Udah 4 hari ngulik mainan baru yang dikasih Nokia Indonesia tanggal 17 kemarin ternyata masih belum puas juga meski sudah lancar menyentuh lembut touchscreen-nya tetapi belum semua fitur yang ada dicoba baru beberapa aja termasuk instal aplikasi yang menarik.Dan yang bikin penasaran adalah adanya 3 juta lagu gratis yang antri buat didonlod langsung dari Nokia X6 ataupun dari laptop.
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Sorry this one’s late. Internet connection was appallingly bad at the hotel and even worse via SIM cards.
But in case you missed any of these posts, here’s what occured on mynokiablog.com between 14th March – 20th March
My Sony Ericsson C510 was a brilliant phone. It was so good, I never again looked at mobile phone websites or picked up an operator’s catalogue to see what sort of phones now exist on the market. I was so satisfied with everything that it did, it was like finding the love of my life. Never would I need another.
Then came along the sodding 28th of February. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that day, in fact, it’s a fine day, it’s my cousin’s birthday. I’m referring to 28th of February, 2010. I thought it would be a spiffing idea to take my family out to dinner and watch that weekend’s big football game. I should’ve bloody well stayed at home, since I saw my team lose 3-0 after a pathetic performance, the dinner was so-and-so yet cost of precious end-of-the-month money, I was drenched in rain and, worst of all, I lost my phone.
For all I know, it was pilfered by one of the shifty thugs that infested the shit-hole of a restaurant my friend with absolutely no sense of taste for pleasant spots chose for us to watch the game. Or maybe it fell out of my pocket as I raced through the downpour and into my car. Perhaps I left it on the table and the waiter didn’t notice and wrapped it up in the paper tablecloth and threw it in the bin. It didn’t and still doesn’t matter. It’s gone, and still aches even today, and it’s not lessened by currently having a similar phone. I now have a Sony Ericsson C902, but I had to go through another mobile first before realising I couldn’t do without the C510’s nifty features.
I decided I would punish myself for being a twerp and losing an object so dear to me by getting a cheap, stripped-down handset. I had only two requirements: it had to have a music player and it had to be a Sony Ericsson. A phone with a media player, to me, is a no-brainer. If the phone’s any good, you’ll all the advantages of a regular mp4 player, with some additional ones, such as the battery life being better and not having to lug around extra devices. And I wanted a Sony Ericsson because I have a data cable, I have the SE PC Suite and using them together, I could recover all of my contacts, photos, videos, notes and bookmarks that I had backed up five days prior to losing my mobile.
I settled on the SE W302, because it satisfied my two basic requirements and, most of all, it was cheap. I blew €200 on the C510, not counting the memory card, and I didn’t feel like squandering that much cash again. So let’s go by bits:
Good
- It’s small and very thin (only 10.5mm thick), and also good-looking. Not having an ugly mobile counts for a lot, since you’ll have to look at it every day.
- Even though the keys are small, I found no trouble in texting.
- It was very cheap. You won’t find a Nokia only 10.5mm thick with a 2.0-megapixel camera, media player and expandable memory for the same price. It also came with a data cable and proper headphones, so for €60, this was a fantastic bargain.
-The texting had the auto-complete function, where it guesses what you’re trying to write and offers suggestions that you can select. Very handu for long words and slow writers, like myself. This is something I’ve missed having since my Motorola V525.
- It can be charged via USB. I cannot emphasize enough how important this is.
Bad
- Only after having bought it did I discover that it wasn’t compatible with the SE PC Suite . This was disastrous, since it defeated the purpose of buying a Sony Ericsson.
- I had to manually import the contacts one by one via bluetooth, because a) it wasn’t compatible with the PC Suite as I’ve mentioned, and b) it wouldn’t accept my Sony Ericsson V600i’s entire address list, only individual entries. This incompatibility between two mobiles from the same brand is unfathomable.
- Each contact had a field for first name and surname, which seemed a good idea. But on ringing someone, it would reverse the proper order, so “Smith John” or “Bloggs Joe” appears on the screen, which I found very annoying.
- Battery autonomy was nothing special. I don’t know how other mobiles in its class fare, but I found it sub-par.
