Alan Bradburne

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Symbian/S60 as an end user. It’s consistent, intuitive and it looks good – what more could you wish for from a UI? Sure there are issues (particularly with regard to memory usage), but they can be fixed.

Symbian got lucky by being in the right place at the right time with a good product that they managed to repackage and reposition well. Kudos to the management for taking a big leap of faith and jumping from the PDA to Smartphone market. It obviously paid off, and was a much better transition than either the PalmOS or WinCE move from PDA to mobile.

Now the bad. I kind of get the impression that Symbian was developed by a bunch of old-school British GPO engineers who haven’t really considered the marketplace that they are in. All the engineers I’ve met from Symb are great guys – same goes for the Nokia bods. However, the documentation, developer support and all the other stuff that comes along with being an OS vendor are sorely lacking. There have definitely come a long way in the last 12 months, but there is still a long way to go until they come even close to the MSDN. The S60 blogs are a step in the right direction, but not really vaguely comparable to Channel 9.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that Symbian is now talking about wanting handset vendors to move away from the proprietary OSs and move to Symbian. I’m glad they’ve finally figured this out – I personally think they are dead right. Right now, MS Mobile 5.0 isn’t their biggest competition, Nokia is.

Having received a Nokia 6230i S40 device the other day, I’m more than a little worried about S60. I still find S40 to be stuck somewhere around 1999 in UI terms, however in general day-to-day usefulness for the average non-enterprise user, the phone is good. Very good. Of course, as a total geek, it is simply too limited and closed for me – can I run python on it? No? Dealbreaker :)

However, I’m a geek. Most people are not. The JME implementation is very good. Feels much faster then the 6680 running S60. The screen is brighter (but smaller). It’s smaller and more pocketable and of course, cheaper. Hell, it even has an email client. There’s a not a lot that this phone can’t do as good as a stock 6680.

But of course, that is the point right there – a stock 6680 or N70 stays ‘stock’ for about 2 minutes, right until you have your bluetooth connection set up. The possibilities then become endless. But of course, exactly how many Average Joes and Janes actually do that? For them (and of course, they are by far in the majority), the 6230i is a very very sweet phone. And they are, of course, right.

Right now, S60 has been having tremendous growth rates, but I believe that it’s going to become a harder sell, now as S40, SE’s OS and Motorola’s OS are becoming more and more accomplished.

S60 is unique in the smartphone market that is doesn’t actually feel like a smartphone – it’s just a bloody good phone that happens to be an open platform. They need to capitalise on this right now.

By the sound of this is exactly what they are doing. From the Builder.com article:

In the future, Symbian will be concentrating its efforts, not on defeating Linux or Microsoft, but rather on wooing handset makers away from their proprietary software and spreading the Symbian operating system down towards the lower end of their handset ranges.

...Symbian is working on trimming the costs associated with its operating system including reducing the amount of memory the OS uses and delivering reference designs with semiconductor companies…

Go Symbian! My wife uses S60 because it looks good and is easy to use, not because she can use it as an interactive python development tool.

Symbian is cool exactly because of this. It’s Smartphone for the masses. S60 currently accounts for just over 10% of Nokia’s phone sales. This has the potential to be much much higher. Hell, it has the potential to be 100% if Nokia sees S60 as the true way forward. And that can only mean good things for us developer-folks.

Technorati Tags: mobile, Nokia, S60, Smartphone, Symbian

My buddy, Karl, has finally got around to releasing some of his old movies onto the web.

First up is the delightful ‘No Presents for Paul’.

He’s an incredibly talented filmmaker. This short may not be to everyone’s taste, but all feedback is welcome!

There’s an iPod friendly version too.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, short

BBC has a quick review of Elektroplankton.

If you have a DS and have never experienced Elektroplankton, do so immediately. It is one of the most amazingly cool ways to spend an evening or ten.

