Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I saw it a few times before, but over the last day it’s happened enough that I think something is really up. I’ll get an SMS on my N95, read it, write a response, and when I try to send it frequently says something like “Application already in use” or some close variations on that. It plops me right back into the message composer too, and doesn’t shift the messages into the outbox to be sent in the background. I hit send again and normally it goes through. Though I have had it fail 4 times before making it out. There aren’t other incoming messages, normally I have one other app open, web or agile messager, it’s happened with both. Though it has also happened to me with nothing else running at all. I did a search and didn’t see anyone else complaining about what seemed to be exactly the same issue, though a few that sound like they might be close. I’m on ATT/Cingular in the US, wonder if there are some build specific issues or if maybe I just have a bad unit.

UPDATE: It seems to have been the Conversations app (threaded SMS viewing app) that was causing the problem. It’s only been a day, but I did a lot of SMSing today and didn’t see the problem at all.

Version 1.1 of the LightSabre application for N95s is out. You need to also install the accelerometer plugin on your phone otherwise the LightSabre application just does nothing at all when you try to start it. Now I can be a Jedi knight. If I had known that my initial review of the phone would certainly have been more favorable. The council must have been testing my patience, I always fail that test.

One of the things I’ve started doing for “send to my mobile” is using del.icio.us to do the bookmarking from my desktop browser and subscribing to the RSS feed from my mobile. I bookmark stuff and tag it “mobile” when it’s something I might be interested in coming back to and reading from my phone. Both the Nokia browser built into the N95 and Opera Mini support subscribing to RSS feeds, so it’s a great way to move stuff back and forth. I was going to say “Would be great if there was a way to optionally wrap stuff in Mowser on display”, but then I realized I should just add a modified version of the bookmarklet to Firefox so that I can opt for transcoding then instead:

javascript:location.href=
  'http://del.icio.us/post?v=4;url='+
  encodeURIComponent('http://www.mowser.com/web/'+
  encodeURIComponent(location.href))+';title='+
  encodeURIComponent(document.title)

Not as clean, but that’s pretty workable.

SmartMobs had a link to Playyoo, a community site for mobile flash games developers. I sent a message to my N95 and tried out a few of the games. The site isn’t public yet, but they have a dozen games or so, and they seem to work well on the N95. Here are some shots of the site and the blackjack game:

The games work well, they just pop up and play from with the browser, simple and slick. There were a few quirks in places, like I have my phone setup for silent and not all of the games were silent. But overall pretty slick.

FlashLite could really make some waves when it comes to mobile development I think. Unfortunately the system as a whole seems to remain closed. If I could create flash apps for free I would give it a try, but the tools all seem to be commercial and there are no open source alternatives (unless you count stuff like VNC outputting and playing flash video content). There’s a thriving community for flash games already on the web, I’m curious how much more would be out there if the tools weren’t all expensive and closed.

Russ gave me a bluetooth thumbpad he was playing around with for his media PC at one point. It’s this odd little keyboard that was supposed to be used for a mobile phone:

But we had been fooling around with it for use with the N770 and N800 devices. Turns out it works quite well for the N95, and Putty in particular. The keyboard is really small too, easily pocketable if you’re wearing something with a bunch of pockets. Like say a motorcycle jacket. W00t! Bye bye tank bag, hello SSH connectivity. One of my big concerns moving away from the E61 was that I can’t really SSH out of the N95 without carrying a big keyboard with me. This should work however.

Problem is the makers of this little thing seem to have disappeared. Fortunately it looks like Targus is producing them now, so you might be able to wander into a random BestBuy or Office Depot and snatch one. Russ ripped the phone clip off his, so I’m not sure how that part of it works out. But the functionality of the keyboard with the apps I tried was great.

Prompted in part by Dennis’s review of Opera Mini on the N95 at WAPReview I snagged the latest Opera Mini on my N95 and tried it out side by side with Webkit for one of the more challenging sites I try at times. My test site is Bay Area Riders Forum, the forums area in particular. Mobile browsers tend to have some real problems with discussion board style sites like these ones.

