Interview: Phillip Schwarzmann

He’s used to interview members out of the S60 community but today I interview him – Phillip Schwarzmann. You maybe know him from the S60 blog ‘‘ Voice of S60”.

Previous interviews:

–Michell Bak

–Michael Hell

-Gregory Taieb

–Ricky Cadden

So,tell me something about your person.(age,hobby etc.)
Well I’m 28 and grew in Baltimore on the East Coast of the United
States. Since you’re a German audience, you might be interested to know
that my grandparents came from Germany to the U.S. many decades ago.
And I then moved back to Europe and came to Finland five years ago and
began work at Nokia. When I’m not doing S60 or marketing activities, I
enjoying running, cycling, tennis and American football. I’m also a
huge fan of German board games, I’m President of the Nokia Board Game
Club, I have over 200 games in my collection, games such as Puerto Rico,
Wallenstein, Settlers of Catan etc..

How do you came to the mobile and S60 scene?
I came to Finland because my girlfriend is Finnish, and naturally Nokia
was the ideal place to work for a foreigner and IT professional like
myself. I began working with nokia.com and web analytics at first. I
began a personal blog and podcast about Finland then saw a job opening
for blogging and podcasting with S60, and began working here about 1.5
years ago. I’ve been a huge Nokia fan since the 90’s and have never
owned anything but Nokia’s, and when S60 released their first smartphone
(called Series 60 back then), I was instantly hooked on S60.

Tell us something about your blog/ job.
I’m in Nokia’s S60 online marketing team. My main responsibilities are
developing the S60 blogs, working with S60.com, and managing other S60
online marketing campaigns. Nokia is a fantastic place to work, and
I’m surrounded by many fantastic people in the S60 team.

Why did you start blogging?
When I moved to Finland, I found very little information about politics
and current events concerning Finland in English. I began chatting on
forums about these topics, and when the blogs became popular in 2004, I
jumped on board and began Finland for Thought
(www.finlandforthought.net) which became the most read English blog in
Finland.

Do you have a idol(blogging idol)?
I was a big fan of Swedish writer and thinker Johan Norberg and his
blog. I think he was my inspiration to actually start my first blog.
On the S60 side – Darla Mack, Stefan Constantinescu, and Ricky Cadden
are three of my favorite writers. Around the office I call Tommi Vilkamo
(of Tommi’s S60 Application Blog http://blogs.s60.com/tommi/) “Golden
Boy” because he has the most read S60 blog month after month, so more
traffic to the site makes the bosses very happy 🙂

What was your first S60 phone and which device do you have at the
moment?
My first S60 phone was *the* first S60 phone, the Nokia 7650. I could
have married that device and had its baby, I was in love. 🙂 Now I’m
using the Nokia N95. Everytime I get a new S60 device (which is often),
I say “this is my favorite device ever!!” Heh, they just keep getting
better.

What do you like most about S60?
Definitely the extensibility of it. S60 has a enormous developer
community built around it, designing all sorts of amazing applications.
S60 embraces a lot of open technologies like the Safari browser, Open C,
and pretty soon, Widgets. My smartphone needs to be open and extensible
just like my PC.

Where should S60 makes improves?
Smartphones are becoming less expensive so the target audience is
growing. No longer is it just mobile geeks like you, me, and anyone
who’s probably reading symbianworld.de 🙂 We all love to have the
device pile on new features and technologies, but for the novice user,
all these features could be overwhelming. But that’s always the
difficult question in technology marketing, “Do we want to have a lot of
features, or focus on a select few?”

What do you think of the S60 community?
I’ve had the pleasure of traveling around the globe to trade shows and
other events to meet other fans of S60. These are an amazing bunch of
people, the community is so active and vibrants. S60 couldn’t survive
without them, they’re constantly demanding new features, new
applications, new hardware etc. that keeps pushing the platform to the
limits. S60 just sold it’s 100 millionth device a few months ago, it
couldn’t have happened without the support and enthusiasm of the S60
community.

~ by Norman John on September 1, 2007.