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mms under pressure

i've noticed more and more that MMS is coming under pressure, such as articles by the always upbeat [sarcasm] Guy Kewney - which aren't without merit; their thesis being that MMS was made for P2P, and pictures sent via the MMSC which are converted to a least common denominator format will not fly in a megapixel and beyond cameraphone world.

either via the RSS feed on this site, or by going to my public flickr page you can see my tests.

a megapixel photo from a Nokia 7610 sent via Email, T-Mobile US MMSC (Ericsson brand), and a Private MMSC we own (NowSMS brand).

they get resized before getting to Flickr...and it's interesting to note that most moblogging sites are getting by just fine with email parsing instead of true MMS.

I control the config of the Private MMSC - and what i saw surprised me a little: the MMSC isn't resizing the pictures, the Nokia phone is! The MMSC didn't need to do any resizing at all, since the email client doesn't send down a limiting UAProf.
An inspection of sending an extended size from the Sony Ericsson K700i was also interesting - it wouldn't let me MMS pictures bigger than 640x480 (VGA) - the menu option is turned off!

Now i have to look at the MM1 (the protocol for sending MMS from the phone) to see if this is a standards limitation, or just a choice made by the device manufacturers to keep support headaches down (since many operators turn off image size conversion on the MMSCs - but either way, it's an interesting decision. why not allow megapixel phones to MMS megapixel images? the MMSCs can definitely handle bigger pictures - with one of my companies I'm working on a system right now that allows 5 Megapixel images to be sent to MMS phones without a problem, and the MMSC is doing the heavy lifting here.

Especially with CDMA just rolling out MMS (really) with many > 1 megapixel phones, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

There are a couple companies that have developed superior technology on the client that are compatible with MMSCs Cognima Snap mostly in the GSM world and dotPhoto's Pictavision mostly in the CDMA/BREW world that are much better at pushing images around from client to server on phones. these companies have been forced to be compatible with MMS systems mainly for billing reasons but the underlying technology is generally a little smarter than MMS.

a few caveats when you read this stuff:

a) it's naive to think hardware manufacturers won't upgrade MMS capabilities are more devices roll out

b) A2P MMS is still an untapped market that doesn't suffer from the problem that companies like Cognima market - sending pics and video to the phone via the MMSC is still the best way to do such things, in my opinion, because the MMSC just handles so much heavy lifting of dealing with the UAProf.

e-books finally working for me

i love books, i guess i always have - but i have way too many of them. and especially tech books - they become obsolete almost immediately. i've tried a few e-book systems in the past, and they just haven't worked for me - until now.

o'reilly's safari is great for tech books. i use this almost exclusively for any tech reference these days. the biggest shortcoming is the lack of being able to reference books offline. at the premium levels, you can get chits for checking out a chapter at a time off-line, but this doesn't really help for airline flights and such. otherwise, the small monthly fee is well worth what i would have paid shelling out $40+ per book.

for pleasure reading, i'm really liking mobipocket on the nokia 7610. as an experiment, i'm trying to read "the davinci code" and it's working out really well. now, this is a book written at the third grade reading level with short chapters, but it's great for reading in short chunks. if this is successful, i'll try to tackle neil stephenson's "quicksilver."

anyone that knows me knows i have an attention span of using a mobile phone for about two weeks. mobipocket might be the sticky application that keeps me on the 7610 for awhile.

got my airport express...

got my airport express. it's a pretty cool device, a lot packed into a little package. this will make me get totally entrenched in the apple iTunes world. their master plan is working. it's funny, but i used to be gung-ho about MP3 being the open format everything could use, now i'm not sure i care...as all my devices become capable of playing iTunes AAC files, i'm not sure i care so much anymore.

at any rate, i'll report more once i put the device through its paces.

FeedBurner MFR 2 - MIDP2.0 Beta

For those of you that are users of the FeedBurner Mobile Feed Reader, there is a beta available of the second version, which utilizes FeedBurner SmartFeed™ technology, which automatically optimizes all feed formats for the mobile client, and allows the compiled code to stay small.

this has basically been a rewrite for optimized parsing and size, but there will be more features before release:

It can be downloaded at:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/products/mfr2-midp2.jad

or

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/products/mfr2-midp2.jar

This beta has been tested on the Nokia 7610, Nokia 6600, Sony Ericsson P900, and the Sony Ericsson K700i. It may work on other MIDP 2.0 phones.

the feature set is similar to 1.0 at this point, and it does not currently upgrade version 1.0 databases, so you will need to enter your feeds again.

