragging about its superior implementation of symmetric multiprocessing (link), hardly something you need for a PDA.

But I think Tim is dead-on in most of his analysis. He did a great job of detailing the technical and attitudinal flaws within Symbian itself, so I won't bother repeating them here. Instead, I want to talk about the flaws in Symbian's governance.

Did Symbian fail? The companies that founded Symbian had two goals in mind: to prevent Microsoft from dominating the market for smartphone software, and to prevent Symbian itself from becoming a power that could dictate to the phone companies that funded it. As a result, Symbian's governance structure was designed with a complex system of checks and balances that wouldn't apply to a normal company. To make major decisions, Symbian had to negotiate a consensus among its owners the mobile phone companies, who understood little about the management of a mobile platform and were suspicious of each other and of Symbian itself.

This bureaucratic, highly politicized oversight process repeatedly forced Symbian into blind alleys, and prevented it from doing things that a "normal" OS company would take for granted. When Symbian was founded, there was talk of an eventual IPO. The prospect of an IPO is an important recruitment tool -- it lets you use stock to hire ambitious engineers and managers. But the idea was eventually shot down by the owners; it would have made Symbian too independent.

Crippled by design. Once the threat from Microsoft receded, the owners' second goal for Symbian -- preventing it from competing with them -- seemed to dominate their treatment of Symbian. I'm not saying there was some central evil plan to hamstring Symbian; there wasn't. But everything the company planned to do had to be approved by the handset companies, and on a case by case basis they vetoed the things that sounded threatening to them. Over time, this forced Symbian away from initiatives and features that would cause users and developers to be loyal to the OS rather than the handset.

So Symbian didn't create an app store, and Symbian's developer relations were very confused because Nokia wanted to do a lot of that itself. But the most egregious example was user interface, which Symbian worked on from time to time, but was eventually forced out of by its owners. When I was at Palm, the Symbian project I feared most was "Quartz," the effort to create an icon-driven touchscreen UI for Symbian. Quartz looked very nice, and if it had survived Symbian would have had a dandy iPhone competitor on the market before the iPhone launched. But politics between Symbian's owners forced it completely out of the UI business, and Quartz was spun out into a separate company called UIQ, which went bankrupt in 2009.

You can get more details on the whole sad Quartz saga here.


Quartz circa 2001

An OS without a single consistent user interface is a nightmare for software developers, because they can't write apps that run across the installed base of devices.

Eventually, in the face of all the restrictions, the most ambitious, nonconformist people at Symbian -- the ones who drive innovation in any organization -- seemed to drift away in frustration or were forced out when they irritated the owners. Symbian itself retreated into focusing on technological esoterica like symmetric multiprocessing -- things that didn't really differentiate the platform to users, but that the licensees wouldn't object to.

From one perspective I guess you can say Symbian was a complete success, because it fulfilled the two negatives that its founders wanted: Microsoft didn't dominate mobile software, and Symbian itself didn't exercise any control over its founders.

However, the cumulative effect of the handset companies pursuing their short-term interest was that Symbian was utterly unready to respond when Apple and Google entered the market. I don't think either Nokia or Symbian really understood how the game had changed. Apple designs phones as integrated systems, with the software and hardware tightly coordinated. Nokia could never achieve that level of coordination with an operating system managed through standards committees.

And as for Android, Nokia apparently thought that open sourcing Symbian would create a level playing field with Google's free OS. But I think the structure of the Symbian Foundation made that impossible.

The fatal flaw of the Symbian Foundation. Although Android is a free product, it's supported by a for-profit corporation that has massive resources. The attraction of Android to phone companies isn't just its price, but its safety -- Google stands behind it with marketing and technical support.

In contrast, Symbian Foundation was designed as a rigorously noncommercial institution banned from any business activity. People at the Foundation told me Nokia was adamant about enforcing the ban on commercial activity because it was afraid the tax authorities might rule that the foundation wasn't a nonprofit, endangering the tax credit that Nokia got for donating its Symbian code base.

