E4 : Engineering news:"Manchester-based Video Image Coding Specialists (VICS), a spin-off from UMIST, has developed compression technology that allows video clips to be played on GSM and GPRS (or 2.5G) phones, and claims to be the world's first company to offer the service."
Looks like a very exciting new option for Nokia 7650/3650 and SonyEricsson P800 owners. There appear to be lots of very clever ideas built into this system. Wow, the world of 2.5G just keeps getting better and better :)
Jonas Salling Shareware "Sony Ericsson Clicker is a revolutionary application, allowing you to remotely control a wide range of applications with your Sony Ericsson phone."
Here's some good news for the developers out there: Nokia and Metrowerks, today announced the release of an all-in-one developer kit for the Series 60 Platform. Metrowerks will distribute the advanced kit, which makes Series 60 application development in the CodeWarrior environment possible for the first time.
From what I've heard from developers this will be a welcome step forward.
"T-Mobile claims it will be the first to offer video-with-audio messaging. This claim stems from the fact that initial fototext/MMS services supported the transfer of video clips inside a multi-media message but that same clip could not offer an accompanying sound track. T-Mobile claims now to have fixed this particular bug."
That's the good news. The bad news in the same article, from the Inquirer, states that, "T-Mobile's CEO, Rene Obermann, absolutely ruled out any move towards flat rate tariffs for GPRS". Booooo, Booooo!
And a second article relating to the T-Mobile announcement puts more emphasis on what I consider a very worrying trend - "The company will have "T-Zone buttons" placed on new phones to afford users easier access to the [T-Zone] portals. It has also inked a deal with software firm 3G Lab to design common interfaces across different devices for different user groups - a move seen as evident of an increasing trend among operators to exert more control over handset development.
This is actually quite disturbing! It's been creeping up on us for a while with Vodafone really cementing the trend in the implementation of Vodafone Live! with it's 'proprietary buttons'. How has the power shift in the industry panned out like this? Why do the operators have such influence on the handset makers that. You'd think they'd have learned their lessons for the 'garden-walled' flop of WAP.
Proprietary services/GUIs/buttons won't work Mr. Operator!! You are utility companies. And mobile phones are becoming commidities, just like with the PC industry. Get used to it.
I don't want your hand-holding cartoon interface anymore than I want Internet Explorer commandeering my internet browsing. Ever pay much attention to that funny looking Windows key on new PC keyboards? No? Me neither, I never use it. There's a lesson to be learned there .....
BBC NEWS:"The mobile phone industry has disabled nearly half a million stolen or lost handsets as part of a crackdown on street crime, figures have shown."
Excellent!
"But members of the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum (MICAF), which is behind the scheme, admit reprogramming stolen phones in still 'relatively easy' and its scale is hard to measure."
I really like the look of this new phone but it 'only' has 2Mb of memory and doesn't appear to come with video software. Rather, the emphasis appears to be on the new QuickShare™ technology which is designed to make the sharing of images just a few clicks away.
Oops! Just realised I haven't been keeping up with comments posted to my blog - sincere apologies (to all two of you ;)
I've hopefully remedied that lapse by using the YACCS commenting system XML feed function to aggregate my own posts in Feedreader (cool).
Seriously though, when I started this blog a few months back it was but a microscopic needle in a macroscopic haystack. I called it MMS Memo because that was all it was meant to be - a little scratchpad for myself, a place to keep bookmarks and make quick comments.
Never did I expect that as I became more and more engrossed in the subject, I would come across so many wondeful weblogs with so many fascinating insights and even less did I expect other bloggers to come across my humble 'abode'.
Ok, enough of this soppiness and naval gazing.... on with the show :)
Wireless News: "The 3650's networking capabilities are astounding. Just spelling out the acronyms of the protocols and standards it implements would fill the rest of this space. The phone is designed to move voice, text, audio, photos, video, and arbitrary data anywhere."
Cool. That means it'll be perfect for moblogging then :-)
:: GiA's Blog :: Another blogger getting excited about moblogging and wondering if she'll have to switch from Blogger to Radio Userland. Or can Blogger Pro handle the job of parsing photos submitted via the email posting system?
