Apple, Give Us a “Freedom of Choice” Button | Electronic Frontier Foundation

I would like to have a “developer mode” for users of the iPhone that doesn’t require signed code (and doesn’t require a paid Apple ADC membership). I don’t think Apple’s reasons for not having one are nefarious or malicious — they like to control the user experience so that it is consistently the best. I’ve used a BlackBerry, S60 devices (Nokia N-series, E-series handsets), Sony Ericsson UIQ, Palm OS, Maemo, and others. They all sucked. They all had terrible software, terrible applications, and the hardware was slow and ugly.

The EFF doesn’t tell you that many applications do store their data in open formats (raw text and XML for example) and that it supports vCard and vCal.

The other side of the coin the EFF shows you is nicely summarized by Marco Arment:

Great since day one

First of all, it is awesome that Nokia has brought us Nokia Media Transfer, which is made to sync S60 smartphones with iTunes and iPhoto. I love it.

It will even re-encode video for playback on the handset if you want, which is pretty fun (though I keep most of my video in non-iTunes-appreciated formats) and works pretty well.

But when working with music, it will frequently fail to sync over everything it should, or does so in such a way that the playlists don’t work. The files don’t all appear to get transfered and I don’t really know why. It drives me nuts when I think I have a playlist moved over and then only a couple of songs made it. Alas!

This is still beta-level software and works well enough most of the time. I have 6GB of available storage on my N95 and tell Nokia Media Transfer to use 3GB or so for music and such—I guess more testing and fiddling is in order. I need to find out why it doesn’t move everything over it should. I am also having a hard time finding out where it is logging things, if it even does. Surely it has to be dropping trails around my computer somewhere!

Thing is, most of the all-in-wonders out there seem to be deficient in key aspects of their design or delivery, making it all but impossible to even predict when the best in show can be represented in the smallest amount of space. I end up carrying a lot of things with me in the course of an average week, never mind traveling.

I realize that this isn’t really a matrix. I may end up adding one into this document in the near future. I wanted to create one, then started wondering how to best do the tables in Textile markup, and then got bored and started writing instead.

Options

• Sony PSP for games, photos, and videos
• Archos 604 WiFi media player.
• Nokia N800 tablet for large-frame browsing, presence, messaging, Xterm, full IMAP email, music, podcasts, videos, photos. Bluetooth keyboard makes for a nice webstation, can work with Bluetooth GPS module as well. Portable VoIP device.
• Nokia N95 mobile phone for calls/messaging, light email reading, light browsing, music, podcasts, shooting 30fps 640×480 mpeg4 video, taking still photos at 5 megapixels. Navigation via the built-in GPS.
• iPod 10GB original, old-school with mechanical wheel, capable of killing a man at twenty yards. 20 hours of playtime via 3rd-party battery.

Personal entertainment, organization, and communications needs are met typically by a handful of devices, or a few discrete devices that can work together. So what are the options I am currently confronted with when packing my bag?

Sony PSP

Pros

• First-rate gaming.
• Vintage gaming available via emulation.
• Good video playback, but must be managed via 3rd party software.
• Good audio playback, but must be managed via 3rd party software and iTunes.
• Good photo viewer, but must be managed via 3rd party software and iPhoto.
• Good battery life, great display. Easy controls, good UI.
• Has an RSS reader and web browser that is difficult to use due to bad input methods.

Cons

• Video codecs are limited.
• Requires 3rd-party software to encode video for the PSP from the Mac.
• Can’t use iTunes to manage video content due to strict formating and codecs.
• I’d rather not use iPhoto.
• Network media playback requires LocationFree base stations and other equipment. I don’t know what LocationFree is, but I think it is Japanese for “Sony is Hemorrhaging Money and Needs More Now”.

The Sony PSP is my favorite device for playing games while traveling. It has a great display, good battery life, and easy-to-handle media (UMD and Memory Stick Duo Pro) that can be beat on in your carry-on. It has fantastic sound, a passable web browser if you want to read Google News or do simple searches, and in my case, 4GB of storage for movies that have been manually encoded specifically for the PSP.

I hate that I have to manage a separate library of videos for one device. It would be even worse if I didn’t have my media on a network filesystem, but used iTunes to manage it all—I am much happier with an Xbox Media Center machine ($75 from eBay, Craigslist, EBX, etc) that can play network media in a wide variety of formats. It’s also a lot quicker to play content and scan/skip through things compared to other offerings out there.

If I want regularly move media onto the PSP or an iPhone, iPod Touch, or whatever else, I am going to get stuck maintaining multiple libraries of “encoded for X” media. Great.

Archos 604 WiFi

Pros

• Great video player, supports many codecs and formats.
• Can be used as a PVR with an adapter.
• Can be used as a voice recorder with an adapter.
• Can have a nice tabletop stand and charging adapter if you get the adapter.
• Has a small version of Opera on it and can be used as a browser, kind of.
• Plays xvid, dvix, mpeg4 video I throw at it with ease.
• Can just drag and drop videos in the Finder.
• Spare batteries aren’t expensive.
• Plays network media great over WiFi.
• Can browse and mount SMB/CIFS disks. Awesome.

Cons

• No video playlist. Really. This drives me nuts.
• UI is clumsy.
• Doesn’t thumbnail and index videos in sub-directories. Only top-level files.
• UI is clumsy.
• WiFi connection seems picky at times.
• Battery life sucks. Hard.
• Nickle-and-dimed for things like a stand. Cables. PVR functions. Voice recorder. They sell everything as a separate option.
• Video can be formatted in a variety of ways, but large-format videos may need to drop in resolution to playback on the device.
• USB data cable charges device way too slowly.

If you don’t like that this device doesn’t have video playlists, one workaround I’ve found is that if you tell it to play on repeat or shuffle, it will play the contents of a folder. This means you can’t keep everything in the top-level Movies folder, or it will mix and match all of them, or keep playing continuously after it plays the things you really wanted to. I use my Archos 604 as a table-top radio and network video player, which it excels at. The battery life sucks something fierce, so it isn’t really a good contender for travel, though it holds so much (mine is 30GB) you want to believe you could watch it all without carrying seven spare batteries.

Not much I can say about it other than that. You have to buy a small group of accessories to get the Archos you want, and then you will have to pay a few extra bucks for codecs that don’t come standard. They’re cheap and let me work with formats I am comfortable with.

I wouldn’t carry it around to play music because it’s heavy. But it is a very reasonable video player on a nightstand (or driving a larger display such as a repurposed old monitor with yet another adapter) without taking up much room and having local storage as well as pulling things off the network, which puts its effective capacity over 2 terabytes in my house.

Nokia N800 Tablet

Pros

• Great browser (Mozilla browser in OS 2008 and 2007 as an option)
• Great IM (XMPP/Jabber/GoogleTalk!) and presence.
• Good audio player though is very aggressive about managing the library.
• Good video playback in OS 2008. Still requires strict formatting, however.
• Talks to my mobile phone to get Internet service even when away from WiFi.
• Can manage content on my mobile handset!
• Great display for indoors.
• Works with most wireless access points.
• Virtual Thumb-board is the first of its type that doesn’t make me want to cut my head off.
• Can work with SIP, GIzmoproject, Skype as a telephone.
• Xterm with honest-to-goodness openssh.
• Has a (gimmicky) video camera for video chats.
• Email client, even though it sucks, supports S/MIME certificates.
• Regular headphone jack.

Cons

• Bad display for outdoors (N810 is the patch for this bug)
• No QWERTY keyboard built-in (N810 is the patch for this bug)
• Email client is just so terribly disappointing. It’s worse than Eudora. Hell, I bet Eudora does real IMAP folder sync now, whereas the Maemo mail client takes half-assery to previously unknown heights. After seeing the S60 email client “evolve” over the last few years, I wonder if software engineers at Nokia even use email.
• Third-party software is missing the target on email.
• Wish I could video chat/audio chat via my XMPP server.
• “Invisible” presence doesn’t work with Apple’s jabberd.
• Presence support limited: no preference settings for the priority of the tablet instance.
• Video playback is finicky and Nokia’s software for Windows to encode movies sucks. Refuses to encode everything I throw at it, even though it can thumbnail the samples. Weird.
• People IM me there even though I’m “away” and I don’t see it for a day because my tablet doesn’t get used every day.
• No good way to manage media and other content on the device. Drag and drop filesystem-level stuff is nice as an option but it’s the only way to do it right now.

Email on the N800 sucks unless you’re using webmail. And then you can’t use the nice notification options on the N800 since the built-in email client is well integrated with the rest of the device and provides nice feedback upon receiving new messages. And OS 2008 has improved message alerts as well. Application itself just stinks. No IMAP folder sync, no subscriptions, no folders at all in fact, only your Inbox, and it doesn’t do a live sync with the Inbox, either. It treats your Inbox as if it were a POP inbox. Claws Mail is the best choice at the moment for IMAP, and it does full IMAP service, but needs significant improvements on the UI for Maemo devices (such as the N800, N810, N770) to really be a solid go-to.

I have been playing with RoundCube webmail mainly so that I can have access to my mail folders when I’m on the tablet.

