Increasingly I see complaints on the discussion board about poor battery life. Of course there are bad batteries out there but for the most part batteries live longer now than ever before. One of my mobile devices would go for days on end without needing a charge but if I used it for an alarm clock it would need charging daily. If I had not observed that it was this one application that caused the battery problem I would have been extremely upset with Nokia. Knowing what caused the poor battery life made me quite upset with the application and I only used it when absolutely necessary.

 

If you are planning on selling your product and want to have loyal customers you need to consider the power consumption of your application or utility.  Forum Nokia has created a web site that will help you achieve this with information and tools. Please visit this page as it is not only important to Nokia to have long battery life but also for you or the company you work for to have the ultimate power management. Right now they may blame Nokia but do not under-estimate the word of mouth that would spread if your product was listed as an energy waster. A good programmer always tries to write the most elegant code and this will help you achieve that.

 

Ron

Last week I was in training in the Silicon Valley in California so I took some time to meet with my teammate Hartti Suomela to do some team building. When Hartti gave me the choice of where to go after some gathering of information on the internet, I chose Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale California. After questioning my sanity and admitting that he had never heard of the place Hartti reluctantly trekked off with me to see the great unknown.

 

WeirdStuff is a showroom and warehouse for all the flotsam and jetsam that is discarded in the high tech industrial world of Silicon Valley. From vintage 1990 computers to barrels full of miscellaneous nuts and bolts (which sell by the pound) all things salvaged from business close outs and other salvage end up at WeirdStuff. If you need an 8 foot glass server rack, or a shell for a Donkey Kong arcade game. Do you need a 1/2” tape backup or a copy of Amish Utilities for Windows 2.0 this is the place to be. A chip tester, an oscilloscope, or a really great 10 foot high “you are here” kiosk almost everything high tech related is for sale. From a box full of corded and one wireless phones to a Sybase back up system it was hard to find something that stumped both Hartti and I.

 

Hartti and I were typical WeirdStuff customers, just people that have heard of the place and were there out of curiosity. Luckily for me I had to fly home or the trunk of the car may have been full of spare parts before I left Monday afternoon. Other store browsers were electronic hobbyist trying to find parts to build a home robot or fix an old computer for the kids. If you needed a resister or miniature motor or power supply here was a great place to get it. Another large segment of the stores business is lawyers. Not that lawyers are known as electronic nuts but they investigate in order to get patent rights. Was there an older version; is the new device you have just a rehash of someone else’s idea? All is very interesting and WeirdStuff proved not to be so weird and mostly just stuff. If you aren’t in the San Francisco area you can check it out on the internet. But there is nothing like picking up a 15 year old piece of computer history in your hands and saying I remember this.

 

Ron

What a great name for an exhibition no pretense at all, let’s just call it what it is… a show. Oh sure, there will be thousands of visitors and keynote addresses and many uppity ups and muckity mucks will be there. There will be exhibitions and conferences and meetings but it is a show, and that is what they call it. I’ve never attended the Symbian Smartphone Show and I don’t think I would want to if they called it the Symbian Multimedia Device Exhibition and Conference. Even though Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I say a cubic zirconia by another name would be a diamond.

 

I’m glad they are still calling it the Smartphone show since I’m going this year. Many of you will be going this year too. There are many Symbian developers in the UK I suspect I might know many of them but they will have to tell me their user name if I am to recognize them. There will be a Forum Nokia Champions event there, one of the reasons I’m going but the real reason I’m going is to just meet with you people. So if you see a one eyed pirate, tap the shoulder and say “Ron?” and let me know your name.

 

Ron