Ovi.com, and the promise of a better sync

I've been using Ovi since I got my Nokia E71x, and I have it say, it's wonderful.  Or rather, it could be.  The level of integration with the phone's contacts, calendar, to-do list, and notes is fantastic.  And the email system it provides is probably my favorite of all the ones I've tried.  The IMAP support is incredible, the webmail interface is actually decent (I loathe webmail in general, so that's quite a complement).  Even Ovi Chat is amazing, because it uses XMPP, so it can talk to any Jabber or Google Talk contacts you may have.  So what's holding it back?  The contacts, calendar, to-do, etc. are web-only.  No way to access them from a desktop application.  Use Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, Evolution, etc.?  Sorry, no contacts or calendar for you.  It effectively turns Ovi into a glorified backup service.  If it just had CalDAV and CardDAV/LDAP, it would be a great solution for all my needs.  I'd give up on Google's sad excuse for a calendar and address book in a heartbeat.  I already want to just turn my back to my Gmail account in favor of Ovi Mail, just for the superior IMAP support.  I'm debating what my next phone will be still, but if Ovi gets some CalDAV/CardDAV/LDAP love, it would be a Nokia, no contest.  If not, I guess I'll just have to keep weighing the virtues and vices of Android, webOS, Maemo, and Symbian until I come up with an answer.  Right now, I'm still hoping Nokia decides to show some initiative and get Ovi to become a true PIM solution, and not just email with a phone backup service attached.

ADD and website advertising

Web ads should not be allowed to be flashy, animated, or employ sound. I have enough trouble staying focused long enough to read anything without all that crap. I can't use any web browser that doesn't have decent ad-blocking, even though I really don't mind reasonable, non-intrusive ads. And the ones with sound just irritate everyone, seriously. Any web ad using sound might as well say "Just to make sure you don't buy our worthless crap, we're going to piss you off and ruin this web page for you." Seriously, that can only hurt their sales. But anyway, Google Chrome finally has support for extensions, which means it finally has AdBlock+, which means I can actually use it! The ad-blocking still kinda sucks, but combined with the FlashBlock extension it works well enough to stop the worst ads. Of course, I'm still using Firefox mostly, because there's still a lot of problems with rendering in Google Chrome. Plus Firefox has StumbleUpon, so I can just hit a button and find something random I'd never have seen otherwise. It's so awesome. Also, my phone broke, so now I have to wait for them to send me a replacement. That's not so awesome. DJ AnounymOS is awesome. Wait, I'm really off topic now so I'm just gonna hit publish and check if I took my Adderall.

Google and smartphones

I'm starting to get pissed off about Google's attitude about smartphones. It's like the only phones they want to support at all are the one's running their software, Android. They give the iPhone a little support just because it dominates the market right now, but mostly their attitude seems to be "if you don't use Android, fuck off." I've found myself actually preferring Yahoo! lately, just because they actually care about all smartphones, not just some particular brand. Sure, maybe if they made their own smartphone OS they'd do the same thing, but even so they have a mobile website that rocks for phones that can support it (newer phones or any phone running Opera Mini). It even shows you what results are sites designed for mobiles, while Google's mobile site (no matter what phone you have) looks like something a 12 year old designed in a couple hours. Supporting everything everywhere is what got Google to the fame it has, they need to get their act together and start doing that again or they're gonna start losing ground. Come back to the light Google, you're getting dangerously close to the dark side.