Shane's Place

What is a Product Code and why would I want to change it?

The Nokia N97 has hundreds of different product codes for all the different carrier types and countries around the globe. This product code is used by the Nokia Software Updater to load carrier specific firmware to your device when it becomes available. Unfortunately, some carriers prevent updates as they do not approve every firmware builds. This means that some users will not get the full benefits of the latest updates from Nokia when everyone else gets access to them, such as the recent update to Ver.12 fo the firmware.

Another reason you may want to change your Product Code, is that you want to remove all the carrier branded software and themes from your device. Changing the N97’s Product Code to a generic Australian one means you get the Nokia updates as soon as they are available for the region and it has the generic country region software installed.

Changing the Product Code

NOTE: Changing your product code uses software that can “brick” your device (render it unusable) if used incorrectly & void your warranty.

If you still want to change your Nokia N97 Product Code there are a few methods on the Internet, but some are tricky and others very dangerous as they try to install trojan horse malware on your PC. My experience with the JAF FULL PKEY EMULATOR by OGM Development, as outlined on this site, is a dangerous application that should be avoided. I tried two versions (V3 & v5) and both tried to install trojan malware over key Windows system files.

Eventually I came across The Symbian Blog’s instructions which use the Nemesis Service Suite (NSS) which was much easier and safer to use.

One key thing I came across, that was not listed in the instructions, was that you should sure you use an original device USB cable plugged directly into your PC, not through an extension cable or a USB hub. Otherwise the software may be unable to read the device.

Secondly, after the process is completed you may have to “hard reset” your device. Instructions for doing that are here with diagram.

I successfully changed my N97 Product Code from a carrier code to a generic Australian code (0576124) so I was then able to upgrade from firmware Ver.11 to Ver.12.

Posted by Shane Williamson

Looks like Sprint has some marketing people on whacky weed as they have issued various press releases that they have deployed 4G in the USA which they claim is using WiMAX (www.sprint.com/4G).

WiMAX is NOT a 4G standard.

At the time of this post there is no recognised international standard of what is the next evolution of 3G called “4G” for Fourth Generation. Various industry associations such as 3GPP (http://www.3gpp.org) are investigating putting forward technologies such as LTE Advanced as a 4G technology, but the battle is far from over as to what will become the final standard. In fact, we may see competing technologies like we did for 3G with UMTS vs CDMA2000.

Companies like Sprint are mudding the waters for wireless broadband as they are using standard based definitions to describe inferior technologies. WiMAX is a great technology, but it is not 4G. The sooner we get a ratified industry standard, the quicker we can stop the cowboys abusing the terminology and confusing customers.

Posted by Shane Williamson

Microsoft is spreading more mobile developer goodness with a great competition for their new Windows Mobile application Marketplace that will be giving away a Microsoft Surface Table to the winner. Called the “Race To Market Challenge”, developers can submit their Windows Mobile application and whoever gets the most downloads or most revenue wins.

The Microsoft rules states

”The object of this Contest is to create an application available in the Microsoft Windows Marketplace for Mobile online store ("Marketplace") that receives the highest number of downloads during the Download Period.”

Prizes will be given for,

• One application in the FREE category will be declared the winner based on the total number of downloads from Marketplace.
• One application in the PAID category will be declared the winner based on the total revenue (application price multiplied by the number of downloads from Marketplace, determined in a US Dollar equivalent using current market conversion rates).

Submissions began on the 27th July and will end on 31st December 2009, so hurry up and get registering!

http://www.mobilethisdeveloper.com

Posted By Shane Williamson

I have been waiting for ‘the device’ to upgrade my Nokia N95 from for quite some time. When Nokia announced the N96, a lot of us N95 users thought the wait was over, but unfortunately it wasn’t. In the flesh the N96 was a very poor cousin to the N95, both in build quality and features, so there was more going against upgrading to it than for.

Then some time later, early reports about the next Nokia N-Series in line to the N95, the Nokia N97, held promise that Nokia hadn’t lost it’s meandering way and was building a decent next generation device that was as revolutionary as the N95 was when it first came out. I was eager to get my hands on the N97 to see if this was the N95 upgrade I’ve been waiting for.

After reviewing the N97 for a couple of weeks now, I can heartily say that N95 users now have the perfect device to upgrade too. At first glance the Nokia N97 has a lot of features that the N95 was screaming out for, such as..

