Dave Olson caved and got an iPhone, so the Nokia N78 he was testing for Roland has now made its way to me (my previous phone has been the Nokia N80). Thanks to both for making it available to me.

Here is the Nokia N78 on Nokia's website for full tech specs etc.

First reactions:

• much slimmer! almost half the height of the N80
• not a slider ... I had gotten used to the convenient / easy lock and unlock that the slider activates. Guess I'll be download AutoLock again.
• wow, the keypad on this is incredibly annoying! bye bye high speed texting ... I feel like my fat German peasant fingers have to use the edge of my fingernail to use them
• speaker and sound is awesome. Regular headphone jack, yay! FM tuner, very cool, I'm going to make a lot of use of this. Dedicated volume buttons, also great. There is much more music functionality to explore here...
• comes with FM antenna headset thingie with remote volume and playback controls, as I said, music quality is very good, although the ear plugs are slightly small for my ears
• lightly tapping the back button seems to not close the app you are in, but bring you back to the menu. The menu / app switching seems easier, but at the same time confusing. Why not make the funny asterisk symbol the same as the Nokia "menu" button that is on all their phones?
• the camera is much fancier -- only slightly more megapixels, but all sorts of autofocus features that make it feel more like a "real" digital camera; the flash is three times the size of the N80's
• video much improved -- now at 640x480, with excellent focus and sound quality
• USB data connection -- yay! not using standard USB mini connection -- boo!
• can the USB connection also do charging? don't know, it did come with a charger
• comes with a 2GB even-smaller-format memory card (I've given up on remembering the names for different formats ... I have three or four different "mobile" memory cards, plus SD for my camera...)
• there is Share Online which lets you connect to Flickr, Ovi, and some other stuff out of the box. Not quite set up yet.
• GPS! Haven't wandered around outside to test yet, but first impression is that it is very slow to get a GPS lock. After installing Google Maps app, the cell tower only location put me in the middle of Howe Sound (I'm on Bowen at the moment) -- I actually still consider that pretty good. Definitely going to be doing more experimenting with this.

My other "first reaction" is that it's clear that I've been a Symbian S60 user for a long time: there are certain apps that I always download / setup. I'll be cataloging those in another post, in part for my own use so I can go to one page and quickly download all the apps that I want on every phone. Like my experience in setting up a fresh install / new Mac, this would seem to indicate a certain level of maturity in S60. Or perhaps a clear line of what they will include and won't with the base OS, so there are distinct areas where third party apps flourish.

For those on the Mac, the N78 is not supported by default. You'll need to download the N78 iSync plugin from Nokia Europe (thanks to Carniumology404 for being the first hit for that).

Back to installing apps...

I'm catching up on some mobile-related blog reading today, and was spurred to write something by Tim Bray's Mobile Blues and Dean Bubley's re-post of an article by David Wood. (And thanks to Roland's Google Reader Shared Items, where I am getting a wealth of mobile and food related links)

Canada (and the world in general) is caught up in a storm of mobile imaginings based on the launch of the 3G iPhone. Recent results of app sales potentially point to a future where carriers *don't* have a chokehold on the mobile handset experience: for the first time, your average non-technical end users can easily buy and install applications for your mobile fun. Except, of course, it's just another kind of walled garden, just one run by a computer company instead of a carrier.

Tim in particular has issues with that, as well as with having to learn yet another development environment to program native apps for the iPhone:

But there’s a little problem and a big problem. The little problem is that I don’t wanna learn Objective-C and I don’t wanna learn a whole new UI framework. I acknowledge that lots of smart people think Objective-C and Cocoa are both wonderful, and quite likely they’re right. I don’t care. I’m lazy; I know enough languages and enough frameworks. You’re free to disapprove, but there are a whole lot of people like me out there.

The big problem is this: I don’t wanna be a sharecropper on Massa Steve’s plantation. I don’t want to write code for a platform where there’s someone else who gets to decide whether I get to play and what I’m allowed to sell, and who can flip my you’re-out-of-business-switch any time it furthers their business goals. …

OK, points taken. You don't *have* to learn another programming environment, but every experience I've had with Java on every single phone I've ever owned has been .... terrible. Use Java if you want to quickly prototype an app for your enterprise ... but the usability and UI for the average end user, never mind the install process, is terrible. Most people go to native platform code for that final bit of polish (IF that polish is needed for your target market).

I don't have much to say on the locked platform aspects: you make your choices. In some ways, writing native apps for *any* platform is a level of lock in. That is, shouldn't we rail against OS X native only apps in the same way?

And here we finally come to the punchline hinted at by the title. For desktop operating systems, there are now a couple of site specific browsers (SSBs [wikipedia link]): you enter in the URL of a website / webapp and it is bundled into a separately clickable "application" that you can run like any other native program on your desktop. I use Fluid, based on a WebKit engine, and there is also Prism, based on a Mozilla engine.

So, somewhere between widgets and full blown native applications, can an SSB engine for mobile operating systems reign supreme? Bubley's summarized thoughts on this are:

…for many applications, Mobile Web will be the way to go, for ease of development, cross-platform support, rapid update and so on.

But for some the most important and demanding applications, there will still be a need for native development, even if it comes with a dose of pain.

The mobile web, with advanced, compliant browsers available on smartphones like the iPhone or various Nokia phones, is the Internet. Various UI niceties and formatting to fit the screen factor aside, this is regular ol' HTML and AJAX, no new platform to learn here.

So, I'm looking forward to "Fluid for iPhone" or "Prism for Series 60": I can think of a web app developer or three that would be VERY interested in exploring a potentially very quick way to have apps on these smartphone platforms, without the full pain of native app writing. Actually, paging Handimobility -- there might be a very nice business in there...

Roland is making a big move. Switching blogging platforms (Radio to Movable Type), switching hosting platforms (Windows to Linux), then moving his host to a co-lo. Wow!

This is a Big Job™. Good luck with everything, Roland.

Roland Tanglao and Avi Bryant are organizing a Vancouver Geek Dinner:

Here are the details:
WHEN: 7p.m. Wed Feb 11
WHERE: Hon's on Robson, 1339 Robson, 604 685-0871, cheap, cheerful and veggie friendly
WHAT: eat Chinese food, talk about blogging, software development, life, the universe, whatever
RSVP: BY MON FEB 9, by leaving a comment, calling me at 604 729 7924 or emailing me at roland AT rolandtanglao.com so I can book a
table
WHO: All welcome! So far: Avi and myself

Roland Tanglao: Vancouver Geek Dinner

I've RSVP'd, plus added it to my Upcoming.org events. Here's the direct link to the event.