Or lack thereof.

First, in 2009, this -

[Bungee jumping, shot on a Nokia N86]

Then, in 2010, this -

[A rollercoaster review of the N97 Mini, shot with the N97 Mini]

So far so good…

Straight after that, we got to work on this -

[Shoot what you like with the Nokia N8, shot on the Nokia N8]

With the winners being invited along to this -

[A zero G flight, shot on the Nokia N8]

Great stuff.

Later, in 2011, this appeared -

[A rollercoaster review 'unboxing' of the SGSII, shot with a ?]

Brilliant? Yes. Familiar? Slightly.

Admittedly they went one better, with this -

[A skydive review 'unboxing' of the SGSII, shot with a ?]

Well done.

Imagine my surprise when, today in 2012 this appeared on TV for HTC  -

[A free-fall fashion shoot with the HTC One, shot with a ?]

Amazing. Not.

Seriously, three years of this now… come along guys, at least try to do something different. It genuinely doesn’t matter who had the idea first or even who managed to push it to the next level. All we’re asking is for some originality.

Samsung was blatant, HTC is just plain late.

And while it’s fair to say, admittedly, everything is a remix; if Sony can create something new, you can too.

-

Do. Better.

Yesterday was a fairly busy day, if you’re a tech-head like me at least; Google+ rolled out their brand pages, the Nokia N9 started updating to the much-heralded mega-fix firmware and, for those that needed it, Spotify dropped onto the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Google+ I’ve covered already (no really, what is it for?), the N9 update I am yet to apply and as for Spotify? Well, what can I say?

Choosing Windows Phone as the last, great, mobile operating system to support, Spotify prepped itself for the promised masses yesterday afternoon (after a preview some six months ago) and boy, is it a beautiful app to use.

First, some caveats:

• Spotify mobile is only available to premium subscribers
• Premium is £9.99 a month. A small price to pay to NEVER PAY FOR ANY MUSIC EVER AGAIN.
• I’ve tried Zune* and, until Spotify dropped, that was fine (if a little alien).

So, to the app itself.

The good stuff:

• WP7 app design: oh my God this app is gorgeous.
• Scrolling, sharing, syncing: all of it rocks my face off.
• It’s Spotify, on my mobile.

The stuff needed in the next update:

• Background colour options
  Windows Phone offers either ‘dark’ or ‘light’, white on black or black on white respectively. Spotify should either match its app’s skin accordingly or at least offer it up as an in-app option. Strangely, while the app offers the light variation, the desktop client offers dark.
• Last.fm integration please
  Syncing tracks listened to in online mode and remembering then uploading my tracks listened to in offline mode.
• Offline playlist filters
  Yeah, love that but, any chance that you filter the playlists by DOWNLOADED FIRST? Having to scroll through all of them in order is a pain.
• Album art on lockscreen
  I mentioned I was on Zune before, one thing that the WP music player does nicely is show album covers on the lock screen while playing music. It’s a nice touch and adds to the overall experience. Spotify should do this too. See below.

 Florence playing through Zune

 Florence playing through Spotify

Overall, great work guys, it’s an awesome service and I’m a big fan. Having it running on my Lumia makes me a very happy bunny indeed. Good job.

Please, continue to iterate, improve and impress.

Danke,
James.

*I signed up for a Zune Pass about a day after first getting my Windows Phone. I like that it covers my Xbox too, but I already have Last.fm there. So it was only really the mobile music angle I needed to cover. Now Spotify is here, I just don’t need it.

Today I created a folder on my Mac marked ‘DKR’.

That is all.

[Private post - made public Dec 14th, 2011]

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

This beautiful video is being blogged all over the place at the moment, and for good reason. Splitscreen is the winner of the recent Nokia Shorts competition (disclaimer – 1000heads worked on this project for the big N) and, work associations aside, the video itself is gorgeous.

The winners (along with the other finalists) should be proud; it’s a great project and the output has been fantastic.

Well done to all involved.

Nokia and Microsoft have announced a strategic partnership that will see Nokia hardware running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software. It’s about eco-systems and, with Google’s Android growing ever-larger, it’s also about a stronger – much more strategic – industry play.

The Nokia community, one that I’ve been a part of for many years (and now spend my days helping to manage), is obviously still in shock. The announcement has been out for 20mins and between ‘MURDER!’, ‘I told you so!‘ and ‘What have you done?!‘ – there are many out there still waiting for their questions to be answered:

- What about Meego?
- Where does this leave Symbian?
- What about the current roadmap?
- When can we expect the first Nokia/WP7 device to ship?

I imagine, over the course of today all of these questions, and more, will slowly be answered; the actual speech from Elop himself isn’t scheduled for another couple of hours and I’m fairly certain that what we’re seeing is just the start of major disruption both internally [for both Microsoft & Nokia employees] and externally for the market as a whole.

