Autor: johannes

…or the end. Every end is a beginning, though. Sounds pathetic, right? Whatever. This is my new old blog, as it was hosted on Tumblr before where it was also treated like a neglected child. *sorry*

But yesterday it dawned on me that I really wanted back a place where I could just write about whatever was on my mind. A place that also could be an outlet for some professional, work-related stuff. So I rolled up my sleeves, ordered an URL and got cracking on Anchor – a wonderful and simple blogging CMS by the amazing Visual Idiot and a team of other awesome people which was “recommended” to “me” by Daniel some time ago.

Since I’m miles from being a developer, this whole thing is far from being finished and will eventually see some changes – as well as a custom theme, while this temporary one is based on Booty *thanks!*.
My *old* blog will be maintained as well. Probably just for photography-related stuff, though.

**Now: enjoy!**

I just love this. It’s well executed and spot on consumer focused.

…aka: How’s life without a proper smartphone?

About 4 days ago, my trusted HTC Desire fell down some stairs and wouldn’t respond to my PCR attempts. That’s when having a great roommate came in handy. After I got home that day, I asked my roomie for a spare and I could choose between a Blackberry Curve [insert random number] and a Nokia E71.

Naturally, I chose the Nokia. Now that I’ve been living with that messy thing for a few days, I thought it would be fun to do a review of it, so here we go.

Please keep in mind that the E71 came out in 2008.

## Industrial Design

Naturally, it feels great. Nokia’s design is and has been at the top, when it came to their flagship-ish phones. The back cover is made from metal which has been printed, to give it a nice feel. The surrounding body, has been made from some kind of plastic – not the cheap stuff, nice plastic. The overall size feels great as well. With a diagonal of about 12cm, it fits nicely in the palm of my hand and the thickness of about 1cm let’s it slide into my pocket effortlessly. The screen cover is made from plastic as well. Not the best choice, but at the time it probably was legit. The speaker sounds very good. The buttons are laid out very nicely for one-handed operation, although the rockers on the side, probably would have been better on the left other than the right hand side.

Speaking of buttons:

## The Keyboard

I’ve been using a virtual on screen keyboard for 26 months and I thought it was great. But yet, I have to admit, that the physical keyboard of the E71 feels much better. Although the buttons are TINY it feels very precise and not as fiddly as one might imagine. I guess Blackberry users know what I’m talking about. Give me one more week and I’ll type as fast, if not even faster then on my desire.

## Camera

Well. It’s pretty bad. It’s not only the 3.2 MP. It’s how the 3.2MP are squished together in an unsharp soup of undefined crap. Even in 2008 that was bad, as far as I can remember.

## Battery Life

This is a Nokia Phone from 2008. Guess what: The Battery life is GREAT. Even with an old Battery, I can easily go through 2 days with HEAVY usage, and I bet I can push it to 4 to 5 days with minimal usage. Charging it takes the whole night, though.

## Software

Now, here is where it get’s ugly. Literally.

2008 was NOT a great time for mobile operating systems. At least if it wasn’t iOS, wich was introduced in 2007. Every other Smartphone felt like shit by 2008. The E71 must have been no exception. First of, it’s extremely sluggish. Loading a webpage takes ages. Opening an APP does at well and let’s not speak about the ecosystem. Symbian was great when it came out, but when the iPhone arrived, you could not help, but wonder why you’d bother to use something else then iOS. There is no Push. There is no calendar subscription service. There is no way to sync contacts but the Nokia PC Suite (sorry, but NO, I won’t). Looking at a webpage feels exceptionally unnatural. Worst pain in the ass: setting the damn thing up. Now, I’ve known my ways around phone settings, but as soon as I turned on my Android Phone in 2010 i forgot most of it, so setting up connections and access points and MMS services, felt like the worst thing one could do to a user. The branded software doesn’t help, by the way. It just cluttered up the settings with connection stuff, you’ll never use but can’t delete. The ONLY convenience I found over iOS and Android was setting up my favorite MP3 as a Ringtone. Choose the file, hit options, set up as ringtone, boom, done. No extra software, no weird app, no iTunes. All in one go.

## Conclusion

I already miss handling my “real” smartphone. Of course I do. The point is that we, or I for that matter, have become so attached to our devices that it’s really hard to let go and dive into a much older system.

Handling Symbian is not fun and I’d say you’re lying if you say otherwise. The other point is: be thankful for how far technology and mobile OS’es have come.

We certainly DO live in the future and damn, it’s good.

Finally, after month’s of teasing, Jan, Philipp, Marcel and Martin, in part fathers of QUOTE.fm, launched watched.li.

It’s a very simple service, that lets you track your favorite TV-Shows and keep track of all the episodes you may, or may not have watched yet.

I was fortunate enough to use it throughout alpha phase and it really, really is the best thing ever for show-junkies. Keep in mind that it’s not all finished yet and that there is so much more to come.

I find this to be amazing.
As the guy says in the video: It’s certainly not fast. But if you give this to a few experienced developers you might at least expect some improvements in smoothness and stability.

Also it’s a perfect example of how OEMs are incompetent for the most part of updating your device properly. But if the rumors are true, one might want to get ready for some more forced competition and speed in update cycles.

• * Handle URLs within shared text such as tweets.
• * Improve support for right-to-left languages.
• * Fix phantom buttons in full screen mode.
• * Fix crash with overflow menu on Jelly Bean.
• * Low profile hardware buttons on Ice Cream Sandwich and above.
• * Increase socket timeout for longer articles.
• * Update Android support library.
• * Fix dark mode link style.
• * Other miscellaneous bug fixes.

It keeps getting better and better.

Google doesn’t currently accept paid apps from the United Arab Emirates. The restriction has had a negative impact on the team’s motivation and even caused Carbon for Android to be temporarily shelved between April and May.

Well, that’s just downright embarrassing. Developers have enough problems making some profit with paid apps in the Play Store.

Path. Everyones favorite mess to talk about. At least it was a few month’s back, when they released their major update. Back then, everybody was hugely impressed on how well it was made and all the little awesome details that went into the Ui. So was I – because even as an Android user I felt that they seemed to care about delivering a great UX. But after using the app for some days I quickly changed my mind, because it really felt sluggish, overloaded and like a bad iOS port wich doesn’t work, because it’s way to far from a native Android App experience.
It certainly seems like Path wants to change that. They’ve been tweeting and blogging about searching for Android developers since the dawn of time. But apparently nobody seems to show up. (That’s Path, not being ready for the world.)

Kind of like the users of Path.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think I could love Path. But I can’t because I have about ONE active user in my timeline, and that’s a girl I’ve never even met in person. Path’s usecase however, should be to stay in touch with friends and family – not internet buddys you don’t know shit about. But my family won’t come. Even though my parents love to use their iPhones, they love Facebook and they really don’t see why they should open yet another account to see what I or their friends have been up to.
Also, my friends aren’t coming, since the number of smartphone users is growing oh so slowly among them and most of them have very little knowledge about the “cool” apps except Temple Run and Instagram.

Path has great potential, but nobody really knows what to do with it. Not even the founders really seem to know how people gonna use their app.
As far as I can tell, Path is still WAY ahead of it’s time – canceling out all the noise that, for example, Facebook produces – giving users a much more streamlined and usefull social networking experience…

…that nobody really needs yet.

I kind of feel sorry for the guy who made the very cool Tabulatabs app. But not being able to change your default browser in iOS makes me wonder how to effectively use the Chrome app, anyway. If you know, let me know!