Jay Eye Sea

Ian Leader: I’ve done a lousy job of posting lately (no original posts since August – sorry), and I’m even too late to put in a Christmas wish list – so here’s one for the new year…

1. A decent Google mail / calendar client for the Nokia E-series phones.

2. Decent task management functionality on the Nokia E-series.

3. Tasks in Google apps and a decent contact manager.

4. An off-line PC client for mail, calendar, contacts and tasks.

5. A coherent strategy for Picasa web albuns and Panoramio.

6. And finally…a ‘new’ Nokia 6310i.

1. A decent Google mail / calendar client for the Nokia E-series phones. I’ve been very happy with my E51 since I got it in Feb ’08, and as we use MS Exchange at workm a combination of RoadSync and Mail for Exchange has dealt with mail, calendar, contacts and tasks pretty well. However, I’d like a client that works with Google: Their Java mail client is fine, but doesn’t integrate with the built-in email functionality (with notifications, active stand-by and so on) and it doesn’t have any calendar sync support. I’ve tried Nokia lab’s client (now just out of beta – at which point it stopped working on my phone!), which will do the email part, but is too complex to set up, adding a layer of redirection by connecting through Nokia’s servers (why can’t they just make this work directly with IMAP services in the same way that Mail for Exchange interacts directly with MS Exchange). GooSync does a good job of synchronising contacts and calendar (but has to be sync’d manually on Nokias), but again, it’s a layer of indirection. Google have made this work pretty much seamlessly on Android (of course), BlackBerry and the iPhone – why not Nokia?

2. Decent task management functionality on the Nokia E-series. The S60 operating system does have tasks, but they’re not handled very elegantly – basically, they’re an add-on to the calendar, and it means that your day-view of ‘today’ is swamped with tasks that are overdue, or don’t have a due date. Please fix!

3. Tasks in Google apps and a decent contact manager. Why no tasks? This is easy stuff – there isn’t a lot of functionality, nor a lot of data to store. The sync interface would be easier than most as well. The new contact manager is a common gripe – I’ll just second Jon’s last post.

4. An off-line PC client for mail, calendar, contacts and tasks. I’ve been using the nightly builds of ThunderBird 3.0 beta 2 (or Mozilla Messaging as they’re now calling it), and it looks like this is going to do the job – handling all of the above while on- and off-line and synchronising with a variety of backends, including Google.

5. A coherent strategy for Picasa web albuns and Panoramio. I posted about this over a year ago, and Google still don’t seem to have a clear plan. While the enhancements to the Picasa photo manager (like synchronised albums, including captions and geo-reference data) and  web albums (like face recognition and tagging ) have been great, it’s still separate from Panoramio, which seems almost unchanged and is still painfluly slow at times – and I just can’t be bothered uploading stuff to both.

6. And finally…a ‘new’ Nokia 6310i. For text and voice, this dinosaur is still the phone to have – it runs for ever, has great reception, and is tough as nails (I was amused to read today that the CEO of the InterContinental Hotels Group agrees with me on this). Unfortunately mine was nicked in Italy this summer, so if you’re enjoyed reading this and you’ve got one you don’t need, please drop me a line…

All the best for 2009 and hopefully I’ll be doing a few more posts this year.