I was a happy user of AT&T GoPhone for the past three months. That ended today.

Up until November 12, AT&T provided unlimited monthly data service as a pay-as-you-go option for $19.99 per month. Once you bought this service, you could use either the 3G or EDGE wireless data networks.

I was gladly buying this service package each month because I was able to use the really fantastic JoikuSpot application to turn my Nokia E71 into a 3G-powered ad hoc WiFi access point that I carried in my pocket.

I guess enough bloggers talked about what a great deal the Go Phone monthly data service package was, because AT&T did away with this package on November 12. Some people in the blogosphere heard about this in early October, as evidenced by the article AT&T hangs up on unlimited data GoPhone option that appeared on jkOnTheRun.com. I missed it because, as you know, I've been really busy.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My latest post on O'Reilly's Inside iPhone is A Glimpse of Our Tethering Future where I recount my experiences working with a Nokia E71 and an application called JoikuSpot that turns the E71 into a 3G-powered ad hoc WiFi access point that you can carry in your pocket.

My use of the Nokia E71 is courtesy of the Nokia Blogger Relations Program.

After a solid week of 3G phone use with laptop (and iPhone) tethering, I've convinced myself that my concerns about iPhone battery consumption while running an application like Netshare from Nullriver are overblown. This can work and any increased battery use can be managed.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the aftermath of the iPhone 3G announcement last Monday, a lot of people who are considering purchasing an iPhone for the first time are looking for information about AT&T rate plans that cover the iPhone 3G.

I've had an iPhone for a year, so I am very familiar with AT&T's total charges. Although iPhone 3G rates will be structured similarly, there are a few increased charges.

At the end of this article, I estimate that my monthly charges for using an iPhone 3G will be about $86. That's up $15 to 17 dollars per month from what I pay today.

Read on for the rate details and my complete monthly service cost estimate....

Continue reading "iPhone 3G Rate Plan Estimated Monthly Costs: About $86 for 450 Minutes and Unlimited Data" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Over on The Apple Phone Show Blog, Liana Lehua suggested that iPhone fans buy a copy of .Mac from Amazon.com now in order to access MobileMe when it goes live in July. It looks like you'll save about $30 if you do this.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once iPhone 3G lands in customers' hands, I think AT&T is going to have some never-before-experienced issues with saturation of the backhaul supporting its mobile phone network infrastructure. A great example will be what happens at the Moscone Center next January when the Mac user community convenes for Macworld Expo 2009.

At yesterday's WWDC keynote, everybody was worried about the resiliency of services like Twitter and Yahoo! Live which people were using for live blogging. But the mobile data bandwidth needed to support the hundreds of iPhones in the room is a fraction of that which will be required for the iPhone 3Gs that will be present in the same place seven months from now.

I'm not the only one who thinks this is an issue. Over on Gigaom, Om Malik raised this issue in his article Is 3G Ready for the iPhone Stress Test?. Om said:

...With the 3G iPhone, there is little desire to wait for a Wi-Fi connection and hitting the high-speed 3G connection directly for whatever you want to do. It has happened to me: Once I got EVDO, I stopped looking for a hot spot to connect my Lenovo X300, which has a built-in Verizon connection... A flat-rate 3G data plan on iPhone would mean that the usage would start to shift from Wi-Fi to 3G...

Most of the problem, if any, will crop up at the backhaul level. At present, the current 3G networks have a backhaul capacity of between 10-to-15 megabits per second, which is enough for the very short term, but it could become a big issue as more and more 3G iPhones and other new 3G phones go online....

There are some excellent charts in that article that illustrate the potential problems, and compare the per user bandwidth use of EDGE, UMTS, the three flavors of HSDPA (which is what AT&T is calling 3G), and something called LTE which supposedly supports 100 Mbps.

If AT&T has 10 to 15 Mbps backhaul capacity in most places that are 3G capable right now, I'm guessing that 20 concurrent iPhone 3G users consuming an average of 500 kbps could make the wireless data service appear sluggish to everybody using it including iPhone EDGE users, BlackBerry users, and data card users. Not everybody will use the network that intensely, but I'm convinced that quite a few people will find a way to do it.

See the problem? Let me know if you think I'm off base.

The places I think that are going to see this stress first are:

• Sports arenas, stadiums, and other venues where public events take place in a confined area,
• Shopping malls and shopping centers designed to look like traditional downtown areas,
• Office buildings,
• Certain neighborhoods in cities where lots of technologically savvy people live or work.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the things that I was wondering when watching Steve Jobs' keynote at the Apple WWDC yesterday was, "How much will AT&T charge me for data if I upgrade from my current iPhone?"

Note to Readers: This article is about the rates AT&T will charge for data service on the iPhone 3G. If you need a total monthly service estimate, look at iPhone 3G Rate Plan Estimated Monthly Costs.

At first it appeared that the data plan price would increase from $20 to $30 per month. That's what AT&T plans to charge iPhone customers for unlimited 3G data. However, I subsequently read Om Malik's interview with Ralph de la Vega, the president and CEO of AT&T Mobility. What de la Vega said in this interview made me revise my monthly data plan price estimate from $30 to $35 per month:

Has there been a change in the cost of data plans?

The data plans are different on the 3G iPhone vs. the 2G iPhone. Consumers will pay $30 a month every month, while enterprises will pay $45 a month. This is what you pay us on other PDA devices such as BlackBerry Curve. The SMS messages are not bundled anymore, and you pay for what you want. Again, the prices are based on what you buy.

Continue reading "The iPhone 3G Rate Plan for Data is Probably $35 Per Month If You Still Want 200 SMS Messages" »

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Before I hit the hay on Friday night, I want to point out Jonathan Greene's blog article Nokia N78 - Feature Pack 2 and plenty to love. This is a great first look at the newest N-Series phone and includes a nearly 20 minute long video of him putting the N78 through its paces.

He has a lot deeper knowledge of the Nokia N-Series handset line than I do. I can tell this because he talks in depth about the new features in the N78 that stem from Symbian S60 Feature Pack 2. He explains that the software is more user-friendly than that which has been included on phones like the N95. He's right.

He also points out correctly that the N95 is intended for a technology-savvy person, while the N78 is aimed at someone who wants many of the same features but with fewer controls and complex options.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning I received a Nokia N78 as part of my participation in the Nokia Blogger Relations Program. I just posted a bunch of photos of unboxing the N78 to Flickr.

See more of my Nokia N78 Unboxing Photos on Flickr.
[ Photo: Dave Aiello. ]

Some of the Nokia N78's big features are a 3.2-megapixel main camera with a Carl Zeiss lens, 2 Gigabytes of microSD memory, and a free three-month subscription to Nokia's voice-guided GPS navigation system.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Operation Gadget Films is pleased to present Jimmy's Snowy Day starring my two-year-old son Jimmy Aiello in his streaming video debut. This short film (2 minutes and 40 seconds) was shot on February 22, 2008, near our home in Newtown, PA.

This movie was shot with a Nokia N95 mobile phone, one of the best small standard-definition video cameras I've ever seen. It produces 640x480 video at 30 frames per second, which makes it great for home movies like this. I received this phone courtesy of the Nokia Blogger Relations program. This is the first movie I've ever shot with it that I've shown to the public.

I edited the movie using iPhoto '08, part of the Apple iLife '08 package that I got for free when I bought my MacBook Pro in March. It took me a while to start making movies using iMovie '08, but I now have an large amount of video from the Nokia N95 and this is the third finished movie that I've produced.

Continue reading "Debut of "Jimmy's Snowy Day," a Short Film Shot on the Nokia N95 and Edited with iMovie '08" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The BlueLounge SpaceStation is a desk organizer for laptop users that acts as a USB hub for all peripheral devices.

BlueLounge SpaceStation [ Photo courtesy of the manufacturer. ]

The photo I've chosen shows the bottom of the SpaceStation. The rubber feet set the SpaceStation 5mm above the surface of the desk. This allows the USB cables to pass underneath the organizer where they can be coiled and connected to the USB hub.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• For the Phinney Family, a Dream and a Challenge on NYTimes.com: This story came out last week, right before Taylor Phinney raced in the Individual Pursuits at the Track Cycling World Championships. Taylor finished eighth. His father, Davis, is a legendary U.S. cycling champ who has struggled with Parkinson's Disease in recent years. This article summarizes their recent struggles and successes.
• ScreenFlow: The Killer Screencasting App on MacTips: "ScreenFlow is the application I've been waiting for on the Mac. I've been using it recently for the MacTips Videos and I love it! It's saves me so much time because I'm able to focus on creating valuable content rather than editing videos."
• Dash’s Car Navigator Gives Smart Directions, if Others Participate, Walt Mossberg on AllThingsD: "As smart as in-car navigation devices are, they could be smarter. They could talk to each other via the Internet and share information on how fast traffic is moving on the roads they have just traveled.... Starting this week, just such a smarter navigation box is hitting the market. Called the Dash Express, this $400 product looks a lot like units from better-known firms... But, unlike any other in-car navigation device I’ve seen, each Dash Express... becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. "
• Windows XP: Going, going ... gone? on Computerworld: "The approaching death of Windows XP may upset you, but it shouldn't come as a surprise. Microsoft Corp.'s product life-cycle guidelines have foretold the fate of XP since 2001. In fact, Microsoft has been killing off one version of a product as it is replaced with another for years now. But this time around, the approaching demise of XP is getting more attention than, say, the final passing of Windows 2000."
• Coming Soon to a Phone Near You on WSJ.com: This article summarizes forthcoming developments in mobile phone voice control, improved web browsers, enhanced storage, and video sharing. [ Subscription may be required to read this article. ]
• How To Use Nokia’s Sports Tracker as a Photo Tracker on The Gadgets Page: "Ms. Jen was part of Nokia’s Urbanista Diaries Relay, which means they sent her to India to promote the Nokia N82 in all its glory. While on the trip, she realized how well the Sports Tracker (a typically exercise related feature) could be used to track the geo-locations of your photos"
• Note to readers: Today would be my grandfather James M. Lynch, Jr.'s 95th birthday. He died in 1982. He is one of the inspirations for this site, since he bought and tried every important electronic gadget that existed in the 1970s. He owned the first digital watch, desktop calculator, and personal computers I ever saw.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Topeak Mini 6 on CoolTools: "This incredibly compact, bike-oriented multi-tool has five different sizes of Allen wrench plus a Phillips screwdriver head, all of which folds up into a little pod about the size of a walnut. Sometimes I'll carry it in my pocket or toss it in shoulder bag; mostly I keep it in the under-seat pouch of my bike. It really comes in handy for quick adjustments...."
• Tapping Your TiVo's Hidden Talents on The Mossberg Solution in the WSJ: "... like any old friend -- or spouse -- who has been around for a while, TiVo has a few tricks up its sleeve that might surprise longtime users and new owners alike. This column includes just a handful of those tricks and highlights some features that may make TiVo more useful. These tips are for everyday users, not serious hackers, and many others exist."
• 1Password. It’s All I Need…And This Remote. on Apple Phone Show: "If there is anything I love more than software that works, it’s software that helps me save time and having to type on my iPhone’s keyboard. This is especially significant when having to type my uber-strong passwords into a login password field. I’ve been using 1Password since Macworld, and I really find it helpful...."

• iPhone SDK, Apple's Touch Platform, and The Next Two Decades on 37signals Signal versus Noise: "What we saw today {at the iPhone Software Roadmap Event} was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth."

  "What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile...."



• Behind the scenes of the old school HBO intro, a video on YouTube noted on 37signals Signal versus Noise: If you have time to watch any of this 11-minute video produced by HBO about the filming of an introductory film clip that HBO used as a lead in to a feature film presentation, you will be amazed at the amount of time put into building scale models of a city, town, and countryside. Yes this was state-of-the art technology in 1982. But think of how differently it would be done today.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first book I bought to try to get new ideas on how I could better leverage my iPhone as a multimedia Swiss Army Knife was iPhone Fully Loaded by Andy Ihnatko. I have been really impressed by this book because it has some really excellent tips and techniques that go beyond many of the ideas I've seen discussed on iPhone-related blogs and websites.

Andy Ihnatko is a freelance journalist who writes a technology column in The Chicago Sun Times and appears regularly on The Early Show on CBS. He hit my radar screen through his regular gigs on The Apple Phone Show and MacBreak Weekly podcasts. Some of the concepts he discussed on those programs, such as using Smart Playlists to fill your iPhone with a constant amount of music that you like but haven't listened to recently (mentioned previously on Operation Gadget), and using Handbrake to convert chapters of DVDs that you own to clips that are playable on your iPhone, are prominently featured in this book. However, there are a lot more ideas that go far deeper into Mac and PC technology to pull together content that you have access to, package it in a form that's storable on your iPhone or iPod touch, and get it transferred on to your device.

There are also ideas that didn't appeal to me personally, but were interesting to read about from a general knowledge perspective. Andy is a big fan of comic books, so he includes an entire chapter on finding comics on the Internet and transmogrifying for your iPhone. He also talks about extensively about electronics and software that can be used to record radio programs for later playback on your iPhone. I used to listen to a great deal of radio myself, so this is interesting to me, but podcasts have largely replaced my radio listening habit since I got my iPhone, and I can barely keep up with the podcasts that I'm subscribed to now.

There are a number of other good iPhone-related books, such as The iPhone Pocket Guide by Chris Breen of MacWorld Magazine, but few are as jam-packed with ideas for filling your iPhone with content as iPhone Fully Loaded. This book always seems to be sitting near my MacBook Pro, and I think it will stay there for some time.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was introduced to Truphone several months ago as a result of being part of the Nokia Blogger Relations program. Truphone makes it incredibly easy to use the WiFi feature of Nokia N-Series handsets like the Nokia N95 to make VoIP calls.

Today Truphone announced some new calling plans that provide cost certainty when making international calls. The Tru Zone is a group of 40 countries that you can call via Truphone for:

• $0.06 per minute to landlines
• $0.30 per minute to mobiles
• $0.20 per SMS message
• $0.00 for Truphone to Truphone calls

These are huge savings compared to making mobile phone calls to international numbers. I don't really know what the cost of doing this with my iPhone is, but the rates aren't anything close to this. A release from Truphone compared their prices with the Verizon Wireless prices on calls to Germany, and Truphone would save you $1.43 to $1.65 per minute!

I've been experimenting with Truphone over the past few months, calling landlines of friends and relatives in the United States. No one has ever told me that there was any clarity problem or glitch on the calls I've made. The only questions I've gotten are from people who have Caller ID who don't recognize the number I'm calling from.

I'll have to call my friend Ramona in Switzerland to see how good Truphone calls sound internationally. The only issue with that is Switzerland isn't part of the Tru Zone. No worries for me, however. The rate to Switzerland is $0.10 per minute to a landline and $0.50 per minute to a mobile. What a deal.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I used to love Palm Treo personal communicators like the Treo 755p. My wife and I had his and hers Treo 650s until June when I bought my iPhone.

However in 2008, I cannot recommend a Treo in good conscience to anyone who does not work in an industry where Palm or Windows Mobile applications are a work necessity (see Handhelds from Palm Still Make Sense in Medicine as an example).

I want to take a moment to salute Jamie Ledino of PC Magazine for telling readers in no uncertain terms to avoid buying the Treo 755p:

It's been eight months since Palm released the mildly updated Sprint Treo 755p. Now Palm and Verizon are selling the same two-year-old phone and even pricing it like a new handset. The 755p has plenty of virtues, which I'll get to in a moment. But look at all of the contemporary features this allegedly new-for-2008 smartphone is missing: multitasking, GPS, mobile TV, stereo Bluetooth for music, a light-sensing display, voice dialing over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi—and the list goes on....

In the end, Palm and its partners Verizon Wireless and Sprint are pricing this phone similar to state-of-the-art smartphones. You can't just say that the Treo 755p is a stable but feature-poor smartphone. The PalmOS isn't in the same league with any of the current versions of competing smartphone operating systems except in terms of selection of third party applications. Palm should focus on Windows Mobile devices until its next generation PalmOS is ready. (According to what I read, that's first quarter of 2009!)

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I expected to be wowed by Steve Jobs' 2008 MacWorld Expo Keynote a lot more than I actually was. However, I was doing other things while the event was going on (real work), and the products that I was most interested in (mainstream Mac laptops) didn't get addressed in this keynote at all.

Bummer for me. I could have bought my MacBook Pro two weeks ago if I had known that the Penryn upgrade wasn't immediately forthcoming.

Here are my comments on the other aspects of the keynote:

• iTunes Movie Rentals / AppleTV Take 2: Clearly the announcement with the most business disruption potential. I agree with one of the commentators on MacBreak Weekly who suggested that Apple is making a play to be the digital media hub in the house, usurping services like Netflix, as well as Television services providers such as Comcast and Verizon FiOS.
• MacBook Air: This is a machine aimed at people who travel a lot or who want a portable machine that is a shadow of their desktop Mac. I could see some very well off Mac users owning the big iMac and a MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is incredibly thin. It's hard to believe a machine with a laptop-like display and keyboard could be any thinner than this and still be usable.

• Time Capsule: This is an interesting extension to the AirPort wireless base station line. Time Capsule is an AirPort Extreme with a 500G or 1T hard disk in it, functioning as Network Attached Storage (NAS).

  My first reaction was, "Bummer. Kathleen just bought me the AirPort Extreme." But then I realized that I would prefer NAS that used RAID 1 or RAID 5 storage anyway. It also costs more than we want to spend on network appliances at this point.



