When Nokia announced they were killing their flagship Symbian operating system and putting Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system on all their smartphones, there was a great deal of skepticism concerning Nokia’s decision, as Symbian was the world’s most used smartphone operating system at the time, and Windows Phone was a recently rebooted version of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, struggling to find marketshare. Nokia’s announcement of their first Windows Phone smartphones last month have made many observers, including myself, reconsider Nokia’s insanity. Symbian was and is a dying operating system, becoming more regulated to feature phones and developing markets. Nokia’s new smartphones look incredible enough to compete in mindshare with Apple, HTC, RIM and Samsung.
To carry Nokia into the post-Symbian world is the Lumia 800, their flagship Windows Phone smartphone. The Lumia 800 looks remarkably like the Nokia N9 they released earlier this year in overseas markets, which runs the MeeGo operating system. While the future of MeeGo seems questionable as Nokia has committed to putting all their phones on Windows Phone in the future, the Lumia 800 offers the beautifully crafted Nordic design of the N9 hardware with the secure future of Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. It reportedly has impressive voice quality and a camera with a high resolution Carl Zeiss lens on the back, wrapped in a minimalist yet vibrant shell that showcases the best of Nokia’s design.
The Windows Phone features combine with Nokia’s standard applications to bring Lumia 800 users what they see as the best of both worlds. Xbox integration, free 25GB Skydrive storage and Office integration are competitive components of Windows Phone that help Nokia keep some features on par with what’s offered on Android and iOS. Nokia Drive, one of Nokia’s exclusive applications, offers full voice guided navigation for free. Nokia Music is a free service which lets users stream millions of songs and have music available to play offline. Nokia’s third exclusive application is an ESPN sports hub, which lets you pin leagues or teams directly to the home screen to follow what they’re up to.
Nokia also announced the Lumia 710, a cheaper Windows Phone with the same processor and memory as the Lumia 800. It’s not as technically or visually impressive as the Lumia 800, but will make Nokia’s Windows Phones more accessible to lower price points. The other line announced by Nokia, the Asha, is a set of touchscreen feature phones running S40 that is marketed towards developing markets to push device usage in those regions.
The Lumia series looks like it could start rebuilding Nokia’s marketshare, especially in North America, where it is struggling the most to keep relevant. Unfortunately, much like with the N9, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 have no set timeframe for release in North America, which is disappointing considering how well they could do here. The Lumia 800 in particular is just the kind of phone Nokia should be looking to release here.
For phones that we can buy in Canada, there are some interesting developments from RIM and from Google. At their DevCon event in the latter half of October, RIM announced BBX, an operating system that brings RIM’s smartphones, tablets and embedded devices under one platform. The BBX browser’s code is the same as that on BlackBerry 6 and BlackBerry 7, which allows it to run HTML5 and WebWorks apps developed for RIM’s older operating systems. BBX also allows development in Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash. Applications developed in HTML5 are billed as lower performance but more compatible with earlier BlackBerry operating systems, while those made in Native SDK are billed as higher performance. Going off RIM’s presentation, it looks like both methods outputted smooth animation in the applications demonstrated.
Naturally, RIM is playing off its strengths by pushing how secure BBX is, and how it strengthens what they’ve developed for the PlayBook, which was the first tablet certified for American government use. It also carefully championed its successes with BlackBerry App World, claiming it is the second most profitable app market (presumably after the App Store). Interestingly, there are tools to allow Android apps to be repackaged as BBX apps relatively quickly, then submit them to BlackBerry App World for approval. This could help RIM increase their app count and compete with Apple for the platform with more applications.
RIM’s BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps is not only for BBX, but is also coming to BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0. The Developer Beta for the operating system update was released on the same day as the announcement, and will feature WebGL, Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 support in addition to the aforementioned Android apps. Across all devices, RIM also announced support after DevCon for BBM in all applications developed in WebWorks. This lets users initiate chats and view statuses, avatars and personal messages from the BBM service inside applications.
The announcements RIM made at DevCon are nicely timed, given that in the week before they suffered a widespread service outage. As an apology, they are offering $100 in free apps for BlackBerry users. Oddly absent at the announcement, however, were any mention of devices that support BBX. Perhaps those will be announced in the first half of 2012, but it seems odd that they would announce the operating system without any hardware to back it up.
Google also chose this time period to announce Android 4.0 (more commonly called Ice Cream Sandwich), an update for Google’s OS that combines the smartphone and tablet versions of Android into one. There was an initial murmur about it at Google’s I/O conversation in May, but most of the big features were announced at their event in October.
