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palmOne to use symbian? that'd be cool

i gotta be honest. i don't like the Palm OS at all. i say this having owned every generation of palm, handspring, pda, treo, whatever since my very first palm 5000, which i think was actually called the "US Robotics Pilot".

(this statement reminds me of the guy on vh1 on one of their "top 100 worst movies of all time" specials who said "Showgirls was the worst movie i ever saw. i hated it the first time i saw it, i hated it the second time i saw it, and i sure as hell hated it the third and fourth times i saw it" - aw...but i digress again)

why? it's clumsy, buggy, seemingly single-tasking, and allthough it's getting better version to version, adding a phone to the OS always seems like a bolt-on. no!, i didn't say strap-on. get your mind out of the gutter. there's a reason there's an exposed reset button on the back of the palm, and a stylus that unscrews to reset it.

but there's a lot of great apps that i like on the palm, and most palm users i know can't live without their palm apps, and the desktop sync that's so much more robust than anything else out there.

there sure is a demand for palm phones. ATT wireless is sold out of Treo 600s, and all the backordered units i am told will ONLY go to new account activations. i've only met one Treo 600 owner who didn't absolutely love the device.

with that in mind - i've often wondered why no symbian licensee has created a device with a palm's form factor to compete against palm here in the states, and why symbian hasn't attacked palm head on. ever.

so i think this article in "el reg" is pretty interesting, and i think is a sign of better things to come from palmOne, if they can figure out how not to maroon their huge user base in north america. oh wait, maybe *that's* what palmSource is for!

review: nokia 6600

snoop doggy daw-aw-awawa-awg snoop doggy daw-aw-awawa-awg yeah, that's right, me and snoop D-O-double-G hangin' with our new nokia 6600s. fashizze

over the holidays here in the US, nokia launched a huge ad campaign connected with their sponsorship of college football and the Sugar Bowl, culminating with a full length music video featuring Snoop Dogg himself at halftime working hard on a game of EA Sports NCAA Football for the N-Gage, and ending the serial ad saga that had gone on for too long in the weeks before. as if you had any doubts about S-N-double-O-P selling out to the masses before, this was almost laughable and the most flagrant of throwing some marketing dollars around i've seen in a long time.

simultaneous with this amazing throwing down of dollars, nokia was trying hard to bring one of the words recommended to die with 2003 into 2004 (god i hope "metrosexual" stays in that time capsule forever) with the website nokiaultimatebling.com, which incidentally was throwing me server errors during the halftime show when the prime ad dollars had just been spent, and now seems to be gone. someone caught hell for that!

all another way of saying, nokia is trying hard to keep their lead as the largest manufacturer of mobile phones in this doggy dogg world, and currently their flagship phone for the crossover enterprise bling-bling market is the nokia 6600, a tri-band GSM phone that utilizes the nokia developed user interface to Symbian, series 60 - and it's soon to be released successor for the US, the 6620 which will be EDGE capable and have some minor upgrades. (forum nokia list here)

no atkins diet for this guy

the phone itself more resembles dr. dre than mr. dogg. the 6600 is a fatty. a little shorter and stouter than it's predecessor, the 3650. the 6600 likes it's big mac with the bun, thank you. the rubberized sizebars feel good in your hands, though, and as a phone for talking, it feels about right. the screen is bright and vibrant, and seems to be equally visible indoors and outdoors. the speaker provides plenty of volume, and the reception in hard to reach areas seems above average. nokia's attennas (antennae?) always seem to be a little better than their competitors. or maybe their indicators always show 4 or 5 bars to make us think that. who knows, but it works. i'm sticking with my story that nokia phones have better antennas.

gin and juice

battery life on the 6600 seems to work about the same as most other nokia phones. the battery lasts a long time if you don't use the phone, but with heavy bluetooth and gprs use, one can run out the battery pretty fast. that said, it does pass the "can go a day" without charging it test, which is about what i'd expect for a phone and screen with this kind of processor. i would have liked to see nokia put a more powerful battery in the 6600, like sony ericsson did when they upgraded the P800 to the P900, especially since the 3650 is so heavily criticized for its short battery life.

