Alec Saunders SquawkBox » gigaomdaily

Nokia unveils iPhone competitor

Alec — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:30:30 +0000

You might not be aware of this, but there’s just been an earthquake in Finland. Figuratively speaking, anyway. Said earthquate occurred at precisely 12:30 PM EDT, today. That was the moment that Nokia took the wraps off its real competitor to iPhone.

Specifically, three announcements were made:

Nokia unveiled the 5800 XpressMusic (press release, datasheet). It’s the first mass-market device from Nokia with touch-screen technology. As you can see from the video, it looks very familiar, being a Symbian OS with touch capabilities built in. At the same time, it has some familiar elements of other touch screen interfaces we’ve seen such as easy fingertip transitions. You might also note in the video that at times the demonstrator seems to be pushing on the screen. The 5800 XpressMusic also includes haptics to provide tactile feedback to the user. Check it out.

Comes with Music (press release, backgrounder) is Nokia’s new digital entertainment service. When you buy a supported Nokia device, including the NSeries, any of the XPressMusic phones and some other mass market phones, Nokia gives you access to the Nokia Music store at no additional charge for an entire year. Download (and keep) as many tracks as you like. This is not a subscription. You get to download and keep as many tracks as your heart desires. Tracks are delivered in Windows Media format, with DRM.

S60 5th Edition (press release) was also introduced. This latest operating system release includes support for new displays, the touch UI, a widescreen mode, a variety of new sensor support, and updated applications and browser support. Wonderfully cool things are possible with the new sensor support, like being able to stop the ringer by picking the phone up and putting it back down face down.

A touch screen phone and operating system were not unexpected. After all, Nokia had to respond to Apple’s phenomenal success with iPhone. However, the gutsy decision to give away the music goes straight after Apple’s cash cow, iTunes.

Scorched earth is a powerful offensive posture. One wonders what kind of deal with the devil RIAA Nokia had to agree to in order to gain the rights to distribute all those tracks for no money… and what the impact will be on their bottom line.

Look for 5800 XpressMusic devices with North American standard radios to land here Q1 2009. Exciting times are ahead.

Skype 4.0 beta 2

Alec — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:59:09 +0000

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.

Skype 4.0 Beta 2 for Windows
Uploaded by SkypeConversations

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.

YouGetItBack updated to include location.

Alec — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:00:36 +0000

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.

Tungle closes $5M, led by Commonwealth Capital

Alec — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:18:45 +0000

Some congratulations are clearly in order for the Tungle team. Right ahead of the market meltdown they’ve secured $5 million in additional financing led by Massachusetts Commonwealth Capital Partners.

In addition, Tungle has released an update to their application in order to make it much more web based. Gone is the clunky desktop application for arranging meetings, replaced by a web based interface, and a simple Outlook connector. It makes for a much better experience than their first release.

If you need to arrange meetings between individuals in different companies, or who don’t share calendars, Tungle takes away the pain removing the endless email exchanges.

Well done!

Bell to interfere with GPS?

Alec — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:43:30 +0000

Speculation is running rampant that Bell plans to interfere with GPS on BlackBerry mobile phone devices in the near future. The rapidy spreading rumour says that in the coming weeks Bell will cause users of free GPS mapping applications (Google maps, or BlackBerry maps, for example) to experience GPS lock times of 2 to 10 minutes, up from the 15 to 20 seconds usually experienced. Users will be able to spend $10/month to regain access to high speed GPS locks by subscribing to Bell’s own GPS service, called GPS Nav.

Assisted GPS, which is the technology used by today’s GPS handsets, can make a GPS fix simple and quick to establish. It works by using the phone’s cellular system to also communicate with the cell towers, adding another level of accuracy to the fix. If Bell were to simply turn of AGPS for non-subscribers, the effect described would be a delay of 2 to 10 minutes. I personally experienced this over the past summer travelling in Europe in countries where I had no data access on my Nokia N78.

Let’s hope the bean counters at Bell are thinking twice. A move like this would more than likely result in the mass of cell phone users interested in navigation simply picking up and moving to Rogers where no such restriction exists.

Email chain letter hits Facebook.

Alec — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:58:30 +0000

Yesterday Paul Brent from the local CTV affiliate dropped by my office to tape an interview with me about identity theft, privacy and online safety. My view is that these are really two subjects — one is managing your own image online (don’t put drunken pictures of yourself online if you’re worried a future employer might find them), and the other is maintaining a certain amount of skepticism about pages you visit and emails you respond to so that you don’t get taken by an online fishing scam of some kind. Credulity is the weapon that online thieves and vandals exploit most often to perpetuate their scams.

This morning I received my first Facebook chain letter. It reads:

——————–
(no subject)

Facebook recently became very crowded, there were many members complaining that Facebook become very slow. The report shows that the reason is that there are too many members Facebook non-active And on the other side too many new members Facebook.
We will send these messages around to see if members are active or not, if you are active please send to 15 other users using Copy + Paste to show that you are active Those who do not send this message in 2 weeks The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space, if Facebook is always crowded with goodness we ask for donations, but until then send this message to all your friends and we assure you send this message to show me that your active and unsuppressed.

