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my first official spinoff

with "friends" ending and spinning off "joey" and all, i got to thinking, "i need a spinoff!"

plus, i am starting to get enough traffic around here just on bluetooth connectivity in cars that i've decided to launch a second weblog just on coverage of this topic, titled the admittedly bland "the bluetooth car weblog."

you can find it here: http://bluetoothcar.typepad.com/main/ if you are interested in such things. i've copied over the archived content and comments. i'll still cross post the original content, but plan to do more pointers to external coverage and such over there. if it's related to wireless, carriers, or devices, you will still be able to find it here.

we'll see how maintaining multiple publications is!

hey sprint pcs, clean out your photo albums!

although i've resisted, i had to go get a sprint pcs account/camera/video phone for a project we're working on. i got one of these toshiba VM 4050 which is a really great handset, but we'll leave that for another time.

anyway, on first use of the camera or camcorder to upload media to your online album, you have to setup a password. when i tried, it kept prompting me for a password. i couldn't set one up and soon figured out a password was already assigned, probably the last 4 digits of my ss# or something.

so i go online to pictures.sprintpcs.com, enter my new sprint pcs number, and go through the "forgot my password" pages, so that my password gets messaged to my phone. 2 seconds later, i get "Dear Member, Your Picture Mail Password is: POOP". hmm, i think, that's an odd default password.

so i log in via my browser and lo and behold, an album with someone else's pictures! including porn! Sprint, you might want to go talk to lightsurf who manages your online album about this one!

(click for larger image, porn blurred to protect the innocent)

motorola releases more iDEN MIDP2.0 Handsets

moto releases kits fori285, i325, i830

my first week of using microsoft office 2004 for mac

(click for full size image)

I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac all week... I used to use Entourage exclusively for mail, contacts, PIM, etc – but then changed over to using all the apple tools such as mail, iCal, Address Book, etc simply because Entourage didn’t quite work for me with the multitude of email accounts I had, and tracking my time just wasn’t effective in it.

After using Entourage 2004 for a week now, I’ve once again bounced back to the redmond way of thinking on this stuff. All of Office OS X is generally better but the biggest feature that I think is somewhat revolutionary is the “Project Center” in Entourage which makes it really easy to track everything you are doing on a project by project basis. You can associate all files, notes, email traffic, tasks, and contacts with a project so you can very easily track what you are going to do, and the big one for me is, what I did for whom. You can set it up so email from contacts associated with a project automatically get filed with that project, which again makes it really easy to see an audit trail of everything associated with a certain project. And they did a good job of handling many to many relationships as well which reflects how most of us really work.

What's new for Java developers in Symbian OS v8.0

find out here.

still not as fully functional as the C++ APIs but getting there with some file access capabilities. meanwhile, can we get some more MIDP2.0 phones to market?

acura RL with handsfree link

acura has announced their second car with handsfree link capability,the RL prototype.

this car has some neat technology. in addition to HFL, it integrates real time traffic updates to the navigation system. the traffic information is transmitted via the XM radio satellites, and shows congestion on the navigation screen. then presumably, you can find an alternate route.

review: apple and logitech MX900 bluetooth mice

of mice and man

my main machine is an original apple powerbook G4 that unfortunately doesn't have built in bluetooth. i am an avid bluetooth user though, using a D-Link USB bluetooth dongle to do such things as use my phone as a GPRS modem, as well as transfer most of the pictures you find in this weblog between the phones and my machines. on the old powerbooks, you get two USB ports - the problem was i often need 3 or 4 for an external mouse, and the various USB chargers and sync cables i use with our arsenal of phones.

what was the solution to my problem? hmm, i could consolidate by getting a bluetooth mouse that used the bluetooth dongle, and get rid of one wire in the process. right? wrong.

i tried two different bluetooth mice, the apple bluetooth mouse, and the Logitech MX 900, and although they both do work adequately, they didn't solve my problem. here's why:

apple bluetooth mouse

the apple bluetooth mouse is a sleek, beautiful piece of design, in line with most of apple's designs that feels great in your hand. setting up the bluetooth mouse with an apple is a snap as you might expect, and the OS gives you great feedback on screen when the mouse is connected or disconnected. the difference in tracking is imperceiveable from a wired mouse, which is great.

