Andrew O Fiddles with Nokia's Widgets
>> Nokia Seeks Lost Marble Widgets: Fiddling Finns need a wake-up call
Andrew Orlowski
The Register
16th April 2007
theregister.co.uk
Comment If you heard an unearthly groan coming from your IT department today, the following news may be responsible. Nokia today revealed that it was bringing the security and stability of Web 2.0 to its mobile handsets.
Yes, the class of PC bloatware known as "Widgets" are to run on Nokia's S60 handsets, and the formal announcement speaks of "transforming mobility and the Internet with rich Web 2.0 experiences".
Permit us to translate.
For "Transforming mobility" read: "opening up a secure platform" and for "rich Web 2.0" experience read: "to Javascript worms, pop-up windows and stealth dialers". In other words, it's the presentation layer people who think they can solve infrastructure level problems - and this time, they're coming for your phone.
We already know what you Reg readers think of Web 2.0 security: this survey of opinion should be a must-read for phone executives tempted to sprinkle a little of the Web 2.0 pixie dust on their business strategies.
JavaScript worms are a popular delivery mechanism for Malware on the PC, but as the J in AJAX, they've recently been adopted to take advantage of Web 2.0: causing havoc on MySpace, Yahoo! and, er... MySpace again.
Nokia says it will initially restrict the functionality of the JavaScript worms, before opening the floodgates. Ovum analyst Tony Cripps has glimpsed the horror that awaits us, but can't quite bring himself to step out of line, and say what's begging to be said:
"Scripting-based security exploits are commonplace on the desktop," he writes in a research note, "and we believe countermeasures need to be employed early to avoid such issues arising on mobile phones."
Uh, huh.
"Nokia promises to remove the sandbox in a future version once developer support and a signing process have been put in place."
That's the same signing process that has proved such a success with Microsoft's ActiveX. At best, it creates an audit trail after the damage has been done, although there'll surely be something more sinister than a wild goose at the end of it. Many of the people behind these scams do not answer the door politely.
"So overall then, a good effort by Nokia to advance the cause of mobile widgets in a rational way," concludes Cripps, cheerfully.
But what's this "cause of widgets", of which he speaks?
IT managers, quite sensibly, don't quite anthropomorphise software in the same way as analysts do, let alone endow them with their own civil rights movement. It's a telling piece of phrasing. IT buyers long for stable, secure and reliable tools - while web evangelists want to wrap the world in angle brackets. And Nokia has mistakenly fallen on the wrong side.
Nokia forgets Nokia
But Nokia has been heading down this slippery road for some time.
When one looks at the prime assets of the Nokia of five years ago, it's alarming to see how many have been discarded. At the turn of the decade, the Finnish giant boasted a formidable reputation for reliability, security and ease of use. Now it's thrown all three out of the window, with security being the last to go.
The diminishing reliability of these devices isn't unique to Nokia, and it may be a consequence of having so many products, in so many markets, all at once. But engineers deep in Nokia we've spoken with describe how they grew weary at being conditioned only to fix a proportion of bugs. It offends an engineer's pride to release a flawed product, but this became a way of life. There was simply too much to do.
As for usability, the company which pioneered an interface that helped popularize the digital mobile phone - NaviKey™ - now falls far behind much of the competition. With feature phones, Nokia's interface has failed to evolve with the tactile and graceful interface of Sony Ericsson, for example.
At the high end, the story is far worse. The S60 UI initially provided Nokia with a clever bridge to the future, but it looks pedantic and cumbersome besides Motorola's MotoRizr 8, let alone Apple's iPhone. Nokia answers the perennial S60 user's question, "Why so many clicks?" by adding extra hardware buttons, such as the slow and inflexible "Multimedia" key. S60 is incredibly poorly written in parts, but Samsung has demonstrated that it doesn't have to be sluggish, by using its own chip to speed up its first European S60 phone. Yet Nokia has ensured most of its smartphone users have a substandard experience, by starving the devices of sufficient memory or fast enough processors.
