It only takes a swipe to get to what you want with the Nokia N9, and it all floats beautifully on the large, curved display. Stay in touch with people, news and events. And browse the web. Quickly. Get around with free maps and navigation. And take great pictures with the 8MP camera. The Nokia N9 makes it all smooth, effortless and gorgeously stylish.

Massive increase in apps downloaded:
- FIVE BILLION apps downloaded – up from 300 million in 2009

Whopping expansion of location-based services
- FIVE MILLION Foursquare users — up from 200,000 users in 2009

Surge in mobile social media platforms
- 347 PERCENT growth in Twitter mobile usage
- 200 MILLION mobile Facebook Users
- 100 MILLION YouTube videos played on mobile devices everyday

I decided to test SPB Mobile Shell on my Nokia N97 to really get a good idea of the potential performance issues, given the N97?s pathetic choice of processor, RAM, and internal storage. I figure, if it runs decently on the N97, it’ll run decently on dang near any Symbian-powered smartphone out there. The installation file is 6.5MB, and when installed, reports taking up just that on my phone. RAM usage seems to be around 10-12MB, which isn’t much more than the regular built-in widgetized homescreen on the Nokia N97. After several days, I was also pleased to report there wasn’t any noticeable battery drain from using SPB Mobile Shell v3.5, either.

After downloading Flipboard you enter your Twitter and Facebook details into separate streams, and those streams are then turned into “magazines,” — and they do, indeed look just like magazines. The attractive print-style layouts present you with pages of recent tweets, articles (pulled from the links in the tweets of those you follow), and the opportunity to respond from right within the app itself. What’s not to love?

Well, it’s got its limitations. First off — it’s not primarily a communication tool, in that while you can respond, you don’t see any of the peripheral information that is available on Twitter: people who respond to you that you don’t follow, for instance, are nowhere to be found, leaving the app to present Twitter as something of a closed circuit. Additionally, any re-tweets using Twitter’s official Retweet function are not here, either. Beyond that, anything you want to do within Twitter beyond reply — such as view a profile or follow a new person — loads you into Safari. In this way, the integration experiences reminds us of the Kin’s clunky realizations of Facebook and Twitter… and that’s not a good thing.

Of course, Flipboard isn’t a Twitter app, so our complaints are relatively picky. As a social magazine, what it presents is a little uneven as well. Beyond saying over and over how attractive it is (love the font choices!), I can say that many images render extremely poorly because Twitter functions on small, low quality images and any resizing up causes our eyes to bleed. Moreover, because it turns each link tweeted into an article on a “page,” we noticed how often many of the people we follow tweet the same link, the same story, the same meme… and Flipboard seems to deal with that by simply skipping over duplicated links — a fine strategy, we get what you’re going for, but because the application also filters out any text tweeted with the link, the “conversations” suddenly seem pretty broken to us. On top of that, as of now, it’s having some serious issues displaying certain blogs — we’re seeing tags and meta data exposed all over the place in a way that makes, well, reading, a little difficult.

Flipboard, rather unsurprisingly, is awash in Web 2.0-ness, and as such, many have noted its failure to expose author attribution in a way that’s helpful or accurate… instead, we get to see who “shared” the item, which looks and feels pretty misleading, and it’s something we wouldn’t be surprised to see evolve or change as the app develops. In fact, in the app’s provided FlipTech feed, you get semi-proper attribution — TechCrunch articles appear under the “TechCrunch” name, but I can’t tell if the article was written by MG Siegler or Michael Arrington — a distinction that may not matter to some, but certainly will to plenty. Finally, the app can be terribly slow to load, and it doesn’t update or refresh fast enough to suit the most avid social networkers. Of the two iPads I worked with in testing, one of them has still failed to load in any account information because of server overload, and the other is running at least 15 minutes behind Twitter’s actual timeline, though it seems to have an easier time staying on top of Facebook.

Now, I like many people, use Twitter primarily as a working tool (plus for joking around and talking about food), and Facebook as a family and friends tool, so their respective “magazines” have incredibly different character (I’m not screenshotting any of the Facebook stream because it looks exactly the same as the shots I’ve presented here, and because I really doubt most of the people I went to third grade with want to be on Engadget). While I’d say that, overall, my Twitter magazine is more interesting than the Facebook magazine, it’s also far, far more repetitive — but maybe that’s just because my circle of people I follow is rather small and insulated. There are other bugs I’m assuming will be worked out — such as the fact noted above that in my check, not nearly every Tweet was represented, they update extremely slowly, and they are not always presented in the order that they actually appeared — all issues that are very problematic for a social conversation tool. And, last but not least, this morning when I loaded up the app for the first time in twelve hours, everything from yesterday has ceased to exist, and was replaced by a new “magazine” — roughly three pages of tweets from the last two or three hours. So, 
if I wanted to look through anything older, well, as far as I can tell, I’m out of luck.

