My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Hi,

Just assorted thoughts in no particular order, but I can elaborate more details
if you are interested.

Ok, let's start back in 1998, when I purchased my first smartphone, Nokia 9000i communicator. Truly amazing thing and it taught me a lesson: "geek" community is just as stupid and non-exploring as "common crowd"! If properly marketed, any field engineer would sell an arm and a leg for such a thing, but no -- it was marketed exclusively as managers toy (and toy was the proper wording) while all geeks pereferred silly Palm. And what Nokia did to developers was more than discouraging.

I had every communicator model til e90 and then eventually switched to n900 (I already nad 770, but did not use it much). I won't speak about n900 because it was definitely too "geeky",
but I am going to focus on things that went wrong in n9/n950 Harmattan.

There are four different sets of expectations: what operators want; what customers want; what geeks want and what developers want.

And the first one is the most contradicting to the rest and causing us must problems. Here in Russia no one cares about operator-sponsored phones, but in the rest of the world situation is likely to be different, and there should be a way out of this pitfall.

Operators want "treacherous computing" to market DRM stuff and control users in every aspect, they also want devices that are easy to support thus preventing unauthorized modification to the most extent.

Customers generally do not care about that, but they want phones to be sponsored by operators and are willing to give away any freedom to save a few dollars.

Geeks need completely the opposite! They want a device that is maintained like a computer.

That means no "certified firmwares" except for hardware level, everything other is just OS and applications. A nightmare if you want your device to be treated like "phone" by certification
authorities and by operators as well. But geeks want modular replaceable components and quick bug fixes, not waiting months and years for "next firmware update".

What developers need is questionable. I doubt they are they all that supportive to controlled ecosystems. It just worked for Apple but it does not mean it should work for those who refused
to buy an iPhone.

Ah. iPhone. It is amazing. When it came on the scene I was truly hoping that it will set new _minimal_ usability level. And that others will focus on filling the gaps doing things better than iPhone does. No! The mobile world just joined massive cargo cult. Though the secret of the iPhone was simple: don't do like others do. Do the proper way. And throw away old IBM UI manuals of 70s where "affordable UI delay" is 2-3 seconds which seemed to be the holy bible for everyone for years. Just burn them, they are no longer needed.

Actually iPhone is just bad and damn stupid. Every current mobile phone is. Even n9 is. Let me show why.

Phones suck at one-hand operation. Bring hardware keys back! And camera and dictaphone keys, definitely.

The killer feature in Meego/Maemo is merged contacts. And it sucks! Because even since n900 they are "exploding" all the way and nothing could be done to prevent it. Actually, Harmattan introduced just another bug so I cannot even merge them anymore.

PIMs suck big time. Even desktop ones suck. Outlook sucks. Everything else sucks because you cannot implement a feature which whill be lost when you sync to Outlook/Exchange.

The main reason PIMs suck is that they are application-centric. There is "calendar" app,
"address book" app, whatever else. They are very loosely connected, thus reasonable usage patterns cannot be implemented properly. It is all about object data backends and proper presentation. Proper PIM is "outliner" where you can link tasks, people, appointments, documents to some structure which is to be visualized with presentation modules which are seen
as "address book" or "calendar" or "nearby map" or "todo list" or whatever.

The closest thing to it I ever seen is Agendus, PalmOS version. (WM version is deficient,don't waste time in it).
BTW, Maemo silently dropped the ability to organize meeting via SMS.

Having all that in place creates a framework that lets the user to follow *natural* patterns.

If you have an appointment, you need the ability to get from the reminder to appropriate contact or todo entry or related documents in just one click.

If you get a message "let's meet at (place) 5pm", the phone contextual heuristics should be smart enough to recognize that as possible appointment with date and place. It is not that
hard. And you need to get to the map in one click as well.

Grab any current phone and do all that operations by hand. Copy the text, create the appointment, make a link to the map.. oops, there are no links to the map at all. And no links to address book too. It JUST SUCKS. If you need to find where it is, you need to start map "application" and then "find" what you need there.

It is easy to have a small in-memory cache of localities to be recognized, etc etc. Just no one cares to.

PIMs suck big time for business. There is no proper data separation, no entities like "company" (contact groups are ugly substitute). First consequence, it sucks when it comes to
MDM. You just cannot separate private data from company owned!