• iPhone 1.1.3 Update: There's some good stuff here. I loaded it on my iPhone already. The cell tower triangulation in the Maps application works pretty well. That feature makes the iPhone version of RinkAtlas viable. Expect an announcement from me on that front soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

• Bills return to Buffalo by bus after loss in Cleveland, The Associated Press on ESPN.com: "Mother Nature sure had it in for the Buffalo Bills this weekend."

  "Bad enough that a blizzard contributed to Buffalo's loss at Cleveland on Sunday, ending the team's playoff chances. Then, following an unscheduled overnight stay because of bad weather, the Bills were forced to bus home Monday after their charter plane got stuck in mud off a runway in Cleveland...." [ Thanks Julie Howson ]



• Who's #1? on ESPN.com: ESPN Classic's "Who's Number One" show will be running down the most important technological advances in sports on ESPN Classic, 10:00pm ET, Dec. 19, 2007. This is definitely something I'll have to TiVo if I can't watch it live.


• Why Wireless Isn't Wide Open on BusinessWeek.com: "Even as the wireless industry chants a new gospel about opening mobile-phone networks to outside devices and applications, some of the biggest U.S. carriers are quietly blocking new services that would compete with their own...." [ via Andy Abramson on VoIP Watch ]


• Canadian surprised by $85,000 cell bill on SeattleTimes.NWsource.com: "Piotr Staniaszek normally pays $147 a month for his cell phone. So he was more than a little surprised to learn his November bill had ballooned to $59,000. And then it got worse. When he called to inquire about the high figure, he was told that his bill this month was $83,000." [ Thanks Martin O'Donnell ]



• Verizon FiOS with only a Apple Airport Extreme {sic} on Elecktronkind.org: Excellent article on the things you need to do to replace the ActionTec router that Verizon provides to most FiOS users with an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station. Something we hope to do in The Home Office in Newtown sometime after Christmas.

  One key fact to note from this article: You do need to keep the ActionTec router on the network if you have Verizon's digital cable service that's delivered over FiOS. Hopefully we can turn off the wireless capability of the ActionTec and put the AirPort Extreme Base Station behind it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Nokia Blogger Relations Program sent me a Nokia N81 8GB mobile phone on Thursday. This is a sharp-looking, piano black mobile phone with a screen that's about two-thirds the size of the iPhone. It's got a slide that exposes a standard Nokia 12-button keypad.

I'll try to publish a photo when I can find one or when I have time to take a reasonable photo myself.

The new features that I've found on the N81 8GB so far are the Multimedia Menu which provides a new navigation method to access multimedia content on the device, and support for N-Gage gaming including some special keys that are designed to make the gaming experience better.

The N81 8GB looks like a device centered around music, video playback, and gaming. It's less full featured in terms of still and video capture than the N95 and N93 that I've discussed previously. The camera on the N81 8GB has good dedicated controls, but "only" a 2-megapixel image sensor and no apparent zoom during video capture.

More on the multimedia capabilities of this phone in coming days.

I am so far in front of the U.S. launch of the N81 8GB that the N-Gage gaming site intended to support it hasn't launched yet. The site says it will launch in December, so I hope it will be ready within a couple of weeks.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I solved the syncing problem that had limited Kathleen's ability to use her Treo 650 with her new MacBook. I owe a lot of credit to the book Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition, which explained the details of the interaction between Palm Desktop for the Mac OS and iSync.

During the process of getting the Treo and the MacBook talking, I got another chance to play with ePocrates-- the medical software designed for PalmOS and Windows Mobile PDAs. ePocrates is a great set of vertical market software and services. ePocrates Rx makes my wife's job (as a pediatrician) lot easier. The key feature of it is dosing recommendations and drug interactions on over 3,000 commonly prescribed drugs.

These reference materials really need to be at a physician's fingertips when they move between exam rooms. There is a huge value to having this information physically stored on the PDA in hand. No doctor wants to slow the visit down to look up drug information via the wireless web.

This was the big reason why I said "no" when someone at work asked me, "Is your wife going to get an iPhone like yours?"

Just like I don't need a large quantity of reference information permanently stored on my iPhone, she doesn't need a high fidelity web experience in her pocket in order to do her job. At one time we had "his and hers" Treos, and everyone thought this was cute. However, now our needs are best met by two different devices.

I'm sure that there are other vertical markets where an iPhone SDK and locally-installed software will be needed before there is significant iPhone penetration. However, I think medicine is one of the biggest ones.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm glad to hear that Apple sold its one millionth iPhone today. I think the $200 price cut will put holiday sales on the trajectory where Apple needs them to be in order to achieve the goal of 10 million iPhones in the first year on the market.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back on January 10, I asked Is OS X the Key Component of the Apple iPhone? The first point I made in that article was about multitasking:

Elegantly-implemented multitasking on a handheld device: Windows Mobile handhelds have this capability already, but none devices I've seen have a UI that comes close to what Jobs demonstrated. Treo handhelds from Palm running the PalmOS don't do multitasking at all. It isn't clear to me whether RIM or Nokia have true multitasking OSes on their smartphones, and I've used both quite extensively.

I'm pointing this out for two reasons:

1. I've got an iPhone, and I'm more impressed with the multitasking capabilities of the iPhone after actually using it.
2. Marc Hedlund from O'Reilly Radar brought up multitasking on the iPhone last week as a "new-ish" thought about the iPhone. I'm not sure it qualifies as a newish thought anymore.

I think Hedlund's article is very insightful for some of the other points he makes. He compares the iPhone to several of the Treo's best features, and tells why the iPhone comes out pretty favorably. He's saying a lot of things that I haven't had time to say, probably better than I would have said them.

The only thing he doesn't mention that I think is a significant advantage to using an iPhone instead of a Treo is the $20+ discount you get on "unlimited" wireless data plans that AT&T gave me when I switched from my Treo 650 to the iPhone. I kid you not.

I think AT&T offers less expensive data plans for the iPhone because they realize that the iPhone will be in the hands of more individuals who pay their own mobile phone bills. These people will have a harder time expensing the monthly wireless bill than the average Treo or Blackberry user. That's my theory anyway.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the summary of my iPhone activation experience:

• 4:00am Saturday (Eastern Time): Finally began activation process using iTunes after a long delay while installing Windows XP Professional on my PC.
• 4:30am Saturday: Received email from Apple, "AT&T is now processing your activation."
• 3:36pm Saturday: Received email from AT&T, "Thank you for your recent purchase."
• 9:36pm Saturday: Received email from Apple, "Activation Complete."

The iPhone was fully operational at that point.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was possible to buy either iPhone model last night in Central New Jersey.

My iPhone moments after I purchased it at the
Freehold, NJ Apple Store on June 29. See more
photos of my iPhone in my Flickr photostream.

I bought mine at the Apple Store at the Freehold Raceway Mall in Freehold, NJ about 7:45pm. The Apple Store appeared to have plenty of stock at that time. That didn't surprise me because I had read that the 140+ Apple Stores around the country would be staying open until midnight. Why would Apple bother doing that if they thought that they would sell out at most of their locations?

First Stop: A Sold Out AT&T Store

Before I went to the Apple in Freehold, I drove to the AT&T Store in West Windsor, NJ. This is a small store that I thought might not attract a huge line. I have no idea how many people were in line before 6:00pm, but when I arrived there at approximately 6:25, the store was already sold out.

What blew my mind was the number of people who stayed in line after the store manager announced that they were sold out. (I had just arrived when he made this announcement.) He told the people in line that they were welcome to stay and his staff would take orders from them. Many of the people were staying in their place in the line when I hit the road for Freehold.

Continue reading "I Got My iPhone Yesterday, Maybe It Will Work Today" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Let's face a few of facts:

1. A lot of media outlets are going to publish articles designed to provoke FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) in the hearts of iPhone fans.
2. This is going to continue and grow in intensity up to and beyond June 29.
3. The motives for publishing this type of article are not all evil.

A great example of an article that spreads FUD but isn't entirely evil is the article called Companies Hang Up on Apple's iPhone published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. This article claims that Apple is working to integrate the the iPhone into corporate email systems because IT management says that the iPhone isn't compatible with corporate email systems.

The truth of the matter is a bit different.

The Journal article pretty much says that the corporate email systems they are talking about are based on Microsoft Exchange. Exchange has the ability to support both IMAP and POP3 protocols, but support for these protocols was turned off by default in Windows 2003. Since a lot of people in corporate IT departments know little about non-Microsoft-centric infrastructures, many of them probably concluded that IMAP and POP3 are inherent security risks.

I sincerely doubt that Apple will make any attempt to integrate the iPhone by adding support for Good, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, or any other middleware that's been blessed by the CIOs of major companies. This is because the iPhone is aimed at individuals, not corporate users. Making the iPhone acceptable to many corporate IT groups would require too much variation in terms of the hardware configuration and the software feature set.

John Gruber from Daring Fireball wrote a great piece that makes many of these same points. His coverage on that website of the reaction to this Wall Street Journal article is well worth reading.

When you read articles like this one that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, consider the writer's perspective. The writers of this article are general business reporters that sometimes cover the technology industry. This article wasn't written by someone at the WSJ like Walter Mossberg who has a complete picture of technology products and how to use them productively. General business writers don't write about how to solve problems, they point out potential problems.

There are still a lot of questions about the iPhone's real world capabilities. The ability to seemlessly integrate with Microsoft Exchange isn't one of them. If all the other usability and performance issues that may limit the iPhone's usefulness turn out to be non-issues, working around the limitations of Exchange will be well documented because thousands of iPhone owners will develop workarounds for every conceivable Exchange configuration. [ Paid subscription required to read most articles in The Wall Street Journal. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm pleased to report that I'm finally putting the Nokia N95 through its paces. The Nokia Blogger Relations program sent me an N95 several weeks ago. I had just started a major new project at work, so I wasn't able to do much with it. Then I found I needed a MicroSD memory card and a firmware upgrade before the phone would do very much, and that delayed things even further.

I love the feel of this phone in my hand. It reminds me of an analog Nokia handset I had years ago that was a predecessor to the Nokia 8801. I loved that old phone for the clean, minimalist look. It was a great little phone with excellent reception in its time. The N95 has a similar look, but the entire front of the handset is taken up by a large color screen and a virtual compass rose of navigation buttons.

The best features I've found so far in the N95 are the 5 Megapixel digital camera that also shoots video at 30 frames per second, and the high quality sound that it produces. Music played over the stereo speakers on the N95 sounds great.

I'm just getting into testing this phone, but I already see some stability issues with Nokia Maps, the application that Nokia includes on the N95 so you can use its built-in GPS features. Even after I did a firmware upgrade on my N95 handset, Maps crashed the phone repeatedly. I'll have to talk to some people at Nokia to find out if I'm doing something wrong that's making this happen.

When Nokia Maps works for me, it works well. I used it to generate driving directions between my home and an office in Jamesburg, NJ. The directions it produced were accurate, but the distances were expressed in meters and kilometers. I was able to use the GPS to display my current location on the phone's gorgeous color screen as I drove through Friday morning traffic for about 45 minutes.

I downloaded Nokia's Podcasting application which actually allows you to listen to podcasts rather than produce them. I think the name of the program is a bit confusing in that respect. The phone has had a few issues when trying to download entire podcasts over the Cingular / AT&T wireless data network called MEdiaNet.

The podcasting application worked infinitely better when it was downloading content over the WiFi network at The Home Office. So, there's my first recommendation-- use WiFi for data intensive tasks on the N95 if data-driven apps are flaky on wireless data networks.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the N95 in the near future. I'm doing my best to use the heck out of it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In yesterday's Loose Wire column in The Wall Street Journal, Jeremy Wagstaff reported some really interesting statistics about mobile phone usage patterns that he got from researchers at Nokia. According to the article, which is unfortunately only available to subscribers:

• 30% of people who carry their mobile phones in a pants pocket fail to answer some or all of their incoming calls
• 61% of women carry their mobile phones in a handbag or some other bag that they carry
• about half of women who carry their phones in a bag "regularly miss incoming calls" because the call isn't noticed or the phone can't be found before the call goes to voicemail
• belt pouches and phone straps are options used by a minority of men and women to avoid missing calls

I don't think I call any women who regularly miss incoming calls because their phone is burined in the main pocket of a handbag. If I had run into that problem in the past, I probably would have stopped calling the people involved. I'd rather send an email or a text message if I know I'm going to have to leave a message anyway.

My wife Kathleen has a good way of handling the phone in the bag issue when she is out with our son Jimmy: she always puts her Treo 650 in the same outside pocket of the baby bag. I've had to grab her phone a few times when she is on-call, and I've been able to answer before the call goes to voicemail.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AkihabaraNews.com reports that several Chinese companies showed iPhone cases and other accessories at the Spring edition of the Hong Kong Electronics and Computer Fair. The show just ended on Tuesday in Hong Kong.

Too bad we couldn't all be there, because Hong Kong is a great city [ via Amazon.com Daily Blog ].

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Taking a look at all of the recent articles on hacking AppleTV that are appearing on technology-related blogs and forums:

• Streaming from URLs on Apple TV
• Apple's not fighting back against Apple TV hacks
• We just got xvid working on the Apple TV

(to name a few)... I'm starting to wonder if there's hope for the same kind of laissez-faire attitude from Apple toward hacking the iPhone.

I've never really believed that the iPhone will be as much of a walled garden as Steve Jobs indicated in his post-keynote comments. I think the process of getting third party apps on to the first generation iPhone will be convoluted, but it will be possible in some form or fashion. Someone will get ssh running on it. Someone will get a third-party Dashboard widget to load on it.

When this happens, the vanguard of the iPhone users will go to the trouble of learning how to do it, and that will be the way that people make their iPhones unique.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen and I are both Treo 650 users, and we often need access to each other's calendars so we can see whether we can plan another event for a day in the near future. As good as the Palm Calendar is, it has never been able to show another person's appointments as well as your own.

I realized a long time ago that the solution to this problem might be something like Google Calendar, but the problem was that I couldn't figure out how to keep a Palm Calendar in sync with a Google Calendar.

This week I solved the problem with GooSync from a British firm called Toffa. Toffa makes a whole line of application synchronization products such as SyncWise Entrerprise for mobile devices that need to sync to a Novell GroupWise environement, so they aren't novices in building synchronization tools.

The key features of GooSync are that it works with so many handheld devices, and it provides over-the-air synchronization. It works natively with many mobile phones from Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, SonyEricsson, and about six other manufacturers. You can use GooSync with Palm OS and Windows Mobile handhelds as well, but they require small SyncML client applications that are downloadable from the GooSync website.

Engadget Mobile first mentioned GooSync back in November and at that time there were several bugs and issues in the synchronization process that were show-stoppers for some people. Many of these issues have been tracked on the GooSync page on Squidoo and they've been addressed by the GooSync folks.

Alternatives to GooSync are CompanionLink for Google Calendar which costs $29.95 and doesn't appear to sync over-the-air, and GcalSync which is Open Source but requires Java on the handheld at the MIDP 2.0 and JSR 75 level. Lots of phones support that, but GcalSync would probably be slow on the Treo 650 if it worked at all.

GooSync is available for free if you are OK with syncing to a single Google Calendar and only syncing the events that are scheduled within a seven-day window in the past and a 30-day window in the future. If you want multiple calendar support and a 365-day sync window, you need to buy an annual subscription at £19.95. Refer to the GooSync Account Options page for more information.

I think the free GooSync service will be fine for me right now. It will also enable me to use some of my Nokia N-Series handsets more easily, since I will be able to bring my calendar with me as long as I connect to GooSync whenever I switch devices.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple iPhone: Probably the most
controversial integrated communication
device ever announced. [ Photo:
Apple Inc. ]

Operation Gadget is probably the last gadget blog on the planet to report that Apple Inc. announced the iPhone on Tuesday at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. We weren't there, but I did take the time to watch a video stream of Steve Jobs' entire keynote, and I'd like to make a few comments about what I saw.

I think the most under-reported aspect of the announcement is Jobs' revelation that the iPhone will run Mac OS X natively. This is a huge development because it will clear the way for:

• Elegantly-implemented multitasking on a handheld device: Windows Mobile handhelds have this capability already, but none devices I've seen have a UI that comes close to what Jobs demonstrated. Treo handhelds from Palm running the PalmOS don't do multitasking at all. It isn't clear to me whether RIM or Nokia have true multitasking OSes on their smartphones, and I've used both quite extensively.

• Widespread deployment of OS X Dashboard Widgets: By making Dashboard Widgets an integral part of the iPhone UI, Apple may have changed the balance of power in this rapidly expanding area of software development.

  A lot of developers have been creating HTML-based widgets for deployment to weblogs and similar types of sites on the Internet. For my RinkAtlas website, I've built rink information and search widgets that are syndicated through Widgetbox.com. Now I'm seriously investigating what it would take to implement similar widgets for the Mac OS X Dashboard. I think other developers will do the same.



• "High fidelity" handheld access to virtually all Internet sites: The inclusion of Safari on the iPhone is probably the single biggest boost to mobile use of the Internet since the development of the GPRS wireless data standard. Shipment of Safari on the iPhone device will coincide with a negative inflection point for more limited browsers in the marketplace. Yes, there will continue to be a need for browsers like Opera Mobile and The Blazer Web Browser such as the version that appears on my Treo 650, but these browsers will probably no longer be sufficient for high end handheld devices.

Continue reading "Is OS X the Key Component of the Apple iPhone?" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Beginning with Thanksgiving, Kathleen and I have been using a Nokia N93 mobile phone to shoot DVD-quality video at family get togethers. People are shocked when they see the quality of the movies we can make with this phone.

