For a while now, I’ve been using this little trick to bookmark mobile sites from my desktop. I thought I’d share.

1. Get a del.licio.us account

2. Bookmark a few mobile sites from your desktop - tag them with a specific tag that will only be used for mobile bookmarks.

3. Go to http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls and create a linkroll for your page. Make sure to check the “only these tags” box, and enter the tag or tags you use for your mobile sites.

4. Make a barebones web page and copy the suggested code into it.

5. Put this page in a web-accessible folder so you can get to it from your mobile device.

The benefits to doing this are that very time you want to bookmark a cool mobile site you see while browsing the web from your desktop, you can bookmark it on your mobile without typing in the address on the device or emailing it to yourself, etc. Plus you always have your bookmarks even if you change phones.

Keep in mind, this code is going to be simple Javascript, so your mobile browser will have to support it. I’ve tried it on tons of smartphone browsers and have had no problems. But smartphone browsers tend to have better javasctipt support than the craptastic browsers on mid and low-range devices. In those cases you can always use Opera Mini.

Mine looks like this. I keep it very very barebones so it’s quick to load and I don’t have to scroll to the bookmarks I really use. I put my desktop bookmark categories at the bottom just in case I need to get to one of my desktop sites.

I’ve been playing around with Slingbox a lot on my PC, Mac and Windows Mobile phone. There’s no doubt it’s a great product - my friend has even started to use my DVR to record and watch things remotely since he’s too cheap to get one!

Anyway, Sling’s video codec sometimes freaks me out when I’m beginning to buffer because it does something that I haven’t seen other codecs do - a pitch-invariant time stretch. Basically, it slows the whole video stream down without making it choppy or changing the pitch of the audio.

I’m assuming it does this to give itself time to buffer more video, avoiding some of the stutter-starts or blank pauses that other codecs suffer from - but the effect is a bit weird. Jon Stewart seems like he hasn’t had his coffee, theme songs are at a lower tempo… it’s just off enough to make me do a double take.

This only lasts for at most 20 seconds or so when I move from control mode into full streaming mode, so it’s certainly not a problem. I think more often than not it just makes me think, “Nice. Smart solution.” If they didn’t do this, transitioning from no-buffered, skippy-frame control-mode into the full streaming mode would be a lot less elegant.

Does anyone know if other streaming codecs use this technique?

I don’t think so.

Looking at pics of the new iPhone, it’s obvious that that gorgeous screen is going to take a lot of power to drive. The phone was also built to be a locally-stored media powerhouse - also requiring some decent claims of battery life.

If you take these needs, plus the awesome form factor, and add in the power-hungry requirements of 3G, I think you’re asking for a bit too much out of current-generation battery technology.

Does the automatic WiFi switcheroo feature help the cause at all? I’m curious to see how aggressive the phone is at searching out hotspots. Scanning all the time would be worse than 3G data use, but it would be great if you could easily hop on a free or unsecured network when it finds one.

In the end, Apple’s slick use of widgets and a great web browser will probably run quite nicely on EDGE. Sure you won’t be able to sling to the device or stream hi-fi media unless you’re in a WiFi area, but with Apple’s ability to create intuitive software, it might start getting close to my desire to have widgets really start to predict and think and actually be helpful.

I do worry about the soft keypad though. Typing with no tactile feedback is tough.

As a software developer, I’m also worried about yet another mobile development environment to deal with when porting applications. But I’m excited by the fact that widgets are easy to develop and am hoping that the device will eventually run Flash or Flash Lite. If Flash is put on this phone as a first-class application, and distribution is unsecured, Flash suddenly has a huge chance to start overcoming J2ME.

Exciting times.

I was checking out the BlackjackSmartZone Forums and came across this post.

It looks like spam at first glance, but it’s actually M:Metrics extending their data collection to the Cingular Blackjack (Samsung i607) via a memory resident program for Windows Mobile that sits around and watches what you do.

You get $15 for signing up and installing the software, then $5/month thereafter as long as you run the software. Given the amount of people they want to sample, this kind of thing must add up to some serious cost for them. I guess that’s why M:Metrics reports are so expensive!

Apparently they have it running on the T-Mobile Dash as well. Anyone know what other phones they have going?

They really are looking like the Nielsen Ratings for mobile now. It reminds me of when Nielsen came to my house when I was young and attached a box to our TVs. They knew when I was watching TV but also when I was playing Atari or using my Commodore 64 by monitoring the TV/Video switch in the back. All the data was sent to a box downstairs and uploaded each night to their servers over the phone. Porting software versus creating an entire hardware and skilled labor infrastructure throughout the US - looking at it that way, M:Metrics has it easy!