iPhone coming to UK, but not for another 7½ agonizing weeks

Well. Most of the rumours have proved to be true. The carrier of the UK iPhone will indeed be O2, and apart from O2 shops (including the recently-acquired The Link shops) the only independent retailer will be Carphone Warehouse. The phone will be identical to the $399 8GB US model.

As of 1pm GMT the only major Mac website reporting on this is TUAW. Some places still haven't got their act together - O2's official iPhone page was briefly visible at 11am GMT but has since been unavailable for over two hours since. Funnily enough Carphone's iPhone page is live and kicking.

The iPhone is priced at a surprisingly reasonable £269 (inc. VAT). Prior to the launch some people were predicting as much as £600! Tariffs start at a not-quite-so-reasonable £35 per month for 200mins/200texts with £45 for 600mins/500texts and £55 for 1200mins/600texts for the heavier users. All plans include unlimited internet usage. There is also apparently a deal with WiFi Hotspot outfit The Cloud, who specialise in providing paid WiFi access in pubs, restaurants, and city centres. The Cloud have a Hotspot finder here. The biggest news is probably the lack of 3G. This is allegedly due to the high power costs of using 3G on a mobile device. So we're all stuck with O2's currently-being-upgraded EDGE network, although for those of us who don't live or work in a major city don't care too much about 3G anyway. O2 have a website to check coverage in your part of the UK.

I can't wait to place my order

iPhone frenzy

Well, it's finally been announced, and it has far surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic Apple fan! I wrote a lengthy piece about it on my mobile phone blog. I bet Bill Ray is feeling pretty foolish right about now

17" MacBook Pro in da house - one user's gripes

It's happened. I hinted at it several times before, but as of 7 days ago I am the proud owner of a new 17" 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with the 100GB 7200rpm drive. Once Apple announced the speed bump and price reductions across the line at the end of May I knew that it was time to splash the cash. Luckily for me the other half is a secondary school teacher, so we qualified for Apple's excellent education discount. Instead of paying £1900, we got the beast for a 'mere' £1750. Add in another £110 or so for a 1GB memory stick from Crucial (significantly better than the £200 Apple would have charged) and the grand total was around £1850. Not a small chunk of change by anyone's standards, but given that my venerable 667MHz Titanium Powerbook is definitely showing its age, it's a worthwhile buy.

Having had the machine for almost a week now, I can definitely say that the speed increase has been wonderful. Apps launch almost instantly. Spotlight is finally a useful tool. Web pages render with far more of that near-mythical 'snappy'. Programs that were as slow as molasses on the old laptop (Dreamweaver MX 2004 I'm lookin' at you) are now quite usable on the MacBook Pro even under Rosetta emulation. I am aware that these are all fairly subjective measurements, so as a test I whipped out my trusty old copy of DVD2OneX. The results were approximately what I expected, but it was still nice to see the results firsthand. Processing a 7GB DVD on the old Powerbook takes about an hour. Using the universal binary version of DVD2OneX on the MacBook Pro this now takes approximately 12 minutes! Absolutely fantastic, or as Jeremy Clarkson might say, "enough to give me a semi"

Despite all the good experiences of the last few days, there have been a few negatives. The MacBook Pro itself exhibits several of the problems reported by other people:

Heat
The MacBook Pro certainly gets quite hot. After a few hours of casual use the left palm rest gets very warm - not uncomfortable but enough to make your palm a bit sweaty! Also the strip of case between the keyboard and the screen (just above the air vent) gets extremely hot, to the point where extended contact is certainly uncomfortable, and even slightly painful. I have yet to run any lengthy CPU-intensive tasks, but I plan on remedying that situation in the next day or two. As long as it doesn't get any hotter than it is now I think it is fairly warm but acceptable.

Warped screen case
The case around the screen exhibits a slight warp when the lid is closed, i.e. when it is closed the gap between the screen and the body of the laptop isn't even. The gap is noticeably wider at the front corners of the machine than it is at the central latch area, i.e. perhaps 0.75mm at the latches and 1.5mm at the corners. This is also apparently a fairly common problem, but other than the slight annoyance of a cosmetic flaw in a £1850 laptop, it doesn't really bother me.
[Update: while taking these photos I've now concluded that the screen warp has at least partially corrected itself. As you can see from the photo above it is still noticeable, but it is not as bad as it was when I first unpacked the laptop.]

Other screen issues
I had previously noticed the new (compared to the Powerbook) hinge design during my last visit to an Apple Store. While I can see the logic of the new design in that it reduces the depth of the laptop, I wasn't so happy to find that I could no longer really use my laptop while standing up because the screen cannot fold back nearly as far as my Powerbook. This results in me having to bend down to properly read the screen.

Secondly, despite Apple offering a choice between glossy and matte screens, the matte screen of my MacBook Pro is noticeably glossier than the Powerbook's. Not a huge deal, but something I noticed immediately.

The third issue is the new hinge mechanism. It is far looser than the hinge on my almost-4-year-old Powerbook. Admittedly the MacBook Pro's screen glides very smoothly and is easily adjusted with a light push from a single finger while the Powerbook screen takes two hands to adjust (one to move the screen and one to hold the base of the laptop to stop it moving!). However there is a flaw - if you lie down on your back in bed or on a sofa with your knees bent, putting the MacBook Pro on your lap results in the screen falling down and closing itself! This was a feasible (and fairly comfortable!) position with my old Powerbook.