Conversations with some of our more gadget-savvy friends sometimes continue with the question, "But what else can that phone do?" After I say, "You mean you want more than a great phone that doubles as an incredibly compact digital video camera?", I tell them about how the N93 is the ultimate entertainment device for my son Jimmy.

Jimmy is our seven month old son. He likes to listen to songs from the CD Walt Disney Records : Children's Favorite Songs, Volume 1. These are songs like "I've Been Working On The Railroad" and "Old MacDonald".

The Nokia N93 and most of the other Nokia N-Series multimedia phones I've tested have extremely high-quality speakers built into them. The Nokia Music Player application and the speaker on the N93 allow me to play Jimmy's tunes, wherever we are, at a moments notice. I play his songs for him on the N93 when we are taking walks with his stroller or with him in the BabyBjorn baby carrier. I turn on his music when we're in the car and he doesn't like any of the songs currently playing on the radio. I play the music for him sometimes when we are shopping in home improvement stores like Lowe's or BJ's Wholesale Club.

Like every other gadget freak in the universe, I have an iPod and I have the right accessories for it. The problems with using the iPod in this case are:

• I need accessories to play music that someone else can hear, and I often need different accessories depending on the situation.
• I can't imagine using earphones with a child under age five or six.
• I don't want to have to put an iPod and several accessories into the baby bag that I carry when I'm out with Jimmy by myself or with Kathleen.

This makes the Nokia N93 or any of the N-Series phones the best music player I've found for use with babies and other young children. It's significantly more practical for me than an iPod in this case, or even a portable CD player with built-in speakers. I never would have imagined that I would be recommending a solution like this until I got a Nokia N-Series phone and tried it.

Technorati Tags: Nokia N93, N-Series, MP3, multimedia handsets, mobile phones

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Kathleen and I continue to be wowed by the digital video capabilities of the Nokia N93. We used it on Thanksgiving to shoot a couple of short videos of our family around the dinner table. The problem we ran into was limited memory. The N93 comes with a 128-Megabyte MiniSD Card. Since the N93 captures 640x480 video at 30 frames per second, we could only fit about 6 minutes of video on our original memory card.

I just got a 2-Gigabyte MiniSD Card from Amazon.com, and the result was a huge improvement. Now I can shoot over 100 minutes of video at the highest available resolution. This will be ideal for the holidays, when we will want to get a lot of video of our son Jimmy who is six months old and our niece Emma, who is about 18 months old.

The Nokia N93 is clearly the best digital video cameraphone on the market in 2006. If you decide to buy one of these, make sure you include a 1 or 2-Gigabyte MiniSD Card in your budget. It really improves the video capture experience.

Technorati Tags: Nokia N93, N-Series, multimedia handsets, mobile phones, MiniSD memory

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Nokia N93 produces DVD-quality video, has a
terrific MP3 player, and includes wireless
broadband and WiFi capability. It's great for people
who want a phone that can be used in relatively
serious video production. [ Photo: Dave Aiello ]
[ Check out my Nokia N93 photo set on Flickr. ]

A friend who works with Nokia chose me to be in the Nokia N-Series blogger program and has been sending me high end phones of all shapes and sizes for several months. The latest phone I've received is the Nokia N93, which I like to think of as the Swiss Army Knife of GSM / UMTS Multimedia Phones.

The N93 folds and unfolds in many different ways. Depending on which way you choose to hold it, it can be a video camera, a still image digital camera, an MP3 player, a wireless Internet access device, and a video phone. And I forgot to mention-- it can also be a plain old voice-oriented mobile phone.

The N93 has every feature I can think of for a state-of-the-art multimedia device:

• DVD-quality video with a 30 frame per second recording rate.
• 3.2-Megapixel primary camera with a 3x optical zoom and a Carl Zeiss glass lens. (0.3-Megapixel secondary camera for video calls.)
• 2.4-inch high definition color display.
• Adobe Premier Elements 2.0 video editing software.

On top of all of that it's a mobile phone with Bluetooth and WiFi. About all its missing is a full alphanumeric keyboard.

There are way too many features and dimensions to the Nokia N93 to cover in one article. I'm planning to do a small series of articles that will appear here on Operation Gadget, including as many samples of photos and videos as I think are necessary to demonstrate the features of this incredible device.

Technorati Tags: Nokia N93, N-Series, Adobe Premier Elements, UMTS, Bluetooth, WiFi, multimedia handsets, mobile phones

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Thursday ESPN announced that it would shutdown its Mobile Virtual Network Operators called Mobile ESPN at the end of the year. I was surprised to learn that ESPN is planning to buy back the handsets of customers who pay their balances in full. In addition they are allowing customers to "suspend" their service without an early termination penalty. Subscribers presumably could suspend their Mobile ESPN accounts and sign up for service on a major wireless carrier immediately.

This shows how desperately ESPN wants the early adopters of their mobile phone service to subscribe to its data services on other wireless providers' networks. Who can blame them? The subscribers to Mobile ESPN already identified themselves as willing to pay for wireless data services. Very few individual customers have been willing to do this.

Is anyone else wondering how Mobile ESPN will succeed as a value-added wireless data service resold by other carriers? I just don't see many mobile phone customers being willing to pay extra for sports-related services, except perhaps game highlights delivered to their handsets. The problem is that most people don't have phones or data plans that are robust enough to easily use such a service, if it existed today.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My friends at Nokia sent me a Nokia N91 Multimedia Phone several weeks ago. I'm a late in putting it through its paces because I've been spending so much time taking care of my son, Jimmy. If you're a regular reader of Operation Gadget, you probably already realize this.

I took my Cingular SIM card out of my Treo 650 and fired up a phone that promises a completely different experience.

Here are some of the highlights of the Nokia N91:

• 4-Gigabytes of built-in hard disk storage (up to 3000 songs)
• Surprisingly good speaker for listening to music with others
• Built-in FM radio
• Seemless switching between music and smartphone functions
• 2-Megapixel camera with excellent movie capture capabilities

Although the N91 has all of the video and camera functions of the other Nokia N-Series phones that have been tested here, the N91 is intended to be a music-centric phone. That's why it has a 4-Gigabyte hard disk, and music player controls on its face. I installed the Nokia PC Suite on my laptop, ripped a couple of CDs in my collection to MP3s, and downloaded the tracks to the N91. This was an easy process, and I'll have more to say about this in another article.

I'm sure that I'll love the N91. I've already used it to record a couple of movies of Jimmy, and I really appreciate the N91's built in hard disk for movie storage.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple of months I've noticed that my Treo 650 has more and more trouble opening the IMAP Inbox for my main email account. The reason for this is obvious: I'm an email pack rat.

At the height of my madness, I had over 25,000 messages in my main email account's Inbox. I was about as anti-Inbox Zero as you could get.

For the last year, I've read article after article touting the benefits of managing your Inbox and not letting it become a repository of last resort. Sites like 43 Folders and Lifehacker seem to do an article a week (or more) on the subject. But it wasn't until I hit the practical limit of my Treo's ability to manage my Inbox wirelessly that I gave in and started filing and purging.

Before you email me and ask, "What do you mean when you say your Treo had trouble opening your Inbox?", I'll describe the situation. I use Chatter Email, an alternative email client for the PalmOS that excels at managing IMAP accounts. As an IMAP mailbox grows, the mail server takes more time to respond to the initial connection request after you login. Whether you are using wireless access or not, you can tell that the mail client has to sync itself with the mailbox.

As my Inbox approached and surpassed 20,000 messages, the Treo began taking longer and longer to display the most recent messages after Chatter Email was launched. Sometimes it would take 45 minutes or more, which meant that I would leave the office to run some errands and my Treo would still not be in sync with my primary email account when I got back. That's unacceptable-- particularly when most of your friends and family know that you carry a wireless email device.

Little by little I'm reducing the size of my Inbox when I'm at a PC-based email client. I began by creating folders in my IMAP account for messages of lasting value. Folders seem to have a positive effect on Chatter Mail's responsiveness, since its sync time is impacted by the size of the Inbox folder. After that, I started at the oldest messages and started filing or deleting.

My goal is to whittle my Inbox down by about 1,000 messages a week. This is pretty achieveable, since a lot of email I receive is related to the status of things I manage that are connected to the Internet. This includes Linux servers in colocation which often kick out messages to me with the output of cron jobs, but also extends to things like Google Alerts.

Having said that, I've gotten rid of a lot of my Google Alerts for the moment. In the past I've used Google Alerts to monitor news sites for ideas for Operation Gadget articles. As you know, my posting frequency has fallen a lot since my son Jimmy was born in May. If I'm not posting much, I don't need the alerts cluttering my Inbox.

Some people in the Inbox Zero crowd (a philosophy that stresses empty inboxes the way some personal organization consultants stress a clean desk) apply a much more aggressive standard when they make file-versus-delete decisions on old email. I try to keep enough old emails around so I can remember the context of conversations that are important. In other words, I keep most emails I exchange with my family for continuity purposes, even if it means that some of the filed messages are no more than "Hi, how are you?" messages going back and forth. I've got so many other messages that I can delete because they are no longer relevant, the savings will still be huge.

If you administer Linux servers on the Internet as I do, Time Management for System Administrators by Tom Limoncelli has some great recommendations in terms of improving personal productivity. There are a lot of tips about how to manage an email account that I thought was interesting when I first read the book. Now I'm going back and implementing a lot of those ideas.

Hopefully I'll be down to less than 1,000 emails in my Inbox before too long. Then the performance of my Treo should be really snappy again. I hope that I can maintain Inbox management discipline when I get to that point.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday BusinessWeek published an article that provides a manufacturing cost comparison between the Motorola Q and BlackBerry 8700 handheld communicators. According to the article, the Motorola Q costs about $158 to make. Some of the key components in the Q are:

• LCD display, $25
• XScale microprocessor, $19
• Digital baseband processor, $14

The BlackBerry 8700c only costs Research in Motion about $123, however it lacks two key Smartphone features that would have increased the manufacturing costs: a media player for audio and video playback, and a camera.

A market research firm named iSupply provides these types of teardown analyses periodically to mainstream media for inclusion in stories. I think their main claim to fame is acting as a marketing consultant to electronics companies, and helping them determine which features should be included in their high style products.

Technorati Tags: mobile phones, Motorola Q, BlackBerry 8700, electronic gadgets.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Martin O'Donnell sent me an article that reported wireless broadband services offered by Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint Nextel are being adopted by some road warriors, but that adoption has been mainly limited to outside sales people, building contractors, insurance claims adjustors, and first responders.

There are a lot of other businesses where 3G data services for laptop users ought to be taking off but currently aren't. For instance, wireless broadband would be a great solution for journalists covering sports events like pro cycling. Cingular HSDPA wasn't deployed during the 2005 Tour de Georgia which I covered in person, but a service like that would have been really useful because I could have easily worked from my hotel room and restaurants when I was not in the media center. I would say that if I were to attend the race next year, a broadband wireless card would be a must.

If I had a job with a long mass transit commute, as I did prior to 9/11, I think high speed mobile data would be worth the estimated $60 per month expense. If I worked in Manhattan and had to commute via New Jersey Transit's Northeast Corridor Service, think of how much work I could do on Operation Gadget while sitting on the train?

I'd also be interested in broadband wireless service if I were a field engineer for a software or networking company. Why waste time at the beginning of a client visit acquiring WiFi or a hard Ethernet connection when you can just open up your notebook and be on-line. (Maybe you need corporate Intranet access, so that might be a reason.)

Beyond the estimated $60 per month cost, there are some surprising issues with buying wireless broadband service. It's really hard to find wireless broadband network cards on Amazon.com. These are still niche products, so maybe this is to be expected. However, it's even difficult to determine which notebook computers in Amazon.com's store have mobile broadband capabilities built-in.

For all the talk of Dell's commitment to wireless broadband, there still isn't a lot of clear information on the subject on their website. I had to delve deep into the options when specing out a notebook for purchase before I saw the words HSDPA and EV-DO for the first time.

Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel each have mobile broadband cards available on their websites, but again, they aren't very prominently featured.

So I guess my question is, how committed are the carriers to pushing this technology to the masses if they don't make a large marketing commitment to it?

Technorati Tags: mobile broadband, Cingular, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, HSDPA, EV-DO.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Deepweb has fixed problems in
LeTour 2006 that made it incompatible
with the Treo 650 and 700p Datebook.
[ Image: Deepweb Internet Solutions ]

Our friend Ad de Vries and his coworkers at Deepweb in The Netherlands have released Version 2.0 of LeTour 2006. The major new feature of this release is the inclusion of team and rider lists. This was done by adding two small buttons to the upper left area of the map (not shown in our screen capture) labeled "Teams" and "Riders".

The riders lists are well designed in that they provide the race number, name, and home country of each rider organized by team. Deepweb has also included a tiny thumbnail image of each team's jersey on their riders list screen. All of this information would be very helpful to a first time spectator at the Tour who was in the Depart or Arivee area.

I would have loved to have a riders list on my phone at races I've covered in person in the past. It probably wouldn't be necessary for me to identify the riders on the top teams in this year's Tour because I've seen folks like George Hincapie and Jens Voigt at other races, but it would be great for identifying domestiques for teams like Bouygues Telecom.

The other key feature in this version of LeTour 2006 for me is the Treo Datebook bug fix. It turns out that there was a problem with the feature that let you add Tour de France stage information to your Palm Datebook, at least with respect to the Treo 650 and 700p. I first mentioned this possibility in the article Dutch Developer Releases PalmOS-based Guide to the 2006 Tour de France. I wasn't able to be any help at all during subsequent testing, but the guys at Deepweb found and fixed the problem.

This Palm app is highly recommended for Treo users who want to follow the Tour.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, PalmOS, Treo 650.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell has been sending me reviews of the new T-Mobile Sidekick III, the long-awaited successor to the T-Mobile Sidekick II. Operation Gadget has covered the Sidekick II since it debuted in 2004, and we've always been pretty impressed with it. Martin uses a Sidekick II on an everyday basis, in the same way that I use a Treo 650.

The Sidekick III is the third generation of this integrated communicator. When I heard that T-Mobile was about to release the Sidekick III, my first reaction was one of concern: How can the Sidekick III top the Sidekick II? After all, the Sidekick II took America by storm, and lots of celebrities came to rely on it as much as some employees of Fortune 500 companies rely on Blackberry handhelds.

The reviews I've read so far indicate that expectations were quite high for the Sidekick III and, although the Sidekick III is an improvement over the Sidekick II, it's not quite as much of an improvement as some respected reviewers expected. Here are a couple of examples of what reviewers are saying:

• Sidekick 3 is better than ever, but still needs more by Tricia Duryee: "The T-Mobile Sidekick 3 is an improvement on what has been an already good thing. The new version maintains the features that made it popular, and new components make it more comparable to higher-end devices on the market today....

  "Although the device is a major improvement, there are a couple of things I found wanting....

  • "the device's form supposedly is sleeker and 20 percent less bulky than previous versions. But the size difference was hardly noticeable....
  • "when I went to send the slide show to a friend, it refused, saying I could only send 2 megabytes worth of data at one time....
  • "the camera doesn't take video, and it doesn't offer full-track music downloads or any other fancy new multimedia service."

• Trying Out the Latest Sidekick by By Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret: "...while our new gadget earned plenty of approving glances from those in the know, the Sidekick 3 isn't all it could be.

  • "The Sidekick 3's screen is generously sized at 2.62 inches diagonal, due in part to its horizontal layout. But the screen's resolution is the same as it was on the Sidekick 2: a mushy 240x160 pixels. Compared with screens on other devices that offer greater sharpness and brighter colors, the Sidekick 3's screen is a definite downer.
  • "While many of the latest smartphones use high-speed EV-DO data networks for zippy Web browsing, the Sidekick 3 only uses EDGE -- a much slower technology." [This probably has to do with T-Mobile USA's decision not to implement higher speed wireless data services as early as Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint]

I think it's instructive that the inclusion of Bluetooth, SD memory, and a 1.3-megapixel camera with flash in the next generation of a device as hot as the T-Mobile Sidekick was not enough for the reviewers to say they really like the Sidekick III. This shows how competitive the market for integrated communication devices is.

Technorati Tags: T-Mobile Sidekick III, Sidekick 3, handheld+gadgets.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Deepweb has released LeTour 2006
to help Palm users follow the
2006 Tour de France. [ Image:
Deepweb Internet Solutions ]

Frank Steele at TDFblog.com recently pointed out that Deepweb has published Le Tour 2006 a PalmOS application that provides stage profiles and distances, as well as intermediate Sprint and King-of-the-Mountains points. An update is planned to provide information about teams including rider lists.

I downloaded Version 1.0 on to my Treo 650 in order to see how well it works. The screens are written mostly in English, with the big exception being that the application uses the term "Etape" to refer to each stage. No big deal there.

The biggest glitch I've seen so far is that the Le Tour 2006 application is supposed to be able to insert information about each Etape (stage) into your Datebook. Whenever I try this, my Treo 650 does a soft reset. This may be because I run DateBk5 from Pimlico Software. I emailed Deepweb to report the problem and I'll let you know if I hear that they can repeat the problem.

I definitely think this software is worth having on my Treo, and I'd recommend it to any Tour fan who is aTreo user.

Update: According to Ad de Vries from Deepweb, "At this moment we have no complains about using LeTour on a Treo 650 (the same for our F1 program) but of course we will check it ASAP with the Treo 650 simulator (we don't have such a nice device overhere) and let you know if we know more about your problem."

This is a great response to receive from a Palm developer-- another reason you should download LeTour and give it a try.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, PalmOS, Treo 650.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day, my brother Scott Aiello tipped me off to a device that can be used as a convenient one-stop place to charge all of your handheld devices. It's called the Personal Electronics Power Station and it's available from several vendors on Amazon.com.

