"We're on the long road, maybe the wrong road, but we're together now, who cares?"
— On the One Road
The essence of writing is to be scrupulously even-handed. Or it's to be
shamelessly partisan and assume that fairness happens in aggregate across everyone's
writing in total. I can't decide. Explaining that both these views exist is in
itself being scrupulously even-handed. But even-handedness is wishy-washy and
indecisive; partisanship lets you put across a strong full-throated defence of
a position. Then, though, partisanship is unfair and discriminatory, and the
ability to see both sides of a position is not the hallmark of an inferior
intellect. So I can't decide. As you can see, I am indecisive. I am indecisive
even about indecisiveness. That's the hallmark of the open source mentality,
right there. Except for the bits which are rabidly partisan and admit of no
error. Indecision even about the need for indecision.
This leads me on to the Nokia N9.
A few months back I bought an N9, and exhaustively
detailed my reasons for doing so. At that stage, I liked the hardware, I liked
the OS, I wanted to try using web apps for most stuff, and I worried a little bit
about there being no applications. Now, three months later, I have a more detailed
set of thoughts. There's a list of positive things and a list of negative things.
If you're looking for a simple review, or you're looking for a fierce recommendation
either for or against, this is not the blog post for you. Likewise, if you're looking
for a writeup with a bunch of numbers in it, or indeed if you're looking for anything
pretending to be a comprehensive and overall review of the device and all that
therein is, this is also not the blog post for you. I'm going to tell a story,
or possibly just let loose with a very, very long stream of consciousness, although in truth it's
more like a river of consciousness or perhaps a roiling torrential waterfall of
consciousness. Sieve out the gems that apply to you, if you can. Because I can't
decide whether I love my N9 or whether I'm annoyed by it. Indecisive, you see.
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I believe in Nessie, to quote the late, great
Arthur C. Clarke. I've been asked a number of times whether I like my N9, and
my standard answer has become that for the first time in my life I have a thing
that I adore but that I wouldn't recommend to anyone else.
This is an attempt to explain why.
First, let us be clear. The phone itself, the device, the sheer physical
thing, is a joy to behold. It's lovely to hold, to look at, to play
with. Using it feels perfect; you swipe left, swipe up, swipe down. No buttons
to push. Portable
Cathedrals is an admirable review of the N9 on that aspect; I couldn't say
any of that better myself. For years I've gradually been moving toward a mindset
where I want things of beauty and elegance more than I want the ability to fiddle
and change, and then yanking myself back because the ability to fiddle and change
is important, is critical, and I cannot cope without it when it's gone.
So I want each in equal measure. My cake and eat it. The moon and the stick, both. I've
now tasted that combination with the N9, and it's likely spoiled me for everything else.
There are also a bunch of mundane things good about it too, beyond the
combination of sheer beauty and amazement that I am able to have a beautiful thing.
The battery life is good. It's fast and slick to use, and I'm told the hardware
is way underpowered compared with rivals, which speaks volumes about the quality
of the software work done by the Nokia team. It's got a bunch of sweet little
features like face recognition for photos. Swiping everything feels so obvious,
so much more so than Android where I was never really sure whether to hit Home
or Back or whatever. It distinguishes between backgrounding
an app and quitting it. (Do not listen to naysayers on this point. They are
not the same. There is a big distinction between putting an app off
to one side so you can come back to it later and quitting that app while being
able to restart it with session intact. If your list of open browser tabs is
your todo list, then you agree with me. It's not about memory management or
anything so esoteric and technical; it's about knowing that I still have a thing,
that it's still where I put it; the same mentality that made spatial windows in
the filer a good idea. If I open a few pages in the browser showing rules for
different card games, as I did last week on a cruise ship, I want to be able to
see the list and get them back. Hitting the "web" icon to get a new browser window
should not try and show me all the pages I've got open. I don't care about whether
the underlying OS processes are still there, but I do care that I think
they are. When I put something in a particular drawer in my kitchen so I can find
it later, I am comforted that I know it's still there when I turn my back. End of
sidebar.)
It's also just like my laptop, under the covers. Time and time again I've
tried to work out how to do a thing from a software point of view -- I'm a developer,
right? I'm interested in this stuff -- and the answer has been "how would you
do it on Ubuntu? That's how you do it on the N9." It uses D-Bus and upstart and
python and ssh and apt. I understand it already. Not at all a benefit for, say,
my daughter, but it certainly is for me.
