Technology.Design.Creativity.Web 2.0

Encouraging SaaS takeup

2009-01-24T07:07:00.001-08:00

The economic crisis that we are facing today may well benefit the SaaS market. Companies are now more conscious and careful about cashflow and will be less willing to invest high capital expenditure on software licences. Besides, one striking benefit of SaaS is the scalability and low risk of technology obsolescence since the risk is shifted to the provider. But, to all the SaaS providers out there, you gotta really understand that SMBs are usually less tech-savvy and have little IT resources at their disposal. In fact, many of the smaller SMBs are still relying on paper and pencil or basic excel spreadsheet to do their invoices and timesheet. To increase the adoption rate, SaaS providers should offer free training for first time users regardless how idiot-proof you think your application is and always offer free trial with no obligation. In addition, customer testimonials are always good to have. You can also see how to influence the government policies or work with business associations to provide some incentives to encourage the SMBs to adopt SaaS.

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Why Apple iPhone Succeeds and Other Fail

2009-01-22T07:31:00.001-08:00

Today Nokia announced that its profit for the fourth-quarter has declined by a whopping 69% and sales declined by 19%. Every $1 drop in revenue translates to 3.6x drop in profit. That's very very steep decline. It's a double whammy for Nokia. It lost market share at the lucrative high end and sales did not fly during the holiday season in the growth markets such as China. Nokia has also invested alot of money into the Come with Music initative. The price differential for a phone that has Come with Music and one that doesn't can be as much as $100 or more. I think in the hard times like today, it's going to be a uphill battle to squeeze that incremental revenue from consumer. Again, not surprisingly, about 1,000 job cuts were annouced. Just a week ago Motorola announced 4,000 layoffs and it would only roll out 12 phone models in a year. For smartphones, it will only produce for Android platform and the first Android handset is slated for Q2 2009 in the US.

The big software giant microsoft is not spared either. Its earning fell in second quarter on the back of weaker sales, resulting in earnings of 47 cents a share against analysts' estimate of 49 cents a share. 1,400 people were let go immediately and upto 5,000 in total are expected to be laid off.

Well not all is bad news. Apple had reported stellar quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple History. Its ipod sales set new record. This is a very good set of results considering that Apple had to amortise the revenue and costs over the economic lives for iPhone and Apple TV. To quote Steven Jobs, "Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history—surpassing $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever."

Eversince Apple opened up its iPhone Appstore, Google Android, Blackberry and now Palm have jumped onto the bandwagon. I'm less optimitic about the takeoff for Blackberry Application Centre since most Blackberry users are enterprise users and generally companies have strict policies on what applications can be downloaded onto company handsets. Besides, Blackberry users will not be the right target segment for games and entertainment which are the ones that have the most downloads on Apple Appstore. Google Android is seen as the alternative to iPhone. The difference is that there is only one iPhone maker and that's Apple. Whereas we can expect more Android handsets by various handset makers in the future.

I think Nokia is making a strategic mistake to pump millions of dollars into its music store. No doubt that it's more and more common for people to play music on their cellphones but will people want to pay over $100 for a subscription per year to download unlimited number of songs (with DRM) at this economy? Wired.com recently wrote an article on the 5 ways the cellphones will change how you listen to music (http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/six-ways-cellph.html) and I think Nokia should reconsider their business model.

In the past, Microsoft and Blackberry dominated the smartphone segment. Nokia had some success with its E series too but all of these players were only focused on the exchange email synchronisation. What Apple succeeds and Nokia or Motorola fail is to revolutionalise the way people use the phone. The ability for each iPhone user to do "customisation" on his phone by installing apps that he finds useful is a very sticky proposition. Besides, the affordability of the apps only serves to reinforce the value proposition. This is also why Apple delivered an outstanding set of results where others fail. Let's see whether Palm manage to revive its fortune with Palm Pre.

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The Mobile War

2009-01-17T22:46:00.001-08:00

Recent Palm Pre launch has created quite a stir. I was once a Palm fan. At that time you could only synchronise your emails by putting the Palm onto the cradle and connecting it to your notebook (oh my, I still remember that I used a Tohsiba Protege then). Then as smartphones took the scene by storm, Palm faded. Sad, but the reality was that the once-upon-a-time innovative company could not stay ahead of the curve. Symbian-based Mobile phones (mainly Nokia), Windows Mobile phones, Blackberry took the lion share of the smartphone devices market until...we all know, Apple iPhone came along.

Apple iPhone didn't immediately target the enterprise users when it was first launched. It targeted the lifestyle users who didn't really care about having their corporate emails on iPhone. That was a smart move. The addressable market for lifestyle users was much bigger and competition was less stiff. If Apple were to target enterprise users from day one, it would be attracting too much attention from Microsoft and Blackberry. It is a much wiser market entry strategy to build up a bigger base of customers by addressing the lifestyle user and leveraging on Apple's strengths in user interface and integrated entertainiment apps and its already big base of iPod fans. With the launch of iPhone 3G, Apple upped the ante with the launch of appstore. It's nothing revolutionary. Yes, you can already buy symbian or windows mobile applications today. But have you wondered why it never really took off in a big way? It never quite reached the tipping point that iPhone created. I'm not sure if the fact that iPhone 2G was jailbroken to allow the installation of third party apps through the Installer (for those who jailbreak your iPhone, you should be quite familiar) had accelerated Apple's plans to launch the appstore but I would say that the strategy of allowing third party to develop apps is definitely one big factor to increase the stickiness. It is definitely a plus point that most of these apps are priced at very affordable prices - at price point that most consumers won't mind paying to try out. Prices can be low because of the the large base of iPhone users worldwide. The phone has evolved to become a very personalised piece of device that is more than just making phone calls or texting someone. With mobile broadband through WiFi or HSPA, I can now run web-based applications with just thin clients on my phone. I can access my computer easily to retrieve files when I'm away from my computer.

So, the trend for mobile is clearly on the apps side. Nokia has its Ovi. Blackberry has its Application Storefront. Google has its Android Appstore. Now Palm is launching an appstore for its Palm Pre. The fight will be on the installed base. The more apps a user installs on his phone, the less likely he's going to switch out to another phone device, especially if there are one or two killer apps that the user must have. The market is now beginning to heat up. Today, most apps are non-enteprise. I can see that as companies become more receptive to cloud computing and web-based applications, mobile enterprise apps will be the next wave. As aptly put across by Gartner, "SaaS adoption is being driven by businesses' pursuit of cost savings and quicker implementations, as well as wider availability of high-speed Internet connections....initial concerns regarding the SaaS applications' security and reliability have faded somewhat as the model has matured"

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Book Summary: The Mckinsey Engagement

2009-01-04T01:05:00.001-08:00

It has been a week since my last post. I am savouring the last day of my long break before I report back to work tomorrow. In the past one week, I had the opportunity to catch up with my reading.

If you are interesting in management consulting, you may be interested the book titled "The McKinsey Engagement: A Powerful Toolkit For More Efficient and Effective Team Problem Solving" by Paul N. Friga (http://snipurl.com/9ftfd)

The author uses TEAM FOCUS as the acronyms for the framework discussed in this book. While the contents make sense and will be usefule as reference for team problem solving, I am not sure if this is THE Mckinsey engagement approach. It seems rather generic. I should caveat to say that the author did point out that this book is not endorsed by Mckinsey.

In a nutshell, TEAM FOCUS refers to the following:

T: TALK
E: EVALUATE
A: Assist
M: Motivate

F: Frame
O: Organize
C: Collect
U: Understand
S: Synthesize

I will elaborate a little more on what the author means by each of these acronyms.

Talk (T): communicate constantly, listen attentively and separate issues from people
Evaluate (E): discuss group dynamics, set expectations and monitor results, develop and re-evaluate a personal plan
Assist (A): leverage expertise, keep teammates accountable, provide timely feedback
Motivate (M): identify unique motivators, positively reinformce teammates, celebrate achievements

Frame (F): idenfity the key issues, put into profitability issue tree, business issues, information tree, decision tree, articulate the hypothesis
Organize (O): develop process map, content map, story line
Collect (C)- collect ghost charts, interview guide, interview summary, secondary sources
Understand (U): undestand implications summary , insight -titled chart
Synthesize (S): obtain inputs from various stakeholders and ensure buy in from client and provide a final report

If you read enough of books on Mckinsey, you will remember that a key principle that all consultants must internalise is the MECE (mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive) framework. MECE means that when you break down an issue, you must consider be able to group the various underlying factors into distinct buckets. There must be no overlap of ideas across groupings and all the possible factors must be accounted for in one of the groupings.

If you are more into logic and thinking process, I would recommend you to read the book titled "The Pyramid Principles" by Babara Minto (http://snipurl.com/9fteb). If you read Japanese, you may wish to read the book "ビジネスカの磨き方" and "実戦!問題解決法" by Kenichi Ohmae. I have read almost all the books by Kenichi Ohmae. I first read his book "The Mind of the Strategist" more than 10 years ago. My key takeaway from his recent books is that what's important is the ability to harness your logic thinking skills for problem solving and develop your own thinking style.

Happy New Year!!!

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Cloud Computing. Areas to Look Out For.

2008-12-27T07:46:00.001-08:00

In my earlier post, I gave a short review on the Animoto iPhone app. Animoto is a classic example of why cloud computing works best for them. Animoto was first made available on Facebook in April and within a week, the company had to increase the number of servers with Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) from 50 to 5,000. To a startup company, it is going to be overly capital intensive to invest in so many servers. Besides, It will also be a hasty decision for the company to buy the servers and is also tough for the company to get the servers running up quickly due to the set up and installation required. An opex model where company only pays for what it uses will be a better business model for a start up like Animoto until it establishes its baseline of usage.

There is a recent good article by Computerworld that talks about cloud computing. I will highlight the key points, coupled with my own views.

1. As illustrated in the Aminoto's case, cloud computing can bring savings to a start up who has yet to establish a usage baseline. Cloud computing also offers scalability and redundancy. One point to note is that it's easier to scale up but the company using cloud services need to be more careful when scaling back as there can be some residual processing resident in the servers that are being switched off and this may cause disruption to the service. The company needs to do the proper clean up first before scaling back.

2. Cloud computing providers need to create different types of pricing models so that it can cater to different needs. For example, the article suggests that for data that has not been accessed in more than 6 months, the provider can move to a slower form of media and charge a lower price for it. The view is that it's not economical to store data in the cloud over a long period of time. Shop around and choose one that best meets the needs but not sacrificing future scalability (we all think big right?!) Check if the company provides detailed billing or audit report for verification, if the need arises.

3. Cloud computing is becoming popular but the performance may not be uniform across various geographies. Getting SLGs from cloud computing provider is important. In my view, it is also equally important to understand the experience of the cloud computing providers. What is their expertise and their main clientele base? What is the customer base's geographical composition? What is the scalability and redundancy plans and where are their data centres. Another important note is to understand their bandwidth upgrade policies.

4. Have back up servers for the mission-critical applications in the event of a service disruption. The idea is not to have your business totally disrupted if there is a complete outage of the cloud. If you can't afford the servers, perhaps you should diversify your requirements across multiple vendors.

5. If you are subscribing to an application provider that is running the application on a cloud, find out whether it is a native 'cloud' application or it is a thick client app that is made to fit into the cloud. If it is the latter, understand what are the restrictions between a 'cloud' app and a thick client version.

Courtesy of Computerworld, the chart below also shows you the potential of IT cloud services are likely to be in the area of collaborative apps, IT Management apps and Personal / Biz Apps. THe survey participants characterised current an future usage - on a scale from 1 (none) to 5 (widespread) - of a variety of IT cloud services within their organization. The chart shows the percentage of respondents toward the higher end (4 or 5) of the usage scale now and / or who will be there in 3 years.

Just in case you are wondering what is cloud computing or what is cloud computing isn't. Computerworld article lists down 4 different styles of cloud computing offerings:

- Software as a Service (SaaS): special-purpose software made available by a third party over the internet with usage-based pricing model e.g. Salesforce.com, Zoho (my own personal view is that SaaS is not cloud computing but rather a form of cloud service).

- Platform as a Service (PaaS): An integrated software environment for whcih systems administrators and developers can build, test and deploy custom applications. E.g. Google Apps Engine

- Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS): A service that providers the core computing resources and network fabric for the cloud deployment e.g. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud

- Core Cloud Services - standalone components built on cloud platforms that can be woven into cloud applications, such as billing systems management and storage e.g. Microsoft BizTalk, Right Scale.

Here's another article that tells you what cloud computing isn't.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/what_cloud_computing_isnt

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Photoshop.com: Do I like it?

2008-12-26T05:46:00.001-08:00

I tried out photoshop.com. Overall, I'm quite happy with the application. The interface is clean and easy to navigate. On the left side bar, you can find your photos or albums and the links to the 4 key sites - Picasa, Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket. You can open and edit the photos that you have saved on these sites within photoshop.com. After you have finished editing, you can click and drag the file into any of 4 sites or choose to download and save it locally on your hard drive. If you choose to download (see the menu bar at the bottom of the screen), you can save in different formats (original size, email/web size or thumbnail size). Making photo edits is simple for novice like me as Photoshop.com provides different selections, showing the range of effects applied on the photo. Generally speaking, Photoshop.com provides more options for photo edits compared to websites like Flickr. You can also choose to put together the photos in a slideshow format or create an album and allow access to friends by emailing them a URL. However, it's also lacking in some features such as geo-tagging and does not accept videos, unlike Picasa or Flickr. In addition, free user has only upto 2Gbp of storage space.

Given the growing popularity of camera phones including iPhone, Photoshop.com should have a mobile site that is accessible via phone. It would be ideal if Photoshop develops a similar app for the iPhone, given that more and more people are using iPhone to snap and upload the photos immediately to their own blogs. In addition, Photoshop.com should also look into linking its site to other mobile photo or social-networking sites (which also means that Photoshop.com should have geo-tagging capability).

If I were running Photoshop.com, I would look into partnerships in the infrastructure layer. Over time, I believe more features will be added to Photoshop.com, including the support for videos and eventually making it into a social networking site. To provide better user experience, Photoshop.com can look into partnering with players which could provide grid/cloud computing and data centre space as well as with handset makers for the mobile site tie-up (if Photoshop.com has a mobile site). Many handphones today are preloaded with applications for access to Facebook or Flickr. In exchange, Photoshop.com provides the eyeballs. To boost its awareness, it may be useful to get a few credible users as evangelists of the product (or perhaps have a twitter account). The site can also be linked to its forum page directly to encourage more interaction and exchange among the users.

