Category: technology

I was talking to Dave today and was mentioning Apple's new powerbooks which now come with Bluetooth 2.0. The idea is to make streaming audio to bluetooth headphones much higher quality, which makes sense but why they jumped from 1.2 to 2.0 who knows. I think its just going to add a whole load of confusion to the market. Anyhow, Dave was not convinced bluetooth headphones were the way to go. He offer the alternative of FM headphones. At first I kinda of dismissed it but now I'm thinking there pretty damm cheap and last a long time in battery life when compared to bluetooth headphones. Also using a FM Transmiter (which is still not sold in the UK!) its really easy to use the same pair of headphones anywhere. For example at work it would be easy to plug in my FM transmiter and use a small pair of FM headphones or headphones attached to one of those cheap FM radios to listen to my music wirefree and anywhere within 50meters. Its even better if you have one of the phones with a FM radio built in. Maybe Dave is right about this, for now while Bluetooth evolves in this area at least.

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I was listening to Dana Blankenhorn on The Impacts of Persistent Distributed IT at Accelerating Change. He suggests that we do not have a platform for this decade and that wireless (wimax and wifi) could be it. He states the simple but actually quite obvious fact that we use wireless to access the internet. So everyone is cramming the pipe beyond the access point and not using the actual wireless in ways we are only just starting to see.

And honestly it all makes sense. Wireless has effective bandwidth from 3meg (802.11b) to 100meg (WiMax 802.16). Why not use the wireless point as a platform? Dana suggests Linux is the key for this and he's not wrong. For example, I saw this linksys wireless router ages ago which can be hacked to put linux on it. Yes thats great but wheres the use in just having linux on it? Yes I know you could install anything you like on it but besides a webserver I've seen little else. Till a while ago when the Xlink guys released Xlink Kai station for the WRT54G. Which means you can route traffic for playing multiple player games on the free xlink network with just a xbox and one of these. (yes i have talked about it before, but highlighting whats possible when you think about wireless as a platform).
Yes limited example but a interesting none the less. I would like to see zeroconf aka rendezvous better known as multicast dns services happening at the wireless level. I mean its ideal because the automatic discovery nature makes roaming around wireless points a joy. And before I go, lets not limit wireless to one point. With Mesh networking it should be simple to extend the range and the users to the service. Lets also not forget machine to machine services would benefit from mesh technologies.

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[11:41:08] miles> Saw some interesting stuff recently on podcasting and 3G phones
[11:41:17] myself> oh yeah?
[11:42:41] myself> i saw there is a smartphone ipodder client now – http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/ipodderSoftware. but directory is messed up so i cant see the url
[11:43:35] miles> What the “What is?” – um, yes. Forget whose blog it was. Suggesting that podcasting might make sense with a 3G phone. Imagine a service that would download your podcasts for you, allowing you to retrieve them conveniently with your phone or other digital gadgets – not using something like iPodder: the service provider handles all of that work. You get the content you want all in one place.
[11:44:03] miles> A sort of podcast aggregator
[11:44:05] myself> humm now thats interesting
[11:44:18] myself> found it by the way – http://www.equin.co.uk/ipoddersp/
[11:44:32] miles> It makes podcasts more viable, too, because the podcasters wouldn't get soaked for bandwidth
[11:44:53] myself> yeah and orange and the like will enjoy being in the loop
[11:44:53] miles> Cool!
[11:45:13] myself> i've not used pocketrss2 with 3g yet
[11:45:20] myself> but that would work too
[11:45:27] miles> Exactly – they can make money off it, and profile their customers' tastes too
[11:45:41] myself> ah now thats true
[11:47:59] miles> http://archive.scripting.com/2005/01/11#podcastingMayBeTheirKillerApp
[11:48:05] miles> That was it, I think
[11:50:17] miles> It's because the American low-end telephony approach isn't shiny enough – but this would work better for a 3G service than a low-end GPRS phone. Plus you could do more with a modern terminal
[11:51:45] myself> yes, this handset i'm using has streaming and very tightly intergrated mediaplayer

[11:52:24] miles> Spot on. If it had MP3/OGG streaming support it would be perfect

