Roland Tanglao's Weblog

I think the photos are as good as the ones on the Nokia N70 (except of course there is no flash) which is two year old technology. What do you think?

KRZR K1:

Nokia N70

Apples to Oranges comparison to be sure! I have 2000 other N70 photos for you to compare if you don't like the one above :-) !

The KRZR K1 video is decent CIF quality but it's two year old techology. The Nokia N70 videos were just as good quality back in 2005.

Check it out and judge for yourself:

KRZR K1 video of the Skyte (blip.tv bug, I rotated the original but the flash video below is not rotated: original KRZR K1 Skyte 3GP Video with correct orientation)

Click To Play

Compare and contrast with Richard's Nokia N70 video of the Skyte

Happy belated Canada Day and happy July 4th to my American cousins.

I am still here. Just took a wee bit of a blogging rest.

Had a nice conversation with Andy Abramson at BloggerCon IV. He told me nicely that my 850 Mhz post was bogus :-) (and pointed me to a nice explanatory mopocket post about the cingular walled garden: "Basically this means that if Cingular does not recognize your phones International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number then you can't use things like MobiTV, Rabble and a host of other applications that companies that are on deck with Cingular have sent me to try but would not install. Your phone must be a Cingular branded phone which means the phones IMEI number will be registered with Cingular. ")!

My summary: it's more the fact that the carriers know exactly what phone you are running (and the N91 is unsupported and unknown to North American carriers as was the N70 and 7610 for the most part) and know you are roaming so they can turn off your GPRS data based on that aaargh!

There is hope. The WiFi stack on the N91 is verrrrrrryyyyyyy 1.0. It crashes and is less than a 100% reliable. However it works well when it works. If every phone had WiFi and every place had WiFi (as do most of the places I hang out in like home, the Bryght offices, and Take 5) and if Skype or a SIP client works reliably over WiFi, then it won't matter that the carriers will only let me do voice calls (and not data with "unsupported" handsets like the N91). Lots of "ifs" but it's coming. Mark my words. 5 years from now making voice calls over WiFi will be painless and something everybody does not just some early adopters!

I don't know where I heard about this but the fact that the N91 (and the N70, 7610 and other phones without 850Mhz) doesn't support 850Mhz means that GPRS data doesn't work (although voice works fine!). Aaargh. Interesting that it worked fine in San Jose at NetSquared; I guess data is not carried on 850Mhz in San Jose.

I'm testing out the private beta of ShoZu 2.0 on my N70 tonight. The old stuff seems to work fine and I love ZuCasts which is an automatic downloader for selected video blogs (it would be much better if I could decide which videblogs I want rather than choosing from somebody else's list) for your mobile phone. Great stuff!

If I hadn't today received an N91 from the Nokia Blogger Relations program (thanks Andy and Nokia!), I'd watch Rocketboom on a regular basis now!

Unfortunately, ShoZu :-( doesn't yet run on the N91! More on the N91 and ZuCasts later.

I recorded a cheesy ringtone (see attached) on my friend Jeff Needham's vintage Minimoog Synth when I was staying at their Sunnyvale home last week for NetSquared. It's public domain and low quality :-) and should work on other Series 60 phones. Enjoy!

UPDATE: As always, Darla Mack has a more thorough Nokia Wireless Keyboard review.

Back in October 2005, on my way home from BarCamp Amsterdam, in a jet lagged stupor, I picked up a Nokia Bluetooth Keyboard aka the SU-8W. Maybe it was me, maybe it was the earlier version of the software, maybe it was my old grey market 7610, its old firmware, and its limited RAM but it did not work very well. The keyboard would disconnect and power down after a certain period of time and it did not reconnect when you rebooted the keyboard.

I am glad to say that it works much better with my N70. For work and fun (!) I monitor several servers. Now wherever I go, I carry my N70 and the SU-8W and monitor and tinker with the servers remotely using PuTTY (which allows me to login and work on my servers securely over SSH). It works really well (the keyboard automatically reconnects when you turn it on, unlike my 7610). Highly recommended.

Nokia, please introduce a series 60 phone with a 3 megapixel camera, optical zoom, macro mode and 640x480 video and a keyboard. I will pay for one of these bricks :-) (basically an N93 with a keyboard!) with my own money!

Check out my N70 running the Nokia open source port of Apache, Raccoon at:
http://roland.tanglao.guest.at.openlaboratory.net/

I figure I'll leaving it running most of the time since I have an unlimited data plan.

Hacking python :-) Apache plugins in progress!