The Personal Electronics Power Station is an outlet strip with a special housing that allows you to clamp your handheld devices to its body using adjustible dividers. The body has an internal space where the plug ends of your handhelds' charging cables go. When not in use, the Personal Electronics Powerstation sits on top of a table or a bookshelf with your charging cables neatly organized.

Some of the comments I've read about this unit say that the internal plugs for the charging cables are two-pronged only and that adapters won't fit inside. That's a fair point, so watch out for that. Another common complaint is that the Personal Electronics Power Station doesn't support USB. How many of your handhelds charge only through USB connections? I can't think of any of my devices that have this problem.

Technorati Tags: Personal Electronics Power Station, electronic gadgets.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Palm, Inc. just announced the release of the Treo 700p for the Sprint and Verizon networks. This Treo brings EvDO wireless networking speed to the PalmOS platform. Check out the Treo model comparison chart for a feature comparison between the 700p, 700w, and 650.

According to Palm's Treo 700p announcement press release, Sprint and Verizon Wireless will announce pricing and availabiliy in separate announcements. That's a curious way to approach this roll out, considering how other Treo model roll outs have been handled in the past. My guess is that Verizon will continue to push the Treo 700w over the 700p because it feels that the 700w is a more appropriate solution for corporate users, while Sprint will treat the 700p as an incremental upgrade to the 650.

I could be wrong about this, and I will correct myself later if my perception of the situation turns out to be incorrect.

My preference in mobile phone service has been to use GSM whenever possible, so that I could use my phone in most countries that have modern communication infrastructures. If you prefer the CDMA network for reliability in the United States or other service-related reasons, the Treo 700p may be the best communicator available to you. I like the idea of the 700p much more than the actual implementation of the 700w. In spite of the improvements that Palm has brought to the Windows Mobile environment in its 700w, the operating system and the user experience are still too complicated for my taste.

We'll see if the execution of the Treo 700p is as solid as that of the 650 when it ships from Verizon or Sprint's distribution networks.

Technorati Tags: Treo 700p, Treo 700w, Treo 650, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Palm Inc..

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Todd Fryburger reports that he will be at Woody's Gap again this year to watch Stage 4 of the 2006 Ford Tour de Georgia. Stage 4 of the 2006 Tour de Georgia will take place on Friday, April 21, 2006.

Last year Todd provided some great on-the-spot information from Woody's Gap, including the MPEG movie clip that we published in How Bad Was the Weather on Woody's Gap? which shows an intense hail storm.

Todd wrote:

{Many of us} in the Atlanta cycling community plan on sitting atop Woody Gap on Friday to watch / listen as TdG Stage 4 unfolds.

We will be using Cingular EDGE / GPRS service via my cellphone attached to my laptop to receive the web-based updates from http://www.velonews.com/ and http://www.cyclingnews.com/. In addition, we will be monitoring Nexrad weather radar via http://www.wunderground.com/radar/map.asp as well as a few
other sites - do not want to repeat the hailstorm experience of last year. We are using Cingular service as we understand the Verizon does not have broadband coverage that far North. We will use a Wilson omnidirectional
external "trucker" antenna to ensure we have the best bandwidth performance via Cingular - it won't be broadband, but should be sufficient for the text-based race updates provided by these websites.

Read on for additional resources that Todd and his friends will have to follow Stage 4, radio frequencies that Todd thinks will be useful, information about how to get to Woody's Gap, and when to arrive....

Technorati Tags: Tour de Georgia, pro cycling, race radio.

Continue reading "How Pro Cycling Fans Will Watch the 2006 Tour de Georgia at Woody's Gap on April 21" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal reported that Palm saw marketshare growth for its Treo 650 and 700 series mobile phones as a result of the patent dispute between Research in Motion, the manufacturer of BlackBerry handheld devices, and NTP, Inc., a patent holding company based in Arlington, VA. According to the article:

... While the BlackBerry lawsuit is settled, corporations say the episode made them realize they need a contingency plan in case the BlackBerry is ever shut down. Palm, of Sunnyvale, Calif., has tripled its corporate sales force over the past year to work with carriers and to talk to more corporations about the Treo....

In the quarter ended in late November, Palm sold 602,000 Treos, nearing the 645,000 new subscriber accounts that RIM signed on in the same period. And when Palm reports fiscal third-quarter earnings today, analysts project the company will easily double its Treo sales from 279,000 in the year-earlier quarter. Internally, Palm executives say they believe that the Treo will outsell BlackBerrys by the end of this year.

The really amazing thing about large corporations continued support of BlackBerry is the amount of infrastructure on the back end of enterprise messaging systems that must be maintained in order to keep workers' BlackBerry handhelds running. BlackBerry Enterprise Server software must be co-located with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, and Novell Groupwise in order for users of the BlackBerry handhelds to receive the much touted "push email" features of the platform. Users of email platforms other than Exchange, Domino, and Groupwise are not likely to get the same benefit from having a BlackBerry.

The Palm OS based Treos, such as the 600 and 650, have much more flexibilty in terms of running a variety of email clients that offer enhanced features to a wider-range of mail servers. GoodLink from Good Technologies is very competitive with BlackBerry Enterprise Server for customers whose businesses use Exchange or Domino. Simpler email server environments receive advanced features from the Chatter Email Client which provides push email features for IMAP, and Snapper Mail which provides enhanced features mainly to users of POP mailboxes.

Here at Operation Gadget, my Kathleen and I use twin Treo 650s to access our IMAP mail accounts wirelessly. I'm connected to three separate IMAP accounts simultaneously when I'm out of the office. This is incredible power considering that we run a very simple, Open Source-based email infrastructure. Anyone could do this sort of thing for themselves, if they decided to rent a Linux virtual server and take the time to understand how to setup IMAP and any of a number of Mail Transfer Agents. We use UWimap and exim and they do a fine job for us at minimal cost. [ Subscription required to read most articles from The Wall Street Journal ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

About 10 days ago I reported that my Treo 650 died of complications resulting from the 1.17 firmware update. I received my replacement Treo 650 through the Warranty Exchange program offered by Cingular about a week ago, and so far the new Treo has worked like a dream.

I had attempted to upgrade my old handset to 1.17 according to the directions provided by Palm and Cingular, but the firmware update didn't go smoothly and I had to repeat the process more than once. The update made the old Treo very unreliable, resulting in periodic White Screens of Death when I ran the Chatter Email application on it.

Mark Blanc, the author of Chatter Email had suggested that there was no conflict between Chatter Email 1.1.4.3p and the 1.17 firmware. From what I've seen since I got my replacement Treo 650, he's right.

Since I started using a Treo with the 1.17 firmware update, I've noticed much better support for my Motorola HS850 Bluetooth Headset. The Treo tries to connect to the headset whenever a call is placed or received. This makes a lot more sense than the previous behavior, which required me to press the action button on the side of the headset.

The lesson I've learned from my firmware update failure is this: from now on I'm only doing a firmware update if the performance enhancements offered by the update specifically address a problem I've recently experienced with my Treo. In other words, I'm not doing anymore updates just to stay current.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Treo 650 firmware updates, WSOD, Chatter Email

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mobile ESPN: This is an example of the kind
of content you can get on your phone
when you are a Mobile ESPN subscriber.
Want it? [ Image: Mobile ESPN ]

MobileTracker reported that Mobile ESPN is now available at Best Buy stores throughout the country as of Sunday. Mobile ESPN (a handset with bundled mobile phone service) had been available for purchase on-line since the Fall. The nationwide launch was announced in a 60-second ad during the Super Bowl called "Sports Heaven".

Mobile ESPN is a service that is delivered exclusively through the Sanyo MVP handset. The MVP has a competitive set of features for the multimedia / cameraphone market:

• High Speed Data Access
• 1.3 Megapixel Camera with built-in flash and video capture capability
• Dedicated Button to call-up the Mobile ESPN service ("The E Button")
• MP3/AAC Music Player
• Speakerphone
• Stereo headset
• USB connector and cable for PC connection
• 16-Megabyte Mini SD card

Mobile ESPN is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator using the Sprint network. Sprint is well into the process of upgrading to the EV-DO wireless data standard, and this is key to the delivery of such features as ESPN video to the handset. A number of reports indicate that Mobile ESPN will be the first MVNO offering in the United States to bundle unlimited wireless data access with all of its available subscription plans. That makes sense because so many of the features of the service require wireless data access.

ESPN will be walking a fine line with its Mobile ESPN service. ESPN is going to continue to sell sports information to other mobile carriers. I assume that the Mobile ESPN service will provide much more information to the hardcore sports fan and that it will be a much more immersive experience as well.

ESPN also has to manage a relationship between itself, Sprint, and the NFL; Sprint is operating NFL Mobile on behalf of the league and promising exclusive content. I'll be interested to see how exclusivity is parceled out, particularly with respect to Monday Night Football which will be on ESPN.

Technorati Tags: Mobile ESPN, Sanyo MVP, Sprint, EV-DO, NFL Mobile, Monday Night Football

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My Treo 650 was pronounced dead last night by Palm Customer Support. It was the victim of a firmware update gone bad. The Treo 650 Firmware Updater 1.17 may be working for a lot of people, but it hasn't worked for me.

The approach Palm Customer Support took with my phone was to attempt to reinstall the Treo 650 Firmware Update 1.17. This didn't work because my Treo was having WSOD problems when I would connect it to the USB sync cable. They threw in the towel pretty quickly after that.

Palm referred me back to Cingular with a Service Request Number for warranty replacement. The Cingular rep I spoke with read me a really restrictive disclaimer, which basically said that if I had dropped my phone on the ground or into the water I could be liable for a charge of up to $425 if the Warranty Returns Department determined that this played a role in the demise of my Treo. I've dropped my Treo on the ground before and you can tell, but every aspect of the phone worked well before I ran the firmware update.

I admitted that the Treo had been dropped in the past, but that this handset was rock solid before the firmware update. She said the phone would not be rejected if it had only been subjected to normal wear and tear. We'll see where we end up with this.

I still love working with the Treo 650. I hope that the Treo that Cingular is sending me is as stable as my Treo was before the latest firmware update. I also hope that they accept my Treo as it is and don't hassle me over the dings that the phone has taken in 10 months of intense use.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Treo 650 firmware updates

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

While researching my article on the White Screen of Death problem my Treo is having, I ran across a recent piece by Stewart Alsop where he asks "Do the vendors choose the color of the death screen intentionally?" He says that the screens of death for his favorite gadgets are:

• Blue for many flavors of Microsoft Windows
• Green for TiVo and DirecTiVo
• White for Treo 650Treo 650 handsets that work on the Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon mobile networks

Stewart and I both have each of these products. I feel fortunate to be able to say that I've only seen two of the three screens of death that Stewart has seen. (I own two TiVos, but I've never seen the Green Screen of Death.)

I told my friend Chris Nolan about Stewart's story. She laughed out loud when she heard it because she knows Stewart pretty well. Small world. Chris has a TiVo, but hasn't experienced the Green Screen of Death either. She has made other platform choices for her computer and her phone, so those two other colored screens don't apply to her.

Do you know of any screens of death that are notorious because of their telltale color? Let me know by posting a comment and I'll add them to the story.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, TiVo, DirecTiVo, Microsoft Windows, BSOD, WSOD, GSOD

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the reasons you haven't seen many new articles on Operation Gadget in the past week is that I've been trying to identify an annoying problem with my Treo 650 that began after I upgraded it using the Cingular 1.17 Firmware Update. I had trouble upgrading my Treo by following the instructions provided by Cingular, so I only performed the Cingular 1.17 firmware update on my Treo and didn't do it to my wife's.

A couple of days after I ran the update on my Treo I experienced a White Screen of Death (known on many Treo-related discussion forums as a WSOD). This was the first such error that I ever experienced with this handset. My initial thought was that the problem had two potential causes:

• inheirent instability of the 1.17 firmware
• interaction problems between Chatter E-mail (my Treo email client) and the 1.17 firmware

I spent several days going through support and issue forums related to the Treo and to Chatter and concluded that I needed to rebuild my Treo application stack, from the core applications on up, and look for a third-party application or applications that were behaving badly. I did this four different times, and found nothing conclusive. The thing that pointed me back to Chatter was that the phone didn't crash or have a WSOD for hours when Chatter wasn't running.

I worked closely with Marc Blank, the author of Chatter Email, over a period of several days. I sent him a number of logs from the Chatter application after crashes or WSODs occurred and asked for his interpretation. He hasn't found any indication that the instability I'm experiencing is the Chatter application's fault, but he's given me some things to try that may have helped reduce the frequency of the instabilities.

A number of readers will probably ask why I didn't go back to Cingular immediately? After all, the problems I'm experiencing now are much more severe than anything I experienced prior to this firmware update. The reason I waited this long is because I depend on Chatter so much that I wanted to rule out problems with that application first. I don't think I've totally eliminated the possibility of a problem with Chatter, but I've done all I could.

What I'm planning to do tomorrow is contact Cingular and try to get routed to the Wireless Data Group. These folks are generally the only people in the Customer Service / Technical Support system who have a good handle on the issues with Treos, Blackberrys, and other high end handsets.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Treo 650 firmware updates, WSOD, Chatter Email

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

After two days of trying, I finally figured out how to run the Treo 650 1.17 Update for Cingular Wireless on my Treo 650. I still have to repeat the process on Kathleen's Treo 650 before my upgrading is done. Here are a couple of things that would have really helped me streamline this process:

1. You need to have your IMEI and Serial Number recorded before you can download SplashShopper from Palm's website. I think it's best to shut your Treo 650 off, remove the battery, and write these numbers down at the beginning of the update process rather than the end.
2. Use the "hard reset" upgrade method from previous Treo updates. I tried to follow the instructions provided by Palm to update my Treo and this failed repeatedly. In retrospect, I probably had too little free memory or too many third party applications installed during the upgrade. The easiest way to do the upgrade is to:
   1. Hotsync your Treo in its normal configuration to your regular user profile.
   2. Perform a hard reset and re-hotsync the Treo in a new, blank user profile as suggested in the Treo 650 Updater 1.13 instructions.
   3. Run the appropriate Treo 650 Updater for your Cingular software version, following the included instructions.
   4. Once the update is successfully completed, perform another hard reset and re-hotsync the Treo to your original user profile.
3. The URL for downloading SplashShopper is only displayed at the end of the installation process. You won't want to repeat the installation even if you can get it to run through to conclusion twice. For the record, the URL is http://web.palm.com/support/cingular_treo650.

The Cingular 1.17 is out! thread on TreoCentral was very helpful in crafting this strategy, although I had to wade through a lot of meaningless posts.

Hopefully some Treo 650 users haven't done this update yet and will benefit from my experience.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Treo 650 firmware updates

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Last Saturday, Scott Shalom, Bill Maurer, and I officiated a men's college ice hockey game between Drexel University and Villanova University in Philadelphia. I thought it would be interesting to see how Nokia N90 video clips of a hockey game would turn out, so I lent the camera phone to my friend Shane Hanlon who was at the game to evaluate our on-ice performance.

Before the game began, I gave Shane a 90-second explanation of how to shoot video with the N90. I showed him how to open the camera so it went into video camera mode, how to start and stop recording, and how to zoom in and out using the Carl Zeiss Optics Tessar 2.95/5.5 lens. Shane gave the N90 back to me with three video clips of the game on it. I decided to publish two of them as-is. I'm not publishing the third clip because it's very short and doesn't really show anything. It's pretty clear that Shane was just getting used to the camera at that point.

When you look at these two video clips, you'll probably ask, "Why is the camera focusing on the officials and not the play?" It's because Shane is there to watch the officials. He spent a lot more of his time taking notes than playing with the N90.

Drexel vs Villanova, December 10, 2005, 1 minute 09 seconds.

The point I'm trying to make by publishing these clips, however, is that the Nokia N90 is very easy to use and does a surprisingly good job of capturing the action in one of the fastest sports commonly played in the Northern Hemisphere. The lighting conditions inside the Class of '23 Ice Arena at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadephia are not very good, yet you can easily see the action and identify individual players and officials on the ice.

Drexel vs Villanova, December 10, 2005, 3 minutes 24 seconds.

Remember, these videos were shot with a palm-sized Nokia N90 mobile phone, not some dedicated video camera. These video clips are displayed at 246 x 210 pixel resolution here on Operation Gadget, but they are recorded at 352 x 288, so the image you see when playing the video directly off your PC with a media player is approximately twice this size.

Technorati Tags: Nokia N90, N-Series, Nokia, N90, hockey

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently received a Nokia N90 mobile phone as part of the Nokia N90 Blogger Relations Program. I haven't had much of an opportunity to use or write about the N90 since I received it. What better way to introduce it to Operation Gadget readers than to show off it's biggest feature-- digital video recording-- than by bringing it along while I clear the driveway of snow after the first major snowfall of the year in Newtown?

Shot 12/09/2005 at 10:09 am

Ten minutes later, my neighbor Frank arrives with an 8-horsepower two-stage snowthrower to help me clear the driveway.

Shot 12/09/2005 at 10:19 am

After the snowthrower came through, it took me about 15 minutes to clear off my cars and shovel the parts of the driveway that the snowthrower couldn't reach.

In this video clip, I demonstrate features of the N90 that allow me to do a bit of on-the-scene reporting: the rotating camera lens-- a Carl Zeiss Tessar 2.95/5.5 Autofocus 2 Megapixel that can be used to capture a 352 x 288 pixel movie at 30 frames per second. That resolution and frame rate is said to be fairly close to VHS-quality. This clip also demonstrates the quality of the built-in microphone. I'm narrating in real time here.

