What is this place? I can't imagine how it looks up close.


Update: I guess it is similar to the mississippi.

yum.

I found some text from earlier in the century about my love for cell phones before everyone had an iphone.

Mobile phone based PDAs have only been in my life since mid 2003 but they have radically affected the way I live my life. With greater speed and extended access to information, I have become a form of cyborg. I am never not able to find out an answer within minutes and I can record every aspect of my life no matter where I am.

I have also been able to extend the bounds of my friendships to people outside of my physical range and yet still been able to spend special moments bringing them to place away from the computer. One of the best time I ever had was on an island in the Atlantic chatting with Lisa Wist about some spontaneous business plan I had.

I think the fact that my first cell phone was a sidekick really started the whole PDA trend for me.

On 12/11/03 I got my first ever cell phone with T-mobile. I never wanted a cellphone but I did want a PDA. This was the first one I could afford that mixed the two together. It allowed me to post to my journal on the go which looking back, has radically changed my life. I made me a lot more dedicated to building elmwoodstrip.org as it was always within reach anywhere that I was. I have already posted around 500 mobile journals since then. What the sidekick was lacking in processor power it made up for in a great keyboard and a ready easy to use interface. It also had the best mobile instant messenging client I have ever seen.

A couple week after getting the sidekick I was able to afford the camera. It cost an extra $30 and was a weird attachment that reminded of something your would expect to find as a gameboy accessory. This is the first pic I took for my journal. I didn't hook up with the computer in any way which was kind of sad and could only store 30 images I think. Luckily you could send unlimited email for $29/month which is outrageous looking back on it because I was getting around ~40k/sec maximum. Now with the Sprint PPC 6700 I get around 400k/sec for about $15

Looking back on that now, sprint was a way better deal that I currently have with $40/month on AT&T

On 10/29/04 I decided to get the sidekick II thanks to a full rebate on amazon.com. I am not sure how it worked exactly but I ended up getting +$25 for buying a sidekick with so many rebates.

The sidekick two was great because it had a built in camera and could record sound. The camera was much better resolution than the original. The shitty part was that it still was very proprietary. It did not hook up with the computer to sync data, it had limited memory, the interface was in fact the same as the sidekick!, same with the OS. The only real difference was the shell.

There were lots of cool utilities you could download but only if you had a developer license. After about 8 months of being a developer and making some stupid crap for the crippled device they took away my developer license because I didn't officially make anything. It made having the device pretty lame because all it had was a couple stupid default apps. The IM client, however, was still amazing.

My Life With Lisa
The sidekick II helped me take documenting my life to the next level. It also really helped me build my friendship with Lisa Wist as we were virtually together 24/7 for months with the awesome IM client.

Shopping
It was also with this phone that I had my first mobile shopping experience. I bought Make Magazine just as it was first coming out for a cheaper than retail price while at Border Books using the sidekick II.

The bugs ate my Sidekick II
The real crazy part is that bugs ate my sidekick. I was on vacation in the Adirondacks and one morning a million little white bugs hatched out of the phone. They pretty much ate though the keyboard and fucked everything up. It was disgusting. I was at a restaurant eating when I first noticed one of the bugs crawling up my arm. Soon there were thousands. The phone never came out of the zip lock bag it when into and I shaved my body because I was so disgusted by them. Soon after, I replaced it with the Nokia 7710.

had a nokia 7710 for the better half of last year. It was an alright phone but was painfully slow sometimes. Not the network connection, but loading files and clicking ok, etc. I would say this piece of crap phone was not worth the $400 I paid for it. It got about 150k/s for about $50/month with cingular. Looking back that price was a total ripoff, however, it was the first experience I had with semi high speed mobile information and it could hold about 12,000 images in it's 1GB memory card.

With this device I learned that I loved touch screen and am never going back to a not touch screen reality. In fact even my next laptop will by touch screen. Unfortunately, I also learned that having a touch screen does not replace the need for a keyboard don a mobile device. Handwriting recognition is nowhere near as fast as typing on a keyboard and the on-screen keyboard took up way to much space. Basically, this mobile device single handedly brought my mobile chatting to an end.

The camera took mediocre pictures.The contrast was really week and it barely worked in low light.
[/q]

Unfortunately, on 11/13/05 the camera died for no apparent reason. Something was wrong with the timing chip and every other line in the image was blank. It almost looked like a photoshop effect but it made documenting my life on my journal suck.
Here is one of the crappy pics it took.

I tried to get Nokia to fix the camera but they refused because it was not an product made for the american market. It was basically the worst customer service experience I ever had. I offered to buy a camera part and install it myself and they continuously said there is nothing they can do because the product was not intended for American usage.

