What’s all the hype about touch screen phone UI, specifically swipe paging anyway? A cellphone is not a book and it is not like anyone’s swipe paging UI does the paper seam flipping animation along with the finger movement gesture following. If swiping animation were considered “a cool thing” to have, what’s so cool about it when everyone does the same, at least for capacitive touch screen phones which comes in a dime a dozen these days?!

I can see that even when the Nokia N8 front page swiping UI actually does so in a much faster paging rate than iOS4 does, and that the N8 actually has a virtual button on the screen bottom which does flawless paging in an instant, the virtual button does take up screen real estate. Yet why would blindly following the iOS or Android way be any cool or even be competitive as everyone seems to be dreaming about. Following others is not “cool”. “Cool” is when you have a better way than everyone else!

Oh yes, there is a better way that I can think of alright; you bet!

After using an iPod Touch 4 for a mere 2 weeks and an Nokia N8 a little over a week, which I will have a full report for them later, I wish there would be a much simpler, faster, and surer paging for all touch OSs’ UI. Just off the top of my head there is a way.

If swiping, like all other iOS gesturing functions, has no on-screen indicators, instructions, menus, or commands anyway, why not just have the screen divided into two imaginary half areas, one left one right (or top and bottom halves if you like)? Simply press the left half portion of the screen to flip backward and press the right half portion of the screen to flip forward! That would work just as easily for either hand. Simple, quick, functional, FAST, and SURE! You can animate to hell after the pressing for those eye candy junkies and kill off all the gesture thumbtitis buffs after that, I don’t care. Just make all commands swift!

No, the iOS is not swift either. There, I said it.

This proves I was correct with my presumption that bloggers like Gizmodo wrote what they wrote because they had never used a Symbian phone ever since the Nokia E60/E61/E61i or the Nokia 6120. That’s why all they could ever say is that Symbian is old but nothing substantial at all to support their views.

It’s funny how they have become an iFanboy right after they were caught knowingly buying a stolen prototype iPhone. Right after the police raided their blogger’s home they have lost their mojo.

Other people had chosen not to read Gizmodo long time ago. To do so would have been no difference in shortsightedness as Gizmodo themselves. So yeah, call me old fashion but I still have a Gizmodo RSS subscription. I don’t follow their tweets though because I prefer to read lines of words at a time rather than a hundred or so characters.

Although I couldn’t afford an iPhone and Android phone at the same time to make proper comparisons myself, I have bought a iPod Touch 4 to experience the latest iOS4 10 days ago and will try to find some way to experience the Android OS somehow before I jump into any conclusion to publish my own reviews.

And oh, yeah in the mean time, I have just placed an order for a Nokia N8 2 days ago. Yeah, that’s right, that’s 8 days after I had played with the iPod Touch 4 inside out.

P.S. – Just a reminder, cause the N8 would make this fact easily be forgotten from looking at those sample photos, the Canon 550D is an 18MegaPixel DSLR camera. Nikon should join venture with Nokia and replace the CZ with their Nano Coated Nikkor and called it the Nikon 3N phone camera.

I kept saying, if you must cheat, don’t let anyone catches you. Yet in this case, the whole world caught them and reflected that in their readers’ comment areas. So much for being tech blog giants.

It proves one point though, a phone is only as smart or dumb as the person using it. Quit wasting good gadget on morons’ hands, should have sent them to those customers who had ordered and waiting for one instead.

Some say Nokia Smartphones are not smartphones at all, I supposed this video demonstrated just exactly how dumb a N97 got.

Incidentally, any mentioned of delays and slowness of the N97 in the Engadget article does not seem to exist in their video. The only slowness bit was from the VW terminal side and the vast amount of data of the satellite image transfered to the N97 via 3G data and then to the VW via a USB2.0 link. The actual delay seen on the video was by far no more frustrating than the rolling beachball on OSX. A USB3.0 link such as the one available on the Nokia N8 should be a lot faster should the VW link is up to that standard.

Any closed system phones would have a tough time getting through all the red tapes before this would work. Perhaps that’s why VW chose a 2 year old Nokia phone for this demo.

Tech bloggers especially American pro Apple bloggers have been copying each others words over and over again, saying that there hasn’t been any changes in Nokia’s smartphones in years and that they should get rid of Symbian all together and follow what everyone else does by introducing Nokia’s own Android phone to safe the company or else it would no longer be in the cellphone business in just a few years.

