I’ve been reading Crossing the Chasm – Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. It’s a classic, originally published in 1991, but the ideas are still valid today. The core point is that tech products may find early adopters, but it is not a smooth growth curve into the mainstream market. There is a huge chasm after the early adopters and before mainstream acceptance, in which many products and companies have fallen.

My Nokia E61 seems to be a perfect case in point. It is amazing - a fully functional web browser, email client with a keyboard and wifi. And it fits in my pocket. It’s a laptop replacement. Perfect for tech geeks and early adopters. That side of me loves it, but the part of me that just wants it to work smoothly and elegantly is less satisfied. (Some rough areas: Connecting to new WIFI networks is an ordeal. It didn’t know about the new daylight savings time change. It asks for my lock code at random intervals. It’s slow to open folders and applications. It needs periodic reboots…)

I would not recommend this phone to anyone who wasn’t interested in spending time learning how the thing works, or isn’t savvy at debugging problems. It’s just not ready for the mainstream market. I hope Nokia isn’t expecting sales to linearly rise, because it seems that once they have saturated the early adoptor market, they are going to fall into a deep chasm.

I love Google Maps Mobile, but it lacks any subway of bus information. (Besides, there’s no signal underground.) So, why not have a version of the TTC RideGuide that runs on my mobile phone? I often use the PDF version of the RideGuide, but it brings my laptop to it’s knees, so I figured the PDF reader in my phone would not work. (Confirmed: Acrobat Reader downloaded and opened the 1MB PDF, but it took about 20 seconds to slowly draw all the roads and bus routes. Then after a bit of panning, it closed the PDF with an “out of memory” error.) I would need something a bit lighter. My Nokia e61 comes with something called “FlashPlayer” which supports a simplified version of Flash (FlashLite v1.1). hmmm.

So, I converted a portion of the PDF RideGuide to swf, and then wrote a simple browsing tool in actionscript and saved it in FlashLite 1.1 format. Using the joystick on the phone, it pans and by pressing some keys (4,5) it zooms in and out. Neat! Unfortunately, a FlashLite application can only use 1024k of memory. Even though my swf file was only 200k, it needed too much memory to run. I chopped the map down in size until it worked. And then I chopped some more. It became clear that to convert the PDF to SWF, would require building the map from scratch in Flash. (Plus the fonts got slightly munged during conversion, so many of the labels look a bit wonkey.) With symbol reuse (e.g. the TTC logo and bathroom icon), the swf file size could be kept down, but that wouldn’t affect memory usage. It’s unclear how to accurately predict or estimate the amount of memory needed. Big problem.

Here’s the result of my test:

Controls:
[4] zoom out
[5] zoom in
[arrow keys] pan


(You need to click in the flash animation before it will read keyboard events.)

Here’s how it looks on the e61. (Wow, do I need a new camera.)

In short, converting a complex PDF map to SWF works, but it must be a simple, or small map in order to not hit the 1MB memory limit.

Ouch. This thread on ask.metafilter outlines some of the problems with Windows Mobile phones.

It’s interesting to note that a couple of responses mention the touch screen as a disadvantage as it requires you to use both hands (one to hold the device, the other to use the stylus). The iPhone similarly requires two hands, but I hadn’t heard this as a criticism.

Could this be a case of rationalizing our emotions? e.g. We hate Microsoft therefore we dwell on every single problem we find as evidence of why we hate them so. We love Apple (or Nokia) and dismiss any shortcomings as insignificant.

I was trying to figure out the bizarre cursor movement rules in the notepad, and discovered that there are some basic text markup formats allowed.

The commands work by holding down the “Ctrl” key and pushing another button.

CTRL-I italic

CTRL-U underline

CTRL-B bold

The formatting effects the word under the cursor, however if you hold down the shift key (up arrow) and move the joystick you can highlight lots of text.

And check this out. There is CUT, COPY and PASTE. (CTRL-X, CTRL-C and CTRL-V naturally.)