Add a comment December 9th, 2007 by PhoneBoy
This will, hopefully, be the last time in a while that this list is so long. With the changes in my responsibilities with Creative Weblogging, I should be blogging a little less and promoting a little more. Maybe I can find the energy to do a post on my S60 Blog, which I haven’t blogged on in a while. 
Meanwhile, here’s this week’s lineup of posts:
Add a comment October 4th, 2007 by PhoneBoy
Another in my comparison series, this time when connecting the device to a Macintosh to exchange data. I’m not going to touch on the PC side of things since they are more or less tied.
Disclaimer: I work for a competitor of both HTC and Microsoft in the smartphone space. That being said, my day job currently has nothing to do with smartphones. This is my own opinion.
Since the advent of Nokia Multimedia Transfer on my Mac, I can more easily sideload content to and from my Nokia device. I can also use the file browser to just get the files I need. There’s also iSync support for many of Nokia’s S60 Third Edition website.
If for some reason, I decide to hook up my Eseries or Nseries devices into a Linux box, a couple of keypresses makes them able to copy files to and from the device. Now I can get data off my phone no matter what OS I use.
But then there’s the HTC. You plug this thing into a Mac, it does nothing. Software to sync contacts and calendar is available, but its worse. There isn’t the equivalent of “Mass Storage” mode, either. This means the only way in and out of this device is over Infrared or by pulling the MicroSD card.
In terms of calendar and contacts, I am using the native ActiveSync client on the HTC Mogul and Mail for Exchange 2.0 on my Nokia E61 for over the air sync. Both do good with the inbox, but the mail client in the HTC Mogul allows me access to my entire folder structure in addition to just the inbox. I expect that Mail for Exchange will have this and other features in upcoming versions. I will dive into the Email client in a future post.
Clear winner here is the Nokia Nseries and Eseries devices. Mac users like myself whom want to sync their phone to their computer should probably avoid Windows Mobile-powered devices unless you’re willing to pay extra for the privilege.
Add a comment January 16th, 2007 by PhoneBoy
Even though Andy Abramson said on KenRadio the other day that it’s kind of unfair to compare a shipping product with a vaporware product, I think this article is worth a read. The points they mention all seem valid, at least based on what’s been said about the iPhone to this point.
For what it’s worth, Andy did call me the other night on his Nokia N800 N770 (via Gizmo) and it sounds fantastic! Looking forward to getting my hands on the N800 as it promises to be that much better!
Edit: I thought Andy had his N800. My mistake.
Add a comment December 24th, 2006 by PhoneBoy
One thing I am making sure I do when I send my MacBook back to Apple to fix that annoying screen flicker is that the drive is backed up. Last time I sent the drive to Apple, I just used the good old fashioned Unix tar command to back up the /Users partition. That turned out to be annoying to deal with.
Meanwhile, I’ve taken advantage of the slow news time to catch up on my video podcasts. A program that I didn’t know about called SuperDuper! was featured on an episode of MacBreak. It’s basically a backup program for MacOS. It’s “shareware” as a lot of the features require payment, but the basic functionality is available for free! The functionality I need? Image my laptop drive for in case Apple decides to erase it.
I have a 320gb ATA/100 drive I picked up at Office Depot plugged into a USB adapter. Yes, I have a bare drive sitting on my desk (well, it is on the anti-static bag). It’s definitely bigger than my 60gb drive in my MacBook, but it works. Yes, I could have bought a proper enclosure, but bare hard drives are so much more useful to me. I can stuff them in one of the many PCs I have.
As you can see from the screenshot above, once you get it going, it gives you an overview of the whole process. It tells you exactly what it’s doing right now. The whole process is like that–very verbose screens that guide you though. I may be sending these guys $28 to use some of the other functionality, but I think I’ll wait until after Christmas and after I deal with the fine folks at Apple a second time over this screen flicker problem.