- The 2.0-megapixel camera was overwhelmingly crap. I wasn’t expecting CyberShot quality but my five year-old SE V600i with its 1.3-megapixel camera takes better pictures.
- No notes function, to jot down important tidbits of information. I had to write text messages with the info and save it as a draft. This was annoying also.
- Having the phone save sent text messages taxed the memory in a jiffy. Annoying, stupid and unforgivable.
- Writing in Portuguese requires accentation. Text messages and accents don’t go well together, since having the odd circumflex and such makes a simple, let’s say, 100-character message the equivalent in terms of byte information of three or four text messages. Every other mobile I’ve had allows you to write with accentation then wipes it clean of accents so it’ll be a single message. The W302 doesn’t purge accentuation, meaning what should’ve been a single message is sent as three or four.
Awful
- It’s incapable of delivery reports. In this day and age, a mobile incapable of delivery reports is like a car currently in production that comes with everything except glass windows. It can be done, the car will still work, there’s probably no legislation against it, but it doesn’t make much sense.
- The sound. Whether it’s a phone call or music, whether with the headphones or speakers, the sound quality is terrible. There are lots of options for playback equalising, with it being a Walkman phone and all, but the sound always has a nasty metallic echo to it. Basslines when listening to music are barely perceptible, and you can crank it up to maximum volume and you won’t hear much, and what you do hear lacks any quality. And it’s a mobile PHONE, so you should be able to hear and be heard during phonecalls.
So, the trial E72 from WOMWorld is already in my town. Been reading reviews yesterday and this morning too, and I have a feeling my love for it will be mostly defined by the following:
× Nokia Messaging. Supposedly, the E72 comes with lifetime subscription, which is a good thing since it’s not free here anymore. Sure, I COULD pay for it, but a) why should I pay for something that I think should be default in today’s mobiles, especially at the high-end level? And b) because I’m not on contract but on a pre-paid package, it’s technically not possible for me to subscribe to it. Now, one could say they aren’t bothered by it, but frankly, I’ve been banging my head into the wall/desk/whatnot after seeing how the N900 was able to fetch my emails automatically and the N97 is just plain unable to do that. Annoying much? Yes, for me it is. (And another part, I can finally try Messaging IM which is for some mysterious reason still only available for a very few Eseries model.)
× QuickOffice. Another thing I think should be default at least on full-QWERTY models, yet not only does Nokia not include a full version on its flagship Nseries device, they don’t even seem to care to at least offer the latest version of the viewer. So, the N97 lacks editing capability, but what’s even more frustrating, it also lacks Office 2007 support. In 2010. Idk about others, but if I have a full keyboard, I want to be able to mess around with documents (especially on such a big touchscreen as the N97’s.) And no, I don’t wanna PAY for yet another should-be-basic thing, mainly not when it only installs to the phone memory which is just inferior on the N97, as we well know.
× HSxPA. It’s 2010, with 4G/LTE/whatnot knocking on the doors, and what does the N97 have? 3.6Mbps HSDPA module, and that’s it. The E72’s 10.2Mbps HSDPA / 2Mbps HSUPA capability will be a welcome change, I’d say.
× And while I’m at it, I’d mention the PDF reader: N95 had the full app, which only came reduced to a ridiculous 15 day trial in the N97. As far as I know, the E72 has the full version of that as well – another thumb up.
Beyond the hardware under the hood, I guess the like-factor comes very much down to services. I at least can’t say I like a device that flips me the middle finger every second time I’d want to get something done with it. Am I right in any way?
This article is a fictional work of my overactive imagination depicting how the smartphone market might appear in 2015. Don’t count on it turning out this way…
Ah, how time flies! It feels like only a few months ago that Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 Series and fans lined around the block for Apple’s iPhone Evolution, yet five whole years have passed since then. During these telling years the smartphone market has truly evolved. Vertical platform integration, wider corporate adoption and growth in the tablet market have been kind to Microsoft, Apple and Google at the expense of the RIM, Nokia and Palm.
With the benefit of hindsight it should have seemed obvious that as vertical platform integration improved, the smartphone market would come to resemble what used to be called the desktop computing market. In the last five years the Microsoft, Google and Apple smartphone platforms developed such successful integration with their desktop siblings that corporates would logically align their end user computing platforms to the corresponding mobile offering. Chrome OS & Google Apps to Android, Windows to Windows Phone 7 Series and OSX & iPad to iPhone.
