Paul Golding's Weblog on Wireless

Saturday, March 01, 2003

:: New channels Announcement ::

Please note that I have added two new channels (nav links on left). One is "Hot Products" which I hope is fairly self-explanatory. I want readers to be able to easily check up on any mobile products I will review or make comments on.

The other channel is "Techno Vision". This is going to be about showing how emerging technologies can be used to deliver something useful in the near future, trying as often as possible to suggest how products from "Hot Products" could be used together to facilitate visionary services: like wouldn't it be great if we took product X and added service Y and technology Z - then we could do ABC. We often get lost in the froth of techo excitement and can't figure out what we are supposed to be doing with half of this stuff. The channel will be different from "My ideas/thoughts" channel which is a blog of unsequenced ideas that pop into my mind on wireless apps, devices and services, from the mundane to the crazy.

Happy reading!

11:15:08 PM

:: Interesting pervasive portal solution [Propylon] ::

I just finished reviewing Propylon's website info for Mission Control and found it interesting. From first impressions I really like the product and approach.

Without going into any technical depth (as I don't have enough knowledge about the product), it seems a similar proposition to Volantis (praised earlier by me). However, its key strength seems to lie in its powerful data transformation capabilities on the input stream, taking any data format and converting to XML. Not surprising, as it leverages Propylon's PropelX solution for business data integration [PDF 283kb], XML being a key long-time strength of Propylon who forwarded the XPipe methodology for pipelined XML processing and transformation. When I last had a demo of Volantis, XML support was just being added, but that doesn't solve the problem of how to handle input streams that are not in XML (probably a large proportion of the content).

I am lacking any details about how Mission Control facilitates the guidelines for transformations from XML to the chosen presentation format. Volantis has a powerful templating design tool for device layouts. I'm also not sure how the transformation takes place, Volantis using their own tag set in the JSP pages.

Mission Control runs on J2EE of course and has been tested on BEA's WLS, which just about every operator seems to be using these days (sweeping statement based on anecdotal evidence).

4:43:01 PM

:: What goes around, comes around - circular usability ::

Met up with a friend today from O2 who showed me a pre-production Nokia 3650, which is the phone with a circular dial pad - see for yourself if you don't believe me (or haven't seen it already).

There must be some reason for re-arranging the standard numeric pad into a circle of keys, but other than visual distinction (and can't knock that - especially from a star like Nokia), I couldn't think of a good reason for the new layout.

Turns out to be a usability challenge - try typing a phone number on a circular pad, nevermind writing a text message. But for games developer's, whilst the handy joypad is a --- joy --- the common approach of using keys like 2,4,6,8 just doesn't work anymore......nevermind, perhaps the elegant Series-60 Symbian interface will make up for it. Full J2ME support of course (in colour) with apparently a wide range of loading options: WAP OTA , Bluetooth, Infrared PC Suite, Email attachment, MMS.

1:48:04 AM