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While I’m most of the time always ‘connected’ with my laptop and/or my mobile phone, for this years’ summer holidays I decided to opt for a completely disconnected vacation. I felt a healthy need to get away for a couple weeks from a social media overload - and guess what? I didn’t miss my email or chat conversations, neither Twitter or Facebook, or other social media apps I regularely use…

It was more then 5 years I took such a long break and it was GREAT! Apart from some teenage “Can we go to check our email, dad?” hiccups, I managed pretty well to stay away from checking mails on my mobile phone or a computer… The last week I was actually completely disconnected in Formentera without GSM connectivity at all.

Last year, it was the first time I didn’t take an extra mp3 player with me for holidays, the Nokia N91 did just fine as a multifunctional device. This year, it was the first time I didn’t take an extra digital camera, since the Nokia N95 with its 5 megapixel camera has now reached a basic quality need for my holiday snapshots - the 2 megapixel iPhone doesn’t fill that need yet for me, sorry. You can check my Ibiza and Formentera pictures here.

The best part for me was our stay at Belgian friend Gilbert’s house in Formentera. On top of the cliffs of La Mola with a magnificent view on the Mediterranean Sea, completely disconnected with only a couple of boats passing by daily. The house, his painters atelier, and the garden house are all powered by solar panels only and provide enough electricity to comfortly host 10 to 12 people, electricity use is cut to a minimum whenever possible. Water is usually rare on Formentera so people use it with care: after every shower, the recycled sea water you used is captured and re-used for the plants, same with the water used for cleaning dishes, actually an ideal place for everyone who needs a personal global warming reducement training

No GSM coverage at the house - we needed to go to the village to pick up a signal, so you had that purely disconnected feeling you hardly encounter these days in the western world… alone with nature, daydreaming in the hammock, swimming in a Caribbean blue sea, lizzards eating rests of watermelon, the sweet sound of crickets, seeing the Milky Way again at night, the taste of local countryside chicken, well no more words to say I had a GREAT time! Anyone interested in a perfect place to rest, think, write or brainstorm give me a wink.

I had a strange feeling getting back the first day reconnecting, trying to find my ‘connected’ rhythm again, meanwhile I’m back on track, it’s going to be an exciting autumn with lots of new projects and events, more on this later here… stay tuned!

Russell Buckley finally posted his long awaited Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year nominations. He has been extremely busy lately counting the ads coming in at AdMob, undoubtly one of ‘the’ mobile succes stories from last year. Next to that Russell says it was a really, really hard post to write: “I’ve been chopping and changing things for a month now and it’s finally time to get it posted before we embark on 3GSM madness.” And more:

As you (hopefully) know, the Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly celebration of the best writing about mobile from around the world. This post brings you the best writing of the year and is therefore definitely worth reading in full and voting on your favourite one. Voting details at the end, but please don’t forget to vote.

Our finalists are chosen, by firstly nominating their own favourite writing over the year and sending them to me. Then, utterly ruthlessly, I whittle them down to 10 which I present here for your delight and edification. Over 50 entries were received, so what we have here is the creme de la creme for you to enjoy. This also means that if you entered and didn’t get this far, I’m sorry, but the standard was very high and I hope we can still be pals.

My post Nokia N91 Kills the iPod * got selected amongst the 10 best Posts of the Year. As Russell indicates, the post might not be the best I wrote this year but I choose it because it’s a very spontaneaous post on what is currently possible to do with a mobile phone, all the features and functionalities experienced in a relaxed environment with friends during a 2-week holiday. Away from the daily PC/laptop professional environment, being able to fully experiment the potential of what we write about nearly every day, not always having the ability to test all devices and applications in depth. I believe devices more and more have to be tested in real environments and situations, not only on their technical potential, it’s not about what a phone can do but about what one does with it!

Also, after all the hype we have been reading the last 2 years on music- and ipod-phones - I have been writing about it myself quite a lot here - it was pure excitement to experience the real stuff in real life in real situations.

That for me is what it’s all about: writing stories on experiences, sense, analyse, test and predict through my field experience the “when, why, where and how” of people using mobile phones.

Sometime the definitions of words get a complete different meaning, as for example with the word ’sharing’: it got a complete negative different meaning the last years with the digitalization of music, while ’sharing’ for me is a POSITIVE word: it’s all about the experience to ’share’ nice music while listening to it, the discovery, the excitement and the fun of ’sharing’ a listening experience with friends, like I used to do on Saturday afternoons when I was a teenager, going to your friends’ place with a pile of new discovered records and ’share’ some nice moments together, listening to music. Double-think this one for a minute

But let’s get back to the Carnival of the Mobilists Post of the Year and Host of the Year nominations and votings for the final winners. Winners will be anounced at the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards in Barcelona next Monday.