For now, I’ve got a couple of Social Media Week events to attend this morning so, I’m going to re-read my WP7 review from last year and spend my tube journey wondering if the bad points I highlighted could quite easily be ticked off by an awesome piece of Nokia hardware…

We are living in interesting times.

Moleskine entry: April 30th, 2010

But I guess you kind of saw that coming.

I work for 1000heads, who in turn work for Nokia, the question is obviously primed: am I being paid to say this? No. Certainly not. The recently announced messaging devices for instance, although they’ve arrived at an astonishing price point.. tey certainly didn’t float my boat terms of specs, looks or features. The N8 however does.. and I’l tell you why.

Whenever I get asked “What phone should I get?” my response – believe it or not – does not start with “Oh, the Nokia…” Instead my reply is usually something like “It depends”.  Then I ask questions.

More often than not based around content creation vs consumption, plus some device history and of course the necessary operator-based queries and, I would like to think, of those that have taken my advice in the past, a fair few have ended up happy with their final choice.

If the roles were reversed and I found myself answering my own questions, there is no doubt that I would recommend the N8.

Why? Let’s see.

___________________

“Question 1: What do you have right now?”

Right now James, I switch between the N900 + the Nexus One.

“Question 2: What do you use your phone for?”

Everything!

“Ahem, can you define ‘everything’?”

OK. Photos, videos, emails, web browsing, calendar, address book… Basically, if the feature exists on the handset, I use it. If it doesn’t exist, I download an app that does. But yes, I guess I said photos and videos first as I do indeed love creating.

“Question 3: What did you use to have? I mean, what is your handset history?”

Before the N900? The N86.

“How was that?”

Well, non-touchscreen, amazing camera, genuinely the last great phone of its kind.

“Question 4: iPhone?”

Never.

“Question 5: Android?”

Great for consumption. Great as a Twitter device, email etc.. Single sign on makes it a breeze to use but, the camera functionality lets it down MASSIVELY.

___________________

So far, so not very surprising. Turns out I want the Nokia N8 for a whole bunch of reasons – so why is it really?

Because I love creating content on my phone. Why my phone in particular? I don’t know. It could be the wealth of meta data available, it could be the sense of geeky wonder I get whenever I upload anything in its final form… sometimes it’s just the damn good quality of the thing.

The N8 is new, shiny and – barring some shoddy, ne’er do well, prototype-based scrutiny a few weeks back – is actually quite exciting. The output from the handset is nothing short of outstanding and, having dragged my N86 around the world with me last year, upgrading to the next model is the next logical step.

I’ve not had any actual hands on time with it yet. So all of this might change. There’s one thing that simply cannot argue; Nokia make some great imaging devices.

The N8, by the looks of things, will be their next, great imaging device. So I’m getting one.

Are you?

Moleskine entry: Dec 15th, 2009

What day is it today? 15th? I think so. That’s right, ten days ’til Christmas, I remember.

It’s been a fair while since I emptied my thoughts into this moleskine of mine, but excuses I have none. Instead I have nearly three months of hard work to look back on. 1000heads is treating me well, very well.

It’s hard work, challenging even, but in the best of ways.

I can’t talk about any of of the stuff I’ve working on, obviously. However, let’s just say I am in exactly the right place at the exactly the right time; I’ve seen the future, and it’s very bright indeed.

It strikes me that it might be some months until this entry makes it out onto my blog. So apologies in advance if this seems out of time at all.

I wonder if, in time, I will be able to talk about what I’ve actually worked on, i.e.: projects of the past. I’m finally getting to grips with how fast this place moves; last Wednesday I helped out with creating an invitation for the Ovi Daily App Awards. Between us we nailed the copy, design, look and feel and just for good measure, a comedy QR code to boot.

They were signed off, printed and sent out within 24hrs and, by Friday, blog posts were already springing up. Amazing.

I understand that this might just be par for the course for some of you but, coming from a veritable behemoth of an organisation, this is not how it’s done ‘client side’.

I’m yawning as I write, I must be boring myself.

Writing from a plane (again), we’re headed for Helsinki. There’s a man two seats away who spoke at OpenLabs. Remember that?

Seems like such a long time ago now…

This evening I attended the Nokia N900 meetup event in London town and, with my very own brand new Nokia N900, I managed to get a Qik video stream of the demo they gave…

It’s a bit dark and there’s no fancy intro, but I have no time to clean it up so I’m just going to throw it up raw.

The TV screen is a live TV-out from the device itself and the UI really is that smooth.

