Why is it then that we’re still required to plug in a variety of USB cables into some of these devices? Not for charging it with electricity, but for loading it up with bits. If I’m able to consume much of the bits already through the wireless network connection that hooks me up with the great big data cloud of the Internet, then how can there be another category of bits that must still travel through the cable?

Let me illustrate the issue through two recent experiences I’ve had, one sponsored by Apple and the other by Nokia.

Case iPad 2 and iTunes

I recently decided it was finally time for me to give up on trying to steer clear from Apple products. The tablets are not just a new revision of the mini-PC/netbook boom from three years ago, I believe there’s much more to them. If the netbooks were about squeezing the familiar PC experience into a more portable form factor with a lower price tag, the tablets are aiming to bring us the smartphone experience of iOS and Android on a not-so-miniature device that gives better room for content presentation and user interface design. You could say it’s a case of less vs. more, which tends to trigger the primitive human reaction of “more is better”. I was so impressed with what my 4.3″ Android smartphone was capable of delivering compared to my previous 3.2″ gadget with the same OS + applications that I wanted to see what happens when you keep adding up more hardware goodness in a similar environment.

In an ideal world I would have preferred to purchase an Android tablet, as there are several reasons why I believe it will eventually become the leading platform for tablet computers and applications. However, the future is not here yet, as we’re pretty much lacking both the Android tablet computers and applications right now. Devices like the Samsung Galaxy Tab with pre-Honeycomb/3.0 version of the Android OS are not true tablets in my opinion. Also the current Android applications designed for a typical 3.5″ smartphone screen probably wouldn’t deliver the “more” effect I’m after. There’s no way around it, iPad rules for the time being. With the recent launch of v2 it was also easier to justify why now is a convenient time to invest in new hardware.

I won’t bore you with a general iPad 2 review here, I’ll just state that it totally rocks your socks off. Now, the one thing that doesn’t rock one single chord is the fact that you need to plug the device into a PC/Mac equipped with iTunes just to turn it on. In a way I understand the need for the iPad activation as a part of the bigger picture that includes the App Store, credit card billing, DRM and all that jazz. A necessary evil if you are stepping into the light /dark side (depending on one’s point of view) of the Apple empire. However, there’s some big irony in the whole post-PC era gospel preached by Steve Jobs when the product that should lead us into this era starts its life with a navel cord attached to a PC.

It’s no secret that I hate the iTunes application and what it has become. If I only had to use it as an occasional maintenance dock for the iPad OS updates and user identity verification, I might be able to live with this handicap. Unfortunately that’s not quite the end of the story. After having hooked up my iPad into all the usual web services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader etc. (which inspired this tweet), I wanted to see how this thing works on consuming some less dynamics content, meaning books. I have a Kindle 3 and love the experience when used in conjuction with Amazon’s book store account, but not all of my eBooks are Kindle optimized. Some things just work better in PDF and especially in color, so the beautiful iPad screen should really shine with this type of content.

What I would like to see for the iPad is a similar service as Amazon has, where you can email PDF’s to Amazon and they’ll optimize it for you and deliver the book into your Kindle, wirelessly through a WiFi connection. Ok, email may not be an elegant choice of technology, but the process flows very smoothly for the user. When I wanted to achieve the same end result for the iPad, I was initially completely lost on what I should do. I had downloaded the iBooks application from the App Store and it did have a Store button allowing for book purchases (but of course not for us Finns, as there’s nothing on sale in the local iTunes book store, except freely available books). How was I supposed to get my own content into the library?

I hooked up the iPad into its navel cord again and launched iTunes. Since you can’t just copy files on an iPad, like you would for any other USB-enabled device with internal memory, there had to be a way here to get the PDFs flowing into the iPad. I didn’t see any menu item related to books or PDFs, the only synchronizable content appeared to be the usual iTunes bits for music, video etc. Finally after rubbing my head for a while and clicking around the menus, I figured it out: I had to perform the “add files to a library” process on my PC’s iTunes instance. Selecting PDF’s brough up a new category called “books” in the library, which also then became available as a syncrhonizable category for the iPad when the device is plugged in with the cable. A few more clicks, then performing a synchronization operation for the very first time (since my music and photos are already online in Spotify or Picasa Web Albums) and eventually the content appeared inside the iBooks app.

Does this process make sense on a device that has both WiFi and 3G always-on internet connection (which often doesn’t work, by the way)? Like hell it does. The tablet computers are essentially big windows into the cloud of content that the web has to offer for us. They are not media players like the early iPods, where you transfer bits from your home media banks into a mobile device. That was the world ten years ago, why must the shadow of iPod and iTunes still haunt the iPad? At a bare minimum, the content synchronization should be something you can perform wirelessly instead through the USB port, but ultimately iTunes as we know it has to be removed from the process completely.