Thanks to the nice folks at Khosla Ventures - who will give the winner some cash, you can complete the Post of the Year vote here (password is “mobilists”), and the winner will get $1,000 and the runner up a very respectable $500. Finally, if you’re a host of the Carnival, click here to vote for the Host of the Year, the winner gets a FREE TRIP TO HELSINKI to the next MobileMonday Global Summit.

If you like my writing and would like me to have a chance to win one of these prizes, take your chance and don’t wait any longer to vote me on stage, the show will be live webcasted!

BTW: if you would like to meet some of the mobilists, come to MobileSundayBarcelona tomorrow!

I had the pleasure to test some of the Nokia Nseries phones: the N80i (Internet Edition), the N73, the N91 and the N93. This post as a resume of my experiences the last weeks using the phones on various occasions, trying out different functionalities on all of them.

Nokia announced in 2005 a new sub-brand called Nokia Nseries. It is a product family consisting mobile, multimedia computers. These devices support digital media services from the area of music, video, photography, games and Internet. They all connect to internet using high-speed wireless technologies being ideal for people who spend lot of time on the Internet.

What makes Nokia Nseries different from many other devices is the fact they all are multi-functional. Every device brings quite advanced features like high-resolution camera sensors, powerful music codec’s, FM radio and 3D graphic support for games. To differentiate products within the product family, devices can carry unique experiences like digital TV reception to device, optical zoom for camera, or hard disk drive to store large number of songs on device.

I am not going to focus on the technical specifications and capabilities of the phones, there have been a lot of other sites and blogs doing that before, instead I’m going to focus how I use the phones and which functionalities I particularly like about the Nseries phones. In general, believe me, the overal capabilities and quality of the phones is just remarkable and impressive; Nokia is without a doubt the undisputed leader of the next generation of phones to come; in any case I haven’t seen anyone coming closer lately.

The basic Nokia functionalities I use daily on all 4 devices are:

• Contacts/Calendar
• Messaging/Email
• Web Browsing
• RSS Feed Reader
• Podcasting tool
• Camera for Pictures and/or Video
• Music Player
• FM Radio

The Symbian OS on all S60 phones is now regularly updated and can be easily downloaded and installed OTA directly to your phone or using a USB connection to your PC. A lot of additional and functional software is available too. I have been playing around with various 3rd party mobile apps, tools and software without problems.

I haven’t been going into details on the office tools available like Quick Office but I have been playing beaming PDF documents to the phones and use them as on-the-spot mini presentations to show something quickly while on the road, always handy I must say… There’s definitely a lot more to check and tryout in this area but I’ll focus on this later.

Richard just published an article I wrote on the N80 (Internet Edition) and Nokia’s Gizmo Project: Phone-to-Phone VoIP. You can read about my latest experiences making international internet calls with the Nokia N80i at Read/WriteWeb.

Since my holidays in August, I use the N91 as my all-in-one multimedia machine carrying my favourite music everywhere and plug it into whatever sound system available; I was sceptical at first (I was one of those iPod die-hards!) but the N91 has become much more than just an iPod replacement for me. Some might found the phone heavy and big (it is!) but for me as of now, it is my favourite phone - I like when them toys are solid I can do anything I want to do with it and I can easily do it. You can read more about my N91 holiday experiences here.

For the Nokia music and podcasting fans, check out the Nokia Podcasting blog with lots of useful tips and fresh info on the podcasting application for your mobile phone.

Mobile Magazine elected the Nokia N73 Phone of the Year in France. The phone has a lot of the same capabilities as the other phones in this post but it is lighter, thinner and has a big TFT screen (256K colours, 240 x 320 pixels, 36 x 48 mm) and a 3.2-mega-pixel camera. The quality of the pictures is quite impressive for a camera phone, even if you’re used taking pictures with a 5-mega-pixel Canon digital camera. I like this phone a lot, it’s has a very easy and simple way to flip the phone to take one-click pictures.

If you want to see the quality of the pictures I shot the last weeks, check here at my Flickr account - Flickr recently added a new feature to select pictures by device but unfortunately I could not select or organise my pictures yet taken by device, would have been great to have that possibility for this post

So this brings us last but not the least to the N93, the all-in-one video camera and viewer. I like the interface of this phone a lot too - the 4-ways to flip and use the phone - it’s heavy and big but the keypad and its keys are very easy to use, after all it’s a video camera. Only the side navigation joystick is a bit too small for my fingers to use easily the extra functions. The quality of the video is exceptional and unique for a camera phone - try to plug and watch your video footage on your TV monitor. Check for yourself the quality of this daylight short here below taken yesterday in Barcelona.

