Following yesterday’s announcement by Apple that they’re dropping the price of the iPhone by $200, Nokia took out ads on Google.com inviting disgruntled iPhone owners to check out its new Mosh social network for mobile.

Cheeky quick thinking, I have to admit! It probably wouldn’t convince me to join the Mosh network, but as with the latest Nokia campaigns (Jealous Computers and NSyndrome), it shows they’re alert and in tune. If anything, it’s worth a giggle and a bit of PR coverage!

[From TechCrunch, incl screenshot]

There’s a new Digital Divide in our world. I’m not referring to the oft-quoted divide between the digital haves and the have-nots, but the increasing divide between the mobile device world and the desktop world that exists for most of us. This was brought home to me recently when I tried to figure out the easiest way to synch my photos and music between my Nokia N95 and my MacBook Pro.

I’ve started taking a lot more photos on my phone since I became an N95 user. The 5 megapixel camera is pretty good for snapshots when I don’t have my Sony camera with me. I’ve also starting filling up my 2GB card on the Nokia with music. Making sure that our Taptu search engine works really well for the widest spectrum of music artists has had the pleasant side effect of leading me to discover a lot of new music.

Coincidentally I spotted a blog announcement of Nokia’s new “Nokia Multimedia Transfer” program for Mac OS X users. I installed it more in hope than expectation of a good solution. My experience in the past of the quality of Nokia’s old PC-to-phone synch products hasn’t been good: over-complex UI, unreliable, and often causing knock-on problems with other synching products on Windows that used to work just fine.

Surprise, surprise. It installed fast, had a great UI, it worked, and so still do all my other Mac synch programs. Someone who really cares has engineered and tested this. And to think that Nokia with their spotty record on Windows synch solutions put all this effort into the minority Mac OS X audience. I’m guessing that now the blogger community is so important to Nokia, and so many bloggers use Macs that they made it a priority.

But there is still a Digital Divide. When I invoke a synch, the Nokia program prompts me to install a USB cable to link my N95 to the MacBook, so I have to fumble around in a drawer to extract it from the tangle of 5 other cables and plug it in before the Nokia app thinks I’ve gone away. If I don’t do this, it reverts to Bluetooth and my transfers take so long that I’m worried I’ll miss any incoming calls while its happening.

Despite all of Nokia’s focus on investing resources to solve the mobile to desktop sync problem (surely it must be to ward off the impending threat of Apple and the iPhone – Apple are great at this stuff) the user experience breaks down at its weakest point – finding the physical cable. Maybe Nokia should be trying to do this synching over the faster WiFi link.

If it’s this hard to do music and photo sync well on the N95 with a special Series 60 application where Nokia have invested special and extraordinary effort to make sure it works, just think how much harder it is to do it well on feature phones where you don’t have the luxury of a special application. For most of us out there, our mobile is joined to our PC only by a very thin and awkward straw. Yet on the Web these sorts of everyday connectivity issues were solved years ago. At Taptu, we’re thinking hard about we could couple mobile search to mobile share to ease this new Digital Divide.

[Image source: ZDNet]

No, this isn’t the story of an Essex mum who discovered that her daughter had not gone to school, eaten or slept in 4 1/2 months because she’s joined at the thumb with her mobile phone, having texted her friends with “I ain’t bovered” 3 trillion times (though that’s entirely plausible too)

Three trillion text messages is how many 2.1 billion mobile users have sent across the world in the past year. Om Malik writes about this means of communication which can only be compared with the likes of email in terms of widespread success.

The popularity of SMS parallels that of email: It is simple, easy and doesn’t need any expensive gear to send or receive. Like email, it is socialist in its usage — a cheap $50 phone can send and receive SMS messages from a luxury model, Nokia N95 and even more snobbish iPhone.

Text messaging has undeniably become a useful communication tool when we don’t have time or energy for the polite conversation sugarcoating required in a phone conversation. SMS is direct, to the point and can be as asynchronous as you like. It’s clever and enables all sorts of long distance actions like letting your mates know you’ll be late, updating your status on Twitter or even getting your Personal Video Recorder to record something for you*.

Now, all together, “We love SMS!”

[* If you've managed to get this working, do let me know! I've yet to get it working properly. ]

A booth in the Radisson SAS hotel in Copenhagen. Subtle, yet speaks volumes about expected etiquette.

[From Jan Chipchase via Gadget Lab]

Just last week my tech-savvy lawyer friend Simon Halberstam posed me the following question: “Will the mobile phone replace the PC as main interface to the internet?” A question I have been recently asking myself, so here are a few musings on the topic.