Nokia always sucked when it comes to integration to third-party services like Google. Thanks to Ovi, which always tried to "compete". Getting simple address book/calendar sync is pain,
maps are not supporting Latitude updates, etc etc. And it should be TOP priority (well, data sync at least, maybe not latitude :-) !

Power management sucks, and given there is no way to install huge battery like Mugen did for e90 (3800mAh), it is often fatal. If your phone is able to drain the battery in 4 hours, it is not acceptable at all. Please do something. Harmattan was enormously bad with unexpected battery drains that cannot be even propely diagnosed. It is just "system idle" consuming
200mAh!

Security and certificate management sucks. Should I dig that deeper?

UI response time really sucks. A different scheduler with RT priority for UI is just mandatory.

Rotation control is enormously bad. Doing it per-application with that slow UI?

So it is not about hardware specs people like to talk about. I do not care about hardware at all (well, at least while I get decent qwerty keyboard). It is all about UI and QA.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

You sure have a few points there, especially the one about bringing back hardware keyboard. This touch-"trend" as I like to call it is just insane. In fact, these capacitive screens appears to have some compatibility problem with my skin, sometimes they just don't react. What the hell?
Even the huge transformer prime tablet SUCKS with the touchy stuff.

But your whining about contacts lists and all that is not high up on my list.
I want a phone with real roundrobin scheduler and multitasking, no crappy backgrounding or slow as hell java apps that gets frozen once minimized. You are right, every phone today sucks bigtime, even the new SGS III. Won't even mention that iCrap, that is totally off the pile-of-junk chart.

Please, Jolla guys. Save us.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Let me ask you this.
What do you think of plasma active?
I believe you can try out a kubuntu active version for your desktop.

P.s. I think you are the Simon Cowell of smartphones

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Yeah, you kind of lost me there, do you know of any current projects that are equivalent for the desktop so I can get a better idea of what you mean? I always just used the funambol sync application, which for some reason keeps seperating out skype addresses after I merge them back in to any given contact - maybe it and the Linux/Evolution sync app don't see eye to eye - but otherwise works ok.

I appreciate your natural design ethic though. And you're right about certificates, I could never get that to work - I believe it remains an outstanding bug - and so still can't connect to my school's WPA/PEAP setup.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

> But your whining about contacts lists and all that is not high up on my list.

And that's amazing that one of primary function of portable gadgets, managing personal infomration is *not* high up on everyone's list. Maybe that's just because the implementation always sucked and you gave up?

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Not really, but there are tricks and hacks here and there that implement this functionality at least partially. The thing to start with for better understanding of this concept is outliner. Another representation of similar entities may be, say, mindmap, but mindmaps really suck at small screens.

Once you start with the outliner, imagine you can link just any entity to any and every PIM object is linkable entity. Once it is done, all "frontend" human interfaces whould work seamlessly following the links.

Say, if you open a contact card, you magically see:

conversation history (email, IM, call and dictaphone records)
meetings, todos, projects
places
photos
documents shared, exchanged or discussed with this person
social network updates

Same thing happens if you open an appointment. Or a location. Or todo entry.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Oh, ok, so you could do eg; a manipulable cloud of associated PIM data nodes you could spin around and poke whatever file and the associated application would open. It would be nice if the desktop could do this as a matter of course though I guess it's all still being worked out. I wonder if it's possible in (another) Nautilus fork

Guess I'll go play with 'mindmap' in the meantime

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Yes, there are two different big things that I left completely out of the scope: desktop and state preservation and sharing. I was going to explain it separately if Jolla is interested.

Basic state preservation and sharing could be seen in Firefox Sync, but it is not reliable :-( And we need that for IM, ebook readers, media, whatever else..

And I have to admin Harmattan sucked exceptionally bad when it comes to properly handling the environmental state. Just a simple rule "never drop older version of the information until you completed receiving replacement" meant nothing to developers as it seems. Drop off the network by accident and you lose state and data all the time.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Ok, I admit its kind of important that it works and not like you say on the N9 that its possible to loose information like that.
But I mean, on the N900 its working quite good from that aspect I think with the merging.
But if we look at the serious problems with phones today is that they really lack the possibility to work with the more technology aware kind of user. Call it the developer profile if you want, but I think its sad that everything is so dumbed down, cloud and ecosystem centric.
I feel like a stupid monkey sitting with a typical "smart"-phone today.
Give us a real keyboard, Maemo-style UI (some freedom to do almost anything), native code enabled software
, a UI making use of real multitasking and we're good to go. The we'd finally be able to make some real use of the processing power in the multicore SoC's out there today.
In fact, I don't even think it would have to be contradictive with targeting both advanced users and the average phone users at the same time. Hell, put in both a debian packager AND a more controlled software management system like Google play or iStore. We can have both worlds. Memory is not a problem.
Meet the full audience for once.
Its a sad fact for me, I can't leave the N900 until something real shows up beside all these sad toys released today. Jolla may be my only hope.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

