Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97, a Nokia N86, and a Nokia E73.

Fri 08.27.10 - At Tuttle Club LA today, I found myself in possession of a Nokia E73 (trial phone), my Nokia N86, and a Nokia N97 of which I was testing out Foursquare via Gravity (works) and Gowalla mobile (doesn't work).

When I first sat down at our table, I loved the contrast between Toorak Coffee's interior orange walls and the green shirts that Geoff and Al were wearing, so I pulled out the first camera phone, the E73, in my bag and took a photo. Then I pulled out the N97 to check in to Foursquare and the like and took the same photo (mostly) from the same angle (mostly). Out came the Nokia N86 8 MP to take the final photo.

When Matt and I looked at the phones' screens, the N86 rendered the best photo where the colors looked as they actually were, the E73 the second best, and on the N97's screen the photo looked washed out. But now that I have them transferred to my computer, resized to 800x600, and posted to this blog, the N86 and the N97 look better but the real color was somewhere between the two with the N97 being a bit washed out and the N86 being a bit dark/saturated, and the E73's photo is a bit blurred and the color a bit light/bright.

The interior of Toorak is a good challenge for a point and shoot camera or a camera phone as the ceilings are high with big halogen/fluorescent lights and orange paneled walls with dark wood furniture. It is a gorgeous interior visually but a bit stressful for a camera, then add on Geoff & Al's shirts.... A comparison waiting to happen.

What do you think?

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N900.

Sat 08.21.10 - More photos from the Nokia E73 Mode Beach Party, as taken here and there with my Nokia N900. Don't ask my why I had two camera phones running that day...

Let's consider these photos the outtakes.

;o)

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia E73.

Sat 08.21.10 - This afternoon and evening was the very fun Nokia E73 Mode Beach Party with a set of 'challenges' in Sunset Beach as hosted by Nokia and WOMWorld.

Attendees were given the choice to dress up in suits provided by the WOMWorld folk and to be apart of the challenges that also involved a film crew. The film fellows were using Canon 7Ds to record the video of the adventures.

WOMWorld's Donna was our 'boss' and the best parts were going out kayaking in the Huntington Harbor and the volleyball game in front of the Beach Party house, as seen in the photos above.

I enjoyed using the Nokia E73 Mode to take photos, as the camera is 5 megapixels and much improved over the last ESeries device I trialed - the E71. The photos are clear, the color is fairly correct, and the camera was fairly fast. My only complaint with the E73's camera is that in automatic mode it does best focusing at objects about a meter (3 feet) away and is a bit blurry and anything closer as seen in the photos above.

As always it was wonderful to catch up with friends who are also passionate about mobile and make new ones. Big thanks to Nokia, WOMWorld - Donna, Adam, and James, for hosting a lovely party and weekend.

The big question is when will the video come out?

;o)

The big question of the day yesterday that everyone at the Nokia Beach House asked me was, "Are you going to pre-order the Nokia N8?"

Am I going to buy the Nokia N8? YES!

Am I going to pre-order? NO!

I have several reasons for buying the N8, which are:

1) Camera
2) Camera
3) Camera
4) Camera
5) Camera

Do I need to buy My Future Preciousssss before it is released, wait weeks, and then have the early adoptor's blues? No.

I will let all the I-gotta-have-it-first-or-I-will-explode-but-will-be-bored-in-3-weeks-and-sell-it-on-ebay crowd go before me. Then I will buy the N8 on Amazon or Mobile City Online or the like, whoever has the best color selection.

The real reason for not pre-ordering My Future Precioussss is that NokiaUSA only has black/dark grey. What?!?!?!?! There are 5 lovely color selections and the US only gets black during pre-order? Join me and Bill the Cat to sputter, "Pppffffffffttt!"

Now, if they had Purple available for Pre-Order, I would have already made my order, but no purple. So, wake me up when blue, orange, or green is available in the US.

Right now, I am favoring Orange, but I might end up with Green or Blue.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Fri 08.20.10 - The nice folk at Nokia and WOMWorld are holding a Nokia E73 Mode Beach Party tomorrow, Saturday, in Sunset Beach. I am quite excited that Donna, Adam, and the other James (not Whatley) are in town organizing the event, as well as being very happy to see Nokia Open Lab alum Mike Maddaloni and Glenn Letham are in town for the party as well as meeting Lenny of Nokia Innovation and Dennis of Wap Review.

This morning Donna and I met up and we took Scruffy and Belle to Dog Beach, which is about 3 miles south of the Beach House. We had a lovely walk and talk.

I joined the group again later in the early evening at the Beach House to have a good hang out time and eat a lovely dinner that Donna made for us! Thanks, Donna!

It was good to have a relaxed time before the party started to catch up and exchange ideas, thoughts, and laughter. I am looking forward to the party tomorrow afternoon.

Recently I found myself thinking about camera phone apps, more specifically about Hipstamatic and do folks really use it past the week they bought it out of the App Store?

Amongst the photographers and designers I know and follow on Flickr, I will occasionally see a photo that looks like it was Hipstamatic-d but not often, which makes me to wonder if it is due to the fact that Hipstamatic does not make a back up of the original photo before it is processed or if folks just aren't interested in Lomo like mobile camera phone photos.

My curiosity continued to wander and I started to wonder really how many camera phone apps people were using past the first week of buying them. Furthermore, what iPhone and Android camera phone apps were people buying and using with any regularity. Do folks like the 'toy camera' apps or were they using camera apps with other functionality?

The Camera phone app world has quite exploded on the iPhone and Android is catching up, but when I searched the Ovi Store there were very few camera phone apps for Symbian devices and those that were there were more geared to an East Asian J-Pop photo booth cute overload on neon aesthetic than the Graham Parson-esque Silver Like circa 1972 via a yellow daisy filled green meadow in misty sunlight aesthetic of Hipstamatic.

There was one Symbian app, Joyeye, that promised Lomo style photos, but it did not work on my Nokia N86 and I did not try to download a version for the N97. It may be that it is only for touchscreen Symbian devices or it may be that the Ovi Store seems dead set on thinking my N86 is an N97.

Two weeks ago to satisfy my curiosity, I conducted a very small survey on Twitter by asking:

msjen: iPhone folk, what is your favorite camera or photo app & why?

Happy Day. I received an email today saying that Sports Tracker is back and ready to be downloaded.

Sports Tracker has been on hiatus the last year or so, after it was spun off as a beta software product at Nokia to become its own company. The nice folk behind Sports Tracker have updated the website, ported over all of the data from folks' accounts at Nokia's Sports Tracker server, and have created mobile apps for all the current Nokia phones with GPS on board.

I am quite excited as I have missed Sports Tracker on my Nokia N86. I have missed mapping my route as Scruffy and I walk each day and I take photos. It is good fun to have a record both in terms of a map and a data record of how fast or slow one walked, the altitude and other fun geo-athletic details.

Sports Tracker ported about 95% of my 'routes' to the new server, only leaving out all routes before the Chennai photowalk, of which those previous routes were when Sports Tracker was in beta and I was testing SP before departing for the Urbanista Trip to India.

My only two minor objections to the new Sports Tracker is that the new website is in Flash and the mobile app I downloaded from the Ovi Store for my Nokia N86 doesn't have an obvious way for me to log into the new Sports Tracker website to pair my routes with the site. Hopefully, the mobile app will ask me to pair the mobile to the server when I start my first 'workout'.

I look forward to seeing what the Sports Tracker team will do and am excited that I can now pair my photos with a mapped route of my photo walks again. Thanks, Sports Tracker!

Today, I broke out the Nokia N97 and the marvelous "Mobile Python" book by Jürgen Scheible & Ville Tuulos, between the two I had a grand good time working through exercises in Mobile Python for S60 and trying out some of the ideas in my head.

I bought the Mobile Python book about 2 years ago and worked through it then, but was not able to really get in to it or process everything that I was learning until I took the Python class last summer and worked on the Alex's Bar Booking app that was coded in python on Google App Engine. Now, as I read the Python for S60 docs and go back over parts of the book, it all makes sense and it seems so easy.

As I was coding today, I felt so good about it all, unlike two years ago or even last year, that I now have a 2nd app idea... I would first like to get my mobile app idea working on the Nokia N86 and N97 before I go deep into the PyMaemo docs to get it working on the Nokia N900.

One step at a time. Next, I have to conquer my sockets issue... ;o)

My personal project of the last few days is to start chipping away at my moblogging app. Roland Tanglao and I have been talking since the Big Adventure in May about working together to get my mobile blogging app idea off the ground.

Basically, I know that if I can get a php script to post to this blog via the Atom or XML-RPC protocol, then I can get my mobile to do it via a python app. I have now spent more than 12 hours spread out over 2 days researching the various protocols, reading docs, and then trying to get several different php scripts to post a simple blog post to Movable Type 4.3's Atom or XML-RPC scripts.

Tonight, I kept getting errors that either the scripts aren't able to authenticate (both Atom & XML-RPC) or with XML-RPC I keep getting a "32300:transport error - could not open socket".

Darned sockets, I shake my fist at you.

There are several interesting articles on mobile that came out in the last few days that would make a for good weekend down time read:

You Might Find Yourself on Future: Cell Phones As Personal Information Filters:

"Pay no attention to the man holding the receiver; it's the phone itself you'll need to impress.

A small army of editors, programming directors, critics, censors, librarians and curators have shaped choices of entire generations. But just like factory workers of the 19th century found themselves inevitably replaced by the more efficient machines, human gatekeepers are giving way to a new breed of automated tastemakers - sophisticated software that separates the information wheat from the chaff and whose influence is growing as fast as the amount of information we produce.

That is, pretty fast."

Engadget's interview with Nokia's VP talks N8, MeeGo 'milestone product,' tablets, Android and more!

"We're going to put our best foot forward when it comes to the user interaction with MeeGo products, and, of course, it's an evolution. Version two is always going to be better than version one, no question about that one. Then, on the similarities between Symbian and MeeGo, of course, from an iconography and the way it looks standpoint, we can do a lot to make sure that it's visible that it is the same family. I think we have to be very careful in not pulling the legacy with us to MeeGo on certain things. We will make some conscious decisions of things that will not be the same logic. For example, Symbian originally was built as a menu-driven operating system, which is not that practical when you are in a touch environment because the tree hierarchies back and forth. For MeeGo, we have taken a totally different kind of paradigm."

Marek Pawlowski at MEX on A mobile developer day too far:

"Handset manufacturers, network operators and software companies have for some time been falling over themselves to win over third party developers to their platforms. After attending Nokia's less than successful Ovi Developer day in London, I couldn't help but ponder whether this industry infighting is in their long-term interests and those of their customers?

These companies share a simple, common objective: increasing the value of their main product offering (be that handsets for Nokia, network capacity for operators or advertising for Google) by ensuring as many applications as possible are available within their eco-system, preferably exclusively. This is what drives all those developer conferences, free handsets and partnership marketing budgets.

It is hard to dispute the initial logic of this premise: customers will naturally be inclined to buy products which allow them access to the best services. Apple is the benchmark example, where the availability of iOS apps is a key selling point for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. In our consumer research we are seeing increasing numbers of customers making handset and operator purchasing decisions based on the quality and economy of access they provide to specific branded services.

However, numerous companies in the mobile industry are simply trying to beat Apple's App Store at its own game without stopping to consider if this is in their long-term strategic interests."

Photo by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N900.

Thurs 08.05.10 - Belle, after being quite lovely and quiet this week, decided to step up & out in noise and activity level this afternoon and evening. I used the Nokia N900 to take this photo, as I like the grain when the light is a bit low.

Today on Twitter in the name of research for tomorrow's blog post, I asked iPhone and Android owners what their favorite camera or photo apps are? Now I will ask you all...

Do you have a favorite camera or photo app for your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia or other camera phone? If so, please tell me what it is and why you like it in the comments.

If you don't have any special apps but like the native camera & photo apps that come with the camera, say so.

Yes, I know that my Facebook Connect is not working for comments, I am sorry but I have been unable to troubleshoot why. Will work on it later in the week.

To follow up on last week's post, 2,045 Days with a Camera Phone, I would like to write a bit more on why I have loved camera phone photography and mobile blogging so much in the last 5.5 years and that can be summed up in one word: constraints.

The old adage in design, photography, and many other arts is that it is not unlimited creative freedom that sparks the best in a designer or artist, but it is limits and constraints that the artist or designer has to push at, be challenged by, and get around that create great art and design or at least cause the artist in question to grow in their craft.

It has been very easy the last 8-10 years to hone one's craft with a DSLR camera almost to the point where too many photographers get obsessed with megapixels, lenses, and processing in Photoshop than the actual act of taking the photo becomes secondary or farther down the line.

By choosing to shoot more than 90% of my photos of the last half decade with a small camera phone and then choosing to send them directly from the phone to the internet with no stops at Photoshop, means that I purposefully chose to constrain myself to a small camera that in many cases had less megapixels and less of a lens & digital sensor system than the contemporary point & shoots, not even considering what the comparable time period of DSLRs could do.

But the magic of setting the self-imposed discipline of the constraints of a camera phone plus no or very little post-phone processing seriously, meant that I had to really hone my eye, my composition, my observation of the scene, and then just shoot and shoot and shoot. I have shot a lot of bad photos in the last 5+ years, but I have also shot a lot of good to wonderful photos with my camera phones.

And it is the discipline of the constraints of a camera phone that make the great photos all the more sweeter than when I shoot a good photo with a Nikon film SLR or DSLR.

All of that being said, I have some to quite a bit of trepidation about the next generation of camera phones, particularly the Nokia N8, as it really is better than the point & shoots out on the market right now. The photos from its big 12 megapixel digital sensor & Zeiss lens are extraordinarily good.

After 5.5 years of pushing, working around, thinking, changing the angle, doing whatever I could to capture the vision in my head with a camera phone, to have a camera phone that will be not just good enough, but great... ...that is why I said in the last article that I started to think seriously about film rangefinders or purchasing a high end Nikon. My thoughts were - if the Nokia N8 is so spectacular then I won't have much in the way of constraints, then whole rubric for why I have shot with camera phones since 2004 will be over.