Meanwhile the once-strong RIM fell increasingly out of favor with corporates during 2012 and 2013 as Microsoft re-entered the mobile space with its well received Windows Phone 7 Series. Microsoft successfully marketed the new platform to corporates as a cost conscious work-play device; cheaper to administer than BlackBerry, more appealing to staff due to its Zune, Xbox and social networking features and fully integrated with the Corporate Cloud concept.
At home the tablet market, initially a niche, became better adopted by consumers as they looked to leverage their substantial app investments. As personal devices grew further in complexity and platform app stores grew in content, consumers chose to leverage their app portfolio by settling on one platform. Apple led the way with the iPhone/iPad combination, later enhanced by the iPad 13 and the OSX branch of the App Store. Microsoft followed suit with Windows Phone 7 Series Tablet, which complemented its smartphone platform with screen sizes of up to 12 inches and Android developed in a similar, although less structured, way. Models such as ‘buy a phone app and get the large screen version for half price’ or vice versa were pervasive by 2012.
Consumers also became weary of learning new smartphone operating systems as each release became ever more complex. As each of the Big Three came to offer similar functionality with different app portfolios, consumers inevitably wanted to learn one preferred system and stick with it to protect their time investment.
Of course there continue to be enthusiasts and switchers who hop around; that population continues to do so and hopefully always will. Main Street however has emphatically shown itself to value platform alignment. These days you’re either a Googler, an iBod or someone who uses Windows stuff…since nobody’s been able to coin an easy term for a Windows Phone 7 Series user.
RIM suffered from both corporate market share erosion and difficulty in convincing consumers with its Storm range and Hurricane (2010 touchscreen slider). In 2013 it refocused its efforts upon streamlining its messaging backbone to create lower internal throughput cost along with developing cheaper devices. The gamble has worked well so far for RIM, which has become a mass market player in emerging markets where bandwidth capped data plans are dominant. Local wireless infrastructures in those markets often struggle to provide messaging reliability on competing smartphone platforms, unlike in today’s developed markets. RIM has been successful in these developing markets with its reliable messaging system.
The question for RIM now is what the company will offer those markets in 2020, when network reliability is taken for granted and participants become more interested by the vertical platform integration offered by the Big Three. Perhaps RIM might have benefitted more by building a new OS back in 2010 aimed at the messaging-intensive youth market, which remains dominated by the ever popular Sidekick brand.
By the end of 2010 Palm and Nokia’s respective smartphone market shares in the US were already well in decline from a shaky start. Nokia never really managed to gain a strong foothold with any major US carrier but continued to be successful as a high volume seller to emerging markets. These days developed smartphone markets outside of the US are looking increasingly problematic for Nokia as the company’s earlier struggles between Symbian and Maemo left it way behind the Big Three in both OS design and cloud integration.
While Symbian won out in the end within Nokia, the lost time was enough for both Android and Windows Phone 7 Series to overtake Symbian’s market share outside the US. Meanwhile Palm, which rose from its own ashes in early 2009 with a good product based upon its promising WebOS platform, was ultimately out-muscled by the growth of Android and Windows Phone 7 Series which now share the market with the iPhone.
So the last five years have been a story of vertical platform integration. Corporates have used it to deliver cost management and employee cloud services while consumers have leveraged it to maximize their app and time investments. In a way this is similar to the outcome of the desktop OS wars we saw in the 1990s where there was a wide selection of viable platforms. In those days corporates and consumers used a mix of Windows, OS/2 and Mac amongst others, but in the ensuing years both sectors trended towards consolidation upon just a couple of end-user platforms. By 2010 that consolidation was emerging in the smartphone market, today it’s largely complete.
Neil Berman
www.theonbutton.com
According to a recent Game Developer Survey, increasing numbers of developers are working on games for the iPhone and iPad.
As shown from the results of the survey, another increasingly prevalent trend has been the growth of the mobile space. Due in large part to the success of Apple’s iPhone software platform, mobile support shot up to 25 percent of developers, more than doubling last year’s 12 percent.
