Yusiang's Log

From buying Coke and paying parking, now somebody is coming out with implantable RFID-based payment chip. Mobile phone seems to be a suitable choice as an alternative wallet for lazy people like me. There are several attempts to establish the mobile payment, such as Japan's Sony Felica, US's Mastercard Paypass, Europe's Nokia & Visa's Virtual Wallet and Korea's SKT Moneta. More interesting mobile payment will probably appear with the improvement of Bluetooth/GPRS/RFID/Smartcard/Biometric technology. Hopefully we can see some "advanced" TouchNGo in near future. :p

It is undoubted that ringtone is one of the biggest business in mobile phone industry currently. BBC has a review on the WiderThan.com's COLORing, a ring-back tone service in South Korea which allows the callers to hear subscriber selected music. When reading it, I thought of something that might be interesting. Basically it would be a service provided by telcos so that the subscribers can set their personalized name/photo/ringtone/video which they want the receivers to see/hear when they call them and the receiver can add the predefined info in their contact list easily.

Sendo released some details about their coming-soon Sendo X. It looks like a competitor to nokia 6600 though I think both of them have something each of them have(or don't have). My wishlist for ultimate smartphone would be the below:-

processor/memory as good as IPAQ pda, self-upgrade firmware

hot-swappable SD with at least >1GB and SD I/O

built-in camera with >1.3 megapixel/flash/auto-focus/optical zoom

EDGE(or class 8 GPRS), Wi-Fi, >50m Bluetooth, GPS

stereo audio, analog/digital FM/TV tuner

dedicated graphics processor, 65K TFT with touch screen

// posted by Steve @ 4:11 AM

Just spent hours watching some videos downloaded from MSDN TV, this particular video about .NET Compact Framework really spark my mind. Never thought it is so much easier than J2ME app development though i heard about it before. Anyway, Microsoft Smartphone is still 'minority' compared to other platform like J2ME and Symbian in term of current market. Symbian app is powerful but its learning curve is too high(at least for me). J2ME availability is high but it is too sandboxed and there is no IDE which is as (nearly) good as Visual Studio .NET.

Yeah, finally exam is over. We had a post-exam 'luxury' dinner in Teluk Gong, Klang. The food is actually not bad(quite good business), though the place is quite difficult to be located. That's the question that we always ask, like "where can i find the best wan tan mee in this area". Fortunately, there are some generous malaysians and singaporeans who have been doing GPS mapping with such information. Garmin GPS unit is still too expensive to most of us, why not telcos like Maxis provides their nodes GPS position so that we can make use of such GPS resources with our phones. The positioning might not be so accurate but I think it is quite useful.

Digi today said no extra charge for EDGE when it is available next year. Theorectically EDGE can give up to 384kbps compared to GPRS 144kbps. The bad news is, they will stop providing free MMS when EDGE is launched. Perhaps I should get beyond prepaid while waiting for hotlink.

Meanwhile, KL Police has started SMS Patrol Notification so that you can ask them to patrol your house when you balik kampung during hari raya. Just type: "POLISKL Balik Kampung", followed by name, address & away duration, and send it to "39988"(Each SMS 50 sen).

Bill Gates didn't say anything about their coming soon(though it has been coming soon since 2002) SPOT watches in the COMDEX 2003, his speech on Tablet PC(is this still considered new?) and security(sigh..windows..iis..) looks dull except the matrix spoof. BTW, SPOT technology is to feed information(weather,message,traffic..) to your wristwatches, you can see the cool demo here.

Today is the last day for me to upgrade my MyKad via MMU, looks convenient for me to do it in campus(can't wake up before 3pm in hometown) but final exam on wednesday. Wouldn't it wonderful if they implement some scheduling like fluidtime (sample pic on the left) which synchonize service timing with groups of people through J2ME app(back end based on web services and agent...AI..sigh..going to fail) so that everybody get their perfect schedule and no more queueing. They currently doing trial for public bus service and washing machine for hostel residents.

It seems that social networking software/service is hot recently especially Friendster which is quite popular among MMU students(and plenty of them are 'leng lui'). Microsoft has joined the goldrush too with their coming Wallop(sample pic on the left) and one of the most interesting feature(for me) is the integration with MSN messenger. When is this coming to Yahoo messenger?? (I seldom use MSN). Will they develop social network app based on my mobile phone contact list too?

Bravo, Maxis! They announced that interoperable MMS would be available by year end . The next thing I hope to see from Maxis are cool MMS services like greeting card/photo manipulation(sample pic on the left) and video content such as soccer goal highlights.

The infrared dongle which i bought for my digicam is too slow for my 3650, time to get a bluetooth dongle. Searching on the net and found some nice products, especially this dongle from MSI which support 200M distance. Imagine how cool it is for you to use your handphone to access net, stream TV broadcast or do VoIP within your home(or even make it a bluetooth-based hotspot for your business premises)

Testing if I can put pictures here ... hmm blogspot needs me to pay US$5 if I want their picture hosting feature, i gotta find a working free hosting that I can use to host pictures for this weblog. Perhaps, I will post any interesting photos(especially pretty girls,hehe) I taken with my 3650 in future, but I can't afford moblogging....any sponsor? ekeke

Going to get very low marks for my FYP presentation :-(. BTW, me and another groupmate are working on 'Mobile Auction', a J2ME-based auction service. You can look at our prototype if you really want to see what it is, though it is optimized for Sony Ericsson UI.

A few car accidents happened in Cyberjaya here last week, where one of them has caused a casualty. Reason? Those lamps near the sharp corner were malfunctioning(we have seen it ourselves). Apparently they don't switch on those less-than-20m-between-each lamps anymore after the OIC event is ended(and all the VIP have flown back to their own castles). Perhaps a MMS-based public complaints service would ease the facility management. Anyway, policy issues matter more than technical one in this case in my opinion(some of the lamps are located besides the highly-publicized high-tech City Command Centre).

Damn, I can't get those n-gage games working on my 3650, those sonicN screenshots look pretty cool for a mobile phone. Perhaps I need to take some time to format my crowded phone memory. "Where can I get those cracked n-gage games?"....err, I can't recall, but here's the list of the sites I frequently visited to enhance my 3650.

S60Island

(sometimes site down)

7650Forever

(not updated frequently but a lot GB roms)

Terracro

(has good review on latest cracked games)

Epocn

(chinese forum, require registration to access their ftp)
There are plenty more sites and yahoo groups I visited....visit here when you are free. ;p

Sigh...my name is not in the round 2 result for HSBC business plan competition again. My English skill is probably one of the main factor for this failure(as you can see from the postings here). Here's my idea i submitted, sharing with everybody else now(if anybody want it :p )....basically it is a MMS-based shopper service. For example, inside a music shop, a music lover would take picture of the album he/she interested to get(but want a cheaper price), and then send it back to the server. The server will identify the location(if the picture is location-tagged) and send back a MMS with prices available for online retailers(like amazon) or suggest nearest location to get the music cd.

Just created this weblog, this blogspot free service looks great yet. For time being, bookmark or aggregate this weblog(using bloglines.com), more to come soon!