The personal-GPS market has just died

Nokia just announced that the turn-by-turn navigation addons to their (underwhelming) gps software, Ovi Maps, will now be offered free of charge, completely undercutting TomTom and friends. They can do this thanks to the recent acquisition of Navteq, the top map-making company in the world (which is still selling map data to competitors at a hefty price, by the way, including Google); and they have to do it, because Google is doing it as well on Android and iPhone.

If Nokia can really deliver (i.e. actually improve Ovi Maps, which is quite frankly not as good as commercial competitors yet), 2010 will be remembered as the year that GPS devices became obsolete, like it happened to PDAs about three years ago. TomTom shareholders better run for the hills.

Remote shutdown on Windows

This might sound useless or obvious to many, but i didn't know it and it made my life easier today...

If you ever need to shutdown a remote Windows machine, and you can't access it with Remote Desktop or similar tools, you can use Shutdown.exe from another Windows machine, like this: shutdown /m \\my-remote-host

Additional parameters can be seen with /? but the most useful ones are:

/r

reboot after shutdown

/f

force shutdown -- useful when the machine looks stuck, which is what happened to me today...

/d xx:yy

give a reason for reboot. See /? for the available codes.

I hope this means I can say goodbye to dangerous hard-reboots...

Nokia Ovi Store Policies on SaaS / subscriptions: fail

(Chances are that nobody will answer this question, like it happened to this developer on forum.nokia.com, but what the hell)

I have an interesting business idea. I'll develop a mobile application with some interesting functionality, and I'll give it away for free. The application will contain an option to upload some data to a remote server, which you will then access from any computer as a regular site. The website will have some advanced features to analyze the data etc etc. The site will operate as SaaS, with a free 30-day trial. Basically, the site will make the real money, in a way similar to what FeedDemon and NewsGator tried a few years ago in a different market.

Now, if I wanted to do that on Nokia platforms, I would try and put my mobile app on the Ovi Store as a free download, right? After all, it will be a useful program in its own right, with the online services being 100% optional. Nokia / Ovi get a free, useful app enriching its (crappy) customer experience, the developer gets a big distribution channel, it's a win-win!

Except that landlords don't like uppity sharecroppers. From the Ovi Terms & Conditions:

4.7. Free Content Restriction

You are prohibited from collecting future charges from end users for Content that those end users were initially allowed to obtain for free. This is not intended to prevent distribution of free trial versions of Your Content with a later upsell option to obtain the full version of the Content. Such free trials for Content are permitted. However, if You want to collect fees after the free trial expires, You must collect all fees for the full version of Your Content through the Program. In this Agreement, "free" means there are no charges or fees of any kind for use of the Content. All fees received by You for Content distributed via the Program must be processed by Nokia.

Now, I can see the motive behind such a "racket clause". Nokia doesn't want Ovi to end up a cesspool of trialware, or to be associated with "click once and pay forever" scams. But the rule is too broad, and it reads like any SaaS scenario is simply out of the question (especially when you consider that Ovi does not support "subscriptions" at the moment, only one-off payments). SaaS is probably the best revenue model in the software world at the moment, and Nokia is telling developers they can't use it.

I honestly do not know if Apple put similar restrictions in place on their store. They probably did (and then some), control-freak as they are, and this is why I wouldn't want to touch the iPhone ecosystem with a barge pole. But Nokia was supposed to be trying hard to regain developer mindshare...

So the question I'd like to ask, before I shell out for the Ovi "publisher" license, is: dear Nokia, my application does something useful on your mobiles. It will then, optionally, send some data to my server, and I will personally collect money to have people access that data on the web, aggregated in various ways. Can I put the app on Ovi?

More notes on N900

The N900 is lovely, but the more I use it, the more I get the feeling that releasing it as a mass-market phone might have been a bit premature.

Take the "grid" icons. Technically, you can sort them: each icon can be given a "priority" number, and the lower it is, the higher it will appear. Technically, you can create additional subfolders and even auto-sort icons depending on the application classification (office, media etc). Unfortunately, all of this must be done *by manually editing an XML file* (/etc/xdg/menus/hildon.menu) plus several other text files (the .desktop and .application files in /usr/share/applications/hildon). For a consumer-grade device, this is shocking. It's even worse: if you mess up said files, the system goes in a "reboot loop" from which is very hard to escape (hint: get the flasher tool and use it with only parameter --enable-rd-mode, then fix the file, then use flasher again with --disable-rd-mode; if that doesn't work, you'll have to do a full reflash).

Also, it does not work with the SIM cards from network Three in UK and Denmark; considering that Three is a favourite of data-heavy users, who should be the main target for this device, this was a big mistake.

Some applications are clearly half-baked (Maps), and the Ovi Store is still closed. You make a big launch taking over the entire ad-space on Gizmodo for a day, and your supposedly flagship applcation store is not working ?

Nokia are slowly addressing these issues by releasing over-the-air updates, which is good, but the overall feeling remains: as released (late), the N900 is for hackers and hobbyists. Which, considering the platform potential and role, is a crying shame.

N900 first impression

Cool. Feels sturdier than iPhone. Opening the battery compartment is shockingly hard, which is surprising if you think that Nokia always paid a lot of attention to battery slots etc. The hardware keyboard is undoubtedly better than virtual ones, and key size is about right for my clumsy fingers. Desktop navigation is da bomb, incredibly better and more customizable than anything seen before. Default browser is lovely if a bit idiosyncratic, mostly due to the erratic touchscreen. Ah, the touchscreen: worse than iPhone, sorry. The stylus is still quite handy. Apps: quite a bit of them, after enabling the extras repository, and decent quality. Will try the ovi store later. The feeling is that, finally, Nokia built a device for the internet: the network is taken for granted and integrated everywhere. The web experience is so good that custom clients (e.g. for twitter or facebook) are hardly needed. I'm writing this post from MaStory, but I could have used blogger.com and the experience would not have been much worse. And of course, this phone runs linux. Which means that you can hack it to death, and that the market is fully open. S60 developers can officially retire, Maemo is simply on another planet. Now let's hope Nokia won't blow this massive chance...