One of these American bloggers recently asked why people in Europe still buy Nokia smartphone when there is iPhone and Android phones nowadays. The results were about how durable and long battery lasting as well as quality sounding Nokia phones are. The blogger then went ahead and commented that apparently (only to him perhaps) most people over there for some odd reasons don’t Twitt or update their Facebook status mobilely. Maybe or maybe they don’t but has this blogger even held a Nokia phone before or has he himself ever Twitted and/or updated his own Facebook status mobilely at all?! Cause if he had, he would know that Twitting or Facebook status updating mobilely does not require a smartphone. FYI, even Nokia S40 non smartphones could do all that. And no, neither Nokia nor its fans consider S40 phones as being smartphones.

The same blogger laughs at Nokia and asks why they can’t compete with Apple in the US Continent; in fact the same question can be asked from a different point of view – why does Apple only win out Nokia in the US Continent alone?

There is also an interesting point in that one of the bloggers in that particular blog site had a recent legal issue vs Apple…

Back to the point. These bloggers on one hand saying that it is all about high profit margins not being market leading and if Nokia does not make drastic changes immediately they would fall out of the cellphone business; yet on the other hand when Nokia fired their CEO, hires another, with another department director resigned, to them that’s a “turmoil” for Nokia. Huh? If Nokia didn’t do it right, how is those been responsible leaving the company a turmoil to the company? If it were a turmoil, were these leaving head of company right to begin with?! Make up your minds, alright?!

Nokia’s soon to leave chief smartphone person, Anssi Vanjoki, who declared that Nokia switching to Android now would be like peeing in their pants to keep warm in the winter. I agree with him on this point. Android is not the holy grail for smartphone business. At this same “Nokia turmoil” moment, LG’s replaced their own CEO to take accountability for ongoing distressed handset business for the company. Yet as recently as this January, LG’s CEO said about half of LG’s new smartphones will run Android. Other companies with cellphone business and Android smartphone products are not doing nearly as well as HTC, Samsung, and Motorola does either, namely Acer and even Sony.

Why would everyone want a generic or similar looking smartphone to everyone else anyway? The popularity of a phone depends more upon its look than its function. Unlike techno geeks and gear heads, the general public usually choose a phone by its looks first before they look into its functions. Others may have function specific needs. Seldom does people ask which OS a cellphone is running before other considerations let alone knowing what different OSs are and offer.

I would not go into details with the obvious advantages of each and every smartphone OS/hardware here. They each have their merits and advantages as well as their own fair shares of shortcomings. That is not my intention for this message. No doubt that Nokia being one of the first if not the first to start the world’s smartphone business naturally their market share would drop drastically when other companies follow suit into the same business with decent products. Even Apple’s “almighty” iPhone has lost some of their share of the smartphone market when locust like Android phones swamped the market. The fact of the matter is, despite the smartphone market might be growing faster than any other products in the world in recent years, it is still a relatively small market compared to the market of all cellphones. Not everyone likes to use a smartphone and even less for a full touch screen smartphone for these specific people. The world is always going to have a need for dumb cellphones no matter how much prices of smartphones will drop. Some taxi cab drivers in HK are using as many as 7 dumb cellphones all at once while driving – all Nokias. They use them for the Push To Talk function as walkie-talkies with fellow cab drivers to organize phone-in customer pickups. Some not as wealthy countries still use cellphones without even having a display of any kind!

Surely having a popular high profit margin product is every company’s dream but it is not exactly a sign of a company’s good health. Like the automobile industry for instance, Lamborghini has only supercars and they have been rather popular since the 70s but they had been down and almost completely out several times within these past 4 decades. Ferrari don’t have any true family cars either and is much more popular and have been doing much better than Lamborghini, they too had been bought by Fiat once. Countless supercar companies with high margin products had come and gone. Several are single model supercar companies like Bugatti. Yet it is Toyota that is now leading the automobile industry after GM. Granted that GM flopped recently which made way for Toyota, but like Audi bought Lamborghini, Fiat bought Ferreri, BMW bought Rolls-Royce etc, it is always the company with a variety of products that wins out in the end.