Both of them did better than I expected. I’ve tried the site a few times from other browsers and different versions of these browsers and I remember having a lot more issues. This time I was able to login, use the popup menus to get to the thread views I wanted, and generally things worked out quite well.

First off, the Webkit based browser that ships with the Nokia. Using the page overview mode you can see that it does a really good job of fitting sections of text to a layout that you can read as a single column on the phone:

It keeps the overall format of the page intact enough that you can tell what the layout really is though. I didn’t expect it to do that as well as it did. I had the font set to the smallest I could get it to go, however it seemed like it still really wasted a lot of space. For instance here’s a shot of reading a section of that article:

For me, that’s tremendous text. There’s quite a bit of wasted space there it seems, and reading is pretty much constant scrolling.

So compare that to the Opera Mini 4.0 version. There’s the map overview, which is the default when entering into a page on mini, which I actually think I like quite a bit:

The same article in Webkit takes up two screens. The fonts are much smaller and the layout seems to be more compact:

That’s a zoomed view of the same section as Webkit, it just includes some of the page from both before and after. This is just one example of course, but from the poking around I think I agree with Dennis, Opera Mini seems to be doing a fantastic job for the N95.

There are a few tiny details in the mini version that kind of wowed me as well. For instance when scrolling up and down the view of a thread in the forums the different levels of responses are indented by different amounts. Each section in both mini and webkit uses the full width of the screen so that it’s easy to read. In webkit you have to follow the level of indent yourself as you scroll, I expected that. In mini however as you scroll up and down it automatically follows the indent level for whatever you were lined up to automatically, both when zoomed in and in overview mode. I didn’t expect that at all, and it makes reading something like that forum that much nicer. Now that’s some intense attention to detail. Excellent job by the Opera Mini folks again.

ShoZu on the N95 is pretty slick. There’s an option to enable the built in GPS to attach geotags to the photos, and then Flickr puts the photo on a map for you. Nice and slick. The option to upload appears right in the camera app. The GPS is quick, and the network is pretty much instant.

There’s another service called Locr that provides geocoded photo uploads as well, but I couldn’t get it working for some reason. Probably something I screwed up, just not sure what. And I like that the ShoZu uploads go to Flickr, that’s where I would really like them anyway. Those 5 megapixel images are just insanely big aren’t they?

Of course, I’m going to need to weigh in on the Android/Open Handset Alliance news from yesterday, but I would like to take the whole discussion in a different direction. Tons of people have been hyping it already despite the fact that there’s no real info, and tons of people bashing it because there’s no real info. Although I’m tempted to say that just like their ability to get people to blog about a 404 last week, Google has just manged to pull another fast one. I’m not going to however. I’m totally onboard with the idea that open platforms are the way forward in mobile, something I mentioned again and again at Mobile 2.0. So I just can’t pass up an opportunity to forward the discussion some while attention is turned that way.

First off lets try to line up some perspective. Lets say you founded Danger, lived through a lot of the challenges there and learned from them, and then had your next startup snatched up by Google and found yourself at the command of vast resources and power, what would you do? The Sidekick line of devices gained a fanatically devoted following of users. Sidekick fans were like the iPhone fans of the day, their device could do no wrong. However the devices never really cross over and made it mainstream enough that Danger enjoys a significant market share. Why? And what would you change if you were trying a second time?

The first and most major is the “closed platform” part. Most folks have a ton of respect for the massive distributed platform that was the Danger backend. Their ability to deploy new applications or revisions to applications from a central location and have it show up on all their devices, that’s just plain hot. However the setup didn’t encourage or enable third party developers really. Apparently it was somewhat possible to develop for the Sidekick, but I never got a good understanding of what was going on there. At the minimum it seemed to require you talk to Danger or T-Mo if you wanted to deploy your app. If it was me I would try for the same kind of “magic services in the cloud” idea that Danger had, but in a way that allowed anyone to deploy their application against the platform. One way of doing that would be to provide a generic runtime on the device that downloaded a client plugin that could run in a virtual machine, and services to hook into the base platform on the device and communicate with the network. The services facing the device would need to be stuff like alerting the user and providing different views of data so that any app can expose “homescreen” functions. The network facing functions would be stuff like updating the service transparently when a new version is available and background data transfer and syncing. Is that what’s behind this SDK that we’re going to see next week? I have no idea, but if I were Andy that’s the direction in which I would be thinking.

