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.

********

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?

"Freemont Troll" by Roshan V on Flickr with a CC License.

I am honestly getting wearied by all the wars being waged online in the name of gadgets, devices, and software.

You love the iPhone? Good for you.
You love your Google Android G1/G2? Excellent.
Love your Nokia Nseries or Eseries? Even Better.
Are you a die hard Wordpress fan? Fabulous.
Can't believe that any designer or developer worth their salt doesn't use Expression Engine? Hmmm... me neither, esp. since the EE folk throw a much better party at SXSW than the Automattic crew.
Are you Windows all the way? MacBook forever? Ubuntu for the win?
PHP partisan? Ruby on Rails raconteur? Django devotee?

Good for you. Good for your neighbor. And good for your perceived enemy.

First and foremost all of the above devices, software, dev frameworks, and operating systems are tools. They are tools to communicate, tools to create, tools to prototype, tools to view, tools to do business on and with, tools to publish, tools to build a system with, etc. etc. etc.

Depending on your usage, needs, culture, time frame, profession, and preference will determine which tool, device, software, operating system will be best for you. Maybe you have a try a few options to know which is best for you. Maybe you need time, maybe you need to discuss it with your friends online and in person. Maybe you need time to physically try the various options.

At the point where you have written or gotten excited about your new device/tool/software online is where the troll can come in.

For whatever reason, some folks want to go past a bit of teasing or a bit of good, honest debate with solid backup arguments to build their case; some folks want to troll. They want to mock, to drag a discussion or debate into a space that is no longer about sharing one's excitement or learning from each other and into a space that is about bullying or badgering the other person into the troll's point of view. A troll can and will argue beyond the point of normal communication and good manners to get their point across or lead the general discussion into a very fruitless place.

This is frustrating. Very frustrating. We have all been online long enough to know what is good manners and what is not. We all choose to use the tools we are using for a reason. If you want to convince a friend to try another tool, do it with persuasion, not with trolling.

It becomes even more frustrating when folks who are professionals in a field in and around technology become devotees to one product and are unwilling to explore the other options out there, esp. as the devices or software grows over time.

Recently, I had to unfollow a person that I liked on Twitter due to the fact that this person started many fights with anyone who was not an iPhone owner. This person chose to take any mention of any other mobile device as a time to point out the superiority of the iPhone, even when it was nonsensical and not on topic. The person would then pursue the argument with Direct Messages on Twitter that would attack one and one's choices.

Love your iPhone that much? Good. I am very glad for you.

I choose to use Nokia Nseries devices for their cameras and moblogging abilities. As of the date of writing this blog post, the iPhone's camera is not up to my standards. Sorry, but true. Please don't send me Direct Messages on Twitter harassing me about using an obviously inferior Nokia, it is uncool and unworthy of our friendship or even mutual respect professionally.

Next year or the year after that there will be another device(s) or tool(s) that will excite everyone's fancy. And just maybe it won't excite yours or mine or someone we know, but maybe it will.

In the meantime, let's all remember that these devices or software or systems are just tools, tools to accomplish what we want to do online or create with or communicate with. None of these tools are worth trolling for and thus breaking relationships over.

Instead let's use these tools to create and communicate with in a way that builds relationships, communities, systems, and applications. We can respectfully choose to disagree, we can also attempt to persuade others to our point of view, let's even debate, but let's not troll over tools.

Photos taken on June 22, 2009 at Carl Zeiss AG by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N86.

The above photo essay is the last bits of Carl Zeiss Lens Factory content I wanted to post, as my videos that I took were not up to scratch. No worries, as every time I go back through my photos, I have more questions that I need to research about Zeiss that leads me deeper into Camera Lens Lust (or Lens Envy).

I would love to get a Distagon lens for my Nikon FM3a film SLF and it looks like Zeiss is working on some nice lenses for the Nikon F mount, which would work both on my SLR and the borrowed Nikon D70s from Thomas. Lens drool.

Best of all, today's find on the Zeiss website was the 'Camera Lens News', a set of articles on lenses and photography. I subscribed.

And the above photo of Stefanos wearing the Cinemizer glasses gave me a good giggle again. All the virtual reality style headsets always make me have a bit of a giggle. While I did not put them on to watch a video from a Nokia Nseries device, the others reported that it was a good to great video experience.

I will now return to drooling over a dream Distagon. ;o)

More on the Carl Zeiss Lens Factory Tour adventure and Nokia N86 (which has a Zeiss Tessar lens):
Carl Zeiss Lens Factory Tour
The Nokia N86 - Review and Photos
Dan Rubin's Spectacular Hasselblad
The Nokia N86: Phil Campbell's Off-the-Cuff Review of Video Features
The Nokia N86: Dotsisx and Ms. Jen Weigh In
Photos Moblogged from the Tour
The Carl Zeiss Factory Tour, Before Departure

Om Malik in yesterday's post, The Evolution of Blogging, concludes with the argument that those of us who are lifestreaming on our blogs rather than Facebook, because we want to be our own 'digital repository' or as I have called it the last few years "Own Your Own Stuff", will need to have our blogging software evolve to handle more real-time streaming.

"Millions of Facebook users will have no reason to use any other service for the foreseeable future. And even when they decide to leave, they'll realize they can't, for they'll have stored their photos and videos into the service, which has no visible way of exporting such data. It's the ultimate lock-in: control consumers' data and you control everything.

For others -- whom I would loosely define as "power users" -- today's blogging software and services are the best option for becoming a repository of our digital creations, because they are more open, more extensible and at the end of the day, give us more control "

Malik mentions Posterous, Tumblr, and WordPress's P2 theme as blogging platforms that are moving towards evolving blogging, but he does not mention Movable Type's Motion. As someone who is serious about owning her own digital repository, I haven't gotten on board with Posterous or Tumblr as they are both hosted and ultimately are yet another space on the web where my stuff gets atomized. I am planning on exploring the possibilities of Movable Type's Motion soon, when I have some time. ;o)

On another note, Fast Company has a great magazine cover article on Nokia Rocks the World: The Phone King's Plan to Redefine Its Business, of which they start with a great few paragraphs:

"The gathering in the courtyard dining room at the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca has the feel of a meeting between the Mafia's dwindling five families and an emerging Balkan gang looking to join forces. Instead of bookmakers, drug smugglers, and racketeers, the endangered species assembled are music executives from the industry's remaining major labels, including Warner and Universal Music, and an agent from the Beatles' Apple Corps.

