Habrainterview with Alexander Zudin (Paragon Software)
Alexander Zudin, the head of the intelligent mobile devices division of Paragon Software, answered questions from the Habrakhabr audience. For 15 years now they have been making software for various mobile platforms. Many people remember their Russification Newton (in an interview in question, as they got from Apple access to the operating system kernel). We asked Alexander to share his opinion on where the market is going now, why there is such chaos among mobile platforms and when endless technological revolutions will end.
How do you assess the activities of Google in the market of operating systems and, in particular, mobile devices?
We must clearly be aware of what tasks Google sets itself in the market of mobile devices. The primary task of maximally reducing the share of competing platforms and stripping the market is so far extremely successful. However, this is not an end in itself. Google is focused on the market of mobile and geo-targeted advertising, as well as mobile services - these goals are quite far from the goals of manufacturers of mobile hardware.
')
Everyone remembers an example of problems with the second version of the Android OS, for which the first models simply did not have enough memory. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the contradictions that lie between iron producers and Google. Historically successful in the mobile market were only manufacturers offering a "cocktail" of software and iron in one glass - Apple Newton, RIM (BlackBerry), Palm, Nokia, now Apple. Android does not yet fit into this outline, and now it is very difficult to predict its future.
The modern mobile market is so unpredictable that, I think, Google itself does not have a clear strategy even two years ahead and acts more like “actual weather”, clearly realizing that for him the obvious money lies in the plane of expanding its extremely successful advertising and search business. into the mobile ecosystem. This is a huge market, exceeding any imaginable earnings of iron producers. In addition, in this market, Google has a huge backlog. I do not think that complete clarity will come earlier than Nokia’s fate, which is also very actively trying to shift from the area of ​​iron production to the area of ​​services and the associated ecosystem, will become clear. Any forecasts in this area today I would equate to the forecasts of the cost of oil or the euro.
Which of the operating systems under which the Paragon software does, in your opinion, the most promising? Maybe Android?
Talking about it is difficult. Back in February of 2010, no one could predict the death of Windows Mobile, which for so long occupied a significant part of the market. Now, few people can confidently say that, for example, after 2 years, Symbian phones will remain on the market or, for example, the iPhone will not share the fate of the once-popular Palm OS, as well as the very bright, but short life of Sony Ericsson. It is more correct to do software for all mobile platforms - this significantly reduces the profitability of the business, but guarantees that the market leader will not be ignored.
Do you plan to release products for webOS? If so, when, if not - why?
Unfortunately not. It does not make economic sense. The number of devices and the potential market are too small. We simply cannot earn money, which, with our extremely accurate strategy, is tantamount to a cross on the platform.
How do you assess the prospects of the mobile software market?
In the medium term - extremely restrained. The problem is that the mobile market is extremely unstable - there is a clear tendency to almost completely change the rules of the game every two years. This does not allow to build marginally sustainable business processes, and, rather, reduces the position of players in this market to survival tactics and expectations of stabilization. If a couple of years ago it seemed that the balance was more or less found, now it is clear that the market is undergoing a complete restructuring without any hint of constancy.
None of the current mobile platforms has a sustainable development model that will deliberately work over the next two to three years. It is gratifying that the revolution taking place in the mobile market testifies to the actual start of the explosive growth of the market and its transition to the mass market category. In the long term, players who managed to occupy a significant segment of the mobile market will be able to count on tangible growth based on its extensive growth. Understanding that there are an average of 9-10 mobile platforms on the market now (Windows Mobile, Palm / Webos, Java, Symbian, Bada, iOs, BlackBerry, Android, MeeGo), we can safely expect a multiple increase in the share of a specific platform while stabilizing the market to one -two major. Now, from my point of view, the most correct in the mobile market is the medium-term investment tactics, which implements Paragon Software.
