Cloud computing is a  that describes a model of computing where by your data is kept on servers that are outside your control and out on the Internet (hence, in the cloud).  According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is:

Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

Cloud-based services are ideal with devices such as Netbooks and mobile handsets because the mobile devices have little computational horsepower, meager storage, and are typically connected to the ‘Net via data connections, either Wi-Fi or 3G data networks.

The promise of cloud computing for users lies in the assumption that our data is safely held in professionally-managed data centers somewhere in the world.  But as recent events show, this isn’t always the case.  Last week, Microsoft/Danger lost millions of Sidekick users’ data in a botched storage area network upgrade.

Microsoft is supposedly working around the clock to bring back the data.  But, as it stands, millions of Sidekick users are without their contacts, photos, emails, notes, and other valuable data they depend on when utilizing their mobile devices.  Because the Sidekick uses RAM to store all this data, any user who power cycles or lets the battery run out on their device will lose all their data until Microsoft/Danger can recover it – if at all.

What is the lesson here? If you have a device you care about that contains data you find valuable, you must seek and constantly update your backups.  If you rely upon hosted services to house your data in the cloud, I suggest seeking ways to backup your phone’s data locally as well.

For example, iPhone users are in luck because of the way iTunes is structured.  In addition to the availability of Apple’s MobileMe service, the iPhone/iPod Touch is automatically backed up each time you sync your phone with iTunes.  Likewise, Nokia N Series and E Series users have access to some Ovi services that back up your photos/contacts and other data, but if you want a local copy of these types of data – Nokia users must use PC Suite on a regular basis.

There are services for many platforms that allow you to backup and maintain your data and I suggest you evaluate our options.  Blackberry users have online and offline backup options and using Google’s mobile web services, you can backup your contacts to their services as well.

Don’t take the Sidekick data loss and assume this type of catastrophe couldn’t happen to you.  With mobile devices becoming a part of our daily lives, there are likely contacts, photos and videos you care about.  Take a minute to back up and ensure your data is safe! 

(Photo credit: Flickr User kevindooley)

In the mobile phone world, the iPhone from Apple has definitely set the bar with regards to touch interfaces.  Apple, with their multi-touch capabilities, has set a new paradigm with regards to user interfaces and user experience on mobile handsets.  We have seen other players in the mobile industry try and replicate Apple’s success, but have come short.

Nokia has appeared to be a sleeping giant when it comes to touch interfaces.  Over the last year, we have seen the Nokia XpressMusic 5800 and the corresponding S60 5th Edition come to the market.  And now, the Nokia N97 is the flagship Nokia model with its large 3.5″ touch screen.

These two handsets have been modest entries into the touch market and it appears with recent announcements from the Finnish handset maker that they have finally embraced the touch user interface and are putting their engineering talent behind it.

The Nokia N900 Tablet

As discussed before, the Nokia N900 Tablet/Phone takes some of the best features of the Nokia N97 and marries them with the popular, yet niche, features of Nokia’s Internet Tablet line.  With the N900 we get the expendable Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system tied in with a 5Mp Camera with Carl Zeiss Lens, 3.5″ touch screen, 32GB of onboard storage and a slide-our keyboard.

If you watch the demo video provided by Nokia, you’ll see they’re featuring the touch interface front and center.  The N900 from Nokia is all about creating media and sharing it with those in your social circle online.

Nokia X6

The X6 is a brand new device category from Nokia.  This X6 device is made for media consumption with its 3.2″ screen.  It also features 32GB of onboard memory and a 5MP digital camera.

But, in a huge step for Nokia, the biggest news out of Nokia World (in my opinion), is the Nokia X6 features a capacitive touch screen.  Whereas the N97 and 5800 XpressMusic features a resistive touch screen that requires ample feedback to register a keystroke or tap, the X6 will be more user-friendly – like the iPhone which also features a capacitive screen.

With its advertised 35 hours of music playback and customizable homescreen, the X6 represents a new venture for Nokia in the touchscreen phone market.

What do you think? Do these new handsets excite you?  Or is Nokia just trying too hard and coming up short?

