Problem on E71/S60 with SMS delivery receipts

For the last 2 weeks or so I noticed that on my E71 SMS [1] delivery receipts (or reports) quite frequently (~50% of the time) are displayed as plain text SMS, instead of hidden and just used to update the delivery status of the message.

Such a report then looks like this:

id:0010520070 sub:001 dlvrd:001 submit date:0812311708 done date:0812311708 stat:DELIVRD err:000 text:Test

This is
a) not very readable
and
b) totally useless (since the message will stay as "Pending"...)

Most annoying is, that my operator (A1) charges for the delivery receipt (equivalent of 1 SMS).

--
[1] "texting" for the native speaker amongst my readers.

Why Microsoft should not do phones

1. See today's news about the dying Zunes (they are not phones - I know - but the same category of devices)

2. A coworker and friend just got an Sony Xperia X1 ... cool phone, if it were not for the Windows Mobile inside. What he (a long time Nokia user) discovered was, that you should not switch off the phone when you rely on the alarm to go off in the morning, because it then wont.

Yes. True.
With Winodws Mobile, the d*** phone is stays switched off and the alarm just wont sound.

The ipod did it again

Just a couple of days ago, my iPod touch put me in panic mode, because the downloaded apps would not start.
The solution was to install one (any) additional app from the store (a free one, preferably).

Yesterday, he's done it again [1].

Again I had to install a free app.
First time it was the cool (but pointless) "Night Stand".
Yesterday it was the "WiFinder"...

This is getting annoying...

---
[1] speaking of "he's done it again" - reminds me of the good old Pepsi ad.

My new iPod touch

So – for about 3 weeks now, I'm proud owner of an iPod Touch. I was not unhappy with my old iPod nano, but it was a good chance and a good deal.

In brief:

1. The Nokia E71 is most definitely the better input device. With anything you have to write (no matter what), you are better off on the E71.

2. The iPod (touch) is the superior reading or consumation device. Emails, web pages, feeds, ... everything. Just better.... and cooler.

3. iPod (and iPhone) are the first mobile devices, that display an email primarily in its HTML alternative (if there is one), and not just in plain text. I know that the verdict is still not out on whether HTML emails are a good idea, but the display on the iPod is excellent... more fun to read emails this way, than on the Nokia. Then E71 is able to display the HTML part, but only if you open the “attachment.html”.... cumbersome.

4. The lack of running programs in the background or in parallel on the iPod/iPhone is annoying. The E71 is far superior in that respect. E.g. having Gmail, Twing (=Skype) and Twitter client run in the background – can't do that on the iPod.

5. The lack of a clipboard has already been widely ranted about, so I will restrain myself from joining in. Since I use the clipboard on the E71 about once every 2 weeks or so, I don't really miss it on the iPod

6. Ah, yes, and the nano was easier to carry around - as his Steveness already demonstrated years ago.
   

Still a great device. Especially to watch TED through iTunes.

Weird iPod touch behaviour

Proud owner of an iPod touch that I am for about a month now (more on that later), I noticed something odd today:
All of my downloaded apps (twitterific, facebook, rememberthemilk, ...) stopped working. They would sort-of-start but immediately return to the home screen before doing anything. The build in apps did all work nicely.

I googled for this, and found that I actually had to install an additional application from the app store, and lo and behold this did solve the problem. Whatever the reason...

Sxipper

There's a great podcast/interview on IT conversations with Dick Hardt about Sxipper.

Sxipper is a free Firefox add-on that saves you time by keeping track of an unlimited number of usernames and passwords as well as the personal data you share every day over the web. The company's mission is to make your interactions with the Web simple, keeping your data private and secure.

Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben, to discuss the product, as well as the entire issue of privacy and identity on the web, as well as how to market plug-ins as products.

Find it here or on iTunes

Note to Microsoft

thanks to martin

This site is optimized ...

Just found this:

Copyright © 2008 ... [This site is optimized for Mozilla 1.7]

Who in 2008 is using Mozilla 1.7 ????

So I surrendered...

... and signed up on facebook.

Not sure if I really wanted this.

Update on Access Point Groups for the E71

Just to report back on what I recently posted about the lack of Access Point Groups on the E71 or rather (third party) replacement thereof ("Access Point Group equiv for the E71")

I've been using Psiloc Connect ever since (and of course paid for it, in the meantime) and it works like a charm.

Glassfish and MySQL event in Vienna

As one of my last tasks as a SW guy in Sun Austria, we'll do a Glassfish and MySQL breakfast tomorrow. Starting at 830 at the "Salzberg". See details here and here.
Alexis will do one of his great glassfish presos/demos.
Looking forward to it, hope to see some of you there.

What I dislike about the E71 / S60

As much as I like my Nokia E71, there are some regressions vis-a-vis the previous Nokia pure-phones I had:

The 6233 could schedule a call - you had a calendar entry that represented a call to another person.
When the notification would pop up, you just had to press the green button to actually call this person.
Quite handy.

Not on the E71. Does only know of "Meeting, Memo, Anniversary, To do", but not of "Call".

Quite disappointing.

Didn't we have a SOA?

via Geek&Poke

I'm done with Palm

So, with my new E71 I'm now really done with Palm - thank you very much.
On the T|X, email was unusable, browsing was awkward, it was unstable, and Palm did not fix any of the issue.