It doesn't augur well that the company's skill at exploiting the emerging markets owes little to its recent R&D work: it's succeeded with low cost models in China by dusting off older, more reliable, and easier-to-use technologies. In other words, it's living off past glories, rather than looking to the future.
In fact, Nokia now appears to quite relish the complexity of its devices. Quite bizarrely, a company which had no need for an inferiority complex appears to have acquired one.
For some years now, phones have really been computers in disguise, but Nokia has always stressed their utility as appliances. Today it proudly boasts: "This is what computers have become", and insists its sales staff call the phones "Multimedia Computers".
But computers are everything mobiles are not and shouldn't be: cumbersome to carry with you, complicated and unreliable. It's like Mercedes branding themselves as "The Lada you always wanted."
Perhaps by bringing bloated Widgets to mobiles, Nokia now feels validated, that it has a "real computer". But one must careful what one wishes for.
Yesterday's network, tomorrow
Today's announcement will do little to raise the morale of the bedrock third-party software developers who Nokia needs the most: the C++ and Java developers required for infrastructure, middleware and mission-critical applications.
Even the most loyal Nokia developers whisper that Microsoft makes a less predatory platform host than the 800lb Elk. How can this be so? Well, because Nokia receives API requests from the community, it has a good inkling of what everyone is working on. The company can deprecate an API on a whim, if it wishes to enter that business sector. And if that API is crucial to your business, then you need to be looking for a new job. Turf wars between Nokia's Enterprise division and its Multimedia division leave these developers in a Kafka-esque situation: duplicating requests for the same feature if it's going to be deployed on an E series phone or an N series phone. Developers need to plough trough that bureaucracy not once, but twice.
Now imagine how today's news will be received. It becomes apparent that Nokia hope to attract new developers by making its phones more attractive to wiki-fiddlers and script kiddies, and Cripps is on hand to sell this strategy:
"Web developers are several orders of magnitude more common [our emphasis] than the C or C++ programmers targeted by S60's native environment and also considerably more numerous [ditto] than Java ME programmers. Attracting these developers will be a key factor in the continued healthy growth of the mobile applications ecosystem," he reckons.
Actually, the health of the mobile applications 'ecosystem' (we think Cripps means 'market') is entirely dependent on how the carriers choose to open up their networks. (For example: it's a given that tomorrow's mobile networks are IP-based, but it's far from certain that the network operators will produce a subset of APIs.)
The implication that more developers means better software has been demolished many times: Fred Brooks Mythical Man Month being the best example, and it hardly needs to be restated here. What does, however, is the Silicon Valley myth that the lone bedroom developer, who knows little more than JavaScript needs any particular coddling.
The exact opposite is true.
Nokia's future
Now this is but a selective snapshot of Nokia's business strategy. We could have been more positive, and praised the company's singular, and admirable determination to bring VoIP to its business handsets, against the wishes of its biggest customers. Then again, we could have mentioned the new CEO's nutty prediction that mobile TV will go mainstream this year - ignoring 25 years of mobile TV flops.
It's just that Widgets sum up so much of what Nokia today is failing to get right. The company is floundering if it thinks Web 2.0 is its salvation.
The irony is that the open internet is moving to an architecture that much more closely resembles the vertical network that Nokia wants to distance itself from. Increasingly, the packet switched network is acquiring the characteristics of the circuit switched networks: with intelligence built into the network itself. The internet needs this to grow, and handle more sophisticated applications.
These days, even the primary author of the fundamental text defining the old, open internet ( "The End to End Principle in Network Design") David Clark, says we need to rip up the infrastructure, and start again
"We are at an inflection point, a revolution point - we might just be at the point where the utility of the internet stalls - and perhaps turns downward," he warns.
Which way will Nokia be facing? Or will it be fidgeting with those Widgets?