• a separate Qwerty keyboard,
• larger display,
• touch screen interface, and
• USB connection power charging
• more memory

Whilst these alone, are not the only deciders for purchasing the device for myself, I’ve highlighted a few bonus features in the Nokia N97 that do make it a slam dunk decision.

Design – The Nokia N97 is well built. The N97 feels solid, especially the opening and closing action of it’s snugly hinged keyboard. The design compared to the N95 is very different, in that the N95 always felt stout and rugged, whereas the N97 has a svelte look and feel.

Widgets – At first the widgets didn’t appeal much to me, but on using them further, they become a highly addictive information source. I’m only disappointed that there are not more widgets or even a dedicated widget area on the OVI app store so you can easily track them down.

Applications – I was impressed to see many of the apps I use on the N95 now available on the N97. Applications like the Nokia Sports Tracker (http://sportstracker.nokia.com) are a must for anyone who wants to track their exercise regime with the N97’s GPS. However there are a few Symbian software laggards who are slow in getting their products across to the device.

FM Transmitter – The FM transmitter is a great addition that I didn't know about till after using the N97. The ability to beam music from the N97 directly to any radio makes it a great travelling companion. I just came back from a trip to Canberra and using the N97 with the car radio was far better than messing about with radio adaptors and cables.

Email support  - The N97 has built in email for Microsoft Exchange and other popular web based email services like Gmail & Hotmail. Whilst the application is basic it is very easy to setup and use. It also comes with an email Widget that allows you to see new email from your home screen.

There are however dome dislikes, that are more frustrating than barriers to purchase. The first is that the inbuilt compass needs to be calibrated before every use. This seems very weird as other devices such as the HTC Dream do not need calibration from the user. The second issue is that there is no preloaded QR Code reader, which is completely baffling.

My wife was so impressed with the review N97, that she promptly went out and purchased one. However she was bitterly disappointed that that there were no white N97s available. Hopefully these will start appearing soon.

At the time of this post Optus seems to have the best post paid cap plan for the N97 in Australia. Be wary of purchasing the N97 with a Vodafone cap plans as their advertised data has ridiculous restrictions on it, like no video streaming, no 3rd party application data and does not include downloaded files over 3Gb.

Posted By Shane Williamson

DVICE has this update about how New Zealand based company Martin Jetpack (http://www.martinjetpack.com/) have progressed quite a way since 9 months ago with a new demonstration of their jetpack. Whist it is only an indoor demo, the footage is quite impressive.

If you are thinking of buying one, you need to put up a US$10,000 refundable deposit on the US$100,000 price tag per unit. You will then have to complete at least 5 days of flight training on the unit at your own expense. Looks like if you fail the training you don’t get to buy one. Details of purchasing in the USA only at the moment, are here http://www.martinjetpackusa.com/ 

This is very cool to see this type of technology starting to become publically accessible as well as affordable. Looks like I will live to see people using these to fly to work :-)

Posted By Shane Williamson

I was recently given the opportunity to review the Linksys Media Hub Home Entertainment Storage with LCD (Model:NMH405) that is now available in Australia for AUS$700. Linksys was purchased by Cisco in 2003 and we are now starting to see some of the fruits of that merger as Linksys becomes the main drive of innovative products into the home network for the traditional enterprise company.

Whilst this high-end version of the Linksys’s media hub range is the costly bells and whistles version, the device is impressively fast as a media server. The problem with using standard desktop PCs as media sharing devices is that they are prone to other applications stealing away valuable processor time and which causes jerky playback of high end video or music streams to the client device.

Having a stand alone media hub means that everyone on the home network has direct access to the media at any time and it also serves as an extra backup facility.

The Linksys Media Hub is a gorgeous looking device and is very speedy with transferring large media files to the device as well as streaming high end videos to networked clients. I trialled a couple of full length DVD movies ripped at full resolution and the device didn’t miss a beat on playback even when a second stream was delivered from the device to another PC.

Admittedly, there are other options in the market to a dedicated media hub, such as network connected hard drives, but these devices are built for storage, not streaming videos or pictures quickly. These storage devices suffer another problem and that is they become superseded too quickly. A unique feature of the Linksys Media hub compared to dedicated hard drive units, is the user can easily upgrade the SATA hard drives within the system. The Linksys Media Hub comes with 2 SATA hard disk bays and the user can add another SATA drive for extra capacity. This gives the unit a greater life span, than those units that can’t be upgraded.

