gravity

Inspired by Jen's 2,045 Days with a Camera Phone:

1. I have over 35000 (35823 as of this writing) public photos tagged "cameraphone" on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roland/tags/cameraphone since I bought my Nokia 7610 1 megapixel cameraphone back in June 2004
2. Over 90% of those were with Nokia Cameraphones
3. most of them were with the N95 (7643) and N82 (20, 554 as of this writing)
4. Combine the 35000 public plus over 10000 on my private kid flickr account plus the ones that I didn't download and I have over 50000
5. Needless to say I love my N82 :-) and its "triumph of the lofi" sensor
6. I also love the non blurriness of my digital SLR and Lightroom but hate the fact that WiFi and GPS are not built into DSLRs (they both should be! All cameras including cameraphones and SLRs and point and shoots will be social cameras in 10 years or less!!!!)
7. And like Jen I have tried the N8 under NDA and it's fantastic
8. Therefore even though (like Jen), Symbian is not my fav operating system anymore:
9. N8 + ShoZu + gravity = a winner so I am getting one (and an iPhone 4 as previously blogged; it would be silly for me not to use the awesome cameraphone power of the iPhone 4)
10. And Jen, I assume when you write:
    1. " I will be purchasing a Nokia N8 and then tracking down a QT developer to help me flesh out the code of my mobile app idea. Here's to 2,045 more days of camera phone photography. ;o)"
    2. that python is ok? Right Jen :-) ? If so I'll help you write a prototype. I don't do C++ :-)

[thanks to WOMWORLD Nokia for the N900 review unit, the following is my usual stream of consciousness; conclusions later :-) !]

Things I like:

1. Eye Candy - Great Effects
2. Audio - Fun sound effects
3. The truly open potential of Maemo since Maemo (now Meego) is a "normal Linux" not some half open / half proprietary b*stardized Linux like Android. This means out of the box I can install with minimal effort and do all the normal Linux things like install Ruby, python, use SSH etc
4. Firefox ! Yes. Being able to write Firefox add-ons and HTML5 webapps is (eventually once the speed is improved and Firefox has some time to iterate and improve)) going to be very very good thing
5. Camera while not as great as the N82 is much better than the iPhone

Things I don't like:

1. Phone is an app and seems like a half baked app at that. Not sure how to invoke it.
2. The media player app doesn't multi-task with the camera app. If I am playing music and switch to the camera app, the music stops
3. Touch Screen is unresponsive
4. UI performance seems to lag and the latency of the UI is often too slow. Seems very sluggish in other words
5. No real twitter client, give me something like Gravity please
6. No ShoZu - the built in sharing programs and PixelPipe are not my cup of tea; I prefer my multi-media to be uploaded automatically (or at least not 1 at a time; need to be able to select unlimited number of photos and videos and upload them)
7. Maemo UI is non-intuitive but it has potential (to me Meego has more potential in the long run than Symbian!)
8. Camera is sluggish when processing photos and is also slow to power up and auto-focus and to take a shot when compared to the N82

The Thrilling conclusion: Archaic OS + wonderful 3rdparty apps (e.g. ShoZu + Qik + Gravity) = mobile multimedia creator happiness iff:

1. You can get this phone at a good price (since it's now over a year old, maybe you can get the E75 at a substantial discount e.g. $200)
2. You don't mind the user unfriendliness of S60V3 and the puny 320x240 screen. S60 V3 is unfriendly and archaic compared to iPhone and Android and other modern mobile operating systems but Symbian has some excellent free or cheap 3rd party programs for mobile multi-media content creators i.e. Gravity + ShoZu + Qik are all free or under 10 Euro each which means that with these programs you have a multi-media creator's powerhouse.

But since the Nokia C6 was introduced does it make sense to consider the E75? Not for me. the C6 is cheaper, has a bigger screen and more up to date software!

C'mon Nokia bundle ShoZu, Qik and Gravity with the C6 and pitch the phone to multi-media creators, students and journalists! It would be a killer combo.