My final quibble is with the (admittedly cool) keyboard backlighting. This seems to be somehow connected to the ambient light screen brightness controller, in that when the keyboard backlight automatically turns off after a few minutes of non-use (despite being set to never turn off) the screen also gets significantly dimmer. I suspect that the light from the keyboard backlight is affecting the ambient light sensor for the screen brightness, so when the keyboard backlight switches off, the screen dims due to reduced ambient light. This may be the intended design, but I find it quite distracting.

Tiny return key, and other keyboard annoyances
I haven't seen anyone else mention this yet, but this is annoying the crap out of me. The return key on the MacBook Pro keyboard is positively tiny compared to one on the Titanium Powerbook. This is evidently so they could squeeze in an extra key (more on that later). I'm hoping that I will get used to the tiny key, but after a week it is still a bit of a lottery which key I will actually press when going for the return key. More often than not it is the backslash key. In fact the whole keyboard is taking some getting used to.

For some inexplicable reason Apple have also decided to move the tilde (~) key and replace it with a new key (which produces the § and ± symbols). Now I don't have a problem with this, but it certainly fucks up application switching. In the past we used command-tab to cycle forwards through applications, and command-tilde to cycle backwards. This was great when the tilde key was above the tab key, but is not so great with the tilde key's new position. It also screws up window switching within an application (command-tilde).

Strange noises
One of the major issues reported by hundreds of different users has been strange noises coming from their MacBook Pros. Most commonly this is reported as a high-pitched whine coming from the base of the screen, possibly from a power inverter. Others have reported a 'mooing' noise which seems to be related to a misaligned fan. I, of course, have a completely different noise What I get is a white noise/static sound coming from the right speaker. it sounds exactly like a vinyl record player on high volume when it is in between tracks on the record (i.e. a kind of hissing and popping noise). The noise lasts for around 5 or 10 seconds. It has only happened 5 or 6 times so far, almost always when I am booting the laptop or waking it from sleep. Rather worryingly, these are two things I rarely do - the laptop is usually powered-on and on a table 24/7. Strangely enough the strange noise has also occurred once when I was booting under Windows XP via Bootcamp. This makes me wonder if it is a hardware fault, rather than a speaker driver problem. The noise isn't solely restricted to bootup and waking from sleep though. I've also heard it once when launching an application. For me this noise is a show-stopper. If I cannot find a fix for it I shall be returning this machine.

Closing thoughts
I should note that this is far from a complete review of the 17" MacBook Pro. I'll leave that to others. This piece simply states my impressions of the laptop after a week of use. I should add that despite my extensive moaning above, this is far and away the fastest and slickest laptop I've ever used. It is, on the whole, a hell of an improvement on my aged Powerbook. The MacBook Pro looks great, and the performance is simply stunning. I will probably even get used to the keyboard eventually. It is just that for the hefty price tag I want a perfect machine. That means a laptop that doesn't get too hot to touch, doesn't have no stinkin' warped screen, and absolutely, positively, does not make inexplicable noises at seemingly random times.

XP on a MacBook Pro pics

Yet another reason to get a MacBook Pro (I think I've almost persuaded myself now) - Accelerate Your Macintosh reader Michael F has posted some photos of Windows XP running on a MacBook Pro.

More MacBook Pro reviews and speed tests

The best of the bunch is a very thorough writeup by 'controller2k' on Apple's discussion forums, but MacWorld's first look and Geek Patrol's benchmarks also make for interesting reading.

OLED keys coming to the MacBook Pro?

Over the last couple of weeks I have pretty much decided that I am going to buy a MacBook Pro. All I've been waiting for were the first user reviews to start appearing on the web. The first have now started to appear, so it was only a matter of a few more days before I placed an order. But, as usual, it ain't that simple.

A new report from NewTechSpy suggests that Apple's next generation laptops will implement the OLED keys which we first saw on the Optimus mini keyboard. The idea is that Apple will replace all the function keys with OLED displays and also add three new OLED buttons on either side of the trackpad. This is supposed to happen as early as January 2007, which is blindingly cool, but remember this is still just a rumour. On the other hand it would certainly fit with Apple's reputation for adopting innovative new technologies.

Is that a mouse in your PC card slot?

This slick new mouse was featured on TUAW today. It's a Bluetooth mouse which slots neatly inside a laptop's PC card slot. The mouse also recharges via the slot. Finally a use for that wasted space in my Powerbook! The mouse has a small kickstand which flips out, and apparently the buttons are on the bottom of the mouse, so that pressing down the body causes a click (the lower end of the mouse is the front). It doesn't look particularly comfortable, but is still seems to be a great idea for those of us who aren't so keen on trackpads and have an unused PC card slot. The mouse is set to be introduced next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Via TUAW, who had it from Engadget, who got it from Uber-Review, who give credit to GearLog (even though the article appears to have vanished from GearLog). Don't you just love blogs? In a strange twist of fate, GearLog is a blog from the editors of DigitalLife magazine

Google Maps for your phone

I somehow missed it at the time but I've just discovered that back in April Google launched a Google Maps service on certain mobile phones. The service is a downloadable application which lets you view Google Maps (maps and satellite imagery tied together with driving directions and telephone directory information) on your mobile phone. Just like the computer version of Google Maps, you can drag the map around the screen. The mobile phone service also introduces a new feature named 'click to call' where you can phone up a local business simply by locating them on the map.

