Collection of reads on the Microkia alliance: summing up, material for opinions

This piece will serve as a sum-up of the events around the Nokia-Microsoft alliance, but more than that these articles are the basis for my opinion that is still slowly forming about all this. I also hope to address a few misunderstandings that might get popular on the web about things relating to this alliance.

UPDATE 9th of March 2011: Added link to Symbian's new UI. Forgot to include this!

Nobody can claim to have not been surprised come February 11th 2011 and Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop's announcement that Nokia would form a "strategic alliance" with Microsoft. Conversation has been heated on the internet, with people arguing the pros and cons of this marriage.

I really love sitting down and getting to the bottom of things I care about, so here's some of the articles I've read about the Microkia alliance. Initially I planned to draw some kind of conclusion of all this, but this proved impossible. New articles pop up daily, so I can only show you which articles gave me the most information I felt I could use. I hope you enjoy this collection.


The basics of the matter

To start you off, here's a videoclip of the bossman himself, mr. Stephen Elop in Engadget's well-rounded interview:





AllAboutSymbian.com were naturally there on Feb 11th, and they summed up what was said in the press event:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/12584_Nokias_new_strategy_and_struct.php


Articles focusing on the business side of things, impact on industry:

Being a Finn, I'm quite concerned for everyone in the threat of losing their jobs. A few finnish blogs have been written in finnish talking about it, the one below is a good read in English:
http://www.ecyrd.com/ButtUgly/wiki/Main_blogentry_130211_1

Tomi Ahonen (@tomiahonen), the king of mobile analysts and his first reaction:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/first-analysis-of-nokia-microsoft-alliance-wow-this-is-good-for-microsoft.html

Tomi went on to twist and turn the possible outcomes of this alliance, but failed to find out how there could be a bright future ahead for Nokia:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/when-things-get-even-worse-than-you-thought-1st-preview-of-potential-for-nokia-microsoft-partnership.html

In short, Tomi feels that the once great Nokia will be reduced to a hardware vendor, as they no longer have the luxury of having their own software to run on their devices. Tomi fears that Nokia will become a Dell, just another company putting Windows in a box and shipping it to the world. Tomi feels the greatest shame of all will be that Nokia is sacrificing all the good that Nokia is, for something it thinks everyone wants it to be. Tomi sees no future in this.

A great moment in all this came as Tomi posted something to help his friends in the industry find another job, reassuring them and giving tips:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/to-nokia-colleagues-being-laid-off-or-fearing-for-job-survival-here-a-little-bit-of-advice.html

Also worth checking out are the comments to the above post:

"Come together, get investors and buy AAVA mobile. Bring new Qt-based MeeGo and Symbian AAVA phones to the world. MeeGo and Symbian are both open source. Elop can't remove that license even if he wanted to. Kill the mother company. It's not just the hardware, it's the software stupid!!! If anyone starts this, you have a guaranteed €50.000 investment from me. There are many people like me who would help you guys start the next Nokia.
All the best for the future."

I guess people with some forte read Tomi's blog (even though they're not too clear on the status of Symbian ;) ). Later on, Aava announced that they are not interested in becoming the next Nokia. So sadly, this is only fantasy.

The internet went rampant with claims that Steve Ballmer had put a trojan horse into Nokia. Intuitively, it did make sense as Elop had just come from Microsoft, and sha-zam, come the first big announcement it would be about creating a strategy together with Microsoft. Fishy!

The Wall Street Journal has caught on to the real story, though:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604576150502994792270.html

Articles thinking about Nokia's plans going forward:

For very many people, the Microkia alliance is the exact fix for Nokia's wavering situation.WP7 looks good, is something completely new and between the lines people want to be relieved that another company besides Nokia will actually be in charge of Nokia software.

The article below supports the alliance:

http://www.osnews.com/story/24400/Why_Nokia_Chose_Windows_Phone_7_and_Why_It_s_a_Good_Move

Here's a passionate post from CellOuts.net about why WP7 is the best thing for Nokia right now:
http://www.cellouts.net/2011/02/nokiamicrosoftthe-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend/

A fascinating incident was the coming forward of '9 young investors' looking to sell a "PlanB" to the Nokia board of executives:
http://www.planb.com

What followed after Plan B was PlanC, PlanD ... and eventually the entire alphabet of plans for Nokia:
http://mynokiablog.com/2011/02/16/nokia-alphabet-of-back-up-plans/


Articles mostly about the survival of MeeGo, Symbian and/or Qt:

For me, the bigges thing about the Microkia alliance was Nokia reducing MeeGo down to a developmental platform (again). Maemo-MeeGo was supposed to be "step 6 of 6" towards a commercial product, but this turn of events put MeeGo back to square 1. Other concerns of mine were the resources and effort put into Qt, now seemingly being thrown away. What's the truth behind the future of the software side of things?

