Wirelessnorth.ca

We’ve once wondered if this whole white-hot field of mobile experience design only got itself invented originally by frustrated Europeans simply trying work-around to the UI limitations of nokia smart phones.

You see, back in the olden days (like 24 months ago), it was the mighty nokia that ruled the global smartphone market. Nokia n-series phones had by far the most features (wifi, 3g, storage) and the best cameras and video cameras etc. But still, hobbled as they were by 9 digit keypads and a notionally open, but still crufty, symbian OS, of that good stuff was sometimes hard to make the best of.

And then RIM came along and took their classic “well-duh” usefulness of a querty keyboard and threw in a cute and handy little trackball. Was that so hard? Apple meanwhile showed how intuitive mobile experience could be with just a big-ass touch screen and a handful of brilliantly simple multi-touch gestures.

Interaction design, problem pretty much solved right?

You would have though the smart n-series engineers would have seen this coming.

Well maybe they did.

There’s big news out from those whacky finns today. The “real” nokia iphone-killer has stepped forward. And unlike the early, lackluster, reviews of RIMs stormy foray into ipodicide, the nokia looks to press all the right buttons. At least… on paper.

- big touchscreen
- AND slide out querty keyboard (kinda like android)
- A real camera
- Lots of storage
- A real webrowser build on webkit (RIM are you listening?)
- And… drumroll… flash support in the browser

A few caveats of course. No doubt the n97 will still be hilariously expensive once it reaches our shores. Flash support has been the main gripe, if not holy grail of iphone developers. But we at WirelessNorth.ca are still skeptical. We’re convinced there’s more than likely there’s a good reason flash doesn’t work on mobiles. You have to remember that flash was always designed to rely heavily on host cpu to render it’s fairly math-intensive vector-based animation instructions. So “runs flash” vs “runs flash at all usefully faster than a slide show without demolishing your battery life” remains to be seen.

Nonethess thanks to our long time friend Moore’s Law, the full convergence of mobile and desktop web experiences will happen eventually. Today at least is another step towards that reality.

One other thing is for certain. We ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to smartphones. The iphone/smartphone avalanche is just beginning, and this snow storm going to be driving some tremendous change and growth in the industry in the next few years.

Pssst someone better go tell the network engineers…

Tonight Bell and Samsung are launching the Instinct in Canada reportedly with the savvy PR-kungfu of an “unlimited” 3G data plan. You may remember Rogers getting a little flack for their not so unlimited. Expect Bell of course to offer unlimited service subject only to their usual laundry list of limits (except for tethering, subject to “acceptable” use, except for data services that don’t count etc.).

The Samsung is nice looking machine, it’s clearly designed to take on the iPhone, but does it stack up? We shall see.

Arguably more anticipated than the Instinct is the HTC Diamond. A friendly tipster to WirelessNorth.ca writes: “Just got a word from Telus that the touch diamond will be dropping in CDMA flavour on the Telus network on August 19th 2008.” Boy Genius had the scoop on the specs for the Telus Diamond here. The Diamond is a proper (Windows Mobile) smart phone, the specs are impressive, it has HTC’s fancy touch interface, nonetheless initial impressions of the device are mixed (in this case the UK GSM version). We’d love to hear what you think from the first ones that can get their hands on the Telus edition.

UPDATE: Telus writes:

“Good afternoon, Just saw your article about TELUS coming up with the Diamond. Just wanted to flag that we are actually launching next week, August 14th. See below the news release distributed yesterday. Rate plans info available at the bottom of the release.”