Linksys Media Hub has two upgradable SATA drive bays.

The Linksys Media Hub comes with software that assists you in managing your media via a PC networked to the system. As well as the software there is a robust web interface for other clients that do not use the software.

The Linksys media Hub media management software

The other great feature I would have liked to try out, but couldn’t, was using the Linksys Media Hub with an XBOX360 using the UPnP protocol for streaming media. Unfortunately my Xbox360 suffered the red ring of death and was absent during the testing. This feature allows the user to stream media from the device to their Xbox360. I use this feature of the Xbox360 with DVDs that my daughter watches regularly. Ripping the movie only from DVDs removes unwanted advertising and difficult to use menu systems making it much easier for children to use the system and view their movies.

Upgrade for the firmware and software is easily accessible from the Australian Linksys website, but there was no firmware updates at the time of this review. There is also a fairly active user forum (http://forums.linksysbycisco.com/linksys/?category.id=MediaHub) that is great for peer-to-peer recommendations for setting up your media and ad-hoc support questions on the device.

Overall I was nervous at the high price of this unit compared to the competition, but the speed, easy upgradeability and the high quality of the unit easily makes up for it.

Linksys Media Hub technical specifications 

Posted By Shane Williamson

1 year ago I was walking the halls of Cebit in Australia looking for a small projector that could be used with a mobile device and couldn’t find any. This year I found many devices being shown and a couple of them were quite impressively demonstrated. I’ll outline some details on two devices that I was impressed with.

The first is the Visimax distributed by Maxon Australia www.maxon.com.au. The Visimax looks to be a very robust and fully featured device, but being the top dollar of nearly AUS$500 it was the most expensive. Unfortunately the staff on the stand couldn’t demo the unit properly except to turn it on and show the onscreen menu. So, not sure what the image or video quality would be like.

Maxon Visimax

Resolution: 640 x 480 pixels
Brightness: 15 lumens
Light Source: LED
Video: NTSC/PAL/SECAM
Battery: Yes (30 min projection time)

Price: AUS$495

The second device, The Digishow Handheld Projector (www.digishow.com.au) was on display at two locations at Cebit, one showing it in full swing as a gaming console projector using the Digislide Gaming Xray mount (www.digislidegaming.com) and the other in the South Australian Government pavilion demonstrating attached to a Nokia N95. This device was most impressive due to how they were being demonstrated in the two scenarios. The image quality and brightness of the Digishow Handheld Projector was good especially since it was being shown on an open stand under the bright indoor lights.

Digishow Handheld Projector

Resolution: 640 x 480
Brightness: 8 ~ 10 lumens
Light Source: LED
Video: PAL & NTSC
Battery: Yes (up to 2 hours)

Price: AUS$399

The Digishow handheld Projector mounted on a Digislide Gaming XRAY speaker & projector mount on Xbox360.

The Digishow Handheld Projector attached to a Nokia N95.

Whilst the Visimax was the brightest at 15 lumens it has a very short battery life for such an expensive device. The Digishow Handheld Projector was by far the most impressive and a testament to it being demoed well in the two different areas. If you are a mobile professional and demo your product or service regularly on your mobile, then this is the must have sales accessory.

Posted by Shane Williamson

A key decider in a mobile operating system manufacturer’s battle for market share, is how and if, they are able to migrate outside of the traditional mobile phone market into other devices. It looks like Android is about to make the dash into other household appliances according to this article in the New York Times.

This is important for mobile operating system manufactures, as it increases their developer pool into non traditional mobile application areas that then expands the mobile operating system ecosystem. Mobile operating systems can be utilised in many different areas other than mobile phones such as vehicles, audio visual equipment, office equipment, vending machines, security systems, home automation and even traditional white-good appliances.

Developing a ubiquitous Application Programme Interface (API) has been tried by many before, but transcending into the different device types is a difficult journey. Microsoft has attempted to some degree to spread their Windows API into mobile and other household devices such as personal data appliances (PDAs), remote controls and media servers, but they always ended up having to change the API set considerably making development difficult for developers to port their code from one platform operating system to another.

Google’s Android operating system may become a platform nirvana if it can maintain that API set across multiple device types. Microsoft’s Windows operating environment comes with the legacy of an untethered world when it was first created. Android, however does not, as it was conceived in a connected and wireless world, making it more adaptive of this type of environment and is a good example of how a mobile operating system is cloud computing aware and takes advantage of this highly popular infrastructure.