Which leads me to the question… who is this going to be useful for? It’s an interesting idea, of course, but who follows enough people on Twitter to make this application truly entertaining? I follow almost 200 people, and have almost 2,000 followers — so this application allows me to interact with far less people than I do on a normal basis, i.e., just those nearly 200 that I follow. Like I said, that’s not going to be a drawback for everyone, but it will be for some (such as myself). Don’t get me wrong — Flipboard has a lot of potential to be an engaging and powerful new way to look at our social media. It just doesn’t have enough meat to keep me interested yet. For now, it’s just like that subscription to Vogue I got a few years back: it seemed like a great idea at the time, but turned out to be suspiciously lacking in content in actuality. Hey, at least this one doesn’t take up as much space!

In fact, if you watch a lot of television, it would be easy to believe that , “There’s an app for that” applies to all walks of life. And with many hundreds of thousands of apps on the different markets, the truth may not be far from that belief.

Apps to Build Apps

But the market is so competitive that some of the players are not content to attract the developers on the strength of their market and available SDK tools alone. In fact, Google has just recently released a tool that makes it easier than ever to create your own Android apps in order to tilt the app scales back in its favor.

That tool, dubbed appropriately enough App Inventor, allows the builder to create games, access the sensors, use text to speech, and even use the GPS – all without writing a line of code. App Inventor puts the power of app building into the hands of the average user… and on the surface that would seem to be a good thing.

Empowering the Subject Matter Experts

After all, what better person to build an app on, say… shopping, than a professional shopper? Who would know more about playing the piano than a professional piano player? The list goes on, but you can certainly see the argument for empowering the user that is the expert on a subject matter in their field.

Can you just see it – nuclear power experts writing nuclear simulations and bus drivers writing bus schedule apps. In a perfect world this would no doubt be a great way to share knowledge.

The Professional Teacher Paradigm

But we live in the real world, and all too often things that look good on paper do not translate well to the place we all live. Consider the idea that a bus driver should give a class on bus schedules. While no doubt the information would be more accurate than published bus schedules (and perhaps a great deal more revealing about buses in general), I am not certain if the prepared material and lesson plan would be up to par with the rest of the semester. After all, bus drivers are busy driving buses, not planning a class syllabus.

Instead, society has professional teachers. These are the people that take the knowledge from the field and prepare it for distribution in the class room. It would certainly enrich the learning experience to have the bus driver speak to the class on the topic of bus schedules. However, it might be a bit unrealistic to expect the driver to bring his own class schedule for the day and expect it to work smoothly with tomorrow’s lesson. Instead, the teacher ties it all together for the express purpose of the classroom experience that makes it interesting and stimulating for the students.

The Developer Role

Now, much like the teacher is responsible for creating the classroom experience, the developer’s role is to create the user experience. And like the teacher, the developer has to take the information and make it interesting and stimulating to the user. By keeping abreast of the latest SDK changes on presentable interfaces, the developer knows what is available to make the experience pleasurable and practical for the end user.

Without the developer being present, the subject matter expert would no doubt be happy with presenting their wealth of information to the user in the most convenient way they could find. After all, they have buses to drive and nuclear plants to manage. You should not expect the average empowered user to go beyond what a generic tool gives them to create an app.

Beyond the mechanics of the app, you should probably expect a subject matter expert to speak in subject matter terms. For example, the nuclear power manager may use a lot of terms that would all but alienate the casual user wanting to learn more about a nuclear plant by downloading an app. So, is there no way that a subject matter expert can use their intimate knowledge in the market? Of course there is.

A Ghost of a Writer

The idea of pairing up a professional content writer with a subject matter expert has been happening for many years. How many great tell all books by generals, presidents, and celebrities have been written or co-written with the help of a professional writer? Let me save you some time and ask it this way – how many can you find that have not been co-written?

The literary arts have used the combination of professional writer and subject matter experts (even in an autobiography, the term applies) to great success. And as general apps continue to mature in both information and capability, this is where I see the future of app development heading.

Future Collaborations and Branding

As apps progress, I think we should see more collaborative efforts between expert and developer. This plays a part not only in delivering the best app for the subject matter, but it also helps greatly in branding and promoting the app itself.

By tying together the expert and the developer, the end user gets the best of both worlds. That is, the user gets an informative app that is still pleasant to use and up-to-date with the latest technology.

The Developer Future

Now, not all developer efforts need to be tied to a subject matter expert to be a good app. A lot of games that are focused on action would gain little by having a celebrity endorsement. And the most cutting edge game that delivers the best experience will get the market. But for the majority of the games on the market – well, they are already a bit cookie cutter by inspection. It would be easy to see how these type of games could be generated by future app generators.

Instead the developer needs to distinguish themselves in a crowded market. For that, teaming with a subject matter expert might be just the ticket. And as time goes on, it might be that we google for the name on the development team to determine an app’s worthiness even before we check out the screen shot. And that could be a paradigm shift in the app market to make the market stronger and better.