The official release of the iPad is still some time away. Apple still has not disclosed all the details. And by the time the iPad hits the stores, developers would have already prepared a lot of great applications that will make the iPad very useful.
Like many others I was wishing for a more OS X Leopard-like tablet. My PowerBook G4 is now really old and I was hoping a tablet becomes its replacement. Obviously this is not how Apple is thinking.
Now that the dust has settled I see Apple’s point. This is not a laptop replacement device. If you need portable productivity, go for a MacBook. It’s obvious.
If you were hoping for a universe-changing revolution (because you follow too many Mac rumor sites and because you wanted that iPhone ‘high’ again) then the iPad might’ve disappointed you. But think about it: Apple already have a revolutionary touch platform. They extended it for a bigger screen and they’re launching the iPad with the ability to run so many useful iPhone apps. It is absolutely the right thing to do.
When the iPad was unveiled, and even now, I was extremely disappointed by lack of camera, multitasking and Flash support. These are almost deal breakers for me.
But when I downloaded and watched the iPad launch Keynote, and saw what’s possible with iWork on the iPad, I became more excited about the device’s prospects. I am big user of Keynote. Having it on a tablet would be an interesting proposition for me.
I imagine that Adobe could actually come up with light versions of Photoshop and Illustrator for the iPad. I mean, why not? If they don’t, some new enterprising developers can address that market.
But at this point, when thinking about productivity on the iPad, questions start popping up in my head. For example:
Will the iPad allow me to install my fonts. Even iKeynote would be pretty useless to me if I couldn’t design or edit presentations with my company’s typeface.
How will file management work? Will files be strictly savable within apps or is there some sort of folder structure somewhere?
What about downloading files and copying them into other apps. For example: I am browsing the web and I find a funny photo that I want to paste into Keynote or Pages. Can I do that? What about taking a screenshot of a part of the screen to use it in a presentation. How would that work?
Will multitasking ever become possible on the iPad. Yesterday I was editing a proposal and kept jumping between Numbers and Pages. Please don’t tell me every time I do that on the iPad I need to restart apps.
These are some of the questions I have. Yes I understand that the iPad is not a MacBook. But highlighting iWork on the device just raises all these productivity questions which could determine if I get an iPad or not.
I haven’t looked at my site analytics for a while, so this evening I checked out some of my browser stats. It turns out that Firefox users (37% ) have overtaken Internet Explorer users (34%) on this site. So next time when some Microsoft-centric web developer gives you a site that only looks good on IE, punch him/her in the face. It’s OK. Really.
Another interesting fact: Chrome (11%) is inching in on Safari (13%). I know that Chrome as already beaten Safari in general on the web. But I guess I have quite a lot of Mac users following this blog.
Isn’t it amazing that a non-commercial open source browser has dethroned the browser that at one point commanded 90% of traffic on the web. If you’re old enough you’d remember how IE came out of almost nowhere to beat Netscape (which also had a 90%+ market share at one point I think).
Every object, every product, says something about the people behind it. In the old, pre-industrial days you would meet your carpenter, your blacksmith and your potter. People behind life’s object where more visible. Today, we don’t see the people behind the objects that define our lives. The creation of these objects requires the cooperation of hundreds of people, who might be dispersed all over the world. The people who make our objects are hidden behind the brand names of companies. Large companies.
In the N900’s case the brand name masking the creators is Nokia.
Nokia is probably one of the most influential companies in human history. They make absolutely every kind of phone imaginable, from the cheapest to the most expensive. They touch billions of lives. They come from a small country yet their ring tone is a recognized part of life’s sound track.
For all their size and reach, the company seems to have been absolutely struggling when it comes to capturing the innovation high ground. That ground has been taken by that ‘fruit company’ in California that has just left almost everyone in the dust, maybe not is terms of sales, but definitely in terms of ‘wow’.
Creating an iPhone killer is not even an option anymore, I would argue. Not with the iPhone’s 140,000 applications, which are 140,000 reasons for people who have an iPhone to stick to their platform.