The road to API nirvana is fraught with danger if core capabilities are not included, such as a well thought out product roadmap, a rigorous support system, a great usability experience and a sound development cost model.

It will be interesting to see where Android appears in next and if they keep a pure and open API environment.

Posted By Shane Williamson

An unbelievable article about how a Mr Gurit Singh in India has petitioned the Indian government to do something about mobile phones as they are making Indian people rude and impatient!?!?! As India has one of the fastest growing mobile subscriber populations on the planet Mr Gurit Singh must be beside himself with what the terrible mobile phone will do to his country.

Well mobile phones don’t make people rude and impatient Mr Gurit Singh, as quite frankly they already were.

Blaming the technology for how people utilise it is just plain silly. I know this to be true because I’ve met with one or two people who are socially adept in how they utilise mobile technology….or maybe even three people.

Sure there are some who choose not to fit smoothly into society by using rude annoying ring tones or answering their mobiles in business meetings or using the phone in movie theatres & concerts or speaking obnoxiously loud about their sex life on public transport or driving their car whilst using their mobile or talking to someone & doing their email or ……….. OK Mr Singh, I’ll sign your bloody petition! :-)

Posted By Shane Williamson

I will be speaking at the Sydney event, “Entering the Mobile Ecosystem” on Tuesday 3rd March. There is a 25% discount if you register with the code “buddy”, further details below.

The seminar is for people who are:

• looking for new, inexpensive ways to reach customers
• wanting practical advice from speakers who have done it
• wanting to meet mobile app developers, including the developer whose Australian iPhone application tops the charts
• wanting a clear understanding of the next steps for you

Location: Sydney Australia
Registrations: http://silfed01.eventbrite.com/
Date: 03 March 2009
Time: 9:00 am to 12:00 noon
25% discount use code "buddy"

Posted by Shane Williamson

Australian mobile telecommunication companies that compete with the largest incumbent carrier in the country, Telstra, have had a constant up hill battle for market share. There have been many attempts by the challengers to take market share from Telstra, but the size and incumbency of the ex-government owned Telco has been too great.

Today the 3rd largest, Vodafone & the 4th largest, “3” have announced they are merging into a joint venture called VHA. Whilst the main reason for merging would be that the current financial economy is hurting both these companies, it looks like it may be the only way for challenger carriers to merge together to share infrastructure as well as their subscriber base.

The new merged entity called VHA will be marketed under the Vodafone brand and will start operations in mid 2009. The Hutchison 3 brand looks to be terminated which will be a great loss for the local mobile industry.

3 Australia has been a driving force of innovation in the Australian mobile market as it was the first mobile carrier to introduce 3G into the country. It was also the first to introduce data capped plans that have led the industry in greatly reducing mobile broadband data rates. The 3 brand was highly successful in achieving a high level of recognition in a short space of time by clever marketing and it’s long term advertising relationship with cricket Australia.

Whilst the new Telco VHA could potentially bring greater 3G coverage around Australia, the burning issue that we are left with is that the Australian mobile space has just lost one of the more active and aggressive competitors in our market.

News articles

Sydney Morning Herald

The Australian

ARN

Posted By Shane Williamson

With Palm’s recent announcement at CES of their new Palm Pre mobile incorporating their equally new mobile software platform WebOS, one wonders if there is room for yet another Smartphone operating system in the market today.

Consider what is happening to the humble mobile today as it is a device that is now replacing traditional PC mobile computing devices and even starting to head into mainstream PC desktop markets. In fact, Nokia last year was the biggest computer manufacturer in 2008. Whilst this seems a bit far fetched, remember that there are now over 4 billion mobile subscribers on the planet and the percentage of this as Smartphones is steadily increasing.

I’ve created a chart of the top 8 device manufacturers that have the greatest individual market shares.

 For details of what is and isn’t included in these numbers head over to Tomi Ahonen’s blog for the details

This chart shows how three mobile device manufacturers, Nokia, Apple & RIM (well 4 if you include Dell), each with their own mobile operating systems, are encroaching in on the traditional mainstream desktop players.

Mobile operating systems should be consolidating as the traditional operating systems did in the early PC days , but they are fighting the trend and are steadily increasing in number as new and old players throw their platforms into the mix, creating a highly competitive environment that is making it very hard for mobile developers to keep up with the fragmented market. This means applications for these Smartphones become operating system specific and not available across all devices.

