DOT's SPACE

I just switched on my old Nokia N86. It was one of Nokia’s flagships just about a year ago. 8MP camera, AMOLED screen – it was one of the many N95 successors.
Switching the phone on is, however, like switching on your old DOS computer in times of Vista. Clunky & outdated springs to your mind when using it. It’s a shame really because it’s not a bad phone. But it’s just so many years behind what is possible today. How could it come so far?

I left Nokia in 2007, a company I loved to work for, yet knowing already back then that things were going horribly wrong. Chaos in strategy, lack of leadership, and arrogance all around. ‘ Because we are Nokia’ was an often used phrase in internal meeting, still seeing oneself in a position to dictate the market while the trends were already going in another direction.

I really hope that the company can turn it around. It’s done so much for mobile telephony, it would be a shame if the future was to be without them. But for that, the clutter needs to be removed – and I’m not only speaking of the outdated phone software here…

So, it’s been about six months after I made my (probably biggest professional) change. In December 2009, I left BT to join Cambridge University as a senior researcher. Making a move from the corporate to the academic world seemed like a big step to me.

When it comes to the details, not much seemed to have changed. My (content) work is still the same. Projects stayed the same, including my role in them. I worry about deadlines for deliverables and content to be done in time. I have to organize my own contributions and those of others.

But there are many things that did change. No worries anymore about strategy and vision rounds (how can one worry about that, anyways?). No ‘business unit’ facing discussions. And the ‘performance management’ at universities is certainly different The atmosphere at the university is very different and conducive to high quality research. That did change my work life quite much. My worries relate to content, deadlines for papers (I finally get to write papers again, have to get more into it still) and getting my new research associate up to speed. It is not related to funding rounds and re-organizations. No corporate messages of survival. It changed my level of relaxation. A good change it seems.

Do I like academia? It is far too early to tell, I would say. So far, I love it, given the changes described above. But I need to see how much I will miss the ‘corporate engagement’, if one can miss this at all. One good thing about corporate engagement is that I can engage much wider with corporations due to my academic position. No more ‘political acting’, like not engaging with your competitor at a certain level. It is nice to engage with companies I hadn’t talked to before.

So we will see what the change will bring in the coming months and years. But it has been a very good change so far.

I finally had to get rid of my latest Nokia phone. It’s enough, really. The most consistent feature was the phone’s unreliability. It was buggy, slow – simply an awful experience. And it was Nokia’s ‘flagship’, the N97. I cannot imagine how a standard user must feel after having paid hundreds of pounds (or an equivalent contract with phone included) and getting a device that does not deserve the name ‘flagship’. Although it is telling for Nokia’s situation that its flagship device is just so bad. Already outdated in hardware spec when being announced back in 2009, it is now light years behind the main competitors, ranging from Apple over Samsung to others. And the state of its software is even worse. Ugly and outdated is the shortest description of the Symbian interface. I cannot believe how little progress things like email client, calendar, music player and other ‘core’ applications have seen over these many years since Symbian and Series 60 have existed. And announcements of future Symbian versions (such as Symbian^3) sound like reading the spec of competitor smartphones from last year! In the end, it just did not work for me anymore. I need a modern communication platform and Symbian is too close to being dead, as far as I am concerned.

So I got a new phone – it’s in fact the first phone I ever paid for (in the form of a contract)! After ten years of Nokia, it’s now a Samsung Galaxy S – an Android-based phone. The hardware is amazing (it makes the announced new flagship of Nokia, the N8, look like being two years too late): 1GHz processor (fast!!!), Super AMOLED screen (brilliant colors, while readable in sunlight!!), 512MB RAM (and there are no ‘memory full’ errors under Android, it seems), and multi-touch screen (something that might come in Symbian^3). The only feature that is not outstanding is the camera with 5MP and no flash (although I never took a picture in low light with my phone!). But video recording is in HD with 30fps.

But the biggest thing is the software. I can only imagine that Nokia engineers must be crying over the state of their software if they were ever to use ‘modern’ platforms. Android (similar to Apple) is like from another world, compared to Symbian. It’s slick, fast, and it works. The email client is not killing me with features but it does its job at least to an extent I was only hoping for on my Nokia. The apps in the store are amazingly many (in particular many free ones – apparently Android has the largest ratio of free apps). The coolest thing is the text input. Samsung licenses a software called Swype which allows for inputting text by ’swiping’ across a keyboard. The recognition rate is amazing, making input REALLY fast. And there are so many other features I so much enjoy (e.g., turning my phone into a mobile access point through a built-in feature, no extra required). So it is really cool.

Why Android though? Well, I do like my iPod Touch and came to enjoy the simplicity of Apple’s UI. But I still wanted a phone that is not crippled and under full control of a single company (I can’t understand, for instance, why Apple is restricting BT functionality so badly!!). Android is licensed by phone companies who try to differentiate – that can only be good for the consumer. Some things don’t work as well on my Android as on my iPod (email being one example) but it’s pretty close.

So it is a big change after so many years of being faithful towards a company I worked for many years. But in the end, I’m a consumer who wants the best features. And Nokia is not among the companies anymore which can satisfy that demand for me (and numbers on smartphone market shares do agree with that sentiment). Anyways, off to enjoy my phone now.

Next week is our 4th EIFFEL meeting, this time near Brussels. We managed to commit another 20+ researchers to debate crucial issues of the Future Internet. Apart from returning to the outcomes of the Athens meeting, privacy and virtualization will be the prominent topics on the agenda.
We changed the mode of the sessions to be more debate-focussed rather than having largely presentations. And we want to steer towards dedicated outcome production, in form of some write-ups.
Given that the funding period of EIFFEL is coming to an end, we will also spend some time on the construct of EIFFEL after the current public funding will have ended. The apparent interest in continuing is encouraging, now we need to see how.
Off now to preparing some material for the meeting. Stay tuned for more.

I have got my iPod touch now for some weeks and it has replaced my phone in many ways. Email and calendar almost entirely moved to the iPod and the phone became a truly mobile, I.e., cellular device again. When quickly checking emails at home, it’s done with the iPod. The mail client on my Nokia, supposedly being the latest model, is a disgrace in most part, just enough for reading on the go.
There is certainly an increased role for my mobile now since Nokia announced navigation for free. My phone is obviously NOT officially supported but another version worked on mine so that car nav works well and free now. But it can still not change my mind in the light of my iPod having all sorts of apps for anything while my Nokia is running with a few core apps only.

This post, btw, has been written from the iPod.