As we are only a few short hops away from Easter Sunday, the Lady Geeks would like to leave you a few eggs to open that will help you enjoy the Easter holiday to the fullest.

Angry Birds: Easter Edition – Android Market, iPhone, and the iPad.

This iconic smartphone app game has released it’s Easter Edition! Celebrate Easter in true Lady Geek fashion as our favourite Angry Birds go up against…green pigs wearing bunny ears. Fair enough. This should be a fun way to spend your Easter weekend, or if you have any long travels to visit family.

Cost: 59p

London’s Parks and Gardens App – iPhone and iPad.

Due to the extra long weekend away from school, work, or whatever forces you to keep your mind and feet moving during the week, we suggest taking some time to just slow down. There’s no better way to spend your Easter Weekend, weather permitting, than getting lost with loved ones in one of London’s famous parks. Sutro Media’s London Parks and Gardens gives you details about every one of London’s best outdoor grazing sports for a lovely day off from work.

Cost: 1.19

Easter App Hunt – iPhone and iPad.

Look around the Garden and try to find the Easter Eggs that Magic the Bunny has hidden. For a bit of fun that the kids can enjoy, download MagicSolver.com’s Easter App Hunt. For every easter egg you unearth you’ll unlock further Easter-themed games.

Cost: Free

UK Restaurant Guide – iPhone

And after all the fun, games, and Easter Eggs, what better way to end the day than with a meal with the whole family. With UK Restaurant Guide APP from Sardine’s Place.com, you’ll have your entire dining experience planned out with a few clicks of the button.

Cost: 1.79

We hope you have enjoyed your basket of Easter apps. Have an ‘appy Easter!

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I’ll be speaking at Heroes of the Mobile Screen on Dec 7th at the BFI SouthBank which is taking an in-depth look at what’s really going on in the world of mobile.

Its going to be a fantastic event with speakers and panelists from across the globe including Doug Richard, serial entrepreneur, from the TV series Dragon’s Den.

Uniquely the event also has secondary school pupils, college students and other members of the same generation, to tell the industry what they want from their mobile, what they expect from their network operators and what’s most important to them in terms of their mobile life.

The event is run by the same team (which includes the inspiring and charming Helen Keegan) that brings you Mobile Monday London, Swedish Beers, Future of Mobile, Over The Air, Mobile 2.0 and Tech Media Invest.

Tickets are available online now for £99 (ex VAT and booking fee).

You can register your interest in Heroes of the Mobile Screen by:

Checking out the website: http://mobileheroes.net/

Become a fan on Facebook

Following on Twitter: @hotms

I would love to see you there.

When was the last time you saw an actual mobile phone on display in a mobile phone store?

If you’ve had the misfortune to wander into one of these places recently you will notice that the walls and shelves of these places are usually covered with “dummy” phones, empty shells in which the screen has been replaced by a sticker. Who could possibly think that a dead lump of plastic riveted to the wall gives an impression of the real thing?

Carphone Warehouse is an unpleasant shop: It’s the only technology vendor I know that borrows it’s design aesthetic from the Job-Centre. At the Liverpool St. branch I asked the bored-looking man behind the minuscule desk if I could try out HTC’s newish “Hero”. I found his reply quite astonishing: He explained that he couldn’t let me try one because they did not have a demo unit and that I ought to look on the company’s website which had an “interactive demo”.

At the nearby Orange shop on Bishopsgate I asked to try out the new Motorola Dext. This time my assistant was able to locate a working handset but unfortunately he brought it to me without a SIM card – that meant that I could not try out the phone’s killer feature: Social networking. So how was I supposed to experience this new product? He pointed me to a fuzzy screen near the entrance to the shop: Oh goody! Another interactive demo.

The previous examples are typical rather than exceptional: Conventional wisdom is that shops have one big advantage over online vendors: They allow you to experience the product. But if shops cannot get this very basic trick right then what value are they adding?  And why, according to Jupiter, over half of all women walking out of stores because they cant find what they want.

We asked the Lady Geek panel about the kinds of retail experiences which they wanted: Virtually everybody said it was important to talk about, touch, smell, engage with a  product before buying.