I've done no editing to these clips. What you see is what came out of the N90.

Shot 12/09/2005 at 10:49 am

In order to post these video clips, I signed up for a trial of a service called Audioblog.com. Audioblog.com began life as an audio clip hosting service for blogs and has evolved into a podcasting and video hosting service. Hopefully it will make publishing video clips from the N90 a piece of cake.

Thanks to Jonathan Greene of atmaspheric | endeavors who gave me the idea to use Audioblog.com for hosting my video clips and Ross Mayfield who published a nice summary of Nokia N90 features which helped me fill in some facts about the N90 that I left out of my video clip narration.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Cingular BroadbandConnect HSDPA
3G Service is rolling out in 16 U.S. metro
areas. [ Image: Cingular Wireless ]

Cingular Wireless announced yesterday that it launched BroadbandConnect, a third-generation high speed wireless data network using HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) technology. According to the Cingular 3G Network Press Release:

Cingular BroadbandConnect is a super-charged enhancement to the company’s nationwide EDGE network, the nation’s largest wireless high-speed data network. When coupled with a compatible device and service plan, the service provides average mobile data connections between 400-700Kbps (kilobits per second) on the downlink and bursts to more than a megabit per second.

Cingular is offering unlimited 3G data service for $59.99 per month with a qualifying voice plan.

BroadbandConnect is deployed initially in the following metropolitan areas:

• Austin
• Baltimore
• Boston
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Houston
• Las Vegas
• Phoenix
• Portland, OR
• Salt Lake City
• San Diego
• San Francisco / San Jose
• Seattle / Tacoma
• Washington D.C.

Unfortunately New York and Philadelphia didn't make it in the first round, so I won't be able to use my Nokia N90 to test it immediately.

Technorati Tags: Cingular, Broadband Connect, 3G, HSDPA, Nokia N90

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I4U.com reported yesterday that Vodaphone is offering a global mobile TV service including content from HBO and Eurosport. Vodaphone's press release specifies the following programming:

• "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" from HBO
• Eurosport
• MTV
• Specially edited for mobile, Seasons 1-4 of "24", featuring Kiefer Sutherland, from Twentieth Century Fox Television
• UEFA Champions League (European soccer)
• Discovery

I recently received a Nokia N90 mobile phone for review purposes. It supports 3G mobile service, to which I don't have access because Cingular has not yet rolled out 3G in my area. If I had 3G service, I'd love to try what Vodaphone is offering and I think the N90 would be a great device on which to try it.

Technorati Tags: Vodaphone, Vodaphone Live!, 3G, Sex and The City, Six Feet Under, HBO, Eurosport, MTV, 24, UEFA Champions League, Discovery Channel

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I missed this in the run up to Thanksgiving, but Palm released Treo 650 Updater 1.17 for Cingular Wireless customers on November 21. This update supercedes the one that was released in July and adds the following improvements:

• Includes Versamail 3.1c,
• Gmail attachment downloads,
• Optimizes Bluetooth performance for some Motorola headsets and other car kits. I have a Motorola HS850, so I'm hoping that this will help me.
• Voice quality enhancements,
• Optimizes memory handling,
• Correctly saves Auto-off power setting,
• Adds an audible beep when the phone can't initiate a call properly,
• Improves battery life by turning off the screen 30 seconds into a call. This was part of the previous update as well.

I will have more comments on the Treo 650 update after I have time to apply it to my Treo.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Bluetooth, Motorola HS850, Versamail, Gmail

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just resolved a bizzare problem that kept me from using my Motorola HS850 Bluetooth Headset with my Palm Treo 650 for a while.

When my Motorola HS850 successfully connected with a Treo 650 to which it has already been paired, the HS850 would play a very quick set of three ascending tones that lasted for about 8/10ths of a second. However, recently when the HS850 tried to connect, the Treo 650 would play a four tone sequence that sounded like notes played on a piano and lasted for more than a second. After that, there would be no connection between the headset and the Treo.

Some aspect of the data pairing the two devices apparently got corrupted. I was able to resolve the problem by following the instructions in the Palm Knowledge Base that called for deleting and re-establing the Trusted Device pair.

I was surprised to see this work because I thought I had tried this before and not been successful. Nevertheless, I got the devices to re-pair with each other and I'll have a lot more productive use of my Treo 650 for voice calls as a result.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Motorola HS850, Bluetooth

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A report in this morning's Wall Street Journal indicates that Google will rollout a mobile phone version of Google Maps today. According to the article:

Google... is tailoring some popular Internet services for use on wireless devices. Starting today, for example, consumers using some types of cellphones will be able to access satellite maps wirelessly and scroll through them as they can on the Google Maps service.

This service is going to require Java on the mobile phone and is supposed to work on "more than 100 different cellphone models"

Update: The URL to download Google Local for Mobile is http://www.google.com/glm. It currently supports a bunch of different carriers and handsets, but not Blackberry or Palm handhelds. [ Subscription required to access most content from The Wall Street Journal ]

Technorati Tags: Google Maps

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

miniVox MV100: Speakerphone
for VoIP is available through
Amazon.com

Yesterday, Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch pointed out a portable speakerphone for use with VoIP services called the miniVox MV100 USB Speakerphone. I had never heard of this before Andy mentioned it. He said:

If you think Polycom makes the best desktop speakerphones, these guys deliver something at a fraction of the price that goes with you and works very well. In most cases it has caused me to abandon using the headset entirely.

This little box is about two-thirds of the size of my Treo 650 and it plugs into your PC using a mini USB cable. It's used mainly as a speakerphone, but you can also plug a mobile phone headset into it for privacy.

mVox also has a Bluetooth device for considerably more money called the mVox MV900 which interests me because I'm always looking for things I can use with both my mobile phone and VoIP.

More information about both of these products is available at http://www.mvox.com/.

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, VoIP, mVox

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon.com is offering the Motorola HS805 Bluetooth Headset for free for a limited time when you purchase a qualifying Motorola mobile phone. All you need to do is add a Motorola mobile phone from the list below and a Motorola HS805 Bluetooth Headset to your Amazon.com Shopping Cart. Use promotion code FREEPHN4BLUE at checkout. The offer is good from November 1 to November 16, 2005.

The qualifying mobile phones are as follows:

• Motorola RAZR V3 Phone for T-Mobile
• Motorola RAZR V3 Phone in Black for Cingular
• Motorola RAZR V3 Phone in Silver for Cingular
• Motorola E815 EV-DO Phone for Verizon Wireless
• Motorola V551 Phone for Cingular
• Motorola V330 Phone for T-Mobile
• Motorola ROKR E1 iTunes Phone for Cingular
• Motorola MPx220 Smartphone for Cingular
• Motorola V360 Phone for T-Mobile

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, HS805

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chris Brewer wrote an article on The Paceline about following the Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope National Team during Day 7 of their ride across the United States. The most interesting part of this article for Operation Gadget readers is Chris' description of the communications technology that Trek Travel has implemented to keep the Tour of Hope in contact with itself and the rest of the world:

It was a unique experience to witness the behind-the-scenes action from the CentCom {Tour of Hope command vehicle} perspective. Trek Travel makes sure that a fresh driver is piloting every vehicle each stage, and then several Trek Travel / Carmichael Training Systems managers take alternate shifts coordinating each stage's transition and execution. For the CentCom staff it's all about communication involving 2 cell phones, 1 satellite phone, 2 close-range radios, a GPS messaging system, and a laptop computer with a GPS mapping system. Add in numerous documents, route guides, maps, etc. and the Centcom staff is in-touch and in constant operational management mode around the clock.

Carmichael Training Systems also deserves a lot of credit for how smoothly the Tour of Hope National Ride has gone so far.

Technorati Tags: Tour of Hope

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At a press conference today in San Francisco, Ed Colligan of Palm announced that his company will release a Treo smartphone based on the Windows Mobile operating system. It will ship exclusively on the Verizon Wireless network, and especially its EV-DO data network.

Denny Strigl from Verizon Wireless implied that the Windows Mobile Treo will not be shipped until "next year"-- meaning 2006. Ed Colligan from Palm clarified this by saying "early next year".

Ed Colligan said that the handset has not been named at this time. He called it "Treo on Windows".

A marketing person from Palm said that the handset had an Intel mobile processor and ran on Windows Mobile 5.0, but said that there would be no further discussion of hardware specifications. Seems like the shipment of this product is still sometime away.

Ed Colligan said that a Treo based on Windows Mobile for EDGE or HSDPA will not be released until the middle of 2006 at the earliest.

Bill Gates, Ed Colligan, and Denny Strigl started receiving calls and SMS messages during the Q&A as a result of the numbers for their handsets being displayed on the projection screen during the demonstration.

Technorati Tags: Treo 700w, Windows Mobile

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I've been grinding away on my consulting projects, Palm has apparently put the final touches on a Windows Mobile-based Treo that will support Verizon Wireless's implementation of EV-DO.

The first solid indication of an announcement was Engadget's first look at the Palm Treo 700w, published on Thursday. This was followed an announcement from Palm investor relations that Palm, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless would make a joint announcement on Monday, September 26 at 12:00 noon EDT. This press release came out at 4:05pm on Friday, minutes after the close of the regular trading on the NASDAQ.

Palm's advisory was followed by an article in The Wall Street Journal reporting that Palm is set to use Microsoft code on Treo Phones. In my opinion there's a big difference between speculation about a Windows Mobile-based Treo by gadget-related blogs is less significant than a news article in publications like the Wall Street Journal [ Subscription required. ].

I'm very optimistic about the market prospects for a Windows Mobile-based Treo. I think that Palm would not be releasing it if it didn't meet their high user-experience standards. The Windows Mobile platform has been in desperate need of a manufacturer like Palm who are committed to adding value instead of just rolling out a compatible handset.

As for the future of Treo's based on the PalmOS, we'll have to wait and see. I don't think that Palm will ever integrate Treo functionality into the PalmOS Cobalt operating system, but subsequent PalmOS implementations based on Linux resulting from PalmSource's acquisition of China MobileSoft may be more to their liking. My experience with the Treo 650 is that there are times when it's really obvious that the phone could use an operating system capable of multi-tasking, and PalmOS based on a Linux kernel may be a good solution.

Technorati Tags: Treo 700w, Treo 650, Windows Mobile

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I received my Motorola HS850 Bluetooth Headset from Amazon.com yesterday and I've already used it during a 100-mile roundtrip from Newtown to West Chester, PA for a hockey officiating meeting. The sound quality was good on my end and the people I called thought I sounded good as well. This article focuses more on the process of getting the HS850 working for the first time.

I was glad I read the Motorola Bluetooth Wireless Headset Quick Start Guide. It's an 8-page fan-folded document a little larger than a credit card that told me how to:

1. charge the headset,
2. pair the headset with my phone,
3. turn the headset on or off.

The brief explanation of how to turn on Bluetooth on your mobile phone is Motorola-specific and meant to serve as an example in the event that you have a phone from another manufacturer. I have a Palm Treo 650 and it helped that I regularly use the Bluetooth feature of the Treo to sync it with my Blogging Workstation. I already had Bluetooth turned on and more or less knew how to search for the HS850 from my Treo and pair the two together.

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, HS850, Treo 650

Continue reading "Getting My Motorola HS850 Bluetooth Headset Working With a Treo 650" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In a joint announcement in Sunnyvale and Tokyo, PalmSource disclosed that it is becoming part of Access Company, Ltd., the developer of the NetFront browser and other Internet technology for mobile devices. The agreement is said to be a definitive, all cash deal valued at $324.3 million, approximately ¥35.9 billion, or $18.50 per share of PalmSource. Both boards of directors have already approved the transaction.

According to the announcement, "ACCESS' USD $18.50 per share offer represents an 83% premium for PalmSource stockholders based on the market closing price of USD $10.09 on September 8, 2005.... The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of 2005 calendar year, pending regulatory approval and the approval of PalmSource's shareholders."

More information about Access Company, Ltd., may be found at http://www.access-us-inc.com/. [ via The Wall Street Journal, registration required ]

Technorati Tags: PalmOS

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've decided to buy a Motorola HS850 Bluetooth Headset for use with my Palm Treo 650 and my PC. I thought about this for a couple of weeks before I made the decision. Much of that delay was the result of a lack of consistency I found in Bluetooth headset reviews on the Internet.

I'd like to review a number of Bluetooth headsets, so I have to start somewhere. On MobileBurn, I read that the HS850 has the same design as the HS810. The improvements from the HS810 are better battery life and Bluetooth 1.2 compatibility. The HS820 is cheaper, but has more problems with wind noise when used outdoors, because it lacks the boom microphone.

I'm planning to use the HS850 to familiarize myself with Bluetooth headsets and as a baseline for future headset reviews.

Regular readers may ask why I didn't buy the Cardo Scala 500, which seems to be a great deal at Amazon.com? I have to admit that I was influenced by the changes that Treonauts made to their review recently. I have never used a Bluetooth headset, so I have to take reviews from major blogs fairly seriously. I think I may come back later, try the Cardo Scala 500, and compare it to the HS850.

Technorati Tags: VoIP, Bluetooth

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon.com has started taking orders for Treo Essentials: Get the Most from Your Treo 650 by Michael Morrison and published by Que.

This is the first book I've seen that has come out with Treo 650-specific advice. Previous books like Now You Know Treo and to a lesser extent the Treo Fan Book were written for the Treo 600 with selected updates for new features of the Treo 650.

I'm hoping to get a copy of Treo Essentials soon to see how many useful tips it has about productive use of the Treo 650. [ via Palm Addict ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm looking high and low for credible reviews of Bluetooth headsets to use with my Palm Treo 650. Many of the Treo-related sites have limited Bluetooth headset reviews, despite the fact that many Treo users I know either have purchased or are strongly considering purchase of a Bluetooth headset.

Here are some places where I have found a number of good Bluetooth headset reviews:

• MobileBurn: An excellent mobile phone technology site edited by Michael Oryl. I couldn't find a category where Bluetooth headset reviews were collected, but a MobileBurn site search for "Bluetooth headset" produced lots of useful results.
• Treonauts: In spite of the fact that Treonauts changed its review of the Cardo Scala 500, this site has the best collection of Treo 650-specific Bluetooth headset reviews. Check out the head-to-head comparison of eight Bluetooth headsets. It's not exhaustive because they leave out a couple of the Motorola models, but it's the best one stop comparison I've found so far.

I'll add links to this story for additional sites with Bluetooth headset reviews as I find them.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my search for a Bluetooth headset for my Treo 650 and VoIP use, I revisited a favorable Treonauts review of the Cardo Scala 650 that I pointed out a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised to see the following paragraph had been added to the review:

UPDATE: Following a flurry of comments and emails as well as additional testing on my part, I have very disappointingly found that the Scala 500 suffers from a significantly higher level of 'static' compared with the Palm Treo BT Headset as well as others. There is no doubt that the Scala 500 still offers the best accessory kit but unfortunately with a sub-par call quality I now have to reconsider my earlier rating and lower it to just 6/10. It's a real shame but I hope that Scala will work to improve their offering in the future.

This caused me to look elsewhere for reviews of the Cardo Scala 500. The sense I got from reading dozens of reviews and comments on different websites is that some people had a great experience using the Cardo Scala 500 with the Treo 650 and some people experienced the static problem that's mentioned in the revised Treonauts review.

What's more troubling to me, however, is the idea in several articles that the problem may lie more with Treo 650 Bluetooth performance than with the Scala 500 itself. Some headsets have a harder time maintaining a connection with the Treo 650 than with other phones. Some have intermittent or persistent static issues with the Treo 650 and not with other phones.

I'm surprised that the experience people have with Bluetooth headsets is so configuration-dependent. I'd think that a device that's Bluetooth 1.1 or 1.2 certified would "just work" with another certified device. On the other hand, this is wireless networking, so is it unreasonable to expect some variability.

Your mileage may vary with the Cardo Scala 500 and the Treo 650. I'm not changing my view that this headset is a great value, but I may not buy one myself either.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been talking to Martin O'Donnell and Andy Abramson recently about getting a Bluetooth headset in order to be able to use it with both my Palm Treo 650 and my PC when I'm using Skype and Google Talk.

Many of the Bluetooth headsets that are currently on sale will do double duty in this manner, but some of them are Bluetooth 1.2-compatible while others are only compatible with Bluetooth 1.1. I wasn't sure if it mattered whether I had Bluetooth 1.2 compatiblility, so I had to do some research.

It turns out that the Treo 650 only supports Bluetooth 1.1 anyway and that Palm says it has "no plans to upgrade the Bluetooth technology in the Treo 650 smartphone to version 1.2". In addition, most Bluetooth USB adapters like the Belkin F8T003 that I have installed on my Blogging Workstation are only Bluetooth 1.1 compatible.

If the Treo 650 and my PC had both supported Bluetooth 1.2, I would have excluded Bluetooth 1.1 headsets from my product search. I clearly don't have to restrict myself now.

Technorati Tags: VoIP

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

E-Health Insider reports that a study published in a journal called BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making indicates that handheld communicators helped surgeons at a London hospital respond to calls more quickly than they did with pagers. The study also indicated that communication between clinicians was improved. According to the article:

A team of surgeons at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, had their pagers replaced with Palm Tungsten W PDAs, with GPRS on the Vodafone network, for three alternate weeks out of six. Several reference textbooks were also loaded onto the devices, including the British National Formulary, as well as medical calculators.