I’ll probably write up a bigger review for The Really Mobile Project at some point but in the meantime, I guess this is my vlomo09 entry…

Cheers.

About six or seven weeks ago now, I said a sad goodbye and a fond farewell to Mobile Industry Review (MIR). My weekly column ‘Whatley Wednesday’ was at an end and the team’s online video counterpart, The MIR Show, was no more.

But this much I’ve covered already. It’s what happened next I want to talk about.

Post closure, Ewan kindly gave me an export of all my prior MIR work, which you can now find in the newly created Whatley Wednesday category on the right hand side of this page. Please feel free to browse at your leisure, there are some pieces in there that I am deeply proud of and I’m really happy that I’ve been able to preserve them.

Even still, I was left wondering where my mobile content was supposed to go. I’ve long maintained that I have three main streams of blogging output:

• Anything SpinVox goes the SpinVox Blog, Big Talk
• Mobile-focused musings went to Mobile Industry Review
• Everything else, stays right here in My Happy Place

With one of those streams now closed, I wasn’t sure what to do. I could’ve started putting the content here, but I didn’t want to alienate any of my readers. I wasn’t sure you’d appreciate it to be honest. This blog isn’t about mobile news, views and opinion. It’s about – for me at least – starting interesting conversations.

The real question was; ‘what to do next?’ and, well ‘start something new’ was the immediate answer.

When it came to restarting Whatley Wednesday, I took up Rafe Blandford on his offer to write a piece for leading mobile site All About Symbian (AAS). Entitled ‘Should Gravity come down?’ the piece questioned the price of a particular Nokia Symbian app and on top of that, Nokia apps in general.

Hand on heart there were a few opportunities like the one above from Rafe, and originally I had planned to accept them all. Not out of greed or ego; I merely felt a certain sense of displacement or maybe homelessness. I figured that Whatley Wednesday could become  a travelling road show of sorts (for want of a better comparison), each week resurfacing on a different publication and taking on a different subject matter.

That was the plan anyway.

However, in the furore surrounding my debut on AAS (seriously, check out the comments – all 67 of them), I questioned the validity of this idea and, when it came to writing up some thoughts about the incoming Nokia N97, I went against my instincts and published them here.

It was at this point that I realised that I needed my own mobile channel, something that I had (at least in part) ownership of and somewhere that I wouldn’t have to apologise for my own opinion. It turned out that I wouldn’t have to wait for long, as in the background, work had already begun on what was at that time only referred to as: ‘Secret Project X’.

So it was, the day after MIR announced its closure, and under the cover of darkness, three men met somewhere along London’s South Bank.

In a coffee shop not far from Hungerford Bridge – EAT I think it was, to be precise – Ben Smith, Dan Lane and I sat down to work out what our next steps were.
What I initially had pencilled in as a rather macabre and somewhat gruesome post-mortem turned very quickly into the conception of a new idea.
The general consensus was that we could rant and rave about how annoyed we all were, or, spend what little time we had planning our next moves.
It was unanimous.

We were going to build something new, really soon.

In the days and weeks that followed that fateful night, emails were exchanged, further meetings were had and plans were made. Further to that, a rough go-live schedule was put in place.

Potential additional contributors from the old team; Samantha Kidd, Ricky Chotai and Jonathan Jensen were asked along too – all of whom were immensely forthcoming with their support and immediately signed on.

On a late night conference call with the rest of the team, the members of Secret Project X finally agreed on a name.
That name was…

The Really Mobile Project

Interestingly, with a new moniker came too a new sense of direction and purpose.

Dan Lane pulled together some of our old MIR footage and excelled himself by putting together a rather awesome trailer. This short video (embedded above), which we made live one week after launching The Really Mobile Project (TRMP) holding page, was shared with the sole purpose of letting people know that no, this wasn’t the end and yes, we would be back.

Even more meetings followed, yet more emails were exchanged and TRMP was coming. By the time we put the trailer out, we’d pretty much made a promise that we intended to keep. Thing is, it turned out to be a lot harder than we first thought.

Building a site?
Gaining access to high quality equipment?
Finding the time to get all members of the team together to film content?

All of these things proved to be less than easy.

Two days before filming was due to kick off, the whole project was put on hold. The equipment wasn’t good enough, the site wasn’t right and on top of that, we had no content.
From the off we had all agreed that whatever it was that we ended up producing, it would be high quality. Our work at MIR had set the bar high and we knew that at the very minimum, we had to match it.

As any decent advisor will tell you; if you over promise and under deliver, failure will greet you with open arms.

So we took a step back and regrouped. What would we REALLY need to do to make this as good as we wanted it?

The project plan was re-written, a wiki was created, and tangible steps were taken to ensure that creating a quality site with even better output would be a nigh-on guarantee.

