The entertainment industry is shifting. Video games dominate all forms of media as an estimated 46 billion dollar industry. Your local video chain likely carries as many video games as it does DVDs. Blueray has beaten HD-DVD as the new media for watching movies at home, but it has the potential to be squashed by digital downloads. Not watching movies on your computer, but rather watching them on a box that is already hooked up to your entertainment system: your gaming console.

Netflix has existed for several years as a DVD-by-snail-mail service. This year they released the Roku box in the US that lets you subscribe to your Netflix service as digital downloads rather than DVDs. 10,000s of movies for $9 a month plus the cost of a $100 box.

I’ve been using my Xbox 360 with a media server for watching movies and TV shows for a few months now and it is so much more convient than having to deal with DVDs. On Monday Microsoft announced that they’d be partnering with Netflix for the Xbox 360. This is huge because Netflix is already a proven movie subscription model that works, and now they’re working with a gaming console that millions of people already own instead of yet another standalone box.

It sounds like the update next fall will fix quite a few other issues that have been bugging me as an Xbox 360 owner. Some of the planned updates:

Netflix

Netflix subscribers who are also Xbox Live Gold subscribers can stream movies from their Netflix queue for free. Unfortunately Netflix still isn’t available to Canadians.

Load Times

Trying to navigate through your Xbox Live arcade games / demos is painful. It can take up to a minute for games to load. Navigating your music library is equally as painful. They should cache the data to the local hard drive.

Xbox Marketplace on the Web

Trying to find something on the Xbox Marketplace is next to impossible. A web interface would be much simpler and would allow for easy searching.

Rip to Hard Drive

Games can be copied to hard drive to play faster (and quieter).

“Live Party”

I’m hoping this will let you set up the equivalent to a “chat channel” amongst your friends. One of my biggest pet peeves with using the 360 for voice communication is that I can’t set up a private group of just my friends when playing a multiplayer game unless that game itself supports that.

I don’t want to talk with people I don’t know online.

What I’d Like To See

There are some big improvements, but there’s still room for more. Here are a few things I’d like to see for my 360 to earn it’s spot in my TV room.

Targetted Content

The current Xbox 360 interface already offers a few advertisement locations. These are horribly used. Microsoft knows my play history for all of my games. They should be data mining that information and targetting advertisement for games I’m likely to want to play based on the games I usually play.

They don’t even do a good job of highlighting that there’s downloadable content available for the games I am currently playing.

Photo Zoom

I’m absolutely flabbergasted that we can’t zoom into pictures on the 360. It seems like it would be a very trivial application to support. Zooming would offer up some interesting 3rd party hacks like reading web comics / downloaded CBZ/CBR files as image files or converting e-books to images.

There has already been a homebrew Nintendo DS web surfer program that works by converting web pages to images on the DS.

Videos

There’s no reason why the Xbox 360 can support more video codecs. I’d really like to be able to play anything I download on the 360 without having to re-convert it.

Video Meta Data

We need something like ID3 tags for video files. I’d love to be able to tag my digitized video collection with director, main actors, and Rotten Tomatoes scores as well as being able to navigate by cover art like I can with my music collection.

Xbox Homebrew

The Xbox 360 already has a homegrew gaming development community, but they’ve starved it by charging a yearly fee to access it. I got to play some of the games when they had a free trial offer a few months ago, and while there were some gems there was nothing to compell me to pay the fee.

This is a huge shortsightedness, by making the games freely available to Xbox 360 gold members they would be giving hobby developers a huge reason to develop games on the play form. Sure, charge developers to have their games listed as that will weed out the utter crap, but at least let them have an audience.

Web Browsing

There’s no reason why the Xbox 360 couldn’t be used as a web browser. There’s even a neat little keyboard attachment you can buy that fits in with the controller. I’d be pretty happy if I could pause a game, check my email, and write a quick response.

I’m surprised Opera hasn’t teamed up with the 360 team to develop a pay browser like they did with the Nintendo DS.

