Hearts That Die For Technology

by Chris Ziegler, posted Nov 14th 2008 at 2:20PM

• A quarterly sales volume measured in the hundreds is considered a rousing success.
• Neither Sany nor Ericssan have any intention of pulling out of the joint venture.
• "Outsourcing" of industrial design saves time, money, and staff.
• None of those pesky Windows Mobile licensing fees to worry about.
• GPRS data speed isn't a problem -- it's a way of life.

Well, it looks like folks in Europe (or Spain, at least) already sold on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic could be in for a bit more than they bargained for, as the phone is now listed on Nokia.es for €429 (or just under $550) which, even given the now weaker Euro, is quite a leap from the €279 price for Europe that Nokia first announced just over a month ago. That still gets you an unlocked phone, however, and your choice of red, blue, or black colors, though it'll no doubt give some folks cause to reconsider the increasingly plentiful touchscreen phone options out there these days.

iPhone apps might some day be the gold mine for advertising.  In the meanwhile, we are seeing the emergence of a new trend: iPhone apps as ads. Hollywood studios are the first ones to react and using free applications to promote its movies. We are totally loving the new app for the latest Bond flick, Quantum of Solace. 

More than just a micro-site, the Bond application lets you watch the movie trailers and read up about the movie. It also pushes you out to the iTunes music store if you want to you want to purchase Jack White's throbbing theme song from the film. Of course others have more immersive apps. The Dark Knight, for example has come up with a way to add some Joker-style graffiti to photos of your friends. Use the touch screen to drag and rotate elements and then save and send them as you like. Bolt, Disney's forthcoming animated canine adventure has released an app which is essentially a free stripped down Super Monkey game for a very subtle hand.

All three apps, however, lack the seemingly most obvious feature - the ability to actually purchase tickets for the movie. That much imagination would be too much to ask from Hollywood, but we are happy that they are thinking about ways to promote their movies on screens that matter.

The Gadget: The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is the new flagship smartphone for the electronics giant. Packing the new "Panels" interface, a full QWERTY keyboard, 3G data and 800x480 touchscreen in a full metal body, is the Xperia X1 poised to challenge the top smartphones?

Price: $800 (no carrier or contract required)

Verdict: The Xperia X1 is kind of a mixed bag. For every good thing the phone does, there seems to be something detracting from it as well. From a hardware standpoint, this is a well built phone that feels extremely solid in the hand. But at the same time, it's not exactly the lightest or slimmest phone available (even for a slider). The 528MHz Processor and 256MB RAM also give the X1 enough horsepower to run smoothly...most of the time.

The 800x400 VGA screen is beautiful, considering all that resolution is tightly packed into a 2.8-inch screen. Videos and images are bright, vibrant and sharp. The fact that it uses resistive touch techonology, however, is not so great. But my favorite hardware aspect of this phone is the keyboard. The keys are well spaced, responsive and I rarely have typos in my texts; this lets me worry about what I'm saying instead of whether or not I'm typing gibberish. The phone also has an optical sensor stuck in the middle of the four-way directional pad that lets you flick your thumb over its surface, and it will scroll up and down, side to side. It's an interesting use of tech, but feels slightly awkward, a bit gimmicky since there's already a touchscreen and a d-pad make the sensor somewhat unnecessary.

On the software side, the big sell for the Xperia are its custom panel interfaces, which range from different types of homescreens, a media player interface, and even a Google-oriented screen. While selected, these panels serve as the default screen for your phone and all navigation tracks back to the panels. In theory, this is a good idea. But when you're in a panel that isn't built around a today-style screen, and you quickly want to check any missed calls or text messages you may have, this interface becomes a bit of a nuisance.

But the one panel that does stand out is the Media Player. Sony Ericsson took their design cues from the PSP and PS3 and created an interface that is equally appealing as it is functional. Clean and streamlined, the media player features large icons and buttons that work well without a stylus. From the screen, you can watch movies, listen to music, view photos or even bring up your contacts list to make a quick call. Aside from the keyboard, this is probably my favorite feature of the Xperia X1.

In terms of calls, signal strength and call clarity were generally good in the parts of the Bay Area I tested in, but phone screens could be better designed. When you hit the call button from your home screen, it brings up your keypad with a list of recent calls. A series of icons for call logs, favorites, and contacts sit above the keypad. In the call log subscreen, it's a bit tough to tell what are missed calls, dialed calls, and received calls at first glance.

