Roland Tanglao's Weblog

My SXSW experience shows that if you aren't a VOIP or gadget guru like Alec Saunders or Andy Abramson and you are a Canadian travelling in the States then as of March 2008, the best thing to do to avoid extremely high Canadian mobile roaming rates is to:

1. Get an unlocked, jailbroken, activated iPhone
2. Buy a GoPhone from AT&T
3. Activate it and slip the SIM into your iPhone. The $10 included with the phone is great if you are just calling folks on AT&T otherwise $50 will do you for a week. Unfortunately GoPhone data rates are a ripoff so using EDGE on your iPhone is prohibitively expensive
4. SMS and phone others on AT&T for free and keep in touch! It worked great (texting and phoning with the iPhone is so much easier than T9 on my N95 or any other handset!) at SXSW. Now if only I could set up Twitter so that I only get SMS from my Twitter friends who are whereever I am travelling too, I could have kept in 24 hours a day sync with my Twitter SXSW crowd! (yes I know you can do this manually but there ought to be a way to do this semi-automatically!)

For the record I used my iPhone for SMS and phone calls with the GoPhone SIM and I used my N95 for video recording and photo uploading over WiFi. It worked great but most people couldn't master the mental S60 gymnastics that I had to do (e.g. frequent rebooting) to get the N95 to work with the flakey SXSW WiFi. And I used Skype to phone home for nearly free over WiFi from the hotel.

I don't travel nearly as much as Andy so I don't have a travel router. I just want to be able to videochat with the family so no iChat and Skype port blocking please! As a food lover and blogger, I second Andy's emotion about the larder and restaurant of course :-) !

FROM Working Anywhere: What A Global Nomad Wants In A Hotel To Work Anywhere:

QUOTE

I admit I'm a bit more towards the side of high maintenance when it comes to what I want in a business grade hotel but as a person who is spending more days a month on the road than in my own house I've pretty much nailed down what I want and need in order to be a road warrior/global nomad beyond a very well informed front desk and a "we'll get it done right concierge."

So here's my list:

1. Real Broadband--1.5 megs or more to my room symmetrically. Anything less and its no fun.

2. Wired and Wireless in Room Access- The ability to plug my travel router in so I can use multiple devices over the Internet connection such as a WiFi phone, dual mode phone, Nokia N800 Internet Tablet or a second PC when traveling with my wife to be.

...

7. 24 Hour Room Service WITH a 24 hour menu--some of us can be in multiple time zones in the same day and span ten overnight. We need to keep our bodies in tune and that means eating what we need not by what the clock says.

8. A Hot Restaurant With A Killer Chef--okay so I'm a foodie and a wine lover, and a coffee/espresso and tea junkie. I like food from Artisan bakeries, locally grown produce and fruits and farm raised beef, poultry and fresh fish. But why should I have to leave the hotel?

...

13. A Larder Hotel De Anza in San Jose lets you raid the larder throughout the day/night. So do other cool hotels. That way, if room service is more than you need, you can find a snack at anytime.

14. High Quality Bottled Water Again, our health on the road is always a challenge. Having better grades of mineral water on hand (at fair prices) keeps us going, and going.

END QUOTE

I spoke too soon in Part 7 of this review. The beta version of ShoZu started crashing shortly after I posted part 7. Aaargh. All is not lost. I am making my way to the Nokia lab in Burnaby tomorrow morning where my N91 firmware will be upgraded from V1.00.028.13 29.03.06 RM-43 to the latest version V1.10.030 05-05-06 RM-43 or later (thanks to Andy Abramson for arranging this because this would not have happened through official channels since the N91 is not sold in Canada!). Apparently the latest version fixes the ShoZu crashing problem as well as the theme reset problem and other various issues. Fingers crossed!

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!

The N91 works flawlessly with my Apple Airport at home. Surprised! Go Nokia go (go Nokia Vancouver who I believe did most of the engineering on the N91!)! I am hoping that WiFi APNs appear just like normal APNs so any properly written app can you use it (which I think is the case judging by the many reviews I read this morning when I should have been sleeping). Thanks to Andy, Brooke, Communicano and Nokia for the review unit. More review bits later!

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.

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.

My trial N70 (thanks Andy and Nokia!) hangs seemingly randomly. I haven't reported it yet because I have been trying to figure out how to reproduce it reliably. Here's the sequence of events:

1. Take a few photos or videos
2. Launch ShoZu and try to select a few photos or videos to upload.
3. Up and down cursor keys don't work, rest of the phone seems to work (i.e. making calls, other apps)

If I then reboot the phone, Shozu, the phone and the cursor keys work fine.

From The Obvious?: Nokia and a spinning colour wheel of death.:

QUOTE

Doc quotes Paul Boutin as saying:

Nokia would never ship a phone with a spinning color wheel of death.

I wish they had because then at least I would have something to stare at when my new n70 hangs which it does on a wearyingly regular basis!

UNQUOTE

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!

Go Andy go! Since the forthcoming N91 was designed in Vancouver, I hope some Vancouver based bloggers are involved in the official Nokia N91 Blog. Andy, I'd love to have an N91 on trial like Ross Mayfield and blog about it when the time comes. Call me at 604 729 7924 or email roland AT rolandtanglao.com!

My qualifications? I bought a 7610 and have uploaded 4576 photos to flickr (and more every day) using Shozu and Lifeblog. And I plan on doing lots of videos once Shozu works with the 7610's videos (which I hope is real soon now)!

From Nokia N90 Blog.:

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Welcome to the Nokia Nseries N90 Blogger Relations Blog site. Here you will find blogger and media information that you can repurpose and utilize in your blog postings about the N90.

UNQUOTE