Author: Martin

This week,
Yahoo launched its Yahoo! Go service that brings the Y! Messenger and the Yahoo
web based desktop including eMail, calendar, address book and notes to (Nokia)
S60 mobile phones. The Yahoo website does not give a lot of details of how the
application works and what it does, so I’ll fill the gap with what I’ve found
out while playing around with it on two phones in the past days.

The application is quite big with its 2 MB installation file.
2 MB phone memory and 8 MB on the memory card are required. It looks like the 2
MB phone memory are just required to be able to download and install the
application. Afterwards, most of the application is stored on the external
memory card.

Even though
the application is quite big it uses the already installed calendar, address
book, notes, and web browser. I like this approach very much as I don’t want
two calendars, etc. on my phone. I like the native phone applications
especially the calendar combined with the Active Desktop that shows upcoming
calendar entries of the day on the Idle screen of the phone. That’s a real
killer criteria for me so I am glad I can continue to use this!

When the
program is installed, all entries of the calendar, phone book, etc. are
synchronized to your Yahoo web based organizer. The application uses GPRS/UMTS
for this so make sure you know how much your operator charges you for data. The
amount of data transferred is very small (after the first synchronization just
a couple of kb per synch) so that should not be a problem.
Once
synchronized, all calendar entries, address book entries and notes are
available both on the phone and on the MyYahoo web page. The phone can be set
to synchronize automatically with Yahoo’s server via a GPRS/UMTS connection or
manually by the user. I’ve set it to manual as I often travel abroad were
packet calls are charged ridiculously high… Synchronization just takes a
couple of seconds.

First
installation is somewhat tricky. The mobile sends out an SMS to a U.K. based phone number and waits for a
reply. The reply never came when I tried it the first time. When I tried the
next day, it worked but it took over 5 minutes for the response SMS to arrive.
This needs to change as most users (including me) are not comfortable waiting
so long and will abort and retry the process. For some like Debi Jones  in the U.S. it didn’t work at all despite Yahoo claiming support for both her
network and her mobile phone. Well, looks like this is the weak spot of the
application.

Multiple
Device Support: Yahoo! Go supports multiple phones simultaneously! Changes made
on any device or on the web are synchronized to all other devices. The different phones can even be switched on at the same time.

There’s
lots more functionality in the package that still needs to be explored. The
Yahoo Messenger has to be mentioned in here, as Christian Lindhom has not promised too much when he said in his blog that the Messenger
Application is stunning. It just looks like the Yahoo Messenger on the desktop,
just smaller. One can even send pictures from the Gallery to other people. The
application downsizes the picture so it can be sent quickly with a reasonable
picture quality. The messenger also offers the option to take a picture with
the internal camera. A great feature especially with UMTS were you can be on
the phone and send a picture simultaneously.

The first
version of the program is already very powerful and nicely integrated both with
phone applications and the Yahoo back office. People have already come up with
good suggestions for future versions like in comments to Russel Beattie’s blog. 

Martin

The way we experience time and change is a strange thing. Sometimes I feel changes in telecoms are slow. A recent article in a German online magazine which looks back on how the telecoms world in Germany looked like 10 years ago made me change my view slightly. Back in January 1996, the German telecom monopoly started to fade away and Deutsche Telekom had to lower their prices for short and long distances call considerably. However, even after the first round of price reductions, a 10 minute nationwide call still cost €3.25! Ten years later, the same call is only about 17 cents… Calls between two voice over IP clients are virually free, apart fromt he monthly flat charge for the high speed Internet connection.

Speaking of high speed Internet at home. Back in 1996, 14.4 or 28.8 kbit/s was state of the art, ADSL and speeds of several megabits per second to the home not even conceivable.

Also, who used a mobile phone back in 1996? Almost no one, which included me. Today, 10 years later, everyone seems to have at least two. UMTS and HSDPA are a reality, the wireless Internet is a reality, even though just being in it’s infancy and not used by many today. But the wireless multimegabit connection to the Internet is already there so it is very likely that it will have become just as much of an everyday commodity in a couple of years from now as ADSL today.

