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Sony Ericsson says the plan to support MIDP2 development on OS X

Mikael Nerde, Head of Sony Ericsson Developer Program said this morning that SE plans to support development on the Mac... first in Q4 on DRM and content packaging tools, then SDK support at a later date. No date committments were given.

Also he said "i'll stick my neck out and say that [ JSR-175] will be available sometime in 2005." JSR-175 allows file access to the device which is otherwise prohibited in J2ME...

san francisco wi-fi

so...i'm in san francisco in a hotel that does not have wi-fi - but that doesn't matter because there are 39 wi-fi networks my laptop can find, yep 39 - about half of them open. i'm about a block away from the Sony Metreon and am using it's wi-fi to do this post.

in general - i've been to a couple other restaurants in different parts of the city in which i had no problem finding an access point. and i think the mayor is mulling over citywide wi-fi here....cool.

san francisco wi-fi

so...i'm in san francisco in a hotel that does not have wi-fi - but that doesn't matter because there are 39 wi-fi networks my laptop can find, yep 39 - about half of them open. i'm about a block away from the Sony Metreon and am using it's wi-fi to do this post.

in general - i've been to a couple other restaurants in different parts of the city in which i had no problem finding an access point. and i think the mayor is mulling over citywide wi-fi here....cool.

the BAMF happy hour at the thirsty bear

the BAMF happy hour at the thirsty bear
Originally uploaded by steveobd.

at CTIA...

I'm at CTIA in San Francisco today - just to do some meetings and browse the showfloor. The floor is pretty small - kind of the size of the normal back room at the other CTIA shows...

I did see a really cool demo of Qualcomm's MediaFLO™ which downloads content at offpeak hours and delivers a browseable high quality media experience with no waiting. Pretty slick and the video quality looked great. Not great for breaking news, but great for catching up.

I think this kind of thing will merge with what podcasting evolves to.

XM releases portable player, the MyFi

I was just talking about how this would be cool the other day! Gotta love when that happens. $349 is a little pricey though, especially when it doesn't include the $10/month subscription.

It can save 5 hours of playback too..interesting.

much much too funny not to blog this.

even evil needs some salad every once in a while
Originally uploaded by lia.

Sprint loses another customer over Treo 650

Way back long ago, all four of us here at Burning Door/FeedBurner were SprintPCS subscribers. But as Sprint got progressively suckier over the years, three of us migrated away to other carriers (TMO for the most part) while Eric stood firm for unknown reasons. Now, Sprint has been stupid enough to even piss him off.

MyYahoo! Search

Not sure how long this has been here, but i see today that Yahoo! has also launched personalized search in the form of MyYahoo! Search.

It allows you to save searches with our without a note, and block sites from future results. very cool.

netflix lowers prices

pleasant surprises are nice. one big one today - Netflix is lowering their prices! awesome. i've been a Netflix subscriber since god knows when, and i got this great piece of news this morning. Kudos to them for figuring this out...

more on preminet (nokia's J2me etc sales platform)

Ewan at AAS has added his commentary on Nokia's Preminet announcement....

I'll add a few comments of my own.

Developers are driven to BREW not because it's a cool platform to develop upon (it's not) nor because it's an easy platform to develop upon (it's not) - but because the economic model works.

For the most part, Qualcomm sets the revenue share for the operators, as well as all the billing and settlement, and make it very easy for subscribers to get, use, and pay for applications. The pay for part is key - as most applications have monthly subscription fees. So instead of an X x Y model, it's an X x Y x Z revenue model which looks a helluva lot better in any business plan. The result is once you get over the barriers to entry, BREW has been very lucrative for the successful developers. Much more so than handango, which can basically adjust their percentage however *they* need to make money.

Secondly, they will be using the Java Certified and Symbian Signed QA qualifications to get applciations listed - which is a giant pain in the ass and expense for developers - but better for operators (lowers customer support costs) and subscribers (they generally get applications that don't have bugs or memory leaks) which of course helps operators (lowers customer support costs).

If Nokia is smart, they will work hard to make this as cheap as possible for the small independent developer who doesn't mind the aforementioned pain in the ass. There's no reason to bilk developers for unnecessary electoronic signatures (Verisign).

Acutally RIM requires a signature but their fee is $100. This is much more reasonable than $400 for an independent developer.

Finally, i certainly hope Nokia has the foresight to not allow operators that choose Preminet to lock their devices from shareware and installing applications from other sources such as handango. This would be a crying shame.

If you own a device, you should be able to choose what install you run on it. period.

