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

Summer holiday and Symbian Foundation

Finally sweet summer and holiday are here! Long days and nightless nights take thoughts away from mobile issues, don’t expect many postings during July!

Before holiday, a couple of minor notes about the recent Symbian Foundation news.

Symbian developers available. When Nokia has merged, reorganized and streamlined development process of UIQ, S60 and Symbian there will be bad news for developers. UIQ already started this by announcing to close down two of their three offices and this - I’m afraid - is just the beginning. However, Symbian related development work will not disappear, it will just move to different companies. The resources needed for platform development will be reallocated for application level development.

The return of the user interface. Many years ago Symbian’s former CEO Colly Myers admitted in an interview that Symbian shouldn’t have spent time on UI development because UI has such a strategic meaning to phone manufacturers. Phones had to be differentiated somehow and UI had to pay the price - companies have spent much time and money to create different UI’s on top of Symbian and the results have been...well, you know. Now UI will become part of Symbian and hopefully we will see it improving when best parts of different UI’s will be put together. For typical phone user UI is one of the most important things; having efficient memory management doesn’t help if you cannot easily use your phone to do everyday tasks.

The return of UI will raise Symbian from OS level to platform level.

Symbian will become open and free, is that important? Yes and no.

It is important because it will put all developers to same line. So far there have been 1st class developers who have had access to Symbian internals and then the rest of us who have been told that some things are just not for us. Innovation needs fuel and this is it.

The phone’s success is determined every day at the retail shops. There phones are nothing else but consumer electronics, evaluated by many properties and operating system is not one of those. Phones are like cameras - or do you know which OS your digital camera has and what were the licensing terms? Would it matter?

Have a nice summer!

//Harri

Solutions for system integrators

Earlier this year I wrote a checklist to use before a potential mobile project, a tool to verify if the proposed mobile project would make sense. Then later I wrote second question set that you could use after you have decided to create an installable mobile application. This is the third checklist, aimed for projects that want to ensure that their solution is easy to sell, easy to buy and easy to productize as a service. My aim is to remind you that although the mobility issues are important, your solution might also need features that operators and/or system integrators appreciate. Some might say that these topics are self-evident, but I’ve seen that sometimes all development focus is put to mobility and these basic requirements are forgotten.

I like your solution and I want to sell it to my customers. What should I do?

After you have done some serious marketing and customer has accepted your proposal, next thing is to give detailed instructions how to setup the solution’s environment. What kind of server setup is needed? How many users can typical server configuration handle? What happens when the user limit is reached?

Mobile (enterprise) applications are almost always connected to back-end servers and processes. For that reason designing the server side architecture together with smartphone architecture is an important task to ensure successful project completion. Of course there is no single right answer for server architecture, but at least following subtopics should be kept in mind.

Think about the situation that your application becomes really successful and your current server setup is overloaded and customers are getting frustrated as operations are getting slower every day. What would you do? Buy more hardware, I guess, but then what? If you haven't thought about this before, you might experience problems if your application isn't really scalable. Just replacing the old server with new one isn't enough if you cannot balance the load between multiple servers. Remember also that being able to distribute processing between multiple servers increases fault tolerance.

Also remember that scalability must be implemented so that you can explain and verify to the customer that it really can be done. This is an important selling point, because of course you and your customer both believe that this application will become a huge success, right?

Surely you don't code everything from scratch by yourself, but build system architecture using some "building blocks" from various sources. When selecting those components, pay attention not only to technical aspects but also to popularity and familiarity of those components. Developing software is expensive, but maintaining and supporting it 24/7 is even more expensive. If you select verified and common application components, you probably make life much easier for your hosting and training partners. After all, a major part of solutions costs occur after the deployment because support and maintenance are expensive tasks. Check my posting about the cost of mobility for reference.

Is this a service?

If you don’t sell your solution as SaaS (Software as a Service), I’m quite sure that one of your partners will do so. They will then be very interested if they can host multiple customer organizations from a single server installation securely and easily.

Multitenancy may be somewhat unfamiliar term for a very understandable requirement: you should be able to run multiple independent instances of your application using single hardware. Independent instances mean that they have private data areas and instances can be managed separately. This is an important requirement for companies creating applications to be hosted by other companies: if new hardware must be installed for every new customer organization, installation and system maintenance costs become too expensive and your systems is not as competitive as it could be.

Also you should remember to think early about user accounts and billing. Being “easily billable” means that the solution must save auditing data that can be used for billing users. What that data really is depends on your business model, but in optimal solution you would have multiple options for this. Some of your partners can prefer monthly subscriptions whereas some other partner can find charging based on data amount better, for example. Here you can also think that if your terminal application always requires server access, it is much easier to distribute the terminal application freely without license codes, because the application is useless without a valid server license. Implementing licensing and billing is much easier on the server side, compared to solution where you try to do that on the terminal. Also it wouldn’t be a problem if users want to change their terminals as license is bound to user account, not to a piece of hardware.

Is your solution secure?

If you forget security issues, you can say goodbye to customers - very simple rule. Minimum requirement is that you should be able to explain how security is handled in your solution and why customer should feel safe. During solution development you must balance between application’s usability and security; make your decision and be prepared to explain that to customers. Security is also about understanding the potential risks and an important task is to be able to explain the solution’s security model so that the potential customer can do risk analysis - small known risk is much better than not being able to do risk analysis at all.

Especially enterprise solutions must allow hierarchical user model. This means that user management can be delegated to different sub-organizations so that organization’s all user management is not done by one superuser. Add proper auditing to this and you will get solution that can also create a report about who has done what and when. In some cases you will be asked if your solution complies with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, meaning (simplified!) in practice that solution must include auditing and data integrity must be maintained - also with mobile devices.

One interesting aspect of security with mobile devices is co-operation with 3rd party security applications like anti-virus and encryption software. For example, when data encryption application is installed into the terminal, the files might not be readable when you try to access those. Especially with older devices security applications created problems by slowing down the terminal and consuming a large percentage of free RAM.

Finally: encrypt all communications. Always.

//Harri

S60 optimized Picasa

Remember by old rant about iPhone getting all the attention and nice optimized application versions whereas the rest of the mobile community must beg for support? Now it appears that at least Google's Picasa has become S60 optimized. This can be a good start, I wish. 

//Harri

Email as SMS replacement?

Those who use GMail with browser might have noticed that there is a new Lab-page available where Google has put some new features for users to test. Nothing spectacular, I must say.

These new features put me into thinking about GMail's strengths, especially in mobile use. One nice feature is the Push Mail feature that works just great. In fact it works so well that sometimes I have wondered could it be used as a cheap replacement for SMS messages. As everybody knows, SMS's are great way to send user quick information, but the drawback is that every message costs real money to the sender. If you send lots of messages, that will have economic importance although cost for one single message is negligible.

Some time ago I was looking for a solution that could alert me by SMS when some important RSS feeds are updated. I can understand that the lack of these kinds of solutions is just because nobody wants to pay the price of sending SMS messages to users. My idea was essentially not about receiving SMS's, it was about receiving alerts to mobile terminal and that requirement could quite nicely be implemented with mobile GMail. What this would mean is that Google team should add feature to Reader that would allow user to request an email alert when an important feed is updated. If user wants, he could redirect an update message to his GMail inbox and if that account/folder is subscribed to mobile phone, we would have a free RSS alert without any SMS's.

BTW: did you know that you can append tags to your GMail address, just write + after your email address, like firstname.lastname+rss@gmail.com. After you have tagged your address like that, it is easy to create filters and it is also a nice way to track who has leaked your email address to spammers.

//Harri