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Review of Edward de Bono's New Book - Six Frames

2008-12-25T08:06:00.001-08:00

I just finished Edward de Bono's new book, Six Frames (http://adjix.com/2tfc)

Six Frames is a set of tools for thinking about Information. These Six Frames are:

1. The Triangle Frame - to layout very clearly your purpose of requiring a piece of information. Is it for a specific need? For your general interest? For confirmation? Edward de Bono says that it's is important to be clear with (1) what is the purpose of this information; (2) why do you need this piece of information; and (3) and where to look for it.

2. The Circle Frame - to review the accuracy of the information as the degree of accuracy will affect the value of the information. Accuracy of the information can be influenced by the following factors: (1) authority - is the source credible?; (2) internal checking - are there inconsistencies in the information? (3) comparative accuracy - counter check the veracity of the information against other sources; (3) adequate accuracy - is the information sufficiently accurate in spite of some minor errors; (4) doubts - this will inevitably limit the accuracy of the information but may not totally eliminate the value of the information.

3. Square Frame - is there any biasness in the information? Are the views balanced or one-sided? Is there other way of looking at the information?

4. Heart Frame - to direct attention to matters that are of interest to you. This could be general interest or special interest due to the work that you are doing.

5. Diamond Frame - what is the value of the information? In this book, Edward de Bono also links the Diamond Frame to his 6 Value Medals
    Gold medal: human values and values that apply to people
    Silver medal: values that apply to an organisation or entity
    Steel medal: values relating to quality
    Glass medal: values relating to innovation and creativity
    Wood medal: values concerning the environment at large.
    Brass medal: perceptual values. How would this be perceived?

6. Slab Frame - this is the final stage where you lay down your conclusions using the information that you have to support the conclusions.

While I think this book is certainly not as interesting and insightful as his previous books, it is nonetheless a useful guide for those who need a quick framework for thinking about information. We also have to be cognizant that not everyone will have the same piece of information and it is possible that with different sets of information, different conclusions may be reached. If the conclusions are vastly different, it may be worthwhile to go back the process once again and to see if we have under-utilised any of the 6 Frames? For example, did we only collect information that only support our hypothesis or did we ignore the doubts cast by the information?

Having filtered the information throught the right framework is not enough. It is equally important that we are able to communicate our thoughts. I would therefore recommend that you consider picking up some books relating to story-telling in an organization setting. Two books that I have read are: What's your story (by Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker) (http://adjix.com/u432) and The Secret Language of Leaders (by Stephen Denning) (http://adjix.com/u2q3).

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Hi Card and Animoto iPhone Apps Review. What to improve?

2008-12-25T01:54:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May your new year be filled with joy and abundance.

In my previous post (http://snipurl.com/93oxk), I mentioned that HiCard (http://www.hicard.mobi/Default.aspx) would be my favorite iPhone app for the festive season. In the last 24 hours, I have sent out more than 20 HiCards to my friends and more to go out today. I have a few choices of the e-card templates and the HiCard is nicely displayed on the recipient's email. Of course, before I sent out my first Christmas Greeting, I sent one to myself for testing.

While it's a nice little app, I thought there are a few things that the developer can take note of and improve further.

1. I can't save the messages. I like to tweak the message included in the HiCard to add a personal touch. It would be alot more time-saving if I could save the different notes for future use.

2. I can't check my global address book on the server. Unless the email address is stored locally on the iPhone, I can't add the email address directly from the address book.

3. I can't change the font type or size of the card.

4. While I can send the same card to multiple parties by adding all their email addresses, I would lose the personal touch as the recipient can see all the other parties' email addresses

5. It would have been a nice touch if I can insert a photo or picture or change the greeting message on the 'front cover' of the card.

But, despite all these, I think paying $1.99 for the HiCard is worth it. I do hope that the developer will continue to enhance the app and offer free upgrades to early adopters like myself.

The second iPhone app that I wish to talk about here is Animoto (http://animoto.com/) - the popular photo slideshow app that reportedly received overwhleming success when they first launched it as a Facebook Application. In 3 days, the number of users shot up from 25K to 250K (http://snipurl.com/93on6).

I just downloaded the free application from Apple AppStore and tried it out with 10 photos for a 30-sec slideshow (you can select anything between 8 and 16 images). The app also comes with 8 different genres of music and songs and 1 Featured Track for you to select the background music to the slideshow (with nice transition effects). Each genre has more than 10 selections.

The rendering takes several minutes and in the meantime you can play the previous videos that you have made. This is fun for those who want to make their photos into a MTV alike slideshow. What is a total let down is the last mile when you play the video. If you play the video using 3G network, the video will experience significant jitters and latency. What you need to do is probably wait for the buffering to complete and the video will then be loaded automatically. It would be really neat if I can save the video on my iPhone and play it anytime I like without consuming my data bandwidth or have it converted into a RSS feed. But it's free and I have no complains about it. If you want to share with a few more friends, consider using the iPhone composite cable and plug it into a TV and enjoy ( http://snipurl.com/93oum).

Try out and let me know what you think.

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IT players vs Telecoms Players in the SaaS (software as a service) World. What're their business models?

2008-12-20T08:15:00.001-08:00

I am not sure how many SaaS aggregators / platform providers today are ready for the ICT world where telecom services and technologies converge.

On the IT world, traditional software players such as Microsoft is also now taking a serious review of their web strategy (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_ozzie). Microsoft however believes that in the Web2.0 world, the winning formula is software+services where a client software will be combined with cloud services. There are also purist web-based providers such as Zoho (www.zoho.com) or Google (www.google.com). However, even then, we can't deny the importance of having access to your data or documents even when internet is not available. That's why Google provided Google Gears to allow off-line access. Just like we have seen in the mobile world where the game is no longer just about the phone hardware, but also the applications. We have seen increasingly web-based applications providers developing their own marketplace.

Broadsoft, a leading VoIP platform provider, has launched its own marketplace of applications (http://marketplace.broadsoft.com/). Salesforce.com for example has a marketplace called AppExchange ( http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/ ) that allows salesforce.com users to find and test drive and subscribe to third party applications that can be integrated into salesforce.com application. The benefit to a Salesforce.com customer is that he can enjoy a single sign-on (meaning using the same set of username and password for salesforce.com application, he can run access the other third party apps onboarded onto the AppExchange). System Integrators such as NEC also has its own SaaS solutions (http://www.applicationsnet.com/Solutions/SoftwareNet/FeaturedApplications__65.aspx). The benefit of a SaaS provider having its own marketplace of third party apps is that the SaaS provider can integrate the third party apps into its own application to offer mashups or data collaboration.

On the telecoms world, we see that telecoms providers are also making an attempt to be a PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) provider, targeting at the SMB segment. Unlike SaaS provider, PaaS provider does not develop the applications. PaaS provider works more like a SaaS aggregator, collaborating with different applications providers to provide the services through a unified platform.

Swisscom (http://labs.swisscom-mobile.ch/welcome.jsf) has a beta labs to offer web-based applications on a beta basis (the last time I checked, they collaborated with Zoho as well. Seems that this did not work out). Telstra has recently announced the launch of T-suite SaaS platform in November. ZDNet.com.au had done some testing and their first impression was that while the platform shows great promise (which probably is a nice way to say that T-suite is not exactly ready yet), there were many bugs that yet to be resolved (and I quote MANY). But then again, since Telstra T-suite is in beta mode, users should not complain (smart move by Telstra) and since it's in beta mode, users should not expect the same level of customer support, if provided. BT is probably more matured in the PaaS space than the other telecoms provider but too bad it seems a little hard to find the online SaaS portal on its website (http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/btbusinessProducts/displayCategory.do?categoryId=BTB-HOSTED-SOFTWARE-I). To give BT the credit, it has done alot more than just be an aggregator of services. BT also offers BT Tradespace, an online business directory and community site primarily for SMBs.

As a PaaS provider, a telco player needs to work with different partners to onboard the service. The value proposition that a telecoms player brings is the single sign-on, single billing, single point of contact (at least for the first level support and the telco providers need to have a back to back arrangement with the various applications providers on the level 2 and 3 support), and an integrated bundle (telecoms + software). In addition, customers do not need to provide credit card details as the payment will be in a post-paid mode that can be included in the existing bills.

Telecoms players have the advantage of knowing their customers as many of them have existing billing relationships with the service provider in one form or another. In addition, telecoms players are able to offer 'mass-customisation' of a bundle service to meet different requirements. For example, for a $200/month package, customer is able to choose his preferred combination in terms of its broadband speed and application that best meets its needs.

SMBs generally have a deeper trust with their telecoms services providers than the smaller, independent web-based vendors. This gives an edge to the telecoms players. But if that's so great, why aren't the telecoms players jumping onto the bandwagon? My take is that they eventually will. We have to realise that telecoms providers have complex billing systems and order management and provisioning systems. Providing the front end (shop front) is probably the least of the challenge compared to integrating PaaS with the exsiting customer database and the order/billing systems sitting at the backend and to know when customers subscribe/terminate or renew/upgrade. The challenge is compounded if you include the traditional telecoms services onto the platform to be offered on-demand basis. To date, no telecoms player has proven the capability to offer traditional telecoms services such as broadband and software as a service on demand basis.

Another challenge is the onboarding process. Most of the web-based players are offering the SaaS directly from their website. APIs may be provided but tweaking and adaptation is required to ensure excellent customer experience. For example, a telecoms provider will develop its own e-shop that shows its own catalogue of services and applications. The telecoms provider decides on the end user subscription bundles to be offered to the market. The customer is likely to find it confusing if the apps provider which is onboarded onto the telecoms provider's platform does not mask out its own support helpdesk or subscription packages (which may very likely be in credit card payment mode and may vary from the telecoms provider as the telecoms provider may package it differently or bundled it with its own telecoms services). Beyond the initial onboarding phase, as a PaaS provider, it will help to increase customer stickiness if you are able to facilitate ease of data export/import across multiple applications. However, if the telecoms player manages to crack this part of the equation, it will be a strong contender and my take is that they will win the war in the ICT era.

=================================

More about T-Suite

http://www.telstrabusiness.com/business/portal/online/site/productsservices/tsuiteapplications.52025

T-suite launched in beta mode in early November with hosted versions of Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange (messaging), Dynamics (CRM) and Sharepoint (collaboration tools) McAfee's desktop security, MessageLabs network security products and Telstra's own PC and server back-up products.

ZDNet Australia has done a very good review.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Telstra-s-T-Suite-First-look/0,139023769,3392935500.htm

More about NEC Aggregated SaaS Solution-in-a-Box

http://www.applicationsnet.com/Solutions/SoftwareNet/FeaturedApplications__65.aspx

Globally organisations are shifting to rent applications, instead of outright purchase. A simple integrated model to purchase, manage and maintain SaaS ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) is essential to manage the ever growing SaaS landscape. The NEC Software Net platform uses an efficient, collaborative, user-centric and context aware Service platform to provide a simple and flexible network based application framework to achieve this. In addition, NEC has licensed leading application solution providers in the on-demand or SaaS space; this means that Software Net end users gain access to multiple best in class software application solutions all through one collaborative portal environment.

More about Broadsoft Xtended Marketplace

http://marketplace.broadsoft.com/

BroadSoft Xtended Marketplace is where you will find the latest Web 2.0 applications integrated with the world's leading voice over IP platform. Explore the Xtended Marketplace to find mashups with popular business solutions and social networking websites.

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LG RENOIR KC910 (8MP) Camera Features Screen Shots

2008-12-19T08:17:00.001-08:00

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Samsung PIXON (8MP) Camera Features Screen Shots

2008-12-19T08:16:00.001-08:00

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{UPDATED} How to Monetize Twitter? Here's what I think the new Twitter Product Manager can do

2008-12-19T08:05:00.001-08:00

It's interesting to see that Twitter is now trying to monetize its popularity. This is nothing groundbreaking. Yammer, for example, is one that uses twitter kind of messaging system as an internal communications tool. Of course, to give credit to the company, Yammer has a different UI and implemented other features that have yet to be done on Twitter. ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/yammer-launches-at-tc50-twitter-for-companies/#comments ). Whether Yammer can take off, it the jury is still out.

I've subscribed to Yammer but I didn't post any messages. It's just an idle account; Twitter on the other hand is very much close to my heart. Why so, I have asked myself. I think this lies in the culture of the company and the job nature of the user. There are only less than 10 Yammer users in my company. Most of us have smartphones and can check our emails anywhere anytime. I can't use Yammer to broadcast as my job revolves around strategic planning and budgets as well as go to market plans on our new initiatives. I deal alot with senior management and they are not on Yammer (in fact, I doubt they have heard about Twitter either). As a matter of fact, sending SMS is much faster and quicker if you want a more immediate response (at least that's what I experience). Sounds sad, but all is not lost. Does that mean there is no viability at this stage? To the contrary, I think there is.

Back to what I think Twitter can do. This is by no means an exhaustive list or a detailed analysis. It's something that I thought of based on my work experience. Perhaps this list can be used for further brainstorming by Twitter or for people who are keen to be Twitter's first product manager.

1. Twitter can be a new form of viral marketing tool for companies to try out. First understand your base first. What's the profile of your customers? Active base vs inactive. How many new twitter accounts are created on average per month or week for example. What is the size of the base in different geographical locations?

2. Have a ready educational / sales kit. Twitter is new. Show them the benefits. My first targets would probably be those companies who already have their own employee blogs, forums or live online customer care or truly care about customer experience or educational institutions which are into e-learning.

3. Get one or two success stories first (even if it's not money-making). You need success stories to build credibility and momentum.

4. Decide on the types of packages / solutions for the target markets. Yammer is in a pretty niche area. I do not think it's wise to restrict the business model to usin g corporate emails. It should be an option but not mandatory. SMEs may not have corporate emails. They may rely on the good old free emails by Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail.

5. If you still want to gun for the big accounts, just take note that big enterprises usually have strict policies on adoption of technologies. It will take quite a while before the company endorses such technologies. If you want to try out, always try to talk to the "innovation" department if the company has one and convince then to implement this as a trial. Or to the media department. Sell to the users the benefits. Then meet the IS. Tell them not only the ease of policing and cost savings, but also the benefits to the company.

6. Scalability is important. I think unless you are already pretty established, it will not make sense to charge by per user account for large corporation. You may want to work out a different pricing scheme.

