kEnny's Rant

I have an email problem. A stupid email problem.

Many years ago when so many of us thought it was cool that America Online allowed access through it's service to the internet, I was an AOL customer. Once I had graduated from AOL, I kept my AIM account active to chat with my family. I did not know at the time what a stroke of genius this would turn out to be. Despite all my best efforts to shut my profile away from wandering eyes, I seemed to be attracting the attention of many curious young people (mostly underage girls). One of these curious young people eventually turned into my wife, which was the only good thing I could say about AIM at that point.

Flash forward, a bit. In an attempt to keep the man from perpetually sticking it to us we dropped our POTS for VOIP from Vonage. Vonage had many class leading features at the time, including one which I exploited to the best of my advantage: Voice mail. In the "olden" days of Vonage, you could email your voice mail audio files to a single email address, which was pretty handy if everyone using this single phone line could get to that same email address. I used a private Google Group as the destination for the messages, which could distribute the incoming messages to the other "members" of the group: Our individual email accounts, and the SMS email address for my phone (we could have done Allison's too, but she already had too many people chatting her up). Our cell provider conveniently removed the attached audio file, so the message going to my phone consisted of a time and phone number, which was better than nothing as the WAV file didn't make for a valid MMS, either.

When I got my first Sony Ericsson phone, the K790a, I was very excited to learn that it was able to log into POP and IMAP accounts all by itself. Aside from being able to email full size 3.2MP photographs taken by it's camera, this also meant I could actually go so far as to send complete voice mail messages to my phone for remote listening. The cool thing about Sony Ericsson is that their phones support IMAP's Push feature, so if you have an email provider that supports the same feature, you don't have to wait for whatever time interval to pass before finding your new message in your inbox. I set out to find an appropriate (read FREE) email provider supporting IMAP's Push.

In those days, Gmail was still in it's infancy, and was still having trouble supporting IMAP, so it wasn't even in the running. I looked high and low for free providers, and couldn't find more than one available in the US. Which one was it? That's right: AOL/AIM Mail. I was able to log right in and set it up with no problem. It worked really well. There was NEVER any spam.  All I ever got was the messages I emailed to it, and the voice mails from Vonage.

Not long after this semi-utopia of voice mail retrieval was set up, my phone was sent through both the washer AND dryer.

Since that time, I went through a couple of phones, including WinMo and Symbian devices, neither of which could support IMAP push. They sucked. Then, we dropped Vonage. It just wasn't very useful to us any more, especially with Google Voice supplying each of us with extra phone numbers. I still kept the AIM email account so that I could email videos from the my phone to Facebook. In December, I got this email for AOL's President of Consumer Applications, Brad Garlinghouse:

Dear kEnny,

Today marks a very important milestone in AOL’s history – and future. As we separate from Time Warner and become an independent company, we mark the beginning of a fresh start and open the door to new opportunities. I believe this is a perfect time for rebuilding trust, confidence and passion around AOL and the products we bring you.

I realize that – at times - over the past few years, it’s been challenging to be an AOL Mail user. I’ve heard your feedback and we’re going to start making changes with a renewed focus on you. We can and will make our free AOL Mail product world class!

We’re starting today with three simple (but important) changes:

1. Significantly fewer ads
2. An easier AOL Mail sign-in experience
3. A new message reading pane that helps you get through your email faster

I know that some of you are comfortable with your current email experience. So, wherever possible we’ll provide you with the choice to disable new features and keep the classic email product.

This is just the beginning. I’m truly excited about what’s to come in 2010 so please stay along for the ride. Our promise going forward is to keep you well informed of the changes we make and the new features we launch. In the meantime, please continue to send us your feedback or suggestions as we work to build a world class email experience – focused on you.

Thanks again for choosing AOL Mail!

Sincerely,

Brad Garlinghouse
President, AOL Consumer Applications

Since then, I've gotten a few spamessages a day. Yesterday, I recieved my latest Sony Ericsson phone, and was able to see, in real time, what a turd this service has become. I think they've come a long way in making things better. Thanks, AOL!

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Want to play with Google Wave?

I haven't done much with it yet.  If you have some ideas you'd like to try out, and for some reason don't have a Wave account yet, feel free to sign up below!

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Long Term Notes: Nokia 6650 Fold

After having used my free phone for a few more months, I thought I'd jot down a few more details on its state of being and what has and hasn't worked out.

The best thing about the newer smart phones is that once the manufacturer gets the hardware and software stable, a lot of the best things about your phone come from new and exciting ways to utilize its features through new software.  This has largely been the case with my 6650 Fold, so the majority of my discussion will be about the trials of various software solutions to my problems, some of which I never knew I had.

The only real complaints I've had about this phone have been about the button layout, which I discussed in my ealier post, and apparently haven't bothered doing anything more about since then.  I did purchase a USB cable, but haven't yet felt the need to actually attempt to make the changes so that I'm not always tapping the key to open the AT&T Navigator.  Maybe later...

One thing that has changed since I first wrote about my 6650 Fold, was the addition of an internet data plan.  This has allowed me to augment many of my favorite text-only services with new features.

