Please let me know if this okay with you. Cheers!

Does one offer guest writers to write content for you?
I wouldn’t mind composing a post or elaborating on some of the subjects you write about here. Again, awesome site!

Below are listed a few popular pubs where one can chill in Mumbai.
They feature almost nightly drink specials and some form of entertainment every night
of the week–DJ’s, live music, trivia, you name it.

In *5 years*, your screen prediction may be true (it’s not as if Nokia can’t deliver in that department when it wants to). Or it may be something different altogether. Not sure of the distinction really is all that significant.

One should remember that Nokia is still globally biggest by volume by far, is profitable, and has money in the bank from having been the world leader for so long. So there *is* room to maneuver, financially. As I see it, there are essentially two problems:

1) The developer mindshare issue
2) The additional back-end — non-phone — infrastructure issue where Google is strong

It’s kind of appalling how quickly the ground can shift in this kind of an industry when pieces just fall together right for someone to put them together. But I guess that’s life in business…

Re: capacitive screens, I disagree. My prediction: in 5 years, fewer than 5% of mobile devices will have anything but a capacitive touch screen. It’s not the only hallmark of a smartphone, but it’s a key part of the new paradigm:

OLD: Clunky unnatural interfaces with keys or stylus. NEW: Natural gestures with capacitive screen.

OLD: Handset makers sell to carriers. NEW: They sell to consumers.

OLD: Carriers influence contents of phone screen. NEW: “How do I uninstall that stupid app that came with my phone” [my wife – non-techie]

OLD: Customization not possible for average consumers. NEW: Simple app stores open up a new experience for mass-consumers.

Now that the app revolution started, I literally *can’t* buy a Nokia any more, as none of my apps are available. And it won’t change anytime soon, because Nokia has probably lost the US market forever. The last ecosystem to launch and survive in the US may be Windows Phone 7, and even that is doubtful because it is so late to the game. It may squeak by thanks to $billions from Microsoft – money that Nokia today does not have.

So the door closed in the US. The question is, how many other countries will also become app-societies and close their doors to straggling, late platforms without the critical mass to survive?

But anyway, about the “new paradigm”… I’m going to get a phone for work soonish, and I suspect it will be an Eseries — I can’t imagine actually typing anything on a touchscreen. I like my buttons a lot, thank you very much

I am not so sure what the design rationale for the Blackberry technical solution was — it never has been any kind of a factor here in Europe — but Nokia’s phones have always integrated very nicely to a corporate network over a secure VPN (with theoretically any application running then on the phone making use of the networked resources), push email services and all, and with remote management of the device. Corporates really love that. Not sure what more would be required. Anyone I’ve talked to has considered Blackberry a lightweight hack in comparison… it may have something to do with US carriers’ networks or something, I’m not sure.

About running apps for a decade — well, time wasn’t ripe for it for many reasons. First; certainly application development had been more demanding… it was genuine embedded development (remember, on devices that span a decade) which really require you to have a real programmers writing a real product that you’ll then ship to, say, corporate clients onto their corporate phones. This is not about kids turning out crappy games for $10 a pop on the appstore. Of course Nokia also contributed by having a bit of a difficult certification and so on process… but it was a whole different application production/distribution model.

Second, what Apple and Google are doing really requires not only easier application development, but also for a lot of the wireless infrastructure to be in place. Especially the US was slow in coming in a good digital cellphone infrastructure… we might have had the prerequisites for the 3rd party app model in around 2004-5 over here (Finland) — the sort of infra that Nokia had been working towards since late 90s — but it was hard to create the needs that would have then driven mobile data bandwidth growth, which would have created more opportunities… it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

So essentially for Apple it was just a matter of exploiting a couple of things coming to maturity at the right time. Nokia could have done it probably too, but they were somewhat asleep at the wheel with the 3rd-party application idea. Not that they weren’t there, but not in the sense of what Apple did.

About the cultish fad — it’s about the capacitiveness. It seems to be an article of faith, and anyone who focuses on that alone in their “smartphone” definition does not have any credibility in my eyes, sorry