Apple headphones are crap

I got my first iPod many years ago (even if I was not an early adopter at all!) and the headphones that came with it were crap. They were the classic plastic headphones that you can buy anywhere for 2 Euro. I don't know about you, but when I use them for more than 1 hour they hurt my ears.

Later I bought the first generation of Apple in-ear headphones and while they never hurt my ears they actually never worked properly. I expect them to remain in my ear for more than 10-20 minutes without having to keep pushing back in. Yes, I tried the other plugs that came with it and no big change.

Following a friend's recommendation I bought some really expensive Shure in-ear headphones. While the Apple's in-ears costed me about 50 Euro, that was money thrown down the drain, while the Shure have been rocking for more than 2 years now and I am really satisfied.

When I got the 3GS a couple of weeks ago it came with the original plastic-headphones. I had seen some presentation that explained how better they were, so I gave them another opportunity and the result is, I'm afraid, that they still hurt. :(

If you are planning on buying headphones, please, consider buying some good ones, Shure, Sennheiser, Atomic Floyd all make great ones. It will seem like you are spending way more, initially, but if you use them regularly it's a well worth expense.

Maps and navigation innovation

For quite a few years in-car navigation has been a very good business. Companies kept improving their hardware and selling every other year (if not within a year) a new device to their customers. I am talking about the navigation systems like TomTom and Garmin, not those that you buy integrated in your car, of course.

The interface had, over the years, small improvements and refinements, but hardly any major change. While Garmin was the leader up to 5 or 6 years ago, at least in Europe TomTom has taken a clear lead both in pricing and UI. Some might argue Garmin has better accuracy, but it's not SOO much better, in my opinion. Companies like Navigon have tried some innovation, but they haven't conquered enough market share, at least until now.

Then mobile devices entered the game. It happened in various small steps like the introduction of GPS chips and Nokia's acquisition of NAVTEQ.
Also, Apple has proven that people LOVE maps on their phones and need something that is not necessarily a navigation system while driving. See for example slides 5 and 11 from this great presentation by Skyhook (the technology providers for location services on iPhones and other devices).

Nokia has come with some interesting application, service and business model, see the Ovi Maps and these 2 demo videos. It is very interesting, it is definitely going to hit Garmin and TomTom, but it's still a paid service, so it will not kill the other businesses.

Apple has quitely acquired a company called Placebase. This confirms the interest of mobile device makers in location and maps services (and probably also adds to the current Google-Apple competition). Obviously, relying on Google's Maps wasn't good enough for Apple, hence expect some innovation here. It will have to be seen what they can achieve when competing with Nokia's technology acquired from NAVTEQ and Google, it cannot be just eyecandy.

Now comes in Google with Android 2 and the new maps service. There's a good quick look from TechCrunch, Google Redefines GPS Navigation Landscape: Google Maps Navigation For Android 2.0. Google's service is going to be free to use and comes in an Open Source OS. Not only, it comes with some very interesting innovation in the UI and service such as the use of Street View, the ability to search for Points of Interest on your route and traffic alerts. Yes, points of interest have been there for a while, but how good are they? It doesn't seem to me like they can be compared with Google Maps on the web. I expect this on-device service to be as good.

OpenStreetMap proves that you can create a good map with crowd sourcing and if Google is going to be in millions of phones within next year, it will not be hard to add a small button that makes you share "anonymous" data to Google so that they can track a lot of information with minimal effort (it's not hard to guess there's a motorway when you're traveling at 150km/h on a straight line).

What is the future of companies like TomTom, Garmin, or even those that sold maps? Who can provide the level of detail that Google will have?

Nokia Mobile Web templates competition

For some reason I must have missed that there was yet another competition at Forum Nokia. The guys are really working hard on helping the community and giving good reasons to developers and designers to create great content for Nokia devices.

It's almost over, but if you know how to do it, you might still make it before the deadline on Oct, 31st. See the details of the competition on their Wiki, Wiki mobile web templates contest instructions.

Best of luck!

