Handful of Nothing

I still cannot believe this video was really shown there. I just can’t. It’s just not the right way to do this IMHO. I also understand that maybe they just want to show that someday s60 will also feature touchscreen (not news on symbian world like the series 90) but I still can’t believe it.

I know and understand that is not about doing something using some basic gestures or interactions but is just the way it was placed. Showing a very simple thing, in A VIDEO, that brings NOTHING new to the table and just position the company like this.

“Hey, We can also do this, expect it next year, but for know here’s a video of what we are capable”

I’ve already written here, and I will write it again:

Now is not time to think how to beat the iPhone, or how to make something similar. We all know that there’s a time to market that is quite big, so you actually need to think what would we do 2 years from know, and start doing that not a iPhone inspired phone just for the sake of having one.

So if this really happened, I’m really really sad about it, because Nokia will not for sure need to do this.
Ok, there’s no way to avoid automatic rotation (like that done by our 2 years old canon camera) or the pinch gesture once you have the multi touch(not invented by apple) because it’s just natural( and just to remember not invented by apple also). The same way apple did a lot of things that were invented by the pioneers in the mobile world, or even like apple copied the graphical user interface from Xerox without remorse (thanks) because that’s the beauty : take a good idea, and use it, but please try to improve it and make it with a lot of competence.

All of this in a day of glory, with such a wonderful collection of new devices:

So Nokia has just announced 4 new phones (plus the music service) and most important for gamers : the return of the Ngage. Not in the form of a device, but as a platform, where you can try, rent and buy game as well have that whole “xbox-live” like interactions that everyone knows are quite good.

I’m dying to try it out and see how the fellows did this, but I can already say : The ngage UI looks amazingly refreshing. It’s just brand new as I could see in the published videos and makes me wonder that there’s a lot of things going on in the Finnish lands.

Another incredible thing posted by the guys over engadget and gizmodo : The loudest speaker ever on a phone. I know most of people don’t care about this, but for me this is a must. I was pretty disappointed with Iphones because I use the cell as my in car music. Why do you ask? Because here in Brazil is just to easy to place a CD player and get your car smashed just to take it off in the first week. I already faced this twice and even when I buy a cheap CD the thief is not kind, breaks the window, breaks the dashboard and steal even buttons for red lights etc.

So I’m really really looking forward to put my hands on the N81 as it seems to have not only the Ngage games revisited as a platform, a non-side talking formfactor (nifty buttons on the top, I asked that since the first first cellphone with game I saw in my life) a incredible speaker and of course a slim (for s60 ok) profile.

The N95 and the Xpress buddies
The american N95 has a really impressive looking now in black, but I really liked the camera cover set up that is now gone. But With 8 gigas plus a better battery I can say if Nokia added to that a nice firmware with more fixes than the 12.x version this is a incredible phone as well. For sure the top of chain in nowadays phones (europe / americas)

The Xpress candybars are also A LOT better looking in black, real killer change this one, and look to have a real nice slider thing on. Need to test this. Of course they are less powerful than the other 2 but they have also a smaller price tag for those interested in good music + nice battery life (14 and almost 24) for the new dudes.

It’s a shame that it takes so long to have them here in Brazil, or I would do a full review with pleasure of those guys.

Check out the galleries from Gizmodo : N81, N95, The Xpress

I will talk about Nokia Music store later, when I at least digg it a little bit more, but for now one thing is clear : you can for sure buy your music while on the bus, and not worry about needing to buy on the pc or synchronize with your device. This is the real deal for mobile. This is how it should be done. Just hope the public receives it well.

After all : this is a nice step by Nokia, and Gizmodo talks about a pane view, must be an alternative to the other multimedia screen, and it shows clearly that Nokia is experimenting to evolve the UI. There’s no doubt that no manufacture will stay quiet of comfortable now in this matter. Iphone was just a thruster, but I think Samsung, nokia and the others were already aware that UI needs to advance, and doing that for a whole company is a lot more complicated than doing just for 1 phone like apple did.

So, I’m posting this because it shows more or less what I believe to be the relation between the knowledge areas / disciplines. I was searching for more direction on this because I received some feedback (understandable) from IA that tried to say that IA was a lot more than dealing with the information, taxonomy etc. I understand that everyone is trying to always improve their skills, but IA has a name, a function and it’s pretty clear. If you go broader on the subjects, you start to change your position and role in a project and start assuming the others.

