MobileViews Blog

Anyone try this imity Pocket Radar? It is a kind of mobile social networking tool that uses Bluetooth on phones to identify nearby people with like interests. Unfortunately, its website does not seem to have any information about which devices (phones) are supported by this J2ME app. And, I’m too lazy to email them this evening

It was released as an Open Source project. So, perhaps when I’m not feeling so lazy, I’ll wander over to Google Code and check it out.

One of the interesting developments that came with the Apple iPhone launch was that AT&T Wireless bumped up the EDGE downstream speed just before the iPhone launched. If you want to find out what your smartphone downstream throughput is, try out DSLreports’ Mobile Speed Test found at:

http://text.dslreports.com/mspeed

The results below are from a Pocket PC Phone Edition on a 802.11b WiFi connection. My  T-Mobile EDGE speed test returned a respectable (for EDGE) 115Kbps. I suggest using one of the larger download payloads (200 or 600Kb) if you have an unlimited data plan. My Phone Edition’s browser locked up with the 1MB test payload.

I went to a local Apple store today after work to take a look at the iPhone. I expected to find a couple of hundred people lined up there (the larger Apple store a few miles away probably drew many more people) and, indeed, found around 500 people standing in segmented lines (to allow foot traffic). There were a number of things that surprised me while standing in line.

First, many, and maybe most, of the people standing in line clearly understood what the iPhone was all about and what various smartphones from other vendors offered. I saw a number of Moto Q, Blackjack, and MDA devices in various hands of excited people eargerly discussing getting rid of them and their current wireless provider in favor of the iPhone. This, quite honestly, surprised me quite a bit. I expected a group that consisted mostly of iPod users with low-end phones who just wanted to coolest newest Apple gizmo.

Second, there were a lot of Windows users in the line. I expected more of a Mac-crowd.

Third, there were a lot of Mac power users in line. I was surprised how many were talking about using Parallels Desktop for Mac (virtualization software that lets you run Windows alongside Mac OS X) to run one or two necessary Windows applications on their Mac. Umm, shameless self-promotion… I wrote a little PDF booklet for O’Reilly Media last summer titled Windows for Intel Macs focused on helping Mac users to use Microsoft Windows on a Mac using Parallels.

Fourth, and this is really an extension of my first observation above, I was really surprised to hear how many people were willing to break their current two year contract with Verizon Wireless, or Sprint PCS, or T-Mobile to use an iPhone on the AT&T Wireless network. One woman mentioned to a group behind us how she had moved from Cingular (now part of AT&T Wireless) to Verizon to buy a Windows Mobile device just a few months ago and is now breaking that contract to get an iPhone.

Fifth, from what I could tell I may have been the only person of the hundreds standing in the line that did not buy an iPhone. I saw tiny bag after tiny bag containing newly purchased iPhones as I stood in line. And, as I walked out, I saw people in front and behind me with iPhone bags. I really didn’t expect to see $500 and $600 devices fly out the store like that.

The real test comes in a few months after the first wave of iPhone users have had a chance to put it through its paces. However, if the majority of iPhone users are still happy by year’s end, I think I will be glad I didn’t name my site WindowsMobileViews in favor of the more generic MobileViews. Because if these new owners are still happy by December, the phone industry will have a new 500 pound gorilla to deal with: Apple.

YouTube Mobile was released from its exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless this week. Unfortunately, most Windows Mobile devices (at least the ones I have) don’t support the 3GPP video file format. I could swear I had a Windows Mobile Smartphone or two that did. But, I can’t remember which one it is. I tried it with Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition, Windows Mobile 5, and Windows Mobile 6 (Smartphone and PDA) devices this evening. None of them could display a YouTube Mobile video.

One of the phones in my household is a Sanyo Katana phone. Although it is not a smartphone, it does have Bluetooth, a camera, and the usual applications that phones have these days. Originally, I paid for web service and photo uploads. But, since those features were rarely used, I moved the phone back to basic voice service. We still wanted to get photos off of the phone now and then though. So, I went in search of something cheaper than $15/month to do that. This weekend I found the…

Datapilot Cell Phone Data Transfer Suite Universal (Amazon affiliate link)

…at my local Costco and bought it. The box contained a bunch of cables for various phone models as well as a USB Bluetooth dongle. I installed the suite’s software and tried Bluetooth first. The Windows XP PC and the phone seemed to pair ok. And, it looked like contacts information could be synced. But, there didn’t seem to be a way to copy the photos off of the phone.

