Mr Ollila says that the industry is more competitive but says that Nokia’s track record of overcoming problems in the past would be key to the future. He points to a Lex column from the Financial Times in 1995, which he has kept, that declared Nokia to be at an end.

“This is about making sure you can build in a comeback, or a recovery, after a miss. The strong ones are separated from the weak ones in how they work through these cycles and demonstrate that they can come back.”

Good read and I hope he’s right. Someone else might argue that the best way to thrive is to be like great boxers: agile and able to absorb blows. Nokia might becoming agile now but with declining revenues from Symbian, how do you keep on going until necessary?
Business metaphors aside, let’s see how far €4.9 billion of net cash can take you in this turnaround.

Recently I came across a video of neuroscientist Susan Greenfield that explores just how crucial stories are to our experience of being human. It’s a 41 minutes long video (lots of food for thought) and a similar but shorter version can be found on the BBC website (Susan Greenfield – is the web changing our brains?). The points made in the second video were actually ridiculed in the comments but I personally think that some might be valid issues. The main point was that the sensory “here and now experience” the web is offering might be preventing us from seeing the world in a much deeper or more extensive way.

We definitively process more data, the question is are we more “intelligent”? Actually, my doubts are more about the effects on our  empowerment than our ability to think.

Is it possible that the multimedia experience we have now is so good and overwhelming that it can become an end in itself and not a way of understanding something? Are we really able to develop a critical consciousness if we are continuously overwhelmed by kittens inspired videos from YouTube? “The ancient Greeks first identified the essence of critical consciousness when philosophers encouraged their students to develop an “impulse and willingness to stand back from humanity and nature… [and] to make them objects of thought and criticism, and to search for their meaning and significance”". We have numerous examples of great achievements (e.g. women emancipation) and I believe they started from people’s ability to understand the world in which they lived, their social status and the dynamics of their oppressed condition. I cannot argue that nowadays we have more information but strangely we also need more and more self-help books and catchphrases to understand the meaning of life and how to live.

An example is the recent abuse of the catchphrase “find/follow your passion”. I guess we are able to give a meaning to our life when we get a sense of purpose. However, is fulfilling your purpose merely following your passions? Martin Luther King, Jr. surely said “I have a dream” but I don’t think he meant he wanted to follow his passions with that speech.

I don’t know if this unprecedented change will affect my deep thinking or empowerment but in every way that matters, I am the sum of my memories and I can certainly say that the constant interruption does have an effect on my attention and memory. Actually, I believe it is also affecting my ability to finish reading books, and apparently I am not the only one.

I finally had a minute to think about this but let me write this down before I forget it.

- Reda

Update: I kind friend recommended the following book: “The Shallows”

I hope I will live long enough to see who can walk the talk

Wow, it’s really the end of an era. 11th of Feb 2011 is now the day when Mubarak stepped down and handed over his power to the military of Egypt and the Nokia I know ceases to exists.

What is going to happen in Egypt is unclear whereas the future of Nokia is much more clear unfortunately. What to say that has not been said already everywhere on the web? If you really care about Nokia’s profits and cashflow (in the next few years), then this is perhaps the best choice. If you cared about Nokia like Steve J. cares about Apple, then this is the really a suicide mission (which by the way started years ago, not this year).

In the end, it’s not about the hardware or software, it’s really about a curated experience. Buying a Nokia phone means different things to different people but to me there was always something good about this brand. In the past, Nokia only needed good hardware, a good distribution channel and an after sales organisation to sell its products/experience. Now it’s a different ball game and software is indeed important but a sub-brand of windows does not allow you to control your product as well as your image. Look at the story of SEGA and how they shifted their focus to software only and now the company I grew up with is just a distant memory. As Rovio pointed out, Nokia’s probably beyond saving at this point and it’s very sad.

I hope the web (web apps) will free Nokia like it freed Egypt in 3-4 years time.

After almost a year, I finally decided to buy the N810 and have to say i have a lot of mixed feelings about the device/platform/experience. I know there are already a million posts on this device, but I thought a list of pros and cons will definitely come handy since I am thinking about selling this device already ! Anyway, I’ll keep it short but I’ll try to update this list as much as possible.

My feelings at the moment go from excitement about this ultra-portable and very stylish device to utter fear of having wasted 200£ of my credit-crunched money on a simple digital photo frame. Actually, without any intention to offend anyone working on this platform, the device is such in pity state that nobody even made an application to turn a screensaver on and make the device a very expensive photo frame (you have to use the slideshow of some image viewer to make it so). Why I cannot take a picture and as soon as I’m back home or withing bluetooth range transfer automatically the pictures and have them on a N810 screensaver?