So I go off and try and test downloading and streaming content on my phone. The results are not good. First finding a nice easy to type feed. http://www.di.fm will do. Ok great, page will not load on my phone correctly. Try http://www.shoutcast.com. Not much better, so i resort to typing in the direct url. Works but does not know what a *.pls or *.m3u file is Unsupported content type. Ok so I try going to the direct mp3 file. I get this error – HTTP Error: 413 Request too large. I think I'm going about it all the wrong way, maybe the media needs to be embeded into a page or be in a special format. So I go to the Orange world home page and check out the film clips in the 3g highlights section. As expected there is an option to download and to stream. With both, it swiches to the mediaplayer and asks to download or prepares the stream. Have to say the stream is good, only 5 secs wait before it started playing. Hummmm, so I need to look at what there using in that wap page to launch the mediaplayer. The link to stream is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp80s&sid98bddc0e8231 and the download is http://wap.orange.co.uk/downloads/index.wml?rm=buy&id=9937media_id=20013&version=gp94&sid98bddc0e8231, but I think you need to be on there connection for it to work?

Anyway the other thing I wanted to point at was the link to ipodderSP I sent to miles about a podcasting client on the smartphone. I gave up my SPV to my wife so I just missed out, but wow ipodderSP looks like just the job. For now, i'm quite happy listening to podcasts on my ipaq than anything else but i'm happy to see even more podcast clients coming to the pocketpc.

more to come….

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I've been doing my research on the 3g forum just recently. Some things of interest.

From Frazzel

The video calling is good as it lets you play back a video to someone your talking to also while on hold you will see windmills and hear some chillout music. Very different!

Not yet checked this out because everyone I know on 3g is using 3 (the company). I think I may know one person on Vodafone Live 3g but no one on Orange 3g. Hey talking of which is it actually possible to do cross network video calls yet? Or do we have to go through the whole interop thing for the 4th time now?

About those Bluetooth problems I was having, well I got them still and Jonstatt sums up the problem. The bluetooth implementation is nowhere near as good as Sony Ericsson. You can only have one bluetooth profile selected at a time whereas the Sony will auto select the right one.. I tried the sync option as described here but decided to just export vcards out of outlook then copy them to the sd card. When in the s750, it will let you import them with no problems. It seems generally people are sending back there sanyo phones which I may do if I can not setup bluetooth dialup within the next week. There is some light however, some people have got it working with the ipaq, mac, a toshiba laptop and even a pc. I got a feeling the last two are pre service pack 2 pc's and I'm going to make a long call to orange about my 3g ipaq dialup connection!

Its 4am, and I've finally got the ipaq to dialup GPRS and 3G over Bluetooth with the Sanyo S750! Actually this is now the 6th time i've done it. Whats the settings I'm using? First thing I've pared the two using the headset method described here. Then I'm using *99# to dialup orange and no modem string of any kind. Now to be fair, I did once get the dialup to work with the string at+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” but not consistently like the no string option. I'm now currently trying to work out why it didnt work before. Other things I noticed, I always have to dialup via the ipaq bluetooth manager otherwise it never works no matter what i do. The baud rate seems to work best on 57600 rather than 115200 and wait for dialtone slows the connection process down alot. I've also just been playing a little more and found +cgdcont=1,”IP”,”orangeinternet” works, but not as well as no extra modem commands. I really need to post this on the 3g forum soon.

I was trying to test the speed of the 3g connection and I can not find one tester which doesnt use javascript of java to complete the test. I really want to know what kind of speeds are possible using this 3g connection now. Which also reminds me to check to see if I get 50meg of 3G data too? By the way, if your interested in the quality of the 1.3 megapix camera check out these two great shots. Yep he's a lady killer…

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At last, I made the switch to the Sanyo S750. Generally, I'm quite impressed with the operating system and the phone. Its the first phone I've seen which has a decent copy and paste function. Email was a easy as pie to setup, i was tempted with using gmail but decided to stick to hotpop for now. The screen is so slick and beautiful that I cant bear to take off the plastic cover. I still cant believe it has the same rez as my ipaq! The T9 seems very good and allows for multiple languages. I'm glad to say it records all its movies in 3gp format and you can save pictures in either jpg or 24bit png which is amazing! By the way the camera quaity is great and puts my spv to shame. Sanyo really thought about the phone and included simple things like unlimited video recording on to the SD card, ringtones in many formats and unified inboxes for all messages.