Despite the general tension typical of an industry in free fall, there is a reunion vibe and everyone greets one another warmly over cocktails, throwing out a bit of cocksure swagger to project the notion that they can still deliver a hit. Still, nobody in attendance would deny that the days of record companies making a killing in the music industry are over.

The hosts for the evening are Nokia's 43-year-old executive vice president of entertainment and communities, Tero Ojanperä, and Eurythmics founder and Nokia consultant, Dave Stewart. The two make for an odd pairing: Stewart with his quintessential British rock-'n'-roll-ness and Ojanperä with his Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness. But tuning in closely to Ojanperä's precise, inflected words, it's hard to elude his magnetism, a cross between Andy Warhol mystic and James Bond villain."

The article both gives a good overview of Nokia's efforts to both woo the music industry and their recent forays into applications and services, as well as giving a few fun tweaks at the "Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness" meets "Baltic Mafia". Blessings on the Finns, I <3 the lot of them!

James (@whatleydude) significantly ups the ante for the rest of us, particularly those of us with a fear of heights, on extending the photo and video capabilities of the Nokia N86.

Really extending how one can video one's self. I do believe that Nokia should be including bungee tested wrist straps in all of the Nokia N86 boxes.

Samsung's Pixon series of camera phones is moving rapidly towards the future of mobile phones, and not because of their addition of 8 and 12 megapixel sensors, but because of the whole package of a device that adds the features of a phone with mobile internet, email, touchscreen, a physical zoom on the camera, and a camera that is the most like a compact digital camera of any camera phone to date.

What I am most impressed by is that Samsung is not resting on their laurels of 5 megapixel phones but pushing the cameras on the Pixon towards the point where the device is a competitive compact digital camera with a phone & internet connection & touchscreen user interaction. The Samsung Pixon 12 has a physical zoom, a Xenon flash, a 12 megapixel sensor, a range of ISO, touchscreen 'manual' focus, and a range of programmed modes, as well as user programmed modes. The Samsung Pixon 12 M8910 is a digital camera and a phone that I am would be more than willing to pay $600 for unlocked.

Elgar at Mobile-review.com gives a very thorough review of the Samsung Pixon 12 Megapixel camera phone. Go read his review and see the comparison photos.

On a note to end the day, as far as Ghosts of Gothic Past go, Matt Edgar whimisically blogs on the comparison between Mobile usage and Victorian Gothic tenants as espoused by John Ruskin: Mobile Gothic: a flight of fancy.

The most exciting news for the day is that Android is stepping up the mobile game with the addition of 1 gig CPU speeds coming soon, which means that Nokia can't continue to claim that 434 mhz is good enough for the flagship Nokia N97.

Nokia it is time to step up your game, both in CPU/RAM speeds and in terms of the camera on your devices. The other manufacturers are gaining both in terms of handsets & brand/market share.

By cameras, I was quite disappointed to read in two separate spaces that Nokia does not intend on engaging and competing in the compact digital camera space, but intends on keeping somewhat on top of the camera phone game. Only flaw in this plan is that Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, and others are starting to converge on the compact digital camera with a sim chip & data connection space.

In my opinion as a photographer and a person who buys & recommends camera phones to others, it behooves Nokia and others to work towards making a camera phone that can completely replace a compact digital camera in terms of optics (physical zoom), flash, sensor, and software. I and most other folks don't want to carry 2 or 3 devices, but one.

If Samsung & Sony are doing it, Nokia can to and do it better if they put a bit of will behind the effort.

Fri 07.31.09 - While at Tuttle Club LA, I (Ms. Jen) interviewed Jeb Brilliant (abrilliantblog.com/) and Al Pavangkanan (twitter.com/alpavangkanan) on what they both thought of the new Nokia N97 flagship touchscreen smart phone.

Al was an early adopter and pre-ordered his Nokia N97, both Ms. Jen & Jeb Brilliant recently participated in a three week trial with a Nokia N97 from WOM World.

I think the big question in all of our minds is and discussed in this video - What is the Future of the Nokia N97? Given that Nokia has released a 'flagship' device that much of the firmware and software is in transition, should the Nokia N97 have been released at the end of June, or should Nokia have waited a couple of more months and released the N97 when it was more "ready"? Will the Nokia N97 be the phone that we hope it will be in a few months?

Developers and Designers need each other and need to work together. (duh.)

All of the super exciting internet / computer eco-systems of the last 15 years have had developers and designers involved together as a tight team: HTML/CSS - Web Standards, Ruby on Rails, Django, Mac OS X, the iPhone app world, etc.

By exciting eco-system, I mean that the platform, device, or system has grown beyond the company or small core group of folk who created/originated the system, a growing that goes beyond all the usual vendors for the company/core to take a life of its own in a wide range of design & development professionals and hobbyists who expand the ecosystem to a dynamic space that is much greater than any marketing budget could every afford or create.

This is definitely the case of the Open Source LAMP proponents, the HTML/CSS web standards folk, the Ruby on Rails & Django communities that have had designers working with developers from the very beginning. By dint of Apple's penchant for design, designers have been on board fully with developers to expand the iPhone and Mac OS X applications and universe.

While I love using Android and Symbian mobile devices, it has recently become glaringly obvious to me that both of these communities don't have the same co-working / symbiotic relationships with the design community that the above eco-systems have. Yes, Google and Nokia/Symbian can afford high end designers, but what about the community outside of Google, Nokia, Symbian, and their paid vendors?

