Inside View

Backseat Serenade

SAY WHAT YOU WILL about mobile phones, their operating systems or their user interfaces. I am really pleased with knowing I carry one that has creative icons on its screen--icons that create things in one easy tap.

I put those icons into good use and this morning, while in the car, I pointed my phone at our resident artist (pictured) as she started serenading the occupants If all works as it normally does, I will be able to attach her image and her audio clip to an email and within a few minutes people on Twitter will come looking and listening. I created these things with my Nokia E7. It's the least expensive and most durable piece of multimedia production gear in my bag.

Backseat Serenade

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Sent mail2blog using O2 3G Typepad service from my Nokia E7.

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Happy Birthday Evernote

EVERNOTE CELEBRATES its fourth birthday today and I'm one of the millions of people who are paying for its service. I've been using the program since July 2008 and even though the Symbian version of Evernote is a weak sister of other operating systems, I can save ideas and things I like with my Nokia E7. I review my notes on other handsets. I can also send images (things like menu items, program notes, and anything my phone can snao and save) to Evernote using Document Scanner QT. I can record things you hear and things I see with my iPod Touch. I'm using the application to create things faster and more importantly, to create more quickly the most critical things related to each academic term. That means I carry around a set of exam papers in the cloud and I refer to the papers several times a week in my hand. Evernote syncs with every computer, phone and mobile device that I own. I can search by keyword, tag and often by printed and handwritten text inside images. Evernote is one of those programs that can do more than it says on the tin. Its versatility and power make it a very clever tool.

Another Analyst Says Nokia and SE Are Dead

24/7 WALL ST has created a list of brands that they believe will disappear and they have rolled Sony Ericsson and Nokia into the mix. Others in the dead pool are Sears (the store we used to furnish much of the family home decades ago), Sony Pictures, American Apparel, Saab, A&W, Soap Opera Digest, MySpace and Kellogg's Corn Pops. The 24/7 analysts haven't been right on last year's forecasts because Kia, Moody's, BP and Zale are still ticking over even though they were placed into the 2011 dead pool.

24/7 Wall St is withering in its hatchet job of Nokia, saying "Shareholders are just waiting for an undertaker" based on Nokia's current market cap of $22 bn. Microsoft has that kind of cash pile. I'm watching with interest because I think Nokia knows how to build quality handsets. Nokia would get another year of breathing room if it can launch a Windows Phone handset launching before the middle of 2012. The alpha version is already making its rounds on YouTube videos.

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Douglas McIntyre -- "Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2012" on Yahoo! Finance, June 22, 2011. It is an article that was recommended on Facebook more than 10,000 times, tweeted more than 1000 times and it has attracted more than 4300 comments, most about Sears and Corn Pops.

Sent via mail2blog from my Nokia E7 using O2 3G Typepad service in County Kildare, Ireland. Photo by Peter Donegan.

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Biros and Webcams

View "E7 in Natural Light" as a Qik Clip

MY WORKSHOP at the ICT in Education Conference on 14 May in Thurles covered how to leverage a biro and a webcam in the classroom. I made a series of three Qik clips using both the iPod Touch (excellent optics in version 4) and the Nokia E7 (lovely audio when compared to most handheld devices). The idea: to share the handheld techniques that work best for me when recording black ink in copybooks. My tearaways follow.

Photos with Speed Inside

ZONETAG IS BACK on my main mobile phone and I'm happy with how quickly that application can snap and send my shots to Flickr. An interesting facet of Zonetag's machine intelligence is how it often embeds the speed at which I was traveling when I shot the photo. If you click on the image attached to this blog post, you will see a link to the machine tags and one of them shows we were traveling at the posted limit. Five years ago, I used Zonetag on the top of buildings in Manhatten to find comic book stores and Chinese takeaways. A flow of uptown Zonetag users gave me photographic proof of what I wanted when they shared their images on the main Zonetag site. Years later, we have apps for that. But all the while, the unvarnished Zonetag just keeps working on my Symbian phone.

