If a music player can know what songs I like by the number of times I play a certain song … why can’t a smartphone know what I like to do with my it by tracking my work flow?

My hand already knows: hit the menu key, down 2, over 3, hit enter on the joystick and my phone now does something.

Why does it have to be like that? Windows XP has the "most used applications" thing going on in its smart start bar, why can’t something similar be adapted to a phone?

Everyone uses a phone differently, yet we all adapt to our phones strict menu hierarchy … why is it in 2007 our phones can’t adapt to what we want to do with them?

I really wish the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) User Experience team, if such a team exists, started a blog. I’m not talking about the guys who make the UI, I’m talking about the guys who dictate the menu structures, icon placement, the guys responsible for making everything "feel" right. I’ll come back to the iPod analogy, there were a lot of MP3 players before the iPod, and a lot were released after the iPod. The ease of use, drain dead simple UI is what shoehorned it’s success in the market and locked it in.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s S60 user interface is a sprawling mess: even Nokia can’t seem to remember where it’s put the configuation options. You’ll find Bluetooth over here, Profile settings over there, and something like SIP buried four menus down. Themes is nowhere near Display.

Source: The Register

Tommi Vilkamo’s reply:

Touché. The situation used to be that sad, indeed.

Luckily, we have recently made significant improvements in making the settings more logical. Already in Nokia N95, which is based on S60 3rd Edition FP1, there is a general settings application, from which you can do all the settings. That is, in addition to having the settings in applications, application related settings are found from the general settings app as well.

Andrew, please let us know what you think about the new approach

Source: Tommi’s S60 applications blog

Who is "we?"

Can I contact said team? Do they have a blog up? Are the usability experts or engineers? Why is the difference between S40 usability and S60 usability so vast?

One would think that for an OS designed to be on smart phones it would have an interface laid out a little bit better than something you see on a regular Motorola (NYSE: MOT) device. Symbian is easy, but it’s one of those operating systems you have to play around with for a whole day or two to familiarize yourself with where everything is. Then again … aren’t all operating systems the same way?

We’re officially in 2007 and we’re still using the same icon and grid model in buried menu’s that’s been around for as long as I can remember. The Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Treo 680 has a wicked front end that uses tabs, it separates tasks a user might preform to designated tabs labeled by a picture on the screen. Such a simple idea yet such an exponential increase in user friendliness. Why aren’t we seeing the same innovations out of Nokia?

More importantly, who is going to make the first 3D OS that isn’t just bling but actually makes using a phone an enjoyable and friendly experience?

I would have to agree with him too. I’m all for a service that works on multiple devices and not just select models.

Two devices don’t make a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Mobile VoIP revolution. Moreover, there are nearly half a dozen Nokia phones with WiFi and VoIP capabilities, but they don’t do Gizmo VoIP.

I wonder why Nokia has chosen to work with Gizmo Project, when most of Nokia’s devices come bundled with their own VoIP application. I think its because those VoIP capabilities are as useless as the built-in IM client Nokia bundles with most of its phones. (Some folks tell me that there are NAT issues that cause problems.)

To makethe Nokia VoIP app work with any other VoIP service, say Broadvoice, is so frustrating that it could soon have you reaching for those leftover holiday wines. (I tried it with an Asterisk-based5 service a friend rigged up for us, without success!) What is even more confounding is that Nokia is making VoIP work on an N Series device, targeting consumers.

VoIP should be a top priority on their E-Series smart phones: these devices are targeted at the business user, have WiFi, and are VoIP capable. Business users make a lot of calls, and could actually be the ones who could use the money savings offered by a Gizmo.

Source: GigaOM

Well said, and now in a later article he heralds Truphone as a champion solution:

I have two E-Series Nokia phones: the E61 and E70. I love them both, but I miss Gizmo on these devices. It would be nice to have incoming calling with my Gizmo numbers on either of these two phones that accompany me everywhere.

Thank god for Truphone2, which has actually made mobile VoIP on ESeries (and Nokia N80ie) work. (I was supremely skeptical3 of their abilities, and they proved me totally wrong.)

Truphone is a UK-based startup that has come up with a great mobile VoIP app that currently works on four devices – E60, E61, E70 and N80ie – and will soon work on four more Nokia models including N90, N92 and N93 phones.

The service was hard to set up the first time around I tried to make it work, but in past two weeks I tried installing it on two different devices, and everything went flawlessly.

Source: GigaOM

What does Nokia have to learn about this? Simple: make your product work on more than 2 phones and more people will use it!

I had the pleasure to test some of the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Nseries phones: the N80i (Internet Edition), the N73, the N91 and the N93. This post as a resume of my experiences the last weeks using the phones on various occasions, trying out different functionalities on all of them.

Source: M-Trends

Definitely not as detailed as Ken’s take on the N series, but it’s a proper job. The only negatives listed were at the end really:

Some minor points I want to mention:

• low battery life of the N80 (couldn’t figure out why yet?)
• flash or quality of the evening and night pictures is not really acceptable enough
• the ticker noise the N93 camera makes when zooming in or out

If you watch that N93 video, actually almost any video recorded on an N93, you’ll notice that annoying mechanical sound when zooming in and out. What is up with that?! Hope it’s fixed in the N93i.

