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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Tuesday, July 10, 2007Putting Google On Your PhoneA fantastic post from Google Blogoscoped:Reto Meier of the Radioactive Yak blog recently turned his cell phone into a “Google Phone,” and he’ll explain how you can do the same through the different mobile-optimized sites and Java clients Google offers.Virtually all of this stuff works great on my Q. A few of them work well on the iPhone too, and of course the iPhone has a slick Google Maps application built-in. I certainly have spent a lot of time ensuring that most of these are in my phones. BTW: Google Reader on the iPhone may be the Safari killer app. RSS just looks great on the iPhone. Labels: Google, iPhone, Mobile [ Posted at 10:05 AM | Permalink ]
Thursday, July 05, 2007Web Development for iPhoneApple finally posts its guidelines for developing iPhone "applications":Developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and provide seamless integration with iPhone applications and services including making a phone call, sending an email, and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using web standards can extend iPhone's capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.Not surprisingly, a little blurb right on the front page essentially corroborates my theory that Apple released Safari for Windows specifically to facilitate iPhone development. ("The first step in developing a web application for iPhone is to ensure it is fully compatible with Safari. Safari 3 Public Beta, now available for Mac and Windows, provides you with the ideal environment for Safari on iPhone compatibility testing.") Labels: Apple, Internet, iPhone, Mobile [ Posted at 10:39 AM | Permalink ]
Semi-obvious iPhone/iPod futuresI was among the crowd of people clamoring for a phone-less iPhone-like iPod back when Steve Jobs first announced the device at the January 2007 Macworld, and I still think that would be a great idea, especially if it could be fitted with a real hard drive. But while wrestling with some weird sync issues over the weekend, another thought occurred to me, and while I'm sure this is equally obvious, I'll spell it out anyway: Apple should sell an iPod-less iPhone as well.You might call such a thing the iPhone nano (with apologies to David Letterman and his even more obvious recent spoof of such a device). And here's why I think this would be a killer idea: After I couldn't get the iPhone to sync with my Outlook calendar properly, I decided to nuke from space ("restore" the device in iPhone parlance) and see what the sync experience is like on the Mac. No surprise, it's better. But since I didn't have any music on my Mac at first, my initial sync was just calendar (Google Calendar via iCal) and contacts (Yahoo Mail contacts via Apple's Address Book application). This information takes up almost no space at all on the device. But what you're left with is a stunningly usable phone and personal information manager. Indeed, once you get rid of most of the storage space--I'm thinking 1 GB would do it for whatever random photos you might take--you can also dispense with a lot of the battery, since that's pretty much only needed for media playback anyway. You could therefore make a phone-only iPhone--the iPhone nano--that was about one-half to two-thirds the size of the existing device, while retaining the same basic proportions. A smaller phone would be highly desirable to a lot of people, methinks. Meanwhile, a future video iPod that's based on the iPhone could arguably be a bit bigger than the current iPhone, while still losing the phone features (and associated monthly charges). This could become the new high-end iPod, designed primarily for TV, movie, and other video content. Just a thought. Labels: Apple, Digital media, iPhone, iPod, Mobile [ Posted at 10:30 AM | Permalink ]
Wednesday, July 04, 2007iPhone observation: Mail application, Take TwoSo my previous post about the Mail application was a bit limited, by definition: I'm trying to wrap the iPhone around what I need, not cover every single feature. However, I did get a number of interesting email replies, so I thought I'd follow up on what I've learned, both from readers and from the local Apple Store, where I spent the morning with the concierge.The iPhone supports a few email services, if not natively, then at least specially. These are, in order of sophistication, from best to worst: Yahoo! Mail. Unique to the iPhone, Yahoo! Mail is a special form of "push" email that is described as being IMAP-like, which is excellent if you use this service. Yahoo! will literally push server-based changes--like new folders, new email, and so on--to the device automatically every fifteen minutes. .Mac. Users of Apple's .Mac email can take advantage of IMAP technology, which is a first-rate experience, but not as