When I was in Gmail the other day, I was a bit surprised to see the following ad:
Yes, the link was to a web site giving all kinds of reasons why one should not do business with this person. I am not going to link to the site at all, but a quick Google search should bring it up if you’re interested.
I am not going to comment on whether or not this person is or is not a “deadbeat” because, for all I know, this person isn’t and this is just a libel lawsuit waiting to happen. Even so, it’s really interesting that a person (or a group of persons) would use AdSense as a way to get back at someone that did them wrong.
Twitterfone, the new way to tweet from your phone, now offers local numbers in 17 countries! North America and a lot of the EU is now covered, along with Japan and Australia! And, of course, more countries are coming.
I managed to score a couple of invites to Twitterfone that I will give away to two lucky commenters of this post. Please explain, in 140 characters or less, why I should give you the invite. You can do it directly in the comment or you can tweet it to me (@phoneboy) and provide a link to the tweet in comments. Yes, I will be checking the length, and anything not tweet-sized won’t be considered. I will close comments shortly after 11pm PDT on Friday night.
Back when I was a kid, I always knew where two things were: the nearest pay phone and, if I wasn’t walking distance from home, the nearest bus stop. Of course, I didn’t have a car back then and I certainly didn’t have a mobile phone.
This post from geeksugar reminds me that I took a picture of a phone booth a the Civic Auditorium in San Jose, California. As you can see, the phone itself is gone. The booth itself still remains. It’s still useful because even if you bring your own phone, you still need a quiet place to make a phone call. In fact, I personally used it for just that reason while I was there.
Maybe instead of ripping out the hardwired phones from these phone booths, maybe they can leave them there as a reminder of days gone by or for those times when you need a little bit of piece and quiet when you’re trying to make a call? Or better yet, turn them into pico cells for the mobile network operators?
Maybe there’s some other use for phone booths. What say you?
I managed to play with AT&T’s Cellular Video offering today. On their site, they offer clips to a wide variety of things. On the front page, there’s typically a link to the latest headlines from CNN. If you dig deeper, you’ll find complete episodes of all your favorite shows, including ABC’s hit Desperate Housewives!
For this service to be worthwhile, you really have to have a 3G phone. And you have to have a phone AT&T believes to be 3G. I tried several of my Nokia handsets with the URL http://cingularvideo.cingular.com, which is the URL their service uses, and no joy. If it wasn’t one of the phones they recognize, they don’t let you in, period.
It’s a shame. There’s a lot of great mobile-ready content on there, available for free! I guess this is one of those reasons they can push you to buy one of their handsets versus buying an “open” device, but why lock it up like this, AT&T?
The headset comes with a little stand to put the headset in and it can be charged with a mini USB cable. It actually kind of snaps in. A wall wort with a mini USB plug is also provided.
The headset itself has kind of an odd looking earpiece, but for good reason. It “grips” to your outer ear, doing away with the usual clip around the ear to hold it in place. Having managed to drain the four hour talk time battery in one day–had a lot of meetings that day–it was still fairly comfortable, yet secure. Perhaps the most comfortable headset I’ve used yet.
However, there are some aspects of the headset I don’t like. Turning it on and off involves holding down a button for too long–5 seconds. By 3 seconds, I think something is wrong. Also, the tone that plays when you mute the headset–by holding down both the volume up and down keys simultaneously–is the same tone as when the headset is low on battery.
As long as I was relatively close to the phone, the sound quality on the headset was pretty good–for bluetooth. As I strayed more than a couple feet away, the headset started sounding worse. Whether that’s a function of radio frequency issues, the beta phone I was testing with, or the headset, I don’t know. More testing is needed.
For comfort alone, the headset is worth trying, and is competitively priced at $59.99 (retail, might be cheaper elsewhere).
For some reason, people want the old, monophonic version of the Nokia Tune, i.e. Grande Valse (or Gran Vals), as is often heard in the series TV Medium. Because I’ve gotten a couple of requests for it–mostly because of a post I made on Vox a while ago–as a public service, I’m making a recording of this ring available in both MP3 and WAV format.
Wikipedia says that my employer owns the sound trademark on this. I don’t know if they do or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Hopefully this is fair use and/or the appropriate parties in Nokia don’t mind me doing this. If it’s a problem, I’ll take it down. Just send me an email.
Believe it or not, I still have a couple of phones that are able to play this old, monophonic ring. The Nokia 6340i that I have, which now has a dead battery, was what I used to play the ring and record it with another Nokia handset in WAV format. I also have a Nokia 6185–battery still works–that is capable of playing it as well.
To download these rings, right-click on the link and do a Save As. If you just click on them, they may or may not play, depending on whether or not what kind of browser you’re using.