Yes, as I said in 2,045 Days with a Camera Phone, the Nokia N8 is the arrival of the maturity of camera phones as a photographing instrument and the pioneering era is mostly over, particularly if one was shooting with camera phones from the perspective of constraints or enjoying the toy quality of some camera phone's imagery.

But I am not going to run away. Why? Because I trust Damian. I trust Mr. Dinning's vision that he has had the last 6 years to push the technology of camera phones to meet that of the highest quality levels. He and I had several interesting conversations over meals at the big adventure in May that gave me an insight to his desire to make the Nokia Nseries line of cameras cross from good to great. Damian and his team have not failed me in the Nokia N86 or any other Nseries camera phones that I have taken photos with since 2004.

So, I will let go of my imposed constraints and walk into a new era and see how good camera phones can really get for the photographer who wants a camera on one at all times, with the N8 I will just have to find a few new challenges to set for myself.

Here's to the future.

On Dec. 9, 2004, I drove to Beverly Hills to pick up my first camera phone, a Nokia 7610 with a 1 megapixel camera. I was ecstatic.

In 2003, I first heard of mobile phone / camera phone photography and mobile blogging from Adam Greenfield & Mie Kennedy's blogs, as well as Joi Ito mentioning it at SXSW. I really really really wanted to start taking photos with my phone and upload the photos directly from my phone to the internet.

The last 2,045 days of mobile phone photography have been wonderful. I don't use the word wonderful lightly here. By wonderful, I mean a whole new world of wonder. A world of exploration, of pushing the boundaries of and of purposefully constricting the boundaries of photography.

In 2003-2004, most of my photographer friends were moving from their film SLRs to DSLRs and thought I was crazy for showing up at concerts and shows with a crazy little camera phone rather than my Nikon or my Sony Mavica digital camera. But as they watched me upload the photos directly from the phone to Flickr or Barflies.net or to this blog while I was still at the show, then their sense of wonder was activated.

In the nearly six years of taking photos and mobile blogging with a Nokia camera phone much has changed. In 2004, my Nokia 7610 was only 1 megapixel, but it was connected to the internet. I had a browser, email, and most importantly, I had Lifeblog - all the better to mobile blog with.

Today, I have a Nokia N86 8 megapixel camera phone which takes fantastic photos. It has a browser, email, GPS, and many more features, but unfortunately no Lifeblog so mobile blogging is more than a wee bit more difficult than it was 2004-2008. But I love the photos that the N86 takes, so I won't complain about the lack of direct phone to blog with no stops at 3rd party server mobile apps.

Having a camera on my phone in my hand, in my pocket, or in my purse has opened up many creative doors and worlds in my life the last 6 years - I wrote my masters degree thesis on how creative people use their mobile phones, I did a whole mobile geo-photo master's project by photo & video'ing while traveling around Ireland with a Nokia N80 and my brother's Garmin GPS (sorry, no GPS in phones in 2006). I have gotten to travel to India, Austria, Helsinki, and San Francisco as well as many other places in the name of mobile phone photography.

Lately, as I think about the upcoming Nokia N8, a 12 megapixel, HD video monster of a camera phone, I have been reflecting about how the camera phone has arrived. With the Nokia 5, 8 & 12 megapixel camera phones, the Samsungs & Sonys, and the just released iPhone 4, camera phones are now good enough that one does not need to carry a separate point & shoot and in many cases they can be better in crowds or public places than a bulky DSLR. And the camera phone in hand is always better than the DSLR that you left locked up at home or in the car.

The last few months, part of me has wondered if it is time to creatively move on, to purchase a high end Nikon DSLR, like the D700, with a few prime lenses or start exploring medium & large format film photography with a used Mamiya or pick up a rangefinder camera and explore that world.

As I researched other photography avenues, I kept asking myself if it is time to say goodbye to the now past frontiers of the camera phone photography world and move on? Is it time to say goodbye to the frustrations of sub-standard mobile blogging software and the further frustrations of trying to convince various industry folks that good software matters? Is it time to move away entirely and take back up with my paint brush, of which no software is necessary?

Then I met a Nokia N8 in the wild. What a beauty. I can't say more due to an NDA and complete respect for the owner of said device... but... Oh my, what a camera. Color, clarity, oh my.

Rather than get sappy at this point or descend into a drooling heap of gadget lust, I will refer y'all to the man behind the N8's camera, the man with 215 more days in camera phone world than I and more days in the Nikon world - Mr. Damian Dinning - who has penned a very thoughtful and thorough series of articles on camera phones, photography and the upcoming Nokia N8 for the Nokia Conversations blog:

Nokia N8 Camera - 2,260 days in the making Part 1/2

Nokia N8 Camera - 2,260 days in the making Part 2/2

Nokia N8 photography - all the FAQs

And yes, come release date in a couple of months, I will be purchasing a Nokia N8 and then tracking down a QT developer to help me flesh out the code of my mobile app idea. Here's to 2,045 more days of camera phone photography. ;o)

Follow up Post: Camera Phone Photography: Celebrating Constraints

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86. Click for original sized image.

Wed 07.14.10 - This morning, as I woke up, I noticed a scarab beetle making out with my carpet, right on the edge of the area that I steam cleaned yesterday. The beetle was about 2cm (nearly 1 inch long) and when it had its head in the carpet, its butt was in the air. Very silly little creature.

Me being me, meant that I had to get up, walk past the beetle without disturbing it, grab my Nokia N86 8MP camera phone to take a photo or two. I put the camera settings on "Close Up" and zoomed in a bit to take two photos of which the one above was the one with the most clarity - click on the photo to see the original large size for details.

Oh what clarity the N86 captured! The hairs on the head of a 2cm beetle.

Of course the beetle got camera shy and lowered its butt by the time I got the camera to it, but the Nokia out performed my wishes. Not even my borrowed Nikon D70s could have taken the above photo.

Bravo!

Sun 07.11.10 - Ever since I wrote my master's thesis on how Creative Professionals used their Mobile Phones, I remain very curious how folks are using their phones. The tech and mobile blogs and blogosphere very much reward bloggers for writing on either the newest/latest/greatest or on the most detailed, esoteric atomic bits about the latest and greatest, all the while most of the folks around us seem to be muddling along with the mobile or cell phone that they bought from their wireless carrier for cheap.

When folks in my daily life find out that I love to take photos with my mobile phone and then moblog them to this blog, I frequently find the person I am talking to puts themselves down, discounts their own technology skills and knowledge, then confesses that they don't know how to get the photos they take with their phone off the phone.

A year ago, I decided that it would be fun to start a video blog that would, magazine style, ask a wide variety of folks the same five questions about their phones, plus a few sub-questions are asked in each interview, plus whatever other bits folks want to talk about their mobile phones:

1) Who are you, what phone do you have, where did you get it, and do you have a data plan?
2) What do you like about your mobile / cell phone?
3) What have you taught yourself to do on your mobile?
4) What don't you like about your mobile?
5) Either What do you wish you knew how to do on your mobile or what do you wish your phone did differently?

This idea has evolved and as of this evening, I formally announce the launch of Mobilefor.Us: Cell Phones for the Rest of Us.

Mobilefor.Us will be an online space that will seek to inform, share, and disseminate knowledge and confidence in using one's mobile phone regardless if you have the free phone from your carrier with no data plan or if you have the latest & greatest mobile with unlimited data or somewhere in between.

Please come join us at Mobilefor.Us.

My fave quote from Rant #1, US vs Them? American wireless industry, come meet me at Camera 3:

But no, Americans consumers get crippled versions of the cheapest lousiest phones you can find. Why is it that an Apple 'innovation' of a Forward Facing Camera is somehow radical in the USA? We've had these forward facing second cameras as standard features on essentially all 3G phones in Europe and Asia and Australia and Latin America and.. for Heaven's Sake, in Africa! I was the person flown in to place the first 3G video call on the continent of Africa when Vodacom of South Africa opened its 3G network for developers - and I used a forward facing second camera on that 3G phone - and this was in ...2004! Shame on you American carriers! That you haven't bothered even to bring this international standard to Americans and we have to wait for an outsider like Apple to bring it (now obviously, they do it on their Facetime proprietary solution, and can you blame Apple for that? You ruined yet another opportunity). The best phones? Isn't it time you joined us in the 21st Century and let American consumers enjoy what the rest of the world expects as normal.

My fave bit from Rant #2, Serious reply to CTIA Steve Largent - he's cruisin' for a bruisin':

In Japan, on just one carrier, NTT DoCoMo, there are today over a million content partners, application and service providers. When did they pass that 100,000 level? in 2004! You think Steve Largent that this is a sign of innovation in America in 2009? You are literally 5 years behind Japan - a country only a third the size of the USA in population. Shame on you! But I know the app store argument is fun to make today, eh? So you admit that the carriers can't do this level of creativity, it takes the outsider - like Apple - to do it. Thats exactly what I argued. So, one, I defeat your argument that the USA is 'innovative' because of the Apple App Store - but you then admit that the 100,000 in December 2009 and most of the 240,000 today (Apple having 225,000) is because of Apple who could not deploy these on the carrier systems, and had to develop its own app store. You are helping me prove my point that the carriers in the USA are dinosaurs, Steve.

The internet, the blogosphere, and the mobile worlds are all the richer for Mr. Ahonen's rants. Put Tomi on your RSS feed, it is always a good read.

Amongst bloggers in recent years there has been a decline in single author generalist blogs, be they professional or personal, and an increase in single subject blogs. Amongst tech bloggers, there has been a great deal of single brand blogs.

As a generalist semi-profession, semi-personal, semi-photography, semi-commentary blogger, I am always amazed when a person can keep a regular single subject blog up for longer than 2-3 years. Most of the personal bloggers I know have burnt out and then gotten reinvigorated by looking at different facets of their lives or by moving on to new passions. But what is a single subject blogger or even worse a single brand blogger to do when they are burnt out on that subject or brand?

Dan Carter of WorldofNokia.co.uk decided to close his blog this week. Dan writes:

"After what has been a up and down 2 years I am announcing that World Of Nokia will be closing it's doors for the final time on 5th June 2010 when the site will no longer be updated.

Both myself and Christian would like to thank you all for your support shown since day one and for everyone who has helped build the site up with comments, links or advertising,

Seeing as this is the final post I thought it only right to explain the reason behind the closing of the site and to be brutal its the fact Nokia have stopped being as creative as they once were not that long ago. The N95 was a modern masterpiece with the exception of the poor battery life but since then there has been a total lack in creativity

Nearly every phone launched until the new C/X series was a small update of the phone it was surpassing which itself was only a few months old (just how many versions of the 5800 and N95 did we really need??)
...

Over the past 2 years just concentrating on Nokia, all the phones ended up feeling pretty much the same due to the tired Symbian OS which only now on the new Symbian 3 due out in September has some chance of doing well. In fact when talking to Christian tonight about the Nokia N8 he said

"its too far off for me and runs Symbian which is putting me off"

"

In response, I commented:

"Dan,

May I make a recommendation? Keep the domain name, you never know what the future will bring AND don't just put your writing effort into someone else's site, but get your own blog and write about what you love right now.

With your own blog about whatever, there is no pressure to blog about a certain brand or even about mobile, but whatever you love.

Good luck!

smiles, jen ;o)"

All commentary about personal branding aside, I do think if one is a passionate person and is interested in observing the world around one or creating a space online, then having a string of single subject blogs or writing for a string of group or contribution blogs may end up being frustrating both for the blogger and their readers.

I will advocate my 2nd Law of the Internet in this case - "Own your Own Stuff".

I encourage anyone who has graduated from or wants to graduation from occasional posting blogger.com or wordpress.com to get their own domain, of which does not have to be in your name but can be an idea or conceptual name, and then set up a self-hosted blog in that domain and blog. Blog about whatever.

If this week you want to blog about mobile and Nokia or Apple, then blog about it. If next week or month or year, you are super passionate about Peruvian butterflies, then pay your domain registry & hosting and keep blogging be it about Apple, butterflies, politics, relationships, brands, travel, underpants, or whatever.

Put own your own creativity and consolidate it into one place, and if you must use tech tricks such as tags, categories, and .htaccess files to drive the SEO traffic to your new generalist blog.

Why? As a gift to your regular readers. People subscribe by RSS or Google Reader or Feedburner, etc, and they will want to keep reading you. Treat your regulars well, give them a consistent RSS or Atom feed.

Also as a gift to yourself. Allowing your own intellectual and creative curiosity to grow and flourish by the ability to explore new ideas over time rather than be limited to a single subject or brand.

Earlier this year, James Burland, a creative from the UK that I admire greatly did all but shutter his "Nokia Creative" blog to move on to his "iPad Creative" blog. While I love James' various passions for creating on the devices he is most excited about right now, I would love to see him for the long term not commit to a single brand, even if it drives more traffic in terms of SEO, but instead have one central blog of James' thoughts on how to create with [_______insert name of device_______]. Otherwise in 5 years' time, where will some of his best pieces be?

Ok, my inner Micki Krimmel will now argue to me that none of this matters to the reader, they don't care and technology will solve the problems of aggregation of all of our content for the reader to find over time. Someone else may argue that in 5 years time, James won't care about the iPad but will think his blog about it is a quaint relic of a different time.

Be that as it may, one of the great breakthroughs of the internet age is that if we want to, we can all be creative producers, so why not set up our own channel that is not dependent on one idea, subject, or brand, but instead a channel / blog / site that allows one to grow in one's passions and creativity over time and still allows the readers to consistently follow and participate.

Dan, I hope you set up your own space that allows you to blog about whatever suits your fancy right now without apologies and allows those of us who read your writing to continue to follow you, even if it is sporadic.

Forgive me for last night's storytelling rant/praise about Over the Air updating of one's mobile / smartphone. But one point that I would like to pick out from the story's threading is that of ease of use for the customer.

Many in the mobile and computer technology space complain about how users do not update their computers, mobiles or software thus making it more complex, difficult, and at times more expensive for creators, designers, and developers to provide great experiences (giving the the stink eye to IE6). But we can't complain if we are part of the problem in making updating difficult or more complex than it needs to be.

