Television 2.0: Throw away your TV

I haven't had an actual telephone line since 2003.  Well, that is not completely true; in Cleveland, I had a phone line that was for my DSL Internet service, but I never even had a phone connected to it.  In Florida, I have had cable with no phone than my mobile phone, and Internet based phone service Gizmo5.  How many of you have come to the same conclusion; that paying for a land-based line is a waste of money?  I would bet a good number of you?  Now, how many have come to the same conclusion regarding your television?

Get rid of your television?  Am I crazy?  "What about all my shows?" you ask.  Well, I am not saying you should stop watching programs (although I do tell myself that very thing quite often), I am saying that over-the-air, cable, satellite, and the rest of it are technologies that are just as dead as the pairs of copper wire in your home for phone service.  And to go even further, having an entire room dedicated to a television seems a bit antiquated, as well.  But I do not mean just the physical part of traditional television is antiquated.  Once upon a time, the work day ended at 5, people ate dinner at 6, and could expect to relax in front of the television for a couple hours starting around 8.  But times have changed, people take work home, or they work from home, or their children have two different activities every day, etc, so how many people can schedule time to plop down on the couch on the networks' schedule? 


Well, a number of services have cropped up lately which directly challenge the antiquated television model.  I don't know if I like this, but I am going to group this category of "television programming without a TV" services as Television 2.0.  There is user and independently created material like what you can find on YouTube and Current.tv.  Some independently-created stuff has its own site or is offered on iTunes, so check out Big Buck Bunny, Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, and Dr. Horrible.  If you do not have an aversion to copyright infringement, most television shows are available for download using various peer to peer services like Gnutella and BitTorrent.  And last, not least, but definitely the most active sector of television 2.0 is the availbility of watching the same shows broadcast on Cable, Satellite, and over-the-air are the newcomers like Fancast and Hulu.  These two services, along with individual networks' sites (USA, NBC, Comedy Central, etc.), allow you to watch recent shows on your computer any time you want, with a surprisingly large repetoire of programming.   And then services like iTunes and Amazon allow you to download the shows to watch anytime, even without an Internet connection.

For better or worse, our lives are becoming more mobile, and more on-demand.  The work day does not end at 5 (or 6, or 7...) anymore, we expect to reach and be reached at any time of the day, and increasingly, we have to make entertainment fit into time slices as they are presented.  On the upside, this means is that you are no longer held captive by the crappy movies shown in the middle of a lazy Sunday, but on the downside, it means that instead of getting frustrated by the offerings and going outside, you may pull up some of those missed shows.  But hey!  it is not the job of the networks, the content creators, or the content providers to encourage us to be active!  That is on you, my friend.

So I am issuing a challenge!  Keep the old style television turned off for a few days, and give some of these Television 2.0 services a try for a bit.  And while you are at it, see if you can rearrange that room so the TV is no longer the centerpiece.  Believe me, it's gaudy and breaks up the flow of a good cocktail party.

This post reminds me, I missed the finale of Burn Notice and the premiere of The Office, so I am going to cut this here and go watch them on Fancast while they're up.

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Report: Nokia BetaLabs Community Chat

Yesterday, the folks over at Nokia Betalabs hosted a chat via IRC for techies (like myself) who are interested in innovative and the very latest applications for their mobile devices.  Of course, Nokia BetaLabs is Nokia-centric, but don't forget that Samsung, LG, and others and also make Symbian S60-powered phones, and most of the applications should work on those, as well.

I forgot to turn on the logging option in irssi so I am writing from memory.  The bulk of the conversation revolved around the planned new website, and what the community would like to see happen with it.  Also discussed was the introduction of a reputation system to help encourage participation from members and greater community involvement.  I think these are some good ideas.  To me, the current betalabs is just barely usable.  There are few enough applications, that one can quickly scan what is available, but when you want to zero in on a particular application, what has been said about it, what potential problems might be, it becomes very difficult.  For example, Nokia Chat is a more promoted application, and there is quite a bit of information to be gleaned from its page, but the Wellness Diary (one of my favourites) has very little information about it.