The Google I/O conference while multiple thousands strong in developers, programmers, and business dev folk, was very poor in terms of designers and any integration thereof.

Android and Symbian dev folk, we need to get designers on board in teams working together from the very beginning of projects to get the eco-system more than just aesthetically pleasing but also to balance the platforms to think outside of the dev/programming box and to grow the eco-systems dynamically as well as spread the goodness.

Design is more than aesthetics, it is an essential part of of balancing the right & left brains as well as the needs of the creators with the consumers. By creating a space for both designers and developers in teams, at conferences, and getting the dialogue moving between both communities means that we build balance applications, devices, and web systems that are usable and delightful.

To grow our communities, to build great apps we need to think of the disciplines of design and development as feeding into each other - feeding ideas, cross polinating, cooperation, and coordination.

Design + Development = Developers <=> Desingers

Ok, Nokia / Symbian and Google / Android, let's figure out how to get more designers and design thinkers involved in community based projects from the ground up. Let's start with design tracks at your sponsored conferences and meet ups between developers and designers at the conferences, why don't we?

Or even better, why don't we all agree to meet up and have a Android / Symbian conference to cross-pollinate between platforms and invite designers of all stripes (web, mobile, interaction, and user experience) to join us?

Update: Sun 07.26.09 - To clarify, I wrote this post because there has been much talk amongst tech bloggers and early adopters that the reason that folks are buying the Apple iPhone is because of the App Store and not buying Nokias or Android phones due to the poor showings on their app stores. I think this point is debatable, as most of the folks I know who purchase phones find out about the App Stores after purchase, not as a point to purchase.

But I do think it is instructive for those of us who are tech folk/early adopters and|or professional developers|designers to examine the web and mobile communities that have been successful, of which my point was that the communities that are growing organically without millions of dollars of advertising & subsidies from the companies behind the technologies are the communities where both developers and designers are both excited about and actively participating in.

To this end, I think that it would benefit Nokia's Symbian community and Google's Android community to draw in more User Experience | User Interface | and good old school Designers. At this point, both of these communities are programmer|engineer heavy. As Mike M. states in the below comment, designers & design thinkers bring an equal set of different skills that are absolutely necessary to the web & mobile site|app|software development process.

To Answer a Few Folk on Twitter: I don't think that Apple has their mental market share amongst designers due to their TV advertising. I know more top end designers who are working on Ruby on Rails and Django projects than Apple iPhone projects with developers. It is not just about big money, but where is it exciting and challenging to create. A place to create where one can make a difference, prototype quickly, and also make money as well.

Tiffany B. Brown's excellent blog post "Black folks is takin' ovah da mobile innanets!" proves Piers Fawkes' "Three Region Theory" research on mobile adoption vs. desktop/laptop adoption rates is alive and well right here at home in North America. Tiffany expands on Piers' theory by giving examples of how folks in North America without regular personal desktop/laptop access are adopting the mobile internet faster than folks with desktop access.

Let's start with Piers' theory:

"OK, so here's a theory about mobile phones and their use: in terms of phones their are three regions: Region 1 where the internet reached most people before mobile phones (North America); Region 2 where the internet reached most people at the same time as mobile phones (Europe); and then Region 3 where mobile phones reached most people before the internet (Asia, South America, Africa). The timing of the adoption of the internet versus the mobile phone within a region affects the relationship that region's citizens have with their phone; and therefore should govern the services that will be used there."

Then Tiffany writes:

Last month, I was in South Carolina for my cousin's wedding. In attendance? Three T-Mobile G1 devices, one Blackberry, and me with my dying, yet WiFi-and-mobile Internet-enabled Nokia N80. That's five internet-enabled smart phones, out of about two-dozen folks under the age of 45.

My cousins are not the same kind of people as the black folks I regularly roll with. My black friends are mostly college educated, almost entirely middle-to-upper-middle class in both occupation and income, and highly tech-literate. It would probably be a shock if none of us had smart phones, right?

My cousins? They're mostly lower-middle and working class folks. College? Only one other cousin has completed a 4-year degree. Most are in service rather than knowledge jobs. Their computing know-how is basic. Some don't own laptop or desktop computers.

And yet, here my cousins were using their phones to check email and update their Facebook status.

One of the things that both Apple and Nokia appear to forget with their desktop/laptop only updates, syncing & other services is that there are plenty of folks both in North America and in many parts of the rest of the world, whether by choice, income, or geography, who are mobile only or almost mobile only. People who have mobile internet access but no to very little computer based internet access or people like my Mom who have very little use for a laptop/desktop computer but loves and uses her mobile phone daily. These folks are the present and the future.

Let's build mobile apps for them. Let's make a great mobile web experience for them. Let's make sure that they can do all internet and mobile updating activities directly from their mobile phones. Let's not make them find someone else's computer, be it work or a PC, to update the firmware on their mobile. Let's make it easy to do everything from one's mobile, if that is what one needs or chooses.

Let's make it a mobile future.

The NYTimes on "Mobile Internet Use Shrinks Digital Divide"

Cecily has been "Drinking the iPhone Kool-Aid" this weekend. Wonder if she would sell me her N82?

I don't want to carry a phone, no matter how fabulous the UI is, and a separate camera. I want to carry one device - a great small camera that goes on the internet. Yes, I am a contrarian and I try to limit my Apple kool-aid drinking to the MacBook Pro flavor.

On the other side of the fence from Cecily, Engagdet's editor, Joshua Topolosky, recently tried to use the iPhone to actually get some work done, new media / blogging type of work, while sitting at the doctor's office and found that the iPhone was great for entertainment & web surfing, but stymied his ability to be productive. He writes up his experiment in iPhone productivity in "Editorial: Taking the iPhone 3GS off the job market".

Best of all, Jan Chipchase, recently got to have a real L.A. experience:

There's now a flock of 4 MJ newscopters hovering over UCLA. Could almost be in Baghdad, 'cept no-one has fired back. Yet.

He writes up his thoughts about the percentage of media to actual fans outside of the UCLA medical center on the day Michael Jackson died in "MJ (The Media Experience) Remembered".

