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.

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: Stinging Eyes

Recently I have read some articles (this, this one and many more) about how mini base stations can be used to set-up femtocells or picocells at home or in offices for better signal quality. I came across the term “deep coverage” in every article. It is not exactly clear what “deep coverage” has to do with signal quality. I explain it for you:

The characteristics of wireless networks include frequency dependent fading, shadowing, reflection at large obstacles, refraction depending on the density of the medium, scattering at small objects, and diffraction at edges. The effect of multipath propagation can cause jitter when the radio signal reaches the receiver by two or more paths at different times. These effects occur in macrocells (multiple km

photo credit: phauly

In desktop video conferencing, the video conferencing application is normally bundled to an Instant Messaging software that includes text chat capabilities. Users can appoint or prearrange a video conference using textual chat. In contrast, the current evolution of video telephony in UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) networks based on the circuit-switched 3G-324M service does not seamlessly combine video conferencing with other communication channels. The notion of video telephony in the mobile environment is nearer to standard voice calling than in the stationary world. Therefore, it is more likely that somebody will place a video call without prior announcement. This leads to privacy and inconvenience concerns. The callee might not want to be seen during a conversation for a variety reasons: A video call