The news du jour is Microsoft Home Server (blog of developer here, product page here, TechMeme coverage).

This is a great product idea, if properly executed. I consider myself a “tech power user” and I already have a home server setup where I mirror backups across multiple computers and stream media to my Xbox 360. This Christmas I wanted to add 500 GB to my home network and the deciding feature on my list was the ability to stream to the Xbox 360. I couldn’t find something to do it that was easily available at the local electronics store — next year my story might be different.

Removable media (CD-R / DVD-R) is more hassle than it’s worth for backups. It takes approximately 10 minutes a disc to restore from a backup. I deal with a lot of digital media (music, movie/tv, photography, comic scans) and if I have a system wipe out I’m looking at DAYS (if not WEEKS) to restore everything from disc. I’m not going to. I had a 60 GB drive with music fail in 2000 and I still haven’t restored from backup. Hard drives are cheap and it is far more time effective to mirror to another drive over a network. It’s logical to think we’ll eventually be doing it over the internet.

With the Microsoft Home Server adoption it’s going to be all about the price point and Xbox 360 integration. If it’s comparable to what it would cost me to buy a PC of my own then I would buy it for the form-factor alone. If it can handle things like printer sharing, running an FTP/Web site, and Xbox 360 connectivity then it is going to be an easy sell. Like anyone who has seen Microsoft’s track record I have security concerns, but they’ve done a good job with the 360 — as long as they limit what can be done with the Home Server they’ll be fine.

Microsoft has a huge opportunity with the sales of the 360 over the past year. The 360 has already become a strong competitor for video-on-demand (with television and movies on demand available), giving Microsoft a channel into home entertainment. If they have seamless integration between the Home Server and the Xbox 360, then they are a shoe-in to convert the existing Xbox 360 user base into Home Server sales.

RedFlagDeals has a nice round up of all of the boxing day deals in Canada. The already have all of the boxing day flyers online. And they offer a nice reminder that some of the online store sales have started tonight (Future Shop, Best Buy, NCIX).

Online shopping is the way to go as you avoid all of the hassle (the biggest problem is trying to log on to the web site).

There are a lot of DVD, comic book trade paperback and video game sales to be had, all from the convience of your computer desk.

You might be able to use the flyers for price matching at competing stores.

Some super finds at Best Buy

• Various internal/external hard drives at half price.
• Half-price RAM.
• Half-price memory cards for digital cameras.
• Less than $20-40 for Wireless G routers.
• $200 off Logitech Harmony 880 Advanced Universal Remote Control ($100)
  • or $40 off of the 659/550
  • my review of my Logitech Harmony 628
• $700 off Sharp 32″ AQUOS High Definition LCD Widescreen TV ($900)
• $700 off Samsung 56″ 1080p Widescreen DLP Projection HDTV ($2400)
  • Free $250 upconverting DVD player with it
• $600 off Toshiba 50″ Widescreen DLP Projection HDTV ($1400)
• $100 off Xbox 360 Holiday Bundle (includes 2 games, wireless controller, hard drive and headset) ($400)
• Movies: Heat ($6), Spiderman 1 ($7), Spiderman 2 ($7), Closer ($10), Final Fantasy ($10), Thank You for Smoking ($10), Sin City ($5)
• PC Games: World of Warcraft ($9), Company of Heroes ($20)
• Xbox 360 Games: Gears of War ($50), Marvel Ultimate Alliance ($40)
• Nintendo DS $130

Future Shop

• I/O Magic External 500 GB HD ($200, door crasher)
• Same price on Xbox 360 holiday bundle as Best Buy, but they’re throwing in “the Outfit” game.
• Xbox games: Halo 2 ($12), Fable ($10)

CompuSmart

• PC Games: Neverwinter Nights 2 ($40)
• Rest of prices worse than Best Buy

Amazon.ca

• 50% off nonfiction, mysteries and thrillers
• DVDs: Harry Potter movies ($13 each), OC Season 1&2 ($48 each), Analyze This ($9)

HMV.com

• Online (because they’re teamed up with amazon, they have better deals in the store)
  • Family Guy Vol 4 ($30)
• In store
  • Hot DVDs: $5.99, up to 80% off
  • Hot CDs: $7.99, up to 70% off
  • Box sets: $19.99, up to 33% off
  • Buy 2 DVDs, Get 1 Free (selection of 100)

The Dell Canada prices are worse than Best Buy for non-computer items.

