I upgrade mobile devices twice a year on average, and have a steady stream of other gadgets being put into and taken out of rotation. I take pretty good care of my devices as well - screen protectors, cases, all that. The smart thing to do when rotating out a device would be to sell it on ebay. But honestly, I hate the hassle. Taking pics, writing great descriptions, finding decent boxes and packing materials. To me, it’s not worth the time.

I recently discovered an ebay store near me. It’s not really ebay-owned of course, it’s called “SellIt4U” or “SellUrCrap” or something. But regardless, they list your stuff on ebay and take a cut of the profit. So I brought my old Nokia N90 over there to see what they could do.

First they check if it’s going for over $50 - otherwise it’s not worth their time. Then they ask about the condition, functionality, etc. Then you sign something and leave. That’s it.

They email you the listing when they put it up. Here’s the listing for my phone (might be taken down at some point since it closed.) I was totally surprised at how many pics they took and how straightforward the listing was. They honestly did a solid job listing it.

It brought in $217. I’ll get around 60% of that - and all I had to do was leave it there.

For me, this is absolutely perfect. Some may complain about their 40% cut. But compared to the $0 I’d get leaving it in my closet, I’d say it’s a great deal. I’m heading back there this week with my XV6700, my wife’s RAZR (we moved her to a Cingy Family Plan - will probably post something on that soon), and an old iQue 3600 PDA/GPS.

Get it?! Oh man that title took me all of 3 seconds to come up with.

Anyway… So Russ came out with Mowser. It’s quite cool, and does a great job of mobilizing pages with some extra meta-commands you can provide it to help it out. It fills the same transcoding need as Skweezer. Competition. It’s a good thing.

Now there’s this guy Kevin Perkins, the CEO of Greenlight Wireless, the makers of Skweezer - and he’s pissed:

Mowser inserts AdMob ads into my stream… WITHOUT my consent! By co-opting my content (and yours too if you have an RSS feed) these two companies earn money every time they mobilize your stuff.

No, I mean really pissed - like federal case pissed:

I’ve been contacted by some people about participating in a class-action lawsuit against both Russell Beattie as well as AdMob. At this point, I’m not going to comment any further. All I can say is, these two companies are harvesting your content for their own gain, and rather than taking civil action in by way of law suit, publishers should contact their ISPs, the FBI, and other authorities for fraud.

Here is some of Russ’ response:

The feed summary pages provide a mobile service similar to PC-oriented sites like Topix.net, Rojo, Original Signal and other ad-supported general news pages on the web. There’s a thumbnail snapshot of the item’s web page (grabbed from Snap.com right now), and then a 500 character excerpt of the articles, with no markup included (i.e. formatting, images or links). So even if a site provides “full” feeds, the feed summary page only displays a snippet of the content, and then links to the content adapter for the full article. The ads are separated cleanly from the snippets with a horizontal rule and well marked. Having advertising on these summary pages is both ethical and legal, and in point of fact, how RSS and Atom feeds were originally meant to be used, driving traffic back to the original publisher’s site, or in Mowser’s case, the mobile-adapted version.

I’ve met Russ, and although he was never known to pull any punches with his old blog, I can honestly say he’s a decent guy that really wants to see the mobile space grow and flourish in a consumer-friendly way. Likewise, although I haven’t met Kevin, I’ve interacted with Greenlight’s CTO, Barnabas, and I can honestly say that if he reflects the company as a whole, Greenlight are a bunch of really smart, passionate people as well who thoroughly enjoy what they do.

Given all of that, I’m not one to take personal sides here. But as a.. um.. person with content that I created that is potentially being exploited for cash by Mowser - I’m not very outraged. Not nearly as much as Kevin.

I equate it to search. My text generates search results in Google and many other search engines and lets them pump ads to the results page. The users are looking through a window at my content (and others), and that window comes at a cost. Yes, it’s probably a public-relations exercise that Russ is going to have to deal with. But is it a federal case? Really, I’m asking a question here.

One of the reasons I’m posting this is because the comments section in Kevin’s blog is closed - and you can’t post comments to the Mowser blog either. With Kevin claiming that many many people are up in arms and are asking him to start a class action law suit, but providing no names or links to those people (if I’m wrong, please point me to them), I think there should be a forum for people to express their outrage - or lack thereof. So feel free to use the comments below if you’re filled with RAGE!!! Or anti-RAGE!!! Or better yet, if you’re cool and neutral.

I have to admit though, the CEO of the direct competitor to the offending product leading the charge does a big credibility-minus-minus in my book. I’m not saying it’s unjustified, but maybe he should have gotten a friend to post or something. I started wondering how mean Russ was to Greenlight in the heyday of his blog, so I did a little search. Here’s what I came up with:

You can just see the history of the mobile web in those URLs actually. There are WML sites, text-only sites, sites for Avant-Go, sites for Palm Clipping, and sites for Pocket PCs. Only a handful of the sites in that list or this one are actually WAP2 (XHTML-MP), if any. And for most of the sites that are formated in a version that my phone can read, I’m better off using Skweezer to view them rather than bothering with the site’s mobile version as they’re all pretty useless.

Give me the option of just seeing the updated feeds and cut down the clutter. Also, where is the transcoder? Once I click out from Bloglines, it’s complete luck whether I’m able to see the linked web page on my mobile or not. Why haven’t they done something as simple as Skweezer or Phonifier for the pages and added that as an option for the mobile links?

Compliments abound. Honestly, I did a search! Here’s the link!

