everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: Nokia

  • Viral Video – Two Approaches

    My aunt Karen is in the advertising industry and she forwards me snippets where our two industries cross paths. It’s always interesting to see something you know really well from another perspective. In this case, she sent over an article from Advertising Age, Why Microsoft Killed Kin After Just Six Weeks

    While the article’s conclusion is probably correct, the pricing was too high for the limited features (no GPS?), I think they went too easy on the viral video marketing campaign which rang false from me right from the beginning. Granted, I am way out of the target segment but if I can see through a staged scene, I am sure the teenagers who ran across the YouTube clips did too.

    the campaign followed 24-year-old Brooklynite Rosa Salazar as she used her Kin to connect with her friends via text messages, Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Twitter, with her friends’ updates rising to the top of her feed. The campaign used insights from more than 50,000 20-something consumers to appeal to the hipster, metropolitan crowd.

    Why Microsoft Killed Kin After Just Six Weeks
    Brooklyn

    When you view this video on YouTube, you’ll quickly find out, from the related videos column on the right of the page that Matty, the subject in this video, is actually a professional stand-up comedian. From that point on, the bubble is burst. You notice that the shaky camera is a professionally shaken camera. You realize the ambush scene where Rosa meets Matty has two cameras that had to have been set up in advance. You realize that what’s supposed to be intimate and a cool little insight shared with just me is actually a slick ad produced by Redmond. You feel dumb for even thinking this was genuine.

    The alternate approach is to just get weird. This video by Nokia (where I work) is super slick and it’s hard to tell if it’s even about a phone. I am not a marketer and I have no idea how effective they were in driving sales but they sure are fun to watch!

    N900 – The Journey Starts Here

  • Use your bike to charge your phone

    Sometimes it’s the simple things. Why not a dual purpose phone charger, phone mount for your bicycle? Stay above 7.5 mph and you’ll charge your phone at the same rate as if you plugged it into the wall and you’ll be able to enjoy free turn-by-turn navigation.

    Launching first in Kenya where it’s really needed but also coming to the first world sometime hopefully soon.

  • N900 PR 1.2 update

    I’ve been playing around with the most recent upgrade to the Nokia N900 and it really is like Christmas. There are so many little tweaks to the core OS that it really is like having a new phone again. Geek Christmas.

    After reading about Jason’s experience, Skype video calling  was the first thing I tried. Skype chat has been running on the phone since I got it but it’s nice to know that I can run video chat as well when the fancy strikes me. I called around to a  few people in Finland and the video and voice quality was surprisingly good over 3G. Google Video chat is supported as well but the quality on Skype was much better.

    Droid theme
    Droid theme

    Instead of reading all the coverage, I thought I’d just poke around for a few days and see what I found. Here are the highlights:

    • The browser now officially supports portrait mode. No need to hack it and you’ve got basic navigation on the bottom to so you don’t have to keep flipping back and forth between landscape and portrait.
    • In Settings > Text Input there is an option to add a virtual keyboard. I later read that it was there before.
    • No need to use the Sym key to enter numbers! A longpress will use the alternate number or symbol.

    You’ll definitely want to add the extra repositories to the Application Manager (here’s how) to sample all the cool projects folks are working on. Do this at your own risk of course but anyone with an N900 knows that right? Some new apps to recommend:

    • grr – quick and easy Google Reader app.
    • gTranslate – app that uses the Google Translate service
    • gPodder – podcatcher client
    • WordPress – blogging client

    One note, BarrioSquare, the FourSquare client for the N900, fails on this release. You can get it working again, just fire up vi and edit a single line in barrioConfig.py and modify a single line. Fixed in the latest update of BarrioSquare!

    One of the coolest apps I found was eSpeak, an opensource text to speech reader. It has controls for amplitude, pitch, speed, and other controls that you can tweak to get it sounding ok but what I thought was really cool is that not only does it come with a bunch of languages including Esperanto (!), it also can read your text is one of seven English accents.

    eSpeak

    Here’s a clip of the West Indian accent reading a popular email newsletter. See if you can guess which one. (sorry, overplayed.mp3 clip lost to the sands of time)

    The N900 is a tinker’s delight. There is so much you can do with this little box. You can root it, run xterm, install the latest Chrome browser. Check out the Instant Community prototype built by some students in Tampere along with Nokia Research, peer-to-peer disposable social networks.

    Oh, and I should say the basic phone software improved, the sound quality seems better to me and I also get the feeling that performance has been optimized to improve battery life.