More video footage I took with the N93 can be viewed in my Under The Radar - Mobility Rules! post and at vpod.tv portal (use tag mtrends).

Some minor points I want to mention:

• low battery life of the N80 (couldn’t figure out why yet?)
• flash or quality of the evening and night pictures is not really acceptable enough
• the ticker noise the N93 camera makes when zooming in or out

But hey, these are still phones, aren’t they?

Nokia released some interesting statistics recently on how people really use new services on their S60 phones. On the predictable success of new tech objects, I’d like to close here and quote Steve Jobs in a Newsweek article from last year ‘Good for the Soul‘:

The way you can tell that you’re onto something interesting is if everybody who knows about the project wants one themselves, if they can’t wait to go out and open up their own wallets to buy one. That was clearly the case with the iPod. Everybody on the team wanted one.

During the weeks I tested and carried the phones, anyone who saw one of the Nokia Nseries phones I used, wanted one, that’s a very good sign…

I wonder how many of them were sold during the christmas holidays… and what Nokia is going to show next at 3GSM World Congress… at least the N95 looks very promising yet!

Here some impressions from the excellent Under The Radar: Mobility Conference from November 16 in Mountain View, CA. Debbie Landa and her team are doing an incredible good job creating this type of events bringing together various types of quality (!) value chain players in mobility. Just seeing the number of VC’s around per square meter shows that mobility is definately on the radar in Silicon Valley. You can view some of my UTR pictures here as a Flickr set.

The number of company pitches one could view in a day was pretty impressive: 32 companies, divided in 8 tracks in 2 rooms; The 2-track system however made me skip some presentations I would have loved to see too. Anyway, on the overal side, this was a very smoothly organised event and a chance to meet loads of new people in the industry, mainly focused Silicon Valley. It was very interesting for me to get a better notice of the US mobile market and understand better between the differences US and European markets.

The overal tone of the conference was all about web 2.0 going mobile, there has been numerous blogposts and discussions lately on the topic… Daniel Appelquist has one of my preferred mobile 2.0 definitions so far:

Mobile 2.0 is not “the Future.” it is services that already exist all around us. These services are maturing at an amazing rate and what they are doing is effectively knitting together Web 2.0 with the mobile platform to create something new: a new class of services that leverage mobility but are as easy to use and ubiquitous as the Web is today. These services point the way forward for the mobile data industry.

I started with the first session on VIDEO with ComVu, Juice Wireless presenting JuiceCaster, Nexage and Veeker; a very potential set of companies. My favourites are ComVu because I can stream (imagine a good flat rate deal somewhere of course) and geotag automatically, and JuiceCaster has it’s community building stuff together. I can’t really remember about Nexage, neither can I found notes back and the Veek Video Peek from Veeker just doesn’t sound right.

Then I went off to the other room to see Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob (excerpt here below); everytime I hit their homepage, I’m always impressed by the number of incoming live ad requests coming in, and they are not fake - as some suggested inside the Microsoft building… Correct me if I’m wrong.

In this ADVERTISING/MARKETING track Greystripe won the audience award for it’s great presentation and idea - inserting ads into mobile game downloads, ok but that’s too American for me, I just don’t believe a cell phone is not a TV and in the long run kids will just skip the ad whenever avaiable or possible.

Meanwhile I missed the session on MEDIA SHARING and SharpCast who won the audience award here. SharpCast is doing what everybody else forgot to do well between the desktop and the mobile: it’s all about syncing your life! I also missed the transactions track but you can view winner Mobo’s pitch here below by CEO Noah Glass himself:

During lunch I catched up with Scott Rafer from MyBlogLog and Dave Harper. Dave (here below) presented in the next MOBILIZE session his WinkSite project. Moderator Rafe Needleman from CNET made a very true review of that session. You can read Dave’s presentation here, don’t forget to check their pitch!

Meanwhile in the other track Loopt was winning the overall audience choice. Loopt is doing what Plazes (and some others) are doing for a while now yet, somehow Loopt chooses resolutely mobile and seems to have spend a lot of time on usability and user experience, stuff not the least to be underestimated on the mobile phone. I’ll check the new stuff Felix will show us next monday for an definitive update on MoSoSo.

