Life is grand

Recently bought a Nokia N95? Apart from its apparently sluggish interface and poor battery life you can now add “miffed about N81 and N82″ to your list of woes.

The Nokia N81 and Nokia N82 look great. All of the features of the N95 but in a much nicer form factor. 8gb memory, Wi-Fi, GPS, XEON flash, quad-band GSM and HSDPA, BlueTooth 2.0, TV-out, FM Radio, MicroSD, 30 fps VGA video recording and a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens and auto-focus.

I hope they get better battery life out of them though I am not hopeful of the interface being any faster.

I just saw an interesting new feature from Sky, the satellite TV provider. You can program your set-top-box on your mobile phone. So if you are away from home and hear of an interesting show you can whip out the mobile phone, find the relevant show and set it to record. Presumably the Sky mobile server then communicates with your set-top-box at home.

A simple but useful idea. I wonder how much mobile phones will come to be remote controls for all manner of other fixed devices? I wouldn’t mind being able to SMS my car to turn on the heating 5 minutes before I get into it.

Go have a spin yourself.

I hope SvN is right about the unconfirmed Apple phone; simple, elegant, focused, quality. Apple.

And it must be GSM and unlocked so everyone and not just Cingular users get to buy it. My Nokia is nearing its end.

The mobile TLD is launching today; dotMobi. The BBC has a decent article on it. Firstly I find it ironic that the domain designed for limited input devices (like mobile phones) is four letters long; .mobi.

Is this going to work though? Or do we even need it? The way I see it we should enter in a domain regardless of the device and get back data tailored to the device. So if I view cnn.com on my desktop I get a nice multimedia, multi-megabyte download. If I hit it on my phone I should get a lightweight package with navigation designed for phone keypads. I shouldn’t have to use different domains.

One good thing about dotMobi is the set of rules dotMobi sites have to adhere to. They emphasise content and small downloads with good access strategies for phone keypads. But really those rules should be applied to all mobile sites irregardless of what domain is being used.

Head on over to Mícheál Ó Foghlú’s weblog to read about a new company launching from 3CS today. The company is Nubiq and they are launching Zinadoo, a mobile website creation service. I’ve worked with Helene Haughney and the rest of her team in the past and have watched Zinadoo grow from strength to strength.

Great to see such entreupreneurial spirit in Ireland.

I’ve spent the past hour or so with a co-worker trying to get a Cocoon+Java+RSS+MySQL+XSL+DELI system to do the simplest of tasks. What a nightmare. It is incredible in its flexiblitlity. I can’t think of much it can’t do. But what it does do is very little. It seems as though the chaps who built this system spent 90% of their time on the framework of the application and about 5% on the application itself. It has huge potential but all the bits that actually do things aren’t there. String replace? Nope. I had to find an XSL template that someone else had rewritten to get that.

It’s the autobahn without the Porsche. The scaffolding without the building. The bricks without the builder.

It’s cool and wonderful and so much fun to work with but ultimately it is insanity when all you want is to get the job done. The glass without the beer (thanks for that one, Elaine.)

This is where Ruby on Rails is kicking Java and .NET web-frameworks all over the park. They are visionary and capable of far more than Rails. But Rails actually does common tasks that you need to do. It is less flexible but ultimately more productive.

For those few edge cases that it can’t handle I’ll write a function in something else and pipe it in.