Molecularist

Everyone,

I was thinking more about what I said and realized that I left one thing out.

The PC Suite guys are not stupid. They have been working really hard to get it right. But, one thing I think everyone forgets is that Nokia’s PC Suite team has to support something like 30 new phones a year. Uh, how many new Pocket PCs or Palms or Windows Smartphones come out in a year – I am not even sure if it is 30 for the whole lot?

I know what it’s like to deal with 1 or 2 phone programs, imagine 30. So, it’s understandable if things happen a little slower and so on.

And, since Synch is very important to Lifeblog, we are in constant discussions with the PC Suite team and we are rooting for them to grow successfully.

I’m not trying to cover my tusch here, just wanted to keep the story balanced and give some insight into what the PC Suite guys deal with on a daily basis, even without the comments from all of us.

Tchau,

Charlie

If getting things to synch between your phone and PC is important to you (it should be if you use Lifeblog), then add your voice to Syncing! Syncing! Syncing! SYNCING!!!, by Russell Beattie.

Here’s my comments I put on his site:

Russ,

Ouch ouch ouch. It pains me, but I love your honesty, and I can’t get enough of folks hammering (us) to get the Synch stuff together. I need the change too.

Before I joined Nokia I was a Palm V junkie. I first used it with a Mac – that converted Claris app they used on the Mac for calendaring and stuff was great – and had no problems. I used Documents to Go (Dataviz knows synching) and Adobe’s PDF conduit to have my PDF, Word docs and Excel spreadsheets all nice a pretty waiting for me to edit on my Palm or my Mac. When I joined Nokia I had to move to a PC (ugh!). So I used the Chapura conduit to synch seamlessly (yes, absolutely-f-ing-seamlessly) with Outlook. Oh, I had been given a 9100 at the time, but I was so hooked on the full synch from Palm that I couldn’t change. So I used a 6310 and a Palm V as a combo.

Things improved with the 9210, but I was pining for the simplicity and strength of the Palm-Outlook integration I had.

Once I moved to Series 60, I settled for the simpler stuff of contacts and calendar. It was a pain with everything else, especially notes, which I use a lot (I change phones frequently). Finally, though, notes are now synched in the 7610.

Of course, my schitck is Lifeblog. And synch is so f-ing crucial to Lifeblog; I tremble telling people they have to install PC Suite. It’s no secret how reviled PC Suite is (it’s even krappier now); then why is it still around (there I said it, fire me)? I have this amazing app I’m selling and it’s based on such a weak foundation as PC Suite. Damn, how I wish you and Mac Canter had the full Lifeblog working. I want you guys to love Lifeblog, not hate it or put it aside because you can’t get the damn (PC Suite) synch to work. Argh!

Now you got a look into what we, as Lifeblog, are trying to push through. Synch is crucial to our survival. We are just some frilly photo album without synch.

But, Russ, you need to follow this a bit more. We all keep mentioning synch as a single line feature to automagically help us keep everything in the right places. Synch is damn hard to do right. One to one it works. But add a third device and most models – even the best – fall apart.

There’s still a long way for Synch to go. In addition to synching a device to a PC, you need to synch those to the online storage, subset to other devices (such as these playlists to my phone with smaller space and this whole thing to my iPod), and between device from different manufacturers. And then, there’s synch over BT, the air, or cables. It ain’t that easy to sweep aside.

And I have no idea is SynchML is up to it.

Nonetheless, keep yelling. Everyone, do the same. Squeaky wheel get the oil.

We sometimes have our heads way too far up our something or other thinking about features, technical aspects, and other left brained things. But, lately, we have been trying to demo the software without mentioning the software. We want to focus on the story, because it’s all about the Story.

Matt Jones, a multifaceted and super guy, sent me this tidbit, which really set off my ‘It’s the Story, Stupid’ thoughts.

Moi!

I liked this comment from the blog of Imran Ali
http://imran.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/metaphotos.html

“This simple tag unlocked a ‘metaphoto’ – telling a story weaving together people disconnected in time, space and experience and giving the viewer space to project their own narratives.”

/matt

And here’s the link to the Sleeping slideshow.
It’s so cool.

Erik’s Weblog : My 7610 Journey

My favorite application is definitely Lifeblog. Version 1.0 has just been released.

I liked it even before I had the phone. That’s the main reason I wrote LifeBlogger. The addition of the phone made it even better.

There have been some great reviews of Nokia Lifeblog lately, and here’s one comment that made us chuckle here in Lifeblog Land.

Gizmodo : Nokia 7610 Reviewed

It seems the 7610 is very much oriented around Nokia’s LifeBlog software, which isn’t a bad thing, but certainly of note if you’re expecting to use it as a business phone—it’s just doesn’t have the software bent for that.