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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Friday, August 30, 2002Samsung has been busy
Samsung has a bunch of interesting 1xRTT stuff in the pipeline. The SPH-A500 is a striking clamshell phone with J2ME support, available from Sprint now [infoSync, Web McDeb]. The SPH-i700 is a PPC Phone Edition CDMA device that sports a digital camera [infoSync, Pocket PC Thoughts]. The SPH-i600 is a SmartPhone 2002 CDMA device in a classic clamshell format [infoSync, Pocket PC Thoughts, PDA Buzz]. The SPH-i500 is a Palm OS CDMA device similar to the SPH-i600, but with a Grafitti area above the keypad [infoSync, Palm Infocenter].
Kyocera's 7135 Smartphone is also due soon, similar to the SPH-i500 and sporting an SDIO slot [Palm Infocenter, PDA Buzz].
Audiovox
PPCW has a user-contributed review of the Audiovox RTM8000 GSM/GPRS card. The short of it is that the card is great for data but not so good for voice.
Speaking of Audiovox, they finally have a keyboard for the Maestro and Thera. It's of the "folds-in-half" variety... I'd prefer a thumb-board.
Audiovox has yet to release EUU2 for the Maestro. Last month I also struck out trying to find it on Toshiba's site, and resorted to using the iPaq version. It worked, however, it took so long to update that I worried that my Maestro would become a paperweight.
Frank McPherson: I wasn't too interested in the Razor Zayo when I first saw it on Pocket PC Tools, but these pictures have me intrigued.
Looks like the ASUSTek MyPal A600.
I recently wished that Radio would show timezones or offsets. via Sam Ruby I learned that Joe Gregorio has started using raw ISO8601 timestamps with his custom blogging software. They aren't pretty, they really need to be formatted for human consumption.
I had wondered what Pyra was up to, Evan answered a few days later with the launch of Blogger Brasil.
Krzysztof Kowalczyk: MMS Will Fail
Do we really need reports to state the obvious? Short summary: MMS will fail. [...]
Here's why it won't work. If people wanted to send you sounds wouldn't they just call you instead of sending a message? And where will they get those sounds and images in the first place? Built-in cameras are just a novelty. The quality is terrible, it will never match even the simplest digital cameras. This thing will wear thinly very fast.
I also believe that MMS will not be a great success for the carriers, but I do think that phone cameras will prove to be more than just a novelty.
Consider last month's Bye bye digital cameras?, which projects 14 million phone cameras sold worldwide in 2002 and 147 million in 2007 (vs 22 and 95 million digital cameras). Ray Ozzie recently wrote about how a tiny digital camera leads to more ad-hoc picture taking. Dan Bricklin has a series of writings about Web Photo Journals in which he advocates the use of tightly-cropped and reduced images.
Cellular phones are ubiquitous and unobtrusive. Phone cameras will allow people to record impromptu moments where they might not have thought to carry a traditional camera, or it's use might have "spoiled the moment."
Call Him Paranoid
We had discussion yesterday re Instant Messaging. A lawyer has indicated that he likes to use IM while on a conference call. Sidebar conversations mostly. This sounds great, but does he understand the security risks he's exposed to? I think not.
My impression is that most of the legal staff is treating e-mail and IM as if it were sealed mail. [...]
The pervasiveness of IM ought to scare the crap out of any organization with secrets to protect, the popular IM services are completely insecure. The use of secure and auditable IM systems (ie: Jabber) face heavy resistance from users: client software is often less mature, network effect, user intertia, etc. Users will ignore IM mandates that aren't backed up with technical measures that prevent the use of non-approved IM systems.
E-mail encryption has hurdles of it's own (NFN: E-mail Encryption: Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?). S/MIME is natively supported by most popular e-mail clients but requires an investment in certificate infrastructure. PGP doesn't require much infrastructure but suffers from poor client integration. Neither technology is likely to be widely adopted by a company's external contacts.
Teaching the appropriate use of e-mail encryption is also an issue. I recently saw an example of why you shouldn't sign/encrypt all e-mail, but I can't find the reference now. The jist of it was that simple messages lacking context ("Approved, do it.") could be used as a sort of Social Replay Attack. The message had a valid signature... I'm not aware of any e-mail products that use PGP or S/MIME to validate and protect the headers of a message, except to confirm the sender's e-mail address.
PocketRSS is a Today Screen plugin and stand-alone application which allows a quick and easy method of displaying various types of RSS/OPML compliant data on your Today Screen. It does require a connection to the Internet from the PocketPC, but is designed to still function while offline. [via Pocket PC Thoughts]
See also Pocket Feed.
