At the same time Nokia World is held in Amsterdam (and apparently a few new phone models got announced) the Forum Nokia Americas team has been busy giving presentations about development on Nokia platforms in Mexico City TechDays (including overview of Nokia platforms, programming with Symbian C++, and Java ME development).

About 60+ developers attended the first day, some of them experienced mobile developers and some of them thinking of moving to develop on mobile platforms. The format is somewhat different to the TechDay events I have attended/presented so far.

First of all, the presentations are simultaneously interpreted to Spanish, and I have to just admire the feat of these interpreters (being able to simultaneously listen to something in one language and speaking word by word in another language).

Secondly, there were almost no questions asked during the presentations. In a similar event in U.S. you need to reserve a good 5-10 minutes of your time to Q&A only. However, the day ended with a panel and a lot of good questions were asked at that point. The questions were both technical as well as business related. The ones I remember well were:

• How to get one's application to the market locally (in Mexico)? (the situation is evolving, more and better channels are becoming available, operators are working on this)
• Can one add Java APIs on a phone later? (No)
• Which one has better Java functionality, S80 or S60 3rd Edition? (S60 has more APIs, but S80 2nd Edition has CDC/PP with some extension possibilities).

For a person, who does not take snapshots of every day events, I am probably too interested in why other people take so many snapshots with their phones.

Why do I not utilize this functionality of my camera phone? First of all, I am not used to take snapshots regularly. I did not take occasional photos before digital cameras / camera phones became popular. In other words, when I see something interesting, my first impulse is not to take photo.

Secondly, if I plan to take photos (like when visiting somewhere), I will carry a dedicated digital camera with me (either SLR or small digital pocket camera with good enough optical zoom). Yes, camera phone picture quality is quite good already, but the optical zoom is still missing on many phones.

Third reason is that because of my work, I need to constantly switch phones and re-flash them. So if I ever take a photo with my camera phone, I will probably lose it during a sw upgrade, because I am not the fastest photo uploader around.

However there are millions of other people who day after day take digital photos and upload them on their computers or to Flickr to be shared with friends and relatives. And at least according to Flickr stats, also camera phones are used widely (no absolute stats of the share of camera phone pictures here though, although by browsing through a couple of brands one can see that dedicated cameras have much more daily users on Flickr site).

Also I have read through many papers about camera phone use (for example here,  here, here, here, and here). Still I do not know why other people take so many pictures and have thriving Flickr sites, whereas I have only my collection of photos from my vacation trips and nothing else.

In its third review of permissible DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) exemptions, U.S. Congress has lifted the ban of unlocking cell phones so they can be used in rival networks. The exemptions in general "allow people to circumvent the copyright protections surrounding digital content in particular circumstances."

This year 6 new exemptions were introduced. "Other exemptions allow media studies and film professors to circumvent access controls to make compilations for educational purposes, allow librarians and archivists to remove security measures to preserve copies of obsolete programs and games, and allow users to bypass a program's requirement for a special dongle if a replacement for the hardware is not readily available. The last case allows accessibility programs to disable the security of e-books if all version have access controls that prevent a read-aloud function." (source)

Multiple news stories available through Google News. You can also check all the new 6 exemptions here. The exemptions will take effect on Monday Nov 27th and will last for three years.

The sixth Under the Radar event, held in November 16th at Microsoft campus in Mountain View, featured 32 emerging start-ups in the mobile sector.

I was not able to participate, but  browsing through the list of participating companies is interesting read too :-) Some of the companies are "old" names (like 4info, Pixpulse, Pixsense, and ScanR) from Silicon Valley Mobile Monday events. There is a number of mobile advertising companies (will this ever get going... I participated in Wireless Advertising Association in early 2000's, but have not seen anything major in the mobile advertising sector yet... which is also a good thing - I want to have my phone as advertising free as possible).

Streaming over Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) on Java ME platform is supported on Nokia S60 devices starting from S60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 3 devices. Because of a couple of recent requests coming from different directions I have spent some time troubleshooting and testing streaming MIDlets. Hence I thought a summary would be in order (you can find bits and pieces about this topic through various DiBo-postings though...)

If you, like me, do not happen to have any streaming server at hand, the first challenge is to find a stream to test with. I spent a while looking for a suitable one. Here is one URL, which I know is working and should be available also in the future: rtsp://ra.yle.fi/yle24/video/uusin_mobile.rm (the URL is a daily TV news stream from Finland - if the language is garbled, its not the stream but language:-)

Feel free to use whatever compatible URL you have. The stream can be a clip (with a specified length) or a "live" stream. Both work well.

The next step is to find a working source to test with. Here is one source, which is not pretty, but gets the work done (this sample contains the same URL as above). Compile it and try it out

 After the initial wait, you should see the video to appear (there are a number of exceptions displayed at certain points - those are there for your enjoyment... err... debugging reasons).

Not working? Check what access point you have defined in the Real Player of the device. Java streaming uses that one, and if it is not defined or it is incorrectly defined, the streaming does not work.

