Author: James Whatley

Chief Strategy Officer in adland. I got ❤️ for writing, gaming, and figuring stuff out. I'm @whatleydude pretty much everywhere that matters. Nice to meet you x

MIR: The Mobile Geek of Glastonbury: Intro

Greetings readers, your friendly neighbourhood Whatley here;

While some of us are off gallivanting around the Maldives – sorry, ahem – A DESERT ISLAND, other bloggers, like myself, have to make do with the festival season to amuse themselves here back in the UK.

And what better festival other than the Mother of all festivals: Glastonbury!

:)

Yes, it really IS that muddy. I took that photo myself.

Last year, I think I’m pretty safe in saying;

I was the ONLY person to live blog Glastonbury from a mobile phone.

Yes. That’s right, I blogged the whole darn thing (well as much as my battery would allow) from my Nokia N95-1 (the original silver one, the one with the REALLY poor battery, y’know?).

In fact the only reason my current blog exists is because of my then(?) obsession with Mobile Blogging.

You can go back and read some of my exploits here, here and here if you’d like.
But really, all you need to know is, at the time, the only way I could do this (AFAIK) was through VOX.

VOX has a neat little application that sits on some/most Nseries phones that you can download and is also available as one of the upload options in the Share Online app, also found on most Nseries phones.

Power wise, again only for last year, I had three N95 batteries (BL-5Fs for the true geeks among you) and these two things below:

That on the left is an independent battery charge-base and that on the right, a portable double AA battery powered phone charger.

The former proved itself to be extremely useful, then and indeed over the past year of ownership too. With that handy little device I can always have one battery in my phone, while another charges. This, of course, is all well and good until you go and lose the damn thing; which is what I did a matter of days ago.

I digress.

The thing on the right, I bought that from Amazon, thing is mind.

It . Was. Rubbish.

In fact I think it actually USED more battery power than it actually gave back. I ended up passing it onto some fellow festival-ite in our circle of tents. It conveniently came with a bunch of other adaptors – not just Nokia; covered SE, Motorola, Blackberry… the lot. You name it. So at least that much was handy about it.

However, for me, it was no good.

And don’t even start me on the quite frankly RIDICULOUS ‘Orange Charge Tent‘.
I mean, who wants to QUEUE for an hour to charge their handset, only to discover that when they get to the front, they then have to wait around for a further two hours to watch their phone charge at an unsecured bar.
Joined up thinking really not their specialty it would seem.

So, how did I stay charged?

Well, while the Orange monkeys were missing out on potentially 3hrs of great music, I managed to find a little store amongst the clothes stalls and falafel vendors, which specialised in phone charging.
You paid a fiver a go and it was kept under lock and key and all was fine. The system the guy had running behind him reminded me a little of chargebox and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were one and the same, I’ll ask them this year and see. Anyway, this little store became a daily haunt for my good self.

In the morning I’d get up, review any content from the night before, write a quick post or two and then upload as much as I could before my battery died. After that I’d mosey on down to aforementioned phone charging establishment, pay my fiver, and then go off and meet friends who I’d arranged to meet at a later time (do you remember when we did that?!).

Later that afternoon I would pick up my phone, liaise with all the folk that had been trying to reach me for God knows how long, and then get off to another stage where upon I’d take more photos/videos that I would later, no doubt upload.

Lovely stuff.
So aside from the not-so-brilliant portable phone charger, last year was a reasonable success.

But what about this year?

Well, my VOX blog is still up and running.
So I’ve got that working just fine, but now look at all the other things I can do!

I can upload via SMS, MMS or Email via Moblog.
I can simply make a phone call and speak a blog post through SpinVox.
I can boot up Qik and stream LIVE content direct to the internet. Not only direct to my QIK page, but if I hit ’55’ while I’m streaming, my 500-odd followers on Twitter will get told about it too!

The plethora of Social Tools now available to the modern, festival-going geek, really, truly, is a spectacle to behold.

I shall be using ALL of those services/apps/tools I’ve listed above, and probably more.

The question is Dear Readers, which ones do YOU think I should be using?

What should your Mobile Geek of Glastonbury be packing in his rucksack to ensure a complete all round mobile performance?

Leave your suggestions below or, if you have anything you want showcased/tested over the coming festival season, email james@whatleydude.com

Cheers! 🙂

MIR: Whatley on the iPhone – “Meh. Next!”

I’ve actually been working my ass off all day and haven’t really been paying that much attention – I’m sick of all the tweets TBH. I got the vibe that others were too.

I did take a look though. I wasn’t amazed. And I think, as our mate Jon said “the difficult 2nd album” as it were.

There was scope to do better.

*shrug*

And as for new pricing? As I said above – I’ve not seen it, not bothered, not paying attention.

What is Apple’s ‘Mobile Me’? Not bothered. Really. Not. Fussed.

Not upgrading. I told you that I am a content creator. I told you that my phone does everything for me. That iPhone? Nah. Nothin.

THEY HAVENT EVEN UPGRADED THE CAMERA.

*sigh*

NEXT.

MIR: Mobile Web 2.0 – What?!