7. Security and Audit trail. This can be important if this is to be used as part of a corporate tool especially for bigger enterprises. I'm not sure how easy it is to implement twitter with security features or with audit trail but these are things that Twitter has to think through if it wants to work with big corporations.

8. SME is a big untapped market. They can be the early adopters. Help SMEs to learn how to incorporate twitter into their websites and how to integrate with their CMS to do content broadcast for their followers. Or work with web-based services targeting at SMEs to see how to integrate twitter into the services. For example, SME may use an online project room and when an update is done, an automessage can be sent out to the relevant parties as Direct Messages. This also means that Twitter must have an easy way for "guest" use instead of making it mandatory for everyone who wants to use the service to have to register and sign up.

9. Work with online communities websites to be the "enabler" for these communities websites. Have some capability built into Twitter that can do online polls or surveys. Have ready plugins that can be included easily into applications especially productivity tools like Outlook or Powerpoints. For example, if I made revision to a shared document, I can easily send an auto-message to my counterparts. Or complement an email marketing tool.

10. Work with handset makers or even telco companies to have the twitter app made available on the phones either as a java applet or iphone app or blackberry app or see how to integrate it even more tightly into their services. However, you may want to think through if you want to work with them if they insist on rebranding or co-branding. Shozu (www.shozu.com) for example is made available on many handsets and have tie ups with some telco companies.

{NEW} 11. SMS is still the predominant application used on mobile phones. Twitter should still proactively engage with the telco operators to encourage the people to use Twitter. To take it a step further. Most telco operators have an ISP arm and have email hosting. Work with them to offer a bundled email-cum-twitter account which can have different features depending on whether this is offered to end consumers or business customers. Show them how stickiness can be achieved. For example, the twitter service can be integrated into the calendaring feature and a reminder tweet can be sent out to all the invitees for the upcoming appointment or a reminder tweet on the scheduled IM conference. Alternatively, if an online listing service is also provided as a community space for the SME customers to post their goods and services, the same twitter account can be linked to payment gateway. This involves some work at the API level but it's worthwhile to think about it. Twitter service can be further expanded to work with companies such as airline companies to send out tweets to inform users about the flight schedule status.

12. We all talk about digital home and the all-in-one box that sits in the living room that helps to control the room aircon, turn on the TV set, switch off the music player. How about working with the partners to offer a twitter service that can be used as a way for users to send a tweet that acts as an instruction to remotely control these?

13. Create some incentives for referrals. And constantly rollout new or improved features. Be open and transparent to feedback.

14. Have different pricing models. Can be a subscription model, capped plan, pay per use, etc.

15. Once you have a big enough mass market, you can even offer to do "twitter-broadcasting" much like SMS-broadcasting.

16. Another potential area is advertising. Something similar to location-based advertising. You walk into a mall and a promotional code is pushed to your twitter account. Well, Twitter probably needs to work with some key retailers to agree to adopt the Twitter platform first so that they can get their regular customer base to sign up to create the viral marketing effect.

If you are interested to discuss more, leave me a comment or send me a tweet @poohwinn

I just came across the interview by Twitter CEO. Check out here.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11299

================================

About this Job

As Twitter's first product manager focused on revenue generation, you will play a defining role in the formulation of Twitter's business. Your job will be to lead the definition and execution of the products and features that will lead to monetization of the Twitter platform.

Responsibilities

Define products and feature sets of commercial-oriented Twitter applications
Manage the prioritization and development of new products and features
Work closely with engineering to develop product functionality
Work closely with customer support to solve issues and maximize user satisfaction
Do customer research to inform product decisions
Create detailed cost and revenue models
Define product positioning and marketing plans
Analyze and report product success

Qualifications

Experience managing web-based software products
Strong familiarity with online advertising and marketing models
Strong grasp of user-experience design
Enthusiasm for talking to customers
Great project-management skills
Excellent written communication and presentation skills
Active Twitter user

Bonus Points

Strong technical and data-mining skills

Working at Twitter

Twitter offers competitive salaries and full benefits, including health, dental, vacation, 401k, and stock options. We work in a bright, sunny office in San Francisco. And you'll be joining a unique group of experienced folks who are doing their best work to create something great.

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Accessing Web-based Microsoft Exchange Emails

2008-12-19T03:52:00.001-08:00

If you are using web email for Microsoft Exchange, you may find that you can't access your emails through Firefox or Safari using http://mail.xxx.com .

If this happens, you may wish to try using https://mail.xxx.com/ exchange when using Safari or Firefox. Do note that it is https and not http.

Hope this little trick is of use to you.

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iPhoto2gmail Plugin is a Great Productivity Tool for Photo Blogging

2008-12-17T23:47:00.001-08:00

Introducing the iPhoto2Gmail plugin (http://iphoto2gmail.notoptimal.net/ ).

This niffty app just reduces my time taken to upload dozons of photos onto my blog by more than half. In the past, I had to resize all my photos and upload them one by one to posterous using my Gmail account. There were also frequent encounters where my Gmail would be in a "still working" mode after a good 20 minutes and the 30 photos were still left humming in email.

Using this iPhoto2Gmail app, I can just resize it with one click and immediately it will be sent to my Gmail account, ready for uploading. Wish there is a similar plug in for iPhone so that I can email multiple photos at once. By the way, they have the Apperture2Gmail app too.

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How to Monetize Twitter? Here's what I think the new Twitter Product Manager can do

2008-12-17T20:28:00.001-08:00

3. Get one or two success stories first (even if it's not money-making). You need success stories to build credibility and momentum.

4. Decide on the types of packages / solutions for the target markets. Yammer is in a pretty niche area. I do not think it's wise to restrict the business model to using corporate emails. It should be an option but not mandatory. SMEs may not have corporate emails. They may rely on the good old free emails by Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail.

11. Create some incentives for referrals. And constantly rollout new or improved features. Be open and transparent to feedback.

12. Have different pricing models. Can be a subscription model, capped plan, pay per use, etc.

13. Once you have a big enough mass market, you can even offer to do "twitter-broadcasting" much like SMS-broadcasting.

14. Another potential area is advertising. Something similar to location-based advertising. You walk into a mall and a promotional code is pushed to your twitter account. Well, Twitter probably needs to work with some key retailers to agree to adopt the Twitter platform first so that they can get their regular customer base to sign up to create the viral marketing effect.

If you are interested to discuss more, leave me a comment or send me a tweet @poohwinn

================================

About this Job

Responsibilities

Define products and feature sets of commercial-oriented Twitter applications
Manage the prioritization and development of new products and features
Work closely with engineering to develop product functionality
Work closely with customer support to solve issues and maximize user satisfaction
Do customer research to inform product decisions
Create detailed cost and revenue models
Define product positioning and marketing plans
Analyze and report product success

Qualifications

Experience managing web-based software products
Strong familiarity with online advertising and marketing models
Strong grasp of user-experience design
Enthusiasm for talking to customers
Great project-management skills
Excellent written communication and presentation skills
Active Twitter user

Bonus Points

Strong technical and data-mining skills

Working at Twitter

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Compare Camera Quality of all 8MP Camera Phones - here's the verdict.

2008-12-17T07:04:00.001-08:00

I thought pictures speak a thousand words and it may be useful for you to have some reference on the quality of the photos produced by the various 8MP camera phones.

If you are interested in the unedited image qualities of the 8MP camera phones, please take a look at the pictures below. Just to orientate you. All pictures are taken at 2MP with the exception of Sony Ecrisson C905. Images of C905 were taken at 3MP as there was no 2MP selection.

I have tested on all the current 8MP camera phones. The pictures are in the following order (remember it's a set of 4 photos for each phone)

1. Samsung Innov8 (with sliding keypad),

2. Sony Ecricsson C905 (with sliding keypad)

3. Samsung Pixon (touch screen)

4. LG Renoir (touch screen).

For each phone, there is a set of 4 photos. The first two photos (using auto-focus and macro functions respectively) were taken with all lights switched off. This was to test the quality of the pictures with the flash. The last two pictures (again, using auto-focus and macro functions) were taken when the (incandescent) lights were switch on and the white balance was set to auto. All photos were not edited.

Hope this provide some use to you.

See the full gallery on posterous

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Special Post: Farewell to my Uncle Forever

2008-12-15T06:18:00.001-08:00

This post is a special post in loving memory of my uncle who passed away peacefully today. Just a day ago, I finished the book by Rick Warren, The Purpose of Christmas. This book is given to me as a gift. My feelings are mixed. Perhaps it's time for my uncle to bid goodbye to the earthly world. But I feel a tinge of regret that I did not get to see him for the last time.

I never met my grandfathers as they passed away before I was born. My grandmothers passed away when I was in my teen and early twenties respectively. Sometimes when I see some elderly folks, I reminisce the times I had with my grandmothers. I often wonder given the short life span of my grandparents, will my own parents live to a long ripe age? And how about myself? Every night before I turn in, I count my blessings that I have one more day with my family and loved ones. I am grateful for the times I have with them. So, my friends, put aside your work and make a commitment to spend this Christmas with your family and loved ones.

Merry Christmas.

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Lego = Innovation = New Revenue Growth

2008-12-14T18:27:00.001-08:00

See this little complimentary gift from Cisco. Lego has made it into the big boys' league.

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Cloud Computing. Is it ready?

2008-12-14T18:12:00.001-08:00

Attended an IDC breakfast event last week on Cloud Computing. Here're the highlights.

1. In terms of IT growth worldwide, US and Europe are the dark spots. Japan and Asia (ex Japan) are showing positive albeit more tapered growth because of the financial crisis.

2.Definition of Cloud Services = Consumer + Business Products, Services and Solutions delivered and consumer on real time over internet (*note = it's real time!)

3. Definition of Cloud Computing = emergent IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real time development of products, services and solutions over Internet (thus enabling cloud services)

4. Cloud Services attributes should have: -

~ provisioned off-site and by third party(ies)

~ via Internet (a hybrid will be over MPLS network to address the concerns of the large enterprises who are inclined to do outsourcing but not running the apps over Internet. Hey, Mr Telco, you have a part to play here!)

~ near real-time deployment; dynamic and scaable

~ pricing model = fine-grained, usage based (or at least as an option)

~ User Interface = Browser (or subsequent successors thereof)

~ Shared resources

5. Worldwide IT Spending (precrisis estimates): in 2008, On-Premise IT $367M; Cloud IT $16M and by 2012, On-Premise IT$ 461M, Cloud IT $42M (CAGR for On-Premise 5%, for Cloud 27%). I think the economic crisis which leads to spending cuts and more outsourcing will be positive for Cloud Computing. Enterprises will be willing to "take some risks" at a more open system for the less sensitive applications.

6. Top Apps for Enteprise Adoption over next 3 years include: IT Mgmt Apps, Collaborative Apps, Personal and Business Apps.

7. Key trends for next year in the ICT area: NextGen Customer Care, Cloud Computing, Thin Client & Virtualisation, Sustainability and Green IT.

8. Besides Cloud Computing, Enterprise Search and Next Generation Customer Care are equally important. Cloud Computing is primarily driven by the focus on cost savings whereas NextGen Customer Care and Search are new growth opportunities.

In my view, the most immediate opportunity in cloud computing lies in the SMB segment, particularly those without their own IT departments and are growing. We should focus on the end-user apps that these SMB needs. In my experience, any SaaS apps in the Finance & Accounting area should not be the top priority. Many SMBs are cautious about having their financial data hosted off-premise and many still prefer to entrust it to a service provider (accounting firm) that they trust rather than a SaaS provider. Be patient. If your SMBs have not used other biz apps other than the basic productivity tools by Microsoft Office, it will take some time to educate them on the benefits. However once the trust level is built, they will hardly switch. Besides, SMBs have less complicated decision making process; in fact for the smaller size companies, the owners generally decide on the IT matters. Finally, prepare to offer similar solutions by various providers at different price tiers and complexities (of course, that only applies if you are an aggregator). If you are a SaaS app developer, make sure that your user interface is not too cluttered with too many functionalities. Sometimes a powerful tool may not be the right tool for the SMBs. They only need to meet one objective. Give them a simple software that meets the objective. Don't attempt to offer more if that means a steeper learning curve. Many SMBs are not tech-savvy and if you simply rely on online marketing and selling, that won't work. Work through channels, conduct free educational workshops. Offer incentives to try out and experience the benefits without commitment.

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Sony Ericsson C905 Cybershot Camera Phone: Is it Worth Getting it for Xmas? Read on...

2008-12-14T08:37:00.001-08:00

Okay, I got the Sony Ericsson C905 and tried it out for a week. Seems like SE is really trying to rejuvenate itself - launched its first windows mobile phone X1 Xperia and now its first 8.1 megapixals phone competing with the LG and Samsung in the camera phone market. Let's get down to the phone hardware first, and then the software.

Phone Hardware

1. SE C905 is a non-touch phone. It's a slider phone and it feels kind of heavy at 136g and slightly bulkier than the equivalent touch phones like Samsung M8800 PIXON or LG RENOIR KC910. However, it is definitely easier to hold in the hands as a compact camera and yes it does have many features of a point and shoot camera (and I'll talk more about that later).

2. Having used the phone day and night for a week, I'm still not quite used to the 'flat' keypad. I feel that the keys are a little too stiff for my liking. Same goes for the navigation controls just below the screen but the control buttons provide easy access to the menu and key functions without having to slide out the keypad.

3. This is not a touch phone so the screen size is smaller. It's 2.4 inch screen with 262K color. The menu UI is easy to recognize and if you are a SE phone supporter, it's not difficult to navigate the phone.

4. From the back of the phone, it does have the look of a Sony camera. The lens is behind a steel panel cover which you need to slide down before taking the photo. This helps to keep the lens clean and free from scratches.

5. Like the rest of the SE phones, this phone uses a proprietary connector for the headphone. This is not the W-series phone so this is not surprising. However, I must say that if you are not an audiophile, this phone is good enough for decent music playback. No doubt, the headphone is a letdown but if you use the speaker, it's loud and sound is clear.

6. The phone has an internal memory of 160MB and has an expandable slot using M2 (memory stick micro) which can have up to 8GB storage. This is one thing that I don't really like about SE. Most of the phones are using microSD (even Sony Ericsson's own Xperia X1) and yet C905 uses M2. There is 16GB for M2 but C905 only supports upto 8GB. So if you have multiple microSDs that you amass from multiple phones, I'm sorry to tell you that you gotta give them up if you want to buy C905. Of course, M2 can also be used in PSP. So all is not lost. You can also use the phone for mass storage. Just connect the phone to the computer and you can then easily transfer files to the M2 card.