Preminet vs BREW?

News.com is reporting that Nokia announced a system they say will compete with Qualcomm's BREW system. I wasn't at CTIA today (i will be there later in the week) so i didn't hear all the details, but it will be interesing to see how Nokia thinks they can sell an equivalent system to operators, and which operators they will be targeting such a system at.

Will they require the same level of QA that BREW does, except on the J2ME platform? I assume they will have to put the same kind of vending machine solution onto the phones themselves and allow subscription models for ringtones and applications.

I guess most Nokia phones now have a "Download" menu item that isn't hooked up to anything I have ever seen - but most of all, how does Nokia sell such a system being a non-neutral party? How do they get Sony Ericsson and Motorola to support their system?

I'll report back more when I learn more...

motorola to recall V710

Just when you thought things were looking up for Motorola, another Motorola misstep. At least they are doing the right thing and recalling the v710 because the camera shoots out of alignment pictures. (the same thing was wrong with the Nokia 7650, but they never did this).

but really, Moto - strap on a pair with some of these carriers. Improve your UI and get some of those good phone designs through QA a little faster!

The carriers do not like Motorola, so Moto does whatever they can to get carriers to use their devices, such as:

1. preventing 3's subs from installing external applications on the A920

2. Not allowing signed third party J2ME apps that access the network to be installed on their J2ME devices. yes that's right, if you write a J2ME application that accesses the network - all the other manufacturers allow you as the developer to get verified by Verisign and "sign" the application allow you to access the network. The carriers strongarmed Moto into locking their phones down so that either Motorola or the carrier has to sign the application. This is like buying a Dell, and having them approve everything you install on it (thanks to dick for the analogy). I have email responses from Moto customer support that verifies this if anyone wants to see them. Nokia and SE told the carriers "yeah, right". Seriously, a customer support email came back to me that said "the carriers made us do it."

3. Locking down Bluetooth on the V710 for Verizon so that the file transfer APIs are disabled.

Business is tight, they gotta do what they gotta do to get these carrier deals in place- but a very rough road to hoe for Moto here on out...probably the last straw for Verizon - they are already pissed at Moto's BREW implementations.

[via Om Malik]

SonyEricsson P910 online update service now available

Sony Ericsson has made their P910 Firmware update service available. This is one of the best features about the P900/P910 that SE has been really smart about and Nokia needs to duplicate for the benefit of both consumers and software developers. It will help alleviate a lot of problems when they release have to release phones with shoddy firmware because of contractual obligations. Witness the Nokia 6600 - what a trainwreck that phone is, most of the buggy firmware versions still out there in the wild with no easy way to update...

SonyEricsson P910 online update service

current king of the hill in blog search

in the continuing game of leapfrog that is weblog search technology - the one that is working best for me these days is blogdigger. what's different about them? who knows, but they seem to give the most up-to-date and correct search results.

we'll see who topples them next. it always seems like yahoo or google are one search parameter away from putting all these companies into a world of hurt, or of course identifying them as acquisition targets. we'll have to see how it plays out.

it amazes me how there are still a bunch of companies entering the search market trying to build the new new thing in search engines. snap.com (wonder how much NBC sold that URL for) and blinkx are two examples that come to mind of trying to do search in a much different way. (If Google Desktop intrigues you but you use Firefox, you should give blinx a try.)

FeedBurner MFR 2 Symbian Series 60 Edition

I'm still calling this a beta because it needs more testing across different devices, but this version has been tested on the Nokia 6620 and 7610 - and should work well on those phones. This build may work on other MIDP 2.0 devices. Official builds will follow soon.

MFR 2 is a signed (trusted) application that can be installed by:

1) Downloading //www.burningdoor.com/jad-dist/mfr2-midp2.jad and //www.burningdoor.com/jad-dist/mfr2-midp2.jar to your PC and using infrared or bluetooth to copy to your inbox. From there, select the JAD file to install.

2) Attempt to hit //www.burningdoor.com/jad-dist/midlet.wml from the Nokia, Opera, or NetFront browser on your handset to download the application Over The Air (OTA). We have found this to be hit or miss depending on the firmware that may be on your handset.

3)You can attempt to push the app down via Handango.

A license can be purchased at the Handango website.

New Features:


Unread Feeds are marked with an icon.

Descriptions now show posting dates.

Registered users can load feeds from a URL accessable OPML file.

Additionally MFR 2 supports:

• Emailing entries


• Automatic updating


• WML/xHTML transcoding


• Embedded FeedBurner SmartFeed™ technology to support all flavors of RSS and Atom

And many more fixes and enhancements.