However its not all good. First thing I'm having a huge a problem transfering my contacts via bluetooth and infrared from my spv2 and ipaq. It will do one contact at a time which sucks when you got 250 contacts needed to be synced. I really dont want to do it via my laptop but it looks like may have to export vcards from outlook or use the software on the cd. I also tried to hack the settings for orange network sync into the phone so I could use the orange sync option. But it simply refuses to work.
Another thing which is related to bluetooth contacts problems. It seems the Bluetooth only accepts one request then hangs up and kicks you back to the home screen. What this means is, if you want to sync multiple contacts it will simply hangup after the first one sent. The bluetooth also seems to be only on for a certain period of time (maybe to reserve battery life, which is pretty damm good so far). What this means is I need to tell the S750 to get ready to dialup or recieve a item before the event. This sucks big time when using my ipaq. I'm very use to just dialing up with my phone still in my pocket. There has got to be a way around this problem!

Anyhow, other things I've found. Mobile SVG support works but I need to explorer it more. The browser is a openwave xhtml and wap 2.0 browser and its pretty good, but I would rather have Opera thank you! There seems to be no way to have more than one email account on the phone, and I never saw an option for imap just pop3. USB storage mode is useful, because it turns the phone into a USB keychain, but only if you buy the optional usb cable. Not seen this option on any other phone, oh plus the phone does accept sd cards higher than 256meg, I put my 512meg in without any problems. You just got to create folders like a digital camera.

Formats supported by the phone out of the box
Documents [/Sanyo/Media Album/Documents] – SVG (.svg, .svgz), vCard (.vcf), vCalendar (.vcs), vNote (.vnt), Text (.txt).
Melody & Ringtones [/Sanyo/Media Album/Melody & Ringtones] – AAC (.3gp, .mp4), MIDI (.mid, .midi), Voice (.amr), MP3 (.mp3).
Videos [/Sanyo/Media Album/Video List] – Mpeg4 (.3gp, .mp4), H.263 (.3gp, .mp4)
Pictures [/Sanyo/Media Album/Picture] – PNG (.png), GIF (.gif), Bitmap (.bmp), Wireless bitmap (.wbmp), JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg, .jpe)

Generally its a good phone but needs alot of hacking to make it a great phone. I'm just worry if its actually quite hackable and if people will.

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Following on from my podcasting with only pocketrss 2.0 entry. Happyjackroad have released version 2.0.1.6 which is the gold version for anyone to listen to. Users of 1.42 can upgrade for free, which is good stuff. Enjoy!

Features
ability to use Today Screen plugin within PocketBreeze – not much use to me, but very cool today screen plugin none the less
database storage for faster feed viewing/searching/history archiving – yeah beats flat xml files for speed.
simple Feed content management – Yep simple but also advanced and fully featured
namespace/xml mapping feature for advanced users – Seriously crazy feature, which few desktop readers even do
custom view modes (including dynamic, keyword-based views) – yep nicely natrual aggregated views
Feed Wizard to easily add/find new RSS Feeds – includes feedster search and pulls opml files off the web, which few desktop readers do still
support for “stylus-free” viewing -pad optimized) – Ideal for reading in a crowded london train
feed item control (read,unread,locked,delete,etc.) – yep very cool
ability to download full article links for offline viewing – bit hit and miss but useful none the less
ability to download audio content (aka podcasting) – No other client does this on the pocketpc yet, enough said!
support for WM2003 SE landscape mode (and VGA) – I dont have a WM2003 SE device so I cant test it
improved network connections – Yep its good
overall new look-n-feel – Didnt like it at first, but love it now.