7. Nowadays it seems to be a common feature for phones to be equipped with GPS and Google Maps. SE C905 has Google maps and Wayfinder Navigator. Wayfinder offers voice prompt but it is not free. Google maps is free and to me Google maps serves my purpose as I don't need a turn by turn voice navigation.

8. Given the small screen (2.4 inch), this phone is only meant for light browsing, preferably for websites that have web pages formatted for mobile screen. The phone supports WiFi.

9. Last but not least, C905 has several navigation buttons (see pictures) for easy control and access to media, contacts or shortcuts to menu. When the phone is in camera mode, these navigation buttons become shortcuts to adjust the camera settings including flash, exposure, photo size etc. Convenient and easy to use.

Phone OS and Applications

1. SE has included a video demo in the phone. The demo shows that you can easily upload your photos to youtube, flickr, blogger or facebook. The strange thing is that I can only upload my photo to blogger and I can't seem to locate the shortcuts or apps to upload my photo to youtube, flickr or facebook. I wonder is it because it's a test set and hence the sites are not properly set up on the phone. Otherwise, if you know how to install Shozu onto C905, you can do so.

2. SE uses a consistent UI for the media. You see a similar UI for Xperia as well. The UI is probably adopted from the PSP where it shows a list comprising photos, music, video, games, web feeds and settings (see picture). This is a neat way. In addition, C905 offers simple, easy to use editing tools for its videos, photos and music.

3. For those who need to use the phone as a voice recorder, C905 can be used for voice recording. But I don't see how I can mix this into any of its editing tools. It's a pity. It will be interesting if I can insert my voice recording when I'm using the VideoDJ or MusicDJ or even the PhotoDJ (editing apps on the C905).

4. When you switch to the music player, the navigation buttons that serve as shortcuts for the camera function will become the control buttons for the music player. In addition, you can set the equalizer. I won't probably use it with my headphones since I'm quite particular with my earpiece (only Shure for me). I tested the phone by playing the music through its built-in speakers. Sound quality is decent and the speakers are loud. You can also stream music via WiFi.

5. However, unlike the Pixon for example, you can't set the music piece as voice or video call ringtone or caller ringtone. Again, I must stress that this is not the W-series SE phones and I will refrain from having any unrealistic expectations in this respect. However, it may be nice if SE can have a one-click access to its PlayNow Arena music store (http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15371.cfm) rather than having to get out of the music player and go to the menu to access it.

6. With the small screen size, this phone is not going to ideal for video. I won't bother to stretch this phone to be a portable video player.

7. The phone has simple email function. I have set up my Gmail account using IMAP. It works but it cannot open attachment. Again, I just want to say this is primarily a camera phone.

8. I must commend on the camera features. Just to recap - it's 8.1MP with autofocus and 16x digital zoom. It has autoflash (a feature that you can turn off if you don't like). Oh, I should mention that it's Xenon Flash. In addition, the phone offers image stabalizer and several other high end features of a point and shoot camera. I have capture all the screenshots of the camera features (see pictures). In addition, you can easily upload the pictures after taking the photos.

9. Since the USP of SE C905 is the 8.1MP camera, I will elaborate a little more on the features. Under Shoot mode, you can choose Normal, Smart Contrast, BestPic, Panorama, Frames. Under Scenes, you can choose Auto, Twilight Landscape/Portrait, Normal Landscape/Portrait, Beach/Snow, Sports, Document. Under Picture Size, you can choose from as small as 640x480 (best for MMS) right up to 8MP. Under Focus, you can choose Auto, Face Detection, Macro, Infinite. Under Flash, you can set it Auto, Red-eye reduction or Off. There is also a self-timer function and metering mode. You can also select the appropriate White Balance (Auto, Daylight, Cloudy etc) and Effects (B&W, Negative, Sepia, etc). Finally, the other features include picture quality, AF light, Stabiliser, Geo-tagging, Auto-rotation.

10. Finally, SE C905 has a built-in slideshow function for photos and a TV out feature. All you need to do is to choose slide show and connect to the TV and you can start to enjoy all the photos that you have taken. The slideshow has several presets that you can choose. The presets are the transition animations between each photo. However, do note that the TV-out cable is an optional accessory that you have to purchase separately.

Well, if you are a SE phone lover and need a good camera phone, this may be the phone for you, provided the price tag is right. Other than its camera features, it's a rather basic phone and I would not suggest you buy this phone if you don't really need the camera feature.

See the full gallery on posterous

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My Favourite iPhone App for the Festive Season

2008-12-13T05:28:00.001-08:00

Christmas is only 2 weeks away and I just purchased hiCard last week from iTunes. It's definitely not as sweet and as nice as sending proper Christmas cards by mail but the thing is I don't have the most up to date mailing addresses of my friends and associates and quite a number of them are overseas. I'm very sure the email addresses (at least the personal email addresses) will still be valid. So, this hiCard is the best alternative for me. Unlike some free web-based ecard service, the recepient needs to click on the URL in the email to retrieve the card. Using hiCard, the recepient receives the card nicely embedded in email with a personalised message from me.

Merry X'mas!

See the full gallery on posterous

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{UPDATED} Why do I buy so many iPhone apps and what can other smartphones players learn from this?

2008-12-13T05:21:00.001-08:00

I was sitting next to a passenger on the plane when I took out my iPhone to put it on airplane mode. The passenger asked my opinion about the iPhone and he was interested to take a look at the apps I installed on the iPhone. He was rather surprised at the number of apps I have on my iPhone and suddenly it just dawned on me that I had never bought as many apps on other smartphone platforms - whether it's windows mobile, symbian or blackberry. See the recent screenshots on my iPhone. These are not all the apps that I have bought. I have not installed all the apps on the iPhone.

I started to take a closer look at the apps that I have bought over the months on iPhone. I realised that while I have some free apps, most of the apps that I have on iPhone are paid apps. I also start to figure out that over time my spending threshold and risk appetite on iPhone apps have increased. In the past, I would do a more extensive search on the app before I made a decision to buy the app and most of the apps would cost $0.99 to $2.99; nowadays, as long as the app is not more than $5, I will be willing to fork out that money to try that app (of course, I do still read the reviews just to make sure I don't get a lemon!). In fact, I realised that I have bought quite a few apps of the same category. The low price simply removes the entry barrier and increases my willingness to take risk to buy the the app, particularly if you become comfortable with the general quality of the apps that appear on appstore over time.

Now, the interesting thing is I don't really often use most of the apps that I bought. In fact, I have bought some games because I thought the games might just come in handy if I need to kill time and after a good 2-3 months, I have yet to play more than 5 minutes on the game before quitting them. I'm just not into games (that I knew even before I bought the games. I have Nintendo DS Lite and PSP. DS Lite is collecting dust and PSP is given away - together with a few hundred dollars worth of games that I bought). Well, I figured out that it's better to just buy the games from iPhone appstore that cost not more than $10 than to spend a few hundred bucks on game consoles. But games aside, I also have quite a few photography-related apps such as PanoLab pro, Camerabag, Picoli, Photogene. I hardly use them as well. I use twitter on my iPhone and I had tried out quite a few Twitter apps and were not happy with most of them as I often had the error message on host connection. Twittie is now my latest Twitter app.

Other than the pre-installed apps on iPhone, There are not more than 5 apps that I use regularly (by that I mean more than 3 times a week). They are: Newsstand, Speakeasy and Twittie, MProfs, Bloomberg. As the Appstore does not have a trial use (except for some apps which have the lite version and that's entirely at the discretion of the developers), I tend to try out many different apps for the same kind of functionality. Just take the Twitter app for example, I had tried out Twitterlator, Twitteriffic, Twinkle, Twitterfon (you won't see all these in the screen shots now as I've discarded some of these apps) before Twittie. I decided to try out Twittie because of the rave reviews and also because the app is affordable (below my $5 threshold). If Apple really takes customer experience seriously, I would urge Apple to work with the developers to have have a "lite verion" or "trial version - with limited functionality or time limit") for the apps and to review the current rating system (see my earlier post on Appstore rating system).

Perhaps, Google or Blackberry can learn from what Apple has done right (or not so right) for the Appstore. I believe that it will be applications and services on the phone that will create the stickiness. That's why we have Android Marketplace for the G1 phone, Blackberry Application Centre for the Storm. This also explains why Nokia has invested billions of dollars to acquire resources and technologies to create the Ovi services and its Nokia Music Store. When Apple first launched its iPhone 2G more than a year ago, critics were doubtful of Apple's success in the market given that the mobile phone market was already saturated and highly competitive. Well, Apple did not compete in the same playing field. They changed the rules. Instead of competing with the smartphones manufacturers head-on, Apple chose to avoid direct competition by positioning the iPhone as a fun, all-in-one entertainment handset for consumers. A year later, Apple raises the bar with the the introduction of Appstore as a key differentiator for the iPhone 3G.

{New}Whether G1 or Storm will be the iPhone killer, let's see. But one thing is clear: if the phone is not user-friendly, forget about the apps. I had tested Storm for a few days and quite honestly, I was not used to the touch and click. I literally had finger-ache. I could not type using holding the Storm in portrait mode because I was not used to the SureType keypad. I had to tilt the phone to a landscape mode. Storm provides the SurePress keypad in full Qwerty form. Holding the Storm in landscape mode and having to press on the screen was just not my cup of tea. G1 is gaining speed with its Android Marketplace. In fact, Wikitude which uses Augmented Reality has been made available on G1 and not on iPhone. At least for now the web-based cut and paste function Pastebud is made available by using javascript bookmarklets. Not exactly ideal - but at least it's a workaround. For that matter, another app SaveMyDocs is another workaround using javascript to allow you to save documents opened in Safari for offline reading.

See the full gallery on posterous

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iPhone Stylus : Do you really need it?

2008-12-13T00:21:00.001-08:00

I bought this little stylus pen for $10 (http://www.oriongadgets.com/2182.html). I don't really need a stylus for my sms or my emails. In fact, I'm now at a typing speed that's nearly as fast as I am when using my Qwerty Keyboard X1 xperia. This was first produced in 2007 and was meant for users who are not used to tapping the virtual keypad. My intent for buying this is not really for tapping the keypad. It's more for me to use the application Brushes (http://brushesapp.com/). I thought this makes it easier for me to colour the pictures that I'm drawing on brushes. Well, I do think it's kind of expensive for a piece of plastic and rubber tip for $10. But it does serve some use for me. The only thing is there is no way I can strap it to my iPhone and this only increases the probability that I will lose it in no time.

See the full gallery on posterous

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iPhone Tips: How to Increase Your Productivity at Work

2008-12-12T05:11:00.001-08:00

iPhone may come with only 2MP camera but it's really good enough to use for note-taking in a meeting. Nowadays I tend to just use my iPhone camera and take a snapshot of what's scribbled on the white board during brainstorming session and I can devote my attention on the discussion itself. I keep a copy of the photo on iPhone and I am able to zoom in and pan on the iPhone to see the details. I will use the iPhone to upload a copy to Evernote (www.evernote.com) and also email a copy to my own Gmail account. When I have the opportunity, I then connect to my MacBook and synchronise it into iPhoto.

Besides work, iPhone is also my portable video library. All I need is to bring along the composite AV cable (http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB129). I jst need to plug into the hotel TV set and play the video on my iPhone. Simple and convenient. I can charge the phone with the composite cable by plugging the USB connector into my computer (if I have one) or the power adapter. What's great about this is that you can also use it as a back up for your important presentations. If you have a Mac, convert your powerpoint or keynote presentation into Quicktime format which preserves the customised animation in the slides and synchronise it into the iPhone. Although I have not encountered any situation where I need to use this emergency back up, it nonetheless gives me peace of mind and I know that even if my computer crashes, I will still have the presentation loaded in no time!

Another road warrior that I have with me all the time is the Mophie Juice Pack (http://www.mophie.com/products/juice-pack). Well, no doubt I need to remove my nice little back cover that I have on my iPhone, it's really not a big issue. The juice pack is designed like a back cover and you just need to slip your iPhone into the cover and it starts charging. What's great about the juice pack is that once the iPhone is fully charged and if you still have the Mophie Juice Pack attached to the iPhone, iPhone will first deplete the battery on the Mophie Juice Pack and retains the charge on the iPhone. It gives me up 6 to 8 extra hours and that's good enough to last me the whole day without having worry about my iPhone running out of juice. At $100 bucks, it's well worth every penny.

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Which Phone should you buy for What

2008-12-11T06:57:00.001-08:00

If you want to buy a phone for

(1) Browsing, choose iPhone or G1. Forget the rest.

(2) Camera, consider LG Renoir KC 910 or Samsung Pixon M8800 for touch screens, or the Samsung Innov8 I8510.

(3) Email, consider iPhone, G1 (most ideally set up for PUSH Gmail but also support other emails), Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia (for PUSH Microsoft Exchange), Blackberry Storm.

(4) Videos, buy one that has at least a 3.2inch screen size. G1 has a slightly faster web page loading and faster buffering for Youtubes (when I compare to iPhone).

(5) Music, Nokia XpressMusic 5800.

(6) Good touch experience, get iPhone because it's capacitive screen and not resistive screen.

(7) Apps especially Games, buy iPhone

That's all for now. I'm now holding 3 phones in my hand. LG Renoir, Samsung Innov8 and Sony Ericsson C905 - all 8MP camera phones. More reviews coming up in a few days. If you have anything in particular you would like to know about the phones, drop me a note. I'll do my best.

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Lone Pine Sanctury, Brisbane, Australia

2008-12-07T18:44:00.001-08:00

Where you can find the cute koala bears. So how far are you from here?
- iPhone upload by ShoZu

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Why do I buy so many iPhone apps and what can other smartphones players learn from this?

2008-12-06T06:06:00.001-08:00

See the full gallery on posterous

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X1 Xperia - my road warrior

2008-12-04T03:24:00.001-08:00

I was a little shocked that it would cost me over $20 per Mb for my data roaming in Australia. The data charges simply deter me from doing much work on the net, except occasional checking of my emails. While my iPhone is my predominant phone for emails and web-browsing, I do have Xperia X1 with me this time round in Australia. It came in handy when I'm asked to retrieve an old document that the bosses needed urgently. Not having any internet connection for my macbook since I am on the road, I simply plugged in the X1 into my macbook and use the micro-SD card in X1 as a remote hard disk. I transferred the file into the micro-SD card and sent it out via email using my X1. Of course, if you are tech-savvy, you can always do the modem-tethering method but it's a more troublesome as you first need to set up the Bluetooth connection between the two and you need to know the number to dial for connection.

