We’ve been a little lax posting lately - a June 1 deadline looms near for our company and we’re scrambling to get there.
That said, we should have a big announcement in the next week or so about our new product launch. Stay tuned!
I’ll just get the short version out quickly: You can stream Internet radio non-stop from Pittsburgh to Philly with very little interruption using Verizon’s data service. That’s about 5 hours of driving without having to turn on the radio.
The long version is not much worse. Although there is no EV-DO coverage more than about a half hour outside of Pittsburgh or Philly, 1xRTT is available and very consistent. This is enough bandwidth to stream 64kbps and less streams the entire way.
Surprisingly enough, 64kbps AAC streams are of pretty decent quality. I find them better than mp3, and as acceptable to my ears as FM radio.
Resco Pocket Radio has 6 quick preset buttons. I kept several set to 64kbps streams and others to 120-160 for when I got into EV-DO range. The big problem was although 1XRTT would be used automatically when I lost EV-DO coverage, my phone would not connect to EV-DO if there was active use of a 1xRTT connection. Therefore, if I suspected that I was back in an EV-DO area, I would have to kill the radio and let it sit for a bit
before it would use it. I don’t know if that’s a CDMA limitation or what.
In summary, I would say if you stuck with 64kbps streams or less, you would experience a total of at most 10 minutes of dropout on a 5 hour drive from Pittsburgh to Philly using Verizon’s data service. I’d say that’s pretty good, wouldn’t you? It’s certainly stepping out of the shadow of early-adopter reliability in my book. However, if you want to use the phone while driving, I suggest you have a passenger to get it unhooked for you and start up bluetooth or plug in a headset. It is anything
but ergonomic switching back and forth from radio to phone.
Here’s a pic of my pocket PC setup taken before I started out. The plug on the left is for my GPS. Ignore that. The rest is USB power and a line in to my stereo. I was really wishing for Bluetooth A2DP here to make the setup cleaner. Oh, and… ahem… wireless DC power.
Back in 1997 (or so), when I bought my first very capable PDA- an iPaq 3630 - I thought about hooking it up to my cell phone to pull down mp3’s from my computer at school.
Silly me. I had no idea mobile data was such a joke back then, and would take years to evolve to the point where that idea would even be thinkable.
GPRS wasn’t fast enough for decent audio. Only EV-DO has the coverage and speed in the US to really do it well now. So I’m giving it a shakedown. Can streaming Internet radio over EV-DO replace something like XM or Sirius?
I know the answer in any rural area is “hell no”. But during trials here in Pittsburgh, it has worked surprisingly well. I’m able to zoom around town, turn it on, and not experience many dropouts or rebuffering at all - even traveling between towers. I certainly prefer it to the radio here in Pittsburgh (don’t get me started) - and I can finally squash the jealousy I’ve had towards my co-workers in LA who get to listen to KCRW in their cars.
OK. So all is well and good around the city. But I’m taking a trip to Philly this weekend, which means 4 hours or so of PA-Turnpike driving through Amish country. Do I stand a chance of streaming tunes on that kind of trip?
Doing some research, I found this press release, and it gave me some optimism. Could it be true?
I then took a look at the Verizon Coverage Map. Go to Pennsylvania and look at the coverage along 70/76 - it’s not bad! All digital all the way.
All this info makes it promising enough to try. Here’s what I’ll be armed with:
Verizon XV6700 with unlimited EV-DO
Resco Pocket Radio 1.51 Beta
Plus a Belkin USB 12v power plug and a line in to my stereo.
How far will I make it? How many dropouts will I suffer? Will I be able to answer phone calls? Will I just switch over to my Ipod Nano? All questions which will be answered after my trip Friday morning.
Color me impressed.
Over at RealTechNews they have a post with screenshots of Opera for Nintendo DS. The bottom touchscreen allows you to pan and scan the full screen render and see the zoom on the top screen. I don’t know what this will be like in practice, but I have no doubt it’s the best way to do it on the current DS hardware.
They have a nice handwriting recognition screen with TLD shortcuts as well.
Here’s the question that’s been going ’round in my head for a while now. Websites themselves are beginning to become mobile-aware. They have different CSS and content for mobile devices. Mobile devices are also becoming better at trying to fit desktop screens to mobile devices. The later is much further along at this point.
So as we move forward, which one will dominate? Will Dreamweaver and Wordpress and all those other ways of getting web sites out there suddenly automate the creation of your mobile site for you? A dual-preview in Dreamweaver, for example?
Or will small-screen rendering combined with better small screen resolutions take care of it for us? So no one has to worry about mobile sites?
Or will we stay a hybrid, using .mob TLD for mobile-friendly pages?
Just a quick note about the next Mobile Monday in Los Angeles tomorrow. The topic is “Mobile Personalizationâ€.
What: May 2006 Mobile Monday (Mobile Personalization)
When: May 15th, 2006 7:00pm
Where: USC Campus, Gate 6 Entrance, Vermont Ave at 36th Pl, Kaprielian (KAP) Hall Room 106,
Who: Anyone interested in mobility
Cost: Nothing!
See www.mobilemonday.la for maps and more info! See you there!
The WSJ reports that Softbank and Apple plan to jointly develop mobile phones. They say specifically in the article that these phones will allow people to download directly from the iTunes Music Store. Apple will be manufacturing phones under it’s own brand (outsourced production, of course), for the first time, the article reports. This is no surprise: The WSJ also says that Apple selected Softbank because they intend to offer high speed network access for mobiles — and get this — “with a focus on improving convenience for consumers.”