Which brings me to another point in the discussion, which was the fact that the BetaLabs, like any other R&D branch of a company, has certain priorities placed upon it.  Certain applications are definitely bound for the marketplace, while others are experiments or pet projects of one or two engineers.  This does not mean that an experimental project will not become a full supported service.  As I understand it, the Sportstracker was originally a pet project by some people that were cycling enthusiasts and has now become a big project, morphing into NokiaVine.  The community was pretty unanimous in that it would like to know up front which apps had "push" behind them, and which were more of a "wildcard".  Communication is always good, but I do not think they need to go so far as having a fully-detailed and public-facing roadmap at the start of each project.  Their resources are thin, and personally I would like to see the apps as early and as often as possible.  FOSS philosophy can still find its way into non-open source project, I think.

All in all, it was a very positive discussion, probably too early for any west-coasters out there, and I hope they do this sort of thing more often.  Thanks to the Guru for putting this on his handy calendar [ical link].

Nokia Photos back with a vengence: 1.5 released

I decided it was about time to give Nokia Photos another try. I had played with it some before and know there is potential, but it behaved weirdly and was a bit awkward to use. Mostly, I am in the process of making sure all my pictures are backed up as I dismantle computers and prepare to move. Thanks to the Guru, I knew that Nokia Photos could be used to mass-upload pictures to OviShare, but had been unsuccessful in the past. It was time for another try.

Make sure you are running 1.2.50 or later. For some reason, the Nseries Suite installer installed an older version and would not recognize an update was available. 1.2.50 is the first version where the connection to the Ovi online account worked properly and the setup worked as advertised.

As a bonus, three days ago, Nokia Betalabs released a new version of Nokia Photos, 1.5, which promises to work with more phones, better support interfacing with plain ole digital cameras, and work even better with Share on Ovi. The Nseries Update Manager did not know about the new version, so I had to go and download the 50MB file manually. It warned about needing .NET framework 3.0, which I had, but I took the opportunity to visit Windows Update and make sure I had the most recent patches, which I didn't, so I installed them while downloading Nokia Photos 1.5.200



The Good

Something else that has made this new application a success is the total ease with which it works. So long as it is running, and my n82 is nearby, they will automatically sync up, so my photos and videos are always backed up. This is made possible by the ultra-cheap bluetooth dongle I bought with my new PC at CompUSA, and configuring Photos to sync on startup, as well as the Nseries PC Suite, which keeps my photos and phone backed up in case of an emergency.

The annoying

• tags
• 50 photo limit
• Ovi client on the phone
• backups

Tags: the tags are very useful but it is difficult to search for them. Say you have meticulously tagged your photos and you want to search through your photos for your friends. It is unintuitive, but the way to do this is to go to the search bar and type in

owner:username tag:friends

where username is your login id. I use ktneely, and this works really well, but an online photo-sharing site should not need such arcane search strings to search through your own photos. What's more, it does not appear to take multiple tag entries. Well, it does, but it treats them as an or, rather than an and. So if you search for friends and florida, the search results will include all the pictures of friends as well as all the pictures tagged florida, even if the latter is simply a picture of a building tagged 'florida' but certainly not 'friends.

One giant improvement with 1.5 is that tags on a photo are included by default. So, if you have mass tagged and then plan to mass upload, your tags will be included. However, a step backwards is that there is an extra click to tag a photo. Instead of just typing, you need to click the plus sign to add a tag to the selected photos.

50 Photo Upload Limit: I would say this isn't a huge deal except when you are first importing your photos into Ovi, but my parents just got back from Europe, and they took 1800 pictures with their digital camera! Yes, they are crazy, but I know they're not the only ones, so this limit can get pretty annoying, pretty fast. You can get around it by uploading 50, and then starting an additional 50 before the first one even finishes. At least this way, you do not have to sit through each group of 50, instead starting as many sessions as you need and then walking away. Still, this limit is silly.

Ovi client on the phone: To really interface with OviShare, you need the ShareOnline 3.0 application installed on your phone. This comes standard with most new Nokia mobiles, including my N82, but older phones like my N75 are not included, which is a shame because that device takes great outdoor pictures. Also, you have to make sure to specify the default channel into which you want the pictures uploaded. On my first few tries, my pictures all landed in my friend's birthday channel because I had not specified. The default should be the username.mymedia channel because that is the general repository for one's media on Ovi.

