Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

A lot of folks have been talking about the mobile version of the Google personalized homepage recently, and of course I’ve given it a try. But just like the Google Local for Mobile release before it, it’s missing the one set of data that would really drive me to put some use behind it: Dodgeball.

I think Dodgeball is a pretty cool service, and I do make use of it. One of the problems with it however is that it doesn’t really have a way to access the data from a mobile phone except by keeping track of all the text messages. I was expecting Google Local for Mobile to have a “checkins by friends” dataset that could be layered in, and I was expecting the personalised homepage to have a module I could add to list recent checkins by friends. But neither of these mobile services have any ties at all to the Dodgeball service. Unfortunate.

I’m planning to go over to the Emerging Telephony conference later on this month. The schedule includes a lot of IP telephony and open source. Sweet! I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to make it out for the whole conf, but I’m going to make as much as I can. Since we had the cancel the Mobile Monday this month maybe we can meetup during the conf instead. Drop me a line if you’re planning to go to Etel and want to meet up.

I barely even know how to start reacting to a writeup like this one. It hits really hard right off the bat with an amazingly clueless statement: “The mobile Internet is a different experience from the PC Internet — as it should be.” Riiiiight. No seamless mesh of information devices here, no borderless flow of personalization and services. Everyone wants their mediums and platforms and applications partitioned off and all seperated into little buckets? Funny, that’s not normally how I hear it go down.

Then it goes on to compare the Google personalized homepage to (and it took me a little while to figure out what was being compared here) Yahoo! Go. Whoa. Google has chosen xHTML and Yahoo uses a dedicated application? For what? What in the name of all that is holy is this guy talking about? Google is using xHTML to sync my address book between my phone and their online service? How can this comparison even be made?

I mostly use Yahoo through the browser interface. I’ve fooled around with Go, and there’s some cool stuff there. But Yahoo hasn’t started constricting users to the application in order to use the mobile interface. I get my personalised content through the Yahoo mobile portal, with my news preferences and a summary of my waiting email, just the way I do with the Google personal page I just setup. Hell, if I don’t login at the Yahoo portal I still get a ton of useful services I can access directly from my phone. When I hit the Google personal pages without an account I get a login page and a message telling me to go to a computer if I want to sign up.

Now I like poking fun at Yahoo just as much as the next person. Sometimes I do it just to get back at Russ for poking fun at Ning. But this just seems, irresponsible I guess. If you want to poke at Yahoo go for it, but at least make some sense in the process.

I was fooling around with the PSP format download for Google Video last night. It was added relatively recently, and the videos actually look fantastic. I was downloading a bunch of Top Gear videos to check out the system with. The problem was that getting the videos down to the PSP using Ubuntu was a real pain in the ass. Not because of Ubuntu, but because apparently the insane naming scheme that Sony has imposed on the device has changed.

I used to have a directory called 100mnv01 that a Windows based tool created on my PSP memory stick before. As Russ pointed out to me last night, the naming scheme for the video files is different for different codec styles. Pause, let that sink in. Where you put the files and what you name them depends on the format they’re in. Wow that sucks. If you’re out there working on mobile products or services this should be great news for you. The PSP has actually been considered a success for the most part, and look how insane some of this shit is. Plenty of room for improvement, lots and lots of improvement all over the place when it comes to mobile devices.

So how should the files be named? Here’s some discussion from GameSpot going over it:

To be able to use the new codec: AVC, you will need at least Firmware 2.0 and the folder should be created for you after you format your memory stick once you have Firmware 2.0 and above. If the AVC folder isn’t created, create a folder in the MP_ROOT folder, named:100ANV01.
MP_ROOT-100MNV01 (.MP4)
MP_ROOT-100ANV01 (AVC)
The .MP4 video is to be named: M4Vxxxxx.MP4 where xxxxx is number (example M4V00001.MP4).
The AVC video is to be named: MAQxxxxx.MP4 where xxxxx is number (example MAQ00001.MP4).

