Mobile Batteries and the Cloud: another rant

To follow up on my last rant on the need for next-generation batteries, here was my use case this morning that ended in a huge failure.

As and aside, the Nexus S is winning me over in a big way.  I'm finding about 90% of my dual-wielding phone life is being given to the Nexus S, and about 10% to my iPhone 4.  Two months ago, these percentages were flipped.  But I digress.

Today:

7:06 AM  Unlplug Nexus S from the charger
7:10 AM Check some email
7:16 AM Walk out the door and fire up Rhapsody, listen to a streaming album over T-Mobile
7:18 AM Check some email, see battery meter is at about 90% already.  Holy moley.  Go look at the batter meter, I used Google Maps last night to find a destination, it has been running in the background chewing up battery.  The app says it's been using 16% of the battery life.  Hm.
7:34 AM Get on the train. Continue listening to another streaming album  (Oasis - 'What's the story morning glory?' in case you were curious)
7:35 AM  Turn off display and put Nexus S in my pocket.
8:30 AM Arrive at work, look at Nexus S - see less that 10% battery message, connect to charger.  Look at Battery Meter.  Rhapsody now using 16%, Maps using 10%.

So let me sum up here - doing nothing really but listening to streaming music, my battery lasted one hour and twenty-four minutes.  One hour and twenty-four freaking minutes!    

This is the promise of "The Cloud".  The Holy Cloud.   One hour and twenty-four minutes of Cloud.

So who is to blame here?   Rhapsody?  Google Maps?  Android?  T-Mobile? Samsung?  My Klipsch headphones?  They are unpowered headphones, are they drawing all the power?

Probably a combination of all, but I'm still saying Lithium Ion batteries aren't up to the task of how we want to use our mobile devices in the coming years.

ars technica ran a timely article yesterday called "What's the best way to use a Li-ion battery?" and essentially the advice is "always plug it into a charger whenever you can."   You better just hope you are near one every hour and a half!

Nokia, farewell, until we meet again.

Nokia, I tried.  I used to love you.   But now we've grown apart.


From my first time I held a 8890 Tri-band GSM on Voicestream in my hands I knew I loved you.  As you got older I was with you through your awkward phase as a 3650 with that crazy round dial pad, through your slim times as a 6670, and your thicker days as an E70.   You became a 3G world traveller as a 6680, the form in which I brought you with me to Japan all six times.


But I was lured away.  First by the half-Swedish, half-Japanese bird Sony Ericsson.  She photographed beautifully and played beautiful music.  And later by a pair of California Girls both Brian Wilson and David Lee Roth could be proud of - Apple and Android.


But I never forgot you.  I saw you reinvent yourself as the N8, and I had to see if we could make a go one more time.    But it was not to be.  When we got together this time after all these years,  I immediately knew something had changed.  Or maybe I changed and you didn't.  It's not you, it's me.   It wasn't to be.  I hope we can still be friends, and I will always miss you.

Yep, last week, I was going to write a post that I was going to try to use a Nokia N8 for a week as phone and report back on what I found.  But the truth was, I couldn't stand it.  I lasted about 3-4 hours and and I popped the SIM out and put it right back into my Nexus S.

What specifically was the problem?   It's hard to put my finger on it, but the whole user experience with Symbian^3 was just horrible.  I'll try though.

• User input.   When you have the N8 in "landscape" mode,  and you click on an input field, you get a keyboard like you might expect.  However, when the phone is in "portrait" mode, which is generally how I operate a phone, you get a 1-9 dialpad and are expected to enter text using T9 or the tap-tap-tap method.  In a text field.  Sometimes it lets you rotate the phone once you've realized this mistake and other times it doesn't.  Hm.
• Accepting user input.  And then when you are done typing in any case, the green check box which signals "ok, done, or go" is in the bottom left corner.  For those of us who read left to right, you don't know how awkward this is until you try it.
• Intrusive Alerts. Things like software updates aren't messaged to you in the background or totally passive like iOS, you get modal dialogs.   This somewhat reminds me of the Adobe update alerts you get in Windows machines and it's bad, bad, bad.
• Fonts.   The Facebook and Twitter apps look pretty much like their Android counterparts, except the Fonts look like those of out a stock SUN Solaris install cerca 2004.  Really difficult to read.
• It's slow.   For a top of the line flagship phone, the N8 feels really slow and non-responsive.   It seems like this is more the OS than the phone itself, because things like videos play at pretty normal speeds.
• Couldn't successfully setup email.  I consider myself to be reasonably technical.  It just would not connect to Gmail no matter how I tried.
• The app store.  There are actually some decent apps in the Ovi store.  But there were lots of unexplained installation errors that have no explanation.  After a few tries you just give up.

I really took for granted how the Apple user experience has shaped our expectations on mobile phones.   Android isn't quite there yet, but the pace will get them there soon.   The N8 feels like any other Nokia phone did five years ago.  Maybe they spent too much time figuring out how to be a Camera Phone, instead of a Phone that happens to have a Camera.

I feel like this phone would work for the die hard Nokia fan that never experienced an iPhone. Someone who would rightly thing it's a better Nokia phone than the previous Nokia phones.  Someone that one day will see what the best had to offer, and will feel duped.

To be clear, I'm being critical here, but it makes me a bit sad.  There's some great hardware here, and in fact the camera on this phone rocks.  

From what the press is reporting, this post is news to no one, including Nokia.  I'm sure there's been more than a few internal meetings in the board rooms of Espoo on whether or not they should just make hardware and install Android or Windows 7.  I look forward to seeing what happens with Nokia.

Until then, farewell. I hope we meet again someday when we're old and gray.

Next Up:  Windows Mobile 7