After all of this, on April 28th at approximately 3.00am, seven weeks since that initial coffee, The Really Mobile Project launched onto the (un)suspecting world.

Now, at long last, we finally have our own place on the web to talk mobile.

One of the things we noticed during our time in the wilderness was just how strong, passionate and caring the mobile community is. Keeping that firmly in mind, we established that from day one ‘Really Mobile’ would be about the conversation.

It’s the community that makes a site, so we want our readers and viewers to feel a part of something. 2009 is the year of conversation after all, right?

I’ve talked long enough and if you’ve made it this far, you have my thanks.
All I have left to say is this; if you follow me because you’re mad about mobile then please, get yourself over to The Really Mobile Project today.

It’s new, we’re still making changes and fixing bugs, but it’s out there.

And it needs you.

Browsing through my Google Reader this morning, I came across this article from the guys over at NokiaUsers.net reporting that Vodafone has just confirmed a July release date for the Nokia N97 here in the UK.

You can read more about the handset over on Vodafone’s dedicated N97 page, but needless to say, this announcement is very good news indeed.

As some of you may or may not know, I am a card-carrying Vodafone member, I have been for some time and, upon hearing that the N97 was en route to my network of choice, I am very happy indeed.
Since it was first announced at Nokia World in December, the initial buzz has been largely positive.
In fact, I remember putting virtual pen to paper at the time and exclaiming how much the the prospect of this handset excited me; even going as so far to say:

“I firmly believe that the Nokia N97 is the replacement for my N95 8GB.”

However, as I mentioned, I wrote that at the tail end of last year and since then?
Well, some things have changed.

Since Nokia World, not only have has there been several opportunities for me to have hands on time with the N97, but also Mobile World Congress (MWC), has come and gone. This conference, previously known as ’3GSM’ and held in Barcelona each February, is the largest telecommunications event in the world and this year saw the unveiling of the Nokia N86.

This 8 megapixel beauty took me completely by surprise at MWC, and although originally pitched as the successor to the much-overlooked Nokia N85 (the N86 test model above was in fact labelled ‘N85 8MP’ on its debut in Barcelona), to my mind the N86 is the true replacement for the N95 8GB.

Why?

I carry two phones. I have done for some time now and I have no doubt that this habit will carry on into the future. My current ‘handset strategy’ is made up of the aforementioned N95 8GB which acts as my personal device, and a Nokia E71 as my work/business phone. Whenever I’m testing new devices I always, always swap out my E71 and swap in whichever piece of gadgetry I happen to be reviewing (the latest of which being the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music).

However this was not the case with the Nokia N86. Two weeks after Mobile World Congress, just in time for MGoL VI in fact, I happened to find myself in possession of said 8MP wonder and I was that impressed I instantly made it my personal device of choice (if only for the few days that I was able to test it anyway).

This. Speaks. Volumes.

If you’ve read any of my mobile stuff in the past you’ll know how much I love my N95, it’s certainly been through the wars over the years and for any device to come anywhere near taking its mantle, it has to be something pretty special.

The N86 is that phone.

The N97, as wonderful as it is, to my mind could have well been labelled the ‘E97′. What with the full qwerty keyboard and ‘communicator series’-like design, the N97 bears more relation to the E90 than to any Nseries phone I’ve ever seen. When I read that Vodafone were going to be shipping the N97 this coming July, I immediately got on the phone and registered my interest. Fortunately it turns out that I am due an upgrade around the same time as the N97 is scheduled to release.

Fantastic.

But that’s not all…

While I was the phone with Voda, I also enquired after the N86…

“It’s not one I’ve heard of Mr Whatley” …came the reply.

“Oh, would you mind checking for me anyway? I work in mobile you see and I really like the look of the N86, it has an 8MP camera and well, it’s very similar to my N95 8GB…”

“Oh here it is Mr Whatley, I’ve found it on our systems.”

“You have?!”

“Yes. Nokia N86. Got it. Now… Ah.. Ok.”

“Yes, yes, what is it?”

“Well it is here, but it has a question mark next to it.”

“Oh. Is that bad?”

“Oh no Mr Whatley, it just means we’re still testing it. I can’t confirm that we are going to get the N86 in stock but I can tell you that we have it here internally and we’re testing the software to make sure it works correctly “

“Really?!”

“Yes Mr Whatley. While I can’t go on record and say that it’s definitely coming, we are still testing. I can tell you that nine times out of ten, when it’s testing, it normally means we’ll be getting it sooner or later.”

“That’s great news, thanks!”

“You’re very welcome Mr Whatley, thanks for calling Vodafone.”

So there you have it. The N97 is coming to Vodafone in July and, from the sounds of things, the N86 won’t be too far behind it.