sophisticated as push email: Basically, the iPhone has to manually sync with the server on a set schedule (every fifteen minutes by default). AOL. AOL uses IMAP on the iPhone. I finally did get this working, and from what I can tell, the big advantage is that the iPhone only requires your name, user name, and password, and then configures the server settings automatically. Any IMAP email service. If you are using a third party email service that supports IMAP, and have access to the server information you need to configure it, iPhone is good to go. This includes, by the way, the supposed "Exchange support" that's advertised in the Mail Settings on the device: Exchange only works if its configured for IMAP. Gmail. Though Google's email service is listed as one of the top-tier choices in the Add Account section of Mail Settings, it's just POP access. The only advantage is that you don't have to look up the server settings; the iPhone will do that automatically when you enter your name, email address, and password. As I noted in the last post, this is really unsophisticated and doesn't meet my needs. Any POP email service. If you are using a third party email service that supports POP, and have access to the server information you need to configure it, iPhone is good to go. Note that POP email is unsophisticated but better than nothing. Web mail. You can also access any Web-based email service, like Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or whatever, through Safari, which ranges from OK to completely unacceptable depending on the service and various browser compatibility issues. I've found Gmail access to be decent (but not "good") via Gmail Mobile in Safari, and I'll certainly use that before I ever configure it for POP. Basically, if you use Yahoo!, you're all set: Yahoo! Mail on the iPhone is a first class experience. I'd describe .Mac mail, AOL Mail, and any other IMAP-based email as a second class experience. Everything else is a joke, or at best better than nothing. In my particular case, I'm stuck using Gmail Mobile via the Web, which is what I was doing on the Windows Mobile-based Motorola Q, though Google does offer a (lousy) Java-based Gmail client on some smart phones too. So it's basically the same experience, with some pros and cons. On the iPhone, the screen is bigger and nicer looking, which is good. But you can't download attachments, which is terrible. Anyway. Mail, like much of the functionality on the iPhone, remains a mixed bag, unless you happen to be a Yahoo! Mail user. Labels: Apple, Google, iPhone, Mobile [ Posted at 12:07 PM | Permalink ]
Tuesday, July 03, 2007iPhone observation: Mail application decent, but doesn't deliver what I wantWhile the iPhone's email application, Mail, benefits greatly from the large screen of the device, the actual email support it delivers is sub-part, even by smart phone standards. (Look to Windows Mobile's Pocket Outlook Email for an obvious comparison.) Most of the email support is POP-based, though those lucky enough to have IMAP support can at least take advantage of that system's work-on-the-server approach. (.Mac mail support in the iPhone is a bit better, though that won't help most users.) Obviously, the best mobile email is text-based, and here the iPhone does a great job of displaying messages with its gorgeous screen and crisp fonts. Now if we could only do things like download and edit Word documents and not just view them. And why can't I save JPEG attachments to the device and use them for wallpaper? Too obvious?One Mail problem points to an obvious design flaw in the iPhone: If you click on a hyperlink in Mail, the link opens in Safari. But if you want to get back to email, there's no Back button messing up the device design. So you have to click the Home button and then manually tap the on-screen Mail icon to go back to your mail, and the message you were reading. Another problem with Mail relates to one of the iPhone's many inconsistencies: If you're viewing a list of messages in your Inbox and rotate the screen to landscape mode, the display doesn't swivel with you. (This is true in some but not all other lists in the device: When you swivel while viewing songs in iPod, the view switches to Cover Flow; when you swivel while viewing videos in iPod, the view doesn't switch. Inconsistent.) The view doesn't swivel when you're viewing email messages or attached Word documents either. Both would benefit from this possibility, but because the iPhone does this in other places, it's bewildering when it doesn't work. Apple makes a big deal out of the screen rotation stuff: It should work consistently everywhere. Ultimately, I was hoping that the iPhone would have a killer native Gmail application, but really all it has is a POP-based Gmail client. That's useless to me because I organize my email up on the server using Gmail's amazing labels-based technology, which treats email like a database table which you can access using different filtered views. This stuff doesn't get pulled down to any client, POP or otherwise, so Google and/or Apple would need to actually do some work to make the iPhone a first-class Gmail citizen. I desperately want a smart phone that can do this. The iPhone isn't it. Update: I've written a follow-up to this post which could be of interest: iPhone observation: Mail application, Take Two Labels: Apple, Google, iPhone, Mobile [ Posted at 5:09 PM | Permalink ]
