Inside View from Ireland

Nokia in Two Years

ONE OF THE FIRST things friends do when I hand them my Nokia Lumia 800 is flick through the phone's apps to see how many familiar icons they see. They often mutter something when handing back the phone.

Nokia have a lot of work to do during the next year if former Nokia users can be prised from their iPhones. Those iPhones were a quantum leap from Symbian for most owners because they did things faster and used an interface that people enjoyed. When people started buying iPhones because their friends had iPhones, they often started connecting through apps, not voice or text. Now those apps represent the mobile environment through which people define their worlds. And Nokia has an apps deficiency.

It will take two years before Nokia's apps for Windows Phone are more compelling than the bog-standard iOS apps.
, the Windows Metro interface and its better live notification system will pull people back to Nokia--if people returning to Nokia's handsets can continue using most of the apps they loved with their iPhones.

In two years, Internet Explorer will have a very capable HTML 5 rendering engine. Nokia phones will have a CPU core dedicated to rich media rendering which means no real need to see the mobile web through an app.

But these things are two years away and Apple will continue selling millions more handsets than Nokia in the meantime. For me, a long-time Nokia owner, it feels strange to watch the brand being reduced to a fraction of its formidable self. I'll be on board for a Nokia handset in 2015 and hope all the apps I treasure from my iPhone will be running of the Windows Phone OS as well.

Speeding Along with O2-Ireland's Dongle

I HAVE A HUAWEI E585 WIFI DONGLE on its last legs but when it's working, it occasionally delivers faster upload service than a higher spec Vodafone broadband USB modem.

I can normally get the Voda USB modem to run two or three times faster than my O2 dongle, especially in the Dublin metropolitan area. Today, along the banks of the River Liffey in County Kildare, the O2 dongle is kicking its Voda brother in the speedtest stakes.

I can't imagine life as a mobile warrior without a mobile tethering service. I use both the dongle and the USB modem to successfully run Online Meeting Rooms video sessions and Google Hangouts. Last week, I used the O2 dongle as a wifi hotspot service for third level students in LIT-Clonmel when a piece of network hardware failed. The Huawei E585 permits the connectivity of five devices simultaneously and that was fine for several project teams working on campus.

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My speedtest screenshots.

mobile

The First Viral Video of 2012

PLENTY OF VIRAL VIDEOS will emerge in 2012 but Walk Off The Earth's work is the first one I've spotted in 2012. At its current rate of viewing, I reckon the first of March will show that more people will have watched the cover of "Somebody That I Used To Know" than the original.

 

Joy in Syncing Multiple Calendars

If you need multiple Google Calendars as well as Exchange Calendaring and perhaps a personal booking system using Windows Live, you’ll be happy to know you can easily sync multiple Google calendars like I do in the colour-coded screenshot.

To add them, just go to m.google.com/sync on your phone. Log into the web page, select your device and toggle the calendars you want to sync. You can sync up to 25 Google calendars onto your Windows Phone. Before leaving the screen, tap and save your settings. I've also bookmarked the page in my Lumia browser.

These newly synced calendars appear whenever your phone syncs with Google’s servers. If you've commanded your phone to save battery power, it's not going to sync your calendars. By default, my Nokia Lumia looks at Google for sync data every half hour. When I set an important appointment on my calendar, I normally sync it before I leave the meeting that set the appointment. 

The Windows Sync team at Google also have enabled the Lumia with an ability to search for Gmail messages that haven’t been downloaded to the phone yet. That's also handy. The option to "search more in Google Mail" is found at the bottom of the results list for a local search. 

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More detailed instructions from Microsoft.

Li Yin -- Sync multiple calendars using advice from the Windows Sync team at Google.

Lumia

Liking Portable Personal Media Storage

I GET A LOT OF VALUE from unconstrained mobile storage of personal media and Sony's new Walkman Z1000 looks like it will allow me to carry all the HD video clips that we produce in the creative multimedia curriculum at LIT-Clonmel.

The weakest link in the latest generation of mobile phones is a lack of removable storage. That's what I face with both iOS and Nokia Lumia. Consequently, I cannot sync the collections of HQ audio and video I receive every week from dozens of students as they prepare scratch work for final assessment. I have to step gingerly through collections as they arrive, then manually direct specific clips onto my mobile devices. This is a time sink because of the limited storage space on my personal media players. Sony's Z1000 comes with a 64 GB offering along with 512 MB of RAM, certainly big enough for my personal DVD and academic work for the next two years. The only problem is a cost point around EUR 380.

But there's a lot for that money. The Walkman Z1000 has a nVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor, runs Android 2.3 with full Android Market access, and it has an anti-reflective 4.3-inch capacitive touch-screen LCD display.

I don't need cellular connectivity on my personal media player. I do need HDMI output and that's the way the Z1000 is set up to communicate with our big screens.

Changing Smartphone Market Leadership

I HAVE BOUGHT more Nokia handsets than any other manufacturer's and Nokia remains the world’s largest seller of mobile phones by volume. It's declining in terms of market leadership and revenues.

iPad Neck Strain

AFTER MONTHS OF HARD USE, the iPad has brought us neck pain and shoulder discomfort. But there's hope for the afflicted from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Harvard researchers could have viewed iPads in my Flickr photostream where my family is caught in full flow with the iPad, holding it in laps, in hands, on tables, and propped up to watch videos. Across all of these modes of use, Harvard researchers concluded that people run a "higher risk of neck and shoulder discomfort compared to normal laptop users" because of the poor posture when head and neck angles are strained.  

Nothing in the iPad sales literature points out that your head and neck require more forward flexion when using a tablet device. If you've a tablet and you want to avoid the strain, you should consider specific placement for your iPad.

Mobile Phone Costs One Euro A Week

I HAVE TWO YEARS of user data to confirm that when you can totally control the behaviour of your mobile phone, you can keep phone costs to one euro a week. Our grandparents are doing that with no data services.

You won't be able to constrain your running costs to five euro monthly (the average pay as you go charge my father-in-law incurs) unless you constrain email services totally to operations across wifi. And if you're a power texter or a Facebook addict, you have no hope of keeping your running costs so low. There's no Facebook in the lives of my in-laws because they prefer to deal with tightly-wrapped social collateral (i.e., viewing images and videos along with listening to occasional audio snippets on the handset). The Nokia E7 is a workhorse. I used it for several years as my daily phone--often getting more than two days between charges--and I still prefer its call handling and QWERTY keyboard over my Nokia Lumia. That's also the personal preference of the in-laws. The keyboard gives a greater sense of control over a touchscreen. The flip-up screen provides a tabletop focal point when using the phone on conference calls.

However, there is a major drawback when comparing the Nokia E7 over all other handsets my father-in-law has owned.

Best Circles Ever Shared

BECAUSE PEOPLE MEASURE THINGS by numbers, I know it's significant to have more followers on Google Plus than on Twitter. But mere numbers don't reflect the depth of conversation or the control of privacy.

I know it's best to use the tool that delivers the best results. In the minds of most people in my life, that means descending into Facebook when you want a casual conversation. It also means watching the flow of tweets sail by to get an idea of who's traveling where or what news someone spotted on their big screens. I get both of these effects and more because I spent a few hours tweaking Google Plus Circles until they delivered more for every two inches of screen scrolling than on any other social network I've used.

And I'd like to share some of the circles that helped me develop this system of business intelligence. Like Gabriel Vasile, I've categories like Bloggers, Celebrities, General, Hangouters,  Journalists, Photographers, and Social Media.