Inside View from Ireland

A Month with iReader

I HAVE USED THE GOOGLE iREADER, the version of Google Reader programmed for the iPhone. It's also very tasty when running on my Nokia E90 as the shot shows at left. Like many things from Google, this is a beta version of the full-fledged Goodle Reader. You can bookmark it easily at http://www.google.com/reader/i/ and I started using it on my phones, I noticed that it offered many of the same features as the desktop, while making it quick and easy to act on items. If you've used list view, then it should be familiar to you. I walk around town using open wifi or O2-Ireland 3G and use the joystick on the E90 to scroll quickly through interesting items. By driving the arrow to the bold print and tapping the center of the joystick on the outside or inside of the E90, I get the full item in its expanded view. Starring, sharing, and keeping unread are done in place, so I never have to leave the list view or refresh the page. I think it might be faster to use the iReader on the E90 than it is on the iPhone since my finger can always remain on the joystick to navigate quickly.

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Sent mail2blog using O2-Ireland GPRS Typepad service.

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Of MARS and MARSA

SOME PEOPLE SAY life runs in cycles and if that is true then I am back where my communications ran through MARS and my daily vector is governed by MARSA. Both of these acronyms are a foreign language where I work today but in the 80s they represented a special connection to home and family.

Reformat Nokia N95

JUST OFF THE PHONE with a friend who has consistently moaned about his Nokia N95. He got the phone months before it ever appeared in the Irish sales channels and that means it's an older model. Because he depends on not getting lost, he keeps updating his maps on the phone, most of the time over the air. The first edition N95 cannot operate with memory paging, which means the phone bogs down a lot when downloading and installing maps while underway in Ireland. He knew he had issues because he would see a flashing back screen every five or six seconds. On several occasions, he has reformatted his N95. It's pretty simple. You switch off the N95. Then you hold down these three keys: 3 * and Green while switching the phone back on. Reformatting the Nokia N95 means losing everything on the phone, so if you're a heavy user and you take your updates while moving through different cells, you should routinely back up your data.

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We back up with ZYB.

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More than a Mobile

WE PLAY WITH mobile phones during the multimedia degree programme in Tipperary Institute so we can use them more efficiently. Today, it's Twitter (group text in picture) on the Nokia N70. Twitter is one of those applications that could push mobile phone usage beyond the simple text, voice and alarm modes. More than two billion people around the world have mobile phones. We know some of those people listen to podcasts from Ireland on their phones. Nearly half of the multimedia students who contribute to this blog confess they take their mobiles to bed (no alarm clocks in the bedsits) and no body shares their mobile with their girlfriend or bf.

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Image by Katie Conway.

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SIP Mobile Ireland

ON MY WATCHLIST: VoIP mobile solutions. So far only Vodafone has licensed a SIP stack for their network but it's not available to users.

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via Voylent and The Register.

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Best App for Blackberry

BLACKBERRY OWNERS should check out FreeNews, one of the smartest applications I've used on my mobile phones. In fact, you don't need a Blackberry -- smartphones run FreeNews. If you like to read your news sources while on the move, FreeNews can deliver full feeds to you through a one-button sync. This is less effort than required to launch a river of news browser. Once you sync--something I do in less than two minutes for more than 80 newsfeeds--you carry your entire river of news with you. In my experience, I can stay updated with the flow of information on Irish websites, specialised keyword alerts, new bookmarks in my del.icio.us network and inside information related to public works projects. Because the newsfeeds download onto your Blackberry (or smart phone), you can peruse what you need while on the subway or flying. I read my newsfeeds aboard Irish Rail and Aircoach (or Air Couch, as one visitor called it). This idea appeals to readers of Tailrank and that news aggregator carved out a little space to hold a cluster of related content.

Old as Crystals

WHEN I HELD my radio crystal in my hand during a visit to the family home, I realised that I have never heard anyone in Ireland talking about listening to a crystal-powered radio. Those were early radio days for me as a 12-year-old and they involved wrapping copper wire around a spent toilet roll, stringing a long line of cable to the top of the attic and hunching over in a corner to hear a scratchy radio signal. Early days--and age-revealing as well.