We derived, in mathematical terms, Paragon’s lemma. It states that the number of buyers of a cross-platform mobile application does not change significantly over a sufficient time interval when a new platform is released or the old platform is destroyed. There is only a redistribution of users of this application between platforms. Understanding this, and the fact that smartphones have not yet become a mass market, it can be argued that the prospects are very good. The only question is how much time and investment is required to achieve a good profitability in the mobile market.
In your company, the sales volume for mobile platforms is close to the sales volume of licenses for desktop systems?
Up to market fluctuations by year are comparable. However, it is worth noting that recently the mobile business has led us to enter the market of electronic publishing, which is no longer limited to mobile platforms, including Mac OS today, conventional Windows systems, Linux products in the near future, as well as on-line Services. In this aspect, the share of revenues from mobile products in recent years has fallen, while the share of turnover attributable to SHDD (Smart Handheld Devices division) Paragon Software, constantly adapting to the market and changing the focus of its activities, remains fairly stable.
How did you manage to achieve such success for a simple graduate of MIPT? Maybe open the secret?
Frankly, I am far from such a question. I have a lot of fellow students from my course at MIPT, who have achieved much more from a professional and commercial point of view.
I still do not have the inner feeling that I managed to create something unique or special. We are simply doing what we were taught at the institute, namely, system and application programming projected on a completely new, mobile ecosystem. And this is interesting. And the commercial aspect in this sense is important mainly in terms of ensuring the growth of our capabilities, which will make it possible to do even more interesting projects.
We have several long-term research projects, but the results we have so far are far from those that could be called successes aloud. We managed to create a stable and organically growing structure that has learned to adapt to the ever-changing situation in the mobile market, and, very importantly, is minimal, but profitable. However, we still cannot build a sustainable model that would provide us with a stable, more than average market margin and would allow us to speak about the significant capitalization of the company.
The success of an IT company, from my point of view, is measured by its market capitalization expressed in any form: from a private purchase offer to public capitalization. Before that, most likely, we can talk only about subjective opinions, or ideological slogans. In the meantime, those valuations of the company's value that we received from the market in the face of seriously-minded buyers and investors are 2 or more times different from the internal vision of value. If we can achieve a balance between the market demand for the company's assets and their external valuation, this will be a success in my understanding. The market does not provide such an indicator of success.
How did it all start? Did you graduate from the university ... how did you assemble the team? What was the first program? How did you earn the first money? How did you invent your program ideas?
The company itself was formed by students while studying at MIPT. If we talk about the mobile direction, it was initiated by Viktor Alekseevich Lopatin, who at that time worked at KAMI. In 1995, when Paragon already existed, he invited us to work on the Russification of Newton. This was our first project. Next, we did the Russification, and then just organically continued to engage in projects for new mobile platforms, which led us to utilities, handwriting recognition and dictionaries.
The idea of ​​dictionaries for mobile computers, as well as the idea of ​​a handwritten text system, came to us from projects related to localization — all this was required for the normal Russification of mobile devices supplied to the Russian market. This is not as romantic as it might seem, but seriously dealing with dictionaries, utilities and recognition, we have gone far enough - today Paragon occupies a leading position in this technological segment of the mobile software market.
Utilities by and large originated from the Epocware division, which developed programs for the Psion / EPOC platform. There was then no fax functionality, having added which as an application program, we got a good example of how to make money in this market.
Did you start as a developer? Then they became Program Manager? Tell us about your career.
Initially, I wrote programs for Newton, and was in my sole person the seed of our mobile department. Before that, I wrote programs in Assembler, working at Fiztechsoft. In particular, I wrote a calculator, which is part of PTS-DOS. And after that I became the ideologue and leader of all the developments being conducted on mobile platforms, because it was interesting to me. Paragon at that time was exclusively desktop companies, all other resources were occupied by existing projects.
Something I do not remember Russified Newton. If I am not mistaken - Paragon did all the text recognition on Newton, and there it worked like how - it seems to me, until now nobody has surpassed the interface of Newton when working with handwritten text?
