This is not a Mobile Me... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Both Engadget and the Unofficial Apple Weblog are running leaked pictures of what purports to be a a pre-release test unit for the much rumoured Apple MVNO. Apparently their anonymous tipster claims that Apple are almost ready to rollout their own cell service under their recently recently trademarked "Mobile Me" name...

CREDIT: Engadget/TAUW

The new Mobile Me?
Personally I'm not convinced, and judging by the comments on the two blogs not many other people are either. This looks a lot like an off the shelf Samsung handset, not something I'd expect from Apple. Surely if they really are going the MVNO route they'll ship their own hardware, if only to differentiate themselves from the other networks? I mean, if they don't ship their own hardware what's the point, for Apple, of doing it in the first place?

People have also mentioned that the SIM looks a lot like a cut up iTunes gift card, but to be honest I don't think that's not such a strong argument, after all it just means that its carrying the same branding as another of Apple's products and one which is closely related to the phone. Surely any Apple phone would ship with iTunes? However the argument that the SIM should have an identity number on it is bogus, those numbers are usually printed on the same side of the SIM as the chip contacts, the number wouldn't be visible in this picture.

That said, this is pretty much has to be yet another in a long line of distinguished Apple fakes. I've talked about this before, the hardware margins in the mobile phone industry are vanishingly thin and Apple is used to much larger profits per unit. Move along, nothing to see here...

Update: Apparently nobody was ever claiming that this was Apple hardware, and it was only the SIM card that was supposedly an Apple product. In which case, what's it doing inside that Samsung phone?

Tags: Apple iPhone Rumours MVNO Mobile Phone iTunes

802.11n busted? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

The Register is reporting that recent trials by Tom's Networking of the latest 802.11n gear were a total disaster.

We found that the product's maximum speed was indeed impressive, topping 100Mbps under the right conditions. But we also saw behavior that does not bode well for use with mixed WLANs... depending on how close the two WLANs are, legacy gear can be essentially knocked off the air.

Depressingly it appears that the interference issues aren't just a hardware or a software issue, although the gear appears to have some problems there as well, but is designed in as part of the original specification. Err, it's not as if there are that many existing wireless networks or anything though, so I'm sure it'll all be fine...

Tags: WiFi 802.11n Review

Get 'em while there is some left.. Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

When Apple announced the new Intel iMac at Macworld 2006 earlier in the month I'd only just bought a 20 inch iMac G5. Well it looks like my still almost shiny new iMac, along with its 17 inch little brother, is about to officially move into end of life status...

If you still want a G5 you can still pick up the 17 inch [USA, UK] and 20 inch [USA, UK] models at Amazon, with a mail-in rebate of $150 if you're buying at Amazon.com. You can't complain, although if you're looking for a bargain you should probably wait for the load of barely scratched second hand models that'll no doubt be flooding the resale market very soon.

Update: It appears that Apple is trying to clear out the last stocks of iMac G5, as TAUW is reporting that there has been a big price drop at the Apple Store. Looks like the UK store has had a similar drop. So as I said, get 'em while they're going if you want one...

Update: The Register is reporting that Apple has officially discontinued the 17 inch iMac G5, although for now at least the 20 inch version is still on sale on the UK Apple Store.

Tags: Apple iMac

A ubiquitous Earth? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Speculation is rife that Microsoft might be gearing up to try and compete with Google Earth. Indeed Alan Glennon argues that recent press releases and job announcements hint that it's not if, but when...

Alan also talks about the <LookAt> tag in KML, which allows you to tag not only a specific position, but also the direction and view point at the position. Brian Flood takes this up and discusses automating the process, so that any picture he takes with his camera is automatically geotagged with a position an <LookAt> tag.

In the very near future you should be able to go out with your camera, which has an integrated GPS or is connected to your GPS module over a PAN, and take a bunch of pictures or video without really worrying about having to tag them manually. When you got home you'd hit the "upload" button on the camera. The camera would then make a Bluetooth or WiFi connection to your desktop system, upload all your geotagged photos and kick off Google (or Microsoft?) Earth which would display them as placemarks scattered across the globe. You could click on the placemark and zoom down and actually have the view point of where you took the picture an a thumbnail of the picture itself, all automatically. Neat? Well not really, it's almost achievable today, so not really very interesting...