There are a lot of developers doing things on Maemo (the Linux-based platform that runs the Nokia Tablets) that are very exciting. Some really creative people out there solving problems this little gizmo is ideally suited for. Network video playback is possible on the device though I haven’t figured out just what the thresholds are for the formats, nor do I know all of the codecs that are supported in OS 2008 yet. It has good battery life, though you need to micro-manage it a bit to get the most out of it. The N800 shares a charger with my N95 meaning less wall-warts to carry around, and OS 2008 has added an alarm clock. I used to carry a Grundig am/fm/shortwave travel radio with clock and alarm in my luggage. Can shave those 20 ounces off my travel weight just from a software update. Nice.

With the ability to get 8GB+ flash cards for the N800, and with OS 2008’s improved video playback, the N800 could easily be the best device I own. It can’t play games very well, but mobile Linux hasn’t ever been a real contender in mobile gaming anyway. I would be delighted if there were a strong suite of emulators for game consoles, though the input options are so limited on the device I don’t know how someone could really pull that off. Would be very happy to see some games that utilize the touchscreen, making them specifically for Maemo devices. Think of it as an open source Nintendo DS waiting to be born.

The people that do Freeciv for Maemo are my heros and I hope they have the time to get it working on OS 2008 soon. Fantastic game.

Nokia N95

First of all, I also have an E61i. I switch handsets pretty often because I’m impatient and fickle. The E61i is awesome for email, though the S60 email client isn’t anything special. I usually carry the N95 however, because it is a better music player, has a built-in GPS, and shoots great video and takes great photos.

If I am going away from home and expect I will not be near a computer very often for email and such, I’ll probably opt for the E61i. In almost all other cases, I’ll prefer the N95.

Pros

• Great sound quality on calls.
• Good keypad for Tegic T9 texting and very light email.
• Very good camera, great video shooting for a mobile device.
• Navigation software is great.
• Browser is WebKit based. Quite good for a mobile handset browser. Same core as the iPhone browser.
• Plays back some video, but I haven’t messed with it much.
• Nokia’s Media Transfer software does great with photos, music, close integration with iPhoto and iTunes.
• Real headphone jack.
• Great display.
• If I had Windows, I’d probably really like LifeBlog.
• Stereo sound on-handset with support for aac, mp3, wav, makes for some creative ringtone options. I’m currently using the Sonic Screwdriver from Doctor Who. Because I’m a huge dork.
• Can do SIP calls via WiFi.

Cons

• microSD is a pain to deal with.
• N-series devices store things differently from E-series devices, so flash storage swapping between them can be a pain in the neck.
• Battery life sucks. I have an N95-1. I hear the US-targetted N95s are better.
• WiFi on the N95 is not as nice as E-series devices. No fail-over to EDGE from WiFi, so you have to manually specify which connection to use.
• Music player is overly aggressive, mines your entire handset and storage card for “music files” which may be WAVs from the voice recorder.
• Java games suck. I paid $8 for Line Rider and it stinks. I’m bitter.
• Email client is limited.
• No S/MIME and certainly no GPG/PGP.

As an organizer, S60 devices suck. I’m not going to go off onto that train of thought right now though. The N95 is a great device for listening to music, making calls, messaging, taking photos, and shooting video. It isn’t as good as an actual camera, but I am having interesting results in playing with creative photography using the N95. Mainly just to do it, but it is quite viable under ideal conditions. The navigation software is pretty darn good, though it will not speak the names of streets, it will show you on the map what they are, and gives directions well (“Turn right,” etc) and I use it in the car frequently, or even while on foot. The software has gotten better since the last time I wrote about it.

the iPod

Pros

• Street cred in spades because it is Rev A (hollah!)
• Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. I’ve thrown it into walls, stepped on it, never skipped a track once.
• Full-size Firewire port.
• Big battery life.

Cons

• No video.
• No photos.
• No phone calls.
• No browser.
• No Bluetooth.
• It’s big compared to iPods these days.

Wishlist

I wish the music player on S60 devices like the N95 was better. I wish it could do snazzier glitz like coverflow, or even reliably show album covers.

I wish there was a snap-on gamepad module for the Nokia tablets that enabled me to play games on that device as well. I think there is enough video and CPU to drive an SNES emulator, for example. I’m not looking for PSP-quality games, but something more engrossing than BreakOut would be welcome. Someone could come up with an ad-hoc multiplayer version of anything and I’d be happy at this point. Freeciv is great but requires a lot of setup unless you’re playing solo.