Now I just wish they’d release the damn thing in the UK instead of having to rely on import. Seems strange that the BBC review a game that isn’t on sale here. Maybe they know something that we don’t.

So, it wasn't just me... Steve spent waaay too much time on iLife '06. Sure, there's some funky new features, but it felt like something was missing.

Wired has the scoop:

... he tells me the keynote that Jobs gave was not the keynote he had planned. Some of the speech had been cut out. Key products were missing.

My source said there was some stuff, "some very, very cool stuff," that Jobs couldn't unveil because of "supply issues."

"They can't get enough Core Duo (chips)," said my source.

He also said that if he were me, he probably wouldn't order one of the new MacBook Pros.

I asked if there would be MacBook replacements for the 17-inch and 12-inch PowerBooks, but he said, "Oh, it's much cooler than that. Much cooler."

Any guesses?

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, osx

Chemistry.com is Match.com’s latest addition to their product portfolio. As Corante’s Dave Evans asks, why didn’t they add these features to their incredibly successful main product, Match.com?

However, here’s my more immediate beef with it.

I’m trying to create an account.  Every-time I enter a bit of data, it goes through a page-reloading cycle to add another entry drop-down.  OK, their developers have never heard of AJAX, I guess I can forgive them for being a bit web 1.0 (although for a site where you really want people to sign up, it’s not very welcoming). 

However, here’s the really silly bit…  I select ‘United Kingdom/England’.  It goes away and seems to spend an eternity reloading the page.  Eventually, it pops up with a ‘City’ drop down.  This drop down contains 10,156 town names in England.  I’m guessing that’s all of them, from Ab Kettleby (somewhere between Nottingham and Leicester) to Zennor (right on the tip of Cornwall). 

Ten Thousand town names.  And I’m supposed to scroll down and find my town in all of that?  Um, there are better ways, guys.  A nice little bit of javascripty AJAX to do a lookup with a text-field observer, or even something as simple as a postcode.

Technorati Tags: dating, UI, webdesign

Susan Mernit has joined Yahoo! as Senior Director for the Yahoo! Personals product and points out the strange but true reality of the online personals space.

What’s striking about the online personals category, imho, is how “me to” it is—and how distinct it seems from the myspace and facebooks of the world

Is this because people looking to specifically ‘date’ want the extra anonymity that personal sites appear to offer, or that they simply think they will find better matches? 

Dating-site matches are next to useless and I can guarantee that you’ll know a lot more about a person (or at least the persona they wish to project) by spending a few minutes checking out their myspace friends and comments rather than their ‘describe yourself’ section on match.com. 

So who drew the line between these services, and who’s going to be the one to blur that line? ;)

Technorati Tags: dating, personals, socialnetworks

Got my grubby paws on the last iPod remote in the Regent Street Apple Store.  Apparently they had a huge shipment arrive in the morning, all gone by 6pm.  It’s a bit of a cheek to make you yet again for something that you used to get as a freebie (i.e. a remote), but hey, the Reality Distortion Field is in full effect, so I can’t complain.

As Greg points out, they should have added this the radio ‘feature’ a long time ago.  I can’t see myself using the radio a whole lot, except for the occasional R’4 when I’m in the mood, but it’s nice to know it’s there.  I just wanted a remote control.  However, the radio does integrate very well with a nice old school tuning interface. 

Just make sure you go into settings first and change the region to ‘Europe’.  It seems to default to USA, which is a bit silly, since the iPod knows where it comes from.  On the USA setting you’ll not have a lot of fun, scanning doesn’t find anything and the reception is bloody awful.  Works great when you set to Euro.

I didn’t have the previous remote, so I can’t really compare.  I do wish it was shiny shiny like the old one.  Still, the clip is nice and big so clips onto my jacket nice and sturdily, and the remote control does a just fine job of, well, remote controlling, so all is good.  However, why do they waste a couple of quid on another pair of white headphones.  I guess they’ll be heading for ebay, as I want to pickup the inner-ear buds. 

