Author: Matt Croydon

Yesterday Reuters covered a breaking story: AT&T Wireless now have the ability to SMS across the Atlantic.

What the hell took them so long?

I signed up with T-Mobile about a year ago.  Shortly after finding the Mobitopians on IRC, I sent a quick SMS to Jim to see if I had properly configured delivery confirmation.  Sure enough a minute or so after I sent the message, I got a delivery confirmation.  A few minutes later, I got a reply from Jim.

Transatlantic texting has been working for quite some time, thankyouverymuch.  I’m glad that AT&T is finally catching up, but they’re a bit late to the game.

Have you ever noticed that just as every mobile phone seems to be missing that one thing that would make it perfect?  The same holds true for mobile operators.

For example, T-Mobile is my carrier, and I love them.  But GPRS on a 3650 is painfully slow, and there’s no word about T-Mobile rolling out EDGE or other 3G data services in the US.  Everyone that I have spoken to at customer service has been excellent and helpful.

And then there’s AT&T.  When researching my new phone and carrier, I was seriously looking at AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile.  When I went to the AT&T retail store, I got a very Sprint-ish vibe.  The sales staff was there when you wanted to actually purchase a phone, but were nowhere to be seen if you had a question that didn’t involve a purchase.  Their data plans didn’t seem very appealing at the time, and their current EDGE plans are out of my tax bracket.

But AT&T has EDGE.  T-Mobile does not, and it doesn’t look like they will any time soon.

And so, each carrier and each phone is missing that one thing that would make them perfect.  So what is your dream team phone and dream team carrier?  I think mine would be a 7610 + IR + EDGE for everyday in the pocket.  In a fantasy world I’d also have a 9500 in my satchel.  It’s too big for an everyday phone, but I love my 9290 and love the functionality that an updated version could give me.  My dream team carrier would be ATT-Mobileular.  It would have enough infrastructure that I always had a signal.  The data would flow fast and cheaply.  When you dialed customer service, they’d be helpful.  International roaming would be straighforward at a low rate.  I would still pay less than the locals for data access while roaming in the UK.  It wouldn’t break my bank account.

That would be lovely.

Via Ryan, Bob Edwards has been dropped as host of NPR’s Morning Edition.

The radio network announced Tuesday that Edwards, 56, will become senior correspondent of NPR News, with his reports being heard on various broadcasts, at the end of April.

Man.  That’s an institution they’re shoving off the host spot.  Worst. Move. Evar!

Infoworld and some others picked up on a press release by VIA on their new smaller than it used to be motherboard form factor.  The Nano-ITX form factor is 12cm x 12cm, or about 4.75 inches square.  That’s freaking amazing!

For more information, check out nanode.com.  The nanode will be available sometime in Q2 2004 directly through mini-itx.com.  I so want a board to slap in something extremely tiny, just because it’s there.

Nano-ITX: the only thing that could make a pretty small Mini-ITX board look like a Buick.

Nokia announced Pocket Kingdom: Own the World.  So far it looks like an interesting mix of Civilization, Street Fighter, and The Sims Online.  It is massive multiplayer in your pocket.  Expected launch date: Q304.

Nokia’s Lifeblog site has gone live.  Christian Lindholm confirms that the 7610 will be out Q204 (as I reported earlier).  A trial of Lifeblog will be included on the CD that comes with the 7610, and should also be available for download near the official 7610 launch.

I wrote up the announcement of the 7610 on Mobitopia today.  It looks like an interesting little Series 60 device.

I’m such a dork.

I am now the proud owner of a remote controlled boat a little bigger than a standard issue Matchbox car.

I’ve been eyeing it at my local Discovery Channel Store for a few weeks, and it is finally mine!  It looks like it behaves similarly to the Zip Zap cars: charge the capacitor for a little bit, and you get several minutes of fun.

Rinse.  Lather.  Repeat.

I’m stoked that cool fun technology like this itty bitty motorboat have made the right price point.  My little boat cost $19.95.  Not too shabby at all.

I’m just worried about a cat coming out of nowhere, pulling a Godzilla, and capsizing the poor thing.

I really wish I knew what conversations were happening at connecting.nokia.com and blogs.labs.mot.com, and why they were linking to my blog.  Does anyone care to share?

What I wouldn’t give to subscribe to some feeds on blogs.labs.mot.com and know what they’re talking about at Nokia…

I’m getting ready to do my taxes tonight.  Well, not really, I’m getting ready to let a wizard do my taxes for me.  I’ll probably do a sanity check on paper, but I’m so good at making stupid math mistakes that I’ll trust some software.  Scary.

Anyway, somtimes dialogs amuse me.  The above informs me that I am about to install Maryland.  Which is weird as I look around and find myself in the state of Maryland.

This is a reminder to myself and others that the biggest local DC-MD-VA Hamfest is coming to the Timonium fairgrounds March 27 and 28.  I’ll try to hit the Hamfest on Sunday.  Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some cool and obscure hardware for next to nothing.

I don’t hold a ham radio license, though I have thought about it in the past.  I lack the funds and free time for another semi-expensive hobby though.

A discussion on the Atom Wiki should make it possible for clients that lack PUT and DELETE to fully implement the Atom API.  If folded in to the next revision of the API, this enhancement will make J2ME Atom API clients a possibility.  As Russ pointed out previously, J2ME does not include support for PUT or DELETE.  But why get rid of SOAP?

I don’t want to make things too hard on Atom API server implementers.  At the same time, I love the flexibility of being able to choose between coding a client with GET and POST (and hopefully PUT and DELETE) or SOAP.  Sometimes the former makes more sense.  Other times it’s the latter.

If I wanted to whip together a quick client demo to impress my friends, I would probably point WSDL2Java or Visual Studio .NET at a WSDL file.  Then I could whip together a working Atom API client in just a few minutes in front of their eyes.  They would get bored while I implemented things on the HTTP level.  I’m sure that Mark or Sam could whip something together at that level in a few minutes, but not I.  (On a side note, check out this post in Sam’s blog and this sample C# client on atomenabled.org)

To demo things, I could easily point my client at Blogger or Typepad, two services with significant user bases, and both with SOAP implementations of the Atom API.  It’s times like this that SOAP shines.

So why do we have to get rid of it?

It seems that many people are against having SOAP in the spec at all.  I can understand where they are coming from.  On some platforms, it would be fairly easy to implement SOAP on the server side.  On the other hand, if your chosen platform does not have a SOAP toolkit that you can use, implementing it from scratch is non-trivial.

Here’s what I think: SOAP should stay.  It adds more flexibility for consumers.  In an ideal world all clients would interact with the API using GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.  Ideally, clients that lack PUT and DELETE would interact with the API using GET and POST possibly as outlined on the wiki.  Alternatively, I would like clients to have the option of using SOAP to interact with the API.  SOAP support SHOULD be implemented on the server side, but should be no means be neccesary.  It would be cumbersome to make SOAP support a MUST, but there would be fewer SOAP implementations if support is listed as MAY.  If several of the big players continue their SOAP support, writing a SOAP client will still be rewarding.