I tried the USB cable next. Getting that to work was an exercise in frustration. But, I eventually managed to get it working (don’t ask me how) and was able to move the photos over. I can understand how the average review of the 39 reviewers on Amazon gave it 2 out of 5 stars. It gave me a bit more appreciation for ActiveSync (but not that much . On the other hand, if we use this Datapilot Suite for more than 3 months, it will have paid for itself.

Google announced a mobile device friendly version of Google Calendar today…

Calendar for Mobile Devices

I gave it a quick try on my T-Mobile Dash by adding an event. The agenda view (list of events) is the only view available on a mobile device. I went to the regular PC to flesh out the information (I could type faster there). Adding the address for an event lets you use the mobile version of Google Maps from a link on the event.

Microsoft Pocket Streets used to integrate with Contacts on Windows Mobile devices. But, now that it is gone, I guess that this Google feature could be handy (unless you are out of tower range . You can find Google Calendar at:

calendar.google.com

Yahoo! seems to be trying to provide more than one way for us to use their services from a mobile device. The client software for Yahoo! Go provides an attractive interface but was very slow on my Pocket PC and wasted too much screen real estate IMHO. Recently, it looks like they took the content from wap.oa.yahoo.com mobile web portal and moved it to…

m.yahoo.com

This mobile web portal has the same lightweight and lightning fast mostly-text interface from the wap design and added the oneSearch feature that provides a mixed result page that reminds me of Google’s SearchMash site. oneSearch returns results categorized as Web (all of the web), Mobile Web (results of pages that look good on a mobile device), and Web Images.

Tumblr is a free web tumblog (sort of a minimalist blog format) service that lets you quickly post text, links, photos, videos and other data. I just noticed the other day that it also provide a mobile device display friendly format. Just add a /mobile after a tumblog’s URL. You can see the mobile display version of my tumblog, for example, at:

http://mobileviews.tumblr.com/mobile

Do you Twitter? It seems like everyone is either Twitter-ing or Jaiku-ing these days. And, those who aren’t, seem to be life-casting. But, sharing your life via text seems a lot cheaper and easier to do than videocasting your life. The one exception may be those who chose to use Twitter via SMS and found a large text messaging bill the next month (unless they had unlimited SMS service, of course).

Twitter has a new mobile browser friendly site at…

http://m.twitter.com/

…that lets the rest of us (assuming a decent mobile data service bandwidth) twitter on the go using a mobile device with a web browser.

BusinessWeek appears to be trying out two different approaches to providing content to mobile devices. Their original Handheld Edition (right side of image) found at http://pda.businessweek.com/ has a simple clean interface that provides a lot of textual content per click (think Google). Their newer dot-mobi site found at http://www.businessweek.mobi/ looks somewhat graphically richer (think Yahoo or MSN) but provides much less textual content per click. You need to make a lot of clicks and endure download pauses to read a whole article. Essentially we have form-over-content (the dot-mobi site) vs. content-over-form (the PDA site). I hope BusinessWeek maintains both presentation options since it is pretty certain that both will appeal to different types of readers. We can only hope other content producers follow BusinessWeek’s lead in experimenting with mobile content presentation.

The USA Weekend insert in my local paper has an interesting full page article title How to make the most of your camera phone that gets its information from the new book The Camera Phone Book: How to Shoot Like a Pro, Print, Store, Display, Send Images, Make a Short Film by CNet’s Aimee Baldridge and and National Geographic photographer Robert Clark. I haven’t read this book. But, based on the co-authors’ credentials, I’ll guess it is a pretty good book. I do have some issues and additional advice for the tips extracted from the book in the USA Weekend article though. I’ll go through the two lists of advice from the main article and its sidebar.