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The thing everyone wants to know, does it work? Well I'm glad to say yes it does! This follows on from my post a little while ago when I explained that I am a beta tester for the excellent PocketRSS 2.0. I was able to download Dave Slusher the evil genius chronicles – introduction and disclaimer mp3 file. I did however pick the wrong feed and got 4 extra files which were a couple kilobytes big, which I later identified as torrent files. So obviously bittorrent on the pocketRSS 2.0 is out the question for now (at least – kidding). Tomorrow I will try with the Engadget podcast along with others. But generally it worked well and quick over my wifi connection straight on to the SD card I have. You can set it to anywhere which is great. But theres one thing which needs a little fixing. The file name can not be some random number, it needs to be whatever the enclosure tag specified otherwise your going to run into trouble later down the road. At this moment it uses a random number with rss on the front and .mp3 like this – rss012345678.mp3. This will cause trouble when loading lots of them and also when people start enclosures with pictures and videos. It took me a while looking at the raw xml to work out the other small mp3 files were actually torrent files not mp3s. I'm sure the great guys at happy jack will sort it out. Oh by the way I saw this on http://www.pocketcasting.com.

We're currently testing a piece of software that is in the “Alfa” stage of development for Pocket PC's that will download RSS 2.0 feeds and enclosures directly onto your device. I'm currently using it on my device and plan to post an article (with screen shots) in the next few days

If your are interested in testing this software email us. The developer is looking for testers and will send you a developers invite to download the software.

Not sure if its the Happyjack guys or someone else, but it looks like the pocketcasting scene is heating up very quickly! Can I also just say pocketrss 2.0 isnt just the only podcasting client for pocketpc at the moment it seem, but its the best RSS reader… Hey it even has advanced features my desktop rss reader doesnt have like the ability to read a opml file from the web and reload it at any time. Its well worth the money, and i'm not just saying that.

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Off the back of the engadget how-to where pureblue wrote this in the comments

Are there any podcast clients out there for the Windows Mobile or Windows Pocket PC devices? It would be handy to leave my iPaq on when connected to WiFi and it copies over my subscribed feeds in the background. This would cut my desktop computer out of the loop, meaning I'm not reliant on having to go home and sync up to get content. It would also be good when I'm listening to a Podcast that mentions another feed to be able to subscribe, rather that jot down the address and remember to subscribe when I get home.

Fear not, its coming soon. I've been beta testing a great new application called PocketRSS. The current version 1.42 doesnt support podcasting but is the best RSS reader for pocketPC out there at the moment. However the beta's of version 2.0 do support podcasting directly on the device, removing the need to have a host machine at all. Happyjackroad, say there going to be launching version 2.0 soon enough, and I would say the beta i'm using is more like a Preview release than beta. Seriously version 2.0 is great and can be totally operated one handed while taking a very busy train into work every morning. I want to also point out that it has many simple features which other mobile RSS readers dont. Like the ability to copy and paste text, see the url of the link and handle over 100+ subscriptions without crashing and burning. Well worth the 10 pounds I spent on it (who says I never pay for software?).

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Ok its that time of the year again, when I get like a text offer a day and phone calls offering me crap phones which I would not be seen dead with. Yep upgrade time. So far last month I recieved 5 text messages and 3 phone calls offering me crap. Best offer I got was for the Nokia 7610 which is bog standard and not worthy of a years useage at all. Told them to stick there offer, my SPV E200 is much better than that thing.

So what have I seen which takes my fancy? Well today I saw on engadget the new Sanyo S750 which is a 3G phone coming out to the orange network soon.
The Nokia 7710 looks interesting but honestly I wouldnt use it much as I got a nice pocketpc with wifi and mass storage now. The SonyEricsson S700i looks great but memory stick duo really puts me off it. Plus no EDGE or 3G? I mean come on, gonna have the phone for another year, GPRS aint going to cut it alone. But back to the Sanyo for a moment. Joey Geraci left a comment saying how it was stupid the small amount of memory it has. And I agree, except I already have 256 meg in my SPV and 512 in my ipaq, any of which can be swapped out.

So in the vain of last year, heres my list of features.
GSM tri-band (900, 1800, 1900MHz) with EDGE or UMTS would be great
High resolution screen at least 12bit colour
At least 1 megapixel with light, two would be excellent
Video download and streaming of 3gp and mpeg4 files
Photo and Video capture to 3gp, mpeg4 and jpg formats
SD or MMS memory card slot
MP3 and OGG player
Speaker phone support
Java MIDP2.0 support
Bluetooth, infrared and USB connectivity. Would never buy a phone without bluetooth nowadays, it must also support bluetooth dialup! Not just headset
Email (POP3 and IMAP4)
Symbian or Windows Mobile operating system

On another angle, anything I buy will have to work with these Bluetooth headphones, which I will buying myself for christmas. The only feature which seems to be missing is the abilty to pair to more than one device at one time. Say if I want to use the bluetooth audio gateway feature of the Ipaq with the bluetooth smartphone headset profile? Quick note to myself not to forget another 2.5mm jack for my SPV which I lost recently.

