Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"All three methods of retrieving your Email ride on top of your standard mobile technologies such as GPRS, EGPRS and 3G etcetera. Now, compared to AUTD, Direct Push might appear to be more complicated, but how it works is really quite trivial if you have a good idea of how the Internet works. Even if you don�t, do try to follow-through my explanation as knowing how Direct Push communicates with Exchange will allow you to trouble-shoot so much more effectively."

Speaking of Direct Push my previous post about it referenced this article which I think deserves separate attention. It is a nice and easy to understand explanation of how Direct Push works. The question at the end of the read is, is it really push? You decide and let us know what you think.

"This year's Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships have come and gone, friends, and we're pleased to report to you the winningest of the cellphone throwers that came from the world over to test their metal tossing mettle. Second place in the freestyle event went to Dutchman Elie Rusthoven, who was almost disqualified for throwing his phone out of bounds, but mustered a silver by performing a phone juggling act that won over the judges (seriously, we can't make this stuff up). But it was a gentleman by the name of Lassi Etelatalo, a Finnish javelin thrower, that lobbed his Nokia to victory..."



I can not tell you how many times I have wanted to just throw my phone as far as I possibly could. I�m sure everyone reading this has felt that way one time or another. Who knew someone would actually get a metal for doing so? Lassi Etelatalo hurled his Nokia handset 89 metres, breaking the previous phone throwing record of 82.55 metres set by Ville Piippo. Seriously folks, you just can't make this stuff up! 8O

"It doesn't matter if 2008's coolest phone runs on FORTRAN or has a dozen monkeys with abacuses inside it. People will buy it, the way they bought the Moto RAZR, because it's cool. And therefore operators will clamour to sell it, irrespective of their internal goals to reduce the number of OS's they support."

Dean Bubley has posted his take on the Smartphone OS wars and for the most part, it's just what I've been saying. Most people don't know what OS is in their phone, and they don't care. Of course, we're the exception to that. Anyway, give his analysis a read and share your thoughts with us. :)

The title of this comes right off the ebay action page. I so enjoyed this persons passion that I would have sent him my old MPx220 if I still had it. While this is about an MPx200 I think all of you frustrated with ANY Motorola phone will be warmed as much as I was by his prose which is also straight off the action page. Please sit back relax and enjoy the read, unedited and unabridged. :D

"I went and did it again, I got another Motorola from Orange.

"Why aye man, it's much betta than the last one, these are reeealy good and don't suck at all, honest!"

Old numpty here fell for it, so let me tell you a little about the phone....
It's the suckiest phone I have ever had. It sucks so much it should have been a vacuum cleaner.

With it's USB interface and docking cradle it's possible to use this phone to crash any Operating System.
So advanced is this horrible device it can even curse Windows XP with the dreaded B.S.O.D.
One thing I did like about Motorolas was the voice recognition dialing.
They decided not to include it on this model.
Or a charger lead for a car ciggarette lighter socket.
Or a belt clip.
Another thing I liked about the previous model was the FM radio... it actually worked quite well.
They've got rid of that too. Still, I could listen to some MP3s instead.... if there was enough room to store any on this rather nasty little device.

But on the plus side, thanks to it's IR port you can now beam a telephone number to another phone or computer with an IR port in about 10 times the time it would take you to simply type it in (with your nose).
The MPx200 boasts the Windows OS, although I think "boasts" is a poor choice of word.
I can only assume that it's the fully blown version of Microsofts fattest, bloatiest Windows release to date...

"Hello Moto..... Hello?..... Moto?..... Hello?..... Oh I give up!" The CPU on the phone is powerful enough to show you your only received text message in about 15 to 20 seconds.
That doesn't sound like a long time does it? Wait 20 seconds before you read on. .
.
.
.
.
20 Seconds is just too long to wait. Any old Nokia will show you the message in about 20 miliseconds.

The memory on the phone is expandable via a new SD or MMC memory card. This is handy as the unit does not come with enough built in memory to store a phone number and a wallpaper image.

But don't let me put you off, it has some really good features like "Airplane Mode".
Using Airplane Mode you can disable the phones ability to receive or make calls, texts or email whilest leaving the phone on so that you can look at the screens crappy walpaper and get hassled by the air stewardess for not turning your phone off. The added advantage of this mode is that, when you arrive at JFK, your battery is flat.
Sat in the taxi, you really need to make some calls to let your business associates know that you've landed, but wait! No charger lead!
Whilst you're sat there in incomunicado, you can reminisce about the bad old days where you would merely turn your phone off.
The best is yet to come...
How do you turn airplane mode off? I couldn't find out from the manual and had to trawl the net. I found the answer in a forum whereby some chap with a similar phone was obviously as irate as I.
Apparently you have to hold the power button down for more than one and a half seconds but for less than two seconds as the latter turns the phone off.
Which sick, criminally insane, Motorola B*STARD dreamed that up!?
"Oh, I've turned it off again, damn!" Now another wait for about five minutes while this chunky phone boots up. "Hello Moto" it declares in a cheesy voice, yes hello again. Glad you could make it.
Let's try again. No, not long enough. "yeah I'll be with you in a minute.". Not long enough again, oh sh*t, it's turned off again! "Yeah, make that five minutes" "Hello Moto"
Pulling the battery doesn't work.
Neither does pulling the sim card
Twenty five minutes of this lunacy was what caused the crack in the outer screen. I threw it accross the room in disgust.
The threat "If you don't come out of Airplane Mode right now, I'm going to kill you!" was the only thing that worked.
Perhaps the speech recognition part of this phone has not been completely removed.

