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Nokia N800 — Canola Beta!

I was very psyched to get an invitation to try the Canola beta for the Nokia N800. There is already a working version for the N770, but given the changes to Maemo and device architecture, extra time has been required to bring this fantastic application to the newer platform.
Essentially, Canola lets you consume multimedia content (pictures, video and music) you have either on your device in local storage or streaming on your network through UPnP (DAAP for iTunes is in progress) or the Internet. I’ve loaded up a few podcast and photocast subs as well as some internet radio stations to test… Here’s a video I shot last night to give you an idea of what you can expect and where the project stands.

Canola is one of the most exciting developments for the Maemo platform and something that really shows off quite a bit of the Nokia Tablet’s capabilities. I’m really looking forward to future betas — not too mention the eventual release!

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CNN – Bluetooth’s ads to tourists in Times Square

Yesterday I was passing through Times Square when my phone buzzed. I looked down and saw that Dr. Sanjay Gupta was trying to send me a message. I was traveling pretty quickly so I was not able to accept it or even capture a screenshot (hey it was below 20 degrees with wind!). This is the first bluetooth ad I’ve seen first hand and has to be one of the earlier experiments in the US.

On my Nokia’s I’ve actually activated the preference for receiving ads (professional curiosity), and I am pretty sure the N73 was set to broadcast mode as well. I’m not sure whether broadcast mode status has any impact on receiving bluetooth ads or not. Anyone?

When the ad came through I was quite surprised. I still don’t really know how I really feel about this. Given the number of attention getting devices in Times Square, I can see where using bluetooth might break through a bit, but it’s still a tad disturbing. The mobile is a highly personal device and this seems to cross a line. If this had been user-initiated it would be entirely different, but on top of everything else I really don’t want messages from Dr. Sanjay Gupta and CNN. I’m sure it was to promote his show or an appearance rather than warn me about some looming health hazard.

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Smart2Go? Not yet.

This is a bit of a rant…

Nokia got a ton of press from their announcement yesterday regarding the Smart2Go service – a free mapping application (to be called Nokia Maps) on Series60, Windows Mobile and possibly even other devices … N800 perhaps?

I immediately went to check it out and found that the site required a code to even get past the home page to see what might be available to install. This was fixed some time later in the day and the site now appropriately redirects you … however, there is NO WAY to install this. There are plenty of links to download and share with friends… even a link to get the manual. Here’s what I found :

Download via PC –

No way to download to PC

Download via SMS –

No way to download via SMS

Perhaps you’d like to read the manual while you wait?

No User Manual

I even tried doing the send to a friend thinking that perhaps that might work… but of course found that this looped me right back to where I started.

Now I am legitimately interested in this product and would love to have quality maps on my mobile. I already own a pocket bluetooth GPS and found myself thinking how much better my experience would be if I upgraded to a more advanced gps with better reception in order to take fuller advantage of this. Yet there does not seem to be any way yet to even try it.

I’m sure people were excited to be announcing things, but the importance of matching that up to the product’s reality is rather critical. You don’t get too many chances to make a first impression. Speaking of impressions, I sent some feedback through the site stating it was impossible to download and found this lovely message as my instant on-site reply:

Thanks, now F-off.

It’s not like they asked for my name and email so I guess I should not be that surprised to see such a note, but to state so directly that there will be no direct follow-up is just poor. Why not offer me an email or RSS updates feed…

There is one last bit here before I’ve fully beaten this one down and that’s the PC-only (don’t even get me started here) MapLoader app, which from the screenshot I saw looks nice enough, though without actually being able to install the application on your mobile to begin with it’s of no use.

Someone needs to get things in order here ASAP. If you are not ready, don’t launch the site – just go with a press release and a screen shot. Capture interested parties with an email / rss update and let the site go live when the product can be used. This is bad marketing and execution all around. The other thing I really can’t figure out is why I seem to be the only person wondering what’s up with this? The rest of the Nokia blogger base happily reported the news with their joyous posts.

UPDATE It’s Feb 10 — release day from the release (thanks to people who’ve pointed that out). The site now lists a Coming Soon… so stay tuned.

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Forgot my watch

Even though I have a variety of devices (phones, tablet, gps …) in my bag that tell time I still feel weird without it.

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N800 – FM Radio!

I typically stream my music through internet radio stations, but there are certainly times when you either don’t have broadband to make that possible or actually just want to listen to a local station. With a quick trip to grab the fmradio.deb, you can then access the FM Radio within your N800.

  1. First grab and install the file.
  2. Next, open up your terminal and enter ‘fmradio’ and return
  3. You should be looking at your N800’s new FM Rad
  4. A special bonus is that once, run, you can add the FM Radio as a home screen applet for easy access.

FM Radio on the N800
Here’s a quick video as well…(should be live shortly if not now)

Hat tip – Maemo-Users.

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S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 announced

Symbian Watch notes the announcement and pending release of S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2.

Feature Pack 2 comes with improvements in usability and software architecture focusing primarily on the mid-range device category. Usability enhancements support the ease of use in for example messaging, multitasking and downloading. Feature Pack 2 also enables instant media playback during downloading and animated notification of inbound calls. Architectural improvements focus on ensuring excellent performance and flexibility of S60 in various hardware configurations, and include for example support for demand paging virtual memory technique.