Apple has solved the problem of updating by making syncing between one's iPhone/iPod/iPad as close to automatic as possible when you dock or plug it into your computer. But it creates another problem in that one need's to have access to a computer to update or sync one's Apple mobile products and it can also create problems if you don't want a full sync or update. I have heard quite a few friends complain about both, either not having a regular computer or by syncing unique data on the mobile is wiped out by the sync. Apple makes it very easy but they have control over how the update happens.

Google's Android has solved the problem by making all their updates to any Android phone happen over the air. As I detailed out last night, Android puts a little notice up in the top tool bar that updates are available, the user can then click on the tool bar and a drop down menu will give one the alerts as to which software and/or firmware has updates available. Google makes updating very easy and gives the user the control on when and how much they want to update.

My complaint of the last four years about Nokia's Symbian S60 devices and updating is that the updating can only occur when one has the mobile phone attached by USB cable to a Windows PC/laptop. If one does not have access to a PC or one does not wish to find a PC to update one's mobile, then one goes without. Once one gets a PC of which to conduct the update on, it becomes a multiple step update process that usually includes updating the Nokia Updater software and then updating the phone. Most of the time this takes at least 3-5 times longer than an Apple or Android update. Unnecessary kit, steps, and time just to update.

What was so exciting to me and praiseworthy yesterday was that the Nokia N900 with the Maemo linux-based OS uses the Android model of OTA (Over the Air) updates. The user clicks on the alert in the top tool bar, one chooses the updates that one wants to have updated, and as long as one has data connection it will update. As stated last night, this whole process for a major firmware update took less than 10 minutes. It was truly efficient.

From the user experience perspective, we as creators, designers, and developers cannot assume what the user will have for 'kit' or a computer to update with and what access to connection they will have. Thus I suggest the following for updating of software and firmware on mobile phones and computers:

1) Let the device that needs to be updated be the only device involved. If a mobile, don't force the user to find a computer to conduct the update.

2) Make the available updates be readily noticeable to the user on the front or home screen of the device.

3) Allow whatever connection is most convenient for the user to do the updating. If wifi, then let the wifi do the job. If data connection through a mobile carrier, then let the sim chip do the job. Don't force it to be through the mobile carrier as some folks have very spotty 2G& 3G connections. Don't let the user fear that a spotty connection will brick the device. Conversely, if it doesn't work for the user to do the update only through a mobile connection, then give them steps to get around this.

4) Allow the user to choose how little or how much they want to update. If a major firmware update, then say so in plain language, not the internal language of your company or specialty.

By taking these four steps we can encourage users to update and make the update painless. Painless updates that just work make for a good user experience, excitement for new features or bug fixes, and in the end for brand affection and loyalty.

The ability to update one's mobile phone / device is an excellent service that a handset manufacturer or operating system can offer a customer as it not only extends the life of the mobile but it also expands and builds on the array of services and software available on the mobile.

One of the big enticements for me to consistently choose Nokia mobile phones over other manufacturers has been the high quality cameras, the great hardware, and the software/OS updates that are available for your mobile even a year or two after purchase.

Only one not so small, not so wee problem...

Up until the last year, all of the updates have only been available for Nokia customers with access to a PC / Microsoft Windows based computers, as one would have to use a Windows machine to update the Nokia in question.

Now, I don't know about you, but if you are a Nokia Nseries owner in the US, you are possibly not a PC owner. If you prefer to buy hard to find, high end, well designed hardware, then you have been mostly buying Apple for years and used to paying extra premium for great devices. If you are a Nokia Nseries owner in the US, you may be a creative surrounded by other creatives with Macs, not PCs. And on top of all of that, the PC owners around you might be the sort who don't own or ever run anti-virus and so you wouldn't want to hook your precious, expensive Noka up to their virii-addled PCs even for an update that will take 45 minutes to set up.

On top of hunting down a PC to update one's Nokia, there is the added irritation that every time one wants to update on a borrowed or ancient PC, the Nokia Updater software on the PC wants to be updated itself. And given that the lame computer in question is a Windows machine it means a lengthy download, a restart of the machine, plug your Nokia back in via USB cable and START ALL OVER AGAIN. SO ANNOYING.
Can I type it again? SO ANNOYING.

30-45 minutes to just get one f*ing update. UGH.

If you don't already read it, I recommend putting Charlie's Diary in your feed / RSS reader, as Mr. Stross is erudite and can pin any bug through the carapace with wit & speed.

Mr. Stross recently tackled "The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash" wherein he talks about how Mr. Job's severe control addiction appears to have several strategic as well as personal reasons:

"It's probably no exaggeration to say that Apple's draconian security policies are among the tightest of any company operating purely in the private sector, with a focus on secrecy that rivals that of military contractors. But even so, the control freak obsessiveness which Steve Jobs is bringing to bear on the iPad -- and the desperate flailing around evident among Apple's competitors -- bears some examination. What's going on?

I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future -- the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn -- on an all-or-nothing push into a new market."

For as much as I enjoy owning a good Apple MacBook Pro computer, as the hardware is so very nicely designed and the OS is not Microsoft (this is a theme for me, not MicroSquash, see other blog posts). But the last few years of watching what had been a potentially interesting mobile platform, the iPhone, turning into a closed cult that now involves cops, I must say I am more than turned off.

As my readers know, for my mobile devices I prefer Nokia (such lovely hardware & great camera phones) and Android (such lovely software) and I am eagerly awaiting the Meego linux based mobile platform that Nokia & Intel are currently working on. I am also excited right now for Nokia's open Maemo and future Meego, as there is plenty of room for a web designer / photographer / developer hybrid, like me, to develop mobile applications in python.

I want great hardware and an open software architecture as well as a whole open ecosystem that welcomes a variety of creative folk to get involved. The future as Mr. Stross envisions where Apple will go in his article makes me sincerely hope that Nokia will make several more iterations of the lovely Booklet with Meego as the linux based OS rather than the current Windows 7, so that I won't have to be stuck in a distopian Job-sian closed cloud-based future for my work and main machine.

As for mobile devices in 2015, I sincerely hope that there will be a diversity of open architectures & ecosystems that inspire creativity, connection and ease of use rather than another great computer world battle that is Apple v. Google or some other such nonsense.

As for other things I hope for in a mobile ecosystem in 2015:

1) I hope that all devices will come with their own solar battery charging array where the solar cells are on the case of the device so that you can flip it over and it will charge while it is not being used.

2) I hope that I will have a small handheld mobile device that will fit in my pocket or hand and it will have a fold out screen that will when full out will be the size of a sheet of office paper be it 8.5x11" or A4.

3) I hope that the OS and software that will run the mobile devices of 2015 will not be a closed system, not just in concept & app store but also not in execution. I hope that Palm's WebOS idea set will be propagated across the mobile landscape so that folks with training in web design & development will be able to code mobile apps and not just C++/Java/Cocoa/Symbian folk.

I hope this because the mobile and telecom worlds have been quite closed due to carrier strangleholds and the high barrier to entry for mobile applications, whereas the web world has had a large flowering of creativity and innovation because the barriers to entry were quite small. If the barriers to creating apps and sites for mobile are low, then in 2015 a 19 year old could create the mobile version of a future Facebook to scratch an itch in his or her community.

4) I hope that carriers will not continue to have such a vise grip on the North American market, but as I suggested in my thesis, that I can buy my mobile device from any number of stores and buy the 'gas' / connectivity from any number of other separate operators/carriers.

5) And then I have a ton of hopes for cameras with complete connectivity in 2015, but I won't go there now... ;o)

I have gotten some requests from a few web designers and developers on what are the best approaches for mobile forms.

My short & sweet answer is to keep it simple and make it flexible. Make sure your forms work with according to web standards best practices: clean code, strip out the extraneous that does not work towards the form's task or goal, and use progressive enhancement when coding the javascript if you use it at all. Resize the screen, are inputs too long or hidden? Test your form: if you turn off your javascript & CSS will the form inputs work? If so, then your forms will work on almost any device out there.

But you argue, "Jen, I am designing for smart phones with good webkit/gecko browsers, so I don't need to worry."

Yes, you do, as you can't guarantee on the mobile web what phone, be it smart or feature phone, what browser, and what screen size will come to visit your mobile or web site and may want to fill out a contact form or purchase something.

Here are some resources to get you started:

Luke W, the king of forms, on mobile forms:
Web Form Innovations on Mobile Devices
Better Mobile Form Design
Forms On Mobile Devices: Modern Solutions

Linda Bustos at Get Elastic on Mobile Commerce Usability: Forms and Checkout

Chris Mills in ThinkVitamin on Coding for the mobile web

WestCiv's Complete CSS Guide, The Mobile Profile

PPK's Mobile with links to his CSS & Javascript mobile tests

If you like the Details & Standards and a different point of view from Luke W, don't miss:
Luca Passini's Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, under point 3.2 Usability Luca argues that one should Beware of HTML style forms and has a different approach to Managing User Input.

Finally, the W3C recommendation on Mobile User Input

Back in April, Cindy Li & I spoke at the UX Summit on Mobile UX (aka Mobile User Experience), a subject very near & dear to me. Cindy took the first bit of the slides and concentrated on her experience in mobile app design as well as mobile web, I took the second part of the slides and focused on the principles of Mobile UX and the concepts that we need to be thinking about as we start design a mobile app or mobile web site/app.

It was surprisingly fun to sit at Cindy's and have us both get to speak into her MacBook Pro and have the magic of Adobe Connect (or something like it) project our slides, our video and the chat area of the attendees from all over the world on one computer screen. By seeing the chat as we spoke, we were able to answer questions as they were asked or reasonably soon thereafter. Later on Twitter, we received quite a few thank yous.

Now in return, Cindy & I present to you all our slides on Mobile UX. Enjoy. And thank you!

Sat. 05.15.10 - The Just for Fun camera phone / DSLR comparison is back. Given that the Camera Phone Fairy showed up this week with a Nokia N900 under my pillow, I decided today to shoot a local gerba daily with a water droplet in the sun, as well as Scruffy and Magnus playing with the Nokia N97, Nokia N86, Nokia N900, and Nikon D70s with a 50mm f1.8 lens.

Remember all the above photo comparisons are for fun on a lovely Saturday afternoon, and if you came over from a serious DSLR forum, please read the title, enjoy the images, and then when you go to rant about this back at the forum, the photographer & site owner here at Black Phoebe is a woman not a guy. A cheeky one at that. Just sayin'...

;o)

Until yesterday the only thing that has been intriguing to me about the iPad is the ability to create drawings and digital paintings mostly due to James's posts on iPad Creative, so screen size would be paramount.

After watching Valdis Krebs and Shawn Joyner use their iPads this week at the Nokia workshop event, I must say that I am not that intrigued.

For some reason, it must have been the angles of Apple's adverts, I thought that the actual screen size would be larger more like a sheet of 8.5x11 / A4 paper and not the size of a medium-ish moleskine or my current small-ish Wacom tablet. Why pay $499 for an animated version of my 7 year old Wacom tablet?

I would be much more intrigued by a mobile device the size of a Nokia N97/N900 or an iPhone that had a 8.5x11/A4 sized screen that folded out, so that it could both fit in one's pocket and also fold out to a full paper sheet size for drawing, writing, multiple apps open at once, plus a larger viewing area.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97 and her N86.

Wed 05.12.10 - Day 3: The Last Day of the Big Adventure. Today we worked in small groups and pairs on the various bits. The best part is towards the end when we were sent out in our pair groups for 20 minutes outside of the Hotel Kabuki to take funny/fun/silly photos for a prize. My photo of Petri on a concrete pedestal was the winner, Petri won a large bottle of good sake. Go Petri, Go!

I would like to extend an big thanks to the Firefish folk for putting on a well-organized workshop and to the Nokia folk for coming a long way to workshop with North American tech folk. While at times it was hard, by the end of today much had been gathered and gained.

Thanks all.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97 and her N86.

Tues 05.11.10 - Day two: the day we workshopped in a conference room at the Kabuki Hotel from 9:30am until 7pm discussing a wide variety of topics around smart phones, until we were all sapped. Then we took cabs down to Farallon for a delightful and reviving dinner in the 4th floor submarine themed ballroom at the Kensington Park Hotel.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N86.

Mon 05.10.10 - Rather than go into a big explanation about the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and why I am in San Francisco until Wednesday evening, let's just say that I am in San Francisco for a mobile device related event and I am having a good, stimulating adventure. Here are some photos of various bits, Japantown, and an amazing meal at SPQR on Filmore.

Fri. 05.07.10 - Today at Tuttle Club LA, Vaughan Risher (@vardenrhode) started asking the mobile folk in the group some questions about the upcoming Nokia N8's HD video recording capabilities.

He had three questions, of which he wrote down for me to ask around about, but then I decided I should video him fleshing out what he was really thinking.

Here are his questions about the Nokia N8:

1) Is there a button to upload full HD, not low res compressed, recorded video directly to YouTube, Vimeo, etc?

2) How does the interface stack up with iPhone or the Nexus One.

3) Can you see a complete video novice being able to use advanced video features.

Vaughan is an iPhone 3G owner who is ready to upgrade and if the Nokia N8 has the ability to upload full resolution HD recorded video directly to YouTube or Vimeo he may be tempted.

Video recorded by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97 at Toorak Cafe, Long Beach, Calif.

Ms. Jen, @msjen, blackphoebe.com
Vaughan Risher, @vardenrhode, vaughanrisher.com

Today, after much thought, I decided to experiment with redesigning the front page of blackphoebe.com. Previous to today, it was a shorter variation of the Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen blog theme, as of today, it is now one large background photo with a semi-transparent left sidebar with various navigation bits to get around.

I have been wanting for at least the last four years to find a way to feature my mobile phone photography without giving up the usual blog front page of chronological ordering of at least eight blog posts, as I like readers to see the choices available and not to pigeon hole Black Phoebe as only a photo blog. About four years ago, I solved the problem by making the blackphoebe.com entry page be the most recent post from this blog plus a set of the most important links to this blog, recent entries links, the about page, and my master's thesis on Mobile.

Many photo blogs have one big photo with a few links to recent posts or possibly a short set of excerpts in the footer. I love this layout style, but I don't want to prioritize image over text. This point of this blog since its inception in April of 2003 was to feature image and text equally. How to manage this goal structurally and visually?