I have no idea how that should affect the camera working or not seeing as the phone otherwise worked fine with cingular. Here is one of the response letter I got. It barely makes sense.

One of the Letters. The old system I stored the letter in did not do Unicode. Notice the e in America is a weird character. I wonder what it was supposed to be. Maybe a euro symbol?

Dear Paul,

Thank you for e-mailing the Nokia Care Contact Center.

We apologize for the delay in responding to your e-mail message and appreciate your patience.

We will be happy to assist you with your inquiry regarding the concerns you are experiencing with the image stripes on your Nokia 7710 Widescreen Smartphone. We can provide the following information:

The Nokia 7710 Widescreen Smartphone you purchased will not be supported by our Authorized Service Center for evaluation or repair. We only support products purchased and intended for use in the United States; the Nokia 7710 Widescreen Smartphone has not been released in the United States.

It is recommended that you contact Cingular Wireless at 1-800-331-0500 or original point-of-purchase for warranty and repair options. You may also find support, warranty and repair information for your Nokia 7710 Widescreen Smartphone at www.nokia.com.

We hope this information helps you.
If you have any additional questions, please contact us. To ensure proper handling, please continue to use the current subject line.

Thank you for choosing Nokia for your mobile needs.

Am�rica
E-mail Specialist
Nokia Inc.

P.S. In an effort to continuously improve Nokia 's service to you, please complete
our short 8 question E-mail Care Survey.

Haha, this is so funny because looking back it was just fast. Not futuristic.

The PPC 6700 which runs Windows Mobile 5.0 is my first truly futuristisic phone. I had a sidekick, I had a blackberry, I had a Nokia 7710 but this phone blows the other ones away in tersm of features, network speed (~200-500kps), includes Wifi, bluetooth, keyboard, IR. It is amazing. More to come...

Click on the extraneous bytes link to see how to solve the corrupt jpeg problem when uploading images form this phone to a PHP based web site.

And as true to microsoft tradition, there was a huge flaw in it.

My only problem with the 1.3 Megapixel camera is that it produces corrupt jpegs that have 16 extraneous bytes in their EXIF data. The unfortunately cause the photos to not work with many web sites which use open source Jpeg libraries to resize images. I heard they even have problems being viewed in gmail.

In order for the phone to be truly useful I had to be be able to take images from the phone and use them on My Journal. So it was time to get out the old fashioned hex editor and begin experimenting with which bytes were the extraneous ones. Turns out it was a regular sequence right at the end of the EXIF data. The etxra string looks like this:

"\x00\x10\x4A\x46\x49\x46\x00\x01\x01\x00\x00\x01\x00\x01\x00\x00"

I found that this string identifies the images as from the PPC 6700

"\x41\x70\x61\x63\x68\x65\x00\x48"

Unfortunately, the string is sometimes repeated but only the first one was extraneous, so you can't just doa blind search and replace. instead you have to just repalce the first one. here is some PHP code that would allow you to use these images as normal ones using GD.

function checkFixPPC6700($orig){
    //get the file contents
    $data = file_get_contents($orig);
    //if its a PPC 6700 image cut out the extraneous 16 bits
    if(strstr($data, "\x41\x70\x61\x63\x68\x65\x00\x48")){
        $bad_data = "\x00\x10\x4A\x46\x49\x46\x00\x01\x01\x00\x00\x01\x00\x01\x00\x00";
        return substr_replace($data, "", strpos($data, $bad_data), strlen($bad_data));
    } else {
        //if not from a PPC 6700 return data unaltered
        return $data;
    }    
}

$data = checkFixPPC6700('IMAGE_006452.jpg');

if (($im = imagecreatefromstring($data)) !== false) {
    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
    imagejpeg($im);
}

Well, thats where the text I found ended. After that I went, AT&T window mobile Tilt, Nokia n800, n810 followed by iphone 2G, iphone 3G, iphone 3GS, and most recently Google's Nexus One android phone.

There was also a screenshot from some old app I made like five years ago.

I can get up to 3GB per month. I think it is because I listen to a lot of streaming radio and because my phone can multitask letting me leave the music on while I do other things. (e:matthew) uses about 1.5GB. (e:terry) on the other hand uses almost nothing. So far this month he has used 105MB.



As for text messages, he uses the most.I can't believe how many text messages he uses and it is only the 18th.

I found myself in these type of situations all the time.

Everyone always brags about how easy it is to use apple products. Half the time, easy just means no options. The lack of file upload in the browser disgusts me. It has nothing to do with technological boundaries and everything to do with making more money by selling more apps with custom upload interfaces. I can't believe their own mobile me site doesn't work from the ipad browser.