What else can I say about it?

* The earpeice is a bit intermittant so you don't know if you've connected or not, very annoying.
* Sometimes it blasts your lughole with your million decibel ringtone while your on the phone. OW!
* Using the menu to read your texts is like pulling teeth.
* The screen is crap.
* The keys bounce (when you press a key, sometimes it enters it twice so it knackers up your word).
* It doesn't learn words.
* When you open it it makes a horrible "clack" sound.
* When you close it it makes a horrible "clack" sound.
* It connects to the internet for an hour while it's closed and turned off in the swimming pool locker.. according to Orange.
* Closing it doesn't disable the keys. Really! Yes, I know!

Even the Orange tarif is crap. 30 quid a month for 60 minutes calls. That's a good night out, but not the phones' fault
No need to ask yourself "Have I got my phone" while patting your pockets. You know you've got it, because the bloody great brick is pulling your trousers down!


In summary:

* I hate it.
* I detest every atom of it's existence.
* It's creator should be tied down and eaten by ants.
* The factory that makes them should be melted by a big laser from space.
* It doesn't have a camera
* It barely functions as a phone


Do you want it? Bid Now!

You have a choice, you can bid for the phone or you can bid for a homemade DVD of it's slow demise.
I plan to use a vice, a drill, possibly an angle grinder, some flamable liquids, a blowtorch and finally a sledghammer.
I may even do the ultimate nasty and tell my wife it spent some money on some new computer bits.

Just let me know your choice, I strongly recommend the latter.
I know what your thinking, you're thinking "I could download something like that off the net".
Trust me, in my video, you'll be able to f-e-e-l the hatred, it'll be worth it.

Please allow a few days for me to produce the video.

The phone must die."

If you read this far here is the link to the actual ebay auction. As it will eventually disappear from ebay it may not be working as you read this.

"Henry Lai has a vivid recollection of his introduction to the politics of big science. It was 1994, and he had just received a message from the National Institutes of Health, which was funding work he was doing on the effects of microwave radiation, similar to that emitted by cellular phones, on the brain. He and UW colleague Narendra �N.P.� Singh had results indicating that the radiation could cause DNA damage in brain cells. The news was apparently unwelcome in some quarters. Someone had called the NIH to report that Lai was misusing his research funding by doing work not specified in the grant (the grant didn�t mention DNA). And the agency wanted to know what was going on."

This is a very interesting article about the politics around research grants and the effect it's having on cellphone radiation testing. It would appear that big business is doing all it can to discredit any research that might threaten their revenue stream. In all fairness, this article might be a little bias towards the Universities, and government grants (The article is from the University of Washington's Alumni Association). I'm sure the handset manufacturers are looking out for their consumers. After all, it might be a larger impact to their revenue stream if we all started to drop like flies. ;) So, what do you think? Are we slowly rotting our brains?

:really mad: I'm ready to throw my E200 out the nearest window. Here's the scenario: I took Thursday and Friday off for a little "work on the house and yard with my wife" vacation, so my email accounts have gotten very full. I was at a family gathering tonight, and with some downtime I checked my Pocket PC Thoughts email accounts - 72 new messages. Email triage time! One-handed email triage with a Smartphone is an awesome thing. When it works that is, and this is what my rant is about. :evil:

I opened up my email account on Pocket Inbox, Smartphone 2003 version, and did a SEND/RECIEVE. It took a while, but eventually all the messages were downloaded onto the phone. I went through all 72 of them, deleting spam, responding to a few, and deleting the messages I didn't need to act on. I then did another SEND/RECEIVE to process the changes. No new messages showed up, so I was done. The first problem is that I shouldn't have to do a SEND/RECEIVE to process the changes. When an email client makes a connection to an IMAP server, it stays connected as long as the TCP/IP connection is available. When you open Outlook and switch to an IMAP email account, is connects up to the server and downloads the messages - and it stays connected. If you move/mark a message for deletion, it's moved/marked for deletion immediately because it's connected. It doesn't disconnect until you shut down the software. That's the way email clients are supposed to work with IMAP.

So why am I so angry? Because when I sat down at my computer tonight and opened Outlook, all of the messages I had processed where downloaded from the server, fresh and marked as unread. That's right, it's like my email triage never happened! I wasted my time and have to re-do everything. I've seen this before with the Pocket PC email client, and the only way to avoid it happening there is to connect to the email account, do the email traige, do a send/recieve, then press the connect icon to disconnect. That usually works, but why should I have to resort to such voodoo to process my email? The problem that makes this scenario worse is that there is no CONNECT function on the Smartphone Inbox client - just a SEND/RECIEVE. It's like the Microsoft software developers don't know there's a difference between POP and IMAP.