Federated Media has gotten gadget reviews from several bloggers together under one roof.

A collaboration between nine tech-savvy bloggers, the Federated Media Holiday Gadget Guide aims to get readers up to speed on the must-have devices, electronic toys, and other can’t-miss gifts of the 2006 holiday season. The Guide will also assist readers in weighing their choices among competing devices — e.g. PS3 vs. Wii and iPod vs. Zune.

Surprisingly enough, you can’t find a comparison of PS3 vs Wii on there, despite what their “about me” page says.

The Microsoft Zune is available for purchase and now the age old battle of rivals has entered the digital music player market. Which is better? I have an iPod and I’ve never laid my hands on a Zune, so rather than repeat web hyperbole I’ll link to it instead.

(Ah, blog posts that just seem to write themselves)

BBSpot does a side-by-side comparison of the Zune and iPod based on the most important features that most tech journals have been ignoring. They’ve done the same for Firefox vs Internet Explorer in case you were wondering. Great reading for a friday afternoon.

For a more serious comparison:

• Roughly Drafted debunks the 10 “Zune is better than iPod” myths — MUST READ
• Gizmodo compares Design, Screen, UI, Software, and Sharing
• ZuneScene side-by-side chart (pro Zune)
• Side-by-side photos
• Zune FAQ

(This is pure fanboyism. I’m not going to lie to you, it could get a little ugly and/or boring.)

I love my Logitech Harmony Remote 628. I bought it at half-price on one of those crazy online Boxing Day sales last year. I bought it knowing it was an older model, but not caring because I wanted to get out of the five remote hell I’d been sequestered in for no apparent reason for several years. It is one of the best gadget purposes I’ve made in recent times, and tonight it proved itself again.

Sure, the blue casing matches absolutely nothing in my home theatre, and I have to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox but these are sacrifices I’m willing to make. I even shrug off the Big Brother implications of an Orwellian Logitech that knows the make and model of every piece of equipment in my den, and how often I purchase something new.

This doesn’t sound like me. The reason why might shock you. It’s because They Got It Right.

I’m blogging about it approximately 10 months after purchase because it hasn’t irritated me at all during that time period.

This is one of those kookie remotes that comes with a USB cable. Connect it to your computer, swing over to the Logitech Harmony website, and login to your user account. You’re presented with an easy to use Wizard that knows all the equipment you have. Reconfiguring the remote is as simple as adjusting the settings as much as you want on the website, for as long as you want, clicking Update Remote and then they do their magic on the Logitech website to save it all as an executable file that automatically updates your remote.

And it works. No hassle. It lets you do everything from remapping buttons to deciding which devices can be on at the same time when you do an Activity (watching TV, watching a DVD, playing X-Box, listening to music). Because the list of device is constantly maintained by Logitech, it knows what an X-Box 360 is even though the remote is much older.

It has a built-in 6-button navigable LCD display, but you’ll hardly ever use it — only when you want to turn one device on/off at a time instead of using an Activity button.

This remote is a joy to touch. It ergonomically fits the contours of your hand and the silicon buttons feel like they belong on something kept by the bedside, not by the TV.

But my favorite feature by far is the button in the middle that makes everything light up with a soft blue glow. I especially like how it’s textured differently so it’s always easy to find.

I thought the Logitech Harmony remotes were overpriced before I had one, but now I think they’re worth every penny — especially if you can get an older model on sale.