But Dick, "It's a Small World" is already gone!

If Dick ran Disney

Dick, since we no longer allow comments because of the 264 comments spams we get per day, a trackback will have to do until trackback spam gets out of hand - "It's a Small World" is currently "Closed for Remodeling" which in restaurant parlance, i think means it is gone for good. just FYI. and last time i was at Google and saw the searches scrolling by on the projector, there seemed to be a lot of people looking for information on the "Paris Hilton" - do they even own hotels in France?

newsgator online services is now free

Cool. Newsgator Online Services now has a free tier. It looks pretty good and offers some cool features like ratings - it will be interesting to see if i as a reader can reap any benefit from that.

It makes you wonder how they would measure up against bloglines if they had a free tier all along.

at any rate, great job Greg and team!

my single biggest annoyance with Nokia phones

After carrying around a Sony Ericsson S700i for a couple weeks now, i've decided perhaps the most useful feature along with the killer killer 1.3 megapixel camera is the ability to pop the external memory card in and out, while the phone is running, and have no adverse affects happen. i really hate the fact that with Nokia phones you have to take the back off the phone, remove the battery (which kills the phone session), remove the memory card, etc. now that Nokia has hotswappable memory cards on the N-Gage QD, you think they could propogate this design to the rest of their handsets.

oh, i spoke too soon - it looks like they've included hot swapping in the impending 6630. 1.3 megapixels and series 60 and EDGE. this phone will be hot.

the best J2ME developer program

whether we like it or not, support for J2ME from operators, hardware vendors, and SUN for that matter generally sucks. so if you have to join one developer program, which one should you join?

I mean, at the free level, you should join them all. are any of them worth paying for?

I think the Sony Ericsson Developer World Core level is worth joining, simple for early access to all of Sony Ericsson's devices. The whitepapers are pretty good, and the developer forums are moderated somewhat from SE or metroworks personnel - so you can for the most part get answers from the source when you have a serious question. plus they send you cool tchochkies every quarter.

I wish that Forum Nokia had this level of support and access to their devices, but they don't. They have good examples and whitepapers, but the forums are filled with people asking newbie questions that never get answered, leaving them generally useless.

review: BlackBerry 7100t

I've been using the new RIM BlackBerry 7100t for almost a week now, and here are some initial thoughts on the device itself and the experience of having RIM-like email on a phone device.

The 7100t is really a true hybrid between the BlackBerries we are all used to seeing and semi-smartphones we are used to see from the likes of Nokia or Sony Ericsson.

Lenthwise and widthwise, it's candybar format is a little wider than most bar phones, but a little thinner than a traditional BlackBerry 72XX series phone. Depthwise, that's true as well. it's a little thinner than something like a Nokia 6620, and just a little bit thicker than your typical BlackBerry.

Functionality wise, it sits right in the middle as well. The 7100t is finally more usable as a phone from both a size and embarassment standpoint, but will provide nothing near what you might need application-wise in a traditional Nokia Series 60 phone. Even though you can add third party applications to the RIM devices, there just aren't as many available as with a typical series 60 device. it's right in the middle.

the email experience
But BlackBerry users typically are in it for the email experience. There are a ton of people that still carry both a phone and email device, and i although the 7100t will change that for some people, there will still be penty of us out there who will be double fisting.

there's nothing like getting your email as it arrives and not having to wait while it downloads in the background. there are plenty of email programs for smartphones that download in the background, but it's still not the same. nokia's email support sucks. sony ericsson's is a little better. motorola...i don't like to badmouth anyone. let's just say if they were playing little league, i'd give them the "most improved player" award.

but what has traditionally been great about BlackBerries are the ability to respond to email. how does the 7100t do?

right in the middle of a traditional BlackBerry keyboard and T9 or quivalent on other phones with a standard 9 key keypad.

you can see on the picture above the spectrum of the BlackBerry 7230 keyboard, the 7100t, and a Nokia 6620 with a 9 key keypad we've all been used to ever since AT&T rolled out touch tone dialing.

i have the followng observations:

• i'm nowhere as proficient a typist on the 7100t as on a traditional RIM keyboard
• i'm way more productive on the 7100t than on T9

the biggest difference with the 7100t is you have to pay attention to what you are typing else you will end up with words you did not intend to type. at certain places in your sentence you have to "branch off" one way or another with words.

