BlackBerry Messenger poster at Waterloo Station, London.

It’s hard to imagine that even just a couple of years ago that RIM would even consider doing advertising that:

1. Directly targets 18-24 year olds, and
2. Doesn’t make a single mention of e-mail.

I’ve been spending time with a lot of users in focus groups and testing sessions over the last few weeks in various locations around the world and the popularity of BlackBerry Messenger is surprising, especially amongst under 25′s who’ve moved on and shaken off their goofy AIM user names from high school.

Those same users no longer see the BlackBerry as something for men in suits to check their e-mail with. It’s the anti-iPhone used by those who want to present themselves as having a higher status or a more business-like approach to life – these are the people who look down their nose at an iPhone and dismiss it as “a toy that makes phone calls”.

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It’s always the way. You spend months drawing and building your own mockups – then just days after we finally launched our Skype for Symbian client to the public, Nokia get round to releasing a set of wireframe stencils for designing S60 3rd Edition and 5th Edition applications:

Forum Nokia’s Wireframing Stencils are a collection of customisable user interface views and components. The stencils can be used to create quick mockups or formal wireframes. […] This package includes stencils for S60 5th Edition touch devices and S60 3rd Edition non-touch devices, both in Adobe Illustrator CS4 format and Adobe Fireworks CS4 format.

From a cursory glance, the set seems fairly exhaustive and contains more or less everything you’d need for both portrait and landscape layouts, covering regular list views, menus, alerts, grid views, virtual keyboards and even 5th Edition home screen widgets.

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via theprodigalguide.com

Really great open letter to Nokia’s CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.  I fully expected this was going to be a dull Nokia vs. iPhone rant, but it’s well considered with some sharp and accurate suggestions, not least number 2:

“Stop dithering, renew your software now: There are no two ways to say this: touch is the future and S60 5th edition simply isn’t up to the challenge. It’s unintuitive but – worse – completely inconsistent.”

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Previously it seemed you could only get this when creating your own grouped table view, but they’ve eased things off now so you can use it in regular views too. Nice!

As is necessary on the day of release of a new handset, here’s the obligatory sample video and photo from the device:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Or watch the same thing on Vimeo, which may or may not look a little bit better.)

The photo test is of some lavender in the garden.  There’s clearly some actual depth-of-field going on, and I was able to touch to move the focus to the foreground flower head, just like the demo at the WWDC keynote:

If you install the Android SDK and extract the contents of the android.jar file (it’s just a regular .zip archive under a different name) you’ll find a whole selection of images in the /res/drawables folder; the ones used on the menu items are all prefixed with ic_menu_.

Some examples below:

Most (if not all) of the icons you’ll find are freely accessible by developers and it makes good sense to stick to common imagery for tasks that the device users will be already familiar with.

Oh, if you didn’t already realise why I’m coming out with this now –  you can now download the first beta for the lite version of Skype from the Android Market.

Having played around with this handset fairly extensively in the past week, if you’re really not that bothered about Bluetooth and can cope with a slightly smaller screen than other models in 3’s range you really can’t go wrong with it; particularly if you compare it with its clunky predecessors, the A835 and the beast that was the A830.

In fact, the only real gripe that I had with the phone is that it makes a horrendously loud BLEEP every few seconds when the battery life is running low. I expect this can be configured somewhere but I realised I’d probably find the charger for it sooner than I’d have found that menu option.

Getting started

You will need a MIDI file that is no larger than 20k, and set to be in format 0 – more on that in a second. First up, you’ll need to download midi1to0 and unzip it somewhere useful. Using this utility, you can convert your .mid file to MIDI format 0 that the handset expects. For example, run from the command line:

midi1to0 mytune.mid mytune2.mid

Setting the title

At this point you can then go ahead and upload the file using the NEC utility on the CD that came with your handset, however it will show up as “No Title” in the playlist. It’s a bit fiddly to fix this (unless you fancy using a hex editor) but it can be done with another couple of tools. If you’re up to the job, go ahead and download and unzip midi2txt and txt2midi. Once you’ve got hold of them you’ll need to run the midi2txt tool as follows:

midi2txt mytune2.mid mytune2.txt

Next, open up the newly created mytune2.txt with notepad or similar. A few lines down there will be a line that defines the content of of the first MIDI track that will look much like this:

mtrk // multichannel track  // track 1

The e606 uses the MIDI meta data named “Text” to store track titles. To put one in this file, add a line like this underneath the one above and save the updated file:

  text "My Tune"

Finally, to recompile the MIDI file from your text file use the txt2midi utility you downloaded earlier. You can use the same .mid filename as before, and it’ll simply overwrite it.

txt2midi mytune2.txt mytune2.mid

Conclusion

Your MIDI is now correctly titled and ready to upload. (But on the other hand, it didn’t cost you two quid.)

Tech Digest reports that Carphone Warehouse are reporting sales of between seven and ten thousand units a week.

This is at least partially backed up by my own deeply scientfic research of spotting lots of trendy young things round London having them dangling off of their wrists.

It’s not a bad phone by any means; the screen is sharp and clear, the speed and functionality of the device are all top notch. Streaming 3G video starts almost instantaneously with 3′s “QuickPlay”; the camera is crisp, clear and fast; it does SMS, MMS and everything else you might expect; the games aren’t too bad; it has the ubiquitous polyphonic ringtunes; its form and keypad are reminiscent of the clean white lines of Apple’s iBook; it has Bluetooth and infra-red support; hell, even my 12” PowerBook talks to it quite happily too over Bluetooth.

In fact I think it’s jolly good all round. Apart from that frickin’ keypad. It’s been coming for a while, but I honestly believe Nokia’s achingly hip handset designers have truly gone for form over function to the detriment of the product as a whole.

Maybe it’s the latent Jakob Nielsen inside me or whether it’s (oh, alright) the fact that I’m getting on for 30, but in all honesty I haven’t got the time or the patience to learn a completely new and seemingly counter-intuitive method of using a phone keypad. That said, your average teenager will probably love it.

If you’re considering it, definitely try before you buy. It’s a capable device by anyone’s standards, and unless you’re desperate to make use of 3′s video-calling, you’ll find it the smallest and lightest option for 3G in the UK right now.

I still think they put Finlandia in the water cooler up there though.