The latest entry in the Museum of the Hard to Believe is the new top-level .mobi domain. Besides the obvious fact that they should have made it at most three letters instead of four, this is supposed to help the mobile web?

I guess from now on it will be incumbent on users to navigate to the proper “mobile” domain to enjoy a true mobile experience. Like computers can’t figure this out for ya?

Well, if this is the way things are going to work, how about some other “useful” top-level domains like…

.iamatmypc
.iamatmypcthathas1600×1200resolution
.iamusingmytinynonsmartphone
.nowivetransferedmysimcardtoasmartphonesogivemethefullmobileexperience
.oknowiamusingapda
.ohmypcisreallyamac
.whatfuckingever

The WSJ reported on 2006/01/05 that the Nokia 770 is a “hit” in an article entitled Nokia to Churn Out 770 WiFi Device, A Clear Hit. The article does not get quantitative, but says there is a two-week wait for the $359 dollar device. It’s got WiFi, a 4.1”, 800×480 screen, Bluetooth, some sort of tablet OS and no phone.

I’d like to try one, especially to see how the browser handles different sites. The browser on my Dell Axim (Windows Mobile 2003 OS) pretty much sucks. Great for text sites or sites like Bloglines that have a special mobile version, but no Flash support, DHTML is a no go, lots of sites crash the browser, etc. etc.

Anyway, I think there is a big market for all sorts of internet devices… not just laptops, desktops and phones. Some are going to be general browsing devices, like the 770, or application specific, like some of the stuff I’ve been reading about internet-aware universal remotes.

Zoinger says, bring ‘em on!

P.S. I wrote this a while ago, but forgot to publish it. Doh!

Anyway, here’s a good article over at InfoWorld on the 770. The article makes the point that although the 770 is not really a great consumer product, it’s a great way for Nokia to use open-source software to obtain a first-mover advantage and free product marketing (eg, having the open-source community guide product development through the projects they are working on).

P.S.S. Just the other day I discovered that my PDA’s browser has the option to display in “one column”. This improves the rendering of most sites and gets seems to get rid of the horizontal scrolling to view content on wide sites. Horizontal scrolling is painful if you have to do it on every sentence.

In yet another illustration of how screwed up the wireless industry is, it is very common, if not universal, for wireless carriers to “lock” the phones they sell. On GSM phones, the locking mechanism works by checking the brand of the SIM card against the phone’s internal carrier brand. If the SIM card brand does not match the phone’s carrier brand, the phone will not operate. I’m not really sure want the logic is behind locking phones (besides just annoying their customers), since even though carriers subsidize phones these subsidies usually require the customer to sign up for a long-term contract. That is, the carrier “earns back” the subsidy over the life of the contract.

As I wrote about here, I recently purchased a used Nokia 8390 that was advertised as a “Cingular phone”. Before the Nokia arrived in the mail, I realized that my SIM card was an AT&T card. Realizing that my soon-to-arrive phone was a Cingular phone, I knew that my AT&T SIM card would not work (never mind the logic that Cingular and AT&T are now one in the same). In order to prepare for the Nokia’s arrival, I ran down to the Cingular store and had my AT&T SIM card swapped for a Cingular SIM.

Of course, this took more than an hour since I had to wait in line forfrigginever at the Cingular store. Wanna know why your wireless bill is so high? Just watch the action at any wireless retailer… it’s like the DMV in slow motion.

Needless to say I was not pleasantly surprised when the Nokia arrived in its original AT&T Wireless packaging. Friggin’ classic.

Fortunately, it turns out that Nokia phones are pretty easy to hack. Hacking removes the carrier’s lock allowing it to work on any network (assuming the phone operates on the correct frequency). A quick search on the net brought me to this article over on the O’Reilly site. Some of the links in this article are a little out of date, but the one that counts leads to the appropriately named Unlockme site in the UK.

From the Unlockme site, I downloaded a copy of DCT4 Code Calculator 5.4 , inputed the required information and entered the calculated unlocking code into the Nokia. It worked like a charm! Now my new Cingular SIM would work with the Nokia.

One word of caution: You only get a few chances to enter in the correct code, so read through all of the instructions before trying to unlock your phone. Although the instructions aren’t very clear, carefully reading both the O’Reilly article and the information on the Unlockme site will probably get you safely to unlocked phone nirvana.

I must say that it’s kind of nice going back to a mobile like the Nokia 8390. It’s a lot like the iPod or the Tivo — devices that do a limited number of things really, really well.

The Nokia 8390 is paragon of simplicity. It doesn’t have a lot of fancy features. No complicated menuing system. No color display. No proprietary connectors. No fancy OS. No Bluetooth. Just voice and text in an intuitive and easy-to-learn way. In a word… elegance.

That’s not to say that I’m not a big fan on some of the newer mobiles coming out these days. Or the new services like Yahoo! Go. In fact, I’ll probably pick up a fancy new mobile in the near future, and with SIM cards it’s easy to swap phones for match your modality. But for now, I’m happy with simple.

Zoinger says, KISS.

Ugh, my not-quite-one-year-old Audiovox SMT 5600 is pretty much broken now. The microphone on the thing doesn’t seem to work reliably now. People can’t hear me talk or I am very, very faint. Too bad, because the phone was pretty nice.

However, one HUGE complaint is that Microsoft’s “synchronization” software only works with Outlook (big surprise there), and the synch software doesn’t store a copy of how you have set up the phone. Before my phone totally broke, I did a hard reset (which erases everything) figuring that I’d at least be able to get my phone set up back once I synched it. No way. My phone was back to its OEM state. Realistically, I would have taken me several hours to re-set up my phone (ring tones, menu look and feel, etc.). Ridiculous! This is just another sad example of the pathetic state of the mobile industry.

So what am I gonna get for a replacement? I’m going on Ebay and am buying an old-school, used Nokia. One without a lot of fancy features, and one that is SMALL. My previous Nokias have been bomber… never giving up the ghost.

Here’s one I’m hoping to get. It’s a Nokia 8390.

Update: 2006-01-05
Classic! I forgot I had an AT&T Wireless SIM card in my phone. That’s not gonna work with a locked Cingular phone.

So today I went down to the Cingular store to see if I could get my SIM card changed to a Cingular one. Yeah they could, but only if I started a new account with Cingular and pick a current rate plan. Well, at least I can get a rebate on a new phone. The Ebayed 8390 will be a good back-up phone anyway.

Also turns out that they would have warrantied my SMT 5600 (since it wasn’t yet a year old) if I had not of broken the LCD. That happened the last time the microphone stopped working. Disgusted, I threw it into a plastic storage bin (not even that hard… really…not really a “throw”… more like a shovel pass) full of paper and somehow the phone hit something metal.

However, actually breaking the phone was a good thing because I now have a fully-working phone. If I had not of broken the Audiovox, I would have just kept fiddling with it — barely getting it to work — for a few more months instead of just getting it fixed or replace.