If they were more productive with the Tungsten W, imagine what the surgeons would have accomplished with a more modern handheld like the Palm Treo 650.

My wife (Dr. Kathleen Aiello) has been using a Treo 650 since March and loves it. She uses it as a mobile phone, an IMAP email client, and a reference tool by running Palm medical software like Epocrates.

Since we got our his and hers Treos, Kathleen and I have wondered whether devices like her Treo would have as profound an effect on her fellow doctors as hers did on her. This study suggests that they certainly might. [ via PalmAddict ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PalmAddict reported that a version of the Opera browser now works on the Treo 650 and other powerful PalmOS devices. Included in this group are the Palm LifeDrive, Treo 600, and the Tungsten T3.

The article refers to an Opera Mini Treo installation howto that explains system requirements (most significantly Java) and technical issues (the default language is Norwegian, but can be changed to English).

I keep thinking that I should try browsers like Opera Mini and Xiino but I haven't done it yet. Maybe I should try Opera Mini, since I recently installed Java on my Treo to test KMaps, a Treo 650-friendly client for Google Maps.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Critical Path sponsored an interesting survey that says that U.S. mobile phone users want to receive email from family members on their handsets provided the service is inexpensive and easy to use. According to the survey, 69 percent of respondents considered emails from a spouse or significant other to be the largest priority.

The reason Critical Path sponsored the survey is that they offer a service called Memova Mobile, a service that mobile phone operators can resell that delivers email to mobile handsets. The results of this survey should be interpreted with that in mind.

This survey interested me because Kathleen and I definitely use email on our Treo 650s to communicate with each other during the business day. We pay a premium for service at this point ($40 per person per month for unlimited wireless data from Cingular), but we made made the decision to spend the money on mobile communications and economize on telephone service at home by using VoIP instead of POTS. [ via TreoCentral ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Andrew Carton of Treonauts published a good summary of RSS reader options for Treo 650 users. The headline readers include PalmOS applications that have paid licenses, browser-based RSS readers that are free, as well as email and Java-based offerings.

Of the RSS readers I've tried so far, Bloglines Mobile (part of Bloglines.com) is my favorite. However, if I was more into podcasting, I'd probably be using QuickNews. QuickNews has robust RSS attachment support, which means it can do things like download podcasts directly to an SD card installed in your Treo and play them in Pocket Tunes.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Marc Orchant published a great list of add-on software for his Treo 650 over on The Office Weblog a couple of days ago. He's suggested two or three Palm applications I'm trying out now:

• SplashID, part of Splash Wallet: I mentioned that I'm trying this out a little while ago here on Operation Gadget.
• Note Studio: a PalmOS-based wiki with a conduit and a desktop app for both Mac and PC. Definitely worth trying.
• Card Backup: a Palm app that backs up your PDAs main memory to a memory card. I bought an MMC card for this purpose before my trip to Chicago in April, but never used it to store a backup. I think there is a freeware and a more fully featured version of this.

These applications and the others mentioned in Marc's article are great ideas for Treo 650 users who are looking to improve their personal productivity.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Somewhere in the transition to my Treo 650 back in March, I lost a memo entry that contained a big list of passwords for websites and other applications. It was a bad idea to store that information in that manner in the first place, so I resolved to find a Palm application that did a better job.

I found one and so I've downloaded a trial version of SplashID from SplashData. According to the website:

SplashID safely and securely stores all of your personal identification information including user names, passwords, credit cards, calling cards, bank accounts, PINs, and more. Information is stored in a secure, encrypted format and is quickly accessible on a Palm OS handheld or Desktop computer with the included desktop software.

I'll load some of my passwords into SplashID and see how I like it. When I have some thoughts on its usefulness, I'll post them here on Operation Gadget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Treonauts published a review of the Cardo Scala 500 Bluetooth Headset which is considered a worthy alternative to the Palm Bluetooth Headset for the Treo 650. There are a couple of things that make the Cardo Scala 500 stand out and probably make it a better choice:

• there's a great deal on it at Amazon.com right now,
• it has better battery life than Palm's own model,
• it comes with clips for your glasses, a belt clip holster, and a neckband.

The chief drawback seems to be that the Cardo Scala 500 is not USB-chargeable, but they make up for that with a very compact charger. I charge my Treo by plugging into a power strip anyway, so I'd need a second outlet which I can easily find.

The current price on the Cardo Scala 500 is just about two times the list price of a replacement Treo 650 wired headset from Palm. If you need a new headset now (I know I do), maybe it's time to consider going wireless.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Treo 650 Updater 1.15 for Cingular was released last Monday. I needed to perform this upgrade because I was running Treo650-1.04-CNG which is an old revision of the Treo 650 firmware for Cingular.

According to the Palm website, the features included in this update are:

• Optimizes memory handling and frees up more memory with non-volatile file system improvements (info). [Important to me.]
• Includes VersaMail 3.0c, the latest version for Cingular Wireless Treo 650. [Not important to me, I use Chatter Email.]
• Adds voice quality enhancements. [I want to see if I notice these.]
• Includes "Get Good" application which facilitates faster, wireless installation of Good Technology’s GoodLink email software for business customers. [Not important to me.]
• Improves battery life by automatically turning off screen after 30 seconds of a call. Most users will not notice while the handset is next to the ear, but this power-saving feature lets you continue your conversation with the display off. The power savings will vary depending on usage patterns. To turn the display back on at any time, tap the screen. Do not press the red Power/End button, unless you want to end the call. The screen-off feature applies to handset mode only, not speakerphone or headset modes. [Want to see how this works and whether I think it's an improvement.]
• Incorporates two software patches previously released on Palm's website:
  • Carkit Update for Treo 650 (Bluetooth carkit drivers)[Not important to me]
  • Treo 650 Voicemail Updater 1.04 for Cingular Wireless [The Treo 650 has always had a problem with getting the right voicemail number from Cingular's network.]

The website goes on to say "Please set aside 30 minutes to complete the process" of running this update. They should have said an hour because I didn't have all of the Documents to Go software installed on my desktop and Treo, not to mention that I wasn't registered with Dataviz yet. As far as I can tell, that's the easiest way to get the latest version of Documents to Go.

The ability to view Microsoft Office documents sent to you by wireless email is just too useful to not have installed on your Treo. I had it at installed at one point, stupidly lost it when I did a previous firmware update, and never put it back. So last night I had to bite the bullet.

When you get into the upgrade, you have to:

1. sync to backup your data, then hard reset your Palm,
2. sync to an empty profile, then soft reset your Palm,
3. install the updater, and sync to the empty profile again (This causes your Palm to load the updater and patch itself.), and
4. sync again with your regular profile to bring your data back.

All of this takes a long time.

To top it all I have to do the entire process again for Kathleen's Treo. Ugh.

The Treo's still the best integrated communicator money can buy, but these firmware updates try the patience of even the most devoted user.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When Kathleen and I decided to move to Newtown, Pennsylvania, we decided that we were going to move as aggressively into the new age of telecommunications as possible. At the most basic level, this meant that all telephone service for the house and the Home Office would use Voice over IP instead of standard telephone lines. Standard phone lines are sometimes known as POTS lines for Plain Old Telephone Service.

In our old place in East Windsor, NJ, we had five POTS lines: four lines that fed into our Panasonic Digital Super Hybrid Phone System which we bought four years ago from Ablecomm and one line that was an office fax line and carried the Verizon DSL service. This system was intended to allow us to:

• run a single phone system for the house and the Home Office,
• answer any phone line on the system via any phone set in the house, and
• operate our own programmable voice mail system.

This was a good idea when I got a lot of incoming calls when I was in the office. A lot more of my business is transacted over email and IM than the phone today, and I need good phone service more often when I'm out of the office than when I'm at my desk. This is a big reason why I bought myself a Treo 650.

The first step in making this switch actually took place before we decided to move. Back in March, Kathleen and I each bought Treo 650s with unlimited mobile data service. We did this because it allowed us to access our email from anywhere and reduce our overall telecom bills by shifting a lot of our calling to free Cingular Mobile to Mobile calling which is free under our billing plans.

The intent after we got our Treo 650s was to reduce the number of POTS lines we had installed in East Windsor to the minimum necessary to operate our phone system, but it never happened because we subsequently focused on Kathleen's job search and then a search for a new house.

During the new house search we came to depend upon our Treos. We were able to call, email, and look at the web from the front seat of our car. This is really helpful when you are house hunting. Eventually we realized that we don't need our home phone for too much anymore, other than as a place for people to leave messages for us. This pushed us even harder in the direction of VoIP.

When we committed to moving to Newtown, I began doing research to see if I could get "naked DSL" at the new house. I eventually settled on Speakeasy OneLink because it was a high speed DSL service that didn't require a regular phone line and I could combine OneLink with Speakeasy VoIP/Home under one bill.

I went with Speakeasy for all of my telecom needs for the Home Office because their VoIP service was a fairly unique offering. Since they have a nationwide broadband network, they are able to manage traffic on that network to prioritize VoIP traffic. This means they can guarantee Quality of Service all along their network, where VoIP carriers that don't own a broadband network have limited ability to manage QoS.

I've asked friends who know about VoIP if they can tell that I'm calling them using one of my Speakeasy VoIP lines. None of them could tell we were on a VoIP call until I told them.

The price we're paying for Speakeasy VoIP/Home is $23.95 per month per line for unlimited calling in the USA and Canada. That's where the real savings is for us compared to our Verizon service when we were in East Windsor. We paid about $31.22 per residential line with nothing but local calls, so local toll calls and long distance added to that. Speakeasy VoIP/Home is also price competitive with Vonage, which prices unlimited calling in the USA and Canada at $24.00 per month.

At some point I'm going to try to come up with a telecommunications cost comparison, illustrating all of the services we paid for in East Windsor and what we substituted them with Newtown. In the meantime, I recommend that you take a look at Glenn Fleishman's telecom package choices and itemized list of charges. He didn't make the same choices we made, but the magnitude of his savings was one of the things that influenced us to take a look at switching to VoIP in the first place.

Technorati Tags: VoIP

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Live Tour Coverage via T-Mobile in
Europe: T-Mobile is offering free streaming
video coverage of the Tour de France via
UMTS. [ Photo: T-Mobile International AG ]

Jonathan Maus pointed out that T-Mobile is offering live Tour de France TV reports to its customers via UMTS video streaming. This streaming video service is free to T-Mobile customers and available wherever T-Mobile offers UMTS.

Video streaming reportedly began on Stage 5 and will be available for all remaining stages of the Tour.

UMTS is a 2-Megabit-per-second 3G data service that is not yet available in the United States.

I'm not surprised that T-Mobile is offering state-of-the-art Tour de France coverage to its subscribers. What surprises me is that UMTS is rolled out widely enough in Germany to justify a large-scale promotion.

Meanwhile back in the United States, T-Mobile USA is holding off on upgrading its data network beyond GPRS. In What T-Mobile is Missing by Not Quickly Upgrading to EDGE, I pointed out that GPRS on T-Mobile USA reportedly tops out at 39.09 kilobits per second. If UMTS has an average dowload data rate of 220 to 320 kbps, GPRS has only 12 percent of UMTS' speed.

I thought T-Mobile customers were all supposed to "Get More". In this case, I guess you only get it if you live in Europe.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jen Colangelo emailed me earlier today to point out David Pogue's review of the palmOne Treo 650 that appears in The New York Times today. I was a bit surprised at this review, both from a timing and content perspective.

It's odd for the Times' technology writer to take a look at a product as celebrated as the Treo 650 seven months after its debut on the U.S. market. Pogue addresses this by combining his review with a recap of the past nine years of Palm-palmOne-palmSource corporate history. I think this information will interest people who aren't already familiar with the story, but doesn't provide us with much insight into the timing of the release of this review.

I'm more frustrated by the lack of useful information for mobile email for individual and small business users. Pogue offers the following information about wireless email access:

Corporations can buy any of several "push" e-mail programs, meaning your Treo gets messages as they arrive (instead of checking at regular intervals). These programs also offer wireless synching, too; when you delete or file a message on the phone, it's instantly deleted or filed on your PC at work.

If your name doesn't end in Inc., you have other options. You can set up the Treo to check your regular e-mail account every 15 minutes, for example. Or, for $3 a month, individuals can get that same real-time, wireless synching with Yahoo e-mail accounts. That way, you get all the joy of corporate BlackBerry ownership without having either a BlackBerry or a corporation.

He doesn't mention VersaMail (palmOne's email client) at all. He offers only two of many different email solutions for small business and individual users. For instance, if you look at other email clients for the Treo 650, particularly ChatterEmail but also SnapperMail, you'll find that push email capability is available on ChatterEmail using the IMAP IDLE protocol. I've talked about these capabilities in several articles on Operation Gadget:

• Which Email Client Should I Use on the Treo 650?,
• In Order to Understand Wireless Email, First Understand the Purposes of the Protocols,
• Treo 650 Saves the Day During the Tour de Georgia, and
• VersaMail Doesn't Seem to Do a Great Job with IMAP.

So much has been written about the importance of choosing the right email protocol and client when trying to work with email on the Treo 650 that I'd expect this would warrant more coverage in a review in The New York Times. I think I know what he was trying to accomplish while working within the constraints imposed on him by his paper, and his positive overall take on the Treo is appropriate, but I have to conclude that this review is late and lacking critical information that would help people who have not yet purchased to make informed decisions. [ Free registration required to read articles from The New York Times. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Palm Infocenter reported yesterday that palmOne released an update for the Treo 650 on Sprint PCS that enables the Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking profile. This is a long soughtafter enhancement to the Treo that will make it possible for Sprint PCS uses to use their Treos as Bluetooth modems for their laptop or desktop computers.

I've been talking about the Treo 650 DUN profile issue since January (see Are You Sure That Cingular Really Wants to Deactivate the Treo 650 DUN Profile?), so I don't need to tell you that this officially turning this on is a big deal for Treo users. The Dial Up Networking profile obviously gives us much more latitude in terms of how we use wireless data service. I think that all subscribers should have the right to use the DUN profile when they need it, particularly if they subscribe to an unlimited data plan.

I could have used this capability when I was in Georgia covering the Dodge Tour de Georgia in April because I was having problems with my laptop's WiFi card. I hope that a similar firmware update is rolled out for Cingular subscribers soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I bought a palmOne Treo 650 after reviewing the RIM BlackBerry 7230 and the H-P iPAQ h6315 integrated communication devices. This doesn't make me a PalmOS zealot. In fact, I'd love to have a Pocket PC that I could recommend as strongly as I recommend the Treo 650.

I was hoping that the H-P iPAQ hw6515 was going to be that Pocket PC, but after reading Jorgen Sundgot's review of the iPAQ hw6515 on infoSync World, I'm not sure this will be it.

From looking at the photos on infoSync World, it looks like H-P integrated a keyboard similar to the snap-on keyboard for the h6315. I didn't like these keys as much as the keys on the Treo 650, because the iPAQ keys are smaller, spaced further apart, and don't appear to be backlit.

The 64k color screen has a resolution of 16-bit color screen is competitive with that of the Treo on a colors-displayed basis. The resolution is 240-by-240, which means that the screen only displays 56 percent of the information that the Treo's 320-by-320 does.

The hw6515 is also more expandable, with both an SDIO-compatible SD Card expansion slot and a miniSD expansion slot. This means you can have a memory card and a WiFi card in the iPAQ, if you can handle the battery drain. The iPAQ also has built-in GPS with TomTom navigation software (I'd really be interested in that). The Treo answers only with a single SDIO/SD/MMC card slot.

The iPAQ hw6515 scores points on the Treo in the memory department (44-Megabytes versus 23 for the Treo) and has a slight advantage in the weight department (it's almost half an ounce or 13 grams lighter). It's a draw in data networking: both support EDGE and Bluetooth. They have the exact same processor, an Intel PXA270 running at 312 mHz.

So where does the iPAQ 6515 come up short? According to infoSync World:

• "...the thumbboard is a bit of a disappointment.... What's the downside then, you ask? Somewhere along the way from pressing a button, something is pouring syrup in the machinery. In the vast majority of cases, a quick double-press will not be recognized, and despite tactile and audible feedback indicating a key has been pressed there's a modest chance it will not show up; absolutely marring for heavy thumbboard users."
• "...the exchangeable, rechargeable 1,200 mAh Lithium Ion battery will not allow for any extended use of an accessory such as a Wi-Fi card as it already struggles to provide sufficient battery life as is...." {The Treo has a removable, rechargeable 1,800 mAh Lithium Ion battery.}
• "...most functionality beyond simple PIM and messaging feels sluggish, and particularly so if one attempts to multitask when the GPS receiver is active." {I wouldn't have thought that the GPS feature would impact the overall performance in that fashion.}

This is a review of a pre-production, European unit, so the performance of the final product may be better. I'm going to stay on the lookout for other reviews and I'll point them out if they differ from this one.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In last week's Wall Street Journal Personal Technology column Walt Mossberg pointed out that U.S. mobile phone carriers are interfering with the high-tech industry's product cycle for mobile devices and software. He referred to the mobile carriers as "new Soviet ministries" because of their insistence on controlling "the flow of new technologies into users' hands".

Examples of this on the hardware side are the hundreds of GSM-compatible phones that are available in Europe and Asia that would work fine on T-Mobile or Cingular, but are almost impossible to obtain because they are not approved by either carrier. Authorized dealers won't carry them, in part because they would not be subsidized by the carrier.

There are also many examples of software and services that are unavailable here in the United States. You'll notice that the most successful services based on text messaging here are free services like Google SMS and Dodgeball. Elsewhere in the world, users pay a small charge on their wireless bills for most succesful text messaging-based services.