Add a comment December 18th, 2006 by PhoneBoy
At least that’s what his Tedlyness thinks it will be called. Certainly won’t be called an iPhone since Linksys owns that trademark. Either way, my Nokia phones suit my penchant for music and videos just dandy, thanks. Give me a cool way to sync with iTunes on my Mac and I’d be all set.
Add a comment December 12th, 2006 by PhoneBoy
I’ve previously written about Soonr, which is a client-side plugin for Skype that makes it possible to send and receive both IM and calls to and from Skype users. I haven’t used it in a while, mostly because I’m too busy using Twitter to be bored enough to fire up Skype on my mobile phone.
Today I got an email from the folks at Soonr letting me know that I can now store up to 100mb of documents on their servers for free and I can access that stuff from my Soonr account over the web. Nice idea, but 100mb is hardly enough to store any appreciable amount of data. Might be nice for a few files, but not much else. Soonr was going to charge for this feature. Maybe they will charge for more disk space.
Still scratching my head on the monetization strategy for this one.
Add a comment June 22nd, 2006 by PhoneBoy
As promised, the folks from Soonr have released Soonr for Mac OS 10.4. It is now available on their site for download. And while the basic functionality–integration with Skype–works as I expect on the Mac, the desktop integration piece is not 100% “there” yet.
In addition to allowing you to chat with your Skype buddies as well as “call” them from your mobile phone (basically, the Soonr desktop agent sets up a conference call between your mobile phone and the Skype friend–or lets you make another SkypeOut call), Soonr also allows you to access files in certain folders in your system. You can choose which ones are made available to you. You can also utilize Mac OS X’s “Spotlight” feature to find files outside of your shared folders. You can protect access to these files with a password.
The cool thing is that this “remote access” can happen not only over a web-enabled mobile phone, but basically “any” web browser. So now in addition to running Skype on your corporate laptop, you have access to your documents from anywhere. Kind of cool, but when I put my security googles on, this has “Danger Will Robinson” written all over it.
A few flaws I’ve noticed initially: If a contact is surrounded in <>’s (one of my contacts is for some reason), then Soonr won’t correctly display the contact name. It basically prints it “as is.” Come to think of it, that creates, among other things, a potential cross-site security risk. It should be straightforward to “translate” characters that might get translated as HTML into something harmless.
One thing about the remote file access: the agent isn’t very good at scanning the shared folder for updates. So, for example, if I go into my documents folder and create a new file, I can’t immediately go to Soonr on my mobile phone to see if the file is available. Not sure how often it updates, but clearly that is an issue. I also cannot seem to make an SMB mounted filesystem available via Soonr as well. Sure, it allowed me to “select” the mounted filesystem as a shared folder, but I can’t access it via Soonr. These issues are probably related.
Anyway, just having the ability to access my Mac-based Skype from my Nokia E70 is damn cool.
tags: skype, soonr, mobile im
Add a comment May 9th, 2006 by PhoneBoy
Soonr is another application that enables the ability to use Skype from your mobile phone. Both require Skype and a special agent application to run. Unlike EQO, which requires a specific application on your mobile phone as well, Soonr uses the web browser built into most phones. This is good in the sense that it’s very easy to support a wide range of phones. There is less variation between web browsers on phones than there is in J2ME implementations on phones
Soonr appears to have a lot of the same functionality as EQO. However, there are some downsides to Soonr’s approach:
1. Chat isn’t instantaneous, at least receiving them. This is because you must manually “refresh” the page to see chat updates from the other person.
2. More data is used with Soonr’s approach, which is a concern for people who aren’t on unlimited data plans on their mobile phones.
Soonr also has some other interesting features, which includes the ability to look at other information on your computer desktop such as your Outlook inbox/calendar as well as access other files on your desktop. These features aren’t working on my system, but it is an interesting idea. I do have other methods for accessing this data, so this isn’t a critical feature for me.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what approach ultimately wins.