Inside View from Ireland

Audioboo Built Into Windows Phone

Bernie Goldbach — Wed, 08 May 2013 02:06:53 PDT

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel with logo from Evernote.

ONE OF THE TOP apps for Windows Phone is Evernote. And it doubles as an audio recorder for Audioboo.

A lot of people don't realise the power the Windows Phone mic offers. Out of the box, it has decent audio recording capability and I've used the audio recorder to make clips inside Evernote that I can email directly to Boomail.

I also use Voice Recorder Pro on Windows Phone 8 to get the highest quality .wav file from my Nokia Lumia. That app uses time and battery power to pull the HQ audio file from my Lumia 820 into the app's mail client. I email the audio into my Evernote first, listen to it, then add an image to the note in Evernote before sending the whole lot out via Boomail.

Lumiaboo

I haven't tried recording more than four minutes at a time because .wav files are huge. However, after four different attempts, the result has always worked. The audio files and associated image goes up onto my Audioboo account. I'm going to start a board on Audioboo where I hold my Evernote Audioboo collection.

Another note maker also exists on WP8. It's OneNote. You can create a file in OneNote, type in notes, add your photo for cover art, hit the audio button at the bottom to insert a voice clip and your're onto the same process. However, you cannot append with OneNote like you can do with Voice Recorder Pro.

I'm keen to prove this Evernote-to-Audioboo concept for our next batch of creative multimedia students because most of the incoming cohort are part of the BYOD Brigade.

Not All Batteries Are Made the Same

Bernie Goldbach — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:43:13 PDT

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Knock-off battery from China.

I LIKE HAVING a replaceable battery in my phone and that's one reason I opted for a Lumia 820. However, I've discovered that all batteries aren't built the same.

In my case, an inexpensive 8 euro battery won't give me eight hours of hard use. However, the 1500 mAh rating on the Li-ion replacement is less than the 1650 mAh of the original Nokia BP-5T Li-polymer so I reckon I'm getting what I paid for.

Batteries and microtechnology intrigue me. I'm worried about all the evil residue I'm leaving behind for future generations because of my disposable batteries so I try to buy the (much more expensive) rechargeable batteries for kids' toys and consumer electronic gear. I've also noticed a relationship between how long it takes to recharge a battery and how long that battery's duty cycle actually extends. And I'm seeing evidence of major leaps in microtechnology that might boost our expectations of battery power.

Battery technology deserves to observe a breakthrough. Researchers at the University of Illinois might have just what we need--powerful microbatteries so strong that you might use one to jump start your car's flat battery. These lithium ion microbatteries are only a few millimeters in size. You could recharge your smartphone in less than a second with these microbatteries.

From research published here in the journal Nature Communications:

-- The batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther and devices that are 30 times smaller.

-- The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies.

-- These test batteries have an internal three-dimensional microstructure based upon a three-dimensional nanostructure cathode design with integrated microscale components that result in a complete battery with superior performance.

Bernie Goldbach teaches creative multimedia students how to power themselves for longer than an eight-hour duty day.

Hands-on Windows Phone 8 in Ireland

Bernie Goldbach — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:06:41 PDT

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | My photo of Lumia 820.

I STARTED USING a Windows Phone 8 just after St Patrick's Day 2013. I like the phone, its range of apps and its handling of multiple email accounts.

The only snag I have with the phone relates to my Microsoft account. Microsoft thinks I'm in the UK and won't let me change my credentials. But that doesn't stop the Store from processing my transactions.

Friends in the WP ecosystem tell me to get my ass over to the XBox world and to start leveraging SkyDrive. I have noted their points and plan to deep dive into both places because I need the phone backed up better than I kept my original Nokia Lumia.

There are several things about the Lumia 820 that make iOS 6 look lame.

The Windows Phone Store cuts me slack when my credit card fails to pay on the first go. Try that with the Apple Store.
In-app Old Skool games like Tapitude keep our back seat driver occupied for half of the battery's life.
The People Hub tells me if one of my Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn friends are awake or in-country.
All my photos and videos automatically upload to SkyDrive.
Because of Nokia Music, our five year old has bought more singles in a month than I did in any teenaged year.
I can pin so many useful things anywhere on the Start screen and many of those things are Live Tiles that show fresh information incrementally.

