Mobile social networking is a great idea, but using a keypad to navigate most social sites can be a bit of a chore.
Blabnote hopes to change that by offering a social networking service that is controlled entirely by speech.
It’s a closed beta at the moment, so all we have to go on is the contents of the promotional site, but essentially this is about calling a number and manipulating contacts and creating ‘events’ by saying things like ‘Invite Dave and Sue to Dinner’ or ‘Join the group called East Midlands Pigeon Fanciers’.
t’s a nice idea, but this kind of servic4 will stand or fall on the software’s ability to recognise your voice commands. Its no good launching a national service if it is going to be confounded by some of the more - ah - idiosyncratic regional accents and require power users to learn Received Pronunciation.
The other factor that might hinder uptake is the same one that means that texting is so popular - you can do it silently in public places and use a shorthand to communicate concisely. If people are going to actually have to say LOL and WTF things are going to get strange.
This may have been obvious from the amount of location-aware apps that have been gushing out of Nokia Beta Labs lately, but Nokia have decided that GPS is where it’s at (and they have the coordinates to prove it). Accordingly, by 2012 over 50% of its handsets will have GPS receivers built in.
Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s head of location-based activities, said in an interview with Reuters that “We are planning to ship 35 million GPS units this year and many more location-enabled phones that use cell-towers to orient themselves on the map. You will see few ‘E’ or ‘N’ Series phones without GPS.”
So, does this mean that in the next couple of years Nokia expects GPS to be cheap enough to stuff into lower-end handsets, or are they just being optimistic about their smartphones taking off in the mass market? Given that they are also putting a lot of development time and money into low-end ‘third world’ phones, it would seem to be the latter. Great news, unless they expect us all to pay smartphone prices.
If you are bored with the S60 interface of your Nokia there is a simple solution - get an iPhone! No, not really (although this can work) what you could do instead is swap it out in favour of RealVista Desktop Mobile.
For all the carping and pained grimaces usually associated with using Windows Vista, one thing that most users agree on is that the interface is rather pretty - slick, shiny and impressive to watch. While RealVista
can’t offer 3D task switching and transparent windows it does make a reasonable fist of an ‘Aero-like’ set of icons.
Applications and phone functions are split into categories and displayed with four large icons per ‘page. The developer is aware of some Nokia N95 and N81 devices that can’t manage to run all apps via these icons, but reckons this is a firmware issue that should be fixable via an upgrade.
RealVista requires Flash Lite 2.1 and is available for free here.
Blyk, the yoof-oriented MVNO, provides free voice minutes and texts to its 16-24 year old demographic in return for watching targeted adverts via their handsets. Once the free balance is used up, or if the user want to browse the web, the phone can be topped up like a regular pay-as-you-go SIM.
The UK Mobile blog SMS Text News has spotted a questionnaire on the Blyk website that suggests the company are considering extending their free service to include data.
Blyk want to know how important free data is to their customers, while making the point that other services might have to be sacrificed to fit the current advert/pricing model. They also want to know want kind of services are likely to be used the most - web access, social networking, chat etc.
Although Blyk are unlikely to be able to provide a huge amount of free data via advertising, this could still make a big difference to the amount their customers try to use and might even encourage some digital holdouts to give the mobile ‘net a try.
Here at Pocket Picks we are all far, far too old to be on the Blyk network and no amount of vitamins and moisturiser is going to change that. If you have given the service a whirl, why not take a break from drinking cheap cider and performing urban street dance and let us know what you think in the comments? Would the prospect of free data make putting up with adverts worthwhile?
Nokia’s Sports Tracker is fine if you are into jogging about all over the place and want to build up to a marathon or something, but what if you prefer your exercise to a bit less high-impact? A pleasant walk in the country, for example.
Nokia Step Counter is fresh out of the Beta Labs and uses the same accelerometer technology as Sports Tracker. Rather than pushing you onwards and upwards like a digital, pocket-sized Nike advert, Step Counter just works like a pedometer and eschews GPS tomfoolery in favour of a bevy of stats about how far and fast you have been walking.
Using that data, plus info about your height and weight, Step Counter can tell you how many calories you have burnt off during your last promenade. Quite wht this isn’t just another version of Sports Tracker is unclear, but it could be that Nokia just want feedback on certain aspects of this kind of app.
Beta Labs have gone to great lengths to ensure the accuracy of the accelerometer reeadings and reckon that the app should be able to accurately report your pace regardless of how you carry your ophone. Nevertheless they would still appreciate feedback from users, particularly women.