Full disclosure: Logitech’s never given me anything for free. I’ve just been happy with (most of) their products :)

Related Posts

• Other posts in Gadgets, Reviews, Logitech

I’m another one of those bloggers who got a free cellphone, and while mine wasn’t as shiny and new as Joel’s (and for damned sure the service provider Rogers didn’t foot the bill), I know I did complain about it. His rant takes the cake though.

I like the idea of getting free stuff. But if you don’t have a good product that’s ready for primetime, all you’ll get is a lot of negative press.

>> Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint!

There’s an interesting prediction that 2006 is the year that the iPod will die. I have a Nokia 6682 (2005 release, review starts here) with half a gig of memory. While I have used it for listening to music, it hasn’t come close to replacing my 4th generation 40 GB iPod.

Here are the reasons:

• Cellphone music transfers use USB 1.1, so take an unbearably long time.
  • I don’t have an MMC card reader on my “MP3″ computer.
• The Nokia MP3 player chokes on a lot of MP3 files (SymbianOggPlay fixes this)
• I may always have my phone on me, but I don’t always have my ear-buds with me, and old ladies throw loose change and lint-covered hard candies at me if I try to use the loudspeaker.

We’re still in an age where the best convergent device is a cellphone, a Nano, and a digital camera tied together with a piece of duct-tape.

After the break, why I think the iPod will die.

I use my phone for playing Su Doku, checking movie times and occasionally listening to music — but it’s still not even close to replacing my main gadgets. I don’t disagree that the iPod craze is coming to an end, I might consider diversifying more if I worked at a company whose sole business model is iPod accessories. What I strongly disagree with is the timeline. I think the year is more like 2008 when we’ll start to notice this.

Here are the reasons why I think the iPod will die (aka “finally lose a significant portion of market-share”):

• If my cellphone can play music and I always have my cellphone with me, what else do I need?
  • Cellphone ear buds with a built-in headset (like the ones Nokia produces) are simply the best thing about having a cellphone MP3 player. Calls automatically interrupt your music, you press a button on the headset and talk, press again to end call and restart the music. Genius.
• Only idiots would pay $10-$14 for 640×480 digital video downloads.
  • But, I didn’t think they’d be able to sell music videos online and apparently they have for $1-$2 a piece. Suddenly all the “music videos on YouTube” contraversy makes sense.
  • The iTunes Movie Store will be very popular, but anyone who downloads from it should have mandatory sterilization. Unfortunately, they’ve already procreated.
• Wi-fi is a natural extension of how people want to use a music player.
  • This is the only reason why Microsoft’s Zune will gain market-share.
  • Much like blue-jacking, there will be an inordinate amount of people “pushing” their podcasts to random people on the bus.
• Streaming radio will be the death of MP3.
  • I’ve been using last.fm exclusively for a few months and it’s so much more natural to how I want to listen to music. I want to quickly choose genres/artists I’m interested in at that moment and then have it auto-select what it thinks I want to hear next — continually improving as I love/hate songs.
  • No one tags their friggin’ MP3s properly, making managing a large MP3 collection more work than it’s worth.
  • Backing up your MP3 collection to CD/DVD sounds smart, but it takes on average 10 minutes a CD to recover the data to the computer. I had a hard drive crash in 2000 and I *still* haven’t restored my 200 GB of MP3 back-ups.

Of course, this is all pretty moot since the iPhone is around the corner.

>> 2006: the year the i-Pod died

>> Nails into the coffin of the iPod: revisiting blog “2006 the year iPod died”

>> Why the iPod will never die�

Related Posts

• Other posts tagged Gadgets, Nokia 6682, Mobile Phones, iPod, Music
• Nokia 6682 review
• uPlayMe – social friendfinder by mp3 playlist
• Where is the last.fm or Pandora application for mobile phones?