this is for the Gz

if you're looking to have fun with the 6600, there's plenty of ways to do that, both legit and illegit. the built in camera can act as both a still camera and a video camera, although they are currently two different applications (they will become one application similar to that on the Sony Ericsson P900 in the North American 6620 version of this phone). The camera can be digitally zoomed to 2X pretty easily by pressing the joystick up or down, and you can switch between full size, portrait or night mode by pressing the joystick left or right. The video camera takes decent videos as far as these cameras go, but as far as i can tell you are limited to about 10 seconds of video, even if you have plenty of room on the memory card. This is in sharp contrast to the P900 that is only limited by storage memory size.

In general this camera is really good, but is limited to 640x480, state of the art outside of japan. i have heard from a few credible sources that a 1 megapixel version is coming soon, but no official word on that yet.

some sample pics (click to see full size):

and some sample videos (quicktime required):

cable car

takeoff 1

takeoff 2

as a game player, the 6600 does a pretty good job, and if you search hard enough, you can find cracks for how to run n-gage games on the 6600, as well as some semi cracked ROMs to run on the totally legal ROM emulators such as EMame or GoBoy. Both seem to run fine on the 6600, and work pretty well with the joystick and keypad, abeit not quite as well as they do on the N-Gage. I highly recommend centipede or zaxxon on EMame. they work just like they did in the 80s!

J2ME games are hit or miss on the 6600, depending on how much the developer had portability in mind when coding the games. although my legal copy of Jamdat Football worked great, my legal copy of Marcel Deisally Football, which was originally coded for the 3650, totally freaked out when dealing with graphics on the 6600. None of this is the fault of the game developers - they couldn't have been expected to make games 100% compatible with phones and phone platforms that didn't exist yet, but it is fair to know if you are upgrading from something like a 3650, don't expect all of your apps and games to just work, especially if they are J2me.

for more on how the 6600 handles J2ME - see my feature on first semester grades for J2ME MIDP 2.0 and some of the references to this piece.

and this is for the hustlas

the 6600 also provides a pretty good platform for the business user by providing address book and calendar sync with outlook on the PC, however as of this writing, syncing with a Mac requires a hack. apple has been pretty speedy about adding support for new phones as they come out, so i'll expect this soon.

the phone offers a great speakerphone, and bluetooth and wired connectivity for a headset.

email access is present, but i have never found nokia's email application to be terribly useful. accounts don't seem to work well in POP3 mode (no auto fetch) and i can't seem to find the setting to have their IMAP client bring down anything but the message headers. i like my email messages to download in the background and be there when i want to read them, not to have to fetch message bodies on demand - but then again, my main phone is a t-mobile plan with all-you-can-eat data, so if you are paying by the K, i can see why you would want to conserve. also, my SMTP server of choice requires authentication, which again the nokia client doesn't seem to support.

the messaging side of things is classic series 60, with this phone being able to accept MMS messages up to 100K. if you take a look at the UAProf for this phone you can see all the characteristics of what the phone accepts - i'll leave UAProfs for another lesson coming soon.

there also seems to be some problems with the bluetooth implementation of the handsfree profile on this phone. it doesn't seem to pass control from the phone to the headset in firmware version 3.42.1.

is this phone tha shiznit?

i like this phone a lot as a phone with some mobile office capabilities of scheduling and getting at your contact list, and especially the open platform for developers to create applications you as the end user can install on the phone. i wouldn't buy a phone anymore where you couldn't add your own applications via some manner.

the version i have is the first release for the indonesian/malaysian market, which has a few glitches methinks with the firmware version 3.42.1 - and nokia isn't very forthcoming about how to get the firmware upgraded on their phones....you pretty much have to know someone.