You mean you never seen "exploding" contacts on n900?
Quite amazing, then it should be something special with my setup.
And anyways -- sync with google was just broken on n900 :-(

I totally agree. But to really meet "average user" requirements UI and performance should be polished at least like Apple does it. To the moment, no one else dares to.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Arkanoid, Please explain. Do you mean that the N900 automatically adds a new contact every time a new person calls you? If you mean the merging stuff I don't get it. If I have the same person as different contacts I just merge them and they're....merged.
Probably I just misunderstand what you mean completely.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

I mean I carefully merge all my address book contacts properly, then I wait several days and.. bang! Some random contacts are spontaneously unmerged. I thought it was sync to blame, but it still happened when I disabled sync. And it became even worse in Harmattan.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

To Whom It May Concern,


I pre-ordered the N900 after reading about it and the previous Nxxx's that I'd never heard of until then. I bought another for my fiancee 6 months later. She had it for a good while, but it was too geeky for her and she got an E7 as She cannot live without hardware keyboard.

Had the two N900's for a while (months) but sold one as it wasnt getting much use.

I did a bit of developing on the N900, and a LOT of modding!

I got the N9 when it was first released in Australia, and loved it the whole way. I can live without hardware keyboard with this device! It has its problems like every device, but I love how easy it is to modify it! Ive made a whole new theme set with extra haptic feedback, modified phone UI... Then theres everyone else......! OC'ing, inception, etc. etc.

I consider myself a advanced user, and now; a developer because of both the N900 and especially; the N9. I've brought my graphic design skills to life in my developing.

Oh, and I wouldn't say no to a hardware keyboard either.


Regards,
F2K.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

I must say that I absolutely loved the PIM capabilities of the old PalmPilots! Loved how Syncing and the Palm Desktop worked.

But then my last Palm broke, and I had all my PIM data locked up in Palm Desktop and couldn't export all my calendar data. And I moved away from Windows on which the Palm Desktop software ran.

While the N900 and N9 calendar works nicely, I haven't gotten syncing working yet - and am not so sure of Google having ALL of my data just yet! :p

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

I always hated Palm because it was non-autonomous and not self-sufficient. If you have a Palm it means you have a "computer" to sync with somewhere, otherwise your productivity is seriously impaired. Even back in 1994 it was obvious that the idea is flawed, that's why I owned a pocket PC (real x86, I mean) instead. Maybe it sucked big time with PIM usability, but hardware keyboard and native software were the killer features (former one is why I was not into Psions)

And PalmOS was a complete disaster in just every aspect. It survived CPU architecture change with no refactoring. All ugly hacks and glitches that were invented to keep the price tag low on 1994 hardware were to stay forever til it died due to natural reasons in 2005 or whenever. I owned a Sony UX50, the top device and even s80v1 looked like advanced OS being compared to it.

But I was not impressed with Palm's native PIM at all. Agendus is all different story, it was real state of the art thing.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

The question is, why would jolla pay any attention to you?

Why is your input more valuable than some random stranger's from the street?

You haven't shown any credentials, your message is probably not more than spam at this point to jolla.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

"Credentials"? Who cares? What "credentials" do you expect?
Elop has "credentials", go ask his "valuable and well-baked" advice instead.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Jolla will most likely not venture into some high end development right from the start. They first need to get the wheels turning for the investors.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Yes, most likely. The first goal is to get running as much as possible from Meego without being sued by Nokia. I expect the pilot model to have many imperfections but we can live with it.

The question is general attitude: is Jolla brave enough to make it user-friendly like phone and geek-friendly like computer at the same moment? The main question: are they willing to try?

I loved swipe ui, but it probably won't be there.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Well, he held a couple of executive positions in various companies. That kind of makes him qualified.

What did you accomplish?

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

-> Qualified in the eyes of his brother sociopaths? Sorry I see a hired away job hopper that does no good to Nokia either.

