Alec Saunders SquawkBox

From the day that I first saw a picture of the E71 on a Nokia press web site, all shiny and slim with those seductively gleaming keys, I knew that this phone was what I had been waiting for.

Side by side with a sleek 10 mm thick E71, my BlackBerry Curve looks positively frumpy – thick, with a cheesy little 2 megapixel camera, and ugly 2D colors.  Slimmer than my iPhone, the E71 with its all metal body and thumb-board feels far more substantial and very business like. I know if I dropped the E71, it would come through with flying colours, but the all plastic iPhone would be a shattered mess.   And with 3G and WiFi, plus the biggest battery I’ve ever seen in a cell phone, the E71 delivers hours of high speed web surfing, email and more.

The Nokia E71 is a sex kitten, no doubt about it.  I’m dumping her though.  We’re through.  She just doesn’t work the way that I do.  She doesn’t understand what I want in a phone.  It’s over.

It wouldn’t be that way, however, if Nokia had spent as much effort on the usability of the E71 as they had on the industrial design.  At the end of the day, a series of seemingly minor annoyances all add up to a device that conspires to make me less productive, not more.

1. The keys are just too small.  Composing messages happens at about 1/3 the speed of iPhone or BlackBerry because my ordinary-size hands are too large to manipulate the diminutive keyboard on this device.
2. The dial-pad is located dead center of the keyboard, and the 0 has been moved out of position to the right of dial-pad.  Forget about quickly dialing a phone number.  It’s impossible because you have to search for each number to dial.  Nokia should have left the dial-keys on the left or right side as RIM did with BlackBerry.  Oh… and the keys are too small.
3. The shift key is sandwiched between the alt key on the left, and the @ key on the right, at the bottom left of the keyboard.  It’s nearly impossible to press.  Say goodbye to capitalization in your emails.
4. The email clients (both the standard one, and the new Nokia email) suck. Yeah, I’m spoiled.  The BlackBerry client is full of easy fast shortcuts for one handed operation.  The iPhone client uses easy finger gestures.  By contrast, the Nokia client uses pop-up menus.  It feels like a return to a text based windowing system running on MS-DOS.
5. Calendar synch seems to be an afterthought.  My email stays synched with my exchange server, but the calendar apparently doesn’t.  I’m not really sure which calendar is on the E71, but it’s not the same as the calendar on my desktop, iPhone or BlackBerry.
6. Despite the higher pixel density of the E71’s camera, it doesn’t take very good pictures.  I’ve come to expect better from Nokia, having been spoiled by the N-Series.  In fairness, the E71’s camera sucks less than the 2 megapixel afterthoughts that Apple and RIM jammed into their devices.  That’s no excuse, though, given what Nokia has previously produced.
7. Browsing sucks too.  Compared to the BlackBerry Curve’s browser, the E71 is a star.  But I’ve now been spoiled by iPhone, and it’s just no fun to visit web pages and view them by panning and scanning.

I put my BlackBerry away three weeks ago to trial the E71. I’ve used it every day and I wanted to love this phone.  The E71 is technically very capable with support for flash, streaming media and more. It should be a fabulous software platform as a result.  And the E71 is definitely beautiful to look at and hold.

In my opinion, this little glamour-puss would be the perfect phone for a light email user with small hands.  For me, however, I’ll take a pass on the E71. It’s just not ready for a heavy business user yet — definitely not as ready as RIM devices are, and not even as ready as the Apple iPhone.

This evening Skype has Tomorrow Skype will release the second beta of Skype 4.0.  Skype 4.0 is an ambitious attempt by the company to redesign the Skype UI to better expose the features of Skype to end users, and to reduce confusion around how to use those features.

After studying feedback from over 350,000 users, including 50,000 new skype users, they’ve returned some features that were missing from Skype 4.0 beta 1, giving it a more familiar look and feel.  Here’s Skype’s Product Manager for their Windows products, Mike Bartlett, to explain more.

I’ve been using the beta privately for the last couple of days.  The changes, while subtle, absolutely do improve the Skype experience.  My favorite is the compact view, which is a return to something more akin to the familiar old Skype user interface. See below:

The bottom line? According to a conversation I had with Mike earlier this week, they’re seeing more users using more types of communications, including a dramatic spike in video usage.  Perhaps more important from a corporate perspective, they’re also seeing a spike in users choosing paid-for premium services.