Only two things will break this trend, one is consolidation will occur and the other is Cloud Computing or services and applications delivered over the wire versus from the device, will bring these applications and services to all Smartphone devices.

Today Smartphone devices are smashing the desktop chains knowledge workers have been slaved to for some time. Whilst these devices will not be completely replacing desktops for some time, they are empowering people to work where ever they want and when ever they want to.

IT departments need to start looking at mobile devices in the same way they do their existing PC fleets. One important factor is the overall integration planning in how these devices are complimenting and extending existing desktop systems/services.

As for backing a particular mobile operating system, that comes down to what level of integration you want your devices to have within your enterprise. This is one of the benefits that Cloud Computing can bring companies in utilising both traditional desktop and mobile devices more effectively to increase productivity and efficiency.

 Posted By Shane Williamson

GoGrid.com is a hosting company that have created this wonderful innovative video that explains some aspects of cloud computing in easy to understand terms and concepts. The video is a good introduction in how the technology works and what some of the basic benefits are.

Whilst I wouldn’t show this video to CxO level management, it does however highlight a key issue with discussing cloud computing today with customers and that is that cloud computing is being over complicated by a lot of vendors causing confusion for the customer.

Never assume the customer understands the technology in the same way you do. When talking about cloud computing to your customer you must define the capability within the overall strategy. This video outlines some great concepts of setting the conversation up to discuss how you can help the customer with your solutions.

Posted By Shane Williamson

Nokia has just announced their new flagship N Series product for 2009 at Nokia World yesterday. The Nokia N97 looks to be a major improvement over it’s predecessors, but as the N96 was such a huge disappointment to existing N95 users, one wonders if this device should have been the next generation device beyond the N95.

Nokia took a big bet that the integrated Digital TV connectivity within the N96 would be a major reason for users to upgrade, but for those countries such as Australia that do not have the DVB-H digital TV standard, the N96 started to look like a “tarted” up N95. In fact, with the N96’s inferior casing build, the Nokia N95 8Gb was looking like a much better alternative. This gave a lot of Australian N95 users a good excuse to look too alternative devices such as the Apple iPhone or the Sony Ericsson Xperia.

It looks like the Nokia N97 is what a lot of us where hoping the N96 should have been. Whilst we can only see tantalising glimpses of what is being demonstrated on the various videos appearing on the web, the device does seem to be better constructed and the user interface more customisable.

Nokia is claiming the device will be launched in the 1st half of 2009, but for Australia that usually means the 2nd half of 2009.

It will be interesting to see if people will wait that time to upgrade to this device, or be tempted by a lot of the other next generation smartphone mobile devices that are starting to appear.

Nokia N97 specifications

System: WCDMA 900/1900/2100 (HSDPA), EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
User Interface: S60 5th Edition
Dimensions: 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm* mm (L x W x H) *18.25 mm at camera area
Weight: Approx. 150 g
Display: 3.5 inch TFT with up to 16 million colors nHD 16:9 widescreen (640x360 pixels)
Battery: Nokia Battery BP-4L, 1500 mAh
Memory: Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board memory, plus 16GB expansion via microSD memory card slot)
Lens: Carl Zeiss Tessar™
Image capture: Up to 5 megapixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
Video capture: MPEG-4 VGA (640 x 480) at up to 30 fps
Aperture: F2.8
Focal length: 5.4 mm
Flash: Dual LED camera flash and video light
WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g with UPnP support
• Micro-USB connector, Hi-Speed USB 2.0
• 3.5mm stereo headphone plug and TV-out support (PAL/NTSC)
• Bluetooth wireless technology 2.0 with A2DP stereo audio, enhanced data rates (EDR)
• GPS receiver with support for assisted GPS (A-GPS)

Nokia N97 data sheet (PDF)

Nokia World site

Posted By Shane Williamson

PhoneTopp has announced the imminent arrival of their iPhone web conferencing application.

The impressive feature of this mobile application is that it allows the user to connect to various mainstream web conferencing product such as Microsoft Live Meeting & Cisco Webex.

The Phonetopp application uses cloud computing to deliver their service by utilising the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service that provides resizable server capacity.

