Good thing too! Cause as I arrived I noticed that I had written down both the fake flight info for my flight and the real info (one of those ‘operated by’ flights) but forgot to note which was which. Never fear, I have that message right in the creamy middle of my 40 message inbox.

So I fire up the messenger client and wait. And wait. And wait. Listen to music for a little while. And then bing! Messages synced. Except the message I’m looking for isn’t there. Almost none of the messages are. Just a bunch of garbage I thought I deleted. Weird, I must have screwed up and not actually comitted the inbox changes? Could be.

So I fire up the N800 running the open source Claws email program. It’s a lot more tolerant. It can deal with my screw up. And I connect it via bluetooth to the E61. Get that? Cause its important. Using the network connection from the phone, so theres no network disparity.

Claws starts up in literally seconds, shows me my inbox list, which does indeed have the 40 items I expect it to. Including my flight info. Yay! Man I wish I could get a Maemo device with a cellular interface. Theres just no beating what an open community can do. I hope Nokia is learning from whats happening.

One of the things I actually miss about the E61 is the camera. Not so much for taking images that I want to save, but because the optical sensor in a phone is a good way to tie physical objects to online representations. So one of the options instead of going with the N95 is to get an E61i, an update to my current phone that includes a camera. Not a bad option, but also boring. The N95 also has GPS. If it’s anything like trying to use a bluetooth GPS unit with any existing phone software, I expect that besides testing out whatever nav software is built into the phone I will never use it. Just too frustrating and unreliable. Last time I brought my bluetooth GPS and my phone in the car with me to help out in case I got lost I found that the free Nokia software I had downloaded to fool around with would pop up a screen trying to get me to pay pretty much no matter what I asked it to do. And MGMaps was taking so long to pull GPS data from my bluetooth module that I was able to start up standard GMaps and enter in the intersection I was at to find my location before it worked. Location based services are the future though, seriously. This year it’s going to happen. I’m just betting that it has nothing at all do with with GPS or the E911 system, the models around those systems are just too screwed up.

The other major reason to consider this is that I do really want something that’s 3G. Not so much because I use tons of data from my handset itself for which I would feel a real difference between EDGE and 3G, but because I end up with other devices tethered to my phone rather than paying for hotspot access when I’m on the go. Hmm, that’s actually pretty interesting. I do use IM and SSH from my handset very frequently. But how often do I do that when I don’t also have my N800 around? Looking back I would say about 20% of the time. Mostly because I’m almost always at work or home, and there’s some computer with a keyboard within reach. About 15% of that 20% is when I’m in a meeting and I happen to have only my phone with me. So maybe I would be able to give up the full keyboard without too much pain.

Considering it. I probably shouldn’t be, but I’m considering it. It must be like gravity. Put enough tech into a small handheld device and it creates a dimple in the fabric of reality, which manifests as an attractive force for geeks.

However I’m in the middle of a situation that’s pretty taxing as far as infrastructure goes. Cellular networks are actually kinda spotty here, and 802.11 networks are both few and far between, and basically treated like demilitarized zones. The number of ports you can assume you can communicate over approaches 1 as you increase the number of base stations you sample from. Generally, you can use port 80. Sometimes I can manage to get imap outbound, not always. Almost never get smtp outbound, and frequently don’t even get SSL smtp outbound.

But that’s okay, right? We got the cellular networks. The good ‘ole wild wild west cellular networks. They’ll let you send just about anything just about anywhere on just about any port. Guess it’s the confidence that comes with having your credit card number, they figure they can trust you with their network. So I want to send something on port 25 outbound from my phone, you betcha I can. Or can I?

This morning I was trying to catch up on a bit of email before diving into the rest of the day. The hotel network is, well, interesting to say the least. So I was lying on the bed using my E61 to get the job done. Or trying to. The network was particularly spotty this morning. It should have been annoying, but it ended up being crippling. I went to load one of the messages (I’m using the built in messenger app from the E61) and suddenly got dumped back to the start screen. Odd, cause the messenger app was still running. I went back into the messenger app and it was frozen. Couldn’t exit it, couldn’t get it to respond to anything, a friend I was IMing with asked if I got the SMS they just sent. Apparently SMS wasn’t working either. Hold down the red hangup key to kill all active connections (good tip for you Nokia addicts out there) and nothing happens. That’s usually the last resort, so things must be pretty well screwed. Annoying, but I’ve come to expect it. So I reboot my phone and keep going.

A few minutes later, it happens again. This time I decide I have to be insane. The application can’t hard hang like this and just never come back, not an application that controls a base phone function like SMS. There’s gotta be some watchdog or something in the OS that would figure out things have gone sideways and kick over the thing. I’m just impatient, right? So I leave the phone like that as I go down to get some breakfast, it’ll be fine by the time I get back. 45 minutes later I walk back into the room and the things is still crapped out. What the hell!?!?

So I SSH into my server, setup a few forward rules, and check to make sure that the GMail App doesn’t crap out when it’s got an intermittent network connection. Guess what? It doesn’t. What’s amazing is that after all these years I can still laugh about the fact that the supposedly vastly superior experience offered by the built in app, as opposed to the obviously inferior experience of the limited sandboxed java app that is GMail, is still something I’m going to have to listen to some fuckwit “industry expert” drone on about at some point.

