*scottstuff*

Out with the new, and in with the old

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 03 Feb 2004 07:29:00 GMT

The MPx200 is gone, and I’m back to a Sony-Ericsson phone. It’s a T616 this time instead of a T68, so it’s a bit bigger and faster, but the basic design is the same. It’s still a pain to look up phone numbers, and the UI is still way too back-button intensive, but it works.

On the plus side, it syncs flawlessly with the Mac, unlike the MPx200, where syncing was an adventure each and every time I tried it. I’m slowly cleaning up the damage that PocketMac did to my calendar–one entry moved from PST to GMT for no obvious reason, and a couple birthdays are missing. I’m still waiting to hear back from them on my bugs, too.

Posted in Phones | Tags mpx200, phones, pocketmac, t616, windowsmobile | no comments

...and back to AT&T it goes

Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:35:17 GMT

I’ve had it with the MPx200, and I’m going to be returning it to AT&T, thanks to their 30-day refund policy. It’s a cool phone, and it has a lot of interesting features, but no matter what I do, it won’t last longer then 8 hours before the battery dies. I’ve deleted every program that I installed, removed the SD card, replaced the battery, and it still runs down its battery astoundingly fast. Cool is nice, but it’s got to be a usable phone. And a phone that’s dead isn’t very useful.

Plus, the PocketMac people still haven’t been able to fix my sync problems. As it stands, I need to reboot my Mac every time I want to sync the phone. Allegedly they’ve handed me off to their “driver guru,” but I haven’t heard anything from them since then.

So, what am I going to do? I have no idea. I’ve been tempted by the Treo 600, but it’s over $300 more then I paid for the MPx200, and it has a lousy LCD display. I’ve had Palms with 160x160 displays before, and I don’t really want to go back there again.

So, I’ll probably get their cheapest Bluetooth phone (this week, it’s the Sony-Ericsson T616) and start looking for a new PDA. I’m leaning towards the Palm Tungsten C for reasons that I’ll explain shortly.

Posted in Phones | Tags mpx200, phone, pocketmac | 10 comments

More Time with the MPx200

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 27 Jan 2004 08:17:05 GMT

I’ve had a Motorola MPx200 smartphone for nearly 3 weeks now, and I still can’t decide what I think about it. It has a number of really nice features, but it has nearly as many shortcomings, and some of the shortcomings are really impressively bad.

The Good:

• The dialing interface is really good. It integrates an incremental search through all of your contacts names and numbers and your call log right into the normal dialing process. This is easily the best contact search interface that I’ve ever seen in a phone. It’s great.
• The flip-phone formfactor is much better the the “tablet” style phone when you pocket the phone.
• The phone earpiece and ringer are nice and loud. My T68 was just a bit too quiet; I usually had to keep the volume turned all the way up. The MPx200 tends to stay around 50% unless I’m in a really loud environment.
• The browser and email client are okay, and can be share your PC’s connection via the USB cable if you’re too cheap to pay AT&T insane data rates. This is useful for caching messages with important information on the phone.
• The screen is sharp, bright, and readable.
• The “today” screen on the default home screen gives a good overview of calendars and tasks over the next day or two.
• It charges via a standard mini-USB cable.

The Cool, but not really all that important to me:

• It’ll take up to a 1 GB SD card, if you can find one actually shipping.
• It’ll play .WAV ringtones from the SD card with a bit of minor hacking.
• You can find an assortment of games and media players for the phone, plus emulators for most older video-game platforms.

The Bad:

• Battery life utterly sucks. With a SanDisk 256MB SD card, I’m now under 8 hours of standby time. This is unacceptable–I can’t even use the phone for an alarm clock at home without plugging it in. I was getting 2-3 days of standby time, but I think the SD card is killing me. I’ve swapped for a new battery without any success.
• The third-party PocketMac sync software just doesn’t work right, and their tech support is painfully slow.
• No bluetooth, and the included headset doesn’t really fit my ears right.

The verdict? I’m going to give PocketMac’s tech support a few more days, and I’m going to yell at AT&T’s support people, but if I can’t get the battery life back up to at least 24 hours with the SD card, and if I can’t get it to sync correctly at least part of the time, it’s going back to AT&T.

Update (1/28/04): I left the MPx200 overnight last night without its SD card, just to see if the SD card’s power draw was killing the phone. It was still dead in the morning, so the SD card isn’t guilty. I have one thing left to try, and then it’s headed back to AT&T.

Update (1/30/04): It’s toast.

Posted in Phones | Tags mpx200, phone, pocketmac, windowsmobile | 5 comments

A tale of two computers...

Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:16:48 GMT

So, a comparison of two computers:

Computer A is the Pentium 90 that I bought in 1994, and Computer B is my cell phone. Don’t you just love Moore’s Law?

Posted in Phones | Tags history, mpx200, phone | 2 comments

Access logs

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 15 Jan 2004 01:08:46 GMT

It seems like there’s always something interesting lurking in web access logs, but actually finding the interesting bit is a pain in the neck. For instance, over the past day or so, I discovered that I was briefly the #1 Google listing for “andy serkis seattle” and that Lockergnome included me on their list of 2004 PDA predictions. I didn’t see that coming. Cool. My MPx200 notes have generated a bit more traffic then usual, too, and they’re only a day or so old. Searches for the Sony/Ericsson CAR-100 have finally slacked off; google was sending me piles of CAR-100 traffic for a while.

I’m seeing a bit of referrer spam, too–mostly for paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com. Either that, or they’ve linked to me somewhere that I can’t see, and that link has generated a dozen hits over the last month, all from different IP addresses in different countries.

The thing is, I spotted all of these trends manually, by running tail -f on the log files, and then grepping for interesting strings. None of the web log analyzers seems quite appropriate for blog traffic. And, interestingly enough, searching for “web log analyzer” in google hits way too many (web logs) on (analysis). If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations, feel free to leave a comment.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tags blog, log, mpx200, spam, statistics | no comments

Cell phones and VoIP

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:38:16 GMT

Now that the MPx200 review is out, I can move on to other phone stuff. I’ve been waiting for easy VoIP for years. I’ve watched free Linux server software like VOCAL and Asterisk develop, but I’ve never been able to get either to work (admittedly, it’s been a while). Similarly, I’ve never been able to get any of the free audio or video conferencing software to work well enough to actually be usable. Heck, even iChat usually has problems with my home firewall. I have high hopes for Vonage and the rest of their ilk, but they still only solve part of the problem. I don’t just want to replace my home POTS line with a VoIP converter box, I want to replace my nasty old phones with something more modern and workable. I want something that’ll sync with my address book. I want voice mail to show up in my email inbox. I want semi-integrated phone service, IM, and maybe even video conferencing, all using open, standard protocols. Killing the telcos is just step one.

I realized the other day that my little MPx200 cell phone is 95% of the way to being a perfect VoIP phone. I mean, it has a nice form-factor for a phone, a nice display, it already has all of my contact information, and so forth. The big issue is that it has poor network connectivity, but I could almost fix that with a 802.11 SD card (if Smartphone 2002 supported WiFi, and if there were drivers for the MPx200. And if I was willing to lose my SD slot and have an antenna sticking out of the side of my phone).

Bizarrely enough, Microsoft has been thinking the same thing. Microsoft Research is offering Portrait, a SIP client for PocketPC 2003 and Smartphone 2003 platforms. It looks like it’ll even do video conferencing. Of course, it’s not a real product–it’s a research tool–and while they claim that it’ll work with any SIP server, I doubt it’s ever been tested with non-Microsoft products. Still, it’s a nice start. If Motorola ever ships the rumored Smartphone 2003 upgrade for the MPx200, I’ll probably give it a try.

I doubt it’ll work, but they’ll get it right eventually. The first round of phones with 802.11 are supposed to show up this spring, so the hardware platform (and market!) will probably be ready by the end of 2004. I doubt that any of the US carriers will encourage this, so you’ll have two different numbers, one VoIP and one cellular, and you won’t be able to roam between the two, but you have to start somewhere.

