Size still doesn't matter: Nokia paves the way for an explosion of apps
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on Wednesday, April 04, 2007 at 11:32 AM.
Nokia today announced that it was releasing an Open C plugin to complement its software development kit (SDK) for S60-based Smartphones.
From now on, it's going to be much, much easier for developers to produce Smartphone applications - and Nokia is particularly expecting that a number of Linux-based open source programs will be ported to the S60 platform and Symbian OS. For Smartphone users, the application marketplace is going to get bigger and more competitive, which should more and better apps at lower prices.
Nokia is particularly keen to point out the potential for growth in the business software market, with open source desktop applications growing in diversity and usability.
The problem is, the desktop is still only an inch or two wide. Exactly how far the business community will embrace phone applications that go beyond simple communications remains to be seen: to most users, the term "desktop" suggests wordprocessing and spreadsheet power. It seems the ceiling for mobile desktop computing hasn't been reached yet - but it can't be far away.
Digg : ma.gnolia : Newsvine : reddit : Spurl : StumbleUpon : Wink
tags: Nokia, S60, SymbianOS
From now on, it's going to be much, much easier for developers to produce Smartphone applications - and Nokia is particularly expecting that a number of Linux-based open source programs will be ported to the S60 platform and Symbian OS. For Smartphone users, the application marketplace is going to get bigger and more competitive, which should more and better apps at lower prices.
Nokia is particularly keen to point out the potential for growth in the business software market, with open source desktop applications growing in diversity and usability.
The problem is, the desktop is still only an inch or two wide. Exactly how far the business community will embrace phone applications that go beyond simple communications remains to be seen: to most users, the term "desktop" suggests wordprocessing and spreadsheet power. It seems the ceiling for mobile desktop computing hasn't been reached yet - but it can't be far away.
Digg : ma.gnolia : Newsvine : reddit : Spurl : StumbleUpon : Wink
tags: Nokia, S60, SymbianOS
Howto: use a hands-free kit without seeming insane
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on at 4:36 AM.
Even in today's liberal climate, it's socially important not to be perceived as a unstable schizoid maniac. Walking down a busy street using a hands-free kit with your mobile phone may be convenient, but it's not helpful when projecting an image of sanity to the world. You may be talking to your friend Jim who lives in Beaver Crossing, Nebraska, but it appears to other people that you are having an animated conversation with yourself. Five key strategies for dealing with this problem:
1. As you walk past other people, smile and point at the side of your head so they can see the bluetooth earpiece you're wearing. This is fine in quiet surroundings, but on a busy street it begins to become impractical and tiring.
2. Push your finger against the hands-free earpiece. This is a very good solution, as it draws the attention of passers-by to the fact you're on the phone to somebody. Unfortunately, it kind of negates the point of using hands-free in the first place. Also, if you have long hair that conceals the earpiece, you'll look a guy who is walking along muttering to himself, with his finger in his ear.
3. Buy two hands-free kits and wear one in each ear. Not only do you get stereo sound, but people on both sides can see you're wearing an earpiece. You look kind of strange from behind, though. At least you won't be able to hear the taunts from the line of teenagers following you, laughing, pointing and throwing stones.
4. Techies only: enlarge and customize your hands-free kit, rerouting the microphone and speakers through a pilot's headset. Complete the look with a pair of aviator shades, a shirt, braided epaulettes and a tie. Everyone will think you are simply a pilot who has taken the wrong exit out of the airport restroom in a strange city and is seeking assistance from Air Traffic Control. For added effect, intersperse your conversation with phrases like "roger that, control" and "this is charlie alpha eight three niner, approaching checkout at TK Maxx - request nav guidance".
5. Dress as an orthodox Jewish rabbi, complete with yarmulke and long side-locks. These will conceal your hands-free kit, and passers-by will simply think you are reciting extracts from the Talmud under your breath. For added realism, offer to perform circumcisions on passing infants.
Alternatively, you could leave your hands free in the car and use your handset like the rest of us.
tags: hands-free, bluetooth, phones
1. As you walk past other people, smile and point at the side of your head so they can see the bluetooth earpiece you're wearing. This is fine in quiet surroundings, but on a busy street it begins to become impractical and tiring.