Nokia CTO Rich Green got up on stage to talk about the future of all the mentioned software:
http://mynokiablog.com/2011/02/16/nokia-cto-rich-green-talks-meego-symbian-qt-windows-phone-and-a-new-disruptive-platform/

Here's a look at what we know about the new Symbian UI. If Symbian's dead, then when's the funeral?
http://mynokiablog.com/2011/02/23/the-new-symbian-ui-nokia-n8-new-homescreen-for-upcoming-firmware-update/

Another twist in the software plot was news that Microsoft had banned all open source software at their Windows Marketplace. Linux veterans were grabbing their waraxes from the closet again, as Microsoft and open source have a somewhat heated history. Here's Simon to give us a more devoted look at the entire story behind this incident:
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/02/microsoft-bans-its-own-licenses/index.htm

Qt and MeeGo have for long felt like proof-of-concept software, and now with the Microkia announcement, people feel that they will finally be laid to rest. At least in the mobile world. Here's an article from CellOuts.net talking about Qt and developers:
http://www.cellouts.net/2011/02/nokia-betrayed-their-developerswhat-developers/


With Finnish company Digia picking up Qt, the fate of Qt doesn't seem so dark after all:
http://www.digia.com/C2256FEF0043E9C1/0/405002251



Further reading, some videos and podcasts for easier information consumption

Its hard to reach any conclusions about all this, as new news articles pop up almost daily. Mobile World Congress was a great MeeGo event, with the unveiling of the MeeGo tablet UI:



So it seems MeeGo will be able to survive even with Nokia not being part of the effort. However, will "MeeGo handset" be critically affected by this remains to be seen.

It turns out, that Qt isn't dying either, as it has already found a new owner. Symbian definitely has a timeline though, as expressed by Rafe from the AllAboutSymbian podcast from Feb 12th 2011. Symbian still might interest a lot of people for a couple of years, with the UI upgrade coming out and all that.

What is still in the balance, then? Well to me its definitely Windows Phone 7, and how it will deliver. There's news of trouble on the software front for Windows Phone 7, as the "Mango" update (also referred to as "WinPhone 7.5") struggles to make it out before 2011. Bare in mind, Elop wants to publish a Windows Nokia phone during 2011 (see video interview in the beginning of this article). Has Nokia, the company deemed incompetent of producing software in time teamed up with another company suffering of the same flaw?


And finally

I hope the reads collected to this blogpost have been useful, and I want to leave you with one more that seems to have a more "universal" feel to it.

The next blogpost supports WP7, but it also discusses UI paradigms to such a level, that I think it might be current even a year or two years from now:
http://www.christianlindholm.com/christianlindholm/2011/02/the-beauty-of-the-nokia-microsoft-deal.html

Please leave me a comment if you have additional "good reads" on the subject!

- Chris

Second encounter with the N8 - Final batch of gripes (I swear!)

Recently I posted my thoughts that rose from my first encounter with the N8. The N8 in question was a prototype and it didn't have a SIM in it and was hardly connected to the internet, so really trying it out proved impossible.

This is "part two" of my encounter with the N8. This time there's a SIM on board, and I went ahead to put all my settings in to begin using it as if it was my own device.

Again, this post is going to focus on things I'd like to see changed in the N8, but I swear that after this I'm done with griping!

Ovi logins, and how it's driving me insane

Among the first things when starting up the phone was logging into the Ovi service to "get the full benefit" of Ovi services on my device. I logged in and then proceeded to do all the usual setting up one has to do. (Login to Ovi counter: 1)

My first priorities were to try out the Nokia Social Hub app and to then setup my e-mail. Steve Litchfield was quite harsh on the Social hub app, recommending everyone to give it a pass. In the Phones Show Episode 122 he shows us as the application stutters when you scroll. When I gave it a try it worked surprisingly well. Okay, I come from a Maemo-heavy background, so maybe I'm just used to stutter ( ;) ), but I found it quite usable. The desktop widget that came with this app was quite unintuitive, and it was hard to understand it's logic. My biggest problem was sorting out the different views you got to see by using the widget, and then not finding these views when using the app "normally" on its own fair and square. Wonder what on earth is going on here.

To add my Ovi chat or whatever to the Social program, I had to log-in. (Login to Ovi counter: 2)

Here's also a translation inconsistency in the bit where you add accounts:

Here I've added my Facebook account.

When I went to setup my Twitter account, the languge had changed to English.