Backups: I went to do a backup of the photo database before I upgraded, but it told me it would consume 57GB of space.

And the thing is, my entire hard drive only has 45GB of data on it, and that is everything. My photos are maybe 2GB, so I am not sure where this is coming from. This is an important feature to migrate your photos with all their tags to a new computer, so I hope it gets better.


What I would like to see
As it now works pretty well with Nokia's OviShare service, I would like to see better integration with that same service, something almost akin to "syncing" of my photos on my PC with the ones on Ovi. I would like to be able to create an album within Nokia Photos, and then have it propagate to my Ovi account.

The reason for this wish is that I would like my tags and photos to propagate to all places. If I upload using ShareOnline, and then tag the pic on the website, and later sync that picture with Nokia Photos on my PC, the tag is not there, it is only online. The only way to really keep it all in sync is to get the photos from the device into Nokia Photos, and then to use that to upload to Ovi, making sure you check "include tags". There is a map, which you should see from the images, and although I had some geotagged images and many to which I had attributed a location tag, they did not appear on the map, which is a bit disappointing. This means that the "location tag" is really just another tag and I will have to wait until I get my N82 back from Nokia warranty repair to give this a real test.

N75 Part VII: Connecting with Ovi

Nearly a month ago, Ovi by Nokia released their sync platform allowing you to backup and manage contacts, todos, notes, and calendar from either the web or your mobile device and keep them in sync.

The setup is a breeze, but as far as I can tell, you have to use their configuration wizard, which consists of going to Ovi on the web, entering your phone model and number and then receiving a text message that automatically configures the sync settings for you. It is a really easy and simple setup process and I have had no problems until today when I decided to add my older N75 to make it a better backup phone. I tried simply copying the working settings from my N82. I duplicated every single setting, but the sync fails for some reason. I can only guess there is a hidden setting in there somewhere I am not able to set.

Unfortunately, the N75 appears to be the only Nseries device not listed on the site. Instead, I chose another Series 60, feature pack 0 device such as the N70, entered my phone number and configured the phone as normal when I received the configuration message. Interestingly, the site does recognize the N75 after I synced with it, even though I could not configure that handset. Looks like they do not have the correct stock photo in there and my N75 looks like an N95. Boy, I wish!

Now I have the N75 synchronizing with Ovi and I did not get a ton of duplicate contacts as I had feared. When I originally migrated from my N75 to my N82, I used the Nseries Suite to backup my contacts and then restore them on the new phone. The only duplicates I have are the ones to which I made changes since the export/import, which makes sense and is very little trouble to cleanup.

A Tale of Two Headsets: BH-900 and Jawbone2

I've been pretty lucky lately. About three months ago, I entered a contest given by the guys at Mobile Industry Review (formerly smstextnews). I made a video submission with my n75. It was the first self-video I've ever made and is pretty bad. I used a tall candlestick as a tripod and it came out kind of weird. I was also in a hurry to get to work. Okay, enough excuses, the point is, my tragic tale of tangled wires apparently struck at the heartstrings of the mobile experts over at MIR, and I won the Jawbone 2.

But, like I said, I've been on a streak lately, and while I was waiting for the jawbone headset (I didn't even know I had won it yet), I received a Nokia BH-900 from my participation in the S60 Ambassadors program.

Style

• Nokia BH-900: To me, the BH-900 looks like a shuttle craft model from a low budget SciFi channel movie. I suppose it could be judged as "cool-looking" but to my mind, it is a bit big and with the mic extended, it looks like a full headset you imagine someone at a call center wearing.
• Aliph Jawbone 2: This is where the Jawbone shines. I have the "blah blah black" version with the optional leather ear loops. This is a very sleek-looking headset and with its multiple earpads, can even be worn without the ear loop, giving it that Morpheus glasses look from the Matrix. Because of its small size and folding earloop, I have found that this headset easily fits in my shirt pocket or other small pockets. Why is this important? Well, I hate to tell you but you look really stupid walking around with a bluetooth headset sticking out of your head all the time. Don't do this, and don't clip your phone to your belt. Trust me.
  

