Nokia Image viewer

The Nokia image viewer su-2

So at last Nokia have realeased there little secret image viewer. The SU-2. I remember seeing it on the Nokia stand a while back but they wouldnt show me it working. Previous blog about it

I found a review of it on infosync just a moment ago.Review: Nokia Image Viewer SU-2

The review praises the SU-2, whoever came up with the idea of the Nokia Image Viewer SU-2 must have had a stroke of genius.

I think the conclusion was fair. For triggerhappy camera phone users, the Nokia Image Viewer offers an excellent solution to the problem of how to share and enjoy pictures in a more relaxed environment than on a PC or even the phone itself. It does only what it needs to do, is small and portable and runs on battery power for when a charger is not available or inconvenient to carry – such as when visiting friends or at the cottage. And although it's not cheap, it's not too expensive either.

Things which stike me.
Why is the pictures only limited to 640×480? why not 352×288 as well? Is 3 meg really enough? Why not have more? It supports the Bluetooth OBEX object push profile which opens it up to palmtops and laptops too. And I have to agree this is a brilliant concept but needs lot more work. I mean if it plugged into a tv why not take advantage and support mpeg4 video too?
Oh well we shall see, maybe in SU-3 or 4?

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At long last 3g comes good

I was at the redbull flugtag
in London's hyde park today and I believe everyone was having troubles with there mobile phones. Well what do you expect with 70,000 people in a 3 mile radius? Anyhow i never had any such problem with phoning or texting with my 3g phone. Could be just because few people are on 3, or because it operates on a different frequency and/or its all data not voice. What ever it is, its good stuff at long last.

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Ignorance of technology

I dont know it kills me everytime. Its a struggle and I'm just lucky to be young enough to see it as a challenge, I guess…

How long do these people in a creative sector such as design expect to exist in this field if there ignorance of technology is what it is? I cant answer that one at all. I wont go into detail, protect the innocencent and all that.
But ravensbourne prides its self on its technology influence, I mean its core to the colleges mission statement. And we want to bring this the fore front with the move to greenwich by 2006.

So why oh why do these people see _technology_ as a extra bit? It drives me nuts, then it only gets worst. Miles said it best today when he pointed out a example. The example is difficult to explain in the abstract, but consists of people pretending to embrace the technology (would be more than there jobs worth not to) but then fighting the rapid change of technology in there usual hours of work.

Its nasty to believe the percentage of such people! Anyway, I hope its all making sense.
I just wish these people would do there research, you know try and understand, try and learn even a little. Not just dismiss everything as thats too technical or thats coding.

Anyway, yes it will be very interesting to now see how things go now the educational boards are asking for information online and the like. I even got passed a document on the 'freedom of information act'.
See if these people did there research they would natrually understand how things are moving forward. Open source movement and open exchangable format. Is there anything else to get?

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New in HP 5550 ipaq

So yesterday evening my college bought me a HP 5550 ipaq with pocketpc 2003, 128meg update and a 256meg sd card. Which honestly is far more than I expected. Thanks Niz and Miles

Anyway, i'm honestly going to blog it from now on, which will make up my report if I have to do one later on.

First thoughts, the screen is so beautiful and bright specially when compared to my old compaq 3630 ipaq. The colours have jumped to 16bit from 12bit but the contrast is perfect now. I never get enough glare to not see the text, even when reflecting the suns position into my own eyes.

At last I have wireless and bluetooth in the same compact framework and with the 128meg upgrade and sd card, I have enough memory to run anything I want. So now I use wifi when i'm in range and bluetooth with my t68i mobile phone for a slower gprs connection. See this is the reason why I needed my 3g phone to be bluetooth! Then I could dialup with that instead.
Oh and also you can redirect all mic and audio to a bluetooth headset! So if I cant get my old one working again, I'll buy one of 3's branded ones as there only 59 pounds and all i need.

There are some neat little things in pocketpc 2003 besides connectivity. At last theres a built in spell checker! Which makes a massive difference to someone like me.
Everything is so much quicker too, I played my old megadrive emulator on both ipaqs side by side and the new one can be alot faster than the old one but also generates the kinda of framerates i didnt think were possible.
I would also like add the biometric scanner is very good and at last I can secure my ipaq without using some complex unlock sequence. It would be nice though if you have the choice of strong password or biometric scan. At the moment i'm using pin or high security biometic (default). Tried out very strong biometric security but you got to get it perfect each time which isnt possible when performing normal tasks.