I sure took my time writing part four of this series. It’s bad when you need to apply “Getting to Done” on your hobbies. In this part of the series I’ll be covering freeware applications, battery life and updating the firmware on your phone.

Synopsis:

• How to synchronize with Google Calendar.
• Battery life good, but not great.
• Music transfer is S-L-O-W.
• Tons of freeware available, along with my picks.
• Reading RSS feeds on the phone.
• Don’t upgrade the firmware.

But don’t you want to read the full text in all it’s glory?

Synchronizing Calendars and Contacts

In my first post in this series I mentioned that one of my goals was automatic synching of:

• contacts between the phone and Gmail,
• and calendar between phone, work and Google Calendar.

I’m happy to say I was able to get things synched painlessly and for free. See the complete details in the Holy Grail of Synchronization.

Battery Life

The battery life on the phone is so-so. Here are some techniques for improving it:

• Charge for 12 hours straight the first time you get it.
• Make sure it completely discharges and then recharges the first three times you charge it.
• These steps are true for all electronic rechargeable devices. You can find out more about it on the second page of your manual.
• Turn off Bluetooth. Having Bluetooth on will cut down your battery life by more than half.

Nokia says the battery lasts 4 hours talk time and 11 hours standby. CNet rates the battery life in real world of 4 hours talk time and 9 days of standby.

I’ve heard up to 5 days, but realistically more like 1-2 days of charge if using the non-phone features. Battery life should be about 8 hours of MP3 play.

There is debate about whether or not having applications running (screensaver, autolock) will affect battery life.

The easiest way I found to discharge my Nokia 6682 is to use the Torch application. See below.

Music Transfer Speed

The music transfer speed is better with the new version of the Nokia PC Suite that came out on August 3rd, 2006. It’s still a bit painful at over ten minutes to transfer an album (without converting to AAC), but at least it’s bearable. Why is the phone USB 1.1 instead of USB 2.0? Unfortunately, I only have a MMC card reader on my laptop.

A Note About Data Plans

Rogers offers an entirely reasonable monthly plan of $3 for 2 megabyte. The only problem is the ridiculous $0.03 a kilobyte if you go beyond 2 MB. The first two MB cost $3 and the next one costs $30? That’s stupid.

How big is 2 MB? Sending four photos from your phone to an online image hosting would go over the 2 MB limit.

One of the qualifications for the freeware applications I mention has to be that they are usable without using GRPS wireless data, because I can’t afford it. Well, I can afford it, but I’d feel pretty stupid spending that much money.

Finding Applications for your Phone

The biggest strength of the 6682 is the wide variety of applications that are available. There are many phones running the same operating system and the software applications are compatible.

The Nokia 6682 is a Symbian series 60 (s60) version 2.0 device. If software supports 6680 / 6681 then it should support the 6682. See a list of all S60 phones.

Essential Freeware Applications

IMPORTANT: Keep a backup of your software on your computer! And back it up to CD/DVD. You can’t copy software from your phone back to your computer, and at some point you are going to wipe out all the software on your phone. Good luck trying to find stuff again.

If you’ve lost the applications that came with your phone on the MMC card, they are *only* available on the European Nokia 6681 page. (If the link moves, go to Nokia UK and find support for the 6681)

Autolock is an essential feature on older Nokia phones that is missing on the Nokia 6682. My friend Aaron was getting tired of my pocket calling him. I don’t know why, my pocket is a great conversationalist.

F-Secure Anti-virus. Good idea before you start trying out lots of applications.

TaskSpy is an application manager much like the Task Manager in Windows. Switches, closes, or kills applications and frees up memory. The same developer makes a file explorer called Y-Browser.

FExplorer is a better file explorer. It lets you access any file on your phone.

Torch lets you use your phone as a flashlight. Great for discharging the battery.

PocketSudoku is the only game I need on my phone.

Non-essential Freeware Applications

Opera Mobile Web Browser. Version 8.60 is free for 6682 owners. I wish I had an unlimited data rate plan.