Of course what would be interesting is if your camera tried to do some data mining for you while our were busy trying to take the picture. If you were living in a world of ubiquitous computing your camera could use it's integrated Bluetooth or WiFi to grab data from the local area. Tourist attractions could have information about their site advertised over some sort of zeroconf networking. Your camera could seek the data out and attach this information as meta-data to your photograph. After visiting some ancient temple all the facts and history about the various sights could be automatically attached and then redisplayed when you clicked on your geotagged photograph inside Google Earth. Although the camera would have to be fairly smart, some sort of agent based based system would be necessary. After all, what about all the advertisements and plain old spam that would get pumped out along with the interesting historical facts around a major landmark or tourist attraction?

Of course that still isn't as interesting as it could be, what if your live position and your photographs are uploaded to the net as you take them via a Bluetooth connection to your 3G mobile phone and could be displayed live in Google Earth. Wouldn't that be interesting?

What do you need to make it happen, well some sort of zeroconf networking for Bluetooth, and a ubiquitous deployment of Bluetooth so that creating PANs is done automatically. We also need manufacturers to stop crippling the Bluetooth software they are deploying. Which is mostly sociological, the technology is already here to allow this sort of thing...

The future of computing is in ubiquity and geolocated data, and I'm beginning to think that it could all come down to personal area networks of small devices connected over Bluetooth rather than convergence devices such as my recent purchase the HTC Universal. Your camera, your phone and your PDA will all share your GPS unit over your PAN. My own experiences seem to indicate that so called convergence devices aren't really the way to go, people want decent ergonomics from their widgets. Phones should of necessity be small, and don't need to have embedded WiFi, GPS units, MP3 players or even a camera. They just need to be able to make a connection to a device that does, and of course offer their own 3G data capabilities to the other devices on your PAN.

Despite what the networks seem to think, video telephony isn't the killer application for 3G, the killer application is data. But only if they make cheap enough, and simple enough, so it gets used automatically by the growing collection of devices your average person carries around with them.

Whatever happens I doubt I'm going to get someone to fund my way to Where 2.0 in San Jose in June this year, which I think could become one of the more important conferences on the calendar, in many way more important than OSCON where people are still talking about the desktop as if it were important. Although that said I'd probably I'd probably kill and maim to get to go to OSCON, and unlike the last three years, nobody is going to fund my way there this year either.

Tags: Google Earth Microsoft Geotagging Geolocation Ubiquitous Computing Personal Area Network Bluetooth Convergence Devices GPS 3G Killer Application Zeroconf Where 2.0 OSCON

Another flight for Global Flyer? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

An attempt to make the longest non-stop un-refueled flight in history will see a second around the world flight for the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer piloted by Steve Fossett. Take-off on this record breaking attempt, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is currently scheduled for between dawn twilight at 6:46 AM and sunrise at 7:11 AM (local time) on the 1st of February. The final decision to go will be taken around 1:00 PM UTC this Sunday...

Take off for the Global Flyer on it's previous flight
New Scientist has more background information on the new record attempt by Steve Fossett and the Global Flyer.

Update: The weather and Chinese New Year intervened and the earliest date for take-off is now the 6th of February...

Update: Take off is currently scheduled for the 7th of February, BBC News has more...

Update: The flight has been delayed again due to a fuel leak, this time with less than an hour to go before the scheduled take off.

Update: After repeated delays, Steve Fossett has now set off on his new around the world record bid...

Tags: Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer Record Attempt Steve Fossett NASA Kennedy Space Center

First impression of the HTC Universal Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I mentioned at the tail end of last year that I was getting my hands on the new Orange SPV M5000 (aka the HTC Universal) . Due to stock levels, it seems everyone and their dog wanted one, this took a lot longer than I'd thought. I finally had to phone Orange again, and then threaten to leave and go to another network, before they finally shipped me one just this week.

The first thing I noticed on on opening the box, no mini-VGA port. Pre-release rumours had suggested that while the prototypes had one, it had been dropped on later production models. I couldn't find anyone at Orange to confirm or deny this, and since at one point they'd apparently forgot that it had WiFi, I wasn't sure I was going to take their word for it anyway. So while I was sort of expecting it, I was still disappointed by its absence. The lack of VGA display out makes this a device a whole lot less interesting, the thought of being able to do power point presentations directly off a palmtop of this size was very appealing.