I've made a few other observations and recommendations during the past fortnight while poking around with the phone--one I got for free when Nokia Care opted not to repair my broken Nokia E7.

I close down apps to keep things snappy.

A lot of people use the Start button too much.

You can press it to go back to your Start screen or press it and hold it to use Speech.

But I think it's more important to press Back to leave an app. If you don't, the app is ready to resume. That can bog down the operating system when you're doing something important like Temple Run.

Tiles on the Start Screen mesmerise me--they're like apps that keep updating. Many Tiles offer information at a glance, so I don't even have to go into the app to learn the temperature is, number of fresh emails you have, or whether point of contact recently posted a picture on Facebook.

I also pin contacts to Start so I get their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn updates right from that Tile. This helps me look informed during meet-ups.

I have most (but not all) of the apps I need.

My Go-To app on all platforms is Evernote and I've pinned my 999 folder to the Lumia's Start screen.

I'm happy to know I've free phone calls to relatives located eight time zones away because Skype and Viber work just as solidly on WP8 as they do on iOS 6.

I still need a simple To-Do app like Wunderlist and I think it's going to be 2Day mashed up with Toodledo. I'm paying for both of them so now I have to knuckle down and make it work.

I've found dozens of great apps in the Windows Phone Store and it's relatively easy to determine whether they're worth paying to use. App Discovery is simpler with Windows Phone, probably because there are hundreds of million fewer WP apps than iOS apps.

I get intelligent contact management.

The People Hub is a stalker's paradise. The People Hub is one of the simplest ways to create personal dossiers. It is so easy for Windows Phone to amalgamate everything shared by people on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and then display it in one tiled area. That same part of the People Hub can be used to text, email, IM, Facebook chat, share stuff, and have a group chat.

Windows Phone knew thousands of people in the various accounts I maintain online. More than 6000 names came onto the Nokia Lumia when I added my email accounts. Some of the accounts spawned duplicate entries when LinkedIn details differed from the legacy addresses of several hundred of my business contacts.

Once all those contacts were in the phone's People Hub, I could browse albums in the Photos Hub. When I connect and comment, I often see replies landing on my Me Tile before I see the comments on the apps themselves.

Around once a day, I hit Start , tap People , and see what's new.

And around once a week, I send business e-mail to people I've previously placed into functional groups. You can do the same thing with any other smartphone but it's not as simple to see dynamic elements like recent tweets, social networking updates and shared photos.

The phone syncs efficiently.

I really really like being able to use Windows Explorer with Windows Phone. And I really really really like having 32GB SD cards that I can swap into the phone with my music and videos ready for Atlantic crossings. It's also dead-handy knowing I can strip off the back of the phone and insert a spare battery--no jockeying for the limited power points on public transport anymore.

I get peace of mind.

I hadn't realised that I turnend on a Microsoft service that automatically saved things to the cloud. When I set up backups on my phone, I noticed some things happening.

My photos are automatically uploading to SkyDrive. Handy that.
All my text messages are backing up. I use some strings of text for project management files.
I'm also creating backups of my Lumia’s settings, including the list of apps I’ve installed, my theme color, Internet Explorer favorites, and account details.

I also turned on a Find My Phone function. Now I can log into windowsphone.com and see where my phone is located on a map. I can remotely ring it, erase it, lock it and post a message. Not that any gurriers would steal a Windows Phone when there are so many easy iPhone targets walking about.

Bernie Goldbach is a creative multimedia lecturer who has owned a Nokia phone since 1997. He also uses a fourth generation iTouch, a Nokia N8 and a Motorola Xoom Media tablet several times a week.

Reverting Two Mobile Generations Back

Bernie Goldbach — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:25:18 PST

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Photo of reliable E90.

BECAUSE I CRASHED my Lumia 800 so hard that nothing would reset it, I pulled my Nokia E90 out of its drawer for my main phone. Amazingly, it started up right away before demanding a recharge.