The Smartphone client works perfectly my Exchange account, but for me it's highly problematic with IMAP accounts. Frankly, at the moment I'm livid that once again Microsoft has released software that works great with their software, but is completely dysfunctional with what the rest of the world is using. If you can't make an email client that can process email via IMAP, what's the point of saying it can do email? There's some serious room for improvement here, because right now the Smartphone Inbox application is at the rock bottom of functionality if it can't do something this simple.

This recent CNN article discusses Microsoft UK's guidelines that were issued regarding off-hours communication. "The provision of a smart phone in no way requires users to either view or respond to business related emails or calls out of office hours," this from Microsoft's Director of People and Culture, Steve Harvey.

Mr. Harvey continues: "Individuals are not skilled in setting the boundaries between work and home (and) colleagues fail to respect other's rights to free time." Guidelines were issued after Microsoft gave more than 400 employees a Smartphone, a Tablet PC, and broadband access at home. Work productivity increased, but people were concerned about encroachments on their personal time.

I'm a pretty connected and mobile person. I have a Smartphone, a Tablet PC, and a SPOT watch. I have broadband access at home, and WiFi hot spot access on the road. I'm pretty easy to get hold of - either through voice, IM, or e-mail. You can even contact me while I'm playing games on XBOX Live! I would go insane if I didn't put limits on my time. Now, I don't have a set time when I start shutting down devices at night. Especially since I don't have a typical "9 to 5" sort of job. But if the phone rings while I'm at home, I know that I have the choice of not answering.

How do you feel? Is there a pressure to answer every call, reply to every e-mail or text message? Or do you find that you can keep that balance between your work and personal lives?

"An annual Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey, known as the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, found that among adults asked what invention they hate most but can't live without, 30 percent said the cell phone." Other items on that made the list were the television, the alarm clock, and the answering machine.

Being a cell phone junkie, I find this interesting. People recognize that these devices are essential to modern living, but they also hate them. My follow-up question is why? Being able to communicate from nearly anywhere is immeasurably valuable. Here's what the Lemelson Center Director, Merton C. Flemings had to say: "The interconnectedness you get from the cell phone is a very positive thing, and I think that's one of the most important things, the bringing together of people. The downside of that is that you sometimes want to be alone." That is a valid point. I know there are times when I don't want to be disturbed. When that happens, I TURN OFF MY PHONE! That statement from Merton Flemings makes me question the results of this survey. Is it really the technology that people hate? Is it, instead, a condition of life that they hate and direct that hate at the enabling technology? If you hate being bothered, it follows that you'll hate cell phones. If you hate going to work in the morning, you'll probably hate your alarm clock. If you hate the lousy network programming, you likely hate your television.

The results of the Lemelson-MIT survey are far from useless. The survey does, however, need to be used to investigate the real reasons behind this "hatred" of technology.

If there was a black belt in .NET Compact Framework programming, I can think of one person who has earned it many times over. Casey Chesnut. Casey sometimes publishes articles on devbuzz.com and there you can find his bio: "casey is an independent consultant specializing in web services, mobile, tablet, and speech development. home site is http://www.brains-N-brawn.com when he bothers to keep his server running."

Casey's latest article, "SmartPhone (SP) and WebService Enhancements (WSE) with .NETcf", is an excellent four page adventure into the wonders of Web Service Enhancements.

"So I had taken my first cut at WSE from the Compact Framework (.NETcf) many months ago (/cfWSE). Since then, I have gotten to do a lot more Web Service (WS) work using the .NETcf. So I felt I was ready for a second attempt to raise the bar ... although this article is really the third in a long running series. I could not continue the /cfWSE article because .NETcf was lacking the System.Security.Cryptography namespace; so that is why I wrote the follow up /spCrypt article. Now I can continue where I left off."

Completely off-topic, but I wanted to share with you all a very exciting program that a friend told me about last week. It's called Skype, and it was created by the makers of KaZaA - but it's not for file sharing, it's for voice chatting. There are three things that make Skype extremely impressive to me:

The voice quality is amazing - it's better than phone quality, and upon my first use the quality of my friends voice was so high is sounded like he was in the room with me. It was actually kind of eerie. :worried:

The software uses port 80, so it slips through firewalls without hassle, which means end users behind firewalls don't need to reconfigure ports. In fact, there's no configuration at all - it even dynamically selects the best voice codec for you depending on your bandwidth.

Most impressive of all, it works flawlessly from behind a NAT (network address translation) layer, meaning that those of us behind routers and gateways can actually use it.

They also have plans for having Skype dial regular land-line phones, and I've emailed them to ask about a Smartphone version - wouldn't that be cool? The beta is free, but they'll eventually charge for the software and possibly a subscription-based service. Assuming they don't screw up a really great idea by charging too much for it per month, Skype could become the "next big thing". Check it out!