Catching up and catching on

January was too long a month, and February too short. But it was a busy short month and I regret I couldn’t write as often as I’d like. 

I’ve been a using Evernote since I first heard of it a few years ago but I don’t think I’ve ever took full advantage of the application. I think I might start using the app for more, especially when writing blog draft posts. 

In my previous post I mentioned the Firefox OS App Days in Manila, and it was by far one of the more exciting things I’ve participated in. It was also fantastic to meet another person from Mozilla’s HQ, William Reynolds (@dailycavalier). I wanted to write about it immediately after but a lot of work distracted me from writing a post about it fortunately Mozilla Philippines has a recap of the whole event written here.

Things have ramped up since then and from my end of the spectrum almost every blog since the Mobile World Congress has discussed Firefox OS entry into the market. One of the factors being the heavy hitters that’s lined up behind Mozilla’s operating system from Alcatel, LG, Huawei and ZTE to telecom companies like  América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN VimpelCom (source), and in our little corner of the world, Smart Communications. 

One thing some tech blogs have missed during the reviews of the Firefox OS phones is that Firefox OS is targeting feature phones in emerging countries and not catering to the Smartphone market in First World countries. Naturally, it won’t have the features and speed the higher end phones would have, so expectations should be managed on the end of the reviewer. 

Speaking of Smartphones, one phone that also caused waves prior to MWC 2013 was Blackberry Z10. I’ve briefly mentioned Blackberry’s new phone and noted how very familiar the UI was to Nokia N9 and WebOS. Two platforms I’ve come to love, I do have a penchant for falling in love with dead or dying platforms. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpPXHvykHk&w=560&h=315]

I haven’t had a hands on experience with the Z10 but based from the reviews and the videos I’ve perused this phone is catered to the power users and there’s quite a bit of a learning curve just to get a hang of it but once we do get the hang of it, it’s a phone that can help a lot productivity wise.

It’s also working to fix the lack of ‘ecosystem’ (truly loathe the term) by trying to make Android apps work in the phone very much similar (correct me if I’m wrong) with how Alien Dalvick would work on a non-Android phone.

Research In Motion, which has recently rebranded itself as ‘Blackberry’, has a tough mountain to climb. Much like Nokia, it took too long to jump into the Smartphone bandwagon and the company suffered from it, with a lot of its users shifting to iPhones or Android phones. 

Time will tell if Blackberry’s gamble will pay off, I’m a fan of the underdog, so I really hope Blackberry pulls this off.