no matter symbian, android, windows or java
how can we change Satio or C905 / 901 if we have not
any alternative from SE ? ( nokia n8 ? )

I of course reported this issue to Foursquare when I saw it, including a description of what the likely problem could be.

I must say I’m somewhat surprised when the following mail appeared in my mailbox, yesterday, 9 months later:

“Thanks for reaching out to us with your questions and concerns! We’ve been overwhelmed with support tickets as our community has grown so quickly over the past several months and we apologize if we haven’t gotten back to you. In the hopes that you’ve found an answer to your question on our support site, we’re marking this support ticket as ‘solved.’”

Not really, and thanks for ignoring I took the time trying to help.

your views in print!

Great reply – I was almost contemplating remaking the blog post into a discussion format I actually agree with mostly everything, but I do have an opinion on what that possible feature openness brings that closed systems cannot – speed of innovation: http://blogs.sonyericsson.com/troedsangberg/speed-of-innovation/

In a world with ever increasing speed of development, some features (like Farmville, or Spotify) will appear and have consumer attraction. The platforms where those features spread the easiest will thus gain the same attraction and following.

Spotify is a good example. It wasn’t sustainable for platform X to claim multitasking wasn’t needed when there was a very obvious use case where the user experience was less optimal compared to other popular platforms, and thus platform X had to evolve. It did so at a lesser pace compared to the platform that was already more open for innovation from the beginning, and while one example isn’t a trend, there are already indications that developers who want to live on the cutting edge of innovation know “where to go”.

Their development efforts will be the must-have features of tomorrow, and will be published first on open platforms. You’re correct in that a majority of consumers won’t select because of the abstract notion of “openness”, but they will select based on those features.

Rather than early adopters, I would call them “consumers who understand open and love the benefits”.

Agree that open is a disruptive revolution, but I’d argue it’s a very slow revolution. Early adopters already made the switch and are not looking back (I threw out my TV years ago). But the mass market will continue to buy closed stuff 10 years from now, and won’t even know what they’re missing.

For consumer electronics, perhaps early adopters are not the most interesting segment since they don’t really drive sales and create a market. A mass market — money spent on retailers, shelf presence, campaigns — will be created and driven by the early majority (after early adopters indicated there might be a market). These people don’t care or even know if their phone or TV or stereo is based on an open platform or not. They buy a a particular TV if they are hit by a campaign bus and it has some nice features. Like perhaps Youtube, movie rentals and Farmville directly from the TV, and of course watch DVDs with pan&scan. Openness in itself is not part of their decision, only the features.

So a question could be: which features are drool-worthy for the early majority AND are only possible on an open platform. Otherwise people will buy whatever is in this month’s campaign and won’t even notice that it’s locked up.

I’d go further and say that even consumers who understand openness won’t care much about it. Myself, I love open, but that factor is a very low prio when I buy stuff for my living room or a phone. Apple solves many of my needs. Disregarding the price factor, Apple has shown that even knowledgeable consumers often prefer ease of use and a consistent experience over openness.

Whatever it will contain and enable, for the next 10 years the device will still be called a TV and have a 10-foot UI. The TV concept is so ingrained in our culture. This means that the interactive revolution (where open is a big enabler) will be very slow, moving with baby steps from the current passive experience. So unless a killer feature appears that is only possible on an open platform, there’s no real need to switch to open platforms since closed products can handle this step-by-step evolution using the same old mktng/distribution channels without even a change in pacing. (Open products could compete on price, ease of development, etc, but not really just because they’re open.)

So my prediction is for the next 10 years, the overwhelming majority will not buy an open TV, and if they do, they don’t realize it’s open. Same with a phone; normal consumers don’t really need the openness, they just want a phone with camera, IM, and Farmville.

Question: Who will be first to introduce a TV that is open AND user-friendly? I haven’t even seen a user-friendly XMB interface yet.

Btw, LG introduces a TV with Plex (XMB based media manager):
http://elan.plexapp.com/2010/09/02/plex-and-the-future-of-television/

My take on 3D TV is that it will probably fail simply because it’s not really that drool-worthy and the devices are quite clunky. No sex appeal.