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Sat 07.11.09 - Today was an overly packed day with activities that ranged from West LA to Irvine and Westminster. Basically, a lot of driving, but it was well worth it.

I had the opportunity to attend the Mobile Camp LA held by the N97 24/7 challenge folk at UCLA's Tom Bradley Int'l Hall. I have in the past been a bit fearful of Bar Camps, as what would I talk about? After thinking about it, I don't find university teaching fearful, but instead a good joyful, challenge. I don't have fear speaking at a conference where I have been invited, they why the mild trepidation about a Bar Camp?

While I did have some trepidation about the Mobile Camp today, we all ended up sitting around a large round table and discussing / debating a wide range of subjects in and around mobile, the internet, usage, user experience, mobile ideas, applications, etc., rather than having to present a topic or sit nicely while someone else presented on a topic.

The best part was that all people at the table who were actively participating in the discussion. Very much an iron sharpens iron, get your brain nice and tuned up type of afternoon. The Mobile Camp LA was well worth the drive and I am not the person who drove the longest, that goes to @rogerpodacter (twitter) who drove up from Temecula!

All in all, big thanks to all the attendees, their ideas & thoughts, and to Nokia & WOMWorld for hosting the event. It was like a mini Nokia Open Lab in LA.

Delightful.

Since the true beauty and genius of the Nokia Nseries 8x line is the camera functions, I will start this review of the Nokia N86 with the photos that I took with the N86 while in Germany for the Carl Zeiss lens factory tour on Mon. June 22 and at the Limes Museum and surrounds in Aalen, Germany, on Tues. June 23rd before I had to hand the N86 back. All of the below photos were taken by me (Ms. Jen) with a Nokia N86 8 megapixel camera phone and later resized by Fireworks with no other retouching before uploading.

The big question that I have had over the last month is should I declare Flickr bankruptcy?

For a variety of reasons, I have not managed in the last 5-8 weeks to post my regular daily photo or two from my phone to Flickr, I have made a valiant effort to keep up here at Black Phoebe, but Flickr has fallen to the wayside.

Part of the problem started back in late April when I returned the lovely little Nokia N79 it its rightful owners and reverted back to my good, old, faithful Nokia N95 camera phone. In early May, after a firmware upgrade, I found that there was no more Shozu mobile application to download unless I wanted to purchase it. Given that I have planned to purchase a new camera phone this summer, I didn't want to commit to any new mobile software until I knew which phone I would be getting, and thus which software or app would be best for the phone in question.

Starting in May, I tried to remember to download my photos to my computer every few days and then upload them to Flickr. Anytime that I involve my computer in a part of the photo upload process, there is failure, as my computer is always a black hole for photos, which is why I started blogging directly from my phone in the first place.

The winning equation for me the last 4.5 years since I got my first internet enabled camera phone was as follows:

Take photo -> Add subject -> Send Directly From Phone to Internet = Win

This is the bad equation:

Take photo -> Save on camera or camera phone -> download to computer -> fiddle with and|or forget != Photo on Internet (quite the opposite actually of photo on the internet, the photos never leave my computer)

Because of the fact that I am not into photo processing on my computer and that photos that enter my computer very rarely leave (Hotel SoCal MBP), for the last 4.5 years ever since I got the lovely Nokia 7610 and an unlimited data package, I have used a variety of methods to daily post photos to Flickr and to this blog (or at least attempt to do it daily).

This spring's camera phone disruption has lead to me getting out of the habit of posting daily photos to Flickr. It has gotten worse. I am not a few days behind, or even a week or two, but five - Yes, 5 - weeks behind in posting photos to Flickr.

I now have 140 - 180++ plus photos from San Francisco, life around SoCal, Germany, Carl Zeiss Factory Tour, London, and Fourth of July that I could post to flickr.

Should I just do it - upload them all, name them, add them to sets, etc - or declare Flickr bankruptcy?

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with the Nokia N97.

Sun 07.05.09 - Both in yesterday's Fourth of July photo essay and in today's close-up/macro mode test, the N97 is consistently choosing a farther away than expected focal point and is not as clear/sharp as the N95 (see my previous test with the N95 & N97). With the Nokia N95 and N82, one could set the camera on Macro / Close-Up mode and get about 4 inches / 10 cm from the subject and get a good clear photo, not so with the Nokia N97, as you can see from the above photos.

The first photo on the left was taken at 5 inches from the bottle brush bloom of which the camera did not auto-focus on the bloom, but on the leaves and stalks behind. In the second photo on the right, I kept the camera about 10 inches / 25.4 cm from the subjects and was able to get a clear photo of the blooms.

Frankly, if the next firmware update comes without a 'manual' touch screen focus option, the engineers in Espoo should be spanked. Samsung has it, Sony has it, now Apple has it, Nokia's N97 needs to have the ability for the photographer to use the touchscreen to choose where the focus should be and the camera should do it.

Andrew Sullivan asserts in the below video interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival that blogging is broadcasting. I think it is both and it depends on the writer/blogger in question. Sullivan's style is that he broadcasts his piece as soon as possible from the time the idea or event happened and he broadcasts in his blog multiple times a day. Other bloggers, such as Geoff Manaugh of BLDBLG, publish a few times a week or once a day, in a longer, edited essay form - I would consider this publishing the blog post or some folks might call the longer, curated/edited essay form an article.

What about the moblogging that I do here? Would it be broadcasting via Sullivan's definition or do I mobile publish because I tend to look for the best image or two of the day and only rarely do I moblog more than one or two images as they happen. The evening, a couple of weeks ago, that I went to dinner with Ernie, Jason, and George at Esperento in the Mission was more broadcasting or documenting as it happens, as I moblogged photos of two of the dishes we ate and two photos of the gentlemen, but most days, I do believe I am publishing.

I do agree with Sullivan that blogging is the most exciting thing to happen for writers, as well as artists and photographers, in many a decade.