Battery life is great, as I can make calls, browse the internet, and watch videos at a moderate level for two or three days without charging it. The 3.2 MP camera has a pretty good sensor that takes crystal clear photos, and uses your touchscreen taps to autofocus on a specific object. But a slow shutter—especially in low light—detracts from the camera experience. Other than that, the software experience on the Xperia is pretty standard WinMo fare.

Overall, the custom software upgrades Sony Ericsson added to WinMo 6.1 are good, but feel tacked on; ths ranges from random 6.1 elements popping up over the custom UI when you get a call or text, text messages and missed calls that go unreported or the frozen screens that occur when you try to transition to another panel/app. It feels like Sony Ericsson chose WinMo by default, not because it's the mobile OS they really wanted.

To be blunt, the Xperia X1 isn't quite up to snuff with the top smartphones in the market from an overall standpoint. Whether you're talking about its $800 price tag, stylus-based resistive touchscreen or 3.2 MP camera, this is a phone that would have fared better amongst early adopters a year or two ago. This is not to say the Xperia X1 is a bad phone—on the contrary, it's a very respectable piece of hardware. It's just not good enough to justify the cost when better, cheaper phones are available. [Xperia on Giz]

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Kaalga is a Firefox extension which integrates a very useful feature into your Wordpress blog editor. It basically highlights some particular words or phrases while you are writing your posts and suggests some possible links. Actually Wordpress is not the only supported platform but it works well with Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal too.

Usage is very easy: use the combination "shift + right click" (shif+ctrl+click on a Mac touchpad) when your mouse is over the underlined words and a window with some suggested links pops up. The image below shows how it looks like:

Behind the scenes Kalgaa uses a semantic analysis engine called OpenCalais and shows the relevant results through Yahoo search.

A similar feature is provided by Zemanta too, a great plugin I use to insert links, tags and images to my blog posts very easily. Unlike Zemanta, one of the cool features of Kaalga is that it lets you insert your domain as the preferred source for links, making it very easy to insert links to posts which belong to your blog. The popup window then shows you your domain's links first (with a red "L" which stands for "local") then other links on the web.

My opinion? A big thumb up for this extension, definitely a must-have for any blogger and it is what I was always looking for. The funny thing? I had to insert the link to Kaalga.com manually

Sometimes I'm surprised on how a blog post can become suddenly successful while others, even if potentially more interesting, stay buried in the archive of my blog.

One example for all is my recent post about Apple iPhone vs Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. In a couple of days, it received more than 3000 uniques views mainly coming from Google Search. Other similar posts, where I tried to compare two or more hot mobile phones, ended up performing similarly.

That being said, how to make a blog post successful and bring many visitors to it? And, secondly, how to make it so successful that it remains on top of your list of blog posts in terms of unique visits? Here are three simple tips.

1) Choose the title carefully. If you choose your title very close to the one you guess people will use while searching on Google, it's bingo time. For example, I verified that the format "X vs Y" for hot products of the moment is definitely a winning choice. My post "Apple iPhone vs Nokia N95" has been the daily most read post for many months and it's still in the daily top 10. Moreover, make sure you have the latest plugins to manage SEO installed. In my Wordpress installation I use "All in One Seo Plugin" and it's working very well, in particular for the so called "title tags".

2) Spread the word everywhere. Make sure that any social netowork you are subscribed to is notified as soon as your post is published. Make sure an automatic Tweet is posted as well as your Facebook status, for instance. Many people come to my blog by just clicking on the URL shown in my FB status. Sometimes this leads to a massive burst of visits but doesn't make your blog sticky. If you care about a certain post more than others, update your status on social networks like Twitter, Linkedin and Plaxo with a link to your post and every hour make sure to update your status with the same message… I can assure it brings an interesting amount of visits (taking for granted you have many contacts in those networks…).

3) Engage people who leave comments to your post. Starting a discussion about your post is always a very good way to keep the visitors' attention very high. In addition, try to involve people sending emails to a couple of key bloggers trying to make them refer to your post in their own blog posts.

Bonus - 4) Blog about something hot. In times when people are searching for specific information on Google (new hot products announcements etc.), make sure you blogged about that (if it fits with your blog subjects and guidelines, of course). It can quickly become a popular post and you couldn't ever imagine it could happen.

A couple of days ago I blogged about Qwitter, a service which informs you when someone quit following you on Twitter.

