B. Mann Consulting

Dave Olson caved and got an iPhone, so the Nokia N78 he was testing for Roland has now made its way to me (my previous phone has been the Nokia N80). Thanks to both for making it available to me.

Here is the Nokia N78 on Nokia's website for full tech specs etc.

First reactions:

• much slimmer! almost half the height of the N80
• not a slider ... I had gotten used to the convenient / easy lock and unlock that the slider activates. Guess I'll be download AutoLock again.
• wow, the keypad on this is incredibly annoying! bye bye high speed texting ... I feel like my fat German peasant fingers have to use the edge of my fingernail to use them
• speaker and sound is awesome. Regular headphone jack, yay! FM tuner, very cool, I'm going to make a lot of use of this. Dedicated volume buttons, also great. There is much more music functionality to explore here...
• comes with FM antenna headset thingie with remote volume and playback controls, as I said, music quality is very good, although the ear plugs are slightly small for my ears
• lightly tapping the back button seems to not close the app you are in, but bring you back to the menu. The menu / app switching seems easier, but at the same time confusing. Why not make the funny asterisk symbol the same as the Nokia "menu" button that is on all their phones?
• the camera is much fancier -- only slightly more megapixels, but all sorts of autofocus features that make it feel more like a "real" digital camera; the flash is three times the size of the N80's
• video much improved -- now at 640x480, with excellent focus and sound quality
• USB data connection -- yay! not using standard USB mini connection -- boo!
• can the USB connection also do charging? don't know, it did come with a charger
• comes with a 2GB even-smaller-format memory card (I've given up on remembering the names for different formats ... I have three or four different "mobile" memory cards, plus SD for my camera...)
• there is Share Online which lets you connect to Flickr, Ovi, and some other stuff out of the box. Not quite set up yet.
• GPS! Haven't wandered around outside to test yet, but first impression is that it is very slow to get a GPS lock. After installing Google Maps app, the cell tower only location put me in the middle of Howe Sound (I'm on Bowen at the moment) -- I actually still consider that pretty good. Definitely going to be doing more experimenting with this.

My other "first reaction" is that it's clear that I've been a Symbian S60 user for a long time: there are certain apps that I always download / setup. I'll be cataloging those in another post, in part for my own use so I can go to one page and quickly download all the apps that I want on every phone. Like my experience in setting up a fresh install / new Mac, this would seem to indicate a certain level of maturity in S60. Or perhaps a clear line of what they will include and won't with the base OS, so there are distinct areas where third party apps flourish.

For those on the Mac, the N78 is not supported by default. You'll need to download the N78 iSync plugin from Nokia Europe (thanks to Carniumology404 for being the first hit for that).

Back to installing apps...

After being really happy with the Nokia Multimedia Transfer app for OS X to get music onto my phone, and photos off it onto iPhoto, I started looking to solve the "where to get new music" problem.

Around the same time, I was playing with the Nokia Podcasting app. Put simply, it is a podcast browser / downloader, which you can set to automatically connect to a network connection and download new podcast updates at a specified time. I set my phone to charge overnight, and set it up so that it would auto connect to my home wi-fi network.

Then I found Hypemachine. Yeah, yeah, I'm not really a cool trendy new music guy, and I *had* heard about it before, I just never really used it: it's a giant blog aggregator that tracks mentions of music and links to MP3s. It also exposes all this music blog aggregation as a podcast, with enclosures to the MP3 links. Not a traditional podcast at all -- it's whatever the Hypemachine has auto aggregated during that time period.

So, every morning, my phone is loaded with brand new music. It's eclectic to say the least -- last Friday featured lots of 4th of July-themed songs. The first time I set it up, I got some nice Catholic-rock-band tunes. Last night, I copied that music back to my computer after about 2 weeks of doing this. 63 songs survived my listening over that period, and I cut that down to about 40 that I would keep / give at least 3 stars to.

I'm listening to a lot more music on the go with this setup, and am being exposed to lots of "new stuff". So far, I bought the new Cold Play "Viva la Vida" album (definitely not a "long tail" band), as well as Ra Ra Riot both as iTunes Plus downloads. But the majority of the bands seem to be ones that I need to point you to their MySpace page to listen to their songs -- see Hooded Fang for one example.

It's been a fun experience so far, and I always look forward to what the next night of downloading will bring me. This whole listening to music on the go thing might really take off one of these days :P

Where do you find new music? Where do you listen to it? Where do you buy it?

Chris Bovard just left a great comment on the iPhone Nano thread -- here's the closer on his post about why he's unlikely to get an iPhone and why he can't understand why everyone is so hyped about it:

My next phone purchase will be N95 8gig because I love my current N95. If I buy another bigger phone it will be a http://www8.garmin.com/nuvifone/ when it is out. I own an older Garmin GPS I use for mountaineering. You can drop it and it goes under water. If Garmin puts this much though into their phone well the iphone will be just another toy.

Maybe time for everyone too look at the big picture instead of yet another Mac babysitter product for the mass.

"Mac babysitter product" is a great post. Except, well, the masses WANT babysitter products. I replied in the same thread -- here's the last bit of my comment:

Food for thought. I am all for competition, so I hope that Nokia continues with Series 60 development and also innovates in their new Linux-based systems (ref: their purchase of Trolltech, which makes cross platform GUI stuff). What these other players MUST realize is that the time has come where the mobile phone is moving BEYOND the bounds of the walled garden telcos, into the open platform of the Internet, and all competitors MUST strive to engage with network and platform effects in order to succeed long term.