Send your advice for Kallasvuo to the usual address, please. [AO supplies his email address]® ###
Nokia Demonstrates Leadership in Technologies for Internet on Mobile Devices
Nokia Press Release
Web 2.0 Expo
San Francisco, US
April 16, 2007
nokia.com
This week at Web 2.0 Expo, Nokia will highlight how its mobile technologies strive to complete the Web 2.0 ecosystem. Through a global press announcement, speaking engagements, and live demonstrations, Nokia will showcase how it is enabling content and application developers to bring Web 2.0 experiences and communities to Nokia mobile devices to give people access to Internet content and services anytime, anywhere.
Nokia Introduces Widgets
Nokia announces today that it is taking a significant step in mobilizing Internet content and Web 2.0 services with its global launch of widget support and Web Run-Time, a new Web application development environment for developers.
Widgets are lightweight Web applications that bring Web content and Web 2.0 services directly to mobile devices. A widget appears as an application icon on a mobile device, so instead of having to open the browser, type in the Web address, find information and type in preferences or choose from drop down menus for more detailed information, a widget can be personalized by you, and get the same information you want straight to your mobile device. Consumers can choose to receive content and services from their favorite Web sites - from news, to weather reports, traffic reports, search engines, email, blogs, games, social networking sites and more. With the constant development of new widgets and new exciting content, the possibilities of using widgets are limitless.
Nokia's S60 - the world's leading smartphone software and the first to bring the full HTML desktop-like browsing experience to millions of mobile devices - will be the first mobile software platform that enables the creation of widgets using familiar standards-based Web technologies, making it an innovative solution for a vast number of Web developers and designers.
S60 on Symbian OS will be complemented with Web Run-Time, a Web application development environment, enabling the development of widgets and integrated Web applications for mobile devices with familiar standards-based Web technologies, such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Ajax.
For more information on S60 software, widgets and Web Run-Time, please visit s60.com
Nokia and Orb Announce MyCasting
Nokia and Orb announce that Orb's MyCasting is immediately available for the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. Orb MyCasting offers a single solution for accessing all of your digital media stored on your home computer directly from your mobile device. Orb's intuitive solution simply streams your own content from your home PC using the Web browser and media player on your Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, creating a "personal media portal". MyCasting is available immediately for download from www.orb.com/n800 as well as from the Tableteer site, which can be accessed via the Nokia N800.
Experience the Internet on Mobile Devices at Web 2.0
On the expo floor at booth 402, Nokia will showcase the company's end-to-end mobile Internet capabilities through demonstrations on its Nseries multimedia devices including the Nokia N95, N76, N75 and N800 Internet Tablet. Experience the flexibility of video blogging anywhere you are with VOX, photo sharing and organizing with Flickr, and photo printing with Snapfish. Other demos highlight location-based services such as maps and navigation, video sharing, and instant messaging - including applications from our content and development partnerships with Yahoo, Google, Rhapsody, Navicore WeatherBug and Orb.
Nokia Shows Commitment to WiMAX as Web 2.0 Enabler
Nokia is dedicating significant research, development and intellectual property to WiMAX and supports efforts in making it a global broadband standard. The combination of WiMAX broadband technology and Web 2.0 services offers people an enriched high-speed Internet experience free from the desktop PC. Nokia plans to bring its first WiMAX enabled mobile device to market in early 2008.
About S60
S60 software built on Symbian OS is the world's leading smartphone software, and is licensed by some of the industry's foremost mobile device manufacturers. The flexibility of the S60 software allows for various hardware designs and software configurations, as evidenced by the multitude of S60 devices already available on the market. Through its award-winning user interface, extensive support for new mobile services and the innovation potential for partner solutions, S60 provides an open and scalable business opportunity for mobile operators and 3rd party developers. For further information and news about S60 and the S60 community, please visit www.s60.com .
About Nokia
Nokia is a world leader in mobile communications, driving the growth and sustainability of the broader mobility industry. Nokia connects people to each other and the information that matters to them with easy-to-use and innovative products like mobile phones, devices and solutions for imaging, games, media and businesses. Nokia provides equipment, solutions and services for network operators and corporations. ###
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