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Nokia Shorts

MY NOKIA N8 EXPERIENCE from Bastien ROGER on Vimeo.

THERE ARE SO MANY reasons to love the Nokia N8 and one of them is video quality. People have been creating some amazing short films using the Nokia N8 handset. I followed the winning entries in the Nokia Producers competition a couple of weeks ago and wondered if they would go to Edinburgh's, Darklight's or Galway's film festivals. It looks like they might, based on the ambitious competition in association between Nokia and Vimeo. 

Testing E7 and Rode

ShaneTest.mp3

JUST A QUICK TEST TO to show how fast it can be done. I sent this image and a short sound clip from my Nokia E7 phone with Shane Egan peering over my shoulder. Shane is interested in extending his practise as a host on local radio. The process of taking the shot, making the one-minute clip, writing the email, sending it to the Typepad servers and viewing it online took less than three minutes.

ShaneTest.mp3

Typepad Ajax on E7

Listen

I HAVE ALWAYS wondered how Typepad's Ajax interface would work on Nokia handsets and after a few experiments, I know the basic Nokia web browser gets easily confused by Ajaxy things. I started this blog post on my E7, saved it to draft, and then finished the post on my laptop. During the next few weeks, I'm going to refine the process. Back when I used the E90 (at right) for mail2blog postings, I used my mail clients exclusively. That's probably the direction I want to go again, possibly using the Well email server as my main point of entry. Using the E7 is a real treat for me because my fat fingers normally slow down my text entry on touchscreens. The E7's QWERTY keyboard is an essential piece of business technology.

Holding the E7

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Driving Down My Mobile Phone Costs

I HAVE DISCOVERED a way to cut back the cost of running my mobile phone without reducing my effectiveness on the job. This is an important consideration since my wage packet has gone down as I continue making my donations to bailing out the Irish banking system. I have shaved a minimum of EUR 20 a month off my mobile phone bill by using the Nokia N8 as my primary phone and also carrying an iPod Touch connected to an O2 data SIM. For the second month running, my total phone charges amounted to less than one hundred euro. When running Android handsets or the iPhone, my monthly costs never slipped below EUR 120 monthly, partly because the iPhone costs more on contract than the N8. Android phones just seem to constantly suck data from the mobile web and the only way I've controlled that tendency is to manually rename the phone's APN to keep it offline. I use my handsets hard, sending dozens of text messages every day and uploading megabytes of content onto internet places weekly as I run the Web Promotion for Business programme for LIT. I use cloud services like Dropbox and Evernote from my hand with a Huawei E585 Mifi dongle serving both my iPod Touch and up to four other students who connect their handsets through it. My primary email service (using eight different email addresses on three different mail servers) runs through the Nokia N8. Even though I enjoy the convenience of an apps-based world, I earn my money and respond to both student and college taskings through email. The N8 excels in this regard. And at the end of each month, I am saving enough money to buy a Chinese takeaway for dinner. Putting the Nokia N8 into daily use has been a big win for me, just in terms of saving money. As those who follow my blog, my teaching routine, my Flickr photostream and my Qik video collection know, the N8 has kept me in the media production game better than any other device I have owned.

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Adjusting my hearing

 

WE BEGIN A 12-WEEK programme under the European Globalisation Fund next week. Part of the programme requires me to adjust my teaching style to fit the vocabulary of students from four different countries and the learning style of a deaf student. I'm staying lofi and trying to prepare a teaching routine that allows me to snap revision clips with the Nokia N8 ahead of time. If successful, I'll turn the phone onto student journals during the tutorial sessions and produce 10-minute summaries of every 120 minutes of contact time. I haven't done this before and I've no technology assistant. If I'm able to produce quality educational materials from inside the classroom, I will share them on iTunes U.

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Watch on YouTube.

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