Just so you have all the info about what I’m doing, I have Ubuntu 5.04 running a locally compiled 2.6.13 kernel on a Thinkpad. I’m using the USB cable to the PSP to access the memory stick in the device, and letting the automounter take care of everything. At first when I downloaded new videos from Google I followed the format of the existing files. When the videos didn’t show up I assumed I had bad mount options or something. Blew a whole bunch of time poking around at the naming and finally blowing away all the files I had and starting over.

Both the directory name and the first three letters of the file need to be used together. It’s not enough to put MAQ files in with the M4V files in the MVN directory, it needs to be MAQ files in the ANV directory. As long as you have the naming scheme right the automounter options under Ubuntu are okay, which is cool. No need to tweek the automounter settings, and you can unmount from the desktop icons and all. The default options will display the names in lowercase, but they’re apparently written out correctly. I used uppercase names in my commands when I coppied the files out to the device: cp /home/miker/TopGearPlaystationmv.mp4 /media/usbdisk/MP_ROOT/100ANV01/MAQ00100.MP4 I don’t think it really makes a difference however. Maybe I’ll script up some transfer to PSP tools that take care of that. Maybe.

I picked up a 1gig DV RSMMC to use with my slew of devices. I want to play around with some feature length movies I have sitting on a drive at home. I’ve mentioned Dual Voltage Reduced Size MMC previously, saying that even though it was a pain in the ass at least it was backward compatible. So I got the 1 gig DVRSMMC because of the Nokia devices. And wouldn’t you know it, it doesn’t work in the GP2X.

I have a few other DV cards, and none of them work. But they all work with my laptop and the Palm devices, so I don’t think it’s just a problem with the card. Anyone else tried out a DV card in a GP2X? Could this just be a driver problem with the GP2X? The fourth firmware update included a fix to detect 2gig SD cards, so apparently whatever drivers are being used for that SDIO slot didn’t handle all the cases necessary for dealing with different media types. Not that dealing with a DV card should require different handling, backward compatability means it should work by default. But I’ve also worked on way too much hardware to believe that. So, hardware problem or software problem? I keep saying I’m not going to spend all my free time digging at things like this any more, so I’m posting about it before I do something stupid like spend a few days debugging someone else’s hardware. Someone please tell me either how to fix it or that it’s physically impossible to do so. Save me some time.

The good folks over at AllAboutSymbian.com pointed out a new freeware screen capture program for Series60 - Best ScreenSnap. Very nice little program, I just tried it out on my 6680 and it’s been working great. Start it up and set some of the settings. I have a 256 meg MMC card in mine, so I put pretty much everything there. Background the program and it watches for hotkeys (default is pen and asterisk at the same time) and takes a capture when it sees them. Makes the shutter sound to confirm the capture. Image is written as a standard jpeg that I’m able to bluetooth back to my PC and view directly. Nice!

There’s been quite a bit of hubub over the GP2X, most folks like the device quite a bit. The latest news is over their release of kernel source code and modifications to open source programs, so I decided the time was ripe to write up a little bit about the device. I have both a GP2X and a Nokia 770, which makes me really excited. I used to dream about how kick ass it would be to have a few Linux based mobile devices to play with. Guess 2006 is the year it really happens.

I’m going to write up some stuff about developing for both the 770 and the GP2X, both have great SDKs actually meant to be used from (GASP!!) Linux. But right now I just wanted to poke around at the GP2X somewhat and talk about the things I’ve played with. For those thinking about getting one, or who already have one and are looking for things to play with, the GP2X wiki is definitely an essential stop. Tons of info there. Just using the quick tutorials there I was able to get a development environment up and going, create an SDL based app, try it out local, and build a copy for my device. Sweet.

Just this week a new version of the firmware came out. I had trouble with the default firmware update technique, so I used an alternative firmware loader. The GPX2 File Archive is definitely another place to spend some time kicking around. Note: the GP2X used to be called the GPX2, so sometimes you’ll find older info and sites that still use the reversed version. It was there that I first noticed that the GP2X is skinnable, so I now have a kick ass FLCL skin on my device. I would also very highly recommend snagging sterm, a command line terminal for the GP2X.