Again, I’m not saying this is unjustified. This is what I’m saying:

1. I’m not outraged.

2. I think both services are cool and I hope this competition makes them both better.

3. I think Kevin is casting a bad light on Greenlight as a whole as being spoil-sports when I know they’re very talented and can give Russ a run for his money.

4. Kevin should open comments in his posts so people can talk about this. Given that’s not the case, I’m offering my comment section. For my 3 regular readers

Ive been developing an SMS component recently, and I have a consistent disturbing reaction that I’ll admit here.

I wrote a commandline test program and have been using it repeatedly to send test messages to my phone. Here’s a typical testing loop:

[Type command]

[Hit enter]

5 seconds pass….

Phone beeps

My Brain: “Oooh! Someone just sent me an SMS!”

[Look at phone - see test message]

My Brain: “DAMNIT! I’m an idiot.”

I do this time after time and somehow my brain decouples my deliberate test with getting a legitimate SMS. Sometimes I make it to “Ooh! Someone just…. DAMNIT!” and even sometimes to “Oooh! DAMNIT!”. But there’s always this little surprise.

One time my wife got in an SMS between hitting enter and getting the test SMS. That didn’t help the situation at all.

I’m sure at least some of you have heard the news that KDDI Mobile is starting an MVNO here in the US. The potential for industry-shaking devices coming here made my hair stand on end… but the dream was dashed quickly.

Let me be clear on this. In Japan, KDDI and DoCoMo release phones like fashion designers release clothing - with seasonal collections of devices in new unique colors with new amazing features. Think about that for a second. Here in the US, we have one or two phones a year that might excite people into ditching their old hardware. If you’re just an average consumer and not an enthusiast, you have even less motivation - that’s why half the people I know have RAZRs.

Only recently have we started hearing the whole “cell phone as an accessory” thing being taken seriously. But come on - we’re talking about a Blackberry or Sidekick hanging on your belt. Compare that to KDDI’s current lineup in Japan:

If you can’t find a phone in KDDI or DoCoMo’s catalog that does your personality justice, well you’re just too indie for words.

This unique variety doesn’t just excite me as a consumer, but as a developer as well. The look of the hardware entices the average consumer to upgrade much more frequently, but whether they care or not, they’re also upgrading their handset capabilities as well. As a developer, you then get to make use of newer, more powerful platforms and actually have significant user adoption. Browser rendering will get better across your whole user market, platforms like Flash Lite will penetrate more quickly, and existing firmware bugs will go out of style with the hardware.

It’s a great dream for us here in the US, but lets take a look at KDDI’s US offering:

Man, I’m surprised I don’t see a StarTac there.

Now I know it’s a bit much to hope for - having the KDDI catalog of hardware designed and certified for their infrastructure in Japan to be magically moved over here, but it’s hard to even believe it’s the same company. Device certification here in the US is a nightmare according to random people I’ve spoken to who claim to know.

I bet if Helio had its way, they’d have a much larger catalog as well - but instead they focus on several very targeted devices. Consumers have to buy unlocked devices like the Nokia N95 to even find the same device painted a different color.

I think if we get the carrier certification bottleneck out of the way here, we’ll have a much better chance at having a selection like this. For this to happen, my belief is that we need a more uniform set of functionality. Feature phones need to have a closer capability set to smartphones, and runtime environments need to be more uniform and implementations regulated better. Hell, I’d be happy if we just stick Flash Lite on every single phone and have Adobe implement every runtime environment for every phone themselves, then use Apple Safari’s Webkit as the base code for every mobile web browser… like that’s gonna happen.

I recently took the Amtrak Acela from New York to DC for work. To my surprise I had about 80% of the ride covered in Cingular (sorry - AT&T) 3G service. Where I live, I only have EDGE, so when I travel I like to play with 3G as much as possible to see what my use cases would be.

I have a Blackjack USB tethered to my mac for DUN access. This is faster than Bluetooth, but for some reason the device doesn’t charge when being used as a modem. What a design flaw! The device has three modes when connected with USB - Mass Storage, Activesync, and Modem. Only the Mass Storage mode charges while plugged in, and you can’t plug in a separate charger while connected with USB.

Putting that ridiculous limitation aside, I did the basic web surfing, email, IM trio and it delivered a solid experience. I didn’t do a bandwidth test or anything, but lets say I wasn’t longing for my cable modem too much.

Now comes the fun part - streaming media. First, I tried to connect to my Slingbox at home and see how well it did.

[WARNING: The Quicktimes linked to from these images are large (10-15 megs), so you'll probably want to right click and hit "Save as"]

There’s no sound because I was the “quiet car” and didn’t want to disturb anyone. But the video quality was excellent and consistent as long as I had signal. Depending on the length of the signal dropout, it would pick right back up again.

On the way back, I tried a video conference with my colleague Ross. iChat AV never connects for me - it has tons of troubles with firewalls. But Skype worked.

The video wasn’t too bad on my end, and Ross said I had about a one second refresh rate on his end.

Given the USB charge limitation mentioned above, my phone would have probably lasted about an hour doing this stuff - which is why that limitation is so disappointing. The Acela gives you power outlets for your devices, so I’d basically have no issues if the thing would charge simultaneously.

As cool as this is, there’s the other step of removing the laptop altogether and doing this all on the phone itself. Slingbox works great right on the device, so that’s no problem. But there’s no reason I can’t do video conferencing from the device - except that it has no front-facing camera or software to enable it. This exists internationally now. But carriers treat video calling as a specific layer of their infrastructure - not just generic 3G packets going back and forth. So until US carriers implement this layer officially in the US and adopt devices that use it, we’re stuck with hacking it together. Cingular just announced that they will be supporting sending video clips to each other during phone calls, but this is not real-time.