Mobile Grumbles

Dowd and Dirty

2009-04-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

Maureen Dowd gets paid for complete crap. Thoughtless, stupid crap. But look, if she has an audience that likes to read what I think is crap, so what? I don't like Danielle Steele books or Stephen King's work either, but the world has plenty of space for their work as well as things I prefer. Even for things I make myself.

It's really smarmy self-importance I dislike. Like Maureen Dowd's.

The iPhone SDK

2008-03-12T12:23:00.001-07:00

It seems to me that the Apple SDK announcement has one big piece of good news for end users, and probably several pieces of news, good and bad, for developers. The good news for end users is that you'll be able to have a simple, on-the-iPhone way to get a new application. It will probably be some degree of revision to the iTunes store currently on the iPhone.

The more functionality they add, the better -- I find the iPhone version of iTunes to be a little too iCrippled. I'd prefer to see podcasts available, for example.

For more about what the news means to people in the development business, have a look at Michael Mace's analysis.

ImageLinkUSA

2008-03-04T11:53:00.001-08:00

This is a plain and simple plug. I've used ImageLinkUSA as a site hosting company for years, and they're great! The domain management software is web-based and works very well, uptime is as close to 24/7/365 as you can ask for, and their service has always been fast and helpful. If you need a place to host your domain and websites, I can't recommend them highly enough.

Traffic

2008-03-03T10:54:00.001-08:00

I'm having a "be careful what you wish for" experience. My iPhone webapps have spiked the traffic on my website so near the bandwidth quota it makes me nervous. This is all free stuff, so aside from any Adsense revenue (which is very, very little at this point) and a PayPal "donate" button it's just an expense.

Still, it's pretty nice to have so many people visit and try these things.

Even though I'm complaining, of course, I'm still linking to these iPhone ebooks:
Five Weeks in a Balloon
Life on the Mississippi
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
Treasure Island

And Cubetry, the daily Cubicle Rhyme client.

Location, Location, Location

2008-02-28T06:24:00.000-08:00

Here's a new location-oriented web service: Verve Earth. It's still in beta, but seems to be working pretty well. It's a world map (from Google Maps, I think) that pinpoints the physical locations of websites, blogs, aggregators, and the like. Nice interface, and could be a cool way to do two things: location websites that have some relevance to their physical location, and add a physical dimension to social networking. The SXSW conference is a long distance away from here, but when the VerveEarth map gets populated enough to see websites and bloggers nearby physically as well as topically, it would be pretty easy to set up some sort of "drop in" session.

Consolidation

2008-02-19T03:57:00.000-08:00

InformationWeek has suggested that there are reasons Nokia should buy Yahoo!. Five reasons, in fact. They suggest that Nokia needs a stronger desktop presence, that Yahoo would somehow combine with Navteq (recent Nokia acquisition) help cement Nokia's dominance of mobile location services, and that Yahoo could help Nokia grow its market share in North America, which is one of the few markets where it hasn't had much success lately.

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Nokia doesn't need any help in mobile location services, for one thing, and they're trying to build out their own desktop presence with Ovi. Nokia very much wants more success in the US, but I don't see that Yahoo would be that much help.

And the final reason I think it's a non-starter is that a Nokia-Yahoo combination wouldn't make any tools available on mobile devices that aren't already available. It just wouldn't do anybody any good.

Anyway, I'd be astonished if Nokia makes a bid for Yahoo. You read it here first!

TOC Conference

2008-02-12T04:10:00.000-08:00

Although I'm not attending O'Reilly's TOC Conference, I'm following the news, blogs, and other coverage. There's plenty of food for thought if you're actually a publisher, although none that hasn't been around for at least ten years.

I picked up a link to, of all things, Harlequin's eHARLEQUIN site. Harlequin publishes romance novels, which are frequently dismissed with a bit of derision, but which lots of people really love. The interesting thing to me is that right on the front page -- this is a publisher's website, remember -- you can choose traditional books, audiobooks, ebooks, "mobile phone", and podcasts.

The mobile phone category is a service; you get stories and some other content delivered to your phone. Not sure yet what the format is, but the screen shot on the site shows a graphic book cover on a mobile display, so it's probably MMS. The "serialized stories" are, I suspect, quite brief. But given the class of devices and service in the US, probably a good choice; at least SMS and MMS tend to be available on many phones, even here.

