Only slightly bent

It’s been a while since I last played with a completely new phone platform, so I was semi-looking forward to getting a Blackberry Bold (9000) as my new work phone. As before, as the device has been reviewed by a zillion other sites already, I’ll focus on providing some personal experiences based on a couple of weeks of usage:

• The feel of the phone is very good; it’s quite heavy, but feels very solid and the build quality is top notch.
• The screen is gorgeous. I really like it. It could use a portrait feature or could generally be longer in the y-dimension, but it’s very nice.
• The browser is, unfortunately, not very good. So I tried the Opera Mini browser, but it turned out that sucked even more. So I’m back to the Blackberry browser which seems to display most mobile-optimized sites decently. The usability is just not very good.
• Strangely, getting email to work was a very painful experience. Not only that, but I think the email experience overall isn’t very good. There are several problems with it:
  * All emails from multiple sources end up going to the same inbox; I can have my GMail mails in their own place, but they also end up showing with my work mail scattered therein. That’s really confusing. Additionally, the GMail client just plain and simple refuses to work.
  * When you delete or move a mail on your mail account, it doesn’t get deleted or moved on the phone. Hence mail just piles up on the phone.
  * When you delete a GMail mail on the phone, it gets deleted (i.e. not archived) on the GMail account; there is no “archive” option
  * There is no “Mark all as read”-option.
• I could get used to a full keyboard on the phone. Once you learn to type on the tiny keys, it’s very convenient. Makes me think the next phone I buy for myself needs to have a keyboard.
• I’m not particularly impressed by the battery life; for some reason I thought Blackberry would be a little bit better in terms of battery life than other smartphones, but no. You need to recharge every day and what’s worse, charging the battery is darn slow.
• The user interface looks pretty enough – though thoroughly unoriginal – on the first level. But click on almost anything and you get a hideous MS DOS-like text-only interface that should really be taken out and shot. Settings etc are far from intuitive or usable and there are too many of them.
• There are several other usability issues also; for example the idle screen shows the number of missed emails and any overdue calendar notices in a small icon on top of the screen. However, one cannot click on these to get to the emails or calendar – instead you have to go through the normal menu structure or deal with the pop-ups.

All in all I suppose it’s a decent phone for business use, but I would certainly not buy one myself.

I enjoy a good management book as much as the next person – oh, wait, probably a bit more as I actually do enjoy reading them. Anyway, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they often promise a whole deal more than they can deliver, so I was happy to see The Economist taking a stab at the gurus a few weeks ago in the article The three habits of highly irritating management gurus.

Here’s one rather fundamental error in the guru literature:

Henderson et al put it even more bluntly in their HBR article:

Just goes to show that prediction is difficult – especially of the future. So considering the data the books are based on is more or less invalid, what good are these disparaged books by the gurus? In my experience, they do provide good alternative viewpoints into problems and help in taking a little bit of a different perspective to things. They help in generating some internal diversity in thinking and that’s always a good thing. And note that I say diversity; changing your viewpoint to align perfectly with the touted system in any given book is not diversity, it’s just altering the tunnel vision to a different version. Don’t use the guru books to merely change your way of thinking from one way to another – use them to broaden your thinking.

I also suggest you give the books’ authors as much money as their books are worth when compared to the promises they make, and borrow them from a library instead of buying. Other than just a few gems, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever want to return to the books after reading them once. And if you and a hundred other people use the library book, the gurus get an appropriately small revenue slice for each read.

For a more detailed look at the topic, check out these resources:

• Andrew Henderson’s page at the University of Texas
• Deloitte: The persistence project
• Harvard Business Review: Are “Great” Companies Just Lucky? by by Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, and Andrew D. Henderson
• .. and if you haven’t seen The System by Derren Brown, watch it here. It’s quite long and in multiple parts but very good. And don’t read the comments before you’ve seen it all.

I’ve been somewhat skeptical on Android over the past couple of years. Now, however, it seems that Google is on to something that can be a game-changer on a few levels – free turn-by-turn navigation with Android, essentially delivering a possibly mortal blow (in terms of direct revenue) to the only significantly profitable location-based service the world has seen.

Now, I’m still not a big fan of the Android devices; even the new and praised Motorola Droid somehow fails to impress me. But it does, along with many other devices coming out soon, does give Android increased momentum. The success of Android still rests on device manufactures coming out with compelling devices and the Android-buzz/craze has yet to infect the ‘normal’ users.

But navigation is a billion-dollar business. If a significant player like Google starts offering decent-quality navigation for free, the others – namely TomTom / TeleAtlas & Nokia / Navteq, the two major owners of navigation data – are going to have a problem.

There’s a decent wrap-up of this development here.

In an ideal world (from the consumers’ point of view anyway), Nokia would adopt Android as their platform to eventually replace Symbian. Symbian as a platform, though still dominant, is heading for life support and inevitable death by a thousand cuts in the not-too-distant future. Maemo could make up Nokia’s other platform and Android the other. I mean why not? Nokia has never really excelled in the software space but can build and distribute awesome phones.