Still not working? Getting a prefetch error? Might be that there is not enough bandwidth. I got that error when I tried streaming over non-3G cellular data connection.

Using your own code, and not getting it working (seeing only the first few frames, possibly hearing some audio, but the video is not moving). Do you use yields in your code? It might be that the stream thread never gets enough processing time to get things done. Try to use either sleeps (or "nothing") instead.

Nokia organizes technology-related events all year round all over the world. In the end of the November we will stop in Mexico City.

The Mexico City Tech Days on November 28-29 will contain technical presentations on mobile programming tools, Symbian C++, Java ME, and Flash Lite. In addition there are a number of other presentations, like for example by local operators. The schedule is not yet completely fixed, but a short intro as well as registration is available here.

Why am I promoting this event in particular? Well, I am there as one of the speakers too and would like to see large, participating audience in front of me :-)

Welcome!

Once again I got inspiration from FN Discussion boards after reading for umpteenth time about Series 40 network configuration issues for MIDlets.

There is a technical note on this (updated this link on Oct 10, 2008), which tackles this issue pretty nicely, but I still would like to write a detailed explanation on how I have done the network access settings on generic Series 40 devices. I have to note that the following explanation works only with the 3rd Edition and newer devices as well as some 2nd Edition devices (see the group 2 on the technical note).

It is notable that even if the browser might be able to connect to the network, your phone might still need some additional configuration to get the network connections for MIDlets to work. If your browser works but MIDlets do not, please skip to step 2.

Also note that I have used Nokia 5300 to write down these instructions. The menu names might be different on your phone, but the general idea should become clear.

1) Get the generic network settings for your operator and save them on your phone. I usually browser to another site while waiting for the settings to arrive and hence forget to write down / memorize the pin code needed to install the settings. Do not do the same mistake :-)
However at this point your browser should be able to connect.

2) Go to Menu->Settings->Configuration and choose "Activ. default in all apps."

3) Next you need to create an access point which you can then use in your MIDlets.
Staying in the the same "Configuration settings" menu, select "Personal config. settings". Press "Add" and select "Access point" from the list. Go to "Access point settings"->"Bearer settings"->"Packet data access point" and write the correct access point name here. For me, using Cingular network, the correct one is "Cingular WEB" (that's the name of the settings I received from the online settings service).
I know that this create access point using a packet data access point seems confusing, but bear with me.

4) If you want, you can also name this access point, but also the default name "My access point" works well. Do this before returning to the Configuration settings menu.

5) In the "Configuration settings" menu, select "Preferred access point" and select the access point you just created (in my case "My access point")

6) Test your MIDlet. If you set up the Data access point correctly, the MIDlet should be connecting to the network just fine.

Another issue related to Series 40 network access is the "KNIEXT _NewGlobalRef failed" error some people have experienced on some Series 40 phones. The cause of this problem is that some previous network connection was not closed properly. This issue can be cured by taking the battery away from the phone for a little while.

Web 2 Mobile is a business plan competition organized by Finnode, Nokia Research Center, and Red Herring together with other industry collaborators (including MediaX at Stanford, Nexit Ventures, and many others). Anyone can participate in this competition; just send in your business plan related to mobile technologies or services by December 10th.

The prize for this competition is a little different from other business plan competitions I have seen. The winner will be invited to visit Nokia Research Center's test laboratories, where the business plan will be brought to life. Winners will be also profiled in Red Herring and the competition is a great way to extend your personal network.

So if you have a cool idea, send it in! Who knows, maybe it is you who will be picked out of the 10 finalists to make your mobile vision a reality!

If anyone developing MIDlets on Nokia devices missed the avalanche of new and updated MIDP documents on Forum Nokia Web site, go ahead and check the new docs.

The updated documents include information on SIP API, MMAPI, Crypto API, Location API,  Mobile 3D Graphics API, Bluetooth API, PIM API, File Connection API, Web Services API, Messaging API, SVG, and so on..

I guess I know what I am going to do for the most part of the next week... reading through this pile of documents :-)

The Grand Opening of Nokia Research Center (my previous employer) in Palo Alto was yesterday. The festivities included a formal event in the afternoon and an evening reception with music, food, and schmoozing. It was nice to see that the opening has received quite a lot of press already. Check for example news coverage through Google News.

At the same time a 3-year collaborative effort with Stanford University (especially with the School of Engineering) was announced. This is extra cool, as I am a big fan of what the researchers at Stanford have done so far with mobile devices.

What the new NRC site will be concentrating on? Based on this press release from Nokia: "Nokia Research Center Palo Alto will initially focus on four core areas:

• Context-aware content and communities, which could provide technology advancements in the areas of search, advertising and recommendation engines;
• Wireless grids, that enable a large number of diverse devices to work together;
• Advanced user interfaces and visual media, for Nokia multimedia computers;
• Innovation radio and sensor networks, offering novel applications of emerging short-range radio technologies. "