Monday, July 02, 2007Verizon Upgrades EV-DOThe iPhone may make my Motorola Q look silly by comparison, but the tables are turned when it comes to using the "high speed" Internet services both devices can access: EV-DO is just way faster than EDGE. Well, it looks EV-DO just got even faster:Verizon Wireless kicked some network sand in the face of AT&T on Friday by announcing its entire EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) network has been upgraded with higher speeds and lower latency. Labels: Apple, Internet, iPhone, Mobile [ Posted at 1:53 PM | Permalink ]
Tuesday, June 19, 2007iPhoneI've written up an iPhone preview for Connected Home and the SuperSite for Windows, but it won't be up for a few days. In the meantime, I'll at least mention that I do plan to get one. This is a recent development, and it actually came out of a discussion I was having with my wife about migrating to Gmail. (We don't usually talk tech as she's "normal," but I thought she could benefit from doing so.) Anyway, I mentioned Gmail interaction with various smart phones and noted how that would be getting better with native Google apps for phones, especially the iPhone. She asked if I was getting one. To that moment, I can honestly say I wasn't planning on doing so at all. And I told her that. But from that second on, I realized that, yeah, I pretty much have to do this. With the full understanding that the lack of a real keyboard and the non-availability of massive amounts of storage will limit its appeal somewhat, yeah. Yeah, I just have to get one. Obviously.Labels: Apple, Google, iPhone, iPod, Mobile [ Posted at 11:09 AM | Permalink ]
Monday, June 11, 2007Safari, Not Leopard, is the Real News at Apple ShowMe, in WinInfo:Apple CEO Steve Jobs must have smiled knowingly when his announcement about a Windows Web browser got more applause than any of the features he just demonstrated for the next version of Mac OS X. Despite ostensibly dedicating a speech Monday to Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," Jobs had an ulterior motive to show off Apple's real platform for the future. And getting Safari running on Windows is just the first step to realizing that vision.My contention here is simple. Leopard is not the future. How could it ever be? This isn't good enough to make Windows users switch en masse. No desktop OS could ever make that happen. No, the future is Safari. First, running on iPhone. Later, running on any number of devices. Traditional and non-computer devices. Remember that the cell phone market is much bigger than the market for desktop PCs. This is big. And yes, I know it all sounds like a conspiracy theory. But I think that we will all look back on this day as the time when we stopped thinking about desktop OSes and focused on the mobile, Web-based future. This might be the smartest thing Apple ever did. And so far, few have even noticed it. Yet. [ Posted at 5:30 PM | Permalink ]
Wednesday, May 30, 2007The Palm FoleoPalm blog:Some of you may have seen late last night or early this morning information about the Palm Foleo.Now it's "officially" official. And no, the Palm Foleo is not a plane, train or portable waffle maker. It's a smartphone companion that has a large screen and full-size keyboard (which makes email and working with documents much easier), Wi-Fi, and an on/off button that actually does just that...instant on, instant off (i.e. no boot up).Against my better judgment, I'm actually curious. It looks like a small laptop, which suggests I won't be able to use it, given my huge hands. I wonder what the battery life is like? If it's good, this could be a road warrior's dream tool. Or it could be the next Sony eVilla. It's hard to say. I wonder what the battery life is really like. [ Posted at 4:58 PM | Permalink ]
Wednesday, May 16, 2007Operating systems present problems for mobile phone makersIHT:Two operating systems run more than 95 percent of the world's computers, yet dozens of systems are behind the 2.5 billion mobile phones in circulation, a situation that has hampered the growth of new services, industry executives and independent experts say.While few outside of Microsoft would argue that monoculture is a good thing, apparently too much of anything is bad as well. Labels: Mobile [ Posted at 7:34 PM | Permalink ]
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