Category: Uncategorized

I use OperaMini day in and day out as my prefered browser and love the experience. Well, except for one thing, the frequent network selection dialog boxes. Some say it is an S60 feature but in my opinion this is just a big bug in the software. Anyway, Constantine from Intomobile now provided a great solution to the problem: In the S60 application manager, it is possible to define the behavior for each Java program. To get rid of the stupid dialog boxes, open the application manager, select OperaMini, select Open, and then set ‘Network Access’ to ‘Ask first time’. Afterwards, no more stupid dialog boxes. Thanks, Constantine!

The only drawback seems to be that one has to select a default access point when the setting is changed. This makes it difficult to use OperaMini over the Wifi network at home when the default access point has been set to the cellular network. Well, I guess you can’t have it all.

In an earlier post , I reported on how I am using my 3 UK SIM card in 3’s Italian network for Internet access without roaming charges. This works well in the bigger cities such as Catania, Siracusa, etc. In smaller cities on the countryside, however, coverage is a mess. Often, there are at least three GSM networks and usually also some UMTS network while outdoors. But once inside somewhere, most networks just fade away. Or even worse, your mobile shows average coverage but as soon as you try to do something, the coverage indication goes away… In my apartment for example, there is complete radio silence except for 3’s UMTS network at the window. At another place where I stay sometimes, only TIM has reasonable coverage. It almost looks like in those smaller towns they just dropped a couple of base stations and never did any proper radio planning and interference analysis. So since SIM cards are cheap and Internet access to be had for a couple of Euros, I now have a SIM card for 3, one from TIM and another one from WIND. At least one works in any place. Not ideal, but pragmatic…

I am in Italy at the moment taking a short vacation and experiencing my first ‘glimpse of data roaming as it should be’: A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a ‘3’ Prepaid SIM card in the U.K. for Internet access while being in Oxford. For 10 pounds a month, one can activate a one gigabyte data option. In addition, ‘3’ doesn’t charge extra for roaming, while using one of their SIMs in one of their other networks. So here I am in Sicily, a thousand miles away from Britain, using the UK SIM card in 3’s Italian network and it works just fine. Since the add on I activated in Oxford three weeks ago lasts for 30 days, it covers my time in Italy as well. Excellent, thanks 3, that’s how it should be! I just wished you had networks in more countries!

The constelation seems right: N-series devices becoming more mature and mobile Internet access now affordable, it’s time for the ultimate test: How will a Nokia Nseries device fare in the hands of a non-techie for more than just voice calls? I don’t have the answer yet, the ‘experiment’ has just started, but I should know soon enough. After testing the N82 in and out for a week, I finally shipped it to ‘the user’ with 4 applications preconfigured: MP3 player with 40 or so CD’s preloaded, Profimail for eMail access, picture upload to Flickr and OperMini 4.1 beta for mobile web access. In addition, the phone will be used intensively as a data modem for the PC. So let’s see how that works out. I’ll keep you posted.

I first heard of a project at the University of Hagenberg to control an RC truck via an N95 over Bluetooth by using the N95’s built in motion sensor in a recent S60 podcast. At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, the S60 marketing team gave a demo how it works in practice. Here’s a YouTube video showing how Oren Levine controls the truck. Very impressive!

Once the Nokia N96 hits the shelf it will probably be one of the first DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast – Handheld) devices being shipped in large numbers. Not that DVB-H capable handsets haven’t sold for about two years now. However, DVB-H is only available in a few European countries such as Italy, and reception is not free. Maybe it is this fact coupled with licensing issues and access to the required spectrum that prevents mobile TV from taking off?

T-Mobile and Vodafone might think just that and have decided to launch DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast – Terrestrial) capable handsets before the European football championship this year. The advantage: The DVB-T receiver in the mobile receives the non encrypted standard digital television signal for TVs. No subscription is required and there are no doubts concerning the programming, since users know it from their TV set at home.

Note that opening up the mobile platform to receive standard terrestrial programming is nothing new. In Japan, mobile TV seems to be quite popular, maybe just because among other things, there is also no subscription required to receive the program via the 1seq, the technology used there.

Critics say the DVB-T receiver chip is likely to consume more energy than the mobile optimized DVB-H chip. That’s probably true but the big question will be if it really matters…

Geocaching has become almost a mainstream hobby these days. So on a previous weekend, I gave it a try to find out what this is all about. As I don’t have a dedicated GPS device, I wanted to use my Nokia N95 with the built in GPS receiver for the purpose. With a quick search I found exactly what I needed for the purpose: "Geocache Navigator" by Trimble. The software is free if you can live which an occasional advertisement, of which I haven’t seen one yet, though.

Strangely enough, the Geocache Navigator is a Java based program but seems to have been specifically developed for Nokia Nseries phones with a built in GPS API. I tried the program both with the built in GPS receiver and my external GPS Bluetooth mouse and it just works fine.

A "cache" can be hunted in several ways with the program. Either you use the program to find starting points for caches around you including instructions what to do at each waypoint, or you use the PC to  visit a geocaching web site such as www.geocaching.com, locate a cache and print out the instructions. I preferred printing out the instructions to downloading them to the program.