I want to feature my passion for mobile phone & (D)SLR photography with at least one showcase for my favorite photo of the week or day or whatever. And I want to feature the text-based articles, reviews, and humorous pieces that I write. One of the things that I like about the Movable Type software is that the templating system is very robust and allows me to set up a template where just one post from a certain author with a certain tag is shown.

Today I changed around the templates for the blackphoebe.com entry page to have the most recent moblogged (mobile blogged) photo to this blog be the feature photo as the whole 100% of the page background photo. I also took out the blog post area, footer, and reduced the left hand sidebar down to the bare essentials.

I am going to try this out for awhile. I may also try adding a footer with a few recent entries summaries as well to balance out the big image, but for now I will try out image only.

Please let me know how it looks on your mobile or iPhone and if you are using an older version of IE, such as IE6, as my IE testing machine is currently out on loan.

Let me know what you think.

****

p.s. For the 100% background image, I tried a CSS only solution with no javascript for better cross-browser/cross-device rendering. Please do report how it works on your mobile and any older browser versions.

Tues 05.04.10 - This video would only be funnier if Mr. Kankkunen had driven circles around one the BMW driving clamshell phone talking idiots from my neighborhood.

One of the things that continually baffles me about the wealthy in SoCal is how they can afford the latest & greatest BMW, Mercedes, Range Rover, etc, but all seem to talk on clamshell phones with no bluetooth headset.

¿What?

How in the heck can one afford a $50-80K car but one's mobile is the cheap/free clamshell from _____ [insert name of carrier here] with no bluetooth or headset?

My mom posits that these folks don't care if they get pulled over for talking on their phones with no hands free because they can afford to pay the ticket. I still wonder why not spend an extra $300 and get a phone with bluetooth or a headset in the box. Idiots.

Now for me, I would spend the $$ for a real mobile and then get the Nokia Car Kit CK-200. But I am also not spending $50-80k on my car, or even a leased one.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Fri 04.30.10 - This morning after several days of watching for the UPS man, two birthday gifts arrived with a thump on the front step: my new PacSafe travel camera bag that will hold a DSLR plus several lenses and Two, count 'em - two, camera phones in their own special area; and more importantly my very own Nokia N86 8 Megapixel camera phone. Not a trial N86 that will have to be returned to WOMWorld/Nokia, but my own, my very own.

Now those of you who read this blog with any regularity know that I have a camera phone and moblogging addiction, in the course of the last 5 years and 5 months that I have been in possession of a mobile phone with a camera and a data connection to mobile blog with. And in those 5 and a bit years, I have tried out many, many camera phones but have only owned 5 of my own camera phones, of which the arrival today of the Nokia N86 was the 5th.

Welcome lovely little 8 megapixel bundle of glass, metal, and plastic kick-ass camera phone joy.

Thurs 04.29.10 - From last night's Jon Stewart show, as usual Mr. Stewart gets to the essence again, this time his love for Apple & when did Apple become The Man. The best part is when Stewart calls Gizmodo's iPhone review "whole video tech prostate exam".

I will use term, "whole video tech prostate exam", about any and all future mobile video reviews and possibly about unboxing videos.

The official Nokia N8 pages with tech specs - Looking pretty darned camera-licious tasty!

I will write up my thoughts later today, the N8's camera specs are very exciting, particularly with the return of the Xenon flash. Until I can use the final released product, I will hold my opinion on Symbian ^3.

Initial news & blog reactions:

Nokia: misguided or misunderstood?

Some thoughts on Nokia N8 and Nokia's device strategy

Mon 04.26.10 - I find the tale of the two leaks of the last week to be very instructive of the respective companies, countries, & cultures of which they occurred.

Leak #1: The ((**GASP**)) iPhone Leak.

OMG! The iPhone 4 has been leaked. The Oh Holy Jobs and Cupertino Silencers get the cops on the beat. Gruber waxes prolific...

Because OMG the next Holy Artifact has been leaked!

OMG!!!!!!!!! THE WORLD WILL END TOMORROW AS THE OH HOLY ARTIFACT HAS BEEN LEAKED!!!!!! WE WILL ALL DIE!!!!!!!

8.8 earthquake surely will hit Jason Chen's house next week. And he is not even boobylicious.

Leak #2: Eldar M. at Mobile_Review leaks the next Nokia high end mobile - The N8.

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Eldar gives the prototype of the non-yet announced Nokia N8 a Russian Rant treatment. Various bloggers & commenters react & rebut.

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Helsinki is still waiting for a few spring flowers to spring out.

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Quietly, the FCC gives the Nokia N8 the seal of approval.

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Espoo wonders if there will be another snow storm before the trees leaf out.

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No earthquakes or police raids in Moscow or Helsinki, nor any clerics nor cleavage. No news at 11.

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Elgar possibly picks his nose, which is full of snot from Spring pollen & creates a bugger sculpture in the shape of not-yet-announced iPhone 4.0, hoping that Steve Jobs will send the Cupertino Police after him.

****

p.s. People, please wake me up with the iPhone X.x has a real camera.

p.p.s. To quote me from last night: "Eldar has made his reputation on scooping everyone's scoop & Nokia is famed for have wonderful devices 3 months AFTER release."

p.p.s.s. Tomi Ahonen, last Thursday, on "So bloodbath in smartphones continues: Q1 results from Apple, AT&T and Nokia"

*****

Tues 04.27.10, 8:07am PST - Nokia speaks and requests the return of their N8 prototype.

Bless Espoo, the money quote is: "We are not the Secret Police, and we want to maintain our culture of openness."

Eldar, return the N8. Nokia's culture of openness and lack of scary Cupertino style closed-ness is one of their unique Finnish treats to the rest of us, let's help them keep it.

Sun 04.18.10 - Just want to remind folks about the UX Web Summit that will be this upcoming Wed April 21, 2010, at a connected computer near you.

I will be departing for San Francisco on Tuesday morning so that Cindy Li and I will be able to conduct our session together at one computer rather than have a split screen.

If you are in San Francisco on Wed 04.21.10 and would like to get together for dinner and drinks, let me know, as it would be good to see folks, even if briefly.

Next Wed., April 21, 2010 is the UX Web Summit, of which anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection can attend.

Our online Summits bring the experts to your desktop! Forget about the hassle of travel or leaving family so you can focus on diving deeper into Web design and development topics.

A great user experience (UX) can mean the difference between merely having a web presence and truly engaging your visitors so they'll gladly come back over and over again. Practical techniques to create the best UX are hard to come by, though.

Join some of the Web's most experienced UX professionals as they share experiences culled from working on sites big and small. Learn from the pros how to tackle user experience difficulties head-on with proven methods in use by some of the most popular sites on the Web.

Cindy Li, the fabulous designer and illustrator, and I will be speaking on Mobile User Experience Design, both from the perspective of native mobile apps and the mobile web. Cindy will be presenting on how to best approach the UX of iPhone app design and I will be tackling the UX of the mobile web. I am very excited to co-present with Cindy on this topic as both of us are passionate about User centered design and the mobile space.

More info on our session:

Mobile UX by Jenifer Hanen & Cindy Li Online

Mobile platform has become more and more important part of the web experience, but how do you design for it? Presented by Jennifer Hanen and Cindy Li, this session will cover resources for mobile design, what you need to get started, principles for mobile design, and prototyping your next mobile application.

Topics covered:

* Resources for templates in Fireworks and Photoshop
* Principles to consider when you are designing for mobile
* Keeping the essence of your traditional desktop web site
* Is it a mobile app or website?
* Designing for a mobile location-based mobile app
* Creating a test without coding
* What to send off to Apple to get your iPhone/iPad app approved

The UX Summit will also have sessions by Dan Rubin, Daniel Burka, Juliette Melton, Nick Finck, Donna Spencer, and Rob Goodlatte.

For a registration Discount, go to http://uxwebsummit.eventbrite.com/?discount=UXHANEN10 or use the discount code UXHANEN10 for 10% off!

Photos by Ms. Jen, Nokia N82 photos on the Left and the Nokia N86 on the Right.

Mon. 04.12.10 - Once again, I will let you the gentle reader be the judge of this contest between the Nokia N82 and the Nokia N86 8MP. The contest for this set of photos was a very bright, mid-day sun while at the Huntington Library & Gardens in San Marino, California.

The question I wanted to raise in this set was how would each camera phone titan do in bright mid-day sun (very unforgiving) in terms of color, clarity, close-up and far away, as well as light handling with no flash. As with last week's Part I of the Nokia N82 vs. the Nokia N86, I did my best to make sure both cameras had the exact same settings and distance from the subject, and I did not alter the photos in post-production in any way other than to reduce all of them to 640x480.

Which camera phone do you prefer?

Sun 04.11.10 - Yes, you have already seen these photos, but I added the ability to use Better File Uploader from the mobile browser so that I can create Lightbox image galleries directly from the Nokia N97's browser to this Movable Type blog install.

Extra excellent!

Photo of Scruffy taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Sun 04.11.10 - Ok, I just got over the toughest part, I was able to upload the photo using Movable Type's 'Upload File' with all thedialog box CSS hacks working.

I am able to save and now will hit publish. When you see this it means I was successful in hacking my Movable Type install to allow me to post and upload photos directly from the Nokia N97's native browser with no plugins to MT or any 3rd party app or site. Wheeeeee...

Update from the N97 a few minutes later: YAY!

I suppose that if I owned an iPhone and used WordPress for my blogging software my life would be much easier as the wide boulevards of Apple & Automatic have many cross connections and tons of developers ready to create an app or plugin for the slightest sneeze.

But as a confirmed dissenter, descending from a long line of Dissenters, who purposely chooses the road less traveled, I have been having a DANGED hard time mobile blogging to this Movable Type blog with one of my Nokia cameraphones ever since Nokia discontinued Lifeblog in all the new mobile phones since 2008.

But I am a true optimist and remain ever hopeful.

And I keep trying new mobile apps, new websites, and new MT4 plugins that promised even the slightest chance of directly blogging from the Nokia camera phone to this Movable Type blog with no, and I mean no, stops or image storage at Flickr or PixelPipe or Shozu or any other 3rd party server or service.

This weekend I decided to revisit the Movable Type iPhone plugin, iMT, that allows one to access a stripped down version of the Movable Type administration area so that one can blog from the iPhone or Android platforms. I had hoped that the iMT 1.1 plugin would accommodate more mobiles than the iPhone or Android platforms.

Wed 04.07.10 - Photo of the crabapple blossoms taken by Ms. Jen in the Chinese Lily Pond area at the Huntington Library and Gardens around 4:30pm. I really love the ease of taking photos with the Nokia N86 and the clarity & color of the resulting photos. 8 megapixel camera phone, I kiss you.

I send this one back to WOMWorld tomorrow, but within the week, I will, crossing fingers, have my own.

Also, tomorrow, I will post up the Part II of the Nokia N82 vs. the Nokia N86, as I took 86 photos with each of the two camera phones at the Huntington's Gardens today.

Photos by Ms. Jen, the Nokia N82 on the Left and the Nokia N86 on the Right.

To Read the review, continue on...

Photos by Ms. Jen on the Left with the Nokia N86 and on the Right by the Nikon D70s.

Sat 04.03.10 - This afternoon my Mom and I took Les Doggies for a walk about Seal Beach and I decided to take both the Nokia N86 8 megapixel camera phone and the Nikon D70s DSLR camera out so that I could take photos of the same things to then see the comparison of how each camera would perform.

Jen, are you high to compare the photos of a camera phone and a respected DSLR? Why yes, I am. I decided to do it for the fun of it but also wanted to see how each would perform.

Tues 03.30.10 - After much to do I have set up Pixelpipe on the Nokia N97, let's see if it will post this photo directly to my blog via the Atom/ Metablog pipe.

Update: 10:47pm on 03.30.10 - Once again I remembered why I don't like using Pixelpipe via Nokia's meh ShareOnline: slow, have to resize before sending, complicated set up, meh, and rather than upload the image to my server via the Atom protocol, the image is stored on pixelpipe's server.

Oh, Lifeblog, I so miss you.

Photos by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N86.

SXSW is my favorite conference/festival/springbreakforgeeks event of the year and has been since 1998 for Music and 2001 for Interactive. I love Austin in early to mid-March.

For a few years now, I have felt that Nokia has missed a big opportunity to reach out to the North American and International web, mobile, gamer, and interactive creator & influencer communities by not participating, attending, or throwing a big open to all badges party at SXSW. Last year Nokia held two private by invite only parties that were kept on the low down, which was completely baffling for a company that is struggling in the North American market, as SXSW would be the perfect place to get all the influencers and bloggers to start talking.

More Text/Write-up/Thoughts plus Links just beyond the jump....

Dear Nokia,

As a 12 year vet of SXSW, here are my tips and tricks for a great SXSW experience, particularly my food recommendations.

Don't miss the Kickball game at Palm Park on Sat. March 13, 2010 at 10:30. More info at http://www.dashes.com/kick

While I already have my SXSW Interactive Badge & plane flight, I would love to win a white Nokia N86 to take lots of great photos & video at SXSW (see min 3:30 to end of video).

Less than a week away folks! It will be fun! ;o)

Ms. Jen

Today, maybe yesterday, Anton saved my sorry hide, and probably many of ours, by announcing that Project52 has been moved to start on March 17, 2010 to go through March 17, 2011:

"A New Beginning February 24th, 2010

Can you believe that it's nearly March already? As you can see, we're finally starting to make some visible progress around here when it comes to Project 52. I hope that the lack of updates on this site hasn't gotten in the way of you and your writing.
A Fresh Start

As the captain of this leaky boat, I consider it my duty to steer us in a more productive direction. I've decided to re-boot the project with a new launch date of March 17th -- St. Patrick's Day. I feel that we got off to a very unorganized start. This is due in part to the number of people that discovered the project after January 1st had already come and gone. Also, a lack of preparedness (in the amount of interest that was shown) brought the logistics of managing this machine to a crawl.
Again, just to be clear: our new dates will be from March17th, 2010 to March 17th, 2011. Please note that on your calendars.

So, for those of you already (and still) participating -- thank you for your patience. We're nearly ready to provide the inspiration and data that you've been asking for. If you've already got nine (or more) entries live on your site, then you are already leading the pack in your habits. But from what I've seen, there are still a lot of you who have signed up that have already stopped writing. Consider this a second chance to begin again. We would love to have you back in the fold!"

