Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Don't usually play these tag games, but this will be the exception that proves the rule. My first Symbian device was the Nokia 7610 which I bought unlocked in August 2004 from a Vietnamese grey market vendor here (thanks Harry!) in Vancouver.

I bought the 7610 because of its 1 megapixel camera which was fab for its time and also because S60 was and is a platform where I knew I could get 3rd party apps and possibly develop my own. I bought the 7610 as a belated 40th birthday gift to myself (much better than a sports car :-) and much cheaper!). I was was smart enough to also buy an unlimited GPRS data plan for my phone which is no longer available in Canada and allows me to monthly use about 250 MB of data traffic photos and videos which is a lot over GPRS.

Took plenty of photos and uploaded many with HuginAndMugin (which my friend Simon wrote in Java; the Java mobile platform annoyed me back then because it couldn't take 1 megapixel photos and it annoys me now because there is a new JSR released seemingly every month and every phone has a different implementation of the Java mobile platform but I am still willing to be convinced that Java on mobile is actually a viable platform ) and via ShoZu.

Went to BloggerCon III where I spoke about HuginAndMugin at the mobile session and met Andy who later became the man behind Nokia Blogger Relations.

From there, the rest is history. N70 and then N91, N93 and N73 and many, many photos and videos taken with all of these phones. Hopefully N95 soon. Oh and I also had a Newton 2000 and one of the first Palm Pilots. I used the Newton alot and the Palm for about 3 or 4 months; never liked Palm; too simple, really ugly fonts compared to the Newton :-) and didn't meet my geeky needs!

Except for the memory problems and the user interface problems of S60v3 (both of which can be fixed or improved, more on that later in a future post), I am quite happy with Symbian and S60.

I truly believe that if the iPhone is 1/4 as usable as it appears and ships 1/2 of the units Apple expects to, then this will be great competition and cause S60's memory problems and usability to be fixed rapidly. Vive la competition!

FROM atmaspheric | endeavors » My Symbian History:

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Ok - that was probably far too long and rambling, but I suppose that’s the point of this exercise. For the next round, I will tag people from my Twitter and Jaiku contact lists and ping Matthew Miller, Roland Tanglao and Ken Camp.

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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.

After taking over 1200 photos and 50 videos with the Nokia N70 camera phone review unit (courtesy of the N70 Nokia Blogger Relations program, thanks Andy!) since I received it on January 20, 2006, it's time for an N70 review.

Ignorance is bliss. If I hadn't recently tried out Robert Scales' new Sony Ericsson K750 or Harry's Nokia N90 (the guy who told me where to buy my grey market Nokia 7610), I would be 100% content with the N70.

BOTTOM LINE:

The Nokia N70 Cameraphone is a fantastic cameraphone as well as a fantastic cellphone. Except for the lack of a macro mode, the 2 Megapixel stills are great and there's lots of great toys like in camera digital cross processing. And the video mode is great! Good-bye postage stamp videos! What would I buy with my own money? Hard to say, but if I could afford it, I think it would be either the just released N91 (so I can try WiFi) or the N90 (for the the macro mode). If I didn't have the money, I'd definitely pay for the N70 because it's more than good enough and I can (mostly) live without a good macro mode.

<RANT>

For me, the camera combined with always on mobile internet access is my killer app (i.e. ShoZu is my killer mobile phone app) for a mobile phone and while the camera is fantastic on the N70 (in comparison to the crappy RAZR phone camera or almost any other cameraphone out there except for the forthcoming Sony Ericsson and Nokia 3 Megapixel phones with optical zooms e.g. N93), I pine for the camera of the K750 and N91 with their killer macro modes.

But you won't catch me switching to Sony Ericsson! For all my criticism of Series 60, it's really the only viable mobile platform out there at the moment. Sony is unusable and has no software (compared to Series 60) and no way to develop software easily (Series 60 has python! go Nokia go!) and I hate Sony's proprietary memory stick. Motorola is unusable (but cool looking in the case of the Razr) and also has no software to speak of and no way to develop software easily and don't get me started on Java on mobile phones :-) ! And BlackBerry is a non starter: no camera not to mention no (well OK very little compared to Series 60) software and no way to easily develop software! Sorry but I don't need "always on" email ) and if I did, Profimail, or heck even mobile Gmail would be good enough

</RANT>

LIKES:

• Great still photos (unlike for example the cr*ppy camera on the Razr).
• Great video. High quality and big! Seems to be a little fuzzier than the 6630 when you move the camera but maybe that's just my jittery hands.
• Great phone phone. Excellent voice quality.
• Love the "no need to train" voice dialing mode.
• iSync works great (with hack and now in Mac OS X10.4.6)
• Lots of great apps like ShoZu
• Easy to write your own apps in Python if you are a developer.
• Love the in-camera digital cross processing effects (sepia, black and white, negative)

DISLIKES:

• The joystick is unusable. I like the one on Boris' 6630 much better. I always find myself hitting cursor down, up, left or right when I mean to press the joystick button. Nokia, please get this right consistently on your phones!
• No Macro mode
• Needs a button to save and retrieve user definable camera settings.
• Can't lock the camera cover so the camera always ends up opening when it's in my pocket.

Just re-posting this because the URLs have changed and people are looking for it. NOTE: that it may no longer work because flickr have changed their authentication APIs and this software is UNSUPPORTED!