Creator of Facebook
Mark Zuckerber
——————–

Your first clue that this is a scam? The vandal who created this mail got the name of Facebook’s founder wrong. Your second clue? Facebook already tracks how active you are through the news feed, the chat room, your online presence and so on. Your third clue? Accounts that are inactive aren’t using “space”. They’re not generating new content.

The only group being exploited by this chain letter is Facebook. Presumably the vandal is theorizing that if he or she can convince enough credulous Facebook users to send this mail to 20 of their friends, and so on and so on, then they might be able to bring Facebook’s mail servers down. If 20 people send this mail to 20 of their friends, and the cycle repeats just 10 times, that’s over 10 trillion email messages.

Personally, I am not looking forward to the inevitable wave of email this is going to generate, both in my Facebook inbox, and outside of it.

Remember to think kiddies. Your best defence online is your own brain.

Related: Ars Technica publishes a study on how users are scammed by fake dialog boxes.

HelloTXT Hictu!

Alec — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:59:52 +0000

My pal Luca Filigheddu scored a victory for his Hictu! microblogging service yesterday. Popular cross-posting service HelloTXT is now including Hictu. HelloTXT lets you update all of your social networks from a single site. Video posting from within HelloTXT is apparently mere weeks away as well.

Now, what I’d really like is a service that takes my twitter update and then propagates it to all the other networks. Maybe next iteration.

MOBIVOX|PL, the Mobivox developer play.

Alec — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:14:22 +0000

You may recall the August 7th announcement that JAJAH and Mobivox had teamed up to provide a voice driven JAJAH service called JAJAH concierge. Today Mobivox announces their business model for allowing any company to deploy similar services on the Mobivox platform. Called MOBIVOX|PL, it’s a voice activated mobile services platform that lets users literally speak commands to the handset and have Mobivox’ sophisticated network handle executing those commands.

And what does this say about the industry? One more time… minutes are dead. Value-added services are the future.

A Hypnotist on the Loose?

Alec — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:58:41 +0000

Nokia launches their Nokia Legends campaign today. A quirky mix of urban legend film vignettes told by veteran character actor and author Ron McClarty, it consists of a series of oddball stories with a distinctly Twilight Zone feel about them in a clever interactive site designed to look like a newspaper. The stories cleverly mix technology with far out scenarios. For example, Hypnotist on the Loose is really a story about electronic payment systems…

My favorite story was the one about the guy who was found frozen to death in his Tokyo apartment. What’s yours?

Anyway, go check it out. See if you can guess the tech story for each of McClarty’s little tales. Share it with your friends by reporting them “missing”. Play the game.

Shooting with Nokia

Head to Head: Chrome vs IE 8

Alec — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:42:04 +0000

The Googlers talk a good story, especially when it’s delivered as a “graphic novel” comic book, but now that the browser is available, how well does their story really stand up under scrutiny? After all, IE 8 claims many of the same benefits, including the isolation of processes to tabs. Well, I set out to find out.

My setup is a quad core pentium system with 3G of memory and dual monitors. On the left side, Chrome. On the right, IE 8.

Test #1. Page rendering speed. I chose the front page of CNET as my target, emptied caches, cookies, etc on both browsers, and then navigated to www.cnet.com. Quel choque! IE 8 rendered the page in approximately six seconds. Chrome? A pokey 35 seconds. I redid the test several times to confirm. It’s true. Chrome beta is a web browsing model-T. In fact, IE 8’s rendering times were comparable to Safari, Opera and Firefox. It was only Chrome that sucked.

Test #2. Javascript speed. For this test I loaded up GMail - as Javascript heavy an application as there ever was. No surprise, Chrome won the day with it’s heavily optimized Javascript interpreter. Nevertheless, the difference was close enough to be marginal — 4 seconds vs 6 seconds.

Test #3. Memory footprint. With Gmail and the CNET front page loaded into two tabs in each browser, both browsers were actually running 4 separate instances, proving the contention that both browsers isolate processes in tabs. However, IE’s memory footprint was a beefy 195M, while Chrome’s was a comparably skinny 80M.

Test #4. Rendering. For this test, I loaded the Calliflower application in both browsers. Calliflower does some reasonably sophisticated things including pushing status to dynamically updating web pages. Let’s just say that they both suck. Whether it was mis-sized boxes in IE, or features that didn’t work in Chrome, neither one of these apps can render Calliflower as well as IE 7, Firefox 3, Safari or Opera.

The verdict? Google had a great launch, filled with breathless oohing and aahing from the cognoscenti, but in the hard light of day I’d say the emperor has no clothes. For now, I give the nod to IE. It’s mostly faster, and a lot faster, even if it does consume a little more memory.

UPDATE: An hour later, Jim Courtney phoned me up and we did the experiment again. Mysteriously, whatever was blocking my rendering of CNET before has now resolved itself. CNET renders consistently in 4 seconds now. Computers!