Category: Mobile Work

While UMTS operators are starting to upgrade their networks for high speed Internet access (HSDPA) it seems the competition is already a step ahead in some areas. During a walk in the countryside in Austria (to be exact: Gaspoltshofen, 3000 inhabitants, about 60 km from Linz) I saw an interesting antenna tower on a hill (see pictures). Turns out that the antenna belongs to Flashnet, a local company providing fast wireless Internet access to the local population.

It looks like they are using Wireless LAN as technology and directional antennas which are installed on the rooftops of their customers houses. Prices are quite interesting, €30.- a month for 2 gigabyte data traffic and 1 MBit/s up- and downlink. Their website also provides a map of the coverage area and they say on their website that they are now serving over 1000 customers in the area. Too bad that they don’t specify how many sites they use to cover the area.

Great stuff!!!

Carnival of the Mobilists 23 at the Wireless Data News blog is out, with the best of what the wireless blogging scene has to say about the CTIA 2006 and other wireless topics. Again, definitely worth to be check out!

Back in January I expressed my frustration with the Audible player for S60 that would only download audio content over the air (via GPRS, UMTS, etc.) but would not play audio content that I’ve already downloaded to my PC and from there to the phone. Well, it looks like it was worth writing the blog entry because Bruno Santos kindly enough left me a message with a solution:

The audible player for Series 60 can only decode category 2 and 3 files but not the highest quality category 4 encoding with which (of course) I’ve downloaded all my audio files to the PC. After downloading one of my audio books again with category 3 encoding to the PC and then to the mobile phone, the audible player just asked once to connected to the Internet to verify that I have the rights to listen to the content. Since then no more costly connections to the Internet. The player works fine even if used over several hours at a time. Thanks very much Bruno, your tip will save me a lot of work (see blog entry from back in January).

Helen Keegan is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists. If you are interested in the mobile Internet, it is the
ressource to find out what people are thinking and in which direction
the technology is moving. Have fun!

AOL is about to start competing with Google and others in the mobile space. This includes adapting pages for mobile viewing with an automatic re-rendering service.

"AOL Wireless Director of Emerging Technologies Raine Bergstrom told BetaNews […] "We’re not just re-rendering, but reorganizing as well," he explained. Bergstrom said most, if not all pages will initially be rendered using the automatic system, and would change based on necessity. [….] "One size does not fit all" ". Here’s the full article.

While I have put my thoughts on the positive sides of such technology in one of my recent blog entries, a lot of other people don’t like it at all. Looks like the front widens…

So .mobi, the top level domain for mobile friendly web sites finally took the last hurdle and we should see the first sites soon. As everything in life there are good and bad sides. In this particular case I see extremely good sides but also extremely bad sides of the idea.

The good side: There is a large community of proponents including mobile operators and device manufacturers. That ensures that it won’t take long and we will see a large number of mobilized sites which can then be advertised very easily (e.g. amazon.mobi, nokia.mobi, ebay.mobi, etc.). That’s great when you see it on a poster somewhere while out in the street or in an advertisement in a magazine. It also seems like there is a code of conduct for creating web pages for the .mobi domain which can even be enforced. Good thing! BTW: I wonder how iMode proponents feel about .mobi and those rules!?

The bad side: It’s gonna separate the PC Internet from the mobile Internet. That’s bad as links in the future might even be more intended at either only PC or mobile users. Take the following case: I like reading blogs with my blog reader on my mobile device More often then not, interesting blogs contain links to other sources. I don’t think these links will direct me to .mobi sites in the future… So Google’s mobilizer for PC world sites is necessary more than ever. Maybe it can be made smarter to detect that there is a .mobi equivalent to the PC world link. But that requires the same URL structure for the .com and the .mobi presence of a site.

