Author: Martin

When I see one of my non-tech friends having bought a new mobile I always ask them a lot of questions about their new toy to figure out what works and what doesn't. Recently, one of my friends bought a Nokia N78, following my advice, as he wanted to have a nice phone, a good camera and mobile Internet connectivity. Also following my advice, he installed OperaMini, all by himself, I might add, and has figured out how to use the built in Wi-Fi to browse the web at home. Not bad I would say. But here are a some basic things he has not figured out by himself:

• Multitasking: He always used the 'red' button to end an application instead of the Symbian menu button. When I showed him he was very surprised and asked me how he could have known this. Right, how could he have known this!? But he was very happy about it because he immediately saw the value of just sending the browser and other applications to the background and returning to it later.

• GPS: He wasn't aware that GPS is only working outdoors. Therefore he was not sure if his GPS was working or not and a bit displeased with Nokia Maps for not showing him were he was. At least, the APN for the A-GPS was configured automatically so if he had tried it outdoors it would have worked. Maybe a notice when starting up Nokia Maps for the first couple of times to try it outdoors would help.

• E-Mail configuration: He asked me if he could also receive is personal e-mail on the phone. Sure you can I said, let's configure it together next time we see each other and you have all the required configuration information (pop, smtp server, etc.) Hm, the right answer would have been: Sure no problem, just type in your e-mail address and password and the phone figures out the rest. To this end, I think Nokia has made great progress already, as it worked pretty much like that on the Nokia 5000 when I was tested that device a while ago.

• Idle screen configuration: To start OperaMini he always went to the menu, selected applications and scrolled down to the OperaMini icon instead of putting it as a small icon on the idle screen for fast selection.

If I remember right, Nseries mobiles have a kind of "First Steps" application to inform new users about the capabilities of the device and maybe to teach them some tricks. However, I don't have it on my own device I must have probably deleted it. In any case, he did not use it, not sure why. So it might help to put that application into a more promiment place, add some more basic tips and tricks and maybe to ask the first couple of device startups if the application should be started. Or how about a discovery mode where tips&tricks are shown until the user turns it off? For the moment, I've sent him this link for further advice.

I last checked the Flickr camera statistics back in January 2008 and at the time, the Nokia N95 was the most used camera phone from which pictures were sent to Flickr, with the iPhone in hot pursuit. At some point in 2008, however, the iPhone has clearly surpassed the N95. While the graphs don't show absolute numbers the manufacturer statistics do and it's worth taking a look:

• From the Nokia N95, about 1100 users upload pictures daily. Whether that is directly from the phone or via a PC can't be seen. When taking the numbers of all Nokia models together, there are about 3500 users uploading pictures daily. The total number of pictures uploaded with the N95 is around 3.6 million.

• From iPhones (Flickr does not distinguish different models), there are about 3000 users that are uploading pictures daily. Again, it's not distinguishable if this is directly from the phone or via a PC. The total number of pictures taken with an iPhone and stored on Flickr is around 6 million these days.

Now let's compare that with the most popular non mobile phone camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XTi DSLR:

• From the Canon Digital Rebel XTi, there are about 6800 users that are uploading pictures daily. The total number of pictures on Flickr from that camera are 51 million, and one should probably also add the 60 million pictures taken with the Digital Rebel XT.

Sounds like a lot more!

But then, when looking at point and shoot cameras from Sony, Panasonic, Canon, etc., the picture once again changes a bit. Even the Sony Cybershot DSC-W55 has 'only'  770 users uploading pictures daily. In all fairness, one should add the number of users uploading pictures for the other leading Sony cameras in the statistic and then compare that with the N95 and the iPhone. The numbers become quite equal then.

And again from a different perspective: When looking at 'all brands' sorted by most popular brands, Nokia is in 9th place, Sony Ericsson in 10th, and Apple beyond 30. Unfortunately, the statistics don't take into account how long a model has already been on the market (a disadvantage for Apple I suppose) and it's also not stated over which timeframe the numbers were summed up. It would be interesting to see the statistics over all cameras for 2008 only, I think they would look quite different. For the moment, however, I would say that 'stand alone' cameras are still more popular than mobile phones for pictures uploads to Flickr. Let's see how the statistics look a bit later in the year.

As a follow up to yesterday's post on touch I've been wondering if Java programs have any means today to make full use of a touch screen with existing JSRs available on mobile devices or if support of a new JSR is required for that? I've been browsing a bit trough the list of APIs of the Nokia 5800, but as a non-Java developer it doesn't tell me a lot. It would be good if programs such as OperaMini that are used on devices of a great number of different manufacturers would have the possibility of using a standardized API. Anyone out there aware of what is (already) available/possible?

Lately, I've had the opportunity to experiment a bit with a Samsung F480, also known as the Toco, one of Samsung's touch screen phones. At a price point of 300 euros without a contract one would expect it to be a smartphone, as devices such as the Nokia N78 are available for less these days. However, it is not. Instead, it's a classic mid-range phone with a touch screen, so a bit pricey for it's capabilities.