It is interesting to see all the changes that are occurring in the handset market.  The iPhone’s effect is starting to ripple and its time for other innovators to start showing us their stuff.  Does Nokia have any chops?  You tell me.

I’ve been calling June 2009 the “Month of Mobile”.  This is because June this year is bringing us many developments, announcements, and releases from different big players in the mobile industry.

Palm Pre – A New Beginning?

In the United States, June 6th saw the release of the Palm Pre.  This highly anticipated handset is seen as many a turning point for Palm, once a major influence in the mobile handset world.  The Treo had a strong following in the early half of this decade but with a lack of new innovations, Palm has fallen in popularity.  Will the Pre turn things around for the Sunnyvale, Ca company?  The next few months will tell.

Nokia and the N97 Mobile Computer

June will see the shipping of their newest NSeries handset – a phone I’ve called the “Holy Grail“.  The Nokia N97 has an impressive hardware stack including a high resolution touch screen, 5MP camera with widescreen video capture, GPS and compass.  Also, the homescreen of the N97 can be customized via widgets written for the S60 platform.  The N97 also features a full slide-out keyboard for easy messaging and text input.

The Nokia application store, called Ovi Store, was recently released, making app discovery and selection easier on the S60 platform.  This combinationwill help advance the Nokia/Symbian platform as a great option for mobile application developers and for customers as well.

Apple, the iPhone, and WWDC

This week, Apple kicks off their World Wide Developer Conference.  Tomorrow, June 8, the keynote address takes place.  We already know the Apple iPhone 3.0 software will be released soon, but mobile geeks everywhere are hoping for new iPhone hardware to be announced soon.  Last June, Apple released the iPhone 3G and there’s hope this June Apple will refresh the hardware stack again.

As you can see, there is a lot happening this month in the world of mobile hardware.

What features or handsets are you looking to try out?  Let’s discuss in the comments!

Over the past few days, there have been many arguments about the Nokia’s soon-to-be-released flagship device: The Nokia N97.  According to a Forum Nokia post, the N97’s CPU will be an ARM 11 processor running at 434 Mhz.

To compare the N97’s processor speeds, another site has charted competing smartphones including the BlackBerry Bold, HTC Magic and Samsung i8910 with clock speeds ranging in the 500-600Mhz range.

My To Do About Nothing

In my humble opinion, too much is being made about one metric of a mobile handset’s performance.  Depending on the handset’s operating system speed and memory usage, the amount of physical RAM in the mobile device, and many other factors – the Nokia N97 will probably “feel” snappy and efficient to most users.

When evaluating how a customer like or dislikes a phone, CPU speed is likely the last thing most consumer’s list.  Other factors such as onboard features, battery life, and how well the handset’s software meets their needs are far more important to mobile handset shoppers.

Let me tell you from experience on the E71 (which only clocks in at 369Mhz) the E71 is the fastest and most fluid Symbian handset I have ever used.  Activities such as traversing the phone’s menus and launching applications happen very quickly and with minimal delay.

Another benefit to having a lower clock speed handset: the battery will last longer.  This will become quite important as the N97 has onboard Wi-Fi, GPS, a 5MP camera, and a widget-based home screen that will likely stress the battery continually.  Having a power-sipping processor will help to extend battery life.

Time Will Tell

At this point, no one except for those lucky enough to be inside Nokia has even played with an N97.  Therefore,  none of us can really say how the N97 will perform with a lower clock speed processor.

However, when the new Nokia flagship is unveiled in June 2009, we will finally be able to see whether the device performs well enough to be called a “flagship”.

Thanks to drastic advances in mobile handset technology, today’s cellular phones are very capable machines. A few short years ago, our phones only had a few functions, mainly consisting of making/receiving calls and sending SMS messages.

However, with the advent of the camera phone and subsequent advances, our mobile handsets pack a whopping amount of hardware and functionality. For example, the Nokia NSeries handsets feature 5MP cameras, on-board GPS, FM Transmitters, email and much, much more.

