An open letter to the PC Suite Team

Update: Picture and name have been kindly requested to be removed. No problem.

First things first: It was a blast hanging out with you and the other Nokia (NYSE: NOK) employees at the NYC Evening with S60 event and the preceding after party. I greatly enjoyed it. This letter will be an expansion of my drunken thoughts and ramblings about the future of the PC Suite I’ve envisioned. Hopefully things will make more sense as to why I’m delivering this message to you and not the PC Suite team.

Our mobile phones hold the holiest of holy pieces of information. Our contacts are indispensible, our pictures are priceless and our messages are extraordinarily private. The only way to interact with this data currently is via the Nokia PC Suite. It’s an application that I’ve heard several Nokia employees, who shall remain nameless, say they absolutely detest using on a daily basis.

The marketing department came up with the catchy phrase "It’s what computer have become." Every time I hear that my left eye twitches a little bit. When I think computer, I think devices that are expandable, upgradable, but most importantly devices that can share information with relative ease. Quad band GSM, WCDMA and WiFi are on all the latest smartphones, can’t we use the internet to manage our data as opposed to an installable Win32 application that requires administrative rights?

The Nokia Research Center has been working on a project called Raccoon. It’s the S60 port of Apache. They’ve also been working on the S60 port of Python. Combine these two and you have magic. The data, your mobile life, is now accessible via the internet. There isn’t a transfer protocol as pure and as beautiful as TCP/IP.

The one thing I could never figure out is how I would be able to interact with my Nokia if it was hooked up via a local (USB, Bluetooth, etc) connection. It hit me like a ton of bricks last week: Adobe Apollo!

This Rich Internet Applications framework has the capability of accessing local disks and working in offline mode. Imagine if you will these two user scenarios:

• I just came home from work. I hook up my Nokia to my PC via USB. The phone prompts me to enter into "transfer" mode. I hit yes. I launch an Adobe Apollo application that can read the data off my device. This Apollo application doesn’t need any code changes to work on a Mac or on a Linux box. From this one app I have the capability to access every single piece of data on my device and manipulate it in any way I see fit.
• I’m at the library. I left my USB cable at home. I take my Nokia out of my pocket, hit the power button and select the "online" profile. I load up whatever browser they have on their machines, type in a URL and enter in a username and password. Now I have access to and can manipulate any piece of information on my mobile device. My Nokia is acting as a web server.

The Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office Suite is the thorn in your hip. Why not replicate the suite in an online form? Outlook can be built with Adobe Apollo; the data can be populated from the PIM on your phone. Word and Excel can just as easily be copied, just look at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs and Spreadsheets. Give people one less reason to consider upgrading to that latest version of Office and one more reason to get a Nokia. Imagine working with your data regardless of connectivity or platform. Imagine if people started buying Nokia’s because they know that the "PC Suite" will let them edit documents, spreadsheets, have a full blown PIM and most importantly … be free.

Photo editing is impossible to do on a mobile device. You don’t have the real estate. Why not build a slide show player, basic photo editor and picture viewer in Adobe Apollo? Same thing can be said about music.

Call me crazy, but this is what I think the future of the PC Suite should be: A web OS that is hosted on a device that can fit in your pocket.

I’ve drank the Adobe Apollo Kool-Aid and I want you to take a sip from my cup as well.

Here is one more user scenario:

• I load up the PC Suite that was built on Apollo at home, select new document and start working on it on my desktop PC. On my commute to work, I proof read it and apply minor edits. When I arrive at the office I just load up the PC Suite in my web browser and apply the final touch ups. Hit print and I’m good to go. That one document was composed, viewed and edited on a desktop Apollo application, a mobile phone and inside a web browser.

The Web is the new platform. We’re merely at the beginning of a revolution.

I’m telling you this because I feel it would be easier for you to evangelize this product internally than someone who "doesn’t get" the Internet.

S60 is just another phone OS to most people. Break down that wall.