Farewell Nokia

Wow, now that's a nasty surprise that Nokia sprang on me. Just last week I decided that I'd replace my 3 year old Blackberry with a Nokia phone. I badly wanted a functional phone based on good quality hardware. My Blackberry (I had it on a rip-off contract with Bell Canada, but that's another story) has been a complete and utter disaster as far as the hardware is concerned. It effectively stopped working reliably about 8 weeks after I received it. Courtesy of Bell's 'warranty' mechanism ('Bell Canada warranty' is a contradiction in terms) I ended up receiving recycled and likely older phones than my new phone back from their 'repair' people. Goes without saying that my Blackberry essentially never worked properly. You try explaining that to Bell call centre person who barely speaks or understands English... - Anyway, I digress, so while I love the Blackberry keyboard, I would never again get another Blackberry, simply because I know now that these phones are manufactured so badly. IPhone is a no-brainer, their reception sucks and that's all that I need to know.

Well, once upon a time I was young, and in those long bygone times Nokia phones were pretty much the best. Turns out that the latest reviews suggest the same of their latest smartphone. Problem is that there's not gazillions of 'apps'. Truth be told, I don't need apps permitting me to switch my TV on from my mobile phone or to flush me toilet while I'm in the car, using said mobile phone. I need my mobile essentially for three purposes: phone calls, email and internet browsing. Nokia's phone does all that well, and it has better hardware than any other available smartphone (eg it boasts a 12MP camera). So, there I was bent on buying this phone - much to the amusement of blackberry/iphone using folks around me.

Too bad that's all history. Nokia's CEO has decided to tie Nokia's superb hardware to truly crappy software, namely Microsoft's. No wonder, given that said CEO is a former Microsoft executive. A German newsmagazine rightly suggested that these two turkeys won't make an eagle.

Any suggestions re a good smartphone that ain't Blackberry, Nokia or Apple and that does the three things that I'm keen on, do let me know!

Microsoft buys Yahoo buys my Image Storage Facility

Capitalism makes it increasingly difficult to escape the tentacles of the larger of the software companies these days. I have to be honest, I belong to the crowd shouting fire whenever it comes to Microsoft, and all of Bill Gates charitable giving can't help me get over ongoing frustrations about truly inferior products that he dumps on customers buying a new PC. I like Apple, but only because their machines are more stable and their software is plain more elegant. I am not a great fan of Mr Jobs and his company's unpleasant copyright hurdles either, when it comes to i-tunes, for instance, or the nonsense of the i-phone tied to an inferior service provider.

I like google a lot, because at least they offer free access to their services (well, not entirely free, as everyone concerned about privacy and data-mining knows). I've also since discovered open source replacements for MS Office, and truth be told, they work just fine (except... bummer ... they are free). Just search for StarOffice 8, download it free of charge and you'll see see what I mean. Equally, googles online word processing software and what it offers for collaborations is pretty cool. Still, I am concerned that pretty much all of my professional life (email, documents) sits on google servers, and is continuously analysed by the company's software. Fair enough, there is nothing there that I would be concerned about if it ever ended up by some accident or other in the public domain, but still, to entrust one company all of that content is a worry to me.

So, I was quite happy that instead of having to use google's Picasa's web albums to store my images there was an alternative, independent operator out there, not beholden to any kind of quasi-Orwellian outfit like google. I was delighted with the services Flickr provided. I am still delighted about Flickr. Sadly, a year or two ago Flickr was bought by another Silicon Valley internet behemoth, Yahoo. It bothered me a bit, but I didn't mind, at least it wasn't Microsoft, or so I thought.

Well, I'm sure you will have heard that Microsoft is now on the verge of gobbling up Yahoo, and with it Flickr and with it my photos (some 4000 or so, and counting). Try as hard as you may, it seems somehow that it's all just a matter of time until the small fish are either killed or incorporated into some larger company, until only few players will be left that pretty much own facilities most people use to store their content, edit documents etc.

Wasn't it an old bearded guy by the name Karl Marx who predicted that such is the nature of capitalism that invariably this would be the outcome? I am not a Marxist, not by a long stretch, yet he seems to have got it right on this one.