If he was to be found holding an executive position in a company for years and is actually accomplishing something there all (including shareholders) can agree with and admire, that would make him somehow qualified.

As for now, Arkanoid for CEO if not this guy:

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/263...nokia-responds
As a programmer / CEO he would have known that Harmattan wasn't all that much behind to catch up with Android in 2011 as Elop declared in his enter WP7 plans speech.

And at least I expect their qualification to pull Nokia ahead reaching further than parroting "ecosystem" and firing people.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Elop is a disconnected 1%er walking into a room of 1%ers going, "hey guys I have an Idea, lets lay lots and lots of people off and move production to Asia and go winblows late cuz uhm errrrr Izzzzzz smart" like those short fat waddling ******ed technology thieves from star trek the next gen and then the rest of the disconnected 1%ers on Nokia board go "sure, ok keep us posted" and the piece of crap failure Microhard trojan horse Elop proceeds to bankrupt Nokia and destroy its competing OS game plan so that Microhard can buy it cheap and use it to patent troll (Read we can spend more money than you on our lawyers so you have no hope/choice fighting our lame windows 3.1 patents) like they did B&N.
The next windowz device will be a vibrator with extra ram for Elop so he can enjoy his final days before a flash mob of Finnish public beats his ___ for ruining their countries income tax.
P.S. I paid a female in Denmark $100 to buy me an N9 and ship it to me so I got it despite Elop dorkwad failure trojan horse

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

in other words, please Jolla, bring Maemo to E7.

pleeeeease!!!

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Just have to say I totally agree with your comments regarding PIMs, especially the context aware part. There are some apps on the desktop that have started teeny steps towards this kind of thing. Xobni (an Outlook addin) is one where it automatically scrapes email signatures for phone numbers and uses that to build a contact profile. But no integration with calendars or tasks.

Gist is another addin for Outlook that will link up contact profiles, pull in information from social network sites, and also add in certain information on any shared meetings. It can be pretty cool when it works, but the UI needs work (always sending me to the web for any real information, where I have to login, and then wait forever for information to load)

I would love, love, love to see some real innovation in the mobile space for PIM functionality along the lines you outline. That's where it is needed the most, yet is the hardest platform to actually use.

Also wanted to say it is refreshing to see another person on here not hardware spec obsessed. Every time a thread comes up here with a "What do you want to see in the next ..." It is all about 16 core processors, 64GB of RAM, 94 MP camera, etc... For me I'd like something with capable performance, good battery life, a decent size screen, and either a hw keyboard or a stylus and throw in a good kickstand for the finishing touch. After that all I care about is software usability.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

My Letter to Jolla:

Dear Jolla, your father and mother have failed at Maemo and Harmattan. Here is what I suggest to you. Send your CEO to a good intensive course on how to run a company, and how to deliver the goods. Learn that a device that doesnt do its basics as smoothly as iOS will fail. Learn that half-baked OS has no chance today. Learn that you need to deliver a revolutionary product in order to break out. Learn to listen and to absorb the best that is out there. And Jolla, please stop tweeting and start delivering. Words are empty and dont fill the shelves.

Sincerely, Lumiaman

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

agree with pim too. My best experience is samsung i780 winmo. It Is great about pim info (never had palm) and compatible with outlook. n900 is good in merge contact, even can create qr code of contacts. N9 can't do that.
i Press Merge in n9, it merge incorrectly. keyboard hardware, at least i Need arrow in n9 Keyboard.
Sorry for my English and bad capitalizing (use Swype, and i still no good use n9's way in pointing cursor to letters)

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Glasshouse - cough - cough - stones -cough.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Lumiaman, I won't blame creators of n900 and n9 for a "failure".
Given lack of marketing support (actually more like a sabotage) both had more than amazing success, despite all software glitches that can ruin the experience.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Or maybe carriers didn't want to sell any of the devices because they where more of a toys rather than viable options with enough of software support behind them even before the burning platform and all?

I would have been hesitant to get Maemo/MeeGo phone as a operator. I can imagine majority of people being disappointed by the lackluster software outside the core UI and lots of returns if the phone would have been pushed to larger audience.

What people want in these kind of forums don't even represent the 0.000001% of the market out there.
There's example a reason why there's no qwerty phones anymore, Samsung and Nokia did actually try to sell them 2-3 years ago, but they are simply not selling even in the kind of volumes that make them viable option anymore in high end.