Thurs 06.25.09 - Praise the minor and major deities that rule over YouTube and BTInternet! I have *finally* after 2 days of trying, got video uploaded. In case you were wondering, the internet connection at my hotel in London had slowed the BTInternet snail got off the salt bed intact and found a nice cool misty forest to traverse over, thus while it was still slow it was reasonably slow rather than chew my f*ing arm off slow.

Thus, here it is my video of Phil Campbell reviewing the Nokia N86's video capacities mere minutes after Anssi Mäkelä handed us the phones as we got in the car to go to the Carl Zeiss lens factory tour.

Phil was quite happy with the video capabilities of the N86, and I am more than quite happy with the photography capabilities (with the exception of the focus on the macro setting, but that can be fixed in a software update).

My full review of the N86 and my review of the Carl Zeiss factory tour upcoming.

Tues 06.23.09 - Since I am having video upload FAIL due to my London hotel's bad BTInternet connection, I am uploading this rather amusing video that Rita Khoury (aka Dotsisx) has posted of the two of us giving a Nokia N86 review as we were on the bus from Aalen to Stuttgart after our 1.5 days of Carl Zeiss lens factory tour happiness.

My video of Phil Campbell doing his off the cuff review of the N86's video recording will be coming as soon as I can get the dang thing uploaded.... (grrr...)

Panorama photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N86.

Tues 06.23.09 - This panorama is a bit clunky, as I was just learning how to use it, but I love it. I love the Panorama option on the Nokia N86's camera.

PyS60 Developers Blog: http://croozeus.com/blogs/

Mobile Lenin on PyS60 ( Mobile PyS60 author) : http://mobilenin.com/pys60/menu.htm

Nokia Open Source on Python for S60 : http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/

Fri 06.12.09 - Will PostOffice for MT post this cron job email now that I have the correct cron job command?

Update: Yes, it did, but not with the cron job command that my server support team said would work, but with the one that Movable Type said would work.

Update at 4:48pm: Sorry, it ran a couple of times too many before I deleted the test email out of the inbox.

For two reasons, email photos to this blog is going to be an imperfect way to moblog:
1) If one does not delete or move the email out of the inbox, after the cron job runs, then the PostOffice plugin will post again the next time the cron job runs - at least when using Gmail.
2) One first has to resize the photo in the phone before emailing, otherwise there will be a large photo - both in pixels and kilobytes - that is posted to the blog.

With the G2 Ion / HTC Magic phone, I downloaded PicSay from the Android Market to do the resizing and emailing all in one go, as the PixelPipe Android app did not send the photo resized.

Given that a super-user/moblog addict like me spent many hours over days to set this up, no wonder why regular folks don't want to blog from their phones to a blog that lives on one's own server but prefer instead if they do moblog to a hosted service. gah.

Oh, Lifeblog, Oh Lifeblog, why did Nokia discontinue you? You were such a lovely and perfect moblogging app for Nokia phones...

Thurs 06.11.09 - Will PostOffice for MT post this cron job email now that I have the correct cron job command?

Update later in the evening: No it did not. The support fellow at my server gave me a new command for the cron job and it did not work, so I just triggered the script via the command line and it did post. Now back to the cron job drawing board.

The next two weeks are going to be very busy with me flitting here there and everywhere for (mostly) business purposes.

On Sunday, I will drive up to the Bay Area for some Python Rehab. Actually, I am going to some training but it sounds much more fun to say to people that Python and I aren't speaking right now, due to some tuples, and so I am checking myself into programming rehab. No seriously, I keep getting tuple errors (little ass*s)...

If you live in SF or Oakland or South Bay and want to get together for dinner, I am trying to get folks together either Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday evening in San Francisco proper.

And then sometime, not quite sure when yet, late next week, I will be flying to Germany for a big adventure of which when I have a bit more info, I will blog about. Yes, this another one of the WOM World / Nokia adventures. This one will involve Industrial Design + Manufacturing + Photowalks, which means it will be AWESOME. I love factories, esp. if I can take photos and ask lots of questions.

Rather than flying back to LA after 4 days in Europe, I have requested that I get dropped off in London. I plan to be in London until the 28th of June at the very least and I will be attending Tuttle Club at the ICA on Friday, June 26th. Thus, if you are in London-town from the 25th to the 28th and want to go for a photowalk or to dim sum or to a museum with me, let's meet up.

Mobile Tidbit #1: I just tweeted:

LG Viewty Smart & Samsung Pixon will do it, will Nokia & Apple do it? Choosing camera focus with touch: http://tinyurl.com/touchfocus

Honestly the most interesting bit of the new camera phones that LG and Samsung have coming out is not the 8.1 megapixels on the LG Viewty Smart nor the 12 megapixels on the Samsung Pixon, but the fact that both of them will be using the touch screen to introduce a "manual" focus to camera phones. By touching the area of the view screen, you can choose what part of the photo that you want the camera to focus on. This is exciting.

I am *shocked* that the Apple UX geniuses did not first come up with this innovative use of the touch screen as applied to camera phones, but then again, I am not really shocked, as the camera is just an after thought on the iPhone.

When I had my 45 minute trial of the Nokia N97 at SXSW where I compared its photos to the photos that my Nokia N95 took, my biggest complaint about the Nokia N97's photos is that the focus was off. It would be great if the N97 had the touch focus feature on it, as then I could have chosen where or who I wanted the camera to focus on rather than have sharp backgrounds and slightly blurry subjects.

Hey Nokia! That first firmware update for the Nokia N97... The update you will most likely release in July? Make sure that touch screen camera "manual/auto" focus is a part of that update, as it is too brilliant and and too useful to be left out.

Mobile Tidbit #2: What is in a Name?

For the last 5.5 days, I have been calling my new lovely Google I/O gift mobile device the "Android HTC Magic", as that is what folks that the Google I/O conference were calling it. But I heard at the event some folks calling it the G2 or the HTC Ion.

When I was hanging out with Justin yesterday, he was calling it the G2. And today on Android and Me, Taylor calls it the Google Ion (HTC Sapphire).

