Community Matters

And, puzzling as it may seem, it is called the iPhone, even though Cisco/Linksys just recently released their iPhone. Trademarks are fun. And apparently neither Cisco/Linksys nor Apple really own the trademark in the US.

Technology wise Apple certainly seems to have lived up to the hype. And then some. A combination of a cell phone, the wide screen video iPod we’ve been waiting for, plus maybe the coolest mobile web pad, yet. All this with what appears to be a really cool user interface and running a full-fledged OS (which is what I like so much about my Motorola A1200 / Ming). Only this is Mac OS X, which in my mind has the best user experience of all the OSs out there.

But let’s do a comparison with the Motorola Ming. Contrary to the Ming, the iPhone supports EDGE and not just GPRS, has an incredibly smooth user interface (at least from what you can tell from the demos on Apple’s site) and is integrated into the iTunes infrastructure. Oh, almost forgot. It also has 802.11b/g WIFI.

The Ming on the other hand has a Micro SD card (i.e., you can expand the memory for cheap - but admittedly that’s limited to 2GB today). It allows you to install your own applications (but see my posting on the lack of an active developer community). And is available today (well, over the internet or in stores in South East Asia) and works on all GSM networks, not just on Cingular (which is one of the biggest issues I see with the iPhone).

I guess this summarizes a lot of the differences between a Linux Desktop system and a Mac. The Linux system is much more open and flexible, easily available and comparably cheap. The Mac provides an awesome user interface in a rather closed environment; DRM encrusted, but with strong support from “premium content owners”.

It will be interesting to see the response of the market and the end users. I certainly am excited. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll buy one and switch wireless providers. But I’ll look at it.

Oh, the stock market seems to like it so far. As I write this Apple shares are up more than 8% to a new all time high.

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?

One thing puzzles me. Lots of people bought the Motorola Ming (or A1200 as it is also called). Lots of people are trying to make it work better, mostly with hacks (see the majority of the postings at MotorolaFans.Com). But there isn’t really a developer community that is writing software for it and addresses the issues that people are having.

Why? Simple. While Linux is open source and Motorola of course follows the rules of the GPL and makes the necessary sources available, they are not making available the necessary tools to build your own firmware image and flash it onto the phone. So even though I see that the calendar sucks (gee - you can’t tell from looking at it if a meeting starts on the hour or half past the hour? You’re kidding me!), I can’t simply replace it. Even though there are many small fixes that I’d like to apply (the battery meter is simply terrible; charge the phone for ten minutes and it shows fully charged, only to drop down to “red - about to die” after powering it on for 30 minutes - that’s useless), I can’t fix this.

I understand the need to control the radio stack and the access to the SIM and many issues concerning the network interaction. So put those in a signed binary and have the hardware refuse to operate when the signature of that binary can’t be verified. Tivo figured that out many years ago. But give us access to the smart part of this smartphone. I bet that if Motorola did that the community would come together and create the killer applications that would make more people want to buy this rather expensive phone. Which is clearly in Motorola’s best interest.

Unfortunately, it seems they don’t get it. Maybe this would be a way to address the issues that caused their stock price to drop like a rock last week…

I have a Motorola Ming and occasionally use it as wireless modem for my MacBook Pro. If you look around, most people will tell you that GPRS gets you 28-64kbit/s with 56kbit/s being the value typically quoted. This isn’t very fast (standard analog modem speed) but should be good enough for occasional use. Yet, almost every time I try I am very disappointed with the transfer speed (and yes, my 7Mbit/s link at home most likely spoiled me).

Doing some more reading on GPRS finally helped me understand why theory and reality appear so far apart. It turns out that GPRS throughput degrades dramatically with distance to the transmission tower. Coverage drops down to 25% if the transmission tower enables the faster transmission schemes. So unless you happen to sit close to the next antenna, forget reaching decent speeds

Too bad the Ming doesn’t support EDGE. There are some rumors that the hardware is capable of doing so and that it is just not enabled in the software, but so far no one has been able to confirm that.

Who would have thought of a minivan as an accessory to a cell phone? I now do - even though the word accessory seems to imply something smaller than the device you are accessorizing; and the Motorola Ming is quite a bit smaller than the minivan :-)

We just bought a Toyota Sienna which has Bluetooth connectiviy for the hands-free speaker/microphone combo that is also used for the navigation system. I know this is the way it’s supposed to be, but given that it’s a Linux device I was thrilled to see this work without a problem.

Turn on Bluetooth on the Ming first, then select Telephone and Settings on the display of the navigation system. It will tell you to search for “Handsfree” device and to type in the passcode that it display. In the Bluetooth app on the Ming, click on search. It will find “Handsfree” and ask for the passcode. Type it in, hit ok and bingo, the phone and the car are now talking.

It does all the things you’d expect (dial the phone, even with voice commands, pick up the phone when it rings). But the coolest thing is that it even plays the ringtones that I have installed on the phone over the car speakers. Nice.

These instructions worked for me, using a MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and a Motorola Ming (A1200) running the generic 46p firmware and connecting to T-Mobile in the US via GPRS. Please let me know if they work or don’t work for you - and remember to check the A1200 forum at MotorolaFans.com

Step 1: preparing your Mac to use the phone

Add this Motorola Ming script to /Library/Modem Scripts on your Mac.

Next open a terminal window (Terminal can be found under Applications/Utilities) and execute the following:
echo “:192.168.0.254″ > /tmp/options; sudo mv /tmp/options /etc/ppp/options
(you’ll have to type in your password here to authenticate as administrator in order to be allowed to write in /etc/ppp).

Step 2: getting your phone ready to connect

In the main menu click on Bluetooth. Click on the menu button (lower left corner) and switch the phone to be “Discoverable”.

Step 3: starting the communication on your Mac

Turn Bluetooth on on the Mac as well and start the Bluetooth Setup Assistant (you can get to that from System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Devices -> Set Up New Device…). Search for “Mobile Phone” and it should list all the Bluetooth phones in the vicinity that are discoverable. Click on “Motorola A1200″ (or, if you have a China Mobile flash image, click on Motorola 明) and continue.

Next you need to exchange the secret key for pairing the Bluetooth devices (just follow the requests on both the computer and the phone) and then grant the computer access. After a moment the Mac will suggest that it can use the Address Book and offer Internet through the phone. Since we want to set up GPRS you need to select the “Use a direct, higher speed connection…” option (even though “higher speed” is rather subjective, here).

Next comes the “Bluetooth Mobile Phone Set Up” dialog. As username and password you can pick anything, tmobile / tmobile works. The GPRS CID String is *99***2#. As Modem Script pick the “Motorola Ming” script that we installed earlier. Hit Continue and you should be done here.

Step 4: dialing out

Start “Internet Connect” (under Applications). Click on Bluetooth. The Configuration should all be set up correctly, all you need to do hit Connect (for some reason I occasionally am asked to type in the password again - no idea when and why then - just type “tmobile”).

You should be connected!

Update: these instructions won’t work if you are using Mac OS 10.5 Leopard - they were written for 10.4 Tiger. I wrote another post on how to use the Ming as GPRS (and EDGE!) modem under Leopard.