The second major takeaway that I would have from Danger is that device distribution can kill your market even if you have a fantastic service and a great device. One way to solve that is by forming a partnership with a number of manufacturers who already sell devices through a number of top tier carriers in all the major markets instead of going it on your own. In that respect HTC, Samsung, Motorola, and LG don’t sound like a horrible mix. Sure, none of them individually are dominating the handset market. None of them are willing to throw their support 100 percent behind the platform right off the bat. But so what? Together they represent a channel into just about any market, and that solves the distribution problem pretty well. I see no problem with this, at all. Apple isn’t there? Nokia isn’t there? Don’t care. Doesn’t make a difference.

The final part, this whole bit about being “open”. I’m an open source bigot, I admit it. But I’m trying not to lean too much one way or the other on this cause there just isn’t enough info. So what would have to happen here for this effort to not just be another hat tossed into the ring of open mobile (like OpenMoko, Ubuntu Mobile, LiMo, Qtopia, etc). It would have to be possible for other folks to implement the OHA standards and participate in the platform without having to use the stack top to bottom. If I could pick up the SDK we get presented with next week and start hacking together some scripts for my N800 to experiment with the services, perfect. It has to be possible for the OpenMoko folks to go “Cool, we want to throw our support behind this too!” and just go off and implement something that makes them OHA compliant and recognized as such. If implementing against a shared public unprotected standard makes you part of the Open Handset Alliance, perfect, we’re seeing some good. If participating in the alliance requires anything else except consistently contributing good code, it’s not really sticking to open principles and probably won’t really make an impact.

Russ gave me back the N95 I tossed at him after MobileCamp. I just got done syncing it up using iSync drivers actually provided by Nokia, how novel is that? I grabbed a few essential apps I needed to try out right away, like Google Maps for mobile which now uses the built in GPS on the N95, and Agile Messenger. There’s somewhere north of a billion features actually built into the device itself, and there are a bunch of services I’ve been meaning to play with or try out that I didn’t both with cause my E61 didn’t have a camera. I’ve been using Nokia S60 devices for a long time, and there’s stuff in here that I’m pretty sure isn’t going to really make it into many of the consumer focused reviews out there. So here it goes, a total geeks review of the N95.

The first question on almost everyone’s mind is normally “Oh yea, how fast?” Normally because they’ve seen the info that Om posted about the N95 he tried out a few months ago. Well here’s what I got:

Not sure what testing service Om used to get his 400 kilobits, I used dslreports.com to get mine. We both used the N95 tethered via Bluetooth to a MacBook Pro. The other variables being that he was probably in San Francisco and I’m in San Mateo, and that he was using the device when almost nothing else existed that could be using the 3G network. Note however that the latency is very low for a cellular network, and the subjective feeling is that it’s absolutely blazingly fast compared to using the E61. Some of that while I’m on the device itself is because the processor is a lot faster in the N95. But even just comparing tethered E61 to tethered N95 and taking device speed itself out, the difference is noticeable.

And if you’re a proper geek, you need to be thinking “How can you live without a keyboard? Are you some kind of horrid backwards quasi-geek? How the hell are you going to SSH with T9 you tard? Use triple tap? You’re insane, I can’t listen to you!” And you would be right, for the most part. I’m expecting to really really, or perhaps even really really really, miss the QWERTY keyboard from my E61 when it comes to some of the things I do frequently on my device. So one of the first things I did after installing Putty was use the wireless keyboard app (it’s under “Office” on the version I have, cause… umm, just cause it is) to connect the phone with my Stowaway
Bluetooth keyboard. And much to my surprise it worked the way I expected it to. Start up VIM on my server and edit a few files, yep, seems to work. Action shot:

I’m a big fan of scripting languages on devices, and there’s been a kick ass pys60 project that provides a python interpreter for S60 devices. That went on pretty quickly, and I thought there was a module I could use for accessing the built in GPS from Python. But apparently Nokia has crippled themselves with this security certificate bullshit. Apparently I can’t install the module unsigned, even with my device set to install all. I need to resign the code with some tool I’m not at all familiar with. Nice that someone has managed to plug the hole Nokia shot in their foot. But it would be even cooler if they didn’t shoot themselves in the first place. Cause there are only so many hours in my day. And while I would be happy to hack some GPS Python goodness I just don’t have the time to read up on even more tools unnecessarily placed in my path. Boo!! Hiss!!! Horrible job, clue up folks. This device just got about half as useful to me as I had hoped it would be.

