SYMBIAN ON THE LINE

Again. Or rather, Still.

I used to have this little bloggy thing, which I started on February 11th, 2008, right when the Mobile World Congress kicked off.

This little bloggy thing that I mentioned was at first called Ssixty dot info. Ssixty, S60... I still wonder if anyone got that. Or how I'd have to struggle to spell it out loud.

Which made me buy a dot com domain (see, I learn!). That made my blog's name change to S60 Online Blog*.

From the beginning it was a blog about Symbian (and specifically the S60 UI implementation of the Symbian OS). News, thoughts and reviews I said. And it had a little bit of all of those.

113 posts later, in July of that same year (it really does feel like a decade ago), I gave up. And let it slowly die.

I gave up because, as the gurus, experts, strategists and/or consultants may tell you, I failed to establish a niche of my own.

See, when I started, there were maybe 30 others doing what I was doing. Hobby-blogs, let's call 'em that, although probably all of 'em hobby-bloggers have surely thought of making a living outta blogging more than once. But back to the point. By July, that number grew to probably about 100.

And so, the echo-chamber was created. The infamous echo-chamber, which had started to plague the so-called 'tech' blogosphere, came to the Symbian-related blogosphere too. Because it likes to travel, I guess.

As such, my news, thoughts and reviews, well... they were mostly focused on stuff other people also wrote about. I'll take them one by one.

News.

You can only directly report news if you're there when news is made. Otherwise, you're just living off of someone else being there. And in the news world, being first (and accurate in that) is most important. There is one small exception to this, in case of events such as the Mobile World Congress. If you're subscribed to enough PR feeds, you might post something first even if you're not there (because generally the people who are there are busy with something else). But that's it.

'Big' blogs, in any part of the market, such as mobile- or Symbian-related, have resources. Its kind of a circle. If you're big enough, you have the resources to be where the news is at any time. But you have to have those resources, and report on news directly in order to become big. In the news world this is most prevalent. And before you say Engadget is big and they just link to other blogs, just analyze how many reviews they did this year compared to last year. I'll tell you. A lot more. Sure, their linked-to-somewhere-else posts still prevail, but the change is obvious. Plus, they do have an entrance into any event related to what they report.

And I got tired of posting about firmware updates. Seriously, this is one of the main reasons I quit. Because I really didn't know what to do about such events. I wanted to report on them, because I still hope that one day every smartphone owner in this world will be 1.aware that he/she is in possession of a smartphone and what it can do and 2.aware of firmware updates and updating his/her firmware on every occasion.

But at the same time, posting about a new firmware update seemed useless. 100 other blogs posted that same thing within that hour. And you can't really say anything different than what everyone else is saying. Because there's no other data to go by. You all know the exact same thing and post the exact same thing. And without copy&pasting, the result always is 100 posts that are 99% the same. Funny.

Reviews.

First off, I'm not one of those guys inclined to do 15000 word reviews. Of anything. There are a few blogs and sites that focus on that, and they do it well. And while reading a review for the first time is very interesting if you're interested in the product being reviewed, by the third one you read you already skip all the "button placement" parts. Because, again, those are all the same. Same data.

I did more software reviews than hardware. Because if I found an app that I enjoyed, I wanted to write about it. And sometimes did so before the 'big guys' (read:Symbian-focused blogs with the most traffic) did. I (and many others) knew that apps were the deciding selling point for a smartphone way before Apple or your average normob did.

However, choosing (because at some point I understood that it would be valuable to readers), for example, to post screenshots of every individual screen or setting you might encounter in an app made writing one review take hours. Which, honestly, I did not enjoy.

See, blogging is not easy. I don't mean the ideas you have, or the content. I mean the act of blogging. Of inserting images, videos. Spacing. Bolding or italicizing text to make it more readable. Linking to previous posts of yours as much as you can (thanksalot, Google). Linking to sources and other blogs covering the same thing. And let me not even try to go into getting pictures and video for the review off the phone and to the computer, and such. All of these are activities that are not necessarily in a direct relation with the content you wish to produce, but nevertheless things that "have to be done". Things that always took me at least 3x the time the writing itself did. 