The service, named Google Local for mobile, is currently only available in the US and is officially limited to just over a dozen phones from a few manufacturers. Google say that 'most' Java-enabled (J2ME) phones released in the last year should be compatible, although phones from Sony-Ericsson are conspicuously absent from the compatibility list. There have been reports on the Google Local for mobile group that some unsupported phones are also compatible - notably the Treo, the SE W800i walkman phone, the SE P800/P900/P910, the SE K750i ... but not the Blackberry.

There are no charges other than data transfer charges for your phone's internet connection. The service is only currently available on certain networks, including Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint.

Mobile MMORPG

Here's one for all of you with unlimited data connections on your mobile phone plans: German developer CipSoft have finally introduced a worldwide version of their Tibia MMORPG for Symbian Series 60 phones. For those of you paying per kilobyte, one hour of gameplay averages around 400kb of data transfer. Could this be a threat to the dominance of World of Warcraft? No longer will people need to closet themselves at home to get their online gaming fix!

Sony Ericsson P990 announced

Say hello to the upcoming Sony Ericsson P990! The new flagship phone from Sony Ericsson is due in early 2006, with major improvements over the current P-series including 3G, true 320x240px QVGA screen resolution (up from 320x208px), a 2 megapixel camera, 801.11b WiFi, 80MB onboard memory, included 64MB MemoryStick (expandable to 2GB), and FM radio. The new model will also apparently support Blackberry 'push' email, and includes a VPN client. The phone is very similar in size to its P-series predecessors (114x57x25mm, compared to the P800's 118x59x27mm), although the screen has been moved upwards to make room for the new keypad on the actual body of the phone (instead of inside the flip as on the P900). Given the extra horizontal resolution the new screen should be 'squarer' that previous screens, which appears to suggest a slightly reduced dot pitch in order to maintain the candybar form factor.

Salling Clicker 3

Salling Software have released Clicker 3! The bluetooth-based software acts as a great remote for iTunes, DVD Player, VLC, iPhoto, Keynote, EyeTV and a host of other programs. In a move guaranteed to please huge numbers of people worldwide this fantastic software is now also available for Windows. The new version sports a snazzier phone interface as well as wifi support. The website has also undergone a slick revamp and now includes a WordPress blog by Jonas Salling himself.

Mac OS 7.5.5 running on a PSP

Neisha Erin Stadelhofer has managed to get Mac System 7.5.5 running on a PSP! It's still in its infancy, but very interesting nonetheless! Interesting tidbits: it takes 4 hours to boot; and she's only had her PSP for one day. In her own words - "yes, girls can hack too". Via MacSlash.

Free Opera (or how to abandon desktops while taking over the world)

The relatively unknown (to the general public) web browser known as Opera is now free! From humble beginnings in 1996 with a public debut as a small Norwegian browser to 2005 and membership of a very exclusive club - browsers that cost money - Opera has had a good innings.

Who cares?
Opera is mostly known for the oft-repeated claim of being "the fastest browser on earth" (which incidentally is probably true). However despite impressive performance Opera never really caught on (cost probably had something to do with that), and it now seems likely that the advent of Firefox has sounded Opera's death knell as a worth-paying-for alternative to the mighty Internet Explorer. Opera users today are a shrinking mixture of diehard loyalists from the glory days, web designers testing for compatibility, and power surfers willing to pay for Opera's much touted speed and impressive, if sometimes exotic, features.

So how is Opera Software going to survive?
Their website doesn't suggest many possibilities, but presumably Opera Software will make a few bucks from paid support for the now-free browser, however it doesn't take a genius to see that, even charging for it, they cannot continue supporting a declining browser forever. Despite that it's not all doom and gloom - surely Opera for Mobiles (smartphones and PDAs) must form a major part of Opera Software's future. After all, Opera for Mobiles has no serious competition and the mobile market can't do anything but grow. Opera Mini, released for non-smartphones (stupidphones?) in 2004, is still in its infancy but is another clear sign of Opera's dominance of the entire mobile browser market.

What will happen to the desktop browser now?
Given that paid support is likely to have a limited lifespan, one possible option which would generate some public interest, not to mention great PR, would be to open-source the browser. This must seem tempting to Opera bigwigs given the lightning pace of development shown by the unpaid volunteers working on the Firefox project. On the other hand Opera Software may be taking a page out of Google's book and offering free-yet-proprietary software to the world, all the while betting that the software's performance and features will boost the company's reputation in the public eye.

Comment
Hmm ... giving away quality software for desktop PCs ... proven technological innovation ... demonstrable longevity amidst fierce competition ... complete domination of a massively growing market. Sounds a bit like the history of a certain fruit company. Opera Software went public on the Norwegian stock market last year - could it be time to buy some shares?

And the iPhone arriveth ...

It's finally been announced, and it's so underwhelming that it's almost disappointing. Nothing unexpected here - maximum 100 songs (512MB TransFlash card) only, and not particularly good looking. Also no syncing over Bluetooth, locked to one computer, and will not sync with any music software other than iTunes. Supports MP3 and AAC. Verdict? Wait until Apple actually design the phone as well as the software.

