Nokia N9 is a strong sign of revival

Testing the new Nokia N9

Few days ago I visited the Helsinki Nokia store to try out the new Nokia N9, the long awaited Meego handset. As I had expected, the N9 was a smooth and pleasure experience, proving that Nokia can really deliver a world class smartphone with an operating system and user interface that not only compares well with the iPhone 4, but goes in certain areas over the benchmark and delivers a better user experience and more functionality than the model of the industry. However the N9 isn't the handset that is going to allow Nokia to make a comeback and put it back to being the leading smartphone vendor. What the N9 provides is a taste of future of what is coming from the company.

You probably have already figured out that I'm not talking about the operating system or the user interface of the device, as Nokia has aligned itself with Microsoft and committed to use only Windows Phone operating system in its upcoming smartphones. The thing that I'm talking about, and what sets the N9 apart from other handsets is the hardware. The hardware is the real star of the N9. When I first picked up the handset, I couldn't believe how good it felt in my hands. In the same time it feels both very light and very hardy, much thanks to the unibody construction of the device. The surface of the device also feels very smooth in hands, but in the same time not slippery at all, there is absolutely no feeling at all that the device would slip out of my hands. The display is also beautiful  with its curved glass that makes the icons and user interface to float over the handset. The design and hardware are very innovative.

The reason why I put so much importance to the design and hardware of the N9 is because these innovations are likely going to appear in the first Windows Phone  handset that the company is going to deliver to the market. In the leaked internal video of Nokia, Stephen Elop, the CEO of the company, demonstrated a Windows Phone handset that looked much like the N9. This is important because I believe that the reason why handsets with Windows Phone haven't sold well is because of two reasons: A) they haven't offered quality design and hardware; and B) their overall delivery of value to the customer has been at best average. In case of Nokia, from the get go of the Microsoft alliance, it was clear that Nokia could deliver more value to the customer, Nokia Maps with offline navigation being one of the best examples of unique selling points. With the introduction of the N9, Nokia has demonstrated that it can offer the best design and hardware, thus enabling the company to cover the two falling points that have plagued other manufacturers of Windows Phone devices. This why I think that the Nokia N9 is a strong sign of revival, it offers a glimpse of what is coming to storm the market.

Google+ UI is the future of event driven software

Everybody following up the exciting world of Internet services and Social media industries has probably heard about Google+, the new social networking service that Google has created to challenge Facebook, the current leader of social networking services. In their quest to challenge Facebook, Google has made tremendous amount of work to invent and innovate new features and new ways to interact for their service, many of which we in the software industry should take a note from and learn, one of these things being the user interface.

One particular innovation that I have especially been impressed is Circles. Circles is a logical innovation to the Facebook innovated event based user interface. In Facebook the centerpiece of the user interface is the personal event queue which consists from incoming notifications that have been generated by our friend and from an outgoing event queue where we push our new notifications. This is brilliantly simple and allows us easily to connect and share events with friends. The problem in this arrangement however is that as the amount of our friends grow, we start to drown to new notifications and start missing relevant events, we also start to become more hesitant on sharing new events because we don't want to bother friends with updates to them that useless and because we want to keep something inside a smaller circle. This is the stepping point for Circles.

Facebook - Single queue vs. Google+ - multiple queue

In Circles you have multiple event queues for different people. You can have an Circle for friends, family, work colleagues, etc... You can also group one person to multiple Circles, for example a work colleague can also belong to friends circle. This way you can easily share updates with the right kind of people, but also quickly see what different groups of people are doing. This is of course goes both ways, people belonging to your circles can also freely decide on which circle you belong. This simple idea makes it easy again to share and receive events. This is the idea that should be copied to any software that deals with peoples and events that they generate.

Many different kinds of software and services could benefit from implementing Google+ Circles type of multiple event queues driven user interface. For a example CRM software could instead of concentrating to display information about overall sales or about a customer in hand, the main interface to the software would be an list of events to which the specific user is tied. These events could be automatically lifted from email or from calendar or from phone, they could also be generated from external sources such as customers RSS feed or picked from web sites or magazines. Events themselves could be grouped by either customer or customer types. However the key to deliver added value would be the ability to share events with the internal organizations, allowing rapid communication and sharing of relevant information in timely manner. One example of CRM software that has tried to go this way is the Salesforce Chatter, in my opinion Salesforce could have went farther in their implementation, but it anyway demonstrates many of the strengths of being event centric. Countless other types of software could also be made event centric, for example why not plug-in version control software and JIRA to multiple event queues, allowing developers to note changes more quickly, enable sharing of thoughts and useful resources. In my honest opinion many software firms would do themselves a favor on investigating if they could transform their software to be event centric.