If you want to download these direct to your phone (because you don’t have a way to transfer a WAV or MP3 file to your phone), I have provided shorter URLs that you can enter from your web-enabled mobile phone handset to download the files directly.
I did an interesting experiment the other day–I tried dialing 0 for a number of phones. What does dialing 0 do? In the United States and Canada, dialing zero was how you reached the operator. You needed the operator to even make local calls at first, but as the equipment became more sophisticated and automated, the operator was needed less and less.
This video from an era gone past explains how operators helped route calls between different cities. Seems quaint today, of course.
In addition to routing long distance calls, operators also were the de-facto emergency service number. You could call the operator and get connected with the local police and fire department as necessary. The operator was used for this function well into the 1980s, in some locations, given that 911 service wasn’t widely available. It still isn’t available in some locations.
Back to my experiment with dialing zero. I have two mobile phones–one with AT&T, one with T-Mobile–and I have a landline with CenturyTel. Surprisingly, I was able to reach an operator on all of these phones. I did notice that some of the Nokia phones blocked dialing zero. My Nokia N95 and my Nokia N73–regardless of SIM–did not allow dialing of the operator. Not quite sure why, but some of my other Nokia handsets were able to do this without a problem.
CenturyTel’s operator was hidden behind a phone tree, mostly because you got the option of English or Spanish. AT&T’s operator gave me, predicably, an AT&T message. Dialing zero only let you dial a collect call. Dialing zero-zero was necessary to reach a real operator.
On T-Mobile, calling the operator was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Why? Because I got a Verizon operator–right away, even. I asked the operator what services they provide, and it still sounds like the same ones: call completion, collect calls, and emergency services.
I guess you still can get an operator, and you still can get service. They don’t even advertise the service anymore. Try finding anything on CenturyTel, T-Mobile, or AT&T website about operator service and you simply won’t find it. But by golly, it’s still there.
Can you tell by looking at the following screens which one is recording and which one isn’t? You can? Good for you.
Most of the people that read this blog should be able to figure this out. Perhaps without what is being videoed showing, and you know what to look for, you know the difference between recording and not.
Enter my wife. Normally, if she needs to take videos, she uses a Nokia N93 I have lying around. Today, the battery was dead, so I decided to lend her my Nokia N95 instead. Same video quality, different form factor.
When she came home, we discussed her video taking experience. It was horrible, as it turns out almost ALL of her experiences taking videos with the phone ends up being.
It boils down to one simple fact: she has no idea when the thing is actually recording. I showed her how it shows it’s recording, the little red area on the bottom. To her, that “blends in” and doesn’t stand out well enough. The “Pause” button is even more confusing, because to her, it means the camera is paused, especially since there is no obvious indication.
The solution to this problem would be dirt simple: a nice, large red REC in the upper left or right corner of the viewfinder. Something that emulates what you might find on a conventional video camera. Something obvious that you’re actually recording.
While I know Nokiainternallybeta tests products–I’m participating in one such test right now–I wonder how much outside testing is done with people like my wife. Someone who is not a mobile phone geek and doesn’t want to become one.
My wife wouldn’t mind carrying around a device like the Nokia N95, complete with the video and picture capabilities it has. However, the phone itself needs to be usable as a phone–the Nokia N93 fails due to it’s size and awkwardness as a phone–and that extra functionality needs to be easy to get to and intuitive to use.
Based on the fact I have to train her each time she uses either my Nokia N93 or N95, or she has to spend too much time familiarizing herself beforehand, I’d say the usability fails the “normal person” test.
Needless to say, I filed an improvement request on the device I am testing to make the recording indication a lot more obvious to people who aren’t geeks. It may not seem like much, but those little things make a big difference to people like my wife.
The folks at VMware have announced the availability of a new beta version of VMware Fusion, their virtualization software for Mac OS X. There are two reasons I immediately ran–not walked–to download and install this beta version:
Proper support for multiple screens–something that affects me quite a bit
The ability to convert a Boot Camp partition to a standalone VM–something I asked about early on in the VMware Fusion process
They’ve also added better support for DirectX (offering experimental support for DirectX 9.0Shader Model 2) as well as made it easier to print to your Mac OS X printer from Windows!
I am still kicking the tires, as it were. One issue I see is that their drivers for Windows XParen’t signed. Upgrading VMware Tools in my Boot Camp Partition converted to a virtual machine did not go entirely smoothly. There was a piece of undetected hardware initially, though it went away after a reboot. Nothing earth shatteringly wrong.
The good news is, for all you people who purchased VMware Fusion 1.x, version 2 is a free upgrade. If you’re not already a convert, they provide a license key you can use to try the beta version of the product out.
Happy Mothers Day to all you mothers out there!