This is not good. All the blogging platforms and clients are anything but intuitive. All were designed in an age when "blog" was a word maybe 500 people knew. This has to change, but sadly, to this day, it hasn't.

There were times when I just wanted to share an app. But the thought of having to "blog" for 5 hours to do that made me not post anything after all.

Thoughts.

I'm a very opinionated person. And a very rational person. I don't love companies or brands. Or hardware, or software. I don't hate any of those either. (And frankly, I also don't hate anyone. Never have, never will).

I have not been too blunt in stating my opinions on my little bloggy thing (a couple of exceptions to this, but that's it). Because of my Bachelor's in Journalism, I presume. Always striving for the objectivity they teach us. Which of course, is in itself a mere fantasy, but I digress. Irony was my main method of asserting an opinion.

And this will probably remain the same. 

The truth is, I felt that it felt empty without me. So I shall blog once more (actually thrice, as you can see from the sidebar).

This is my new blog. 

This blog will focus more on thoughts and opinions. Of Symbian-related things, but not only. After all, competing OS platforms, are, in a way, also 'related' to Symbian, as they exist on the same market, so there might be a post covering them from time to time. Competition is always good, and I will embrace it.

Because Posterous' bookmarklet makes it very easy, I may from time to time quote other bloggers' opinions/takes on something, and add my own comments. Hell, I might even write a couple of thousand words now and then, but only for something I believe so strongly (in) that I feel it's worth it.

There will be news. News that hasn't been reported 100 times before. Or has, but then I'll report if I have a different angle or take on it. 

There might be reviews. But probably not thousand-word reviews. If microblogging should have taught us anything, that's to be as concise as possible. So less screenshots, less words, which means you'll get to actually try the app/phone being reviewed faster, since you won't have to read that much. Yeah, really.

For this, I'm hoping you'll trust me. Trust that when I recommend an app, you will do just that. I'll give you reasons for why you would do that, but I won't give you a descriptive opinion on every letter in the app's UI. I will give you reasons why I think you should buy a phone, but won't go into details such as the d-pad positioning unless that has a negative effect on user experience.

I will try to make every post easy to read. But not necessarily by bolding, italicizing, underlining or indenting. Mostly by the manner I'll write in. I guess we'll see if this will work or not, but I thought I'd give you a fair warning. Also, all titles will be lowercase. All words will be lowercase in the titles, except for brand names and proper names. I don't know why, but this looks best to me. (Later edit: Especially in contrast with the all caps title, wouldn't you say?) A forced departure from the newspaper headline model that almost all of us used to go by, if you wish.

It's not S60 Online anymore, it's now Symbian on the line*.

Rather appropriate, I'd say. S60 will be no more, so the brand had to be changed. Also, now more than ever, Symbian seems to be on the line. It's still the No.1 smartphone operating system by a healthy margin, but, in a disturbing similarity to Internet Explorer's, that's shrinking. Quarter after quarter.

Why do I care about Symbian, you ask? Because in my humble opinion, it is the most advanced mobile operating system on the planet. And even if they leave the codebase untouched today, that will still be true for at least 2-3 years.

However, it's under attack from the UI prettiness of other platforms. What they lack in substance, underlying capabilities and features they make up in UI and UX. So will Symbian step away from the line and rise again (so that I'll have to change my blog's name and domain yet again)? Will it become as pretty as it is mature and functional?

Interesting times are ahead, and I want to actively be here as we live, experience and enjoy them.

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And now, some administrative (for lack of a better word) stuff.

I imported my old blog here, all the posts are available.

But, all the internal links are broken right now. I will fix this, although it will take some time.

All external links pointing to any of my previous domains are and will permanently be broken. 

Furthermore, as I was an idiot and did not renew any of my older domains when I should have, they now belong to link-farming people. This is why I did not link to any of those domains, and won't ever. 

To those of you who have, at some point, linked to my posts, I have this to say: I'm really really sorry. I know asking you to change the links to the current ones is too much, so I won't. I just want you to know that this domain will be renewed, even if it's the last thing I do (it's actually on a self-renewing plan, so domain squatters please go somewhere else for your make money with google links).