Picked up a Universal Dock too.  Even though it’s just a lump of plastic with a connector, they still manage to do a fine job of creating some lovely packaging.  Sweet.

Who knew it, people really are using mobile browsing. Great to know that people are starting to forgive the us for the whole WAP 1.0 thing. The browsers really are getting better (can’t wait to actually use the new Nokia Webkit-based browser), but as Russell points out,

I personally think there is a massive vacuum right now in mobile-focused web sites. The numbers are clearly showing there’s a growing trend for people to access sites remotely, sites need to really get up to speed in making their existing content more mobile friendly, and to do something innovative and compelling for those mobile browser users who may have different use cases for the information they’re trying to retrieve.

I couldn’t agree more. And in case you haven’t guessed, that vacuum is something we are looking at rather seriously right now ;)

Technorati Tags: mobile, WAP

drool

Technorati Tags: apple, mac

Interesting presentation by Christian Lindholm at MoMoLondon last night. Was good to see the app working (since it won’t install on my 6680 because of lack of memory – see my previous post).

It is a very interesting app, and in many ways, adds exactly the type of functionality that the S60 platform needs to achieve the promise of a real smart phone. iSync only gets you so far.

Also spotted the news that Nokia has agreed to pre-install it on devices.

I find this rather odd and a little worrying. First off, I’m not sure the networks are going to like this. The above article says that AT&T/Cingular are cool with it, but from my experience of networks in the UK, they are currently pretty obsessed about taking their brand, UI ideas and other services (email, calendar etc) through to the mobile. I would have assumed that the same is true for the US carriers.

The other problem for me (apart from not being able to install it, obviously) is concerning its walled-garden idea. Your mobile is totally pwnd by Yahoo!. In some ways this is good, I mean, let’s face it – Yahoo provides some cool and reliable services. However, it uses all proprietary protocols and seems to add certain services by hacking S60. How is this going to co-habitate with other services?

My other slight criticism is of the app’s size. 1.8M download, uncompressed to a 3.6Meg install? Woah. This is an embeded system, guys!

All said, I am looking forward to giving it a try when I can find a phone that it will install on ;)

Technorati Tags: momolondon, Nokia, mobilemonday, Yahoo- technorati tags end ->

What were they thinking? I couldn’t agree more with Brand Infection. It’s bland, generic and invokes no emotion.

I’m not an everything-new-is-bad person, but come on, look at that old logo – it’s beautiful. One of the really great logo designs.

Great tip on the Proectionist tumblelog: use any? instead of !empty? D’oh. How did I miss the ‘any?’ – I guess I’m not alone though!

Technorati Tags: ruby, RubyOnRails

To counter the rant, some congrats and praise is in order for TextMate. 15 months old and a v1.5 release to celebrate. I use it constantly and any other editor seems so damn primitive after living in TM for a while. When I first moved the Mac, I was shocked to find the BBEdit was the best they had. No offence, BareBones, but I couldn’t stand it. Far too OS9-y and stupidly expensive (I believe it’s cheaper now, but still far too expensive). SubEthaEdit worked for a while, but TM was a breath of fresh air. I just fit with my brain straight away. Also major props for the level of support.

Congrats MacroMates. Great to hear that it’s paid off too. Looking forward to the next 15 months of constant improvements.

Technorati Tags: mac, osx, TextMate

<rant>
I really like Orange- both as a very-long-term customer and as a developer. There’s some great people there and they really get it, but their stupid stupid stupid homescreen on the Nokia 6680 renders the phone useless. I’ve ranted elsewhere so I don’t want to go over it again, but Yahoo release their cool new Yahoo! Go and won’t install since there’s no memory left of the device, due to the stupid homescreen eating up all memory. From a clean reboot, there’s often not enough memory to take a photo. Reading a new message takes 7 clicks (instead of 1 with the standard Series 60 interface). Aarrrrgghhhh.
</rant>

Technorati Tags: 6680, mobile, Nokia, Orange, Yahoo- technorati tags end ->

A $20 with a Del Monte sticker underneath the serial number is expected to sell for $20,000.  That’s a pretty good markup!