I doubt even Jolla will be making their phone with a qwerty and i hope they wont. These kind of minorities should not be the ones pushing companies like these in anyway just because they are the most vocal ones in certain niche.
I hope the people in Jolla have also learned that when they where working for Nokia.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Well I don't have any particular demands of my own, I would be perfectly happy with a new device that thrills and amazes me as much as my N9 did - and still does. With contemporary spec, of course.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Finally, someone who gets it.

I see most users around here have no idea how a company works... They think if they try hard enough, they can give them "advice" and send them their requests and ramblings.

What you're talking about is true, as all market research already demonstrated, and Jolla is probably aware of this too. This market research thing is probably a lot more valuable to them than some kid writing an e-mail about their OSS dreams.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Well, I did not see any efforts that count like "actually try to sell".
And niche position is just ok. That's another management problem: if you are a "phone company" you inevitably compare niche products with bestseller ones. And it just does not work that way. It was stupid to compare sales of Nokia 9110 with sales of Nokia 3210 and make a conclusion that "9110 failed". Actually you do compete to other players in the same niche and should compare to them, not to some other thing that is called by similar name by an accident.

There is another problem: to get outside of the niche you need to spend ENORMOUS effort on QA and usability. I see it to be almost impossible for a relatively small startup and newly developed product. First iPhone was a niche player as well, don't you remember that? It wasn't really even a smartphone.

Better get a solid position *inside* a niche where you already do have credit, respect and customers willing to pay. *Then* you may walk out of the closet.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

I woudn't overestimate "market research". It can predict almost nothing if your product is really innovative. Well, you can give up with innovations and feel confident with "market research". As you see everyone chose this way.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

I'm just wondering... does anyone know if Jolla (Mer) does also store sensitive data (my contacts, calendar and SMS) inside the tracker database?

So if the tracker indexer stops creating thumbnails I lose in the worst case all my data?

This was the biggest issue I had with Harmattan. Apart from this, the most perfect device out there...

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Yes. And it may go ALL WRONG and there is no simple way to repair the tracker database. See famous "merge bug" and all glitches like that.

Lack of crypto support everywhere is what worries me as well.

We have gpg and openssl on the phone, but no encrypted mail, OTR and SRTP. It just sucks. Most other mobile platforms have FDE at least, but for some unknown reason not Maemo/Meego.

Having no option to protect your privacy is plain stupid (though non-issue for most customers :-( )

I also remember good old days when backup was just the filesystem image -> no issues with applications install and data in unexpected places. But it is just incompatible with treacherous computing principle.

Ah, well. Disregard this whole post. Tracker problems are REALLY ruining user experience, while everything else is just geeks whining.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

And yet another crazy thing with harmattan -- state handling:

How is address book sync done in MfE? Once a while, DROP all synced contact and fetch them from a server.

Home screen feeds? Yes, DROP current state and try to update.

Weather update? Yes, FORGET current weeather data and fetch new.

Guys, did you ever have QA at all? Did you have basic mental health check when hiring people? Whoever invented that is completely out of his mind.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

You hit the nail on the head. That is why JOLLA will not succeed. If the same leadership is in charge of JOLLA that was in charge of Harmattan.....good luck amigos

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

isnt tracker an indexer? Why on earth do they indexing password :O

but yes tracker seems to have stupid issues that need to be fixed however tracker is fully opensource

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

This is not meant to be sarcastic in any way towards your nickname, but many of those who were in charge of Harmattan and partially responsible for many of the shipwrecks (but also some of them successes) in Harmattan - are now responsible for Windows Phone parts at Nokia. Developer relations, program management, marketing..

Go look it up on LinkedIn.

Re: My letter to Jolla and what was wrong with Harmattan
 

Jolla won't to be a major success. They are trying to survive in the market to release another phone. Add to that that they won't release a high-end device.

No one here can possibly believe that Jolla can compete with android or IOS or even windows phone.

I can tell you right now. If they survive the first release and then get another chance the could grow slightly. But need years to build branding and and consumer base. And one failed release means the end.

Unless they have someone who loves to wasting money like Microsoft pushing windows. That is the muscle jolla needs to live to see another device.

Good luck Jolla. I'm waiting for your low-end phone.

I' will probably buy it, but not as my main phone. I will do becouse I like the idea of Meego and Linux. Not because its a great phone!
Chuck