In the IMAGING track Daem Interactive was to me way ahead of the others but I may sound too subjective here The key in the image recognition technology sector will be how fast the companies presented can go to market with the right solution. Japan is leading innovation and ideas in this area but the companies in this track at UTR showed some very mature technology and solid business ideas behind.

In the Galileo room, TalkPlus was showing what voice 2.0 is all about and convinced judges and audience with it. Get a grimp of it yourself here in demo and interview I did the day after with TalkPlus CEO Jeffrey D. Black.

Jeffrey explains the voice 2.0 concept (left) and demonstrates a SIP Call

Jeffrey D. Black, CEO TalkPlus explains TalkPlus

My list of companies to watch has been growing quite fast now, here below the ones I recently added - check back in a year or so and let me know what happened with these companies

ComVu
JuiceCaster
Loopt
Plusmo
WinkSite
Mobo
Sharpcast
TalkPlus

You can view all the Under The Radar: Mobility judges and audience winners here.

Note: all video shooting done with a Nokia N93, thanks to vpod.tv for hosting - actually you should check their portal, Rodrigo is currently live reporting from Nokia World in Amsterdam.

And as an extra for the incrowd fans: hear Peter Vesterbacka (Some Bazaar) explain his “to found 100 companies in a year” pitch. Way to go, Peter!

My favourite rss calendar application upcoming.org went mobile a couple of days ago. In their usual humble style upcoming team anounced: “Just open up m.upcoming.org on your mobile phone’s web browser and log in. We’ll give you your Upcoming events for the day, plus links to your watchlist, your friend’s events for the day, and an event search form, just in case you’re looking for more stuff to do.”

I tried it out immediately but was a bit dissapointed with the given functionality, just browsing my or my friends’ events on my mobile is not really something I currently need when I’m on the move.

I liked the 2nd paragraph of the anouncement though: “We tried to focus tightly on showing 90% of what you’d need while you’re out of the house, but if there’s anything essential missing, let us know and we’ll do our best to add it in. This is an exercise in minimalism, so please think about space and download time when offering your suggestions.”

Well, here’s some I’m looking for when on the move inbetween conferences:

Actually it’s a good excercise to start with for anyone attending regularely events and who needs to travel a lot… What excactly one needs from a mobile accessible, live updateable calendar application? The events you’re attending or watching, you’ll have probably listed already on your laptop, location map functionality is obvious to have when looking for the event location while on the road. What about friends to connect to, attending the same conference? All this makes sence to me.

I created the Mobile Events group a couple of months ago for the Carnival of the Mobilists website (Events section) which you may also view here on my blog. I think it’s a great way to stay updated on events in the mobile & wireless sector and watch which friends are attending events around, have a look which events are currently anounced.

Upcoming Mobile isn’t yet offering the functionalities I would like I described above, however I’m confident upcoming is busy thinking about and/or developing the stuff. They just added some RSVPs and Guestlists for Event Organizers too…

Meanwhile I love the possibility to integrate my upcoming ‘Mobile Events’ group events feed into iCal or MyYahoo! Maps or Calendar

The best part is synchronising my iCal to my N91 beaming all those events with a single click into my calendar on my mobile, that’s neat! Now just keep building the other functionalities around. How about you, how do you manage (or would like to manage) your events and functioalities while on the move?

Nokia to unveil the Nserie Music Collection. From Darla’s blog:

As you can see, the N73 and N70’s have been made over in a new color… black is back! The N91 gets an external and internal make-over. Also dressed in black, the new N91 has upgraded its HD from 4gb to 8gb, hence the device name… Nokia N91 8GB. Just when you thought you couldn’t have any more music. That should keep someone musically entertained for a long time!

Nokia is definately serious in challenging the ipod right in it’s heart, the music (& video) player, while offering all those extra and excellent mobile phone features.

I have been writing on the Nokia N91 is (busy) killing the ipod before here. The story got picked up at geek.com - Is the N91 really an iPod killer? where an interesting debate is brewing amongst readers.

Related to Nokia’s music phones and one of my favourite apps I use, the Nokia podcasting application: Apple is now trying to claim the term podcast. Read more about it on Robert Scoble’s blog, Wired News, and The Guardian. I think Apple is not applying a good strategy here, maybe because competitors, such as Nokia, are using podcasting-named applications on their phones or devices? And now with Microsofts’ Zune coming in, it won’t get better, more and more podcasts will be created and listened to… for sure!

