IPhone

When you like to control the information that is available to you through feedreaders the one that I have found most useful is google reader. It allows you to navigate using keyboard shortcut keys rather than the mouse. As a result you are able to navigate more effectively through the sometimes hundreds of posts. For a while now, about three years, I’ve been looking for an app that gives us the convenience of google reader whilst on mobile devices. For a while I had the N95 and ipod touch, the ipod touch and the miniS and now the Iphone and N97. The problem I kept having is with keeping everything up to date on all the devices. I didn’t want to read through twenty articles on a mobile device only to have to wade through the same articles a second time when I arrived back at the main computer I use for content processing. That’s where MobileRSS for the Iphone and ipod touch comes into it’s own. It is a simple, intuitive way to go through your google reader feeds whilst mobile. Select the view you want, whether using “show new” or “show all”. Show all will give you several thousand posts along with all the key words you’ve added, something that is not so easy to manage. The “Show new” tab however is great. When I pick up the phone and update all my feeds it gives me all of the new posts in an easy to process format. I have the option to view all feeds if I desire or to see each feed one at a time. As you know some information sources like to post dozens of posts a day whilst others like to post just one or two a day. Those that post once or twice a day are usually the first ones I’ll read. This is because they’re more specialised, more thought out posts. As a result they’re more relevant. There are two three ways to navigate through the content. The first is by selecting the list view. You see the headlines you want to read. In the second view you can read article by article and click the up or down icons to get to the previous or next posts. You can also drag the article from the one you’re reading to the next one. This speeds up the process by minimising the number of button presses. When I am reading each article I can add notes, keep unread, star, share or even send it to to a number of other places. As a result I can share the articles I find of interest according to the way I think other people prefer to share. The options for sharing are email/facebook/twitter/readitlater/instapaper and delicious. This means that I can share content within seconds, rather than minutes, anywhere I am, whether in a traffic jam or waiting to pay for the day’s shopping. Another advantage is that it’s always on. Whether I have wifi or 3g I have access to all of the latest articles. I’d recommend using it. See whether it makes information gathering and sharing easier for you too. More information

I tend to play a lot with my new phone as a result of which the battery depletse in a short lapse of time. If I’m by a power source then that doesn’t matter because recharging the phone is easy. There are other cases where recharging is a hassle.  That’s part of the excuse I used for getting a mophie air cover for the phone. Last night I was at a party and whilst talking to one person I found out that their phone battery was dead so I removed the cover from my phone and lent the external battery/charger/iphone cover to that person. As a result as the party progressed that person wasn’t tethered to a wall waiting for the phone to charge. She had full mobility. The cover does not recharge the phone fully. Instead it provides you with between seventy to eighty percent of the charge you would normally have. That’s enough to get you home comfortably. In other situations though the back can be used as an external battery. That is to say that rather than recharging your phone it behaves like a primary battery. The cover drains itself of power before the Iphone battery is depleted, therefore making sure that you can have around twice the normal autonomy of such a device. This could be interesting when the device is used on a hike for example. There are two weaknesses to the mophie that I would like to see rectified. The first is for when you’re using the mophie as a cover but haven’t used the cover’s battery. If you plug it in it will automatically start recharging the battery rather than going straight to recharge the battery. As a result I prefer to remove the cover when it is just the phone battery that needs recharging. The second problem is the amount of time it takes when you want to recharge the device both by itself and with the phone already in the case. It’s better when you’re recharging both at the same to do it over night.

Port of Nyon in Winter The picture above was done with an iphone and the autostitch application. To produce this type of photograph the process is simple. You take a series of pictures with the Iphone camera before going to the autostitch application. You select the photographs that you want stitched together and click the stitch button. The application will then find objects within the photograph before combining them into one panoramic shot. Once the image is processed you have the option of either saving the picture as it is or cropping it to remove the edges hence giving this type of result.

Flickr had a mobile website that worked well because it was developed for all mobile devices. As a result I was getting into the habit of taking pictures, amending the title and adding comments whilst on the move. Recently though, the mobile developers at Flickr decided to do what every narrow minded developer of mobile websites likes to do. Develop something for the iphone and ipod touch. This is theoreticaly a great idea but in practice it’s a nightmare for anyone using a normal phone. it’s a nightmare because all of the mobile functionality of websites disappears. As a result of this the website is all but unusable. And no I’m not going to get an iphone. It’s a shame that the mobile web developing community are doing this more and more. I hope that flickr will do their best to rectify this most annoying of situations.

