Web review

Waze is born from a simple and smart idea: connecting cars together, to automatically create a new “social network” that detects and gives alerts about traffic conditions, police traps and accidents.

You’ve only to install the Waze client, free and available for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile, starting it everytime you’re driving your car. It will anonymously record your track  to inform other drivers about traffic (Waze collects speed informations from all the phones and it creates statistical alerts). You can also send “human” messages to the community, reporting speed cams or dangerous events on the road.

In addiction of this, Waze is a “normal” car navigation system, with a “not-so-normal” feature: also the maps are drawed and updated by the community! When you drive with Waze running on your phone, it records every your move and it sends it to Waze servers, where the centralized system merges this data with the existing maps. When several phones record a difference (because, for example, of a change of a road) this part of the map is updated.

People from United States are luckier than Europeans, because USA government gives maps of the territory for free, so there’s a complete base to start with. Anyway it’s also possible to start from scratch: we just started to draw maps here in Italy, and major cities like Rome or Milan are already half-mapped. Let’s call Waze the Wikipedia of streets

www.waze.com

The fifth version of the most popular browser for mobile devices is now released as public beta. Opera Mini is the Java version of the Opera browser: it can run on any J2ME enabled smartphone, bringing a good web experience also on devices with limited browsing capabilities.

The idea at the base of Opera Mini is to offer a fast browser that saves bandwidth with the help of Opera servers, that compress web pages and graphics before sending them to the final user. In addiction of this, Opera Mini tries to embed a number of features that are normally present only in desktop browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer… and of course Opera for PCs), like tabbed browsing and speed-dialing bookmarks.

Opera Mini 5 beta is available for free. You can download it directly from your phone, pointing it to http://m.opera.com/next .

Who doesn’t know what FON is? I already talked about this amazing project that tries to create a worldwide network of free Wi-fi spots, thanks to FON users sharing their bandwidth in a relationship of (free) mutual trade.

FON Maps is a Google Maps application that helps users to find the nearest FON access point, but what I can do if I’m going to move to a foreign city and I want to connect to a FON spot? I can’t use FON Maps if I’m not online, but I can’t go online if I don’t know where is the nearest FON access point!

Raúl Ochoa did something for me: FON Maps Liberator is a web mashup that uses FON Maps to export the position of access points in .GPX format, to add them to the “Point Of Interest” of our GPS. leggi tutto »

I always become angry when people tell me: “with Skype, I can make free phone calls around the World!“. SURE, it’s Internet telephony, you can do it with Skype, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo IM, AIM, Gabber, Trillian, Mercury… I think that any personal messenger supports voice call today. If both users use the same software on their PC. But if you want to call a “normal” phone you’ve to pay.

A couple of weeks ago I received a free US Robotics VoIP USB phone, included in an order I of hardware that I did on the Internet: it is advertised as a Skype phone, but It doesn’t interest me. After some tests I discovered that it can be used as a “general” SIP phone… and I can use it with any VoIP service that supports this open protocol

- Services

I chose two free services that support SIP VoIP system:

• To make free phone calls I used VoIP Buster: it’s part of a network of similar sites (they’re owned by a single company), and it offers 300 minutes of communication per week (landlines only). You can call more than 30 countries for free, and you can do it with their software, or with a generic SIP client (hardware or software… see below for details).
• To receive calls from landlines phones, I searched for a company in my country, because I needed an italian number. I found that Messagenet offers free “real” numbers for free, with SIP support.
  Anyone can call you from a normal phone line (and pay a regular local call, if he’s calling from the same area code). I chose a number with 011 prefix (Torino)
  Of course if you’re not italian you’ve to find a similar service for your country. Please leave a comment with your suggestions

- Software

The choice for SIP softphones is not too wide. Many of them are bound to closed services, so they can be used only with them. Anyway there is a couple of good generic application that matches my purpose: X-lite and SJphone. I chose the first one because SJPhone doesn’t seems to support my phone natively (or it doesn’t support hardware VoIP phones at all?).

Configuration is quite simple, you’ve only to follow instructions on VoipBuster site and/or MessageNet web page to setup X-lite to send and/or receive regular calls. Unfortunately, X-lite has a limitation: it doesn’t support multiple account configuration. Its commercial version, “eyeBeam” has this feature (pricing starts from 30$). I please you to leave a comment if you know a free alternative SIP software that is able to manage incoming and outgoing accounts.