Much of the big change seems to be cosmetic, improving on the look of the Gingerbread version of Android currently on more advanced Android smartphones. Widgets can now be resized to give more space on home screens, which is useful for people who want to put home screen icons under there, I suppose. There is the ability to lock your screen and use your face as a passcode, so it uses the camera to recognize you, although it didn’t work very well in the on-stage demo. There is gesture support, which replaces the navigation buttons on earlier Android phones. This is a welcome change for me, as I found the navigation buttons often redundant or unresponsive on the Android phones I’ve used, so hopefully the gestures (which are similar to those in webOS) make it easier to go between applications. In an effort to fight back against Siri, voice dictation is now almost instant when transcribing your speech, which should keep the voice support competitive between Apple and Google. A big feature announced for NFC-compatible (Near Field Communcation) phones was Android Beam, which is like Bump for NFC phones, allowing people to share content across devices.
A lot of the thumbnails and the contacts list in particular looks surprisingly reminiscent of Windows Phone. Home screen folders are made simpler in Android by allowing people to make them by dragging app icons over other ones, just like in iOS 4 and above. Screenshots are now native to Android by pressing the power button while pressing the volume button, much like how on iPhones you can take screenshots by pressing the power button with the sleep button. Bookmarks can be automatically synced with Chrome on your computer, much like how Safari can sync over iCloud on iPhones. So yes, those of you who claimed iOS 5 was borrowing enough ideas that it should be called Froyo for iPhone, Android takes its liberties in borrowing ideas as well, so it’s not any more pure or special in its innovation than any other operating system. To its credit, many of the changes make Android less of a cheap knockoff of iOS and more something of its own, even if it takes a lot of visual cues from Windows Phone.
Ice Cream Sandwich is being released alongside the Galaxy Nexus, which Samsung and Google are pushing as the flagship Ice Cream Sandwich Android phone. The phone has LTE support, a dual-core processor and a 4.65” Super AMOLED screen. From the specifications released so far, it appears to pack quite a punch, assuming Ice Cream Sandwich makes use of its hardware effectively. I’m not sure if this can be classified as a phone anymore at this size, and I don’t know how people can feel comfortable using it when it’s that large, but perhaps Google is going after the booming market for lumberjacks, the Sasquatch and its other large, mythical cousins who have hands the size of dinner plates. Samsung pushed how incredible the display resolution is, although the pixel density is still slightly lower than the iPhone’s (316 ppi vs. 326 ppi). It has NFC connectivity, so it can make use of Android Beam. It connects to HSPA+ networks, and there will also be a version at some point that connects to LTE networks for regions which can support it. The camera may only be 5 megapixels, but is impressive in the fact it claims zero shutter lag. The Nexus is supposed to be released sometime in November, with Ice Cream Sandwich support coming in the month or two after. It seems Android fragmentation still stops Ice Cream Sandwich from successfully being released to all new Android devices in a timely fashion.
In a quick break from mobile phone news, I wanted to throw in a cool product I saw in the last couple weeks that doesn’t really warrant its own article, but looks really innovative. Two engineers who formerly worked at Apple (one of which is Tony Fadell, who used to be one of the VPs of the iPod division) began a startup called Nest Labs and announced on October 25, of all things, a learning thermostat called the Nest.
While the thermostat seems like household equipment that doesn’t really change that much, Nest has taken a completely new approach to the device, bestowing it with a very minimal, clean interface and encasing it in a small hand-sized stainless steel dome to be placed on your wall. A metal ring around the outside rotates to let you lower or raise the temperature, and the colour of the screen changes depending on whether it’s cooling or heating.
Nest is unique in the sense that you use it like a normal thermostat, but overtime it picks up on your routine and learns to automatically change the temperature for you. If everyone leaves at around eight in the morning and comes back around five, it starts to learn to change the temperatures at those times. This is due to six sensors in the thermostat which track temperature, motion, humidity and ambient light. This means it thinks you might be away if it hasn’t seen movement in a while, even if you’re at home. One solution for this is installing Nests in multiple areas of the house. Nests learn independently, but can talk to each other, so if one sees movement, it will alert the other ones that someone is home. Nest can be manually adjusted online or via an iOS device, with Android support coming soon. It will be sold for $249 and Nest Labs claims it is shipping soon.
The Lumia, BBX and Ice Cream Sandwich are the newest and greatest from Nokia, RIM and Google, demonstrating new innovations and improvements in the mobile phone industry that, in the end, make things better for us. The model of the Lumia and the Nest are some of the best cases of industrial design I’ve seen in smartphones and thermostats, and it’s cool seeing all these impressively designed electronics come to fruition. I would not have believed a month ago that I would have ever found a thermostat exciting or beautifully crafted. Something to be appreciated about technology is the speed and creativity that comes with new electronics. The announcements made in the last month do nothing short of reinforcing how impressive it can be that a device so simple and minimal can be ornate, powerful and valuable.
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