Here are the files:

1. Hugin/Mugin binaries
2. Hugin/Mugin source

From Roland Tanglao's Weblog: Hugin/Mugin 1.0 - J2ME Flickr uploader for Series 60 Nokia cameraphones.:

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LATER: I have added a Public Hugin/Mugin Flickr group. Please post your comments there.

After a prolonged testing and development period, Hugin/Mugin (Hugin and Mugin are Norse gods that Simon likes! This program was formally known as FlickrLive) is available for general release:

WHAT: Hugin/Mugin is a J2ME Flickr uploader for Series 60 cameraphone phones. It enables almost real time uploading (e.g. with a 30 second delay on the Canadian mobile carrier Fido's GPRS network) of photos from your phone directly to Flickr. No muss, no fuss, no chain of pain. It comes as two midlets: one to configure called Hugin/Mugin Settings (Flickr userid, password, tags, etc.) and one to actually upload called Hugin/Mugin

WHO IS THIS FOR: Power Users, techies and geeks. Sorry, but with the current cameraphone state of the art, I can't recommend this to normal people!

HOW TO INSTALL: download this Hugin/Mugin Zip file (60 K zip). Unzip it and transfer the .jar and the .jad files to your phone. Install it by opening the Jad.

HOW TO USE: Run the configuration midlet, Hugin/Mugin Settings, and put in your default tags, title, camera resolution and flickr id and password. Then when you want to take a photo, run Hugin/Mugin. Click to take a picture and upload!

LICENSE: Free, GPL

SUPPORT: none, ok, best effort :-) which means leave a comment here or on your blog and I'll do my best to answer any questions

TESTED ON: Nokia 7610 ONLY! I believe it should work on other Series 60 phones like the 6600 and 6630 but I don't know for sure.

REQUIREMENTS: Series 60 Nokia phone AND some kind of mobile data service like GPRS, EV-DO, 3G, 1X, etc.

SOURCE: will be available tomorrow when I have time to post it and it will be GPL'ed

AUTHOR: Simon Lewis, my programming maven (really! Simon can and has almost programmed everything from CORBA frameworks to apps from Lisp to C, C++, Java, Smalltalk etc.) friend in the UK; I didn't write one line of code. I'm just the product manager :-) which means I just did the testing and helped with the requirements.

PROBLEMS: More details in the release notes tomorrow with the source but J2ME on the 7610 doesn't appear to let you upload true 1 megapixel images. Instead you get pixelated 640x480. Sad but true! Still it's cool to have pixelated 640x480 images uploaded to Flickr in pseudo real-time. I hope that by releasing the source tomorrow that somebody will be able to work around this.

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Watch my 30 second video with Dave Shea, Bill Tam, Jeff LaPorte, Bryan and Steph Rieger and posted in "real time" (takes about 10 minutes using glacially slow GPRS to transfer via Shozu) to show the use of Shozu.

I demoed Shozu (and recapped my journey from buying my grey market 7610 for my 40th birthday using my own money to using email to upload photos to Flickr, to using Hugin and Mugin (Java midlet to upload pictures to flickr developed by my friend and ace programmer, Simon Lewis) and being frustrated by the low res pictures from the 7610's crippled Java implementation of the camera APIs to uploading photos 4 at a time using Lifeblog to today's Shozu happiness!) tonight and we had a great Eqo demo and presentation from Jeff LaPorte.

Well, I had to deactivate and reactivate Shozu on my N70 and now it successfully uploads both photos and videos to Shozu but unfortunately when Shozu emails the video to blip.tv and Now Public, it's not showing up (or they are both being very slow). I know that Shozu has the video and that it emails properly because when I get Shozu to email me, I get the email with the video attachment now problem! This is weird because 3GP from my old 7610 worked fine and quite quickly via Shozu to blip.tv, perhaps blip.tv and Now Public can't handle MP4 which is the video format from the N70?

Aaargh, email is really the wrong way to do this. We need a standard video upload API. How about the Atom Publishing Protocol?

Thanks to the Nokia Blogger Outreach program (N70 blog), Andy Abramson (and company, thanks Brooke!) and Nokia, I received a review Nokia N70 today.

Here are my steps to switching to it from my current 7610:

1. hack iSync to support the N70
2. install SIM and charge phone
3. power up phone, sync with Mac
4. install Shozu

More later!

I don't have enough memory apparently. I wish there was a page I could link to on the Yahoo site but ... oh well there doesn't appear to be one (just crazy form driven pages where the URL doesn't change). I think I'll hold off using this until it actually is small enough to fit on my phone. I am unwilling to erase any of my current apps to work with the Yahoo behemoth :-) ! In the meantime, I will continue to use small mobile apps that are focused and work well (like Shozu!).

I'll be there at 7:30p.m.ish and if I have cellular connectivity and the gods :-) of Shozu and blip.tv are smiling at me, I will do some live 1 minute video blog segments with my Nokia 7610 before the election results are in and after say at 8:30ish (mmm post stamp video yummy NOT, can't wait until I get a phone with a better video mode like an N70 or N91 later this year).See you there (RSVP to Darren via a comment or on upcoming).

From Drown Your Election Sorrows at the Library Square Public House | Darren Barefoot.:

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Last week, I suggested that we have a little get-together to watch the election. After careful consideration, we're going to meet at the Library Square Public House. Here are the details:

Library Square Public House
300 West Georgia St.
7:30pm onwards

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