Yay! Two days ago, I declared my Project52 February Fail since I was so busy the last four weeks and dropped off the face of the Project52 planet, I am glad for a new start three weeks from now.

Now, if I account myself as smart, I will pre-write the first few weeks of entries and get them queued to go starting March 17, 2010.

Once again, I hereby pledge to write more about Mobile user experience, Mobile and Web application building, etc.

Thanks, Anton, et al, for all your hard work. Y'all rock.

Photo of a DimeStorePretty.com hair pin purchased on Etsy taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900 on 12.01.09.

If you know me, you know that I really don't like jewelry at all, but I do like a good sparkly hair pin. Forget a diamond ring, or the necklace, or the diamond tennis bracelet, but give me a few lovely vintage rhinestone hair pins and I am very happy.

All that said, recently, per my usual, I have composed whole paragraphs of wonderful, amazing, world alerting blog posts in my head though I am nowhere near a computer. Once I get to a computer I have completely forgotten what I wanted to write about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... I could talk into my mobile and record my thoughts as I compose them. I could text myself the ideas as I have them. I could email them to this blog. YES, I KNOW.

But it doesn't happen.

If the business dudes in their suits and BMWs get to wander about like crazy people, gesticulating wildly with their hands, while talking loudly into their bluetooth headsets, can someone please invent a super cute 1940s rhinestone wifi to my blog hair pin so that I can walk around or drive around town talking to myself as it gets transmitted to my blog?

Please?

After months of going going going, it has all caught up with me this week and I am exhausted in a bad way. I am off to bed soon. Yes, shocker, before midnight.

But I have a few posts I would like to write and by writing them now it will remind me to do so in the next few days:

1) Voice Mail Transcriptions: Spinvox vs. Ribbit vs. Google Voice

My quote for the week in an email: "I have had Google Voice for months now. The transcriptions suck pustulated monkey butt. "

2) My Final Final Wrap up to the Nokia Booklet 3G. Somehow I was prescient in all my moaning about the evils of Windows 7 Starter and how I wished wished hoped against hope that Nokia would partner with a linux distro to put a proper OS on the Booklet, and on Monday Morning, Feb 15, 2010, OPK & Intel answered my prayers to the mobile deities: MeeGo.

3) A few assumes that there will be at least three things in my list but I have forgotten the third due to tiredness, so instead I will delight you with this link from the New York Times on how the seafaring history of humans has been pushed back another 60,000+ years if not more:

On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners

Go read it.

Plus a small lament:
Oh, Google App Engine, why oh why did you wait until only the last few weeks to get semi-decent docs? Oh the agony you could have spared by putting those up months ago.

Contrary to all of the uproar this past week, I like Google Buzz, but with a reservation or two.

I like that Buzz is a version of Jaiku, which I love love love, that is attached to my Gmail & Latitude on my mobile phone. I like that most of the people I liked best on Jaiku are already on Google Buzz and are already my friends due to being in my address book. I really like that I am not limited to 140 characters, as I am on Twitter, and that to interact with Google Buzz I just need to log into Gmail.

Google did ask if I wanted to have Buzz attached to my Gmail account and I said yes. Google also asked if I wanted my Google profile public, which I edited and then made public and searchable.

My only but about Buzz is that it would have been much better if Google Buzz had asked if I wanted to make all my address contacts and Google Reader follows to be my friends in Buzz. I would like to have opted-in rather than logged in with over 100 people I was following automatically! 100! Woah!

I can't really go unfollow them now. And by automatically having me follow the folks in my address book who are on Buzz, it took away the fun game of joining a social network where one has to search for one's friends or other interesting people. Google took away the exploration phase.

Google, please allow for opt-in, not opt-out. And don't forget to let us explore to find our own friends rather than finding them for us.

Today I officially started something that I have been meaning to start for nearly 11 months, a new mobile website. A blog for all the non-tech folks out there who want to either find usable information about their cell / mobile phones or a place to share with others their experiences in a way that is more about sharing & D.I.Y. than about mobile tech geekery.

I set up the blog, though I still need to work out the layout / style, and I shot my first video with my Mom's friend Debbie who is the mildly bewildered owner of a hand-me-down refurbished Nokia 6750 from AT&T.

The questions I will be asking folks are:

1) What phone do you have?

2) What do you like best about your phone?

3) What did you figure out how to do all by yourself?

4) What do you like least or frustrates you about your phone?

5) What do you wish you knew how to do with your phone?

If you would like to be interviewed, let me know.

Give me the rest of the weekend and Cell Phones for the Rest of Us will be officially launched.

First off, I love the name. easypeasy

Second off, I love the first paragraph of copy on the Easy Peasy website:

Why was your awesome netbook shipped with that horrible operating system? Your netbook is not a typical laptop, so why should you use a typical operating system? easypeasy is harder, better, faster and stronger than what came with your netbook. And did I mention it is 100% free?

I shall install Easy Peasy on the Nokia Booklet 3G today and see if there are any differences from Jolicloud.

Screenshot photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Wed 02.10.10 - In the last two weeks of trialing the Nokia Booklet 3G that WOM World/Nokia sent to me, I have had a range of great to ok to just bad experiences with the Booklet, but all of them have been predicated on the Operating System (OS) and not necessarily the Booklet itself. I am of the opinion that the Booklet is a great little mini-laptop that is beautifully designed but hampered with a crappy OS in Windows 7 Starter. It would be great if Nokia were to install an OS that had the same level of polish, attention, and design that the Booklet itself has.

Here are my thoughts after two weeks of testing, installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling alternative Linux based Operating Systems in the form of a Pro & Con comparison of the hardware, and the various potential OSs of Windows 7 Starter, Ubuntu, and Jolicloud:

Pros for the Nokia Booklet Hardware:
Beautiful hardware design
3G with a sim chip port in a netbook is excellent and frees one up to be able to work on a computer anywhere
Lovely screen
I like the chicklet style keyboard, even if a bit narrow
Truly long long long battery time: 10-12 hours. I have yet to run it all the way down.

Cons for the Nokia Booklet Hardware:
I don't like the touchpad, rough surface, works poorly in Win7

Overall: The Nokia Booklet 3G is a lovely, little mini-laptop. The only thing cuter is Jackie's pink Eee PC. The Booklet would be cuter than the Eee PC if it came in hot pink or deep purple.

****

Pros for Windows 7 Starter:
Native 1280x768 screen resolution

Cons for Windows 7 Starter:
Wow! Win7 Starter sucks.
AT&T Sim chip does not *just* work for the 3G side, Al and I had to add our own settings & it still didn't work. It finally did about 3 days later.
Multitouch on the touchpad does not work or works very badly and intermittently.
Win 7 on the Booklet is slow. Sometimes molasses in a blizzard slow. Unexceptably slow.
Can be quirky on start up and starts in Airplane Mode with wifi/3G turned off. Odd but true.
Windows 7 Starter does not let the user do a lot of normal tasks like change the background, so I had to download a specious 3rd party app to rid the desktop of the Win7 logo.

Overall: Windows 7 does NOT live up to the hype. While it may appear to be an improvement over XP or Vista, any OS is an improvement over those two, so it is not saying much. Windows 7 Starter is a bad little OS. Nokia's biggest mistake is not the 1 GB of RAM or Intel Atom chip speed on the Booklet, but the inclusion of Windows 7 Starter as the OS as the Windows Bloat slows down the hardware. If Nokia wants to be in bed and having relations with Windows (each to their own), then for the price of the Booklet, they should have Windows 7 Ultimate as the shipped OS, as it is more polished and for the $600 price unlocked the Booklet does deserve a polished OS.
Did I mention how damned slow Windows 7 Starter is to do any task? Ugh.

****

Pros for Ubuntu via Wubi:
Super fast install of Ubuntu via Wubi which uses bit torrent.
Wow! Ubuntu is much nicer than Win7 Starter! Can I say that again?!
AT&T sim chip 3 G data *just* works in Ubuntu after you answer 3 questions, no fiddling with properties & preferences.
Multitouch does work on the touchpad and it is *fast* (it worked on the first two times I installed Ubuntu through Wubi, but not the last two times)
Ubuntu is fast on the Booklet, none of the hesitating or slow loading of Win7.
Ubuntu comes shipped with over 25 applications that provide a wide range of office, graphics, web, and developer tools and programs, including Nokia's QT.

Cons For Ubuntu:
800x600 screen resolution. As of Jan 29, 2010, don't try the kernel mod fix to make the res 1280x768 as recommended on the Ubuntu wiki, it makes for a very unstable install, wait for the Ubuntu dev folks to make a stable fix.
Sometimes the multitouch works great, sometimes it runs too fast.

Overall: Ubuntu is my favorite OS for the Nokia Booklet 3G hands down and miles ahead of Windows 7. While at the time of writing this, I could not get the native screen resolution to work with the Ubuntu fix, the Jolicloud folks did, so the Ubuntu folk should not be far behind with a workable fix.
The best part of Ubuntu on the Nokia Booklet is that the OS has a light footprint which makes for a fast Booklet and even though light & fast, Ubuntu is powerful and comes with or one is able to download easily any and all developer tools to really work on the Booklet with Ubuntu. I can code and deploy Django, Google App Engine, and Nokia's QT with Ubuntu, which I would not be able to do fast or easily with Windows 7 Starter or Jolicloud on the Booklet.
I really do think that Nokia should do a co-promote with Ubuntu's Canonical and ship a version or a dual boot of Ubuntu customized / polished up for the Booklet, as it is provides much more programs and functionality than Windows. For all the naysayers that don't think Ubuntu is polished enough, if Nokia were to work with Canonical, much of the polish problems could be solved within a few weeks with a team of devs & designers on the project. The main points are to make sure the native screen resolution and multitouch always work, as well as the syncing with one's mobiles. If one really wants Windows, then provide a dual boot. Many folks would be happier with Ubuntu after 30 minutes of using it, not just a geek like me.

****

Pros for Jolicloud:
Native Screen Resolution of 1280x768 out of the box (or install as the case may be)
Different User Interface desktop layout
Apple/Mac style keyboard shortcuts work to close windows (ctrl+w) & exit programs (ctrl+q). Ubuntu & Windows do not do this.
Touchpad is fast for moving the cursor.
I like the black background & the colors & icons are easy on the eyes.

Cons for Jolicloud:
First time I tried to install last week, it kept quitting. It worked tonight, but it was very slow.
Slow start up load
Froze completely the 1st time I asked it to use the AT&T sim chip for data connection, had to force re-start.
2nd time I tried to use the AT&T data, it froze again. Not working.
Different User Interface desktop layout
Multitouch does not work, two fingers won't scroll
While Jolicloud is built on Ubuntu, it does not have as many programs & applications available without downloading or using the package manager
Jolicloud takes over any install of Ubuntu on the Booklet and I had to uninstall both to reinstall Ubuntu to get it to load again.

Overall: Jolicloud has a great deal of potential, esp. as a netbook OS for non-power/non-geek users. The User Interface has quite a bit of polish, the native screen resolution of the Nokia Booklet works on startup on Jolicloud, and I love that some Mac/Apple gestures & keyboard shortcuts just work. The downsides to Jolicloud of non-working 3G, missing programs & tools that Ubuntu ships with, slow load time, and the lack of multitouch on the touchpad make Jolicloud unworkable for me as a geek user who would like to use the Booklet as a mini-laptop that is a mini-dev box. But I will not discount Jolicloud as their developers are ambitious & very responsive and many of these issues may be solved within the month or two.

***

Conclusion:
I may expire waiting for Apple to deliver a cute, tiny, light, fully powered 10 inch MacBook Pro. Nokia has done the next best thing by making a cute, tiny, light, well designed 10 inch Nokia Booklet 3G. But... it is under powered with a bad operating system in Windows 7 Starter that slows the machine down and makes for a bad user experience. Sorry, but the Windows 7 experience does not cut it, even in the upgraded $80+ Ultimate version.

As with many Nokia products the hardware is beautiful, but the OS is either lacking or the wrong fit for the beautiful hardware. In the case of the Booklet, Windows is a wrong fit, but there are options out there and Nokia should give the customer a choice of a great user experience with the Booklet.

Nokia needs to step up their game and either develop a kick ass version of the Maemo OS for the Booklet, which would be delicious, or work with Ubuntu to make a Nokia branded version of Ubuntu that would make the Booklet experience a delight to use and worth the $600 unlocked asking price.

At this point, I would love to buy a Nokia Booklet 3G if it had a great OS, but not if it comes shipped with a bad OS at $600 when I could get a pink Eee PC at $275 and install Ubuntu on it for free.

Tues 02.09.10 - Today, Jackie Ojeda, singer of Bella Novella and talent buyer for Alex's Bar , and I talked about her super cute new little pink Eee PC netbook that she bought for taking notes at nursing school and to communicate more effectively while on tour with Bella Novella

The last week, Jackie got to see and test out the Nokia Booklet 3G netbook that I had with me, of which she liked, but when she went to buy a netbook she was turned off by the AT&T 2 year contract for the $199 price on the netbook or the $600 unlocked price. She was able to get the Eee PC for $275 without any contract, even though it does not have 3G nor GPS as the Booklet does.

We both agreed that the best part is that the Eee is pink.

Photos of Thurs 02.04.10 taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97

Thurs 02.04.10 - Three tweets from the 5 o'clock hour this evening:

@msjen: That was *HYSTERICAL* A neighborhood 5 year old boy just showed up to show me his mom's new phone, "Look, it is a mini computer" he says. about 6 hours ago

@msjen: Me, "Does you Mom know you have her new phone?" Ely, "No!" Me, "I think you should go home." "Ok" His Mom has a new Nokia N97 mini. about 6 hours ago

@msjen: Of course, I had him stop long enough to do a video. I am now walking over there to make sure he really took it home. about 6 hours ago

I do have video of Ely standing at my door telling me about his Mom's new 'mini-laptop' as he brandished a brand new Nokia N97 Mini with no adult in sight. I need to get Carolyn's permission before I post it, though. He was so excited about the 'mini-laptop' that could take photos.