The Archos is awesome for playing videos due to its bigger display and good output options, but it falls on its face because the battery life is terrible and the device is too big to put in your pocket. Even your coat pockets will bulge with it in there. I’d much rather pack the PSP, which can carry music, a few specially encoded video files on Memory Sticks and a few games as well in the same cubic inches that the Archos demands.

The Nokia N800 tablets are surprisingly good for a device that offers a lot. They nailed mobile browsing without question, and their media player options are decent on the audio side and still too picky on the video side but each software revision gets better and better there. In fact, with a portable Bluetooth keyboard, an N800 is a very serviceable webstation, capable of using Backpackit, Writeboards, Google Docs, and more. I have to experiment more with the video encoding options since OS 2008 has made it a bit easier to deal with, but so far the N800 is the most impressive device out there in terms of features and extensibility.

What it still comes down to is a matter of priorities. The PSP is great at games, but second pick for video. The N800 is great for browsing and Internet radio, but stinks for email. I can do light browsing on my handset, but can’t use snazzy web20 ajax shenanigans with the WebKit browser on my N95. The Archos can play just about any video file I throw at it, but it feels like I’m carrying something very useless and brick-like in about 2 hours after I pick it up.

So while we are still converging, we haven’t had that convergence yet. As of yet we’re still at proof-of-concept. The options for managing mobile content are still largely weak and incomplete, and while you can get a device that does everything, you’re still limited to picking which two or three things you want it to do well.

I’m not going to die if I’m disconnected however: there is something to be said for disconnecting from the email servers now and then and putting my presence to Away. It’s been a pretty relaxing Thanksgiving Holiday due to such simple actions, and good technology should provide simple discrete choke-points for interruptions and noise.

When it comes down to it, I think I’d rather have separate devices communicate well with one another rather than a handful of devices that claim to do everything. Why can’t my N800 tablet be the display and user input device for my mobile handset when it is around, for example?

I hope that this is where things are headed. It just doesn’t seem very likely to me that anyone can get “the best” of five worlds and fit it all into one device. So coming into 2008 I still don’t have a silver bullet device that does everything I want it to, or my expectations and demands are far too high. I haven’t decided which yet, but I have decided that I need to streamline my harem of devices, and fast. I have been trying to strip out extra clutter lately everywhere I can find it, and my backpack is a fine place to tackle next.

I don’t know what will end up making the cut just yet, but I may be hawking some things at low low prices! soon, provided I can admit to not needing it. Convince me.

First of all, obviously this isn’t something I would have purchased myself. It was the handset that MEGACORP gave me when they stopped paying parts of phone bills and decided that they’d buy us all mobile phones instead. Most of the people in my department just suck it up and forward the calls to their personal mobile numbers or VoIP lines, and with good reason.

This phone sucks.

Actually, the handset itself is probably fine, but I’d never know, because the one I get in the box from Verizon is nothing like the one that Motorola shipped them. Mine has a browser on it, so that you can buy shit. You can go to a little store and pay whatever dollars for a ringtone of the Theme from Shaft or whatever, and purchase a copy of Tetris or something. Fine. Whatever. Nice that they give that option I suppose.

But what they really do is make that your only option to put anything on the handset.

Even more insane is that while the phone has a Contacts and Calendar application, you cannot sync it to a computer. While I was waiting for Activation Guy to sort out the ins and outs of configuring this device so that it would work, I was asking where I needed to go to download the sync software so I could put my Outlook crap into it. I figure, if I am going to carry around a second phone, it may as well have my office schedule and contacts on it. That way my real phone can manage my personal stuff and my work phone can have my work stuff. That sounded like a reasonable idea to me.

“You can’t do that,” said Activation Guy, “That phone doesn’t support it. You can take your addressbook to a Verizon Wireless Store and they can put your contacts into the phone for you,” which sounds helpful at first, but it isn’t. You can’t update the contacts except to do it manually, which on a handset isn’t trivial. So every time I have to change a few contacts, I’m supposed to go to a Verizon store? How is that helpful? And the handset does support it by the way: Verizon doesn’t let you do it beacuse they take that feature away from you. Presumably so you have to go into a Verizon Wireless Store and wait in line behind the similarly angry customers to have them do what you should have been allowed to do yourself.

I honestly don’t even know why they left the Calendar application on there, because it is completely useless without some sort of sync function. Are you really going to tap in all of your appointments into a RAZR? Me either. They could have just left an alarm clock on it, pulled the Calender, and kicked me in the stomach and called it even.

Since it has a browser, I assumed I could at least hook it up to my Thinkpad to let me get online and hop on the VPN and check email and handle an escalation if I’m oncall and away from WiFi or ethernet. Wrong again!