There’s been a bit of buzz about what Masayoshi Son would do after Softbank bought Vodophone K.K., and I guess this is the beginning. We can probably expect a pretty aggressive push by Softbank to differentiate itself in the saturated Japanese market. Son-san has had a reputation for really playing hard in the markets he’s entered, and he also has the Yahoo brand which is very very popular in Japan. KDDI already has a music download service (Chaku-Uta) so the market is already more advanced than here in the U.S., so it’ll get interesting fast.
These developments are definitely worth watching!
MobiTV has been off my radar for a while - last time I checked it out, the content wasn’t compelling at all. But now, check out this channel lineup.
There are some serious heavy-hitters there.
What’s more is that Nokia is bundling their player with their newer phones.
It seems their subscription model is carrier-based. The good thing about this is that you can have it bundled in your data plan to take the edge off the cost. Sprint does this with their Power Vision plan. But if your carrier doesn’t offer it (like Verizon Wireless USA), then you’re SOL. Verizon USA has their V-Cast service, so my guess is that they see them as competition.
So let’s say you have Cingular and a Nokia 6682. You’re getting streaming video over EDGE speeds. I’m guessing that’s going to be less than 15FPS with some stuttering. Has anyone tried this? Are there any current Cingular phones that can carry this over UMTS?
Let’s step that up to Sprint with a Samsung A900 and EV-DO. Now you’re probably getting some decent video. I think Sprint rebranded the service as Sprint TV though.
So can anyone relate experiences with MobiTV? I have Verizon and a PocketPC, so I’ve got 2 strikes against me ever trying it. Am I missing anything?
I opened my Bloglines feeds and it loaded pretty quickly. The screen transitions make going back and forth from feeds to the feed list nice because you know what’s happening — the screen tells you that you are moving rather than just waiting in mystery for the app to respond. Interestingly enough, here the soft key response was snappy. Next, I changed my browser’s skin first, which was easy. It hit the network to give me my options for the skins, then hit the network again to apply the skin — but it was smooth. I also noticed the new feature: “Speed dial”, which shows * number short cuts for each HomePage bookmark. Yep, less typing to get to where I want to go, I’m a fan.
I wanted to test out the “content download” feature, next, so I grabbed a small mp3 file from the Princess Monoke soundtrack and dropped it on my web server and pointed the browser there. Unlike the previous versions, this time I was prompted that I might have to leave the browser to continue. I said “Yes”, and the browser opened up the native Moto WAP browser to download the MP3. After downloading the MP3, playing it in the Moto preview screen, I was able to save it to the phone, and resume browsing. Pretty slick. I can totally understand that this is a significant update for Opera because it takes it one step closer to being the definitive mobile browser.
I do find myself wanting to look up words every now and then, so I changed my “Multisearch” settings on the front page to Dictionary.com. No trouble there, and looking up words is that much easier. I also added the Weather Underground to my presets for the multisearch so I could check weather easily without much typing. Just put your zip code in the search box and you have local weather.
Despite the sluggish button response, which could be the Moto RAZR more than anything, I’ll definitely continue to look forward to what Opera’s going to do. I still continue to use this single app more than any others on my phone. What’s next Opera? I’m curious to see further development of the “Browser-to-SMS” feature that they noted in their release. It looks like it requires work on the Content Publisher side to enable special processing for the Opera Mini so that a step in the SMS to purchase flow can be eliminated. Looking forward to it!
VDC is the first service I’ve seen that streams content I’d actually watch for extended periods to mobile devices.
The channels of note (in my book) are Discovery, TLC, and BBC America (you can put the Travel channel in there too). Those are actual channels being streamed to Windows Mobile devices.
Till I came across this service, all I’ve seen have been the standard web fare - NASA TV, preview channels, and channels trying to sell junk.
I gave their HD Preview channel a whirl on my VX6700 over EVDO. Streaming at 300kbps, the quality was excellent with little dropout. I was at 2 bars at the time.
Interestingly enough, switching to WiFi and streaming at 500kbps actually ran into a CPU limitation. Decoding couldn’t keep up well enough to sync the audio and video - so 300kbps would be the sweet spot.
Now the bad news: $12/month. Yeesh. Of course, this type of early-adopter service is always priced at a premium - especially when you have non-trivial content. That said, I wouldn’t use it enough to pay that level of fee.
Now let’s say I traveled a lot more than I do now. My choices for mobile TV are syncing at home (or on the road with TVTorrents) and bringing a PVR, using a placeshifting appliance like Slingbox, or an IPTV service like VDC.
I’m afraid, with those options at the states they’re at now, VDC comes in last in my book. I can’t deal with paying $12/month when I already pay for those channels and more at home. Slingbox will let me stream my paid-for services to my device as much as I want, and use my DVR. Following closely behind placeshifting would be using TVTorrents to grab the shows I want to a PVR.
What would VDC need to do to become a player in my scenario above? Basically they need to tweak the knob of ratio of premium content to price . In my book, they’re at about a $3/month level right now, not $12.
I’d like to hear your opinions on the topic. With DVB-H knocking at the door, and placeshifting becoming hotter, where does IPTV fit in? Content is king - people will gravitate towards content. Do you agree?