New SE P910i P950i leaked

Gizmodo are reporting that Ubergizmo has been served with a Cease & Desist letter for revealing pictures of the new Sony Ericcson P910i P950i update, codenamed 'Hermione'. Update: It seems Gizmodo received a C&D themselves, but unapologetically ignored it. Ubergizmo got the picture from the French site MobileMag (who appear to have removed the offending article). The images are apparently from an Orange (France) internal presentation.

From the image we can see that the phone features a slick new all-silver look, as well as a prominent new central directional keypad. Other obvious differences include a forward-facing camera aperture (presumably the original aperture is still present on the rear of the phone). Other improvements supposedly include 3G UTMS connectivity and a 2 megapixel camera.

Comment:
This looks like a solid update. 3G will be a welcome speed upgrade, provided you live in an enabled area. It never made sense that a high-end phone like the P-series was limited to crawling along at GPRS speeds. And the 2MP camera is a drastic improvement over the current VGA resolution which again was a notable weak point in the P910 specs. The directional pad doesn't sound too appealing here, but some may prefer it over the scroll wheel.

Update: More info via Gizmodo, and collected here.

Cabir finally spotted in the wild!

Mobile anti-virus software makers must be deliriously happy. The mobile virus Cabir (covered earlier) has finally been spotted in the wild. Although the article mentions previously reported infections at the Live8 concerts, Google was unable to find any reports of it. Cabir still only affects Series 60 phones, and unless you're in a crowd of thousands is still not any kind of serious threat.

iPhone with 512MB RAM?

A recent post on fscklog (English translation here) offers some evidence that the iPhone will have 512MB of RAM. Not enough, if you ask me.

Too ugly to be the iPhone?

Could this be the much-discussed iTunes-enabled phone from Motorola? AppleInsider, Slashdot and Engadget all have coverage, while one Engadget reader points out the (somewhat superficial ) similarities to the Moto E1060.

Home made laptop batteries

Roll your own for around half the price.

Build your own Salling Clicker

The Unofficial Apple Weblog commented on a very interesting MacDevCenter article today detailing how to control iTunes from an internet-enabled mobile phone via a WAP browser and OS X's built-in Apache webserver. Great stuff, but hang on a minute ...

If you already own the incredible Salling Clicker, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. With Clicker you can already do everything described in the article without typing a single line of code. Furthermore you can view album art and playlists on the phone, which really has to be seen to be appreciated. And to top it all off it's not only iTunes - Clicker also has controls for iPhoto, DVD Player, Keynote and PowerPoint, as well as numerous third party plugins (admittedly of varying quality).

Given the all-round awesomeness of Clicker, it was the ability to script apps other than iTunes that really intrigued me about the MacDevCenter article. One such use I will be looking into is toggling P800 Manager's internet sharing. Since Clicker can activate the BlueTooth connection from the phone, this would eliminate the need to physically visit your Mac to start P800 Manager's internet sharing. It may be that P800 Manager is not scriptable, in which case I'll be looking into applescripts which enable internet sharing over bluetooth.

Back to the MacDevCenter article, the use of a web interface was also interesting - on the plus side it is not range-limited like the BlueTooth-based Clicker is, but on the down side internet access on a phone costs money (quite a lot in most cases). I suppose if you have an unusually large home the web interface may be the best option, but I for one cannot imagine any other need for the greater range.

One free alternative that comes to mind is sharing your Mac's internet via BlueTooth to access the web from your phone, all in order to surf to your Mac's webserver and control iTunes. How's that for convoluted? But we're now back to limited BlueTooth range, which kind of defeats the purpose. I think I'll be sticking with Salling Clicker, at least for iTunes control.

Walkman phone announced

Continuing this post, SonyEriccson have now officially announced their new Walkman phone. Notable features are the 2 megapixel camera and the supplied 512MB MemoryStick Duo Pro. As previously stated, it supports both MP3 and AAC.

Mac Mini in a Lexus

How cool is this?

Memory Stick Pro Duo hits 2GB

Engadget are reporting that Sony has finally announced 2 gigabyte Memory Stick Pro Duo cards! These should work in the P900 and P910 - yet another reason I'm considering an upgrade.

Sony Ericcson Walkman Phone

Sony Ericcson are planning on cashing in Sony's Walkman brand by releasing a combination phone and digital music player. The story is that it will have enough storage for six to ten albums worth of MP3 or AAC files which suggests a 256MB capacity. The support for AAC is interesting, since that is the usual format for the iPod and iTunes.

Pirated software erases your PocketPC

Geek News Central are reporting that the developer of an app named Pocket Mechanic has introduced a 'feature' which forces a hard-reset (thus erasing your data) if the user inputs a pirated serial number. Sounds like the Echelon fiasco all over again.

Finally - P800 updated firmware

I've finally had a reason to go down to London where I had the chance to upgrade my P800's first generation firmware. I had it done in Tottenham at R's Electrics with a two hour turnaround. So far I have noticed a definite improvement in iSync reliability, instead of failing 100% of the time (unless you went through a complicated rigamarole) it only fails about 50% of the time. I'm still working on improving that, it may be 'interference' caused by BluePhoneElite or Salling Clicker.

Another noticeable change is the default video-player now has a widescreen option to play back video in landscape mode. The default picture viewer also benefits from a new landscape mode. Both huge improvements! The camcorder app also now has a night-shot mode.