so if you are in north america, i wouldn't seek out the 6600 from grey market importers just yet, G. i would definitely wait for the 6600 to be released by T-Mobile US (only if it has updated firmware), or the 6620 version that will be offered by ATT Wireless and Cingular, who will probably be in the works of merging by then, you know what i'm sayin'?

ratings
phone: 8
texting: 8
mms: 8
email: 7
browser: 9 (opera)
pda features: 7
camera: 9
battery: 5
usability: 8
durability: 8
stability: 9
gameplay potential: 8
third party apps: 9
fashion: 8
out-of-box accessories: 5

read this through the shizzolator

a new class of device

it's interesting that a new class of mobile device is starting to appear on the horizon. what do we call these? pocketpc, taken. handheld, taken. palmtop, been said. i don't know - let's call them mini-PCs. either way they are pretty cool if they work. the basic idea, is a mini-handheld-pc that is your all in one, desktop that you plug into a keyboard and monitor at work and home, and have a fully functional PC OS on the road, with the ability to plug in mobile phone, data, and wifi cards.

one is made by tiquit and one is made by OQO that shows it's heritage of having an apple powerbook designer.

they remind me vaguley of the philips velo the first windows ce device i owned, which was semi useful at the time, but no desktop or laptop replacement - and in general this class of devices were a big flop.

it will be interesting to see if these companies can get any traction. i have a hard time thinking of a startup hardware manufacturer like this that tried to create a category buster and didn't die a painful death. they all run out of money. palm is one ( and you can argue they are dying a slow, painful death) but then they had the backing of 3com, didn't they?

a lot will depend upon price and execution, of course, but i could think of a few solutions that this could be used for, where the power of a pc is needed, but the professional is always on the go. the medical field primarily comes to mind.

big hardware companies with lots of cash can execute on these types of things and, i wish apple would do one of these with an OS X device.

b.o.t.h.

the other day i rattled off about not seeing coheed & cambria live, and wanting to see them in sfo. as fate would have it, i have to go to sfo for a meeting today, and whoa! they are playing tonight at bottom of the hill.

so i guess i have to go.

b.o.t.h. is i think the best place to see an up and coming band in america...you are always close to the stage, they serve PBR at the bar, and its san francisco, there's no smoking allowed in bars or restaurants, which is great for a non-smoker ;) i've seen a few great shows there, and a lot of really good bands in between.

just look for one of the oldest guys in the place!

sniffin' the bluetooth TL

because of all the confusion some people are having looking for phones they know work with the acura tl handsfreelink system - i decided to help them out by taking a look at what bluetooth profiles the TL *really* supports.

ben hui, with whom i used to work, has created a great freeware bluetooth browser (which is more of a sniffer) which was great for this task. thanks ben!

the profiles

you can see here the HFL supports Handsfree, OBEX Object Push, and OBEX FileTransfer. so that's why the P800 and P900 won't work with HFL, they only support the "Headset" profile.

here's some more of the details:

so i find it interesting that HFL also supports OBEX Object Push and OBEX FileTransfer. I wonder what you could do with that. perhaps that's just used to pass along some of the meta information like the phone's battery level and such.

one thing i think would be cool is to have text messages get pushed to the screen as they come in on the phone. i'll have to look into writing that.

falling off the wagon with fifa

anyone who did business with us during the spyonit/724 years knows our office had some serious playstation EA Sports FIFA addictions. a day didn't go by when a meeting got delayed because someone was playing fifa in the conference room, and well, if any of my comrades say that fifa didn't affect their work, they are lying sons of bitches. i take full credit for being the pusher, having introduced fifa '97 for the PC to to this crowd and the epidemic spread from there. there were some good side affects, such as a bunch of americans being able to name entire rosters of the entire Serie A and La Liga Primera, and intelligently discuss why zidane could control the midfield like no other...such a shame he's french. In addition, an "all the ps2 you can handle" policy believe it or not, is a pretty good way to motivate a development team to "get shit done" and work late hours etc.