Encrypt your mobile phone calls

NOKIA PHONE owners can sign up for a beta test of Voylent, a program that runs on your S60 phone and encrypts your conversation before sending it out over the wireless data-channel in the GSM network. Normal GSM conversations are only weakly encrypted and can be easily sniffed. Technology available to law enforcement agencies in Ireland cannot break Voylent's encryption algorithm. From the developers:

Voylent is a client for GSM cellphones that encrypts voice conversations (IP support not available in this version). We have just released our first public beta and are looking for testers, feature requests and feedback. The client has been tested only a few models, mainly Nokia S60 with Symbian OS.

Note to Ray Ozzie

WE NEED TO SHIFT playlists into our car. We jack them in now, using a cassette adapter with an iPod. We're going to hook up a Wi-Fi receiver into the back of the car so I can sync the car when it sits in the driveway. Something else, I want something that's on Dave Winer's wishlist. I want a Wifi-enabled MP3 player that uses RSS 2.0 with enclosures as its infrastructure. Microsoft (MSFT)could easily deliver this product and it would span a whole generation of wireless jukeboxes powered by Windows Vista.

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Dave Winer -- "This music gremlin is an interesting idea"
Steve Hamm -- "What Ray Ozzie Can Do for Microsoft"

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Nokia 9500 IP Telephony

AT THE 3GSM WORLD CONGRESS, Jaakko Olkkonen, Nokia's General Manager of Enterprise Voice Solutions, suggested global availability of IP telephony over GSM from Nokia's S60 smart phones will be extended to the Nokia series 80 smart phones by the summer. As a long-time brick users, this would be an interesting development with fantastic battery drain on my camera bag. I carry the phone in my camera bag along with other essentials (iPod and cables).

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Wireless DIY

CORY DOCTOROW points to a wonderful free book that describes how to assemble and maintain a wireless network. "Wireless Networking in the Developing World" is expertly written, including parts by William Flickenger ("Wireless Hacks") and Thomas Krag (wire.less.dk). Many of the writers have built and deployed wireless networks under austere conditions. The book enters the public domain thanks to a very liberal Creative Commons License that encourages others to build on this work. Portions of this work appear as related topics in the data communications course at Tipperary Institute. The comprehensive diagrams, descriptions and background information contained in this excellent resource means you could build a wireless network without referencing the internet. For those in rural Ireland, far from traditional internet access, this book helps set down all the steps, equipment and tests needed to connect people over broadband. What a wonderful use of Creative Commons licensing and a community wiki.

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Limehouse Book Sprint Team -- "Wireless Networking in the Developing World"

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Christmas phones

MORE THAN HALF of my first year (freshmen) multimedia degree students want a new mobile phone for Christmas. Their lust helps drive the mobile phone marketplace--where more than 800m mobile phones will be sold this year. Over 500m of them will have cameras. By 2009, more than 90% of the one billion new mobile phones sold will have cameras.

Free Music over Bluetooth

IN SELECTED HELSINKI LOCATIONS, Nokia, EMI, Free Record Shop and Robert's Coffee are promoting local download of mobile content. Consumers can now download the latest music and related content from EMI artists to their phones in selected Free Record Shop music stores and Robert's Coffee cafés in Helsinki. The service is called bFree. It is also running at the Nokia Mobility Conference in Barcelona.

Another month of pocket feeds below 100

UPDATED: I read 15 MB of newsfeed text on my mobile phone every month. I get no advertisements and no images when using FreeNews.

MY MOBILE FEED diet continues costing me less than EUR 100 a month. That is the fee charged me by O2 for GPRS data each month and most of the 15 MB of data I read on my SE910i is comprised of newsfeeds. I have 80 newsfeeds on my phone because I can read those 80 during dead time on public transport while they are still fresh. If I subscribe to more than those 80, I end up paying for unread news and my data costs exceed EUR 80 per month. For the record, the Boing Boing feed costs me most. The Digg feed provides me best value, with little of noise endemic to Slashdot.

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I read this blog with FreeNews ver.1.0.3.

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Wi-Fi before landline

CASHEL -- It's a measure of how much technology has penetrated our lives when the builder of my house asks, "Do you think I can hang an external antenna on that Wi-Fi router?" If we can hang it out above the roofline, I will have wireless internet access before I have a landline in the new house.

Nokia 9500 turns 100

On the day that I demonstrate to primary school teachers how we use a mobile phone to send mail-to-blog, Flickr told me that the picture of my Nokia 9500 sending mail-to-blog just notched up 100 total viewings. It's part of my Nokia 9500 set (images of the phone in use and images taken by the phone).

