Joy of Gadgets

Since I’ve joined Check Point Software, I’ve done a fair bit of traveling–moreso than I’ve done in quite some time. Since I am ending up more random places, and have had the joy of going through airport security in Tel Aviv on two occasions so far (which makes the TSA experience seem relatively painless by comparison), it has forced me to refine my travel toolbox–things that come with me on every trip I make. Lighter traveling makes for easier traveling, and the following items have earned a more or less permanent place in my travel bag.

The Apple iPhone: As much as I have liked the Nokia phones over the years, thanks to the breadth of applications on the iPhone, not to mention the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities, the iPhone has been a welcome travel companion. TripIt and iXpenseIt have become absolutely indispensable applications while traveling.

Portable iPhone Battery Charger: Written about this in the past, of course, but it bares mentioning again, especially when using the iPhone in airplane mode on a plane where they don’t provide a USB or power jack. It keeps my phone charged so that when I land, my iPhone and I are ready to go.

The Nokia E71: This comes in handy, particularly on those trips to Israel where I can’t use my iPhone as anything more than an iPod Touch thanks to AT&T’s roaming rates being so expensive. Prior to my purchasing an iPhone, the Nokia E71 was my primary phone and it is still quite capable in a pinch. It is also a failsafe in case I completely drain the battery in the iPhone

MaxRoam: One thing I have to admit missing from my days at Nokia was not having to worry about my mobile phone charges when traveling abroad. 500 – 1000 EUR phone bills were not all that uncommon for travelers abroad. Even though I was a responsible chap and asked how one might reduce that cost while abroad, I was often told “not to worry” by managers. Meanwhile, Check Point has a different opinion about these things, so I carry a MaxRoam SIM in that Nokia E71 to keep the roaming costs a bit more reasonable. That and I get a local SIM card if I’m going to be someplace more than a few days.

Skype: Assuming I have a good Internet connection, Skype is a lifesaver, especially for making reasonable calls to the US while I am abroad. Actually, the calls are included in the ~$30/year Skype North America plan, making it an excellent value.

Monster Outlets To Go: Given the relative lack of plugs I have found in hotel rooms, having a power strip with me has proven to be a wise investment. Abroad, it is even better because I can make more efficient use of the relatively scarce plug adapters. The Outlets To Go by Monster has been fantastic. It’s compact, the plug lights up when connected to power, and it’s relatively inexpensive. Can’t ask for much more than that.

iPass: As much as I’ve used (and loved) Boingo in the past, I have had numerous issues with their software on the iPhone and on the Mac. Also, I frequently find their “mobile” software doesn’t allow me to log into hotspots I use frequently. Enter iPass, who has been at this remote access game longer. They still provide dialup Internet access on the road, but also provide Internet access through a number of other mechanisms, including many of the same WiFi hotspots Boingo does. Their iPhone app works pretty well.  More options is good, and when providing reliable remote access solutions, experience counts.

A Travel Router: Because one never knows exactly what kind of broadband connectivity one will find at a hotel, and I have multiple devices that might need to use that Internet access, a travel router has a place in my bag. I can plug it into the hotel Ethernet and make it WiFi so my laptop and my mobile phones can connect to it. I currently use a first-generation WTR54GS from Linksys, which I have flashed with the flexible DD-WRT firmware.

The EVERYMAN Headset: Yes, with Skype, one needs a quality headset for an optimal experience. The EVERYMAN delivers in terms of cost and compactness in my travel bag. Yes, they gave me a review unit a few months ago, but at $23 shipped to my door, I’d happily buy another one!

An Extra Change of Clothes: One thing I learned from a professional services guy I worked with early in my career is that you never know when you will get stuck someplace on the road. Flights get canceled or severely delayed. Any number of accidents can happen involving your clothing, as well. As a result, I always–even on short trips–bring an extra change of clothes with me. I have never had to use them, thankfully, but it’s nice to know they’re there if I need them.

An Extra Bag: Yes, I actually pack an extra bag in my carryon. It’s one of those nylon “recyclable” bags you might get at a grocery store. This particular one folds up nicely with a velcro flap to keep it a nice, tidy bundle. However, if I end up picking up a few extra things on my travels, having a way to carry that stuff home is important.

