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. 

Input on a feedback ecosystem

I am about to plunge this often-erratic blog over a sharply-defined edge and into a sea of clear certainty.

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk feedback.

How many times have you been presented with a survey in which you were highly interested but failed to complete?

How often do you play a song you enjoy yet neglect to rate it?

How many software bugs have plagued your mobile device of choice and were not followed by reports sent to the developer(s)?

I think it’s safe to say that the one aspect of feedback that keeps our complaining (or praising) confined to unproductive quarters is the frequent disconnect between the usage and the feedback opportunity.  At least in my experience, far too often the feedback mechanisms are separated from the origin of their need, especially when that starts with a mobile device.  The greater the gap, the less likely we may be to take the step that can actually serve to prevent future aggravation.

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?

Home, home on the range

The title of this post is an old cowboy folk tune that rings pleasantly nostalgic… a stark contrast to what I am actually going to lament.

2008’s economic implosion was identified months ahead by savvy analysts who knew the olympic housing boom was unsustainable.  Unfortunately, people caught up in the event had banked on it lasting just a bit longer… and the Last Ones Holding lost as always.

And so today in the US we have markets flooded with severely devalued houses that act as a drain on the economy.  What triggered me to talk about it today was this short article referencing a study that found many Americans wanting to relocate.  Not surprisingly, the cities targeted for abandonment are those in devastated local economies: Detriot, Cleveland, et al.