The mobile market is one of those areas where so much interesting stuff is happening. I'm glad that we're having these types of discussions.

Yes, I finally got a new cellphone. My Nokia 6630 lasted me 2 years, and has been a great phone. But, I'm finding the need for a smartphone -- calendar, to do's, and email at my fingertips. Hence, sticking with my favourite platform, the Nokia E61 was the best choice for me. If I wanted to do more multimedia with my phone, I would have held out for the Nokia N95, with 5Mp camera and integrated GPS, including geotagging of photos on the fly. *drool* If I had wanted a phone with camera in the same price range as the E61, my pick would have been the Nokia N80 (which is what Kris just picked up to replace his Sidekick).

Regardless...I will miss having a cameraphone. I'll have to see what kind of camera or picture taking workflow will make it easy to still upload photos on the fly.

Even better, I didn't even have to travel to Europe to actually buy the phone. I got it at Cellular Baby, just a few blocks from my house.

My first impression of the phone: fast! The UI is very responsive, and it comes loaded with applications. I haven't had much of a chance to add extra applications. I'll be putting Opera on, even though the built in browser is surprisingly usable in some ways.

I've now got ShoZu on my Nokia 6630 setup to easily send video to my blip.tv account*. Lots of Gnomedex video going up.

Most fun was lamenting about the lack of Nokia smartphones to buy here in North America with Bre Pettis (someone *needs* to give Bre a phone for his Phonetagger alter-ego) and Will Pate. Short story here is: Nokia, forget about buzz marketing to give away phones -- there are people that just want to *buy* your high end phones.

Watch the Video

And I'm going to repeat what I said to Nokia before about encouraging carriers (especially in Canada):

My top hint on what Nokia should do? Forget the free phones: continue to sell great phones, but pressure Fido and Rogers to offer a "citizen journalism" data package so people in Canada can use all the cool features. The HipTop plan from Fido is $25/month for unlimited data...I think there would be a ton of people that would pay that to be able to upload pictures to Flickr on the fly and use all of the other great features that Nokia phones can enable (*cough* ShoZu *cough*).

So, I wasn't going to write about this at all, but now Travis has, so I'm going to tell how it went down with me.

Travis Smith: I Won't Be Nokia's Bitch:

This is cool: Nokia’s going to be sending me a fancy free (not fancy-free) cell phone soon, because I have the POWER oF BLOGGING at my fingertips.

That said, me and 44 other people (or should I say 44 other people and I? The use of “other” depends on a predicate, doesn’t it?) will be getting a Nokia 6682 multimedia smart phone, fully equipped with 512 MB of memory, a stereo headset and a wireless Bluetooth Headset as well.

A company that does "buzz marketing", Matchstick.ca, had three separate people contact me via email. All of those emails were sent en-masse -- I consider it to be spam. And I happen to know at least two other people (David Crow, Roland Tanglao) that got the same email.

There are a bunch of us (Scott, James, and Chris, too, once we told him the specs) that are lusting after the Nokia N91, but it is supposedly delayed until the first quarter of 2006.

Some background on the specs: this phone is a pretty high end unit, including a 4GB hard drive (store tons of music, photos, etc.), standard headset jack (use your killer headphones to listen to the music), 2MP camera (almost decent enough quality to leave your low-end digital camera at home) AND, the big one, built in Wi-Fi of the 802.11G flavour.

It's this last that is interesting. Nokia has already said that is working on Voice over WLAN: see Time Europe -- "2006 will be a big year for [mobile] wi-fi" and vnunet.com -- "replacing mobile and desktop phones with series 60 Nokia smartphones could make IT management easier". So, my guess is that they are specifically holding back the release of the N91 so it can be one of the flagship phones to include this functionality.

I can't remember what exactly prompted it: I wanted an application for my cellphone that *wasn't* a productivity app, that *wasn't* the half-finished handiwork of a lone developer, and that did just work. So I ended up buying a game.

My phone is a Nokia 6630, running on the Series 60 platform. The Fido site does sell applications, including games. It was basically useless for looking for stuff. My phone isn't sold by Fido, and they only offer browsing by type of phone. There is no way to say what platform your phone is.

Luckily, the Mobile Gamer site in the UK was great. Right at the top of the site, you can filter everything available by your model of phone, and mine was listed, so I got a full page of Nokia 6630 games. I browsed around for a bit, and settled on Might & Magic -- the same name of a game that I remember playing on the Apple IIe. Actually, the graphics on my phone look better than an Apple IIe.

Getting the game was ridiculously easy. I entered in my full phone number, including the +1 to show it's in North America. I paid via PayPal. Moments later, I got an SMS with the URL of a download. I clicked on it in my phone. It downloaded the installer. The installer launched, and downloaded the rest of the game.

That is what seamless delivery of mobile content is all about. I didn't try it, but I suspect I could have navigated the site directly, and completed the entire experience via my phone's browser. Hmmm...pay for something via PayPal, have it delivered immediately around an identity-based infrastructure that's encrypted. Skype + eBay ring any bells now?