Whatley here, reporting in.

Founder of Moblog.co.uk and all round friend of SMS Text News, Alfie Dennen, has set up a new blog in lieu of the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit which takes place in London next week.

The weird thing for me (for a start anyway) is the name “Mobile Web 2.0” – so weirded out was I by this in fact that I had ended up dropping a note to Alfie explaining my thoughts.

Well he went ahead and published it:

“When did we have Mobile Web 1.0?

What the hell just happened?
First up: If you ask ANY consumer on the street: Are you using Mobile Web 2.0?
They’ll probably look at you like you’re from Mars.

Second: These naming conventions genuinely drive me nuts. WAP. Mobile Internet. Mobile Web. Internet, made Mobile. Mobile 2.0. Mobile Web 2.0. ENOUGH ALREADY!

We may as well ask: Is this the year of the Mobile?

Just so we can tick every box (and seriously, that question is now, officially, a joke, you know it’s a joke because whenever anyone asks it these days the response is LAUGHTER).

It’s like when people carp on about Web 2.0. More often than not I find myself chiming in with something like: You know people just call it the web now right?”

And so on. You can read the full post here. There’s a whole bunch of great content up actually (not including my post ;) ), so yeah – head over and check it out!

MIR: Welcome to Three-Fail

Afternoon readers, Whatley reporting in.

My post quota has been a bit low lately, (sorry Ewan), I’ve been working hard on a top secret SpinVox project, (more on this next week – promise), in the meantime however allow me to share with you something that appeared on my radar earlier today care of my friend Roger.

Roger, aside from being a girl, is a good blog-buddy of mine.
She and I write and maintain:

Why Don’t Grownups Get it? – conversations we have had with growdups, by Roger and James.

We tend to take it in turns to post up stuff and normally it’s quite non-techy and it tends to lean towards the ridiculous.

But, as I said, this afternoon Roger posted up something that I felt I just had to share:

Roger – Over to you:


I don’t know if it is just me, with my seemingly magnetic ability to attract idiots, but I don’t have much luck with customer service types.

See my post on Dell. I rest my case.

Or I would rest my case, but I’m afraid I have to shake it into wakefulness for another round, this time concerning those ever-helpful bods at 3 Mobile.

Don’t worry, it’s not a longwinded rant. I’m really not cross about this one. Like Ron Burgundy when Baxter eats the cheese, I’m not angry. I’m impressed. With the sheer level of idiocy.

It’s a quickie. And here it is:

My phone broke. This happens. I took it to the 3 shop (one of those ones in a Superdrug, where you can’t tell if they are shop assistants or muggers, you know the ones). They sent it off on a three day repair on Monday. And credit to them, it came back into the shop, all shiny and fixed, today.

Of course, when I switched it on it went mental beeping away with hundreds of voicemails and texts from lots of terribly important people trying to get hold of me (it’s a social whirl being me, it really is).

And here’s the thing.

One of the messages was from 3.

Telling me my phone was ready for collection.

Let’s see if we can spot the flaw in their logic, shall we?

*sigh*

Roger.

Vote Now! (Food 2.0)

Go Team Six!
Go Team Six!

I mentioned in a post a while back that I was taking part in the Food 2.0 project – aptly named:

"Nom Nom Nom".

Well, it's all done now, so you can nip over and have a look at my team's page here and you can also vote for the winner too.

– vote for us – vote for us – vote for us –

So PLEASE jump on over and check it out…

🙂

WOOOOO!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

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International Essex Diva

MIR: Doing things in ‘Sequence’ – the hidden Nokia feature!

Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited along to take part in a new food-based event rather amusingly entitled: ‘Nom Nom Nom‘.

The brainchild of London Underground blogger, Annie Mole – Food 2.0 Nom Nom Nom (to give it its full title), was a LOT of fun.
I was there in two capacities. First as a representative of SpinVox (lead sponsors of the event), and second, as a competitor.

The event you see was the online/digital version if you will, of Masterchef.

As one half of GO TEAM SIX (the other half being my good friend Ribot, foodie, photographer and a mobile UI designer to boot), the challenge was twofold.

First to create three dishes (one of which had to be cold) for four people in just under two and a half hours. The second to create ‘output’ for the Nom Nom Nom blog pages.

Ribot and I, being the mobile geeks of the group, Qik’d and photographed EVERYTHING. I went armed with my trusty N95 8GB, my spare N95-1 (packing an 8GB Micro SD), and also my rather snazzy Nokia Tripod.

Tripod

After reading a blog post by a fellow contestant – one Russell Davies – I had an idea for the day’s content. As well as Qikking left, right and centre and of course, snapping anything that moved I decided to set my N95-1 to SEQUENCE MODE.

What is this crazy mode of which I speak? Well, at first I had no idea. I even put a call out to try and find some software for my phone that would allow me to do this… One email conflab with Mr Davies later and it turns out that this mode is right there!
And what’s more – it’s been there the whole time!
Look!

sequence 1

I never knew it was there. I had to be told about it. That’s right. The first Mobile Geek of London didn’t know about sodding sequence mode!
(but it’s OK I did my research and not many other folk knew about it either)

Moving swiftly onward I popped my N95-1 into the tripod (as shown above), and set sequence mode to go off at 1 minute intervals…

sequence 2

sequence 3

Over the course of the afternoon, while Ribot and I put our chosen dishes together, my cheeky little handset took 154 different photos, and to what end?