When we look at the competition ahead, Google doesn’t have any legacy comparable to iTunes, which is why the Android devices are much better prepared for the post-PC era with no strings (cables) attached. For the average tech consumer it may not feel like such a huge drag, and I’m sure Mac/iPod users don’t pay much attention to it at all. Nevertheless, the behaviour patterns everyone is learning from more recent services like Dropbox or Spotify will make Apple’s inconvenient truth gradually ever more visible to their customers.

Case Nokia C7, Symbian^3 and Ovi Suite

Speaking of Dropbox, after initial scepticism of the service’s alleged greatness, I’ve grown to love its beauty of simplicity and ubiquity. The service runs on my home PC, work PC, Android phone and iOS tablet, quietly taking care of small but important tasks such as making sure my KeePass database of usernames and passwords is always available wherever I go. The ability of Dropbox to deliver a dead simple way for masking the file transfer and synchronization complexity into a simple folder that’s available across devices makes it the perfect service for “normal” people who are not interested in the geeky side of technology and gadgets. It just works.

My dad recently bought a new mobile phone, a Nokia C7. I didn’t have the heart to try and convert him into an Android user, as the leap from traditional “dumbphones” built for phone calls, into a full-blown portable computer like the modern smartphones, might have been too long. If SMS is only just becoming a routine for you, it’s maybe best that your first smartphone resembles a mobile phone that’s familiar to you. That’s pretty much what Nokia offers. The C7 has a decent touch screen and a Symbian^3 OS with a few bits and pieces of what iOS, Android and WP7 (why not start including it in the list now) are made of, but at the end of the day an average user might easily mistake it for an S40 mobile. Sometimes this is not such a bad thing at all, we must keep this in mind.

The big screen and the capable camera make the C7 a nice gadget for shooting photos. Nokia has always been great at hardware and if I’d have to find a way to regularly get high quality photos captured with an Internet enabled device, I’d probably turn to Nokia’s product catalog, just due to their reputation on camera performance compared to the many lame efforts of Asian smartphone manufacturers. Based on this reputation, I had assumed that the process of taking photos and performing actions on them in Symbian^3 would at least be on par with Android. Surely many members of the product marketing team must have been faced with the situation of having to demonstrate the camera functionality of Nokia products, just to draw the attention away from anything related to browsing web content or other weak spots of Symbian. Well, from my experience with C7, I now think they’ve never bothered to proceed beyond snapping a photo with the device. You know, like, sharing it with some other device or application.

On an Android device, I can click on any picture to bring up the Share menu, which presents all the applications installed on the device that have the ability to integrate with the camera/gallery. Dropbox is my favorite method for moving pictures into an archive, but Facebook sharing and all other social applications are also very potential candidates for the next action I have in mind after taking a photo. If I install new apps, the menu gets appended with them. No need to spend any time wondering what to do, it all just works right in the context.

What are the options on a C7? Well, you can of course 1) send an MMS (do people still use those?), 2) attach it to an email or 3) send it via Bluetooth. All of these options probably would have felt useful five years ago, but as of today they all just scream legacy to me. Ok, perhaps the problem is just that the stock C7 doesn’t come with all the necessary apps, so lets go and login to Ovi Store. I’d imagine a search term like “photo sharing” would shed some light on the best way to proceed. No, nothing useful here. Since none of the top mobile app brands from the world of iOS and Android are available on the Symbian platform, even a geek like me finds himself having another one of those “iTunes moments” where the familiar logic of solving a problem doesn’t seem to work.

Sugarsync is the closest thing to Dropbox on Symbian, so let’s install that one. I get the PC application installed, even though the folder configuration is not nearly as intuitive as Dropbox. I manage to download the mobile app from Ovi Store and seemingly also connect the C7 to the same user account as the PC. The folder structure looks different from this angle, there’s some bizarre “briefcase” concept blocking my view etc. but it looks like this could in theory work for photo sharing. Except that when I start the process from capturing a new photo and wanting to move it to Sugarsync’s folder, I cannot figure out any sensible way to complete this task. The share menu is of course not updated as it would be on an Android. There is no easy navigation path between the photo gallery, the file system and the sharing application. Unless you want to work with memorizing and moving cryptic Pic123456.jpg files inside file explorer, there’s no solution. It just doesn’t work.