Even today’s more inexpensive feature phones carry on them 1 or 2 megapixel cameras capable of sending MMS messages and so forth. But, in my experience, many mobile phone users don’t use these advanced features because they are too hard to work with. This is part of the reason the iPhone is such a game changer, as it altered user behavior by creating a better user experience when accessing these advanced hardware features.

The Ease-of-Use Factor

Adding to this, the usage figures of iPhone users show they consume these advanced services more frequently than phone users on other platforms. A Financial Times article reports that iPhone users consume more mobile data because surfing the web on Apple’s mobile handset is so simple and enjoyable.  It’s a fact: iPhone users snap more photos, send more emails and text messages and this pattern doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.

The Youth Factor

mocoNews recently reported that, in the U.S., T-Mobile will soon refresh the very-popular Sidekick product.  The Sidekick is a handset that features a slide-out screen that reveals a full QWERTY keyboard.  This particular handset is especially popular with teenagers and college students here in the United States.

However, the way these young users utilize their Sidekicks is astounding.  Here are some usage statistics that show Sidekick users:

• Send and receive 3,000 instant-messages a month
• Send and receive 600 text messages a month
• View more than 450 web pages a month
• Two-thirds of all traffic through the Sidekick browser goes to social networking sites

This handset, when combined with its 3.2 megapixel camera and built-in social networking software, is a connected teenager’s dream phone!  It goes to show that the Sidekick user base is a mobile-data hungry crowd that loves to use their handsets to the fullest.

However, in your opinion – what other factors drive advanced mobile feature usage?  I look forward to seeing your thoughts in the comments section below.

We believe that the touch interface is going to be a dominant technology in the mobile world for some time to come.  It turns out Nokia may be catching on to this mentality as well.

Nokia fans have had only one touch enabled mobile handset come out in recent months – the Nokia XpressMusic 5800.  In June, the Finnish handset giant is posed to deliver the Nokia N97, a device that is a feature monster, packing a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard for data entry.

To add to this Nokia touch fever, a few poignant publications have noted that sources inside Nokia are reporting a threesome of ‘thin touchscreen phones’ set to debut later this year.  The new phones are said to feature the VibeTonz technology that Nokia licensed from Immersion, which takes haptic feedback technology to the next level by delivering a “multi-sensory experience”.

I’m not sure what to expect from a VibeTonz-enabled hands yet.  However, after experiencing how Apple’s iPhone and application developers are utilizing touch on the Apple platform, I’m anxious to see what Nokia can deliver if and when they put their creative and engineering muscle into delivering a touch-enabled device.

A chief complaint amongst touchscreen phone users (and a major barrier for buying them) is the lack of tactile feedback while typing.  Perhaps with Immersion’s haptic technology, Nokia can win over those who have held out on buying a touch device to date.

What is your opinion?  Can you type adequately on your touch-enabled phone?  Have you held off on buying a touch-enabled handsets, or is the utility of the iPhone enough to make typing troubles non-existent?

Also, do you think Nokia can deliver a winner of a touch handset, or are they just too late to the game?

We look forward to the comments!

[image courtesy: MaxRoam]

During my Monday morning RSS catchup, I came across Mobile Today’s report of O2 and Orange throwing their toys out of the pram in discussions with Nokia over the inclusion (or not) of Skype on the new N97.

O2 and Orange responded furiously to Nokia’s declaration that it will equip its upcoming flagship Nseries device, the N97, with Skype. If the row is not resolved the two operators may refuse to stock the N97 – or any future Nseries handsets containing Skype – unless Nokia strips out the Skype client.

This level of reticence towards services that invade their territory isn’t surprising, but it’s unfortunate. Who loses out by useful services like Skype being removed from the devices? It’s the customer.

It reminds me of the music industry battle; It was ten years ago already that Napster surfaced from a university student’s dorm, changing the landscape for the music industry ever since by showing music consumers that there was a new way (legit or not) of accessing more music than what your local music chain could offer.

