Peter's Blog

I've been trying out various alternative methods of text entry on my pocketpc. Each different entry method is implemented by a SIP (Soft Input Panel) and Windows Mobile 5 comes with four SIPs built in:

Block Recognizer

a bit like palm's graffiti. Requires remembering odd letter strokes and neat writing.

Keyboard

tiny keyboard to peck text out on. Will suggest a list of words, given enough letters to work with so you can choose a word from the list.

Letter Recognizer

recognises less formally written letters than Block Recognizer. This one reminded me most of my palm tungsten T2.

Transcriber

supposedly handwriting recognition but not accurate enough to be useful.

The third party things I have tried are:

Tengo

this one works like predictive text on a phone but with just six buttons. It's kind of fun, the keys are large and you can type quite fast but it is very error prone, frequently choosing the wrong word and going back to correct errors is quite fiddly. I am getting tired of it's mistakes. Like a phone you can re-select a word and chose a different completion but it has an annoying bug where it adds an extra space after the word which my perfectionism cannot ignore.

Calligrapher

supposedly better handwriting recognition but not good enough to be useful. This is mainly my fault for having poor handwriting (these days I only use it to write my signature).

Fitaly

a weird, supposedly efficient keyboard layout to learn, tied with a list of word suggestions. This was ok but the word suggestions weren't much better than those provided by the pocketpc keyboard, still have to type four or five letters to get any suggestions.

WordLogic

another mini qwerty keyboard but with a more sophisticated word suggestion mechanism, often it is only necessary to type the first three letters of a word. When I try to add a new word to WordLogic it seems to crash it and I have to reopen the SIP.

Tengo is most fun but the error rate is bad. WordLogic is my next preference, I make fewer errors but it feels like a slow way of writing. I think this is because the keyboard is too small, most errors seem to be due to tapping the wrong letter.

Conclusion: no clear winner. Letter Recogniser is the best of the built in ones, it is probably faster than WordLogic. I do have a soft spot for tengo though.

Got Motorola V547 back from 'repair' but it still keeps disconnecting during calls or fails to dial with a 'call failure'. As the problem is intermittent there is little hope in convincing O2 or their repairers that the phone has a problem so we have given up and she has gone back to a Nokia 6610. No camera!

The v547 isn't totally useless: it still reminds her to take her pill every day.

Program on TV about Skype and how VOIP is shafting telephone companies. Interesting to see that all Skypes development is done in Estonia and everyone in the company (100 people) use laptops. So why haven't they fixed the problem that makes my laptop take 2 minutes to come out of hibernate when skype is running?

Skype calling rates to Nigeria (23p/min) are still more expensive than Vonage (18p/min) and Alpha Telecom (14p/min). It's still cheapest to buy VAT free phone cards from street traders in Peckham (11p/min).

Tempted by Dell Axim X50, a PocketPC, which Dell are selling for £234 which seems like good deal for something with:

• Wifi (only b but that will do)
• Bluetooth
• 64M ram
• 128M flash
• Compactflash and SD slots: can share compactflash with my camera and they do a 1G card for £41.36 which is a good deal
• Free TV Tuner (!). Just have to walk around carrying a UHF aerial.
• Powerful IR emitter, useable as remote control.
• It works with Skype which means free phone calls from starbucks.

I haven't been using my Tungsten T2 recently. Reasons:

• My digitiser is flaky and I have to be pixel perfect clicking on things. The handwriting recognition is pretty poor, have to write ultra-big block capitals all the time which always seems like hard work.
• No Wifi Bluetooth is no comparison.
• Palm OS is pretty noddy compared to windows: it does have 'files' as such just databases which makes it hard to port anything to it.
• Appears to be a dying platform: Palm are being sluggish with their Wifi and this could be a fatal error.
• Sony are already pulling the plug on their Palm PDA's to focus on phones.

Saw two items of interest while out shopping yesterday, coincidentally the same price:

Doom 3 for xbox

£30, tempting. Nice to give it a try without upgrading my pc. Don't have any time to play it

Skype handset

£30. I had heard of these but didn't realise a local shop would have one. It is like a normal corded phone but plugs in usb socket. I was again tempted as it may encourage my wife to use skype, using conventional dialling buttons. I decided this was unlikely and the £30 would be better spent on a bluetooth headset: can't dial on it but can listen to podcasts and it is handsfree. I have one already.

I've still got to wait till August before I can update my phone to one that plays mp3's. When I do I have decided that this is going to be my ringtone. It makes crazy frog look cool. I've saved the file in case the link dies in 6 months time.

I'm one step further along in the Domain Name Saga, I have heard from Nominet and they have transferred my tag for bisiand.me.uk to 123-reg. I have told them to start the transfer and I am waiting for them to confirm.

Google progress is interesting (to me), petersblog.org is getting hits in it's own right for newer content, particularly regarding the v547 phone (which out of about 261,000 results, google places on the first page at number 8 ), and the crazy frog ringtone. The old content is getting odd visits but that may be through random dns successes for bisiand.me.uk.

I was getting about 100 visitors/day on bisiand.me.uk, I'm currently at 31 today (according to Statcounter) and it looks like either petersblog.org or statcounter went down a while last night as traffic dropped to zero.