Portable Wifi

2008-02-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

This is pretty cool; JoikuSpot is a downloadable application that turns an S60 phone into a wifi hotspot. Once you have a hotspot that, say, all the folks around the table in the cafe are using with their own devices, you also have a sort of ad-hoc local area network.

One of the things that Apple supports with iTunes is sharing libraries -- on my home wifi network, my daughter's iTunes library is shared, so in the rare even that I want to listen to some hiphop tunes, I can listen to her library. This kind of local sharing is going to spread to other kinds of content because it does something people like, and at the same time mollifies the corporations quivering in fear about content sharing. My theory in that area is that we're just going to have to wait for their panic to subside so they can understand that even though the rest of us recognize that they're talentless leeches who serve nothing but their own selfishness, they're still welcome in the big human tent and we don't intend to turn them out into the gutter.

Anyway, any time it becomes possible to share music or pictures or words with your audience, more music and pictures and words are created. This particular wave is going to involve lots of mobile devices, even though we don't yet have the right devices to do that. There's a pretty good chance these will come first from some unknown little company in California or Japan or China or India or somewhere, hit the mainstream when Apple revises the idea so lots of people love it, and finally hit the infrastructure when the marketing companies like Microsoft and Nokia finally come to grips with the ideas.

Mobile Output

2008-02-08T04:49:00.000-08:00

The idea I'm exploring in this blog is using mobile devices as creative tools -- much the same way personal computers have tools for creative work in writing, visual arts, animation, video, and so on. In my previous post I talked about how mobile phones -- which are the most common mobile devices -- inherently foster mutual activities. These can be mutual creative activities, of course.

One interesting development is Qik video, a service for streaming video live from your phone. It works on the Nokia N95, but I'm not sure about others. Robert Scoble used it to stream interviews from the World Economic Forum in Davos. On Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech show he talked about how much of a difference it made that the video was live and had an audience that could participate by suggesting questions to ask.

That's a mutual creative activity if I ever saw one. I've been thinking about what it says about the line between "performer" and "audience". Everybody has an audience sometimes, even if seldom as big an audience as the Scobleizer enjoys. And you're in an audience a lot. Before the existence of "media"; for example in the days of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, when people went to hear a play, I think there was probably less distinction between being an artist and an audient.

The whole "mass media" thing -- like the "mass market" -- was probably an aberration produced by the mind-boggling weirdness of the last century. I think we're getting back to normal, but on the other side of whatever that was.

Mobile = Mutual

2008-02-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

Computing devices give you wonderful ways to create new things; graphical, textual, interactive. Generally the creative process is pretty solitary when it involves a computer. Or, well, big parts of it are solitary. But creativity with a mobile computer is more likely to be collaborative. You can interact with people while holding this gadget in your hand. You can mutually set up photos, act in impromptu (or...uh..."promptu"? scripted, I mean) video.

So far the collaborative creativity involving mobile gadgets doesn't really involve the mobile except as a recording device. There aren't any mutual creation tools that link mobiles particularly well. What we need is a bit more infrastructure; software and connectivity that does what's needed: multiple input and editing, some form of automatically keeping the various streams straight, and some way to store the collaborative product.

Sounds pretty straightforward. The only piece of technology that's not really there -- as far as I know -- is a way for mobiles to communicate with a small group, either locally or maybe in a more distributed way.

The Garmin Nuvifone

2008-02-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

Garmin's Nuvifone looks like another take on the "what should a mobile phone do" question. You can see two existing, fairly successful approaches, in Nokia phones and the iPhone. Nokia's approach is to answer the question "what should a mobile phone do" this way: everything we can think of, and you can add more if you want. Nokia values features over design and builds devices that are nearly as capable as personal computers -- more capable in some areas. The cost of this, at least the way Nokia does it, is the kind of design quality that Apple chose with the iPhone.

The iPhone does not have as many features as a comparable Nokia phone. Apple chose design over features. It doesn't rival your personal computer -- or even your Nokia phone -- in capability. Instead, it makes more sense to talk about the iPhone in terms of design.

The Nuvifone, which is starting off with the worst name of this bunch, isn't actually available yet. Their site says "available Q3 2008", which probably means sometime in the summer, but could be as late as, say, September. If the pictures can be relied on, the NuviFone emphasizes calling, mapping (of course), web browsing, and text messaging. It's a touch-screen device like the iPhone, and doesn't seem to have even the iPhone's one button on the front.

