*scottstuff*

TheFeature.com has an interesting article on Intel’s new ”Jabberwockey” research project. In short, it’s a bluetooth-driven system for recognizing “familiar strangers” via their phones. It runs on your phone and keeps track of other bluetooth devices that it sees, so it can recognize when those devices show up in other contexts.

Personally, I find this kind of fascinating. I don’t see the present incarnation as being particularly useful, but I love the concept. If you had a bit longer range then Bluetooth (30 feet is kind of short, 100-150 feet would be just about right, IMHO), and some reasonably standard way of mapping device IDs to people (think FOAF or something Technorati- or Google-driven, where people opt-in by posting their own IDs), and we could have a really fascinating way of building communities. There are certainly a ton of privacy issues, but those could be mostly mitigated by the opt-in nature of the device ID→identity mapping and by turning off Bluetooth discovery on your phone.

Network World is reporting that ShoreTel is about to start shipping VoIP phones that support “hi-fi” codecs. Specifically, they’re going to be using up to 256 kbps for 16-bit, 16 kHz audio, which could sound a lot better then the 8-bit, 8 kHz audio stream that has been universal for decades.

I’ve been wondering when this was going to happen. In a LAN environment, there’s no real reason to limit yourself to 64 kbps audio. Even when talking over the Internet at large, you should be able to find a decent codec that’ll give you better sound quality while still using less then 64 kbps. On the other hand, we’re all really familiar with the compression inherent in standard telephones; there’s a chance that better sound quality could actually backfire by making IP phones sound less like the old phones that we’re all familiar with. If someone wants to send me a pair of Asterisk-compatible hi-fi phones, I’ll report back on how they sound.

I’ve had it with the MPx200, and I’m going to be returning it to AT&T, thanks to their 30-day refund policy. It’s a cool phone, and it has a lot of interesting features, but no matter what I do, it won’t last longer then 8 hours before the battery dies. I’ve deleted every program that I installed, removed the SD card, replaced the battery, and it still runs down its battery astoundingly fast. Cool is nice, but it’s got to be a usable phone. And a phone that’s dead isn’t very useful.

Plus, the PocketMac people still haven’t been able to fix my sync problems. As it stands, I need to reboot my Mac every time I want to sync the phone. Allegedly they’ve handed me off to their “driver guru,” but I haven’t heard anything from them since then.

So, what am I going to do? I have no idea. I’ve been tempted by the Treo 600, but it’s over $300 more then I paid for the MPx200, and it has a lousy LCD display. I’ve had Palms with 160x160 displays before, and I don’t really want to go back there again.

So, I’ll probably get their cheapest Bluetooth phone (this week, it’s the Sony-Ericsson T616) and start looking for a new PDA. I’m leaning towards the Palm Tungsten C for reasons that I’ll explain shortly.

I’ve had a Motorola MPx200 smartphone for nearly 3 weeks now, and I still can’t decide what I think about it. It has a number of really nice features, but it has nearly as many shortcomings, and some of the shortcomings are really impressively bad.

The Good:

• The dialing interface is really good. It integrates an incremental search through all of your contacts names and numbers and your call log right into the normal dialing process. This is easily the best contact search interface that I’ve ever seen in a phone. It’s great.
• The flip-phone formfactor is much better the the “tablet” style phone when you pocket the phone.
• The phone earpiece and ringer are nice and loud. My T68 was just a bit too quiet; I usually had to keep the volume turned all the way up. The MPx200 tends to stay around 50% unless I’m in a really loud environment.
• The browser and email client are okay, and can be share your PC’s connection via the USB cable if you’re too cheap to pay AT&T insane data rates. This is useful for caching messages with important information on the phone.
• The screen is sharp, bright, and readable.
• The “today” screen on the default home screen gives a good overview of calendars and tasks over the next day or two.
• It charges via a standard mini-USB cable.

The Cool, but not really all that important to me:

• It’ll take up to a 1 GB SD card, if you can find one actually shipping.
• It’ll play .WAV ringtones from the SD card with a bit of minor hacking.
• You can find an assortment of games and media players for the phone, plus emulators for most older video-game platforms.

The Bad:

• Battery life utterly sucks. With a SanDisk 256MB SD card, I’m now under 8 hours of standby time. This is unacceptable–I can’t even use the phone for an alarm clock at home without plugging it in. I was getting 2-3 days of standby time, but I think the SD card is killing me. I’ve swapped for a new battery without any success.
• The third-party PocketMac sync software just doesn’t work right, and their tech support is painfully slow.
• No bluetooth, and the included headset doesn’t really fit my ears right.

