2 posts tagged “mobile phone”

finally, i have finished flim-flamming around and made a big decision. it involves technology purchases, and that is always an exciting sort of decision to make. recently i've been fretting about mobile phones. i want the iphone because it's gorgeous and does everything i want it to (and all my friends have them now too and spend their time comparing apps and i feel left out), but it's useless for the art project i'm working on because it doesn't support flash. so i have to buy another phone sometime for the art project and was looking at android, but that's still too immature and as the project won't really get off the ground for a few months, if i'm realistic (because my collaborator and i need to talk about what we're going to do again now because our last plan was crushed by her phd supervisor, so we need to plan and think before we even start to code and test), it's probably more sensible to look at phones for testing closer to the time we'll be doing the actual testing, to give android a chance to show what it can do. i had been going to buy a netbook for when i go back to work, in the hopes that then i could actually continue to compose through the period of servitude, but i'm concerned about weight, now that i've discovered that my neck is showing signs of greater-than-usual-for-my-age wear and tear and that one of the discs is bulging out of place a bit and getting close to a nerve. so last night i sat down and made up a big table in evernote discussing the pros and cons of all the various devices under consideration, which was a very interesting exercise and i am delighted to announce that the winner is...

ipod touch!

it has all the functionality of the iphone except the actual phone and the camera, for about the same initial outlay (but of course without the phone plan) and not having a plan attached leaves me free, if need be, to get a phone on a plan when the time comes to pick out a testing phone. it's significantly lighter than a netbook and more subtle for new contracts where one might not necessarily want to sit down in sight of one's co-workers at lunchtime with a computer when they could get concerned that you're trying to do two contracts at once or something. it has wifi access. and a truckload of apps - my productivity tools all have iphone/pod apps, plus i discovered some fabulous looking apps for music last night - a keyboard one which allows access to a full piano keyboard which you play with your fingers - should be useful for confirming intervals, working on melodic fragments and multi-touch allows you to play chords too, which would be very helpful. there's also an amazing-looking ear training app which would be incredibly helpful for me. and of course you can get metronome and tuner apps too, as well as a rudimentary notation tool (although it doesn't play back yet, which i think makes it a little limited for now). if i put on my prophet hat, i do feel that if the major notation packages, finale and sibelius, end up making versions for a mobile platform, it'll most likely be the iphone/pod, plus of course there's always the chance that apple will release a version of logic, and there's no way that would be available on anything else.

so i have made my decision. now i just have to try to hold myself back until i have a job. or at least the prospect of a job. or at least am looking for a job. um.

W810i_product_quality_image_1

a little late, i know, given that half the people i know have iphones and most of the rest of them have some sort of blackberry/mobile windows hoo-ha-thingy while i'm still languishing with an almost-2-years-old sony ericsson w810i, but i felt that as i'm embarking on a collaborative project that requires me to programme for the mobile web, i should really be using it and finding out first-hand what works and what is seriously annoying.

so cue a little experimenting with my phone. most people, i believe go through this when they first get a phone. i did give it a go at one point, couldn't fathom it for some reason and figured it would be too expensive to use if i did get it working, so installed google maps and left it at that.

today i started by trying to work out how best to keep track of my expenditure (because i'm flat broke at the moment and i've decided i need to start budgeting properly so i don't end up like this again) and figured if i could find a little expense-tracking app for my phone, it would be better than writing these things down on little pieces of paper and hunting for pens and things and none of it ever getting put anywhere where it could be of any use at all. so i hunted one down and actually managed to install it which felt like a disproportionately great achievement. it's a long way from beautiful, but it actually seems to be quite well built - easy interface to use, minimal typing required and it keeps track of the basic stuff i need - what i spent, what i spent it on, and i can even put a note alongside it. and at the end of the month apparently i can export it all to xls so i can look at everything that happened in the month with ease. it was an interesting exercise in seeing how simple but how useful an app can be.

the next step was actually getting webby stuff to work. sony's interface leaves a certain amount to be desired, i feel. the email set up has HRs between sections, so you keep thinking you've got to the end of the page of options, when in fact there's a bunch more things to fill in underneath. so i managed to set it up to send, but didn't realise there were still outgoing-mail-servery things it wanted from me - it had looked like it was done with the questions, so i'd assumed it was going to use the o2 settings or something to send the mail, but it seems it needs a normal outgoing mail server just like normal email. once that was set up, sending and receiving was go. yay! i don't know that i'll use it for checking email very often (and the download seems a bit haphazard - rather than just downloading the new email since the last check, it seems to pull down a bunch of random other stuff too. and there doesn't seem to be any way to actually delete msgs out of the inbox, just to "mark them for deletion", whatever that means).

anyway, now that email's set up, i've been able to set up something a bit more useful - to be able to send tasks directly into my remember the milk account whenever i think of them. the only drawback with this is that to use the import-list function for rtm, you need to be able to separate items listed in the body of the email with line breaks, and i can't see that the sony ericsson mail client allows this, but will be checking the manual for that one and, if need be, attempting to find an alternative mail client. next step: set up email for evernote, so i can snap things i want to remember - posters for shows, or jot down random project ideas - and file them away before i forget. third step: set up emailing to flickr, which seems to work...

Testing sending to flickr from my phone