Most open source companies give away their software in order to make money from some other mechanism -- consulting, or support, or a for-fee version of the same code. Symbian Foundation was banned from making money on any of these activities, meaning it could never become financially self-supporting.

Forget about marketing support; Symbian couldn't even offer enhanced technical support to licensees who were begging to pay for it. That was especially crippling because Symbian OS is notoriously complex and difficult to program (link).

Consider this quote from Tim Ocock's article:

"The difficulty of writing good Symbian code was hugely beneficial to Symbian as a business in the early days. For many years, 80% of Symbian's revenues were earned through consulting for licensees....Symbian’s licensees...each had their own proprietary telephony chipsets that needed to be integrated and their own customisations to the platform in mind....Despite talk of Symbian enabling differentiation, the reality was licensees' budgets were squandered on hardware porting and making the core platform fit for purpose."

Picture yourself as a manager at a handset company, choosing an OS for your smartphone. The Symbian option has no advertising support, requires customization, is hard to program, has few third party consultants to support it, and the company licensing it won't help you do the programming. Meanwhile, Google Android is more modern, is based on Java and Linux so it's easy to find programmers, has lots of support, and has user-friendly features like an app store. Which one seems the safer bet?

How could the Symbian Foundation ever succeed in that situation?

Although people advocating for a "European" mobile OS often complain that Android had unfair financial advantages, the fact is that Symbian was ripe for the picking, a situation that was almost entirely self-inflicted.

The lesson for other tech companies: Open source is not magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on a struggling product to turn it into a winner. Open source is a tactic, not a business strategy. It has to be paired with a business plan that says how you'll make money and drive innovation.


This is the end, my friend, of our elaborate plans

Like an army refighting the last war, Symbian was designed to defeat Windows Mobile, but never came to terms with its new adversaries Apple and Google. There's no shame in that for most of the folks who worked at Symbian; they did the best they could to navigate the politics of Nokia and all the other Symbian licensees. But radical change was necessary. I hope Nokia's Qt strategy will be successful. And I'm sure that Symbian code will continue to serve for years as the underlying technology for millions of Nokia smartphones. But except in the dreams of a few EU officials, Symbian OS is now just legacy plumbing.

It's time to move on.

Nokia N8 torture test [video]

BEIJING, China – Before they’re released to the world, Nokia phones undergo some rather stiff testing to see if they’ll stand up to the wear and tear of everyday life. After the break, you’ll see the heartbreaking sight of a pair of Nokia N8s undergoing the infamous drop test, simulating your phone falling from the height of your shirt pocket onto a hard surface dozens of times.

In addition to the drop test, there’s more than 200 other endurance tests that we put new models through to see if they pass muster. Some of the highlights include:

Extreme weather: We use special machines to expose them to extreme temperatures from around -40°C to +85°C, helping them to withstand conditions from the cold of the arctic circle to the heat of the Sahara desert.
Humidity: We also test for use in tropical and humid parts of the world by placing devices in a special chamber for several weeks where they will experience humidity levels as high as 95%.
Clothing: When we carry devices in our back pockets they may bend when we sit down or rub on trouser fibres. We simulate these effects with special machines that bend and twist the device, and one that uses a real pair of jeans to test friction and wear and tear.
Pockets: Devices are often in bags or pockets with other items like keys or coins, so we place devices in a special “shaker” machine with hard particles to see how resistant they are.
Buttons: People press the main keys on their device an average of 200-300 times every day. To ensure the keypads can respond to this level of use, we press the keys up to one million times in the lab.