Last night I started using newsgator on the ipod touch and today I’ve come to the conclusion that I really enjoy this app. The reason for this is mobility. With the ipod touch I synchronise the feeds before I leave the computer and at my leisure I can read all the feeds and clip those that I think are relevant for later reading or to be shared. It’s also a nice way of feedreading because it’s small and practical. No laptop to carry around and no need for wifi to view the content.

According to a Le Matin article the Iphone will come to switzerland. It’s the 3g version of course so for those that have been patient this should be a fun time. I see no mention of cheaper dataplans as of yet but it’s an interesting time for those creating mobile video content. It’s also a new version of mobile web browsing.

When’s the last time you visited a wap site? Have you thought of how content displays on mobile phones other than the Iphone? I hadn’t until quite recently. Recently I moved back to Switzerland and have started to work for Allthecontent / Toutlecontenu.com and they provide multiplatform content for devices ranging from televisions to mobile phones and more. As a result of reading too much American press I lost interest in what Nokia were doing until it was mentioned that the iphone is not true mobile web use. At first that statement didn’t make much sense but since then I’ve bought a Nokia N95 8 gig model and I’ve been playing with vodafone live, seeing how content is presented. It’s very simple, quick and to the point. Images are small and sparse but text is heavy. Naviguate from one menu to another and you eventually get to content that’s paying. That’s where it becomes interesting. There are quite a few topics, from sports to entertainment to adult content. Some of this content is in video form, some in MMS form and yet some more comes as text. As a result content is easily accessible from most media handsets. Then there’s the question of data packages. Look at Swisscom. For 18 swiss Francs you receive a hundred megabytes of data transfer. That’s not much when considering the 3 gigs a day of transfers via my laptop. Mobile is different. I read that not more than fifty megabytes a month are downloaded over the air. Take a look at Iphone optimised pages in contrast. They’re graphic intensive, slow to load and designed for one specific screen resolution. As a result of this that content is not accessible on most data plans or mobile devices. Iphones have a good part of the market but they’re excluding many users. You can’t download content on the iphone. You’re losing revenue right there. What I think will be interesting over the coming months is to see how the European Vs. US mentality of mobile delivered content will affect telephone operators in these markets.

this is a post typed from the iPod touch to see how easy it isto use. Aside from not having a proper keyboard it seems to work fine. Great for blogging on the move.

According to a number of articles, 02 and Apple are in final discussions about the iPhone and how they will distribute it within the European Union. So far we still have to wait until December of this year to get it in Europe. I don’t think I want to own this particular phone because the one I have now has almost all these functionalities to start with. I also like having a qwerty keyboard for ease of typing whilst on the move, unlike the iPhone. The browser is probably the strongest feature of the iPhone but this is irrelevant for most websites. Both Google and Facebook, two of the only websites I’m interested in using on the move have created useful interfaces for those on the move. in the case of Gmail, it’s the interface that allows you to check and send e-mail within their own java applet which is installed on your phone. In the case of Facebook, their strength is in giving you just the features you want, i.e. what your friends are doing, the latest news, and more. It’s great to get some quick information whilst unable to go online. I want to try out the iPhone and see how great and easy it is to use. Apple loves making software that is simple to use, without submenus as you find with windows mobile so for newbies it’s better. In a few months, I may get to see the iPhone in person and see how good it is…. unless I fly to the US or go to one of the EU Macworld.

It’s a nice screen, it’s a laptop replacement similar to the phone I’ve had for two or three months but the hard drive is much better. He advertised all these features as new yet I’ve got most of those capabilities already so I’m laughing slightly. I was just two months ahead of that particular market. I’m wondering about wifi access. How easy is it to connect to password-protected networks and how strong is the antenna?. Would it work only on open networks? I like the screen but where’s the keyboard for fast texting? How easily will it scratch? I know at least one person that’s going to be looking forward to the PVR with integrated wifi although I don’t find it interesting because the hard drive is too small at the moment. The fact you can stream from five computers at once is nice.