Dan’s Blog (2.0)

I just wanted to highlight this article [requires registration] from today’s New York Times. Basically, the article is comparing the new Samsung “Blade” (A900) with the hugely popular Motorola RAZR, but the real story here is the detailed analysis of some key human factors issues with the RAZR’s UI as compared to the Blade’s. When did the mainstream press start covering usability issues so well, and as such a key criteria? Very cool. Of course, no mention of the browser on either phone, so they still have some catching up to do. Forget about the address book, which one supports WICD Mobile? As a side note, what is up with Motorola and usability? It sucked six years ago when I got my first Timeport (the only tri-band phone then available) and it sucks now. And by the way, the RAZR is just an updated StarTAC, isn’t it? Feh.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 8:53 under Mobility

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So I finally got around to downloading and installing Yahoo! Go mobile. Am I impressed? Yes and no… It was not that straightforward to download the application and get it running on a Nokia N70. There are some aspects that are quite unintuitive. Overall, I think it’s a good start. I mean essentially it is an application that launches a few other mini-applications (for photos and Yahoo! Messenger), some built-in S60 applications like Mail and Calendar and then has a bunch of Web-links for content (like “ringtones” — ugh!). One problem is: I can’t get it to bring up Opera as the default browser when it initiates a browsing session (admittedly this is probably a S60 problem but it would be nice for the Yahoo! application to give me the option of setting an alternate browser). I wish the content wasn’t just a link off to a browsing session — how about reading news through a built-in RSS reader? To be fair, they’ve indicated that mobile Konfabulator-style widgets are the next step, so maybe integration of these will solve some of these issues. The background synchronization and email config seems to work fine — I was up and running with my Yahoo! mail account in minutes once the application installed. I wish you could replace the phone’s “active idle” screen with the Yahoo! Go application and that the applications’ main screen could contain more dynamic content (like a mini-my-yahoo: number of messages in your inbox, top headlines, etc…).

Verdict: It’s a great start.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:12 under mobile 2.0

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We have over 600 people signed up to the Mobile Monday London mailing list and we will be very close to the 200 mark for attendees at our next event. Unbelievable!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:08 under Mobile Monday

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