Join me tomorrow morning on the SquawkBox where Mike will be our guest.  And if you want to take the beta for a spin beforehand, download it here when available.

We continued our discussion of economics today, the day after the single largest drop on North American in history.  The markets are up today, after president bush called on US lawmakers to pass the bailout package, but there is still a lot of speculation about what this will mean for companies and investors.

We started with Eric Schonfeld’s piece on how this will impact Venture funds.  Schonfeld points out that limited partners in a venture fund commit capital and then deliver the money to the venture fund as the VC commits to make investments. He postulates that as investors suffer losses elsewhere they won’t be able to make their commitments to the venture fund. As a result, Silicon Valley investor confidence is at it’s lowest level in 7 years.

We then moved on to Rafe Needleman’s advice to startups for surviving the downturn.  He says, in essence, don’t count on advertising, rotate your business into enterprise, don’t go direct, raise money from angels not VC’s, conserve resources and (paradoxically, spend to plan).  We had a few survivors of the last downturn on the call who added some color and additional viewpoint to Rafe’s advice.

Switching topics, we then discussed the emergence of a series of anti-cloud computing rants.  There was Larry Ellison complaining that he didn’t understand what Cloud Computing was, beyond a marketing term for technology that already existed, and Richard Stallman’s rant against Cloud Computing that appeared yesterday.  We debated the definition of cloud computing, the privacy implications, and more.

On today’s conference call: Dan York, Jim Courtney, Hudson Barton, Brad Dixon, Bill Volk, Sheryl Breuker, Marcus Elford and Sergio Meinardi.

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 Squawk Box September 30 - Credit Crunch and Cloud Computing [35:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

There are several interesting startups solving the problem of cell phone loss.  Both YouGetItBack, launched last June, and Maverick Mobile, launched at DEMO, back up your data, and let you lock down your mobile in the event of loss pointing out that with smart phones the most costly loss to the user is likely not the phone, but the data present in the device itself.

Yesterday YouGetItBack announced additional measures to help you recover the actual device.  Their “Mobile SuperHero” software has always allowed the user to lock down a lost device.  Now it has been enhanced to include the ability to send the phone’s physical location back to YouGetItBack.  Moreover, because the tracker is network based, the software can continue to send tracking information even in the event of a SIM change.

Press release here.

“You don’t have a WiFi router on you, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do”

And that was how DemoCamp 10 started for me last night — tucked into a corner of Ottawa’s Velvet Room cabling together a Linksys Wireless-G Travel Router and Rogers Portable Internet so that the assembled demo fans could actually see what the products and services that the demonstrators had brought.  Five minutes later we were up and running and the show could go on.  I recommend anyone who travels buy one of these trusty unite.

Ottawa DemoCamps have always been fairly geeky affairs.  We’ve had people describing new graphics algorithms, showing off single board computers and many more very early stage companies.  Last night, however, the Ottawa tech community really stepped it up, showing more companies and products with more polish than many I had seen previously.

Three of the companies that really stood out for me were:

Ramius with Sixent.  Sixent’s multi-profile social networking site addresses the biggest complaint that I, and many others, have with Facebook — the ability to easily manage your online profile.  It’s true that Facebook gives you tools to manage your online persona, but Sixent’s approach makes managing your persona (and privacy) in an online world accessible to mere mortals. You can create multiple profiles depending on the use case, and add appropriate capabilities and information to each profile.  With a built-in set of collaboration tools as well, Sixent looks to be very suitable for both personal and business needs. I signed up on the spot.

Chide.it.  Chide.it showed two products – FluidSurveys.com and ReviewRoom.  Of the two, FluidSurveys showed the most promise.  It’s a free tool  for quickly constructing online surveys.  You can then run the surveys, collect the results, and analyze them with Excel.  I would imagine that makes SurveyMonkey ($20/month) and other companies like them Chide.it’s competition.  I signed up for this one on the spot as well.

Gazaro, who have created an AI driven “personal shopping flyer”.  List the things that you’d like to buy.  Gazaro then shops the sales for you to find the best bargains. There are a couple of short comings at the moment — it only works with US based retailers, and it only lets you shop for electronics.  Nonetheless, Gazaro shows a lot of promise.