I’ve never been a huge fan of the big name ‘hub’ sites such as Yahoo or MSN. Their remit has always been to clutter the screen with as much junk as possible – flash banner ads jump out at you, reams of gossip news items spoil the above the fold content and in general the experience is confusing at best.
Enter the new ‘Bing’ inspired MSN. It is quite incredible how simple the new layout is. In stripping the page bare Microsoft have won me over here (A rare occasion) with their easy to navigate and easy on the eye design.
The content is clear and immediate and navigating the new MSN is a joy. I’ve shown screen grabs of both the old and new versions below:
NEW – Clean, supremely easy to find content and subpages
Welcome to our new site which is finally up. It’s a work in progress as our time is dedicated to our clients but will give you an idea of what Predicaments does and how we work. If you’d like to meet with us in person we’re based in North London – around 15 minutes from Oxford Circus tube. Call us on 0208 144 8516 or drop us an email.
We are also recruiting and will be posting job specs in the next few weeks.
Google is gaining some serious traction with their Android platform (They’ve just been showcasing Android 2.0 OS) and providing free GPS turn by turn navigation can only serve to enhance their mobile offering. There are rumours of the app being ported to Apple’s iPhone where it will sit side by side paid GPS Navigation packages such as Navigon, Copilot and Tom Tom.
What interests me are the realtime benefits of a Google App – syncing your contacts’ whereabouts, the most up to date POI available and so on. I’ve often wondered why a company so involved with mapping and search has not developed a GPS navigation sooner. They look set to assert more mobile dominance now this has been released.
The new CNN.com aired today and is widely being hailed a huge success. With 38 million unique visitors every month, 1.7 billion page views, and 100 million video views a redesign was no easy task for a site of such traffic magnitude and importance.
I love the reworked layout, the simple but clear video pieces and the speed at which a user can navigate deep into the site.
The Nokia E71 was the best selling Nokia last year. It’s not hard to see why – although Apple’s iPhone steals so much of the limelight nowadays it was realworld functionality that played a huge role in making sure the E71 made it to the top of the pile. With a fantastically small form factor matched to quality materials including metal and a brilliant qwerty keyboard, GPS, Nokia MAPS, advanced notifications and improved menu system the E71 captured the hearts of many.
A year later the E72 is about to be launched. Check the promotional video above. Interesting points to note are the five megapixel camera, the optical mouse and redesign and integration of Nokia’s new messaging suite. The camera and lack of media oomph was the main flaw of the E71 – whether megapixels alone can rectify this is another question. If the phone can handle video and media substantially better than the E71 then Nokia have another winner on their hands, especially if the camera optics are a big improvement.
What is most interesting to me however is how the E series will translate to Symbian S60 5th Edition devices (i.e. touchscreen). The main thrust of the E series has always been messaging and most often the provision of a hardware keyboard.
At the last Keynote I was excited, wondering what Apple was going to introduce. It was so boring then I cannot even remember what was launched or discussed? A price drop perhaps? A new iPod shuffle? In any case this time round I wasn’t to be fooled and didn’t hang on my laptop waiting for the ‘next big thing’ but instead cooked a Thai curry and casually glanced at the Macrumors feed. *sigh* – another Apple disappointment? Or perhaps not.
We’re going to be developing iPhone Apps soon because I love Apple products and the App store is one of the best things about the iPhone plus we’ve got some great ideas that seem perfect for the platform. Finally I feel the iPhone offers enough to seriously rival features of other smartphones but not because Apple are first or offering say the best camera with the highest number of megapixels but because Apple seem better at implementation than anyone else.
However I have to say this incremental update to the iPhone, especially when faced with Nokia’s new N97 and Palm’s re-entry into the market with the ‘Pre’ could have been more impressive. Touting features such as tethering (I think I was doing this 5 years ago with my Nokia 6110??), video (Hello Apple – this is really old news in mobile), MMS and so on are just bizarre. It’s almost as though Apple feel they have invented the mobile phone and that all other manufacturers’ contributions mean nothing.