If you think of a Nokia phone as "phone/computer" and the iPhone as a "phone/media device/browser device", it looks like the Nuvifone is going to be a "phone/mapping device/browser device." The iPhone and Nokia phones can do maps too, of course, and Nokia and the Nuvifone (probably) will do media too. It's just a question of where the emphasis (or in Nokia's case, generality) lies. Is mapping that important in a handheld device? Is it a major selling point?

Based on my experience and observations, no, I don't think mapping is important enough as a feature to propel the Nuvifone deeply into the mass market for that reason alone. It will probably be an outstanding mapping device, as that's Garmin's core capability. But having other phones with mapping capabilities, including several Nokia phones with built-in GPS and the iPhone's new location service, I don't see it as particularly important.

On the other hand, the Nuvifone could turn out to be so good in either design (like iPhone) or general capability (like Nokia) that it becomes quite a hit. Have to wait a few months to find out.

Making Makers Mobile

2008-01-23T06:35:00.000-08:00

Right now there's a big difference between being an end user in the world of computers and being one in the world of mobile phones. You can, if you want, pretty much build your own computer from off-the-shelf components and operate it using off-the-shelf software; all open-source if you're so inclined. Most people don't build their own computers, of course, any more than they change their car's oil themselves or make their own furniture. Or houses. Or what-have-you.

The fact that some people do is more important than it looks, however. A type of artifact that some people build on their own stays open to the "maker" idea, and there are always some companies that support the maker culture. I'd even suggest that the energy and enthusiasm in the "make your own" part of any industry drives innovation in the more mainstream part of the same industry. In fact, the whole PC industry can be traced back to the HomeBrew Computer Club and people like them.

The mobile phone industry has come to us in a more corporate, top-down process. At least in the US, not only is it essentially impossible to build your own phone; it's immensely difficult to choose a phone you like except as one of the sponsored items allowed by a carrier like AT&T or Verizon.

Now, this is probably good enough for most people, most of the time. Most people who use any sort of artifact or tool are not going to get so involved in the tool itself that they learn how to make their own. But it makes a big difference when you can do that, even if you personally don't. When was the last time you really used that freedom of speech you have? Probably not very recently -- but that doesn't mean you don't care whether you have it, right?

The mobile phone industry is starting to change, and it's going to start allowing some individual makers to get involved. Glenn Fleishman explains how it might work and some of what it's going to mean. An industry that's actively resisted innovation and change is starting to face up to it, and the results can only lead to more and better products and services.

Quite a deal!

2008-01-21T03:52:00.000-08:00

Not really all that mobile (unless you have a Mac laptop!) but check out the amazing bundle of applications at MacHeist. Graphics without needing the incredible overkill of Photoshop, along with a large set of utilities and games, and the whole package is $50. Pixelmator is worth more than that by itself; the rest is basically free.

MacBook Air as a Mobile Device

2008-01-20T08:11:00.001-08:00

The MacBook Air is really not very far from some handheld devices in total mass, and for that matter in price. It's still more than most in both categories, but it's in the ballpark. On the other hand, it's also not very far from my MacBook Earth in the same respects.

A MacBook -- any laptop computer, really -- is an excellent tool for creating things. You have a keyboard, a full operating system enabling you to store and retrieve any sort of document you want, an open-ended array of software tools, networking of various sorts, and often both a camera and a microphone. Compared to some of the better devices in the handheld class, including the iPhone, the Blackberry, the N95, and the Nokia E90, laptops are clearly more capable creative tools. That's why people bother to carry them around; it's a lot easier to slip a mobile phone into your pocket than to bring your laptop case.

The MacBook Air is getting some criticism for its somewhat different mix of capabilities. Let's see if these would matter to me. No Ethernet port -- this wouldn't be an issue for me; my MacBook connects wirelessly 100% of the time anyway. No optical drive -- might be an issue; I sometimes use my MacBook's superdrive (or combo drive or whatever the heck it is). But only occasionally, and I'm not sure I've ever really needed it, since I also have desktop computers with any kind of drive I need. The non-replaceable battery might be an issue, but this might not be a current thing. In the past I've carried additional laptop batteries. But not with any machine since Li-ion batteries arrived; now that I think of it. I don't have a spare MacBook battery now, and don't anticipate ever obtaining one. No Firewire port -- this is pretty personal because I'm not really a camera/media guy, but I don't even own a Firewire cable. If I'd been able to save a few bucks on my current MacBook by omitting the Firewire port, it would have been a pretty automatic choice.