for example, in typing a reply to my collegues today i mistakenly sent "i am going to pinkish a new entry" instead of "i am going to publish a new entry" because the "i" and the "u" share a key i somewhere made a mistake and that's the word it picked. T9 probably would have done the same thing, an original BlackBerry probably would have just left a misspelled word.

all in all, it's pretty good, and i would expect to get more proficient over time.

ze phone
The phone itself is middle of the road. The reception is about average and on par with any other blackberry phone. Clear, but not crystal clear. now a whole lot to say here.

the screen is pretty good looking - much more the dimensions of a phone than a typical RIM. it comes with an odd "Comic Sans" font as its default font, which took awhile to figure out how to change. the other defaul is "anti-aliasing off" which just looks really "jaggy" at this resolution. very odd. turn on "anti-aliasing" for sure.

bluetooth
oh, where do we start. the 7100t supports exactly 2 bluetooth services, "AUDIO Gateway" and "Voice Gateway". which pretty much means you can use a headset or handsfree with the 7100t, and that's about it as far as bluetooth.
for comparison, most nokias support 8 bluetooth profiles, and most sony ericssons support 12. what's missing?

• Dial Up networking (you can't use the 7100t as a bluetooth modem)
• Obex File Transfer (you can't push pictures to it, even though you can set wallpaper with photos)
• Obex Object Push (business card transfer)
• no service for syncing via bluetooth
• a bunch of other stuff you may or may not use

I find this a little odd since most of the products that T-Mobile distributes are pretty open so i'm not going to fly off the handle and declare it "crippled" just yet, but let's just say the usefulness is severly limited, and i'll be turning bluetooth off to save battery life - although i'd probably use it with my car if i didn't use another phone for voice.

the browser
one of the best things about 7100t is the browser. it does a pretty good job rending all types of markup (HTML, xHTML, and WML
) and even supports popups if you want it to. It seems to render pretty fast, and just is generally better than its predecessors.

the IM client
another great thing about this phone is the IM client. if you are an AOL instant messenger or Yahoo! messenger user, the bundled OZ IM client is great. it will pull in your buddy lists from those services respectively, and run in the background along with email. i've had a few cases where running both at the same time seemed to logjam getting email, but for the most part it has worked without incident. a great companion to plain SMS, which the 7100t also supports.

the rest
the rest of the phone's features are similar to the BlackBerry 7230 family i reviewed a year ago.

the thing that would stop me from using this as an everyday phone is the lack of a camera and to some extent missing bluetooth features. otherwise it's a great phone. I guess i'd rather see the price stay low on this phone than putting in a half-assed camera like the Treo 600, which is quite possibly the worst VGA camera on the market.

as RIM licenses their email capabilities to other vendor's platforms like Sony Ericsson and Nokia, i would certainly choose one of those smart-phones with RIM email capability, which would seem to cannibalize RIM's hardware market. but with so many more nokia and SE phones sold, and RIM addicts being somewhat brand loyal, it's probably a good bet for them.

RIM has included two USB cables this time around, one for the charger, and one for travel so you can charge the RIM with just your laptop and the USB cable. this is great.

BlackBerry email is still hands-down the best way to get AND respond to email on the go. The contact and calendar sync is good enough for me, but probably not good enough for dyed in the wool Palm OS addict.

ratings
phone: 5
texting: 9
mms: 0
email: 9
browser: 9
pda features: 7
camera: 0
battery: 6
usability: 7
durability: 8
stability: 7
gameplay potential: 3
third party apps: 3
fashion: 5
out-of-box accessories: 7

legend:
0 = nonexistent
3 = below average
5 = average
7= above average
10 = the best i've seen

dick's triumphant return to blogging

always worth the read. convince him to continue.

korn greatest hits, vol 1

Upon first inspection, Korn Greatest Hits, Vol 1 is pretty much your typical greatest hits album - all the singles you want, a few classics, and a couple new tunes and remixes to get the hardcore fans to buy the album. The new new tunes are awesome covers, however, that make this collection stand above the rest.

It leads off with one such cover, an amazingly faithful rendition of one-hit-wonder Cameo's "Word Up" - which Jonathan Davis delivers in a manner where you can't quite tell if he is serious or totally tongue-in-cheek, which makes the song that much better.

Following that is another somewhat faithful cover of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2" - probably a song that first exposed me to the concept of radio overexposure. It's good to revisit this song again.

In my younger days, Korn made up a good chunk of my listening time, but I have to admit I kind of gave up on their last few commercial efforts, as perhaps the novelty had worn off, and they all got rich and happy.

so for me, anyway, it's good to have this retrospective collection, as I didn't already own most of what they had to offer.

