It came from Black Background

I shot the clip linked below on a Sony Ericsson P900; the final result is a ~176K MPEG-4. It looks worse than the worst videophone transmission out of Baghdad under fire, but it's still good enough to capture the gist of what's going on around you at the moment. (As far as I could tell, I had all of the quality settings maxed out.) I suppose that that's more than enough for the current generation of mobile devices. Still, I wonder if we'll soon reach the point of phones carrying enough combined CCD, megapixel, and storage horsepower to outperform lower-end, dedicated consumer video electronics. According to Steve, we may already be there on the camera end with the new S700I from Sony. (Is that your first '10' rating for camera capabilities, Steve?)

The Video (may require QuickTime to view easily): Gameday Crowd

Posted by Matt Shobe at 10:50 AM | Permalink

Steve commissioned a review of the Sony Ericsson P800 for his blog, which contains a growing library of comprehensive reviews covering the latest mobile handsets. (If you didn't already know, Steve has collected more devices than your average Times Square electronics hole-in-the-wall has in total inventory.) Since I haven't written a product review in over two years, I figured this would be a good chance to knock some rust out of the wheel wells and see if I can still get all the way around the composition track without hyperextending a tiresome racing metaphor. Crap.

Nevertheless, please do check out the review and feel free to leave comments there, should you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with my take on this innovative, convergence-minded handset. I'm planning to focus this blog on mobile imaging and its business implications in future postings. At last, some long-promised thematic consistency emerges? Don't hold your breath.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Being able to switch carriers is a boon to consumers; it finally allows unfettered freedom of choice in the US wireless marketplace. But one added cost to switching no one's made many bones about yet is an environmental one: disposal of your old handset. Carriers with the same network technology (e.g., CDMA) use differing encryption schemes, dispensing upon a hardcoded handset little more than tchotchky status once you've, say, switched from Sprint to Verizon. This means tons more phones into landfills or refurbished into overseas markets, where disposal policies are even worse than the US'. For someone who's got the extraction capabilities, I sense several growth moneymaking opportunities here, from contact synching to materials recycling to, of course, yet more listing fees for ebay.

One question this article didn't answer for me but I presume to be true: if I've got an "unlocked" multi-band GSM handset (the kind that will work with T-Mobile/AT&T/Cingular networks in the US and damn near everywhere else abroad), I can conceivably keep that phone and switch GSM carriers for years to come, right? If so, it's yet another example of how the GSM "your account on a SIM card, not the phone" concept remains elegantly superior to its rivals.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to The Register, Nokia's rolling out their new 7600 model in Europe, positioning it largely as a trendy fashion accessory that happens to be a GSM camphone/MP3 player. It's an audacious crambox of with-it technology, i'll give them that. But I double-dog dare you to text your mates effectively on that keypad. Shades of the 3650's digital rotary dial.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How this guy was busted is the cracking good part of this otherwise ugly story. Turns out that 2.4 and probably even 5.8GHz aren't nearly as secure as you'd like for your neighbor-spooking intentions, no matter how clever you and your lava lamp might be.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i have this p800 with me and i'm traveling, so i decided to live the moblog lifestyle for a little while. the uneven results so far:

http://shmobile.textamerica.com/

what's remarkable to me is the fact that two people found my completely unpublicized blog and made comments already -- one by a moblogging pilot who was stuck at o'hare (presumably at the controls) the same day as my flight was cancelled. hope he spends as much time monitoring his instruments as his inbox up there...

Posted by Matt Shobe at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the happier, simpler, go-go 90s, a prescient but ill-fated company called DKA created what amounted to the groupware version of the now-ubiquitous weblog. The Burning Door team was central to that product's creation, defining both the technical architecture and user interaction design. "SceneServer," as the packaged product was entitled, allowed users to:

• post whatever was on their mind, and share links (there were a few billion fewer of them in 1997, but still)
• rate and comment on others' postings
• get notified when stuff they cared about got changed, either by an original author or another member of the community

Sounds awfully familiar to users of Movable Type and Blogger, no? It's fascinating to me (and the others here at BD) how web technical architectures, no matter how novel or forward-looking, always require a certain size-of-community tipping point to break out into the open. SceneServer never made a dent in the larger web consciousness for a variety of reasons (which might be worth exploring as a user experience post-mortem some day), but its spirit is definitely powering every individual publisher who shares their world via text and cameraphone.

-- section below added 1/25/04 --

Oh yeah. Why you're here -- why this blog's called It Came from Black Background. I created a set of templates for "edgy" SceneServer authors to demonstrate the unfadeable hipness of our technology with the espresso crowd. They were entitled Black Background because, well, they had such a background and in the days of HTML 2.0, <body bgcolor="#000000"> was about as out-there as you could get on a budget. Plus, they also featured orange text. Orange! Like, retro yet browser safe. So iconoclastic!

Sorry -- got all Dean-conceding-Iowa there for a paragraph. So I suppose, with this blog I can't help but make a callback to my own insignificant web publishing past and get a little smug about it.

-- end edits from the future --

I'm looking forward to working on the design challenges that arise from this new world -- especially its walking-around wireless implications -- and taking another shot at shaping how individuals and common-interest groups make community happen online.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)