Although the App Store has certainly been a godsend to Apple (and it will continue to be for some time), for developers it has the potential to become a trap.
On the surface, the iPhone and iPad would seem to be ideal platforms to develop games for. The iPhone, for example, has:
Yet, for those same reasons, the iPhone will prove to be an economic challenge for most game developers. With 140,000 apps to compete with, even the most creative programs will have a hard time attracting the notice of potential customers.
According to Gartner research, revenue from app downloads is expected to reach $6.2 billion in 2010, rising to over $29 billion by 2013. The problem is that such predictions often assume straight line growth, both in the number of users and in the average number of applications sold. For example, for those numbers to hold, the number of smartphone users would need to increase to over 300 million by 2013, and the average user would need to consume each year the same number of apps, at the same average cost, as current users consume (Gartner expects more than 2/3 of these smartphone app consumers to be iPhone owners).
The problem with those assumptions is that they contradict basic economic models.
By far, the largest source of smartphone apps is the App Store, accounting for 99.4% of sales in 2009. Whenever an application is approved for the App Store, it diminishes the value of all the existing apps by reducing their individual utility. In a sense, it is the inverse of the network effects that accrue to a social networking site as more people become members. Online gaming communities, for example, depend on membership growth to ensure that gamers have opponents to play against at any given hour of the day.
Although these two opposing forces are easy to confuse, it is important to recognize their differences. Normally, having large numbers of programs available on a system is positive because it encourages people to buy more systems, which in turn gives a signal to publishers to fund more game development on a particular platform.
Figure 1: Aggregate Cost – Benefit Chart for the App Store
In the chart above, the average cost to develop an application is assumed to be the same over time. Therefore, the aggregate cost of all iPhone applications increases in a straight line as the number of applications increases. Network effects increase the benefit of each application added until point A (tangent is parallel to aggregate cost), at which point the average benefit begins to decrease. Once you reach point B, the benefit of adding new applications falls to below cost.Consider the PlayStation 3. When it was first launched, one of the main criticisms was the lack of games (particularly exclusively titles) to justify the console’s high cost relative to the Xbox 360. Over time, as more games became available for the PS3, a virtuous cycle developed that helped to increase the pace of development.
So far, Xbox 360 and PS3 development has not yet reached the crossover point represented by point B in the above graph. Ideally, console makers will introduce a new platform before the crossover point is reached and before developers decide that a platform is no longer worth developing games for.
This model is very similar to the product life cycle chart that I presented in an earlier article on music simulation games (see Too Much of a Good Thing: Explaining the decline of Guitar Hero and Rock Band). For example, if you were to overlay the product life cycle chart over the total number of music games, you would notice several similarities to Figure 1 (above).
In fact, diminishing marginal utility has an important role to play in both cases.
Gartner assumes that current users will continue to purchase the same number of applications each year through 2013, telling Information Week that “high-end smartphone users today are early adopters of new mobile applications and are more trustful of billing mechanisms… Therefore, they are expected to continue to pay for applications they believe will be useful.”
However, diminishing marginal utility suggests that users will purchase fewer applications over time as the value of each additional application and its ability to meet the particular needs of the user decreases. A new iPhone owner who purchases a software program from the App Store will first purchase the application that most fills a perceived need. The second application will also fill a need, but most likely it will be a less important one, and so on. By the time the average iPhone user has purchased 20 applications, the value added by each new program will be marginal at best.
Although Gartner recognizes that early adopters are heavier users of technology than late adopters, they ignore the fact that iPhone’s future growth will increasingly shift toward late adopters. Diffusion theory suggests that early adopters tend to be educated, have higher social status, and are wealthy. On the other end of the spectrum, late adopters tend to be less educated, have lower social status and have less income. They will be more skeptical about adding new features and applications, and will instead rely upon standard applications that come preloaded with the phone.
Apple has responded to this challenge in two ways, through market expansion and platform renewal.
By continually adding new features to the iPhone, Apple has attracted new users who value these features and are willing to enter into long term contracts to obtain them. Examples range from commonly found features like GPS navigation to more esoteric features like instrument tuning and remote invoicing.