There’s a lot going on right now in mobile. And it’s easy if you’re working in the environment to feel like this is a golden time when everyone is finally getting their paycheck for having put in the years of effort. Because the environment is doing well it’s going to attract a hell of a lot of competition from people who you didn’t have to compete with before. People who aren’t going to listen to all the reasons you have that explain why things can’t be done. People who are just going to run out there and get them done anyway. Frequently while you’re still laughing about how horribly they’re going to fail when they realize how difficult your industry is. Next thing you know you’re living in a van down by the river.

The project is apparently an experiment by the folks who do Habbo hotel. It mixes an interesting amount of presence and chat. When you’re close to someone in one of the rooms you can hear what they’re saying, so the connections are different than in an any-any room like most of the existing chat services. And you have control over setting up your avatar, which seems to always evolve into an interesting sidechannel for conversations and status. If you see me on grab me, I’m using the nick ‘Miker’.

• I thought Rudy and company did a fantastic job with the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards. I heard about a bunch of new companies I hadn’t ever seen before (check out the list of finalists for some interesting pointers), it was a great chance to connect with a bunch of folks I hadn’t seen in a while, and I was proud to see that the local team (Mobile Complete) fared so well in the placings.
• There was more Linux presence than I expected there to be. Of course I knew Trolltech was going to be there with the Greenphone. But Access also had a tremendous booth and signs up all over the place about their mobile Linux stuff. The Motorola and Samsung booths also had Linux featured pretty prominently. It’s interesting to see the different usages of Linux as a base, varying from completely open like Trolltech to completely hidden like Motorola and Samsung.
• I got a chance to play around with the E90 Communicator in the Nokia booth. Like all the communicator series it’s a brick of course, but this time the brick runs a whole boatload more software than the previous versions cause it’s S60 based. The old communicators had a really very small screen on the front and the large screen inside. The outside display on the E90 is the same resolution on something like a 6680, so you can use it closed for real applications. And the inside screen is nearly laptop resolution. Will they manage to start shipping it before my interest in the platform dies completely? Only time will tell. I’m just going to assume this time that push email won’t work, so that I don’t get disappointed.
• While helping out at the AdMob booth I was forced to realize that the mobile world won’t end up changing the online world like I had assumed it would. It really looks like the innovation is going to flow the other way around. People who are already working in mobile have had all semblance of initiative and innovation beaten out of them. You can lay a new business model down in front of them and explain in detail how it works, and generally they aren’t able to grasp it unless it looks enough like something they already know. However, people coming from the online world and looking to expand into mobile generally are accustomed to a shifting environment and taking in new opportunities and integrating them into their mental framework. It’s really wrong on a number of levels. The number of handsets out in the market dwarfs the number of PCs, the experience on those handsets are different, the context of the user is different, the networks inbetween offer different capabilities, and asynchronous messaging means something completely different. The stage should be set for mobile to completely subsume the online world. But instead it’s the people from the online world staggering out into the sun and realizing there’s no one trying to grab the potential of the new medium and just picking up the pieces waiting for them. Just means we’ll have to wait a while as the online folks start to really understand “this whole mobile thing” in order for the real applications to start coming around.
• I got to meet Luca and Andrea of WURFL fame and have some good conversations, caught up with Dan Appelquist to jaw some about the future Mobile 2.0 events, and had some great conversations with the dotMobi folks about their developer initiatives. The dotMobi folks have been talking about growing the overall mobile ecosystem, which is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been trying to help do with Mobile Monday in Silicon Vally, the Mobile 2.0 conference, and overall at AdMob. And Dan pointed me at the Betavine project going on at Vodafone with the same goals. With so many of us pointed in the same direction hopefully we’ll be able to make some progress on that goal.
• In general the European operators do seem to be more progressive than the US carriers. Most of Europe is still clinging to the per-KB based charge structure for data, which really stifles the mobile web quite a bit, so I tend to lump them all into the same conservative grouping. But they do seem to smell the winds of change and they’re interested in trying to stay ahead of the game. I kept getting the question about what’s the best way to increase mobile web usage, to which I always answer flat rate data plans. Everyone still wrinkles their nose and generally doesn’t want mobile web to expand badly enough to give up data tariffs. I heard a lot of activity around 3GSM from groups that do stuff like “consumer advocacy”, generally complaining about the hidden data costs associated with services like music download and the general opaqueness of the pricing plans. It just seems such an unlivable situation I’m not sure how it’s gone on this long, so I won’t say it’ll stop soon. But the forces do seem to be aligning against the oppression of data services through pricing discrimination.

I have a few pictures I took to show to folks back at the office, but there’s nothing interesting in there like juicy unreleased product photos. It was a great event, very happy I had a chance to attend and check it out in person.

Who would have expected this to come out of what is effectively a thin client based browser implementation? Not me, that’s for sure. I used to use Opera Mini frequently even though I have a “full browser” (Nokia insists that the OS browser isn’t a “mobile browser” but a real full implementation) native on my E61. This cements it however, I’m using Opera Mini all the time.

The bookmarklets at o.yeswap.com are a great resource to get things kicked off. And the technique of appending the bookmarklet text to the url so you can bookmark the page and then remove the domain, nice. That should really help the relatively uninitiated at least get started. An iteration or two on the part of Opera to help reinforce the behavior and some clever bookmarkletting on the part of the community and I can see some really interesting stuff happening.

The UI feels a little less sluggish, but I certainly wouldn’t call it snappy. SMS sending feels just about the same. Hitting the record button on the side definitely doesn’t start recording right off though. YAY! That was a tremendous pain, cause you would accidentally start a recording, and when you go to delete it the app would say it was open (cause you’re in the recorder, duh). So you would have to exit out of the recorder, go searching for the gallery app so you could delete it, which of course you never use the gallery app cause the device has no camera.

I tried out the native email app, again. It just disconnects when I put it in the background, again. I started up my IMAP mailbox and put the phone in my pocket when I left my place. When I got to work and went to check on my messages the messenger app wasn’t up and I had to reconnect it to the mailbox. The same thing happened here at work as I was resetting my Putty options. The messenger app still gets an D overall. It works for some small set of stuff you would want to do. It does those things slowly. And generally doesn’t work for a large swath of practical use cases that should lie inline with the supposed enterprise focus of the device.

The Nokia Open Source browser seems to be pretty much the same version as before. I had heard that at some point the OS browser would start dealing with WML and passing a UA-Prof header like the Services browser, but that doesn’t seem to be the case yet:

mike@www:~$ nc -l -p 8080
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: madgat.com:8080
Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, text/css, text/vnd.nokia.rs-tgd, */*, text/x-hdml, image/mng, image/x-mng, video/mng, video/x-mng, image/bmp, text/html
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8; q=0.7, *; q=0.7,*
Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip
Accept-Language: en;q=1.0,es;q=0.5
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 es61 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0
x-up-subno: SWC_1164934299401_6444_1680434716_vmag.mycingular.net
Via: 1.1 alpmagr1fe09-dmz.mycingular.net

The wifi does seem to be a bit more responsive, but it’ll take some testing to be sure on that one. Sometimes connecting to a network would take forever with the old firmware, but this one has gone pretty quick so far. Granted, every test I’ve run so far I’ve been sitting about 3 feet away from the AP that I’m using, so some more extensive probing is required.

Hopefully it would spuriously reboot when it can’t connect either, that was always a real gem. “Yea, it’s got wifi on it! Check this out!” . . . reboot . . . “Sorry about that, here goes, must have just had the wifi driver in a bad state.” . . . reboot . . . “Yea, still some kinks to work out, but it really is a good phone. Seriously. Of course I’m not laughing, it really is a good phone. Yes I see the irony, I just don’t think it’s laugh worthy.”

When I was using the 6680 putty worked out decent for running a quick command or two in a pinch. But with no real keyboard and a really limited screen it wasn’t really workable for something I didn’t expect to do and have scripted up in advance. The E61 has a full keyboard and enough resolution to make for a more than respectable display. It works more like a terminal emulator now, so you can actually do things like use VIM on the server. Kick ass.

However, there were a few issues with my Debian server. On some servers the key two to the left of the spacebar on the E61 generates a tab, but not all servers. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to figure out what the difference was between the servers on which it generated a tab and those that didn’t. There were some other oddities as well, like the ctrl key. I expected that to work just like control on a regular keyboard but it didn’t. However, after much poking around I noticed that it does work like a control key when I’m running screen on the server. So if I’m running screen I can generate tabs using ctrl-I, and ctrl-a works as expected. But generating an escape (ctrl-]) when using VIM is still pretty cumbersome.

So I’ve started using mapchan and let it start screen when I’m using my phone. I found mention of mapchan in the text terminal faq, and I wasn’t sure if it was older than dirt or just unpopular. But I compiled it and it’s been working fantastic, using this mapping for my particular server config:


input
0xe7 0x09
0xf1 0x01
0xbf 0x1b


I have no idea what those keys that I don’t use are supposed to be, but that mapping makes the C with the thing under it into a tab, the accented N on the other side of the space bar into a ctrl-a, and the upside down question mark (bluekey+l) into an escape. Fantabulous, now using just about anything on my server is pretty convenient.

Remapping additional keys is pretty easy. To figure out what the keys I didn’t use were I just ran xxd on my server (hex dumps whatever it gets on standard input), hit the keys I want to find the values for, hit return, and select send ctrl-d from the putty hotkey menu (or just his ctrl-d if I’m already running screen).

Of course I would love my phone to do all sorts of interesting stuff on it’s own, but for now having good terminal access to my server is the equivalent of how most folks think about remote desktop. I live on the command line quite a bit, so this opens up a whole set of tools for me.

So this has nothing to do with WLAN Manager really, just the overall concept. Sometimes when you screw something up in a product it doesn’t really mater if you fix it in the next version or not. Once the perception is out there that it’s broken, you have to create something new for no good reason other than to shift user behavior.