When I walked over to their house to make sure that Carolyn's new phone made it home without harm, Ely informed me that the Nokia N97 that I had was 'Too Big' and that his Mom's new phone was much better than the big N97. Carolyn and I tried to show him that the Mini is just a smaller version of the N97, but he was convinced it was MUCH BETTER. Oh, to be 5 and all boy.

I proceeded to show him how to take photos and video. He particularly liked the sports mode of the digital still camera and made his Mom run down the sidewalk to get an action shot.

In other local Seal Beach news, all the flowers are a-bloom due to last week's rain. Magnolia, aka Bird, cashed in her savings for pierced ears at the Westminster Mall. She got pink sparkly earrings. Magnolia hopefully appreciates that her Mom is super cool to let her get her ears pierced at 4, I had to wait until I was 7.

;o)

Wed 02.03.10 - William Sisti, aka Flyinace2000, tweeted me today asking if I had seen his twitters about installing Mac OS X on the Nokia Booklet 3G, here is the transcript of our Twitter conversation:

William: @msjen Have you been following my tweets lately? I got OSX on the Nokia Booklet 3G. about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 I have been a twitter near blackout for the last 3 days due to my TweetDeck being down. Are you going to blog how you did it? about 9 hours ago

William: @msjen I did OSX only now. Working on finishing walk through that i will post in soon. Still ironing out details. www.unboundmobile.com about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 A blog post with specifics would be lovely. Did you dual boot or OS X only? about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 Is it your own bought Booklet or a review trial one? Mine is a trial, so if I can't dual boot w/o harm, I will let you try. ;) about 8 hours ago

William: @msjen It is on loan but i had permission to do whatever i wanted to get this to work. about 8 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 Did you install any of the mac software like iPhoto, iMovie, or the like? iMovie would die an evil death on 1gb of RAM, though about 7 hours ago

William: @msjen I didn't bother too. those applications require GPU support that the gma500 can't provide. about 7 hours ago

The point to having a mini-laptop is to be able to work and play on it when out and about. At this point, Windows 7 Starter that comes shipped on the Booklet is a non-starter, but Ubuntu via Wubi really is a great alternative if one is willing to live with a 800x600 screen resolution until a stable driver for the Intel Poulsbo chip is worked out, as Ubuntu sits lightly on the Booklet and is a power house of a OS plus it comes with creativity and productivity software.

Wed 01.27.10 - #37 the Nokia Booklet and I are not only back on speaking terms, but with great affection. Thanks to Andrew Currie and Steve Rowlands who recommended Wubi as a fast and very painless way to get Ubuntu Linux running on a netbook without harming the original Windows install, as of this morning, I now have a working dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Nokia Booklet.

And when it is time to ship #37 back to WOMWorld/Nokia, all I have to do is log into the Windows side of the install, go to the control panel and uninstall Wubi in the normal Windows fashion and the whole Ubuntu side will be gone. The machine will then return as it came.

The best part for me, is rather than spending the next 11 days of my trial period struggling with Windows and ultimately disliking the Booklet, I get to spend it enjoying the Booklet, use it as a mini-laptop, and being able to evaluate it as the lovely piece of hardware that it is.

Once Andrew got Ubuntu working on his trial Booklet, #38, via Wubi, he announced mid-day that he had uninstalled Wubi and was on to try Jolicloud. It appears that Andrew is going to test every possible way to set the Booklet free of the confines of Windows. Good on him.

Now that #37, my trial Booklet, is free, I am going to go deeper and see what the capacity of the Booklet is now that it has been set free. Many of the reviews of the Nokia Booklet 3G is the surprise or disappointment on the part of the user on how under powered the Booklet supposedly is in terms of RAM (1 GB) or in terms of the Intel Atom processor. Today as the Booklet wizzed along happily a good speeds under Ubuntu, it hit me that the Booklet may be 'underpowered' for an inefficient hog like Windows, but the Booklet was a speedy little fellow(ess) under Ubuntu.

For a mini-laptop, does it need to have bigger laptop sized RAM & processor or does it really need a better, freer, more open Operating System that is more efficient with the hardware it has?

Point in case, the Booklet allegedly has a multitouch touchpad, but for the life of me I could not get the two finger scrolling to work under the Windows OS, but in the Ubuntu side the touchpad is by far more responsive and is really fast at multitouch. Same hardware, different OSes.

Photo taken of the Booklet screen by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Tues 01.26.10 - Today was also a busy work day, thus my only accomplishments in making progress with the Nokia Booklet was to download and install the Oceanis Change Background program that Vaibhav of The Symbian Blog recommended.

Apparently the version of the Attack of the Redmond Drones that Nokia installed on the Booklet, Windows 7 Starter, is a non-starter in that it does very little and really is only there to irritate the Booklet's owner into returning it or paying MicroSquash $80+ to upgrade to Windows 7 Home or Ultimate. Since, I have no intention of giving any $$ to the dreaded Mordor, I mean, Redmond, I instead put a call of help out to Twitter and my mobile Tweeps delivered.

When I installed Oceanis Change Background, it put a very amusing cartoon in places of the Windows logo, of which I have taken a photo of and placed above, the caption that satirically sums up MicroSquash:

"It's a revolutionary approach really... Instead of developing new software adjusted to the user's needs, we've started developing new users, adjusted to the software's needs."

I also let the Booklet phone home to Finland and update itself and add Nokia Ovi Suite and the Nokia Social Hub. Ovi Suite is just the new name for Nokia PC Suite which is the way one is to supposedly manage one's mobile device's relationship with one's PC, but my mobile, currently a Nokia N97, is a Protestant and does not need to a middleman to manage its relationship with its deity, the MacBook Pro in this case. So, I closed Ovi Suite when it wanted the N97 to come to confession and make a connection.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Project52 : Week 4

Mon. 01.25.10 - Late this morning the Nokia 3G Booklet arrived from the folks at WOMWorld/Nokia for a two week trial review period. I am quite excited about this, I do love to tinker about on a new computer, especially one as lovely and beautifully designed as the Nokia 3G Booklet.

It is cute! It is tiny! It is solid! It is light in weight! It is well-made! Did I mention it was beautifully designed and cute?!?

And then....

I turned it on and I was confronted with the... evil blue background with the light waving Windows logo. Gah.

Fifteen minutes into my new love affair with #37, I had to turn her off and put her back into her wrapping and two boxes and then put her box under my bed, because Windows 7 had so elevated my blood pressure that I was ready to call DHL to take #37 back to London and then write a scathing review of how F*cking Evil Windows is and How it is the Worst Possible Decision... blah blah blah... all because I spent 15 mins trying to figure out how to change the damned Windows background into something more eye pleasing. Big, deep breath.

So, I returned to the work project that is on deadline for tomorrow and then surreptitiously searched Google for 'Nokia 3G Booklet Hackintosh', 'Nokia 3G Booklet Ubuntu 9.10 USB live boot', etc. Yes, I spent most of the rest of the afternoon deep in dual work mode and researching my options for a USB live boot of a real OS, an OS that keeps one's blood pressure at normal.

Which computer or mobile operating system one likes is not just a matter of brand preference, or what your friends like, or what you have already spent the time to learn, it is also about a mental metaphor and mind map. And that mental metaphor / mind map may still be uncomfortable even after learning how to use a system. Sometimes, one just has to give up an operating system that does not fit one's mental processes and move on to one that does. After reluctantly using Windows for years, I happily and with abandon switched over to Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X about 4 - 5 years ago and have never looked back.

I gladly pay the Apple Tax to get lovely, well designed hardware and OS. I am also happy to pay the Nokia Tax to get kick ass mobile cameraphones, even if I continue to be bewildered by Nokia's hard-on for all things Windows and how their Symbian mobile OS is mapped to Windows and its metaphor. One of the reasons that I am so excited about the Nokia N900 is that its OS is Maemo which is a lovely mobile version of Linux.

All of this adds up to, right now I just can't open up #37 the lovely Nokia 3G Booklet again, until I have time to create a USB stick with a live boot of Ubuntu or Moblin for the Booklet.

Project52 : Week 3

I hereby coin a new word, Snobmob, of which the definition is:

"Any person is the type of person who feels so superior about themselves and their knowledge and/or use of mobile technology that they call lesser mortals 'Normobs'."

I have previously written about my distaste for the word 'Normob', and tonight I was set off by Ewan's post, Nokia N900 is now a consumer phone, at the Mobile Industry Review who in his post claims that Nokia's choice of advertising the Nokia N900 in the London Tube is a mistake as the device is for super geeks, not for normobs (aka the average 24 year old female).

"It's always good to take a walk through the tube even if you can't stand the delays, grime and the folks playing music. It's good to get a view on what the mobile market is pitching to end consumers. The Nokia N900 Maemo device was arguably never intended for the average 24 year old female on a 35/month contract. Indeed when I originally talked to Nokia back at the start of Q4 2009, they were -- broadly speaking -- unsure if any operators would 'range' the device. And that issue didn't really bother them either. The N900 is almost a reference device for Maemo, for the future of the company's super-high-tech gadget series of devices."

Now I know some kick ass 20-something women/girls/females/humanswithinnybitsmidbody and most all of them have branded smartphones from a carrier, my local area within a 25 meter radius has at least 7 of them, and they have not had troubles with learning how to use their phones. I have heard two of them explain to the their boyfriends how to use the boy's phone. Maybe the females in California are made of sterner technological stuff than the ones that Ewan encounters.

When I get a new phone to trial from WOM World/Nokia, most of the local females see them, hold them and try them out. Of all the phones, that I have trialed in the two years I have lived here, it was the Google Ion/HTC Magic and the Nokia N900 that I had to do little to no explaining before the local female 20-something supposed 'normobs' were off and running and enjoying the devices. Most all of them have LG and Samsung phones that have been branded, nee raped, by the carrier and they are very used to a phone that one has to explore.

The only thing that stops them from getting any of the high-end phones that I have is price point, as they are unsubsidized by the carrier. It is not the intimidation of a technologically superior phone. One of them is currently waiting to see if T-Mobile, her carrier, is going to pick up the N900 before she upgrades to a new phone.

Culture is learned. Tech culture is learned. We should not be building biases into our blog posts/punditry and assuming that folks who aren't like us won't be able to use the device that we think is most high tech or most worthy of high techologica wizardery. That does a disservice to the potential user and to the folks who designed it.

The Nokia N900 is a beautifully designed device, both in hardware & software, if one has used an iPhone or Android or any of the Samsung touchscreen phones, then one can learn via exploration or via transmission through in person or online tutorials.

Thus, for as long as the derisory 'normob' is bandied about, I will use 'snobmob', and even possibly add it to the Urban Dictionary.

But I would rather that all of us mobile tech bloggers drop our assumptions about users that are based in bias and instead get excited about technology that could be revolutionary in the long run for the largest amount of people we would never expect to use it & love it.

Gentlemen, drop the snob, it is unbecoming of you, your intelligence, and humanity.


****
Update, Sat 01.23.10 :
I want to be clear that the above is a commentary on word usage by mobile bloggers, pundits, and others, not a serious attempt to coin a word so that people can further divide and belittle each other.

Please read Ben Smith's comment below, as he is apart of the London mobile bloggers that came up with the original term, normob, of which he defines and defends its usage. Also, please read my response comment.

As for the 3rd comment, where the writer is asking if we can call a specific mobile designer a 'snobmob'; no, let's not.

Instead, I would like to reiterate that as a blogger or writer or online pundit, our word usage does matter, particularly as we have a potential worldwide audience who may not know our (sub-)cultural assumptions nor maybe be native speakers to the language we are writing in or the reader who drops into a page of our blogs from a search engine may not catch humor or earnest intentions on our parts unless we try to pay attention to word usage and clarity. I say this to myself as well.

Sun 01.10.10 - I went over to my brother's house today and he showed me the Blackberry Storm 2 that he got this week at his new job. He has had the original Blackberry Storm for the last 12 months and I knew that he had many frustrations with the original Storm, so I asked him if he would do a quick video interview to compare the two Storms.

In this video, Joe talks about the software and OS improvements that Blackberry made to make the Storm 2 the phone that they should have released last year. We also talk about the experience of having a pure touchscreen with no qwerty or alphanumeric T-9 keyboard.

Overall, Joe is much happier with the Storm 2 than with the original, but the other folks at work are still sticking to their qwerty keyboard Blackberrys and Joe is the only one who chose the touchscreen Storm 2.

The video was filmed by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

The geyers are a' gushin' on the Google Nexus One reveal this morning:

The Atlantic Wire filtering Engadget & TechCrunch's reviews : Nexus One: The Summary Judgement

ars technica : Google's biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL

Frog : Why Google Had to Take Control of Android with Nexus One

Tuttle LA's own Matt Kapko at The Eye on Mobile: Google is in the trenches while Apple is in our pockets

TechCrunch : Apple And Google Just Tag Teamed The U.S. Carriers

Quote from the last article:

"Think about your cellphone and cellular service five years ago. Both were likely horrible. But you were content in your misery, because you didn't know any better."

Actually, TechCrunch, no, five years ago - Jaunary 2005, I had AT&T's data all to myself and a Nokia N7610 with email, a web browser, a cameraphone, and Lifeblog; I was not miserable and the combo was the opposite of horrible. It didn't get horrible until late 2006 when (Cingular) AT&T in LA started degrading in its service. Then again, I have not owned a phone that was branded by a carrier since 2004. Since 2004, all of my phones have been unlocked and unbranded, praise be to Amazon and Nokia.

My own toddle down memory lane aside, I will be watching what Google does with their own Android mobile. I won't be spending $529 to buy this nexus one, when I do have that amount extra, I will be buying Nokia N900 Maemo mobile as I love that it has python natively on the mobile, Maemo is more open from the dev point of view, it has a qwerty keyboard and the camera kicks bootay.

Even though I am not ready to part with $529 for the Google Nexus One, I am very excited that Android is continuing to mature as a mobile OS and that Google is taking more control of the product. If I were forced to choose between the Nexus One and the iPhone 3GS for my next purchased mobile, I would definitely choose Google over Apple.