  • Loosely Connected

    Mike Manos has joined Nokia as VP of Service Operations and has been tasked to build the cloud infrastructure for our Ovi services. The New York Times calls him a “data-center celebrity” and reading his blog certainly shows the knowledge and experience he brings to the table. His initial post gives a hint of his methodology which I really like.

    I recently spent a good part of a weekend putting together deck furniture for my home.   It was good quality stuff, it had the required parts and hardware and not unlike other do-it-yourself furniture it had directions that left a lot to be desired. In many ways its like IT Infrastructure or running any IT shop.   You have all the tools, you have all the raw components, but how you put it all together is where the real magic happens, and the directions are usually just as vague on how to do it.

    One of the common themes across all steps of the deck furniture pieces was a common refrain, ‘Do Not Tighten Bolts”.   The purpose was to get all of the components together, even if a bit loose, to ensure you had the right shape, all components were in the right place, and then and only then do you tighten the bolts.

    If you really want to know the secret to putting together solutions at scale, remember the “Do Not Tighten Bolts” methodology.   Assemble to raw components, ensure you have the right shape and that all components are in the right place, and then “Tighten it down.”   This can be and is an iterative process.   Keep working to get that right shape.  Keep working to find the right component configuration.  Tighten bolts.    As I built my first deck chair, there was significant amounts of trial and error.  The second deck chair however was seamless, even with the same cruddy directions.   Once you learn to ‘Not Tighten’ technique the assembly process is quick and provides you with great learnings.

    – from Do Not Tighten Bolts

    Welcome Mike! I look forward to working with you.

  • Solving Rubik with a Phone

    With a Nokia N95 and a Lego Mindstorm NXT kit you too can have robots solve your Rubik’s cube. The folks at ARMflix have programmed an old N95 to take a photo and analyze the pattern on a Rubik’s cube and have it sent over to the Mindstorm rig to run through the moves required to solve the puzzle.

    Pretty cool guys! Check out the video below.

    – via Ubergizmo

  • Portable Computing, Peanut Butter or Chocolate?

    The Nokia Booklet (stands out better in the search results than “netbook”) is not the first time Nokia has entered the PC market but it’s announcement took many people by surprise.

    As the lines between what is a laptop and what is a smartphone blur, it’s fascinating to see how a PC companies like Apple and Dell and a phone company like Nokia define this new form.

    Like the old Reeses commercial from the 70’s, do you like your 3G, GPS, and 12 hour battery in  your laptop or do you like a full-featured browser with flash support and xterminal on your phone?

    Either way, it’s delicious!

  • Find my Phone, Nokia Style

    I just got an email from the folks behind the Mobile Web Server which runs on Nokia S60 phones. They figured out how to run a web server on your phone so you can configure your mobile device to basically be a node on the internet, addressable via an IP address, hosting web pages, streaming GPS and sending camera information. I haven’t played with it in a while but one cool feature they had was a widget that you could put on your Facebook page which featured a button which allowed anyone viewing your Facebook page access to your camera on your phone.

    Today, perhaps in response to the broad coverage about the Find my iPhone story I blogged about, they reminded me about the Remote Start feature where you can start the web server via an SMS message which you can send to your phone.

    We would like to remind you about the remote start feature. In the unfortunate situation that your phone got lost somehow, it would be possible for you to start the server if you are not having it always on. . . When the server is online you can see who has been calling, read the messages or if you are uncertain where it is, use the positioning or web camera to locate it.

    For more details, see the Mobile Web Server user guide (pdf) or wiki site.

  • Yes, but can your phone do this?

    Promoting new features of the Nokia E71 with Taiwanese magician Liu Qian performing a little street art. I can’t wait for the SMS-a-pigeon feature when it comes out.

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  • Nokia Phones, Survival of the Fittest

    Nokia prides itself on making a durable phone that can withstand daily wear and tear. The short video below gives you a look inside the test center where they drop, bend, and tumble the phones to see if they can stand up to whatever our customers can throw at it.

    But some tests can’t be simulated.  Someone recovered their phone from inside a cow and today The Sun reports that a fisherman recovered a phone that spent a week in the belly of a 25lb cod.

    For some more wincing field tests, be sure to check out what these crazy Russians have put their Nokia 5800 through.

    UPDATE: There’s more! Someone in Wisconsin found a Nokia in their bag of potato chips. No word on whether it was still working though.