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On Holidays in Brisbane

2008-12-02T00:34:00.001-08:00

Just arrived into Brisbane for my holidays...

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just my 2 cents worth on iPhone Appstore Rating System

2008-11-29T08:00:00.001-08:00

I am not an avid photographer but I do enjoy taking photos using my iphone to capture some instant moments that will otherwise slip past. And I'm quite inspired by Greg Schmigel's iPhone Photography blog ( http://justwhatisee.com ). I started to try out some iPhone applications that I can use to apply different filters to the photos and email to my friend or upload to my Flickr website. I come to realise that Apple's rating system has little meaning to me.

Appstore had limited apps on photography when it first started. Now it has over 10 pages of photography-related apps. I don't have the patience to go through all the reviews and I depend on the average rating to make a quick decision whether to review further. Then I realise that the average rating is actually quite flawed. Firstly, it can be skewed if there are more comments given on the first version of the app then on the subsequent version / update. Secondly, not many people will revise the rating even if they download an updated improved version of the app. Thirdly, there are no date stamp on the reviews. Although the most recent review will be shown first, you simply have no idea if this review is about the first version of the app or subsequent versions. Just take an example: if an app is downloaded 1000 times when it first made the debut and isonly downloaded 10 times since the last revision, it will be "draggeddown" by the average rating as it's highly skewed, regardless if greatimprovements have been made to the latest version of the app.

If Apple is indeed betting on Appstore as the future for iPhone, it should improve the rating system - this not only benefits the developers but also the customers. While I agree that the Appstore should still maintain the average rating of the app since the debut of the app at Appstore, it should also show separate ratings for different versions of the application so that a reader can know at one glance if the app has a better rating since the last revision. In addition, it should correspondingly filter and only display the comments regarding a particular version of the app instead of the full laundry list (which of course could be an option if the reader chooses to view all). Plus, it will be useful to know how many times has the app been downloaded. I'm sure this will provide better user experience and will be something welcomed by the developer. If the developer has indeed made great improvements to the app, he deserves to charge at a higher price and customers will be willing to pay if the rating is indeed good and the comments are indeed positive. Today, you can't really tell unless you read all the comments and try to make out whether the comments are referring to the latest version of the app or the earlier version.

Perhaps Android or Blackberry can also consider doing the same.

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

{UPDATED} Wow, should I get SAMSUNG PIXON or NOKIA XPRESSMUSIC 5800? Which One?

2008-11-27T09:59:00.001-08:00

Would like to thank Mike for pointing out the oversight I made about ShoZu and I would like to repost my review on Pixon 8800 to make sure that all my readers are correctly informed. If you are re-reading the post, please the correction is made to point 11 under Phone OS and Applications.

Further to the short video demo that I uploaded yesterday, here is the point by point analysis of the phone. I hope you enjoy it.

Phone Hardware

1. Samsung has clearly taken the pole position in the phone-camera category. In a short span of months, Samsung has pushed out her second 8 megapixals (MP) camera – Samsung M8800 PIXON after i8510 INNOV8. Clearly, no other phones except LG perhaps can come close to Samsung in this area. PIXON is the slimmest phone with a 8 megapixals resolution, a record previously held by LG RENOIR KC910 (a successor to LG KC990 VIEWTY).

2. PIXON is a 3.2 inch touchscreen phone but it's not the first touchscreen phone launched by Samsung. However unlike OMNIA, M8800 PIXON is not a windows mobile phone. It is also not using Symbian OS which is the OS for INNOV8. Instead, it uses Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz interface (I'll touch more about the phone OS and applications in the later section)

3. Let's talk about the camera feature first since this is the key USP for PIXON. The new PIXON is equipped with the core functions that you will find on any Samsung's low end point and shoot range camera. PIXON's camera features include auto-focus, 16x digital zoom (which, to me, is pretty useless if you want a high quality shoot. Optical zoom will be much more important), fast-shutter and face detection. And of course, being a phone, it provides the geo-tagging function and easy uploading via the mobile internet.

4. It's natural that that we compare PIXON to LG RENOIR since both have 8MP camera. While I have not tested LG RENOIR, I learnt from third party sources that RENOIR uses Schneider-Kreuznach lens and Xenon flash. PIXON on the other hand uses plastic lens and dual LED flash. In addition, RENOIR has active autofocus whereas PIXON uses passive autofocus. But the report also commented that camera speed-wise, PIXON has an edge over RENOIR and PIXON has a more friendly user-interface. ( http://technorati.com/posts/OpbBYGK7SrgKE3pAz_SSxWJrJcNHyvOX4y9G993i3j0%3D ).

5. Putting aside the camera feature, I tend to compare this to Nokia XpressMusic 5800 as well. Both are very lightweight (PIXON 121g and Nokia 109g). Both have long battery life with Nokia winning by a slight margin (Samsung has talktime of upto 3 hours and 40 minutes and standby of 290 hours; Nokia has talktime of up to 4 hours and standby of upto 300hours). However, unlike Nokia, Samsung has only 256k colors. Nokia 5800 by contrast, supports 16m colors.

6. Some other similar features are the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and full virtual Qwerty keyboard and built-in GPS. PIXON uses Google Maps whereas Nokia has its own Nokia MAPS (which requires a subscription). However, Google maps is free and to me Google maps serves my purpose as I don't need a turn by turn voice navigation.

7. Samsung PIXON also uses a resistive screen and as mentioned in my earlier post on Nokia XpressMusic 5800, I am not very used to the "touch" on resistive screen. It requires you to exert pressure on the screen to scroll down. It requires more deliberate efforts to scroll than the multi-touch capacitive screen on iPhone.

8. PIXON uses proprietary headset jack. But all is not lost. You are able to connect a 3.5mm normal earphone to the connector provided by Samsung. The only thing is you can't afford to lose this connector. In addition, the phone also has the ability to do TV out. You have to purchase the accessories separately.

9. PIXON has an internal storage of 200M (much larger than Nokia 5800's) and similar to most phones today it has an expandable memory slot using microSD card.

10. In terms of its speakers' quality, Samsung included its own SRS (surround sound system). By comparison, I feel that Nokia 5800 is a cut above Samsung when I play the same song using the speakers. The music player also boosts some presets (in total 8 of them). However, unlike Nokia's XpressMusic, you can't change the presets to customise your own. (More about this in the later section)

11. While PIXON has a 3.2 inch screen, its browser is not friendly. You can't open several tabs at one go. And because it has resistive screen, it is not using to navigate with fingers as you need to press against the screen as you move around on a web page. But what I like about the phone is that you can zoom in and out by using the volume up/down button or to use the virtual buttons on the screen. Both are easy to control. I don't' encourage you to buy the phone if you intend to browse a lot. Besides the less-friendly browser and browsing capability, PIXON does NOT support WiFi. WiFi is important for me because I tend to put my phone on WiFi when I'm at home or in the office so that I don't have to pay for cellular data charges. PIXON is not the right phone for web-browsing. iPhone or G1 are clearly far better choices.

12. Last but not least, PIXON has several physical buttons to provide one-click access. It has 3 buttons at the bottom of the screen. The left and right buttons are self-explanatory (making and ending calls / power switch). The middle button is NOT a home or menu button. Rather it is a "Back" button. I had thought it would be easier to have a Menu button but Samsung has designed the Menu button as a virtual button (read on to find out). On one side of the phones are the camera button and the volume buttons (which can act as zoom in/out and and scroll up /down depending on the application that you are running). On the other side of the phone are the hold button and a menu button that provides a virtual menu for quick access to "call", "music player", "messages", "browser", "main menu" and back.

Phone OS and Applications

1. As mentioned earlier, the phone uses TouchWiz OS. It has several widgets on the home screen that you can pull out from the side of the screen to the main screen. Some neat widgets include Google Search, Weather Channel, Favourite Contacts, Photo Album, Music Player and others that are already pre-installed on the phone and many more that can be downloaded from Samsung FunClub website.

2. Pixon's organizer application comes with some handy tools such as Calendar, Memo, Task, World Clock, Calculator and Converter.

3. For the music player, the interface is very friendly and easy to use. You can set any piece as voice or video call ringtone or caller ringtone. You have the option to decide whether to allow background music playing. It has an additional feature similar to the Shazam. PIXON has this application called the "Music Recognition". It will try to identify the song that you are playing. I have not tried out too many songs (in fact, only a few), hence it's not fair for me to comment on the accuracy. So far it recognizes most of the songs I bought from iTunes. Between the two phones, I'll recommend Nokia XpressMusic 5800 over Samsung PIXON for music not just because Nokia 5800 has better music player features and speakers but also because Nokia is targeting squarely at the iTunes market with the music store via its Come with Music service.

4. Nowadays most phones have both music and video players. Given the 3.2 inch screen size, it's comfortable to play a video or movie on it. What's neat about the video player is that you can choose to upload to web or to send via email/MMS or Bluetooth (same for music) and even add tags to it (only for videos). You can view the video in either portrait or landscape mode.

5. In addition, PIXON has this Video Editor application that allows you to insert one video track and two audio tracks. You can choose 176x144 or 320x240 for the resolution settings. You can choose from 5 different effects (Emboss, Black&White, Sepia, Solarise, Sharpen) to apply on the video. Interesting tool for you to make your own little impromptu video.

6. Just to also mention that the phone has a voice recorder application but it can only record up to a maximum of 60 minutes. I thought if Samsung really wanted this to be a "fun phone" for photo-taking and video editing, it should perhaps include some effects to make some tweaks to the voice. What you can do for video editing is only to trim the length.

7. Don't bang on this phone too much for games. PIXON has some pre-installed games (mostly for trial only). It doesn't have the depth and breadth of an iPhone appstore.

9. The phone can be used easily for mass storage. It has a Documents Viewer application that allows you to open Microsoft Office (only 2003 and not 2007) documents. This is a pleasant surprise to me. I have tested it out on a few powerpoint files (since I tend to deal a lot with powerpoint files). You can view in portrait or landscape mode. And more surprisingly it has a Search Function. This means I can go to certain particular slide easily if I can remember the keywords in that slide. The viewer has a zoom function too.

10. Okay, I just want to say that this phone is not cut out to support heavy duty email. Of course, PIXON is never provided for that. It can support POP3 or IMAP. I have tried setting up using IMAP. I realised that it seems slow in processing my emails. There is also a limit on the size of the file that you can download. Only up to 5Mb. Most powerpoint file that I receive tends to be bigger than 5Mb. So this is practically of no use to me. If you just want simple text reading, this phone serves the purpose. If you read my earlier post on Nokia 5800, I mentioned that Nokia 5800 supports Mail For Exchange which allows synchronisation of Inbox, Calendar and Tasks. For PIXON, only basic email function is supported.

11. CORRECTION: Samsung includes the ShoZu application which serves as an aggregator platform to allow a user to easily access many social networking sites including Facebook, Blogger, Picassa (for more details, please visit www.shozu.com and it also just launched an application that runs on iPhone). This provides a one-click convenience for a user to have a single sign on to access all these sites. The litmus test is the single sign on capability (that is user will not suffer from frequent timeout errors or disconnections from the sites that he wishes to access through Shozu and the ease of use of the application itself (by that I mean the interface design and navigation). I'll be using Shozu over the next few days and will write a post on this next week.

12. PIXON has a Photo Album application that uses its built-in accelerometer sensor. Not only does it auto-rotate the screen when you change the orientation of the phone, it also allows you to advance back and forth easily by tilting the phone. Cool way to view hundreds of photos quickly.

13. There is another neat thing I like about this phone. At times, we may send a sms to the wrong party. This phone has this "precautionary" feature built in by requiring you to click the "Done" virtual button so that you can preview your entire message again before sending out. In addition, when you type your message, the textbox is enlarged so that you can view your draft message easily. You can choose to use the normal phone keypad or handwritten (using the stylus) mode or the virtual Qwerty keyboard. However, I somehow feel that it is a little slower than most phones in sending out the messages. Not sure if it's because it has the dialog box that shows "Sending" and hence the perception that it's taking a bit longer.

14. Lastly, I just want to say that this phone supports RSS. This means you can import your favourite feeds into the phone easily. That's something I must have for all phones. Feeds are my daily needs.

So in summary, I would say that if you are looking for a phone that can double up as a proper camera and have decent music and video players. This is the phone to go for. It has long battery life. This is important for taking photos and playing videos. Plus with the light weight, I really won't mind carrying one more gadget with me.

See the full gallery on posterous

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Google vs Apple in the New Mobile World

2008-11-26T19:25:00.001-08:00

I thoroughly enjoy being a handset reviewer. I'm always one of the few to have the privilege to try out new handsets. And just to say how much I really love being in this role - I only write a review after I feel that I've tested the handset enough and have a good assessment of the proos and cons. Every review that I write is not a mere collection of secondary sources. It's my own assessment after using the test set that I'm given for a few days. But well, what few people know is that I ended up being a handset reviewer (as part of my job scope) by chance because I was really looking at the SaaS trends and the future product roadmap in the mobility and collaboration space.

As phones become more and more like mini-computers, the types of applications running on the phones become more and more important. More and more people use phone for doing more than just making phone calls and SMS/MMS or emails. I use my phone to tweet, to check out my news feed, to play games and videos, listen to music and do some simple photo editing.

Between Apple and Google. I am placing my bet with Google. While Apple is really good with its devices and has huge success with its Appstore, Apple is still very much in the consumer space. Apple is driving iPhone adoption in the enterprise market by supporting Microsoft Outlook Exchange push mail and leaving it to the software developers or SaaS providers such as salesforce.com or sugarsync to develop iPhone applications. Its move into push mail for Outlook Exchange has certainly waken RIM up. RIM has just launched its business grade iPhone-equivalent as a retaliatory tactic (see my other post on Blackberry Storm).

Google on the other hand uses a flanking approach. It does not support Microsoft Exchange push email and therefore does not attract much attention from RIM. G1's target segments are users who really love to have push capabilities for email, calendar and contacts and yet do not want to pay for Apple Mobile-Me or the great fans of Gmail users who desire to have the push capability as well as the small businesses who do not have outlook exchange and are or intend to use web-based emails. In addition, I believe over time Google will replicate its full suite of desktop apps onto its mobility roadmap. All the Google apps are part of a growing suite of services that support search, collaboration and mobility.