The music industry has been grappling with this hot potato ever since; rather than going with the flow and finding ways to work with peer-to-peer networks in the early days, it opted for a lengthy legal game of Whack-a-mole with developers who were much smarter than them. It’s only in the past year or two that services like Spotify and Last.fm have started making creative use of the web to distribute music legally. Would users have gone on to use illegitimate services if no one had managed to put a business plan together to do it all above board? I suspect so.

To put it simply, once the penny drops, there’s no going back.

This is the crossroad the mobile industry is at; Through devices like the iPhone, the N-Series Nokia range and many other new phones, we’re getting an inkling of how customisable our gadgets are. Need to call a friend abroad? Grab Skype. Fancy using a Twitter app instead of SMS? Grab it from the App Store.

Of course, this freaks out the operators who want to be “more than just a bit pipe”, who up until recently received a cut of most mobile activity. And it’s fair that they need to ensure their revenue in order to stay in business, that’s just common sense. However, excessive greed may help increase the revenue-per-head in the short term, but in the long term, customers will see right through this ploy and find an operator who’s less likely to put a spanner in their creative works. Whether it’s Skype, off-portal mobile web access or having some flexibility in available tariffs, customers are (slowly but surely) becoming more empowered. Customers will only accept a less-than-full-featured phone for so long before they review their choice of operator.

The area where operators can build true value for their users is customer care; provide prompt and responsive service when something goes wrong, be helpful rather than obscure in helping your users choose a tariff and device that suits them. Users will love you. Nothing can replace the good feeling that accompanies a smooth transaction when the new shiny phone arrives. Happy customers is what makes a business, isn’t it?

[Via PaidContent]

Every day, mobile surfers arrive to Taptu using dozens of different devices through dozens of different operators. Just like each one of us is a beautiful snowflake (or so says my mother, anyway), each of those combinations of device/firmware/operator comes with its quirks.

A common problem Taptu users flagged up is difficulty with streaming video on some Nokia devices, so we thought we’d share our best tip which should allow most users to be able to get streaming working via Real Player on their Symbian S60 v3 phones* like the N95, N76, E71, etc…

So here is a simple step-by-step on setting your phone AND Real Player to use the same Internet connection. We’ve put a step-by-step in screenshots on Flickr to make it easier too.

1. Open the main menu and select ‘Tools’
2. Select ‘Settings’
3. Select ‘Applications’
4. In Applications select ‘RealPlayer’
5. In RealPlayer select ‘Streaming’
6. Select ‘Network’ in Streaming settings
7. Select ‘Default access point’ (See screenshot)
8. Select the same option which you use to Browse the internet. When they are the same you should be able to stream.
9. Then start up your browser as you normally would and select the same option as the RealPlayer ‘Default access point’

For many users, this will fix to streaming problem! If this doesn’t resolve your video streaming problem, you may want to call your operator to find out if you need any different settings to enable streaming.

If you have more questions about Taptu, check out our FAQ for more answers to commonly asked questions.

[* For a more complete list of S60 devices and which version they are, Wikipedia has a nice list here]

The always-useful Nokia N95 blog publishes a list of 25 of the most useful Nokia N95 apps available at the moment. Definitely worth a look, my ultimate favourite in the list is Qik.com, a live video broadcast service, which I’ve tried in the past few weeks and have found astoundingly speedy, if at the expense of some image quality.

It’s services like Qik that remind me what an exciting time it is to be working in the mobile web world right now!

Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show, Nokia presented S60 running with a touch interface.

To get more details, I listened to the Voice of S60 podcast, hosted by Phil Schwarzmann who interviewed Minna Karvonen, Product Marketing Manager for S60 UI and UI Customisation.

Minna explained that the touch interface would support finger and stylus input, mulitilingual applications and is backwards compatible with the existing S60 3rd Edition platform.

While this is great news and will most likely change the landscape of mobile browsing, the cynic in me struggles to see how S60 will make this in any way as smooth and usable as the iPhone. (What, did you really think I wasn’t going to make this comparison immediately?) Regardless, it’ll be a very interesting space to watch once it is released in 2008.

And finally, here’s a video of the Nokia presentation, taken by Rafe of All About Symbian: