Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I kept seeing commercials on TV saying Vehix has a mobile version. I went and poked at it however and had some issues. First off was that my N95 brought up the full web version. I’ve seen a bunch of discussions online saying things like “if the user is on a device with a full browser or using Opera Mini of course they want the full version.” From expert users sometimes even. That’s just stupid. I’m pretty sure the problem was just that the platform Vehix used just didn’t recognize the N95 But in case someone made the explicit decision to return the full version to Webkit on the N series, you were wrong. Definitely in the state it’s in now.

One of the major problems is that there’s no actual link over to the mobile version if you end up on the desktop version by mistake. I searched around on the web and didn’t find any mention of it. So I pulled on Firefox on my desktop where I have a bunch of mobile user agents saved in modify headers. The first two user agents I tried resulted in an “unsupported browser” error page. Well, that also is just dumb when you’re dealing with mobile. Seriously, if you’re going to do things all half-assed, at least allow your users to pick the right version manually if they should happen to understand what’s going on. Throwing up an error page and suggesting a bunch of desktop browsers to be using instead, that’s just poor form.

Turns out the mobile version is at http://mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.vehix.com/ if you want to check it out. Once you can get there it really is a pretty nice mobile site. The layout is clean, selection options were a bit funky at times but workable, and it seemed like a perfectly practical site. My car is holding its resale value very nicely, that’s always great to see. Can’t really thank Vehix for that, but it put me in a good mood at least.

I tried out JoikuSpot yesterday for a while. It’s a bit of software that turns your Nokia phone into a Wifi access point using the cellular connection as the backhaul. It worked perfectly!! I have a 3G N95, so the connection is very fast. No setup at all, I just installed it and started running it, told it to connect to cellular for the backhaul, and it started broadcasting an ad-hoc access point SSID I was able to connect to from my Mac. Sweet!!

The first page I brought up was actually redirected to the JoikuSpot homepage, but that’s just a flash screen. Connections after that go through as they should. Pretty sweet if you’re out somewhere with a bunch of geeks and everyone wants to check their email or scan their blog comments right in the middle of some other outing. That never happens though, right? Especially not in the Bay Area, where everyone is well adjusted and normally socialized.

Another cool thing, my MacBook stayed connected and constantly using the connection for 45 minutes using the wifi bridge. I’ve yet to get the Bluetooth modem scripts for my Mac to stay connected consistently for more than 15 minutes at a time. W00t!! So this might become my new defacto access method. Or does anyone out there know the magic settings to keep pppd from barfing every once in a while when connected to the N95?

Looks like Eric Rice is experiencing some frustrations dealing with Nokia. Not the same frustrations that I had when trying to get my N95, but the theme is familiar. Nice to know I’m not the only one.

Good luck figuring out the answer to your question Eric, but also keep in mind:

• You’ll have to hack the config that the online Nokia configurator gives you for ATT if you don’t want screwed up images when using the built in browser. Screwed up images are, for some reason, the default.
• Firmware updates are a crapshoot, make sure you backup to something besides the memory card.
• Using the N95 as a Bluetooth modem under OS X works unreliably, it connects for a few minutes and then randomly disconnects. None of the solutions I’ve found online seem to work for me.

Russ and I spent a bit of time poking around today with the Mowser images on the Nokia Open Source browser on the N95. For some reason I was getting these really crappy looking images when I loaded the site, just absolute junk. I’m on ATT in the US, so we tried from some other ATT phones and they worked out fine. I had seem some similar issues before when I was fooling around with HSDPA and EV-DO connections for my lappy, so to remove the network from the equation I connected my N95 over wifi and reloaded. Bing! Crystal clear images.

After a bit of searching I found a post about the proxy being used for images by ATT in the US causing problems for N95 and E90 devices. I tried duplicating the AP, removing the proxy info, changing the connection, and reloading. No better image quality however. The post says you need to reboot in order to make the change work. In retrospect all I probably needed to do was shut down the browser, but I rebooted anyway. Sure enough, crystal clear images! I’m really surprised the devices are getting configured that way on a fast network like the N95 uses on ATT. Thanks Zach! Now, certainly would be nice if devices were unfucked by default once you get them configured on ATT. Wouldn’t that be nice?

One of the things I did while I was over at Russ’s earlier was update the firmware on my N95. I grabbed the Nokia Software Update thing, backed up my phone to the memory card, and let the update do it’s thing. Worked well, even though I was using Vista. Happy day!

However once my phone started back up I wasn’t able to restore from the backup. When I go into the Memory app and choose “restore from card” it kicks out of the application, hangs completely unresponsive for a few seconds, and then reboots. Let me say that again. After doing the firmware update I can no longer restore from backup. Yea, I’m as confused as you.

Fortunately after years and years or having my hopes and dreams dashed by mobile devices it’s no longer possible to disappoint me. So I just used iSync to get my contacts and calendar entries back on the phone. I’ll just manually have to reconfigure the settings and reinstall applications. Just wanted to share this odd experience in case you’re thinking about doing the update. I would highly recommend having a secondary backup for anything you want to actually keep. Wow.

Does anyone know if the location requestor module for Python is going to be built into the base Python set of modules at any point? I took the time today to try to figure out the twisty set of pages that Nokia make developers navigate in order to do anything with their devices, only to find that even after finding an open source tool for manipulating sis files and certificates, and signing up for symbiansigned.com, and installing Wine on my Linux system so that I could run their .EXE only certificate signing request program, that for some reason it doesn’t seem to run under Wine? Why? Seriously, at this point I don’t give a fuck any more. I’m just curious when I can get Python on my phone to do what I would like it to do.

But since I’m here and I’ve bothered to go through this stuff, here’s some free advice for Nokia that they can feel free to use should they decide to extract their heads from their asses any time soon: When you generate a random key for developer use and package it up for developer use, the “secret key” isn’t really all that important. Just generate the damn thing on the symbiansigned site and send it back to the developer so they can use it. It’s supposed to be tied to the IMEI, right? So who cares about the private key? Come on folks, I just want to write software for your hardware. Why do you keep making is so hard for me?

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.