the apple bluetooth mouse runs on 2 AA batteries (non-rechargeable), which for me lasted about a month with heavy use. that's great. unfortunately, it makes the mouse a little heavy to travel with. so i ended up leaving this mouse at home, and day by day migrating to carrying a lightweight wired targus optical mouse in my bag every day. that was the first disappointment.

the second was that this was supposed to save me a USB port by sharing the bluetooth connection with my other devices, but in practice you cannot use more than one bluetooth device at a time, making this a giant pain in the you know what. transferring a 40K picture or java .jar file from my apple to would routinely get halfway there and then just fail. when i disconnected the mouse, and tried it again, everything worked fine. i tried this with 3 or 4 different phones, and always got the same result. big bummer.

now, if i can rant on one other thing. apple: come into the 90's. put 2 buttons on your mice. and maybe, just maybe, come up to the 00's and put a scroll wheel on it while you are at it. who in the hell thinks that a one button mouse is a good idea? especially when OS X works fine with every other mouse on the market, extra buttons, wheels and all!

to end on a good note, the smartest feature is that the mouse has an on and off switch so you can save the batteries. i think that every bluetooth device should have a one-button-bluetooth-on-and-off switch.

logitech MX900 bluetooth mouse

well, one way to solve the issue of not having a two button mouse is to buy a two button mouse. the MX900 is the bluetooth version of the popular MX700 "wireless" mouse sold by logitech. the MX900 not only has two buttons and a wheel, but it also has five other buttons, which when installed on the PC do things like scroll up and down, bring up a task menu and do forward and back in your browser. pretty cool once you get used to it.

the MX900 comes with rechargeable batteries, and a big-ass cradle that doubles as a USB bluetooth dongle/base station. this is nice, except that again for my purposes, which is to carry with my laptop, i have no interest of carrying around a cradle with any device. since it works with the apple/d-link dongle, it shouldn't matter because i shouldn't need to carry around the cradle, however the battery only lasts a day or so before needing to be recharged. hmm.

in addition, this mouse, however is even heavier than the apple mouse. so much, so, that my wrist started to hurt after a day of use. i also found the tracking was inadequate on the Mac, which to be fair is not supported by logitech.

i also had the same problems with file transfers while the mouse was connected as i did on the apple.

the bottom line

if you are looking for a bluetooth mouse to carry around on the go, i'm not sure there is a solution right now. if you are looking for one that is tethered to your desktop, a bluetooth mouse is an okay solution. you might be better off using a mouse on a dedicated frequency ouside the bluetooth /wi-fi spectrum. for now, i use the logitech on my PC desktop at home, and i'll reserve the apple mouse for when i get that G5 dual-processor machine i've had my eye on.

HandsFreeLink Compatibility

I've created this entry as a living test document for which bluetooth phones work with Acura HandsFreeLink (HFL). You should also refer to these 2 entries for more information. 1, 2.

These are based on my tests. If any readers have tested other phones, please add a comment and i'll update this entry.

Phones that work with HFL
These phones implement the Handsfree BT profile and work as designed.

Sony Ericsson T68i
Sony Ericsson T610 (my pick)
Sony Ericsson T630
Nokia N-Gage
Nokia 3650
Nokia 6230 (my pick)

Phones that should work but do not
These phones implement the Handsfree BT profile, but do not work. They have the potential to work with newer firmware.

Motorola V600 ( this phone partially works, using the "Transfer" function)
Nokia 6600 (firmware 1.42)
Panasonic X11
Panasonic X70

Phones that will not work with HFL
These phones are bluetooth enabled, but do not implement the BT Handsfree profile. Someone (hopefully Honda) needs to put pressure on Sony Ericsson product management to add this BT profile to these phones. I have talked to Sony Ericsson about it and they say they need a "business case". To me, people not buying their phones because they are incompatible with the cars from Honda and Toyota that are emerging would be a "business case".