Here it is necessary to separate flies from cutlets: Newton at the platform level was very poorly amenable to Russification. I have a longtime comrade - Richard Northcott - the head and owner of the Japanese company Enfour. They were always very close to Apple, as they were the main contributors to the creation of the first Japanese fonts for Macs. Apple is a terribly closed organization, and Richard was the only person in the world who managed to convince them to give him access to the Newton OS core and make localization. On the basis of its “patch” we made the core of the Russian localization. Only this “patch” allowed to fully translate the interface. Apple itself neither did the Japanese nor the Russian localization Newton - they were made by Enfour and Paragon, respectively, based on a patch developed by Enfour.
Regarding the recognition system, the English version for Newton was not made by Paragon, but by “Paragraph” - the names are similar and this is what confuses us. Their system is called Calligrapher, and ours is PenReader. There was no Russian version of Calligrapher at that time, and we started creating a system for recognizing Russian handwriting, taking to Paragon with the help of Viktor Alekseevich Lopatin one of the engineers of the team that dealt with handwriting recognition issues at the Institute of Precision Mechanics. The developments of this particular team formed the basis of the Paragraph system.
Regarding the interface Newton, I would not say that it was very convenient. After years it becomes clear that any pen-based interface is not very convenient. Newton, most likely, was the breakthrough that Apple managed to develop in the iPhone. But at that time there was neither technology, nor element base, on the basis of which one could realize what Apple is currently doing in the iPhone.
You Russified Newton OS, in 2004 you made handwriting on the Microsoft Tablet PC, now you are working with an Apple iPad. Do not you think that the story is developing in a spiral and iPad - this is, in some way, a repetition of old ideas?
Paragon is a technology company. The basis of our products in the direction of system utilities, and in the direction of the mobile business are technologies. PenReader is our key technology, the main goal of which is to achieve the world's best quality of recognition of natural (fused), live (i.e., obtained from the pen, not from a scanner) handwriting text. Platforms come and go. Our task is to be a technological leader in this field.
We are actively working with the widest range of customers who need handwriting recognition and analysis technologies: from organizations engaged in the study of human handwriting for various purposes (pedagogical organizations, law enforcement agencies), to automakers where our unique technological capabilities are required. Retail products are also important for us - we have released and will continue to release them for all new platforms. This summer should be the long-awaited version for Symbian, the version for Android and, of course, for the iPad and iPhone. However, in the last two the functionality will be limited, since iOs is a very closed system, unlike the same Android system. Embedding handwriting recognition in it is very difficult.
As for the development spiral, I think the reality is that neither Apple, nor Google, nor anyone else knows the situation in advance. While it can be argued that the idea of ​​the Tablet PC has completely failed in the form in which Bill Gates presented it at the time with fanfare. It should be understood that the iPad is not a tablet in the classic sense. This device, technically being just a big iPhone, basically “attacks” such growing market niches as “reading rooms” of books and some home use scenarios for laptops. All the rest is just Apple's expectations, as is Google, for example, who are trying to find a trend in the tablet market. Apple’s current sales figures cannot yet confirm that a correct solution has been found. I would say that the market is actively looking for new form factors. It’s too early to talk about the results.
From my point of view, the “tablet epidemic” is an echo of the mobile revolution that is happening now. The market is so keen on mobile innovations that it forces companies to be active even in segments adjacent to mobile, which leads to the next round of the “tablet race”.
I think that the mobile helix, at least relative to operating systems, has a simple end called a fuel cell. If we remove the limitation imposed by the battery life and the processor power limitation stretching behind it, the question of which mobile OS is better will disappear by itself. Since almost all known disasters of mobile OS are based on limitations imposed by battery life or by processor / memory, which again reduces it.
The question of the interface and usability of mobile devices associated with a small screen size will quickly settle, as is the case with Mac OS / Windows. In addition, the market is very quickly standardized - one or two will remain, but rather, as is the case with Windows, the single dominant OS. The ecosystem known to us from the “desktop world” will already be built around it - here the development will take leaps and bounds, and will not stray through the dense forest of slow evolution, as it is happening now. All this threatens the inevitable demise of all mobile monsters of the present (Apple, BlackBerry, Nokia, Samsung), but users will benefit from it. The only question is when the fuel cell becomes acceptable enough for the market to be widely used in mobile phones.
