Old kids on the block

Last week I took a deep breath and then took the plunge: I'm on a Nokia Windows Phone and I'm loving it. For years the iPhone in various iterations was my constant companion. Increasingly, Apple's blatant disregard for users slowly etched away the glossy feeling of being an Apple fan boy and my disaffection grew. When a software update broke the Wi-Fi on my 4s and the fix took months, without a single word of apology from Apple, the spell was broken.

 It took a while before I found my new portable brain externalizer and communications hub in a bright red Nokia Lumia 920. I feel like a guy who drove a Prius and switched to a Humvee. It's BIG, obvious, it's floor-denting solid, and it feels powerful and secure and at the same time wholly irresponsible to own and operate. The spider web that long adorned the back of my 4S is a physical impossibility with this thing, and I hope it lives up to the reputation of the Nokia's of yore. Of course, it guzzles like a Humvee too, demanding top-up charges between my long trips across the Netherlands.

 Windows Phone 8 is nice, especially since I got used to live tiles already on my Windows 8 laptop. The OS makes me feel like it’s putting information at my fingertips, literally. iOS is getting stale. I still think that tiles are an interactive redux of desktop icons and not a truly revolutionary interface, but they’re a darn sight better than Apple’s icons and badges. So 2007.
Up front I was afraid of a dearth of useful apps, but it turns out most of my mobile friends are ported. Evernote, LinkedIn, facebook and Twitter have decent (if not amazing) representations. Weave turns out to be a nice news and feed app. Nokia's included navigation app HERE Drive is very good, easily beating the iPhone's maligned Maps app.
The phone itself is fast. Apps load quickly and disappear as fast when you’re through with them. The browser provides easy access to my favorite haunts. The e-mail app is decent, with swipe-able columns to hold your unreads, urgents and miscellaneous unmentionables. Sound quality is great for conversations. Music will never be great from something with the size and frequency reach of a phone speaker, so I won’t even discuss it.

The vaunted camera fails to amaze, as the automatic settings lead to over-processed images with saturation and contrast at levels that make me feel the picture is rotoscoped by Van Gogh. Sure, it takes pictures in murky conditions where the iPhone fears to tread, but that’s not where I usually hang out anyway. In plain daylight, it needs a firm hand on the exposure and white balance settings. The Lumia 920 could have done without all the feature phone fuzz about the camera, then its resolution and low light performance would have been a pleasant surprise.

Overall the Nokia is great. It exudes quality, usability and a bit of cheek. It’s a strong statement that the old stalwarts from Kägeludden and Redmond are back in the mobile game and making a difference. Me? I'm not even looking back.

Apped

With OS X Lion Apple Inc. is making Macs a lot more like its mobiles. Fortune Magazine's CEO of the decade has chiseled out a whole new web experience for the users of Apple products, one based around a highly controlled 'Apple' experience trough apps rather than trough traditional internet use. The upside of this is that Apple's quality control provides a seamless, pleasant, and relatively safe internet experience. The HUGE downside is that it leaves out anything that doesn't fit in Apple's vision of your online future.

Much of the debate about the pros and cons of a 'limited' internet experience is waged by my fellow loudmouths in the IT industry. "Users", meanwhile, vote with their wallets and make Apple stock a stratospheric phenomenon. Clearly, it works well for most people, in spite of its drawbacks.

I, for one, like what Apple is offering on weekdays and tinker around with Tux over the weekend, allowing me do have a much richer, albeit more difficult computing experience mostly for the sake of learning cool geeky things about computing. 

For my parents however, Apple's approach is a godsend. It allows them to have all the front end usefulness of computers and the internet, without having to worry about the complexities of the back end. That they lose a lot of the power that the technology is capable of is much less of an issue, as they don't miss what they've never had.

Although Apple is certainly pulling the App bandwagon, the popularity of this vehicle is increasing rapidly and there is no software or mobile devices company that refuses to hop on, and app stores are definitely the new business model in both industries. Nokia has the Ovi store, there is of course the Android Marketplace, and even old lets-screw-up-on-the-latest-trend Microsoft has the Windows Web App Gallery. I can only speculate what happens when this trend collides with the rapidly increasing use of virtualization in the enterprise sphere. More on that later.

Apps are here to stay, and computing will become more useful to more people yet again.