Played some more with Flickr and I am rather impressed with it. I have tried two or three photo upload sites and this is by far the best. I have tried:

• Epson online site. Neglected this for months now.
• Drupal image module, i.e. this.
• Photobox private archive. This is where I get my prints done and they give me 50M more space with every order. I'm up to 250M. My photo archive on my laptop is 1G.

Compared with the above Flickr offers a lot more features and, although it has adverts it is not blatantly trying to sell prints. This is important to me if I want to let friends or relatives look around. It just seems rude for each picture to have price tags on it.

Flickr highlights:

• Drag-and-drop windows upload utility. I can drag photo's from Paintshop Photo Album onto this and upload them, easy, cool. Ease of uploading is important: PPA displays the images clearly and I drag them to upload them. Much better than fiddling with the file open dialog box.
• Organizr utility, an online version of Paintshop pro Photo Album. This is java or flash or something and is quite well done, more like a windows app than a web app.
• Calender organisation.
• Post from email, including mobile phone.
• Anyone in the world can see my pictures and that is cool.

Flickr is free up to 10Mbytes per month and only displays your last 100 pictures. Upgrade to 1G/month and limitless pictures is $40 a year.

I do recommend Photobox for prints: they come in a day or two and the quality is superb: they make 'photo-quality' inkjet photos look very poor.

My wife has had her phone for a year so down to the O2 shop for an upgrade. She fancied a change from Nokia and liked the colour of the Motorola V600 but unfortunately that is discontinued, it has been replaced by the V547 so I got her one of those. For free . It has:

• Clamshell design
• Bluetooth
• Big clear screen
• Camera: slightly better than nokia cameras (e.g. my 6610i, wife's old 7250i) don't look quite so much like they were taken through the bottom of a dirty jam jar. Still no match for a digital camera.
• MP3 ringtones! Cool, was able to download the crazy frog which has everyone in stitches.
• Good build quality
• The keyboard has a nicer feel than the Nokias which are a bit cheap and clicky.
• The UI is rather like my late lamented Sony-ericsson T68i: fiddly and annoying.
• Good predictive text: it quickly learns that you want to type 'am home' more often than 'an good'.

With the free phone I got 25% off a Jabra BT200 FreeSpeak Bluetooth Headset and a car charger for £5.

The Jabra headset Just Worked with the phone and it is indeed cool. My wife was delighted with it, she wants me to ring her whenever she goes out so she can pose with it. I set it up to voice dial and told her she can leave the phone in her handbag.

I wanted to try the headset with Skype so I tried reinstalling my existing bluetooth USB dongles:

Smart Modular Technologies

I downloaded their latest blueopal drivers and installed them. On first installation the Audio drivers and some other bits failed to install. It did manage to install an OBEX network driver and I was able to copy files to and from the phone. This is how I installed the crazy frog .mp3 file which I downloaded above. (Am I missing something? Was I supposed to pay for it?). I tried reinstalling the blueopal drivers to get headset support and was rewarded with my first every BSOD under windows XP. The setup program kept trying to reinstall, giving more BSOD's so I had to uninstall it manually by deleting files and picking the nasty bits out of the registry by hand.

MicroStar International (MSI) dongle

Luckily I had an MSI dongle as well. I downloaded the latest SP1 drivers for this (carefully avoiding the XP SP2 version that uses the new Microsoft USB stack but that not support a headset, not until MS get into the VOIP business) and installed them with no problems.

The headset gives new microphone and audio devices so I redirected everything to the headset and again it Just Worked. Skype worked ok and talking to someone in the same room you can hear a delay of about a second between them speaking and it coming through the headset. Ragarding range, the MSI dongle is supposed to have a 100m range and with the laptop downstairs the headset can receive anywhere in the house, although at the furthest reaches the sound gets a bit choppy. I won't try Skype over Wifi, my Wifi is too flaky.

Peter's vision of the future (well maybe not that visionary):

• full mp3 players in cell phones. If an iPod shuffle is the size of a stick of gum, why not make the cell phone a little bit bigger for a 500M flash memory chip?
• death of land line phones, ripped apart by mobile phones and VOIP.
• Nokia had better pull their fingers out, the V547 makes the Nokia phones look very dull.

Got around to trying Skype today for some VOIP fun and games. The main problem for me to set this up was the poor sound quality on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop. Using windows sound recorder with a plugin external microphone the recordings were distorted and pretty poor quality. I did some searching but I could find no fixes for this. Eventually I tried downloading new drivers for the SigmaTel C-Major Audio hardware from the Dell site. This fixed the problem.

I tried dialling my home phone but I could not get through because my home phone is set up to refuse calls from phones that withhold caller ID (to stop telesales) and Skype obviously has no caller ID to give.

Ringing wife's mobile I was able to amaze her and check Skype out simultaneously. It works. It's as good as using the phone and for ringing my mum in the evenings it works out cheaper than the landline. The rate to mobiles looks pretty steep, about 30p for a 30 second call.

I didn't need to fiddle with the DI624's firewall settings to get this working. For the record, I am on a 750k down/128k up broadband connection.

Now to ponder more about bluetooth headset.

pros:

• can make phone calls with hands free

cons:

• horrible pose factor makes it embarrassing to buy

Summary: Skype is cool.