Women are “reassurance addicts.” Women feel at a relative disadvantage when shopping for technology.   They are much less likely to have done research about the product before they buy compared to men.   And they are much more likely to rely on the sales experience than men. Nearly half of all women have no idea what brand they are buying when they walk into a tech store.

The retail experience is akin to a “vending machine.” Not only that but as a woman, you feel like a bit of bait ready to be snapped up by a pushy sales guy.

Our research indicates a clear prescription for selling more phones to women:

• Find a way to put a few real products on display – and into customer’s hands.
• End the hard-sell tactics and let good products sell themselves.
• Stock a smaller range of more interesting products. Vendors should be brave experts and trust their opinion about what customers should want.
• Employ women to help attract more women and make the environment a place where women want to be.

With Best Buy entering the UK market, tech retailers have no choice but to add real value or die.

There’s no name more feared by the makers and vendors of video games than the “R4″, the cheap, popular add-on to the Nintendo DS that allows gamers to load approximately 100 illegally downloaded games onto a single ‘cart’.

Naturally for some, the allure of this technology is the ability to get something for nothing. There are others who claim that they only use this technology for legitimate ‘homebrew’ software. I think there’s another really good reason that gamers like these things:

As you can see from the demonstration above, the DS is not quite as portable as it’s makers claim. Users of R4 cards have the advantage of combining many games into a single package, effectively allowing them to carry an entire collection in a tiny handbag.

The thing that Nintendo seem not to have noticed is that the pirate product really is delivering a better user-experience than the legit product sold in shops. The R4 cards and their many imitators have freed DS gamers from constantly needing to swap easily lost game-carts.

As a gamer whose happy to spend money on games but really appreciates not having to carry a load of crap with me, I’d like to see Nintendo respond to this threat not by the usual litigation and threats to ban products which hurt their business model. How about some innovation?

Nintendo needs to release it’s own R4 killer. Imagine an official game-download service like WiiWare for the DS that allows affordably priced games delivered directly to the hand-held, plus it should allow a large number of games to be stored on one cart.

That would kill my R4 envy and make room in my over-filled handbag, which would be a real bonus for many women, considering the average woman’s handbag is now 40% heavier than 5 years ago.

Although we are not just a tech review site, as this is a niche well-served by thousands of opinionated man geeks whose mission is to describe tech objects in the most excruciating detail possible, I want to briefly attempt to describe the newish Nokia BH-503 headset…

Since this is just a headset, it does essentially the exact same thing as every other bluetooth headset ever made, just a little bit better and in stereo. Sounds boring eh?

What’s remarkable is not the engineering that’s gone into this product but that it’s taken the world’s finest electronic companies over three years to come up with the something that “just works”. It’s an understatement to claim that the market is flooded with crappy and non-functional bluetooth products. The overwhelming majority of Bluetooth gadgets are barely-functional trash.

This year Nokia seem to have got it right for the first time – they’ve built a headset on which I can listen to music on without annoying cut-outs. They’ve figured out that when a connection fails, the smart thing to do is automatically re-connect. They’ve managed to make a product that can withstand a few months of knock-about use without breaking.

Best of all they’ve made it so you can actually have a phone conversation a feature which previous generations of headset seemed to fail, despite arguably being the raison d’etre for a bluetooth headset.  And the best thing about this is that it liberates me to do other stuff while on the phone.

Bottom Line: It’s the first Stereo bluetooth headset I’ve owned that sounds good, does not make me look like I’ve escaped from the local mental institution, does not instantly fall-apart and is approximately as reliable as the old sort (you know the ones with wires).

 

Rosie Boycott wrote an interesting piece on how women and men’s brains are wired differently, how she has changed her view from believing it was nurture rather than nature that determined a woman’s success and ultimately we are all born equal in line with Simone de Beauvoir.  Now, she concedes, after reading The Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker, that the reason that most women in the their early 30s choose to opt out of the career game is that women are

“wired to resist the demands at the top of those fields.   Women care more about intrinsic rewards, more service orientated and are wired for empathy.”

Nature wins over nurture.  It is to do with the levels of oestrogen that women have, along with prolactin and oxytocin which surges in pregrancy, breastfeeding and mothering.   These produce a ‘natural high’ and tests have shown that female rats experience a greater rush of pleasure from being with their newborns than from cocaine!  As a new mum myself, I never for one moment dreamt that I could feel such intense and strength of emotion for another human being.  I found the whole experience completely overwhelming.