Use and Setup

• BH-900: Pretty straightforward. The BH-900 paired easily with my phones, of course, and the controls are very easy to figure out: there is a toggle for volume and an on/off button. As you can see from the pictures, the mic slides out. it's not necessary to use this, but if you do have it extended, contracting the mic will hang up the phone.
• Jawbone 2: Pairs easily. I don't understand why almost every headset has a pair code of '0000', I mean, that just makes it far too easy to pair your headset with your work neighbor's phone. Good times. The buttons on the jawbone are hidden, which makes for a nice design but a much less intuitive interface. Luckily, the headset comes with a well thought-out cheat sheet with the few options you will need. Kudos for the ability to easily turn off the blinking LED, something I never understood on a headset since the wearer cannot see the blinking and it only serves to annoy others. Every headset should come with this feature, and it should be the default.
  

Fit

• BH-900: The Nokia headset takes a sort of one-size fits all approach. Its prongs fit around the back of the ear and it rests loosely on the cheek. The large speaker pad is not as uncomfortable as it looks, but it really is a speaker that sits near your ear, rather than in it as many of the newer headsets are doing.
  
• Jawbone 2: The Jawbone comes with an array of implements to create a perfect fit. Well, perfect may be overstating, but I can definitely forget that it is there sometimes.
  

Sound Quality

• BH-900: The sound is good on the Nokia and more or less sounds like you are holding the phone to your ear, as it is basically a speaker that is against -but not in- your ear.
  
• Jawbone 2: The sound quality is not great. When first using this headset, the voice on the other line would come across as crackly, as if there were feedback or the speaker was defective. After some fiddling, I think the volume on my phone was too high, and the volume on the headset too low. The headset can be adjusted through the NoiseAssassin button, and by increasing the headset's volume, the sound quality was markedly improved. The NoiseAssassin feature seems to work, but it is not a lethal killing machine on par with, say, a ninja, so don't expect miracles.
  

Battery and Charger

• BH-900: the Nokia headset uses a standard 2mm Nokia charger, the same used by my N75, N82, and N800 tablet. This is handy as I need carry only one charger for all my stuff. If I remember to turn off the headset, it can go for a long time on one charge. I do not use my phone too much for talking, but I have let this headset sit for a couple weeks, turned it on, and then used it for over an hour.
• Jawbone 2: The jawbone I received included a USB cable that attaches magnetically to the headset, a'la MacBook laptops. It apparently came with a wall plug adapter which didn't make it in my prize. Not that it matters, I wouldn't be able to use a European plug anyway. I have left it on over 24 hours, with maybe an hour of talk in that timeframe, and the battery has held up. Both headsets far outlast my phone in terms of battery life, so there is no problem there.
  

Conclusion: Judging from Amazon, it looks like the price difference between the two headsets is about $30, with the Nokia BH-900 somewhat cheaper than the Jawbone 2. I would say the two are very comparable in terms of feature set, with the BH-900 a bit on top in terms of sound quality and the Jawbone on top in terms of styling. So, if you are the kind of person that puts your bluetooth headset in at the beginning of the day and don't take it out until you go to sleep, the Jawbone is for you. Just do us a favor and click the button 5 times to turn off the LED.

N75 Part VI: using Handy Shell to revive a crippled N75

The Guru of all that is Symbian reviewed a shell replacement application for S60 devices. (it is currently in beta from Epocware, and you can download it here). The shell is basically what you see on the screen when you first turn on your phone (or, in the case of an N75, when you open the clamshell). As I wrote in my last installment of Unbranding the Nokia N75, the most recent version of firmware for the N75 effectively rebrands the phone, and installs a god-awful tabbed view for the default.  (see pretty house image on the right). 

The tabbed shell replacement by AT&T is not only less functional than the default one by Symbian, but it is a huge resource drain.  While running the tabbed view, I got less time out of my battery than before.  What's worse, the "main" tab (pictured) has no information other than the time.  There is all that space where upcoming appointments or whatever could be placed, but the tab remains empty. If you have installed and configured a theme, you will not see it until you hit the S60 (yin/yang) button to take you to the deeper menus.