This approach is very similar to the one taken by Nintendo with the Wii. Nintendo began by improving existing GameCube technology and adding motion control through the Wii Remote. It expanded the market again with the balance board, which attracted a new group of customers who were fundamentally concerned about fitness.
The other option is to introduce a new platform to attract more early adopters. Console makers do this every time they introduce a new generation of gaming hardware, and Apple is doing it with the introduction of the iPad.
Initial demand for the iPad could help to extend the growth stage of the App Store’s product life cycle. Ultimately, however, the iPad’s size and price will limit its market appeal relative to the iPhone. As a result, it will not provide the type of renewal that will support the growth rates projected by Gartner.
Even if Apple successfully expands the market and attracts a new group of early adopters with the iPad, developers will still need to contend with the diminishing utility problem discussed earlier. The only exceptions will be applications that
When the iPad is released, early movers who can design applications that fit all three criteria will have the best chance of success.
Quality versus QuantityReturning to the social networking example, the network effect of adding more members would no longer be valid if the social networking site did not add additional servers, network switches, and bandwidth to compensate for the added burden. Instead, the system would begin to crash during times of peak activity and members would begin to turn to alternative sites. The value of any individual member’s contribution to a social networking site does not matter to the site’s overall performance. Users who fill discussion boards with gibberish impact online performance on these sites as much as users who contribute valuable content. Like the social networking user, the individual role of any given application does not matter, because it is the aggregate that determines overall performance from the point of view of the consumer.
Figure 2: Aggregate Data for the App Store
The aggregate number of applications (blue line) relative to the aggregate number of downloads (red line). Download numbers include free programs.At the same time that iPhone owners are becoming overwhelming by the number of applications, they are also impacted by the number of lower quality applications that Apple allows to be sold through its store. In this case, it is the individual effect of each program rather than the aggregate that matters. And this is where the App Store differs most from instrument simulation games. Consumers of Guitar Hero and Rock Band know they are going to receive a polished product, whereas iPhone users are left to wade through a sea of poorly thought out applications.
Figure 3: A Typical Product Life Cycle
The iPhone and App Store are still in the growth stage of the product life cycle.
That does not necessarily mean that iPhone owners will be switching to Nokia any more than social networking users will stop using the Internet because of an inability to access a popular site, or because the site has become polluted with unmoderated nonsense. It does mean that the App Store will hold less value to iPhone owners, who will increasingly limit their purchases to popular titles from companies with large advertising budgets or apps that have been recommended by friends, TV personalities, and other influential people.
This article was originally posted on February 7, 2010 on Gamasutra.
HELSINKI, Mar 2 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) – Nokia unveiled a new C5 smartphone model on Tuesday, hoping to benefit from a booming demand for cheap smartphones and from rising consumer appetite for mobile social networking.
The C5 handset will be one of the cheapest smartphones from Nokia, selling for 135 euros ($183), excluding taxes and subsidies, and hitting the shelves next quarter.
“It is products like this that will grow Nokia marketshare in the smartphone segment and help them to increase their average sale prices,” said John Strand, chief of telecoms consultancy Strand Consult.
Volumes on the smartphone market are seen surging in 2010, with some analysts forecasting up to 50 percent growth, as handset vendors are pushing advanced features, once exclusive to pricey top-end models, into cheaper and cheaper phones.
Nokia continues to lead the global smartphone market with an around 40 percent market share, but it has lost ground to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry.
The Finnish firm is in the midst of a massive revamp of its smartphone offering and has said in 2010 almost all of its smartphones would have a touch screen, a full keyboard or both, compared with less than half in 2009.
NAME CONFUSION
After introducing the C series — focused on personal social networking — Nokia has four smartphone product families. The E series phones are for business users, X series for youth and music, and N series for the most advanced models.
It plans to use the new names across its smartphone offering.
Nokia has historically flooded the market with phone models little different from each other, with additional confusion arising from their four digit names, which have been hard to differentiate for consumers.
However, the new naming of X series phones may also create confusion as Sony Ericsson has used the name for few years — X1 and X2 smartphones are from Sony Ericsson, while Nokia has launched the X3 model.
Sony Ericsson’s new flagship device is the X10, while Nokia is also widely expected to launch an X10 cellphone.