Everyone I talk to in the industry says that the biggest reason for this difference is that the carriers in the U.S. have operated a closed text messaging system historically, and that people who wanted to offer pay services that appeared on the user's phone bill had to partner with or license their technology to each carrier.

There are also numerous situations where carriers demanded that key features of handsets be witheld from users, and manufacturers complied. The most notorious example is Verizon Wireless' version of the Motorola V710.

I agree with Walt Mossberg that mobile phone customers in the United States would be better off if the carriers didn't try to control the market for handsets and value-added services. In a more perfect mobile phone market, we'd force the carriers to change the handset distribution model and do away with subsidies. Of course, that would destroy the handset market as we know it today.

I only think that significant change will take place if many major developers of mobile phone products and services shift the focus of their development to Europe and Asia. I don't think that this has taken place yet in a profound enough way to get U.S. regulators and politicians to sit up and take notice. Until that time, I think the market will continue as it is.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned on Monday, Beth Seliga, a freelance photographer who covers pro cycling, asked me which email client to use on her new palmOne Treo 650.

I had strong opinions ready when she asked this question, so I'm going to repeat them and enhance them with links for the benefit of everyone who reads Operation Gadget. In an attempt to keep it simple, I'm breaking the results down into two categories: what may work and what probably won't work:

• What May Work

  • Chatter Email: This is the email client that Kathleen and I both use. I chose Chatter Email because of:

    1. the Strong IMAP Support: I decided to standardize on IMAP-enabled mailboxes so that what we saw on the desktop we would also see on the Treos.
    2. my Selection of the Unlimited Data Plan: I was willing to pay $39.99 per month for unlimited data service for our two Treos.

    If you do not choose to go on an unlimited data plan with your Treo, that doesn't mean that Chatter Email would be a bad solution for you. However, you should realize that using the push email capability may cause you exceed your bucket of wireless data kilobytes.

  • SnapperMail: This email client appears to be aimed at the POP3 email users of the world, rather than IMAP users like me. If you use the Post Office Protocol for email, I would definitely give SnapperMail a try. I think it's clearly more stable than VersaMail.
    

• What Probably Won't Work
  
  
  
  • VersaMail: I realize that this is the email client that most Treo 650 users try first, mainly because palmOne installs it and puts part of it in ROM. There are a couple of issues with this program that are show stoppers for me:
    
    
    
    1. Instability: Versamail just crashes too often. It seems like Versamail crashes on people whenever they try to show me their Treos running it. Most of the time the demonstration starts like this: "Why does this program crash so often? Oh darn...."
       

    2. Faux IMAP Support: The folks at palmOne don't seem to understand the design philosophy behind IMAP-- specifically, that IMAP users are supposed to keep their email permanently on the mail server. If you need clarification on this point, refer to In Order to Understand Wireless Email, First Understand the Purposes of the Protocols.

       When you use Versamail to manage your IMAP mailbox, it loads copies of part of each email on to your Treo and keeps them there-- just like the way it handles email messages under POP3. The only thing is it doesn't discard those messages when you finish looking at each message. It also doesn't discard those messages if you choose to constrain the number of messages in your Inbox to those messages that arrived in the last "n" days.
       

    
    
  
  

Those are my opinions on the three biggest email clients for the Treo 600 and 650. I've had my Treo 650 for 11 weeks now and taken it on a two week business trip, so I think I can be reasonably confident that I'm not missing anything in the basic functionality of these three programs. However, if I receive new information, find out something new, or a serious competitor materializes to these three, I'll mention it here.

I'm intentionally leaving out clients that are specific to one mobile phone carrier. I know that Cingular has one. I don't think it is worth using because the number of users from whom you can learn will be so much smaller than if you chose a mainstream Treo email client.

If you have any alternatives that I haven't mentioned, feel free to post a comment and I will take a look at it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I made a few friends at the Wachovia Cycling Series simply because I knew a lot more than your average pro cycling community member about mobile Internet devices. Here are a couple of examples of things people asked me about:

• Sammarye Lewis co-author of the new book Tour de France for Dummies asked me how to make her H-P iPAQ h6315 work smoothly with a Garmin GPS 10 Deluxe or another handheld GPS, so that she can get directions to places along the Tour de France stage routes.
• Beth Seliga, a freelance photographer who covers pro cycling, asked me which email client to use on her new palmOne Treo 650.

I like these opportunities to help out because I feel like it's a way to "earn my keep" out on the circuit. After all, some guys can sprint after six hours in the saddle, and others really know the difference between POP3 and IMAP....

I think it's only a matter of time before the well funded organizations all have the kind of electronic arsenal that the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team has at its disposal. Whether they ever use the technology as aggressively as Discovery does is a whole different issue. Here's an example of the extent to which Discovery is living in pro cycling's future:

I saw Chris Brewer in the media tent near the finish line at the Wachovia USPRO Championship on Sunday. I said, "Chris, I see that you've already reported that George Hincapie has won the Prologue of the Dauphine Libere. {That Prologue was taking place at the same time that the USPRO Championship was beginning.} How did you get that article up on ThePaceline.com?"

I fully expected him to say that one of his co-workers was back at the hotel in Philadelphia, or someone was on-site at the Dauphine and did the update from a media center with broadband.

Instead he unclipped his BlackBerry from his belt, held it up, and said, "I did it from here."

I've only posted one story from my Treo 650 at a pro cycling event: it was the article where I reported that Lance Armstrong had announced his retirement in Augusta, Georgia the day before the Tour de Georgia started. I did it because my laptop wasn't working on the hotel's WiFi network.

I think the fact that Chris Brewer feels confident enough to update the home page of a big site like thePaceLine.com from his Mobile Internet device is an indication that Discovery now has experience competing in more than one race simultaneously and they can keep their fans informed about it while still keeping their staff size reasonable.

In my opinion, they are at least a year ahead of the Domestic Pro Peloton in this regard. I have no idea whether the major European teams have this capability, but given the limited European distribution of BlackBerrys and devices like the Treo, I'd have to guess that Discovery is way ahead of them as well.

Technorati Tags: Wachovia Cycling Series

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems that far more people know about BlackBerry handheld communicators and their number one feature, "push email", than have any idea how they function. I'm using the term push email to mean that the BlackBerry handheld beeps or vibrates immediately when a new email message hits the user's Inbox. Note that I didn't say that these notifications happened automatically.

To make push email work, BlackBerrys depend on a layer of middleware that's often not present in other mobile email solutions. The middleware is one of the following server or desktop-based applications:

• BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES): Corporate email users that use Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes on their desks generally have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server somewhere on the backend keeping their BlackBerry in sync with their desktop email account and calendar. This is an expensive piece of server software licensed to corporations, so it's managed and supported on a 24x7 basis by the Information Technology department. As a result, very few small businesses or individual users have access to a BES.

• BlackBerry Web Client (BWC): The service that's generally provided by mobile phone carriers to individual and small business customers. This performs a similar function to a BES, but it's far less integrated.

  The BlackBerry Web Client uses a carrier-provided mailbox (username@carrier.blackberry.net) to store messages that are copied from the user's main mailbox. The BWC accesses the user's main mailbox through either the IMAP or POP3 protocol.

  The drawback to this approach is that most carriers put a hard limit on the size of the mailbox they provide, so users have to manage email on their BlackBerry devices to stay within that limit. In effect, the user is acting as his or her own IT department, managing the email within a fixed-capacity mailbox.
  

• BlackBerry Desktop Redirector (BDR): For Microsoft Exchange users whose companies have not subscribed to BES. This requires that the desktop PC run the Exchange client 24 hours-a-day. When it's properly configured, incoming messages get forwarded to the user's BlackBerry. Again, making it work is up to the end user unless he has an IT staff.
  

The impression that most non-BlackBerry users have of the experience of using a BlackBerry is that all users have access to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server. In truth, only BlackBerry users at the largest corporations, institutions, and government entities have this level of features.

Users who work for smaller organizations or work independently who want BlackBerry-like capabilities have several choices:

• They can buy a BlackBerry handheld and use one of the BlackBerry middleware tools that is less reliable and capable than the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
• They try to find a service provider who will sell them a BlackBerry handheld and resell a slot on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server to them. This option is probably going to cost more on a monthly basis than using a mobile carrier's basic BlackBerry service.
• They can buy a handheld like the palmOne Treo 650 which can be configured to use email client software that makes an IMAP-based email account perform in push email fashion.

When I had to make the decision, I bought the palmOne Treo 650 with service from Cingular Wireless and installed Chatter Email as my email client application. I think it works better than a BlackBerry 7230 that uses the BlackBerry Web Client. I tried that BlackBerry configuration last year, it was OK, but I ended up doing more mailbox management than I wanted to.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell and I came to the conclusion yesterday that in order to make an informed decision about wireless email for a small business, the decision maker needed to understand the purposes of the basic email transport protocols. Without this knowledge, it is extremely difficult to comprehend the services that mobile phone carriers offer and how best to utilize them. The main email protocols are as follows:

• IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol): designed to work well in situations where a user spends some time at more than one computing device and must see the same incoming email in each place.
• POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3): designed to handle situations where a user manages his incoming email through one primary computing device.
• SMTP (Simple Message Transfer Protocol): designed to allow users to send email between a client and a server or between two servers. (Most people use SMTP to send, regardless of the protocol they use to manage incoming email.)

Many small business people that use or are considering a wireless email device also spend sometime working at a desk. This means that they could benefit from accessing their email via IMAP rather than via POP3.

The fundimental difference between IMAP and POP3 is that the IMAP protocol manages email that is retained on the email server, while the POP3 protocol retrieves email from the server and deletes the messages that have already been read. When you think through these design principles, you'll also realize that the IMAP protocol is best suited to a wireless data access environment where connectivity is generally available, fast, and purchased on a flat-rate basis or at a low cost.

On the other hand, POP3 could be the right protocol if wireless data access is sporadic, slow, and/or expensive.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've written a couple of stories about gadgets that I wish I had when I was covering the 2005 Dodge Tour de Georgia. One gadget that I'm proud to say I had with me for the all six stages was my palmOne Treo 650. The Treo 650 has quickly become the key component of my technology arsenal, and I would have been unable to file stories in a few really important situations without it.

I got my Treo 650 on March 31. I actually bought two Treos, the other one was for my wife. We had agreed to get his and hers Treos because we had both previously been heavy wireless email users and were in need of technology upgrades. The purchases were timed so that we would receive the Treos and have time to work any glitches out before I left on my trip to the Chicago Showcase Hockey Tournament. That took place right before the Tour de Georgia.

When I arrived at the Tour de Georgia opening press conference, a critical component of my laptop was not working. My WiFi network card was unable to maintain a connection to the hotel conference center's wireless network. For a moment I thought that I would be unable to publish a report on Lance Armstrong's retirement announcement, by far the biggest news story of the event. In a moment of panic, I pulled out my Treo 650, connected to my site's Movable Type backend using the built-in Blazer web browser, and published my story.

The palmOne Blazer Web Browser and the Treo 650 hardware provides the best handheld Internet experience I've ever seen, but that's only part of their appeal. These tools are also excellent for quick access to websites that have flexible page layouts and useful for emergency access to web-based business applications when your primary computer is unavailable or not working. The Blazer browser is helped immensely by the enhanced display (320 x 320), which has twice the resolution of the Treo 600 and most other PalmOS handhelds.

The Treo 650 is often compared to Research in Motion BlackBerry handhelds such as the BlackBerry 7230. After using both devices for long periods of time, I have to say that the Treo offers a superior web browsing experience both in terms of responsiveness and fidelity to the look and feel of the web page. When I used a BlackBerry, I found myself gravitating toward WAP-enabled sites, but the Treo gives me two different ways to look at HTML-based pages and the speed necessary to allow me to see them before I get frustrated. The Blazer Browser on the Treo 650 also implements a number of key JavaScript actions, Cascading Style Sheets, and other advanced features that make its browser far more likely to work with modern, full-featured websites than a Blackberry's browser.

Probably the most impressive feature of the Treo 650 is the integration between the PalmOS Contacts application and the Phone application. The Contacts application lets you do things like type a first and last initial and bring up a short list of people and their phone numbers. Using the 5-way navigator button, you can then choose the number you want to call. This part of the Treo User Interface is optimized for one-handed use, and it's a significant improvement over most mobile phones as well as first and second-generation Treos.

The Treo 650 has the potential to be a great mobile email platform if the right wireless email client is chosen. I tried Versamail, but found that it did not work well with my three primary IMAP email accounts. I then tried Chatter Email which bills itself as "the most powerful email client for Treo". This is a very well done, surprisingly mature mobile IMAP client that I recommend wholeheartedly. In my opinion, Chatter Email is the most BlackBerry-like email implementation on a non-BlackBerry device today, provided that your IMAP server supports the IMAP IDLE command.

Another email client that has been recommended to me by several people is SnapperMail. This appears to be aimed at the POP3 email users of the world, rather than IMAP users like me. If you use the Post Office Protocol for email, I would definitely give SnapperMail a try, although VersaMail might also be a good choice for you.

The Treo 650 is a much more stable, reliable handset than any of the Treo models I've used previously. Back in the days of the 180 and even during the heyday of the 600, I wondered if I'd ever see a palmOS-based mobile communicator that would run without crashing for days at a time unless the addition of third-party applications was blocked. After using a 650, I have to conclude that a number of features have come together in this device to improve its stability:

1. core application code maturity making third-party applications that leverage the key features of the Treo less likely to crash it,
2. CPU performance ensuring that the Treo keeps up with the data that it's receiving, and
3. non-volatile memory making data loss a thing of the past.

The true test of my Treo 650's reliability was when I went on my recent two week trip to Chicago and Georgia and didn't take the computer on which I have Palm Desktop installed. With previous Treo models, this would have meant that I ran the risk of losing the data on my Treo if a serious application crash occurred or if the device ran critically low on power. Thanks to the non-volatile memory and improved stability of the Treo 650, I got through the two week trip without any data loss. That would have been impossible on the Treo 180 and improbable on the 600.

I like many of the other features of the Treo 650 including Bluetooth support, the unsophisticated, VGA-resolution digital camera, and the Documents To Go 7 Professional Suite that lets me view Microsoft Office documents without being near my PC, but to be honest, I could do without any of these features and still be incredibly happy. The 650 is what I hoped all the previous Treos would be: a durable, stable, and highly usable mobile communication device where I can install my choice of a wide variety of third party software. When the chips were down, it helped me succeed at the Tour de Georgia. If you need capabilities like these, I'd definitely give the Treo 650 a try.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I probably went overboard in my criticism of Engadget in my earlier article called Engadget Repeatedly Disses Athletes. My wife Kathleen pointed out that Operation Gadget normally has a positive tone even when I disagree with something said on another website. I agree that my comments were uncharacteristic of the rest of this site.

I'd like to recommend a report about the Nokia 5140i mobile phone announcement published by MobileBurn.com. This article emphasizes the features of the 5140i that might appeal to fitness gadget fans. Here's an excerpt:

Nokia recently announced the latest in their 'rugged' range of handsets, the 5140i. Targeted at fitness fanatics, athletes, and outdoorsy types, the 5140i includes much of the same features seen in the original 5140, including Push To Talk (PTT) and EDGE data. The 5140i now packs a 65k colour screen, though - a real improvement over the 4096 colour display in the 5140. The new model is also slightly bulkier all around....

The 5140i also features Fitness Coach, an interesting personal trainer program (originally seen in the 5140) that helps with general training by creating, tracking, and customizing fitness plans. Data from Fitness Coach can now be transferred to compatible wrist computers and heart monitors (produced by Polar Electro) as well as be sent to other mobiles via SMS.

If Engadget had reported on the Nokia 5140i announcement the way MobileBurn did, I would have linked to Engadget and praised them for pointing out the key differentiators between this handset and others already on the market.

You have to admit that the 5140i and its predecessor are unique products. I believe that U.S. mobile phone carriers will not be quick to carry either of these models in local stores, but they'll never even consider stocking them unless there is some grassroots demand. A good feature summary from a big site like Engadget could help to build that demand.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell pointed out an excellent article in The Seattle Times called T-Mobile Resists the Rush where several T-Mobile USA executives suggested that it was too early to roll out faster wireless data services. The choicest quote in the article came from Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's Chief Development Officer:

What is it that they [customers] will be missing? Today, you can get e-mail on devices, you can get instant messaging and you can get Internet access.

He's right up to a point.

I can get a device which is a good email client on T-Mobile. It's called the T-Mobile Sidekick II. It works well from what I understand except for two issues:

1. It has a UI that's designed to appeal to hipsters rather than business people.
2. Its email client is an IMAP polling mechanism rather than a real IMAP client.

The core problem is that there basically aren't any T-Mobile wireless email solutions more sophisticated and dependable than the Sidekick II.

• The palmOne Treo 600 provides customers with true email client choice, but it's hamstrung by its low-resolution display and, more importantly, by a lack of wireless data bandwidth.
• T-Mobile has extensive BlackBerry device offerings, but the backend email infrastructure offered to individual and small business customers is primitive compared to that which users of corporate email systems with integrated BlackBerry Enterprise Servers receive.
• The H-P iPAQ h6315 is a troubled device which has not received the kind of technical support from Hewlett-Packard that's necessary to keep it in the good graces of the gadget pundits.

Cutting edge mobile data devices, like the palmOne Treo 650 and the Motorola RAZR V3 are designed for the EDGE wireless data protocol which runs at 154.32 kilobits per second at peak and averages 107.11 kbps. T-Mobile's GPRS wireless data network tops out at 39.09 kbps.