in the later years, i guess fifa lost it's effectiveness, heavy tolerances were developed, and the group started moving to the new street drug of choice, konami's winnng eleven (called International Superstar Soccer in Europe). i never took to winning eleven, mostly because they didn't have real teams represented, and it just wasn't as much fun pitting "Ronaldi" and "Figa" against "Savola" on "Team Catalonia" - and thus i went cold turkey, my addiction was broken. (back in the real world, i did finagle a ticket to a camp nou match last spring to see barça play, which was amazing, here it is, as seen from a nokia 3650).

with the advent of playstation online, however, and fifa 2004 supporting online play, i had to give this enhanced version another try. I've been slowly building up my chops again, getting ready for the online arena, and took the plunge last week into the online arena.

the major point here, is that online gaming has come a LONG way from the days of LAN quake, constantly wanting to be the LPB with your "shotgun" enabled double 28.8 modem (and anyone remember Quake Haiku?) - to everyone having high speed DSL and cable modems. last night, after a bout of insomnia, i decided to try a game at 3 am (and with kids, that's pretty much the only time i could play anyway) - as there was nobody in north america up, i had to play against some folks in the "N. Europe" room and the experience was pretty surprising. no lag, no coughs, no hiccups. playing FIFA "across the pond" was pretty much like playing on a LAN. the europeans have better online EA Sports names to - instead of "go b01l3rz" i was playing against the likes of "Rcarlos21" and "batigol".

with strides like this in online gaming, and wireless speeds getting faster, we're pretty close to having some good mobile gaming experiences on mobile devices - it should be cool. N-gage arena is a good first step. let's see where it goes from here.

in the meantime, anyone up for a game of FIFA?

"Really must get sleep
Definitely the last round
OK just one more"
  - Salt

people are browsing on their phone?!

we all know WAP sucks, and WAP is dead. and yes, WAP is pretty useless for browsing the "mobile internet".

that doesn't mean that people aren't browsing; as the browsers are getting richer and better on phones, it seems people are starting to browse again using them, just not using WAP! XHTML looks really good, and the new mobile browsers mobile browsers are doing a much better job in rendering regular old HTML for the mobile profile. Opera on the Nokia 6600 and P800/900 looks damn good, an the build in browser on Microsoft Mobile (Smartphone) is totally usable as well. boy did openwave miss the bus there. there is really no need for WAP anymore on these new phones with better processors and better bandwidth. the newly announced nokia 6620 is going to be even more usable on the EDGE networks of AT&T and Cingular.

P900 Opera

6600 Opera

6600 Opera, Full Screen Mode

i wouldn't bring this up, except that in looking at our webserver logs, i'm starting to see more and more people using these browsers to, well, browse, enter comments, download MIDlets, whatever.

here's one from a P900

"GET /steve/archives/000279.html HTTP/1.1" 200 16741 "-" "SonyEricssonP900/R101 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0"

ah, now here's an interesting one:

"GET /steve/archives/000155.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12398 "-" "Nokia6600/1.0 (3.42.1) SymbianOS/7.0s Series60/2.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (Google WAP Proxy/1.0)"

what's the "Google WAP Proxy"? what's a WAP proxy?

well, if you do use your wap browser and start at http://www.google.com/wml - they have what is referred to as a "transcoding proxy server" or a "transcoder" serving up your pages. what this does is sniff your device, and then take regular old HTML and turn it into WAP, XHTML, or whatever on the server side before sending it down to the device.

most telecom software infrastructure companies sell these things, but the need for them is going away. we saw this market evaporating a couple years ago a the last place i worked, and my product management team did all we could to kill further product development in this area and refocus it in other more forward looking areas.

that was still the right choice, but it's cool that google has this piece of soviet-era technology, and interesting that people are actually using it, especially on a 6600.

first semester grades for J2ME MIDP 2.0

I've ranted in the past about J2ME 1.0, about how awkward, slow, and buggy applications were that were written using this mobile platform from SUN, and being wideley adopted by mobile device manufacturers. however, owing much of my technical past to Java related technologies, there was no way I was going to give up hope that J2ME could be improved and get closer to native technologies on devices.