First, a little history. Back in the heady days of WAP, there was a company called phone.com, which was later renamed as Unwired Planet, and then to Openwave. They were one of the first to evangelise the notion that mobiles would become internet devices and indeed the predominant internet devices.

Many others were caught up in the excitement, pouring hundreds of millions into building mobile portals. Remember the Vizavvi debacle? Zed and Genie? These grand ambitions were radically downsized as the internet bubble burst and the cold light of day set in: more and more phones sported microbrowsers but very worryingly, few people were using them – except in Japan.

A Jan 2007 ICM Omnibus Survey of the Mobile Internet showed that 21% of UK adults access the Mobile Internet to search for music, ringtones, mobile games or other forms of entertainment. Which means that 79% of people don’t. Not-so-different results have been observed in the US and in European studies.

I’m as sad a mobile geek as anybody, but I can’t see myself using my mobile (Nokia N95) as my main interface to the internet when I’m at work. Why would I, when I have a broadband-connected MacBook Pro right in front of me? If you’re poring through 82 unread blog posts like I am now, a 17 inch MacBook screen sure beats a 2.5 inch N95.

What I can see myself doing is using my mobile internet device as my main interface to my social network. I’m a recent convert to Facebook, and their mobile service works surprisingly well. And I’m not alone in liking it.

According to M:Metrics, 12.3 million consumers in the US and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile in June this year MySpace attracted 3.7 million US and 440,000 UK mobile users. In America, Facebook’s mobile audience is about 2 million, and in Britain, about 307,000. Rounding out the top three is YouTube in the U.S., with 901,000 mobile visitors and Bebo in the UK, with 288,000.

Where do I see all this going? In ten years time, the desktop internet will still be the optimum device for office-bound knowledge workers. The destiny of the mobile internet is to be the natural place you go (several times a day or more) for social connection. It will also be the way to seek out the myriad tiny snippets of information (people, time, places) which spin out of this context.

[tags]Mobile devices, social network, community, Facebook, MySpace, M:Metrics, mobile phone, technology, gadgets, Taptu, Taptology, Steve Ives[/tags]

If you’re using a Symbian Series 60 phone, whether it’s a Samsung, Nokia or LG, you probably wish it could do something more or do it differently. Well, the great news is that the S60 team is listening and looking for your feedback.

They’ve created an Application Wishlist, where you can add or rate Digg-style which features you would most like to see added. You’ll need to register to comment and rate wishes, but it’s worthwhile.

I don’t think wishes like “a tap-dancing phone” or “it turns into a Transformer when you hit the snooze button” would be likely to be put into action, but if your improvement ideas are less silly than mine, go on, close your eyes and make a wish!

[via Symbian-Guru]

[tags]nokia, s60, s60.com, s60v3, symbian, wishlist, mobile phone, technology, gadgets[/tags]

One of our much-loved tools, Skype, has been down for over 24 hours.

Clearly, we’re not the only ones feeling a tad lost without it. Reports of team members rediscovering their vocal cords and others having to dig up friends’ email addresses have been flooding in. Some call centres have also come to a standstill due to the lack of Skype connectivity.

So what happens when you’re relying heavily on a tool to go about your business? What would happen if, for example, mobiles phones or search engines disappeared for a day?

We’ve taken mobile phones for granted in recent years, failing to make definitive plans when meeting up with friends, opting for the “Let’s wing it… I’ll call you when I get nearby” alternative. Texting friends throughout the day is like a lifeline for younger mobile users, and making calls while on the road are the norm for business users (with handsfree kit of course!) I mean, really… What else do you do when you’re on the train home and you find yourself at a standstill for an hour? Text your mates, call your mum or browse the web on your phone to pass the time.

As for search engines, as a blogger and hopelessly curious reader, I dare not imagine what a day would be without Google, Technorati or Wikipedia (or Wapedia often in my case!) I realise that it’s a luxury that such extensive indexes of knowledge even exist, and that I would continue to breathe and live without them, but they’ve grown to become a part of my routine. Losing this ability to find out inane trivia while on my mobile at the pub or having to use the paper classified listings to find a local plumber just wouldn’t brighten my day the way search engines do!

Maybe I’m too connected for my own good - my dad regularly says I need to go camping in the Canadian wilderness for a while to detox from technology. He does make a point, seeing as I can probably count the computer-free days of the past 10 years of my life on my fingers and toes, but some of us really love technology, gadgets and winning pub quizzes due to our infallible general knowledge of complete rubbish!