2. Push your finger against the hands-free earpiece. This is a very good solution, as it draws the attention of passers-by to the fact you're on the phone to somebody. Unfortunately, it kind of negates the point of using hands-free in the first place. Also, if you have long hair that conceals the earpiece, you'll look a guy who is walking along muttering to himself, with his finger in his ear.
3. Buy two hands-free kits and wear one in each ear. Not only do you get stereo sound, but people on both sides can see you're wearing an earpiece. You look kind of strange from behind, though. At least you won't be able to hear the taunts from the line of teenagers following you, laughing, pointing and throwing stones.
4. Techies only: enlarge and customize your hands-free kit, rerouting the microphone and speakers through a pilot's headset. Complete the look with a pair of aviator shades, a shirt, braided epaulettes and a tie. Everyone will think you are simply a pilot who has taken the wrong exit out of the airport restroom in a strange city and is seeking assistance from Air Traffic Control. For added effect, intersperse your conversation with phrases like "roger that, control" and "this is charlie alpha eight three niner, approaching checkout at TK Maxx - request nav guidance".
5. Dress as an orthodox Jewish rabbi, complete with yarmulke and long side-locks. These will conceal your hands-free kit, and passers-by will simply think you are reciting extracts from the Talmud under your breath. For added realism, offer to perform circumcisions on passing infants.
Alternatively, you could leave your hands free in the car and use your handset like the rest of us.
tags: hands-free, bluetooth, phones
Vodafone Mobile Connect USB modem: not exactly great
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on Monday, April 02, 2007 at 6:12 AM.
£45 a month is rather a lot to pay for access to the Internet, even if that access is high speed and available more or less anywhere you can get a mobile signal. Even so, in my line oF work being able to get web access anywhere without having to hunt around for a wifi hotspot (which usually means sitting in Starbucks drinking crappy coffee for an hour) is very useful. So I decided to sign up to Vodafone's Mobile Connect service. Rather than the old style plugin card, you get a dinky little lozenge-shaped modem that connects to your laptop's USB port. The modem automatically checks for a signal, connecting at 56Kps by default but achieving megabit speeds if a 3G network is available.
I added the billing to my Vodafone business account and gleefully scuttled home with my new toy.
The disappointment began five minutes later. First off, I discovered that what is advertised as an "unlimited" plan isn't exactly unlimited. Vodafone's small print informed me that, for the purposes of the Mobile Connect USB Modem, the word "unlimited" means "1 gig of downloads per month". A single gig isn't very much even by standard business use, so calling an account with a 1 gig practical limit "unlimited" is, frankly, taking the piss.
Second, the Mobile Connect does not like Macs. After an hour messing around trying to make it work, I phoned the helpline. The guy at the other end told me that it doesn't really work very well with Macs, and offered me my money back. This apparently, was old news at Vodafone HQ - but it seems they chose to advertise it as being Mac-compatible, oh, just for the hell of it. After a lot of messing about, reinstalling the driver software twice and doing some seriously kinky messing about at the command prompt, I got the thing working.
A month down the line, I've got a new laptop. Now I discover that if Vodafone Mobile Connect doesn't like Macs, it just doesn't understand Windows Vista at all. According to Vodafone, the right drivers will be available next month. Or the month after. Even though the Vista API was released to developers in January 2006. So right now I'm paying £45 per month for a connection I can't even use with my main work laptop, which is running Microsoft's now-mainstream OS. When I bought the bloody thing, there was nothing in the documentation to indicate that Vista compatibility might be a problem.
So what we have here is a product that could be quite good but actually sucks quite hard, probably because it was pushed through and released too early. It's also fecking expensive. Conclusion: don't bother.
tags: Vodafone, wireless, 3G
I added the billing to my Vodafone business account and gleefully scuttled home with my new toy.
The disappointment began five minutes later. First off, I discovered that what is advertised as an "unlimited" plan isn't exactly unlimited. Vodafone's small print informed me that, for the purposes of the Mobile Connect USB Modem, the word "unlimited" means "1 gig of downloads per month". A single gig isn't very much even by standard business use, so calling an account with a 1 gig practical limit "unlimited" is, frankly, taking the piss.