I imagine that the people who are working on Nokia’s high-end N Series and Eseries phones, powered by the Symbian OS, as bunch of overwhelmed and disillusioned office workers. They are smart and capable, but simply stuck. Symbian is the dominant smartphone platform so ‘someone’ has to service it. They try to make it cool with a touch version. They tweak here and tweak there. They try to fix this and and that and, in the process, they probably feel more complexity and clunkiness creeping into their work. It feels like MacOS 9 felt like in its dying days. A dead end that just won’t die.
Then there are the people behind this new creature: The N900.
First, here is a guess: these guys are not even in the same building as the Symbian guys (I actually have no idea if this true, it just feels like that).
If you want to know wether to buy this phone for your mother, I can tell you right here: Don’t! Unless she spends her time on Sourceforge and needs X Terminal on her phone. You can now skip reading the rest of this post and go check out Facebook.
I mean, talk about identity! The N900 has one hell of a character. No feminine curves and shiny metal bits. No whimsical angels or cute graphics. It is black brick. Take it or leave it. OK?
The people behind it, you know those other guys in that other building, are probably a bunch of geeks with a sense of mission. Somehow, someone at Nokia stole a prototype from their lab and decided to slap a N Series logo and a number “900” on it and actually released it to the mainstream. Those lab guys don’t even make phones. They make internet tablets. They have nothing to do with big old Symbian. They have their own open source based OS called Maemo (pronounce My Mo).
The most impressive thing about the N900 is that Nokia finally has something which doesn’t feel like a compromise. The last time they released something like that was with the N95, which was Symbian’s last hurrah before its strange encore as a ‘touch’ OS.
Compromises make more people sort of happy. The N900 will make some people extremely happy and probably anger a lot of ‘normal’ people. In my mind this is a GOOD thing.
The day Nokia’s PR agency finally delivered the N900 test unit to my office (I’ve been asking about it for months now!) I went home to set it up. You might think I am joking but I was physically cramped after doing that. Its new unfamiliar OS meant that I spent an unhealthy amount of time hunched in a weird position. I was in pain.
But over the two weeks I spent using the phone, this monster revealed itself to me. I was online on Skype with it without even launching a Skype app, with my phone contacts and Skype contacts on the same screen. I was making international phone calls on the cheap using my Gizmo SIP number in the same way I would make a normal call. I was easily answering my POP mail and Gmail on the phone. I was browsing the web heavily on a really good browser that supports Flash. I even had Firefox running on this phone.
The N900 is an unbelievable multitasker, as demonstrated in the video below. I was jumping between web browser, email client, phone app, calculator without a hitch. It was jumping between my different Wifi networks without asking me a million questions. It had all my missed calls, messages and IMs neatly waiting for me as yellow cards, placed among other card representing open apps and tasks.
It has 4 infinitely customizable home screens. I used one for frequent contacts. One for calendar, weather and Facebook widget. Another one for bookmakrs. And so on and so forth.
When I had to repack the the phone and give it back so that another blogger can review it, I was truly distressed.
Look. I am not a professional phone reviewer. I have never used Android or Palms WebOS. I never lived with an iPhone beyond using my wife’s at home sometimes. If you want to read full N900 reviews go to Engadget or something. What I am concerned with is Nokia’s move into new territory with Maemo.
As a first step into this new territory the N900 first disoriented me, then really impressed me.
The guys at Nokia’s Maemo division have changed the game. The N900 does not pretend to be an iPhone killer. It is its own, powerful, geeky, black brick thing.
People keep asking me.. “but Ahmad, you are such an Apple evangelist. Why don’t you have an iPhone yet?”. My answer is always: I need a better camera, I really like Nokia’s mapping features (now totally free too). I can’t say I am happy with my current N97mini (another test unit from Nokia BTW). But I am sticking with it for the moment.
But my conclusion is: there is room in the world for Maemo phones. And I might eventually get one.
Out of the box it is a powerful communication and media device. No, it doesn’t have 140,000 apps. But the open source community of geeks might even make it more useful.
