N900 Multitasking: Nokia wants your input

Own a Nokia N900?  Peter Schneider of Nokia Maemo marketing has a challenge for you: he wants to know how important multitasking is for N900 owners, and exactly how they take advantage of it.

A new poll at talk.maemo.org breaks it down by number of concurrent windowed applications on the desktop.  The poll has a slight design quirk (it has categories for 0, 1 to 3, 4 to 6,  6 to 9 and > 9 apps, whereas 7 to 9 might be better for the 6 to 9) but it’s not enough to undermine the purpose.

So if you have not already, take a moment to respond to the poll and then post your typical use cases that either require multitasking or explain why it is unnecessary for you.  Your input could be valuable for future product considerations!

This effort has the endorsement of the maemo.org community council.

UPDATE: It was brought to my attention the poll has already closed.  I am very sorry that I didn’t notice.  I’m quite frankly surprised it was not allowed to run longer.  However, posting comments may still be helpful.

The N900 microUSB defect, and your chance to do something

Does this look familiar?

After my post-mortem on the Nokia N900 microUSB failure fiasco I received an interesting offer from Nokia: collect the Care experiences in a clear, objective format, and the situation(s) would be investigated.

An offer I can’t refuse.

To start this off, I am reintroducing the survey that galvanized the maemo.org community.  That survey has closed but had collected a significant amount of data beforehand.  The challenge here is to bring respondents back to the table.  Even more critical, to obtain a reasonably accurate picture of the problem’s scope we really need response from as many people as possible, especially those not having any problems.  More on that later in the article. 

Survey THIS!

This is going to be more of a rant than usual posts because today I pretty much reached my limit on a sore subject:

Flawed surveys.

I was tasked with taking a survey today designed to identify gaps in corporate ethics compliance.  Other than the misspelling of my organization, it started off innocently enough… and then I reached a question that locked me up.

Swine Flu: blowing and overblowing

Medical researchers have warned us for years we are overdue for another deadly pandemic.  The Spanish Flu of 1918 and Hong Kong Flu of 1968-1969 are frequently referenced in public forums as prior examples of a common cycle.  By now people, US citizens at least, should be well informed about the potential of a new viral variant springing seemingly out of nowhere and laying low great swaths of clustered populations.

Maybe it’s a sense of anticlimax, or lingering echoes of the 1976 swine flu debacle, but numbers on a CNN poll (article here) indicate that by far most respondents think there’s too much news about the current outbreak.  To wit:

CNN Swine Flu Coverage Poll

Which begs the question: if little or nothing at all had been said, how would these numbers look?