Mark Evans

Monday Reviews: Nokia N90, Google Pack, Roboform

Amid the focus on wireless at CES, it provides me with a chance to talk about Nokia N90 smartphone that I've been testing for the past month. Let's start with its strengths: it takes very nice photos with a two mega-pixel Carl Zeiss lens, and the phone is, well, a phone. Now the shortcomings: it's not cheap and, frankly, tries to offer too many features rather than doing a few things really well. Nokia has some nice elements here but it needs to go back to the drawing board.
Now, let's look at Google Pack. For geeks and quasi-geeks, Google Pack is underwhelming because we're already using most, if not all, of the software such as Firefox, Norton anti-virus, Adobe Acrobat, etc. For the mainstream market, however, Google Pack could be hit because it's easy to install and feature-rich. The most intriguing thing about Google Pack has to be the Google Updater program that's automatically installed. Not only will this keep the current applications up-to-date but it gives Google an easy way to offer new software such as Star Office. Forrest analyst Charlene Li has a good stratetgic overview of Google Pack, while A Consuming Experience offers a comprehensive view on what Google Pack's about and how to use it.
Finally, I've been meaning to highlight what I consider to be the most valuable “Web 2.0″ software out there: Roboform. Given the proliferation of new services/applications, it's an impossible task to remember all the usernames and passwords required. Fortunately, Roboform does a great job of handling this chore for you. It's well worth the $29.95 price.