Mobile Blog: Video, Media, Augmented Reality, Rich Media, IVVR

photo credit: Spencer E Holtaway

GSMA launched its social networking portal myMWC for the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona. It’s missing some features like real connections to your Facebook or Twitter stream. But you can specifiy your profile URLs there. The session and seminar schedule planner with Outlook/iCal export is great! Get connected

First of all, Windows Mobile is so close to Windows for desktop PCs that you might expect to install some of the applications you know from your desktop on your mobile. Media Player, Outlook and Office Mobile, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on -it’s all included in WM6.5 Pro. What’s left? A good mobile media player! WM6.5 Media Player doesn’t like my DivX movies and some MP4 files. For DivX there is a solution: DivX Mobile Player for Windows Mobile. Note: Although DivX Mobile supports the latest DivX codec features, your mobile processor is limiting your mobile video experience. I’ve downloaded a DivX movie from the Internet and tried it on my phone: The sound was fine, but the video was choppy. After some experiments I saw, that a video bit rate above about 300 kbit/s is causing problems. For the technical folks: It is not really the bit rate, but the complexity of the encoding that makes the mobile processor go nuts. The higher the bit rate and the higher the complexity, the more likely the video, or even the sound will be choppy.

DivX Mobile Player is for free, but it doesn’t support native MP4 containers with h.264. Therefore I bought CorePlayer Mobile for $30. It’s nice, but not really worth 30 USD. It doesn’t offer as many codecs as VLC or mplayer, and it’s user interface is too desktop-alike. CorePlayer Mobile has a lot of submenus; you need about 4 clicks to activate the fullscreen mode! Unfortunately, VLC for Windows Mobile isn’t available yet: VLC forum.

photo credit: *kaetzchen

Recently, I bought the HTC Touch Pro 2. As advertised by HTC, it is a professional communication tool. By upgrading it with Windows Mobile 6.5 its performance and functionality seemed boosted. A couple of days ago a friend of mine (he is not really into the mobile market, though) just bought the HTC HD2. Realizing the HD2 has double of processing power and double of RAM compared of my TP2, I quietly regret my decision. The HD2 is extremely fast, especially when browsing web pages. The only drawback of the HD2, and all touchphones, is the missing physical keyboard by nature. As I type a lot of emails on the go, sometimes blindly, I need a physical keyboard. But maybe Samsung solves this general problem with its Touchwiz UI? I think, HTC is about the turn the mobile phones market upside down. They are already very successful in the business sector. As they will start to market their products more to consumers for private and leisure use, they might rule out RIM and their blackberry; while wresting market share from Nokia and Samsung.

photo credit: papalars

Did you already sign up for GSMA world congress in Barcelona 15-18 February 2010? Let’s meet: http://www.mobileworldcongress.com

You may have noticed the special ONE site about the 3G-H324M module for Asterisk – sip.fontventa.com – shows an error message for a couple of days. Thanks to the good people at archive.org you can still access an 2008 version of sip.fontventa.com (as far as I know, nothing has changed since then) by using this link http://web.archive.org/web/20080324183826/http://sip.fontventa.com/

Does anybody has a link to the source code of the 3G-324M module for asterisk?