S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 will be available for all S60 device manufacturers in Q2. It is fully compatible with S60 3rd Edition, and applications developed for 3rd Edition will run on all Feature Pack 2 devices. The new Feature Pack 2 will be demonstrated at the 3GSM World Congress 2007 in Barcelona in S60 stand in Hall 8. [Symbian Watch]

FP1 devices are just starting to roll out — like the N95 — and one of the big features of the release is the ability to handle firmware updates OTA. This will hopefully actually be implemented and allowed regardless of region for unlocked devices since updating the firmware can currently be a frustrating exercise. OTA is potentially a riskier adventure, but perhaps using a units WiFi connection will at least assure that your signal will not suddenly vaporize mid-stream.

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Steve Jobs loathes DRM just like rest of us

This is simply awesome. From Steve Jobs…

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player. [Steve Jobs @ Apple.com]

Now there is unfortunately nothing here stating that they will in fact abolish DRM, but it is a massively public statement from the current leader in*digital distribution on how the system can be open and fair to both consumers, stores and device makers. I know I am not alone in wishing we get there sooner rather than later. DRM sucks for everyone.

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Wal-Mart and Studios in Film Deal but they won’t play in my house

Today the company will introduce a partnership with all of the six major Hollywood studios — Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal — to sell digital movies and television shows on its Web site (www.walmart.com/videodownloads), becoming the first traditional retailer to do so. [New York Times]

While I am not surprised to see that Walmart is embracing Windows DRM (other than Apple’s FairPlay, it’s the only game in town), but check out this lovely view of their website on a Mac:

Walmart's Video Download store as viewed on a Mac through Firefox

To me, this is a total F-U. It’s a complete lock-out. Walmart is saying, there’s only one platform that we recognize and that’s Windows through IE. I was able to get the page to load with Safari, but Firefox and Camino but displayed the loveliness above.

The only thing I can give credit to Walmart for is that they have a single price for each film (prices actually vary by title) which will let you get both a download and a portable version for the same price – which is the default.
BTW — I just noticed that Apple has an ad on the NYT page promoting iPod and iTunes which not only competes with this service, but is completely incompatible.

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Nokia N800 – ReaderMini

In my initial post about ReaderMini, I only described the experience. Now you can see it in action and (hopefully) appreciate how good the experience really is on the Nokia Internet Tablet. Personally, I find it to be very close to the way I read feeds on desktop, which is amazing considering it’s happening on a pretty small handheld device.

Since the initial launch, ReaderMini has continued to actively evolve through user feedback for both bugs and improvements. The roadmap is looks strong and I believe this will continue to be a killer app for the Internet Tablet. If you use Google Reader on the desktop, you need to be using ReaderMini on the Nokia.

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Nokia N800 – Maemo Mapper

I had posted a screenshot of Maemo Mapper earlier this week, but thought it might be quite a bit more interesting to see it in action. I was successful in configuring three different map sources – Google Maps (Streets and Satellite), Virtual Earth (Streets and Satellite) and Terraserver. There are differences between all of them:

  • Terraserver only provides topographical information
  • Google Maps seems more up to date than
  • Virtual Earth which seems to have the simplest and easiest to read map

I’ve used both cellular data (EDGE) from my Nokia N73 and home wifi connection to download maps and use the Nokia LD-1W GPS, which is very small and easily fits in a pocket. You can capture full tracks and export as well as import .GPX files which is cool so you can share trip data with other applications like Google Earth or import POIs from Geo Caching sites.

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Maemo 2.2

If you are developing for the Nokia 770 or want to start, the latest environment was just released:

The maemo team proudly announce the newest development environment for Nokia 770 Internet Tablets: maemo 2.2 ‘gregale’. This release supports development for the latest OS 2006 Software Edition. Maemo 2.2 is based on the latest Scratchbox Apophis R4 cross-compilation environment.

For installation instructions please see the tutorial:
http://www.maemo.org/platform/docs/tutorials/Maemo_tutorial.html

More info on the release:
http://maemo.org/downloads/releases.html#maemo22
http://repository.maemo.org/stable/2.2/Maemo_Dev_Platform_v2.2_relnotes.txt

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Wired News: Steal This Download

This sounds like a great read… and is formated beautifully for small ebook readers like the Nokia N800. I’m sure it looks great at full screen and printed out as well.

Investigative reporter Kim Zetter spent a year probing the life of David Thomas, a high-tech grifter who became an FBI asset.

In interviews with Thomas, his girlfriend, his associates in the underground and federal agents on the cybercrime beat, Zetter pieced together the strange world of the “boards,” online bazaars where crooks and swindlers work together to scam everyone else.

Now Wired News is pleased to present Zetter’s probative three-part series as a readable, printable 25-page PDF file. Download it (.pdf). Print it. Read it. The text is justified, but the crimes aren’t. [Wired News]

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N800 pairs with Bluetooth headsets

Dan, aka ThoughtFix successfully paired a bluetooth headset to his N800 I did the same and found that while it shows up and seems ready to connect, there’s nothing yet in the system that seems to recognize the new audio device.

N800 Paired Devices
If the device is smart enough to know that the bluetooth device is capable of doing audio, you might get the feeling that something good is coming. We do have Skype and Rhapsody on deck for February… I’d be stunned if the N800 handled A2DP, but very content to do VOIP over Bluetooth.

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doc Reader lets you handle Word docs on your N800 / N770

doc Reader is a graphic utility that lets you read MS Word documents in your Nokia 770 or export them to text or PDF format. [Maemo garage]

I just gave this a try and while it does not open your file directly as a .doc, you can instantly view or convert to text as well as convert to PDF. I chose PDF for my test and it worked beautifully — as though I had printed to PDF from within MS Word on my desktop!

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