1. Please port Maemo to Qik, and Nokia please buy Qik; just like Nokia should have bought ShoZu :-)
2. Miss604's Denial of Service of Attack
3. Bryght - the first hosted Drupal, first Drupal as a service, 5 years ago
4. Bryght partnership with Workhabit - 50 servers, Cisco routers, pre cloud, we had DOS attacks and Workhabit's awesome Gary, Aaron and Jonathan fixed the routers
5. DOS cannot be fixed completely but it can be minimized through various means including taking out the DOS IP addresses at the router level, taking your site down is not a solution, shows that real hosting companies need to own their infrastructure or have DNS separated
6. Drupal Gardens aka "Bryght done right" aka "Bryght in the cloud is not using Aegir
7. But Drupal Gardens does use Drush
8. Bryght didn't use Drush, we used python for lots of historical reasons To upgrade 1000 Drupal sites e.g. from Drupal 5.1 to Drupal 5.2 sites I ran hmupdate.py (or was it hmupgrade.py? it's fuzzy now!) in a for loop over the 1000 Bryght Drupal web sites
9. Aegir has commoditized Bryght (former Bryght guy, Adrian Rossouw, developed Aegir; Adrian rocks)
10. The entire Bryght Drupal as a service is available in a box i.e. commoditized
11. The awesome Emma Jane Hogbin has advocated a web infrastructure e.g. a Drupal cloud for every town
12. A Drupal cloud for every town is a way to attract businesses because you can spin up a free (government pays for it, far better than bogus tax breaks) scalable, modern, SEO optimised website for a business or non profit in 5 minutes
13. Dreamweaver doesn't cut it - Technologists have failed because there is still no Dreamweaver for 21st century but wordpress.com is close and Acquia Gardens when it's 1.0 will be even closer
14. Does Qik have a business model? Yes bundling with handset
15. Schmap is annoying and irrelevant
16. Iphone 4.0 is highly relevant :-)
17. Apple Gaming network is huge - Could Tiny Speck use it for Glitch? Yes! How porous will Apple make it? i.e. will it play nice with other social networking sites? probably not in the near term but maybe in the long term
18. iAds - based on HTML5! Big ! Will make HTML5 "the voice of the new web dev generation"
19. Multi-tasking - it doesn't matter, it comes down to UX; area where Nokia is lost (except possibly Maemo! go Maemo go! p.s. I hate the name Meego much prefer Maemo!)
20. User Experience of multi-tasking is what's important and having to install a 3rd party task manager to make Symbian multi-tasking work is a really, really bad user experience
21. Yet another shout-out to Jan Ole Suhr for the awesome Gravity Twitter App - best mobile Twitter app on ony platform, only available on Symbian for the moment
22. Took Boris "83 clicks" to pay for Gravity, sad but true :-) ! Nokia, please fix!
23. Maemo potential is so much greater than Apple iPhone and Symbian because it's Linux and because it's truly open from the get go rather than openness being bolted on like Symbian :-) !

Shaky pontifications without borders video

Part 2 of my E75 review is a short update to say that the E75-1 works great with Rogers/Fido 3.5 G aka HSDPA and it's fast with ShoZu and Gravity. I thought that Rogers HSDPA was only compatible with the E75-1 (but a search through the specs shows that the E75-1 works great with 2100MHz but not 850MHz HSDPA and Rogers offers 2100MHz so that makes sense!). Now I am dreaming of having an N86 and/or N900 with 3.5G. Wow that would be fast and a great experience!

A while back I thought I lost my N82. In my panic I tweeted about the horror of using the iPhone 3G's camera (I love iPhone apps but hate the camera!) and the nice folks at WOMWORLD Nokia offered to lend me an E75 with a QWERTY keyboard and 3.2 megapixel camera until I bought an N82 replacement.

Fortunately I found the N82 but by then I had the E75 (thanks to Tom Hall of WOMWORLD Nokia!)

So this will be an abbreviated series of stream of consciousness reviews

1. I actually like the E75 form factor. It's light and thin! And the slide is nice
2. Gravity rocks on it. Best Twitter client on any mobile platform. Only limited by the small screen.
3. The screen doesn't have enough pixels! (320x240 belongs in the dustbin of history :-) certainly doesn't belong on a "business" phone like the E75 that was introduced in spring of 2009!) So Gravity and other heavy text and graphics based apps like the web browser suffer
4. S60 5th 3rd edition shall we say is "long in the tooth". I am not going to repeat my past anti-S60 whingeing (e.g. N97 S60 whingeing) :-) Suffice to say that anachronistic unusable error messages  like"Create WLAN connection in offline mode?" abound. As well as the many other S60 issues (e.g. the antiquated web browser, c'mon Nokia, put a modern Web Kit browser on the E75 via a software update, please!)
5. The camera is decent. Far better than the iPhone (and the E71) but not nearly as good as the N82 which shows you that Nokia is still ahead of Apple (but for how much longer?) - check out my e75 photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roland/tags/e75photo/

N97 Review Thrilling Review Conclusion - only recommended for S60 geeks

If I had money which I don't due to transitions in employment and the need to pay $8000 for a new roof, I would buy an N97 NAM with my own money. But, unfortunately (it pains me to slag Nokia since I desperately want Apple to have viable competition longterm and slagging Nokia is like slagging my first love since I loved my first cameraphone, the 1 megapixel Nokia 7610 I bought in 2004!)  I can not  recommend the Nokia N97 for other people i.e. people who are not already S60 geeks.