I refuse to give up and try another cloud based content syncrhonization application (forgot the name already). Usability is even worse on this one and I’m actually not even able to complete the pairing process of the PC and the phone, because I started by creating the user accoung in a different device than what the online registration wizard assumes. Well, I’m 100% sure that this is not a big loss. At the end of the day, I register a Gmail account for my father and just instruct him to email the photos from his brand new smartphone as attachments to his own address. I feel completely defeated for having to suggest such a lame process. My foolish cloud dreams have been shattered once again.

Of course there is a way to perform content transfer between the Nokia C7 and a PC. The answer is Ovi Suite. You need to install this Nokia’s equivalent of iTunes onto your computer, then plug in your shiny new mobile device with a USB navel ch… cable into your computer and perform a synchronization of the gallery items. To add insult to injury, the micro-USB cable supplied with C7 is about 10cm long. Sure, you could start playing with Bluetooth device paring and all that, but that’s another experience I want to spare my old man from. Also, unlike with Apple hardware, you’re actually allowed to mount the phone directly as a USB drive (well, I assume you are, didn’t try it with C7), but that is all still cable games.

Nokia even offers an advanced USB On-the-go feature, which lets you connect other devices or mass media directly on the Nokia phone which acts as the master device. Great, but what’s really your fetish with those cables? You’ve already given up on producing rubber boots, isn’t it time to give up the rubber cables next?

“Quit whining and plug it in!”

You may consider me a spoilt geek who has nothing better to do with his time and gadgets than to complain about what features they are lacking. Fine, maybe that’s also true, but here’s the underlying motivation why I write posts like this: when I observe how the world is changing slowly but surely towards a particular direction, it allows me to also spot those little pieces of the world that are standing still, i.e. getting left behind. Those little things represent potential disruptions to traditional businesses and business models, which to me are a very intriquing topic. As they say, shift happens.

Here’s how the world looks from my eyes today:

See? It’s all in the cloud already – today. The devices are connected to the cloud, the content is mostly in the cloud, also the people have arrived in there thanks to the social media breakthrough. What’s the one thing that doesn’t belong there? Yep, correctomundo, you guessed it right.

We all knew it was coming, but someone had to say it

Last July I wrote a blog post on how the world will end for Nokia. At that time I was deeply frustrated with the mainstream media reporting on how the brand new Nokia N8 and the updated operating system Symbian^3 were going to start Nokia’s big fight to reclaim the position they had lost to Apple and all the Android manufacturers. Such claims were totally detached from the reality of what was happening in the mobile marketplace of 2010 and I’m sure not even most the Nokia personnel believed in them anymore.

A growing crowd of people were joining the cult of Apple, some of them skipping right to the end conclusion that iPhone was simply better and Nokia was therefore screwed – period. A much more telling sign was, however, that the ecosystem around Symbian application development was not only facing problems in growing its presence in the US markets – it was in fact dying altogether. Long time advocates of Symbian were throwing in the towel, because they couldn’t live with the huge gap between Nokia hype and lack of results delivered. Symbian and Nokia had become an embarrassment that no one wanted to associate themselves with anymore (in other words, an epic fail).

What I believed Nokia had to do was to admit their failure instead of trying to cover it up while attempting to build a replacement in the form of MeeGo. My concluding comment at that time was:

We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

That was what we have now finally received, first in the form of the burning platform memo from Stephen Elop and a few days later in the announcement of adopting Windows Phone as the primary smartphone platform for Nokia future devices. All of this had of course started already in September with the naming of a new Nokia CEO, when the Finnish Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (a long term member of Nokia’s former management “dream team”) was replaced not by another Finn like Vanjoki but with a man from Microsoft. Makes perfect sense, since it’s a lot easier to admit failure when you haven’t been the one causing it.

If you look at where Windows Phone 7 is coming from, you’ll see that also Microsoft went through a similar phase earlier on. They realized that the existing Windows Mobile platform foundation was simply not good enough to build on anymore, so Microsoft made a brave move to re-design WP7 from scratch, which meant they gave up on backward compatibility and a big catalogue of existing Windows Mobile apps while at it. Thanks to this earlier reset they were now able to get the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to commit to their platform. Think about that for a while: everyone fails sooner or later, but the winners will be those who are the quickest in admitting failure.

Symbian no longer exists (but would you like to buy one anyway?)