You can turn off the tabbed browsing, but it does not give you back the standard Symbian Active Standby. Oh, no Charlie, it gives you a completely blank screen, as shown on the left. You can configure this screen with shortcuts for the up, down, etc. arrow, and for the selection buttons, but you will not have any clues for 5 of your 7 shortcuts.  What is worse, you do not get the nice overview of information you would normally have, such as the calendar, reminders, e-mail, etc.

As you can see, this is a pretty useless screen. It takes your high- dollar and useful smartphone, and basically turns it into a cheap phone. The functionality is still there, but the notices and useful at- a-glance information is simply missing.

 Thankfully, Epocware's HandyShell, when released, will really make my N75 a viable phone again. Currently, I only use it when I need 3G speeds when tethered to my laptop, but with a decent standby screen, and the release of Nokia Chat for slightly older phones like the N75, most of what I use on a daily basis is on there. Nokia Chat works really well on the N75, however, the typical memory issues get in the way. The N75 has such a low amount of memory that it often runs out. Not that one needs a reason not to use AT&T's ugly tabbed interface, but it is a memory hog and should be avoided at all costs.

As you can see on the right, my N75, with HandyShell installed once again has a decent information screen, and if you close the clamshell with the screen up, it will be there when you open it again for a quick check of that meeting, todo item, etc.

Ovi Suite by Nokia to support Macintosh

Today, when I went to download the Windows version of OviSuite for my laptop (it dual boots, I use Windows so seldom that I had more than 100 patches to install, including .NET), I noticed that they have plans to support OviSuite for Macintosh.

This is really cool for two reasons: 1) the obvious: support for macintosh means Ma users have a viable alternative to the iPhone; and 2) there may be support for Linux in our future. I do not know much about desktop application development, but I figured one reason we have not seen the Ovi, Nseries, or PC Suites for anything but windows was Nokia's apparently heavy reliance upon .NET technology. If they are releasing a version for Mac (which basically runs BSD under the hood), a Linux version shouldn't be too much more difficult.

Even if we do not see a Linux version, broader support is always a good thing.

Google Chrome Released: Total Control of Information Dead Ahead

Google has released Chrome, a new web browser to compete with Firefox and Internet Explorer. Google wrote about this yesterday on their blog, and they released an online comic book to describe what it does.

Basically, this is a browser meant to run online applications, Google's future bread and butter. Combined with Gears, the idea is to make your desktop irrelevant and use online applications such as Gmail, gCal, and Google Docs for all your productivity needs, rather than Thunderbird or Outlook, OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, and Firefox or Internet Explorer. Using these applications, it does not matter whether your desktop is Windows Vista, Mac OSX, or Linux; you can use all three and access the same data in the same way from each. Chrome enhances this experience by making them run better, offline, and in their own separate space so that when Facebook crashes your browser, the document you were editing and the e-mail you were reading remain untouched.

We all know about browser inconsistencies. I am sure you have noticed that some sites just look and feel different when accessing from Internet Explorer than Firefox. In fact, many sites will not let you through the front door if you are not running a web browser they have approved. From the comic, Google states they have devised a way to test all the sites on the WWW with their new Chrome browser, and that they will optimize it to work best with sites that are the highest ranked. See comic pages 9 and 10.

Now for the paranoid part: Google is increasingly the portal through which most people access the information on the web. By creating a browser, they control both the means by which you find and access the information you are looking for, and they can decide which sites that will not work with the delivery mechanism. They could effectively shut you off from the information you want to access. Many people worried about this when Hearst had the bulk of news circulation in America, and more recently with ClearChannel controlling much of the radio, television, and billboards across America, but this has the potential of even greater influence.

Do I really think Google will do this? No, I do not, but I write about it because we should always be aware of and careful with our cool new tech. Keep your options open, get your information from multiple sources, and trust in your own knowledge and critical thinking skills. And try out the new browser (if you run Windows, that is), it looks to be a real benefit for those running online applications. Just keep a mind as open as Chrome's source code