Checking my firmware version numbers (in the Applications list, click view and then system info) displays this:

Phone: R2F Bluetooth: R5A Organiser: R2D02 CDA: R2A

I'm not actually sure if this is the very latest firmware or not, but it's several generations ahead of my old firmware. So far so good.

OS X on PocketPC

This is pretty cool.

Automatically copy Bluetoothed images into iPhoto

While searching for some iPhoto information, I found this interesting tutorial on how to set up folder actions to automatically copy images into iPhoto after they've been bluetoothed to your Mac.

Holy Macmobile!

Well, it was bound to happen. Given that the Mac mini's front dimensions are 2" x 6.5", and a car stereo port is 2" x 7", it was inevitable someone would want to put the former into the latter. I'm not quite sure I get it myself - yes it would be nice having iTunes as your car stereo, but the mini seems overkill for that and if you used an iPod instead it could leave the car with you. But then again I don't have kids - I guess parents would appreciate the DVD-playing ability of the mini. I suppose with an internet-capable mobile phone you could also do email in your car, although I can't think who would want to. The voice control aspects of having a full-fledged Mac in the car are interesting, but to be frank my own experiences with voice recognition don't fill me with eager anticipation. I also wonder about the power supply. Will the mini get turned off when you aren't using the car? If it does I wonder if they've taken the Mac's relatively slow startup into account, presumably you'll just have to wait a minute or two after turning on your engine in order to play some music.

PB CallerID

I tried out BluePhoneElite today and to my surprise it works with my original firmware P800! The manual even mentions the P800, saying that although you can initiate calls from the Mac - which will also have on-screen caller-ID - and have 'answer the phone' and 'ignore' options when the P800 rings, the SMS funcions will not work due to a firmware bug with all Series 60 and UIQ phones. A pity - something I would find very useful would be SMS composing on the Mac.

BluePhoneElite also has a slick proximity function. I particularly like the option to set your iChat status:

MGS Virtual Pool 2 reviewed

After briefly mentioning MGS Virtual Pool 2 a short while ago, I had planned on doing a fuller review at some point. That will no longer be necessary, since AllAboutSymbian today posted a glowing review of the game.

3G networks? Pffft - 4G is coming

Unwired reported on DoCoMo's 4G tests today. The plan is for 1 Gbps mobile transfer rates. Apparently field trials will begin in early 2005, but given how much money the European mobile carriers have already spent on largely unused 3G bandwidth I'm not confident we'll be seeing 4G in Europe anytime soon. This C|Net report predicts commercial 4G services by 2010.

RSS on UIQ

Total Wireless Solutions have released NewsFlash, an RSS reader for the UIQ platform. I've been trying to estimate the total size of my 170 or so regular RSS feeds. On average each feed seems to be anywhere from 3 to 15 K of data when it refreshes each hour or so - except for blogs like BoingBoing which include images in their RSS feed as well as blogs like EnGadget and Gizmodo which put out a very high number of articles. If we call the average 5K and we have 170 feeds, the total is about 850K downloaded for each hourly refresh. That's 5 or 10 minutes by GPRS, not great but acceptable. On the other hand it would be half a minute or so on 3G - perhaps I should be investigating 3G options when I upgrade my P800.

Treo 650? P910? Something else?

The recent arrival of the Sony-Ericsson P910 has made me think about upgrading my P800, but I've been reading more and more intriguing things about the Treo 650. However today's Gizmodo review of the Treo has tilted the balance back towards the Sony-Ericsson side of the fence. There are still things I don't like about the P910 though, notably reliance on Sony's MemorySticks. Perhaps I'll wait for the P1000.

MGS MadMacs UIQ

Noumena have released their latest Magic Game Station (MGS) game. It's a 3D turn-based tank game named MadMacs which apparently includes the capability for 8-player online games. There is a downloadable demo, as well as a Series 60 version. If you haven't tried any MGS games, you are strongly urged to. Every one of their MGS games easily makes my list of great games available for the UIQ platform, while some, such as MGS Karting or MGS Virtual Pool 2, would both make the top five.

CrystalPlayer Mobile for UIQ

An updated version of the CrystalPlayer video player was announced today. No horizontal playback, and another proprietary video format - no thanks. See my earlier take on the advantages of SmartMovie over VICS Video Player.

Skulls and Cabir gangbang Series 60

The Register reported today that a new combined version of the Skulls trojan and the Cabir worm (covered earlier) has been discovered. It's been tagged as Skulls-B. Beware of an application called Extended Theme Manager for Series 60 phones.

P910i Mac-centric review

I recently discovered a MacBidouille review (English translation here) of the P910i from a few weeks ago. The nice thing about this review is that it is Mac-specific. I mentioned the P910 back in July.

OS X polyphonic ringtone converter

I noticed the creatively-titled Polyphonic Converter listed on Macshareware.net today - it's for converting midi files into polyphonic ringtones for modern phones. The good thing about this is that there are thousands of midi files freely available all over the web.

Nokia 7710 and Series 90

Nokia recently announced this new phone. It looks very slick and improves on several of the flaws of the P800, notably the P800's lowly VGA camera and its distinctly average phone-related features (poor microphone, no profiles). Hopefully the 7710 will have the same great reception that my old Nokias all had (the P800's signal reception is noticeably worse). The Register has a write-up.