While the form factor of the G1 phone is not exactly as sexy as that of an iPhone, the G1 phone and Android software are really designed to support search, collaboration and mobility. To facilitate its mobility roadmap, Google made Android an open platform so that developers can access the core mobile device functionality through standard APIs to develop apps that truly encourage collaboration and mobility. I won't be surprised if Google starts to make the mobile version of its Google Gadgets available on its Android platform. That means the Google gadgets can be placed easily on my mini-mobile web pages or microblogs.

Where would you place your bet on? Google or Apple?

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Wow, should I get SAMSUNG PIXON or NOKIA XPRESSMUSIC 5800? Which One?

2008-11-24T06:38:00.001-08:00

Further to the short video demo that I uploaded yesterday, here is the point by point analysis of the phone. I hope you enjoy it.

Phone Hardware

1. Samsung has clearly taken the pole position in the phone-camera category. In a short span of months, Samsung has pushed out her second 8 megapixals (MP) camera – Samsung M8800 PIXON after i8510 INNOV8. Clearly, no other phones except LG perhaps can come close to Samsung in this area. PIXON is the slimmest phone with a 8 megapixals resolution, a record previously held by LG RENOIR KC910 (a successor to LG KC990 VIEWTY).

2. PIXON is a 3.2 inch touchscreen phone but it's not the first touchscreen phone launched by Samsung. However unlike OMNIA, M8800 PIXON is not a windows mobile phone. It is also not using Symbian OS which is the OS for INNOV8. Instead, it uses Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz interface (I'll touch more about the phone OS and applications in the later section)

3. Let's talk about the camera feature first since this is the key USP for PIXON. The new PIXON is equipped with the core functions that you will find on any Samsung's low end point and shoot range camera. PIXON's camera features include auto-focus, 16x digital zoom (which, to me, is pretty useless if you want a high quality shoot. Optical zoom will be much more important), fast-shutter and face detection. And of course, being a phone, it provides the geo-tagging function and easy uploading via the mobile internet.

4. It's natural that that we compare PIXON to LG RENOIR since both have 8MP camera. While I have not tested LG RENOIR, I learnt from third party sources that RENOIR uses Schneider-Kreuznach lens and Xenon flash. PIXON on the other hand uses plastic lens and dual LED flash. In addition, RENOIR has active autofocus whereas PIXON uses passive autofocus. But the report also commented that camera speed-wise, PIXON has an edge over RENOIR and PIXON has a more friendly user-interface. ( http://technorati.com/posts/OpbBYGK7SrgKE3pAz_SSxWJrJcNHyvOX4y9G993i3j0%3D ).

5. Putting aside the camera feature, I tend to compare this to Nokia XpressMusic 5800 as well. Both are very lightweight (PIXON 121g and Nokia 109g). Both have long battery life with Nokia winning by a slight margin (Samsung has talktime of upto 3 hours and 40 minutes and standby of 290 hours; Nokia has talktime of up to 4 hours and standby of upto 300hours). However, unlike Nokia, Samsung has only 256k colors. Nokia 5800 by contrast, supports 16m colors.

6. Some other similar features are the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and full virtual Qwerty keyboard and built-in GPS. PIXON uses Google Maps whereas Nokia has its own Nokia MAPS (which requires a subscription). However, Google maps is free and to me Google maps serves my purpose as I don't need a turn by turn voice navigation.

7. Samsung PIXON also uses a resistive screen and as mentioned in my earlier post on Nokia XpressMusic 5800, I am not very used to the "touch" on resistive screen. It requires you to exert pressure on the screen to scroll down. It requires more deliberate efforts to scroll than the multi-touch capacitive screen on iPhone.

8. PIXON uses proprietary headset jack. But all is not lost. You are able to connect a 3.5mm normal earphone to the connector provided by Samsung. The only thing is you can't afford to lose this connector. In addition, the phone also has the ability to do TV out. You have to purchase the accessories separately.

9. PIXON has an internal storage of 200M (much larger than Nokia 5800's) and similar to most phones today it has an expandable memory slot using microSD card.

10. In terms of its speakers' quality, Samsung included its own SRS (surround sound system). By comparison, I feel that Nokia 5800 is a cut above Samsung when I play the same song using the speakers. The music player also boosts some presets (in total 8 of them). However, unlike Nokia's XpressMusic, you can't change the presets to customise your own. (More about this in the later section)

11. While PIXON has a 3.2 inch screen, its browser is not friendly. You can't open several tabs at one go. And because it has resistive screen, it is not using to navigate with fingers as you need to press against the screen as you move around on a web page. But what I like about the phone is that you can zoom in and out by using the volume up/down button or to use the virtual buttons on the screen. Both are easy to control. I don't' encourage you to buy the phone if you intend to browse a lot. Besides the less-friendly browser and browsing capability, PIXON does NOT support WiFi. WiFi is important for me because I tend to put my phone on WiFi when I'm at home or in the office so that I don't have to pay for cellular data charges. PIXON is not the right phone for web-browsing. iPhone or G1 are clearly far better choices.

12. Last but not least, PIXON has several physical buttons to provide one-click access. It has 3 buttons at the bottom of the screen. The left and right buttons are self-explanatory (making and ending calls / power switch). The middle button is NOT a home or menu button. Rather it is a "Back" button. I had thought it would be easier to have a Menu button but Samsung has designed the Menu button as a virtual button (read on to find out). On one side of the phones are the camera button and the volume buttons (which can act as zoom in/out and and scroll up /down depending on the application that you are running). On the other side of the phone are the hold button and a menu button that provides a virtual menu for quick access to "call", "music player", "messages", "browser", "main menu" and back.

Phone OS and Applications

1. As mentioned earlier, the phone uses TouchWiz OS. It has several widgets on the home screen that you can pull out from the side of the screen to the main screen. Some neat widgets include Google Search, Weather Channel, Favourite Contacts, Photo Album, Music Player and others that are already pre-installed on the phone and many more that can be downloaded from Samsung FunClub website.

2. Pixon's organizer application comes with some handy tools such as Calendar, Memo, Task, World Clock, Calculator and Converter.

3. For the music player, the interface is very friendly and easy to use. You can set any piece as voice or video call ringtone or caller ringtone. You have the option to decide whether to allow background music playing. It has an additional feature similar to the Shazam. PIXON has this application called the "Music Recognition". It will try to identify the song that you are playing. I have not tried out too many songs (in fact, only a few), hence it's not fair for me to comment on the accuracy. So far it recognizes most of the songs I bought from iTunes. Between the two phones, I'll recommend Nokia XpressMusic 5800 over Samsung PIXON for music not just because Nokia 5800 has better music player features and speakers but also because Nokia is targeting squarely at the iTunes market with the music store via its Come with Music service.

4. Nowadays most phones have both music and video players. Given the 3.2 inch screen size, it's comfortable to play a video or movie on it. What's neat about the video player is that you can choose to upload to web or to send via email/MMS or Bluetooth (same for music) and even add tags to it (only for videos). You can view the video in either portrait or landscape mode.

5. In addition, PIXON has this Video Editor application that allows you to insert one video track and two audio tracks. You can choose 176x144 or 320x240 for the resolution settings. You can choose from 5 different effects (Emboss, Black&White, Sepia, Solarise, Sharpen) to apply on the video. Interesting tool for you to make your own little impromptu video.

6. Just to also mention that the phone has a voice recorder application but it can only record up to a maximum of 60 minutes. I thought if Samsung really wanted this to be a "fun phone" for photo-taking and video editing, it should perhaps include some effects to make some tweaks to the voice. What you can do for video editing is only to trim the length.

7. Don't bang on this phone too much for games. PIXON has some pre-installed games (mostly for trial only). It doesn't have the depth and breadth of an iPhone appstore.

9. The phone can be used easily for mass storage. It has a Documents Viewer application that allows you to open Microsoft Office (only 2003 and not 2007) documents. This is a pleasant surprise to me. I have tested it out on a few powerpoint files (since I tend to deal a lot with powerpoint files). You can view in portrait or landscape mode. And more surprisingly it has a Search Function. This means I can go to certain particular slide easily if I can remember the keywords in that slide. The viewer has a zoom function too.

10. Okay, I just want to say that this phone is not cut out to support heavy duty email. Of course, PIXON is never provided for that. It can support POP3 or IMAP. I have tried setting up using IMAP. I realised that it seems slow in processing my emails. There is also a limit on the size of the file that you can download. Only up to 5Mb. Most powerpoint file that I receive tends to be bigger than 5Mb. So this is practically of no use to me. If you just want simple text reading, this phone serves the purpose. If you read my earlier post on Nokia 5800, I mentioned that Nokia 5800 supports Mail For Exchange which allows synchronisation of Inbox, Calendar and Tasks. For PIXON, only basic email function is supported.

11. What I find strange is that Samsung includes ShoZu for MobileBlog (which also allows you to upload your photo to ShoZu). I thought it would be more useful to include a Flickr or Facebook application since this is primary a camera phone. But then again, Samsung may want to encourage people to do micro-blogging and hence ShoZu application will fit the bill.

12. PIXON has a Photo Album application that uses its built-in accelerometer sensor. Not only does it auto-rotate the screen when you change the orientation of the phone, it also allows you to advance back and forth easily by tilting the phone. Cool way to view hundreds of photos quickly.

13. There is another neat thing I like about this phone. At times, we may send a sms to the wrong party. This phone has this "precautionary" feature built in by requiring you to click the "Done" virtual button so that you can preview your entire message again before sending out. In addition, when you type your message, the textbox is enlarged so that you can view your draft message easily. You can choose to use the normal phone keypad or handwritten (using the stylus) mode or the virtual Qwerty keyboard. However, I somehow feel that it is a little slower than most phones in sending out the messages. Not sure if it's because it has the dialog box that shows "Sending" and hence the perception that it's taking a bit longer.

14. Lastly, I just want to say that this phone supports RSS. This means you can import your favourite feeds into the phone easily. That's something I must have for all phones. Feeds are my daily needs.

So in summary, I would say that if you are looking for a phone that can double up as a proper camera and have decent music and video players. This is the phone to go for. It has long battery life. This is important for taking photos and playing videos. Plus with the light weight, I really won't mind carrying one more gadget with me.

See the full gallery on posterous

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Samsung Pixon M8800 : Short Video Overview of Phone. Buy the Phone if you like to take photos or videos. Read on...

2008-11-23T06:59:00.001-08:00

This is my first attempt to upload an actual demo of Samsung M8800. I have been asked by some of the readers to include photos or videos if possible. So here is the first video on Samsung Pixon 8800. If you find the video useful, please leave me a note in the comment box so that I know if I should continue doing this in the future.

I was mulling over whether I should upload the video together with my detailed review but I decided against it. I thought it would benefit some of you who are just interested to have a quick two minutes view of how the phone looks like and what are the key features and how is the user interface. In summary, this phone is great if you are really looking for a high megapixals camera (and yet a light weight one) and are interested to snap photos or videos on the fly and do simple video editing. In addition, it's music player, while not as great as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

In the next part of the review, I would include screenshots of Samsung Pixon 8800 and run through the phone point by point. Do look out for it. Once again, if you find this video useful, please drop me a note in the comment box or send me a tweet @poohwinn. Thanks.

Click here to download:

Samsung Pixon M8800 Nov 2008.m4v (12960 KB)

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More on Blackberry Storm

2008-11-22T09:27:00.001-08:00

In my earlier post on Blackberry Storm ( http://is.gd/8fwc ), I compared Storm to iPhone.

To hear more views on Blackberry Storm, go to Buzz3r.

http://www.buzz3r.com/cluster-bar/blackberry-creates-its-own-storm-mixed-reviews_1/

So whats your view? Share with us!

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous

How Apple iPhone Changes the Market Landscape and What Should Carriers Do?

2008-11-22T07:13:00.001-08:00

The runaway success of iPhone across the world has indeed revolutionalised the next generation of phones. Before the debut of iPhone, touch phones were at best a good to have feature. For example, resisitive screens have always been available on Windows Mobile phones, but it was not THE thing. We would always prefer a physical keyboard and a stylus. Apple changed the game when it launched its first generation of iPhone 2G/Edge . We are awed by the convenience of touch and the ease of zooming in and out of internet pages by panning and pinching with our fingers. The capacitive screen brought the touch phones to a new level. (see here for more details on how capactitive screen works: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone2.htm )

Since then, we have seen a slew of phones that aim to provide the similar touch and accelerometer capabilities as the iPhone. I said similar and not same because to date, I have yet to test a phone that offers the same level of finess in its touch and accelerometer capabilities (see my other posts on the recent phone models). Storm and G1 are close competitors to iPhone in this aspect - they make it up with many other features that are missing in iPhone today - such as expandable slot, MMS, copy and paste function, just to mention a few). If you may remember, Samsung Omnia had some good success, particularly in countries where iPhone 3G was / would be launched later than Omnia. Now almost all major phone manufacturers from Nokia to Sony Ericsson to HTC have their touch phones series. I won't belabour too much on each of these phones since this is not the intent of this post. I thought this is healthy for the market. Now, we have more choices. Apple has indeed caused a disruptive change in the competitive landscape in just 2 short years. It has even overtaken RIM's second position in smartphone sales. Of course, now with Verizon launching Storm, we have yet to see how this will pan out.

iPhone is not simply about the Phone itself. In fact, iPhone brings with it an ecosystem - the iTunes. If you are a Blackberry user especially if you are a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) corporate user, you have very applications that you would buy and load into your Blackberry. Reasons are two-fold. Firstly, the range of applications is limited and certain corporate policies may prohibit installation of third party apps. Secondly, the applications are relatively expensive, say about $10 or $20 or more. Thirdly, traditional Blackberry phone is really meant for one core functionality - messaging. The same goes for Windows Mobile phone or Symbian Phones. To be fair, I must say that there are many third party Windows Mobile applications that are availabie. There is no lack of applications. Then one might wonder, why didn't the "appstore" concept take the central stage in the past so many years since the availability of Windows Mobile phones. Let's look back in history. Windows Mobile was an attempt by Microsoft to take away market share from RIM by extending its dominant reach in the PC market and desktop Windows / Microsoft Outlook base to the mobile world. The whole "wow" factor of having a Windows Mobile phone was that you were able to finally synchronise your emails, calendar appointments and contacts over the air. The big "PUSH EMAIL" capabilitiy was why people wanted to buy a Windows Mobile phone. Plus, the early Blackberry gadgets limited phone functions as its primary purpose was for messaging. Even then, it was a real pain to read attachments on Blackberry. Windows Mobile made up for the shortcomings in Blackberry. Not only do I not need an activation pin/password that is required for my Blackberry (which is different from your Outlook user name / password and domain), I can easily set up my email outlook account on my Windows Mobile phone anytime. Reading attachments was much better on Windows Mobile phone. I could also buy third party applications like Documents To Go. In the case of Blackberry, while similar third party apps for reading attachments are available, they are usually on a subscription model (if you are recall, you could not download and save attachments from a Blackberry back then. You could only open them).