Posted in Phones | Tags asterisk, mpx200, phone, voip | no comments

Motorola MPx200 Review

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:10:00 GMT

I’ve been in the market for a new phone for most of the last month, and I settled on the Motorola MPx200 early last week. The MPx200 run Microsoft’s ”Smartphone 2002” software, a pared-down version of their PocketPC/Windows CE operating system. I haven’t had a PC running Windows on my desk for years; I’m traditionally a Linux guy, although I’ve been using an Apple PowerBook for almost two years as my primary computer. So, I’m going to try to answer two questions:

1. How well does the MPx200 work?
2. How does it work with the Mac?

The phone itself seems well-designed. It’s a flip phone, roughly the same length as a credit card but slightly narrower. It’s about the same thickness as my PowerBook. This makes it smaller but thicker then my old Sony/Ericsson T68. The screen is bright and clear. In indoor lighting its as good as any small screen that I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how well it works outside; I’m in Seattle, and it’s winter :-).

The Smartphone platform differs from Pocket PCs and Palm by not using a touch-sensitive screen or stylus. Instead, it’s more like a traditional phone, with a semi-joystick and a couple menu selection buttons. This makes it usable one-handed, at the cost of some flexibility. This is clearly intended to be a phone first, and a PDA only tangentially. On the other hand, it has a decent CPU (TI OMAP at 132MHz) and somehow manages to have room for a SD card. You can install new software onto the phone; there are emulators for most handheld gaming platforms, IM clients, ebook readers, and media players available. It’ll play MP3 files and display JPEG files, plus small Windows video files right out of the box. It has a basic calendar/contacts/tasks suite, plus a POP/IMAP mail client and a small version of IE.

There are a few nice features that struck me at once. First, the USB connector on the bottom is a standard mini-USB connector, so it should be easy to replace if it gets lost. Next, the phone can use the USB cable for networking; since AT&T Wireless’s IP connectivity is so expensive, this is a nice feature. Third, the phone will charge itself directly over the USB cable. This means one less cable to carry when traveling, and one less wall-wart hiding underneath my desk at work. Fourth, the contacts/call log/speed dial setup works very well. In general, if you start dialing numbers from the “home” screen, the phone will start filtering through the contacts and call log lists, and show you entries that match the numbers or letters that you entered. So, if I enter 6 2 7 (6 is MNO, 2 is ABC, 7 is PQRS), the screen shows me the entries for my boss (Mark) and my sister-in-law (Mary). This is the only time that I’ve ever seen a workable form of autocomplete on a phone, and it doesn’t get in the way of the common case–if I was actually calling 627-1234 or something, I could just keep dialing and the obvious thing would happen. It’s not a bad design; I’m kind of surprised to see it coming out of Microsoft.

On the downside, the battery doesn’t last very long. I’ve seen claims of 24-300 hours for standby time; mine seems to be in the 48-72 range, but I’ve never really let it go that long without charging. I actually ran it dead playing solitare over the weekend; with heavy use I doubt it’d last much longer then a day. Fortunately, it charges fast and comes with two charging cables (AC and USB). Motorola refers to the battery that comes with the MPx200 as a “slim battery,” implying that a longer-life model is available, but they don’t list it on their website, so I doubt that it actually exists.

The built-in email client claims to work with POP3 and IMAP. It doesn’t support SSL in either case, and I don’t think it supports anything better then plain-text authentication. However, it does seem to work with POP, and it even does a decent job handling attachments. You can email pictures to the account that the phone checks, and it’ll download and cache them for you for offline viewing. Out of the box, the phone can handle MP3s, JPEGs, and windows-encoded video, and there are tools for playing MPEGs. I’m not sure how useful that is on a phone, but flexibility is a good thing. The phone supports MIDI and WAV ringtones. With a bit of a hack, it’s possible to store WAV files on the SD card and use them as ring sounds and alarms.

In general, I like the phone. The combination of size, format, bright screen, usability, and flexibility make me pretty happy.

Now for the bad news. The third-party sync software (Pocketmac Smartphone 3.0) is abysmal. It just barely manages to work well enough to keep me from returning the (otherwise excellent) phone. In general, Pocketmac Smartphone feels like what I’d expect from an open-source project around version 0.7–most of the functionality is there, but it misbehaves all the time, and a lot of things just don’t work the way you’d expect them to work.