Sony Ericsson P800
Sony Ericsson P900

wireless cabin - 'bout time

reading this perspective of guy kewney i wanted to say, "duh!" but since that term is so eighth-grade, i refrained. i routinely have to travel with 5-6 cell phones, and i very rarely if ever turn any of them off, and if i do, it's to save the battery.

using cell phones on planes would sure create some annoying situations, but i'm all for it - more for data access than voice. retreiving mobile email and texting sure would be helpful in a whole lotta cases.

oh, and here's a secret - if you can still find one of those mobitex RIM blackberries - they work over much of the U.S. and Eastern Canada, especially when you fly over metropolitain areas. in old BellSouth country which now belongs to Cingular, you can get blackberry email between Atlanta and Orlando no problem almost the entire flight. two bars in the window seat the entire way.

is RSS following in the path of WAP?

no. it's not. at least not in my opinion. i keep seeing random posts about how the many different RSS standards and Atom ( like this one, nothing against this guy, everyone is entitled to their own opinion) will lead is leading it down the exact path to death that WAP followed.

the logic seems to be:

RSS has a lot of competing versions. WAP had a bunch of different competing versions. WAP died. Q.E.D. RSS will die.

that's not my opinion and here's why:

1) people seem to confuse WAP with it's original markup language, WML. WML did have X x Y x Z permutations where X is the manufacturer, Y is the version, and Z is the gateway. it was difficult, but people solved this problem, by creating frameworks to deal with it and using UAProfs. there were quite a few products that dealt (and still deal today) with this problem in an elegant manner. creating content was not the problem, and had nothing to do with the death of WAP, again in my opinion.

2) WAP died because of network latency/slow phone processors, which was the exact problem it was trying to solve. WAP was supposed to tokenize it's markup language, WML, and send a binary representation to the phones, thus reducing the work on the processor and reducing bandwidth by a factor of N, making it fast and usable. good theory, bad implementations. WAP was launched on phones using CSD which i think was still too slow to make these applications usable. people gave up, and WAP got a bad reputation. by the time GPRS came along, it was too late.

3) WAP died because of poor application design on small screens and keypad input. Too many people tried to just transcode existing 800x600 applications to fit onto a 60 x 30 screen. posting data was a nightmare, and people couldn't easily enter information using a keypad. the few applications at the time that were designed for this i think were usable, and perhaps somehwat useful, but they were the minority. again. bad rep.

4) WAP died because the mechanisms for push were ignored or weren't made available by the carriers. WAP push, which allowed an application developer to start a WAP session based on alerts or stimulus from a PC based system. only Nextel and Sprint PCS in the early days made this available to developers, but it was never implemented by commercial applications. SMS launching WAP browsers was first implemented on the Ericsson T68, again, after it was too late.

5) WAP died because superior solutions were coming to market. the experience of an XHTML browser, and the silver bullet that would be brought to market by iMode made developers, and more importantly, the enterprises that were getting no return on the investment they put into WAP/WML, to kill all the budget surrounding these applications. because the version 1 projects using WAP/WML were so dismal, combined with the bubble bursting, enterprises and finiancial institutions say "no way, quit it".

6) the divergence of WML was largely a time to market issue tied to hardware deployment cycles (development of phones had to precede deployment by 6-9 months) , the divergence of RSS/Atom is a personality conflict. the former was largely solved by a standards organization (WAP Forum/OMA) getting involved, the latter has yet to get there. there were valid reasons for the divergence of WML, beyond differences in syntax.

so, if you beleive my hypotheses above for why WAP died, if RSS dies, it won't be because of divergence, it will be for other reasons, like people just getting plain fed up with the immaturity surrounding the open syndication community, and glomming onto an open standard that a standards body creates, and syndication clients start to support.

after all, it's all about a publisher being able to reach the biggest number of readers. once microsoft says "Longhorn will support open syndication format X" guess which version publishers are going to start piping out?