Women are looking for inherent meaning from work, as opposed to domination which is more what men look for.    Pinker asserts that we need to accept and honour differences amongst the sexes and not mark everyone according to the accepted standard of money, success and drive.

Brands must understand that women’s and men’s brains are wired differently and their buying behaviour and reasons for purchase are not the same as men.   Technology brands must respond to these differences rather than play lip service or fall into cliche land i.e pink it up and dumb it down.   A woman I spoke to today, echoing hundreds of women, told me how the fear of not wanting to feel stupid was what prevented her from enjoying and experimenting with technology.  So much of the fear that women have when it comes from technology is from being self-conscious and not wanting to get ‘that look’ which involves eyeballs rolling from a 19 year old at PC world.  Whether the reality of the experience is actually like that is irrelevant, that is how women feel about technology and tech brands must realise this and put changes in place to make women feel comfortable about buying technology.

Consider two siblings: One of them is beautiful and receives lavish affection. She is universally adored. The other left with only her wits and natural abilities to survive in a tough competitive world.

Nokia N95 and E65

The first child is artistic and is encouraged from an early age. She is famous for her talent and ability to entertain. Meanwhile the second finds it difficult to compete. She struggles to live up with to her more successful sister’s fame and reputation.

The first receives constant acclaim from a legion of adoring fans, while the other is dismissed as a cynical copycat, or worse an impostor riding on the coat-tails of the more talented and interesting older sibling. Such is the relationship between Nokia’s popular N-Series phones and it’s relatively unknown sibling the E-Series.

Nokia N95 and E65

Nokia sent me the E65 to review. It’s positioned as an alternative to the Blackberry (which I use as my main business phone). It’s Nokia’s attempt to capture a slice of the ‘Business Professional’ market place.

I was anticipating something sleek, beautiful and stylish. Something as classy as the forthcoming N96. What I got was a wannabe phone: sturdy, ugly and quite plasticly. It came in a standard cardboard package, and the un-boxing was free of drama or excitement. It’s almost impossible to believe that this product is an offspring of the same family that bore the N95 and it’s glamorous successor the N96.

Compared to the Nokia N95, the interface is small with buttons placed ever so slightly too close together for hurried fingers. It’s saving grace is the navigation – its intuitive and simple and you don’t have to read the manual to do basic things such as send messages, take pictures and videos and access the web. Nokia have evolved their phone interface over almost a decade and anybody who has used a Nokia phone during that time will find it instantly familiar and comfortable.

Underneath the serious packaging the E65 is essentially the same sort of thing as the N95 – they both run exact same Symbian operating system however Nokia have decided to distinguish the two product lines by having slightly different initial configurations. For example, the N95 comes with a podcasting application, a selection of games and a great media player. The E65 comes with… well I’m not sure what. There seemed to be a bunch of links to download ‘business software’ but there was nothing actually loaded onto the phone that the similarly priced N95 didn’t have.

The operating system may be virtually indistinguishable, but the hardware is dramatically different. The E65 is like a cut-down N95. Take away the N95′s GPS, the 2-way slider (with extra media buttons), the stereo speakers and the dual-cameras, the support for advanced Bluethooth Profiles and the handy Stereo Headphone socket and you would be left with something with approximately the same feature-set as the E65…

… Almost because the N95 has the uncanny ability to connect to almost anything while no amount of network-trickery and calls to tech support enabled me to make a reliable WiFi connection on the E65.

The model’s position is ‘Style with Substance.’ I showed some of my Lady Geek friends and interestingly before they even spoke about the functions of the phone, the conventional design had put them off. One Lady Geek felt it was very masculine. She wanted her phone to be something she could show off – the E65 is not a phone that Lady Geeks will want to show off.

If Nokia want to capture the female audience, the first thing they need to do is not think of them as ‘business professionals.’ Women’s personal and corporate lives are merging -most people use their mobile phones to stay in touch with family and friends while at work. Instead of letting work into their private life, people seem to bring their private life to work. See previous post by Elisabeth for more detail.

Nokia need to find insights about their audience; they must see beyond “business user” cliche and get to the truth of how women feel about their mobile phones.