Conversation with Al, Jeb, & Ms. Jen #4
On the Nokia N900, Al's Trip to Thailand, Jules' iPhone, etc.
(or how we gush about the Nokia N900 for nearly 20 minutes)

Video'd by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97
at Tuttle Club LA on Friday 12.04.09

http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen
http://www.jebbrillant.com
Twitter: @not_al, @jebbrillant, @msjen

I am currently buried under in work and thus don't have any real photos to post from today and the two blog posts that live in my head about the Nokia N900 will have to wait for a day or so.

In the meantime, here is a few delightful links for you:

The Language of Food on Ceviche and Fish & Chips. A wonderful cultural historical linguistical exploration of vinegared meat from the Persia of the Sassanids to vinegared fish dishes of modern day Peru and the UK.

Tom Chi in his OK/Cancel form writing on how developers and designers need to work together and not in separated worlds in Bowman vs Google? Why Data and Design Need Each Other

These last two articles are on the differences between US/Nordic or Apple/Nokia in terms of advertising and approach written by Teemu Arina, who I met last year at Nokia Open Lab 2008, and Karri Ojanen, who I have not met but I love his name & admire his work. I have been formulating my own thoughts on the essential (good) differences between the design & advertising cultures of Apple v. Nokia which in many ways stem from the differences between Norther California and Finland culturally, and Teemu & Mr. Ojanen have beat me to the punch in: Interactive value creation, Apples and Nokias and with Digital (Advertising) in the Nordics.

Photo by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Fri 12.11.09 - The big difference that clouds can make in a photo, yesterday was nice & bright & sunny and I could not get the N97 to focus on the rose. Today was raining, grey, and dull in light, and the N97 was able to focus beautifully on the rose.

Obviously, this Nokia N97 is from Finland and prefers cloudy, rainy weather to capture nice crystal clear images. ;o)

Tues 12.01.09 - By a chance of delicious WOM/Nokia induced trial phone fate, I currently have both a Nokia N900 and a Nokia N97 in my hot little mitts, so I have been putting both through their photographic paces to see which one is the better Nokia Nseries flagship phone / mobile device of the year 2009.

While I do love the petite-r size, design of the phone, and the lovely flip hinge (thwack!) of the Nokia N97, the Maemo operating system of the Nokia N900 is winning me over even though the form factor of the N900 is a chunky monkey with a non-thwacking sliding qwerty keyobard. Delightful form over amazing brains?

Which to choose, as both the N900 and the N97 have 5 megapixel cameras with a Carl Zeiss lens, though the N97s seems to be more wide angled than the N900, both devices have LED flashes, and good sensors as well as software to render the images and video.

Which is better in real life rather than on a tech spec? Well, let's see how the pretty form vs. hot brains perform in the all important Photo and Video departments:

Photo taken today by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900

Tues 12.01.09 - Rabbit rabbit. With the greeting to the new month out of the way, I would like to alert you to several interesting takes on Nokia's strategy and mentions of the N900:

GigaOm's very own Om Malik had a chat with Nokia's Tero Ojanperä last week and Om now has a wee bit more faith in Nokia's direction. Read it at, "For Nokia's Ovi, the World (Minus the US) is Enough."

Analyst Michael Gartenberg questions What's the future of Nokia? on Engadget's Entelligence:

"Second, Nokia's services strategy is as muddled as the fruit in Don Draper's Old Fashioned. Ovi sounded good when it was announced but it's now gone through so many iterations, with different services added, dropped, and changed that it's hard to know what's in and what's out. Comes With Music has been reported as having as few as 107,000 users worldwide, and Nokia's put off bringing it to the US this year, leading me to wonder what kind of future it has as a service. The N-Gage project not only resulted in two failed phone designs but the service itself is on its deathbed."

As a Nokia mobile phone owner, I have felt quite burned over the last four years by Nokia's frequent changing around and dropping software and services. I won't even invest any of my data at Ovi, as I don't want it to go away in 2 years when Nokia has changed its strategy again or the project manager has moved on along with the marketing manager to another project and the new folks in charge don't care and move on to new divisions themselves.

The big reason that I am so excited about Maemo is that Python comes already installed and integrated on the Nokia N900, so I can code my own apps and not worry about will they be supported 12-18 months from now. I don't code in C, C+, Objective C, Java or Symbian, so most of the world of mobile application development is closed to me, but I do code in Python. While one can install python on Symbian and run a PyS60 app on a Symbian phone it is not without hassle and if you want to share the app, then the other person has to install Python on their phone too, thus creating a large barrier to entry.

Roland Tanglao and Croozeus are also both excited about pre-installed Python on the N900. Yesterday, I was on the Maemo.org website looking at the various apps available for download and the ones in development. The best part was finding out that many of the apps that I would want to use or contribute to are coded in Python. One of the great parts of any Open Source and/or Linux community is the ability to contribute to projects and to the code base, and now for me it is even better that I can contribute in Python. Furthermore, I am very excited that Maemo community has an active PyMaemo sub-community.

Yes, the Nokia N900 may seem a bit too geeky to some, but in the long run, I do think Maemo will bring in developers who have been alienated by Symbian's high barriers to entry and the whole certification / app signing troubles, developers who will have more choice in programming languages, more choice in how to contribute & distribute. More choice means more mobile applications available to everyone.

*******
Related N900 Posts:
Nokia N900 : The Artist Phone
Nokia N900 : The Gold Standard Test
The Nokia Flagship Face Off : Nokia N900 vs. Nokia N97 : Part I, Night Video

Wed 11.25.09 - I was attempting to take low light 'night' photos with the Nokia N97 on the edge of the dancer's pit at Royal Crown Revue's show at The Mint, but the still camera kept using the flash and blurring photos even though I had the camera settings on the 'Night' mode with no flash.

As the flash would do its thing, against my will, the photos would have a white out in the left side of the image and the rest of the image would be foggy (example of this here). This was really frustrating.

So, I decided to see if the 'Night' mode on the Nokia N97's video would work better, and it did. After the initial light meter reading, the video's color and lighting to the room is fairly correct and I am glad that the N97 did record video nicely in the 'Night' mode. I am happy with the no flash video capture in terms of light and with the sound quality.

As I have stated a few times the last week or two, the Nokia N97 is much much improved with the Oct. 2009 v.20 firmware update, but there are a few tweaks still to be made to the camera software to make the N97 a real flagship mobile device.

Of which, if the photographer wants the flash to be off and/or use Night mode, please make sure that the mobile's software knows to tell the flash NOT to flash. And it would be nice if the N97 would be more consistent about focusing on the objects in the middle of the focus square when green rather than some where off in the background.

Drawing and Photo by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900.

Fri. 11.27.09 - Different folks will approach the same mobile device from a variety of perspectives, and I am here to tell you as a Professional Art Weirdo, the Nokia N900 exceeds my hopes as an Art Phone.

Yes. People. OMG. Creativity. Not. Consumption. This. Phone. Rocks.

I have spent all evening drawing, taking photos and trying out the browser. Tomorrow, I will get on X-Term and download Maemo Python and try some programming out.

The Nokia N900 has a native phone app called "Sketch", and while other mobiles I have used have had a sketch program, this is the first time that I have found the app to be usable as an actual sketching device. The feel of the N900 in my hand plus the screen ratio, on top of the line control in the sketch app, makes me feel like I am using a wee moleskine notebook. While the N900 is about a centimeter smaller in width & height as my moleskine, it does not need to be opened, instead I can use the stylus to draw with the device comfortably in my hand.

Comfortably after 20 minutes of sketching Scruffy's paw while he slept. The N900 did not feel weighty or get uncomfortable. I was able to switch between drawing with a fine line and then erasing to get the white space back. A true delight for an artist with small hands.

Then I used the camera on the N900 to take a close-up/macro photo with no flash of Scruffy's paw and the camera accurately captured the paw in the low light.

This is the mobile phone that I and other creatives dreamed of when I was doing my interviews in 2005 & 2006 for my master's thesis, 'Moleskine to Mobile: How Creative Professions Are Using Their Mobile Phones', has now arrived in one kick ass device. Multi-faceted creativity has returned to the N-Series.

Bravo!

*******
Related N900 Posts:
Nokia N900 : The Artist Phone
Nokia N900 : The Gold Standard Test
Nokia N900 - Views from the Pundit Analysts, Maemo & Python
The Nokia Flagship Face Off : Nokia N900 vs. Nokia N97 : Part I, Night Video

Photo of a local Nokia N97 as was the closest thing around to take a photo of by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900.

Fri 11.27.09 - Is the Nokia N900's native web browswer's support of javascript and AJAX good enough to blog directly in the mobile browser to my Moveable Type install that uses Better File Uploader? Every other mobile browser, including the iPhone has failed at the first or second screen.

10 minutes later, of course I didn't read the manual, so after searching on how to zoom out (the volume/photo zoom physical key) and zooming all the way out so the whole page fit in the screen, I was able to go through all four Better Uploader's AJAX powered screens and upload the photo from the device's memory to my own server using my own blog with no third party app or server!

The Nokia N900 wins the Moblogging and Best Mobile Browser Gold Medal!!!

(Typing all of this is giving my hands cramps, but YAY!!!!!)

Dear Santa, Please, pretty please, with sugar on top... a Nokia N900 of my own for Christmas...

*******
Related N900 Posts:
Nokia N900 : The Artist Phone
Nokia N900 : The Gold Standard Test
Nokia N900 - Views from the Pundit Analysts, Maemo & Python
The Nokia Flagship Face Off : Nokia N900 vs. Nokia N97 : Part I, Night Video

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Tues 11.10.09 - I was playing round with the Night Mode on the Nokia N97's camera to see under what light conditions could I get a bit of blurred movement. While I could have used Auto setting with the flash off and gotten a crisp, sharp image of Grace and Magnus in the bright light of Tammy & Ryan's kitchen, I purposely set the N97's camera to Night to see if I could get a bit of doubling or blur.

I am happy with the way this photo turned out.

Lauren over at The Adnostic is currently blogging unofficially for NaBloPoMo this month. Her last few posts have been on how she is using her iPhone, or more specifically how her iPhone is her wedding planner and organizer.

From HiTech Wedding Planning:

"I'm getting married next week. Holy crap I'm getting married next week! Calm down. It's okay. Everything is in order thanks to a my iPhone.

I was flipping through a Real Simple Weddings magazine and I found their version of the to-do list. It was three pages long, in a small font. THREE pages! That's insane. It's just a freaking party with some paperwork people. There's no need to overdo it.

I didn't get any issues of Modern Bride, Martha Stewart Weddings, or any of any of the other typical wedding magazines. I did get two wedding books, but I only read one of them once and was done. I never opened either of them again. Primarily, I used the internet and my iPhone.

Early on in the planning stages, I found the iWedding iPhone app and relied it almost entirely for the timeline of to-do's and storing all of the budget and vendor contact information. It gave me a good idea of what needs to get done and how many months/weeks/days it needs to get done by."

I like that Lauren is giving us a breakdown of how she is using the apps and how it has both influenced her planning and allowed her to take charge of her own wedding planning. Lauren is the Queen of Planning, so I expected her to not be overwhelmed by the planning of a wedding, but it is also very cool to see how she is taking her natural talent for planning and organizing and refining it with the use of her mobile phone.

Also: Apps I Like - iFitness.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Lauren and Dave are getting married on Saturady in Seattle and I am a bridesmaid. This afternoon I drove up to Glendale to meet up with Felicity Lao and Kim Ray for a trial wedding day makeup run.

As Felicity was putting makeup on Kim, I was taking photos with the Nokia N97 that I am currently trialing and Felicity - a current iPhone owner - said, "I miss my Nokia." I handed her the N97 and she tested out the touchscreen and qwerty keyboard and again announced that she missed having a Nokia phone.

Kim asked about the camera and said she wanted a phone with a better camera. Felicity then said she didn't like the camera on the iPhone. Then both of them asked me how much the Nokia N97 cost, when I told them $500 they both blanched. Kim then asked which wireless carrier had it for less, I said none in the US.

Both Felicity and Kim were sad that such a nice touchscreen cameraphone was not to be had in the US for under $200. Over the course of the conversation, it became obvious that both of them had been starter Nokia owners in the past but had moved on to other smartphones with their carriers and were unhappy with the phones that they had, mostly due to poor build quality and lack of high quality camera, but were unwilling to spend more than $200 on a mobile phone.

After thinking about it, I realized that if Nokia and the various US mobile carriers/operators can't come to agreements to have good high end Nokias available to folks in the US for a decent subsidized price, then maybe Nokia should take a cue from the Apple online store and sell unlocked Nokia phones for either the straight up price or for a small price per month for 24 months.

If Kim and Felicity are both willing to pay AT&T $200 for the iphone plus >$80 a month for the rate plan, then why should they not pay Nokia $28 a month for the Nokia N97 or N97 mini or N86 or N79 and then get a sim chip / rate plan from whoever they want?

If Nokia charge $28 a month for 24 months and showed it as prominent option next to the phone on their website and advertise their finance plans, then they would not only sell more phones but provide the perception that their high quality mobiles are also a good value for one's dollar.

All photos taken today by Ms. Jen with a Nokia n97.

Tues 11.03.09 - Today a white Euro, Nokia N97 entered my life for a bit, what is the first thing I did after making sure it was charged and had the newest firmware version 20 on it? I took it out for a photo walk.

The big October version 20 firmware update has taken care of about 98% of my previous frustrations and complaints about the N97, it is now a very nice little mobile computing machine of which the touchscreen is more responsive and the camera is taking better photos.

I don't know about you, but I have had a little list of blog upkeep items that have been on my to do list for ages, but haven't had the time to research and then execute them. After thinking about a few of them for some time, oh like a couple of years, I decided recently to make a real paper list and make it happen.

Here are the things I wanted to do:
1) Figure out how to get thumbnails of images to appear in the excerpted version of this blog's RSS and Atom feeds.
2) Think about how to keep the evil sploggers (spam bloggers who scrape feeds) at bay AND keep my regular feed readers happy with a good feed. I have had my private full feed for at least two years now & announce it frequently but folks who want a full feed didn't know about it.
3) Even though Perl is not really my friend, I have wanted to figure out how to alter the Atom script for this blog so that when I use Lifeblog or PixelPipe to mobile blog from my camera phone to this blog that the photo will be uploaded into the file directory of my choice and not the default main blog directory.

