3 posts tagged “mobile”

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The dutch NOS (national broadcast service) has now started streaming their news videos as well as live streams of the olympics for the mobile phone platform. At the same time they upgraded their mobile site and added a dedicated new application as a download option. It features an enhanced news experience including live video media streaming of the Olympics.

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Their all new refurbished mobile website now presents the topics news, sports, weather and traffic information. In addition the latest newsvideo broadcast can be streamed from the site directly onto your mobile device. On the Nokia N95 it is done using realplayer. The mobile site also features a download section offering a dedicated news application to be downloaded. For my N95 this was a properly signed *.sisx application.

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The dedicated news application the information of their mobile website and extra articles and videos. The interface is a bit more slick that their mobile website and features a 'news ticker' with the latest info. Additonally they are offering several video streams: the news in the last 24 hours,  the latest news, separate news items (about China, Birma etc..) as were already possible to view with the flash-enhanced webbrowser of the N95, live political streaming of discussions from the Hague (yuck) and upto 6 live streams from the Olympics and Roland Garros. The Olympic channel selection for the mobile consumer is now wider than that of the tv-consumer. The application installation went flawless though it did gave a message that it was, at the least, free until end of 2008. Let's hope it stays like that.

Upto now I was annoyed that the Brittish and the Germans could watch their national news broadcasts on the Nokia n-series but we as the dutch could not. In one step we are on par or perhaps even slightly better off ;-)

In the last few months I have seen an increase of dedicated mobile websites delivering to the point efficient information with only minor ads. Anything from cinema guides, TV-guides, weather, news to traffic information. Many of them I prefer over using RSS and the larger PC oriented sites. RSS often has randomly abbreviated information) bits luring you into going to PC-oriented sites with obnoxious popups, flashmovies or mindless jabber to get to the real bits. Mobile sites lets people reinvent the art of using limited screenspace useful.

I will regret the day my phone gains 1024x758 pixels of resolution.

Jenneth Oriantia did a smartphone typing speed test. She tested all the thumbboards on all the smartphones she could get her hands on. On average the phones score arond 10-ish seconds for typing 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' (6-7 seconds on a real keyboard). Only the Sony Ericsson P1 scored a lame 20 seconds. She scored 12.21 seconds on an E61i. Which is slow compared to her 9.13 seconds on the Hiptop 3.

Then she tried it on a N95, probabely using T9, and scored a whopping 13.64.

I tried it myself. It took some practice to get the fox jumping the dog within 15 seconds using T9. I did 20 seconds for one handed single tumb typing. Not bad. However it is safe to conclude that femine fingers are more suited for cellphones typing. For her it seems a qwerty thumbboard is about 30% faster. For me I don't know. I can't compare.

So please step in and give me a thumb. Have a go at your phones and post your results in the comments together . Perhaps with the thickness (width) of your thumb in millimeters mentioned! Mines are 24 mm.

The N95 enables you to do some very nifty mobile office activities. There are two ways:

On the Phone:

• You can run software on the phone and use a bluetooth keyboard and do the office thing. Nice to use the TV-out, too keep the crick out of your neck. You can run QuickOffice and do the office thing. Write e-mail, webbrowse etc.. Edit movies, pictures and so forth...
  

• You can run remote desktop clients  and servers on the phone (RDM+, VNC). Access pc's by remote or the phone by remote (very cool). It does not however gives you a resolution above 320x240. I would love to be able to have an office application to do 640x480 via tv-out or get cracking with VGA and hook op a TFT in a internet cafe.
  

• You can run MySMB on the phone, a SMB server, and share you N95 drives (internal memory drive, system drive and memory card drive) via the Windows Networking protocol (CIFS/SMB).  You can even define users and groups that have access to different drives. The SMB-client feature is due begin july 2007. Mounting the shared drives from you NAS or M$ Windows-PC
  

From the Phone using it as a usb-stick:

• There is loads of software that can run standalone from a usb-stick and that keeps all the files on a USB-stick, this is also valid for a N95. There is OpenOffice, Skype, Firefox/Mozilla, Gaim for IM. Most are available for the Windows and Linux platform I.e. check the Portable Apps website for their listing of software. There are other websites too.
  
• Very cool is TrueCrypt. To mount a encrypted virtual partion from your usbstick as a separate removable drive under Windows or Linux. Sadly there is no port for the N95 to allow the N95 read the encrypted virtual partition on the memory card.
• Using Standard Edition Java (Mobile phones run Micro Edition Java), there are loads of java applications that run on almost all major desktop platforms. Not only office software, but X-servers, Ssh, p2p software, Latex, image and music collection players and manager. Access to remote database and so forth. JDisto i.e. is a Java Destop enviroment. Although still a bit in the early stages. Many of these applications have Java Micro Edition counterparts for on the phone.

Bill Gates said: "640K ought to be enough for anyone.". NO it is not. Especially not for Windows Vista. But you can do a lot with 640K and a heck of a lot more with the N95, if you realise the there's 20MB's of RAM and 330 MHz clockspeed with a 3D-graphics accelleration.

Envision your own mobile solution and see if Google can find it ;-)