The MacBook Air is slower and has less storage than my MacBook Earth. This could be an issue for sound, as I use my laptop for music and podcasts, but I suspect sound will be just find on the AirBook. Video might be an issue too, but other than TedTalks, I don't do much video. So as mostly a writing and sometimes graphics machine, an AirBook would be fine with me. Of course, looking at it this way the AirBook probably ought to cost less, not more. I spent about $1100 on my EarthBook, and frankly it includes a lot of things I don't use. So an Airbook in the $500-$750 range would be an easy choice for me. Well, I mean, not now; I already have an earthbook!

That's an area of mobile device design (and production and distribution) that's never been well served: the smaller, less capable, and less expensive unit. Given the realities of miniaturization and, frankly, marketing, smaller and lighter usually means more money, not less. And by the time the industry has progressed to the next stage, companies drop the old stuff instead of keeping it around and reducing the price. Too bad. When I was at Apple I suggested a lower-cost, lower-performance laptop line, particularly for students (and even ruggedized). Clearly I wasn't persuasive enough!

Humbling Grumbling

2008-01-20T07:57:00.000-08:00

It's kind of humbling to realize that in the world of grumbling, I'm just a rank amateur. Apple held its MacWorld conference last week, at which:

They singlehandedly got more coverage than the entire CES show for the rest of the industry
They announced new products, one of which may have long-term effects
Steve Jobs put on another interesting, fun-to-watch keynote (and keep in mind that corporate executives are generally known for buzzword bingo and 68-powerpoint-slide presentations that say little or nothing)
They introduced some cool new product design

And Still People Are Complaining! Humbling grumbling, indeed!

iPhone and Updating

2008-01-16T04:30:00.000-08:00

Apple has updated iPhone software pretty significantly; you can rearrange your home screen and the map now uses some sort of cell-triangulation-based location system to act like a GPS. Without, I should say, the long wait to get a fix on satellites, the flaky routing software, and byzantine directions provided by the Nokia devices I've used with real GPS built in.

I don't often find myself in need of a device to tell me where I am. In fact, it's quite possible I've never needed that. What's more interesting is when it can tell me what's nearby. This is the real value of the iPhone update, and as Google begins to take it into use, it will probably be reasonable to expect location to be integrated into searches and other services.

I say Google because they're designing things for the iPhone more than anybody else but Apple. The Google search page is now tailored for the iPhone pretty nicely, and if you use gmail on your iPhone, the latest software update gives you a more complete picture of your account. Now it includes all your folders (the ones you see when you open gmail on your computer).

I'm not sure the gmail update is better. It's certainly not simpler. I'll try to pay attention as I use it, but I already liked the very basic display of inbox/sent/trash, which is what you get from a plain POP3 email account on the iPhone. Dot-Mac mail also adds drafts, but keeps things pretty plain. Yes, I do have too many email accounts, thanks for mentioning it.

Apple has been doing more with iPhone software updates than I remember seeing in any software updating, ever. This is Apple, of course, which in addition to turning out excellent product design, is a finely-tuned moneymaking powerhouse. Maybe the fact that there's an ongoing revenue stream from iPhone users will keep these updates free of charge, but I won't be surprised to see them begin to cost something.

iPhone as an ebook Reader

2008-01-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

Here's an experiment: a sort of "web app" (Apple's phrase) that's a simple ebook reader for the iPhone. It's not a general-purpose reader; I just took a Project Gutenberg text, looked at Apple's iPhone development material, and used some of the content from the stylesheets they've posted.

I used Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon, which has some interesting challenges for a mobile ebook. In the style of the day (or maybe it's just Verne's style), each chapter entry in the table of contents has a brief synopsis. This makes the table of contents pretty long.

The book also has 42 chapters, so if you want to see the whole table of contents before starting to read, it's a certain distance to scroll down. One advantage, though, is that with 42 chapters it's pretty easy to find your place again. You need to do that because I haven't yet figured out a way to offer built-in bookmarking in a web app (which is really just a web page). If you start with a particular chapter, of course, you can just bookmark the link for yourself.

