Posts Tagged ‘Nokia’
5+1 Reasons: Why Nokia N900 is not up to the mark
Nokia, once an industry leader in smartphones, is lagging behind the competition. They seem to be one of those companies who have not been able to get their arms around good user experience and software. With the N900 powered by the Maemo 5 OS they attempted to break the stranglehold, here are the reasons why it is a failure:
1. Screen orientation is limited to landscape except when in phone mode – the N900 retails for $549 at the US Site – for that they could have done a better job making use of the onboard accelerometer
2. Touch Screen Navigation is challenging. Scrolling with fingers on the menu/program screen leads to launching of apps inadvertently – this happened to me enough where I have to keep the stylus in my hand while trying to hold the phone with both hands. Of course – NO multi-touch interactivity!
3. Application Discovery is a pain for the average consumer. The application manager will search catalogs (or repositories) and the catalogs are provided by multiple parties. You have to set this up and that implies first finding out about them!
4. My search on the default application catalogs failed to produce popular applications for Twitter, FourSquare, Pandora and so on.
5. Future of App Ecosystem is murky. Nokia is merging Maemo with Intel’s Moblin effort into something known as MeeGo.
And the bonus reason – the device does not seem to be stable. Three months into it – it simply stopped powering on! I had to send it in (fortunately it was in warranty period!). I got it back yesterday – the reason cited, and I quote from the later that was sent to me:
Ericsson & Cloud Computing
Ericsson usually does not figure in the Cloud Computing conversations and blogs – at least the ones that I have been following (and I checked, they are not part of the supporters in the Cloud Manifesto project). However I think there may be a case to be made that Ericsson may be in an excellent position to offer Cloud Computing services – may be as managed services which they excel at. How did I arrive at
Being a part of Cisco’s Service Provider group I regularly track news on Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) and the first bit of information that was lodged in my mind was an article in the Technology section of NYTimes titled “Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Are Managing Just Fine“. To quote from the article:
Ericsson manages all or parts of the networks of 230 mobile operators with a total 225 million customers.
It is significant revenue for Ericsson earning them $1.7 billion last year from managing the mobile networks. With this bit of information fresh in my mind, I ended up last night attending a presentation by Brad Anderson on Erlang at the Atlanta AWSome meetup last night.
Brad gave an introduction to Erlang and the history of its development with Ericsson. His point that Erland is extremely well-suited for building Cloud Computing platforms and from his slide titled “The Three Biggies”, here are the reasons why Erlang is ideal for Cloud Computing:
- Massively Concurrent
- Seamlessly Distributed
- Fault Tolerant
The slides from an earlier presentation by Brad can be found here which make a good case on “Why Erlang?”. They also talk about how Erlang is catching up with major social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Erlang, as I learnt, has been around since 1990 and used actively by Ericsson on their Telephone Infrastructure unit and augmented by the Open Telecom Plaform (OTP). And guess what Erlang is Open Source!
It is difficult to tell how much of Ericsson equipment and how much of the Erlang based technology is being used to manage the mobile networks but it is certainly interesting to note that the combination of a technology expertise (programming platform/langauge) in Erlang and their massive experience in managing networks and operations would be very useful in providing Cloud Computing Services.
The real question is does really think of itself to in a position to provide Cloud Computing services?
All Things CC: 