Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

I've borrowed a Bookeen Cybook for a while, and am rather pleased with it.

• Ebooks in text, HTML or PDF format are easily uploaded to the reader via USB, without any special drivers or other software.
• Reading a page is very pleasant due to E-Ink, provided you have enough surrounding light. It even works in full day light, which an LCD can't handle.
• You can add any number of fonts from Windows and you can select among those via the reader and show the text at any size. This makes it very easy to achieve optimal reading comfort.
• It's very light, and no bother to hold for longer periods of time. I've read books for hours at a time without problems.
• In its 512M of Flash memory it can store many books, so it's no problem stacking up with books and documents for trips etc. Note that a typical book is less than 0.5M.

• Page flipping is slooooow, and to avoid 'ghosts' from previous pages the display is made completely black before the new content is displayed, which is annoying. This also affects browsing through menus.
• The PDF support is definitely not bug free. Actually in many cases it crashes on the first page of PDF files. Clearly a case for improvement. The reader is certainly not ideal for reading PDFs anyway, as you can't control the text size (PDF is by nature a final format), and the display is rather small, so text can become unreadable.
• The page flipping multi-function key is hard to press and placed badly. It would be better with page-flipping keys at the side of the reader, like on the Kindle.
• It can only show a very limited range of gray tones, which makes pictures look rather lo-fi.

It's definitely optimized for literature in text and HTML format, and works very well for that. Actually much better than the paper version (except for the slow flipping). I've used it to read manuals in PDF format as well, but that wasn't a hit, for the mentioned reasons.

Amazon Kindle 2 looks very promising too, and I'd like one of those, so if anyone wants to sponsor...

Juniper has released a new report called Future Mobile Enterprise, and as usual (and much appreciated) provided a brief white paper called Mobilising the Enterprise, highlighting the highlights, so to speak, of the report.

Not revealing that much though, but it's clear that the report is covering all types mobile, including laptops, netbooks, and mobile phones. The white paper claims that at least a "smartphone" or PDA is required, ignoring the vast amount of voice-centric phones that support downloaded applications and a browser (now often with more or less full HTML support), and hence could be used for simpler tasks like time reporting, status reporting, photo and video submission (e.g. for damage reports) and the like, as indicated in the Abiro Mobilizer white paper.

Mobile phones increasingly get PC-like features, smartphones are said to save the mobile phone industry, netbooks sell like donuts, it's talks about putting Android in netbooks and navigators, smartphones (as PDAs with mobile communication) are self-reliant and no longer tied to a PC (as was Microsoft pretty flawed dream), increasingly operators offer flat-rate also for mobile phones and not just USB modems, netbooks will be sold subsidized with a mobile sub (laptops are already), etc, etc.

As I've mentioned from time to time, what saves the mobile phone industry is the operators' subsidizing of phones. Without that the industry would collapse, as very few would (think they could) afford a new phone.

Anyway, what I intended to get at was that people will increasingly wonder "Should I get a new wonderous information-centric phone or should I stay with a 'normal' voice-centric phone and buy a netbook instead, using the phone as modem"?

It's also a question whether there's any point buying video-focused media players anymore (they are not selling well already), as a netbook (esp. if running XP) or an information-centric phone function well for playing both music and videos. Phones might be skimpy on storage space and rely completely on Flash memory nowadays, but a netbook with a hard drive and a larger screen than a dedicated media player can certainly serve as a media player / web tablet.

Selling mobile phone applications is in most cases not a profitable business. Giving applications away for free even less so.

GetJar is now testing ads to be shown inside applications. They provide the ad text/image and it's up to the application developer to provide means for showing the ads, via a marquee, a boot-up screen, or similar.

See http://my.getjar.com/site/Developers under "Get Ads"

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I've added a page about M2M, that will (or at least might) be expanded on later with information about M2M equipment providers, related programming languages, how to control such modules and how to interface them with other equipment.

There's a lot that can be said, including about the potential future, that's very interesting indeed for M2M.

The questions are, as always, am I the right person to write about it, will anyone care, and will I have the time and ambition?

Abiro - Mobile Developer - Wireless Machine-to-Machine Communication

This is a cased GSM module with a few digital and analog ports, and that supports running Python scripts uploaded from a PC. My intention is to understand enough of how such modules work to be able to manage projects and do business involving such modules.

A major issue I had when trying to use the module was that the documentation is very extensive and at the same time disparate. A tutorial for getting started is completely lacking. Just finding out how to upload a Python application to the module took days, as the usage paradigm is so bizarrely out-of-date.

An area of special newbie confusion is the weird choice of connectors:

• It has a mini USB port, but it's not supporting USB, rather 4 digital inputs.
• The power connector is a 6 pin RJ11 that combines power and an analog input and digital output.
• Instead of the device having a USB port and supporting the mass storage profile, it does all the PC communication via a serial port. Serial ports have been outdated for at least 10 years now, and a USB port can do everything a serial port can do and much much more. There could still be a serial port for external devices of course, but for the PC communication it's a terrible choice.

Instead I would suggest the following for a next-generation device:

• USB for the PC communication. Ideally it would work as both host and slave, so the module could communicate with USB devices on its own.
• A set of dedicated pins or holes (with screws or clamps) for input and output
• A hardware-controlled high-speed dedicated I2C port for easy connection of I2C peripherals.
• A standard connector for power.

Welcome to the 21st century Telit :) !

The application developer has to deal with all the AT commands supported by the GSM modem. There's no abstraction of this at all, so a simple thing like sending a text SMS becomes a long sequence of function calls for sending and receiving modem data. Probably someone could make a buck just providing utility classes for SMS, MMS, GPS (supported by other modules), port communication etc to fellow developers.

To make a point, I read in an FAQ how to send an MMS, and instead of describing how that's done it just pointed to the MMS specification. There should have been a class for basic MMS sending and receiving in Python.

Also using HTTP should have been completely abstracted under a class. Instead it's a strange combination of AT commands and calls.

I can understand why this is so, seen historically, because traditionally such modules were used as modems to PCs (or other controllers) via a serial port, but for the Python programmer this makes it much more difficult than it needs to be.

As pointed out earlier, each module provider has its own programming environment, which doesn't help matters.

I'll return later with information about how to actually use the module.

This screencast describes in a basic way how to use the Mobile Game Builder in NetBeans to develop Java ME based games. It's not just used for designing the graphics, but also to animate sprites etc.

Creating Mobile Games in NetBeans