Nokia’s brand is one of the most valueable brands in the world (MillwardBrown rates it as 12th).
Nokia is quite close to becoming a synonym of a mobile phone. Whenever I tell someone that I work for Nokia, reaction is almost always the same - “oh, so you make phones”. It is very difficult to explain that myself and a lot of other people in Nokia R&D don’t make only phones, but also software products.

Now internet services and software are becoming central to Nokia’s growth strategy.
This change sparkled a lot of discussions about what Nokia actually is and whether this change is for better or for worse.
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Conratulations Tommi, congratulations Nokia! It is really a lucky break for Nokia that someone with such a great track record of blogging and openly talking to community of Nokia users will head Beta Labs.

As Stephen Johnston said “Plenty of improvement ideas are in the pipeline, and the key one for me will be to build up a sense of community of Nokia early adopters and use them as lead innovators to help us know what we should be working on next.”

From my point of view the most important change would be that of the spirit of development in Nokia, so that beta culture really grows roots, and more interesting and innovative projects have a chance to emerge from our own developers and see the light of day.

William L.McKnight, 3M chairman of the board, formulated management principles already in 1948 where he encouraged 3M management to “delegate responsibility and encourage men and women to exercise their initiative.”

This is one principle I see us in Nokia adopting this very moment.

That finally happened. I’ve completely got rid of Windows on my computers.

The last bastion of Windows was my Nokia work laptop, and now there is Nokia corporate version of Linux installed. I would’ve preferred Ubuntu, but that was not an option.

Migration was relatively painless and that’s yet another proof that Linux can be successfully used on laptops in corporate environments. As a disclaimer I should say that moving to Linux was not a sentimental decision or pledging support for Linux community, but a pure necessity of my present job. Using shell scripts and tools like sort, awk, grep, python, perl and running experiments with web 2.0 stuff locally (even without a network connection) is just so much easier.

The only thing I really miss from Windows is Lifeblog. I really hope that soon there’ll be a way to upload complete Lifeblog database to an internet server and access it via web interface. Let’s see what Ovi brings us when it’s ready.

In the past couple of months I’ve been doing internal trainings, and on pretty much every one of them I was getting questions regarding Symbian platform security. And to be honest, platform security is something that made me loose my sleep a few times over the past couple of years.

But I don’t want this to be yet another post about how bad the PlatSec is, and the reason for that is that I believe it actually is a good thing. Here are some facts.

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An excellent collection of train travel related information on Seat61 web site (thanks to Nick Burch for the link). Virtually all countries and rail companies are described. Timetables, fares, best routes and a lot of travel tips are available.

Just thinking about air travel, tightened security, requests to come to the airport at least 3 hours in advance, and inter-terminal transfer hell in Heathrow or JFK makes me wonder - why don’t all companies update their travel policies to include trains & ferries - London to Helsinki would be a perfect example how an updated policies can be used
It all reminded me of the deluxe tours on a private train from Moscow to Vladivostok organized by GW Travel/The Trans-Siberian Express Company. Takes 2 weeks and can cost up to 10.000€, but what an experience!

Just a couple of days ago I was wondering when Nokia Internet Tablets will get an open source browser. So I was really happy to read today that a Mozilla based browser engine that shares the key components and extension interfaces with Firefox is available as a development version.

UMPC has a brief review of the browsing experiences with Mozilla on N800 (via ThoughtFix).

internetTablet blog reports that the new browser is:

• Built on top of the latest version of Gecko engine
• Has full ajax support (supports Google maps - street view and Google docs)
• Supports rss feed preview.
• Supports Firefox and Mozilla add-ons
• Allows to view SSL certificate details

Jonathan Green in his video post
Browser Comparison: iPhone vs. Nokia N95 and N800 compared performance of Nokia S60 web browser, N800 Opera browser and iPhone Safari browser.

Jonathan’s conclusion “my preference is for how Safari handles things over Opera” resonates with my own thoughts in “Opera Mobile vs. Nokia S60 browser - new browser war?“.

I’m wondering when Nokia will introduce open source browser in its internet tablets as well.

It was also really nice to see that one of the sites used in the browser comparison was Jaiku. Popularity of this application is growing by the hour.

Nokia has just announced an update to the Internet
Tablet OS 2007 edition, feature upgrade release is now available for
download. The update (version number 4.2007.26-8)
includes Skype client support, Adobe® Flash® 9 browser plug-in, improvements in online use times and single memory
card support up to 8 GB.

Read more on Maemo pages.

via Ari Jaaksi

Update 2007-07-06 14:39: Thoughtfix has a nice review of the new firmware.

A pot of honey…

I should admit that I didn’t believe in the internet tablet concept in the beginning. I simply couldn’t imagine why would I need a device like that if I already have a laptop to use when I’m at home/in the office and a multimedia computer when I’m on the move. That is until I got an N800 of my own and used it for a few weeks. Now it is always in my briefcase, on my table, or in my hands.

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Today, after a long court battle, breaking CSS protection in DVDs is finally made legal in Finland. Leading Finnish technology law firm “Turre Legal” was representing Mikko Rauhala, who intentionally set up website to discuss the technology of circumventing CSS protection, thus breaking new Finnish copyright law.

More on this subject in Turre Legal’s blog. Don’t miss an excellent article by Mikko Välimäki: “Keep on hacking: a Finnish court says technological measures are no longer “effective” when circumventing applications are widely available on the Internet”.

Thanks to ButtUgly for the link to Turre’s blog.