Tao of Mac

Jul 31st 2004 · 2 min read

Dances with Samples

While fiddling around with a test phone, I started jotting down a few trivia that show just how far we've come this past year:

  • Time to transfer a 6.6MB file via Bluetooth: 5 minutes at 20KB/s (people who think  for mobile phones is going to work wirelessly never worked out the maths). The transfer never paused, even considering the file was going straight to a memory card. So, you feel like waiting over an hour for your new album to sync across?
  • tagging in mobile phones is finally being taken seriously:
File name    : <Filename Removed>
File size    : 195091 bytes
File date    : 2004:07:31 12:45:13
Camera make  : <Handset Vendor Removed>
Camera model : <Handset Name Removed>
Date/Time    : 2004:07:30 20:05:48
Resolution   : 1280 x 960
Flash used   : No
Exposure time: 0.059 s  (1/17)
Aperture     : f/4.0
ISO equiv.   : 1000
Whitebalance : fluorescent
Metering Mode: center weight
Jpeg process : Baseline
  • ...but with 200KB pictures, MMS is going to be a bit of a problem for everybody (users and carriers alike, since it's impossible to ensure the user experience is exactly the same across handsets).
  • Time to send the above picture via e-mail: 1m 52s (roughly 14Kbps uplink, a bit better than average speed). Would you wait that long to send a single picture? Here's something where definetly makes a difference...
  • SVG support is finally here - in the sense that I simply beamed the ubiquitous tiger.svg to the phone and besides it just working, it was actually well rendered. I really should be getting around to doing some more SVG stuff (as soon as I can generate both Flash and SVG from the same data the way I want to).
  • It's great to simply type something like http://slashdot.org/palm into a phone browser and get instant gratification. XHTML support is not internet access, but it sure beats WAP any day.
  • Phones are still too big. And as screens are in fact getiing bigger, they become more prone to scratches - maybe clamshells have a slight advantage there, despite my eternal loathing of them.

And finally, thanks to a late night hacking session (which is still only available in CVS and thus prone to changes) newspipe now sports a "mobile" mode I grafted in to send you text-only copies of some RSS items to an alternate e-mail address. And guess what, it works via MMS as well (provided your carrier allows you to receive e-mail messages that way), and with the right phone, you can even follow the links properly.

Yeah, I know, I should be outside enjoying the sun. Be right there in a moment.