Cons

• Writing with it is quite strange. The keyboard is not as useful as I thought (possibly because of the layout), the word suggestions on the screen become a distraction and there are a lot of missing features that could have been implemented to improve general navigation (e.g. the Benq S6)
• My biggest complain is web navigation because when I try to move the page in any direction I often end up clicking on its links. Also, the resolution makes impossible to click on some links without the stylus and the directional pad is used to move from link to link and not move the page. Why Nokia didn’t use the “opera-mini” approach with some sort of pan-view navigation and read-view for reading and clicking on links is beyond my understanding. Just look at how nice is the the Android browser!!!
• The directional pad would have been perfect to navigate pages with a simple touch but nothing… What’s strange is that Nokia already implements the NaviWheel on some of its mobile phones so why they didn’t implemented it here (not just the rotation gesture but also scroll up and down). Also, it is positioned in the wrong place . Nokia could have positioned the d-pad outside the keyboard to have larger keys and be able to use it even when the keyboard was closed. On top of this, I always find difficult to move up (I’ve got big thumbs ) because there is not enough space between the d-pad and the front part of the N810.
• During the installation of any application the devices becomes unresponsive for seconds if not minutes! Not sure if CPU is up for most of the jobs, but the impression is that it’s not just a hardware issue
• Ecosystem is not as lively as others (a certain phone and s60) and here the lack of business drive is really showing the limitations of the open source ecosystem compared to other ones. The biggest problem however is that most of the N810 applications compared to S60 ones for example don’t get the job done quickly either because of lack of features or because the GUI is too complicated to use (and that applies to apps with nice GUIs as well where you need 50 clicks to just add a song to a playlist! Jez, sometimes performing a task seems I playing a game! )

• I’m not quite sure what niche it is supposed to fill. Can I use it as a mobile? No thanks, my N95 is already doing that job nicely. Is it a portable computer? mmm, don’t think so. Navigator? TomTom is cheaper and gets the job done better (besides, I use my N95 as my satnav)… So, I’m not sure where and when is supposed to be used?
• Official website is sloooow (www.maemo.org). Is it hosted using one of these web servers?
• Minimising into the background so that it does not take precious screen space in the application switcher area is not possible for skype and other applications.
• it’s labeled as n-series but i think it’s should be called gseries as in geek series or google series since it seems that Google products work better than other ported applications (actually you can install Android too). The device is barely ready for a geek, imagine for mass market.
• Browser is sometimes slow and loading a page make any other browser windows completely unresponsive (e.g. why can they fill the gap when loading the page with something else such as changing view for one specific page or something else…). BBC iPlayer does not play smoothly . It seems it can barely play youtube videos.
• It’s still not 100% finger friendly… Actually, you get the feeling that it’s trying to force you to use different styles all the time (now keyboard, now stylus, now middle finger ). Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
• Even when it’s finger friendly, I get the feeling of a desktop environment with menus a la windows and problems a la Linux! Totally disappointing! Examples?

• The menu is like windows when it could have been like the curtains-menu you probably saw in the Benq S6.

• The Application Manager shows the libraries! Is the average user supposed to see this advanced configuration with names like libillumination0 which have nothing to do with the applications I have installed (well, they are dependencies but the user should not really care)…

• Email notifications are quite useful but kill the battery in few hours (using wifi), so it’s now off

Pros

• Not trying to contradict myself with the above points, but it’s quite finger friendly once you change some setting (echowb theme), understand the “workflow” and where you are supposed to put your fingers . I know, it shouldn’t be like this but it definitively grows in you once you get it
• Wonderful screen, good resolution. Device is absolutely gorgeous and the screen is fantastic (oops, I think I already said that)! You have to see it to understand and just compare the style of the N810 with the Benq S6 to see the difference between plastic and metal!
• That’s it I wish I can expand this list in the future

What i would like (or I wished they copied from other successful gadgets)

• USB Host (possible already, but not out of the box)
• 2 memory slots not 1!!!!
• Able to read multiple card formats
• make the keyboard ‘reactive’ to the stylus so the real keyboard can be used instead of the on-screen one
• Use the direction pad for scrolling pages with a simple touch
• Option to show the category instead of the name… I.e. Why I cannot turn something to show Media Player instead of Canola2? Would really help newbies.
• Nokia to show some interest in keeping this platform alive…

-Reda

Interesting Links

Nokia will bring bling and finger-friendliness to Maemo 5

PS: Application Installed/Used

• Default Media Player (often useless when playing radio since a broken connection is not re-established and need to do it manually)
• Browser. Resolution kind of ok, hopefully I will not become blind by the age of 50 using this tiny tiny screen, but it crashes the device very frequently. Cannot check Google Reader without worrying to crash my N810
• Skype
• Canola2 (took a long time to get it working!)
• Kagu Media Plaer
• mYTube
• PDF Reader
• AbiWord
• FBReader
• Maemo WordPy (nice menu – big buttons)
• E-Mail
• CrazyParking
• Blocks
• VGBA
• Scopa (Italian game)

The problem I have is that I have one gadget (my dear Nokia N95) which does all of sorts of things in a mediocre way and other 200,000 million gadgets which do one thing very well and it looks like we’ll never get true convergence. You could argue that I have already an exceptional device because my mobile can take good pictures, play music and show videos but my point is that I will claim to finally have a “converged device” when I won’t need to buy something else with exactly the same functionality.

