Last: October 2003
Next: December 2003
November 26, 2003
small things
Been away from the Internet for a week, on the way encountered many small things that made me smile, including, amongst others: Christmas dogs in hats, festive Tupperware, my phone returning to the mothership, sportaerobics, beer festivals (and the wonderful Danish obsession with beer), an absinthe drinker, and, ummm, three pictures of toilets (one seemingly an Eliasson project).
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November 16, 2003
keitai
Whenever you think mobile phones are getting a bit boring, or you want to see the possibilities, or what's going to happen in the next few years, there's only one place to look: Japan. About a year ago, it seemed we were catching up in Europe - colour screens, cameras, proper Internet access, open OS - but never take your eye off the competition, as they're busting out with new features, bad, mad and crazy.
The biggest difference in ergonomics is flip phones compared to our candybars - there are candybar phones in Japan, but they are big and ugly compared to the flips. The flip format allows some nifty features, such as a second screen. These are now as colourful and good quality as the main screen, are on all the time (unlike the idle screens on UK colour phones), and you can download programs to run on the outside screen. These displays show everything from the time, to your last mail, to information downloaded from the net.
The main displays are high quality, getting bigger with better resolution. The latest craze are 3d displays.
Japan led the introduction of camera phones (especially j-phone, now Vodafone). Resolution has now increased to over 1.3 megapixels (2mp is coming very soon). The flip format means some phones have two cameras, often at different resolutions, and also with different focus - the inside one is perfect for portraits, the outside good for landscapes. The latest cameras have proper auto-focus and high quality lenses. Image editing, storing, organizing and sending functionality is well developed.
For the late night picturetaker, several handsets offer a picture light (like a wimpy flash), and a few let you colour the light, rather like the Lomo Coloursplash. From the brochure for the SH251iS (the naming and numbering of Japanese phones is a fun topic in itself):
There are some innovations in interaction as well. Sony have incorporated a signature scroll wheel into new phones, but other manufacturers have their own variations - 360° control is growing in popularity, with the wonderfully named Neuropointer, and the Roll Navi trackball.
Additional input mechanisms are becoming popular. Several handsets can read URLs from posters and magazines, and some read barcodes. This handset needs a little lens clipped over its camera:
One phone has a fingerprint reader for added security.
Multitasking is becoming possible, allowing access to schedules, address books, and i-mode whilst talking. One implementation of this is the task key:
Location services have always been big in Japan: a lack of a useful addressing system for navigation means maps and directions are a neccessity. i-mode has offered location services for a long time, but now phones are starting to have GPS built in (I think it is actually AGPS) - NTTDoCoMo offered the F661i for a time, but the leaders are KDDI, who offer 8 phones with EZNavi capability. This service has been upgraded recently to EZNavi Walk, with improved location finding and walking directions. I suspect that only the KDDI AU network has AGPS-enabled base stations. I think some of the handsets include electronic compass capability as well, allowing maps to be rotated to your direction, but I haven't got far enough in deciphering the Japanese. One of the greatest things in all these services is the easy emailing of a position or a map to someone.
Several features are becoming standard, mainly because of standardisation by the providers - for example the NTTDoCoMo 505i series offers Flash support, IR remote control of appliances (with i-mode integration, which means online TV listing services can program the video for you), a memory slot (normally Memory Stick Duo or miniSD), and i-appli dx, allowing applications to be written in Flash rather than Java, and easy programmatic access to the phone book, your messages, and to fetch information from the Internet. The newest range, 505iS, offers barcode reading and group chat as well.
It's good to see that it isn't just hyper-connected phones that are being produced. There are several niche products, both for types of people and specific uses.
The F671i has some very user-centric features: large characters, large keys, simple menu, read-aloud function and 3 speeddial buttons when closed. It's not patronizing, it's not dumbed down, but is designed for a target market, and to do a few particular jobs very well. The closest to the mythical one-button phone I've seen (Xelibris don't count). An updated version of the phone, the F671iS, has great on-screen visual instructions to help you along.
Characters are strong - many phones offer the ability to change the UI, with cartoon characters delivering your mail and giving you alerts - Disney, Toro, and Winnie the Pooh are offered on different handsets.
Sony have taken this a stage further with the PostPet, a networked version of the keitai pet. If you send a mail to a compatible handset, your pet will deliver the mail on their phone!
There are phones for audiophiles - several contain stereo speakers, but the SO502iWM has optical digital and analogue terminals to let you record in high quality onto a Memory Stick from a CD player. It looks like a phone, but its key strength is music.
Those wanting better Internet access have a Communicator-style handset with full keyboard, the SH2101, which reminds me of a Sony PEG-UX50 with a phone built in. There's also a 3G access point that can plug into your home computer network for instant Internet access, and also replace your home fixed phone. I've often touted a 3G to wi-fi access point as a potential killer device.