J2ME and BREW video monitoring

this looks like a pretty cool solution from iNet Cam. it basically allows you to use a video capture source to record and stream video to people who can monitor on their cell phones via J2ME and BREW.

I haven't tried this yet but it looks interesting. there was something similar OEM on the P900, and i wonder if that ever got off the ground.

I would love to use something like this for example, to check on the kids at daycare or at home if they were with a babysitter.

sonic youth sonic nurse

a surprisingly strong effort from Sonic Youth, who you think would be lazy and tired by now. granted, this is no Daydream Nation, but it does show that kim gordon and thurston moore can do what they do best: churn out dissonant post pop for their fans at 110%.

web2.0 or mac world?

supposedly Apple Macintosh makes up 2% of the total PCs in use... as i look around here at in the main conference room, i would say about 75% of the participants here are using Mac Powerbook G4s, mostly of the 15" variety, although there are quite a few footlongs. i'm sitting here in between Catarina Fake of flickr and Jeremy Zawodny of yahoo, both of whom are using their macs for wildly different purposes, i am sure. i miss my mac, which i had to leave behind at home.

my point is, i think that 2% figure is very misleading; in the web and web development community, apple has at least 50% of the market. at least

google sms

very cool. finally, google SMS queries officially supported via 2-way shortcodes.

many 3rd party developers including myself have developed this service over the years ( as much as 2 years ago) - but it's good to see this deployed as a cross-carrier service by google. you just send your query via SMS to 46645 (GOOGL) on most phones, and you will get a response via SMS. for certain things, this is a better experience than using the your WAP/xHTML browser.

i actually tried to search for an indian restaurant the other day here in san francisco via xHTML (on a modern phone on a fast network)and it took forever. via SMS, it was much faster.

these services have been around forever in the Europe (and here as well via the individual carriers) but i think it's a better way to drive adoption via the portals..

sparta porcelain

The first few times I listened to Sparta Porcelain - I thought it was just a logical progression of their break-away-from-At-The-Drive-In album Wiretap Scars. it is that, but also so much more. Porcelain still is easily recognizeable as being in the atdi lineage, but somehwat more melodic, and just with wall-to-wall great songs. Give it a listen. Actually, about five or six listens. this might be one of the best releases of the year.

Sony Ericsson S700i

In a phrase, the Sony Ericsson S700 is a camera with a phone, not a phone with a camera. I'm not going to do a full review because this phone is so similar to the K700i, but i will touch on the finer points of why you will want this phone, and the few reasons why you might not.

everything amout this phone revolves around the camera. it looks like a digital camera, and the buttons are placed as if it were a digital camera. the menu system is the exact same menu on my Sony DSC-T1, a standalone digital camera.

ah, but the secret is the phone scissors open into a phone with a keypad! In that case it acts and looks just like a K700, an awesome phone it it's own right. Great photos, good email, and great Java application support including the Multimedia API and the 3D graphics API. I would expect some great games to be written for this platform before it's all said and done.

The S700 has a memory stick duo (but NOT a memory stick duo pro) slot which allows up to 128 MB of video recording of unlimited length at 176 x 144 and shoots pictures at 1280 x 960 which look superb. the best i've seen.

here are some S700 pictures.

if you don't feel like going there, here's one here:

the camera is a little grainy under low light conditions, but i could say the same thing about my DSC-T1, and almost any other digital camera for that matter.

one of the great things about this camera is a lens cover, which has a switch to easily open and close the cover. I've always wondered how the dust fleeing from my pocket to the lens on your typical cameraphone affected performance of taking photographs, but with a built in lens cover, i no longer have to worry. this is truly ingenious.

the phone itself is totally operable without opening up the keypad in most instances. you can take calls and place calls that are in your phonebook just by using the smartly placed keys, and i must say, this is most intelligently placed "back" button of any phone i've used. it's just in the right place and intuitive to use.

everything else about the S700 is pure sony ericsson. it's expandable via Java applications and great for ringtones and a small amount of mp3s.

my only complaint with this phone is the use of memory stick duo instead of memory stick duo pro, which would have allowed expansion up to 1 GIG, which would have truly made it a real digital camera with a phone attached, and even a decent mp3 player. the way it stands, 128 MB just isn't enough to run anything these days.

ratings
phone: 8
texting: 8
mms: 8
email: 7
browser: 8
pda features: 7
camera: 10
battery: 6
usability: 8
durability: 8
stability: 9
gameplay potential: 9
third party apps: 8
fashion: 10
out-of-box accessories: 9