Category: thoughts

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mobile review thoughts work

The ultimate mobile search experience (a.k.a Foodfinder lives)

The folks at Yahoo oneSearch just announced the new oneSearch Shortcut application with a new auto-locate feature that determines the users location using cell-tower positioning and wi-fi triangulation. This combines with the existing voice search and oneSearch clusters to create what is in my opinion the best mobile search experience in the business (especially on Nokia S60 devices). Read on for a quick description of the user experience:

oneSearch Shortcut
The Shortcut application starts off by showing you a small text entry field on the idle-screen of you mobile phone. The text field has a small note telling you to hold down the “Call” button and speak.… Read the rest

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personal thoughts

Food and drink

I’m lucky enough to have a job that has taken me to several different countries and one of things friends keep asking me is how each trip was. This is a really tough question for me to answer since I’m really not much of a tourist, I have no interest in visiting the local monuments and museums which means that I generally dont get out much when I’m at conferences etc… And this isnt restricted to business travel either – my vacations usually involve visiting people rather than the places they live.

The one thing I do like doing on trips is sampling the local food and drink.… Read the rest

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mobile technology thoughts

Tutorial on Nokia N95 3G connection sharing (Mac OS X and N800 Maemo)

I’ve recently had the pleasure of using a N95 8GM NAM (N95-4) that was provided to me by Nokia as part of the WOM World program. I actually have both the original N95 and an N95 8GB (N95-2) but both of them are euro 3G which meant that I was stuck at EDGE speeds on US AT&T network. I’ve had a couple of weeks to play with the device and the big differentiator was of course the blazing fast internet speeds (see the speed test results below). Uploading ZoneTag photos and seeing Zurfer images was so fast that I would just continue using the 3G network even when I had an available WiFi access point.… Read the rest

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personal thoughts

Do you have the time?

I had an interesting experience this morning – my cellphone (which is set to get automatic time updates from the cell tower) suddenly reset its time back by 8 hours and as a result my cellphone alarm didnt go off. When I got up it said that the time was 11:30 pm when it was actually 7:30 am. I tried restarting the phone and even forced a network time update but the phone stubbornly said that the time was 11:30 pm and there was nothing I could do about it. When I was driving to work the phone finally set itself to the correct time and the alarm started going off about 2 hours later than it was supposed to.… Read the rest

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mobile research thoughts

What is Mobile Spatial Interaction?

Helping organize the Mobile Spatial Interaction (MSI) workshop at CHI 2007 has made me very sensitive to the usage of the term MSI. Most people see Mobile and Spatial attached to Interaction and immediately start talking about location aware applications and services. However as someone who has spent the last few years working on location-aware applications, I have always felt that MSI and location-aware apps are two slightly different classes of research. As a result I’ve been spending some time thinking about how to define MSI as well as understanding how it differs (if it differs at all) from the current of location aware applications.… Read the rest