As they say on TV, though, don’t try this at home! Extreme endurance tests are not covered by your warranty…

10 Reasons why you should develop for Nokia’s Symbian smartphones

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - I studied Computer Science at University back in the late 90s. Back before smartphones and mobile developing. Back when C++ was the language of the land. Back when development was all done on a PC or UNIX box. Are you surprised I took a vow to never write another line of code ever again? Gosh, I wish I was developer now and not back then. I missed out on all the fun! So here’s my Top Ten reasons why I wish I was developing for Symbian (..and young again and back in college)…

10. Versatility – Which is the only platform that supports devices from the high end, low end, QWERTY keyboard, touch, feature, and smartphones? You guessed it. Symbian. Having just a touch screen is so dull!

9. Ovi Store – Once your app is complete you’ll need a popular store to sell it. How about a store with 2.7 million downloads per day? Or a store where the average consumer downloads 2.6 apps per visit? Or a global store that’s available in 30 languages? How about one billion downloads per year, which is in the same league as our top competitors?

8. Ovi Growth – 2.7 million downloads per day? …That number has doubled in just 9 months. The Ovi Store keeps getting bigger, by the second. 2.6 more people per second to be exact. That’s 200,000 new Ovi accounts per day.

7. Always improving – Symbian is constantly being developed and improved. Some 250 new features were introduced in Symbian^3. With features for the next Symbian^3 release already announced, including split-screen text input, Swype, QWERTY keypad in portrait mode, and an all-new web browser. (It’s coming in early 2011).

6. Future – No binary break. That means your app will be compatible with future devices for many years to come. And when MeeGo comes, your Qt apps will be easy to port over.

5. Symbian and Nokia are #1 – Nokia plans to ship 50 million Symbian^3 devices. That’s a LOT of potential customers. After all, Symbian is the most-used smartphone platform in the world.

4. Languages – Goodbye confusing C++. (how I hated you in college!) Hello Qt, Qt Quick, and HTML 5. Developing for Symbian has never been easier. With a 70% reduction in code, that gives you more time to improve your existing apps, or make new ones.

3. Calling All Innovators – I said I’d give you ten reasons to develop for Symbian, maybe I should have said ten MILLION reasons. The Calling All Innovators competition is giving away $10 million for developers. That’s 17 prizes for $150,000 and two grand prize winners win $250,000 in cash and $1.9 million in Nokia marketing. LIKE!

2. Operator Billing – Trivia time: What’s the credit card penetration in Germany? A low 30 per cent. So for 70 per cent of Germans, operator billing is essential. Ovi Store has operator billing for 99 operators in 29 markets. More trivia: How many different operators have billing for Apple, Blackberry, Android, and Getjar COMBINED?? Just one. Wow. Two out of three users with operator billing options choose it over credit card. And purchases can increase by 13 times compared to when only credit card payment is available. That’s Wow x13.

1. Success Cases – Facts, shmacts, right? How about some real world examples: 70 developers have passed one million downloads on the Ovi Store. Offscreen Technologies have had 45 million downloads in over 200 countries. Digital Chocolate has more than four million games downloads. HeroCraft more than 10 million downloads. Lunaforte six million downloads. Idevio two million downloads. And shortly after their launch on Ovi Store, Shazam doubled the amount of countries they were in from 60 to over 120.

Long Live Symbian

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – You may have seen today that the Symbian Foundation announced it will be ramping down its operational activities and over the next six months will transition into a simple licensing body. I know that this was not an easy decision for the board. A few big companies announced their intention to leave the Foundation recently taking their funding with them. The Foundation was forced to reconsider its future and after a board meeting, decided it could not continue in its present form.

There has been a lot of speculation about Symbian in recent years. Nokia acquired Symbian in 2008 and established the Symbian Foundation, making Symbian available royalty free and in open source. At that time, this was the fairest way to ensure that the huge ecosystem benefitting from Symbian development didn’t lose out. Since then the competitive landscape has changed considerably. With competition comes choice and every company has had to make choices about their software strategy based on their own priorities and capabilities.

Make no mistake, Nokia chooses Symbian.