Fast forward to today. What has Apple done? When Apple launched iPhone 2G, Apple was not targeting at enterprise users. It avoided direct head-on competition with either Windows Mobile or RIM. Instead, it aim straight at consumers. Apple leveraged on its core competence - designed a phone that had the form factor which would wow people as an iMAC or MACBOOK did and positioned the phone as a all-in-one for voice, videos, photos, and music. This is what a Apple is good at. By then iTunes was already widely used by both Mac and Windows users and people were used to buying music and synchronising it into iPod. No doubt there would be some cannibalisation on the iPods, but the upside was far bigger. iPhone would allow Apple to make inroads into the mobile world and take a slice of the mobile market which would tip 1.8 billion by end 2007 (estimate from Yankee Group report).

Apple upped its ante in 2008 with the launch of iPhone 3G and this time, Apple aimed squarely at the enterprise market by annoucing the capability of provide Exchange push mail. This will expand its addressable market to some "prosumers" who are at two minds about using iPhone because of the lack of Exchange push mail. Most importantly, the linchpin of Apple's iPhone strategy again lies in its iTunes contents and ecosystem. This time, it announced the availablity of appstore on iTunes. Free applications would be available. Paid applications would start as low as $0.99. This lowered the entry barrier for consumers to try out many types of applications. I would not mind paying just under $5 for any application. Most of the applications were largely games and utilities tools initially but as more and more corporations adopt iPhone, we see that more and more software developers are now incorporating mobile applications on iPhone into their roadmaps. I'm sure Apple would realise that as user loads more and more applications onto the iPhone, he is less reluctant to switch to a different phone and loses all the applications that he has been using or has bought. This is very strong customer stickiness. RIM must have realised this and thus it's luanching its first Application Centre to support Blackberry OS 4.7 (which is what Storm's OS is). If you take a leaf from Apple's iPod strategy, Apple is not going to rest on its laurels and cede the market share. Apple will push out new upgrades on iPhone firmwares (Just look at the time interval between major firmware upgrades 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 - it's getting shorter). Let's see over the next few months how the competition will heat up. In the meantime, sit back and hold tight to the coming mobile war.

While social networking such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter became popular way before iPhone took the market by storm (let's see if Blackberry Storm will replicate this success), iPhone has popularised this even more. Now, I can easily access do my 'twittering' or update my flickr or facebook easily with one button on the iPhone. The types of iPhone social networking apps, particularly for Twitter, reflects the underlying trend. Now even Sony Ericsson X1 has a new panel for Facebook. Storm will also come with pre-installed application for Flickr and Facebook. Given the increasing penetration of social networking tools, I'm wondering why carriers (telco operators) are not leveraging on this for their marketing or customer support. I think there is a lot of opportunity in the social media marketing that the carriers are missing out. I have yet to come across a carrier that is proactively using blogs or twitter to do product releases or news updates or to use social networking tools to make product or event annoucements. Going forward, phones will become more powerful and applications running on the phones become the key factor to creating customer stickiness. Carriers should exploit this opportunity to work closely with the handset manufactureres or the independent software developers to pre-install certain applications unique to them. Carriers should also be aware that customer support has to go beyond just supporting the phone hardware itself if carriers really want to be the first touch point to customers. It's no longer good enough to just set up retail stores to sell the phones. Carriers need to understand the needs of the customers and provide the right type of phone to customer. That's true customer service.

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X1 Sony Ericsson Xperia : Best Windows Mobile Phone To Date? Is That So?

2008-11-22T05:55:00.000-08:00

I'm lucky to have been able to lay my hands on X1 and use it for a few days....here's my personal take on X1. Of course, comments are welcome.

It's uniqueness is really on its panels - so instead of the usual windows mobile screen. One can transform the screens based on his or her preferences or context.

At work - I can choose a more professional Homescreen that shows my appointments and RSS feeds to allow me to keep tabs of the world. However, if I feel very 'zen', I can choose Gold Fish panel to relieve my boredom or stress. Else, outside work, I can simply choose an Entertainment panel that allows me to access my photos, music, videos easily - while still have the start button at the left hand top corner for me to access my program and with one click to get out of the program to go back to the panel.

Phone - hardware itself
1. Easy to hold in the hands and carry around. However, the form factor is a little 'masculine'. I'm referring to the aluminum version that I have. Can't comment on the black version as I've not seen it. However, the finish is good and gives a good appeal to those who want a 'professional and sleek phone'.

2. Battery life seems rather okay - I put my phone on 3G and full push email capability.

3. Keypad - though the buttons appear small - but they are not too difficult to do the 'thumbing'

4. A downside to it is the memory - it internal memory is only 400Mb although it can have an SD card.

5. The speaker quality is clear and audible enough when I played a movie.

6. Compared to most windows mobile phone (or probably most of all the present windows mobile phone), it's a great relief to some who need to have only ONE phone to read email and do some entertainment to have a 3.5mm jack. That means I can plug in my headset and enjoy the music or video. This is a good feature to have.

7. Camera is only 3.2megapixel. Good enough for simple photo-taking but not the key selling point. Samsung has taken that position with its 8megapixal phone.

Phone - software
1. Fundamentally it's a windows mobile phone. It runs on the latest windows mobile v6.1. It includes two web browsers. The default is Internet explorer but a better browser is the Opera 9.5. While browsing is not as easy as iphone to pinch and spread the fingers, Opera is a very good browser for windows-mobile phone to allow easy pan and zoom and it has the tabs functions. It's easy to navigate but unfortunately if you try to click open any link in an email, it will open up in Internet Explorer. There could be some way to set the Opera as default instead but I've not explored it.

2. It is windows-mobile so you can't synch the phone with a cable for movies and music if you are using a MAC. You need to use an adapter and transfer the files manually to the microSD.

3. GPS - it' has this application WayFinder. I've not used it... It does have Google Maps and another applicaiton Quick GPS which helps to speed up the time to determine your GPS position.

4. Panels - that's the 'uniqueness' of Xperia. With a one button click, you can pick and choose the panel depending on what you prefer/want. The response time is considered good. On average it takes about 3 sec for the panel to load. However, you should take note that if the internal memory is used to almost full or if the panel is stored on external storage card, the response time may or may not lengthen. But so far, it's good. What I like is the ease of switching. And if there are more panels being developed in future (probably some may be chargable), that will provide more choice to people. Currently the panel functions are pre-fixed. That is you cannot install additional widgets to run on a particular panels. What you can do is however to customise the chosen panel in terms of colors, the RSS feeds I want to receive, the number of appointments / tasks to show, the application launcher to show on the home screen etc.

5. I've played a 45min episode on the phone. Thought the screen size is not big, it's still for viewing. In fact, amongst all windows-mobile phone, I think this is really one of the top choices.

6. Applications is not an issue. It's windows mobile and there are already many applications for windows mobile....

There is a SDK for developers to develop more panels but currently panels are limited - and at any one point, a user can only have 9 panels loaded onto the phone. And the 'one button' is convenient.

Line Dancing as Teambuilding Activity : How to do it? Simple Instructions

2008-11-21T08:00:00.001-08:00

I just organised a workshop and we had line dancing as the teambuilding activity. This is good for as big a number as 100. I've posted a simple instructions as a teambuilding brief and a judging sheet for your use. I

This is a low-cost but very enjoyable team building activity. The group first learnt how to do simple 16-count line dancing steps in about 40 minutes. It's very fun to have 100 people dancing together and making all sorts of mistakes initially and eventually "mastering them" and dance in a more coordinated fashion. We then split the teams into several groups. Each group had about 15-20 people. Each team was given a song piece (about 3 minutes) with the accompanied props. Team was supposed to make use of the steps that they learnt to chronograph a dance and use the props that they were given (they were allowed to do barter trade). Other than team bonding, this teambuilding activity also encouraged alot of creativity - think out of the box on what to do with the props and how to do a variation of the basic steps learnt. We spent less than $800 in total for a group of 100. The $800 was spent entirely on the props.

Thought that some of you may want to try it out.

Download now or preview on posterous

Mission Possible Leading the Line.pdf (58 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

Teambuilding judging form.pdf (68 KB)

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Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic aka the "Tube" : Can it beat iPhone? Here's my take!

2008-11-21T05:56:00.001-08:00

Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic or otherwise known as the Tube is the first touch phone launched by Nokia. As the name has it, it's positioning itself as an entertainment phone and yes, it does.

Phone Hardware

1. Phone colour is chic in a fashionable way. But because it's plastic, it does not feel as sleek as the other high end nokia phones. Target segement is probably those who are looking for a cheap but good entertainment phone, specifically for music and video.

2. It has a 3.2" screen that is big enough for viewing and yet the phone has a nice size that is not too big to hold it even if the palm size is small. I believe Nokia deliberately designs the phone in a manner so that all the controls can be performed with one hand. Phone is otherwise known as the "Tube".

3. This is Nokia's answer to iPhone on a touch phone. However, it uses a resisitive touch screen to support both finger and stylus input, unlike the capacitive touch screen iPhone (refer to this wikipedia entry on the differences between the two touch screen technologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen).

4. The downside to resistive screen is that you tend to have to use a little more force when you enter text using your fingers. *New update with thanks to Gogo's feedback (see comment)* Resisitive screen requires you to exert pressure on the screen when scrolling and it is not as intuitive as iPhone's multi-touch capability. On the iPhone, I can scroll down my long contact book very quickly by swiping my finger on the screen whereas on Nokia 5800 I tend to be slower because I need to press on the screen. What's good is that it provides the haptics that gives a vibration when you touch it.

5. When it comes to composing sms or email, it doesn't have the auto-correction function that iPhone has which makes virtual keyboard easy to use. For those who are used to having a Qwerty keyboard, this phone has a virtual mini-Qwerty and a full screen Qwerty. Else, you can choose to use the stylus for text input or to use their handwriting recognition with stylus.

6. Like any other Nokia phones, Nokia 5800 has a simple user interface that is intuitive – perhaps as good as iPhone (this is based on judgment that I don't need to read a manual to know how to use a phone and can use the phone without much frustration for the first time). However, for young children iPhone is still a notch up because everything is just a click on the home button to go back to the home screen to launch an application.

7. The phone has a 3.5mm jack and this is especially great and important if you want to position the phone for music and video. You can easily just connect it to a portable stereo speaker to play the music or to the TV to play the video.

8. The phone has very small internal storage – 81Mb but this is not a major concern because I can always choose to decide whether to save your downloads onto SD card. The expandable slot is using microSD – similar to X1 or G1 (see my earlier posts on X1 and G1)

9. The phone has built-in (supposedly surround sound stereo) speakers. Music experience is great if I compare amongst the phones I have used and tested. And it has built in equaliser into its music player – this gives the music buff the ability to change the settings or even create their own presets.

10. Battery life is very good. Probably because I don't surf as much using this phone. And the purpose of this phone is really not for web browsing. So for playing music, this is probably one of the phones that offers long battery life.

11. Nokia 5800 has the accelerometer-alike capability but it's not as smooth as iPhone in that it has a more discernible delay and it does not work in all apps. For example, its calculator will not auto-rotate when you flip the orientation.

12. The phone is really not for heavy web browsing. It's narrow screen is a challenge but X1 (with an equally narrow screen size) overcomes this by including Opera mobile 9.5. Nokia's own browser falls short in this aspect. I'll provide more details in the section on OS and Applications.

13. Last but not least 5800 has 3.2megapixals camera with Carl Zeiss. But if you let me have a choice, I prefer a higher megapixals camera phone say 5 or 8mp then a 3.2 with carl zeiss. Again, just my own preference.

Nokia 5800 OS and Applications

1. 5800 uses symbian S60 5th edition for its full touch phone. Generally Symbian seems to be a more efficient operating system than windows mobile. Opening a few applications concurrently does not have any visible delays in the processing speed or cause any frozen screens.

2. Because this the new edition symbian OS is rather new, many of the old applications need to be 'upgraded' to run on the S60 5th edition. I've tried downloading a few apps from Nokia Beta Labs but encountered the message that the app is not compatible with the phone.

3. 5800 has Mail For Exchange supported but Mail For Exchange (MFE) only synchronises the INBOX for mails although it does synchronise the calendar/tasks as well as contacts. What's good is that at the calendaring application, you can also have a view of the tasks to be done. MFE allows you to access the global address book but this cannot be accessed directly in SMS or Email. For global address book access, you have to open up the company directory application in the MFE folder. But I doubt people will buy the phone because of emails because if that's the case, one would choose the E-series for enterprise use if the user is a die-hard Nokia user. 5800 also supports the typical POP3 and IMAP account. MFA allows you to read emails but opening up attachments is a problem as it does not have the quick office application built in. You may have to buy separately.

4. Web-browsing. As mentioned earlier, this phone falls short in this aspect. It's not as smooth as iPhone where you can scroll /swipe up and down using the fingers. Plus the narrow screen size makes web browsing challenging. It does not use Opera mobile 9.5 unlike X1 and does not have the pinch and zoom capability on iPhone's safari. But I think in time to come Opera will release a browser that works on Symbian OS S60 5th edition.

5. The phone has a Instant Messaging (IM) application but setting it seems challenging to set it up. However you can always install third party IM application to get it going.

6. In terms of games, iPhone is a notch up with its big screen and its accelerometer function and with the huge repository of games in the iPhone Appstore. Don't think games will be a core value proposition for this phone. At least not for now. Nokia had dabbled in N-gage before but the results were mixed.

7. As mentioned earlier, the internal speakers are solid and the music player interface is easy to use. In fact, there is a choice of equaliser and the ability to use the song for contacts / ringtone. More versatile than iPhone. Not sure if this phone comes with free subscription to the "Comes with Music". If so, it will certainly attract people to this phone.

8. I tried to access the mobile music store through the phone. It is not yet ready. So no comment on this. Today, I can access iTunes (US) through iphone and preview the music. If I like it, I will then purchase it.