The verdict? I’m going to give PocketMac’s tech support a few more days, and I’m going to yell at AT&T’s support people, but if I can’t get the battery life back up to at least 24 hours with the SD card, and if I can’t get it to sync correctly at least part of the time, it’s going back to AT&T.

Update (1/28/04): I left the MPx200 overnight last night without its SD card, just to see if the SD card’s power draw was killing the phone. It was still dead in the morning, so the SD card isn’t guilty. I have one thing left to try, and then it’s headed back to AT&T.

Update (1/30/04): It’s toast.

So, a comparison of two computers:

Computer A is the Pentium 90 that I bought in 1994, and Computer B is my cell phone. Don’t you just love Moore’s Law?

Now that the MPx200 review is out, I can move on to other phone stuff. I’ve been waiting for easy VoIP for years. I’ve watched free Linux server software like VOCAL and Asterisk develop, but I’ve never been able to get either to work (admittedly, it’s been a while). Similarly, I’ve never been able to get any of the free audio or video conferencing software to work well enough to actually be usable. Heck, even iChat usually has problems with my home firewall. I have high hopes for Vonage and the rest of their ilk, but they still only solve part of the problem. I don’t just want to replace my home POTS line with a VoIP converter box, I want to replace my nasty old phones with something more modern and workable. I want something that’ll sync with my address book. I want voice mail to show up in my email inbox. I want semi-integrated phone service, IM, and maybe even video conferencing, all using open, standard protocols. Killing the telcos is just step one.

I realized the other day that my little MPx200 cell phone is 95% of the way to being a perfect VoIP phone. I mean, it has a nice form-factor for a phone, a nice display, it already has all of my contact information, and so forth. The big issue is that it has poor network connectivity, but I could almost fix that with a 802.11 SD card (if Smartphone 2002 supported WiFi, and if there were drivers for the MPx200. And if I was willing to lose my SD slot and have an antenna sticking out of the side of my phone).

Bizarrely enough, Microsoft has been thinking the same thing. Microsoft Research is offering Portrait, a SIP client for PocketPC 2003 and Smartphone 2003 platforms. It looks like it’ll even do video conferencing. Of course, it’s not a real product–it’s a research tool–and while they claim that it’ll work with any SIP server, I doubt it’s ever been tested with non-Microsoft products. Still, it’s a nice start. If Motorola ever ships the rumored Smartphone 2003 upgrade for the MPx200, I’ll probably give it a try.

I doubt it’ll work, but they’ll get it right eventually. The first round of phones with 802.11 are supposed to show up this spring, so the hardware platform (and market!) will probably be ready by the end of 2004. I doubt that any of the US carriers will encourage this, so you’ll have two different numbers, one VoIP and one cellular, and you won’t be able to roam between the two, but you have to start somewhere.

So, I finally broke down and bought a pair of new phones. Cynthia’s old phone was essentially dead, and I didn’t like the deal that T-Mobile offered us, so we switched to AT&T Wireless. Their plan is the same basic price with a few more minutes per month; it’s basically a push.

Picking service plans is easy; actually picking phones has been killing me. My basic requirements are:

• Must sync with the Mac, preferably via Bluetooth
• Must have a usable calendar/to-do list implementation
• Must be under $300, ideally under $100

Amazingly enough, only a few phones make it through this filter. I was looking at the Nokia 3650, but AT&T has just dropped it, and I could only find one store in the Seattle area with one in stock, and they wanted over $300 for the phone. So that’s out. That leaves only two Bluetooth phones in AT&T’s lineup, the Sony-Ericsson T616 and the Siemens S56. We’ve had Sony-Ericsson T68s for over a year, and they’ve been okay, but there are a bunch of little things that I don’t like about the T68 (the interface is generally clunky). So, we looked at the S56, and it didn’t look any better then the T68, while the T616 seems to be a bit of an improvement. And, no matter how you slice it, it isn’t any worse then the T68.

So, during The Big Snow, I stopped off at the AT&T store, planning on getting a pair of T616s. One little thing got in the way–I read an announcement that PocketMac is now shipping a version of their sync software for MS Smartphones, like the Motorola MPx200 that AT&T is selling. That means that the MPx200 can sync with the Mac, which puts it back onto my list. It doesn’t do Bluetooth, but most reviews claim that it’s actually a decent phone, not just a gizmo like a lot of the early palm phones, so I figured I’d give it a try.

The short version is that the MPx200 is a decent phone, and the rest of the software on it doesn’t seem to totally suck. Plus, it was on sale, so I walked out with a MPx200 and a T616. I’ll have a longer review of the MPx200 soon.