B. Mann Consulting

Dave Olson caved and got an iPhone, so the Nokia N78 he was testing for Roland has now made its way to me (my previous phone has been the Nokia N80). Thanks to both for making it available to me.

Here is the Nokia N78 on Nokia's website for full tech specs etc.

First reactions:

• much slimmer! almost half the height of the N80
• not a slider ... I had gotten used to the convenient / easy lock and unlock that the slider activates. Guess I'll be download AutoLock again.
• wow, the keypad on this is incredibly annoying! bye bye high speed texting ... I feel like my fat German peasant fingers have to use the edge of my fingernail to use them
• speaker and sound is awesome. Regular headphone jack, yay! FM tuner, very cool, I'm going to make a lot of use of this. Dedicated volume buttons, also great. There is much more music functionality to explore here...
• comes with FM antenna headset thingie with remote volume and playback controls, as I said, music quality is very good, although the ear plugs are slightly small for my ears
• lightly tapping the back button seems to not close the app you are in, but bring you back to the menu. The menu / app switching seems easier, but at the same time confusing. Why not make the funny asterisk symbol the same as the Nokia "menu" button that is on all their phones?
• the camera is much fancier -- only slightly more megapixels, but all sorts of autofocus features that make it feel more like a "real" digital camera; the flash is three times the size of the N80's
• video much improved -- now at 640x480, with excellent focus and sound quality
• USB data connection -- yay! not using standard USB mini connection -- boo!
• can the USB connection also do charging? don't know, it did come with a charger
• comes with a 2GB even-smaller-format memory card (I've given up on remembering the names for different formats ... I have three or four different "mobile" memory cards, plus SD for my camera...)
• there is Share Online which lets you connect to Flickr, Ovi, and some other stuff out of the box. Not quite set up yet.
• GPS! Haven't wandered around outside to test yet, but first impression is that it is very slow to get a GPS lock. After installing Google Maps app, the cell tower only location put me in the middle of Howe Sound (I'm on Bowen at the moment) -- I actually still consider that pretty good. Definitely going to be doing more experimenting with this.

My other "first reaction" is that it's clear that I've been a Symbian S60 user for a long time: there are certain apps that I always download / setup. I'll be cataloging those in another post, in part for my own use so I can go to one page and quickly download all the apps that I want on every phone. Like my experience in setting up a fresh install / new Mac, this would seem to indicate a certain level of maturity in S60. Or perhaps a clear line of what they will include and won't with the base OS, so there are distinct areas where third party apps flourish.

For those on the Mac, the N78 is not supported by default. You'll need to download the N78 iSync plugin from Nokia Europe (thanks to Carniumology404 for being the first hit for that).

Back to installing apps...

After being really happy with the Nokia Multimedia Transfer app for OS X to get music onto my phone, and photos off it onto iPhoto, I started looking to solve the "where to get new music" problem.

Around the same time, I was playing with the Nokia Podcasting app. Put simply, it is a podcast browser / downloader, which you can set to automatically connect to a network connection and download new podcast updates at a specified time. I set my phone to charge overnight, and set it up so that it would auto connect to my home wi-fi network.

Then I found Hypemachine. Yeah, yeah, I'm not really a cool trendy new music guy, and I *had* heard about it before, I just never really used it: it's a giant blog aggregator that tracks mentions of music and links to MP3s. It also exposes all this music blog aggregation as a podcast, with enclosures to the MP3 links. Not a traditional podcast at all -- it's whatever the Hypemachine has auto aggregated during that time period.

So, every morning, my phone is loaded with brand new music. It's eclectic to say the least -- last Friday featured lots of 4th of July-themed songs. The first time I set it up, I got some nice Catholic-rock-band tunes. Last night, I copied that music back to my computer after about 2 weeks of doing this. 63 songs survived my listening over that period, and I cut that down to about 40 that I would keep / give at least 3 stars to.

