Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been using the Nokia N900 since March 2010, when Nokia decided to give one to every person that attended the launch. Its mostly been my roaming phone so far, and its been places ;)

Naturally, I found some problems which I very quickly wrote to Glen, who heads Product Management at Nokia Singapore/Malaysia/Brunei. I’m happy to state that these problems have been fixed in v10.2010.19-1 (PR 1.2) – see the changelog for a more complete list! This was released May 25/26 2010, worldwide, and I’m only now getting to update it. Let’s go through some of them…

Short codes (USSD) leading to “incorrect number”
I could not dial numbers that are formatted like *131#. The error message thrown at me: “incorrect number”. These codes are known as Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes.

I discovered this immediately within 24-hours of using the phone, largely because I had a Starhub prepaid card in it, and pretty much everything related to account management could not be done. DiGi in Malaysia uses this for checking your balance, and so on as well. Naturally, this was not something only I found – it was quite a problem on the forums too.

Pleased to report it has been fixed in PR 1.2.

Web browsing – landscape only?!?
Web browsing only works in landscape mode, and not portrait mode. I understand Nokia is pushing this connected device mantra, and its like your mini-computer replacement, but clearly, sometimes I want one-handed operations.

Today, it works. Not automatically – go to the web browser, look under Options – Settings, and make sure you select Enable Rotation. It takes a little over 1.5 seconds to rotate between landscape/portrait, and to be honest this seems a little slow, but it is at least fixed in PR 1.2.

Improved communications
You can now have video calls in Skype and Google Talk. You can also start using Facebook IM chat. Ovi Chat still remains. A killer? BBM chat integration!

Some things were however, not fixed, and I guess we might wait a few months before the next update happens.

1. Copy via selecting text on the screen works in the Notes application. In the Messages application (Conversations), you can’t select using the screen, you have to use the keyboard (shift [uppercase] + up/down/left/right). This is still an inconsistent UI bug, and the messages app needs fixing
2. More in what I consider inconsistent UI: the +/- hardware buttons are reversed when it comes to volume and zoom using the camera application. I know there is no +/- button per se, but I’d still regard this as a bug.
3. Not a large bug in my book, but there is still no Multimedia Messaging Support (MMS).

The upgrade for me happened over the air. Half way through the upgrade I was a little worried about what might happen to my pictures. But it seems there is User Data Preservation (UDP), so I’m not complaining. Everything remained after the update – photos, contacts, text messages and more.

From a developer perspective, you’ll find that Qt 4.6.2 is now pre-installed. What does this mean to you? Check out the Qt Labs blog post on Qt 4.6.2 for Maemo 5. Kinetic scrolling is one of the things that excites me, with this change.

Anyway, if you’re a Nokia N900 user, get this firmware update. While it was non-destructive for me, your mileage may vary, so you might want to make backups.

Do you use Web of Trust (WOT)? Its a great plugin, available for Firefox, Chrome and other browsers, that help you browse the web in a safer fashion. From June 11 to June 18 2010, you can fill up the community survey, and stand a chance to win an Apple iPod Nano.

I just noticed this: Apple now not only sells you apps in the AppStore in Malaysia, but you can also download podcasts and iTunes U content, using your Malaysian iTunes Store account. This is a big change, considering the directory was not available, this time last year. I believe this change is mostly international, across all iTunes stores.

Incidentally, you can now also buy iPad apps in the AppStore (yet, you cannot get an iPad from Apple or any of their authorised resellers; people are generally price gouging you now with their parallel imports). So what do you get in the Malaysian AppStore today?

1. Apps: iPhone, iPad
2. Podcasts
3. iTunes U podcasts

So what’s missing? Music, Movies, TV Shows, and Audiobooks. I guess that’s stuff we should look forward to, in the future.

This could be big for podcasters in Malaysia/Singapore. Audio, video content can go into the directories. We’re getting faster Internet. And there are a lot of iOS-devices out there, which now may have yet another reason to use iTunes (and maybe purchase apps at the same time). Kudos Apple, we’ve waited long enough.

I live in the “rest of the world”. I do not reside in the USA. Why is it I cannot get content that I’m willing to pay for?

As a preamble to this, you might want to read an article in The Economist: Cupertino’s cold warriors: What has Apple got against eastern Europe?.