In the last week I received five emails, where Qwitter informed me about people no more following me.

You know what? All of them started "following" me just not long ago, maybe "waiting" for me to follow them back. Since this hasn't happened, they unfollowed me. The point is that their only aim was to increse their followers' number, without really caring of my tweets. Their only aim was to catch my attention and to make me follow them back.

Unfortunately, as stated many times, I follow people I really care about. If you follow me but I don't think I can be interested in what you write on twitter (with all my respect, of course) I will never follow you back. At the same time, if I follow you it's because: 1) we know each other personally (well, in that case I would appreciate if you follow me as well) - 2) I care about your thoughts and I don't care if you follow me back.

It's great how Qwitter gives me a confirmation about this bad behavior by "marketing-only" twitter accounts. Here is an example for all, Mr iphone reviews unfollowed me after just a couple of days he started (on October 21st) following me, "much interested" in my thoughts and opinions:

Today was the Apple day. All the main technology blogs are reporting the announcements made by Steve Jobs during today's Apple event. New Macbook, bew Macbook Pro, an updated MacBook Air and the new 24" Apple Cinema Display.

Aside from the great innovations introduced with these new products, far ahead from the competition, it's pretty clear that Apple computers are still targeted to a niche, not for everyone.

Despite the reduction of the entry price for the Macbook line, $999 Is still a lot of money if compared to the entry level models from other brands (priced in the range $400-$600).

Moreover, the new stunning 24" Cinema Display is priced twice a direct competitor, like models from HP, Dell or Acer, undoubtely great monitors as well.

So what? Is Apple still not for everyone? Well, from a certain standpoint (price) I would say it's not for everyone. On the other hand, Apple is a marketing leader and innovator. People are willing to spend that amount of money for Apple products because Apple is a king in telling you why their products are better than the competition. For example, today Jobs has been (as usual) a marketing guru by explaining why Apple's notebooks are better and why consumers should choose them in place of other available alternatives.

In conclusion, despite it is evident to everyone that Apple is definitely MORE expensive than the competition, the truth is that their products are better, they are presented as MUCH better than any other product coming from the competition and consumers FEEL they are really better.

The result? They are worth their price. Period.

Choosy is at the same time a simple but excellent idea in order to offer an easy way to use more than one browser on your Mac. I find myself disoriented when I use Opera and Firefox (or Safari) at the same time because there are some essential features I love in each of them (currently I'm using Firefox just as a container for Feedly).

The main downside of using more than one browser is, for example, that you can accidentally click on links on one of them which leads to the opening of the default browser, not the one you are currently using. In MacOSX, the default browser can be specified under the general preferences within Safari and from then on, that browser will be the default choice for the system to open links.

The following video well explains how Choosy works. It's basically a software (it adds a new preference pane on MacOSX) which acts as the default browser, but you can make it perform as you like, for instance showing a menu where you can choose the browser you want to open at a certain time.

Image by siva

Since the death of my faithful Nokia N95, I was wondering whether an iPhone 3G could be both a replacement and a good companion when it comes to use it for business.

When I say for business, I mean full access to email everywhere and a deep usage of voice calls. At the same time, the BlackBerry Bold is a smartphone I saw the first time in the US thanks to Jim Courtney who showed it to me during one of the famous wine dinners organized by pal Andy Abramson.

My experience with the iPhone is limited to the 2G version I gave to my wife a couple of months ago, bought in Cupertino. That model is not bad, battery duration is enough and overall experience is not bad. On the contrary, feedbacks I got from iPhone 3G users are not that great, aside from Dan York who seems much satisfied about that (his company, Voxeo, replaced Blackberries with iPhones).

The question is: what's a better choice for business usage? Honestly, I never had a Blackberry myself but the feedbacks I'm getting everywhere is that those are solid and fully functional devices which make your business day really effective, regardless the location you are staying in. The new Bold seems to be a major upgrade of previous models and with a high definition display, 3G and Wifi included it offers you a wide range of possibilities when it comes to manage your business life on the go.

The new Storm, at a higher price, offers you an iPhone-like experience too, with a touch screen in place of the standard qwerty keyboard. Jim Courtney pointed out that a BlackBerry App Store will be available in March '09, making the gap between RIM smartphones and the iPhone even smaller.

What do you think? For business, BlackBerry Bold/Storm or iPhone3G?