Welcome to Adam's Mobile Technology Blog!Walking out of Oxford Street station at 8am on a cold December morning I was greeted by a young girl in a luminous coat handing out giant daises...(stay with me, there's a point to this I promise).
It has to be a hard job standing there trying to get passers by to stop and give you 5 seconds of their time so I, having not particularly woken up that morning and wanting a daisy, took one. Three things were strange about this flower. Firstly, it was huge, clearly larger than your average daisy should be. Second, it had a label attached to it with a rubber band, and three.....it was Blue. You really don't need to be a genius to figure out that it was huge to get your attention, the label was whomever was paying the young girl stand there and advertise their product and the fact that it was blue was due to the food colouring in the bucket the flower had previously been sitting in.
The label on the flower said "Start your day off different" and was to promote the new Nokia Lumia 800, Microsoft's latest attempt to crack the Smartphone market (with the Finnish company's help) by using their own Windows 7 Mobile operating system...told you there was a point.
I looked down and noticed that, after the few seconds I had held the flower and the 12 feet I had walked with it, the blue ink that drew in my eye had ran all over my hands, so far, certainly it had started my day differently (for the worse that is). All could have been saved by making one small tweak and wrapping the bottom in paper. This, on further thought felt like the perfect analogy for the handset.
The bright screen and new tiles feature of Windows latest attempt at breaking into the smartphone market may draw you in but the new handset has one major fundamental flaw that could, as far as I can tell, have easily been prevented. If Microsoft are serious about competing with the likes of Apple, Samsung and HTC, they must take full advantage of all of their assets. The phone looks great, the operating system has excellent features and has been received and reviewed well. The most obvious problem, as I see it, is with the front facing camera......their isn't one. This is a key feature on most devices (certainly the ones they are trying to compete with), yes I understand that not everyone is desperate for video calling but now, like downloadable content, is deemed standard (a minimum requirement if you will) on most handsets. Apple has been using this feature alone to sell millions of iPads over the past few months through promoting "FaceTime" connectivity through both their mobile and tablet devices.
Here is where it starts to get really strange in May of this year Microsoft purchased the most successful video calling ("face time") software of all time, Skype, for $8.5 bn (£5.2 bn) and were (quite rightly in my opinion) proud of their biggest every acquisition, so why isn't their new phone integrated with Skype? To be fair, this isn't the first time a phone provider has missed the mark due to an oversight that could, so easily have been avoided.
Back in 2003, Nokia released the N-Gage with the idea that it would lure away young gamers from the Gameboy Advanced and have the added features of being (you've guessed it) a phone too. The main issue was that to switch between game cartridges you needed to take apart the entire phone, involving turning the thing off, removing the headset, removing the back panel and taking out the battery, then replacing the cartridge, not to mention then having to put everything back together. Not the most convenient design feature aimed to compete against a device that you simply removed the cartridge and installed the next wild adventure of a short moustachioed plumber. The nail in the coffin however probably came when it was reviewed by CNN on its overall design where it earned the affectionate nickname of "the Taco".
Dell had a similar problem when launching the Streak. Aimed to combine the features of a Smartphone with the added capabilities of a tablet, the device on paper seemed perfect and simple; a tablet that allowed you to make phone calls. The only main issue, as pointed out by a friend of mine at the time when I looked into getting the Streak 7, was that when trying to make a call without the hands free kit made it look and feel like you were trying to make calls with a large piece of toast strapped to the side of your head; not the most professional of looks. It also has issues with shorter battery life and screen quality, meaning it was too big to be used as a phone and not the quality expected with a premium tablet. The device was launched in June 2010 in the UK and discontinued around 12 months later.
They say hindsight is a virtue and everything and, for me, this is the case particularly in technology; it is easy to pick flaws as time goes by but the new Nokia device has just come on to the market, Skype was only purchased this year and Windows 7 is the latest version of Microsoft's mobile operating system, aimed at social interaction. It begs the question, if a flaw so many of us have noticed is Windows best attempt at breaking into the Smartphone market then how seriously can they possibly be taking the competition?