BBC News have picked up the story of the filling-up of the million dollar homepage.

Great to read a bit of background about Alex Tew.  Fantastic idea at exactly the right time.  Great work, Alex.  These are interesting times – a lot more interesting than that previous little bubble.  This time, we actually have real users and the ‘net (and of course, mobile) are truly important parts of people’s lives.

Boku no Watashi no Katamari Damacy (aka. PSP Katamari Damacy) rocks.

Really.

I’m missing the amusing king’s-speech humour (my Japanese isn’t that good), but it still rocks. It’s almost a perfect evolution of the classic video game. Sure, we’re got FPSs, RPGs and all these fancy next gen thingamybobs, but this is just pure gaming goodness.

My PSP has never had so much attention.

Technorati Tags: katamari, psp, games

Macromedia have updated their list of Flash Lite supported handsets. It’s growing rapidly. Let’s hope this trend continues, especially now as Flash Lite 2.0 is out.

After playing with FL1.1 and now reading about and looking forward to starting with 2.0, I think the 2.0 release (and hopefully, lots of embedding in phones) is going to push it much more into the big time. The lack of persistent storage and having to write quirky server-side APIs for 1.1 has kept it out of everyday use for me. But 2.0 changes all this. Got some big plans… Lets hope this beings some sense to the mobile app and game development market. JME’s lack of consistency across devices costs us all too much time, and FL2.0 happily covers most typical JME apps (for me, at least) and let’s face it, development timescales between the two platforms are, um, a little different.

Come on MacroAdobeMedia, get those handset makers sold on it!

News via Alessandro.

Technorati Tags: FlashLite, mobile

Living in the UK is a ‘Geographic Failure’? Ouch.

I’m back at the keys, tap-tap-tapping away at the code. 

Holidays were great.  Too much food, too much alcohol, so exactly as it should be :)

Seemed to watch a ton of movies, so here’s my reviews in a nutshell…

Narnia (@cinema) : great fun, brought back loads of childhood memories.  Yeah, there’s the whole weird preachy religious thing going on, but I loved the books as a kid, and this was a fantastic visualisation.

King Kong (@cinema) : Woah.  Jaw dropping.  I think David Weinberger hit the nail on the head, it ‘defines what it means to get your money’s worth’.  Incredible.  I really hope it gets the LotR-type-DVD treatment.  Fantastic entertainment, and besides, who doesn’t want to watch the delicious Naomi Watts for a few hours?

March of the Penguins (@cinema) : Incredible.  Unlike DW, I could have sat through another hour – it was just so fascinating and amazing to watch.  Gorgeous cinematography.  Can’t wait for the DVD w/extras.  Want to see more!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (on DVD) : OK, I’ve seen it before, but it really was one of my favourite movies of ‘05.  Awesome production design and Depp simply rocks.  Just as much fun second time around.  And probably 3rd and 4th times too.  Love it.

Toy Story 2 (on TV) : I know I saw it the first time around, but I’d forgotten most of it.  Perfect for that full-of-turkey afternoon, supping on more wine.  Pixar have done no wrong so far, I really hope they don’t screw it up with Cars – it looks so, well, bleugh so far.

Doctor Who Xmas Day episode (on TV, obviosuly) : Woo!  David Tennant was perfect.  I thought Christopher Eccleston was awesome and was a bit worried since I’ve never seen DT in action, but he really worked it – another great Doctor.

OK, I think I’ve had my blockbuster fill for the next few months.  I’ve got a pile of artsy-farsty French movies here that I’m dying to watch next.

Technorati Tags: KingKong, movies, narnia