A few weeks ago, I dedicated a few hours to attempting to bending the Atom and RSS feed templates to my will. Unfortunately, Movable Type 4.x is very dependent on the Asset Manager for knowing where the images are, and due to challenge #3, I was not able to fix #1 with any satisfaction, as all the fixes required the Asset Manager to know where all the images are and by default the Atom script uploads all assets/images to the main blog directory, which causes a messy main directory with my daily mobile blogging. To solve this, I have been manually moving images to a proper image directory and then updating the blog post later, thus the Asset Manager can't keep up with me. Poor thing.

Persistent artist vs. computer program. Who is going to lose? In the long run, the program. Until I solved problem #3, problem #1 was a null point.

I solved #2 by resetting my public facing feeds to be a bit bigger excerpts that would show the images but would excerpt any article over a certain length. I use the .htaccess file to stop any lifting of images. And I still have the private complete feed for anyone who emails me and lets me know that they want the url.

Today, I decided to conquer the moblogging directory issue and attempt to make Perl bend to my will.

Updated a few minutes later: Ok, so the path is right, I am just missing one bit in the Atom file to make sure that the photo is being uploaded into the right directory.

The Fix: How to Change the Directory that Movable Type Uploads to When Using the Atom Protocol (Lifeblog, PixelPipe, etc)

Conservation with Al, Jeb, and Ms. Jen #3 - Mostly on Mobile Video
Video'd by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95 at Tuttle Club LA on Friday 10.23.09
Video(s) edited on Ms. Jen's Nokia N95.
blackphoebe.com
jebbrilliant.com
Twitter: @not_al @jebbrilliant @msjen

Wherein we discuss:
1. The new underground, via Howard Forums, Google Voice client for Symbian S60 v. 5
2. Al attempts to demonstrate the Google Voice widget for the Nokia N97, but the lack of connectivity at the Library in Long Beach, Calif, defeats him.
3. In the meantime, Jeb answers Ms. Jen's question on why he likes using Qik (http://www.qik.com) for live real time video feed to the web. Jeb uses heartwarming and heartbreaking stories to illustrate his point, Ms. Jen is still skeptical as most of the tweets about Qik streams are pixelated, bad sound, and rather dull.
4. Jeb also tells about the Santa Clara Social Web BarCamp that he and Ms. Jen will be road tripping to from SoCal on Mon. Nov. 2, 2009. Props are given to @torgo (http://www.twitter.com/torgo) for the invites to the Social Web BarCamp.
5. Al continues to try to get the Nokia N97's Google Voice widget to connect to the web and call Jeb's Google Voice. Al tells us about his upcoming trip to Thailand to fix his father's computer plus how he plans to visit the stores that sell fake phones.
6. Ms. Jen, Jeb, and Al discuss how all Nokia mobile phones that have video recording capacity should all have a native simple video editing app no matter what.
7. Due to the loudness of the room that the Tuttle Club LA is held in, Ms. Jen shows Jeb her cheap trick for creating directional sound when one is video recording with a mobile phone and has no external directional mic.
8. The Conversation returns to how all mobiles should be able to function completely on their own without having to do tasks on a computer or laptop. Ms. Jen's twitter exhcange with @alsiladka (http://www.oviapplications.com/) is discussed as he said that the Nokia N86 sold in India does have a video editor but Ms. Jen was unable to find one on the euro N86 that she had on loan from WOM World.
9. Wrap up. @Norcalbarney is mentioned as a minor deity of mobile video. Good times.

I am not much of a video recording person, I only remember to switch my camera phone or digital camera to the video mode when it occurs to me that the photo I want to take will only make contextual sense if there is sound and the image over time. I usually notice this after the person has started speaking or the action has began, thus my videos tend to be truncated.

Oops.

To top it all off, I really hate the post-production process. In other words, I hate editing video. In grad school, we had to do an intense 2 week course in video and editing, and I hated every moment of it, other than the editing instructor was a hot 40-something Irish gentleman. But not even Gerry could convince me that editing was worth my time, although I did enjoy watching him talk. Luckily for me, in my final project team we had a member in Shonagh Hurley who not only loved editing video and but could spend hours creatively editing.

Unfortunately, Shonagh is in Dublin and I am in SoCal, so when I need to trim or splice together video segments, I am a bit screwed. And why?

These photos were taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N86 and her Nokia N95.

Tues 10.13.09 - This afternoon I decided to conduct a test with the trial Nokia N86 camera phone that is about to go back to the folks at WOM World and my trusty & slightly rusty Nokia N95 camera phone. Originally, I had hoped to conduct the experiment using the Nokia N86 versus itself, by conducting the experiment with the Nokia N86 with the version 11 firmware with the upcoming version 20 firmware, which is rumored to have camera improvements, but alas and alack, the new firmware has not been released yet. Thus, the N86 v. the N95 in close up mode.

I wanted to test the close up / macro mode of the camera as I have noticed that the N86 for all of its 8 megapixel wonder and Carl Zeiss wide angle lens does not get very close or very sharp close ups. It may be in part to the wide angle lens and it may be in part due to the image processing software/algorithms. One of the problems that I have experienced is due to the wide angle lens, if I want to fill the photo with the subject I have to get closer and then the image goes out of focus or you keep the image in focus and it does not fill the frame (see the difference between the non-wide angle lens N95 hibiscus flower photo above and the N86 flower photo).

Fri. 10.09.09 - Here is the second in what appears to be an ongoing series of conversations with Al Pavangkanan and Jeb Brilliant, while we are at the Tuttle Club LA (really Long Beach) because I get curious and feel the need to ask Al and Jeb lots of questions with the video capture running. Lucky for me they are gracious, opinionated, and funny.

Wherein we discuss:
1. The Nokia N86
2. Why white mobile devices are Sexy.
3. The Nokia N900 and the Nokia Booklet
4. Laughter
5. Software licenses: should they be attached to one phone IMEI, one sim chip, or one email?
6. Joikuspot & Mifi
7. Back to the Nokia N900: mobile devices that are stand alone and don't need a PC, particularly a PC, to sync. Plus rant from Jeb and Ms. Jen about PCs. Then a rant by Ms. Jen about bad marketing & copywriting.

Photo by Ms. Jen with the Nokia N86's panorama mode.

Wed 09.30.09 - Once a month, the folks at 3 and 3 Mobile Buzz host a Pop quiz. Tonight I found myself joining James Whatley, Ben Smith, et al, at the Alphabet Bar in Soho. Lots of good laughs, much whispering of answers, and general good fun was had by all, but the best part is that all the teams were using their mobile phones to find the answers to the pop quiz!

Click on the photo to see the large version of the panorama.

Photo by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Thurs 09.24.09 - Martin Ramsin presenting the Ovi SDK to the folks at the Ovi Developer event in London.

The new Ovi SDK Beta utilizes the new Ovi API and javascript, which makes it a good place for web designers and developers start to on creating mobile apps.

While the Ovi Dev day got off to a bit of a rough start before lunch with a small conceptual conflict between the verbal democracy of the dev crowd vs. the business-styled approach to presenting topics that Nokia folks are so fond of.

After lunch things got back on track when the presenters spoke of more concrete and relevant topics such as the Calling All Innovators UK, an open panel with last year's winners, and Martin presenting on the release of the OVI SDK.

I had a very good conversation after wards with Nokia Forum's Jouni Toijala about how to get more web designers and developers involved in mobile application development.

[Update a few hours later from a laptop: No, it crashed. The pre-release demo that was available for Ovi Dev event attendees to try out was half charged, the Vodafone connection was poor, and when I went to save this entry after writing the above title using the N900's web browser, the whole device crashed and had to be rebooted. After that I could not get it to browse blackphoebe.com at all. Please remember that the N900 has not been released yet.

p.s. What I was trying to get the N900 to do was to go on the full, non-mobile, version of my blog's Movable Type install and use Better File Uploader to upload a photo and blog it here straight up, not using any other app or service. To date, I have not been able to get a Nokia, or iPhone, or Android phone to correctly render and upload a photo using BFU's lightbox upload. The first mobile browser to render the AJAX correctly wins in my book.]

test pixel pipe pro.

Update from my computer later in the day, Tues 09.01.09 - I realize that lots of folk find Pixelpipe to be a great mobile blogging application, but I just find it moderately annoying, and the above photo is a great example of why.

To start out with, I was unable to get Pixelpipe to work on the Nokia N97. I was able to get it to somewhat work on the Nokia N95 & Nokia N79, but was not happy with it.

I do find that the Pixelpipe Android user experience is MILES better than the Nokia Share Online + Pixelpipe. Also, I will say that Pixelpipe's support folk have been great to help me set up an "Atom" enabled pipe so that I can blog directly to this blog, rather than have the photo hosted on the Pp servers.

Today, I went to the Android Market (on phone app store) and purchased Pixelpipe Pro for $1.99 to see if the experience would be any better. In many ways, the user experience of Pixelpipe Pro is better, as there is a nice tabbed navigation allowing one to do tasks such has add a title, body copy, tags, a tab view the queue of photos or video going out, etc. I was not able to figure out how to do a minor task like rotate the image, so I exited out of Pp, went to the Android Gallery, rotated the image, saved it and then opened Pixelpipe again.

The above image now showed up as rotated and up I sent it to Pixelpipe. I was a bit frustrated here, as it did not allow me to choose to what location I wanted to send out to other than the tag version of indicating where it is to be sent. In the paid Pro version, I should be given a drop down menu of my pre-registered pipes and be able to choose one or more of them.

I sent the photo and did not see it show up on this blog within 10 minutes, so I thought we had a Pixelpipe failure, only to see it appear about 20 minutes later in the non-rotated version of the photo, even though I had saved the rotated photo and chosen that one to send in Pixelpipe.

Here is what I would like to suggest to Pixelpipe for their Pro version of the mobile app:

1) Allow the user to do all tasks and activities from the mobile app and not have to go to the website to set up pipes or manage them. All the settings and controls should be editable in the mobile app.

2) Allow the user to be able to do minor image editing tasks in the mobile app like rotate a photo or choose what size the photo should be sent at.

3) Allow the user to choose which Pipe they want which photo to be sent to in the mobile app without having to add tags.

4) Can Symbian also have a Pixelpipe Pro mobile app comparable to the Android Pixelpipe Pro that is completely separate of the evil Share Online? Please.

This July, I participated in a three week trial of the Nokia N97 that included weekly Tangler chat meetings where we addressed various topic on and about the Nokia N97. During the time with the Nokia N97 trial device, I posted photos to this blog, tweeted about my in the moment rants/raves on the Nokia N97, posted a bit of video, and other wise left other bits of N97 commentary blowing about the winds of the internet.

Here is my official Nokia N97 Review and I am going to divide my review of the Nokia N97 into three parts plus and Aside section:

I. My Favorite Photos I took with the Nokia N97
II. A Real Life Story of the Nokia N97 and the iPhone 3GS, as it Went Down At the South Coast Plaza Apple Store and Who Won
III. The Things I Really like about the Nokia N97 and the Things I Really didn't like
IV. A Few Asides

Here we go:

I. My Favorite Photos I took with the Nokia N97

All photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97 in July of 2009.

While I did find it awkward to take photos with a device as big as the Nokia N97, as my hands are very small, other than a few issues with clarity and farther than I expected focal range, now looking back at the nearly 400 photos I took in the nearly 3 weeks with the Nokia N97, I really do like most of the non-close up day photos. The Nokia N97 does a fine job as a 5 megapixel camera, as evinced in the photos above.

The above photos, other than being resized, have not been retouched or processed in any way.

II. A Real Life Story of the Nokia N97 and the iPhone 3GS, as it Went Down At the South Coast Plaza Apple Store and Who Won

Last summer, when my sister's cell phone was 2 years old, my Mom and I discussed the idea of getting her a new one for her birthday. This June I brought up the subject again, as my sister's mobile was nearing on 3 years old and we decided that we would get her a new mobile phone for her birthday on July 21st.

To be fair, I thought that I should give my sister Allison the option to see, touch, and test/try out as many new mobile phones as possible. My sister's major usages on her mobile are texting, Gmail, taking photos, and sending her photos Vox blog. With this in mind, I handed her my HTC Magic / Google G2 phone for her to try out the touchscreen only Android phone. She was polite but not very interested.

Then I took her to the South Coast Plaza Apple store mid-July to see what she thought of the new iPhone 3GS. I had the trial Nokia N97 with me as I wanted her to compare both phones side by side.

We tried out the iPhone 3GS with me, bizarrely, acting as the salesperson showing her all the features and pointing out how many considered each feature to be far superior to any other smart phone on the market. All the while, I had the Nokia N97 out and showed Allison how it compared to the iPhone - from the Nokia's physical qwerty keyboard to the iPhone's touchscreen, we tested out how each phone's camera would take the same shot, we tried the internet on both phones, we tried the GPS, etc etc etc.

At one point we had two Apple sales humans watching me with fascinated horror, not saying a word as they stared at the Nokia N97 in my hand and the iPhone in my sister's hand.

I was actually hoping Allison would choose the iPhone, as it is So Much Cheaper than the N97, but at the end of our 15 minutes of fondling the iPhone at the Apple store, I asked Allison,

"So, honestly, what do you think?"

Allison on the iPhone, "It is too light and plasticky. I don't like the touchscreen and I don't like the photos."

Me, "But what about the User Interface? The flicking bits? All the apps."

Allison just looked at me and said, "I guess I am a Nokia girl."

She put the iPhone back on its pad and started to walk out.

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This really happened. I did not pitch the Nokia N97 to Allison, if anything I was very indifferent about it, as it is not necessarily the phone I would choose.

My sister is an example of a person who wants a smart phone but doesn't want an iPhone, hard as it is for many people to believe at least to many of the designers I know. Since she received her Nokia N97 for her birthday, she has been very happy with it. I have asked her several times how it is going and she continues to be very happy.

My sister's experience is a living example of Rita Khoury's thesis that the N97 is for the connected user not the power user. My sister loves texting, email and Facebook, as she has FB always on and connected as a widget on her Nokia N97.

But Ms. Jen, you ask, what do you really think of the Nokia N97?