As the Smart Q7 doesn’t look like its going to turn up today, (expected tomorrow) I thought i’d relocate for a few hours.
I’ve taken the Fujitsu Loox on a little tour and right now I’m sitting in the park.. More details in my scrapbook website.
Gone Mobile Blogging… Watch and Communicate | Chippy’s HiBlue Lab.
Finally we’ve got a bit of sun here in Bonn so it’s time to get out with the devices for some mobile blogging. I’ll be jumping on my bike to find a suitable place to work. Not too crowded, not too sunny. I’m thinking that the Rhine, south of Bonn might be good.
First though, I need to decide on what device to take and to do that, I need to write down exactly what I want to achieve.
The first problem I have is that a true ‘work’ device doesn’t quite match up to the microblogging requirements because I would like a big keyboard. My phone, as with nearly all phones, isn’t up to what I want from a microblogging experience so we’ve immediately hit a choice between taking 3 different devices or making some compromises.
See full article for live tracking…
I’m very tempted to do this myself but I’m not sure that a ‘pro’ that should be doing it. I think it would be better if someone from the ultra mobile community did it so here I am putting the challenge out to you.
Fly the Ultra Mobile computing flag. Pull all your Web2.0 skills together with your mobile computer and passion for travel and sign-up for the competition. Think GPS, Google Maps, Geotagging, Live tracking, great photography, audio voxpops and creativity. My initial idea was to take a micro scooter and get rolling with a MID or ultra mobile PC and do another live dot-to-dot. Jog and Blog is another.
Read all about it here and of course, if you’re successful, tell them we sent you ;-)
I’m very tempted to do this myself but I’m not sure that a ‘pro’ that should be doing it. I think it would be better if someone from the ultra mobile community did it so here I am putting the challenge out to you.
Fly the Ultra Mobile computing flag. Pull all your Web2.0 skills together with your mobile computer and passion for travel and sign-up for the competition. Think GPS, Google Maps, Geotagging, Live tracking, great photography, audio voxpops and creativity. My initial idea was to take a micro scooter and get rolling with a MID or ultra mobile PC and do another live dot-to-dot. Jog and Blog is another.
Read all about it here and of course, if you’re successful, tell them we sent you ;-)
Life has been so busy over the last month that I’ve hardly had a chance to think about CeBIT and yet it starts in just 5 days. On Monday, I’ll be meeting JKK and Sacha in Hannover and we’re going to hit CeBIT as hard as we can.
Fortunately the accommodation, tickets (I have a press pass again this year) and transport have all been arranged so all that remains to do is fix up the schedule, write up a hit-list and organise the kit.
I’ll write about the ‘hit list’ in the next few days as we’ll probably use it for the basis of a warm-up podcast tentatively planned for Friday but let me quickly talk about the kit I’m going to use at CeBIT.
Due to three ‘smoked’ UMPCs, a couple of no-show UMPCs and a general need to keep spending down this year, I’m having to really cobble together the best I can from the devices I have left here. I’m not exactly struggling to find a PC to take but I had planned a different set of devices and was planning to have a bit more of a ‘showcase’ setup.
I will go with the three-device strategy (phone, mid, notebook) because of flexibility, fall-back and battery life. I’ll take my Nokia N82 for the important tasks of voice, SMS and email and it will also come in handy for some direct-to-flickr photo shooting due to it’s superb camera optics and flash. I might use it for a bit of Google Latitude fun and the occasional 3G Bluetooth modem but the idea is really to preserve it for essential comms. At the top end of the range i’ll be taking my laptop. Actually it’s a Medion Akoya Mini netbook but I don’t have anything else so it’s going to serve as my main keyboard and screen during the event. It’s far from the perfect mobile netbook though and I’ll have to deal with a lack of built-in 3G, no Bluetooth and a poor 2hr battery life. On the positive side, I’ve used it a lot and it’s got a stable build with all my applications running well.
As the third device, I want to take a MID. The original plan was to use an Aigo P8888 but the standard 2hr battery life and lack of standard XP build has put me off buying one. I’m not a JKK and so hacking XPe and piggyback batteries was never on the cards. The Viliv S5 didn’t hit the market on time. The Wibrain i1 prototype doesn’t standby or hibernate due to an incomplete BIOS setup and I’ve killed the Raon Everun Note I was preparing. As I look across my devices for a MID, the only one I can see is the Nokia N810, a device that I had ignored for the best part of a year but started using again recently when I upgraded the OS and installed a bunch of community applications on it. As an RSS, mobile website, IM and twitter tool, it’s working out quite well. Web browsing is frustratingly slow but certainly better than my S60 device and with 4 hours wifi-on battery life, it can sit and pick up feeds and tweets for a long time before the battery needs changing so today I bought a second battery and a USB charger cable for it, fished out an old Nokia 3G phone with a broken backlight and will tether the two up on a 2.50-Euro per day pay-as-you-go UMTS contract, drop the phone in my bag or on my belt and put the N810 in my pocket as and use it as as always-on ‘informer’ and twitter tool. I’ll also be able to put comments on photo’s at Flickr and post to the blog using the Flickr blog posting tools as Jenn did at CES. The N810 needs a lot more power to turn it into a real MID but the size, battery life, screen and keyboard should help to keep me updated on the go and certainly won’t need much space.