People, can we decide on one name and stick to it? Thanks.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her HTC Magic camera phone.

Sat 05.30.09 - Even though the Google Android HTC Magic phone only has a 3.2 megapixel camera, HTC and the Android team have put them heavy lifting image algorithms to work, as this mobile device takes the best looking photos daytime and strong light I have seen from a device that is under 5 megapixels. The phone has no flash, so night time or action photos are usually blurred.

The new Google Android phone did a great job on local flowers today even though the daylight was gray from June Gloom cloud cover. I purposely put the camera lens within 4 inches of the big vine flower. The camera auto-focused on the buds behind and to the left of the big flower, as well as distorted the color of the big flower a bit to the orange, but nonetheless, the photo turned out surprisingly nice for a 3.2 mp camera with no close-up function.

The big failing so far with the HTC Magic is that there is not a sharing application, like Shozu, to send the images to places on the web. From the photo gallery one can send the photos to email, messaging, and Picassa, but not to Flickr or to one's blog.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Here is my transcription of two sessions from Day 2, 05.28.09, of the Google I/O 2009. Per my usual, the following is a combination of live quotes from the speaker, notes off the slides, some paraphrase and a few of my own asides.

So far, Brett Slatkin's Offline Processing on App Engine: A Look Ahead has been my favorite of the day. Lunch conversation with Prashant and Bastian was delightful.

Here is my transcription of two sessions from Day 1, 05.27.09, of the Google I/O 2009. Per my usual, the following is a combination of live quotes from the speaker, notes off the slides, some paraphrase and a few of my own asides.

Chris Nesiadek's presentation on Android's Interaction Design was my favorite of the day.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Wed 05.27.09 - Or how Ernie, Ms. Jen, and hundreds, if not a thousand plus of us were given free Android HTC Magic phones today at Google I/0.

Or how Google quite brilliantly insured that hundreds of developers would write Android apps by making sure that they would have testing devices!

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Wed 05.27.08 - Due to my plane being an hour late, I may miss the first session on how to code for Android. Even if late, I am looking forward to the Google App Engine and Android sessions today and tomorrow.

If the folks at Starcut are going to proudly announce that they mobilize brands and media and charge a newspaper to mobilize the said newspaper's website, then they should educate themselves on the standards of the mobile user experience.

Major rule of the mobile web: Give the User a Choice. Don't assume that they want the full website or that they want a reduced site for mobile. Just because a script has detected that the browser coming to the site is a mobile browser, doesn't mean the reader/user wants to be forced into a locked sandbox with no exit. Don't assume that every user wants to reduce their data usage, some of us have unlimited plans. Give the user a choice.

Here are a few examples of Mobile Sites that do the User Experience right by giving the reader/user a choice to either view the mobile version or to switch over to the "classic", "full", "regular" version of the website:

Why does this matter? Well, not every Nokia or Sony Ericsson or Blackberry or insert name of mobile device is a smartphone with Opera Mini or a version of the Webkit or Gecko mobile browsers, but then again, not every Nokia or Sony or Blackberry or other mobile device is a simple device with a simple mobile web browser.

I think it is great that more and more websites offer mobile versions that are stripped down and load fast for mobile devices, but if you are going to strip out choice along with kilobytes, this is not good.

My Nokia N95 has a full featured web browser that renders most websites, except heavily AJAX sites, quite nicely. I have an unlimited data plan. Between my Nokia's browser and my data plan, I want to see the full version of most websites unless I need information quickly and then the mobile version is usually fine.

Not yesterday.

Yesterday, I left the house in a rush to meet up with Lauren Isaacson in Encino so that we could have lunch together before she departs for Vancouver. I was heading north on the 405 and passing the Long Beach Airport when I realized that I left my paper copy of the LA Times Food section. So, I did what I would normally do in this situation, I opened my Nokia's web browser and typed "latimes.com", instead of getting the usual, full web version of the LA Times website, I was forced into the mobile version of the site with no exit out.

No link to the full version. No links to the Food section. No ability to get out of the reduced web version. I then went to Google to search for the article and the Google search took me back to the front page of the mobile site with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com. Here is the mobile site that I saw with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com at either the top of the mobile page nor at the bottom:

I was very frustrated.

I was mad in the immediate situation of trying to locate information that was still live on the full version of the website but I was unable to get to the information because the mobile version of the site did not let me go there. I was mad as a web & mobile user experience designer to experience bad UX design first hand. I was frustrated that Starcut has probably charged the LA Times a lot of money to piss off loyal readers like me.

In the end, I had to use a desktop computer at Lauren's parent's house to search the LA Times' website for the article on the restaurant we were to go to. Itzik Hagadol is excellent, especially their 20 salads for $8.99.

But the lack of ability to exit the LA Times's mobile site from a mobile browser is not excellent. It would be excellent if Starcut would revisit the site and add a simple link at the top or the bottom of each mobile page, giving the reader/user the option to go to the full non-mobile version of the site from their mobile browser.

Ernest over at Darla Mack's S60 News & Reviews just posted a comparison review of the Nokia N97 vs. LG Viewty Smart: Side By Side Comparison. While Ernest didn't have both devices in his hands to do a review, he did use the Omio Comparison Widget to create a tech spec side by side comparison.

About halfway through reading the side by side tech spec showdown between the Nokia N97 and the LG Viewty Smart, I thought, "Wait a minute, this should be a comparison between the Nokia N86 and the LG Viewty Smart, not the N97!" I followed the link to Omio's site and made my own tech spec showdown between the two upcoming 8 megapixel camera phones to be released this summer from Nokia & LG, see below after the jump / below the fold.

Folks, the Omio Comparison Widget is hours of entertainment if you are a deep mobile tech geek who gets off on which specs are better. For me it was minutes of entertainment and I will be waiting to get the camera phones in my hands to take actual photos and see how the mobiles perform under a mobile blogging geo-tagging photowalk photography test.