Second, the Mobile Connect does not like Macs. After an hour messing around trying to make it work, I phoned the helpline. The guy at the other end told me that it doesn't really work very well with Macs, and offered me my money back. This apparently, was old news at Vodafone HQ - but it seems they chose to advertise it as being Mac-compatible, oh, just for the hell of it. After a lot of messing about, reinstalling the driver software twice and doing some seriously kinky messing about at the command prompt, I got the thing working.
A month down the line, I've got a new laptop. Now I discover that if Vodafone Mobile Connect doesn't like Macs, it just doesn't understand Windows Vista at all. According to Vodafone, the right drivers will be available next month. Or the month after. Even though the Vista API was released to developers in January 2006. So right now I'm paying £45 per month for a connection I can't even use with my main work laptop, which is running Microsoft's now-mainstream OS. When I bought the bloody thing, there was nothing in the documentation to indicate that Vista compatibility might be a problem.
So what we have here is a product that could be quite good but actually sucks quite hard, probably because it was pushed through and released too early. It's also fecking expensive. Conclusion: don't bother.
tags: Vodafone, wireless, 3G
If you live in the UK, you should be aware that from today the penalty for using a mobile while you're driving becomes even tougher. So when you're grovelling to the copper who has pulled you over, be sure to make extra nice and omit any
(a) oinking noises
(b) speculation about why s/he isn't out catching real criminals.
Or it's three points and a sixty quid fine for Gordon Brown to spend on hiring social workers. And you wouldn't want to be responsible for more of those, would you?
(a) oinking noises
(b) speculation about why s/he isn't out catching real criminals.
Or it's three points and a sixty quid fine for Gordon Brown to spend on hiring social workers. And you wouldn't want to be responsible for more of those, would you?
Today, I finally got round to upgrading my phone. I've been with Vodafone from more than ten years now, and I've always been very happy with their service. The only thing that annoys me is that my current contract cycle is 18 months in length. By the end of that amount of time the average phone is pretty much falling to pieces in my pocket.
I'm guessing that I am not they probably call a heavy-duty user. I know that makes me sound like some kind of crazed addict, and I have to say the comparison is not entirely inappropriate. Not only do I tend to leave my phone in my pocket, rattling around with keys and coins, I constantly fiddle with the damn thing. My last phone was a clamshell, and after I had flicked it open and shut about a million times the only thing it was good for was swatting flies.
So this time I've gone for a rough and tough Nokia 5500. This is the Fort Knox of phones. Made exclusively of toughened plastic, rubber and steel, it's the sort of thing you could take to the bottom of the Marianas Trench and drop depth charges on all day. Afterwards it would still be full of battery and quite a fit for a game of mobile Sudoku. The only downside is that it is a little on the chunky side by the standards of modern phones. That's a price I'm quite willing to pay for something that is actually going to stay the course.
I'm guessing that I am not they probably call a heavy-duty user. I know that makes me sound like some kind of crazed addict, and I have to say the comparison is not entirely inappropriate. Not only do I tend to leave my phone in my pocket, rattling around with keys and coins, I constantly fiddle with the damn thing. My last phone was a clamshell, and after I had flicked it open and shut about a million times the only thing it was good for was swatting flies.
So this time I've gone for a rough and tough Nokia 5500. This is the Fort Knox of phones. Made exclusively of toughened plastic, rubber and steel, it's the sort of thing you could take to the bottom of the Marianas Trench and drop depth charges on all day. Afterwards it would still be full of battery and quite a fit for a game of mobile Sudoku. The only downside is that it is a little on the chunky side by the standards of modern phones. That's a price I'm quite willing to pay for something that is actually going to stay the course.
Disrupting a class with your cell phone: three classic strategies
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on Sunday, September 03, 2006 at 10:42 PM.
Anyone under the age of 14 will tell you that the a cell phone is an ideal tool for causing mayhem in the classroom. That's why the damn things were invented. If people wanted a piece of mobile technology just to communicate with one another we'd still be using paper cups and very long pieces of string.