I first started out in about 1999 with Palm Vx, then moved to an m500, later to a Tungsten T, T5 and T|X.
I did have the bluetooth adapter, the Wifi adapter and the wireless keyboard (I really thought I'd use the palm with the keyboard instead of a laptop when travelling... ).
I used it for data entry (offline and online/web, spreadsheets), for taking notes, as a pure PIM of course (i.e. address book, calendar), for email (wireless), and for playing simple games.
It never was much of a music player (not at all,a actually).

That's all past now.

I still love the Palm as a concept and what it did for they industry years ago. But I hate the attitude of the company.

Access Point Group equiv for the E71

Recently one of my first rants about the Nokia E71 was, that Nokia dropped Access Point Groups from connectivity options:

"its predecessor, the E61i had the concept of access point groups , where you could group e.g. your home Wifi, your office Wifi and your 3G connections (i.e. access points) into one group, and then assign this access point group e.g. to your email connection settings. So email retrieval would work on any of those networks, but go over the faster and cheaper Wifi first.
No longer possible with the E71."

However, there is a 3rd party tool called Psiloc Connect that does exactly this: re-introduce access point groups, or rather a single access point (which you then can configure in email, fring, synch ...) which itself checks and decides whether to you WiFi or fall back to 3G/GPRS.

I'm testdriving this for a couple of days, to see if it is worthwhile the 9.95 €.

Shapes from the crowd

Here's an excellent post from Christian about flickr (geo-) shapes - derived from crowd-sourced tags.

Shapes from the crowd - Christian Spanring

The 2 examples he gives (Vienna boundaries, and Vienna inner city) to me are typical examples of the "wisdom of crowds" effect: quite accurate with a large enough sample and good mixture of people within the crowd (Vienna boundaries) and sometimes "totally off" with a specific narrow topic and (therefore) a badly composed crowd (Inner city vs Stephansdom).

It also highlights the problem with tags, that - especially on flickr - it is unclear what the are used for: the place where the picture was taken from, or the motif...

Thanks.

No more email SMS notifications

So, after 8 years or so I finally switched off the SMS (=aka text) notifications from my private email account to my mobile, since 95% of those notifications are pure spam.
I sick and tired of being told by sms that my penis is to short...

Being overconnected

Yesterday while I was travelling from Graz on the train back to Vienna a good friend and colleague (Chris) was trying to contact me to arrange for a meeting (a.k.a. beer) later that evening.
He was actually trying almost each every means of communication available to him, so I received (within 1 minute):
a) a voicemail
b) an email
c) a tweet

I cannot escape him.
(and I don't really want to)

Extension from Thunderbird to Shredder

I now updated my extension to also work with Shredder (the Thunderbird3 beta).
Seems like - again - the internals of the mail popup menu changed:

• First of all the user agent now reports "Shredder" instead of Thunderbird.
• Then - after a lot of debugging - I had to replace the
  document.popupNode.getAttribute('emailAddress')
  with
  document.popupNode.getAttribute('text').
• Problem there is , that text contains more then just the emailAddress used to, and I had to parse it...

And XUL on Thunderbird/Shredder is still not easy to debug.

My new Nokia E71

The Noka E71 is probably the best Nokia (smart) phone I ever laid my hands on.

And I have to admit that I hated Symbian based phones in the past... the communicator series, etc.

They were slow, hard to use, had a bad form factor (ok, that's not really related to Symbian), and so forth.

And when the iPhone was first released I really thought, I'd never move from my POMP (plain old mobile phone) to a Nokia SmartPhone...

Enter the E71.

• It is fast.

• It is lean (SW wise I mean)

• It has an excellent form factor.

• The display is brilliant.

• It comes with Wifi, Bluetooth, 3G, GPS (my order of importance, should be more space between 3G and GPS … ;-) )

• Email actually works:

  • not just „ POP over IMAP“, but the phone client and the server actually stay in sync.

  • I can actually read an email (ok, more display size related, then phone OS)

  • I can see and open attachments … and read or work with them too

• The camera is OK (not really important to me, but still; see this for a test)

• Gmail, Gmaps, Skype (via fring), flickr-upload work amazingly well for a phone.

• The tiny QWERTZ (the german layout for QWERTY) keyboard does work well. Better than the virtual keyboards on iPhone and friends.

Still, there are some classical Nokia goofs (you did not expect me the ever stop ranting about nokia, did you?)

• its predecessor, the E61i had the concept of access point groups , where you could group e.g. your home Wifi, your office Wifi and your 3G connections (i.e. access points) into one group, and then assign this access point group e.g. to your email connection settings. So email retrieval would work on any of those networks, but go over the faster and cheaper Wifi first.
  No longer possible with the E71.

• Automatic email retrieval is a cool thing, but can you spot the missing item here ?
  
  Why - oh why - just not every (1) hour ?
  

• I can no longer schedule a call in the calender. That's really a loss to me... I used that feature a lot for “scheduled call backs”. I still can set a reminder of course, but there is a lot more typing involved – both when entering the reminder as well as later when doing the call. It used to be just one click (on the green button).

And I get a full new set of typos when SMS/texting now that I moved from T9 to QWERTZ ;-)