I had forgotten what it was like to go three days between recharging a handset. If I don't use the phone to talk and if I run my email only occasionally, I easily get 24 hours between recharging the handset. But that battery savings comes at a cost--this is a rock-solid Symbian S60 phone without all the apps I regularly use on my handsets.

I miss flicking through the Lumia's People Hub. I miss getting snappy newsfeeds. I miss easy, dependable calendar synching with Google Calendar. But I remember ploughing through a lot of productive days with the Nokia E90 several years ago and I believe the phone's limited usefulness with Twitter and Facebook is actually freeing up a whole hour of time throughout a normal day.

That's a telling lesson in productivity and suggests I will make big gains in my output if I confine my social grazing to occasional forays with the Xoom tablet and iTouch instead of the always-on connectivity (and distraction) the Nokia Lumia afforded me.

Bernie Goldbach is trying a rigorous GTD routine.

Nokia Marked Down Big Time

Bernie Goldbach — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:52:05 PDT

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Irisheyes photo of my Lumia

I HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT for Nokia and the two main handsets in the house are Nokia products. I hope to continue buying quality mobile phones from that proud Finnish company.

The marketplace has not been kind to Nokia since the iPhone established its dominance in the marketplace. Current numbers make difficult reading for anyone associated with the brand that once was synonymous with the most advanced smartphones on the planet.

Bobbie Johnson shares data from iSuppli that shows "the Finnish shipped 83 million mobile phones around the world in the last three months — nine million fewer than Samsung, which managed to ship 92 million units."

The devil is in the detail "because Samsung is doing particularly well — although it’s making a ton of profit, in fact, worldwide shipments from the Korean company were down 13 percent in the last three months. The crown was passed along because Nokia is doing significantly worse than everybody else — dropping 27 percent from the last quarter of 2011."

I read and listen to the roadmap of Nokia but I also know the cold reality of the market. Nokia's share price is low enough now that it's an acquisition target. Nokia's cash pile will run out before the end of 2014. And its market assessment is continuously marked down by funds managers after several profit warnings.

Bernie Goldbach has curated links to Nokia, many in place after listening to All About Symbian for years.

Geocaching with a 4yo

Bernie Goldbach — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 01:57:37 PDT

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | 388 words

WE REBOOTED OUR ENTHUSIASM for geocaching, led by our four-year-old daughter who proved her sleuthing skills by discovering two local geocaches within an hour of walking out the front door.

I tried basic geocaching for part of a weekend in early 2002 shortly after we had the house set up in Kilkenny but the scavenging wasn't very lively unless I bumped into a fellow geocacher. Today, there's wonderful geocaching energy online with smartphones. I use the excellent Geocaching Live on my Nokia Lumia where I can see "there are 1,717,029 active geocaches and over 5 million geocachers worldwide." Two international geocachers were in Cashel today. I know because we visited the same local caches and spotted their notes today. We became part of the buzz, adding our two log entries to the 7,415,544 new logs already submitted during the past 30 days. You can watch the video below.

Geocaching with Young Ones

Local merchants running shops within 300 metres of the Cashel geocaches were fascinated by the enthusiastic reports of our four-year-old as she breathlessly explained how she found the caches, one behind a tree and another behind a sign. The local chamber of commerce would be surprised to learn that people are getting off buses or driving off the motorway to walk the land, find a geocache, and then buy something local. In the case of the longest-placed local geocache, more than 300 people have visited the site. Their electronic footprints are recorded online and the path they've created to the cache shows their physical interest.

We'll be putting several geocaches into the wild throughout the summer of 2012. We'll have clues tagged as "geocache" on our Flickr photostream and we'll share other info through the main Geocaching website.

The Geocaching Live Windows Phone app includes a Live Tile that automatically updates to show the nearest local geocache. This means as we travel, we can watch the phone update places to explore. While this is an excellent way to convert heads-down phone time into real world hiking, the Live Tile will flatten my Nokia Lumia's battery within five hours so I'm a wary user of that update mode. It is a very impressive app, offering clever ways of sharing caches to social networks. Because our little girl wants to hold an intelligent compass, we're probably going to get her a colour Garmin and download the geocache map info into her own device.

