Nokia 1662 is a entry level FM mobile phone.  It has a slim build and easy to hold. Powered by a series 30 symbian OS (almost 4 years old), Nokia 1662 performs quicker and does not create any lag in operations. As far the features go, the phone offers basic telephony along with Call conference & Speaker phone, basic messaging and a on-board memory (close to 1000 contacts)  to store your contacts and SMS. The display uses 120×160 resolution and offers 65,000 colors, which is better than the old 128×128 pixels resolution. The display measures 1.8″ diagonally and is easy to read. Display profiles / themes are built-in and new themes cannot be downloaded. But the given themes will suffice the basic user.

The phone I bought had tones of some popular Hindi numbers (AMR quality). The keypad is a single polymer plastic having ridges to aid finger movements. It has a plasticky feel and average fingers might be little big than the keys. Overall, it is a disappointment in keypad section. People who live in SMS texting – stay away from this phone. The FM radio is good, supporting Auto and Manual tuning. But the reception is average inside closed surroundings. The bundled earphones has piano finish, but offers only decent sound quality. The bundled battery is BL-4C, which is slim and offers upto 2.5 to 3 hours talk time.

For Rs.1600 (On street), Nokia 1662 is a baisc color phone strictly meant for basic users. No bells, no whistles. But the value and solid build quality, coupled with bigger display and large phone book makes this a good choice.

Every professional has a set of toolkit. Doctors has steths,  medical surgery kits etc. Engineers have Calculators, Draft sketch tools etc., and so on. So,is there any toolkits for a typical User Interface Designer ? Well yes! You have many sets of tool kits. Are you a hybrid designer? You have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Visio, Flash. Are you a Front-end designer? You have Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash. Are you a Usability Test engineer? You have cameras, screen sharing devices / software, Morae, Webex and so on.  Under the User Experience Umbrella, you have all sort of hardware as well as software tools to do the job. Oh even a plain paper and pencil is a toolkit for paper prototyping tasks.

Coming to Gadgets, Do I think Gadgets are part of UX toolkit? Yes I do. Unlike 4 or 5 years ago, today, a software is accessed through multiple mediums like Interactive TVs, Mobile Phones, Exclusive Internet devices, Laptops, Desktops etc. Gone are the days, where the software was developed for one primary medium – the desktop. To simplify the list, lets consider the Mobile and Desktop which comprises the majority. People manage mail, calendar and tasks/to-do in their mobile devices and sync online with similar web services. They even sync with their desktop  software and vice versa. Also ported versions and exclusive mobile-versions of business apps are available now. It is the UI designers responsibility to create the software which is accessible in all possible major mediums. So unless you get a hands-on experience with such devices, you cannot truly design or develop a software and make it a big success.

Studying a gadget’s operation and designing accordingly gives the highest rate of success to any gadget specific app. For instance, take the iPhone. It has multi-touch interface. The human-machine interaction is bit more enhanced with gestures and multi-touches. An application which uses the traditional click type navigation can be improved better with multi-touch, and even shaking the device (shuffle in music player). The advantages are vast. And yes, when there is a pro, there will be a con. Sometimes, apps that uses traditional input methods, when ported to mobile gadgets may not recognize the advanced or new type of interactions. The developer has to wait until his software SDK supports such input methods. Till then, the user interface designers has to come up with fixes and work arounds.

To study the mobile / handheld  devices we should own one. (Or, atleast one device for the team) . We should be a typical user and we should study ourselves about the device and analyse our interactions with the device, app and how we use it. This puts us in the shoes of the user and the result is – better UIs and interaction methods crafted into ported mobile apps.

- Mint

You are marrying a family, not just her!
For any REAL web developer – learning just HTML and CSS is not sufficient. He has to learn the basics of Web servers and fundamentals of associated technologies to effectively code the webpage. So learning just HTML and CSS is just like marrying the girl without knowing her family. Now such a thing might end up in unpleasant situation regarding her family. So what a smart lover usually do is – Get to know her family members along with knowing her. So in our Web developer scenario, the guy should learn the fundamentals of Web Servers, standards, the history, the issues etc.. along with HTML and CSS. Doing so will make the marriage life happiest of all! (Ever suffered a poke by a brother-in-law and blinked how to deal with it? you better learn them first while dating / loving).

HTML 1 2 3 4 … and 5
HTML5 gets a lot of new tags a web developer wished in the past. You know? A web developer spends more than half of his time in fixing bugs and checking compatibilities? Nearly 30% of the code around the world works on making sure the content is displayed right on whatever browser it is accessd. And half of the time, you overlook simple errors and fire-fight later. HTML5 gonna make the life easier for web developers, but then, not much easier. Like in all technology transition experiences, transitioning from HTML 4.x to HTML 5 will take a lot of time and we guys have to write more and more code to support both standards. Fortunately, today’s JS libraries and browsers are coded in such a way that they are backwards compatible and they do not break the code. HTML5 is cool and great!

Start now!
Anytime is a good time. So start learning HTML 5 now, because you have the “early entrant” advantage for you. By the time when HTML 5 officially comes into force, you will be “FIELD READY” to put your skills into action.

Difference between Web Developer and Web Developer:
In real world, people mix up web developer to ASP, JSP, PHP developers  as well as HTML, CSS developers thus creating a lot of confusion in the classification. For easy understanding go with this -> Front-end Web Developer  (HTML CSS and Javascript). Back-end Web Developer (ASP, JSP, PHP etc).

- Mint

Now the basic lesson for an interviewer is to sound friendly, make the conversation engaging and get the most out of it. I thought the caller must be in a hurry for lunch. Or he must have had a bad day. Or, he is like that.  Fine. Let’s leave the judgement part altogether. Judging people over phone is not accurate in 90% of the cases.

The interview kickstarted when he asked me to explain “who I am “, I chose to cut the crap and jump straight away into facts. I let him know that I am an arts graduate and currently working in <small bigname> company. Funny, he didn’t aske me “why are you looking for a change?”. Had he asked me that, “Oh I need a change boss. My a** is getting sore by sitting in the same geography” would have been my answer. Anyway, he didn’t ask and I didn’t bother about that. I gave him a big-picture of who I am.

Then I started explaining him about all the entries in my portfolio one by one. He asked me about the linear navigation in one prototype. Looked like he is concerned about the inability to jump to any wizard screen from anywhere. What can I say? It was my superior’s idea and not mine’s. He was half convinced. Then the questions focused on the Gadget I designed based on Yahoo Gadgets concept and the reason behind displaying a set of links, instead of buttons in that gadget. I do not know whether he was satisfied when I told him that “it was purposely given to maintain  a web experience, because that gadget anyways opens a web browser to access that file online”.  It took nearly another 10 minutes for the session to complete. At the end, he wanted to see my recent portfolio and sounded disappointed to hear “oh. Unfortunately I can’t.  As they are IPs of my current employer”. Then I showed him my contributions to Open Source projects. Finally he wanted to know if I had any questions. I had many, but part of me doesnot prefer to ask. So the call ended formally.

Concluding, I say these guys – <thebigname> are so obsessed with desktop software and their mindset was set ! I am not sure, if their venture into Web Apps would help them get things right at the first place. What they need is not people, but a change in their own mindset, a change in fundamentals. Last – get rid of too much Pride.

- Mint