• Symbian Ogg Play skinable music player for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. There’s even a skin to make it look like Winamp or an iPod.
• Much better player, still has 34:09 limit on displaying MP3 progress bar size.
• Fast forward is much faster (can do minutes at a time instead of 6 second increments).
• It handled all of the files that the Nokia Music Players couldn’t handle.
• Skins have to be installed on the same memory as the player (phone or MMC). Move files between memories is fairly simple using FExplorer.
• Make sure to set up your hotkeys as the default is ‘no keys’.

  Options >> Settings >> Hotkeys

Symplification has an amazing bundle of freeware software for S60 phones. I use the bundled “Nokturno” theme by Diezelsoft. Highlights:

• Calcium calculator
• Cocktail drink library, put in ingredients and it will tell you what it can make
• FExplorer file explorer
• ReadM eBook reader
• TaskSpy shows memory usage, CPU load, active processes and frees RAM.
• Torch slang for flashlight in UK, displays a white screen so you can use the phone as a flashlight
• various games, not all of them ran on my 6682
• various themes

Untried Freeware Applications

These are ones that sounded cool, but I never got around to trying. Now you know why this part of the review took forever to write.

Bemused lets you control Winamp on your computer over Bluetooth using your phone. This makes me want to buy a Bluetooth adapter for my computer.

XXL Screensaver lets you change your screensaver to something different. I don’t use it.

There are a lot of applications for screenshot capture.

You can even play DOOM on your phone.

Simple time tracker to create CSV data files that can be loaded into a spreadsheet.

eBook Maker. Create your own books. I prefer iSilo.

Photographer’s calculator for depth of field from aperture and focal length.

Egg Clock egg timer. Set up simple countdown timers.

Google Maps for Mobiles (requires net connection). Again, I wish I had unlimited data rate

Simple calendar import/export. Never tried it, because I use the Nokia Phone Sync to Outlook Calendar.

Helix Player music/video player. Might be better than Symbian Ogg Play.

Offline RSS Feeds

Because I don’t have an unlimited data rate plan, I wanted to be able to read webpages offline by downloading them on my computer and synchronizing them to my phone using the USB cable. These were the possible solutions I found:

• AvantGo – should have worked but didn’t support offline synching with the Nokia 6682.
• Mobipocket – offline sync worked, but it does a HORRIBLE job of converting HTML.
• iSilo – costs money, but does an amazing job. Worth it.

If you do have an unlimited data plan, MobileRSS does a good job of converting RSS feeds into a format that is readable in your phone’s web browser.

Application Development

Nokia’s embracing of standards and open source software makes me feel tingly inside. Even though I’m sure I’d never use it, it makes me happy that I could run Perl, Python or Apache on my phone. It looks like application development for S60 phones is simple, so if there is a killer app you need you could always make it yourself.

The Nokia forums have great advice for beginning mobile application developers.

“Best” Software

There is a brand of software out there that starts with the name “Best”. The descriptions sound very useful, but they *really* suck. Don’t waste your money.

Lists of Freeware Applications

If you looking for themes, MobileThemes has tons.

• The SymbianWiki has a list of Series 60 Freeware.
• The Symbian s60 homepage.
• Russel Beattie has a list of what software is on his Nokia 6680.
• GetJar has a list of free Java applications for 6682.
• S60 Freeware. And Symbian Freeware.
• MySymbian’s list of S60 freeware.
• Gadget 17’s list.
• UK Online’s list.
• Simon Judge’s list.
• AllAboutSymbian’s list.
• Symplification is a great blog for Nokia/Symbian information.

Firmware

I thought that firmware upgrades were only available via Nokia stores, but I was able to do it over the Internet.

• Check your firmware version by typing *#0000#
• Connect the phone to the computer with the USB cable
• Plug the phone into the wall electrical socket with the charger
• Visit this webpage using Internet Explorer

Note: It seems like Nokia changes their URLs every five minutes, so go to http://www.nokia.co.uk/ and search for your model number (or the European version of your model number, ie: 6681 instead of 6682).

