What time is it?

Beware all N78 users, the device gives faulty clock information. Take a look at the pictures below to see what I mean (time between the pictures is no more than 5 seconds):

Notice the time? This is easy to reproduce, just open the menu screen (first image) and leave terminal like that. After some time check what time is it:  look at the time, press menu button and check time again. That's it, at least in my device (software version 12.046).

//Harri

How many different device models does your company have?

Look at the news coming from Australia, there seems to be some serious thinking if HSBC should change their 200.000 Blackberries over to iPhone. I don't have an opinion whether that would be smart move or not, but I must say that the idea of changing company's all devices (in this scale) is a bold and beautiful.

A weak CIO would handle this process in a different way, "trying to avoid mistakes". He would have a limited pilot group using new terminals for a while. Of course that requires that servers and services are tuned to support new terminals. Because that was difficult with old hardware, new server installations had to take place. Then support process and help desk must be taught to handle requests coming from pilot group and so on. Time passes by and pilot group thinks new devices are "nice" and they don't want to go back to old devices. Because pilot project didn't show "significant cost savings", decision is made to keep the old devices for a while and start a new pilot with new devices. Repeat this a couple of times and you will get a big mess. 

When a company doesn't have a clear strategy covering the mobile solutions, it can lead to a situation where nobody controls which mobile devices are used. Nobody expects that staff could choose their own office furniture, desktop computing environment or some other equipment that is there just to enable the core business. For some reason mobile devices are an exception and often companies can have almost every kind of terminals used in everyday business. This puts an extra burden to support people, necessitates middleware servers between various phones and back-end services and makes dedicated mobile applications look non-economical because they must be implemented to many different platforms.

All this reminds me of an very old project where I used to work. Project had a requirement that relational database engine can be changed at any time. This meant in practice that all the work of RDB must be implemented at the application layer, because otherwise implementation hasn't been database independent. So, lots of work was put to implementing database functionality and the database itself was only a replacement for a flat file. As you might guess, database was never changed - in fact it wasn't ever even discussed. If somebody had been bold enough to stand up and say that project is doing stupid things, all the effort wasted on duplicating database functionality could have been allocated to making the solution better to end users.

This experience often comes to my mind when I see companies struggling with different devices, mobile middleware, frustrated users and so on. Free advice to CIOs: pick a (reasonably good) mobile device that matches with your requirements and give that to everybody. Then you can simplify the environment and new mobile solution projects become possible, because there is not a myriad of devices to support.

//Harri

Family calendar tip for Mac users

This is a tip I must share with you!

Everyday problem for any family is how to organize hobbies, daycare, who is where with whom, who picks kids from nursery and so on. In business environment this is easy, because everybody is using a groupware calendar (at least in perfect world). However, I haven't been excited about buying an Exchange server for my family, for example.

So far we have been using a shared Google calendar, but I just saw an announcement that makes this easier than before. At least if you are a Mac user with a Nokia phone. Story goes like this:

1. Make a Google calendar for your family and share it as needed
2. Get the calendar to your Mac's iCal by following this guide
3. Sync your calendar from Mac to your Nokia phone as instructed here

It works. Now you have a family calendar that can be used with browser or directly from your Mac desktop and you can also carry it with you in your terminal. Next time you book a meeting to evening, you can see immediately if you should be nursing kids at the same time. Nice.

P.S.

I wonder when S60 terminals add support for CalDav. After all, S60 3rd edition  fp2 has added support for WebDav and CalDav is an extension to that. Finally we could get an alternative for SyncML.

//Harri

Sweeter dreams with smartphone?

Today's newspaper had a small piece of news at the science pages telling that neurophysiologist and engineers have together created a new innovation for mobile terminals. The idea is that smartphone will wake you up when your sleep is the lightest and only a small signal is needed to wake you up. Software records the sounds you make when you are sleeping and does statistical analysis to determine when is the best time to wake up.

I haven't tested the application and I don't know more about it, but I like this innovation that combines medical research with smartphone development and claims to solve an everyday problem.

Application's homepage can be found here.

//Harri

Back to work (with Nokia N78)

Oh no, a four week vacation (never had a vacation this long before) is over and office is calling. Normally I walk 15 minutes to office but today it took half an hour to get there. By a bicycle.

During vacation I got myself a new Nokia N78 smartphone. It is a nice device but some things bother me. For example:

Terminal was supposed to come with a free 3 month navigation license. Couldn’t get that working, so I contacted Nokia’s support. No answer yet, but other users seem to have the same problem.

Terminal has a “naviwheel” that imitates iPod’s control wheel. This wheel is less accurate and doesn’t work with all applications.

The keypad isn’t always working precisely. Especially end key (the red one) and clear key (c) are difficult to use and false key presses happen a lot (maybe this is just my terminal?)

Camera application can geotag images (i.e. add coordinates from GPS to picture’s metadata). Photo viewing application from terminal can use this information but when picture is uploaded to Nokia’s Ovi service, location information is lost or not used.

Podcast application still doesn’t remember the position nor does it offer ability to fast forward the episode. Once you have listened a one hour long episode half way and accidentally stopped it, you know what I mean.

FM receiver does strange things. Once it started to have once a minute a five second break. Another time channel didn’t change at all - UI was refreshing, frequency information changed and so on but channel was same all the time. A device reboot fixed these.

With default settings active idle screen has an item that takes you to “Share online” application. That item also has two small icons with a number that probably mean something. However, I couldn’t find from manual any explanation what those are. Maybe somebody knows?

Finally something not actually related to Nokia: because terminal so willingly wants to upload data to Flickr, I also created an account there. To my surprise an account created with default settings published pictures to everybody. When I uploaded family pictures there, those were suddenly shared with the whole world.

What was good with the terminal? New access point handling makes WiFi usage a lot easier than before.

What was exceptional with the terminal? The ability to mount WebDAV disks over the air. With this feature my terminal suddenly had 50+ GB storage space; my previous laptop didn’t have that much.

//Harri