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FACT: My Nokia 9500 is giving me more minutes of connectivity at less cost this year than last.

Nokia 9500 instead of laptop

OVERHEAD BIRMINGHAM -- A passenger aboard my Aer Lingus flight saw the notes from a presentation I made in Dublin yesterday. He quipped, "With that kind of mobile phone you don't need to be getting laptops for students". How astute. That's also a conclusion reached by John Kennedy when he reviewed the Nokia 9300 for the Irish Indepedent (23 June 2005).

Green Screen 9500

TIPPINST -- Here's a green screen test with the Nokia 9500. We'll update this test with a link to the video short that we filmed when we wrote and sent this item via email to the IrishEyes weblog.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia 9500 O2 Typepad service.

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Present and available

UNDERWAY -- When away from Ireland as I am at the moment, it is important to let people know when I am available because it costs more to take a call when roaming. On my Nokia 9500, I have special ringtones affiliated with callers who I give priority treatment. For most of the others, I assign a silent ringtone. That way I don't even know they're ringing.

Commencement Address by Steve Jobs

STANFORD -- Steve Jobs, a college drop-out and brilliant executive at Apple and Pixar, addressed the Class of 2005 at Stanford during their commencement exercises. His remarks follow.

Basic phone

TECHNO-CULTURE -- Karlin Lillington writes about the joys of a simple mobile phone on the day that the number one referrer to this blog is about how to hack a Motorola V710 phone. As much as I can empathise with people who want to have a phone that needs no operator's manual, I hardly believe the industry can survive with only a functionally retro approach to mobile communications. The industry cannot sustain itself by servicing grannies who hardly use their minutes.

Neighbourly WiFi

KILKENNY -- When my neighbour turns on her laptop while sitting at her kitchen table, her XP Pro system finds my WLAN and asks whether she wants to connect to the available network. So she occasionally does, especially when out in the back garden under the sun. Does she incur a liability when connecting to my open WiFi node? There is plenty of talk in the Irish tech press about securing your infrastructure but as anyone with an eye to the cheap side can vouch, you can find open WiFi nodes sprinkled all across Dublin. Many of them come courtesy of Eircom, the largest Irish telco. Attorneys have started grappling with issues related to open access and those burning questions will bounce around on Irishblogs as the popularity of wireless technology continues to increase.

Social bookmarks

DLIB -- John Breslin already thinks social bookmarks are a viable pointer to the cross-talk on Irishblogs. If you're new to the concept or don't see the value in meta data, you should at least glance at the general review of social bookmarking tools made by D-Lib magazine.

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Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott -- "Social Bookmarking Tools: A General Review"
Bernie Goldbach's del.icio.us tags

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Walkman phone

SONY ERICSSON -- The London Sony Ericsson crew released more information about their W800 Walkman phone and it promises to set new standards for entertainment. It comes with a half-gig memory stick (enough to hold around six hours of music), USB cable in the box, simple buttons that switch you into music mode (saving power by killing the mobile phone signal), battery rated for 30 hours of playback, and a two-megpixel camera on the back. It's also a mobile phone with all the smart bits associated with a 21st century device. But it's got the Walkman logo on it and that means good things ahead.

The Walkman is heritage worth reviving. I had one of the 340m Walkman music players that have been sold since 1979. My Walkman gave me freedom to buy music in a shop and then enjoy it underway. I hope Sony Ericsson embrace that philosophy with the Walkman phone. It looks easy to rip a CD collection onto the W800 phone but the tracks will be copy-protected using the Open Mobile Alliance's DRM 2.0 specification. You can also bring MP3 tracks across to the memory cards using a drag-and-drop technique without any file protection.

Cameraphone TV

SONY ERICSSON -- I am looking at ways to share images I snap on both the Sony Ericsson S700i and the Nokia 9500. I want to push cameraphone images to televisions. Sony Ericsson is making that easy with their Media Viewers. The latest addition to the fold is the Bluetooth Media Center MMV-200 which enables content to be played directly from a Bluetooth mobile phone on the home TV or stereo sound system.

       

       

                    

   

Wireless in Dublin Airport

DUBLIN -- One of the first questions Euan Semple asked about the Dublin Airport was where to find a hotspot for his wireless laptop. Answer: the end of Terminal A in the Dublin Airport. I showed him my wireless notebook--no power, no leads, plenty of content. He was surprised by the analogue dimension of an important part of my life.