With such a strong identity and posture, the N900 and whatever comes next will stand its ground. Let’s just hope Nokia leaves the Maemo people undiluted and uncompromised.
Nokia has decided to stop charging for GPS navigation on its phones. Voice navigation for driving and walking is now FREE. If you have an NSeries, ESeries, XpressMusic 5800 (or a bunch of other devices which have maps/navigation) you basically have just been give a GPS navigation device that works all over the world.
The maps on Nokia devices always have been free. Which was great. But navigation was a charged service. Middle East wide navigation, for example, used to cost US$ 10 per month or US$ 100 per year. But as the competitive game between Nokia and Google has heated up with the latter offering free navigation, Nokia decided to up the ante and go free with its comprehensive navigation service world wide.
I have been testing Nokia’s Amman and Jordan maps and voice navigation for some time now and I have been pretty delighted with it. People sometime ask me why the heck I need voice navigation in Amman. Well, most of the time I don’t of course. But only in the past few weeks I used my N97 Mini test unit several times to find addresses. For example, I was supposed to go to a meeting at a company located somewhere off Abdullah Ghosheh Street the other day. You know, one of those side streets in a typical residential area. As I left my office, I searched for the street name, found it, clicked “drive to” and was guided effortlessly to my destination.
I also used the service on a recent trip to Irbid, which I rarely visit. I found my way out of a residential area to the main road back to Amman..
The video above is a cool demonstration of the service, shot in in one of my favorite cities: Berlin.
If you have a Nokia phone, check if you have the maps app. Update it to the latest version. Get the Amman/Jordan map (I think by now it should be downloadable from the web). And off you go
This might sound like the the first line of a joke waiting for a punch line. But this Lebanese man is not the star of a funny joke but the writer Hazem Amin, who one evening found himself as “Amman’s only pedestrian, stumbling over its sidewalks“. That’s the title of his article in Al-Ghad today [Arabic link].
It is a great article about Amman’s contemporary character. Lebanese tend to see Amman as a “highly organized and precise city” as Amin writes. We Ammanis might complain a lot about our city. But compared to Beirut and Cairo, Amman is indeed a city of ease and comfort (which happens to be one of the attributes our team at SYNTAX made into one of the corner stones of Amman’s brand).
But this ease has become the ease of driving, and not walking. Not only have Ammanis stopped walking, but they have forgotten what walking is. When the writer left his meeting in a cafe in Shmeisani, he saw his hotel on the Third Circle on the horizon. He was tempted to walk instead of taking a taxi. He asked a building guard and a grocer about how long it would take him to walk to the Third Circle. Both answered identically: One and a half hours. Having the luxury of time in a city he’s unfamiliar with, Amin decided to walk. He made it in 25 minutes!
Walking, he meet those other dwellers of our sidewalks. Certainly not other pedestrians. But advertising billboards and “illogically placed” concrete benches! I smiled when I read that because this is just so Ammani. Our sidewalks are decorative in nature. Cut and paste jobs never intended for usage.
The Lebanese man in Amman concludes: if Ammanis really wanted to walk, their sidewalks would have been fixed by the simple effect of their shoes treading the ground!
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Here is another usage of sidewalks in Amman. This one is courtesy of my neighbors in the office building where I work. Thank you.
Watch this video by Aramram. Many of us defending web freedom in Jordan are doing it because we care about the country’s development and the benefits of free speech online for society, for government, for Jordan’s international image and for business and investment.
After 15 years of liberal internet policy in Jordan, it would be shameful to sacrifice it because of a bunch of rumor and false news spreaders. Let’s make no mistake, there are people out there who are using the net to defame people and make unjust accusations against them (not just government officials but sometime normal citizens). The level of conversation on some sites is extremely low and insulting.
Still this is no reason to put forward legislation that will make online expression risky for those who want to use the web medium to push society and the country forward.
As one of the people in the video said, citizens can be counted on to differentiate between sites with integrity and sites without integrity.