Another disappointment is that the mini-USB connection doesn't seem to support host mode, and you can't just plug the handset into a your computer and mount it as mass storage. That's just unforgivable considering that pretty much everything from digital cameras, iPods, the PSP, flash drives costing less than what I paid for lunch, and yes even a lot of mobile phones can do that. It's almost certainly going to turn out to be a software limitation as well, why on Earth haven't they implemented this?

The biggest disappointment though has to be the handset's Bluetooth connectivity, it took me a good half hour to figure out how to connect the handset to my Mac for file transfers, why isn't this ready to go out of the box? Worse yet the device doesn't advertise itself as a mobile phone, instead it declares itself a "device". This would be fine except that I'm still running Mac OS X 10.3.9 on my laptop, which doesn't let you use any Bluetooth devices that aren't classed as phones to connect to the Internet. Even if they do advertise dial-up networking amongst their available profiles....

This problem at least seems to go away Mac OS 10.4. Looks like I've finally got a reason to upgrade...

There are also a few irritating software issues, a good many of them generated by the "customisation" done by the network. However a lot of this can be turned off but going to Start > Settings > Today > Items and deselecting Orange from the list of things to appear on the default home screen. If you don't disable this there isn't any point in selecting anything else from this list as any additional information won't be displayed. Another totally unrelated but equally irritating issue is that the software keyboard popup keeps appearing, even when your typing on the hardware one, at certain types of prompt. You might want to install a null keyboard CAB file. Worked for me...

What doesn't work is synchronisation, both Missing Sync and Pocket Mac don't support Windows Mobile 5.0 yet and neither are saying much about when they will. This isn't great, although again not to unexpected. I am living at the bleeding edge here after all...

However I had presumed I could just transfer my address book and calendars as vcard and ics files onto the palmtop and import them into the local applications. This sort of works for vcards, although there are disappointingly some problems with field entries migrating into the wrong places, for instance all my fax numbers ended up filed under the wrong headings. But for calendars the it doesn't seem to work at all as only the first appointment off any calendar I try and import into the handheld's software is registered, the other several thousand in the calendar file are discarded. This is pretty shoddy programming on Microsoft's part, a couple of for( ) loops wouldn't have hurt too much, surely?

There also isn't much information about developing for these handsets, unlike Nokia with their open source strategy and Python and Perl ports it's a lot harder to find out how to do things under Windows Mobile 5.0. One good resource I have come across is the XDA Developer Forums and Wiki which has a lot of information about the handset.

So do I like it? From reading the above you probably think I don't, but I have to admit having a palmtop with a proper VGA screen and WiFi is going to prove really useful. To be honest however, I might pull my shiny new Orange 3G USIM out of M5000 and put it in my reliable old Nokia 6600, replacing it with a cheap pay as you go USIM and keep my main number in a handset that I can actually carry around easily. Thankfully, unlike some other networks rumour is that Orange's USIMs will work just fine in a 2.5G handset. I use the phone a lot and the M5000, while a nice palmtop, is pretty impractical as a phone...

Update: I've now solved the issues I was having connecting to the Universal as a Bluetooh Modem from my Powerbook.

Tags: HTC Universal Orange SPV M5000 Mobile Phone Upgrade GSM 3G WiFi PDA UTMS Review Criticisms Bluetooth Dial-up Networking Syncing Microsoft Window Mobile

Another five minutes? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

It looks like Michael Arrington's criticism of Ning has pushed them into addressing at least some of his points. In what appears to be a response to the criticisms levelled at the start-up they've posted a summary of what's been happening and news of some new features coming soon on their blog.

Diego Doval has now made a more measured response than his initial reply, and people are jumping to the defence of Ning. On the other hand some people are pointing out how "lost in space" Ning has become. Back when I originally grabbed a beta account I added a couple of Ning-related blogs to my feeds list. But despite that I don't remember seeing anything other than puff pieces about the site since then, at least until Michael's post. If a Web 2.0 company can't be bothered to write about itself on it's own blog, it's evidence of something, although I'm not exactly sure what...

What Ning is trying to accomplish is laudable, but bubbles are about mindshare, and they've made a poor first impression on the great and the good. It's going to be hard for them to recover from that, perhaps their competition will learn from their mistakes? You don't just have to have the right service at the right time, it has to be pushed at the right people as well, and that also has to happen at the right time.