License codes from 1.0 and above should work for 2.0 as well.

sony ericsson makes P910 official

the full press release is here.

there's much skepticism surrounding the usability of the keyboard pictured above - all i can offer here is that the people i know who have tried it love it and say it works really well. can't wait to concur firsthand.

cameraphone examples now integrated into my feed

we have a cool new feature at FeedBurner that allows you to "splice" photos into your feed via our RSS feeds provided by our partner, Flickr.

i have a ton of cameraphone example photos i've been meaning to share and comment on, and this is the easiest way to do it, so as i get good or bad examples from the phones, they'll show up here in this feed with comments!

series 60 help

anyone know of a decent 3rd party symbian series 60 email client? i very much dislike the one that ships with it.

or maybe i can't figure it out. it's the main reason i don't use a series 60 phone as my main sidearm. it can't seem to check mail automatically (unless i can't find this option) and you can only have one mailbox active at a time (as far as i can tell). they just recently added SMTP auth.

any recommendations from the mobile masses?

thoughts on Nokia Lifeblog

i gave nokia's beta release of Lifeblog a spin today and here are some initial thoughts. this product is still in beta a 0.95, but seems pretty solid so far.

Lifeblog according the about box is "a PC and mobile phone software combination that intelligently and automatically keeps a diary of the multimedia item you collect on your phone, such as photos, videos, text messages, and mutlimedia messages," and seems that it will be packaged as an add-on to the Series 60 interface.

the idea is as you send or receive any of the items mentioned above, Lifeblog keeps a timeline organized by date, and allows you to add additional notes along the way. what i think it is, is a better way to organize multimedia than is currently presented on the Series 60 interface. this is a graphical view of your inbox, outbox, and any photos or videos you take that make it very easy to track back to items if you know the relative time they were performed or received, and it think it works, from that perspective, even if that is not the original goal.

it's analogous to how agendus is a far superior way to organize the Palm OS or the Symbian UIQ OS than ships with the respective native OSes.

With that in mind, here's what i'd like to see the roadmap for Lifeblog be:

1) make the UI object-oriented...not in the ParcPlace Smalltalk sense, but in the IBM OS/2 sense...great - i got to the pictures i took yesterday of the soccer game, but i can't "Send" from Lifeblog. anything i can do to an object in other parts of the Series 60 UI, allow me to do from the Lifeblog interface

2) Sync/Upload via Bluetooth

3) ability to add notes for that day

4) calendar widget integration...isn't this really just an extension of a calendar view?

5) upload to a server - i understand this isn't a moblogging tool, but it sure could be a cool one! i'd rather just have a safe place to store everything...hell, can i send it to my iDisk somehow? i wish.

that's it for now. i'll post more as i use this more. looks like a great start to a new way to thinking about organizing mobile media.

new MIDP 2.0 phones have some cool features

MIDP 2.0 is really looking up on the newsest handsets.

Nokia looks like they really have a solid implementation that shipped with the new 7610 - platformRequest() as well as all the camera APIs seem to work great - and they've started to include some integration with other parts of the Symbian Series 60 OS. for instance, if you tag an input field as being for email, you can insert an email address from the contacts application instead of having to type it in. that's great.

My first impressions of the Sony Ericsson K700i are great as well. the first thing you notice is how fast J2ME applications run. this phone seems to have plenty of speed and memory. the most impressive thing to me, however, was the new Java 3D API that's included on this phone. the Micro 3D implementation is impressive with the 3D tennis game they included on the phone as a demo and supports 3D models and texture maps. this game is one of the best looking phone games i've seen on any platform, and it's playable too! i wish i had more time...it's been awhile since i've done any 3D graphics programming but this API looks easy enough to give it a try.

i'm just glad that maybe i can stop ranting about how MIDP 2.0 needs to come of age. on both these phones, this is a really good step in the right direction.