When I switched jobs in December (not related to mobile industry at all, BTW), I was presented with the dreaded question “which Nokia E-series phone would you like to have?“. Having lived without a Nokia phone for years, the thought of returning back to the non-touch S60 world was simply unbearable and literally made me feel sick in the stomach. There was absolutely nothing in the Nokia business phone catalogue that I wanted to carry in my pocket. To buy off some time, I asked if I could wait for the Nokia E7 release that was just around the corner. My employer agreed and I just continued using my personal Samsung device, powered by Android.

As it ever so often happens with Nokia product launches, E7 got delayed into Q1/2011. I ended up upgrading my personal Android device to HTC Desire HD (words cannot describe how much this thing rocks, but that’s another story). On Monday, February 7th, Nokia E7 finally started shipping in limited quantities to the Finnish resellers. The company representatives were calling it “the most important model this year” in terms of sales expectations. On friday, February 11th, the device was as good as dead. Why? Because Nokia pulled the plug on Symbian, as illustrated on the following slide.

Regardless of this fact, Nokia is still expecting to sell 150 million Symbian devices before the game is over. Hmmm… okay… and how exactly do you plan to trick people into buying them? If you’re shopping for cars, it’s perfectly justified to buy a 2011 model that you know is going to be soon superseded with a 2012 model. Typically you get a sweet deal with accessories, plus there’s unlikely to be too many “bugs” and product recalls for a proven model.

It’s not going to work quite like that in the mobile industry. Nokia E7 is surely a beautiful piece of hardware design and component engineering, built with the decades of expertise accumulated into Nokia’s organization for producing the best mobile phones out there, delivered through the most efficient logistics chain in the business. Unfortunately it is now merely an empty shell with a “burning platform” inside it. I wish there was a quick way to flash the operating system of E7 from Symbian^3 to Windows Phone 7. But as always, if it was easy, the Chinese would have already done it.

E7 may still be a viable option for the oldskool business crowd who just want a replacement for their existing Nokia Communicator, primarily for phone calls, calendar and email. But if that’s all you wanted, then why did any of the Symbian engineers bother coming to work in the morning for the past 5 years? I hate to be the one breaking this to you, but getting a touch screen device with built-in support for Facebook widgets will not be enough to show you what’s really going on in the ecosystem of today’s mobile applications. You still won’t understand what all the cool kids are doing with their mobiles. You won’t see the business opportunities until your iPhone using competitor shows them to you.

The end is the beginning

If you can’t be one of the cool kids at the school yard, then try and be one of the smart kids instead. You probably won’t gain overnight popularity, but you may end up making a nice living eventually and getting your revenge. While the iPhone is certainly no one hit wonder á la Razr, there is no proof yet that Apple (or Google) would have secured their position as the U2 of mobile phones, forever entitled to sold-out stadium gigs and undivided attention from the media.

Android is aimed almost exclusively at disrupting the dominance of iOS, which means Apple and Google are fighting for the same market position. Sure, their approach is different in many ways (closed system vs. open source, for example) and Android is reaching towards the lower end of the market where iPhones are not even intended to be an option (remember, that’s where Symbian was supposed to go and retire). Windows Phone 7 is in such early phases of its existence that the platform doesn’t yet have a clear identity of its own and it is therefore being typically described through comparison to iOS and Android. This approach is ignoring the key focus areas where WP7 does differ from the established players: business users and .NET developers.

Ask a corporate IT department about which platform they want to be supporting and it’s a case of choosing a lesser evil from iOS or Android. Both of them are prime examples of the consumerization of IT. People like me will no longer tolerate standardized hardware from our employers, we’ll just rather bring our own devices to work. The problem with the cool gadgets that are capturing the attention of geeks and consumers alike is that they have been designed specifically to YOU. You as a single person, who makes the single decision to buy. The needs of a group of people encapsulated inside an organization such as a corporate office are quite different. Security, administration, compatibility and all those boring aspects are actually quite crucial to delivering monetary results beyond personal satisfaction. The mobile platforms of the future will have to be a working compromise between usability and manageability. This is where Microsoft is ahead of Apple or Google, who don’t truly know how to operate in the business segment. Nokia also has some very relevant experience from trying to meet the needs of business users and should therefore be well positioned in formulating a winning strategy to get both the IT managers and the Outlook junkies to ask for  WP7 devices.

