A special edition of Jargon Watch brought to you in association with Research In Motion: makers of the BlackBerry

BlackBerry Orphan - children who suffer from mental neglect because their parents are continually occupied with their mobile email device

Adult pacifier - mobile email device

Is Jim the most evil man on this planet? One of BlackBerry's biggest defenders, Jim Balsillie, the chairman of Research In Motion, says children should ask themselves, "Would you rather have your parents 20% not there or 100% not there?"

I can't believe that he went on record with that quote.

Thanks to Wall Street Journal: BlackBerry Orphans by Katherine Rosman (December 8, 2006).

Exodus

Exodus: Alright. Movement of Jah people! Oh-oh-oh, yea-eah!....

When Nokia launched their latest version of the Internet browser it looked very promising, having used it extensively on my E61 I have found that that demonstration put lipstick on a usability pig.

My friend Ian Wood has been a long time advocate of the Opera browser. I had previously tried to use it on a Nokia 6111 with no success but gave it a second chance whilst at home in Liverpool since my web withdrawl symptoms were that acute.

Unlike the first time with the 6111, both application packages installed with no hassle at all. The application was easy to configure to get on the web.

So far I have found that pages get rendered much faster and more faithfully than the Nokia browser. The picture above shows how Opera rendered the top of this blog on my E61.

More information here on Opera Mini.

Feels like Siberia

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I have come home to Birkenhead just across the Mersey from Liverpool. I have found it hard to find a decent cup of coffee and a wi-fi hotspot. In fact I have had to go down the M53 to find a Starbucks at a large retail park in Ellesmere Port.

Connectivity is 5GBP for 60 minutes, which reminds me of the old cyber cafe near James Street station that I used to check my emails in nine years ago before moving to London.

Understandably, I won't be posting again until I get back home, I am still getting email on my phone via a patchy GPRS connection and I am sure that my newsreader will be overflowing by the time I get back online again.

I had a look at 3G data cards, but at the moment they don't support the ExpressCard socket on the MacBook Pro.

Feels like Siberia.

Blackberry is Bond-approved

Sony Ericsson must be steaming, after going to the trouble of doing their product placements for the new Bond film, BlackBerry ended up stealing the ultimate endorsement from Daniel Craig according to The Metro (November 21, 2006) - The Green Room column by Neil Sean.

Daniel Craig may earn his millions but he still enjoys freebies. The blond Bond caused a fuss at the Casino Royale premiere because only his goodie bag was missing a Blackberry phone.

Why didn't Sony Ericsson have its products in the goodie bag instead?

Memories of Q

I was looking an advert (pictured) for the new Motorola Q smartphone whilst on the New York Times website. What struck me was not the original Speak n Spell-type buttons or the styling but the letter Q in the name. A red Q in fact and my immediate reaction was Compaq.

For those of you too young to remember: Compaq was a company who reverse engineered the IBM PC and then build a luggable version called the Compaq Portable. The company did very well selling portable and desktop computers and even had a popular line in servers. At one time the Compaq supplied more computers than anyone else in the world.

The company acquired two other computing greats Tandem Computers famous for their fault-tolerant NonStop server line and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) the mini-computer pioneers.

Compaq 'merged' with HP in 2002 and the Compaq brand has been progressively been erased from the product lines.

The letter Q was a key part of the company's brand identity, indeed IT news website The Register used to call the company The Big Q (as opposed to Big Blue, IBM's nick name). In the space of four years Motorola and Verizon now feel sufficiently confident to use a Red Q without incurring an association with the Compaq brand.

Indeed this may been a deliberate move as the Motorola Q device may want tap into the karma of Compaq's original iPAQ Windows PDA device, which were all the rage with management consultants (many of whom were given them for free) some six years ago.

Generation Wireless

A number of interesting things that have landed in the inbox here at Chez RC:

From Forrester's First look at contents's new value

• Young consumers are connecting socially in record numbers via broadband, mobile phones, and IM. And technology is reaching young consumers: 95% of online 12-to 21-year-olds have or use one of the three. Still, Generation Y prefers in-person conversation for most communication scenarios
• Advergames - Forrester's way of describing the way computer and console games have become legitimate formats for advertisers to address hard-to-target groups in the post-television age. It is being used to fulfil four objectives: reaching a mainstream audience, creating brand awareness, strengthening customer relationships and moving the relationship towards customer evangelisation
• Wi-Fi hotspots have increased by 145 per cent over the past two years in the US

In Business Week's Wireless Report email Matthew Maier talks about how Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 has shown a turnaround in the beast from Redmond's wireless fortunes with earnings growning 50 per cent year-on-year to 75 million USD and losses being cut to 2 million USD from 29 million USD the previous year.