The iTunes store is a major pain point. I can buy Apple hardware in Malaysia, be it iPhone’s, iPod’s, Macs, and more. But when I visit the iTunes store, I can only purchase apps for the iPhone (the iPad store opened recently). Why can’t I purchase music/movies, legally? So you’ll say why not visit Amazon’s MP3 store. Bam, I can’t make a purchase there either.

The iPad’s come with iBooks. Its a fabulous book reading application. I cannot purchase books from the iBook store, but I can purchase ePub formatted books, say, from O’Reilly’s Safari bookstore. What about the Kindle – its available in quite many locations, but only where AT&T is present – so some rather “odd” countries show up in the availability lists. Why can’t I purchase books, legally?

I’ve been a long-time subscriber to audible. Audiobooks mean I don’t have to take a trip out to the bookstore. Chances are, I might get audiobooks cheaper than the dead-tree versions available in Malaysia. Today I got an email from Audible, telling me there’s a book I might be interested in. True enough, I was interested in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. Who couldn’t be, after listening to the most amazing The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal?

Of course, I get greeted with the magical message:

That basically reads:

We’re sorry. Due to publishing rights restrictions, we are not authorized to sell this item in the country where you live.

Sorry David Kirkpatrick, I tried to give you some money, but apparently, you’ve decided to shaft the rest of the world.

Sadly, this situation is not much different in a first world country like Australia. Sure you get the iTunes Music Store (you are paying a premium, in comparison to exchange rates), and eventually the iPad becomes available for sale, but its always behind the US. So its not an isolated third-world 1Malaysia problem. Of course not – Singaporeans still suffer from the lack of the iTunes Music Store, and they’ve been a first world, industrialised nation, since 1996.

When will American content sellers realise that the Internet lacks boundaries?

When will they realise that limiting based on geolocation (Android marketplace) or credit cards (iTunes store) is so 20th century? Incidentally, there’s a petition out there for Google: Enable paid apps for all countries on the Android Market!. Its okay Google, you’re not the only retarded one here – the BlackBerry AppWorld is no better; PayPal is available in Malaysia, but you can’t buy apps either.

You push globalisation to the core, yet you refuse to embrace it.

Give us the content that we want to pay for. It doesn’t matter where we are located. Really.

I rebooted my MacBook Pro today, because I wanted to try out Safari 5. The short version of all this is: I came off quite impressed. DNS prefetching, the Web Inspector, and Safari Reader (strips ads/formatting) are killer features.

First up, its fast. DNS prefetching makes a difference if you browse the web like I do – I have a folder of bookmarks called “Daily”, and in there it has sites like Techcrunch, Techmeme, Hacker News, Slashdot, and a few news sites. You can imagine I’m usually loading up links elsewhere, and if an article is too lengthy, I usually just use the Read Later widget and send it to Instapaper.

There is now a free Safari Developer Program (as opposed to the US$99 paid iPhone or Mac developer programs). It allows you to sign your extension (beyond that, I don’t see the value – guess why its free?). There is supposed to be an Extension Gallery, but I guess this will be around in due time.

As someone that frequently uses the Web Developer extension in Firefox, I have to say I’m quite impressed with the Web Inspector that comes built in with Safari 5. Its more visual. Timelines, Resources, looking at HTML5 storage containers (local databases), and more is quite useful.

I mentioned that I like using Instapaper above. What is its killer feature? Scraping text from a page, images if need be, and giving you a clean reading interface. Safari comes with Safari Reader, which is very Instapaper like. The blog you read has got ads, but a fairly simplistic (aka boring) design. With Reader? Articles look a whole lot better – I can tell I’ll be using this feature a lot. Its not just about the fact that it strips ads – its a much cleaner, interesting interface. I wonder if it’ll catch on?

Before Safari Reader

Using Safari Reader

Memory usage seems to be better than Firefox 3.6.3, with multiple tabs open. I know the Firefox team are hard at work to make magic happen here, but Safari seems to have the edge at the moment. I haven’t used Chrome enough to know if it compares.

What do I miss? My Firefox add-ons. Here’s to the Safari Extension Gallery growing to become like addons.mozilla.org. Give Safari 5 a twirl, you probably won’t be disappointed. And if you’re into reading about every whizz-bang feature, go check out the feature list.

Mark’s done an excellent job again, getting VM’s of MariaDB 5.1.47 (release notes, changelog) out there for download. He’s also improved the bandwidth available at the box hosting these images. Get it for Ubuntu 10.04 or OpenSolaris 0906.