This is a dilemma I'll have to face myself in a few weeks when I finally got my hands on a Nokia 3650......... finally.......
Weird. One of my blogrollees, Russell Beattie, has an unhealthy interest in Irish music, including Sinead O'Connor, The Cranberries, The Corrs, U2 and Van Morrison in his list of tastes. Maybe he really should come to work here in Ireland for Newbay Software as he jokingly suggested recently (seeing as they are probably the first moblogging company looking to recruit software developers).
Telecom.paper: "The purpose [aim] of Vodafone Germany is to sell one million camera phones by October 2003. By the end of 2002, 15,000 camera handset enabled for MMS were already sold and Kuczkowski [CEO] is very satisfied with the development till now."
That's the MMS news from the above article but also check it out for news on the planned Spring 2003 launch of Vodafone Germany's UTMS network.
I guess this new fangled audioblogging thing could be considered a form of moblogging but I just don't (yet) get the point. I've visited a few audioblogs and all you get is little icons prompting you to click to hear the audio message. Now why should I wait around to hear audio when I could much more quickly scan text, save it, print it, copy and paste it, etc, etc???
Video blogging on the other hand is a whole different ball-game - it's a visual thing and perfectly suited to blog publishing IMHO. Ok, maybe audio blogging is perfect for an audio interface on the viewers side (ie. making a phone call to check updates on a blog) but until such time as audio interfaces proliferate I'm going to sit here with a puzzled look on my face :-<
Augmented Moblogging will also be covered here as it moves more out of the realm of science fiction into the realm of science fact. If this is the first time you've read the buzzword make sure to visit Headmap.com and their Blogosphere Globe. It's truly brilliant stuff.
I'm also after rewording the blog description over there on the left below the blog title (MMS Memo) to more accurately reflect the focus here. I've qualified it a little by stating that Moblogging is the real target here. And yes, I'm aware that there are many more means of moblogging besides the Nokia 7650, such as the Danger Sidekick but hey, the web is all about niches and this is my very narrowly defined niche :p
It's time I spruced up this blog a bit so I've started by adding a blogroll over in the left hand side, brought to courtesy of Blogrolling.com. Thanks for a wonderfully convenient free service you guys!
Please don't be insulted if I haven't yet included your brilliant blog in my roll, I'll get there :-)
David Davies is putting together all the pieces for moblogging through Radio Userland's blogging system. He created his own assetManager tool for the job, which allows you to attach pictures and even send HTML messages to your blog from any capable mobile device.
And he's just gone and bought himself a Nokia 7650 to add video messaging to it. I'm puzzled why he didn't wait just a little bit longer to get a 3650 though.
BBC NEWS - 3G goes live in the UK: "The UK's first mainland third generation mobile network, the Hutchison 3 network, is officially opening for business, enabling callers to see each other and send video footage via their phones."
And it's all happening on the 3rd day of the 3rd month of the 3rd year....... of the 2nd millenium... doh!!!!
It just had to happen, didn't it. -- "A high-tech peeping Tom has been arrested in Hong Kong for taking pictures under women's skirts using a Nokia mobile phone, police said yesterday. The 26-year-old was found to have more than 40 pictures taken beneath women's skirts on his Nokia 3650 phone, which has a digital photograph-taking function, when he was arrested on Friday."
Mike Grenville reports that the general air of optimism and new technology at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes last week quite impressed him. But his comments about the 'PMG' are what impressed me -
"The most interesting new product for me was the Personal Mobile Gateway PMG. It is a credit card size device that handles the mobile communication from a range of other devices — phone, camera, PDA, laptop etc that communicate with it by Bluetooth. One of the benefits is that producing the actual user devices becomes considerably cheaper and easier for them to communicate"
Gate2Info: "The handset market is getting New players with new features. AlphaCell, the leading provider of advanced rich media mobile handsets,announces the worldwide launch of the M5 - its innovative flagship product."
Well I've never heard of them before anyway! I must say the phone does look rather tasty, after you give it some time to grow on you. It's got some nice features too including dedicated hardware support for video applications. Good to see another player in the market.
