S60 Open to new features

The folks at Worth1000 are running an interesting Photoshop contest where people are taking ads for today's products and placing them in retro-style ads.

For those of you not from the US, or are not up on your history, Rosie the Riveter (pictured below) was a cultural icon in the US during World War II. The US Government used Rosie in various media of the day to encourage women to go to work to support the war effort.

I couldn't resist sharing this photoshopped picture of Rosie the Riveter sporting a Nokia device.

(Photo by brypro63)

Those familiar with Nokia's history know that Nokia's been around since 1865. We weren't selling phones back in the 1940s, but if we were, I'd bet a woman like Rosie would be carrying Nokia device!

If you use a Microsoft Exchange 2003 or later server and have a Nokia Eseries or a selected Nokia Nseries handset (N73, N76, and N95), then you can bring your email with you.

Quoting from the marketing speak:

Mail for Exchange, enabled by Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, is one of the mobile email solutions available for Nokia Eseries mobile devices. This solution provides wireless synchronization of email, calendar, and contact data between compatible Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2 (or later) and mobile devices. By using the direct push technology of the server, the Mail for Exchange client enables a virtually seamless email experience for Nokia Eseries devices. This email experience is supported either over a mobile network or wireless LAN, depending on the specific Nokia Eseries device used.

Your Exchange inbox integrates into the standard S60 email application, where you can read and send email. The 2.0 release also gives you the ability to query the Global Address List (GAL) and import found contacts into your mobile address book. You can also accept/reject meeting requests. Quickoffice 4.5.25.0 (not available at this writing, but expected in September) support is integrated to reduce the number of steps needed to receive a document in email, edit it, and return it via email. Tasks are also synchronized and in-device search is supported.

If you're an Exchange user with Nokia Eseries and Nseries devices, give Mail for Exchange a look.

Update: Download Mail for Exchange.

Looks like the Jaiku Mobile 0.80 for s60 3rd Edition is now finally available for all to see! I've been using various iterations of this client for months, though I've been restricted to specific handsets. Now I can use this client on all of my S60 3rd Edition handsets, and you can too!

Some said the only social network that really matters is the one you carry in your pocket, i.e. your mobile phone. Jaiku fits very well into that model. Anytime you've got a minute, you can fire up Jaiku and check in with your peeps. Post your thoughts. Respond to someone else's. See your friend's "lifestream" as represented by the RSS feeds of all the sites the blog on or use. All from your mobile handset.

If you're not lucky enough to have a S60 3rd Edition handset, you can join in the fun via your mobile web browser on http://m.jaiku.com.

You will find me on Jaiku as 'phoneboy'. Feel free to add me as a buddy on Jaiku and follow my various ramblings.

In writing for another blog, I came across an article about how South Koreans are concerned their kids are spending too much time on the Internet via their phone. They are looking to buy phones without Internet access to curb this. Apparently, in South Korea, this is hard.

I'd say it's hard in most developed countries. As more and more of our handsets get more and more powerful--and more and more connected--the issue of what happens when these devices are in the hands of children is very relevant.

How does the handset know it's in the hands of a child? How does the handset restrict or prevent access to material that you as the parent find objectionable? Who decides what's objectionable in the first place? Content issues aside, what about preventing the device from being overused for phone calls or text messages?

I don't have any answers as to what the best approach is here. You can be certain I will be watching these developments closely as I have a couple of kids of my own that will be toting mobile phones soon enough. If you have any thoughts on this, share them in the comments!

The point of this video is to test how well a certain competitor's new product might work in the sub-zero temperatures of Helsinki. Being that it's currently summer in Finland, it's perhaps not the best time to test this. However, the guys at F-Secure decided to shove it in the freezer to see how it fared.

Yup, I guess that fancy touch-screen's not going to do so well in Helsinki during the winter. Hat-tip to Jonathan Greene for finding this one.

I got a pocket knife today as a thank-you gift for a project I've been working on. It does 11 things: it's a straight blade knife, has a couple of cerated edged blades, two different church keys (a.k.a. bottle openers), a pair of scissors, a corkscrew, a letter opener, a Phillips-head screwdriver, and a mystery thing that I have no idea what is for. It's bigger than the pocket knife I had before. Of course it is--it does more than the old one did.

Pocket knifes are a bit like a mobile phone these days. Depending on the model, they can do a lot. How well can it do those things? It depends.

Let's take the screwdriver on this pocket knife. If I happen to be somewhere where I need a Phillips-head screwdriver, having one in my pocket is quite handy. However, if I'm at home, the form factor of the screwdriver on the pocket knife makes it much less desirable than the screwdriver in my toolbox.

A pocket knife can only have so many functions before the knife itself becomes too unwieldy to carry. Each blade takes up a certain amount of physical space and must be a minimum size to be useful, yet not to big.

Kind of reminds me of mobile phones. Given the relatively small size of a mobile phone, there's only so much room for buttons. Or display size. Or battery. Or number of megapixels that can be captured.