I'm listening to a lot more music on the go with this setup, and am being exposed to lots of "new stuff". So far, I bought the new Cold Play "Viva la Vida" album (definitely not a "long tail" band), as well as Ra Ra Riot both as iTunes Plus downloads. But the majority of the bands seem to be ones that I need to point you to their MySpace page to listen to their songs -- see Hooded Fang for one example.

It's been a fun experience so far, and I always look forward to what the next night of downloading will bring me. This whole listening to music on the go thing might really take off one of these days :P

Where do you find new music? Where do you listen to it? Where do you buy it?

So, I went on my first GPS adventure after work tonight. I was talking to Roland about doing something for BarCamp Vancouver 2007, and he reminded me that Cyprien had a Bluetooth receiver to borrow. So, we swung by Cyprien's place and I was off to see if I could find the pieces to make this work. Thanks, Cyprien!

I specifically posted earlier about a simple GPS logging device instead of a Bluetooth receiver. Bluetooth receivers allow you to hook up a PDA or your laptop and do various "on the go" GPS activities, usually involving directions and maps. But, I'm looking for something dead simple that a) just works and b) doesn't mean fiddling with / charging / carrying a bunch of other devices.

I've been using ShoZu for several weeks now. It's an application for your cameraphone that will automatically upload pictures that you take to Flickr. As in, you take the picture, and seconds later, ShoZu will connect to the network (GPRS in my case) in the background, and upload to Flickr. I've got it set to fully automatic, but you can also set it to ask you each time you take a picture whether it should be uploaded to Flickr or not.

It's made me actually take more pictures with my phone, as well as actually getting them off my phone to share. You can see the pictures I've uploaded with ShoZu, as well as all pictures on Flickr tagged with ShoZu (over 4000 as I'm making this post). 

There are a bunch of us (Scott, James, and Chris, too, once we told him the specs) that are lusting after the Nokia N91, but it is supposedly delayed until the first quarter of 2006.

Some background on the specs: this phone is a pretty high end unit, including a 4GB hard drive (store tons of music, photos, etc.), standard headset jack (use your killer headphones to listen to the music), 2MP camera (almost decent enough quality to leave your low-end digital camera at home) AND, the big one, built in Wi-Fi of the 802.11G flavour.

It's this last that is interesting. Nokia has already said that is working on Voice over WLAN: see Time Europe -- "2006 will be a big year for [mobile] wi-fi" and vnunet.com -- "replacing mobile and desktop phones with series 60 Nokia smartphones could make IT management easier". So, my guess is that they are specifically holding back the release of the N91 so it can be one of the flagship phones to include this functionality.

I can't remember what exactly prompted it: I wanted an application for my cellphone that *wasn't* a productivity app, that *wasn't* the half-finished handiwork of a lone developer, and that did just work. So I ended up buying a game.

My phone is a Nokia 6630, running on the Series 60 platform. The Fido site does sell applications, including games. It was basically useless for looking for stuff. My phone isn't sold by Fido, and they only offer browsing by type of phone. There is no way to say what platform your phone is.

Luckily, the Mobile Gamer site in the UK was great. Right at the top of the site, you can filter everything available by your model of phone, and mine was listed, so I got a full page of Nokia 6630 games. I browsed around for a bit, and settled on Might & Magic -- the same name of a game that I remember playing on the Apple IIe. Actually, the graphics on my phone look better than an Apple IIe.

Getting the game was ridiculously easy. I entered in my full phone number, including the +1 to show it's in North America. I paid via PayPal. Moments later, I got an SMS with the URL of a download. I clicked on it in my phone. It downloaded the installer. The installer launched, and downloaded the rest of the game.

That is what seamless delivery of mobile content is all about. I didn't try it, but I suspect I could have navigated the site directly, and completed the entire experience via my phone's browser. Hmmm...pay for something via PayPal, have it delivered immediately around an identity-based infrastructure that's encrypted. Skype + eBay ring any bells now?