Being very honest, job titles are more and more just a requirement for HR department. You can have a focus (eg: usability) but you will be for sure involved on the task gathering and analysis and even on the UI designing itself if need. At least this is what I believe to my team, and what I try to always push to them “you don’t need to be specialist, but also not generalist”. We have a broad knowledge area and we need to not only know how the sub areas relate and work but also have a minimum practice in most of them.

Just closing this quick post : I think more and more in nowday UX teams, that no subject is more or less important to the others, and that is clear that most of the professionals must have a lot of practice and skills from different areas. This is crucial to be able to focus on project, and sometimes to take it forward when only you is the part of the design team.

So, Now it’s a journey of almost 24 hours travelling / wandering across airports (JKF, Dulles, Cumbica, Rio, Recife) to get home only tomorrow afternoon. Damn it.

About the UXWeek: I will make a detailed post later, but what I can say is that it had it’s moment and for sure a lot of great things were learned and I think I was also capable of sharing a little bit of knowledge in mobile ux.

I’m bringing in my bag 2 iphones (one to pay the other) and a lot of information on how to make the team I work with, work better and more creatively.

Let’s see what we can gather in real life with the things said in the week.

It has been a great conference start. The keynote by Debora Addler was a class on the essence of Design. It was great even to known that she was able as an individual to patent it. Not that I’m in for patents, but when they are used like this, just to protect a single small inventor they are really doing what they were meant for.

After that, a nice storytelling session with Kevin Brooks from Motorola Labs, and I have the pleasure to meet a colleague from Nokia London, who actually designed the camera Ui. That reduced the felling of not knowing anyone around.

Then I attended an Ebay session, that it was not bad, it just didn’t fit for me. A pity but I was trying to find my guide book with my ticket for the tools session in the other room.

In the lunch time, I sat in the “Mobile and devices” table, to discuss about Symbian, Linux, Windows mobile, community innovation, reliability and more. In the table among other great people I met was Barbara Ballard, from little springs design. One of the few companies focused solely on mobile here in the US. If you want to check out her book : here

After lunch I attended the “how to manage Ux teams” and also one of the best sessions of the day about mental models, which in the begging left me a little bit skeptical about, but after a couple of minutes I could start realizing the potentials of using it.

Also a lot of other adaptive path sessions followed, and a loot of good information was gathered. Of course sometimes you get yourself thinking “This doesn’t fit for me” or “this is kind of too simple or too web related” but in the end the great thing is to realize that some of the things you think a pretty common you just forgot or doesn’t use more (Like Alan from Nokia said to me).

So I’m fully satisfied, the only thing that is killing me is that I got pretty ill in the evening and lost the cocktail night at Union state. Tried to sleep but I still felling bad. d***. Hope I’ll better tomorrow morning.

You can follow up the UX Week by twitter, flickr and of course googling for other blogs that are talking about it.

I have to admit : the keyboard correction works quite well. The thing that bothers me is the vertical keyboard . I just can’t use it with my thnx like the horizontal one.

Yes, this week will be pretty crowed attending the Ux week, but I believe that I will be able to gather a lot of insights and experiences from the sessions. Looking forward to not only talk but learn a lot about improving our indt team skills, and bring a lot of improvements to our Maemo projects (and the non maemo also of course)

If you’re around DC or Ny from 17-20 drop me a line =)

After we publish some videos (the keyboard and the scrolling) I lost a little bit of my time reading some comments on the sites that posted something about it, and I got really impressed by the way the people:

1. Really think we are doing or we want to do some kind of Iphone copy
2. Really believes everything that is in the IPhone was invented by apple, thus using it is copying apple.

Again folks, sorry to disappoint you, but apple is not the god of innovation. Even the click wheel or other nice things were not done by them (like the ipod ui). So please stop bothering yourself to post about:

“apple invented the error correction”
“apple invented the kinetic scrolling”
“apple invented the multi touch”
“apple invented the pinch gestures”
“apple invented __________________(just write whatever feature in the iphone here)”

It’s just not like that. Apple’s made a good job of putting a lot of features together in a simple, very intuitive ui. But did not invented the actual pieces of it. Deal with that. I sometimes get really pissed about people that are blinded in the matters of religions, but getting blind in the matters of what apple excels (marketing) is really out of this world. Get a little bit of knowledge.

Just to close: there was user who said this, when asked about the ability to use the keyboard on the horizontal position in more situations than the safari browsing:

“I have an iphone so I can say: yes you can”

Ok, show us then.