The biggest shortcoming I've found with this phone is that it lacks a comfortable amount of RAM. There is a great web browser for S60 and WM phones called Skyfire, which I could only run after rebooting the phone or it would protest that there was not enough memory available.  SInce installing another helper application, I can't even run it after a reboot, but it was fun to use while I could.  If you have a data plan, and an S60 or Windows Mobile device, compare Skyfire to your packaged browser.  I'm willing to bet Skyfire will take you places you never thought possible from your phone.

Similar to Skyfire's problems with running short of memory, the same can be done with my built-in browser from time to time, so my browser of choice for this phone is Opera Mini. I use the full screen interface, almost exclusively, and it hardly ever malfunctions.  The Opera Link feature allows me to manage bookmarks and notes from my desktop, then synchronize with the browser on the phone later.  I only wish I could use it as my default browser.  Unfortunately, I have not found any way to do this yet.

Google has a full suite of applications for S60.  The ones I use are Search (accessible by pressing the C key from the idle screen, and now featuring voice recognition), Maps with Lattitude, Sync (SyncML or Exchange ActiveSync), and YouTube.  From Opera, I use Google Voice, Calendar, Reader, and iGoogle.

I would like to make special note of the Google Sync features for a couple of reasons.  The first is that being able to access your contacts and calendar features from your phone AND anywhere you can access the internet, is very, very handy.  The second? Something strange was happening when I was synchronizing both contact and calendar information that was causing the birthdays of my contacts to drift, making them all a few days younger!  Disabling the calendar sync has not helped, so I'm going back to the SyncML method.  Google? FIX IT!

The music application works well, and can be accessed with the phone either opened or closed, and there are many playback options to configure to your taste.  There isn't any 3.5mm headphone jack, so you're options are limited to using the somewhat proprietary 2.5mm headset jack or Bluetooth.  I'm using bluetooth, and it works great.  This phone does not appear to have any limitation as to what sort of audio is being listened to in order to pump audio through the bluetooth connection. One of my previous phones required a headset that supported A2DP in order to play back .wav or .mp3 files, or it would play throught the phone's speaker.  Nokia does not have that limitation.

One of the features not included with this phone is picture GeoTagging, but it can be added by installing Nokia's Location Tagger software.  This is built into many of their phones, but is not included with the 6650 fold, probably due to RAM constraints again. It loads up when you start the phone, grabs your location with the GPS, goes to sleep, then wakes up the GPS when you launch the camera application.  Any pictures taken after the GPS has reaquired your location are geotagged.

In closing, I have to say again that while there are a lot of limitations to what this phone comes with, there is plenty it can do if you know where to look, and while there are many signs saying Symbian might not have much longer to live in this world, the fact is that it allows for plenty of added functionality for a very cheap (and fairly durable) flip-phone. Thank you, Nokia 6650 Fold, for being a great temporary measure.

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Evolving dyamics of entertainment and power usage...

I can see this being quite an interesting area as we add more entertainment functions to devices, which in turn need more power to run, even if they replace 5 boxes that would need even more energy to run.

in reference to: FAQ: Can flat-screen TVs make the efficiency grade? | Green Tech - CNET News (view on Google Sidewiki)

So I guess I've been busy

What have I been doing, that would keep me from my most favoritest of blogs?  A few things.

Allison and I started dieting the South Beach way, and have each been losing weight in a steady fashion.  Along those lines, I've been using my new phone to keep track of the miles I have been walking or riding on my bike.  Nokia Sports Tracker is my weapon of choice.  I can use downloaded maps from Ovi Maps, or grab them from an active internet connection and see where I've been.  After the workout, I can check my stats and compare them to other workouts on the phone, or upload them to the website and do the same thing.  You have a number of privacy options for the workouts you upload, so you can share with your friends, or everybody, or nobody.  The other nice thing it does after uploading your trip is it offers to scan your phone for any pictures or video you may have taken during that time.  It then places those pictures on the map of your route, similar to geo-tagging.  I love this phone.

We sold my car, Ellie, which had served us for many years.  While it made me sad to see her go, the money we are saving on insurance has gone to adding Internet service to our phones, which is kinda nice.  Since we already have unlimited family messaging, and neither one of us has a "smart phone" it only costs us an extra $10 per phone, per month.  I've been taking advantage of the weather and biking to and from the vanpool most days.  Good times!

We took a trip to Ohio to see Allison's friends and family for the part of July.  We had LOTS of fun, and of course it was with faces full of tears that we left to come back home.  We flew out of Portland, so we spent a little bit of time with my family before and after the trip.  We did lots of hiking and exploring and generally had a great time.

I have graduated to keeping the books for the Vanpool.  I actually have a legitimate use for Remember The Milk besides just for my own personal purposes.  I set up monthly reminders for processing the vanpool log, collecting fees from the riders, and sending the reports to Intercity Transit.  I can access the reminders and check them off from anywhere.

I think you are up to date for now.  I'll be writing more about my experience with my phone later.

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