Guest writer Tony Butler - you'll remember his 'Overcoming Gadget Lust (or How I learned to stop worrying and love my phone)' from last year? - brings us another slightly light hearted look at life in the mobile world and in the All About Symbian readership in particular, taking in piano music and caravans along the way....
This is going to sound strange, radical, blasphemous and counter-intuitive, but I've a sneaking suspicion that the recent reported (whether it is actually true yet or not) overtaking of Symbian OS by Android on the world stage does, in one fell swoop, more for Symbian's credibility than all the technical slides, sales numbers and glowing reviews from the last few years put together.
TigerSpike is a Sydney, Australia, based business — with offices in London and New York — that has been offering solutions in the personal media space for eight years. The company has recently started working with Qt and I (Richard Bloor) caught up with Chris Watt, product director at TigerSpike to find out about the company’s initial impressions.
After my extended musings on what makes a smartphone and on the varying definitions around the world (see below for a summary), something else hit me yesterday as I pondered more pronouncements from around the world. Apologies if this seems like me rehashing an old argument, but it seems that there's more to the very word 'smartphone' than meets the eye too! Read on....
Twenty four hours later and the discussion around Nokia’s Q4 2010 results is still going on. Taking some time to go over what was announced, filed and talked about, there are a number of points that I think need to be considered in between all the hype, fluff and distractions.
You'll remember my somewhat scathing appraisal of the current state of in-app advertising in Symbian applications last week? I focussed on both the aesthetics and overall user experience and found the implementation somewhat lack-lustre, to say the least. inneractive is the company behind the examples given and I was pleased to get a direct response from Hillel, inneractive's marketing manager, asking for right of reply, to explain the company's approach and plan. The full interview between myself and Hillel is below, for your interest.
I realise that some may mistake this short piece as an attempt at humour. And I'm already bracing myself for the flurry of N97-hating comments. And this in no way lets Nokia off the hook for underspecifying the N97's memory or putting in a completely hopeless GPS antenna. But I wanted to give credit where credit is due. Some aspects of the N97's design were absolutely right, some even outright genius. Here are seven things that Nokia got RIGHT with the N97...
As writers who often seem to be taking Nokia's side, against the prevailing mood in the world tech press, I'd like to justify why our faith isn't misplaced. Specifically, in the context of updates and stability. It's at this point that I have to acknowledge the few who have bought specific network-branded, locked Nokia smartphones in some countries and been left high and dry, but on the whole Nokia's firmware and application update programme has been relatively impressive. Read on for my thoughts and a cautionary tale or three.
While not yet directly relevant to Symbian developers, it looks like Amazon are going to address the issue of mobile app pricing with the launch of their Android App Store (reports Technologizer). Along with the fragmentation of the “Android app story” and leveraging their recommendation engine, Amazon are going to introduce variable pricing of applications. And while that’s the biggest gamble, I’d love to see this on more platforms including Symbian and Meego.
The pendulum swings regularly in the software world, with different ways of making money from software being in 'vogue'. The latest fashion, somewhat predictably, with most applications and games needing a price of 'free' in order to get serious numbers of downloads, is to put adverts inside the app or game and rely on income from these to bring in a similar amount of money to that which you'd have expected if you'd tried to sell the item by more conventional means. The concept is indeed sound - but I'm finding the implementation often lacking. What's needed is more imagination.