And for those who think Nokia does not have a high profit margin product, let me remind you that Nokia has the highest profit margin cellphones product in the world, ever – Vertu.

And for those who thought that Nokia is a cellphone company which does not know how and cannot make changes big enough to turn itself around (turn around from market leader to what anyway?), let me remind you that Nokia was originally a rubber boot company and it turned itself into one of the largest communication system company in the world if not the largest, which prime business is still selling total mobile phone system solutions to large cooperates and service providers rather than simply cellphones to the end users.

Nokia’s 40% smartphone world market shares will drop by a large margin before rising again but Nokia being the shear size of the company with utmost commitment to being the world leader in the market, it is going to stay in the top of the world market. Changes are necessary in order to keep at that. Changes have already been made in the past few years and more changes are being made. The truth is, changes had been made all along in their hardware as well as the Symbian software perhaps even more so than anyone else, it is just that those who do not care to look further past the name of the hardware and software company and product, to actually study their products or even have one on hand, either doesn’t know or down right omit them all together for easy continuing message spamming as their “analytic” works.

If anything, I’d start worrying about RIM if I were a business investing agent looking into the cellphone market. But that’s another topic.

Mark my words for it.

Get a camera with a real viewfinder.

When they (Panasonic G1 then Olympas Pen E-L1 and and then Panasonic GF)1 first came out people thought they are the greatest for being small and compact and therefore much more portable than conventional DSLR. Judging by the film era cameras such as Pentax’s ME Super/ LX1 and Olympus’ OM series, I didn’t think those EVF Mirrorless DSLR and EVIL cameras were all that small, and I tried to explain to many that it could have been even smaller even in fullframe 135 format but no one would listen. Then came Nikon D5000 and other brands counterparts which is even smaller than Nikon’s earlier small DSLR – the D40, and got really closed to EVF DSLR size; and then Samsung’s N10 and Sony’s NEX series that are much smaller proved me right. At APS sensor size, both the Samsung N10 and the Sony NEX are noticeably smaller than the Panasonic’s G1/2/10 and GF1 and Oly’s Pen series.

I was hoping if Nikon were to make an EVIL camera, it would be in fullframe 135 sensor size but it doesn’t look like they would make it in that size.

Sensor size and physical size is not the main problem with EVF.

When you shoot with conventional DSLRs, the only time you can’t see what you are shooting would be when the mirror flips up to allow light travel through the opened shutter to the sensor. This blocked time is only a fraction of a second and you would be able to see the live view right after and ready for the next shot and continuous shooting. Whereas with EVF, you get a much longer blank view during exposure, sometimes close to 2 seconds, and then default to displaying the shot on the EVF or LCD rather than the live view. Even with the live view option, if available at all, the image is so slow that any moving objects would be delayed and choppy on the EVF or LCD.

The second problem is more with the work flow but unfortunately no one gets this right and no one has any options to set their cameras right either. With optical finder DSLR, when you finish shooting with the optical viewfinder and press play to display the images shot, the display would show on the LCD screen. With EVF DSLR, like many Prosumer P&S cameras, one has to switch back to LCD display mode first by pressing a toggle button or else pressing play would only display the shot images on the EVF! Why in the world would I want to watch my shots on the EVF when there is a much bigger LCD display?!

While the newer EVF DSLRs have a proximity sensor to auto switch the display between the EVF and the LCD display, this creates yet another problem for there is no option to turn off the LCD display while leaving the camera on and ready to shoot. The LCD display is on constantly even when you are just walking around waiting for the next shot. This is not just battery eating, it is also very distracting for bystanders. Why would anyone want to leave the LCD display on during idle time anyway; and why don’t these manufacturers get it?

A small funny instant happened when one of the nice feature with EVF and EVIL cameras brought up the possibility to use almost any SLR lenses from any manufacturers ever made via extension tube adapters. Specifically this allow EVF and EVIL camera owners use some of the legendary lenses made by Leica. Despite the much smaller sensor size making these images being a cropped part of the much bigger 135 image size possible, people love the idea and marvel the image quality over standard lenses. The funny thing was, one of my friends was in a group of these people and one of them was so excited to see the image quality and sharpness of an image taken with a Leica lens attached, he was trying to show my friend just that…..

…..in the EVF! @_@

Get a life, you people.