The second thing they need to think about is packaging. The packaging should feel like a box of delights. A luxurious item. If you are asking women to choose between a pair of Jimmy Choos or the E65, you need to think about every aspect of the experience: right from the product through to the packaging. The choice of the E65 or a pair of Jimmy Choos- I know which one I would choose!

The E65 is not a bad phone, it’s merely disappointing compared with Nokia’s flagship products. All it takes is some imagination to show how the N series is probably a more appropriate business communicator than anything in E-Series (with the notable exception of the E61i).

I think Nokia are also making the big mistake of under-selling the business potential of their more well-received N-series phones. While primarily designed for fun and entertainment these more powerful phones have all the processing clout required to accomplish mundane business tasks. Why not mention this fact in their advertising?

As David Pogue said in the NY times, Bluetooth earpieces remove….

“any remaining visual distinction between a busy executive and a lunatic.”

I read this and laughed.

I love and hate my Jabra Bluetooth headphones. I love them because they allow me to do what women love to do: multitask. I can chat to a work colleague whilst changing a nappy. I can make a cup of tea and talk to my mother-in-law. Not to mention phone calls sound amazing.

Since having babies, my life has become just one long to do list which I never seem to get to the end of. So when I can get them to work, its amazing. I can forgive the odd stares I get from people along the street (I think I fall in the lunatic category not the busy executive).

But most of the time, I can’t get them to work. I struggle with tapping them once or twice to get them to connect, i struggle with getting them in pairing mode. They have far too many buttons and lights that flash mysterious, baffling codes.

Admittedly, I have not read the manual but like most women, who has the time or inclination? I want to plug and play. I want technology to be instinctive. I get so frustrated. Yesterday after re-pairing them for the hundreth time, I was ready to throw them in the bin. Thats how irriated I am by them.

The Flip camera has so few buttons you can’t fail but to understand what each one does. The ipod is so instinctive you can’t not learn how to use it. Bluetooth headphones are such a wonderful idea but why cant they be as simple and reliable as a wired headset?

My friend I was chatting to this morning, had to put the phone down half way through an important conversation as she couldn’t push the buggy and chat to me at the same time. Bluetooth headsets are a GREAT IDEA – it’s just that every bluetooth headset I’ve tried has been poorly implemented.

The opportunity for brands is to make their bluetooth products reliable and intuitive. If I technology-literate women like me struggles with these devices, what must it be like for other women? I know so many women who would love this product, but I won’t be a product advocate until companies like Jabra start undertsanding the need to make these things ‘just work’.

I heartily agree with The Register’s report last week on DAB’s failure, despite ten years of hype by Britain’s most powefull media monopoly. The Register’s Andrew Orlowski writes:

Well, DAB has to be the best thing to happen to the Corporation in the past decade. It screws commercial radio rivals, who hand over £100,000 for a property (licence), and then must give the “penthouse suite” back to the public broadcaster. The paltry audiences for DAB mean the commercial operators must bleed red ink, while the BBC runs its own deeply subsidised digital broadcasts. Trebles all round!

That’s why you’re unlikely to hear the true extent of the digital radio fiasco on the Beeb itself, and why the digital propaganda is likely to continue.

It’s not just commercial broadcasters who find themselves excluded from DAB – the extortionate cost excludes community and non-commercial projects who simply cannot afford to pay for the license and the high-end equipment needed to broadcast via DAB.

From the consumer’s perspective the future of DAB continues to look grim – prices of DAB sets have come down from their original crazy prices (the first Pure Digital branded radios cost in excess of £500), however at a time regular transistor FM radios can be bought for pennies the cheapest DAB tuner is closer to £40.

The reason for this is that DAB is a quaintly British standard – that has not been adopted in any other country. Accordingly few of the major foreign electronics firms have seen fit to develop a product which could only ever be marketed to a single country.

Orlowski argues that Britian might have been better off DAB+ or the popular AAC format as our next-generation digital audio platform, however I think this just misses the point that there are already so many other kinds of affordable devices that might soon be able to do a better job:

My Nokia phone has an internet radio receiver which can pick up far more stations than my kitchen-bound DAB receiver, and companies like Recieva alread market devices which look exactly like DAB radios but which work on entirely open standards.

If only the BBC had spent the taxpayer’s money advertising a standard that everbody can use then they might not have got themselves into such a pickle.