Well, with the content that came out of it, I was able to create the following video:

Shot on a Nokia N95-1, standing on a Nokia Tripod and edited together using Windows Movie Maker, (who needs a Mac anyway?)

I know this ain’t ‘news’ per se. But it’s a feature I didn’t know about and it’s made me look at my N95 in a completely different light.

I thought I’d share it and show you just what’s possible.
The original N95 still manages to surprise even me.

Brilliant.

MIR: Walking with Normobs – A Response from our man Whatley

Been a bit busy of late folk, hence the absence of my regular Whatley on Wednesday slot.

Been a bit busy of late folk, hence the absence of my regular Whatley on Wednesday slot.

Trying to get down for the weekly podcast mind…

But yes. Reading the site with interest as I often do, I really enjoyed Tuesday’s ‘Walking with Normobs‘ piece.

So much so that I stirred from my blogging slumber and decided to join the debate…

First off, I totally agree with where you’re coming from. I do. Terry. I do.
But you need to look ahead.

The Normobs of the future will be at the early adopter stage we’re at now.
Underestimate them at your peril.

Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited along to a Nokia End User group test thing wotsit.

On the N81 8GB.

Yes – the same device that I reviewed way back when and the same device that my esteemed colleague Ben Smith lavished hatred upon recently also.

This is no strange thing. I often find myself in these kinds of focus groups.
Why?

Well I’m one of those people. One of those people that when asked:

“Would it be ok to contact you in the future?”

I say “Yes”

If I’m not busy, and if I have the time, then I’ll gladly offer assistance. From big companies like Vodafone and Nokia after some customer insight or for a friend’s friend whose N95 keeps breaking because her firmware is ‘stuck on v10’.

I like to help.

Anyway – off I went to this group gathering – just off Carnaby Street, and lo, as is the norm with these things, I entered a room full of folk from all different walks of life/areas of London.

In fact – one guy had such thick urban ‘accent’ that the gentleman running the session actually found it difficult to understand at times. Love it.

I digress.

The point is, Terry, these kids – I was, it seemed, the oldest chap in the room, (quite refreshingly so too). These kids knew their stuff. We had a mechanic, a trainee IT bod, a couple of students and an accountant… and me, obviously.

As I said – these kids knew their stuff.

They knew about firmware updates, they knew about downloading games (N-GAGE or otherwise), they knew about all sorts of stuff.

I was genuinely impressed.

They referenced other devices in their analogies. They reminisced over handsets of yesteryear when articulating their complaints.

They. Knew. Their. Stuff.

You and me, Terry? We’re the old men of tomorrow.
Our kids? What handsets will they be concerned about getting us?
We’re early adopters now. Our kids will be too. Their kids. And so on.

The normal mobile users of tomorrow will be using the products you and I use today.
You make valid points about Skype as a service. Skype is a different way of making a phone call, branded. Tell your Dad to make a phone call by pushing the Skype button, and he will. Tell him to make a call over Skype? He’ll look at you like you’re from Mars.

Similarly with other naming conventions/terminologies: Podcasts vs Radio Shows. Blogs vs Diaries.
And so on…

Of course we’re not expecting our folks to go out and start making VoIP calls tomorrow.
But that’s not the point.

I’m pretty damn sure that the big guns aren’t really concerned about the Daily Mail reading, Marmalade eating Normobs taking up their services. Of course, it’d be lovely if they did! But I doubt very much they EVER will. The Daily Mail will die out as new generations come forward with new ideas and thoughts. Challenging the way we think and the way we view the world.

I read recently on a blog in Clay Shirky’s Book “Here Comes Everybody” about a little girl who, on a recent trip to see some family members had, on arrival, taken one look at the television, screamed and then run behind it suddenly looking for something…
The reason?

She was looking for the mouse.
The girl in question had never seen a screen without one before.

These small changes in behaviour and expectancies of ‘the norm’ take generations to change. Sometimes things go faster, but often things move a lot slower.

There is a particularly fond day dream of mine, where all of us geeks are sitting round at dinner late into our 70s and there we are still moaning about the lack of X and how Y never really did turn up etc etc…

And our kids?

Well they’ll be doing their equivalent of blogging and moaning about the lack of parent-friendly services/devices on the Market I’m sure.

Cheers.

..

..

..

And as an afterthought, going back to that focus group for a second, maybe those kids in the room weren’t that savvy after all.

Maybe it was just that bloody device that made them get online and learn something.

Heh.

Speaking Freely – Shopping List

“This is my shopping list so I can read it later. Vine tomatoes, whole juicy cucumber, iceberg lettuce, two lemons, lots of fresh mince, need some red peppers, some kidney beans, some vegetarian mince I think. And some herbs. Some eggs. Thank you, bye.”


spoken through SpinVox