Like a malignant tumour on the mobile phone industry, Windows Mobile is now used by 36 different handset manufacturers and sold 5 million units this year (in comparison Symbian handsets shipped 21 million units to September).

Marketwatch.com have a couple of news stories of interest:

The market for online music has apparently plateau-ed at 6.6 million songs per month in the US and CD sales are heading for the floor like a Stuka bomber with a fuselage full of flak. Record companies are afraid (but when will shareholders wake up to the fact that the record companies have been mismanaging their businesses for years?) "Digital optimism seems to be crashing down on itself," said Simon Baker, a media analyst with SG Securities in London. "Downloads in the U.S. have alarmingly plateaued, this has devastating implications."

Pew Internet Survey found that teenagers like to blog and download stuff. Blogging is a form of self expression, building relationships and carving their own online presence and that the kids have no problem with people looking at their photos, stories and poetry online. More here.

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Mobile Game Shift

Microsoft finally woke up to the fact that the net has finally grown into the computer and moved its game (extend, embrace and extinguish the competition). Meanwhile, high school girls from Allgeheny county in Pennsylvania complained about sexist Abercrombie & Finch t-shirts. Though by the looks of it, I have my suspicions that the group of PC teens could be not-too-subtle viral marketing campaign by Abercrombie & Finch?

These stories overshadowed news from Barcelona where Nokia unveiled a brace of products at its Mobility Conference (I think that's PR speak for media jamboree and extended press launch). I won't discuss the network side of things, but there was two consumer orientated products that really impressed me. First up was a new web browser for the Series 60 flavour of Symbian OS. Where it really gets really clever is that the browser offers two views: one is your conventional mobile web browser, the other is a 'map' that shows where about on the web page the image in the browser is from. Its one of them ideas that seems so elementary you wonder why nobody thought of it before.

In terms of product design Nokia seems to have got its mojo back. The Nokia N92 handset seems like a really interesting piece of kit. The two pictures courtesy of Nokia that I have posted give two views of the same handset. Through clever design Nokia has managed to have a clam phone effortlessly hinge in two ways. Into the small package Nokia has squeezed a DVB-H digital receiver and a fully functioning smart phone with a camera.

It is also of interest that Nokia is looking to sell Bose noise cancelling headsets with the phone rather like what Motorola did in association with the Carphone Warehouse earlier this year. Someone needs to tell some of the phone manufacturers that Sennheiser make top notch noise cancelling headsets that also fold away to fit inside a suit jacket pocket without ruining the cut.

Jargon Watch

Blackberry Thumb - A swelling of the sheath around tendons in the thumb, road warriors are starting to require professional treatment from an orthopedist according to reports from Associated Press. Similar devices like Palm's Treo range, the Danger Sidekick and numerous copycat devices running Windows Pocket PC / CE / Mobile give similar injuries.

Gamers using console joypads have had similar injuries for years called 'Gamers Thumb'. Does this mean that we will see a move back to Palm's Graffitti pen computing interface? Kudos to Wired News.

Its all gone horribly Pete Tong

Nokia has gone after mobile phone purchasing women with its Lamour range. They seem to have made a classic mistake. Unlike Samsung and Motorola who have engineered small or slim phones to attract style conscious women,

Nokia has taken its inspiration from Portabello market with a mobile phone range that have received henna tattoos (or so it seems). Gasp in amazement at the chunkiness of the phones such as the 7370 pictured, be amazed by their superficially attractive designs. Hope that Nokia can do much better like it has with the 8800.

You dancing? No I'm textin'

According to The Business, the youth in the UK are spending more (600GBP) on SMS than they are on CDs. Most of this is going on flirting. They say its the business phenomena of the always-on age. I say its because record companies are not developing enough artists and the kids don't have the social skills to flirt face-to-face.