Phonetopp’s press release included the following statistics……

An enterprise collaboration survey recently conducted by PhoneTopp via a web survey tool and deployed to over 15,000 Microsoft, WebEx, Adobe and Citrix customers revealed:

• over 62 percent of respondents desired or strongly desired to participate in a web conference from their
  smartphone
• over 57 percent of respondents participated in a web conference at least once a week

There is no live product as yet so it will be interesting once Phoetopp does become released to see how the user experience pans out. The fact that the company is launching their product on the iPhone first before any other smartphone device again demonstrates the importance of the user experience.

Phonetopp has also stated that they are looking to launch early next year and hope to sell the service for US$8 per month subscription.

Phonetopp’s website

Sign up for the beta here!

Posted By Shane Williamson

HTC is delivering yet another first to the market with a mobile that utilises the WiMAX radio frequency.

The HTC device is surprisingly called the HTC MAX 4G. As there is no agreed 4G specification yet it looks like HTC’s marketing department has been sniffing too much fairy dust.

What is impressive about the HTC MAX 4G is HTC are finally getting 5 megapixel cameras into their devices.

The benefit for including WiMAX is really only for users in those countries that have deployed large scale WiMAX networks that act as an edge extension to an existing 3G network. Therefore the user is able to roam onto a WiMAX network with devices such as this and use mobile data services over the WiMAX infrastructure.

The HTC MAX 4G comes with VoIP capability, but there is no indication as to whether or not the user will be able to use a carrier inclusive VoIP service whilst roaming on WiMAX or whether they have to use an alternative provider such as Skype which they will incur further costs.

Device manufacturers need to work hard on ensuring the user experience is seamless when roaming to different wireless network types especially WiMAX. This will ensure the user can utilise all traditional mobile services such as voice/video calling SMS/MMS as well as mobile data.

The HTC MAX 4G specifications are:

• Processor: Qualcomm® ESM7206A™ 528 MHz
• Platform: Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional
• Memory: ROM: 256MB / RAM: 288MB / Flash: 8 GB
• Dimensions: 113.5mm X 63.1mm X 13.9mm
• Weight: 151 grams (with battery)
• Display: 3.8-inch LCD, w/ 480 x 800 WVGA resolution
• Network: Tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE:900/1800/1900 MHz Yota Mobile WiMAX 2,5-2.7 GHz
• TouchFlo 3D UI
• GPS: Internal GPS
• Connections: VoIP, Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth® 2.0 with EDR, HTC ExtUSB™
• Cameras: “High-Resolution” main camera, VGA secondary camera
• Additional: Motion G-sensor (automatically rotating picture), Proximity sensor (saving energy while talking due to the switching the display off), FM-radio
• Audio: Ring tone formats:AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, QCP, MP3, WMA, WAV, 40 polyphonic and standard MIDI format and 1 (SMF)/SP MIDI
• Battery: Li-Pol, 1500 mAh
• Talk time: GSM: up to 420 minutes, VoIP: up to 230 minutes
• Standby time: GSM: up to 350 hours, VoIP: up to 50 hours
• AC Adapter: Voltage range/frequency: 100 ~ 240V AC, 50/60 Hz, DC output: 5V and 1A

Thanks to MobileCrunch for the link

Posted By Shane Williamson

Entertainment Earth has this great Christmas present for uber geeks to keep your favourite canned Christmas Cherry Coke timelessly cool and Dalek additive free!

The Doctor Who TARDIS USB Micro Fridge sends your favourite canned beverage through time and space to get that deep space chill only the TARDIS can deliver. please note however that current Earth technology limitations mean that only your canned beverage may enjoy time and space travel and not you.

Head over to Entertainment Earth and pre order the wee beastie!

Posted by Shane Williamson

Ross Dawson’s brother has created a great Australian weather application for the iPhone called “Oz Weather”. Oz Weather is a customisable weather application for Australia.

The application is demonstrated on this video.

Great use of the interface of the iPhone and Oz Weather looks to have a rich feature set.

For more details you can see Graham Dawson’s overview on his site here.

Posted By Shane Williamson

According to AdMob’s latest report for September 2008, the Apple iPhone is now #4 in the top 10 handsets worldwide that are hitting their ads in mobile sites & mobile applications.

With 35% of iPhone impressions to Admob mobile sites coming form outside the USA & UK, this shows the massive impact Apple’s expansion to other countries has had with the new 3G iPhone.

Whilst this is but one company’s data on device statistics, Admobs numbers are large enough to give a sizeable impression on what is happening with mobiles that browse sites and use applications that display advertising. Admob’s stats track over 6000 mobile sites and applications.

