Category: Mobile Technology

Read about Adedeji Olowe’s take about everything to do with mobile technology and how the mobile has become a platform to engage and live lives.

Prevent message read status on Blackberry Messenger

That Blackberry share market is having a free fall faster than a rollercoaster is not news. That Blackberry is eating Nokia’s lunch in some markets, such as in Nigeria, is no news either.
It is also no secret that the number one feature that makes the Blackberry sticky is the Blackberry Messenger; quite a lot of good and as many evils can be done on it. One feature that I love most is that I could see when my message has been delivered and read. The one feature I hate most on BBM is that others could see when I have read their messages.
Isn’t that a contradiction? Well, I’m human and it is contradictions that make us Homo Sapiens.
You see, once in a while, I need to read messages while I decide if a response is required or not. But when a message you have seen shows as read at the other end, it could have unforeseen consequences. Proving that you are not ignoring the sender (which in this case, is what I want to do) could be a tight spot to wriggle out of.
I searched online for a way to defeat this feature but couldn’t find one until out of sheer serendipity, I discovered a solution.
You can keep those short-tempered and pesky folks out of your hair if you do the following:

  1. Make sure your BBM is configured to Save Chat History. To configure, open BBM, select options and scroll down to the Save Chat History; select Media Card
  2. When you get a chat from someone who you want to hide from, delete the chat without opening to read it.
  3. Now select the sender’s profile and using the Blackberry menu button, select View Chat History.

You will be able to read all the messages without the sender’s status changing to Read at the other end.
Now, configuring your BBM to Save Chat History is really dangerous and could land you in serious trouble. But since I’m exposed to the same risk, I would probably never talk about it.

Nigerian news on my mobile, anyone?

Last Sunday I was on the road and like I do every Lord ‘s Day, I wanted to catch-up with Simon Kolawole Live! on Thisday but I couldn’t because Thisdaylive.com isn’t formatted to be displayed suitably on a mobile device. If I zoom up to what my ageing eyes could read properly, the pages extend beyond the browser and would require too many horizontal scrolling. Anyway, I gave up and that was it.

All news organizations in Nigeria have websites though the quality and design of these websites is an argument best left for another day. Save for Vanguard and maybe Thisday, the rest are online junk; crappy slow-loading messes that hardly receive proper updates. Even Thisday just earned a bit of my respect after a belated redesign. Business Day Online used to be a joy to read but then only heaven knows what happened to their webmaster. At first, it was an irritating music (yes, music on a business news website!) and now the whole site is just something else.

Anyway, back to my ranting.

The internet is alive and kicking in Nigeria, but on mobile phones. And considering that we spend most of our productive time stuck in some traffic, the mobile web becomes even more important. So, it is amazing that none of the top news organizations have their websites formatted to be displayed properly on mobile devices. You can’t even load Guardian on your Blackberry because the file size is too large.

Any news agency that is quick to recognize the potentials of the mobile web stands a chance to win a large followership (large followership translates to premium advertising) as long as it has good stories to offer for the quality of the news in Nigeria is something else. Maybe the same stuck-in-the-box thinking affecting the quality of the news is also affecting the quality of the web and the absence of a mobile site. Maybe not.

If you want to know the difference between a proper news website and its mobile version  visit Guardian.co.uk on your desktop and mobile device.

Major news websites in Nigeria:

Comparison of electricity tariffs in other countries

The following table shows the price of electricity per Kilowatt Hour across different countries. This should serve as a quick reference to what other guys like us pay in these countries.

Country$/KwHN/KwH
Kingdom of Tonga0.457068.55
Denmark0.428964.34
Italy0.372355.85
Netherlands0.347052.05
Germany0.306645.99
Philippines0.288043.20
Sweden0.273441.01
Ireland0.238935.84
Spain0.195029.25
France0.192528.88
UK0.185927.89
Croatia0.175526.33
Singapore0.173426.01
Portugal0.163924.59
Nigeria (Proposed)0.146722.00
Hong Kong0.123018.45
Iceland0.116117.42
Belgium0.114317.15
Perú0.104415.66
South Africa0.101515.23
USA0.092813.92
Malaysia0.074211.13
Australia0.071110.67
Finland0.069510.43
Canada0.06189.27
Nigeria (Currently)0.04677.00

Blackberry is hurting Nokia in Nigeria

Nokia is definitely the largest maker of any type of phone in the world, from the penny pinching Nokia 1100 to the super sexy N900, the mainframe of smartphones.  While market penetration is good with the cheaper phones, the more expensive smartphones offer more profit margins.

Look at it this way, in Nigeria the cheapest of Nokia phones go for about N3,900 ($26) retail price from which Nokia, the distributor and retailers must have eke out their profit. I can only imagine how much each can get out of that phone: It is probably a game of numbers. The bread and butter is from the more expensive phones. Analysts have opined that Nokia makes as much as 25% margin on the more expensive phones. Generally profit margins on smart phones that can play movies and send e-mails can be 10 percentage points higher than standard devices.

Then Blackberry came to the party.

Blackberry was launched in Nigeria circa 2006 with Glo. It was so expensive that only large organizations could give them to their very senior executives, who were only able to connect to the enterprise email servers. But Blackberry was smart; in time, they lowered the cost of devices, expanded to all GSM operators (is MTEL an operator?) and then brought in the democratic Blackberry Internet Service (BIS). The BIS allows anyone to have a Blackberry which connects to free email services such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and just any other POP enabled email address.

Unfortunately for Nokia, the traditional high end buyers, who normally trade in their expensive phones after every 9 to 12 months, are selling out instead of cross selling. Blackberry has become the new fad as sales are ramping up massively; so if you don’t have a Blackberry, you don’t know whatzup. Every Blackberry sold is at the expense of Nokia phones.

Mobile Internet and email are the primary reasons why people are migrating to Blackberry (save for the few senior executives who are entitled to official Blackberry devices). What Nokia is not doing is to push these capabilities in their phones enough. In my own opinion, on a good day, a Nokia phone will tromp a comparative Blackberry device any day, feature for feature, value for money.

How this would play out in the end is left to Nokia. Considering that Nokia has done so much in Nigeria, it is going to be sad if it allows Blackberry to eat its dinner.

Why can't I swap the OS in my phone for another one?

That has been the question running on my mind for so long. I use a HP desktop at work, currently running Windows XP SP2. But I know that, if I want, Linux could be made to run on it with minimal efforts (which involve scouting for drivers).  At home, I run around with a Pavilion DV2000 that came with a Vista but I kicked that out and ran XP SP3 for about 5 months before laying my hands on Windows 7 Ultimate evaluation version(which is as sexy as it gets).

If I so desire, I can run some geeky UNIX variants on the same laptop (unfortunately, I’m not a geek so that wouldn’t happen!). Even Apple, the holy grail of closed system, can dual-boot Windows using BootCamp.

The same can’t be said for any of the smart phones in town today. The laziest smart phone today is probably faster and better than the first PC I ever used (Compaq Pressario. Windows 95, 16MB Ram, 800MB Hard disk) but I I still don’t get that degree of flexibility.

I am waiting for that day when I can swap my Symbian for Windows Mobile. Or WebOS for Android.