Moodle on Mobiles

DCU -- Three of the five people who saw pictures of students in my Nokia 9210i were shocked that I accepted SMS messages from students. None of them give feedback to students through text messaging. Yet the mobile phone is the closest thing to a computer in most student backpacks--why not leverage it?

Arrested for using Wifi

AKMA -- Actually, only a warning--no arrest--was involved when Reverend Akma defiantly sat outside a public library and used the WiFi signal he found there. The policeman's attitude (grounded in urban legend surrounding proper use of wireless data signals) sounds curiously like that encountered by persons of colour who use mobile phones near the arrivals desk of Dublin airport.

AirPort JustePort Crack

GVSV -- Jon Johansen, author of DeCSS, has discovered the public key that the AirPort Express uses to allow software to play audio through it and posted it to So Sue Me. The public key for AirPort Express is out in the open (see below but no need to check Jon's blog because it's withering under the load). Until Apple "patch" it, anyone could encrypt data using it and get Apple's device to play the music.

Wifi phones around the bend

ZDNET -- Market research suggests there will be more than Nokia 9500 Wi-Fi phones on the Irish market before the end of 2005. These hybrid phones let people make connections using a local wireless Internet access point and seamlessly switch over to a mobile phone network whenever necessary. That capability could save me more than €150 monthly. And fewer minutes on the mobile phone network means better voice traffic for those who want to use network voice services.

SMS Alerts

GLOBETECH -- One of the quiet success stories is the revenue flowing from premium SMS or subscription text alerts in Ireland. Companies like Globetech partner with content providers to offer a range of subscription based SMS alerts. Customers (anyone with a mobile phone) can opt to receive information via SMS text on a daily, twice weekly, weekly or triggered by an event, basis. These are paid for using premium rate SMS, and all revenue is shared.

Motorola iTunes

WSJ -- Next year, Motorola will offer smartphones that can play iTunes. This makes both the iPod and the Motorola phones more desireable. Plus it helps lock in Apple's technology as a de facto standard.

AirPort Express Base Station

APPLE -- There's an important triangulation underway concerning Apple's AirPort Express Base Station. Three of my regular reads have great things to say about it. David Pogue refers to Andy Rooney about the general idea. "Look behind the television set in your living room. It's a rat's nest of electrical cords," Rooney said. "All different - no two the same. If Thomas Edison was so smart, how come he didn't come up with one cord that fits everything?" Apple continues something they started years ago by introducing yet another way to eliminate wires from your life. The pocket-sized €149 AirPort Express is a welcome addition to a home or business trying to connect people without cables. It's one of the simplest ways to connect 10 people at once. You need the bigger base station to connect up to 50 people together.

Sony Ericsson P910

SONY -- People slag me off for the clamshell Nokia 9210i that I use. It's clunky because it has a keyboard. But look at this--Sony Ericsson feels it is necessary to add an integrated Qwerty keyboard to its best-selling, top-end smartphone. The keys aren't as friendly to touch typists as those on the Nokia Communicator. But they're very functional and miles ahead of graffiti or voice-recognition software.

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Moblogged aboard Irish Rail using Nokia Communicator O2 Typepad service.
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Wear and tear on Nokia Communicator

DUBLIN -- Everyone knows mobile phones are commodity items. They are built to be consumed. They are designed to wear out. I'm getting little warnings from my Nokia 9210i that it's time to ensure all back-ups are done and that plans are afoot for a replacement. I figure I have eight weeks left.

Linksys WMLS11B

LINKSYS -- John Handelaar enthuses, "The WMLS11B can play MP3 streams, Windows Media streams and RealMedia streams without a PC. And it has an Ethernet port .... They’ve given it a dumb name - WMLS11B - but they’ve made a new Kerbango. This time it also does WMA. This time it also does wireless. And this time, IT ONLY COSTS EIGHTY QUID." It's available now.

Mesh networking and signal degradation

WIFI NET NEWS -- Sascha Meinrath offers clarifies how Wi-Fi signals degrade on mesh networks, continuing on from earlier comments that had "purposefully oversimplified the throughput degeneration rate."

