Yesterday evening, my Nokia N70 stopped working properly. That is, the numbers 1, 5, and 6 didn't respond. After a day of adding phone numbers to my Powerbook's address book and using iSync to add them to my contacts list, and trying straight rebooting the phone (turning it off then on again), and worrying that I would have to get another phone (which would have been my 4th this year, beginning with Siemens S55, then Nokia 7610, and then now with my N70, not including the Nokia N80 I had for a while), it works again. I couldn't hard reset the phone—*7370*# or, star seven three seven zero star number-sign—because I wasn't able to type in the code it asked for (12345) since, well, the 1 and 5 weren't working. What made it work again was the following: open the phone, take out the battery and SIM card, blow around a little bit, then replace the SIM card and battery and turn it on. Voodoo, I know, and probably not a permanent fix. But here's hoping it is, because I paid my right arm for it.
N70
A forwarded email and a phone call later, I'm the owner—or rather lendee for about a week—of a Nokia N80. Since June when I lost my 7610 in Seattle, I've been using the Nokia N70, which has a really great camera for both stills and video, and a soft, friendly keypad. (I do a lot of text messaging these days.) Initial impressions of the N80 are:
- the keypad is nice, and the slider protects from accidental phone calls (the phone, when sliding closed, asks whether to lock the keypad), but I'm used to the layout feel of the N70, so I don't like the N80's as much
- S60 3rd edition looks nicer than 2nd edition, which runs on my N70
- the ringtones—I only have two, both of which are MP3s: Aaliyah's "(Outro) Came to Give Love" and Cut Copy's "Future"—sound great, possibly better than my N70, but that may just be the honeymoon one grants when using a new product
- the blue blinking light is annoying when the phone is sitting next to my computer, acting almost like a beacon, reminding me that the phone is still there
- the photos I've taken with the N80 so far aren't as good as I thought they'd be with a 3 megapixel camera, but I like the camera button when holding the phone in "landscape", and maybe I just need to fiddle with some settings
The wifi is pretty neat, as I spent about an hour surfing around while laying in bed, using Opera Mini which this site looks okay in, but the mobile version looks just about right in. Wifi on my phone is pointless other than to upload photos using Shozu, since if I'm at a place that has wifi I probably already have my laptop with me. The ease with which I can upload photos and, potentially, stream live video makes me wish for an inexpensive unlimited mobile data plan even more.
See also: a long review by Zack Smith of the N80 with photos of the phone and photos taken by the phone; who should and shouldn't get an N80.
Couple the N80 I have with an inexpensive Bluetooth GPS device, and I could add an order of magnitude more metadata to my SkyTrain walks (and serve that metadata out using GeoRSS, which I'm already experimenting with). Basically it would enable me to document my world in a way that lets others re-document it as they see it. Rukavina is doing some interesting things mapping withi his Nokia N70, and the only way I can learn about this stuff is by doing it. All theoretical at this point, since I don't have the tools necessary. lets others re-document it as they see it.
(I excised the above paragraph from my brief review of the Nokia N80 because it didn't really seem to fit. Pasting it in here in case I need to point to/elaborate on it later.)
There's been some talk on prominent weblogs about the value of having a mobile version of your weblog, so, ever the follower, I introduce a not yet perfect mobile version of Just a Gwai Lo. I'm on the hook for other how-I-did-this-in-Drupal articles, so we'll just add this one to the pile. Let's just say that this took longer than the 10 minutes it took to think I had it right.
I have some questions, though, part out of ignorance of how big the mobile market is in North America (to say nothing of other markets like Europe and Asia and Africa), and part out of befuddlement, because some of this seems like extra work. Note that I'm priced out of the mobile Internet market, and couldn't get connecting my Nokia N70 to my Powerbook's Internet connection via Bluetooth to work, so I literally don't know what the fuss is all about.
- shouldn't there be a hosted service that just does this, using RSS feeds, through the browser on your mobile device?
- shouldn't your existing site degrade gracefully for phones, PDAs and various whatnots? I've seen this site in Opera Mini, and it looks really great. I heard a friend reads this site on his hiptop while commuting to work, without complaint.
- if it can't degrade gracefully, can't we hack something together with browser-sniffing or setting cookies, so that people don't have to bookmark separate domains. (To the people who have "mobile" as the subdomian, you know how much extra typing that is, right?) I have the mobile version of my site set to NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW because it just doesn't seem right to duplicate my own content on a separate domain. And yes, I've already thought of the objection that justagwailo.com is technically a different [sub]domain than www.justagwailo.com.
Again, I'm priced out of the market, so as legitimately I have these questions, having a mobile version of your site won't do me or very many other people any practical good until there's flat rate, around $50/month, reliable-if-slow mobile Internet for the masses.
Alex: “The N70 may not be particularly impressive to my international readers, but we have essentially nothing comparable Stateside. That the phone has a decent camera, wi-fi, a quality web browser (based on the same code Safari uses), FM radio, good media playback, and is extensible by both usual Symbian means and a special version of the Python programming language is a package totally unmatched here. Our “smart phones” are clunky PDAs with mobiles grafted on to them running crippled versions of Windows. No thanks.”
Alex goes on to bemoans the increasing gap between American cell phone technology. Not really knowing much about it, I rely on ex-telco employees Boris and Roland to do the talking and to point out which phones I should want. Roland has been writing extensively about his Nokia N70, which he got as part of Nokia's blogger outreach program—see Kami Huyse's 5 blogger relations cultural facts to help run a successful program—and thanks to him I've been writing about and posting photos and video from my Nokia 7610. Alex wants to hand money over to Nokia to give him the N70, and I similarly want to hand money over to buy the N91. Not that I'd be able to do much with it without a respectable data plan, but it has a wifi modem in it, so I could go to the second office, buy a coffee to assuage the guilt of using their free wireless access, and upload whatever media I had recorded to my favourite sharing services. As Alex points out, though, the lack of good infrastructure and decent plans makes it hard for me to interact with my environment and stay in touch with the people I care about. Or at least, not as easy as I'd like.