Wednesday, June 18th, 2003
Treo 600 confirmed (update)
While there’s still no official information on the treo 600 @handspring.com there’s a preview of the treo 600 on the german handspring site, handspring.de (auto-translation). You can also find a much better picture than the one leaked before there.
To sum up the (not very detailed) information provided: small, cellphone-like design, querty keyboard, palm os 5 with a fast arm cpu, new webbrowser, integrated digicam, caller id, sd/mmc slot (most likely sdio), five-way dpad.
They also mention an upgrade-possibility for current treo users at the launch and that the price will be lower than the price of the current treo line, which isn’t as promising as it sounds considering that handsprings product-line-up is heavily overpriced in germany. I hope it’ll make it beyond the 600 euro line.
update: just noticed that it’s also on handsprings uk site.
update 2: i almost forgot to link to this news item (auto-translation) @heise.de that offers a higher res pic and reveals some more info: the treo 600 will be available in a gsm/gprs and a cdma version and feature an additional speaker for system tones and mp3 playback.
update 3: things are going fast this night (i feel so old today): treo 600 @handspring.com
Monday, June 16th, 2003
New Series 60 phone announced: Nokia 6600
Nokia announced a new series 60 phone, the nokia 6600. It’s the first series 60 phone featuring midp 2.0 support and based on symbian os v7.0. My first impression was that it looks awful, but perhaps i can get used to it. However, the siemens sx1 is still more appealing to me. Aas, mobile burn, infosync and mobitopia got more info and pics.
Thursday, June 12th, 2003
The house of the future
Following the room of the future: the house of the future.
Tiny tree for my desktop
Bought a bonsai tree for my desktop today. The first plant i ever bought - strange feeling having something green and living on my desk next to all the tech-stuff. Let’s see how long it’ll survive. I already think about building a robot to water the bonsai, but perhaps i’m just seeking self-justification for buying a lego mindstorms set. (pic taken with 7650)
Papa got a brand new crump-lah bag
Today (or more like yesterday - however, few hours ago) i bought a new laptop bag by crumpler (to be precise, the ‘very busy man‘) that i’m totally in love with. I’ve been looking for a bag for quite a while now, but yesterday i stumbled across those bags on the net and couldn’t resist buying one immediately. Originally i wanted to write a long eulogy on how great it is and how much i like the design and all those compartments and its robustness and why i decided to buy this bag and not another one, but now i think i’ll save this for later. Expect to read about this bag from time to time, cause, as mentioned before, i’m really in love with it. I’ll also post real-life pics of it in the future (the picture above was taken from the crumpler website).
Ps: now that i revisited their site, i’m not quite sure if i would have prefered these colors, but it actually doesn’t really matter because they didn’t have them in stock where i purchased it.
Pps: You have to excuse the title, but i couldn’t resist and i’m just too happy with this bag and it’s awfully late here in vienna (fyi: the time below is gmt, so it’s actually 4.37 as i write this).
Wednesday, June 11th, 2003
Nokia announces Series 60 update
Read the press release here and some discussion on the aas forums here. Too bad there are no screenshots available yet. Main changes include the upgrade from symbian os v6.1 to symbian os v7.0 and midp 2.0 support. No new nokia seríes 60 devices featuring this updated version are announced yet, though i think we can expect some interesting announcements soon.
If you’re a software developer you can find more info @forum nokia. Nokia also introduced the nokia developer suite for j2me v2.0, featuring midp 2.0 support. Considering the new apis provided with midp 2.0 i could imagine a shift from native symbian c++ to j2me development coming.
Monday, June 9th, 2003
MIDP ruined me…
… or at least my day. But let’s start at the beginning of this sad little story:
About a month ago i started working on a small rss-reader midlet. I used suns j2me wtk 1.0.4 because i thought that would guarantee that it runs on the largest possible number of target devices and honestly believed it would work on my (then beloved) nokia 7650. The development of the first full-featured version that met my expectations took about one week (i should note that this was my first attempt in writing a j2me midlet, a skilled j2me developer should be able to finish something like that in a day or two). It loaded rss feeds from the net, parsed them using kxml (a tad slow, but it worked), displayed them properly, even stripped the html from descriptions to make them better readible (the lack of this feature makes friday, another rss-reader midlet, imho almost unusable), even offered simple bookmark support based on a j2me rms. Of course it lacked proper error handling, commentary, testing and documentation, but at least it worked correctly and did its job when i tried it in the wtk emulators.
Then came the day i activated gprs on my nokia 7650 and tried my midlet on a real phone - and of course it didn’t work. It installed and started fine, the menus looked right, the bookmark management worked correctly, but it didn’t load the feed. I didn’t have the time to further investigate the problem back then, but today i took the time and tried to get some help @forum nokia. First i stumbled across a thread that mentions that you have to open the httpconnection in a separate thread to make it work on a 7650. I didn’t do that in my original midlet (and yes, i know it’s REALLY bad programming style and that you should ALWAYS open your httpconnection in a new thread). Fixing that took me about half an hour, but again, the midlet didn’t work.
Next i found a thread where a nokia official explained that there’s a bug with httpconnection with several language versions, so i tried switching my phone language from german to english, again without success. So i continued my journey into the archives of forum nokia and found a thread where someone claims that httpconnection doesn’t work on firmware version 3.16. Of course my phone runs on 3.16, so i’ll have to get a firmware upgrade soon, though i don’t have time for that and i’m really scared of having to give up my phone for a week or even longer just for this damn upgrade. Stuff like that really pisses me off. Currently i’m trying to focus on breakfast @tiffany’s (the movie) to free my head from all this j2me crap, but even that won’t work. Feel free to contact me if you think you can help me with my problem.
Saturday, June 7th, 2003
Pioneer Computer Jacket
I4u posted news of a fantastic new jacket by pioneer (you’ll have to scroll down a bit) with a flexible oel display embedded into its sleeve. This looks so totally sci-fi that i can’t wait to get my hands on one, too bad that it’s unclear when those will hit the market. This news also made it to the slashdot main page, check out the comments posted there for some of the finest geek humor (and we all love geek humor, right?).
Friday, June 6th, 2003
Room of the Future
Pcworld.com: "Admittedly, the Hilton Garden Inn’s gadget-crammed Room 267 is not your typical lodging. But stay just one night there, and you’ll want it to be."
Thursday, June 5th, 2003
InfoSync view on Palm/Handspring merger
Read.