5 megapixel phone

Showing the rest of the world what we have to look forward to, this 5 megapixel phone will be available in Korea later this year. There are images of the device here. And lots of criticism here. The criticism is pretty harsh in my opinion - I for one would like this kind of camera in a UIQ phone.

Update: ArsTechnica has a review of the phone.

Free eBooks for your P800

I was recently directed to ManyBooks.net as a good site for free books. There are a lot of the Project Gutenberg books here, but the layout and organisation is much better, and books are available in many popular eBook formats, including my preferred PalmReader (pdb) format. I'm a long time fan of the late Robert Heinlein, and given his many references to Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars series, I've always wanted to read them. So it was a nice surprise when I found book one of the series, Princess of Mars. Books two to five are also available.

1.5GB mobile phone

Okay ... this is what I want my next phone to be like. This CultOfMac report on a new phone from Samsung sounds flippin' awesome. 320x240 colour screen, megapixel camera, 1.5GB harddisk, built in FM transmitter, TV output (!!!), and built-in stereo speakers. The original TechWorld report is here.

The phone is being discussed as an iPod killer. I don't know about that, 1.5GB translates to about 15 albums worth of 128Kbps MP3s - not enough for a real music freak. However for me the killer features are most definitely the hard disk, megapixel camera, FM transmitter, and TV out. While I probably won't go for a $800 Samsung phone, it should only be a matter of time before Nokia or SonyEricsson incorporate most of these features. The one probable drawback will be battery life. Neither of the articles discuss it, but with a built in hard disk I would be surprised if it could manage a whole day of moderate use.

Ogg and the Music Man

When Mireth Technology, the makers of MacVCD and iVCD, released Music Man (formerly MacMP3CD) a few days ago I was curious to see if it would simplify the process of converting songs from my MP3 collection to 48Kbps Ogg files for my P800 phone. My current method involves batch converting MP3s to WAV with MACAST MP3 Converter and then converting the WAVs to Ogg with Ogg Drop X.

After installing Music Man as per the instructions, I discovered that in order to convert MP3s to Oggs I would need to install the LAME MP3 encoder as well as the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component. I already had the Ogg component installed, and after a quick read of this I was ready. Note: installing LAME 3.96 resulted in an error at the end of the make install process - the error was make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1, however the encoder seems to be installed correctly, since Music Man MP3 conversions now work correctly.

All of the above only took 20 minutes or so, and soon after that I was merrily converting MP3s to Ogg in just one click. Very handy, although watching the output folder shows that Music Man converts the MP3 to WAV before reconverting to Ogg, so the actual workflow appears to be similar to my previous two step process. However, I was disappointed to discover that Music Man does not apparently allow you to set the bitrate of your output Oggs. They appear to be 128Kbps files, which is too large for me to consider using on a mobile phone with only a 128MB memory card.

eBooks and DRM

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing discusses a C|Net report on the current state of eBook publishing and whether or not Digital Rights Management (DRM) makes a difference.

RealVideo to SmartMovie

I missed this story on MacOSXHints while I was away on holiday, but I just noticed it tonight. Converting RealVideo to anything else on the Mac has always been hard, but this guy is reporting success converting RealVideo internet streams to SmartMovie AVIs using the command line encoder Mencoder.

PocketPC and Symbian viruses, neck and neck

The first PocketPC virus has been discovered! At the moment Duts, as it's known, doesn't do any damage and asks the user's permission before spreading, but transmission avenues include email, the web, synchronisation, or bluetooth. And Pandora's box is now open ...

Of course, over here on the Symbian side of the fence, we've had our first virus, Cabir, for over a month now (at the moment it only affects Series 60 phones, not UIQ phones like the P800). Again, the virus is a "proof of concept" non-malicious release which requires user approval to spread itself, and unlike Duts, can only do so via bluetooth.

Both viruses were allegedly created by members of the hacker group known as 29A Labs. I considered the ramifications of linking to 29A, but those of you who are interested could easily find them on the web anyway. Whatever the case may be, if you do decide to have a look at their page make sure you have a look at their 'old news' for a bit of an eye-opener.

Salling Clicker updated

The newest version of Salling Clicker is out! Version 2.2 adds support for the Sendo X, Motorola A925, Nokia 7610, palmOne Zire 72, TapWave Zodiac and Sony Ericsson T637, as well as adding integration with EyeTV and VLC. This new version also includes a separate installer for P800s with the original R1D firmware (that's the phone firmware, not the calendar or other parts). It appears to be working on my un-updated phone exactly as advertised so far. Great stuff!

Son of P900

Sony Ericsson have announced the P910! It's billed as a 'minor' upgrade, but in my opinion the major benefits are 64MB internal ram and access to Memory Stick Duo Pro (up to 1GB!). Not to mention the non-virtual QWERTY keyboard! The screen has been upgraded to 200k+ colours too, but that's not a big issue for me.

Breaking the 128MB barrier will make a huge difference. Instead of storing 6 albums of music in 48KHz ogg format, we're now talking about 48 albums. In my eyes 48 albums is a full-fledged music player, whereas a 6 album capacity was just a phone that dabbled in music. In a similar vein, we're now talking about 8 full length SmartMovie xvids per Memory Stick instead of just 1. Finally, we're also talking about enough storage for a movie in a VHS quality format now - think Divx or VCD/KVCD! Granted, it will take a phone with a beefier processor than the P910 has now to play back VHS quality Divx or MPEG1, but imagine plugging your phone into a 50" TV and playing back a movie...