So why not dedicate your first Friday evening drink to the wonderful technologies we take for granted? And to the Skype team who probably haven’t slept much in the past 24 hours!

Last week Madhuban Kumar posed me a question: Is there a mobile museum anywhere, or any museum with a significant collection of old phones? So I decided to take a look. I discovered that the Contempory Museum in Baltimore was the first US museum to showcase an entire collection devoted to the cell phone and its impact on everyday life.

My Google searching didn’t turn up many more museum collections, but there are quite a few personal collections. British businessman Dr Graham Cooley has one of the largest. He lent 120 mobiles from his own collection to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, which claims to be the largest computer museum in the world. The phones were featured in the foyer and “constitute one of the largest such collections in Europe”.

The largest physical collection of phones that I found is owned by the mobile phone testing company Mobile Complete, to support their Device Anywhere service. More than 350 phones have been lobotomised, inserted into racks, their covers removed and wires inserted to allow remote operation and viewing over the internet. Not nice if you’re a phone but very nice if you are a mobile web site developer.

If we are talking virtual, rather than physical, then I can offer you some truly impressive collections. Mobilezoo is a new web site that has compiled detailed information on 750 handsets already – see their Evolution Gallery – which anyone can access for free. M:Metrics is a respected mobile market research firm with 1800 devices listed and viewable in their Device Tracker service. WURFL is the biggest of them all, listing 6,860 devices at last count, just technical data though, no pictures.

We certainly do hoard a lot of mobile phones. In the USA probably more than 500 million sit in the back of a drawer gathering dust, worth at least $10 billion in scrap value alone. Recellular Inc. has estimated that 130m mobiles are retired in the US every year. The British hoard a lot too: 52 million at last count.

My conclusion: if you want to create a museum with the world’s largest collection of mobile phones, just go out there onto eBay and start buying. As of today, you will only need a few hundred and you will soon be in the Guinness Book of World Records!

[Photo: Max Glanville Photo]

[tags]mobile phones, cell phones, taptu, taptology, recellular, m:metrics, contemporary museum in baltimore, technology, gadgets, phones[/tags]

If you have a Nokia phone, take a moment to remove your phone’s cover and check whether your battery sports the letters BL-5C. If it was also manufactured between December 2005 and November 2006, your battery is most likely on Nokia’s battery recall list.

As Alex at SMS Text News says, the potential short circuiting while charging “could cause the battery to dislodge. And overheat. And, although the press release doesn’t say this, overheating batteries have been known to go pop.”

You can request a battery replacement on Nokia’s website (or on your local version). The original press release is also available if you’d like to have a read.

If you’re now watching your phone suspiciously on the corner of your desk, expecting it to go boom any minute, check whether it’s one of the following models: Nokia 1100, Nokia 1100c, Nokia 1101, Nokia 1108, Nokia 1110, Nokia 1112, Nokia 1255, Nokia 1315, Nokia 1600, Nokia 2112, Nokia 2118, Nokia 2255, Nokia 2272, Nokia 2275, Nokia 2300, Nokia 2300c, Nokia 2310, Nokia 2355, Nokia 2600, Nokia 2610, Nokia 2610b, Nokia 2626, Nokia 3100, Nokia 3105, Nokia 3120, Nokia 3125, Nokia 6030, Nokia 6085, Nokia 6086, Nokia 6108, Nokia 6175i, Nokia 6178i, Nokia 6230, Nokia 6230i, Nokia 6270, Nokia 6600, Nokia 6620, Nokia 6630, Nokia 6631, Nokia 6670, Nokia 6680, Nokia 6681, Nokia 6682, Nokia 6820, Nokia 6822, Nokia 7610, Nokia N70, Nokia N71, Nokia N72, Nokia N91, Nokia E50, Nokia E60

[Via Engadget]

[tags]Nokia, mobile phone, cellphone, technology, gadgets, engadget, smstextnews, taptu, taptology, battery replacement, product recall[/tags]

If you’re based in the UK, you’ll probably agree that this Summer was less than stellar in terms of weather. In case you still hold hope that we may get BBQ-friendly weather before the season ends officially, All About Symbian writes about eight weather forecast services for Symbian phones.

In fact, only three of the eight suggestions are Symbian-only as the other five are web-based, so have a look at Steve’s post and cross your fingers for some sunshine on the weekend.

Rain, rain, go away, come again another day…