If you know any little kids, here are three tips to pass on to them before school starts - each guaranteed to give teachers' blood the kind of pressure you usually only find in Space Shuttle fuel pumps:
1. First one comes courtesy of Nokia, the first mobile provider (I think) to include calculator modes in their cell phones. In the middle of a lesson, get your phone out and start messing around with it. When your teacher tells you to put it away, say 'but I'm using it as a calculator!' in a bright and helpful voice. Do this even if you're in a history or religious studies lesson. In fact, especially then.
2. In a quiet moment, whip out your cell phone and start flicking through the media gallery. Announce you have a picture of your girlfriend naked and invite the teacher to look at it. Watch his facial expression flit from anger to shock, to prurient interest, to frustrated lust, to shame and then back to anger again, all in the space of about two seconds. If your phone is a Nokia N90 - or any other model with a twist-and-shoot architecture - spin the screen round to face the teacher and say 'I'm bringing it up.....now'. Watch him dive.
3. The greatest gag of all uses a much-overlooked piece of cell phone technology: the voice recorder. Wait until your teacher gets mad, or, even better, provoke him in some way. When he reaches the peak of rage flip on the recorder. Hopefully you'll pick up some slander or obscenity. When he's calmed down, play the recording back at full volume. Put on a serious expression and warn him you're also going to play it to your parents and and to senior staff members. Sit back and enjoy as he spends the rest of the lesson pleading for his career.
Ha, ha ha, all jolly good fun. Please don't actually do any of the above, and if you do, don't tell them it was me that told you.
If you know any little kids, here are three tips to pass on to them before school starts - each guaranteed to give teachers' blood the kind of pressure you usually only find in Space Shuttle fuel pumps:
1. First one comes courtesy of Nokia, the first mobile provider (I think) to include calculator modes in their cell phones. In the middle of a lesson, get your phone out and start messing around with it. When your teacher tells you to put it away, say 'but I'm using it as a calculator!' in a bright and helpful voice. Do this even if you're in a history or religious studies lesson. In fact, especially then.
2. In a quiet moment, whip out your cell phone and start flicking through the media gallery. Announce you have a picture of your girlfriend naked and invite the teacher to look at it. Watch his facial expression flit from anger to shock, to prurient interest, to frustrated lust, to shame and then back to anger again, all in the space of about two seconds. If your phone is a Nokia N90 - or any other model with a twist-and-shoot architecture - spin the screen round to face the teacher and say 'I'm bringing it up.....now'. Watch him dive.
3. The greatest gag of all uses a much-overlooked piece of cell phone technology: the voice recorder. Wait until your teacher gets mad, or, even better, provoke him in some way. When he reaches the peak of rage flip on the recorder. Hopefully you'll pick up some slander or obscenity. When he's calmed down, play the recording back at full volume. Put on a serious expression and warn him you're also going to play it to your parents and and to senior staff members. Sit back and enjoy as he spends the rest of the lesson pleading for his career.
Ha, ha ha, all jolly good fun. Please don't actually do any of the above, and if you do, don't tell them it was me that told you.
New Samsung Ultra Editions: a little bit of ooh-la-la
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on at 12:08 PM.
Samsung held the European product launches for the new 3G phones in their Ultra Edition range last week. These are basically riffs on the 'so slim it bends' design of the Ultra Edition phones the company launched back at the start of this year, though none is as spectacularly skinny as the X820s, which at 6.9mm thickness, ain't going to be beat for quite some time.
The Z720 (13.8mm) is positively chubby compared to its slightly older cousin, but it remains the thinnest HSDPA slide-up cell phone on the market. The Z370 and Z260 are a bit narrower, using Samsung's advanced materials science to make them thin but strong.
So much for the detail. What's really interesting is the place they chose for the product launch: the Louvre, Paris. Launch location is the sort of thing that brand managers lie awake all night thinking about. So what does this choice tell us about the way Samsung wants us to view its new mobiles?
Well, before the French Revolution the Louvre was a royal palace - but presumably the Korean guys don't want us to associate their technology with an old, decadent, inefficient, despotic, uncaring organisation staffed by bewigged, puffy-faced autocrats. These days the Louvre is an art gallery containing famous pieces such as the Mona Lisa, so it's more likely they want us to consider the Ultra Edition phones as works of art, instant design classics that will live in our collective imagination for generations.
