Chippy's Hiblue Lab

U820 and MiFi with Earl Grey

Originally uploaded by umpcportal.com

I’ve been using the U820 as my only mobile device for a week now. For ad-hoc work it’s been fantastic. Small enough to take everywhere and big enough to be able to scan a ton of email or RSS feeds or to tap out the occasional long email or post, like this. The only thing I need to fix is the resume time. From hibernation it takes minutes. Longer than a cold boot. Something is definitely wrong!

The Mifi makes accessing the Internet as comfortable as being at home. Built-in 3G would be slightly easier but I wouldn’t be able to advertise UMPCPortal.com as the hotspot name!

Mobile internet event with vodafone

Originally uploaded by umpcportal.com

Im at the mobile internet event with Vodafone today. Using the MiFi over the O2 network!

X70 is working well too.

sk3 and u820 comparison (9)

More photos from this set here…

http://www.umpcportal.com/gallery/v/sk3u820comp/

These two are so close in size and yet the u820 only has a 5.6 inch screen.

Reading about the crunchpad on my own pad.

Originally uploaded by umpcportal.com

It’s a viliv x70 and is going on sale on 6th of july. See umpcportal.com/tag/x70 for info.

Tweetdeck over rdesktop on q7

Originally uploaded by umpcportal.com

Finally after finding the repo (mojo Armv6 at handhelds.org) and giving up trying to get xterm working, I installed mlterm common and tiny and it worked.

http://repository.handhelds.org/hasty-armv6el-vfp/pool/universe/m/mlterm/

Update: No need to mess with installing a term. evilvte is pre-installed!

Since then I have installed rdesktop as you can see in the pic. Tuxpaint also installed. The whole world of Linux apps awaits! The only restrictions are screen space, storage and memory (128M)

More soon…

My main job is to promote ultra mobile computing solutions. High-end smartphones, MIDs, UMPCs, Netbooks and the like. My websites work extremely well as a platform for information and discussion but there’s a big problem – hands-on. We’ve done live videos and chat sessions which have worked well but I want to do more.

Here’s an idea…

How about I rent a big mobile home / RV, load it up with devices from resellers in Europe and come to you instead? I recon I could join up with a few mobile internet, barcamp, web conferences, mobile monday events too and make sure as many people as possible get the chance to see the devices. Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London seem like good, central cities to aim for but first I need to get a big list of events together, work out the best time to do this and find a sponsor. I can probably link up with a few other mobile device bloggers in Europe too.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, both from the customer, blogger or sponsor side of things, please let me know.

I’m off to upcoming.com!

Tags: event, mobile internet, tour, umpc

A few hours ago I was showering. As with all showering sessions, I usually get an idea. Today it was an idea for simple twitter grouping so I grabbed my daughters bath crayon (an idea someone at SXSW gave me) and made a note on the glass.

I’m calling it g_rouping

This very simple idea requires no 3rd-party services and allows anyone to group a bunch of friends together around an interest so that other twitter users can follow them. All you do is create a group prefixed with g_ and give it a meaningful name. E.g. g_cars g_food g_indianfood

I’ve created a twitter group called g_ultramobilepc and all I need to do now is to advertise it via my normal twitter acount as a friend grouping point. If you’re a friend of ultramobile pc’s, you follow the group with your twitter account and folllow the friends of the group to connect with like-minded people. Done.

As ‘owner’ of the group, I will follow you back and weed out the bots and spammers so that the friends list is higher quality than the followers list. You follow friends manually by hitting the friends page or use 3rd party tools that will automatically connect you with all the friends. (I need to test these before I recommend an particular one. Any ideas welcome.)

Obviously there is a lag between the time that bots follow the group and the time the admin removes them so there’s a chance that you’ll end up with a bot or two but i’m sure you can handle it. There’s also no guarantee that a ultra mobile PC friend won’t talk about bacon sandwiches too but again, thats a problem with twitter until it implements some sort of chat tagging, streaming or sub-acounts.

I haven’t found a way to view the tweets that the group sees from its friends but of course, when you follow the friends, you’ll see the tweets anyway.

I’d like to see others create g_ groups and test this out so go ahead. if this takes off, it will be easy for twitter to implement the g_ username as a group with special tools and that’s something we all want to see. Go ahead and create one for your interest area and let me know if you have ideas or thoughts in the comments below.

P.S. I checked the T&C’s and there doesn’t seem to anything that prevents anyone from doing this and personally, I think that using a g_ prefix will allow twitter to enhance services for this groups idea.

P.P.S. You can follow me @chippy too!

On my new project over at MIDMoves.com, i’m talking about how i’m going to Geo-enable my part of the tour. Obviously it’s something i’m very interested in but there’s a long long way to go before this stuff becomes easy enough for the the mainstream customers.

Here’s the list of what i’m trying to achieve.

• Location. Where am I now? Exactly?
• Turn-by-turn, step by step. Where do I need to go. How long will it take?
• Public transport. Where is it? When does it depart and arrive?
• Phototagging. Ensuring that my images are tagged with their location
• Live location tracking and networking. Allowing other people to view my location and to enable notifications when friends are near.
• What’s near me? How do I find the nearest hotel? Wifi? etc.
• Location tracking. How to I archive my locations and route?
• Map mashup. How do I create a map that shows my tracks along with all the ‘e-things’ I did along it. Photos, blogs, podcasts, twitter updates etc.

Check out MIDMoves for the posts and more moblogging action.

Click to Play

Well that was pretty much a total failure on the blogging front wasn’t it. I definitely should not have taken the M528 out with me. It’s not ready for service yet. [Note: Its a production sample from at least 2 months ago. No indication of what the final build will be like] I just couldn’t get the browser to work without crashing on blogger.com. I lost two posts!

What was a success was the tracking and photo tagging. The S60 Sports Tracker software does a really nice job there. There are lots of things for Nokia to improve on but the core system is sound. I’m sure we’ll eventually see it merge with Nokia Chat and Nokia Maps under Ovi.

Other things that didn’t quite work so well:

• My Jack Wolfskin body bag. Despite having some good straps, this over-the-shoulder style doesn’t work when blogging.
• Battery life on the N82. With audio playing, GRPS data uploads, GPS calculations and other apps running, the phone needed a battery swap after a few hours. It wasn’t dead but I definitely would not have made it back
• The crappy Nokia headset keeps falling out of my ears. I hate those in-ear things.
• It was a bit too hot for jogging. 30 degrees!

In the end I did 10km in three stages taking 11500 steps and burning 839 kcals. At least that’s what SportsTracker is telling me so I think i’ll go and light the BBQ after this post!

As for the blogging part, well i’m going to have to try that again I think. I think online tools are going to be OK through the browser so I won’t have to switch to XP or anything silly like that. TheM528 form factor is pretty much perfect and it appears that the CPU power, although less than I’m used to, is acceptable for this sort of work. I’m going to need a slightly better keyboard than the one on this demo device though. I hope they use a different one on the final version.

So that’s it for Jog and Blog #1. There’s a few thing to work on for #2. You’ll see a notification through friendfeed if I do another one.