Fry's expands to Illinois!

okay, i forgot just how much shit Fry's carries...I went by the new store in chicagoland this weekend, and i retract any doubts about their success here. pretty impressive. the salesman (who was relocated here from san diego) told me they are planning on launching five stores here over the next two years. and, there seems to be a market for this place given the number of both camaros and lexuses in the parking lot.

rush feedback

I was a pretty decent rush fan for about three or maybe four of their albums (and I did actually own the albums) in the late eighties, but alas, we parted ways after that, and although I check in every so often to see how this canadian trio is doing, I must admit I haven’t really been intrigued by anything they’ve done lately. Until now.

feedback is collection of covers; aging rockers covering aging-more rockers such as buffalo springfield, the yardbirds, the who, cream, and perhaps one or two others I can’t place. I can’t remember if “Mr. Soul” is buffalo springfield or some other band neil young was in; cut me some slack, all these original songs were released before I was born. I must admit, I didn’t do my homework nor any reseach for this review, but as far as I know, rush has never even done a cover on any of their twenty or so double live albums they seem to release with regularity.

Anyway, feedback is kind of fun. When I saw this song list, I thought to myself, “there’s no way rush can pull this off” - but they can and do. Alex Lifeson, an unequivocal hall-of-fame guitarist in his own right, shows some versatility we haven’t heard out of him since the early eighties, and geddy lee doesn’t over-do it – he just sings these classics in his own style which believe it or not, works with these straight-forward arrangements. None of these songs make neil peart break a sweat, but he tries to show off when he can, paying ample homage to keith moon.

[buy at amazon]

Bad religion the empire strikes first

the empire strikes first is no better or no worse than your average bad religion album. Yes, that’s right: it sounds pretty much like every other bad religion album in the last twenty years. Which is quite amazing if you think about it. I’m not suggesting bad religion hang up the shoes; it’s good to have some things always stay constant in your life. It gives you something to hang onto. Something you can always be sure of

What is also amazing, is that while bad religion’s music pretty much stays the same, what they sing about also stays the same, which is amazing because the world has changed a lot in twenty years, and for a left coast, left wing band like bad religion, they can still sing the same old tune about social inequity, lack of justice, and how technology is spoiling the youth of america no matter which president is in office. I guess that’s their point; the government doesn’t work no matter who is in control. Fine. I can empathize with that; one of the reasons I never registered to vote until about two weeks ago was because there just was never a candidate bad enough to vote against since I was eighteen.

Yeah, don’t expect any keyboards, or blues riffs sneaking into the empire strikes first - although maybe there’s a few more guitar solos than we come to expect, and what is almost a rap snuck into the bridge of “let them eat war,” you can still name that band in one note. it’s dual guitar, bass, drums, greg gaffin singing, and backing vocals that NOFX likes to make fun of. Nothing for the greatest hits collection, either...this is a pot boiler to keep the fans happy. Fans like me.

[buy at amazon]

Fry's expands to Illinois?

Fry's, a long time silicon valley and southern california favorite for your hardcore geek computers and electronics has opened a store in downers grove, illinois, right down the street from CompUSA, BestBuy, Circuit City, and probably others that sell the same kind of merchandise. i'm guessing me and about 10 other people who live in the area have heard of Fry's.

I'm sure this is a trial balloon for the chicago market, but i hope they are ready to write off those losses, as i think the market is about saturated here!

P900 comes through in a pinch

the other day eric had a jones for some jet, however we had no way of playing music here in the office: i forgot my ipod at home, eric's was either out of juice or wasn't able to sync with his new thinkpad, and matt had to return his laptop which had acted as our music player for the last few months here in the office.

so we had to get creative.

luckily, i had a few phones laying around that perked up their ears and said they were up to the task. the treo 600 - a pretty big SDIO card...but hmm, no free MP3 player. the nokia 6230, yeah able to play AAC files as well, but no industry standard jack.

sony ericsson P900? memory stick duo. it took 3 adaptors ( 1 for memory stick duo, to memory stick, then memory stick to PCMCIA, and one phone headset to 1/8" stereo jack) but about 2 minutes later we were cranking "cold hard bitch," and the crops were saved.

handango lowers commission

handango has lowered its commissions to independent developers from 70% to 60%. is this a sign that their business model isn't working? that's the first thing that comes to my mind. handango allows developers to sell mobile applications without the carrier getting a piece of the action, but is more difficult for most users to download applications.

