My delightful, nearly ten-month old son yesterday ate his first blackberry. Unfortunately not the bramble-variety (he loves those, particularly with apple and pear). This was one of the larger, Canadian ones; my life's slightly aged 8000-series. Oscar somehow managed to tooth and gum his way through the keyboard. Whilst the on button still works, nothing else does any more. He was slightly grouchy for the rest of the day… it might have been indigestion.
I had my old Nokia N82 sitting in a draw at work, so I brought that home for my wife to use instead. The BlackBerry was syncing back to Mrs B's corporate account, so all of her contacts appeared to be safe and sound in Outlook. They were exported to a csv file, and then I booted up the Samsung netbook that I've been trialling in recent months (not as good at the equivalent HP), and set to download Nokia PC Suite to sync the contacts via Bluetooth. Except that PC Suite has, in the past 12 months, been replaced by the Ovi Suite. Well, a bit of rebranding by Nokia is fair enough I guess in the face of the iPhone/Android pincer movement that has surrounded them in the past few years.
Ovi Suite is a 90Mb download. The uncompressed installation probably three times that or more. That's an awful lot of program for something that basically just allows you to ship data in and out of a phone. I remember the days of the early nineties demoscene when people were getting elaborate 3D graphics out of 4k. Whilst I'm not saying that everything needs to be written in machine code by any means, 90Mb for a phone sync tool looks like lazy coding in the extreme.
Another example – a simple painting tool from AutoDesk that we've been looking at called Sketch Book Pro. They do an iPhone version of it that can't be more than a meg or two. The Mac installer – 140Mb.
The problem with lazy coding is it is just a symptom of a poor approach to software design and delivery. 90Mb of the sync tool, running like a dog, and no doubt with the ability to have a 3D animated background to turn this “destination software” into a cosy Jack Russell puppy lookalike (through the magic of embedded, uncompressed AVI no doubt). Meanwhile, they've forgotten something. There is no import function. You can't, in this bloated monstrosity, actually get your contacts data into the phone through any route other than typing them in.
If they are lucky, Nokia might find themselves manufacturing Wellington boots again in the next few years…
mmitII 