One thing I’m really happy about is that I’ll only need one power brick for all the kit and the reason for that is a nice little U2o power pack I’ve got from Ultimate-Netbook.co.uk. I did some field testing for them last year and we’ve been happy with the results so they now sell it. Fortunately they let me keep it after the testing so I’m now armed with a 55wh power pack that takes a 19v input (the power brick from the Medion Akoya plugs straight in) and provides 5V (via USB), 9v, 16v and 19v outputs. There’s a selection of adaptors with the device so both my phone, the N810 and the Medion Akoya will run or charge from it. If I treat the Akoya well, I’ll get about 6hrs working time out of it which should be fine for a day’s work on the floor.
For photo and video work I’ll be taking my trust Canon S2IS and tripod. The long lens, VGA video capability and great stereo mics are perfect for recording conferences or device overviews and although a DSLR with 720P video recording would be my preference, it won’t be hard to get some good results out of the S2. Besides, JKK has a new Canon HD cam so we’ll be using that for most of our videos.
Finally, I’ll take the Samson USB mic which is great for mobile podcasting and interviews. Audacity is installed on the netbook and it’s an easy process to upload an MP3 to UMPCPortal.
I’m a little sad there’s no ultra mobile PC in there but it’s a proven set of kit that I’m very familiar with and that should help to keep the stress levels down. The whole kit comes in at 4kg which is very good considering I’ve got the tripod, cam and a 400gm microphone included in that. Total cost of the complete kit is around 1400 Euros (new)
Of course, if I have any issues, I won’t need to look too far for help. Sascha the ‘netbook king’ is joining us in the accommodation and on the floor and he’ll be bringing a stack of netbooks so I’ll probably get some good hands-on opportunities with some of the netbooks I haven’t had a chance to use yet. JKK is with us too and he has a good set of kit too so between us, well have no excuses.
As JKK, Sascha and I prepare over the next few days you’ll probably here a few more warm-up stories. We’ve tentatively planned a podcast for Friday evening so expect a CeBIT warm-up post over the weekend.
Here goes. More exciting than a presidential inauguration (or maybe just the sort of steady, easy-to-follow entertainment some Americans need after the parties last night!) it’s the live city-wide, MID-based dot-to-dot. I am still having problems with my gps module but there’s no more time left for messing around so I have to go for it. As per previous live maps, my current position (and you should see occasional comments too) is on the top map and the dot-to-dot will appear in sections below. Each diot should show a comment or media. If you wish to follow the messages as they happen, i’m using @chippy to send them out.
As before, i’ll be using the Wibrain i1, Intel Atom-based MID (i’m using this because it’s got a hand strap and one battery lasts for well over 4 3G-connected hours.)
All the exciting action (!) starts at around 11am CET (Central Europe.)
Update: looks like we have a problem with the live map. Shame. I think my gps is incompatible with the ipoki plugin.
Update2. I finished. Did you join the dots yet? You do that while Ieat this pizza and drink this beer! After 6hrs and about 10km walking, I need it!
Click on the ‘dots’ to reveal text and images.
And if you didnt manage to work it out…..here are a a few images of the final mashup. These are just images. The map above contains all the media.
I took a walk to the horses this afternoon; a live media-walk for MIDMoves to test out some geographically-tagged capabilities on the big Web thing. Tracking is nothing new. Location-based tweets and near-live video posts are nothing new. Putting it all together in a media-rich way and being able to show it live is something different though. It highlights the difference between a smartphone and a PC-based MID or UMPC. There’s just no way you can tie all the components together and post-process it into a presentation like this with a smartphone. Having access to full-screen Web2.0 applications and smooth multi-tasking was the key here. There’s lots of improvements that can be made but this is a great step forward for live, media-rich tracking.
Move and zoom the map below and click on the icons for videos, audio recordings, tweets and images.
Source: MIDMoves.com
Thanks to Mobilxfor the i1. Ipokifor the live tracking app.
Source: MIDMoves.com Thanks to Mobilx for the i1. Ipoki for the live tracking app.
Watch out next week for a very special live geo-media tour on MIDMoves.
One advantage of running an Intel-sponsored MID event is that I get some nice kit to play with. In fact, the whole team gets some nice kit to play with on the tour. Between Jenn, Nicole, Ewan and myself we’ve got 4 different MIDs to test out. The Compal MID (not sure which ‘brand’ this will be yet) the Benq S6, the ClarionMiND and the OQO 2+. There’ll be 2 of each to be shared out and I’m getting an OQO 2+ and a Clarion Mind. The devices have been shipped by Intel from the US and we’re expecting them very soon. Jenn is also getting an OQO 2+ and I guess, as she’s in the US, she’ll be getting it first so watch closely over at Pocketables.net
The MIDMoves tour starts next Monday, the 19th and MIDMoves will be the place that we’ll all be reporting about the devices first. If I have time before the tour I’ll fire up the studio (still warm from CES coverage!) and do some live work with you. If I don’t have time during the tour, expect lots of coverage after it.
If you’ve been following MIDMoves, you’ll see that I’ve been getting into final planning. Roaming 3G costs have meant that I’m having to change my tour itinerary but there are some exciting things happening. In my latest post, I’ve been talking about geographically aware applications and services.
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