Online shared intelligence

How do I use my Nokia N810

My usage follows my habits, and thus I need to start by describing those, because a critical parameter for judging the Internet Tablet is precisely… that the Internet be available, that is, wireless connectivity:

• Work — Split half/half between working from home or at the office. In both cases covered by wireless. In the case of the office, wireless is somehow hampered by a very strict corporate firewall (I will address that later). Also, I move around the corporate campus quite a lot (meetings, chats, the occasional nicotine fix, cafeteria), very rarely dragging my laptop with me (at least, since I use the N810);
• Week-day leisure — Mostly at home, errands, occasional eat-outs, mostly in an urban and stationary basis (I spent no more than 45 minutes a day in the car);
• Weekends split between travels (mostly to Santa Barbara to see Ona and the kids) and home pleasures: playing in the garage or the office, fixing things, helping clean, walking the dogs, cooking, music, movies and TV).
• Travel: Whether for pleasure or work, the laptop rarely makes it into the bag (even when the X61 Lenovo is very small and light).

So, fairly sedentary life, definitely not the road warrior I used to be. Interestingly enough, modern sedentary life shares much more with the road warrior life than it used to, because of this increasing addiction to things Internet… but that is a whole different posting.

So, how do I use it?

In the routine described above, the N810 has almost totally displaced my laptop AND my smart phones in every occasion when I am not on my desk: the laptop because it is impractical (large, heavy, slow to boot, absorbing, etc.) and the PDA/Smart phones because of screen size, speed and usability advantages.

The displacement of the laptop is not surprising, but that of the phone is. Both in my Sony Ericsson P900, 910 and 990, and on my Nokia N93, I have 90% of the functionality I get from the N810, and then some (synchronized PDA suite). I used to extensively leverage ALL features and applications in my phone, even when small screen and keyboard sizes, T9 typing in the N93, anemic memory and slow performance unavoidably frustrated me. But the biggest contention was screen size (both physical and logical). I find browsing on anything below 800×480 totally worthless. Even in the Sony Ercisson P990, at 320×240, browsing less than a paragraph at a time is just ridiculous. Particularly because, regardless of the paragraph you are reading, the browser still has to load the whole page to show it to you. Which, by the way, is the major lie behind the iPod commercial where the user brings up a web page, a full paragraph in view, and immediately moves on: what was it, a web page of only one paragraph? Can I please have the URL? 

And here comes one of the major killer features for the N810: the gorgeous screen. Reviews unavoidably compare bitmap (pixel) dimensions, and the comparisons become hubris very fast. The screen in the Nokia N810 is the exact minimum size and quality to be very different from others:

* Browse more than a single paragraph at a time, and let your eyers jump around the page (isn’t that a basic requirement of “browsing”?); this capability enables what, for me, is one of the most addictive features of the N810: Getting-Things-Done organization via browser and local file. What do I mean? I use monkey GTD, one of the smartest implementations of tiddlywiki by SImon Baird, to keep my to-do’s, with fantastic advantages:

* The file is available 100% of the time to me, either by accessing it from my laptop (when at work or at home, my N810 is 100% of the time USB-connectedto either my Windows laptop or my Mac) or on my N810 if I am out;

* The keyboard in the N810 is too small for typing long docs, but ideal for short notes;

* If a sketch is required, the N810 mostly obviates the need for paper that creates loopholes in the GTD system;

* If I land, say, in Costco, I always have my Costco context available for things I needed to get, even if I thought about them two months ago.

If you have tried GTD and failed, it’s almost certain that the reason you failed is because of too many recording devices, or the constant paper-vs-computer tension. Now just imagine that the file is (a) device independent, just a browser required, and (b) always available to you in your device, in a form factor that makes it usable…

* Read a 8.5×11″-paginated book or document on PDF, with the usual margins, with zooming set to “text width”, all of it without using a loupe. I didn’t realize what that meant until I had it available; with smaller screens, you go “hunting” small windows around the text, or you zoom it down to eliminate the lateral hunting and then it becomes unreadable. It doesn’t matter if you have a fantastic interface to move that reading window around the page, you will end up with a headache if you persist.;

* Play a game of medium-to-high visual complexity: this one is easy to defend as another advantage. Brain needs visual clues of any complex environment: reduce resolution and the clues need to be sacrificed, end up with boring, lame mind frames.

* Watch a video without squinting, and see the details. Same as with games: complexity requires detail, and eliminating visual complexity makes the watched piece boring. You just have to add compression artifacts and you realize that in smaller screens you end up listening to your videos more than watching them.

All of this ends up meaning that I use the Nokia N810 for visual pleasure and light work that doesn’t require multiple windows. Multiple windows are still the domain of the computer, as is very precise mousing and ultra-high-complexity visuals… but I will get to that in my next posting.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 12:37 pm and is filed under gadgetry, nokia N810. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.