Anyway, if you have an iPhone, let me know what you think.

Saved Google Maps on iPhone - howto

2008-01-11T19:22:00.000-08:00

One of the cool things you can do with Google Maps is save a map with a number of locations highlighted. This is a good way, for example, do prepare yourself to drive around to look at houses for sale.

Anytime "driving around" is involved, it makes sense to open the map on the iPhone rather than, say, print it. Besides, my printer is currently out of cyan ink (or maybe it's yellow; the whole apparatus is irritating).

Anyway, although the Google Map application on the iPhone doesn't (as far as I know) have a way to save multiple locations on one map, the problem turns out to be quite easy. Here's how I solved it:

Create a saved map on a computer with whatever addresses or other locations you want
When you have the map the way you want it, send the URL to yourself at an address you can receive on your iPhone.
On the iPhone, open the URL in the email.

And there you go. Even though the iPhone has a special version of Google Maps, you can still open the browser-based version if you want to.

New Yahoo Mobile Stuff

2008-01-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

At the CES show (why is there still a show?) Yahoo seems to be making a new push at mobile services and content. Their "big thing" is Yahoo Go, announced in version 3 (beta, currently).

OneSearch is a redesign of the search and results pages for mobile screens, along with some tweaking of the search algorithm for mobile use. They've announced it for the iPhone -- Yahoo is already one of the default, uneditable bookmarks in mobile Safari -- and they even posted instructions.

The instructions are a good idea; the first time I tried it didn't work; the browser didn't recognize the search field as a text field. When this happens on the iPhone it's a bit of a dead end; the keyboard won't appear if it doesn't detect an input field. But following the instructions -- which are stone simple, really just entering the URL m.yahoo.com -- it worked.

The OneSearch results page is a useful redesign; it's clever enough to add location information to results when that might make sense, and not otherwise. Look for "pizza", for example, and it will give you pizza restaurants. Look for "blogging" and the results you get are Wikipedia and the like.

Scroll down far enough in the results and you'll see categorization. Result categories are separated (in the iPhone version) by blue headline-bars. I didn't exhaustively research the available categories, but they seem fairly consistent: local results (if any), images, web, news articles, Yahoo answers, and so on. This is a different approach than Yahoo uses for its default desktop search results, and I think it works pretty well.

The "search again" field is placed at the bottom (end) of the results, with only a (fairly small for the iPhone) link at the top. This sounds like a good way to deliver more content at the beginning of the list, but they squandered the opportunity by using the top half of the first screen of results to display:

Make Y! your default search
Y! Pizza
Yahoo Go ad
Yahoo Go download link

So from a pretty good design idea it goes to a pretty annoying implementation. But it's only half a screen and easily scrolled up, so no (or not much) harm done.

If you prefer Yahoo search results, the new OneSearch does a good job of organizing and formatting what you get. You lose some screen space to headings, but what you get back is a nicely organized set of categories. Of course, as with all categorizations, if it's not your categorization it might not be an improvement over no categorization at all.

Yahoo's Go service/software is a bit more ambitious; I'm going to take a look through that next.

Mobile Luxury?

2008-01-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

Nokia has the Vertu line of "luxury" phones. These are "luxury" in the sense that expensive watches have become "luxury" items; they're manufactured with more expensive materials and are ornamented to look fancy. Functionality doesn't improve, of course, and in fact may be worse.

Now Tag Heuer is coming at the same idea from the other direction -- they make watches, and have announced plans to introduce "luxury" phones.

I don't really share this view of what high end or luxury mean. On the Vertu site the introductory flash promo shows all sorts of things that have only one thing in common: expense. One message from this is that "expensive" can also mean bandwidth. The other is that I think "expensive", when associated with "luxury", generally means "waste" nowadays. Waste of materials, waste of design effort on fashion over function, waste of money and resources at every step along the way.

To me, the best expression of luxury has to do with clean, simple, effective function. Not having to screw around with poorly-made, poorly-functioning, poorly-designed things and processes -- that's luxury.

2008 -- 1993 all over again?