One of the things I was looking forward to now that my device has a camera again, was fooling around with some QR Codes. So I used the QR Code generator to whip up a link to m.thisismobility.com. The folks at MobileCamp mentioned that the N95 shipped with a QR Code reader already. Yay!! So I looked around on the device. Not in the main menu or under tools or applications. So it must be built into the camera application, right? The camera app wasn’t automatically picking up QR Codes when I held them in front of the camera (the most acceptable option), or identify them in the captured image and present me with an option to follow the link (the close second most acceptable option), or automatically popping up a new menu option to use the data in the image (the third reasonable option), or providing anything like a “send to QR Code scanner” in the send menu (the fourth reasonable option). Nope, eventually I found a separate dedicated Barcode application in the “Office” folder. The app seems to be tied into nothing else except the web browser. And it generates an unconfigurable horrible noise when it finds a barcode. Probably somewhere around the 300th way it could be done, and found well south of the point where we cross from sanity into insanity. Man, I was hoping that Nokia providing a barcode scanner in their devices presented the possibility to increasing their use here in regions where they’re not popular already. Doesn’t seem like it however.

Doesn’t sound good huh? Russ gave me back the phone and said even though I didn’t want to like it, I would after playing with it for a while. Not the case. I’m not mad at Nokia any more at least, cause as it turns out I would have been mad to pay so much for this device if they managed to sell me one. What I’m seeing here is relatively little value added by the integrator. The N95 is a grab bag of the coolest stuff you can toss into a phone, but no real cohesion or innovation (besides being willing to put out a phone that costs as much as a laptop). Just a grab bag of features, not a unified device. Still, it does have some sexy features, and I’m sure I’ll play with it a bunch. I just wouldn’t suggest paying the retail price. Maybe that’s why they’re giving the things away at so many events.

Here are some screenshots (taken using a fantastic bit of freeware called Screenshot 2). The Nokia portal is starting to look pretty decent, this is what the default homepage looked like:

And how the browser renders the mobile version of my blog:

The version of Google Maps that uses the internal GPS:

The Under the Radar Mobility event is happening next week (Nov 15th) in Mountain View in the Bay Area. The event always attracts some of the best and brightest in mobile. AdMob presented last year, check out the writeup from Rudy De Waele. Rudy is back as a judge again this year along with a stellar lineup:

• Julie Ask, Wireless Analyst, Jupiter Research
• Vineet Buch, Principal, Blue Run Ventures
• Rajeev Chand, Senior Equity Research Analyst, Wireless Technologies, Rutberg & Co.
• Tim Chang, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners
• Greg Cox, Business Manager - Microsoft
• Gary Little, General Partner - Morgenthaler Ventures
• Doug MacMillan, Head of Business Development, Forum Nokia
• Rafe Needleman, Editor, Webware/CNet
• Daniel Rosen , Head of AKQA Mobile - AKQA Mobile
• Harshul Sanghi, Managing Director, Motorola Ventures - Motorola Ventures
• Jeremy Toeman, Consultant - Stage Two Consulting
• Eric Ver Ploeg, Managing Director - VantagePoint Venture Partners
• Mike Wehrs, Nuance Communications (formerly AOL Mobile)

It’s an excellent opportunity to hear feedback and critique across all the different layers that make up mobile, as well as hear rapid fire pitches from a bunch of young companies. The folks at Deal Maker sent me a link that you can use to get $100 off the normal admission price. I’m planning to be there, doing track 1 almost all day, but then swapping to track 2 at 3:00 to see the social networking group.