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RSS is changing how people surf the Web — and it could bring the mobile Internet into the mainstream, too.

At long last someone is talking some sense. Carlo Longino lays it down straight in his post titled Really Simple Mobile Surfing. RSS is simply great for mobile devices and the only problem now is developing rss readers which make the process of subscribing and updating easy and painless. For now I'm sticking with reading RSS on my PocketPC but I do have a RSS reader on my Smartphone too.

Found a nice link when checking out the story about AOL working on a mobile RSS reader. RSS2WAP which might be a good option for those without Java, Symbian or the compact dot net framework? But it gets better…
After many times talking about how the mobile phone is ideal for podcasting and listening to music. I'm to hear the following in the same entry.

Things don't have to be limited to just text, either — RSS already supports images, and other enclosures, like audio and video, currently giving rise to the podcasting phenomenon. RSS could deliver video content across 3G networks, and even on slower ones by pre-loading content in the background or during off hours.

Bang right on the money! A viable business model for the mobile providers, but acceptably open for the grassroots, opensource, public to get a shout in? I'm happy, I dont see why AOL getting in first has anything to do with this?

Lisa sent me a while ago a link about 24 on 3G mobile devices. And I was thinking, this is novel but I'm not totally convinced. Now Podcasting it the mobile device instead of streaming would not make much sense to a mobile provider but it makes tons of sense to the rest of us.

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I've been really trying to embrace the podcasting movement, i say trying because I obviously dont have a ipod and most of the software around syncs with itunes or windows media player. What I really want is a piece of software which syncs podcasts to my pocketpc or smartphone's storage card. Till then I check every morning before i go to work if theres any more pods from adam curry, it conversations, dave winer and a couple more. Then copy it to my SD card for use in my mobile devices.

If you dont know what podcasting is check out this nytimes story which adam curry and dave winer were talking about recently.

Ok things I would like to see done with podcasting sometime soon, please comment if you've already seen it.
Better podcasting client software, so I dont need to manually copy files on to my SD card. Even better – a way to put pods on to phones and mobile devices. Sync folders would be nice, and hey why not download to a public place like a webdav server? Imagine podcasts shared between multiple people. Hey and dont forget about other devices like the xbox

Smil used in podcasts. This one pushes against the podcasting concept, but I've also been thinking about relevent pod advertisements mixed in with podcasts. I'm a big fan of smil and started thinking if you could mix in smil inside of rss or atom or get the software to download the smil file. Once the smil file is downloaded, it then searches through and downloads the bits it needs. As I said it breaks the podcasting method but its a thought because then you could reference and quote other podcasts inline. It also adds a little more structure to podcasts. Adam curry for example plays creative commons music in his podcast, it would be kinda of cool to get different music depending on when you play the pod back. Maybe?

As talked about before the process of using creative commons and other non-copyright (as such) music inline is pretty cool and using other podcasts inside your own is great too. But I've been thinking an enclosure element can support almost any type of media. Why not podcast images? And you know what this fits perfectly with the new ipod which now supports photos. I already thought about including photos in as enclosures but seriously why not? Maybe the podcast is talking about a new product or service, why not include some detail shots of it? I remember a while ago on the gilmor gang they were talking at great length about the google desktop search and I'm sitting on a tram thinking god there has to be a decent screen shot somewhere. So I spent sometime searching for a image while on my GPRS connection. If I had it before it would have made a big difference to my listening pleasure.

I wont get started on authoring tools but I would like the authoring tools to reflect the structure of the show. Even simple things like putting in decent metadata and cc licencing would be a start. And please use decent file names, date formatted file names are not good enough – seriously. Hey and why is there only a few group based podcasts? I mean using the 4 way skype conference calling feature you could easily record a nice podcast for later. Actually I've been thinking about doing one with Dave, Harry and Miles at some point just for a test, maybe around a dinner table or something? Miles had the thought about embedding SMIL inside of RSS using namespaces.

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