Another interesting statistic from AdMob is the 2nd largest country with traffic to Admob sites is Indonesia and it is catching up on the US very quickly.

The Admob MobileMetrics Report is here.

Via MobileCrunch

Posted By Shane Williamson

Rumours have been abounding on the Internet that Microsoft is looking to purchase Blackberry manufacturer RIM. Whilst the current financial crisis is a bane to many, it looks to be a blessing to others in that dropping share prices of companies are making them affordable targets for takeovers.

If these rumours are true and Microsoft is looking to purchase this company, is this a good move for the software titan? Microsoft has their own mobile operating system called Windows Mobile and they are already working with numerous mobile device manufacturers to propagate it further.

In my opinion the glaring issue with Microsoft’s mobile play is they are not addressing a key fundamental that new players in the industry like Apple are doing well and that is creating a positive user experience. Microsoft has a lot of share holders and to keep them happy they must sell a lot of licenses of their software. Microsoft is geared for mass market plays in selling software, but going for these mass markets can mean they do not address properly how people use mobiles and the operating system within them.

Microsoft must return to basics with their strategy in mobile and recognise that all business users are personal users as well. Users need the ability to personalise their device and that’s not just adding a ring-tone here and a wallpaper there, it’s about having the capability to tailor the device to their usability requirements.

Microsoft’s Windows platform is not famous or pervasive due to the fact that it was released by Microsoft. Windows success is due to the 3rd party developer ecosystem that surrounds the platform. Windows users have an amazing choice in both software and hardware when purchasing a desktop system. This freedom of choice has expanded the Windows platform to be the dominate desktop operating system on the planet to this day. So why isn’t Microsoft doing the same with mobiles?

Microsoft has had a difficult time battling in the mobile arena to date due to only focusing on the business user. Microsoft’s mobile operating play has been to try and replicate some of the features and user interfaces from their desktop environments without taking into consideration that mobile is not just a different environment, its a whole new world.

Mobiles are a personal addition to our lives, they give us freedom and empowerment that we have never experienced before with technology. The cordless access to anyone, or anything, at anytime and in any place, allows us humans to be completely free.

So, whilst Microsoft may or may not be looking at the mass marketability of the Blackberry legacy (and of course one or two patents that they own) in the end the power of mobiles are that people use them, not businesses.

Posted By Shane Williamson

Renai LeMay over at Zdnet Australia has this post that Avaya has finally announced their one-X Mobile platform integration with the Apple iPhone and it will be available in November this year.

Avaya’s one-X Mobile client enables the corporate iPhone user to do the following….

• Have calls to the deskphone simultaneously ring the iPhone or up to four other devices of the user's choice, reducing the chance of missing important calls.
• Transfer calls seamlessly between the iPhone and your deskphone.
• Have calls made from a mobile device show the desk phone caller ID, for true one-number portability.
• Manage only one business number and voice mailbox.
• Access a full suite of business telephony features.
• Use an easy graphical user interface.
• Turn on/off business profile as needed.
• Use VIP Lists to allow only key callers to get through, ensuring minimal interruptions during off hours or during critical meetings.

Canned Flash demo here…..

Posted By Shane Williamson

I cannot believe the underhanded tricks that companies such as Sybase 365 and Mbill will go to make a fast buck.

I received my mobile bill last month to find over AUS$20 worth of “received” Premium SMS charges on it. I have 3 Australia (www.three.com.au)mobile account and it has Premium Numbers disabled. The Premium SMS charges were billed as “Sybase365”. I had no recollection as to what these charges were so I contacted 3.

I was initially told by 3 that they could do nothing about the charges. They then gave me a 1300 number for Sybase 365 which was only an automated IVR system and could get through to any support people.

I eventually discovered the company’s head office number 02-9258-9600 and after another IVR finally got through to a person. The Sybase 365 individual took no responsibility for the issues as he claimed that “the charges are not ours but from a partner of theirs called Mbill”. I was told by the Sybase 365 individual that they had already had complaints about them and that they probably wouldn’t call me back, so the person said he’d call them on my behalf. I heard nothing back.

After 1 week of not receiving any return calls from Sybase 365 or Mbill to my requests, I escalated the issue to Hutchison 3G Australia (“3”) who were very responsive to the issue.