Your start-up has five minutes to sell itself to me, don't waste it, you probably won't get another five minutes...

Tags: Ning 24HL Web 2.0 Bubble Social Applications Mash-up Stealth Startup Zoho Creator

Mobile as server... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I've had a web server running on my phone for a couple of years now, and I'm not the only one, so I was fairly confused to see people making a fuss about having Apache available on your phone. Or rather I wasn't confused, after all it is a big deal, because now we have a full scale stable enterprise level server available on the Series 60 platform. But the publicity surrounding this seems to be focusing on the fact that it is possible at all...

This frankly surprises me a lot, I've been waiting for someone to come out with something vaguely like Rendezvous... sorry, I mean Bonjour, err, I mean Zero-configuration Networking... over your Bluetooth personal area network for Series 60, but it hasn't happened...

Maybe this is why? I guess people just haven't caught on that they have a computer in their jacket pocket. I mean most phones these days have heavier duty processors and more memory than the machine I did most of my PhD work on, there really isn't anything stopping people doing serious work on them now. Except the fact people think about phones as client only devices, and especially with the availability of both Python and Perl ports for Series 60, this hasn't been the case for a while...

After all, if you can have a web server for your PSP, what's the big deal about your phone?

Tags: Series 60 Symbian Web Server HTTPD Nokia Apache

Back in transit Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm sitting in the departure lounge of Edinburgh Airport logged onto the BT OpenZone, rather than the T-Mobile, wireless hotspot. I actually have a T-Mobile account and would have used their service, but the hotspot seems to be totally shot at the moment. It's even refusing to give me an IP address, let alone allow me to talk to the proxy so that I can get out onto the Internet, hence the fallback to BT.

Of course it's nice to have a fallback, it's not often you see competition between wireless providers. Normally providers lock venues into contracts where they insist on being the sole service provider. Although thinking about it, I'm not actually entirely sure I'm supposed to be on the BT OpenZone network, as I've a funny feeling that I'm in the spill over from the BA Executive Club lounge.

I've got a late flight, but I should be home before the plane is turned back into a pumpkin, so I guess that's alright...

Tags: AstroGrid NeSC Workshop Edinburgh Airport

The AstroGrid Workshop, Final Day Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

The fourth and final day of the workshop is being run as a question and answer session. Now we know more about the software we get to pin the developers against the wall and ask them why it works the way it does; why that button goes there, why do you have to double click on that thing, why can't we just click that, and what's with all the XML? Towards the close of the meeting we were also standing up and talking about how we're thinking about using all this stuff, so I plugged the laptop into the projector and trotted out my half hour's worth of tinkering with Perl and the ACR, no doubt to the general amusement of rapidly thinning audience.

It's been interesting to see how the AstroGrid code base has evolved since last time I looked at it seriously, and it was especially interesting to see the state of the ACR. If the VO is to succeed I think something like ACR is very necessary as it lets the community access these new resources in the way they've always done things, in their favourite scripting language.

Related: Day 1, day 2 and day 3 of the workshop.

Tags: AstroGrid NeSC Workshop Edinburgh

Ning-less? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I never did tell you how I got on with Ning. I guess that's because I didn't find it particularly interesting I just couldn't figure out the advantages of using Ning's proprietary stuff over just sitting down and writing your mashup by hand.

It looked fine if you just wanted to clone one of the existing applications, and make some minor changes, but not so fine if you wanted to write something unique. You also lost control of the hosting, user registration and lots of other stuff. In the end the disadvantages seemed to be much larger than the advantages for those people who wanted to do something novel. But I figured it was just me, that I didn't "get it", so I kept quiet...

Well it looks like it wasn't just me, Michael Arrington has just posted a damning inditement of the service on TechCrunch. Michael starts off by saying that he considers Ning to have been the perfect service at the perfect time, but from his post it looks like he's a disappointed man. He talks about the four main problems he sees with Ning, but to me one of these is overwhelmingly more important than the rest,

You have to know PHP, or at least HTML, to build anything unique on Ning. They promise to create tools to allow non-programmers to build stuff in the future, but for now, 99.9% of the Internet population is effectively locked out from creating new stuff. - Michael Arrington

If you have to kno