selling through carriers obviously is working, as JAMDAT announced it would IPO and developers i know distributing through the qualcomm BREW infrastructure are all making decent money on their apps.

and for comparison, the BREW infrastructure pays the developer 80% of the retail price, and these are usually subscription based. so with that in mind, 60% looks less and less attractive...which will drive more developers to do the extra work to distribute through carriers. given, that's all some carriers are paying as well, but with elevated startup costs.

this usually entails joining the carrier's developer program, paying a fee (~=$500), and also purchasing a certificate from verisign (~=$400) - so you need to sell quite a few apps to get a return on investment.

video phones to have now (updated)

i've been fortunate these last few weeks to have been working on a few projects requiring me to test most of the camera phones in the market, and a number of these phones can also shoot video of various degrees. this is short and sweet, but here's the top four video camera phones to have. caveat: i haven't tested those that don't work in north america.

sony ericsson K700i
the K700i is the next evolution of SE's most popular cameraphone, the T610 - this time they did it right with an amazing screen you can see in the sun, much more memory, and a really good, but still VGA camera. the K700i can shoot 10 second (limited) or what it calls "unlimited" video clips, which are limited by the 32MB of internal memoery. there is a night mode and even a light that be used while taking video. the only thing i can find missing from this phone is external memort expansion. too bad they couldn't have fit that in like nokia did with the 6230. that feature would have given this phone the clear edge, but without it, it's a bit of a tossup. this phone is not yet available from any operators in north america, you need to get a GSM account with T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, or Cingular wireless and purchase the phone from an importer such as expansys or romeo hifi.

sony ericsson P900
the SE P900 has a great video camera, and the time and length of the video you can take is only dependent on the memory available. since you can record on the external memory stick duo (but NOT the duo pro) you can record up to 128 MB of video. there are also various modes available for quality and lighting. see my review here. the P900 is a pen based smartphone, with good PDA functions and email capabilities as well. this phone is not available from any operators in north america, you need to get a GSM account with T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, or Cingular wireless and purchase the phone from an importer such as expansys or romeo hifi.

toshiba VM4050
if you are into the clamshell profile, and don't plan to leave the U.S., this might be the phone for you. the screen of the VM4050 is one of the best i've seen, and works amazingly well in camera viewfinder mode. Sprint makes it really easy to upload your videos (and pictures) to your online album on their website, or send them as emails to your friends. the "upload all" makes things really easy, and is a feature i haven't seen anywhere else. this camera also has a light that can be turned on to increase the lighting, and although i've seen this feature before, this one actually works. the downside is that you are limited to 14 seconds of video and there is no external storage, which is not so critical given how easy it is to upload your videos to the server on Sprint's fast 1X network. Available from Sprint PCS (review coming soon)

nokia 6600
this nokia phone also limits you to 14 seconds of video, but does allow for external storage on an MMC card up to 128 MB, if you can find them. the modes for quality and lighting are good enough, and the T-Mobile version has some decent capabilities for being able to send and share easily. the nokia 3650/3660 is a cheaper version of this phone that has pretty similar video capabilities. available from T-Mobile, but can also be used on AT&T Wireless and Cingular if purchased the phone from an importer such as expansys or romeo hifi. see my review here.

nokia 6230
if you prefer a small phone that fits easily in your pocket or purse - i think this is the best phone with video capabilities around. nokia packs a lot into this little package. it can record up to 4 minutes of video and again uses an MMC external memory card, and this phone can also play Mp3s and AAC files. the videos are well above average, but not the best you are going to find. this camera's size is what really makes it attractive. (full review coming soon) this phone is not available from any operators in north america, you need to get a GSM account with T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, or Cingular wireless and purchase the phone from an importer such as expansys or romeo hifi.

frustrated with MIDP 2.0 compatibility

it's still interesting to me how different the MIDP 2.0 implementations are - the same jar that runs great on the Sony Ericsson P900 and K700 (this phone rocks) doesn't work on the Nokia 9500 nor the motorola V300/400, and doesn't work for totally different reasons. Sometimes a build works on the Nokia 6230, some builds don't. and their SDKs and emulators don't help a lot, as they are mostly just skins over the same back end.

so much for write once, run anywhere.