What mobile devices do you use personally?
Laptop Lenovo X200Tablet and Nokia E71. If with a laptop, which no one has yet thought of a replacement, everything is clear, then the E71 is today (except for the E72, which is, in fact, a slightly improved version of the E71) - still the best, from my point of view, telephone.
I still do not understand the meaning of the iPhone, and many other phones on which I can not simultaneously work with my mail in working Outlook, write SMS, watch Yandex or Google traffic jams abroad, listen to Ovi Maps commands, look in the open gmail, and at the same time "chat" with someone on Skype, being in traffic. Yes, all this, launched together, sometimes overloads the phone, but I also like that it synchronizes perfectly via Bluetooth with the integrated phone system in my car (which I could not achieve with other phones). I can completely control it from the helm (except for searching for complex contacts), it holds a charge, takes the signal well, falls on the concrete floor or in the snow almost without consequences, its microphone does not spoil from close shots, when someone calls me during workout. Clearly aware of its shortcomings, I currently do not see an alternative that would be significantly better. Recently, being in our American office and going to the Apple Shop, I almost succumbed to the hysteria around the iPhone 4G. However, at that time there was only the possibility of pre-order, and it took me 10 minutes to cool down to this idea.
My wife wants an iPhone 4G, but this, I think, is one hundred percent female craving for actual accessories, and not a conscious choice.So far, unfortunately, I don’t even see close to myself a device that could replace the E71. Perhaps the keyboard version of the N8, but definitely not Android - I have no soul for it. From the prototypes that have been in my hands, I was very impressed with the Samsung Wave. Mainly due to the fantastic screen. We are currently conducting quite active development for the Bada platform. If there I manage to assemble a complete set of utilities I need (I have not even tried to play with Bada yet), namely: a normal calendar, browser, mobile Outlook client, Skype, Yandex and Google Maps, a sane analogue of OVI maps, OTA contact and calendar synchronization - I do not exclude that for the first time in my life I will have a Samsung phone.
How do you assess the activities of Google in the market of operating systems and, in particular, mobile devices?
We must clearly be aware of what tasks Google sets itself in the market of mobile devices. The primary task of maximally reducing the share of competing platforms and stripping the market is so far extremely successful. However, this is not an end in itself. Google is focused on the market of mobile and geo-targeted advertising, as well as mobile services - these goals are quite far from the goals of manufacturers of mobile hardware.
')
Everyone remembers an example of problems with the second version of the Android OS, for which the first models simply did not have enough memory. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the contradictions that lie between iron producers and Google. Historically successful in the mobile market were only manufacturers offering a "cocktail" of software and iron in one glass - Apple Newton, RIM (BlackBerry), Palm, Nokia, now Apple. Android does not yet fit into this outline, and now it is very difficult to predict its future.
The modern mobile market is so unpredictable that, I think, Google itself does not have a clear strategy even two years ahead and acts more like “actual weather”, clearly realizing that for him the obvious money lies in the plane of expanding its extremely successful advertising and search business. into the mobile ecosystem. This is a huge market, exceeding any imaginable earnings of iron producers. In addition, in this market, Google has a huge backlog. I do not think that complete clarity will come earlier than Nokia’s fate, which is also very actively trying to shift from the area of ​​iron production to the area of ​​services and the associated ecosystem, will become clear. Any forecasts in this area today I would equate to the forecasts of the cost of oil or the euro.
Which of the operating systems under which the Paragon software does, in your opinion, the most promising? Maybe Android?
Talking about it is difficult. Back in February of 2010, no one could predict the death of Windows Mobile, which for so long occupied a significant part of the market. Now, few people can confidently say that, for example, after 2 years, Symbian phones will remain on the market or, for example, the iPhone will not share the fate of the once-popular Palm OS, as well as the very bright, but short life of Sony Ericsson. It is more correct to do software for all mobile platforms - this significantly reduces the profitability of the business, but guarantees that the market leader will not be ignored.