It’s that time again:

FreeConferencing.com Launches: Until they do something to equalize inter-carrier compensation between most civilized parts of the United States and rural locations, services like FreeConferenceCall.com and now FreeConferencing.com will continue to exist and be profitable. By hosting these services in, say, rural Iowa, they actually make a small amount of money per minute on incoming calls. Anyway, FreeConferencing.com is a way to do a one-to-many call, complete with a web-based console to manage the call.

Vonage Trying To Act Like Mobile Phone Carriers: Vonage, the VoIP landline replacement service provider that refuses to die, is now offering a deal where you can sign up and not pay for equipment, shipping, or activation. The catch? You have to sign a two year agreement complete with early termination fees that are, according to my calculations, worse than a mobile phone contract.

iPopperz Fashion Earphones: Personally not my thing, but these are relatively inexpensive, in-ear haedphones with a number of styles, colors, and whatnot. I would consider buying the black, green, and black pair. One cool thing: they sell replacement earpads. Granted, there is a huge amount of markup there, but it’s the first time I’ve seen them available.

Bad Experience on DeFi Mobile: I briefly wrote about DeFi Mobile in October. Wasn’t sure how well the service was going to be when it went live, but someone forwarded me some correspondence to and from the company related to their experience. In short: it was bad voice quality and improper CallerID. Anyone have a good experience with DeFi Mobile?

Qwest Offering Free WiFi Nationwide: If you happen to live in an area where Qwest is your local exchange carrier and you get high speed Internet from them, now you can take it with you–sort of. Qwest has signed a deal with AT&T to provide Qwest customers free WiFi at 17,000 AT&T operated WiFi hotspots. Personally, I think it’s worth $9.95 a month for Boingo, which offers WiFi at AT&T locations and a whole bunch more!

I would expect someone like Andy Abramson to be excited about his client, Truphone, getting an application on the Apple iPod Touch that makes it possible to make VoIP calls over WiFi. Eventually, according to MarketWatch, you’ll be able to receive calls as well, though I’m not sure how that will work given Apple doesn’t allow background apps on their iPhone and iPod Touch.

However, when I look at it in the bigger picture, I go “meh.” It’s not exciting to me. Turning something that isn’t a phone into a phone is old hat. That’s been a reality on the Nokia N800/N810 for a while thanks to Skype. I’m sure you can think of other examples of this as well.

I don’t see a lot of “average” people go through the trouble of downloading the Truphone app from Apple’s App Store, getting the necessary microphone adapter from Apple, and using this to make calls versus some other method. No doubt some people will do it–perhaps people aided by geeks like me, perhaps not.

Most of the people I know can barely use their mobile phone. Anything more complicated than making a call, receiving a call, and perhaps using the camera requires assistance from someone like me. I helped my wife’s aunt over Thanksgiving with her LG Dare, never having seen the phone before.

Now granted, not everyone has an iPhone, or an iPod Touch. Apple does make it dirt simple to get apps onto the handset. I’m sure the smart guys at Truphone guys have also done a brilliant job of making this application dirt simple to use, much like they’ve done on the Nokia handsets.

I am struggling to see the market for this. It might seem like there is with 300 Million applications downloaded from Apple’s App Store. However, what percentage of Apple’s iPhone/iPod Touch user base have actually downloaded an application and installed it? How many Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users are actively using third party apps on their devices? My gut says not nearly as many as people are thinking.

The other niggling question is: of the people that download Truphone’s iPod Touch application, how many will turn into paying users instead of just using the free features of the application?

I would love to be wrong and have this be a mainstream game changer. I’d love to see more people using VoIP, but I’m having trouble seeing how this vision will work. Can anyone help clarify it for me?

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Tuesday, I received my white Nokia E71. The phone’s been out a while, as I’m sure anyone who follows a Gadget blog or reads Wired can tell you. Since I work for Nokia, you should realize the following is my own opinion on the Nokia E71 NAM, i.e. E71-2, RM-357, or at least one other name I’m not allowed to use in public.

The first thing I noticed when I opened my package was how small the box is compared to even the N96 I received not too long ago. It’s about half the size. Inside the box, pretty much everything inside that wasn’t shrinkwrapped was cardboard instead of plastic, making the packaging a lot more recyclable. Very green, even if the inside of my box is mostly black

Inside the box, I got the phone, battery, 2.5mm stereo headphones–more on that in a minute–power adapter, micro USB cable, manual, CD. Pretty much everything I expect to come with the phone, though the matching wrist strap and carry case were nice bonuses.

I had seen and even handled some pre-release versions of this handset, but they are never as good as the production units. This one felt wonderful. Solid construction, not too big. The keys are crammed together, but it’s pretty easy to push the right ones.