Do not confuse the endof the Foundation with the end of the Symbian platform. The Foundation has been very important in steering the platform through increasingly challenging waters, but the Foundation and the platform are not the same. Nokia has no intention to change the plans announced on the 21st October to continue to develop and evolve Symbian.

Nokia believes in Symbian because we know that it isthe only platform capable of serving our global audience with a range of devices carrying locally relevant content and services. We also believe that decisions were needed to make Symbian more competitive and attractive to developers. That’s why we announced we would focus on Qt and Qt Quick for application development. Qt is itself a thriving open source framework and already a firm favourite with many developers because of its ability to accelerate the development of rich, visual applications. We will focus on Qt and Qt Quick for our own development for both Symbian and the MeeGo platform, which means that applications developed in Qt for Symbian now will still work on Nokia MeeGo devices in the future (we’re planning 2011 for launch of MeeGo products). Finally, focusing on a single framework means that there will be no break between current and future versions of Symbian on Nokia devices. Anything developed for the latest range of Nokia Symbian smartphones would work on future devices, and importantly, any future developments of the Symbian user experience would benefit users of the recently launched products like the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, recently shipped Nokia C6 or soon to be shipped Nokia E7.

The Foundation’s decision does not in any way slow down our plans for Symbian or Qt. Nokia has already started to focus its own engineering resources on Qt and Qt Quick and we’re busy developing our own applications and services in the framework.

We are grateful to the Foundation and its employees for all they have done to keep Symbian as the the most used global smartphone platform. Now it is time for Nokia to drive where Symbian can go next. The end of the Foundation is the end of an era, but for Symbian, a new era is only just beginning.

– Jo Harlow, SVP, Smartphones

Symbian Exchange and Exhibition 2010 Preview

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – So we’re just a few hours away from “Symbian Exchange and Exhibition”. Or you might call it by its nickname, “SEE 2010″. Or a couple years ago you called it, “The Symbian Smartphone Show”, or in 2003 it was known as the “The Symbian Exposium”, or in 2000 the “Developer Exposition”, or in 1999 the “Developer Conference” or if you’re me, “an excuse to visit Amsterdam”. Jokes and indicisive naming conventions aside, this event has a long, rich history. And of course Nokia Conversations is here at the show to give you the lowdown. But first a preview of what’s to come…

Traditionally held in London, SEE 2010 moves to the serene canals of Amsterdam during November 9th and 10th. The show’s venue, Beurs van Berlage, was originally built as a commodities exchange at the turn of last century. Architect Henrik Petrus Berlage designed it to “reject the styles of the past.” How fitting for an event like SEE 2010. Symbian.org continues, “the venue for SEE 2010 will be an open arena for creators and innovators to engage, exchange, and explore the opportunities that will drive the industry forward”.

Like the openness of Symbian^3, SEE 2010 is open and free to the public. But don’t be mistaken, SEE 2010 is not a tradeshow. It’s a place for the Symbian community to come together, network, converse, share, educate, and hopefully have a little fun as well.

Executive Director of The Symbian Foundation, Tim Holbrow, kicks things off tomorrow at 10am sharp, soon followed by SVP of Smartphones at Nokia, Jo Harlow, who delivers the keynote. Participants can then choose which track they’d like to follow the rest of the day: Application Developer track, Platform Developer track, Business Apps track, and the Business track. There’s also the Symbian Hands on Lab and the Birds of a Feather. And don’t forget the interactive demos going on throughout both days.

Nokia reaffirms commitment to Symbian platform

As Symbian Foundation announces changes, a new era of Symbian development and innovation begins.

Espoo, Finland - Following an announcement by the board of the Symbian Foundation that it will be transitioning from its current operational activities to become a licensing operation only, Nokia today reaffirmed its commitment to the Symbian platform. Nokia plans to continue to invest its own resources in developing Symbian, the world's most widely used smartphone platform, and expects to deliver a strong portfolio of Symbian-based smartphones to people around the world.

