8 posts tagged “cell phones”

Web-based tools do a great job of providing access to your data and applications in a flexible way from any PC. The problem I've had is that there's not always a great way to access this data from a mobile device, like say your friendly neighborhood BlackBerry. I always have the thing on me, so I might as well use it to access my important stuff.

Now, I know a lot of phones have web browsers, and Opera Mini is actually a pretty decent piece of software. However, for my money, I haven't had a mobile browsing experience that I've been really thrilled with. It's more like it's "enough to get by." If you do try this, I recommmend sticking to sites that have mobile versions. Life is too short for all that scrolling.

Anyway, I've come across another way that works out pretty well to access web data on your phone: RSS. Most newer web tools provide a way to syndicate the important data via RSS, which can of course be loaded into conventional desktop or web-based readers. But there are also RSS readers that work on phones, and the best one I've seen is NewsGator Go!. (It's so good, I'll excuse the ridiculous exclamation point at the end of the name. I mean seriously.)

The app itself functions well, with a nice interface and a good set of options to customize your reading experience. Even better, since it's part of the whole NewsGator product line, it synchronizes with the NewsGator web-based reader and desktop software. The effect of this is that you can mark some feed items read on your phone, and those same items will be marked read when you check out the feed in either the web-based or desktop client. And, for some icing on the cake, it handles the registration process really well...I registered the software on my computer, and the next time I used the app on my phone, it magically figured out I had paid for the software. Nice. (At this point I've almost totally forgotten about the exclamation point.)

Thus far, I've accessed data from Cork'd and Stikkit on my phone, and I would definitely rig something up for Backpack, except there's already a mobile version, saving me the trouble. Less work is always a plus in my book.

The other day I was creating a text message on my RAZR using T9 and keying in the sequence 4 7 generated the likely result gr instead of is.

WTF.

In an odd psychic moment, I blogged about a nifty, free browser for J2ME cell phones, Opera Mini, a few days before a big update to the software. (Opera Mini is now at 1.2, whereas I think it was at 1.0 a week and a half ago.)

Right off the bat, I don’t see any difference except the startup screen, but I think the changes are under the hood. According to the Opera web site, the earlier version was for Europe or Scandanavia only. It seemed to work fine for me when I first tried it, but, oddly, I started having trouble a week or so later. There was a “network error” of some kind and my “browsing experience” would be “limited.” Limited in the sense of No page loads for you!

So, long story short, I decided to upgrade. Everything’s been good so far, but I was not happy about having to re-set up my browser bookmarks. (Typing URLs into a phone is no fun.) But, it works, so that’s what counts.

In short: Opera Mini 1.2…thumbs up.

Overall, I’ve been quite happy with my black Moto RAZR. It’s small, gets good reception, and syncs with my Mac. Unfortunately, the built-in browser sucks. Really bad. Like, it doesn’t really work at all.

Well, I take that back…it renders the default Cingular start page without a problem. However, when I try to go most any another URL, I get an error message saying something like Page could not be displayed: Invalid Response. Apparently the rest of the entire Internet is broken. To add insult to injury, the error message is displayed in that ugly-ass Motorola cell phone font.

Opera to the rescue…or, rather, Opera Mini. Opera Mini is a downloadable J2ME browser that kicks the crap out of the built-in browser, and only needs 97K of space. To get it, just go to http://mini.opera.com in the regular browser and you should be prompted to download.

After the download/install, you may have trouble finding the app. On the RAZR all Java downloads are filed under Games...apparently, that’s somewhat common. (Don’t ask.) You should be set to browse to your heart’s content.

But here’s the best part: no more ugly-ass Motorola cell phone font! Opera Mini has a font smoothing option which makes the mini-web look much nicer. Somewhat smaller, but much nicer.

Let me add additional nuance by rephrasing: The number keys on my cell phone take up way too much space considering I almost never dial an actual number. I mean, doesn’t everyone just store their numbers in the phone’s memory and dial from there?

I first had the idea for this post a few months ago, when I was out and about and away from a computer. I tried to look something up using the browser on my cell phone and realized the keypad on the phone was not well suited for this at all. But, simultaneously, it’s not even that well suited for the way most people use their phones nowadays.

Interestingly, phone manufacturers have seemed to realize this as well, some time ago, but they didn’t put much marketing oomph behind the resulting products. The Motorola MPx, despite being a bit unwieldy, was a flip phone that opened along two different edges and had a QWERTY-style keyboard. Its launch was scrapped for unclear reasons.