The good news: firmware updating over the Internet works!

The bad news: It’s the same friggin’ version that I already had (4.41.0 12-10-05 RM-58), and updating the firmware wiped out any software/themes/settings I had stored, as well as screwing up my contacts. !@#$ Why don’t they list the firmware revision before you download it? Someone must die.

Secret Codes (k0d3z!one!!!)

GoSymbian has a list of all the special codes (like *#0000# for firmware version).

Got any more suggestions or disagree with my choice of software? Please post a comment.

VERDICT

People Who Should Get Raises (Cumulative)

• Nokia Headphone developers.
• Image Store auto-sync developer.
• SyncML initiative.
• Nokia Open Source inititative. I was so much happier with my phone once I added free software.

People Who Should Get Reprimanded (Cumulative)

• People who developed the PC Suite Contacts Editor. It’s not finished!
• Person who changed text entry to support accents without having an option to restrict it to only English character.
• Web designer who doesn’t put the firmware number on the firmware update page.

People Who Should Get Fired (Cumulative)

• Person(s) at Rogers responsible for their data rate costs.
• Person who decided to call a non-blog-centric application Lifeblog. *Everyone* thinks it should be used for moblogging from your phone. Manage expectations and change the name to “Lifelog”.
• Person who designed (I use the term loosely) the wrist strap.
• “1 Trial Use” bundled software.
• Person who decided to only include the extra applications on the MMC card and not on the CD-ROM.
• Person who developed the half-sized MMC card adapter that I can never, ever detach.
• Person who decided the PC Suite application would only support Microsoft/Lotus.
• Person who decided on USB 1.1 for a phone released in 2005.
• The Nokia USA web team. Why are the support links missing on your site? Why do I have to go to the Nokia UK site to find good support for my phone?

Other posts in this series:

• Part 1: Initial Opinion
• Part 2: Software Applications
• Part 3: Contacts, Camera, Headset
• Part 4: Freeware Applications, Battery Life, and Updating Firmware

Related posts:

• Other posts tagged with Gadgets, Nokia 6682, Mobile Phones
• The Holy Grail of Synchronization: How to synchronize Microsoft Outlook (multiple locations), Google Calendar, Gmail, iPod, and mobile phone with Funambol / ScheduleWorld.

Full disclosure: I’m reviewing a new mobile phone I got for free from a marketing company in Toronto called matchstick.ca. They gave me a sweet package as well:

• Nokia 6682 Phone with USB connector and charger
• 512 MB memory upgrade
• Bluetooth Headset
• Extra headphones

Because I just know I’m going to lose the instructions.

Other Posts

• Sale on Logitech Headphones at BestBuy (and info on how to fix them)

SmartphoneWare makes (read: has purchased the rights to) a wide variety of Symbian software applications with the name “Best” in the title. Some of their software seems very useful like Best Answering Machine and Best Full Screen Caller.

On the surface, Best Answering Machine seems like a great idea. Modern smartphones easily have the capability to act as their own voice-mail. The only reason why it isn’t provided by default is because of collusion between cellphone manufacturers and cell service providers. But the implementation of Best Answering Machine on the Nokia 6682 is utterly horrible for one reason: it plays the recorded message on the loudspeaker as the caller leaves the message. Voice-mail playback is on the loudspeaker as well.

I hope this is an unintentional side effect of poor hardware support and not a design decision. If it wasn’t for this deal breaker, this would be a great application to cut the service provider out of the equation. Instead it is useless.

What is the point of not answering your phone during a meeting or a movie if it plays on the loudspeaker while they leave a message? Who wants to broadcast their private messages for the entire neighbourhood to hear?

Despite the suckage of “Best” Answering Machine, I gave Best Full Screen Caller a try. There were numerous issues with image aquisition. When I finally successfully associated a picture with the contact info it STILL didn’t show up when I tried calling from my home number.