Although, I will say from the descriptions in the tech specs in the below comparison of the LG Viewty Smart, Well, hello! The LG Viewty Smart will allow for manual focus as well as automatic? Hello! Now we are starting to talk photography!

The nice folks at Amazon.com have opened up the ability for bloggers to add their blog to the Kindle-world. If you are a regular blogger and would like to have the various Kindle reader folk out there to able to download and read your blog on their Kindle's, then go register at Kindle Publishing.

The nice folk at Six Apart alerted their Twitter followers about the new Kindle Publishing option for bloggers this afternoon:

Our friends at Amazon just launched Kindle Publishing for Blogs -- list your blog in the Kindle store: http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com

Why is this exciting to me? Given that I am a big fan of reading, mobile devices and blogs, this is a perfectly easy way to make sure that one's blog reaches what possibly may be a new audience or at the very least it makes current readers of one's blog be able to read the blog anywhere on a mobile device at their convenience.

I signed up for Kindle Publishing this afternoon and within 20 minutes I had this blog, Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen, and The Happy Tastebud signed up as Kindle subscriptions. And in another 20 minutes after that, I had the links to the Kindle subscriptions added to both blog's sidebar Subscribe area right next to the links to Atom and RSS feeds.

It was easy. Amazon did not require anything of me that I had not already had accomplished (description, keywords, screen shot, masthead, etc). I did not have to recode my blog nor did I have to make a device specific app, like many have done for the iPhone, but all I had to do after filling in basic information was to give an RSS or Atom feed to Amazon.

Amazon allows you to see a preview of your content as the Kindle will display it to the reader and it is not optimized for a photoblog or for the design control addicts amongst us, as the photos are very low resolution and in black & white and the typography is serif and fairly large. Also, there is no control over layout. But all of this adds up to an impetuous for me to make sure that my content is compelling regardless of the device or machine that it is viewed on.

Whether anyone actually subscribes to my blog via the Kindle or not really doesn't matter, what does matter is that Amazon is making a wide variety of publications available to their Kindle readership and Amazon is making it easy for bloggers and other content publishers to distribute their work, which is very exciting for the mobile and handheld device ecosystem.

[Photos coming to this space tomorrow when I am not so tired.]

Thurs 05.07.09 - Tonight was the first ever Mobile Geeks of LA at the Cat & Fiddle on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. Basically, James has taken the Mobile Geeks of London on tour.

It was good fun. While it was only 73 degrees F when I left Seal Beach, it was 88 F when I arrived in LA at 8pm!!!! Luckily, the courtyard at the Cat & Fiddle is not only beautiful, but has a burbling fountain of which all the mobile folk were gathered around. Somehow the sounds of water falling made it seem cooler.

What was cool and sweet was not only hanging out with friends (Lauren, James, Vikki, Jeb, Geoff & his wife Christine, Amir, Al, Francine, and Matt), but also meeting and talking with new people like the Las Vegas folk who came out for the event and others.

Big Thanks to Whatleydude, Matt Singley, and Jeb Brilliant for putting together a lovely evening.

My Nokia viNe from tonight: http://vine.nokia.com/#/mid=&lc=&vid=965979&cc=&page=home

Photo taken with Ms. Jen's Nokia N95.

Wed 05.06.09 - Today the Nokia N79, that the Nokia folks loaned me at SXSW, was whisked away by FedEx to go home to New York. Farewell to a lovely little mobile.

Take a stance. Even for a minute or two or a month or longer. Do it publicly.

One of the conversations, however briefly, I got into today on Twitter with Jonathan Greene was about John Gruber's iPhone post, "Complex".

While I agree with Gruber's initially stated premise that starting with a simple problem or solving a problem (just one) is a great way to begin any project. Once the simple has been defined, then build on it. Gruber goes from strength to strength to Apple fanboi kool-aid drinking by the end of the post.

In one of my Tweets, I pose the question:

"Gruber is very much in the Apple fold. That is why I ask if he is making a theoretical stance rather than an accurate assessment"

I think it makes great articles to take a stance and argue from it. I think it makes great art when one decides to take a stance, even if briefly, know where one resides in that theoretical space as one creates and practices one's art. But it is also important, whether one is writing articles or creating art to clearly acknowledge the stance and space that one is standing in, so that the reader or viewer can also know where to stand.

What do I mean by this? In Gruber's piece, his lack of a disclaimer or acknowledgment to the audience or even to himself of his US-centric and Apple-centric position makes the ending arguments of his piece fall flat if the reader falls outside of the concentric circles that Gruber is assuming that everyone is agreeing on. Many of the ideas in his article are intriguing, such as basing a series of devices on a software/firmware platform first rather than the function of the device, but this assumes that all the readers have drunken deeply of the iPhone kool-aid and are devotees at the shrine of Jobs. But what happens to the cult when Jobs retires and the powers that be don't carry on the same way? What happens if Gruber is looking at Apple's strategy from a theoretical stance or from a critical (in the academic sense) 20/20 hindsight review of the last eight years of strategy rather than what may or may not have happened?

This year at SXSW, Andy Budd and I had two very fun rounds of debate about Apple, the iPhone and anything that Nokia is doing. We were to have round three but never got to it. Andy is a User Experience professional, not only does he blog about it, run a whole web firm predicated on UX (clearleft), writes books on it, and speaks on UX, but he also firmly lives it. I thoroughly enjoy engaging Andy on topics of UX as it intersects mobile, as it is a great place for my great passion of mobile to cross his of UX. Andy and I disagree on the iPhone. While I agree with him that it is the "game changer" of 2007/2008, I don't think we can assume that it will be going forward.

I argue that Nokia and other firms cannot be discounted in the wake of the iPhone, as not every user/customer/person will be satisfied by the iPhone's features, functions, and OS. I have a number of non-web-design LA area creative friends who tried the iPhone and returned it before the 30 days were up for an Android G-1, a Sidekick 3, or for a Crackberry. I also have a number of friends and colleagues in LA and other places, who prefer Nokia Nseries phones to the iPhone, of which I am one of them. Most of us in this category want camera phones that take great photos.