Do you plan to release products for webOS? If so, when, if not - why?
Unfortunately not. It does not make economic sense. The number of devices and the potential market are too small. We simply cannot earn money, which, with our extremely accurate strategy, is tantamount to a cross on the platform.
How do you assess the prospects of the mobile software market?
In the medium term - extremely restrained. The problem is that the mobile market is extremely unstable - there is a clear tendency to almost completely change the rules of the game every two years. This does not allow to build marginally sustainable business processes, and, rather, reduces the position of players in this market to survival tactics and expectations of stabilization. If a couple of years ago it seemed that the balance was more or less found, now it is clear that the market is undergoing a complete restructuring without any hint of constancy.
None of the current mobile platforms has a sustainable development model that will deliberately work over the next two to three years. It is gratifying that the revolution taking place in the mobile market testifies to the actual start of the explosive growth of the market and its transition to the mass market category. In the long term, players who managed to occupy a significant segment of the mobile market will be able to count on tangible growth based on its extensive growth. Understanding that there are an average of 9-10 mobile platforms on the market now (Windows Mobile, Palm / Webos, Java, Symbian, Bada, iOs, BlackBerry, Android, MeeGo), we can safely expect a multiple increase in the share of a specific platform while stabilizing the market to one -two major. Now, from my point of view, the most correct in the mobile market is the medium-term investment tactics, which implements Paragon Software.
We derived, in mathematical terms, Paragon’s lemma. It states that the number of buyers of a cross-platform mobile application does not change significantly over a sufficient time interval when a new platform is released or the old platform is destroyed. There is only a redistribution of users of this application between platforms. Understanding this, and the fact that smartphones have not yet become a mass market, it can be argued that the prospects are very good. The only question is how much time and investment is required to achieve a good profitability in the mobile market.
In your company, the sales volume for mobile platforms is close to the sales volume of licenses for desktop systems?
Up to market fluctuations by year are comparable. However, it is worth noting that recently the mobile business has led us to enter the market of electronic publishing, which is no longer limited to mobile platforms, including Mac OS today, conventional Windows systems, Linux products in the near future, as well as on-line Services. In this aspect, the share of revenues from mobile products in recent years has fallen, while the share of turnover attributable to SHDD (Smart Handheld Devices division) Paragon Software, constantly adapting to the market and changing the focus of its activities, remains fairly stable.
How did you manage to achieve such success for a simple graduate of MIPT? Maybe open the secret?
Frankly, I am far from such a question. I have a lot of fellow students from my course at MIPT, who have achieved much more from a professional and commercial point of view.
I still do not have the inner feeling that I managed to create something unique or special. We are simply doing what we were taught at the institute, namely, system and application programming projected on a completely new, mobile ecosystem. And this is interesting. And the commercial aspect in this sense is important mainly in terms of ensuring the growth of our capabilities, which will make it possible to do even more interesting projects.
We have several long-term research projects, but the results we have so far are far from those that could be called successes aloud. We managed to create a stable and organically growing structure that has learned to adapt to the ever-changing situation in the mobile market, and, very importantly, is minimal, but profitable. However, we still cannot build a sustainable model that would provide us with a stable, more than average market margin and would allow us to speak about the significant capitalization of the company.
The success of an IT company, from my point of view, is measured by its market capitalization expressed in any form: from a private purchase offer to public capitalization. Before that, most likely, we can talk only about subjective opinions, or ideological slogans. In the meantime, those valuations of the company's value that we received from the market in the face of seriously-minded buyers and investors are 2 or more times different from the internal vision of value. If we can achieve a balance between the market demand for the company's assets and their external valuation, this will be a success in my understanding. The market does not provide such an indicator of success.
How did it all start? Did you graduate from the university ... how did you assemble the team? What was the first program? How did you earn the first money? How did you invent your program ideas?
