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.

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.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.