“This isn’t a data phone,” said Activation Guy, who was still trying to figure out why my phone couldn’t be programmed for the Verizon network. (That’s another thing, you have to program these stupid things yourself with the aid of a support tech once you get them. There is no SIM of course, because it’s CDMA, so you have to type in a series of numbers and follow hidden menus to make your phone service work). “What do you mean it isn’t a data phone? It says EVDO on the home screen. It has a browser.” “Oh, we don’t call that data,” he said. Suffice to say I wasn’t going to try to argue with Activation Guy about this, but apparently EVDO and 1xRTT aren’t data services. They’re just icons on your phone that light up to tell you that if you had a better phone you could actually get online. Though only if you used a cable like some kind of Neanderthal, because:

Verizon Wireless removed all Bluetooth profiles except for Bluetooth Headset. So there is no DUN, there is no OBEX, and there is no sync profile. They stripped it out of the firmware. It used to be there before they got their mits on it, so you can’t send over any media, send photos off the phone to your computer, or zap a ringtone you made over to it.

The charger for the RAZR V3M is a usb cable. But if you don’t use the USB cable and wall wart that Verizon Wireless gives you, the phone says “Unauthorized Charger”. It appears to still charge, though very slowly. I’ve been charging it for two days now and it isn’t full yet. If I find another outlet and plug in the supplied do-dad, it shuts up and charges, but be real—it’s a USB cable. Get over yourselves.

Every possible chance Verizon had to nickle and dime you, they took. Every step of the way is a walk around the yard at a prison. You get one hour a day to walk in a circle and then you’re brought back indoors for the beatings.

The funny part is that when I plugged it into the USB port on one of my Macs I could sync my addressbook to it. Interesting that it wasn’t possible half an hour ago, but my G5 from 2003 bent the laws of space and time to make it so. Still can’t sync my calendars to it though, which is just as well, since the phone isn’t fit to use on a regular basis with all of these limitations and will just continue to forward calls elsewhere to handsets that work.

Speaking of, I’ve been using a Nokia N95 for quite a while now and love it, and recently picked up an E61i, also from Nokia, which has been really nice as a messenger and organizer. More to come on those later after I’m done recovering from having my head slammed into the wall repeatedly by Verizon Wireless.

After spending years with GSM operators I’m reminded of why they’re superior: I can bring my own equipment and manage it myself.

textually.org: Phone Heist worth $50,000:

And still we have no registry of stolen IMEIs in the United States.

There have been a lot of incidents of muggings for mobile phones in my area, I’d say at least six a week. I have to think that if the $thing being stolen had minimal or no value because it couldn’t be used, that this may stop people from taking them.

Schneier on Security: Cell Phone Stalking:

Me:
So far we have the mobile operator saying what they’re describing is impossible, which as far as I know, it is. Then you have non-technical people explaining the situation and the behavior to an equally non-technical group of reporters and local law enforcement.

Take a deep breath, folks.

The story about That Family in Washington that has a stalker/miscreant hassling them with abuse and threats of bodily harm? I think it’s totally BS. But there has been some really interesting discussion about it on Schneier’s weblog, and so I hope that this conversation goes on for a little bit longer mainly so someone can demonstrate that I’m wrong. The problem is that most mobile malware is bogus/vaporware/alarmist tripe.

So until it breaks out of “a friend of mine knows this guy that read a blog about a google search that turned up a .JAR file that rooted his Samsung,” I’m going to call shenanigans. Part of the problem, in my mind, is that the reporters aren’t necessarily experts in such things, and so they rely, of course, on what equally unsophisticated users are telling them.

So yeah, there are some things that are technically possible, but remember what they say about the most likely explanation…

Loca – About Loca:

Loca is a pervasive surveillance project that currently exploits Bluetooth technology. To best participate in the loca project you will need to set bluetooth to ‘discoverable’ on your cell phone.

Imagine that you are walking down the street when you hear a beep from your phone. You see a message reading:

“You were in a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park; are you in love?”

The thing is – you were in the flower shop an hour ago and then you did go to the park for half an hour!

This is probably one of the most creative uses I’ve seen for device discovery. And in the case of Loca, it is pseudo-anonymous information—Loca doesn’t know who you are, they only know your handset.

I like that.

Mobile-review.com Review of GSM/UMTS-communicator Nokia E90:

For its potential target audience, Nokia E90 is a very balanced and reasonably priced solution. It has no counterparts that have made it to the market, therefrom follows its low price flexibility and most improbable price shifts (if only the enterprise audience really doesn’t like it).

And I just got my N95, too. As attractive as the E90 is, I’ll be hard-pressed to give up my 5MP digital camera that fits in my pocket and can upload to flickr from anywhere.