Buy an iPhone 3GS instead. Sure the camera on the 3GS s*cks compared to the N82, N95, N97, N86, etc but the software is a joy to use and the touch focus is something that Nokia should have done first. and there is a viable useful app ecosystem for the iPhone unlike Nokia (sure it may develop but there is no sign of it).

The N97 works for me because of these apps (in no order):

• ShoZu - Sorry Pixelpipe your service is unusable until Nokia fixes Share Online, sharing only 30 items at a time is a non starter for me.  The unreliable Share Online which has no cues about whether a photo has been uploaded already is a major annoyance.)
• Gravity - Gravity rocks, it's one of the best Twitter clients on any platform and is continually being improved! Gravity makes the N97 QWERTY keyboard useful instead of a frill. Without gravity, I'd be content with the superior camera of the N86 8MP and pecking away in g*d aweful T9)
• Nokia Sports Tracker is a must have for tracking your bicycle rides, walks,etc. It is full of annoyances like not remembering any of your preferences (I always want to share my Maps with everybody, please don't ask OVER AND OVER again) but works well and is very useful and works in the background unlike the iPhone trackers all of which are useless because the iPhone doesn't allow 3rd party apps to multi-task
• QIK, video streaming need I say more. It just works and keeps getting improved!

If you love the above apps or any of the other few (there are about 50 good apps on S60, on iPhone there are several hundred good apps!) good apps on S60, then that probably means you are an S60 geek and then the only choice in 2009 is either the N86 8MP or N97. However once a 5 megaxel iPhone with decent video comes out in 2010, then I fear Nokia at its current rate of stagnation won't even be able to keep S60 geeks like myself happy.

Why normal people should NOT buy  the N97:

• the UI is impossible to use for non S60 geeks, hand the N97 and iPhone 3GS to a newbie and may G*d have mercy on your soul :-) ! Can't stand S60 constantly nattering at you asking whether you want to connect or not, of course I do ! touch inconsistently works from screen to screen, app to app and a host of other UX issues
• the whole thing feels like a work in progress e.g. widgets are a great proof of concept but in reality aren't really that useful, e.g. the twitter and facebook widgets don't display enough useful info and autoscroll, they just display the last 10 or so status updates, these widgets feel like "hello world" rather than actually useful
• instability - e.g. I reset the phone via *#7370#, set the camera to sequence multiple shot mode and take 16 pictures and the camera app freezes; if Nokia can't get their camera app to work in 2009 no wonder ShoZu also has stability issues
• there's not enough RAM - even if you install all the apps on the built in 32GB mass memory you still run out of RAM

1. The N97 touch UI is a wart on top of an S60 wart. The S60 touch UI  works  only if you are an S60 geek like me or sloanb. For the mass market aka "humans" as Marc Canter calls normal people :-), S60 and the S60 touch UI are unusable. Please Nokia (speaking as a friend who wants Nokia to thrive instead of merely surviving the iPhone juggernaut):
   1. fix the S60 UI as per Rui's suggestions
   2. start a separate stealth division or company to re-do the UI (as I  previously advocated after Nokia Open Lab 2008 and as Alec Saunders advocated today  or just buy Palm :-)  (yes I know buying Palm is unrealistic, but in the long run it's just as valid as Maemo (which I like but is just for geeks at this point) or even worse trying to revamp S60 to make it usable)
2. Having said that, I am strangely enjoying using the N97 (the Touch makes perfect sense if you have been living and breathing S60 since 2004 like I have!). I love the beautiful big screen (the N82 screen seems tiny and dark by comparison) and the camera seems faster shot to shot and the pictures are not bad in regular light (e.g. this photo of Dane from the N97 looks better than this photo of Dane with the N82 (need to view both at original size) wouldn't you agree?).
3. Nokia not having full Mac support for the N97 at launch time in 2009 is inexcusable. The days of the Microsoft hegemony are over. Get over it Nokia, the 1990s are over :-) !
4. Even if Ovi Maps supported the Mac, I doubt I'd like it. I bet I'd feel the same way as Stefan i.e. I'd still use Google Maps instead of Ovi.
5. Over the air update of my trial N97 (which is European) firmware worked flawlessly. Unfortunately as per Ms Jen, the same can't be said of the N97 NAM, again inexcusable for a flagship device.
6. Still not a fan of widgets:
   1. Rather have the weather widget use the official and best Canadian forecast which is Environment Canada's
   2. The facebook app doesn't show enough info and doesn't show Notes
7. Surprisingly email works better than expected with my gmail account. Major bug is that tags don't show up as IMAP folders which they do in a proper email client like Thunderbird.
8. Qik, ShoZu and Nokia Sports Tracker (Sports Tracker still has a bad website and inexplicably doesn't upload all the photos you have taken during a ride but that's not an N97 exclusive bug) all work just as well as they do on the N82 and E71 even though none of them except Qik support the N97 officially yet.
9. Gravity rocks! it's one of the best mobile twitter clients on any platform! Beautiful and fun with the kinetic touch scrolling.
10. The Web Browser still feels pokey and outmoded compared to the iPhone web browser. Please fix!
11. As many others have pointed out, the keyboard is fine except that "long" key presses should result in numbers or the other symbols instead of auto-repeating the key.This works fine in the E71! Please fix in a future firmware update.