Free Wi-Fi in Dublin

DUBLIN -- Meeting up in Dublin with some Irish bloggers, I can find free Wi-Fi in two pubs. Solas in Camden Street and the Avoca House in Carysfort Avenue offer free Wi-Fi to customers.

DLink antennas increase range

ZDNET -- Networking-equipment maker D-Link has two new antennas that will increase the range of wireless networks established by D-Link's consumer-targeted Wi-Fi gear. The company said the $29.99 ANT24-0400 2.4GHz Omni-Directional and the $39.99 DWL-M60AT 2.4GHz Directional antennas are available and can be used with select D-Link 802.11b- and 802.11g-based gear.

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Richard Shim -- "D-Link antennas expand Wi-Fi range"
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Goldbach Postscript

INTERCONNECTED -- After reading page 6 of Da Vinci's notebook, I have adopted one of Leonardo Da Vinci's precepts as my own.

RSS for Radio

SEARLS -- Doc Searls offers four tactics involving syndication that radio broadcasters could implement to enhance the reach of their programming. I wonder if I could get Irish radio stations to cop on to RSS. Aggregating programme synopses could be a very big leap forward for the industry. It could even lead to a pay-per-programme listenership with a bolt-on value like RSS enclosure.

Commodity Wi-Fi

THURLES -- As 75 different participants milled around the reception area of a broadband seminar, I noted the commodisation of Wi-Fi kit, including Wi-Fi switches now. Wi-Fi systems are just much less expensive now than they used to be last year. There's really no excuse for a public body to keep Wi-Fi tucked inside its network. People can walk off the street and use the toilets at public venues. They can walk underneath street lamps and get free light. Likewise, they should be able to get free Internet connectivity from community Wi-Fi nodes.

P900 printing

INFOSYNC WORLD -- I thought it was so cool when I sent my first document for printing from my Palm to our office HP printer. Things have gone several steps further now because many HP printers support the Bluetooth Basic Print Profile (BPP).

On the road with 9210i

DUBLIN -- My Nokia Communicator 9210i is my longest-serving mobile phone. I've used it for three years now, posting hundreds of mail-to-blog entries. It needs a new battery because it cannot survive two days of normal use without recharging. Its earpiece is faulty as well--to be expected because I've dropped the phone onto bus floors, carpet, linoleum and tiled floors. Nonetheless, the phone is a mainstay in my life. It's the smallest computer I've used the most often.

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Another mail2blog entry from Dublin's quays.
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Bitbuzz blog

WEIRD WEB -- Alex French, the Bitbuzz guy who seems to have more to do with Dublin Wi-Fi than any other person, has an occasional blog. It's updated more frequently than Karlin, who needs the expert help of someone like Alex to restore her AirPort to proper running order. Funnily enough, the blogosphere lost all contact with Karlin shortly after she spoke out against e-voting in Ireland. Right after her "letters to God from the dog"

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Alex French -- "Weird Web" meet Karlin Lillington -- "techno\culture"
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Open Note to Mobhaile

KILKENNY -- The Irish taxpayer is funding a community portal concept woven around Microsoft Sharepoint and heavy templates. While the developers work on smoothing out the system, I wonder why mobile connectivity (after all, it's coined "Mobhaile" isn't it?) isn't the priority? There are very interesting mobile technology capabilities out there worth leveraging, many appearing in the SmartMobs spotlight every week, some percolating into Irish mobile developers, such as the free developer kits at Semacode.

No computer is more pervasive in Ireland than the cameraphone. Irish citizens are wired on the pavement and community-financed initiatives should connect people at that touchpoint. I see more value-for-money in that proposition than a tired templating process for community portals.

Inverse Surveillance

THE FEATURE -- In the highest rated article in 2004 on The Feature, Howard Rheingold outlines reasons why cameraphones should be used as a "inverse surveillance" tools. "They could create an opportunity for the public to snoop on the snoops and watch the watchers." Rheingold is on message and attracts a host of equally pointed commentators appended to his essay. His theme echoes Steve Mann's ideas of citizen "sousveillance" from 10 years ago.

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Howard Rheingold -- "Inverse Surveillance: What we should do with all those phonecams"
David Brin -- Clever technology helps people act resiliently.
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Free Wi-Fi in Dublin fades with Presidency

KILKENNY -- After spotting an Eircom Wi-Fi node in the lobby of the Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel, I remembered problems people had mentioned concerning that flavour of Wi-Fi and also recalled how the days of free Wi-Fi in Dublin are directly related to the days remaining in the Irish hosting the European Presidency.