Some say Microsoft is a dying consumer brand. There’s a hint of truth in that, since the world of personal computing has been moving away from the traditional PC desktops, into cloud apps provided by the likes of Google, and more personal mobile devices like the iPhones and iPads. Microsoft is clearly a runner-up in both categories. At the same time, they do have an impressive record of charging against Nintendo and Sony with their Xbox 360, which shows they are not planning to become a purely business brand anytime soon. It would also be a mistake to assume that Microsoft is forever stuck on the desktop, as they are building a huge “platform in the cloud” offering as Windows Azure and all the related Online Services brands. Sure, Gmail beat Hotmail with ease, but it doesn’t look like Google Apps would be walking over Microsoft’s cloud-enabled Exchange/SharePoint offering quite yet. Microsoft’s “all in” cloud strategy is going to provide a highly credible portfolio of productivity apps to Nokia’s WP7 devices, certainly much more than they could have ever built on their own or acquired through weak partners like Yahoo.

Like Mr. Scoble put it in his blog post on the Nokia WP7 alliance, “apps are the ONLY thing that matters now”. If that statement holds true, then the producers of those apps are the ones whose interest you need to capture on day one. Yes, you know this one, so sing along with me: “Developers! Developers! Developers!” If Symbian was the most hostile development environment for mobile phones ever invented, then judging by the initial launch strategy of Windows Phone 7, it’s the complete opposite. Not only is Microsoft altogether making massive investments into its developer toolkits, the promise of easy application portability across mobile, desktop, console and browser environments must sound more tempting than learning to develop apps for yet another mobile platform that promises to be something big, one day, maybe. The world is full of .NET developers who Microsoft and Nokia can target to persuade them to extend their applications onto the closest possible mobile platform, which just happens to be WP7.

We all know the facts: Microsoft is not cool, Nokia is not cool. When put together, they will indeed look like a pair of turkeys initially. They will take a fair amount of beating after class from the tech blogger bullies and gangs of Android geeks from all over the globe. Nevertheless, once we get over this initial reaction and start seeing physical results from the partnership, there’s a very real chance that both Microsoft and Nokia will be stronger together than what they could have been on their own, without admitting their past failures.

There is a dark shadow looming behind the partnership, as Microsoft’s previous mobile partners have not really fared all too well after teaming up with Redmond. It may well turn out to be a similar bust for Nokia, only time will tell. Even though it’s clear that Nokia has a lot more at stake in the deal than Microsoft, it’s getting more and more embarrassing for Microsoft not to have a credible presence in mobile devices. While Microsoft has never been too great at new product innovation, they’ve proven time and again their ability to muscle into a maturing market. Let’s see if they mean business this time around.

Back when mobile phones were all about hardware, radio technology, silicon chips and plastic casing design, Nokia kicked everyone’s ass and it was a proud time to be a Finn (also a Nokia employee for a while). That time period was around one decade ago. I guess you could compare it to the 80′s when personal computers were still a messy playground with tens of competing manufacturers pushing their hardware+software packages to consumers, and Commodore building a comfortable lead with their C64 killer product. We all know where Commodore is today, or more specifically, most of us have absolutely no idea of where they are. Since those early days we’ve moved on quite a bit and everyone’s using either Windows or Linux on very generic hardware (apart from the crowd who choose to pay for the Apple/OSX device lock-in). That, in my opinion, is where we have been moving towards im the mobile phone markets ever since 2007 and the release of the iPhone. Nowadays we carry just big screens with us, either with or without a slider qwerty keyboard, and that’s pretty much how exciting the hardware part gets. Take a look at the HTC product catalog if you don’t believe me.

How is Nokia doing in this brave new mobile world? Not too well. Sure, they’ve got as many devices on their product catalog as ever and they completely own the non-smartphone market in developing countries. But do they really live up to the promises of their product marketing department or, more importantly, the expectations of their most loyal customers, their advocates? Well, you be the judge. Here’s one example of how a N97 customer felt after his purchase:

Now here’s the piece of news that originally inspired my own blog post: Symbian-Guru.com is over. I strongly encourage you to read through what Ricky and Rita have written down as the epitaph of their site, as this reads much like an epitaph of Nokia and Symbian that wouldn’t of course be published like this. Some key points from their writing could be summarized as follows:

• The gap between promises/expectations and product reality has grown unacceptable
• Developers have abandoned the Nokia platform long ago and now all hope lies on Nokia’s internal software development efforts
• Nokia’s own services are all hype and no content, as not even the company’s employees are committed to using them
• “Open source” in the context of Symbian is a meaningless buzzword, when no one is interested in the source in the first place
• Waving the Nokia/Symbian flag has become too embarrassing in the US market due to lack of visible marketing support from Nokia

As a sort of a CRM practioneer with some little insight on what customer relationships mean to a company, I would now like to produce the following quote from my very own words:

When you betray your most loyal customers and they call it a day, the game is over.