As an Apple fan at heart, I think they don’t have a right to claim the term “podcast”, the term submerged on the internet - inspired on the ipod - and was used before Apple introduced it into iTunes, trying to claim it will not help their excellent credibility market status they have amongs consumers nowadays. Some common sense cannot hurt these days in business… On this regard, I would like to point you to the famous Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers quarrel:

Note: The following is an excerpt from pages 159-165 of the PDF version (pages 147-153 of the print version) of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, published under a Creative Commons License. A free, legal copy of the entire PDF of this book can be found here. The content of the original Groucho Marx letter can be found here.

“There’s a famous story about a battle between the Marx Brothers and Warner Brothers. The Marxes intended to make a parody of Casablanca. Warner Brothers objected. They wrote a nasty letter to the Marxes, warning them that there would be serious legal consequences if they went forward with their plan.This led the Marx Brothers to respond in kind. They warned Warner Brothers that the Marx Brothers “were brothers long before you were.”The Marx Brothers therefore owned the word brothers, and if Warner Brothers insisted on trying to control Casablanca, then the Marx Brothers would insist on control over brothers.An absurd and hollow threat, of course, because Warner Brothers, like the Marx Brothers, knew that no court would ever enforce such a silly claim. This extremism was irrelevant to the real freedoms anyone (including Warner Brothers) enjoyed. ”

However, Nokia might be better introducing “Ncasting” for their Nseries podcasting

(*) sub-title: “Connected Holidays (with the N91)”

Back from a 2-week holiday… time flies… just realizing it’s the end of the week… and I haven’t blogged yet (!) … while there are so many interesting things happening to write about…

Before I left with my family and some friends to enjoy The Emporada Triangle I managed to buy the Nokia N91, the phone David Williams from Nokia demonstrated to me in November last year in London and which has been described in the blogosphere as the iPod killer.

Regulars of m-trends know about my passion for music-on-the-move and I had the pleasure to experience the Apple iPod 40Gb for over a year until it crashed unluckily and unreparable, too bad for such a solid music device. I decided to wait for the first real music-phone, it came later then expected but it has been worth the wait.

Apart from some adress book sync problems I managed to counter quickly thanks to Justin’s post and some Mac hacks here, my whole experience with the N91 has been just brilliant!

The first thing that impressed me was the quality of the sound watching a Real Player video… impressive. I added some 500 of my favourite tunes to the 4Gb harddrive, synchronised from my iTunes library and created new playlists on the fly while I connected the device to a hi-fi stereo… this is the first phone I know of with whom you can create instant parties everywhere, anytime I have been writing before on my doubts how to scroll big music libraries without a scroll wheel (as the ipod) but this doubt vanished completely after the first use.

The rest of the HD space I used mainly to download some podcasts with the Nokia Podcasting Application, I also installed Shozu (probably one of the best mobile apps around!) to upload some holiday pics with a click to Flickr.

Our host had a wi-fi connection in the house so I could browse the mobile web the first time for free (!) The latest Nokia Web Browser for S60 is probably the best I have experienced on a phone, with it’s zooming capabilities you can ‘browse’ a webpage the way you want it. The same browser lets you subscribe and store your favourite feeds; I can tell you I haven’t missed a thing on the news side though I had planned to disconnect completely for at least a couple of days

I could perfectly browse my MyStrands Mobile account, I had some problems though listening to the Real Player audio previews due to some tough operator proxy settings. I read Justin Oberman selected my Connecting Cultures through Music article as Post of the Week of his Carnival of the Mobilists #41 hosting. I’ll accept the invitation for the brownies, Paula! I also installed the Free Mobilists’ Mobile RSS Reader package so I stayed tuned on my mobilists friends’ feeds, nicely bundled.

I wouldn’t type loads of email with that phone - there are other models for that, like the BlackBerry killer, but I could easily configure my regular email account and check my mails once in a while. I read Caroline launched the Wireless Industry Partnership and she informed me the 2nd CTIA Gathering of the Mobilists was fully booked for the 2nd time, great!

Well, this is basically a sum-up of the apps I used the most upto now, there’s still lots to discover - oh that SIP Client - and Visual Radio, no stations avilable yet in Catalonia… but too much to mention in one post, so I will have to update you on more experiences I guess…

So, what has this article to do with my title? Simply, it looks much more obvious that Nokia can add now easily more music features and storage to it’s phones than seeing Apple creating all those phone features to the iPod…

And oh btw: one of the features I appreciate the most is the ‘one touch button’ to switch from music listening to an incoming call and the ability to create a ringtone from any song in my library. You won’t get bored with this phone, Nokia is listening to it’s users… Mobile 2.0 is definately here… Driewerf hoera!

… Then he came home and did a Phone Software Update… better get used to it!