That said, however, I found the touch screen implementation to be very good, intuitive and easy to use. A well done device that will surely find it's customers. After having gotten used to the large screen and big icons, it takes a minute to adapting again to the comparatively small screen of the N78. Many people will feel the same when taking the decision in a shop for which phone to go so this is a big advantage for touch phones in general.

When I look around in the metro these days I see a lot of touch based phones and mobile devices in the hands of non-geeks. Quite a rapid adoption in less than a year. The F480's touch interface can be used with one hand only, something that I think is very useful in crowded places such as the metro.

I guess what many people find appealing about touch user interfaces apart from the bigger screen sizes is the missing indirection from what they see to what they press. You want to launch the calendar application, you simply click on it instead of using the D-pad at the other end of the phone to first scroll through the icon list to select it. It's straight forward.

So where is Nokia with touch phones these days? There is the Nokia 5800 but it is still not generally available in December 2008, so Samsung, LG and others have a considerable advantage for the moment. I guess it has something to do with Nokia implementing the touch interface in their high end S60 smart phone OS, i.e. the task takes considerably more time than for a mid-range phones with a limited amount of software on it. There's a good review by Rafe Blandford of the 5800 and he comes to a similar conclusion.

In addition, what makes a smartphone powerful is the number of third party applications. While most current applications will run on a touch enabled S60 device they can't take advantage of the touch based UI unless they are adapted. Take OperaMini for example which is strongly keypad/shortcut based. For efficient use on a touch device a separate touch version needs to be developed so zooming, scrolling and selecting commands and options works via the touch interface as well. Many software developers won't be too happy about developing yet one more version / input method. 

The first N-series touched based device, the N97, is still at least 6 to 9 months out. That's a long time to wait. But it seems there are not many alternatives for me at this time. The iPhone is too restrictive, Windows Mobile based touch devices only seem to have a touch layer for use with fingers in the front with most applications in the back still being stylus based. And also, OperaMini is not yet touch based… Still too many obstacles for the moment.

Recently, Vodafone Germany's boss is quoted (in Germany) saying that Vodafone Germany currently spends a middle three digit million sum a year on power for its mobile networks in Germany. Interesting, so let's break that number down a bit.

Let's assume that Vodafone's yearly power bill for their complete GSM and UMTS networks is 400 million euros and that their DSL assets are not included. I am not certain of the later one but there's no telling if that is the case or not and how much power their DSL lines use. Let's further speculate that around 25 million people in Germany are using their network today (not SIM cards!). 400 million euros / 12 months / 25 million people = 1.3 euros per person per month.

I'd say their revenue per person (i.e. not ARPU per SIM card) is around 15 euros, which is probably on the conservative side. So around 8-10% of that is spent on power.

At a rate of 0.2 euros per kW/h, that means I 'personally' use about 6.5 kWh of power a month for mobile telephony and mobile Internet access. An interesting number, that is a bit higher than the 1.4 kWh that resulted from a calculation in this previous post. In the previous post however, a global average was given which did not take into account that in most European countries, most network operators have both a GSM and a UMTS network, thus doubling power consumption compared to countries which only have GSM networks. Also, networks are much more heavily used per person in industrialized countries, which again increases the power consumption per person as more base stations are required. For the total power use for my mobile activities one has to of course also add the power for recharging the mobile phone and to a certain extent also the power consumption of my notebook.

It would be an interesting comparison how much power is required for my fixed line DSL and telephony connection at home and in the office. The DSL modem / Wifi access point / DECT phone setup (let's say this is my private fixed line mini base station) consumes at least 15 watts, which amounts to 15 watts * 24 hours * 30 days = 10 kWh a month. In this number, the power requirements of the network behind is not yet included.

While not directly comparable, each of those numbers give an interesting insight into how much power is required per person to drive our information society. Compared to the several hundreds of kwh of power per month consumed per person in Europe, however, the number is not negligible but still quite small.

Looks like I finally found a Google Application to which there is nothing comparable form my use on both notebook and mobile phone: Google Reader for blog reading.

In the past I’ve been using Thunderbird for the purpose but it hasn’t been very practical over time for me since I don’t have a lot of time to read my blog feed on the notebook. So I was falling more and more behind on the feed up to the point when I simply had so many messages that I had to erase the backlog every now and then and start afresh. So I decided to give Google Reader a try because it is both on the desktop and on the mobile. After using it a while I have to say that the experience is great.

Now I can read my feed while commuting and can manage my feed, i.e. insert and remove blogs on the notebook or do some follow up research if required. Perfect! The picture on the left shows how Google Reader looks with Opera Mini. Nokia’s built in browser renders Google Reader in the iPhone version, which is a lot nicer, but since the browser doesn’t have a full page scroll feature it’s not really usable. Too bad but people have been complaining about this missing feature for years now… On the other hand, however, the stripped down version is a lot better for commuting, as more often then not there’s only a 2.5G network available.

Anyway, if you have trouble keeping up with your feed and have some time during your daily commute, Google Reader is the solution for you.