Main Article

• Emphasize the camera: I really take exception to this advice. Take this route in choosing a camera phone only if you are mainly going to use it to take photos. if you want it most for voice or email, choose a camera phone that suits your main requirements first. Then, you can take a look at its camera. If you really want to be able to take photos all day, buy a small digital camera that you can carry in your shirt pocket or purse/bag. You will save a lot of money and get much nicer photos that you would with most camera phones.
• Check the resolution: The advice in this paragraph makes sense in that they also say don’t be fooled by higher numbers. Most camera phones sold in the US (not as true in other countries where much better camera phones are available), have awful plastic lenses. The number of megapixels doesn’t make a difference if you have a terrible lens (and most camera phones have terrible optics). I’d change this to check the lens.
• Get multimedia messaging service: I disagree with this advice too. MMS is nice to have but not as important as good ol’ fashioned email/web access for your phone. If you plan to share photos directly from your phone, make sure your phone has a good email client that supports POP3, IMAP4, and SMTP? Why, because these days most people share their photos by posting to sites like Flickr. The best and cheapest way to do that is just to email the photo to the sharing site.
• Consider buying some accessories: They say that various photographic add-ons are available for camera phones. What are they talking about? Most phones cannot use add-on lenses, traditional tripod mounts, and the like. This advice is just nonsense for the vast majority of camera phones in the real world.

So, for the first set of advice, I give them half a point out of the four pieces of advice.

Sidebar

• Get close: I mostly agree with this advice up to a point. Most camera phones have unusually wide focus. And, since the image quality is usually poor and doesn’t have an optical zoom, you generally don’t want to crop as a substitute zoom. That said, don’t get too close. Most camera phones don’t have macro capability and tends to have lots of spherical distortion. If you get too close to a subject, you will find the subject is out of focus compared to the background and/or looks expanded like a funhouse mirror image.
• Slow it down: They basically advise us to stick with still shots and avoid action shots. This is generally good advice. But, again, I have some additional thoughts. You can take some action shots with planning: Make sure you have lots of light. Plan for your camera phone’s shutter lang. Mine is about a full second. So, I need to anticipate where something or someone will be and shoot a second ahead of time. And, don’t forget that many (most?) camera phones can record video these days. Switch to video. But, be prepared for relative low-quality compared to the video from regular digital cameras or video cameras.
• Just keep shooting: These first three words of advice starts out good but goes downhill when they tell you to get rid of a photo that doesn’t look good to you. Don’t delete any photos while you are using the camera phone. This process is often slow and you may miss a good photo while fussing with the controls. More important, however, is the fact that your camera phone’s LCD display is not the best photo review tool. What looks good on that display may not look good on your desktop and what looks poor may not be so bad after all. Storage is cheap. Decide later.

I’ll give them a half point for each piece of advice in the sidebar. So, they get a total of 2 points out of a total of 7 pieces of advice.

The best camera phone advice, IMHO, is to take a lot of photos with it and learn its specific strengths and weaknesses. My T-Mobile SDA camera phone, for example, does not have a very good camera. Although it has options to adjust for some lighting conditions, it does not do a very good job of it. It tends to overexpose in bright sunlight and have a lot of noise in low light levels. However, it tends to take decent photos at dusk and dawn (i.e., when dramatic lighting is available). The example photo here was taken using the SDA.

I’m reasonably happy with the photos I get from my camera phone. But, I manage my expectations. I know they won’t be anywhere near as nice as photos taken even with low-end digital cameras. But, at least I have a photo of something that would have otherwise been missed. If I know I want to take better photos when wandering around, I carry a small digital camera with me. I still carry the Canon PowerShot SD200 I bought two years ago (see my review here: Canon PowerShot SD200: A Big Little Camera. It is just a 3 megapixel camera. But, it takes better photos than any camera phone I’ve ever used and fits in my shirt pocket (I use a neck strap to make sure I don’t lose it).

Google announced a new feature for their Calendar today…

Calendar on the go

You can now have Google Calendar send event reminders to your phone via an SMS message. You can find Google’s documentation here…

Google Calendar Notifications

Here’s a bit of advice before you try this service out. Check what your SMS text message quote is. You might get a surprisingly large bill if you have Google Calendar alert you to every event.