Telepocalypse

Irish blog

I've written before about my freebie Nokia N90.

You can take a peek at some of my holiday snaps from Ireland, plus my daughters (advance proposals of marriage accepted with non-refundable cash deposit) here.

Nokia are getting really close to putting all the parts of the puzzle together here ... but there's still some way to go. I really think they need to market these N series devices differently. At least they've stopped talking about smartphones. Just tell people "talk, message, pics". They don't care about anything else except playing a few tunes and an alarm clock. Make it a social faux-pas to take crappy phonecam pics. Sell grandparents on the idea of getting a super-hires quality camphone for their kids to snap the grandkids.

In 10 days I took about 180 pictures and videos with my camera phone and had tons of room still left on a 512Mb memory card. My wife took her posher point-and-shoot digicam and took zero. If I didn't already have an N90 (and an N70, and another N70, and an E60, and an N91, and what's this one in the bottom of the drawer...) I'd go out and pay for an N93 right now with my own cash. You only get to photo the kids growing up once.

The things they've got right:

• Lifeblog (the PC media organiser) is just a great little app for capturing everything off your device. Simple, effective, done.
• The gallery app on the handset for previewing is pretty sweet too -- the animated visual cues as you navigate around make the "look at this" experience of sharing with someone sat next to you much better.
• The double-jointed form factor is just great. I've gone back to the N90 after trying all the others. (The N93 fixes all the missing bits from the N90 experience.)
• Quality matters. They've put a lot of effort into the optics, and it shows. Still behind dedicated digicams, but close enough I no longer care much. But I'm willing to pay a bit more still for getting closer to "satisficed".

There are some wrinkles:

• Why can't I rotate videos in Lifeblog? I'll pay for the CPU cycles if you supply the algorithm!
• Rotating images on the handset is so hard as to be an April Fools joke, despite being the #1 editing feature by miles, and one I'd happily do in the field.
• Why isn't simple integration with Flickr etc. an "out of the box" feature rather than a tortuous ordeal?
• Why is uploading to web services painful -- 50 photos-at-a-time limit, and unreliable?
• Why does Bluetooth sync sometimes bomb out, and won't let you resume with strange error messages?

The operators could do better at selling these devices. From my experience, the camera is a "parity" feature with voice and messaging -- every bit as important to me, even if not needing a service package. Yet the ads and marketing are all stuck on minutes and messages. They should be buying you the premium unlimited Flickr account if, say, you agree to one of the higher monthly minute buckets. Forget nickel-and-dime messaging revenues, these features should be about reducing churn and making customers really happy. Then integrate the back-end so my phone number works as my web photo manager ID, and my address book interoperates with the photo sharing site. Photo sharing crosses device types in Europe and N America, and the operators mostly don't seem bothered to make it work outside of their little worlds (with the honorable exception of Sprint, who being tied into CDMA don't get to sell these snazzy phones).

That said, Nokia probably need to make it easier for operators to re-brand Lifeblog, integrate with the own white-label or co-branded portal services, and generally share the limelight. Trying to sell Lifeblog as a stand-alone software app sounds a bit crazy to me (it's free with N-series phones) -- I'd give it away, and even encourage non-Nokia phone users to get some Nokia brand and user experience exposure. Think of it as the equivalent of iTunes or Quicktime for the PC: the first step to getting a Mac.

Checking out the Flickr camera popularity index, Nokia is leading in the camphone category. The handsets and PC software are winning out in this segment -- they've solved more of the user needs than anyone else. You just wonder what life would be like without the "carrier barrier" and Nokia could really put all the bits together...

I had low-quality camera phones before, and they were useless. Getting a good one was a step-change -- the best piece of consumer electronics I've acquired in the last few years. I've not tried the competition (you know where to post the handsets...) but I'd make a quality camera phone a priority purchase if you've not got one yet.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:08 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/833