"The future of Symbian as a platform does not depend on the existence of the foundation," said Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President, Smartphones, Nokia. "The changes announced by the foundation have no impact on Nokia's Symbian device roadmaps or shipping commitments. The platform powers hundreds of millions of smartphones - including our own - and we expect to deliver ongoing support and innovation benefitting the Symbian ecosystem in the future."

Nokia's recent decision to focus on Qt as its sole application development framework is expected to bring greater efficiency and speed of evolution to the Symbian platform. This approach is aimed at ensuring compatibility for apps with future Symbian platform versions, and enables more frequent updates and upgrades for Nokia smartphones. To take advantage of this ever-growing opportunity, developers can find the tools and support they need through Forum Nokia, and global distribution to Nokia's broad base of smartphones through Ovi Store.

Nokia is the volume market leader in smartphones and the company's commitment to the Symbian platform is unchanged. Nokia smartphones based on the new Symbian platform include the Nokia N8, Nokia C7 and the new Nokia C6-01 which are available now, as well as the upcoming Nokia E7 which is expected to ship before the end of 2010. Nokia expects to sell more than 50 million Symbian^3-based devices.

Nokia at Symbian Exchange and Exposition 2010
Nokia will exhibit and demonstrate its portfolio of Symbian-based smartphones at the annual Symbian Exchange and Exposition (SEE) 2010 event in Amsterdam, Netherlands November 9-10. Nokia's Jo Harlow will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, November 9 at approximately 10:15am CET. For more information on the event, which is hosted for the Symbian community and free to attend, visit http://www.see2010.org/.

Nokia N8 Camera School - #5 Street Photography

Street photography - taking photos of people and crowds - sounds very easy, but there's a certain art to getting it right. Haje shows you how using his Nokia N8.

Nokia further refines development strategy to unify environments for Symbian and MeeGo

Sole focus on Qt framework and support for HTML5 further clarifies platform strategy and enables the continuous evolution of the Symbian experience.

Espoo, Finland - Nokia announces that as of today, greater clarification and simplicity in its developer offering will empower the development community to create applications to reach users across both the Symbian and MeeGo platforms. The decision to focus on Qt as the sole application development framework will ensure that applications will continue to be compatible with future evolutions of Symbian as well as upcoming MeeGo products. In addition, Nokia announces its intent to support HTML5 for development of Web content and applications for both Symbian and MeeGo platforms. To demonstrate its commitment to the new offering, Nokia will develop its own future applications using Qt for a more consistent experience and better integration of applications and services.

Nokia is focusing on Qt as a robust, tried and tested framework that unlocks the hardware, software and service capabilities of the existing Nokia smartphone range as well as creating huge opportunities for future Symbian and MeeGo products. Nokia's introduction of Qt Quick into the Qt framework enables the more rapid creation of rich user interfaces and the most visually engaging applications. In addition, Qt's in-built support for HTML5 complements Nokia's intent to support HTML5 in Web browsers.

One benefit of this simplified approach is that planned and future improvements in Symbian will be developed in Qt and will be compatible with the existing Symbian^3 platform release. This means that Nokia's continued commitment to develop the Symbian platform will benefit not only future users of Symbian-based products, but will result in updates and upgrades for existing Symbian^3 users. The resulting change to a model of continuous evolution replaces the previous release-based model. Nokia will no longer refer to Symbian^3 or Symbian^4. The benefit to consumers will be a constant improvement in the experience of their Symbian-based Nokia products.

Rich Green, CTO of Nokia: "We're making strategic technology decisions that will accelerate our ability to offer the strongest possible opportunity for developers and the richest possible experience for consumers. For developers, it will open up a huge installed customer base for their applications. For consumers, it means a more compelling engagement with their Nokia product in terms of access to the best applications in the marketplace and a constantly improving product experience. We firmly believe that the choices we have made will not only mean significant opportunity and success for our developer partners, but for Nokia as well."