If you were running palmOne or Motorola's handset businesses, would you sign a distribution deal for your flagship mobile Internet device with a mobile provider whose network runs at 20 percent of the peak data rate supported by the device? (That's T-Mobile.) Not if you can deal with a carrier that supports your device at its full data rate (Cingular), and just as an added bonus, has two and a half times the marketshare of the carrier with the slower data network.

A couple of weeks ago I said that I was switching from T-Mobile to Cingular because I wanted the Treo 650 and I wanted the bandwidth that was available from Cingular. The greater bandwidth allows me to run Chatter Email, a full IMAP email client that is the most Blackberry-like email implementation I've seen on a PalmOS device. It works, it's worth it, and I'm not looking back.

As the smallest national mobile carrier in the United States, T-Mobile USA needs more than the hipster demographic to get to the next level. The easiest vertical market to capture after the hipsters would have been the gadget connoisseurs. In order to be competitive in that market you have to have the best available wireless data network compatible with your infrastructure, not the slowest and cheapest.

We'll see how long it takes T-Mobile's management to conclude that accelerating EDGE deployment is a top priority.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been using VersaMail 3.0 since I got my Treo 650 eight days ago. I'm always hesitant to make conclusive statements without backing them up with significant research, but I want to warn people who are just starting to use the Treo 650 or are considering purchasing it: VersaMail doesn't seem to work too well as an IMAP mail client, at least with respect to the way I manage my IMAP mailboxes.

I have three separate IMAP mailboxes, one each for:

• operationgadget.com (mail about this blog),
• ctdata.com (corporate mail), and
• weblogimprovement.com (mail regarding weblog engineering that I do for clients).

These mailboxes each have between several hundred and two thousand messages in their Inboxes. I have virtually unlimited storage capability for each of these IMAP mailboxes because I manage my own mailservers.

The perfect mobile IMAP client for me would provide windows into my three mailboxes, using as much bandwidth on the Cingular EDGE network as necessary. The way VersaMail appears to work is to download at least a portion of each message onto my Treo, as if I was trying to conserve bandwidth.

I'm not saying that this is definitely how VersaMail works because I haven't read all the documentation. I think I am safe in making this judgement, however, because my Treo 650 has become more sluggish as VersaMail has collected and displayed more email in each IMAP mailbox. Further evidence is the steady increase in the amount of time it takes to sync to the PC I use, refered to elsewhere on Operation Gadget as my blogging workstation.

I'm now attempting to sync my Palm to my PC. Once I complete this task, I'm probably going to remove VersaMail and try one of the third party email clients that works with the Treo 650. The ones I want to try the most are SnapperMail and ChatterEmail.

I'm planning to take a look at both of these programs and provide some details on how they differ from VersaMail. Once I've determined which one of the three best meets my needs, I will try to review it in detail here on Operation Gadget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen and I got our Treo 650s last night. I didn't think they were going to arrive yesterday, but UPS delayed a shipment status message that would have told me that the package was "out for delivery". As a result, I arrived back at the Home Office late yesterday afternoon to find a UPS Call Tag on my front door.

I quickly followed the instructions on the Call Tag and put the packages in "Same Day Will Call" status, so I could pick them up at the UPS facility in Trenton, New Jersey around 7:30pm. Same Day Will Call is a nice web-enabled service that allowed me to pickup the phones 18 hours before they would have been redelivered to my place.

Both phones seemed to be in working order when I unpacked them. I followed the Treo 650 setup instructions to install the batteries, initialize the digitizer and set the clocks, and plug them into wall outlets to fully charge.

The Treos were fully charged by the time we went to bed. I woke up for a little while in the middle of the night, so I decided to follow the instructions in the Treo 650 Upgrade Guide. This quickly put most of the information that I had stored in my Treo 180 on to my new 650. I went back to sleep.

I got up this morning and started putting the Treo 650 through its paces. The only problem I ran into initially was the fact that my 650 did not seem to know where to find Cingular's Voice Mail service. This is a common problem with Treo 650s on Cingular that have Gemplus SIM cards. PalmOne has developed a Treo 650 Voice Mail Updater that attempts to solve this problem, but it didn't work on my Treo.

After scratching my head for a little while, I called Cingular Customer Service. The problem with changing the voice mail speed dial number on the Treo 650 is that the Cingular-branded version doesn't let you do that yourself for some reason.

The first level support person pretty quickly handed me off to a technician. He walked me through putting the SIM card in another GSM phone (we have a number of them around, but I used my sister-in-law Mary Kuykendall's Nokia 6010 because it's the simplest GSM phone that was here at the time) and setting the voice mail speed dial number on it. This didn't take long once we determined that was what we had to do, but the duration of the call was probably at least 20 minutes.

Cingular's Customer Service did well in my first contact with them. Let's see how things go the next time I call.

I haven't really used the Internet on the Treo yet, and I haven't attempted to set up mobile email. I'll try to report on that later. I'll also have pictures of the two Treo 650s up in the Operation Gagdet Photo Gallery soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the combined Cingular and AT&T Wireless had the highest number of customer complaints of any U.S. mobile phone carriers in 2004, according to figures released by ConsumerReports.org.

The Consumer Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Communications Commission and obtained reports documenting the complaints received and the carriers to which the complaints referred. They filed the FOIA request as a follow up to a mobile carrier satisfaction survey of the readers of Consumer Reports that was published back in February.

Verizon Wireless did the best of the national wireless carriers in terms of number of complaints per million subscribers, followed by future merger partners Nextel and Sprint.

There is little doubt that Cingular deserves its place as the worst carrier in 2004. The question is how much will they improve in 2005? They are getting toward the end of their GSM 850 and EDGE data network upgrades, and gradually eliminating differences between the Cingular customer experience and that of the former customers of AT&T Wireless. This can only help their future numbers.

People who read Operation Gadget regularly are probably a bit surprised by how the numbers treat Verizon Wireless. This company is being sued by customers who bought the Motorola V710 for use on Verizon only to find that many Bluetooth features of the phone have been locked out. This type of issue probably doesn't fit well in the FCC mobile phone carrier complaint framework.

I don't regret ordering a phone that works on the Cingular network. I think their worst customer service performances are largely behind them. Kathleen has been an AT&T Wireless customer for the last few years, and she hasn't had a bad experience with them either.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I said to Kathleen, "You know, the Treo 650 doesn't come with a case, so we're going to have to choose cases for ourselves." She said, "OK, let me know what the options are and I'll pick one."

I think palmOne PDAs and communicators have the most developed accessories aftermarket of any electronic gadgets other than the iPod. TreoCentral has produced a large number of reviews of Treo 650 cases. Here are links to a couple that I think are interesting:

• Innopocket Aluminum Hard Case: Similar to the case that Palm manufactured for the Palm V and Vx. [ TreoCentral Review ]
• B650 Book Case: A leather case that folds around the 650 like a book. No belt clip. [ TreoCentral Review ]
• Bellagio Lateral Pouch Case: A case similar to the case that ships with the H-P iPAQ H6135. Clips to a belt with a 360-degree rotating belt clip. [ TreoCentral Review ]
• Copilot Case: A lateral pouch that has a belt loop. [ TreoCentral Review ]
• Vaja i-Volution T65 Case: This is an expensive, custom-made leather case. One of a series of cases by Vaja of Buenos Aires, Argentina. [ TreoCentral Review ]

Another interesting Treo 650 case that I just learned about is the JAVOedge Treo 650 JAVOskin in steel blue. [ Also in frosted white. Via PocketFactory.com. ]

I still haven't mentioned the Treo 650 Side Case from palmOne itself. I'll try to find a review of it to point to later.

I have no idea which one of these cases I'll buy for myself. There are several good choices. If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to post a comment.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It looks like Jonathan Greene of atmaspheric | endeavors is about two weeks ahead of me in experiencing the Treo 650. A couple of days ago, he published a summary of his first week experience with the Treo 650. He says that as a former Treo 600 user, he chafes at the limited memory of the 650.I can understand this if you were pushing the limits of the 600 before upgrading.

I'll be retiring a partially broken Treo 180, so I don't expect to have to make compromises.

Jonathan gives a couple of examples of accessory software that he depends on, like BackupMan and PowerRun. I'm looking forward to checking those Palm apps out.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a call from my friend Cecil Ledesma a little while ago who asked me for my first impression of the Treo 650. I had to tell him that I don't have mine yet-- I'll probably get it within the next week. I was able to tell him, however, that Treo 650 Updater 1.08 for the Sprint PCS-version of the Treo 650 was actually released by palmOne the other day. Here are the features:

• Overall voice quality improvements and enhanced call clarity
• Internal setting modification to allow correct access to Sprint Affiliate roaming partner networks (previously released as Sprint PCS Treo 650 Roaming Patch)
• Optimizes memory handling and frees up more memory with non-volatile file system improvements
• TTY (also known as TDD or Text Telephone) optimizations and improvements
• Optimizations for data calls
• Includes VersaMail 3.0c which provides greater stability and improvements
• Bluetooth Carkit drivers are now included in ROM (previously released as Carkit Update for Treo 650)

[ Feature list courtesy of palmOne. ]

The most consistent complaint I've heard about the Treo 650 on Sprint PCS has been "call sound quality", so this update will be welcomed. There's still no support for the Dial Up Networking (DUN) profile, but that's got to be on the nice-to-haves list for Sprint users at this point.

If you are looking for a Treo 650 and are considering Sprint PCS as your carrier, this update makes the choice a bit easier to justify.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of regular Operation Gadget readers [ Jonathan Greene and Levi Wallach ] have expressed some surprise that Kathleen and I are buying two Treo 650s to use on Cingular Wireless. There are a couple of reasons why we've chosen to do this that may not be apparent to others at first glance:

• Kathleen had a BlackBerry on the Cingular Interactive Mobitex network until about four months ago. Since then she has not had wireless email. We were paying about $40 per month for the wireless data service for her at the time the contract was cancelled, and we considered that a good investment. The total cost of her mobile phone and wireless data at that point was about $80 per month, so the total cost of phone and wireless data service for her Treo 650 will be virtually the same.
• My T-Mobile bill is between $95 and $100 per month. This is inflated by the cost of using "anytime minutes" to call Kathleen because she and I are not currently on the same mobile carrier. By switching to Cingular, I can cut my bill by $15 to $20 per month by reducing the number of "anytime minutes" for which I'm paying.
• Kathleen's parents and sister have a Cingular Wireless "family plan". By switching our phones to Cingular, we will reduce the amount of billable minutes that they and we need.
• We also expect to be able to save money on long distance telephone calls to Kathleen's family and some of our other relatives by calling them on Cingular-powered mobile phones rather than on regular phone lines.

The way we're looking at this, we are cutting our total mobile communications bill by 11 percent, getting two state-of-the-art integrated communication devices, and getting unlimited PDA access to the Cingular EDGE mobile data network for two users. The Cingular EDGE network operates faster than T-Mobile's GPRS network.

In defense of T-Mobile, I feel that they have the best customer service of any mobile phone carrier in the United States and their handset unlocking policies are the fairest to their customers. These intangibles may trump a 10 percent cost savings and a faster wireless data network for some people. Also, T-Mobile's billing plans are generally a bit less expensive than Cingular's if you would not benefit as much from the savings associated with free in-network calling to other Cingular customers that is clearly beneficial to my wife and me.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife and I went ahead and bought two Treo 650s yesterday. I thought a few things about the purchase process were pretty interesting:

• This was our first purchase of mobile phones from Amazon.com. As such, we experienced a completely self-service purchase process, including filling out credit applications.
• There was lots of documentation available, such as detailed descriptions of rate plans. Where I thought the process came up a little short was in preparing me for the information that would be required during the purchase process. Maybe it varies from carrier-to-carrier, but I felt that Amazon could have told us that we would need information from our driver's licenses earlier in the purchase process.
• Amazon deserves credit for clearly explaining the mobile carriers' credit check processes in post-purchase emails. They told us that:
  1. the carriers sometimes don't do credit checks right away,
  2. we should expect to receive another email documenting our carrier's credit decision within two days or we should re-contact Amazon,
  3. our orders would be automatically cancelled in seven days if the carrier did not respond with a credit decision.

[ FYI, our new carrier (Cingular) did the credit checks within 24 hours and approved us. ]

One surprising aspect of purchasing a new phone from Amazon.com that has Cingular service is that the process does not currently include support for number portability. In other words, if you want to take advantage of the good discount that Amazon.com and Cingular are offering on the Treo 650, you have to allow them to assign you a new phone number. This might be a show-stopper for some people.

This didn't matter to us because my wife's current mobile phone has a number in the "856" area code (the Philadelphia suburbs of New Jersey). This is not the area we live or work in now, so we want her to get a new number.

My mobile phone number is listed in my email signature, but not currently printed on my business card, so I don't feel married to it. In fact, someone I don't know Googled me the other day and called me on my mobile phone to ask a question rather than emailing or calling my office and leaving a message. This is another reason why it's time for a new number.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife and I are about ready to make the plunge into a new mobile phone era by each purchasing Treo 650s. To give you a little background on our gadget habits, Kathleen and I are Blackberry users from the Mobitex era. We each had separate TDMA mobile phones at one point, then I made the jump to the Treo 180 on T-Mobile about three years ago. This gave me a single, integrated device, but my wife kept her separate gadgets.

At some point I had hoped to switch to a Treo 600, but didn't feel I had the money in the pre-Operation Gadget era.

My wife lost her Blackberry about six months ago when the reseller who had been servicing our Cingular Interactive Mobitex account shut down that part of its business. She's been chafing at her lack of mobile email access ever since.

Now we're looking at the monthly cost of not being on the same wireless carrier and it just doesn't make sense for us to keep paying for larger "buckets" of "anytime minutes" than we would need if we could call each other mobile-to-mobile. On top of that, the wireless data capabilities of converged devices like the Treo 650 are just too compelling to pass up.

Our intent is not to wring quite as much savings out of our telecom budget as Glenn Fleishman did a couple of months ago, but we want to knock at least 25 percent off the total. We're pretty sure we can do that.

I'm hoping that we can get this process underway this weekend. I'll report this effort in more detail when we start working on it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Gizmodo reports that Siemens demonstrated an application called Runster that varies the tempo of music played on a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone based on how quickly the user moves. The idea is to allow the user to listen to songs that are appropriate to the intensity of his or her exercise. The application was demonstrated on a prototype Siemens SX2 mobile phone at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany.

I've created playlists for my wife's iPod to correspond with running and cycling workouts that I do in the hockey offseason. These playlists have different tempos that I think are appropriate for the pace of my exercise. I think I will be using applications like Runster in the future during training and I hope that a feature like this comes out for the iPod platform some day.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Montgomery Advertiser reports that a 26-year old pickup truck driver from Tennessee was ejected from his vehicle while composing a text message. The accident occurred on Interstate 65 outside of Athens, Alabama. Investigators said that the driver lost control of his truck, which overturned on its way down an embankment.

As someone who has used a handset to send a text message while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike in the past, I say that driving while texting is incredibly dangerous. There is no excuse for doing it while the vehicle is moving. I even question whether text messages should be sent or read while a vehicle is stopped at a traffic light, because it's so easy to lose focus on what other motorists are doing around you. [ via Textually.org ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I'm testing a Hewlett-Packard iPAQ h6315 with service from T-Mobile USA. Overall, I've had a very good experience, but I have run into a glitch or two. One problems I've seen is that the mobile phone component of the iPAQ will occasionally disconnect itself from the mobile phone network when it goes to sleep.

This is one of the problems that an unofficial ROM patch has been published to fix. The problem with applying this patch is that H-P and T-Mobile will not provide support for iPAQs to which this patch is applied. At least one article ominously warns that "you will do damage to your iPAQ if you install this ROM".

Here is another problem I have with the using this patch. I've looked at the website where this patch is posted, http://www.lvlolvlo.net/, and there is no indication of who wrote it. It's easy to lookup who the owner of the site is by doing a "whois" search, but I don't like the effort that the author has expended to preserve anonymity. I feel that, at some level, you have to trust the developer of software you install on a PDA. How can you trust someone who provides so little information about him or herself?

Comments I've read from some other iPAQ h6315 users indicate that they are willing to take a risk to correct some glitches they've experienced with this device. I wouldn't feel that way if I paid $500 for this iPAQ.

I'd recommend waiting for H-P and T-Mobile to issue an official ROM patch. When a manufacturer like H-P goes to the lengths it has to warn users to avoid an unofficial ROM patch, I think the best bet is to heed such warnings.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

TreoCentral reported that unnamed sources expect Sprint PCS to issue a software update for the Treo 650 next week. The features expected to be included are:

• fixes for voice breakup and muting problems,
• patches previously issued for Bluetooth devices like car kits,
• improvement of non-volatile memory management,
• improvements to VersaMail.

This update does not appear to add support for the Bluetooth Dial-up Networking (DUN) profile.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In his continuing quest for information about the Danger / Sidekick II Server Outage, Martin O'Donnell pointed out the following threads from Hiptop.com:

• Acknowledgement of the outage, posted this afternoon.
• One user reported that the system was promised to be back up by 9:00am today, but that didn't happen.
• There's lots of general complaining about Danger's lack of communication.

There is also a thread that alleges that moderators on Hiptop.com censor unfavorable comments about Danger, Inc. and T-Mobile. Other comments suggest that most of the postings that have been purged are from forum users who are known to Danger, Inc. to have multiple IDs on the system and are repeating themselves.

Independent Sidekick II User Forums may be found here:

• Danger Sidekick in Yahoo! Groups,
• Sk-Buddies i