Update: I'm not sure how I ended up posting this after the previous entry about the P900 firmware update, but there you have it

The Land of Ogg

Until a few weeks ago I never gave the Ogg Vorbis format a second thought as a music format. I always knew it could achieve the same quality as mp3 in less space, but so what? Hard drives are bigger and cheaper than ever. Then came my awakening (cue choir breaking into song) - I got my first phone which can play real music. The limited storage on a 128MB memory card suddenly made the Ogg format rather appealing.

A bit of digging around on the Mac software sites turned up an OS X app named Ogg Drop X. This is a nicely done drag-and-drop Ogg encoder. It works well, can batch encode Oggs at a variety of bitrates and has good metadata tag support. Unfortunately the program is intended for ripping CDs to Ogg and as a result it only accepts the uncompressed music files you'd find on a CD (AIFF / WAV format). I'm reliably informed that audiophiles would recoil in horror at the thought of re-encoding an mp3 as an Ogg, which is presumably why this program doesn't offer the option. So you're stuck with creating your Oggs direct from CD, or using something like QuickTime Player to convert your mp3s back to AIFF prior to using Ogg Drop X.

Update: If you have a batch of MP3s to convert, using QuickTime Player to convert those MP3s to AIFF is a painstaking process, primarily because you have to sit and wait for each conversion to finish before starting the next one. After a few conversions I was heartily sick of it so I set off in search of a better solution. Enter the freeware app MACAST MP3 Converter. This a batch converter for MP3 to AIFF/WAV conversions.

However in the default mode, MACAST MP3 Converter's output AIFF and WAV files are not accepted by Ogg Drop X. To fix this, select AIFF in MACAST MP3 Converter's pull-down menu, click options, select Custom, click Set, and then select Compressor: 24-bit Integer. The output files will now be compatible with Ogg Drop X.

Finally, MACAST MP3 Converter isn't totally bug-free. The notable one is that it appears to consume all available CPU power, even after the conversion has finished. So don't forget to quit the program once you've finished your conversions!

Who says size doesn't matter?

As far as size is concerned, mp3s at 128kbps (generally accepted as CD quality to the untrained ear) weigh in at about 1MB per minute, or just over two hours on a 128MB memory stick duo. However an Ogg can achieve very similar quality at half the bitrate. Since space is at a premium, I have chosen to encode my Oggs at 48kbps. In my opinion the quality is still totally acceptable, and this means we can fit almost six hours of music on a 128MB MS Duo. In practice I generally only keep a couple of albums at a time on my P800, for a total size of about 40MB.

Playback on the P800

The bad news is that there isn't a lot of choice. As far as I'm aware there is only one Ogg player available for the P800, and that is OggPlay. The good news is that OggPlay is a quality piece of software! It can not only play Oggs (you'd hope so!), it can do so in both flip-open and flip-closed modes and it's clever enough to mute the music if the phone rings. It's also skinnable - there are various skins available on the developer's site.

Crappy P800 headphones

I've heard the bundled headphones that come with the P800 are less than satisfactory (I wouldn't know since my phone from eBay didn't come with them!). But since they have the pickup-hangup button on them you are kinda stuck with them if you want to receive phone calls while listening to music. All is not lost however! On a recommendation I bought this headset adapter. What can I say - this is a nifty little device. It consists of a spring-loaded retractable wire connecting the P800 to a combination microphone, pickup-hangup button and headphone miniplug adapter, and it comes with a detachable single earpiece for your handsfree conversations. The clever part is that you can unplug the single earpiece and plug your high-quality third-party headphones into the miniplug adapter, and still use the pickup-hangup button and microphone on the adapter itself.

GPRS in the UK

GPRS is mighty expensive in the UK, just a month or two ago I looked into it on my T-Mobile pay-as-you-go plan and prices started at £1.50 per megabyte or £40 a month for 'unlimited' usage (discretionary 100MB cap, 12 month contract). This is way too much for me to use it for my regular email, let alone browsing the web.

So when I noticed this I thought, what a great idea!. A text-based web browser almost makes me want to sign up for GPRS so I could use the P800 as a mobile modem for the laptop. I'd still have to lug the laptop around along with the phone though. All I need now is a similar program for the Symbian OS.

P800 ringtones

The P800, unlike it's newer sibling the P900, cannot play an MP3 as a ringtone. It is restricted to normal ringtones (which are MIDI based, i.e. they only reproduce the melody of a song, not the actual sound or any lyrics) and WAV files. Unfortunately, a WAV file is by definition uncompressed, which makes them enormous when compared to the phone's memory. An average MP3 that is 4MB in size, when exported to WAV with QuickTime Pro at the default settings (48KHz, 16bit, stereo), will weigh in at around 50MB in size! How can we reduce the size of our WAV file? Luckily for us, since the file is only for a phone's ringtone, and given the limited speaker in the phone, we can drastically reduce the fidelity of the WAV file to the minimum possible and still have a recognisable song. Using the minimum settings (8KHz, 8bit, mono) when we export to WAV, our output file comes out to about 2MB in size. This is of course for the entire song - for a ringtone we only need about 15 seconds of the song which at the same settings will somewhere in the 100KB range. To cut out the section of the song we want, use the 'bookend' markers underneath QuickTime Player's position slider to select the portion of the song you want to keep, copy it, and paste it into a new empty QuickTime Player document. We can then export to WAV from this new document. To export to a WAV, simply choose Export (this requires QuickTime Pro), select WAV, click Options and choose 8KHz, 8bit, mono. If you have a lot of MP3s to convert you may wish to have a look at SoundConverter, a great drag-and-drop audio conversion application. It is free for input files under 500KB in size, otherwise it costs US$10. What I do is cut my MP3s in QuickTime Pro, save them all, and then batch convert the lot with SoundConverter (once your MP3s are cut down to size they should be quite a bit smaller than 500KB).

