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

Getting the MWC mobile guide for your phone is a good idea to prepare for the congress while your flight to Barcelona and in order to avoid carrying the printed catalog on site. I noticed a problem with the installation page http://whatamap.com/mwc/install/.It says that you should access this page with your mobile for downloading the mobile guide. With my WM 6.5 device and Opera or Internet Explorer that does not work, unfortunately. It still says “You have arrived on the MWC 2010 mobile guide installation page with a desktop browser”. By using an user agent switcher for my Firefox I found out the correct link. There is only a Java-Version available, though: http://whatamap.com/mwc/s60/MWC2010.jad

Downloading the native Windows Mobile app

1. Search for MWC 2010 in Windows Marketplace application
2. Install the app via Windows Marketplace
3. It will appear in your phone menu

Update

I cannot find the mobile guide in the mobile marketplace by using “MWC 2010″ on my mobile. On the marketplace website it is not available as well: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/catalog/cataloghome.aspx?bin=1&device=0&os=0.

photo credit: marcopako 

One step backwards: Windows Mobile 7 should lack Adobe Flash support. We are all awaiting Adobe Flash 10.1 for mobiles which hopefully reduces cross-platform development costs. But (maybe) Microsoft will follow Apple’s strategy by restricting Adobe Flash support on WM7 devices. Read more on mobiletechworld.com

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.

Video call set-up times are generally between 1 to 5 seconds (1-second call set-up when using MONA specified in H.324 Annex K.) independently of the IVVR (Interactive Voice & Video Response) application one is going to use, which is sometimes faster than the initialisation process of complex J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) applications. This makes quick on-the-go lookup or entry of information pleasant. However, what happens when the caller needs to interrupt a gaming session or the call is interrupted because of missing network coverage or exceeded battery life? Games should enable users to start and stop with breaks in between, since the time they have to spend may be brief. Mobile games are used especially to pass time for just a couple of minutes or even seconds when waiting for the bus, riding the subway, or to relieve boredom during TV commercials. Therefore, all mobile applications need to apply ways to interrupt a session and quickly resume to the last state as the user desires. This requirement also applies to IVVR applications. As application and user data of IVVR programs can be completely stored on the server-side, there are no limitations to auto-save program states or record the user’s actions. With the caller’s unique phone number as an identifier, it is easy to develop resumable applications.