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boards.ie -- "Any free wireless zones in Ireland"
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Two-way SMS

BOARDS -- The mobile and the wireless section of boards.ie often carries interesting material about wireless applications, in addition to tips about using phones. I followed one thread that explained two-way SMS applications, such as a voting application, and its handling of large amounts of text messages. The Nokia Communicators can handle this kind of thing in a venue. I've also used a Nokia D211 on my laptop to handle SMS polls.

Dodgeball

DODGEBALL -- Dearbhaile Hanley explains Dodgeball better than the front page of its site. If we could code together the local bits on the back of our SMS Gateway, hang some code base from server-side projects already running in Tipperary, I think we would have instant critical mass. For starters, there is a higher ratio of mobile phones to twentysomethings in Irish cities than in NYC.

Nokia 7650 BT Advice

DEVICE ADVICE -- Brian (dubwireless) Greene gives an excellent tutorial on Bluetooth with the Nokia 7650, including pairing, setting up, and connecting. The Nokia 7650 uses the mRouter software from Intuwave to bridge between the local computer's BT adapter and the 7650 over the Serial Port Profile. You should use Nokia's PC Suite V1.1.0 on the computer side of the connection.

If you buy a phone more frequently than once a year, you should monitor the conversations on the Mobile Boards.

Some cross-talk from the discussion provides useful background info about Bluetooth and mobile phones.

• rymus: "Nokia bluetooth card (DLT-4) ... has gone out of production."
• sirlinux: "if you connect a bluetooth serial port to the phone then setup as per a normal serial port using the bluetooth serial port it all works."
• dubwireless: "two 7650 apps I have seen use the PC Suite as a 'pass through' internet connecition was the IRC and IM+ Instant Messanger apps."

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Brian Greene -- "How To Connect Widcomm based Bluetooh software (e.g. TDK and Billington) and the Nokia 7650"
Boards.ie -- "7650 Bluetooth and your PC"
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National Irish WAN Meeting

IRISH WAN --The national conference of the Irish Wide Area Network will happen on Saturday, April 24, 2004 in The Auditorium, WIT, Waterford and I wonder if the bloggers from the southeast want to arrange a break-out session for a chat on the day.

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Irish WAN -- National Conference
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Dublin Wi-Fi through San Jose

IRISH TIMES -- Danny O'Brien made some interesting observations about Dublin Wi-Fi while watching free Wi-Fi service being rolled out in San Jose last week.

• The mayor off San Jose is rolling out free Wi-Fi access to downtown San Jose, but anybody with Net Stumbler quickly discovers a host of overlapping signals already in the same spectrum.
• It costs San Jose hotel guests the same to connect to Wi-Fi there as upmarket hotels charge in Dublin--around EUR 10 for a half day.
• Dublin is slowly filling in with Wi-Fi points. BitBuzz and O2 have strong points of presence. Dublin WAN offers a community option as well.
• The brick and granite walls of Dublin severely curtail the coverage of each local node.

O'Brien acknowledges the enthusiasm of local citizenry who are well-able to configure local nodes without requiring big government to kickstart their efforts.

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Danny O'Brien -- "Royston kicks to touch on Dublin emulating San Jose's WiFi initiative" in The Irish Times Wired on Friday, March 26, 2004.
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Wi-Fi Dublin

DUBLIN -- Buswell's Hotel offers free Wi-Fi service until 23 April. The centre city hotel is familiar to anyone in the Dublin chapter of the National Union of Journalists because it offers a venue for regular meetings. The pub area is a great place to capture strings of conversation related to important items of business affecting the national agenda as government buildings are located all around Buswell's. I have never seen a laptop being used in the pub area. I wonder if free Wi-Fi service will change anything--much of the clientele is very set in its ways and not the kind of a crowd associated with early adoption of technology.

