It’s nice when technology still has the power to impress. Especially simple stuff. Today we tried plugging the N95 into our projector, and lo, superb resolution huge projection of our apps running on it. Superb for demos. Also ran some photos through it - excellent resolution.

This form of technology is really getting places. Especially the possibility of using it in conjunction with the bluetooth keyboard I’ve  just bought. Not quite got my relatively large hands  onto the relatively small keys. The overall package isn’t quite as small as I might have liked, but the concept is great. It’s particularly good for typing in complex information, be it URLs or people’s names in the address book. The integration into the platform is excellent.

I’m hoping to write a post sometime soon using that very combination.

Schmap have published a photo of mine as part of their New York guide.

It’s interesting. I don’t know who Schmap are, but they seem to search Flickr for the pictures they want and ask permission to use them. I’m not getting paid for this, but the photo is credited, which is cool. I just wish they’d used either this picture of the Queensboro Bridge or this generic New York one, both of which I prefer to my Grand Central Terminal shot.

I’m happy as an amateur photographer that one of pictures has been publisher. Schmap is happy as they have the picture they need. The only people that are unhappy, it strikes me, are professional photographers and photo libraries who would normally have expected to provide this kind of picture to a guide.

Amateurs have been taking great pictures with good cameras for nearly two centuries, so it is the internet and sites like Flickr creating an incidental showcase that enables this new approach. Quite remarkable commercial evolution.

I was having a look at a company that does MMS dispatch for companies as a means of information customers about products. Nice idea, but handicapped by our friends the operators.

They have a nice button on the front page to send yourself an example message. I did so, and lo, I get an SMS. Not an MMS from them, but an SMS from Vodafone. It contains a URL (http://www.vodafone.co.uk/getmyphoto) and a random password. Given that the browser on the N95 is pretty good at rendering complex web pages, I clicked through to it. No chance. The magically Vodafone PageTrasher(tm) technology did a remarkable job of compression: the resulting page was zero bytes long. Nothing. Nada.
Some time later, I try the URL on my computer. I get a length page of legalise and options that looks like I’m going to have to pay to look at my message. Not only that, but the URL has changed to http://getmyphoto.vodafone.co.uk and I have to click on that manually.

Ignoring the legalise and pricing info, I click through, enter my password and lo, I’ve a two-frame MMS message reformatted by Vodafone into a table with two images in it, so if there were any neat SMIL messages, hidden jokes, or whatever, it’s all gone. And what if it had video or audio in it?

How on earth the marketing technology company can address such insanity, I don’t know. What I do know that the MMS market isn’t going anywhere until the operators stop doing this kind of thing and just get on with delivering to the very capable terminals.

So far so good. Battery life is not brilliant, and I’m about to go into the first long day in London, so we’ll see how far it gets.

I’ve always found myself fat fingering the buttons on S60 devices, and I continue so to do. Especially round calls. The fact that there are separate answer/hangup buttons for calls hasn’t quite filtered through to my fingers yet.

What I particularly like, on the other hand, is the flexibility of configuration. Unlike the P990i, I’ve fully customized the front screen. This is, rather confusingly, called standby mode. To me that would mean the screen blanker, but there you go. Just an example of how mobile terminology is still confusing. I like seeing the list of next useful calender events, synced with my Google Calendar still using goosync.

The camera takes very nice sharp pictures, although the digital zoom is as, well, digital zoomish as you’d expect. The autofocus could be faster, but I’m spoilt with my Canon 350D and it’s silent, near immediate ultrasonic motors.

I finally managed to get the GPS to locate me by leaving the phone sitting in the garden and ignoring it for several minutes. While the length of time to capture a satellite fix is horrible, the mapping software is very nice. I really like the way it slowly zooms in to where you are from planet level. I remember oooohing and aaaahing at that on Google Earth, and here it is now in my pocket.

I’ve had to restart it twice, but I’ve not had the crash and lock-up behaviour that some people have seen. But then I have rev 11 firmware, which seems to be more stable than the release version.

Managed to use the phone for two days before getting the first full-on blockage. Managed to soft switch it off, however, and it has now come back

The P990i continues to have a stable set of issues - frequent restarts, e-mail crashing, slow, even slower startup, poor display updates, lack of flexibility in the UI configuration. However the little keypad continues to be very useful, and the pen stuff is pretty nice. I’ve still not lost the original stylus.

However, for demoing mobile apps, it’s not good as it doesn’t have the typical twin softkeys which are fundamental to the process. So I’ve been considering moving on to something new.

Despite having seen numerous people struggling with N95 issues, I figured that since it was the number one seller across Europe for a while I should get one of those. So far mainly ok. No crashes, but the battery does go down very fast. Nice hardware, although the slider is a bit wobbly. The screen is awesome and the camera much better than the P990i.

More on the software later.

Now you can buy your Motorola cell phone (this being in America) from a vending machine! Spotted in San Francisco airport international terminal. There was also a machine vending ipods of all things!

Another article of mine published on mobile advertising. Read it here.

I’m writing this from Heathrow, on my way to California. On landing here from Edinburgh I have to queue up to tell Virgin where I’m staying the night on arrival. This is in the name of anti-terrorism security. Pardon? How does this help with anything? It’s much more likely to be the employment service trying to reduce illegal immigration.

It would be a pretty stupid terrorist, or illegal immigrant for that matter, that can’t make a cheap hotel booking or pick an address at random. So what good does it do? None that I can see.

I’m amazed they don’t ask for in-bound passengers to give their mobile number so that activations and calls can be geolocated. It would be much more effective, but once again, it’s only going to track the people who have nothing to hide. Anybody wanting to remain covert would ditch the logged phone and buy a pay-as-you-go device for their nefarious deeds.