Day: 19 October 2004

Opera 7.60 Technical Preview on Smartphone 2003

I remember Fravia telling me in May of this year that Opera were bring out a version of there browser for the Microsoft PocketPC and Smartphone market. And I didnt believe him, till I saw the official announcement. Well through Scoblizer I found there is a technical preview available for Smartphones. Now I'm going to try it out and see how it performs next to IE. I'm hoping the PocketPC version is not far behind.

First day useage – Yes its a little bit of memory hog, but damm is it fast! Doesnt like Javascript much, but who does? Not test CSS yet. But it loaded my blog very quickly and remembers the last page even after a exit. Neat stuff for a technology preview.

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Blogging from inside

Robert Scoble posts some thoughts about getting the green light for blogging within a company. His arguments are very convincing and worth looking at if you feel the fear of webblogging. I keep reflecting back to the fact that I am a BBC employee and my views are not all shared by the BBC. I wonder how many people would care if I did not disclose who I worked for? Anyway theres a follow up by someone from Jupiter research here.

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Projectsyzygy is now complete

S.Marchant 148 AC City Archives

Looks like the Alternative reality game – project syzygy is now ready to be played? There is a link which goes on to http://www.perplexcity.com/. Which then has cgi to take email addresses. I shall sign up soon, but before I do I'll be checking out the new forum on unfiction.com. Oh by the way, did anyone else see there is a image map on the image which clicks through to this http://www.perplexcity.com/indexB.html and that leads to the first image.

Good to see theres a primer for newbies like me. And as someone else pointed out, its almost impossible keeping up with two ARGs, so I'm giving I love bees the boot now. Oh by the way theres a arcticle on Wired about the ending of i love bees, which I got from Slashdot. The general view is that i love bees sucked as a ARG but was a neat advertising campaign for Bungie. I think it also was good way to push ARG's out into the mainstream, not to say that it wasnt already.

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The mobile phone as an Mp3 player

Russell Beattie and many others have been talking about the mobile phone as a mp3player. To me this is nothing new at all. God since I first saw the Ericsson Mp3 attachment in early 2000, I always wanted one.

Ericsson T28 with Mp3 attachement

And I did end up buying one, I mean two. Now if you can get them on the market, they cost 25 pounds. It used MMC and came with 32 meg and a nasty card reader which would consume the mouse and keyboard ports for power. Thanks goodness for 8 in 1 card readers!

Anyway since the old ericsson days I've progressed onto the Microsoft Smartphone range. I wanted the Ericsson Bluetooth Mp3 Headset but there was no way I was going to get hoodwinked back into using Sony Memory stick, specially the Duo versions. I thought in advance that the SPV with large SD card could play not only music on the go but little movies if needed. And in that lies the issue.

The Bingo which Russell talks about is just that, with enough storage your mobile phone can be a great mp3 player. Maybe even better than the ipod? As Russell identified, why carry all your music with you when you can stream it on demand? Yes I know GPRS and 3G are expensive at the moment, but its getting cheaper plus there nothing stopping you from copying files over beforehand. Obviously there are those who disagree.

I wanted to go one step beyond Russell's argument. Most phones now have Bluetooth, hell some even have wifi now. How long have apple fans been screaming for Bluetooth or wifi in there ipods? Well I'm thinking Bluetooth with something simple like the file transfer stack or even some kind of mDNS (zero-conf) protocol on top of Bluetooth. Could open the door to p2p sharing or listening on the go… How interesting would that be. That regular train ride to work would be that more interesting. Think about toothing someones music collection while waiting for the train to Crystal Palace?

Oh by the way, Mark Eichin, makes a good comment about audioblogging. Don’t worry folks, there's no way I'm going audioblogging anytime soon…

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