More Mobipocket Conversions

Some of my ebooks are in html format. I briefly experimented with reading them on the P800's web browser but the files are quite large and really thrash the P800's CPU. The phone is barely usable while the html file is open, at least with the default web browser. I was unable to access the html file with Opera.

I found a slick hint at MacOSXHints which details how to use txt2pdbdoc and the pdftotxt portion of xpdf to add the ability to export documents, via the Print command, in the pdb format. This means you can export any text from almost any document (it only exports text, not images), be it a webpage, a spreadsheet, a pdf, or an email. Note that the author had some trouble getting backslashes to display in the main hint, he's posted a correction here.

This solution, while extremely elegant, does have its downfalls. For one thing single carriage returns seem to be lost in the conversion, so you end up with extremely long paragraphs. This can be a problem, especially for novels with lots of dialogue. I had hoped to use this method to easily convert some pdf and html ebooks I have. I was unable to find a fix for this, so I am stuck with exporting the text from pdf and html ebooks manually.

For pdf ebooks I've just been choosing the File:Save as Text command in Acrobat Reader and then converting the resultant text with PorDiBle.

For html ebooks I've been opening the html file in Safari and choosing Edit:Select All, and then choosing Safari:Services:TextEdit:New Window Containing Selection. I then save the resultant TextEdit document as an rtf file and drop it onto PorDiBle. Note, according to this slightly dated Doc Converter review, earlier versions of PorDiBle could convert html files. Unfortunately this no longer appears to be the case. The review also mentions MakeDocDD, which I plan on experimenting with, but my initial test resulted in the app crashing.

Both of the manual conversion methods above produce properly formatted ebooks, within the limitations of PorDiBle (notably it's inability to translate some common higher ASCII codes, '...' is a particular bugbear of mine).

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but given that reading a novel takes ten hours or more, the two or three minutes it takes to convert an ebook becomes entirely acceptable. Especially when you save all your conversions to replicate your entire library in pdb format!

Finally, in the course of my experimentation I decided I needed an OS X pdb reader rather than bluetoothing the books over to the P800 to check the formatting. A quick google search turned up eReader. There doesn't seem to be a lot of competition, but eReader doesn't suffer for it. Everything works, it looks decent, and performance is good. What more could you ask? The Pro version includes skins and changeable fonts and font sizes.

Update: I recently discovered the OS X version of Palm's very own DropBook. It works well but like PorDiBle has problems with certain unusual higher ASCII characters.

eBooks on the P800

One of the reasons I took the plunge and upgraded my old Nokia 8250 to the new P800 is that I wanted a portable device to read eBooks on. I had originally gone onto eBay looking for an obsolete £30 Palm and ended up with a £150 P800 phone, but that's another story...

One of my early finds on the P800 was MobiPocket Reader. This is a great eBook reader which can handle many (but not all) popular formats. The one major drawback is that it does not like gzipped text files (oddly enough the default reader that comes with the P800 handles them with aplomb). Since a gzipped text ebook can be 30% the size of a plain text ebook I really wanted an easy way to compress my many plain text ebooks into a format MobiPocket would like.

Enter Pordible. This is a slick OS X drag-and-drop app that converts text or html files into a compressed .pdb (PalmDoc) file. PalmDoc is not quite as space efficient as gzipped text, but it's pretty good. And it is compatible with MobiPocket

One final note: after bluetoothing a .pdb file over to the phone, I found that it would only get imported into MobiPocket's library if MobiPocket was not loaded. If MobiPocket was already open in the background, it would read the .pdb file, but would leave it in the Beamed messages folder. My workaround is just to remember to quit MobiPocket before bluetoothing a new ebook over.

Encoding for SmartMovie

Okay ... I've made some progress on SmartMovie. After spending hours reading every scrap of information I could find on the net, I've come up with a couple of processes for encoding SmartMovie files on OS X. There seems to be some sort of obscure bug in ffmpegX which means we have to demux and process our audio seperately before remuxing the final file.

Note: depending on the aspect ratio of your source movie, these are the resolutions you want to aim for when resizing (step 4 below)

4:3 -- 272x208
3:2 -- 320x208
1.66:1 -- 320x192
16:9 -- 320x176
1.85:1 -- 320x176
2.35:1 -- 320x128

METHOD 1
Pros: Works on a wide variety of formats
Cons: Needs QuickTime Pro, only works on movies you can open in QT Player

Required software:
DivX 5.1 Mac codec
ffmpegX 0.0.9h
QuickTime Pro

1. Open the movie in QuickTime Player.
2. In the Movie menu choose Get Movie Properties (cmd-J)
3. Select 'Video Track', select 'Size', click 'Adjust'