Continue reading ‘The Nokia E71 NAM: The Good, Bad, and Uglyrgb’

The Nokia E63 is a lower-cost version of the wildly-popular Nokia E71 that was released several months ago. It’s a little thicker than it’s cousin, and the case is plastic instead of metal. It also downsides the camera to 2 megapixel without auto-focus, and loses HSDPA data and GPS.

However, the handset still has a 320×240 color screen, 3G data (at UMTS speeds of 384k/s), WiFi, an awesome keyboard, and the ability to easily switch between home and work profiles. And it has something the Nokia E71 doesn’t have: a bog-standard 3.5mm headset jack on the top of the handset!

The price is certainly right on this handset: 199 EUR before taxes and subsidies. Three variants are being produced to account for the different 3G frequencies around the world, including for the North American market, i.e. for use on AT&T and Rogers. No word on whether or not we’ll see this device taken by a carrier, but this device could easily become under $50 with a two year contract!

I recently signed up for the T-Mobile @Home service through the folks that support voice services at Nokia, where I work. I was sent a Nokia 6301 along with the Hotspot @Home router. The draw? Free calls on the home WiFi, or in earshot of any T-Mobile Hotspot. Why not?

Normally, I would not be buying–or necessarily wanting–a phone like the Nokia 6301. I am quite firmly a smartphone user. The Nokia 6301 is most certainly not a smartphone, but if you want the free calls over WiFi, this is one of the handful of phones T-Mobile sells that permits you to use the Hotspot @Home service.

The technology behind T-Mobile @Home is called UMA. I won’t get into it in detail here, but in short, it allows seamless transitions between your home WiFi and the mobile phone network. I cover UMA in a little more detail on phoneboy.com.

Now, onto the phone hardware. It’s a pretty run of the mill S40 5th Edition FP1 device. Has the usual assortment of keys on the front, power button on the top, volume control on the right side, a 2.5mm headset jack, power, and a not-very accessible USB port. On mine, I basically have to take the back cover off in order to be able to get the port cover off.

Once you take the battery cover off, you can also access the MicroSD slot. The device comes with a 512mb MicroSD card that you can load with music or use to store pictures taken with the 2 megapixel camera.

Unfortunately, I have been spoiled by the two variants of the N95 that I currently have as well as the older N73 and the newly arrived N96, which I will cover later. The 2 megapixel camera on the Nokia 6301 certainly won’t win any awards, but it takes servicable pictures, as shown on my Share on Ovi account. The one feature the Nokia 6301 camera DOES have is the ability to take pictures in landscape mode, giving you a 960×1280 picture. You have to manually put it in that mode, but it’s a nice touch that it has that feature.

The phone has an Active Standby screen like my Nokia smartphones have, but it is disabled by default. Once it is enabled, you can have a number of icons display along the top–you can choose as many as you want among the pre-selected choices. There’s also sections for Music/Radio, Calendar/Notes and more. You can even customize in which of these sections–if any–these will show.

The features are nice, but the real test for this phone is the sound quality–particularly over WiFi. I called someone today and talked with them for an hour on my Nokia 6301 using my home WiFi. They had no idea I was on a mobile phone, much less over WiFi. The audio quality–for both of us–was that good.

I also tested the phone handoff between WiFi and GSM. I started a call with 800-555-TELL (a.k.a TellMe) and played the blackjack with the lovely Sean Connery impersonated voice. The call didn’t miss a beat, though there was an audible “thunk” when the call handed off.

I tried the web browser, which is a fairly basic XHTML/WAP browser. It’s functional, but it’s not the Webkit-based browser that’s on my Nseries devices. Of course, when you’re not in WiFi range, you really don’t want to be web browsing much since the phone only supports GPRS on T-Mobile’s US network–not even EDGE.

One note about the WiFi on this phone: it is only provided for use with the T-Mobile @Home service, or whatever UMA service provider you buy the phone from. It will not work independently of UMA. The good news is that while you’re in range of a configured WiFi access point, the data transfer is much faster.

One downside to S40 devices is that contact and calendar sync are a little more of a challenge. T-Mobile has a (presumably subscription) service where you can sync your stuff to the cloud. Since I have no interest in that, I set up PC Suite on my work computer and am syncing my calendar and contacts over Bluetooth. The phone also, surprisingly, has Nokia’s “Phone switch” application, which makes it possible to sync information between phones.