On Twitter, I summed up my statements with on Gruber's article:

"It can be easy to forget culture & sub-cultural usage patterns as well as differing personal usage. The US is not all."

To this end, both in Gruber's article and in my own conversations with web colleagues who are passionate about A or B or C or X or Z device, I think we all have to remember that different mobile devices are not just fulfilling a cultural zeitgeist of the moment (like the iPhone in the US right now), or a sub-cultural niche (like the Sidekick 2 in the North American punk scene from 2005-2007), but also individual's differing usage patterns.

I do think it is important to state, even if briefly where one stands in that moment within the frame of the discussion so that the reader/viewer knows what one's theoretical stance is.

This is why I always encourage my friends who are excited about digital photography to write about and publicly dialogue about whether they are most interested in the act of shooting the photo or in the act of processing it later on their computer. Do you post your photos as is or do you process them? It is not an inconsequential factoid, but a record of your artistic / photographic journey that helps your viewers to know where you stand right now.

This is why I try to be clear that, for now, I like to shoot photos with camera phones, as I like the immediacy, I like the constraints, and I like to send my photos to this blog or to Flickr unprocessed, as is. And on the other side, for my friends who the great pleasure comes in the hour or two spent at their computer later processing their DSLR photos, good - many beauties upon you. Let us know about your process.

Why do I talk about theoretical stances or spaces in conjunction with John Gruber, the iPhone, Andy Budd, Twitter, Flickr, and camera phones this late in the evening after a long day? Well, in my recent post on the Nokia N95 vs. the Nokia N97, I was outright that my interest is in the camera capacity of the device and in response to some comments, I made a few comments that went deeper into the the territory of the quality of the camera being preeminent. I didn't make these comments to inflame but to iterate that my theoretical space and concern as an individual user of mobile devices is that of a photographer first and foremost.

From what position or space are you standing in right now?

Photo Credits: All photos taken by Ms. Jen either with her Nokia N95 (v.1) or Dustin's Nokia N97 prototype on Sun. March 15, 2009 at the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas, during SXSW Interactive. Nokia N95 photos on the left column, Nokia N97 on the right. Click on first photo to start the lightbox slideshow.

One of the best parts about SXSW Interactive this year was getting to not only hold the upcoming Nokia N97, but use it to take photos. Yes, I did actually put the Nokia N97 through its paces rather than just pet it.

Big thanks to the Nokia USA folks who were hanging out in the Austin Convention Center hallway and let folks stop by to check out (fondle, really) the new & upcoming Nokia Nseries and Eseries devices.

Thus, the above photo comparison is a straight showdown between my own Nokia N95 (N95-1 - two years old) and the soon to be released, much ballyhoo-ed, Nokia N97.

Yes, the touch screen and qwerty keyboard on the N97 were delicious. Yes, I drooled. Yes, I love the new Symbian Series 60 version 5 OS. Yes, I want one. But... and the big but for me, before I purchase, is how will the camera really perform?

All the features are great, but if the camera is not as good as my current, 2 year old, completely paid for Nokia N95, then what is the point of getting a new device? I am in the market for a new Nokia Nseries, but I want a camera that is better than the one on my current N95, not as good or less than.

All the photos above were taken in the Austin Convention Center hallway during the Nokia Sunday afternoon meetup to see how the Nokia N97 would perform against the N95 (with most recent firmware update v. 30.something.something). I asked all the people to hold the same pose so that the photo set up would be the same for each photo and I turned the flash off on both camera phones. The lighting was sun streaming in through big windows and some overhead fluorescent lighting. Between the lighting, the neutrals of the ACC, and the white walls, I was interested to see how clear the Nokia N97 images would be and would they veer towards the warm or cool in the color spectrum.

Disclaimer* aside, while the Nokia N97 prototype that I used for the above photos did an ok job, the photos were slightly less clear than my Nokia N95's photos and warmer in color tone. I was really hoping that Nokia would seriously up the ante with the N97's camera, but for a camera phone that will be the top of the line and the flagship product from Nokia in 2009, I would hope that between now and release that the Nokia engineers and programmers will upgrade the N97's software and tweak the camera performance so that my Nokia N95 will not beat it in another photo comparison in a couple of months time.

*DISCLAIMER: The Nokia N97 that Dustin Randall (aka DocMobile) had for me to play with is a prototype, of which the browser and other software bits were not fully ready for prime time. Which if some of the software on the prototype N97's was faulty, then it stands to reason that other bits may be to. Whether the camera software on the device was ready or not , Nokia does have some work to do, as the N95 is still taking better photos..

Follow up: My Nokia N97 Review from July 2009: The Nokia N97 : Photos, A Story, Thoughts, and Asides

Hi!

I have two mostly finished but not ready to publish posts one from Saturday on the Nokia N97 and one from yesterday on the N79, but due to client deadlines and my Mom's birthday (today!) it has been too busy to finish the posts up properly. I will do it tonight.

Sorry for what appears to be a lack of activity around here, but without Lifeblog on the Nokia N79, I can't moblog my usual photos.

---

Update: Will PixelPipe push the photo to my server or will it live on their server just like Flickr does? If PP pushes to my server, I can use it for moblogging when I have a phone without Lifeblog (new Nokias), but if they just send the link to the photo that lives on their server, then why use it over Flickr for the same purpose?

Further update via my twitter: "Huh. PixelPipe is not any different for moblogging than Flickr or others. Photos on their server, not mine. Fail. #ownyourownphotos"

Even more: If Nokia is going to stop putting Lifeblog on their new phones after the Nokia N82, I wish they would open source Lifeblog so developers can iterate and continue to make direct phone to Movable Type moble blogging with no intermediary service or server.

Photo taken with Ms. Jen's Nokia N95.

Sun 03.15.09 - Showing the Nokia N79 to Kenyatta and Ella of Rocketboom on a stair landing at the Austin Convention Center at SXSW Interactive.