The overall size of the device plays a huge role in the quality of features that will be available on it. For example, the thinness of the Nokia N76 dictated you weren't going to get a huge battery or a 5mp camera. Conversely, the E90 gives you a full QWERTY keyboard and a huge screen. It's much bigger, so it can offer a much better experience. However, the E90 is much larger than the N76.

I have no doubt our R&D folks are increasing the amount of functions available on the mobile device while keeping them a reasonable size and making them as easy to use as possible. It's quite a balancing act, and unfortunately, compromises will have to be made.

My solution to the compromise is to carry two devices. This bears a size penalty. I look forward to the day when I can have it all in one device that's a reasonable size.

An internal colleague shared this with me. I thought it might be worth showing here. The video shows the difference between a Nokia E60 and a Nokia E90 and how they react to receiving a Bluetooth message. This particular Bluetooth message is a worm that is propagating--a message I'm sure you could do without.

While the virus demonstrated here is unlikely to infect a S60 3rd Edition phone, you never know what evil may be lurking out there. I recommend not accepting Bluetooth messages from people you don't know and are not expecting. If you've run into this or similar issues, share your thoughts in the comments.

Security and convenience are often at opposite ends of the spectrum. One of the challenges security-conscious people have is configuring mobile devices to use the insanely complex WPA keys we use for our WiFi access points. Imagine typing something like the following with a typical 12-key phone keyboard:

6t/~:w]k528U'm2PIV}_W(|]SE~^BcM"2|\+UHc`F2g2$IdI}rcFG_ovGF9hg6a

While this random gibberish ensures your WiFi access point is not going to be broken into anytime soon, that's hard to type on a regular keyboard, much less a 12-key keypad!

The solution I came up with might be heresy to some security folks, given that you essentially have to communicate your WPA key in the clear. The likelihood of anyone knowing what that random bit of gibberish goes to--assuming they're listening--is probably pretty small. In my mind, it's an acceptable risk.

I SMS my WPA key (without any explanatory text) to myself. Some operators provide a way to SMS their customers over the web. Others provide an email interface--my preferred method. Check with your operator. This gets the WPA key into a text message on my phone. I use the Copy and Paste feature in S60 phones, as Johanna demonstrates in her latest blog entry, though she uses a haiku she wrote. Same idea, except you paste that blob of text where you enter the WPA key.

Try it out and let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

One thing I managed to get lucky enough to play with over the past several weeks is the private beta of the latest Jaiku client for S60 3rd Edition devices. At this writing, the prviate beta client is at 0.61.1 RC2 (RC meaning "release candidate.").

For those who don't know, Jaiku is kind of a cross between Twitter and an RSS aggregator. You can communicate status updates. You can import all the various RSS feeds that represent your online activity. It also incorporates the state on your mobile phone profile along with your physical location--determined by the mobile phone network.

When I first started playing with the Jaiku S60 client, I was not impressed. Much of the richness that Jaiku provides is quite simply not available in the current public client. You can see your friend's last updates, and update your own status, but that's about it.

The current closed beta client--it's tied to handset IMEI, so I can't share--gives you access to the more or less "lifestream" of your friends. You can respond to comments--and all responses are easily viewable as such.

While Jaiku is active, as you move from place to place, your location is automatically updated. The location information is something you code in, but the information is shared among all Jaiku users. The trick is making the location information useful to everyone.

Now we have an application that allows you to interact with others, but also takes into account your location, your "status" (as determined by your phone profile), and all the other "electronic droppings" you might leave around the net. Just the kind of app that's right for The Convergence Zone. ;)

The Jaiku folks have not stated when they plan on releasing their Jaiku S60 client to a wider audience, but the information they've communicated to us beta testers suggests it will be any day now. When it's released, I'll be sure to let you know here. In the meantime, feel free to leave your comments.

Update: Jaiku says that their 0.80 build (released to beta testers on 8 August 2007) will be sent off to be signed for general availability.

Here I was blogging on the See Into S60 blog, and then I suddenly stopped. The powers that be decided that it would be better if I had my own blog on the S60 site, as opposed to commandeering the See Into S60 blog. Unfortunately, that process ran smack into the middle of the summer holidays in Finland.

Of course, none of this stopped me from blogging. I had plenty to say on my personal blog and elsewhere. No shortage of interesting things to write about.

The Convergence Zone is an exploration of the convergence of software, services, and features onto mobile devices. What's on your device? How do you use it? Where and when do you want to use it? What are some of the implications of all this? These topics and more are fodder for discussion here at The Convergence Zone.

The name of the blog came from a weather phenomenon here in the Seattle area the local meteorologists call the Puget Sound Convergence Zone. It's basically where the winds coming off the Pacific Ocean split by the Olympic Mountains will "converge." Given the topics I wanted to cover here, The Convergence Zone seemed like an appropriate name.

Hope you all follow along as I take this journey into The Convergence Zone. If you see something you think I should cover, leave a comment here or send an email to dwelch -at- s60 dot com.