The emotions described in the Symbian-Guru.com post are the cornerstones of a successful company, except that now the stones have been turned and there is nothing to build on anymore. It is no longer a case of doing minor adjustments to product offering or shifting the focus of marking communication – we’re far beyond that by now. Of course the biggest mobile device manufacturer in the world could never publicly admit such a deep crisis, but the most important customers know it already. From observing the market reactions of the early adopter crowd, everyone who is seriously looking for proper smartphone functionality from the handset that they carry around with themselves is going either for iPhone or Android. It’s hardly a secret to anyone, rather it’s plain and obvious. That’s what I’ve done and I’m sure many others will follow.

There will certainly be a big enough market outside the world of smartphones and “smart” (geek) users to ensure that Nokia can keep generating billions of € worth of sales, which the stock market analysts can delve into and speculate future revenue trends by analysing how much more the company can squeeze out of it’s superior supply chain. However, it will not be the market that will attract the interest of those people who are building the new application ecosystems on top of the device manufacturer’s offering. They will be following the iPhone crowd, where all the action is. Where new markets emerge.

If the old world of mobile phones was all about radio technology and hardware manufacturing, then the new world of mobile devices is focused around the services enabled by the hardware. This is of course not a surprise for Nokia, who have been continuously declaring their internal transformation to a service oriented company. Nokia have been making bold moves on the services front, by offering free navigation (after acquiring Navteq for $ 8 billion) and low cost packages for Comes With Music subscriptions to a semi-endless music catalog (something Spotify currently charges € 10 / month for mobile users) on their mid category products. Sure, these offerings do have lots of potential value to the customer, but upon a closer look they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ability of building attractive mobile solutions that the users would like to use (as many Ovi users would probably agree). It is just built on external content, which Nokia is presumably using as a heavy loss leader product to get people hooked on buying the familiar hardware that the company actually physically develops and manufacures. There is basically nothing in this strategy that Microsoft, Google or Apple could not imitate if they wanted to. The difference is that neither Apple nor Google need to imitate it due to the success of their own unique strategies, and Microsoft can afford not to compete immediately but can rather attack a maturing market later on, since that is where they’ve always excelled at (and Windows Phone 7 looks to support this strategy).

Was N95 perhaps the last real flagship from Nokia? While there were many people willing to use it as the yardstick to play down the signifigance of Apple’s first iPhone offering, I think the underlying problems in the Nokia/Symbian camp were already building up at that time, regardless of the fact that N95 was a commercial success. A high number of complaints on software bugs and general lack of the kind of high-end feel expected from a flagship product could retrospectively be interpreted as signals that Nokia’s existing method of developing new high-end products was reaching the end of its lifecycle; a point where optimising the existing process no longer delivers significant improvements, but where you need to invent a whole new process instead.

How far do you then have to go to find a big flagship product from Nokia’s product catalog? Something that packed a true punch, like the iPhone did? Nokia 7650 from 2002 perhaps? The setting is of course completely different from Apple, who entered a new market, but the question still has to be valid. If you only deliver lots of good products but no single great one, then why should I buy from you? The picture below is a beautiful collage from the Nokia product catalog, featuring each and every mobile phone they have ever made between the years of 1982 and 2006. The number of new product innovations and dominant mobile phones of their time included in this serving is just awesome. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a system in place that would keep producing the same kind of “wow” results in the new world we are living. Nokia has become a victim of its past success.

Acknowledging that all the market share you’ve achieved and the great products you’ve delivered over the years is now worthless might surely feel like an act of pure insanity at first. But if you could get yourself to admit it, wouldn’t that be the exact moment when the climb back up starts? If the game is over, just reboot (heck, remove the battery if you must) and start all over. If you can’t do that, then you might as well consider it the end of your world. We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

Now you have the chance to take a trip down memory lane and revisit the Internet from the 90′s, courtesy of the Geocities-izer by Wonder-Tonic. For example, you can remove all the Web 2.0 nonsense from this blog of mine by viewing it through Geocities-izer instead:

Ah, the good old times. More great examples available here.

I used to be tracking my sites with a free account from Mon.itor.Us for over a year and was quite satisfied with getting a weekly report delivered to my inbox, with the average uptime and response time stats for the week. However, trying to do anything within the service’s web interface, like examining the performance statistics or configuring monitors was just really painful, thanks to the poor usability of the service UI.

Enter Pingdom. Wow! Talk about the difference that a good UI design can make to the same underlying service, which at the end of the day consists of pinging different URL’s. It’s never  just about how you collect and store the data, it’s the presentation layer that really counts. Pingdom does an awesome job on this front, delivering a Google Analytics type of a user experience. They offer a free account for one single monitor, so trying out the features is a breeze. 5 checks is already $9.95/month, but if you’re actually making money with your sites, then I’m sure you could make worst investments.