For more information about Qt application development framework including Qt Quick and HTML5 support go to qt.nokia.com/qtquick and qt.nokia.com/HTML5. Developers can start developing with Qt today at www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/.

About Nokia
At Nokia, we are committed to connecting people. We combine advanced technology with personalized services that enable people to stay close to what matters to them. Every day, more than 1.3 billion people connect to one another with a Nokia device - from mobile phones to advanced smartphones and high-performance mobile computers. Today, Nokia is integrating its devices with innovative services through Ovi (www.ovi.com), including music, maps, apps, email and more. Nokia's NAVTEQ is a leader in comprehensive digital mapping and navigation services, while Nokia Siemens Networks provides equipment, services and solutions for communications networks globally.

Nokia N8 is shipping!

EVP of Nokia, Niklas Savander, announces that the first Nokia N8 devices have left the factories in Finland and China and are now making their way around the world.

Interview by Phillip Schwarzmann. Scenes from Nokia factories in Salo, Finland and Beijing, China.

Nokia N8 shipments have started

Espoo, Finland -Nokia's latest entertainment smartphone, the highly anticipated Nokia N8 with Ovi services, has started shipping. Customers who have placed a pre-order for the Nokia N8 in Nokia Online Shops and Nokia retail stores will be the first to receive their Nokia N8. Market availability will vary by country and by operator, with broad availability in the coming weeks.

"With the N8, and the new Symbian software, we are bringing a familiar, faster and more intuitive user experience to the world's most popular smartphone platform. The Nokia N8 has received the highest amount of consumer pre-orders in Nokia history and we are thrilled to start shipments of the N8, the first of Nokia's new Symbian smartphone range," says Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President, Smartphones, Nokia.

"To appeal to today's high-end buyers, smartphones have to be enjoyable, useful and beautiful. Ease of use, excellent multimedia performance and elegant design are all essential elements of the package," says John Delaney, Research Director, IDC.

The first of a series of smartphones based on the new Symbian, the Nokia N8 is fast and easy to use and supports true multitasking, allowing users to run multiple apps simultaneously and switch between them easily. Dubbed the world's best camera phone, the Nokia N8 lets you take the highest quality photos and shoot HD-quality videos in supreme clarity with the 12MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics. You can edit photos and videos on-screen and choose from multiple ways to share them; transfer large files to an external hard-drive with USB-on-the-go, or upload photos to social networks like Facebook, Twitter or RenRen straight from the homescreen. All this is delivered in a robust aluminum body in a range of vibrant colors with a real-glass 3.5" AMOLED display.

The Nokia N8 has a black belt in entertainment. Its WebTV apps from channels like E! Entertainment, National Geographic and CNN and the intuitive music player inject an element of fun into idle moments. Plug the device to the home entertainment center to watch HD-quality videos from the big screen with full Dolby Digital Plus Surround Sound. The latest version of Ovi Store, available first on the Nokia N8, gives easy access to more apps - from social networking services like Foursquare to games like Need for Speed Shift or productivity apps like Tesco in the UK.

Like other Nokia smartphones, the Nokia N8 comes with free Ovi Maps walk & drive navigation in more than 70 countries worldwide, with no hidden costs. The latest beta release of Ovi Maps is also available for download from Nokia Beta Labs for the Nokia N8. It features visibility to public transport in 85 cities around the world, as well as real-time traffic, safety camera alerts, visibility to parking and petrol stations, and speed limit warnings.

About Nokia
At Nokia, we are committed to connecting people. We combine advanced technology with personalized services that enable people to stay close to what matters to them. Every day, more than 1.3 billion people connect to one another with a Nokia device - from mobile phones to advanced smartphones and high-performance mobile computers. Today, Nokia is integrating its devices with innovative services through Ovi (www.ovi.com), including music, maps, apps, email and more. Nokia's NAVTEQ is a leader in comprehensive digital mapping and navigation services, while Nokia Siemens Networks provides equipment, services and solutions for communications networks globally.