J2ME has started sophomore year with a second version of the MIDP profile that has made its way onto phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, and now Motorola. SUN keeps a list of their licensees which happens to be a little out of date as of this writing. The P900 is indeed available, and i now have some experience in using it by writing a RSS Feed Reader which uses some of the new features of MIDP 2.0, most visibly the ability to launch the platform's default browser given a URL.

So what do I think? The results are mixed. (NOTE: these grades are for the J2ME support, not the phones themselves - here's my review of the P900 in general...Nokia 6600 generic review coming soon)

Sony Ericsson P900: C+

SE does a pretty good job of installing and executing MIDP 2.0 apps. I was able to run the BD3 Feed Reader in testing mode where it fetched RSS feeds, parsed, and processed the XML every 5 minutes for 3 days straight - and as long as all the resources that were opened were closed, the memory footprint stayed pretty much static. this was a surprise. I don't think I ever saw MIDP 1.0 apps run with this stability on any platform. Performance is also much better than on the P800, which has a MIDP1.0 VM and an otherwise equivalent 155 Mhz ARM processor.

On the downside, there's still a long way to go in making J2ME apps on the P900 look more native. they can start by using the MIDlet's icon rather than a generic icon for every MIDlet in their menu. I've seen this asked on the SE forum a bunch of times and no one from SE ever answers it. Secondly, there's still a lot of features of the P900 that can't be touched from J2ME, even with extensions. Although I guess this lowest common denominator thing is part of the play of J2ME portability, they could do a lot better job in perhaps providing a toolkit with widgets and such that make more sense on the P900 in a stylus based environment.

It took them 2 firmware releases to get some of the kinks out, and get the entire spec implemented. Lucky for SE, they allow users to update their own firmware.

There's no list of known issues, so many programmers are muddling through what works and what doesn't at http://www.sonyericsson.com/developer.

Nokia 6600: C

On the good side, Nokia does a good job of making J2ME apps feel at home on the 6600. For the first time on a Nokia device, J2ME apps are first class and appear on the top level menu like any other Symbian C++ application instead of at the back of the bus in a special "Apps" folder as on all other Nokia phones.

On the down side, the list of known issues in the nokia 6600 MIDP implementation are atrocious. Nokia uses SUN's Monty VM in their implementation so some of these things are perhaps not their fault, but it definitely shows a lack of testing and a rush to market. Understood but not totally forgiveable in this market. I don't know if the P900 uses this VM or another VM.

There are other things that definitely are their fault from a lack of testing. A prime example is not implementing the MIDlet.platformRequest() method which is new and has prevented my feed reader from running on this phone. Calling this method with the right parameters is supposed to either make a phone call or launch the default browser. It currently crashes the 6600 - and unless Nokia provides a way for users to update their own firmware, it's going to leave a whole lot of phones that don't really support MIDP2.0. Couldn't they have gotten a programmer to pull an all-nighter and gotten this right? The sun was probably up all night anyway in Finland since this was released in the Summer.

Some of the other bugs are pretty bad too, especially since they cause memory leaks - but at least they provide workarounds.

Conclusion:

I don't want this to be negative because I want to see a LOT more of MIDP2.0 out there on devices. There are some necessary features which i haven't tested such as the messaging API as well as the JSR-82 bluetooth exensions, which both these phones implement.

That said, SUN used to require a lot more testing of their licensees than they seem to now, and I would expect this software to be a little better. I think both implementations are better than the freshman 1.0 equivalents, but let's hope for a much improved second semester!