Image from the public domain GeoCaching community, rendered by a Geocaching Mainer.

Bernie and Mia's geocaching adventure has just started, thanks to Gabriela Avram's recommendation to Mia and Rafe Blandford's well-appreciated tip about "geocaching with your Windows Phone".

GC3EQP2 Cashel Castle (Traditional Cache) created by Nonno's (geocaching.com)
GC1Y6QR The Rock Of Cache (Traditional Cache) created by Peig (geocaching.com)

16 Hours Between Charges

Bernie Goldbach — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 04:26:46 PDT

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | 133 words

MONTHS OF DAILY USE of my Nokia Lumia 800 have resulted in 16 hours between recharging the phone, thanks largely to a combination of the pre-installed Battery Saver, the clever functioning of several paid apps and controlled usage of email.

I toggle the Battery Saver "on" during most of the day because I want to prevent the phone from making 3G or wifi data connections automatically. Since I've four email services on my Nokia Lumia, they reduce the phone's battery capacity by at least one hour every work day, in my experience.

I don't run ad-supported apps during my work day because they poll a lot of data traffic and run those advertisements inside the apps. Instead, I've bought nearly every app on the Lumia, reducing battery drain due to advertising traffic.

I also have configured as many screens as possible to black backgrounds, another technique that reduces the power required to display the main screen.

With these considerations on board, I can better extend the daily life of my phone and handle voice calls, video recording and YouTube playbacks. The only way I've minimised the power requirement for those three tasks is to remain stationary in a strong area of reception.

lumia

The Fastest Phone I've Ever Owned

Bernie Goldbach — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:41:58 PDT

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | 155 words

AFTER FIVE MONTHS of daily usage, I can declare my Nokia Lumia 800 (in photo) as the fastest phone I've ever owned. Its battery life, email synchronisation, and front screen live tiles are welcome features.

Nokia made a video of the Lumia 900 (see below) and it effectively captures how I use my own phone. I can trust the phone's alarms to work in the morning, the call quality/noise cancelling is good enough for live radio interviews, and the Marketplace (more than 80,000 apps) has the business applications I've needed to get things done.

I'm watching my Zune updates for an update that gives me a USB tethering method with my Lumia 800. The phone's antenna is stronger than both the Sony Ericsson and iPhone 4 handsets that we use in the weak area of connectivity where we live.

There are a lot of reasons to value the Nokia Lumia 800 as a reliable, consistent mobile handset. Discovering it's also faster than any other handset I've owned is a welcome result.

Related info:

Luke Johnson -- "Nokia shifts 1m Lumia 800 handsets in Q4 2011" on the T3 blog, January 13, 2012.

Eric Savitz -- "Nokia: The Recovery Begins" in Forbes, March 30, 2012.

YouTube: 24 Hours Hands on with the Nokia Lumia 900

nokia

Free Nokia Lumia Launches in Ireland

Bernie Goldbach — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:07:48 PST

NOKIA'S LUMIA IS available from "free" in Vodafone Ireland shops, meaning a 60 euro monthly contract will get you a very capable handset.

Where I work, the monthly contract price is around 20 euro more per month than many legacy Nokia owners currently pay. I consider the extra money is the cost of being connected online while you're mobile. It costs a lot more to push data through 3G masts than it costs to run SMS texting across Ireland. The question for all the network operators is how to make data such a compelling service to attract tens of thousands of Irish to pay for it on monthly contracts. It's a tough sell.

It's also a tough sell to pull a happy iPhone owner back to Nokia. Tens of thousands of Irish who grew up with Nokia now own iPhones. Many of them are happy in an Apple ecosytem and they've paid for dozens of apps they use several times a week. Leaving those paid apps behind will be a big decision because in many cases, those iOS apps enrichen mobile experiences much more than intimate phone calls or conversations by text.

I have a lot of time for Nokia's Lumia and I've made it my primary phone largely because I can manage four e-mail accounts better with it than I can on my laptop.

I can manage direct messaging with the Lumia more efficiently through Rowi and the Metro UI interface. It's as good as Boxcar on iOS.