Lower prices have not led to cheaper phone bills for most people. Instead, they just communicate more, communicate while on the move, and spend the money they’ve saved on other multimedia services such as Internet access, music and audio book downloads, blogs, online photo albums, etc.

There are interesting times ahead!

Every now and then, I find a digital marble which seems to make my PDA and mobile phone twice as useful as before. Wapedia, a service of Florian Amrhein, is my recent discovery. The website offers an interface to the Wikipedia database for (wireless) devices with small displays. The result of a query is reformatted for small screens and pictures are reduced in size for quicker download times and better viewing on a small device. Answers to questions such as "Where is Austerlitz?" or "What is a Home Agent?" at the breakfast table or while sitting in my favorite cafe in Paris or in a train are now only a couple of clicks away. Great, thanks very much, Florian!!!

In the past
years, the media has speculated just how much of a threat WiFi hotspots are to
UMTS. Well, from what I have experienced over the last few months, it is just
the opposite. Equipped with a prepaid SIM card from Italian Operator WIND and a monthly data volume of several
hundred megabytes for 20 Euros a month, I’ve travelled through many countries
in the past months.

Many hotels
offer WiFi coverage and if one is really lucky, there is even coverage in the
room. However, in the days and age of UMTS, I am showing it the cold shoulder. As
the price is right, I prefer to use a UMTS network, even if it is somewhat
slower than a WiFi hotspot connected to the Internet via a DSL connection. I
don’t have to worry about whether I have coverage in the room, no need to select
the network, no fumbling with the credit card for buying expensive online time,
and most of all: coverage directly in the room or wherever else I am when I
need to communicate instead being forced to sit in a noisy and crowded hotel
lobby.

As even
Internet telephony via UMTS and Skype works flawlessly, the final advantage of
Wifi hotspots is gone. At the airport I also don’t bother to search for a WiFi
hotspot, UMTS or EDGE (in case my Italian SIM card can’t roam to a UMTS network
in the country) is where I go. Great! 

Well, the
only place where the WiFi hotspot still has an advantage is in the plane at
30.000 ft 😉

With the right SIM card and a good wireless
data tariff such as the prepaid offer of the Italian operator WIND, the mobile
traveler can surf the net these days anytime and anywhere. Costs are moderate
and a GPRS/EDGE or UMTS networks can be found almost everywhere. While the web
surfing experience with UMTS is close to that of DSL, EDGE and especially GPRS
can not quite compete with a high speed fixed Internet access. For such slower
connections, a number of manual Firefox browser settings can make a big
difference.

A very effective method to speed-up the web
browser is ‘Pipelining’. If enabled, several embedded elements of a web page,
such as pictures, are requested at once after opening a TCP stream instead of being
requested one after another. This decreases download times when using GPRS or
EDGE, as fewer TCP connections are required to download a web page. Fewer TCP
connections reduce the effect of longer round trip delay times of GPRS and EDGE
compared to fixed line Internet connections. More detailed background
information can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipelining-faq.html

Activation of Pipelining in Firefox:

• By entering ‘about:config’ in the URL line, the browser presents  a list of all configuration parameters.
• Basic
  pipelining is activated by double-clicking on the „network.http.pipelining“
  parameter and setting the value to TRUE.
• I achieved
  the best pipelining effect by setting the value of the „network.http.pipelining.maxrequests“ parameter 8 again by double clicking
  on the parameter name.
• The
  broweser should then be restarted to make sure the changes take effect.
• Additional
  information on the process can be found here: http://www.port80software.com/200ok/archive/2004/12/30/231.aspx

The Result:

A test with
an extensive web page and previously deleted browser cache at first shows no
difference in the time it takes to show the first part of web page. A big
difference can be observed, however, in the time it takes to load the complete
page. Instead of 60 seconds for loading the complete web page, the modified
browser settings decreased the required time to 40 seconds!