Found the new ipaq is compatable with the old jackets so I can still use my compact flash cards too. So imagine 256 + 128 + 60 = 444 meg of available space! And I got a 80 meg cf card spare too.

Anyway this also means I can plug into ethernet using a network pcmcia card, which is useful for friends houses and non wifi areas.

In my portable triangle the weak link is now battery life. Which I have yet to try out. As wireless and bluetooth has to be banging the battery for power. Which is good because the main battery is now removeable. Maybe I should have asked for a spare battery too? Well at least the usb cable charges and syncs as standard now.

I was a little disapointed with the software built in as standard, but have quickly realised that it doesnt matter because I have so much memory unlike the old ipaq where i had to put everything not needed by wireless onto the cf card.
But yeah i did think the remote control software would be there as well as the voice over ip software. Maybe there on cd I forgot to take with me?

My own dilemma is what to do with the old ipaq, as my wife wont use it for more than a couple of days. I dont want to sell it as I will get nothing for it and i dont know if i can keep this new ipaq (i'm pretty sure i can). So for now I'm going to retire the old ipaq and put it back in its box. Once i finish transfering files over bluetooth of course.

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Real Hot desking


My new office desk, dont you love the heat stained look?

Yes i'm in heaven, the sun is out in south London and its hot but breezy. So natrually i dont want to be inside working.
So recently I've been sitting outside on the college benches working in the sunshine. As I talked about in my post sunshine and wireless , things dont get much better than this. The only problem i've mainly had uptill now is screen visability with the sun and battery usage.

But its now solved, with a long extention cable hanging out of the fashion department. Now I can have the screen on full brightness and charge the ipaq without a worry in the world.

The alloy metal of my tabletpc does get quite hot in the noon sun, but isnt so hot it feels uncomfitable to use. Which is actually suprising when you consider i was outside from noon till 2000. 8 hours with a hour break from the sun for a meeting in the hot and sweaty college.

Anyway heres some pictures of the view from my 3g phone.
The view from the front
The view from the left
The view from the right
Weird thing my 3g camera phone does with the lens edges. More reasons to hand it back soon…?

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Digital Shoplifting pictures

Here are some pictures taken from my digital shoplifting in Borders. I was tempted to reduce them but what the hell, sorry to all 56k users. 172k is kinda of large but check out the quality of the shots.





Heard so much about the 3 above, need to read them really.



Looks ok, but the content is told in a nice way. Perfect for lending to friends.



How ironic.


The book i was trying to decide if I should get. About how realitivity and quantium physics are linked in this superstring theory.

Yep and a few programming books which I'll just link to

Apache – the best apache book I found. I want to get rid of iis now and i'm going to install apache 2.0 for sure. This would be a great start…
RSS by Oreilly, maybe a bit out of date but still good

XML-RPC by Oreilly, enough said once again
XML databases – Just what i need to compare xquery to xpath and it has a really decent look at xbase, xlink and xpointer
Wireless security, end to end. Thinking of setting up a radius server on my wireless access point.

I was thinking to myself while posting these, if I could get pop3 to blog working. I would be able to post directly to my blog from my 3g phone.
Now that would be something, maybe this is the outline of mobblogging, but i've only seen mms to blog and java app to blog. Not email to blog.
This gets me thinking again that the motorola phone is more useful than this nec e808. It also does 640×480 pictures I believe? Unlike this piece of crap. Need to do more research into this and quickly before i cant return the phone to 3.

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Digital shoplifting while super drugged

Digital shoplifting while super drugged

Ok I've had a pretty good time walking around Cambridge today. Very Pee'd off that the conference wasnt on, yeah g thanks apple. And I was very tempted to jump on the train back to work. But nope I thought well i spent the time going to cambridge I might as well have a wonder around.

Cambridge reminds me of bath alot. Old building built around a central hub and tiny roads no one can go down. Its got element of Amsterdam with the amount of people on bicycles wobbling all over the place. But I'm not here to bore you about this.

I poped into superdrug mainly to check out the 3g stand 3 have now setup throught-out different stores.
Here in england superdrug is a odd place to put a stand about selling 3g. But I've learned that superdrug and 3 share a parent company, so it all makes alot more sense.

Anyways, yeah I was checking out the stand with these two women on it. The phones were in glass cases and it all looked pretty good for a non pernimant stand. The kinda of quality you expect when you go to a exhitbion.
ok, so 3 have now realeased there 4th phone and its basicly the same as mine but it has no flip and the screen is larger too.

But what they were talking to me about was, if i dont like my phone i can return it within 14 days and get another one. Hummm i thought, maybe i dont like this phone as much as i first thought i would.