All in all, the phone is not a bad little device. It’s probably something I’ll carry alongside something more functional and with an AT&T SIM, but for a voice-centric device, it does the job.

The folks at Joiku, makers of the awesome JoikuSpot for S60 now offer a similar program for Windows Mobile devices: WMWiFiRouter. Both of these programs turn your mobile phone into a WiFi hotspot!

The theory is that the program uses the data connection on your mobile phone–which is hopefully 3G. That data connection is made available over WiFi as a regular access point to other WiFi-enabled devices. Sort of, at least on S60, as it is only able to use an AdHoc network type, not infrastructure. This limits you ability to use it with, say, a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. However, it works great with computers.

JoikuSpot is also currently 40% off: 15 Euros instead of the normal 25! While that’s still a lot of clams in U.S. Pesos, it’s still a nice investment. Where else are you going to get a portable WiFi router for that price?

A while ago, I had purchased a Linksys WTR54GS as a travel companion. Not to be confused with the legendary WRT54GS, which is a desktop router, it is a fairly serviceable router that slides into a nice little compact carrying case complete with an Ethernet cable to jack in a computer or to something else.

The main problem I had with the WTR54GS? The firmware. Linksys never bothered to update beyond the initial shipping version, and the firmware is crap. The router’s web interface was slow and frequently experienced weird glitches. A problem with nearly every Linksys router since they switched to using VxWorks instead of Linux.

The folks behind DD-WRT figured out how to liberate this device from a life of running VxWorks. I followed the rather convoluted steps for getting DD-WRT onto the router. One small hitch I ran into was that the referenced Sercomm utility crashes under XP. However, a quick Google search resulted in finding an update to Sercomm that would make it run under XP.

After about 10 minutes, the WTR54GS was running DD-WRT. The web interface worked and was nice and peppy. All the functionality of DD-WRT is now in my travel bag, ready to convert WiFi to Ethernet or vice-versa.

Now if only Linksys would drop this VxWorks crap, their current routers might not suck so bad.

We’ve come to the end of another week of posts. It looks like I’m going to continue to crank out these posts, mostly because the automated methods to do this aren’t as attractive and, quite simply, don’t work that well.

The post list this week:

• Let’s Go Down To The Party Line (From voip.com/blog)
• Scan Your Network For SIP Devices (From voip.com/blog)
• Amazon Web Services Lowers Transfer Prices (From The Web 2.0 Weblog)
• Phones Sound Different Worldwide (From voip.com/blog)
• MRCP and Text-To-Speech (From voip.com/blog)
• iSkoot Updates Symbian Software, Handles Security Incident Well (From The Mobile Technology Weblog, The Wireless Weblog, and The VoIP Weblog)
• Nokia N95 8GB NAM (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• Sponsored Post: cellity A Hot App According To GetJar (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• GoMadic QuadCharge Univeral Charging Station (From The Mobile Technology Weblog and The Gadgets Weblog)
• VoIP Over The VPN (From voip.com/blog)
• AT&T Offers Unlimited Prepaid Data (From The Mobile Technology Weblog and The Wireless Weblog)
• Ring Voltage Booster II (From The VoIP Weblog and The Gadgets Weblog)
• Sponsored Post: cellity Launches freeSMS Application on Facebook (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• How Rotary Phones Affected Area Codes (From voip.com/blog)
• Give Your Mobile Phone That Old Time Feel (From voip.com/blog)

A while ago, I had purchased a Linksys WTR54GS as a travel companion. It is a fairly serviceable router that slides into a nice little compact carrying case complete with an Ethernet cable to jack in a computer or to something else.

The main problem I had with the device? The firmware–something Linksys never bothered to update beyond the initial shipping version. The router’s web interface was slow and frequently had issues. A problem with nearly every Linksys router since they switched to using VxWorks instead of Linux.

Leave it to the fine folks being DD-WRT for figuring out how to liberate this device from a life of running VxWorks. I followed the rather convoluted steps for getting DD-WRT onto the router. One small hitch I ran into was that the referenced Sercomm utility crashes under XP. However, a quick Google search resulted in finding an update to Sercomm that would make it run under XP.

About 10 minutes later, I had removed the crappy VxWorks-based firmware and had the latest DD-WRT up and running in no-time. The web interface was nice and peppy. All the functionality of DD-WRT is now in my travel bag, ready to convert WiFi to Ethernet or vice-versa.