2008-01-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

I'm just talking about a fairly narrow scope, but 2008 would represent a rerun of 1993 if the Apple Newton reappears. I've noticed this rumor around the net. Of course, Apple is always the target of a raft of rumors, but I think there's reason to credit this idea. If it's not this, it might be something similar. As Michael Mace points out, there isn't a good device available for the cohort he calls information lovers.

I would call the group creators or, more in tune with today's language-mangling marketing professionals, mobile content developers. These are people who, today, carry their laptops everywhere in order to write or draw or code or edit or whatever it is they do. I'm often in this group, and speaking for myself, a laptop is the tool of choice only because there isn't a better tool available.

Creators need a mobile tool that provides these things:

Pocketability, so you can always have it with you. The model here is a Moleskine notebook and a pencil.
Image capture. The model here is a Leica rangefinder camera.
Writing tool. The model here is almost as simple as Notepad, although maybe WriteNow is more like it.
Graphics. Something like MacPaint, maybe with color, is what I'm thinking of.
Calendar.
A way to deal with lists of things. As far as I know (and this will sound completely ridiculous) no good approach for dealing with lists in a human-centric way has ever been created for computers. Although some old Newton software came close.

A select few might point out that this list is really fairly close to the late, lamented Psion MX5. True enough, that gadget was close, but really just a near miss -- which actually can turn out to be worse. For all that was right with the MX5, I found the hardware quality to be so bad it made the thing unpleasant to use.

Anyway, Apple is pretty good (lately, anyway) at hitting market needs and wants that nobody else quite sees the same way. Most companies are still thinking that they can beat the iPod by adding more features, which (at least in the US) is completely missing the point.

So a 2008 launch of a Newton MessagePad? Sounds plausible to me.

Others' Eyes

2007-12-21T19:56:00.000-08:00

It's fun to hand an iPhone to people who've never tried one. I get jaded about mobile devices; after all I get to play with the best toys all the time. I had some time at my daughter's school, though, before a parent-teacher conference, and I was doing something on the iPhone.

People walking by stopped and stared. Gawked, almost. I passed it around, teachers, students, whoever was there. The auto-rotation and the screen resolution; that's what gets them in the first ten seconds. It still gets a lot of "WOW" reactions.

TryPhone -- or maybe not

2007-12-12T18:56:00.001-08:00

TryPhone is, I suppose, an interesting idea. It supposedly helps you "try" different phones through interactive demos, and provides specifications and reviews. The idea is, I guess, to help you make up your mind about which phone to buy.

I didn't get much out of the demos. There are only four phones listed, and while I'm sure they've done their best, the demos aren't very complete, and tend to be fairly unresponsive.

To their credit, I have first-hand knowledge of just how complex and difficult it is to create a complete Flash simulation of a device like a phone, even a simple one, and these demos are remarkably bug-free and operate consistently.

I don't know how far they're going to be able to take this -- there are hundreds of phones on the market, and while four is a good start, it's not that good. Then there's the issue of how much even the best demo differs from the experience of actually using the device itself. It's possible to emulate S60 software on a windows system. I do this all the time, and it simply isn't an experience frought with verisimilitude.

Still, I wish them luck, and hope their flash coders don't get RSI or keel over from overwork!

Flex Services

2007-12-11T12:45:00.001-08:00

Adobe's Flex development environment seems to be pretty powerful, and at the moment it's not at all oriented toward mobile development. However, the idea underlying most applications and services being created with Flex is in perfect harmony with mobile use.

Take Buzzword, for example. It's a "connected" word processor you use in a browser window. Its capabilities are right at the surface; unlike Microsoft Word and its ilk, Buzzword does not have dozens of menus with hundreds of options. This is a good high-level description of a good mobile application. Try an iPhone, for example, and you aren't faced with lots of menus, options, and a big control structure to navigate.

Flex tends to produce applications and services that don't yet work very well on mobile gadgets, though, because they require too much memory or rely on the very latest version of software (Flash, usually) that doesn't yet run on mobiles.

That's the sort of thing that always gets solved over time in tech industries, leaving only the question of when Adobe will start really pushing Flex into the mobile space, and how hard they're going to push it. They're already thinking about it.

Stories

2007-12-08T14:16:00.001-08:00

This ad campaign says, in part, "Nokia N82: Tell Better Stories."

Even for a marketer, this is over-the-top, irritating drivel. I often find Nokia's marketing offensive, and this sort of thing keeps them pegged near the bottom of my list. Completely shameless.