Even with the latest firmware and applications though, I’m having some trouble with some movie files that I was expecting to play. I downloaded a bunch of the XVid and DivX movies from the GPX2 file archive, but some of them wouldn’t play on the device. I thought the mplayer in the GP2X had XVid, DivX and Mpeg4 support, but the player sometimes complains about unknown file types for some movies I put on there. I was really hoping that I would be able to just snag some of the videos I have on my drive at home and put them on the GP2X and that would be it. Apparently that might have been a pipe dream. Fortunately I can try to hack something together on my own if I really want to go after this.

The device has an SDIO slot, but that slot is where I normally have my MMC card. So if I were to try hacking together some kind of networking support using that slot I would have to put the programs I want to run on the built in flash. The EXT port might be a more realistic target for this, serial Bluetooth or something. The device runs on two AA batteries, which is pretty cool. But it could do a much better job of displaying the battery status. There should be a constant little battery meter in the corner of the screen when you’re in the launcher. I ran out of battery power at one point, but had no idea that was the problem. The device just started acting strange, and I was afraid I had borked it during an install or upgrade.

Overall very cool device. There’s a ton out there already in terms of software and info, and lots more that could be done. I’m going to be playing with this thing quite a bit I bet.

There’s a beta release of TCPMP for the Series60 and UIQ up online now. Very much beta quality still, but it rocks being able to download normal avi vids to my phone and watch them play! I’m really looking forward to the evolution of this app, keep up the great work folks!

I didn’t have any time to fool around with it yesterday, so I just installed the Yahoo! Go app I posted about the other day. It’s a huge install (1.8 meg .sis file) so I wasn’t sure how it would fare on the 6680, but it worked out okay. I currently have it setup to sync everything: mail, address book, calendar, tasks, and photos.

The mail, address book, calendar, and tasks items seem to work out. The address book and calendar in particular I think I’m going to be really happy to have. I’m going to have to spend some time playing with it long term to see how the syncing works out. One of the common problems with apps like Go is that waking up the phone every now and then to make a data request tends to drain the battery quickly. And the phone becomes sluggish and unresponsive when the background task is running, and there’s no good way to make the user aware that something else is going on.

The photo part is really a problem though. With the app installed I can no longer take pictures with the 1.3 megapixel camera in my 6680 consistently. Even with all the interface components of the app closed I get an out of memory when I snap a pic sometimes. I can use the VGA resolution camera as far as I can tell. But the camera I actually use, the 1.3 megapixel one, is even more unreliable than it was before. I keep changing the settings to see if I have problems after turning off photo sync, but apparently the app is doing something and not paying attention to me when I change settings. Not sure what it’s doing. Hope it’s something important though, cause I don’t like it when my phone ignores me.

I’m gonna try out the calendar, tasks, and address book for a while and see how they work out long term. And I have some other testy type stuff I would like to try out on this thing. Hopefully I’ll have some time this weekend to try some of it out.

Every once in a while apps just disappear when I’m using them on my 6680. I thought it was due to the pitifully small amount memory in the phone. I thought stuff just crashed. But today when entering in a calendar entry and the app went away on me, I realized that I had hit two buttons when typing after using a number. When you’re using T9 you get a number by holding down the corresponding number key for a few seconds. If you hit another button with that key still held down it consistenly crashes the running app on my phone. All the time. And only in T9, this doesn’t happen if I’m typing tripple tap.

I even made a little video of it in action: 6680 App Crash. I just though it was odd and wanted to share. It’s a 3gp video, so you should be able to view it on your 6680. Of course, due to the pitifully small amount of memory you’ll probably have to save it, let the browser error out with an out of mem, then manually go over to the gallery and pull it back up. But it’ll play after that. <sarcasm>SMOOTH! and simple, nice job Nokia!</sarcasm> Hopefully now that I understand what’s up I can be more careful when entering numbers and avoid some frusteration. Maybe it’ll help some of you out there with misbehaving 6680’s also. Odd bug to have pop up. Maybe I’m just searching for the wrong things, but I didn’t see mention of this anywhere online. Is this a known issue?