Archive for the ‘phone’ Category

Bought a Nokia N95 recently?

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Nokia N81 and Nokia N82

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.

Posted in Post, mobile, n81, n82, nokia, phone | Comments

No buttons? Gestures.

Friday, January 12th, 2007

Reading Kottke’s roundup of iPhone coverage I was struck by the following comment:

You could have different swipes and taps as a speed dial mechanism…swipe the screen from top left to bottom right and then tap in the lower right hand corner to call mom, that sort of thing.

That is very interesting. A lot of people are complaining that a touchscreen interface won’t let them dial without looking at the screen. Firstly, none of them have even used the iPhone touchscreen. It could be rubbish or Apple might have figured something out. We don’t know.

But gestures would go a long way towards solving that problem. I already use gestures on the trackpad of my MacBook Pro. It works very well and you don’t have to stare at the trackpad.

Will there be custom gesture software in the iPhone? I hope so. Three taps and the pizza joint is dialled.

Posted in AAA, Apple, buttons, gestures, interface, iphone, keypad, mobile phone, phone, touchscreen, ui | Comments

The Apple Phone

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

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.

Posted in AAA, Apple, iphone, mobile, phone | Comments

Sony Ericsson W950i Walkman Phone

Friday, November 17th, 2006

Sony Ericsson W950i Walkman Phone I am rarely excited by modern mobile phones. They tend to pack too much into an unusable interface and end up being slow at what they are meant for; voice calls and text messages. My current phone is a bare-bones Nokia; it doesn’t have a camera, radio or 3G, it doesn’t double as a PDA or an MP3 player (I have an iPod nano for that.)

This Sony Ericsson W950i though is giving even this mobile-phone troglodyte heart palpitations. It looks good, the flush keyboard is gorgeous (and I hope usable), and has dedicated controls for the music functionality. That is an absolute must, the dedicated controls. It has a lovely 2.6″ touch sensitive screen too. It is also slim opting rather to be wide which is a form factor I prefer (and which Motorola are doing well with in their Razr phones.) It has 4gb of memory, twice what my iPod nano has and apparently will work like a USB drive which makes transferring files a doddle.

A plus is the lack of built in camera. Well done Sony Ericsson for not trying to shove in a crap mobile phone camera.

All in all it looks like a winner. My only reservations are interface speed, voice quality and whether the interface might be too crammed with options. As soon as O2 Ireland get it on their shelves I’ll give it a go.

Posted in AAA, Sony Ericsson, Sony Ericsson W950i, Sony Ericsson W950i Walkman Phone, Walkman, cellphone, mobile phone, phone | Comments

dotMobi

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

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.

Posted in AAA, Domain, dotmobi, mobi, mobile, mtld, phone, tld | Comments

A first podcast

Thursday, August 3rd, 2006

I am dead impressed. Evoca makes podcasting as easy as making a telephone call. I don’t have a microphone on my PC and so have never even tried podcasting. Evoca gets around this by letting me phone in my podcast. A few seconds after I ended the call the podcast was up and ready to be published to the world. I’ll write more about Evoca soon but check my phonecast/podcast up above and have a look around Evoca yourself.

(Thanks to Tom Raftery for the link.)

Posted in Tom Raftery, audio, evoca, phone, phonecast, podcast | Comments