I just came home (04:06) from a New Year’s Day Party which was quite revealing. We had a Nintendo Wii with one controller being shared amongst 4 players, in between turns people of course would play with their mobile phones. Entire conversations were being started when everyone was showing off pictures they took or newly acquired ring tones. I got a chance to play with a relatively new Samsung slider phone, a Windows Mobile candy bar style device, and an LG Chocolate.

Each device had a completely different operating system, and user experience, but none have made me go "whoa that’s awesome!" My Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61 doesn’t even make me go "whoa!"

So what is this "whoa" factor? All you have to do is look at Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and more recently Beryl for Linux. The subtle fade ins and outs, 3D effects, audio queues, and innovate ways to manipulate windows and media, these are all things that make my experience richer and make me go "whoa!" To this day I can vividly remember the first time I played with OS X and saw that crazy dock and expose, Windows Vista with its subtle bling, and finally got Beryl to run that famed cube desktop manager on my Ubuntu box.

So while yes Nokia is making phones with powerful 3D graphics engines for the sake of the next generation N-Gage platform, what are they doing to harness this power to make my interface experience a memorable and visually striking one?

Goodnight for me, and enjoy your lunch (12:06) Finland!

Considering I started on November 19th I don’t think this is too bad, check it out:

Here’s what I found interesting, 5 countries are responsible for 50% (yes I know it’s 50.3%, I rounded down) of my traffic:

I need to find some way to get that Finland percentage up, I mean after all my goal is to become an official Nokia (NYSE: NOK) blogger. Running around all the headquarters and research centers interviewing employees about their role in the company would be … magical. What out Phillip Schwarzmann, you’ve opened up Pandora’s box with that bimonthly podcast. The people want more, and I need to build a reputation before I can give them what they want, as well as have the honor of calling you my colleague.

Which reminds me, I really need to update my about page. I’ll probably do that within a week or two, I would like to introduce a blog roll at that time as well. Less than 10 days to CES!

My rant pertaining to my lust for the death of the PC suite presented itself with a small problem.

I want to be able to access and modify any of the data stored on my phone over a web browser. What would basically happen is you take your phone, run an application, let’s call it "Net Mode" and it turns on a mobile web server allowing real time access to your data. This application pings a gateway server to establish a solid, hopefully encrypted, IP connection, which then lets you access a website, where a user must authenticate, giving you total control of your device.

Here is my issue: What happens if the connection is on my LAN? As in I’m at home, laptop connected to my router via wifi and so is my E61. Do you really want your data bouncing from your E61 to a server in Finland back to you? Then it hit me … count the number of hops between both devices. If it only takes one hop from the IP address of my ThinkPad to the IP of my E61 then the gateway server would tell the site hosted at Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to use the local (192.168.1.XXX) IP addresses of my devices instead of the external (70.247.189.XXX) ones. Not only does it reduce latency but it increases throughput.

I really need a white board and a board room to clearly explain this, I know I’m going to make quite a few people raise their eyebrows trying to figure out what I’m trying to explain here.

Those unable to watch their favorite artists in person were able to view performances from the five Nokia (NYSE: NOK) New Year’s Eve events via a global television broadcast, as well as online at www.nokianewyearseve.com. An additional global television program of musical highlights will be broadcast on January 1. To orchestrate this enormous global celebration, Nokia enlisted the services of Harvey Goldsmith CBE, the producer of Live Aid and Live8. The estimated total television and Internet audience is expected to be more than 150 million.

"With more than 2 million music lovers celebrating with us in person, and more than 150 million television and Internet viewers, Nokia New Year’s Eve was certainly the biggest New Year’s party of 2006," said Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Nokia. "Nokia New Year’s Eve clearly lived up to our mission of "Connecting People" and delivered on our promise of leveraging the power of television, the internet, live events and the world’s most exciting music artists to get people talking, sharing and celebrating on one incredible night. Our thanks to the artists who performed — and the millions of people who celebrated with us in person and around the world."

Source: Nokia PR

And with that I’m going to go lay down. I simply need to recover from last nights celebration. If you want pictures of the event Nokia set up a site for the press here. That’s where I got the picture above of the Berlin event.

Now I know about the applications popularity but never used it myself, so if you can inform me as to why this app rocks so much … I would appreciate it. When I want to view/edit files on my Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61 I just connect it to my PC via BlueTooth. The "Nokia Phone Browser" gives me access to everything.

It seams that Dominique Hugo, the creator of famous FExplorer, probably the most popular 3rd party application, is preparing to release FExplorer for 3rd edition. The long-awaited FExplorer for 3rd edition devices is on the way, actually it’s almost done.

Source: Symbian Freak

Quite a healthy number of screenshots and mostly positive things to say, but I have one question to ask: Is Nokia (NYSE: NOK) behind The Gizmo Project? As in do Nokia employees maintain Gizmo?

It’s a short article so I’m not going to bother snipping, just check the whole thing out.