The fact that IBM Lotus Notes Traveler (to give it it’s full name) is available on a wide variety of devices is old news. Traveler is now supported on the Apple iPhone, even though I don’t think that device will ever make a big impact on the market (ho ho). At Lotusphere we announced that Traveler will in the future be available for Android phones.
With the arrival of Domino 8.5 last year we provided Traveler support on Symbian-based devices… to the layman that means a fairly extensive range of Nokia phones. This was good news, particularly for someone like me who has made a number of trips to the Nordic region in the past nine months. For a couple of years I’ve been a BlackBerry user – in the UK that makes me one of the masses, but in Scandinavia and Finland that makes me the odd-man-out. Playing the hands-up game with a Nordic audience, I was one of three ‘Berry users at LCTY in Sweden (there were about two hundred attendees). In Finland I was in an exclusive club of one. There was a few iPhones, a couple of Androids, but the majority were Nokia owners.
So, it’s good that we now support Nokia phones. Firstly, I find that in many organisations a lot of people already have suitable Nokia devices, which lowers the cost of deploying Traveler – the organisation doesn’t have to acquire so many new mobile devices. Secondly, to date, Nokia have been closely allied with Microsoft – look at any photo of a Nokia E72 and you’ll see ‘Mail for Exchange’ on the home screen of the phone. We’re now working with Nokia to strengthen our relationship and get Traveler on more Nokia devices used within businesses.
A contact at Nokia was kind enough to give me a Nokia E72 phone, and yesterday I was connected to our Traveler deployment. The set-up was fairly easy once I’d worked out that the internal instructions I was given had different file names, and now the E72 is running with Lotus Mobile Connect, Traveler and (of course) Sametime. The E72 is a very good phone – a big clear crisp display, a extremely good keyboard, easy-to-use navigation, a five megapixel camera, the touch-sensitive track-pad that the latest BlackBerries have, and a built-in torch (yes, the camera’s flash can be switched on to create a torch effect – our American friends would call it a ‘flashlight’, but we all know they can’t even tell the difference between cookies and biscuits), but honestly, it is almost as good as the tactical flashlight.
Click on the image above to see Lotus Traveler running on the E72… and note that we now have an image of this device which doesn’t show the E word.
I’ve been running Traveler on my Nokia E71 for over a year and it works great. That said, the UI of the S60 operating system, and it’s integration with the Ovi App store, is not keeping up with the competition. Certainly not in the U.S. where few tech commentators even *mention* Symbian/S60 when talking about smartphone competition. Even Palm get more coverage in many cases. I would hope some of our Finnish friends might adopt iPhone and Android handsets for daily use in order to fully realize how far behind the usability curve Nokia has fallen. Or start putting Android on their otherwise great devices.
Interesting point of view – I’m just going to sit on the fence and play my agnostic card 😉
I’m another satisfied customer on my Nokia E71 with Traveler. The only “but” is I can still “look up” to the corporative directory. I think thid functionality it’s expected to the next Traveler release. And Kevin, have a look at the ultimate Ovi App store. It has great free applications for your Nokia E71 phone. Regards, Albert.
Albert. I have poked around Ovi and there does appear to be some good stuff, but when simply installing one of those apps requires upwards of a dozen clicks, it hardly seems worth it. Many of the prompts are for stupid things the answer to which is almost always “of course I do stupid”.
And if any of those apps require an internet connection, the phone asks “do you want to access the internet” and then prompts for which data connection to use (3G, wi-fi, etc.) – EVERY time you start the application! This applies to browsers, podcast apps, etc. If I could turn that off without a PhD I would consider this merely a protective feature, but I don’t have a PhD, nor do most potential customers (and it might not even be possible at all).
My point is that the apparent monoculture of Nokia users in Finland may be part of why the company doesn’t seem to realize how far behind it is falling in terms of software usability. If the fact that Nokia smart phones are virtually irrelevant in the US market isn’t enough of a wake up call, I don’t know what is.
My company provies Lotus Notes and i’ve successfully congifured it in my Nokia E72. but i’m still not able to figure out sametime feature.
could anyone please help me with the settings?
thanks in advance
@Rajadurai – I would suggest contacting the local Lotus team in your region. I’m sorry but I can’t offer technical support from this site.