Month: July 2004

PhoneScoop has some play time at MotoSummer 2004.  They took a look at the A780 and I think they see as much potential in it as I do.  The A780 isn’t the sexy RAZR V3, but it’s the smartest of a new crop of phones from them.  I that that is has the serious potential to be the next really big thing.

One of the things that I like about the design is that it’s both a one-handed and a two-handed phone.  It’s sort of like an oldschool Treo but small enough to actually fit in your pocket.  It’s one handed when all you need is a phone.  It’s a candybar phone actually when used one-handed.  When you need some smarter features, pop open the flip and you’ve got a QVGA touch screen ready to rock.

I have a feeling that Moto is going to cripple developers and only allow them access to the phone through MIDP 2.0 with a bunch of extra JSRs and APIs.  That is dissapointing, but it’s the “safe” decision that probably makes carriers and Moto themselves a lot less nervous.  I can hear the tech support call now: “what does core dump mean?”

I hope that Moto puts up some developer info or releases an SDK at Motocoder pretty soon.  I’m pretty sure that there are a bunch of developers out there who are chomping at the bit to code for and learn about this phone.

• Russ was up late last night talking about MMS sucking and possible, powerful, popular, and practical at 3am.
• O’Reilly Make is a new magazine about geeky do it yourself.
• Via Hack the Planet, TiVO has filed with the FCC [pdf] for access to broadcast-flagged content.  Happy. Joy. Scary. Run!
• Here is the full text of Kerry’s speech last night.
• Via Nelson: Francis Crick, of the famous duo Watson and Crick, died last night.  May he rest in peace.
• What is on Tim O’Reilly’s radar?  Follow the alpha geeks.
• Mobiletracker notes that the Sidekick 2 is mentioned in Newsweek for $229.  Not too shabby at all.

Here’s an afternoon update for you:

• Netcraft reports on the well-priced entry of MySQL AB to the shared hosting market.  Their servers live at Rackspace and they’re priced quite competitively but at the same time are not at bargain basement prices.  Hopefully this will be a good move for them.  Bang/buck is high here.
• Novell is readying SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.
• A Bluetooth iPod would rule, but so would the second coming of the Newton.  I’m not sure which one to expect first.
• Daily Wireless has some great coverage of OSCON.
• I stumbled upon an awesome GSM/GPRS AT command guide [pdf] this afternoon.

After reading a few articles about the new Motorola A780, the only thing I can think of is the potential to be the killer phone.  It runs Linux and most apps run on top of a virtual machine using Java.  I really like the form factor, which is saying a lot from a guy who is firmly in the candy bar phone camp.

I’m not going to drill down in to specs, but it has them: EDGE, Bluetooth, MIDP 2.0, Opera 7, document viewers, a 1.3 megapixel camera, and some whacky TransFlash memory module (as if the world needed yet another memory form factor).  It seems more functional than the flashy RAZR.  Something about this phone has grabbed the Series 60 power user inside me and has it very interested.  You can bet that I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  It looks like Erik was trying to work a few bugs out.

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Another test… let’s see how it
works this time

Let’s see if this works…
no reason why it shouldn’t!

Artima.com Articles — Using Objects to Configure Jini Network Services. Secure large-scale Java distributed computing is at the heart of Jini 2.0. Every aspect of building a secure distributed computing environment is configurable in Jini. This article provides a tutorial on using the Jini service configuration model, and illuminates the decisions by the Jini architects to rely on objects for service configuration.
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J2ME Games with MIDP2.