Despite the program requesting access to the network, it’s not required if the instructions are printed out beforehand. In this case, however, the GPS co-ordinates have to be typed in manually. As you can see in the second picture on the left, I managed to find my first cache 🙂

For a visual explanation of how the program works, have a look at Trimble’s video that shows how the program works. Very nice, it won’t be the last cache I’ve hunted 🙂

Last week it was a great pleasure to attend Oxford University’s Future Technology Conference. Hosted by Peter Holand, Ajit Jaokar and Tomi Ahonen, the event brought together over 70 people from all over the world, coming from as far as the U.S. and South Africa.

Unlike other conferences that mostly focus on presentations from new startups in the mobile domain, this conference had a much broader spectrum, which was reflected by the many refreshingly different topics presented during the day. Below are a couple of notes I took for contemplation. In addition, I’ve uploaded some pictures to Flickr.

Mark Selby, Vice President Industry Collaborations, Nokia:

• Mobile is about creating, consuming, interacting and connecting
• Berthold Brecht about the radio: It is nice that it is talking to me, but I would like to talk back.
  TV = unhealthy fixation with furniture
• DRM is a waste of time, people will always find a way around it. Social acceptance of ownership is necessary in the same way that it is accepted by most today that breaking into someone else’s house is not acceptable.
• Augmented Reality: I’ve reported about this before and Mark had a remarkably new application: What if you could point the camera of your phone towards a building and a server back on the Internet then recognizes the building and tells you about restaurants inside, apartments for rent, etc. In my opinion, still some years away, but I see a great potential here.

Jonathan MacDonald, Blyk:

• The ‘community’ doesn’t see themselves as the ‘community’. Everybody sees himself as an individual!
• The advocacy dial: ignore, review, engage, recommend
• Personal recommendation: The best form of advertising
• Offers solutions, not services

Niklas Blum, Fraunhofer R&D Institude FOKUS

• Reported on how to integrate web services with IMS. Interesting slides, my question, however, who integrates with whom, telco with web 2.0 company or vice versa remains.

William Volk, CEO NyNuMo

• Reported about service uptake of his games on the iPhone.
• Discovery is crucial and Apple did a superb job with application discovery for the iPhone.
• Since his games are browser based, they could be easily adapted to Nokia Nseries browsers.
• However, Nokia has no content discovery in place that comes even close to that of Apple.

Tomi Ahonen vs. Dean Bubley

• The great mobile debate: Will the future of the Internet be shaped by mobile, or is the PC still in control? Hilarious debate, no clear winner 

Simon Cavill of mi-pay

• Gave a great presentation about using mobile phones to send money between countries, mostly from immigration countries such as the U.K. back to Africa.
• I’ve reported about M-Pesa before, which is something similar but only on a national basis. This one works for sending money home, bypassing expensive services such as Western Union. Hopefully, his slides are put online by Forum Oxford.

Antonio Vince Stabyl – CEO of itsmy.com (Gofresh)

• Great presentation of his mobile social networking service.
• During the presentation, he mentioned that the service first became successful when it was discovered by users in the U.S. markets with reasonably priced flat rate mobile data.
• Virality kicked in when people having data flat rates recommended the service to friends.

Christian Lindholm, Fjord

• As always a thought provoking presentation around user interfaces.
• “Users only exist in mobile & the drug industry”

And that’s it for the roundup. Once the link to the presentations is available, I’ll put it into the comments section below. Thanks to Peter, Ajit and Tomi for the great event. Looking forward to an ‘encore’ in 2009!

About a year ago I figured out how to use a Linksys WRT54 Wifi router and Wireshark for Wifi packet tracing and reported about it here. Now I have found another inexpensive tool for the job, which is equally helpful.

Background: The problem with Wifi packet tracing and Windows is that the wireless card drivers do not report the Wifi specific headers and also can not be set into promiscuous mode, which required to pick up packets from other devices in the network. On Linux, things are a lot easier, as drivers forward the required information.

I recently bought a Linux based eeePC, for quite different purposes, but now stumbled over instructions how to make Wireshark work with it and how to set the Wifi chip into promiscuous mode. I gave it a try today and it works like a charm. I love Wikis!

Here are some additional hints I unfortunately can’t add to the Wiki as a login is required…:

• Starting with Wireshark 0.99.5, WPA decryption is supported with manual key input. Very helpful for tracing real networks. Note: While I have this version on my Windows PC, the Debian packet manager only installed 0.99.4 on the eeePC. As a consequence, I have to wait with WPA decryption until I open the tracefile on the Windows PC.
   
• For the WPA decryption to work (later on on the Windows PC), the eeePC’s network card needs to be set to a network without encryption before promiscuous mode is activated. Otherwise, the Wifi chip seems to reuse the previous encryption key and tries to decrypt the packets instead of delivering them as they are to higher layers.

I’ve already made some very interesting discoveries when tracing my N95 in idle mode with the SIP VoIP client active. Lots of power save, polling and other Wifi management messages going back and forth which can’t be seen when tracing the Ethernet layer only. More about that in a future post.