• I have to reboot my Mac every time I want to sync. Once I’ve plugged the phone in and then unplugged it, Pocketmac won’t recognize it again until I reboot.
• It crashes all the time. I’ve had it crash 3-4 times per day.
• It doesn’t always sync right. I have a calendar entry that I moved from 4:30PM to 11:00AM and it refused to update the phone. Similarly, I have a couple contacts that won’t update either.
• The calendar sync doesn’t work right. Right now, it duplicates a couple entries every single time I sync the phone, so I keep having to go in and delete duplicate entries in iCal. I’ve had it delete entries from iCal as well, which is completely unacceptable.
• Even when it works, the iCalendar handling is bad–each comma (,) in .ics files is escaped with a backslash (\,). Pocketmac doesn’t handle this right, so I have a phone full of entries like “go to Costco\, buy lunchmeat”
• There’s no way to sync only specific calendars. I have a couple information-only calendars that I’m subscribed to in iCal, but I only display when I’m looking for information from those calendars. Unfortunately, Pocketmac syncs those onto the phone as well, completely swamping my personal calendar entries with noise.

I’ve had a tech support ticket open for almost a week, with no response at all from them. I can see it sitting in their ticket queue online, status “open”.

Fortunately, they have some competition in this space–Mark/Space also makes Mac<->PocketPC sync software. They don’t support Smartphones right now, but I’ve seen a handful of requests. Hopefully the situation will resolve itself–either Pocketmac will improve or Mark/Space will replace them. Until then, the phone still syncs, sometimes, and that’s good enough for me at the moment. Barely.

Update:Pocketmac’s support people finally got back to me and pointed out a couple mistakes that I’d made with respect to my tech support request–I didn’t read the notice that they were all at Macworld for the week, and I didn’t send the tech support ticket to the right group inside the company. Oops. They’re looking into my problems now. I’ll post another update if they get things to work.

Update: See my updated MPx200 status.

Posted in Phones, Handheld and PDA | Tags mpx200, review

New phones

Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 09 Jan 2004 09:27:50 GMT

So, I finally broke down and bought a pair of new phones. Cynthia’s old phone was essentially dead, and I didn’t like the deal that T-Mobile offered us, so we switched to AT&T Wireless. Their plan is the same basic price with a few more minutes per month; it’s basically a push.

Picking service plans is easy; actually picking phones has been killing me. My basic requirements are:

• Must sync with the Mac, preferably via Bluetooth
• Must have a usable calendar/to-do list implementation
• Must be under $300, ideally under $100

Amazingly enough, only a few phones make it through this filter. I was looking at the Nokia 3650, but AT&T has just dropped it, and I could only find one store in the Seattle area with one in stock, and they wanted over $300 for the phone. So that’s out. That leaves only two Bluetooth phones in AT&T’s lineup, the Sony-Ericsson T616 and the Siemens S56. We’ve had Sony-Ericsson T68s for over a year, and they’ve been okay, but there are a bunch of little things that I don’t like about the T68 (the interface is generally clunky). So, we looked at the S56, and it didn’t look any better then the T68, while the T616 seems to be a bit of an improvement. And, no matter how you slice it, it isn’t any worse then the T68.

So, during The Big Snow, I stopped off at the AT&T store, planning on getting a pair of T616s. One little thing got in the way–I read an announcement that PocketMac is now shipping a version of their sync software for MS Smartphones, like the Motorola MPx200 that AT&T is selling. That means that the MPx200 can sync with the Mac, which puts it back onto my list. It doesn’t do Bluetooth, but most reviews claim that it’s actually a decent phone, not just a gizmo like a lot of the early palm phones, so I figured I’d give it a try.

The short version is that the MPx200 is a decent phone, and the rest of the software on it doesn’t seem to totally suck. Plus, it was on sale, so I walked out with a MPx200 and a T616. I’ll have a longer review of the MPx200 soon.

Posted in Phones | Tags at&t, mpx200, phone, t616 | no comments