delayclose

I doubt Nokia is willing to burn the bridges with standardization bodies like that.

For some reason the article chose to use Estonian as an example of Finno-Ugric languages, which have all been traditionally considered difficult for English speakers.

Having no native teachers available increased the difficulty, and the WWII usage was against non-native English speakers. That said, the Native American languages that I know of are grammatically quite different from English.

"to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word."

This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider:

herne(k)keitto leu(v)an rei(j)än isän (=m)maa sydäm(m)en

You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment.

Here's a long but relatively easy-to-follow article on the subject http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html (in Finnish).

The only non-fanboy argument in the article is Japanese carriers' hunger for control. This is absolutely true, and might be the reason Android gets some traction in Japan. But consider the implications of this for the user -- why is it that you think that Android is a "good" OS, something that you'd want on your own phone? "It's open and I can do whatever I want with it"? Well, not after the Japanese carriers have their way with it.

"Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly."

I just press the ä key.

I don't see how adding a predefined style called "level 2 heading" to paragraph would be more distracting than adding a "/this is a level 2 heading" TeX command.

That said, I think having a catalogue of suitable elements for each context and a (modifiable) document structure tree is better than either of the above alternatives.

Yes, but he's talking about people who have no idea how to use Word properly. How would similarly "skilled" people fare with TeX? I mean, what, you don't need to be "careful" writing all that "/this is a level 2 heading" stuff into your ASCII document?

Using WYSIWYG with predefined styles is more writing focused than messing around with TeX, I would think. I think the author seriously misrepresents the way Word is poised to be used today (could be that he's accurate about what Word was like back then, though).

Even for ten years ago, forgetting that other countries need to typeset too was kind of lame. ASCII is seriously limited outside American context.

I had always thought European cars had the door on the passenger side, while Japanese and American cars had it on the driver's side. I admit to not having driven all that many cars, especially American ones, but I don't think I've ever encountered a counterexample. I'm sure one is forthcoming, though :)

>This information can be found online or in the manual

So can the information on how you should partition your hard drive for Linux installation. Yet (historically) most people think Linux installation is a usability disaster.

Or for another way of looking at it, do you really think that an interface which requires you to go online (or read a manual) to figure out how basic stuff like undo or delete work represents "good usability"?

Also, as the author points out, what is "refresh" supposed to do in the context of a single message? Just because a symbol is familiar, it doesn't mean its meaning is automatically clear if it's taken out of context. For example, at my workplace recently got a new microwave that has a play/pause button. In this case, it's relatively easy to figure it out but it still gave me a pause.

Live in Tampere, work in Helsinki.

I'll just butt in to say Kobe is great. Lots of character and interesting places to hang out in. Has it's own charm, different from Osaka or Nagoya (which I really like too).

TFA's main point is that it takes companies like Nokia a very long time to ship a new product. Fair enough, but the time frame and the value judgements therein are just ridiculous FUD, even if you consider that this type of prediction is always goign to have errors. A few points, off the top of my head:

1) Nokia had a touch screen phone (in addition to the tablets) years before iPhone, and released another in 2008 (5800 XpressMusic) and a third this year (N97, which the article mentions but which somehow seems not to count). TFA says first Nokia touch screen phones "with crude, unusable software" are due in 2011.

2) TFA claims that first devices comparable to the first iPhone would ship in 2014, and makes a snide remark about how competetive such a device would be then. This is, of course, a completely ignorant premise: Nokia's top models are, and always have been, technically ahead of the iPhone. If Nokia gets iPhone's usability in 2014, why would that come at the cost of losing their edge in tech?

This change does not seem to affect secondary gmail accounts: does anyone know of a way to get them to work too? Or is there a technical reason why Google cannot do it?

In case someone does not understand the problem: I have a few gmail addresses that I use in contexts where I don't want to disclose my real name. For convenience, all mail sent to these addresses gets forwarded to my primary account, which does use my real name. But because of the sender field, I can't use my primary account to reply to these mails, which makes the situation quite messy.

Just so you know, you can still see the email originated from gmail; you just don't get to see the gmail username. Probably not a huge issue, though?

Forwarding email from a random address to a gmail address has been possible as long as gmail has existed. It's not a feature that depends upon Google support.

For the silverlight-impaired, Light-Bot is a similar game and works in Flash

http://armorgames.com/play/2205/light-bot

edit: Ah, I didn't notice there was a javascript version too. Oh well.

Oh well, I think I have to disagree with the article there. The Japanese may have different tastes than the western audience, but there definitely is a huge amount of effort spent on just how the phones look. There are cool design choices (like the swivel screen mentioned in the article), boring ones (dozens of different color casings), and a huge amount of after-market customization paraphenelia (stickers, "jewellery", straps, etc.) available. Some cell phone stores and craft stores have prominent displays showing off ridiculously overdone pimped phones covered in gleaming stickers.

What I meant to say earlier was that this look could appeal to some people in the west too. Some people just want something that looks different than the iphone or razr. I know my wife loved the cute pink clamshell phone she had in Japan (that I spent days trying to jailbreak afterwards).

But you can do that on pretty much any western smartphone, and it's not a particularly new feature. Whether it's good enough to encourage mass adoption is another thing entirely. The Japanese phones do not have a new amazing browser that makes Opera Mini and the Webkit-based browsers common in western phones look like crap, nor do they have bigger, high-resolution screens. The mass adoption webbrowsing on cellphones in Japan is due to widespread use of cellphone-friendly layouts (single narrow column with minimal graphics) on Japanese webpages, and cheaper data plans.

What would you do with HD video on a 480x320 screen?

Anyway, it'd need an extra chip to work, which would make the phone bigger, and then it'd kill your battery when you used it (receiving signal, decoding video, playing sound and keeping the screen lit), so it would be useless in all but a few scenarios, like riding the bus to work (but is there anything worthwhile on at that time...).

I used to have a TV-tuner for my Game Gear. Used it maybe three times. It's a useless gimmick 95% of the time.

The article speaks of excess hardware making the phones "surprisingly clunky", but really the phones don't have any hardware that you wouldn't find in a top of the line Nokia, and the software is more or less equally shitty to use. What the Japanese phones do have is software features that rely on carrier support (like iphone's visual voice mail) and widely available cheap data transfer rates, but the actual phones really aren't all that special. Japan should export the infrastructure first, then worry about the phones.

-The internet browsing thing is basically because a lot of Japanese websites have a "mobile mode", ultra simplistic layout as an option. It's not really a phone feature.

-TV receivers in mobile phones require a special signal to be sent for them (the currently available models can't deal with normal dvb-t, for example [AFAIK]), and there are different standards in use for this in different parts of the world. And well, it just isn't a terribly useful feature in the first place.

-Push email is used to replace SMS, which is pretty cool but that'd require a data plan over here.

On the other hand, Japanese phones generally lack stuff we take for granted: t-9 text input, spelling dictionaries, they use a slightly different network standard (FOMA vs 'normal' 3G),... all of which are possible to fix, of course, but then, it wouldn't be that hard for the competitors to copy their good features either.

I'd say that if Japanese phones ever become a hit in the west, it's because of the cool and different designs rather than features.

In general, a discussion that revolves around the exact definition of pretty much any concept is more or less sure to lead to retarded internet raging.