The company itself was formed by students while studying at MIPT. If we talk about the mobile direction, it was initiated by Viktor Alekseevich Lopatin, who at that time worked at KAMI. In 1995, when Paragon already existed, he invited us to work on the Russification of Newton. This was our first project. Next, we did the Russification, and then just organically continued to engage in projects for new mobile platforms, which led us to utilities, handwriting recognition and dictionaries.
The idea of ​​dictionaries for mobile computers, as well as the idea of ​​a handwritten text system, came to us from projects related to localization — all this was required for the normal Russification of mobile devices supplied to the Russian market. This is not as romantic as it might seem, but seriously dealing with dictionaries, utilities and recognition, we have gone far enough - today Paragon occupies a leading position in this technological segment of the mobile software market.
Utilities by and large originated from the Epocware division, which developed programs for the Psion / EPOC platform. There was then no fax functionality, having added which as an application program, we got a good example of how to make money in this market.
Did you start as a developer? Then they became Program Manager? Tell us about your career.
Initially, I wrote programs for Newton, and was in my sole person the seed of our mobile department. Before that, I wrote programs in Assembler, working at Fiztechsoft. In particular, I wrote a calculator, which is part of PTS-DOS. And after that I became the ideologue and leader of all the developments being conducted on mobile platforms, because it was interesting to me. Paragon at that time was exclusively desktop companies, all other resources were occupied by existing projects.
Something I do not remember Russified Newton. If I am not mistaken - Paragon did all the text recognition on Newton, and there it worked like how - it seems to me, until now nobody has surpassed the interface of Newton when working with handwritten text?
Here it is necessary to separate flies from cutlets: Newton at the platform level was very poorly amenable to Russification. I have a longtime comrade - Richard Northcott - the head and owner of the Japanese company Enfour. They were always very close to Apple, as they were the main contributors to the creation of the first Japanese fonts for Macs. Apple is a terribly closed organization, and Richard was the only person in the world who managed to convince them to give him access to the Newton OS core and make localization. On the basis of its “patch” we made the core of the Russian localization. Only this “patch” allowed to fully translate the interface. Apple itself neither did the Japanese nor the Russian localization Newton - they were made by Enfour and Paragon, respectively, based on a patch developed by Enfour.
Regarding the recognition system, the English version for Newton was not made by Paragon, but by “Paragraph” - the names are similar and this is what confuses us. Their system is called Calligrapher, and ours is PenReader. There was no Russian version of Calligrapher at that time, and we started creating a system for recognizing Russian handwriting, taking to Paragon with the help of Viktor Alekseevich Lopatin one of the engineers of the team that dealt with handwriting recognition issues at the Institute of Precision Mechanics. The developments of this particular team formed the basis of the Paragraph system.
Regarding the interface Newton, I would not say that it was very convenient. After years it becomes clear that any pen-based interface is not very convenient. Newton, most likely, was the breakthrough that Apple managed to develop in the iPhone. But at that time there was neither technology, nor element base, on the basis of which one could realize what Apple is currently doing in the iPhone.
You Russified Newton OS, in 2004 you made handwriting on the Microsoft Tablet PC, now you are working with an Apple iPad. Do not you think that the story is developing in a spiral and iPad - this is, in some way, a repetition of old ideas?
Paragon is a technology company. The basis of our products in the direction of system utilities, and in the direction of the mobile business are technologies. PenReader is our key technology, the main goal of which is to achieve the world's best quality of recognition of natural (fused), live (i.e., obtained from the pen, not from a scanner) handwriting text. Platforms come and go. Our task is to be a technological leader in this field.
We are actively working with the widest range of customers who need handwriting recognition and analysis technologies: from organizations engaged in the study of human handwriting for various purposes (pedagogical organizations, law enforcement agencies), to automakers where our unique technological capabilities are required. Retail products are also important for us - we have released and will continue to release them for all new platforms. This summer should be the long-awaited version for Symbian, the version for Android and, of course, for the iPad and iPhone. However, in the last two the functionality will be limited, since iOs is a very closed system, unlike the same Android system. Embedding handwriting recognition in it is very difficult.