So how’s the uptime then? Here you go:

Uptime report, last 30 days

Response time report, last 30 days

In addition to the widgets above, you can also access the monthly summaries over here. The reports inside Pingdom are much more detailed, one particularly nice feature being the possibility of filtering data based on different tracking locations, ranging from Stockholm to Los Angeles.

I’ve got a dirt cheap hosting package from Suncomet, which gives 2 GB of disk space with unlimited traffic & DB’s for just €30 per year. It’s not a lightning fast service and the P2 server does have it’s share of downtime, so every now and then I think about if I should bother to switch to another service provider. With a monitoring service like Pingdom I won’t need to make guesses on what I’m getting for my next-to-nothing investment. As for knowing the performance of other potential providers, well, that’s still going to be to some extent guesswork and leaps of faith. At least until we get more universal hosting service monitors like HostPeek.

Recently I haven’t been touching iTunes much at all, since my online music consumpion has transformed from files to streaming, thanks to Spotify. Many times there are still tracks that are not available through the Spotify subscription service, which is when I turn to see if iTunes is providing them available for purchase. Much to my surprise, I’ve started to increasingly dislike the iTunes experience. Looking at the results from the new 2010 Customer Experience Index by Forrester, it looks like I’m not the only one.

Let’s compare what happens when I search for an artists in both services. iTunes goes first:

With the current version of iTunes 9, there’s just too much going on in the user interface. Even with the UI chrome excluded from the picture, there’s still way too many items fighting over my attention. Furthermore, I don’t get the immediate Google Experience ™, where the first search result is big and bold, waiting to be clicked. In iTunes the items are too small and don’t appear clickable, maybe because there’s just so much I could click on. Overall, the navigation just feels like too much work, not enough fun.

What about in Spotify then:

Lots of small text here as well, but it’s a lot more bearable, since the structure is so clear. I know the purpose of each UI element and they are grouped in a logical manner, so that none of the information I’m not interested in feels like any kind of distraction. Even without any previous experience of using the application, I think I would be quite at home in navigating in Spotify, since it follows the univesal language of audio library software. What’s funny is that I think much of that language has evolved from the most popular audio library out there: iTunes.

Why is iTunes starting to become more cluttered? Why is it going down the path of Altavista, which used to be the top search engine of its time, before transforming into a messy portal with too much ads and features going on, then consequently losign the game to Google? My theory is that both iTunes and Altavista have (or had, in the case of AV) the same problem, which is the need to be constantly selling to the user. iTunes Store does not make any money until the user clicks “buy”, and it needs to achieve this same behaviour time and time again. In a similar fashion, the portal fever that Altavista was infected with consisted of presenting as many ad banners to the visitor as possible, whereas Google cleared away the clutter and developed a way to show only relevant text ads in predetermined sections.

The Spotify model doesn’t have the hard sell built into it. Its model lures in new users with free accounts, to explore the simple functionaliy built over the vast library of music available for streaming by just clicking on it, building up an engaging first experience of the service. Sure, the users are greeted with audio ads between tracks, unless they purchase the premium account. However, that’s a handicap that you can disable with giving them money, and I’m betting people can easily understand the trade-off there. In iTunes Store there is no subscription service that would make the catalog browsing free from the hard sell. Not until Apple starts offering the similar streaming scheme as Spotify, that is.

Let’s take one final look at another UI for searching a particular artist. With the introduction of Google Music giving some glimpse of things to come, I’m betting that the future UI design patterns for audio libraries will most likely be coming from the masters of search.

I had been gradually upgrading my home PC for many years, replacing parts here and there, which meant that there was hardly any original part left in the configuration. Luckily there was never any problem in getting the same old Windows XP activated, regardless of its draconian WPA hardware checks that had caused quite a stir when introduced back in 2001.

Last year I ran into a hardware issue that I was unable to pinpoint. I burned through a new PSU, new motherboard, new HDD, new graphics card, without finding a combination that would have booted reliably. Although I had never purchased a brand name PC during my 18 years of Wintel computing, I felt that I was just getting too old for this.

I’ve got a laptop from work, so at home I hardly need portability. However, with such low prices for supermarket laptops, it really turns the question around: do you really need a big PC under your desk? If I was tired of replacing components myself, then having a big case with free expansion slots does not actually provide a benefit but rather an aesthetic handicap. So, I grabbed a budget laptop from Acer, hooked it to my screen & keyboard and was happy as ever. Painless, easy to purchase IT gadgets for the home user, which I ultimately am. Sure, the hardware was not state of the art, but Vista ran as good as you can in general expect from it (not too well then).