Both Nokia and Palm have made a concerted effort with their new devices to tap into the here and now, the realworld. Palm’s excellent use of multitasking is enough alone to guarantee a huge number of fans and Nokia are on a bit of a roll with their touchscreen phones since the very popular and cheap 5800 was launched. The N97 takes things onto a new level – great 5mpx camera with Carl Zeiss optics, good low light performance and lens cap, video, great widget based home screen and full qwerty backlit keyboard…the list goes on.
For many the iPhone is still playing catch up with features on other devices but it is Apple’s incredible PR machine and brilliant UI that ensure it’s edging closer to world smartphone dominance.
We’ve been helping out with bits and pieces for groundbreaking Classic Music hub Dilettantemusic.com and the site is now live. To help you on your way we put together a series of video tutorials.
I found this article by CNET’s Tom Krazit totally spot on. He really ‘gets’ the importance of the ‘little’ things that make a mobile experience useful and productive. One of Apple’s failings with the iPhone (And something they promise to address any day now) is the inability to allow third parties to run apps in the background. Palm seem set on not only providing a pleasing aesthetic and user experience but have also had a keen look at user functionality.
Check any Symbian Smartphone and you’ll find holding down the menu key brings up all your open apps. Use your D pad to flick between them, copy and paste between apps with ease…and then you start to see how basic the iPhone is. Everyone wants an iPhone because they’re cool – if you turn up with your ‘smartphone’ to a board meeting you risk being laughed at if it’s not an iPhone or Blackberry…depending upon your corporate status (Are you biz (blackberry) or creative ‘cool’ biz (iphone). I just don’t buy it. Yet.
Remember the Palm Pilot? It had a cult following and even saw Sony launch their popular ‘Clie’ range of Palm OS powered products. That time has come and gone but the Pre looks good, provides interesting functionality and more importantly for Palm, seems to address many of the business failings of other handsets – multitasking and notifications.
By using a ‘card’ system users on the Pre can flick between apps in a neat and intuitive way. Similarly notifications have their own special space without obscuring content. A mobile device should surely be something you can use on the move as opposed to having to stop, use both hands and then shut down apps to launch others? If you check the online video demos at Palm’s website you’ll be impressed – the Pre seems to flick between a host of Apps with ease and better still with realworld functionality. Palm have a strong sell here – they have concentrated on communication rather than hype and have addressed realworld situations and social media to drive the phone’s notification system and messaging.
The Pre launch is very close to the new iPhone launch so it will be interesting to see how far Apple has gone in the way of letting background apps run and whether software and hardware have now been redesigned enough to deal with the new breed of supersmartphones.
I’m still in amazement that YouTube has failed to successfully monetise their site and seem to be plucking all the wrong ideas out of the hat. Recently they are trying to leverage some sort of revenue stream by tapping in to social media and still try to keep advertising revenue flowing with little effect on cost.
I wonder how many publishers would benefit though from a subscription model? Flickr has successfully applied this to their picture sharing site and I see no reason why YouTube cannot offer a similar or even more complex cost model. As a YouTube ‘Pro’ account member you would be able to upload longer videos, customise the player in depth and add more widgets to your channel or host it on your site via enhanced tools. There is so much scope for YouTube to ramp up revenue here, make it’s online position stronger as a more advanced media player and also offer groundbreaking features to publishers and digital marketeers.
I’d love a YouTube ‘Pro’ account and would gladly pay for it. There are other online video solutions of course such as Brightcove, Ooyala and many more but full implementation is costly and way beyond the means of SMEs or individual publishers wishing to host or encode client content. A YouTube ‘Pro’ account could be a halfway house between the free and corporate video services offering longer videos, thumbnail generation and editing and easy widget creation and embedding / publishing options.
I’m surprised YouTube haven’t offered this yet but I was talking about HD YouTube videos a while back so this may only be a matter of time.