As for the development spiral, I think the reality is that neither Apple, nor Google, nor anyone else knows the situation in advance. While it can be argued that the idea of ​​the Tablet PC has completely failed in the form in which Bill Gates presented it at the time with fanfare. It should be understood that the iPad is not a tablet in the classic sense. This device, technically being just a big iPhone, basically “attacks” such growing market niches as “reading rooms” of books and some home use scenarios for laptops. All the rest is just Apple's expectations, as is Google, for example, who are trying to find a trend in the tablet market. Apple’s current sales figures cannot yet confirm that a correct solution has been found. I would say that the market is actively looking for new form factors. It’s too early to talk about the results.
From my point of view, the “tablet epidemic” is an echo of the mobile revolution that is happening now. The market is so keen on mobile innovations that it forces companies to be active even in segments adjacent to mobile, which leads to the next round of the “tablet race”.
I think that the mobile helix, at least relative to operating systems, has a simple end called a fuel cell. If we remove the limitation imposed by the battery life and the processor power limitation stretching behind it, the question of which mobile OS is better will disappear by itself. Since almost all known disasters of mobile OS are based on limitations imposed by battery life or by processor / memory, which again reduces it.
The question of the interface and usability of mobile devices associated with a small screen size will quickly settle, as is the case with Mac OS / Windows. In addition, the market is very quickly standardized - one or two will remain, but rather, as is the case with Windows, the single dominant OS. The ecosystem known to us from the “desktop world” will already be built around it - here the development will take leaps and bounds, and will not stray through the dense forest of slow evolution, as it is happening now. All this threatens the inevitable demise of all mobile monsters of the present (Apple, BlackBerry, Nokia, Samsung), but users will benefit from it. The only question is when the fuel cell becomes acceptable enough for the market to be widely used in mobile phones.
What mobile devices do you use personally?
Laptop Lenovo X200Tablet and Nokia E71. If with a laptop, which no one has yet thought of a replacement, everything is clear, then the E71 is today (except for the E72, which is, in fact, a slightly improved version of the E71) - still the best, from my point of view, telephone.
I still do not understand the meaning of the iPhone, and many other phones on which I can not simultaneously work with my mail in working Outlook, write SMS, watch Yandex or Google traffic jams abroad, listen to Ovi Maps commands, look in the open gmail, and at the same time "chat" with someone on Skype, being in traffic. Yes, all this, launched together, sometimes overloads the phone, but I also like that it synchronizes perfectly via Bluetooth with the integrated phone system in my car (which I could not achieve with other phones). I can completely control it from the helm (except for searching for complex contacts), it holds a charge, takes the signal well, falls on the concrete floor or in the snow almost without consequences, its microphone does not spoil from close shots, when someone calls me during workout. Clearly aware of its shortcomings, I currently do not see an alternative that would be significantly better. Recently, being in our American office and going to the Apple Shop, I almost succumbed to the hysteria around the iPhone 4G. However, at that time there was only the possibility of pre-order, and it took me 10 minutes to cool down to this idea.
My wife wants an iPhone 4G, but this, I think, is one hundred percent female craving for actual accessories, and not a conscious choice.So far, unfortunately, I don’t even see close to myself a device that could replace the E71. Perhaps the keyboard version of the N8, but definitely not Android - I have no soul for it. From the prototypes that have been in my hands, I was very impressed with the Samsung Wave. Mainly due to the fantastic screen. We are currently conducting quite active development for the Bada platform. If there I manage to assemble a complete set of utilities I need (I have not even tried to play with Bada yet), namely: a normal calendar, browser, mobile Outlook client, Skype, Yandex and Google Maps, a sane analogue of OVI maps, OTA contact and calendar synchronization - I do not exclude that for the first time in my life I will have a Samsung phone.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/99288/
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