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Anthony Quinn -- "New Dublin wireless hotspot goes live" covered by ElectricNews.net and SiliconRepublic.com
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Intelligent Mobile

KILKENNY -- I live in a part of Ireland where my mobile phone signal sucks when rain falls. And to compound my frustrations, it rains a lot in Ireland. While visiting Motorola in Cork last week, I learned that help was at hand--Motowifi is close by. Motorola have Wi-Fi at the baseband of several of their phones already. This means the little phones can offer Wi-Fi connectivity with no added requirements. It's a growing capability. The percentage of mobile phones that are Wi-Fi enabled will grow from near 0 percent last year to 85 percent by 2007, predicts On World, a San Diego, CA-based wireless-market research firm. This could mean I will have one less device in my bag by 2010.

Cover your tracks with background noises

SIMEDA -- If you have selected versions of Nokia phones, you can run software that plays background noises when you're on a call. You can select from a traffic jam, roadworks, dentist's office and a circus. Press the "down" key on your Nokia phone and the background noise plays for you.

Sharing bandwidth

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- So you want to share your Eircom broadband connection and want to do it wirelessly. If you already operate a small Wi-Fi network, the easiest solution would be to plug a wireless device into the Eircom-supplied DSL modem (a Netopia modem). Your best buy is the Linksys WRT 54g (€140). It plugs into the existing set-up very easily and it super-quick to set up and manage.

Carriers should stay out of content

JOI ITO -- Four years ago, when the Irish delegation at MILIA was larger than would fit on the government jet, experts extolled "content is king" and pundits explained how the big boys should develop original content. The biggest players in Ireland bought that line. They permitted their content divisions to create new media, but for only two years. Then they switched them off and shuttered their content businesses. Joi Ito thinks that it is "a bad idea for the mobile carriers to get into the content business" mainly because "people will fill their mobile devices from their flat-fee low-cost pipe" and "most content isn't time sensitive."

Free Wi-Fi Dublin Pub

DUBLIN -- Visit the canteen in the Smurfit Business School and you will see laptops on most tables. So it comes as no big surprise that a local pub offers free Wi-Fi for all comers. The Avoca House on Carysfort Avenue, just down the street from the Smurfit campus, is the first pub in Dublin to offer an always-free service. I've used the Bitbuzz network in The Front Longue but it's scheduled to go commercial. The Market Bar near Drury Street has free Wi-Fi access too. You have to ask the bar staff for a log-on sequence and you're good for the day.

Cost of GPRS

JOI ITO -- One week after he got a mobile phone bill for $3500, Joi Ito is ratcheting back his moblogging. "Sorry about the sparse blogging the last few days," he says, after he foolishly used a Nokia 6600 Bluetooth/GRPS connection for Internet operations with a Powerbook while roaming. That (inadvertent business customer) usage pattern explains why both Vodafone and O2 enjoy profit margins above 25%.

Vodafone settings

BOARDS -- Brian Greene and friends have priceless information in the Mobiles/PDAs Discussion Zone of Boards.ie, including settings for Vodafone.

Intextication

SMART MOBS -- I save inadvertent racy text messages that arrive to my mobile phone. They areentertaining digital artefacts. Invariably, they are sent at night by someone well past the legal limit for safe driving. Their phone technique confirms their drunken state and their writing style normally points to a late-night mating ritual. The Sunday Mail, in a January article, calls "texting under the influence" intextication.

According to research by Virgin Mobile, out of the 60 million texts sent daily in December, 15 million of them are sent by people who have had one too many. Virgin said that two thirds of women who text while drunk send messages to former lovers and some text the wrong
person. A public relations officer in London sent a sexually explicit message to dad instead of boyfriend Dan after hitting the wrong button. Oops.

Parents who give their teenagers mobile phones as gifts might be
surprised to know that once their kids are on the network, they could well be inside a nightclub scene. Oftentimes, only a single digit separates their teenagers from textual intercourse with hen's nights on the
prowl.

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Sunday Mail --"Intexticating"
Emily -- "Texting under the influence"
Joi Ito -- "I'm glad I'm not intexticated"
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Notable absence

SBP -- Adrian Weckler admires four gadgets.¹ Notably, a mobile phone is not among the four items he cites. I suspect that if he had a Motorola V525, he would list it as a "must-have item." At the moment, he values four gadgets above all others.

Wireless Internet for College

TEMPLE BAR -- Around a year ago, I spotted some guys in the Waterford Institute of Technology doing some Wi-Fi work next to the school cafeteria. I fired up my TransNote, couldn't detect the node and thought it was just a circle of interested hackers. It was more. It affects what I am doing in Temple Bar with Dun Laoghaire College of Art Design and Technology.