9 posts tagged “nokia”

Thru Engadget Mobile, I found out that there is a trojan horse program out there that sends messages to a premium SMS number in the background, thus costing you a ton of money. According to the Unwired View article, this is the first time that a particular trojan horse was written specifically for Series 60 devices. Series 60 is the operating system used in the higher-end Nokia smartphones, such as the Nseries and Eseries devices.

I do a detailed analysis of how this happens and what you can do about it over at the See into S60 blog.

I can now say I have achieved one of my personal goals–I’m now blogging for Nokia over at the See into S60 blog. Thanks to Phil Schwartzmann for giving me the opportunity. You can have a look at my first post where I introduce myself and what I hope to talk about there.

I'm like a kid at Christmas.

I am reposting this from my other blog.

Cybette tagged me on this Symbian History meme Olly started. Some of my Symbian history can be summarized in this video:

The Nokia Tune, otherwise known as Grand Valse on some older Nokia handsets, has become the perennial tune one hears as the default ringtone when they buy a Nokia handset. Nokia recently came up with versions of this ring tone for the MIddle Eastern market (with a tip of the hat to Darla Mack):

I wrote a few posts on my other blog in the past 24 hours or so that I'd like to draw your attention to and get some feedback on, especially those of you on the Vox Mobile group. Feel free to comment either on the specific post or here. Either way, I'd love to get your thoughts.

• Nokia: Take it Direct to the USA is my opinion about what Nokia can do to improve their market share in the US mobile phone market.
• What are Carrier Customizations? explains the kinds of things carriers ask mobile phone manufacturers to change on the handsets for use on their network.
• Update your Time Zone Files if you have a Nokia Series 60 Third Edition handset.
  

My dad had made a comment recently in response to something I wrote about my parents in a post I made about music:

I can attribute my taste in Pink Floyd to mom and The Eagles to my dad. Considering some of the other things I saw both parents partake in, listening to their music was probably the safest of the choices I could have made.

Specifically, he said:

You weren't supposed to be watching everything we were doing back then.

Well, guess, what: I was. I remember far too many things from my youth. Heck I remember being in my crib back in our apartment in Capitola. I remember living in that apartment, though unlike what my dad implied in his comment, I have almost no memories of my parents actually being together. There is also a certain amount of irony in having my first job out of college two blocks from that very apartment building.

I'm not going to get into the stuff I saw growing up. Okay, maybe I will, but not here and not today. But it does remind me of an ongoing debate about the fact that teachers aren't real fond of camera phones being in schools because, well, their tirades can end up all over YouTube.

My employer, Nokia, has sold more digital cameras embedded in mobile phones than many manufacturers of standalone digital cameras have sold. In fact, the proliferation of digital cameras in mobile phones has caused problems not only for schools, but for business as well, particularly in areas were sensitive information exists. The business are afraid of information leakage, and rightfully so. And it's even difficult to find phones without cameras. They do exist, of course, and even Nokia is making camera and camera-free versions of some of their business-oriented E-series phones.

I've heard the quote from Robert Heinlein "An armed society is a polite society." Guess what: most of our society is now armed with camera phones. And while we've always had nature's perfect camera: the eyes, what we now have with camera phones is the ability to share what we saw with others very easily. Nokia has tools built-into the Nseries devices that make it fairly straightforward to post what you've captured to Vox, not to mention the tool that Vox itself makes available for Nokia handsets.

Unlike guns, it's not going to be easy to legislate these things out of existence. The camera phones aren't going away anytime soon and are only getting better. I think the best thing we do is assume that anything we do in front of others can easily be captured by someone and shared with others instantly. And maybe, just maybe, we'll all act a little nicer towards each other in the process. Polite society, indeed.

How do you pass the time during a flight?  What do you bring in your carry-on?

I either listen to podcasts that I have downloaded to my Nokia phone or I watch videos I have downloaded from online and encoded to the 3GP format for use on a Nokia N93. I wrote a procedure for how to do this on a Mac fairly easily, and you can see the results.

The flights I usually take are only an hour and a half in the air. When I went to Finland in October, I had a bunch of stuff encoded on my phone, laptops, whatever had a battery that could play these videos. :)

This evening I am taking a red-eye to the Washington DC area. I'm only going to be there a day or so, which is good. I can get by with a single carry-on. However, because it's a long flight, I have a lot of videos to catch up on, and my MacBook won't last the entire flight, I am bringing my freshly-reimaged work PC running Windows XP. At least I have an airplane adapater for it, in case I get lucky. I also have a second battery for it, so it should last longer.

Meanwhile, for the flight there this evening, I am not going to use my laptop. I am going to try and sleep. However, I will want some music to listen to. I spent way too long going through my music collection in iTunes to copy over onto an MMC for my Nokia 9500. I could have copied it to the MiniSD for my Nokia E70 instead, but I think the 9500 will be a better companion in terms of battery life. Hopefully, it will last the whole trip playing the roughly 150 songs I copied over to the 1gb MMC.

For the non-electronic parts of my trip, preparing is pretty straightforward. I have a travel bag that is already pre-stocked with the things I will need away from home (toiletries, etc). I have removed all liquids from this bag, so I can carry it on. That means leaving hair styling products at home. Toothpaste, assuming I can't get it at the hotel, is accomodated by the bar of Dr. Bronner's soap I have added to my bag. Yes, it seems weird to brush your teeth with soap, but some people swear by it. It does leave your teeth clean, though the taste is a little funny. And Dr. Bronner's soap rocks for getting the rest of you clean, too. :)

Anyway, time to spend the last couple of hours with my kids before I take off...