Life is a great adventure

My last blog post was almost 3 months ago, I would not be surprised if no one is reading this any more. Before that I have been blogging very little. Twitter is taking a lot of inspiration, I admit, but also most of my "writing energies" have been focusing on mobiForge. Writing for mobiForge, as part of my dotMobi duties, has been great and offered great visibility, of course. My adventure with dotMobi is about to end, anyway, after more than 2 years it is time to move on. With that, I expect some more time for this blog.

A few ideas are already taking shape, but the reality is that I am going back to the white board and start thinking about new ideas and new projects. They might be in mobile or they might be somewhere else. Of course I think the future is ubiquitous, so mobile will have some space in any plan I will make, but the bottom line is that I will have some time for myself. Some time to think about what is exciting on the Internet today and maybe what is not quite as I would like it to be. From this, I expect some new exciting project will come.

Do you have a cool idea? Do you want to share thoughts? Let me know!

Google Street View in Dublin

This morning while walking to the bus stop I saw the Google street view car, it was black with a little Google logo on the side.

If I got the timing right, you might see me waving. In the worst case you will see me waving to the bus that was arriving. ;)

Peculiar device recognition by Disney

Earlier today I followed a link on mocoNews about Disney announcing record visits on their mobile site. I remembered Disney has a nice disney.mobi address, so when I read that the article talked about visitors to "disney.com" I was a bit surprised and wondered if it was a mistake. With my Sony Ericsson V640i I went straight to the .com and to my great surprised I saw a nice mobile site. My curiosity immediately grew from 0 to 100!

I opened a nice xterm and started playing with curl and headers. Here are a few discoveries:

• disney.go.com is the real address, no matter what you use, you are always using the .go.com domain


• device detection happens in the very first page, once you're on disney.go.com you are going to get the desktop site with flash, javascript, etc


• the real mobile site is at m.disney.go.com, once you're there you will always get the mobile site


• the iPhone seems to go to the desktop site, but then gets a special layout


• no matter what headers you set, if you go to .mobi you will get the mobile site


• the desktop site is served with a Windows server, so I assume developed in .NET


• the mobile site is served from a Coyote linux, using Tomcat


• if you only provide the User-Agent string of a mobile device you will NOT be detected as mobile


• in order to be detected as mobile you will have to provide a valid UAProf URI, and that's actually enough by itself


• the iPhone on disney.mobi gets the same presentation as all other devices, i.e. not the same as if you visited disney.com in the first place

There is definitely some broken flow here, although I think the mobile experience is very good and the detection at the root is a very good move. Now, will someone from Disney tell me how many visits they get from mobile compared to desktop? I'd love that. ;)

Some nerdy stuff if you wanted to replicate my tests.

Basic request (and then follow the redirects):

curl -D - http://disney.com

Basic request with mobile User-Agent:

curl -D - -A "Mozilla/4.0 SonyEricssonV640iv/R1EA Browser/NetFront/3.4 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1" http://disney.com/

And with UAProf:

curl -D - -A "Mozilla/4.0 SonyEricssonV640iv/R1EA Browser/NetFront/3.4 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1" -H 'X-Wap-Profile: http://wap.sonyericsson.com/UAprof/V640iR101-3G.xml' http://disney.com/

And just in case, with iPhone User-Agent (and no UAProf as it doesn't serve it):

curl -D - -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; it-it) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20" http://disney.com

Even more nerdy note, the desktop site sends the following header:

X-Cnection: close

According to a quick search some proxy or gateway in the middle.

Speaking of crappy User-Agent strings

I am normally a fan of Opera Mini and I use it quite often on my V640i, but yesterday we stumbled on a very wierd string.

A Samsung SGH-E740 (on Device Anywhere, so you can probably try it yourself) has Opera Mini installed and the User-Agent string is Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/1.1.7621/hifi/tmobile/uk; Motorola V3; en; U; ssr).

Now WHY is that "Motorola V3" string there? Surely this is not a Razr V3, surely Opera Mini aspires to be a better browser than the one pre-installed on the Razr V3, so WHY?

I don't have a clue, of course.

PS: The X-OperaMini-Phone-Ua header is there and has the original User-Agent string.