It's made and supported by a proper big company. Perfect example of this:
my extra charger. I wanted one of those little battery device thingies that you
can charge with USB and leave in your bag, to re-charge the phone when it's
running down and I'm not near a socket. So I bought the
Nokia portable charger. It's a squircle
shape, which is the shape all through the N9 -- icons on the home screen are
that shape, the waiting spinner is that shape -- and it's the same cyan colour
as my phone. It's not some horrible black third-party cheap flimsy plastic box.
Having spent a lifetime using the hardware that one can find that works with
first arbitrary Linux distributions and now Ubuntu, it's rare for me to be able
to buy accessories designed for the stuff I own, let alone ones which are also
elegant and themed right and nice. This is the advantage with having Nokia on
board.*
This carries right through everything; Nokia have a full and well-written
set of UX guidelines for
N9 applications, good documentation on
how to build N9 apps and the capabilities of the device -- I was particularly
pleased with the
docs on how to build web apps for the N9 -- and in general the whole thing
feels professional and competent and like you're in good hands. This ain't nothin'.
It's a lot. I like it.
Of course, life's never that nice. There are a whole heap of complaints about
it too.
The browser, while it's WebKit-based, hasn't had as much development as those
on iOS and Android. So there's no text reflow when zooming, which is really supernaturally
annoying. The browser can't do fullscreen -- you always have the
address bar, making it impossible to even pretend that a web app feels like a
native app. Meego still feels like an iOS rip-off in a bunch of ways -- look at
the home screen. (I admire the Windows Phone people for going their own way
in how their OS works, as do I admire webOS; Android and Meego (and,
disappointingly, Firefox OS on mobile) started from a "copy iOS" sort of base,
I think.) Writing Qt apps for it uses a bunch of Meego-specific components,
meaning that it's somewhere in between hard and impossible to test that app
in your normal Qt/QML environment -- most other mobile platforms are like this
too, sure, but I can run QML apps on my Ubuntu desktop, and development would
be so much easier if I could do that with my N9 apps, but I can't because you
don't have the magic Meego components. Huge chunks of the underlying Meego
architecture require you to write C++ library .so files and can't be used from
Python and PySide, making the point of saying "look, PySide, isn't it great"
much diluted. Getting my mail from Gmail required me to set it up in "Sync for
Exchange", a flagrant contradiction, and that Sync for Exchange thing keeps
telling me that "The server or web address is wrong" when I go out of network
for a few minutes. Notifications about new emails appear in the events feed
but don't disappear if I read or delete those emails from other devices. The
magnifier on text to move the cursor is annoying and under-sensitive. Setting
up a development environment is either very hard indeed, or requires you to
install a whole separate version of Qt from Nokia at system level, which is
highly likely to sod up your standard Ubuntu system. The list
of minor abrasions and annoyances extends into the distance.
Then there are the two big elephants in the room: Nokia have canned the
whole project, and no-one bought the phone anyway so there are no apps and
no community and no support.
These two are not, I think, unrelated.
I'm not qualified to talk about Nokia's market positioning or the state of
the smartphone market as a whole, really. I mean, it baffles me that Nokia obviously
put together a world-class design and development team to make the N9 and then
started backing away from it before it even went on sale, but they did,
so there it is. And, of course, I knew that going in. Since then, Nokia have
officially canned the whole thing; not just under-resourced the whole N9 project
but cut it off entirely. So no lovely USB chargers any more; no more apps from
them, no more well-written and elegant design documentation. I can rail about
the circularity of all this until the cows come home -- well of course no-one
bought it, you did your best to make sure they couldn't! canning the project
because no-one bought the phone is what happens when no-one bought it because
you wouldn't sell them it! what are you, Acorn Computers? -- but that
helps no-one. Cautionary tale, sure. As mpt said once,
"Great design makes success more likely. But Windows on PCs shows that it isn't
necessary, and Windows Phone shows that it isn't sufficient." But the fallout
from this, from no-one using the N9, from the lack of success whatever reason
there is for it, is that there are no applications, no community, no support.
This affects me more than I thought it would.
You see, I went into this thinking, well, I don't use most of the apps out
there in the world, so I won't be bothered by their absence. And that's still
true. But the lack of userbase hurts me because it means that I get Opera Syndrome.