On the night before I receive my N97 from Nokia WOM World for a brief trial, just for fun I looked back at my N999 concept/vision from December 1, 2008. And what the heck here's the N999 concept updated for July 2009 (notable updates are in bold):

1. screen with as many pixels as the 5800 Tube or iPhone (sorry but QVGA doesn't cut it in 2009!)
2. S60 simplified and fixed as Rui describes
3. 5 megapixel camera with cover and Xenon flash with 3x optical zoom and 640x480 30fps video (basically re-use the awesome N82 camera hardware and software and combine with the N93 optical zoom)
4. Quad band GSM and 3G (i.e. works on Rogers and AT&T in North America AND European 3G out of the box just like the N85, no funky North American model)
5. Built in ShoZu (with 10MB limit removed for 3G and WiFi, make the limit 50-200MB for 3G and WiFi) - killer app for photographers and videobloggers - Qik is built  into the N97 why not ShoZu? (I can't stand Share Online's limit of 6 photos at a time since I take over 50 a day; hope it's removed on the N97)
6. Bult-in Qik (killer app for videobloggers!) - Qik is built  into the N97 can't wait to try it!
   
7. Awesome web browser (Nokia's Web Kit browser was great in 2006, it is now far behind Apple's)
8. Lots of available RAM (as much as the N95 8GB please!), 8GB storage on built-in card - Reviews are mixed on the N97, sounds like it has a lot of RAM (more than the N95 8GB)  but with widgets it takes up a lot more. - I doubt I will use widgets!
9. Built in Nokia viNes to take advantage of Nokia's great GPS hardware (killer GPS app!) - viNes apears to be dead. Nokia Sports Tracker appears to be alive, so I'd rather have that built-in
   
10. Built in Twitter App i.e. built in Gravity

Now I know the above list is not possible given today's processors and batteries but in that case I can live without optical zoom! Everything else is doable as far as I can tell.

I still don't need:

1. QWERTY keyboard - I'd rather have an awesome camera and flash than a touch or QWERTY keyboard. And for me touch keyboards are just as good as QWERTY.
2. Email (Email is dead to me (ok email isn't dead but my resolution is to take any email thread  that I need to keep that has more than 2 replies to a wiki or blog); I continue to use it  for work and to communicate with "normal" folks!) - If the browser is as good as the iPhone's, then webmail clients work just fine.
3. Touch (would be nice, but not convinced Nokia has the software chops for this; I am not interested in S60 transmogrified with touch, I would prefer touch to be part of a totally revamped user interface that's NOT S60.) - Unfortunately it appears that Nokia's current touch interface s*cks. I hope I am proven wrong by my N97 trial.
4. Micro SD card slot
5. Calendar (would be nice but that's what my laptop is for :-) !) - Again with a good enough browser a web client would be good enough)
6. IM (Twitter is IM enough for me and I am fine with using it in the browser)
7. VOIP is dead to me except for Skype
8. MMS - I am not convinced I need it, I can always use ShoZu email photos :-) but I was wrong about SMS (so maybe I am wrong about MMS) - I am pretty sure I am wrong about MMS and I am pretty sure (unfortunately) I will be MMSing my relatives with pictures since they all finally seem to have MMS plans and devices and none of my luddite :-) relatives still use flickr or any of the other public or private photosharing sites!
   

Gravity, the fantastic S60 Twitter client proves that German S60 developers continue to rule the moribund S60 apps ecosystem (unfortunately the S60 app industry is a cottage industry compared to the iPhone app industry). First, profimail ruled the world (back in 2004 when I bought my first S60 phone and thought the mobile email was relevant, just say no to mobile email, just say yes to short form customized mobile two way communication like Twitter) and now gravity rules. And if you don't believe me that the iPhone app industry is clearly dominant over the S60 app industry than that's your prerogative and I'd have to wish you the best of luck making money with your S60 apps!

Behold the awesomeness of Gravity in my Gravity Screenshot set on flickr!