Maybe branding people just get carried away. Check out the Samsung Ultra Edition 3Gs. Whether they're works of art is a matter of opinion, but each one is a pretty damn fine cell phone.
The Z720 (13.8mm) is positively chubby compared to its slightly older cousin, but it remains the thinnest HSDPA slide-up cell phone on the market. The Z370 and Z260 are a bit narrower, using Samsung's advanced materials science to make them thin but strong.
So much for the detail. What's really interesting is the place they chose for the product launch: the Louvre, Paris. Launch location is the sort of thing that brand managers lie awake all night thinking about. So what does this choice tell us about the way Samsung wants us to view its new mobiles?
Well, before the French Revolution the Louvre was a royal palace - but presumably the Korean guys don't want us to associate their technology with an old, decadent, inefficient, despotic, uncaring organisation staffed by bewigged, puffy-faced autocrats. These days the Louvre is an art gallery containing famous pieces such as the Mona Lisa, so it's more likely they want us to consider the Ultra Edition phones as works of art, instant design classics that will live in our collective imagination for generations.
Maybe branding people just get carried away. Check out the Samsung Ultra Edition 3Gs. Whether they're works of art is a matter of opinion, but each one is a pretty damn fine cell phone.
The Nokia N91 and global domination
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on Saturday, September 02, 2006 at 9:06 PM.
I finally got my hands on a Nokia N91 the other day, courtesy of Chris Pilanka. It's the cell phone that Nokia bosses seem to think is going to quickly lead them to global (if not galactic) domination by, ooh, this time next week.
In case you didn't know, The devious Finns have launched in Nseries with lots of multimedia widgetry. The N91 has got a 2 megapixel camera, an MP3 player and four gigs of storage space. The idea is that every digital camera maker in the word will go bust and the N91 and its siblings will have such a huge impact on the MP3 market that iPod sales will slide and Steve Jobs will ride backwards to Helsinki on a reindeer just to beg for a slice of the Scandinavian action.
Er, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. Nobody is going to buy a mobile phone like this as their sole camera - not now 8 megapixels are pretty much standard. (Not that anyone can tell the difference between 8 megapix and 2 megapix, but as in all things there's a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses schtick going on here). Equally, as far as being an MP3 player goes, cell phone manufacturers have got some way to go before their products acquire cachet of coolness required to penetrate the vital twentysomething hipster market, which is still in love with the cool lines of the iPod.
Where the Nseries is going to hit hard, I predict, is with kids and students. As far as school-age teens are concerned, the N91 offers more scope for alleviating boredom and/or causing classroom chaos than any other previous cell phone.
The N91 is light, slim and sexy, though it doesn't quite have the high-grade back pocket slippability of an iPod. The sound quality is great, especially if you use it with good earpieces (Nokia recommends Bose and Sennheiser earpieces, apparently). The only thing you shouldn't do is try to connect the thing to your Mac. I'd heard the bad rumours, so I gave it a go - and yes, within thirty seconds both phone and Mac had crashed. It seems crazy that Nokia still haven't sorted this out. Macs are no longer a minority technology. It does suggest, however, that they're not really pursuing that 21-35 market, where Mac penetration is at its highest.
Nokia has also included a web browser, WiFi connectivity and loads of other nick-nacks and widgetry. Apparently, you can even use it to make phone calls. Now that's what I call revolutionary.
In case you didn't know, The devious Finns have launched in Nseries with lots of multimedia widgetry. The N91 has got a 2 megapixel camera, an MP3 player and four gigs of storage space. The idea is that every digital camera maker in the word will go bust and the N91 and its siblings will have such a huge impact on the MP3 market that iPod sales will slide and Steve Jobs will ride backwards to Helsinki on a reindeer just to beg for a slice of the Scandinavian action.
Er, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. Nobody is going to buy a mobile phone like this as their sole camera - not now 8 megapixels are pretty much standard. (Not that anyone can tell the difference between 8 megapix and 2 megapix, but as in all things there's a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses schtick going on here). Equally, as far as being an MP3 player goes, cell phone manufacturers have got some way to go before their products acquire cachet of coolness required to penetrate the vital twentysomething hipster market, which is still in love with the cool lines of the iPod.