I can't claim this overview to be complete, or accurate. I don't use any of these handsets, or live in Japan. Any comments and additions very welcome.
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November 09, 2003
stupid
Tom Smith asked, tongue-in-cheek, for an 'Am I Social Software or not?' tool. By specifically invoking the Lazyweb, he doesn't get quite what he asked for... instead, I proudly present:
What kind of social software are you?
the ultimate inane in-joke quiz for people normally above this kind of thing
Of course, it's hideously overengineered, with 12 possible outcomes!
In the process of making this, I came up with some scales to categorise social software against:
political - playful
grassroots - bigco.
virtual - real world
making - organising - dating
past - current - future
mainstream - techie
Any others?
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November 07, 2003
two quick things
Remembered from when going to sleep last night...
Weblogs in aggregators are completely inverse to IM contacts - you get rid of the ones that talk the most, not those that never contact you.
Out of the 355 feeds I read, and maybe double that weblogs I've encountered over the last few months, not one has been an AOL journal.
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November 02, 2003
art 3
Don't worry, I'm exhausting the exhibitions I want to see. And I'm starting to think about technology again. Normal service will be resumed shortly.
Continuing the grand tour, it's amazing to have two current shows I like based around old masters, and there's enough other contemporary and modern work to make London almost as hot as Venice was during the summer.
A trip to Tate Britain for two new exhibitions, Turner in Venice and the Turner Prize. Be aware that both are pretty busy (however the galleries don't feel crowded), and although the queues for tickets aren't snaking outside as they have been, you could be in for a long wait. Unless you're a member, which lets you just walk in. Fantastic.
First, Turner in Venice. If you've been paying attention, you'll realise I don't have much time for Old Master paintings. Pretty, sure, but they don't normally stimulate me. I was looking forward to this exhibition, though, as if any city can light up art, it has to be Venice (with London coming a close second).
This is an exhibition about the city first, and Turner's visits second. After an introduction to the city, featuring a period map, and works by Canaletto and contemporaries (more or less forgetting the sections on literary connections and examples of famous Venetian artists - too many paintings of fairies and people), we reach the main body of work, a tour of Venice through Turner's paintings. The rooms are themed by area of Venice, including one sequence along the Grand Canal. Wonderful location-based curating. You are given a map to help get your bearings, but I can highly recommend a trip to Venice before seeing this exhibition.
Turner captured more views, sketches, places and angles than others, even though he spent just 4 weeks there. Many of the paintings are postcard views - San Marco square, the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria della Salute. Much more interesting are those of the sea, initial views approaching Venice, the Arsenale, Murano, and impressionistic sketches from his hotel, especially at night. Even so, you unfortunately never really get away from water, or even the larger canals.
The later paintings are less precise, and some appear to hardly even be there, ghostly. Some pieces were even completed once he was back in Britain - his sketchbooks are mainly of building fragments and pieces of scenes, meaning these paintings are almost imaginary, a dense rendered resonance of the city. Highly recommended.
So to the Turner Prize. There's little to say that hasn't been in the media frenzy. There's nothing really special here. The Chapmans' desecration of Goya etchings is nothing more than vandalism, Doherty's film uses bad jump-cuts, slack editing (and the film does stop and start, ruining any perpetual effect). Perry's vases work better here than in the Saatchi Gallery, especially those that aren't trying too hard to shock. It's easy to see some of them working as paintings or prints, rather than relying on the novelty value of ceramics. The hard thing to quantify is that the artists are being judged on their previous exhibitions, not what is presented here - on the basis of this exhibition, Perry should win, but for some of the previous work (especially the McDonalds ethnography), it has to go to the Chapman brothers.
Then to the V&A, primarily for Zoomorphic, an architecture exhibition of modern building based in some way on nature.
A waste of space. Small tatty pictures of buildings play second fiddle to jars of worms, the text does little to illuminate the buildings (you can't even tell if some are built, going to be built, or just proposals, such as Alsop's vision of Broadcasting House). It's the usual suspects - Foster, Piano, Gehry... the website is more informative than the exhibition. It's like a bad overtly kid-friendly display in the Natural History Museum. That bad.
This is the worst exhibition design I have encountered since, well, the last exhibition in the contemporary space. It is a hard space, but the curators insist on (are obliged?) to create a walkway taking up a third of the space, with almost nothing to see there. If there is a reason for the corridor, it should be used to greater effect.
To try and stop my blood boiling, I decamped to the cast courts, one of my favourite places. Unfortunately, the East Court was closed, because Rachel Whiteread's House is being constructed in there. Gah.
And so to the photography gallery. Which has been been halved in size, to make room for a shop for the temporary exhibitions. Time for home.
A little sidenote on gallery websites - the Tate site hides an amazing amount of information (for instance scanned images of all of Turner's sketchbooks), but it would be nice to be able to get a list of works from the Turner in Venice exhibition without having to buy the catalogue. The V&A site doesn't even include a gallery plan.