The e-mail turned out to be a bit of a downer, as well. I set up my GMail and Ovi accounts. Guess did I have to log-in to my Ovi account again? Sure did! (Login to Ovi counter: 3)

Can't scroll by having my finger on the text, btw.

Above is me trying to scroll down the page by dragging the text. Won't work, you'll have to catch the miniscule scrollbar on the right to go down. Yawn. This was the only place in S^3 where I found myself doing this. Inconsistency! Argh.

Here's another oddity I ran into in the Mail app:

An e-mail from my GMail inbox.

When viewing mails from the GMail inbox, the text was nice and big and it mimiced the "threaded" view of e-mails you have in the PC browser version of GMail. This was really nice and enjoyable, and with pinch to zoom working quite nicely here. Then I opened an e-mail from my Ovi inbox:

Nice and... unreadable.

For some reason, when reading e-mails from my Ovi e-mail account, the text would settle itself very poorly on the screen. First, its too small to read unless you put the device right up in your face and second, if you pinch to zoom, then the text doesn't reallign itself with the changed view. So its either this miniscule print or then endless scrolling left-right-left-right to read one paragraph. C'mon, this renders the e-mail app on the N8 unusable for me. Why does it attempt to mimic the view you see in the webmail versions of these e-mail services anyway?

I then went on to have a look at the new Ovi Store (Login to Ovi counter: 4) although I first did it in the browser by accident, so I launched the Ovi Store app (Login to Ovi counter: 5) and found it to be nice and improved. I was intrigued by the topApps application (Login to Ovi counter: 6) although found it odd, that searching for other apps besides the ones listed in the assorted "most famous in category..." wasn't possible here. I then fired up Maps (Login to Ovi counter: 7) remembering something about pinch-to-zoom on the maps and it was pretty cool. I really enjoyed seeing the maps on the nice and bright screen, and maybe for the first time ever Maps didn't feel too heavy for the hardware it was running on.

Syncing my stuff

I was really hoping that on the N8 I could sync to my Ovi Calendar from the calendar app. For some reason, I had to do it through my address book, where it promted me to sync my contacts from the Ovi cloud service (Login to Ovi counter: 8). Upon starting this process, it asked me if I also wanted to sync the calendar and images or something, which I naturally did. Bit of a strange logic here.

When going through the syncing process, I was confronted with a message that I hastily tapped out of the view somehow, and suddenly this was staring at me:

Sorry... what?

This is in Finnish, so probably this wouldn't make any sense to many people anyway, but here's another example of something I griped about in my "part one" post. The finnish translation is really poor in S^3, and at times completely unreadable. Here words are cut so short that I've no idea what could be their meaning. "Automatic sync" yeah got that much, but what on earth is it asking me below? A weird check-box (that isn't one) and the option to Sync or get out. I was a bit lost here, went with "Sync". Syncing seemed to work fine.

Things I liked

Now, because I promised to stop griping about the N8 (or actually S^3 to be precise), I will end this post with a few notions of what I liked.

For some reason, I really enjoyed the SMS notification up front, on top of everything in the desktop view. I found that the little "bubble" was quite functional and well placed both in portrait and landscape mode:

Landscape SMS notification.

The turning of the screen was nice, although not the fastest I've seen. A huge difference to S60 5th was, however, that I think Nokia didn't want the device to be too sensitive to turning the screen, and therefore there's a "wait period" to see if the user's serious or if tilting was an accident. Somehow it just seemed to be implemented really well and the delay seemed intentional and well controlled. Thank you, Nokia! Gripe #1 from S60 5th Ed. fixed!

I really enjoy the threaded SMS conversation view:

Lookin' good! -b

Tapping on a message bubble reveals the SMS in its full:

Single SMS view.

The obvious thing I liked (no, loved): the friggin' awesome camera!

Conclusions

So there. I feel like I've made my peace with Symbian^3 and the N8. I've finally said a lot of what I wanted to say about why exactly S^3 is stilla way away from being great, the way it should be. No Symbian^3 device will find its way to be my main device, but I think a lot of people can enjoy it to the fullest. I also think that most people won't even notice half of the stuff I gripe about!

In bringin out these negative points I wasn't aiming to flame, but to show the aspects of the UI that still need work in my opinion. The purpose of this is two-fold: I want people to read about these little things that eat into your experience, and second, nowhere can you read detailed examples of what exactly is wrong with Symbian^3's UI, it just gets called old and lame. I think I'm somewhat fair here in taking the time and effort to point some of them out and hopefully I've made it clear as to why I think these "features" are faults. I think this should make it easier to fix them. Also, since I've called them out, so I've done my part.

Am I completely off here?