Where the Nseries is going to hit hard, I predict, is with kids and students. As far as school-age teens are concerned, the N91 offers more scope for alleviating boredom and/or causing classroom chaos than any other previous cell phone.
The N91 is light, slim and sexy, though it doesn't quite have the high-grade back pocket slippability of an iPod. The sound quality is great, especially if you use it with good earpieces (Nokia recommends Bose and Sennheiser earpieces, apparently). The only thing you shouldn't do is try to connect the thing to your Mac. I'd heard the bad rumours, so I gave it a go - and yes, within thirty seconds both phone and Mac had crashed. It seems crazy that Nokia still haven't sorted this out. Macs are no longer a minority technology. It does suggest, however, that they're not really pursuing that 21-35 market, where Mac penetration is at its highest.
Nokia has also included a web browser, WiFi connectivity and loads of other nick-nacks and widgetry. Apparently, you can even use it to make phone calls. Now that's what I call revolutionary.
At last: Americans are beginning to use SMS. Mobile users in Europe have been in love with texting for half a decade now - around two thirds of cellphone owners make at least some use of text messages.
In the States it's been very different. In 2003 just 25% of US users texted. Now it's 40% of around 200 million users (source: ft.com).
Why is this? Lack of literacy? Fat fingers? Laziness? Or - the conventional explanation - that pricing models in the States have lagged so far behind British and European counterparts that cellphone users over there have avoided texts because they haven't, so far, been economical. That explanation is lent a little extra weight by the fact that the increase in American SMS usage is in line with mobile providers' attempts to gain deeper market penetration by slashing costs.
But correlation doesn't equal causation. SMS has proved attractive to European right from the start, despite some expensive pricing, and in countries like UK has been one of the technologies that has had most impact on daily life over the past five years. Some people, especially kids and young adults, use their mobiles for texting far more than they use them for making voice calls.
I think SMS has been slower to take off among Americans because, in some ways, they are more technologically conservative than Europeans in their private lives. In the US, technology has traditionally been much more driven by the needs of business than by individuals seeking different ways of running personal social networks.
That is changing. It seems to me that a more important correlation is between US SMS usage the rise of Web 2.0. Americans are becoming culturally acclimatized to the idea of technology driving private lives as well as business ones. The popularity of MySpace and all the other social networking sites is evidence of this. Maybe it's the drive to use technology for greater social integration that's pushing up the popularity of SMS in the States. Europe - where, let's face it, everyone just lives more closely together, and there's a longer history of government-enforced social cohesion - was a much more natural marketplace for SMS when it first appeared.
In the States it's been very different. In 2003 just 25% of US users texted. Now it's 40% of around 200 million users (source: ft.com).
Why is this? Lack of literacy? Fat fingers? Laziness? Or - the conventional explanation - that pricing models in the States have lagged so far behind British and European counterparts that cellphone users over there have avoided texts because they haven't, so far, been economical. That explanation is lent a little extra weight by the fact that the increase in American SMS usage is in line with mobile providers' attempts to gain deeper market penetration by slashing costs.
But correlation doesn't equal causation. SMS has proved attractive to European right from the start, despite some expensive pricing, and in countries like UK has been one of the technologies that has had most impact on daily life over the past five years. Some people, especially kids and young adults, use their mobiles for texting far more than they use them for making voice calls.
I think SMS has been slower to take off among Americans because, in some ways, they are more technologically conservative than Europeans in their private lives. In the US, technology has traditionally been much more driven by the needs of business than by individuals seeking different ways of running personal social networks.
That is changing. It seems to me that a more important correlation is between US SMS usage the rise of Web 2.0. Americans are becoming culturally acclimatized to the idea of technology driving private lives as well as business ones. The popularity of MySpace and all the other social networking sites is evidence of this. Maybe it's the drive to use technology for greater social integration that's pushing up the popularity of SMS in the States. Europe - where, let's face it, everyone just lives more closely together, and there's a longer history of government-enforced social cohesion - was a much more natural marketplace for SMS when it first appeared.