So I have choices now, the Nec 606 is the one most people are going for, it does video calling, has bluetooth, and 32meg. Its pretty much like mine but with no keyboard and only 32meg. oh and its smaller of course. But the battery dies like nothing you've ever seen before.
The motorola on the other hand does everything i want, but it has no video calling at all. So i'm missing out on the main reason for 3g if i get that one?
Of course i have the nec 808 already and the 808y seems to be pretty much the same as the 808.

So the question really is, is video calling important to me? If so i should stay with the nec, if not i should go to the motorola.

See at this moment, there is only 2 people i can call on video calling plus the fact its free for me to call, so that makes a big difference in terms of using it. If i had to pay 50 pence a minute to use it, i wouldnt use it straight forward as that. Maybe if it as low as 20p I would consider it. one pound for 5mins of video calling, mmmmm maybe.
So to the greater question, i would say i should change it. But another thing worries me. If i change it, will it take 3 a another 5 months to deliver a phone to me? There is no douht in my mind once i get 3g working as a modem (hoping to do this today) for my laptop, i will be laughing.
It will be basicly free isdn to midband speed internet on the go when ever i want and all for free till October.

But i can do that with the motorola plus it will be bluetooth so i can do the same with my ipaq as well as tabletpc. Now that would be joy for sure. And god help me and my ipaq if they increase the bandwidth to 2meg as umts can support.
The power drain on the ipaq and phone will be stupid. Really stupid…

Ok so digital shoplifting, yes i commited the unthinkable. I went into borders in cambridge sat down in there inbuilt starbucks and masterminded my plan while drinking a strong mocha and laughing to myself in little giggles.

I then went from book to book just taking pictures of the book covers i found interesting. So i can then go on the web and find them. Of course on Amazon.co.uk. What did you think i ment?
But seriously i took a picture of the cover and the index page or the page which explains why i'm interested and then wrote a comment on the camera to go with the picture. Now thats a smart feature of the phone. I'll have to check the motorola does that before signing up.
Also need to see if that information is transfered to the pc as is or in another way. would be kinda of cool if it was pushed into the image as metadata or from my point much better if it was a text file with just the same file name.

Anyhow, i did end up buying a book for the grand sum of 20 pounds and not shoplifiting it. so the opposite worked for me. But I did want to do something while i was in the store.
Something which is more like the digital shop lifting you hear about in japan. I wanted to send miles a picture and some text of a book about quantum physics, because i wasnt sure if it was any good or not. Now I could have phoned him, but what a waste of time that would have been for him, specially if he was in the middle of something. Also a long text would have been really long because the front cover said it all. A mms would have been perfect really. Humm maybe theres something good about picture messaging after all.
But back to the shoplifting, the camera dont yet have the storage or the speed yet to do a whole book or even a magazine. Its all about that one thing you need rather than the whole thing.

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3g blues – Read the fcuking manual

So at long last I got my 3g phone talking to my Tabletpc. And it was so my fault, I was going to external connect rather than data transfer. Come on guys you know that was a honest mistake that anyone would have made.
Anyhow my problems are not over yet. I tried transfering some java files while doing my music for the long trip up to cambridge (dont ask). And it would transfer them fine, but i go to the java app to run one and nothing. It doesnt see a single of them.
Nightmare for sure…

So whats the plan of action? well i'm going to try downloading 3's own java apps to see what there named as. Because i think its as simple as that really. If not, i'll have to into the specs to see what it does and doesnt support.

I have to say this phone is driving me bloody nuts. The battery lasts umm, one day at the most. Hence why 3 put two chargers in the pack. If there was a usb sync cable which also supplied power at the same time then yeah i'll be happy. But oh no, this cable they give you only syncs and nothing else.
Which is damm ignoying because for example i was transfering music (will come on to that in a bit) and it was so slow, but i couldnt leave it o ver night because the battery would die. Yes you guessed it the power and the usb connection are the same port.
But i dont get it because ericsson have been doing this for years and there cables are split. So you can charge the ohone while syncing. Why does nec have to be different? Maybe because there eastern.

Ok good and bad news on media.
It does indeed play music and video from external source which is great but only a selected amount.
Mpeg4 and 3gp on the video front, note it captures up to 12secs of mpeg4 too. And on the music front were talking ogg, 3ga and wma. Yeah what a suprise, no mp3 at all. But I have yet to actually upload any mp3s to it just to check it doesnt do it for sure. Ogg is also a suprise specially alongside windows media.

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