Ex Vox Pop

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Bout bloody time…

First there was the implementation of a standard headphone jack and now...

http://www.everythingusb.com/nokia_8600_luna_13128.html

It’s as though Nokia has been reading my blogs.

Took my 6600 away with me on holiday last week and found it interesting to be back on the old unit for a while.
I’m even more convinced that Nokia has gone backwards with the design of the Dpad on the N95.
The joystick on the 6600 is a lot more positive in its action. Reminds me of the old days when micro switches appeared in C64 joysticks.
I’ve been trying to work out why Nokia would have used such a mushy input point in the N95, and beside trying to cut corners with the cost of manufacture, the only other excuse I can think of is the slimness of the sliding screen section. Maybe there just isn’t the room to mount a 6600 style joystick?

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Photo blog

I'm off for a week, so here are some photos dedicated to the people who have made some very nice comments ;-)

IMG_0510 copy

IMG_0471 copy

Untitled_Panorama1

Monday, July 23, 2007

Killer apps queue here please…

Last week my mate, who has a N93 made the comment that Nokia doesn’t really have a decent ‘killer app’ for their smart phones (One might think of the iPhones interface as a potential ‘killer app.’)

Nokia doesn’t seem to be able to get everything together in a nice, sexy, utterly compelling package.
Ngage was a good attempt, but it didn’t really come close to providing a ‘must have’ gaming experience.
The GPS is great but it’s not very well integrated with the camera or the other software on the phone. Specking of which, I’ve just upgrade to AGPS and the improvement is really noticeable. Nokia must have been planning all along to supplement the crummy TI GPS chip with the data connection of the phone. I’m wondering what manufactures like Tom Tom are going to do to compete with this?
I noticed that Tom Tom has a patent for overlaying location and path data onto a video feed. Shame Nokia didn’t use the camera and the GPS in the N95 to do the same thing.

Unfortunately Nokia seem to have the same problem that Microsoft admitted to recently.
All sorts of great disparate tech, but not much creative ‘glue’ to bind it all together.

I signed up to get onto the Nokia Mosh social networking site, and I guess I get to see what they’ve been up to when it goes Beta. But what Nokia needs is that ‘must have’ thang.
For a long time, the phone bit was the ‘killer app’ and SMS came out of left field, as did ring tones. The radio is great, but visual radio is almost pointless it so underutilised.

What next?