9. I'm pleasantly surprised that this phone can support podcasting and also import of OPML – news feeds. It's really an entertainment phone.

8. Similarly this phone plays video very well too. Definitely between G1 and Nokia, G1 video application needs a lot more improvement. In fact, it's video capture capability is better than X1.

9. It has a editing tools for photos – including basic ones like saturation, brightness, and the fun ones like adding a bubble talk.

10. 5800 has Nokia Maps. However, I feel that Google maps is more intuitive to use and navigate but I believe the voice enabled turn by turn navigation will certainly be an advantage provided that the price is right.

11. At this moment the applications for S60 5th edition will be limited but as far as I'm aware 5800 does have backward compatibility support for some applications.

12. Last but not least, Nokia certainly designs the phone to bring out its value in music and entertainment. Its one touch access to Music, Video, Web on the top right corner is very convenient.

13. Some other shortcuts – if you click on the clock, it brings you to the time / alarms settings. If you click on the top left corner of the screen where the email icon is, it brings you to your mailbox. At the centre bottom of the screen is a one click access to the dialer and the contact book. Simple interface but intuitive.

If you ask me whether I will buy this phone, the answer is yes if I want the phone for simple calling, texting and for music primarily and if the phone is priced at a lower end compared to iPhone. iPhone is more than music. I bought the iphone because it has reads email attachment the best (note – it's attachments not emails per se). In addition, iphone has excellent web surfing browser, fun games like SPORE and other many applications that I need such as colour palettes, Japanese flash cards, and of course the iTunes store where I download lots of podcasts.

Nonetheless, Nokia 5800 is very user friendly and if you have been a die-hard Nokia user, you will find this phone very easy to navigate. Plus if you don't relish the other features provided by the iPhone but simply want a phone that allows you to play music and songs with reasonable good quality (in fact, Nokia's built-in speakers transmit much better sound quality than iPhone's) and take better quality camera as well as video (which is missing in iPhone), then this Nokia 5800 is for you.

Let me know what you think?

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Blackberry Storm - A Match to iPhone or is it not? Read on...

2008-11-21T04:49:00.001-08:00

Phone Hardware

1. Blackberry Storm is RIM’s answer to Apple’s iPhone. It’s also Blackberry’s first touch phone. Having said that, Blackberry has retained a very similar user interface to its traditional blackberry and that makes transition from the old Blackberry to the new Storm relatively smooth.

2. I’ll make references to iPhone for comparison since Storm is often compared to iPhone. It’s touch screen with tactile feedback (which I will touch on more at the next section) and has accelerometer capability. However, I feel that iPhone is easier to hold in my hands because it’s thinner and lighter. I went to check up the actual specifications to confirm my thoughts and the specs are as follows; Storm: 112.5mm (H) x 62.2mm (W) x 13.95mm (D) and iPhone 3G : 115.5 (H) x 62.1 (W) x 12.3mm (D). Storm weighs 155g and iPhone 133g.

3. Storm has a slightly smaller screen than iPhone. Storm’s screen size of 3.2” is a little smaller than iPhone’s. However, it’s screen resolution is sharper. On the other hand Storm’s screen has a slightly higher resolution than iPhone’s.

4. There is no doubt that Storm has a much more superior design than HTC G1. Storm retains Blackberry enterprise look. BUT a big minus to many Blackberry users is the lack of a trackball – which you don’t really need in a touch inteface as you can swipe your fingers across the screen. But I can bet with you if you speak to any die-hard blackberry users, they will tell you that the trackball (or scroll button) is what they love about Blackberry. Notwithstanding this, I believe that people who are going to take up Storm will not miss this feature too much. It takes time to adjust. Similar to G1 phone, you need to press the menu button (one of the four physical buttons at the bottom of the device) to gain access to the menu functions within the application. This is something I am not used to as I often just need to press the scroll button.

5. Storm makes up for what are lacking in iPhone. It has a removable battery (allowing a replacement of battery when the juice runs out), 1G internal memory but with microSD slot (technically can support up to 16G). Also, it’s battery seems to last longer than iPhone but charging Storm battery to full capacity seems to take much longer as compared to iPhone. While Storm has longer battery life, it can’t last more than a day for me.

6. RIM has packed in a lot of entertainment features into Storm. While camera is not a traditional enterprise feature, it seems that most phones nowadays are equipped with camera. Storm is no exception. It has 3.2megapixals camera and has video and voice recording capabilities. Pictures taken can be uploaded to Flickr directly with a one click access on the menu.

7. I played MP3 on Storm. The sound quality emitted through the speakers is loud and clear and I do felt that its quality is slightly better than that of an iPhone although not significantly so. Clearly it loses out to Nokia 5800 XpressMusic but then again, Storm is not made to be a music phone. Video playback on Storm is smooth and video controls are easy to use. Storm also has its own media synch software that allows you to put your own iTunes music into Blackberry.

8. However, there are certain features that iPhone is one up against Storm. Storm’s built-in speakers are loud and clear but I have tried it out for audioconference, the microphone’s audio-pickup quality is not very good. Not sure if this is because mine is a test set. Most importantly, Storm does not have WiFi capability. I know that some of us may feel that WiFi is not necessary if you are on 3G. However, this is a real shortcoming to me because I tend to put my iPhone on secured corporate WiFi in office and home wifi when I’m back home. Reason being it’s a lot faster to pull down emails with big attachments and web surfing is a lot faster. Last but not least, you are not paying for the cellular data charge (of course, if you are on a corporate scheme, this may be less of a concern to you).

Phone OS & Applications

1. In terms of the phone OS features, Storm is certainly a clear winner. Storm has not just the basic SMS and Email, it also has MMS – a feature that’s greatly missed for iPhone users. It also provides more customisation features such as the font size, sensitivity level, etc. A power tool for enterprise users.

2. Email set up with Blackberry is easy but I encountered some problem during set up and it frustrated me because I could not do anything but wait till the following day. What happened was that I was once a Blackberry user but I’ve stopped using Blackberry since Microsoft enabled Push capabilities in Windows Mobile phone (and now iPhone). My Blackberry account while still a valid account nonetheless requires an activation password. I set up my phone only after work, past 8pm. IT department supporting Blackberry Enterprise Service has closed. While the Blackberry customer support desk was extremely helpful, he could not do anything. This however would not be the case on Exchange email as I could set it up easily anytime, anywhere over the air.

3. If you are a heavy email user and receive hundreds of emails a day, you will appreciate Storm’s email search function. This is lacking in iPhone today. While I enjoy reading my email and attachment on an iPhone, it become a real pain if I have to go through 200 emails to find a particular email and I can’t recall when the email was sent to me. iPhone only displays the emails in chronological order with the most recent email at the beginning.

4. In terms of reading email attachments, iPhone is still the best phone for this. iPhone is the only phone in the market that can open not just microsoft office documents, acrobat pdf files, iPhone can also open iwork documents. Something that a true Mac user would appreciate. In addition, the ability to pinch and zoom a document using the fingers makes reading easier. You can’t however download attachment and save it locally. This is where Storm has an advantage. It can download attachment and edit the documents with the application “Documents to Go” - but I seem to encounter error messages to say that I can’t download and save any attachment with file size greater than 3Mb although I can still open it.

5. The gripe I have is the lack of a trackball (as in the case of G1 phone) or magnifying glass (for iPhone). There is more hardwork involved just to place my cursor correctly at a particular part of a paragraph where I want to do my correction. What makes up for it is the cut and paste function which many people have bemoaned lacking in iPhone....imagine this. You type a long email. You realise that you just want to copy a particular section of the email and send it off in a separate email to another person. But you can’t do it. You have to retype. I hope Apple will include this and the email search capability into its next firmware upgrade if Apple is indeed serious about breaking into the enterprise market.

6. RIM touts its SurePress technology. This means you first touch the screen to highlight the selection that you want and then physically press on the screen to confirm the choice. The need to press (not touch) the screen to confirm my choice somehow makes it more difficult for me as I tend to press a wrong selection despite the fact that I’ve highlighted my intended selection correctly with a touch the screen. I’ve also tested this with a few other people who are first time users. This is a common occurrence. But rest assured that after a couple of days you will get used to it and this will be less of an issue

7. So far so good about Storm...until I start trying to compose a long email. As in all touch phones, the keypad is virtual. Compared to iPhone, I find that finger swiping on Storm is smooth but it is not as smooth as the that on an iPhone. On the other hand, the good thing about Storm is that you can choose to compose using the virtual portrait keypad or the landscape full qwerty keypad. Today iPhone native mail application only presents a portrait Qwerty keypad although there is third party application that allows you to compose email in a landscape form.

8. If you prefer to type in portrait mode, you can use the SureType keypad which has auto-suggesting words features. You just need to tap the suggestion you want to use. However, I realised that often I tap on the wrong suggestion...but it may be just a matter of getting used to. I am definitely not a SureType master and I believe that with ample practice, you should be able to improve and type much faster and more efficiently. Of course, if you really think SureType isn’t your cup of tea, you can always use the Multi-Tap feature.

9. I prefer a full Qwerty keypad. While some may not like the fact that iPhone’s native full Qwerty keypad is only in portrait mode, I find typing still faster than if I use Storm’s full Qwerty keypad in landscape mode. When you touch a letter on iPhone’s keypad, you will see the letter being ‘magnified’ and hence you will know whether you are pressing the right letter. In addition, iPhone’s auto-correction is good. In addition, iPhone can learn new words and will be able to recognise similar keystrokes the next time you try to type that word. It will also recognise the common keystroke errors that you frequently make and will present the word that you intend to type. When it comes to fast typing, I tend to press the wrong letters more often on RIM’s Storm as I don’t see the letter that I’m pressing except for a bluish light that emits from the position where my finger is placed on the screen. If you fingers are big, it may prove to be quite a challenge. For iPhone, the numbers are presented as the top most row of the keypad. This not the case for Storm. Numbers are embedded in the alphabet keys, and I have a higher chance of typing the wrong numbers. I have not used Storm long enough to made an assessment whether its learning capability equals that of iPhone.

10. Unlike iPhone, RIM’s Storm is a “Clickable Screen”. That means when you type, you need to press down to simulate a “click”. It is as if Storm has virtual buttons underneath the screen. While some may like this feature, I find that I have “finger-ache” after long typing and it actually slows my speed in typing. While some say isnt this the same if you type on a physical keyboard, I can tell you that if you actually type on a physical keyboard, the strength required may actually be smaller because you only press on that key (not to mention that you definitely make fewer typing mistakes and hence fewer corrections needed). For Storm, you need to press on the whole screen.

8. There is no debate that Storm is able to do multi-tasking. That means you can open up an application while other applications remain running in the background. The same goes for G1 phone. Both Storm and G1 demonstrate good processing speed for multi-tasking. Windows Mobile phone usually will be more sluggish and iPhone can’t really perform this task well (it can allow you to listen to music while you check your emails or surf the net but it cannot open two applications say email and web browsing at the same time). What does this mean? It means you can let your Google Talk or MSN continuing running in the background while you clear your emails and if there is an instant message coming through, you can toggle to the application by pressing on the menu button for 3 seconds.

9. Blackberry allows tethering. Today you can’t do this on the iPhone unless it’s jailbroken. AT&T has recently announced that AT&T is working with Apple to make this available on Apple soon.

10. iPhone users can help themselves to a plethora of apps available at the Appstore. RIM is also going to have its own Blackberry Application Centre early next year – likely March 2009. At this moment, third party apps for Storm will be limited. Generally, RIM’s apps will target more for enterprise uses and given RIM’s traditional business arrangement is to work closely with the carriers, it is likely that carriers will play a more active role in supporting the Blackberry Application Centre. Indeed there is report that says that the application centre will allow user to retrieve applications hosted by carriers. If this is indeed true, then it’s certainly a different business model from that of iPhone where Apple plays a key role in deciding which apps to be put onto Appstore and it’s an open for all concept.

11. Blackberry browsers is not as user friendly as Safari on iPhone. Web browsing on iPhone Safari by far offers the best user experience. Blackberry browsers have a virtual buttons for you to zoom in and out of a web page but it’s not as intuitive as using your fingers to pinch and pan. Web page loading is also slightly slower on Storm.

12. Last but not least, I like the screen capture feature on iPhone. I use this feature when I want to email something interesting that I read in the email (without having to forward the whole email) or on the internet. I don’t think this is a key feature to most people, but it’s just something that I enjoy.

On the whole, Storm is certainly a strong match to iPhone if we compare the phone’s features. As a casual phone, Storm’s multimedia features are richer if we strictly compare the phone hardware and native software (what comes with the phone). However Apple’s Appstore made the difference. Appstore has many applications that make the whole iPhone experience more fun and personalised. If I’m a designer, I can download color palettes and photo editing applications over the air from Appstore onto my iPhone. I do not think Blackberry Application Centre will be able to match Apple Appstore, at least not in the short run.

IPhone’s form factor is definitely more attractive. What makes iPhone stand out from the crowd is not just the phone itself. The iTunes ecosystem creates the stickiness with consumers. Putting aside the applications, movies and videos, what is truly amazing about iTunes is the depth and breadth of the podcasts contents. If you have been using iTunes since the early days, you will realise the big leap that Apple has made over the years and this is not something that a competitor can easily catch up with.

I think Storm is a phone that RIM wishes to position as an All-In-One phone. However, I do feel that it somehows blurs the positioning of RIM. For serious business users, what they want is a phone that allows them easy access to emails and global address book. They do not need a phone that has many different functions but they do want a phone that can do emails for serious users. That means a phone with long battery life (although with 3G network, it’s hard to last Bold or Storm for more than a day) and has the ability to perform powerful email functions such as search, document editing and last but not least a phone that allows the user to type emails efficiently. That’s why after so many years, most of the Blackberry users still prefer a full physical Qwerty keyboard and is the preferred choice for business users. iPhone may have overtaken RIM in the total number of units sold (for now), but we have to remember that RIM has always been a phone for business users and not for consumers and if you compare like for like the number of iPhone enterprise users certainly pale in comparison to that of RIM’s. My take is that Storm is an attempt by RIM to attract the more casual users who also need to access emails regularly. There is less tendency for current heavy email Blackberry users to switch to Storm. Bold is likely a better choice for this group of users. There is no loss to RIM, however, as Storm expands its addressable market. The thing that RIM needs to be careful is not to lose its brand positioning amongst its group of professionals.

Posted by email from poohwinn's posterous