Nokia design contractor Provoke Design has unveiled a few new concept designs it has put together for the ‘HARDCORE New Finnish Design‘ exhibition in New York later this month.
The Express will allow the user to ‘enhance his/her mindset instantly’ (it says here) by changing the colour of the handset electronically.
The Share “enables communication and sharing of information through personalized codes formed in subgroups of likeminded individuals” which is as perfect a rendering of purest marketing drivel as I have yet encountered. It just needs the word ‘paradigm’ as a sort of metaphorical cherry on the top of the nonsense cake. It’s something to do with skateboarding and geotagging, according to the press release.
The Feel is intended for use by couples - a bit like a phone version of one of those heart-shaped pendants in two halves. It features a tactile, haptic feedback system that lets two people communicate through simulated touch and achieve ‘deep communication’. Oo-er.
via Engadget.
Nokia Beta Labs isn’t just there for the Symbian things in life. As well as pumping out bleeding edge S60 apps at what seems like a rate of twenty or so a day, Nokia have also released experimental PC software - usually novel takes on their synching apps or ways of controlling you phone from the desktop.
Nokias Music is at first glance a bit of a departure, given that it is an iTunes-like music player and organiser that lets you manage your digital music collection and hook up to a wide range of MP3 players. You can knock together playlists and rip CDs directly to connected devices.
Obviously, this primarily intended to e used with Nokia phones like the N81 and N95 but perhaps leaving things open will convince a few people to give a music-oriented smartphone a try - particularly when Nokia rolls out more phone-oriented features like Nokia Music Store integration.
Nokia Music PC Client is a 63MB download for Windows Vista and XP with service pack 2, available here.
Opera have released version 4.51 4.1 of their slimline Opera Mini web browser.
Among a few new features and bug fixes, the big news on the new version is a promised speed increase of up to 50%.
Yes, we know, ‘Up to’. Still, it does *seem* a bit faster. The code itself feels like it has been tightened up a bit and is more responsive and the autocompleting URLs are a definite improvement on slowly tapping out addresses.
Most importantly, Opera have increased the speed of the proxy servers that cache webpages to improve access times. This make a huge difference compared to the native browser on most phones.
Other new features include the ability to upload and download files from within Opera Mini itself (previous versions have had to launch the native browser to achieve this), inline searching of web pages and the ability to save pages for offline reading.
The latter is a great addition to the app and makes it possible to take reading material with you to mobile deadspots (e.g. on a plane) without having to faff about with ebook formats and the like.
Opera Mini is a free Java app, available here.
I’m sure many of you have received a mobile bill and thought “Blimey, my SMS charges are astronomical!”
Little did you realise just how right you were..
A scientist at the University of Leicester has calculated that the cost of sending a text message is four times more expensive that that of transmitting the same data from the Hubble Space telescope.
As part of research conducted for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”, Dr Nigel Bannister contacted NASA who told him that it costs approximately £8.85 per megabyte (MB) to transmit data from Hubble to a receiving ground station on Earth. From there, there are further transmissions required to get the data to the right people in observatories and universities, etc. which can push the cost up to nearly £85 per MB.
A single SMS text message has a maximum size of 140 bytes (160 characters encoded at 7 bits per character) . There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte so it will take 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte.
Assuming an average cost of 5p per text, that works out at a whopping £374.49 per MB - about 4.4 times more expensive than sending the same data from space.
Which rather begs the question - how much would it cost to text your mate on the International Space Station?
MIT is known for being at the forefront of computing and communications, so perhaps its not too surprising to hear that a class entitled “Building Mobile Applications with Android” a) exists and b) has come up with a load of working Android apps before the first android phone hits the shelves.
The apps on show lean heavily towards the social networking end of things, with quite a lot of geolocation going on too. Although these are undeniably cool features, I do sometimes think it would be nice if every once in a while someone would just write a version of ‘Snake’ or something.
Anyway, here is a quick sample of what the latest generation of IT geniuses came up with.
Loco is a mobile social network that links to your phone contacts and lets you view their locations using google maps.
Flare is an employee tracking system for small businesses (e.g. pizza deliveries).
KEI is an intriguing BlueTooth ‘key’ app that can be used with a special receiver to (for example) unlock your car. Quite whether I would want to trust my car to the 128-bit security the app uses is another question.
GeoLife is a nice mashup of a ToDo list with Google Maps - effectively assigning ‘to dos’ to physical locations and reminding you to do them when you reach those locations.
It’s great to see that there are already some bright developers working on Android apps - and the thing hasn’t even come out yet. Imagine the kind of stuff we will start to see once people use an Android phone and find that there are some itches that need to be scratched..
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