You can read about “one side of the coin” in this post:

“…convergence is the future, many portable devices can do many things at the same time, but at the end of the day when it comes to take a very good photo, you use your $1000 DSLR camera, when it comes to play a videogame seriously, you use your PlayStation and when it comes to record a video, you use your “serious” videocamera. …”

and this could be true for many years to come considering there is a new generation  which is growing up and is more than happy with “beta-quality” standards. Ok, I’m no saint and my generation was more than happy with VHS-quality videos but good quality products are now becoming a premium. Anyway, I don’t think this is the way it should be at all and Metadata Working Group is a fine example at how big companies can get together if they recognise the disadvantages of  walled gardens… Would defining a standard to move and process my data between devices reduce the barrier to convergence? Perhaps, here’s few examples:

• Renting Market. At the moment, there isn’t a gadget renting market because there isn’t a clear way to shift the data from place to place… Imagine if during a concert you can use the best camera on the market to take pictures and transfer all the data to your phone at the end of the event. Imagine that you don’t have to carry with you a 5kg bag all day just to take high quality pictures and don’t have to settle for mobile-quality pictures…well, data mobility could help that.
• My N95 does not have a FM Transmitter radio, but I could add one using a 3.5mm audio jack. Imagine the same modularity and extensibility with the camera, the memory and everything else…
• Imagine you have a saturated mobile market where mobile phones are becoming a commodity. Really really busy people have a blackberry and another phone; not so busy people have only one … What if you could move the data between two or more mobile phones (not from the same vendor) easily and transparently? Would you use the blackberry mobile during the day and keep the other in the bag and do the opposite in the evening? Would it help selling more phones? Perhaps…

We got to the point that not only different technologies are being converged into single multipurpose gadgets, but also content is being converged and I’m glad with have at least a starting point which is Internet but without a clear business reason I don’t think many companies will make any efforts towards convergence. I just hope that the next “open xxxx” or data portability project will bear some fruits data standards

Update:

I was writing post this and I just read about a microsoft patent to share resources

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Picture in Flickr

It’s really easy to do. You can find a very nice tutorial here (www.logicscape.com/oob_tutorials/)

The whole experience is very addictive because is basically a positive feedback loop (very engineering view, I know ) and you could seriously end up in an “unstable” mental and physical state. “Greed and fear” drive the economies around the world and I’ve been trying to understand what are the factors that influence the social interaction. I think it’s all down to “narcissism and control (of your data)“. Each one of them affects each other and both can drive you nuts!

Personally, I’m not into social networks (although I used to be a big reader of feeds and I subscribed to way too many of them) but Flickr gave me a glimpse of how addictive it could be.

I have been a Flickr user for years but only recently I started enjoying photography and as good Web2.0 etiquette suggests I sent some of my pictures to groups and as expected I received some positive feedback about them. Two minutes later I was hooked and it went on for days! Then suddenly one day, I decided to put my narcissism aside and started living the real life. On this addiction problem, there is a nice picture in Flickr that nails it and you can find long discussions in Flickr’s forums too!!

So, my goal is now more than ever to prioritise and save time (and cost) as much as possible and see if I can apply the old pareto principle.

I really hope it helps.

There are all sorts of cases, holders, bags, protectors (as shown at the end of the document)… everything you can wish for except mobile anti-stress bags for my mobile phone! How’s that possible?

-Reda

So I started to look at my pictures and tried few things with Photoshop… Few things I learned so far:

1. You can take amazing pictures with just a Nokia N95
2. Take as many as you can because they are not all great (unless you want to take a proper camera with you). Thanks to Nokia (in a sarcastic way though) and the extremely high compression of its photographs (notice the high variation in size), you can take a lot of pictures before you fill your memory card…
3. Black and white conversion seems not give the best result with N95 pictures. There is always a lot of noise in the pictures and the image does not look crisp and clear as it should (compared for example to a 5 years digital camera)

Some examples:

N95 – day example. OK

N95 – another day example, kind of OK. I love the original version of the next photo. It was taken on a cool morning in Kista (Stockholm) when I was going to work and it just snowed. Unfortunately, you can see some noise especially in dark areas…pity. But I love this picture as well as the original…

N95 – night example (some light in the background). Kind of OK.

And this is an example of how a nice, crystal clear picture should be. Look at how nice is the contrast, how sharp is the picture. I love it. Why Nokia had to set the compression algorithm so high (without judging the rest of the camera) is beyond me.

-Reda