In the end, you can’t have them all…

One of my most difficult mobile challenges these days is to find a mobile phone and software for my girl friend to allow her to take notes and access her eMails while commuting to and from work. "So what’s the problem?" many people like me who use a mobile phone for these and many other connected tasks may ask. Well, here they are:

• Dimension: Of course it has to fit in a small bag
• Spam: The eMail account to be mobilized gets lots of spam and due to ‘legacy’ reasons we can’t open a new one for mobile use. Thus the eMail program must be capable of downloading and displaying many mails quickly (like 30 a day out of which 27 are spam…)
• Notes: A good keyboard is necessary, a communicator with a small keyboard will just not do.
• Patience: The targeted user (girlfriend) has no patience with technology, the device just has to work…

I’ve been leaning havily towards an S60 device together with a Bluetooth foldable keyboard (e.g. the Nokia SU-W8) to solve the issue. Even if the dimensions will get some critisism I am sure the size of a, let’s say, Nokia 6680 would be acceptable. Unfortunately two things have hindered me so far to take action: There just does not seem to be any usable notes application with easy synchronization to the desktop and the ability to write more than just a few lines. Secondly, the native S60 eMail application is nice to receive an eMail or two a day but is in no way suitable for the 30 eMails a day described above. It’s just too slow and it doesn’t use the display in an efficient way.

So here’s hopefully the solution: ProfiMail. I’ve installed it this evening and used it for two hours. I am enthusiastic. It’s fast opening mails, seems to handle HTML content quite well, and can handle attachments and multiple eMail accounts. Furthermore, the program allows to efficiently create eMails and is able to store drafts;  that looks like it could fulfill the notes requirement including synch to the PC (via eMail).

For a detailed review have a look over at AllAboutSymbian. Thanks to Ewan for the review, you ‘ve brought me a big step forward!

So I am going to test this one for a little while and if it doesn’t choke on 30 eMails a day, it will be a winner for me.

Today I got my hands on a cool PDA for tough environmental conditions: A Toshiba Toughbook-P1 PDA (see picture)running Windows Mobile. Waterproof, ruggedized, WLAN, Bluetooth and a GSM/GPRS module inside. Couldn’t resist to configure it for GPRS and test it. Perfect, works like a charm. The design is great for harsh conditions but it is somewhat heavy (1.2 lbs…) and big (see comparison in the picture to my SE// V800). Definitely nothing you can put in your pant pockets. Full specs can be found here. Ah yes, you can use it as a phone, too. Sound quality of the hands free mode is excellent.

The Carnival has moved on and has stoped this week at Dorrian Porter’s Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition. Again, a superb collection of what people around the globe think about wireless topics this week. 

The Blogsphere has been in turmoil lately discussing Google’s approach to transform web pages to make them better suited for viewing on small screens of mobile devices. The main problem most people (content providers) see is that adds get dropped which thus has a negative impact on their business model. So here’s what I think about this from my (the consumers) point of view.

For easy reference, here’s a link to Russell Buckley’s blog entry on the topic which has attracted a lot of attention. And here’s a link to a blog entry at WAP Review on how Google Mobile works.

From the consumers point of view, probably 99% of the web content today is not mobile optimized (including this blog, shame on me, shame on Typepad) when requested from a mobile device. Most of this content can not be displayed correctly on a small device today. Recently, some mobile browsers have appeared on the market that render a complete page correctly and show you a small portion on it. I have my doubts that this makes it really usable. Also, mobile phone rendering capabilities are very limited and I simply don’t have the time to wait for the download of a full page and don’t have the deep pockets required for the amount of data transferred.

I often read blogs on my mobile phone with a great program called Resco News. Often enough an interesting blog entry is not contained completely in the RSS feed or has some interesting links to follow. In this case I am stuck on my mobile phone without Google Mobile’s help. With Google Mobile, however, I can get the complete blog entry and can also follow the link no matter if the page is mobile optimized or not (and most are not).

Sure, if the web page is already delivered in a mobile optimized format then Google should just pass it through without modifications. Thus, graphics in general and adds in particular that behave in a mobile friendly way stay in. I guess this is not so difficult for Goggle to do. They could fetch the page from the original web server pretending to be a mobile phone. In case the server returns a gigantic page with heavy graphics, java script, etc. then kind of a "self justice" has to kick in and the page needs to be stripped down to something usable on a mobile device. Sorry if some content is lost on the way but it is still much better than not to get the page on the mobile at all.

So here’s the essence of my opinion in other words: If the content provider does not adapt content for mobile viewing, then somebody else has to do it to make it usable on small devices. If on the other hand the content provider is willing to include mobile devices in his design then the page should be handed down to the small device unaltered.

P.S.: Some people argue that it is "evil" to modify content without permission. Well, then I guess most desktop web browsers with popup blockers and mobile browsers without Java script and full HTML capabilities are just as "evil" as Google Mobile as they alter the page as well.