I then received a call on my mobile earlier this week from an Mbill support person. This individual was very difficult to understand, but he claimed that I had entered a competition on a web site for an iPhone. I recalled the incident and remembered getting the SMSs, but I had replied STOP to all of them.

In order to prove his point the Mbill support rep sent me via email some Excel spreadsheet logs to prove it was my device and that I had subscribed. Unbelievably their logs show clearly that they sent me a discontinued notice to a STOP response from me (see line 4) and they still sent chargeable emails to my device.

It gets better. Notice how they send 3 Premium SMSs to my devices in a very short interval (lines 8,9,10), which is AUS$15 in 1 minute! So, even before I can reply STOP to the first one I’m already charged for the luxury of receiving their spam.

It gets even better. Notice how they use 2 different premium SMS numbers, so even if you respond with STOP on one, they still SMS on the other number.

Even with this evidence the Mbill support person argued through email that it was still my fault and not Mbills.

Here is an example of some of the difficult to understand emails I received from this support individual….

I don’t even think Google Translator would be able to interpret this……

Eventually with the evidence of Mbill’s log files, 3 Australia agreed to refund me the full amount.

So, I strongly urge everyone not to enter into any mobile or web based competitions by Mbill (mbill.net) as they will Premium SMS you to an early death.

The Australian mobile industry needs to deploy rules and regulations to prevent irresponsible companies such as Sybase 365 and Mbill from getting away with these scams.

Posted By Shane Williamson

Digg This!

Looks like Apple has forced the hand of RIM to rethink its mobile platform strategy. RIM has announced the details of its first ever Blackberry Developer Conference to be held in Santa Clara, California in the USA in October this year. Whist it is great to see the mobile device manufacturer take their developer program to the next level, one has to wonder if they are trying to fight a battle that they could already be losing.

Blackberry devices have been in the market for over 10 years so it is surprising that this is its first ever developer conference. Whilst many argue that they have single handedly taken mobile email technologies backwards due to the simplistic service they deliver, the 12 million plus users worldwide with Blackberry devices are a strong driver for many mobile developers to build for their devices.

With new contenders like the Apple iPhone rocking the mobile developer landscape, it's getting very crowded and difficult for mobile developers to focus on only one or two mobile development platforms. Hopefully at this conference RIM will be changing their development model for their devices and start to show mobile developers a reason to hang around and not get swept away by the new entrants into the game.

Device manufacturers like RIM need to start thinking outside the box in how 3rd party companies develop for their devices. They need to start looking at creating hybrid development platforms that integrate both the device operating system and the network together to create a seamless service for customers. This gives telcos a huge opportunity here to develop a Telco-As-A-Service model to leverage their massive investments in carrier technologies so that mobile developers can take advantage of them to enhance their products and services.

Blackberry developer conference (20-22 October 2008) - http://www.blackberrydeveloperconference.com/

Posted By Shane Williamson

Nice to see the Nokia N95 is still being remembered by its N-Series creators by receiving a new firmware update!

Included in this update.....

• Nokia Maps 2.0 built-in
• Full N-Gage client
• Nokia Search 4.0 with Google plug-in
• Share online 3.0
• Enablers for Comes With Music
• Download! application updated (v 3.1.50)
• Upgrade to Music Player
• Update for Flash Lite 3
• New baseline for VoIP (with error corrections)
• Autorotate
• Added 5th theme

I've been running the new firmware for 2 days now without any problems and it does seem to be a bit faster, but that could be due to the fact that I haven't reinstalled everything yet.

Great to finally see the display auto-rotate feature finally going native in the operating system too.

For more details click on "Update Phone Software" - Don't for get to backup first! :-)

Posted By Shane Williamson

The cameraphone today is more prolific than both standard and digital cameras added together. The cameraphone is changing the way people produce and interact with media on a global scale. Even with lower megapixel versions of these devices people are happy to use their cameraphone in place of a higher resolution stand alone camera to snap up pictures and videos of friends and family.

Adding complexity to this growing phenomenon is the way people are now sharing their personal experiences in picture and film to anyone via the plethora of web 2.0 platforms that make it easy to publish them. Even the concept of "life streaming" whereby people can Twitter, Blog, Podcast or Vodcast their daily perambulations into other people's lives is more prevalent now, all due to the pervasive cameraphone.

Telecom TV have this interesting video on how much the humble cameraphone is changing the way we use and produce digital media on a daily basis.

Posted By Shane Williamson