Nokia is guilty as well. They had a line of “fashion” phones (which seems to have disappeared from their web site), one of which had no traditional keyboard at all. The new 7380 seems to be a successor of sorts for that, but it’s not compatible with U.S. cell phone networks.

The good news is that this may be coming back into vogue. Motorola announced they’re putting a Google key on their upcoming phones for one-touch access to Google. This is at least a step in the right direction.

I’m sure it’s too much to ask for Apple to come out with an ultraslick cell phone, but I can dream.

I’ll admit the title is a little sensationalistic, but ya gotta reel ‘em in. Anyway, I saw in Wired magazine that during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina different parts of the telecom infrastructure proved to have different levels of resiliency. (The power went out, radio stayed up, etc.)

So, here’s the tip: if you’re stuck in a disaster area and you want to let people know you’re OK (or that you need help), send them an SMS. They put much less demand on the cell towers and network and are much more likely to get delivered. In contrast, most voice calls did not go through.

Hopefully, you will never need to use this knowledge, but it caught my eye: a good friend spent some time in the Gulf helping to coordinate rebuilding efforts.

Yesterday, Google bestowed upon us Google Local for Mobile, which, to oversimplify, allows you to access Google Maps (now re-launched as Google Local) on your Java-enabled cell phone. The whizbang feature is that you can view the actual, graphical map, zoom in and out, and so forth.

Oddly enough, I had occasion to use it yesterday, as I found myself in downtown Chicago unsure of which direction to go. So, this (to quote Ebert & Roeper) is an early review.

To avoid keeping you waiting, overall I give it a mild thumbs-up. It does a pretty darn good job of recreating what Google Local provides given the limitations of a cell phone. The maps themselves look very nice on my RAZR, though I imagine if your phone has a crappy screen you may be unimpressed. Also, I had never installed any third-party software on my phone before and that process went very smoothly. (I do worry, however, that the concept of installing software on your phone will confuse some people.)

On the downside, it was not able to correctly map my address. This, suffice it to say, is not a trivial problem. I entered 651 w washington chicago il and that mapped to the address 651 Washington St. in West Chicago, IL. Bummer. I realized later that if I would have entered 651 w washington blvd chicago il it would have given me the info I needed. Alas, it did not save the day, and we were forced to whip out a laptop and snarf an open WiFi connection to get our bearings.

So, a word to the wise…be as specific as you can with the address and you’ll be better off. Or plan ahead and don’t forget the frickin’ directions next time before you get on the train.

Last weekend I spent a lovely couple of days away from it all enjoying the fall colors in Door County. And when I say “away from it all,” I’m not exaggerating…no Internet access and not even a land line where we stayed. Fortunately, I had pretty good cell coverage thanks to Cingular so this was the perfect opportunity to use the Net-enabled features of my RAZR.

Google SMS was the star of the show and didn’t let me down. Getting away from it all is nice but I’ve definitely taken for granted the ability to quickly look up a phone number or the weather forecast. Google SMS lets you do things like this via plain ol’ text messaging…send a message like weather green bay wi to the number GOOGL (46645) and in a minute or so Google will send you the Green Bay weather forecast in the form of a simple message. No “data plan” or fancy smartphone required.

I got the weather each morning and was even able to solve the nagging question of what a gaucho was by sending Google a quick define gaucho. In that example, you may receive more than one answer but it will indicate as much by including “1/3” (one of three), “2/3”, etc.

Gmail’s POP feature was not quite as satisfying. Starting with the good news, it worked great for sending mail, as I sent a few messages to myself to serve as simple reminders. It went downhill from there, unfortunately…when I tried to download my e-mail my phone was “Retrieving messages…” forever and eventually ran out of memory. I took a look at the messages it was able to get and it seems to have POPed off all mail sent or received since I enabled POP in my account (which was about a month ago). And, even worse, it apparently gets the oldest messages first so I had no hope of seeing recent “unread” stuff.

Looking at it more closely, Gmail seems to have no option to POP only what’s in the Inbox, which seems ridiculous. The best thing I can come up with is to go into my Gmail settings before I leave town the next time and enable the “only POP mail that arrives from now on” setting. This is a moving target, though, and I need to do this before every vacation or else I’m screwed.

Finally, here’s a fun bonus for reading all the way down to the bottom of this post: MC Hammer visits Google. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Please, Hammer…don’t hurt ‘em.”

Ba dum bum ching!