nokia – thomas

three wishes for chandler development

go mobile, in one way or another. connecting to the hub on a mobile device is close, but not cigar. look out for iphone. can the ical app on iphone interact with chandler, ie syncing with the chandler hub? or perhaps a third party application for iphone? it’s difficult though, considering that there already is ical.
learn from claris organizer (which became ical). features such as contacts, ability to attach contacts/appointments into an existing appointment, including the ability to search for associating contacts for a particular appointment. kudos to benjamin wilreker for his innovative contact management in chandler to date.
learn from the calendar in nokia s60: it’s fantastic to have your upcoming appointments and tasks (with alarms) in your pocket, immediately at your sight and editable when you grab your phone.

or is it already too late to pull it all together? not having contributed to the project, i feel uneasy critisizing, but i hope chandler will reach beta status within 2008. at the moment it still hasn’t found its niche, nor is it usable enough.

chandler and mobility

for some years, i’ve been keeping track of chandler, an open source personal information manager. at the moment, it’s on the verge of becoming usable for me. i still miss claris organizer (1, 2), which i used as my calendar until 2001. since 2004 i’ve been using the built-in calendar of the n-gage, and now the n80ie.

i’ll get back to chandler in a moment, but first some points about my current pim.

almost always carrying a device such as the n80ie gives me the possibility to immediately take note of whatever i need to, as well as being reminded of any task or meeting. this alone is enough for me to keep using the n80ie as my main and only pim.
the drawbacks: the calendar is medieval, and i cannot synchronize it with chandler/my computer. i don’t quite like nokia, and i prefer open source, already using linux. also, chandler offer so much more.

there’s no point for me to keep two parallell calendars (chandler & n80ie); i can’t combine the mobility of n80ie with the features of chandler. sheila at the chandler project tells me that there is indeed some movement towards mobility. however, it seems the next step is focused upon notifications to mobile devices, which isn’t enough for me to abandon my current pim. i have to be able to quickly get a view of my calendar anywhere, anytime, and schedule a meeting or whatever on the spot. not even my otherwise valuable eee enables me to do that (too big to fit in my pocket, and too slow to get from shutdown to an open calendar).

the iphone comes with ical, which uses the same standard calendar format .icl, but i’m not sure to what extent it’s reasonable to expect chandler to work along with ical on the iphone specifically. on a larger note, i’m curious to see the prospects of chandler working at all on a mobile device. the openmoko device perhaps, eventually? maybe chandler could go the ubuntu way and develop a specific chandler mobile version, that could be syncronized with the chandler hub?

nokia – new shit in same package.

so i was reading slashdot today, about nokia opposing the ogg format and deeming it “proprietary”. one of the comments nailed my feelings about nokia:

the Nokia of five years ago is probably not the Nokia of today. Where old Nokia was trying to deliver devices to let you do whatever you wanted to do, new Nokia is trying to become a media company and that means is almost certainly joining the dark side.

nokia certainly has changed during the years. i’ll illustrate my point by relating to some of the nokia phones i’ve owned.

nokia 6110: before the millennium, a good piece of mobile phone using the gsm network.

could do text messages and had an alarm. it felt like quite an investment at the time, but its quality was as good as anything. it was a nokia and i took pride in nokia being a finnish company.

nokia n-gage: it’s 2003, and oh my, did nokia fuck up with this device.

aimed at the young and hip, someone at nokia should’ve been fired for thinking that being dumbo is cool.

yet the n-gage had its merits, and in 2004 i bought one. why? beacuse, like the asus eee today, it was cheap and technically advanced. if you felt too cool to bother about looking like dumbo, you got yourself an n-gage at 100euros in 2004, and you could do: web surfing, instant messaging (messenger, icq), email, calendar, ftp, listen and record radio, mp3 player with mmc card and use it as a speaker as well. for a hundred euros. in 2004! in a sense, nokia had never been better. but that’s not because they tried to, but because they fucked up, and were desperate to enter the gaming market. (where they failed, miserably. and as a sign of future decay, nokia later released the n-gageQD – priced the same, better designed, but had poor mp3 support and no radio!!)

nokia n80 internet edition: it’s late 2006 and nokia brags about it’s n-series “computers“. feeling the need to get a faster device with wlan and more pixels, i wait for the n80ie, which promises so much, more than the already existing n80, which, it turns out, has the exact same hardware as the n80ie, and can be upgraded to n80ie later. for this fact alone, i wish nokia burns in hell. not only does the availability date for the “internet edition” constantly postpone, i become hugely disappointed at nokia when the n80ie finally arrives.

the n80ie, selling for 480 euros at the time, is indeed a potent phone. yet it disappoints in so irritating ways. here goes:

no ftp program available, because, nokia has designed the symbian os in a way that newer versions are incompatible with older ones, so the ftp program i had on my n-gage doesn’t work anymore on the newer n80ie.
they disabled the ability to record fm radio. wtf nokia!? that was a huge disappointment, and to me illustrates well the point how nokia has allied not with the device owner, and instead trying to gain more control over the device in order to be able to sell “content” as well. aka as zeroes and ones.
sound recording is limited to 1 minute. [sarcasm]yeah, thank you nokia for being so KIND as to let me record ONE minute! it’s very good to limit the length artificially! [/sarcasm]
built-in memory is way too modest. since nokias web browser can’t do stripped down surfing, it frequently crashes while surfing, most often because of memory shortage. oh, and did i mention symbian os i painstakingly slow? so good luck with restarting the application – or, more often than not, restarting the phone as well. however, it has to be noted that the opera mini delivers instead.
general instability. the n80ie just crashes. it just doesn’t work like it should. it’s software is poorly coded.
general impression of what nokia wants me to do with the phone: [sarcasm] use mms and use OUR excellent “download” service to eventually pay for software that we create. no, nokia, it’s 2007 (2006 when n80 arrived) and you still don’t get it: internet is open, the devices i OWN i want to – OWN – and i’m not a dumbass who’d want to pay money for some shitty “services”.

so in conclusion, nokia just didn’t pay attention to open source and linux but rather thought hey, sms was such a bloody good cash cow for the phone operators, let’s team up with them and make even more money!

and what can you say to that? nokia is a listed company, it tries to make money to its shareholders. yeah whatever, nokia, you still suck badly. kallasvuo suck harder. the “comes with music” that nokia is keen to promote, seems to me it is about to walk the same path as vista. the alternative? linux and the eee.