I can stay abreast hundreds of newsfeeds by using Wonder Reader on Lumia. It's snappier than any laptop or mobile feed aggregator.

Vodafone press releases tout the Lumia's injection-moulded polycarbonate because the handset feels good and solid when you hold it. I agree but I think I'm going to snap the phone into an Otterbox so I can hold it one-handed when I snap shots. The Lumia's smooth curves make it difficult to grasp in my fat hands.

The Carl Zeiss optics on the Lumia's 8MP camera are fine and its 720p HD video recording work well--but not in poor light. I've snapped and shared a dozen shots and videos from my Lumia. We revert to our Nokia N8 for camera moments and I use my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc for document imaging.

Nokia Drive works exceptionally well but Lumia has left dozens of my favourite pinpoints behind on the Nokia Maps server. When using Drive, I can't see spots I've marked at locations I've enjoyed through years of driving in Ireland and the States.

I'm surprised by the 25 GB of free cloud storage that comes with the phone. It's very nice having the ability to work with familiar documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) while saving them in Microsoft's Skydrive. It feels more elegant than Dropbox and it doesn't cost a cent. I'm collaborating with several colleagues by accessing Skydrive folders. This is clearly an enterprise service.

I've shown the Lumia to friends afte unplugging it 12 hours beforehand. The phone normally drops below 40% charge right around a 12-hour duty cycle. Then its battery saving kicks in and throttles all my data services. From personal experience during the past 45 days, I know I can get 16 hours of life between mains power charging with the phone. My usage normally involves 20 minutes of voice calls a day, reading and replying to five or six texts, reading 180 emails, writing 20 emails, reading tweeting 200 tweets, tweeting 25 times, reading 40 news items, taking two or three photos, listening to three or four half hour podcasts, and posting status updates four or five times. I can do all those things in 16 hours between recharging.

The Nokia Lumia works data well for me. But I pay O2-Ireland 60 euro a month while using 790 MB every four weeks of over-the-air 3G data to get a result.

See the Lumia in my Flickr photostream.

nokia

Nokia in Two Years

Bernie Goldbach — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:47:11 PST

ONE OF THE FIRST things friends do when I hand them my Nokia Lumia 800 is flick through the phone's apps to see how many familiar icons they see. They often mutter something when handing back the phone.

Nokia have a lot of work to do during the next year if former Nokia users can be prised from their iPhones. Those iPhones were a quantum leap from Symbian for most owners because they did things faster and used an interface that people enjoyed. Nokia had 46% market share of mobile phones in Ireland when the iPhone launched in 2007. A lot has changed in five years, including the way people used their phones. When people started buying iPhones because their friends had iPhones, they often started connecting through apps, not voice or text. Now those apps represent the mobile environment through which people define their worlds. And as a late starter in the touchscreen game, Nokia has an apps deficiency.

It will take two years before Nokia's apps for Windows Phone are more compelling than the bog-standard iOS apps,. The Windows Metro interface and its better live notification system will pull people back to Nokia--if people returning to Nokia's handsets can continue using most of the apps they loved with their iPhones. This is not as difficult as one might think. Of the millions of iOS apps floating around, the only ones I'd like to see on my Windows Phone are Audioboo, Phone Casts, Instagram, Clicky Touch, Cut the Rope, and Skype. The Windows Phone Marketplace has a strong representation of business applications already, in both free and paid forms.

In two years, Internet Explorer will have a very capable HTML 5 rendering engine for mobile phones. I believe Nokia phones will have a CPU core dedicated to rich media rendering which means no real need to depend upon apps to see the mobile web.

But these things are two years away and Apple will continue selling millions more handsets than Nokia in the meantime. For me, a long-time Nokia owner, it feels strange to watch the brand being reduced to a fraction of its formidable self. I'll be on board for a Nokia handset in 2015 and hope all the apps I treasure from my iPhone will be running of the Windows Phone OS as well.

Composed on my Nokia Lumia using Evernote and Typepad's mail2blog service over O2-Ireland's towers. I shot the image of me using my reliable Nokia E90 during an Irish tweetup.

Bonus Links: All About Windows Phone. Subscribe to my notes about Nokia.

nokia