Roughly a year later I found myself buying another PC for my home: Asus EeeBox EB1012. This was not even the size of a laptop, nor nearly as powerful as my Acer. It is in fact a miniature HTPC built out of the netbook level hardware of Intel Atom CPU and Nvidia Ion chipset. It runs Windows 7, which should be easier on the system requirements as its older brother Vista. The main point is that this little box can disappear behind your flat screen TV and sit there quietly, providing media library and web access in the living room. Forget about gaming, that’s what the Xbox 360 is for (and what a huge box it is next to the tiny EeeBox).

With this trend, I may soon be buying my next PC that will again be cheaper and less powerful than the one before. If I take a closer look, I actually already had purchased a Synology DS209j NAS station, which really is just a low spec PC built for one purpose: serving data from the 2 terabyte HDDs sitting inside the box. It does of course allow streaming the content or even acting as a web server with PHP & MySQL, but really it’s just a HDD with more accessibility features than a plain USB drive.

I haven’t got a netbook yet, but it looks like there isn’t a need for one in my hardware catalogue, regardless of all the hype. I’m writing this blog post while on the road, using my HTC Touch Pro 2 as the mobile typewriter. Packed with a touch UI, full keyboard, 3G/Wifi and the Opera browser, the “phone” ends up delivering me basically all the functionality I’d need from a netbook. It is almost hilarious that the device is pretty usable for all the basic tasks, except for making phone calls, which really is a lot more complicated than on my first Nokia phone in 1997. Maybe the Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM upgrade would help, maybe not.

At a time when applications are moving from the hard drive to the web, when the media is increasingly being streamed from some cloud (either your own private one or some published service), it is finally starting to feel like we have reached a point where the Moore’s law is no longer relevant to the consumer (or even for the manufacturer). Yes, there will be a need for the data centers to purchase more efficient servers for their racks, to accommodate the rising demand for the many freemium services operating with thin marginals. For the end user, the magic of a new CPU upgrade is just not what it used to be. We may finally be able to stop looking at the GHz’s or GB’s, and start to focus on the items higher up in the IT food chain: applications, usability and design.

Still, the geek in me is of course just waiting for the moment when I can start to compare chipset specs when purchasing a new washing machine or a toaster. That’s just some of the joys promised by ubiquitous computing where we seem to be heading.

Nevertheless, some changes in the behaviour and assumptions of the web audience are so profound that you shouldn’t really even dare to assume that you have an option whether to comply with them or not. One such assumption is the ability to search. The sad fact of the matter is that a huge portion of casual surfers don’t even know what is a browser, since all they do is search through Google, even for the URL to a site they want to visit. Hell, if it wasn’t for the smart address bar in Firefox that let’s me access pages from my browser history so painlessly, even I might be lazy enough to just google the name, instead of wondering about .com/.net/.fi.

In the current climate, you are then pretty safe to assume that most users enter your site as a result of a search (hence the popularity of SEO). What happens then after they reach your site? Well, unless they were lucky enough to land on the exact right page, I bet they’d prefer to do a search on the content of the site. The absolute quickes way to information is a search box, or at least it should be, when the search is working like Google is. Even if the results are not quite as well organized, it’s still useful when the visitor is looking for some more rare keyword.

How can it then be that in 2009 there is still an incredibly large portion of midsize retailer sites that are lacking the search functionality altogether? Take this one example: Koti-Idea furniture store.

There are 2 tempting boxes in the top right corner, but that turn’s out to be the account login, so most visitors will not be interested on that. There’s a shopping basket on the bottom left, but I don’t see anything to add to it yet. There’s even an application (IE only) for designing your own bookcases or sofas, which sounds all fine and dandy. However, I can’t get to the product which I have in my mind, since there’s no box to type in the name and click “search”. Instead, I would need to start thinking in categories and navigating menus. How much fun will it be to start guessing the taxonomy adopted for this particular store, browsing through one category after another, just in case you would run into the product you are, well, searching for.

Upon my quest for new furniture I ran into several sites that lacked any means of searching for the products that were hidden somewhere deep in the folder structure. Sure, I could have always gone back to Google and do an advanced search for hits from that particular site. In the non-eCommerce world that would have been roughly the equivalent of walking into a store, then going back home and returning with a credit card, just because the cashier didn’t accept cash payment. Now wouldn’t you just rather walk to the store next door instead?