If reconfiguration is a problem for you (you’ll have to change 4 or 5 fields into X-lite account manager), you can also find a SIP service that offers both in & out calls. There’s an interesting offer of Messagenet: 13.2 Euros/month to call 28 countries in the World. I’m sure you’ll find similar offers browsing SIP operators in your country.

After X-lite setup (with Messagenet configuration), I can receive calls directly on my USB device: anyone can call me from any normal phone, my US Robotics rings and I can answer with its “green button”, without touching my computer. Same to make calls to landlines phones in the World (with VoipBuster config.): I pick up the phone, enter the number (in international format) and start speaking

Recently I had problems trying to make Nokia LifeBlog work for my Nokia 6680: the last version available for my model (or similar ones, like the 6630) is the 1.8, but it is incompatible with the newest PC Suite 6.81.13. In addiction, the newer 2.x version is nicer, it has more functions and it doesn’t require any license to work, but it is (officially) only for Nokia N-series phones.

… no everybody knows that it’s possible to have it work also with our series 60 devices, using a quick trick

1. download and install Nokia Life Blog phone version on your mobile (currently it’s v. 1.6);
2. tell a little lie and choose a N-series phone (for example, I have a Nokia 6680 and I selected Nokia N70): the wizard will make you download Life Blog for PC v. 2.x (currently: v. 2.1);
3. Install it on your PC and then go to the application folder (for example: C:\Program Files\Nokia\Nokia Lifeblog); open the file named SyncConfig.xml with Notepad or another text editor;
4. Un-comment the part of the text between <!– and –>(in other words, you’ve only to delete <!– and –>);
5. It’s done! Now you can use Life Blog also with your 6630, 6680, etc…

The FON Website launched an interesting promotion, for the first purchase of any user: they’re sending “La Fonera“, a little Wi-fi Router, for 5$ or 5€ (shipping cost is 8$ for USA and 10€ for Europe).

“La Fonera” is a FON router and it allows to join the FON network; it connects to your existing modem or router, with an ethernet cable, and it gives two Wifi streams: the first one is private, for personal navigation, the second is shared, available for any other FON user that is close to you (you can adjust the available bandwidth for the two streams).

FON users can use others’ Wifi spots everywhere, without paying anything (for example when you’re on holiday with your notebook). Access is restricted throught a personal login/password, so FON can inform authorities in the case of abuses.
Users can navigate a World map to discover where’s the nearest FON Wifi spot (you can also download a part of the map to your GPS device).

Joining the FON network is the key to get free internet access everywhere.

If you’re not interested in mobile internet you can also choose to give Wifi to others, and to get paid from FON (they will share with you money they get from FON users that, on the contrary, don’t give out Wifi, but they pay for using it throught others’ FON spots).

http://www.fon.com

Let’s go back to cellphones based on Symbian S60 operating system (the Nokia 6600, 6630, 6680… and the others, also not Nokia.
It’s hard to enumerate all the applications and games availables for these little jewels, that are more like Palm PC than simply Phones. Today I want to speak about the emulators currently availables.

If you don’t know, an emulator is basically an application that allows a device (usually a PC, but we’re talking about a cellphone) to run other applications or games that were originally “written” for other devices, computers, consoles.
An example? I think the most famous emulator is Mame (also a reduced version for Symbian does exists, see below) that, installed on a PC allows to play an huge list of coin-op games, recents and less-recents.

The list below is a collection of the emulators for Symbian phones, that I know. If I forgot someone, please make me know: leave a comment

Free:

• Frodo :: Commodore 64
• E²MAME :: Coin-ops
• PicoDrive :: SEGA Megadrive
• ZXBoy :: Sinclair Spectrum (version with sound only for registered users)
• fMSX :: MSX
• Crazy Chip-8 :: Chip-8 (Pong, Space Invaders…)
• ScummVM :: Graphic adventures with SCUMM system (Monkey Island, Indiana Jones…)
• vBag :: Gameboy Advance (without sound and interface, this is a preview, read instructions to load games)

Commercial:

• Super GoBoy :: Gameboy & Gameboy Color
• vBoy :: Gameboy & Gameboy Color
• vNES :: Nintendo Entertainment System
• Yew NES :: Nintendo Entertainment System
• vSun :: Super Nintendo (SNES)

It’s foregone, but I have to remember you that the ROMs (the games that you’ve to load in your phone to use them with relative emulators) are available to download throught any file-sharing circuit, and often also on the Web, but it’s illegal downloading and playing with games if you don’t have the original copy.