According to SmartphoneWare both of these applications support the Nokia 6682.

However, all was not lost. Best Phone Reminder does work. It makes your phone beep every 5 minutes if you have missing phone calls and you haven’t looked at your call log. But worth $10? Don’t think so.

UPDATE: I take that back. Best Phone Reminder has saved me from ignoring so many missed calls that I think it’s worth the money. Even if it is a fairly simple app.

I’m really not impressed with SmartphoneWare. Especially when I look at something like Best Taskman that looks like a poor attempt to rip off the freeware TaskSpy application.

* I’m not advocating piracy, I’m increasing the chance this post shows up in search results so that would-be pirates know not to waste their time.

This is driving me nuts. What I’m looking for should be too hard to find, but for some reason I can’t get my hands on it.

There are two things I want:

First: An application for S60/Symbian/J2ME phones that can read web pages or RSS feeds OFFLINE. I live in a draconian part of the world that does not offer flat rate data plans for anything ressembling a reasonable plan.

For some reason when I try to use Opera or the built in phone browser it always makes the assumption that I want to surf using GRPS. A perfectly valid assumption if I did not live in a Syberian gulag (aka Ottawa).

Second: I want a PC application that will automatically synchronize specified files with my phone when I hook it up to my PC. This isn’t really a big deal, I could hack together a script to do it in minutes, but if there is something out there that does this already then I want to know about it.

After the break, my results with various solutions.

Solutions That Should Have Worked But Don’t:

AvantGo does support non-GRPS synching provided you can connect your phone to your desktop Internet connection via Bluetooth or USB. Unfortunately that is not supported by the Nokia 6682. Which is too bad, because that one feature would make this phone so much more useful.

MobiReader does offline synching of RSS feeds (which it calls eNews). The only problem is that it’s eNews viewer looks like crap. It has *huge* problems with viewing and navigating pages. For instance, <P> gets converted to spaces (only <BR> is understood). I don’t think it understands <A NAME=”"> anchors, either.
MobiReader really is next to useless unless you are creating your own content, publishing an RSS feed on the web, and willing to job through hoops to support it. I also find it incredibly difficult to navigate through a large page.

The one nice thing about MobiReader was the ease of synching. Attach phone by USB, press a button in application, done.

Solutions That Might Work:

Sunrise RSS Plucker is an open source tool for converting RSS feeds and websites for offline reading on handhelds.

Solutions That Might Work:

I’m going to give iSilo a try. It comes with a Palm Database (PDB) creator called iSiloX. It looks like it does a good job of generating a nicely viewable and navigatable documents. The iSilo reader is shareware that degrades into lower features freeware after a 30-day trial. One problem I haven’t quite figured out with the iSiloX creator is how to get it to not download specific links on webpages (ie: banner ads). You can build configuration files for each page you download to specify the link depth to follow, what links to ignore, only load links on the home server, etc.

iSilo supports synching with HotSync (Palm) or ActiveSync (Windows Mobile). Neither of which work with my phone.

PDB files can be read by iSilo, MobiReader, QReader, eReader and ReadM. So even if the iSilo reader isn’t the right application, the iSiloX creator might be useful. It turns out the PDB is container format, so iSilo is the only reader that supports iSiloX files. But that’s ok because the software is perfect and does exactly what I want.

Update 1:

What’s really nice is they have a command line version of the PDB creator called iSilioXC. You can easily set up iSiloX to run as part of the Windows scheduler, or use iSiloXC on linux/solaris/mac with cron jobs. I’m calling iSiloXC from a perl script to take some HTML files I munged and put them in a PDB file as part of the munging process.

Automatic synchronization is still an issue with the Nokia 6682, but I might be able to get something working with OBEX over the USB using these instructions and ObexTool. I was hoping I could use SyncBack but it doesn’t recognize the path to the phone. I might try the Windows SyncToy as a last resort.