The Opera web browser is hugely competent; it's as good as any other browser on
the market. But hardly anyone uses it, so it doesn't get tested, and so web things
that ought to work in it do not because developers don't test against it; therefore
new users won't switch to it because stuff doesn't work in it; repeat until false.
I've had a similar experience with the N9, especially regarding the web browser.
It's WebKit; it should be able to do everything that Android and iOS web apps can.
But the screen's a little larger in size, in pixels, so web apps switching into a "mobile"
mode which were only tested on Android and iOS don't work sometimes. I have to use
Google+'s mobile site in "basic mobile" mode because "pretty smart mobile mode"
won't post comments. Google Reader works fine on the mobile web, but not G+.
Many sites, as ever, assume that if you're not Android/iOS then your phone browser
must be some sort of 1998-era WAP thing and serve you rubbish super-basic HTML,
or worse you get the "sod off you're not supported" message even though I'll bet
I'd actually be fine. (Amazon Cloud Reader, you are the weakest link, goodbye.)
There are other browsers -- Opera, Firefox mobile -- but again you hit the
same issues -- they're not official builds, because no-one uses the N9 so it's
not a supported platform, Fx mobile is new and doesn't do much yet (no
text reflow there either), they don't support adding an app to the home screen,
the list goes on.
There are some really quite lovely apps for the N9. The ones that come with
it are universally good. There's a community of people writing great apps, too;
people like Thomas Perl. There just aren't many.
Also, the N9 suffers from the same problem that open-source platforms always
suffer from, which is that the community that there is is full of people who
want to tinker all the time, so half the development effort is going
into making wicd run on it or tweaking obscure bits of the OS so that it runs
0.2% faster or other ultra-geeky things. XKCD
refers. And tearing one another apart on minutiae, of course ("it's not
meego, it's maemo!" "why isn't your app GPL!" etc etc. I
refer.)
And that ties into a larger point, which is this: I thought to myself, I'm
not that worried about the lack of native apps, because I can use web apps for
almost everything, nowadays, and they'll be fine. I was wrong. The mobile web
world, for apps, is quite shit. Jake Archibald memorably
described the distinction between "look stuff up" web sites and "do stuff" web apps:
"look stuff up" are things like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, and "do stuff"
are what we'd think of as apps. "Look stuff up" sites work absolutely
fine on my N9; I don't need a YouTube app, I just use the website. Wikipedia,
IMDB, all that, I get a native-feeling experience, sized and designed and working
fine for touch on a mobile-sized screen. Things like wtfsigte
are a lovely experience on mobile. (Great restaurant site: NSFW name.) The Lanyrd
people (more Jake) have done a superb job with their mobile web app. But
"do stuff" web apps? For mobile? There are hardly any at all. Really. There
are plenty of web sites for desktop browsers, but those sites are not mobile-friendly.
You want a todo-list app? A notes app? A book reader? Not for you. Or at least
maybe these things exist but I can't find them. And there's little to no motive
to fix this, because everyone who might design and build something excellent
to do this is building iOS apps or Android apps instead, so it's not getting
any better. I was pretty frustrated by this discovery, I can tell you, and I could
make this interminably long piece twice as long by talking about why this is
and what could happen to fix it, but I won't.
So I wouldn't recommend my N9 to anyone else.
I'm not blaming anyone for this, really. It's hardly surprising that
there's limited support for the N9 from web devs and app devs and Nokia when
no-one uses it. It's hardly surprising that a phone which is very open-source friendly but has
no apps has its userbase dominated by people who care about open source issues
like low-level tweaking and not about making great apps. It's hardly surprising
that Nokia decided that they didn't want to be in the business of building and
maintaining a whole OS stack by themselves. But that's why I'm indecisive. Do I
actually love my N9? Or do I love what it could have been? No other platform
comes close to giving me the combination of elegance and openness; the closest
out there is webOS, which is also abandoned and on hardware that doesn't exist
any more either. Maybe Firefox OS will solve this for me, but that doesn't exist
yet either. Or Ubuntu Phone. Of course, the other thing I want is a huge, vibrant
community of app makers and accessory makers and friends and users and family, which
is what the N9 hasn't got.
Meanwhile, I'm stuck now. I don't know which of those things that I want is
the best to compromise on.
I'm not very good at compromise.
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