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Today a little bit of self advertisement which might be of interest to those of you in the WiMAX business: On June 12 and 13, Chris Beardsmore of Intel, John Edwards of PicoChip and myself will host a 2 day WiMAX course at the University of Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education.

I am very proud to be part of this trio and each of us has a different angle on the technology. Chris has been working on the WiMAX business development side for many years and has a lot of information to share of how WiMAX is doing from that point of view. John is the air interface expert and will share his knowledge about the in’s and out’s from basic OFDM to MIMO. And myself, being the core and radio network guy will concentrate on the WiMAX core network, the radio network, authentication, mobility and session management and lots of things around it.

So, if I have caught your interest, head over to the course’s web site for the details. During this week, there are also a number of other wireless courses given by industry experts ranging from mobile web to the latest on HSPA and LTE. So if you have a bit more time to spend, it’s very well worth to stay a few extra days!

I am glad to have the Internet in my pocket to help in situations when the organization of others make success without pain highly unlikely. Take the follwoing scenario that happend to me recently: A theater visit is organized (note the passive in the sentence) in a city none of us have visited before. Turns out instructions concerning how to find the theater are practically worthless. People in the town are helpful but have different opinions on where the theater is ranging from ‘just aroundd the corner’ to ‘at the other end of town’. So here the Internet and navigation on my Nokia N95 comes to the rescue. Googeling for the town’s and theater’s name reveals the address and phone number of the theater immediately. Ah, the theater has three stages throughout the city. That explains the different opinions of the locals. A quick look into a local newspaper reveals the theater for the play. O.k., since Google has found the address, a quick look with Nokia Maps shows us the exacct place and guides us to the theater. How nice, how painless 🙂 Needless to say that the bus driver of the other group was one hour late since he had no one finding the details with his phone.

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 🙂