Every now and then I like to post screen captures from my 8125. I found a great utility for taking screen captures that are saved to bitmap files. It’s called Pocket Screen Capture and is completely free. It runs on a timer so that you can prep the screen before taking the shot. The image is saved to the /temp directory and can then be easily transferred to your desktop. You can see sample of a screen capture from my device below.

About a year and a half ago I released BlueGPS, a Symbian UIQ application. BlueGPS runs on devices such as Sony Ericsson’s P800 and P900 phones. BlueGPS can establish a wireless connection between the phone and Bluetooth GPS receiver. This acts as a virtual serial port and data is streamed to the phone. The data is then displayed on the screen and can be uploaded to a remote server using HTTP.

The ability to upload GPS data to a remote server allows developers to create truly innovative applications. At one point I was using SensorLogic’s Platform to handle the GPS data uploads, which were then displayed on a Google map. There are unlimited possibilities when dealing with location data.

Over the past year and a half I received a tremendous amount of feedback about BlueGPS. Several user emailed me asking about new functionality and even wanted access to the source code. While I was hesitant at first I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to see this project progress is to release it into the open source community.

I create BlueGPS because I was passionate about the technology as well as the Symbian operating system. While I’ve seen little progress in regards to Symbian devices here in the US I know they’re thriving overseas. With that being said I recently switched to a Windows Mobile powered 8125. I hate to admit that I’ve jumped ship, but when exciting new hardware becomes available I tend to jump on it.

I’m not completely abandoning Symbian, but it will probably be a while until we see a device as powerful as the 8125 here in the states. There’s the P990, which is truly killer, but it appears to be aimed at the European market. Even if it does make it to the US it will probably cost double what I paid for the 8125 ($299). I’ll definitely keep my eye on Symbian, but we’re seeing the coolest devices running Windows Mobile. The Treo 700W is a perfect example. I simply wanted to state my loyalty to Symbian because the first mobile application I ever wrote for Symbian was Dashfly Minutes.

So over the next couple of weeks I will be getting the SourceForge BlueGPS page in order. I’m planning on contacting the necessary people in the Symbian community announcing the availability of the code. In the meantime, if you’re interested in downloading the app for your phone you can do so by clicking here. If you’re interested in contributing to the project then please feel free to comment below and I’ll be sure to get back to you. I’m excited to see where this project will go!

I’ve continued to research ways to get my iTunes download of The Office to play on my 8125. While I couldn’t get TCPMP to work (read the post here) my buddy Steve pointed me to VideoLAN. I’ve played around with VideoLAN on the desktop, but didn’t know they offer a Windows Mobile version. Once again, I was unsuccessful with getting the video to play and will continue to dig around for more solutions. If you have any success I would love to hear about it.

I was reading Brad Feld’s rather funny post on his experience with iTunes DRM. This post isn’t to make fun of Brad, but to share in his pain. I had a similar painful experience this past weekend and spent about two hours trying to get The Office to play on my 8125 device.

I downloaded the latest episode called Dwight’s Speech and was prompted for my iTunes account info before I could watch the show. This was no problem and the show played perfectly although 320×240 isn’t the greatest resolution if you have a decent display. Watching the show at the default res looks incredible, but once you double or even triple it (for high res displays) the video looks pixelated. You can see a screen of the video below. This was taken at full screen size on my Mac, which is 1280×854. Click on the image below to view it all full size.

I don’t have HD just yet so I’m not sure what the output will look like. I’m definitely looking forward to finding out though. Knowing that the target device is the iPod it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Apple to bump up the res just yet.

Now onto where it gets complicated. So I decided to get fancy and load the video on my 8125. I put the file on my miniSD card (thanks to Steve for the card!) and loaded the card back into my device. A couple of interesting things about the video file is that it was about 105MB with a .m4v extension. I came to find out that this wasn’t supported by Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

After scouring the web for about 30 minutes I finally found this great post about playing .m4v files on Windows Mobile. I went ahead and installed TCPMP, FFmpeg, and the AAC decoder plugin. I was pretty pumped at this point thinking I was going to beat the DRM system. I opened TCPMP and browsed to my video file and to my amazement I received the following screen:

Oh yeah, now it was time to dork out on the couch next to Jamie and let her make fun of me. When I pressed play nothing happened….it just stayed on the first frame and I was unable to get past it and hear any audio. At this point I was seriously frustrated and decided to give it a rest. A big kudos to the TCPMP team and I’m sure at some point in the near future they’ll get everything worked out for .m4v files. Or it could have totally been operator error, but my patience has worn thin and I’ll wait for another day to tackle this beast.

One last thing I’d like to mention is that I did try exporting the video from QuickTime Pro. Unfortunately the export functionality is disabled for DRM files…shocker. I paid for the dang video so at least let me export it and take it with me!

I visited some friends in Irving this weekend and brought along my 8125 and Bluetooth GPS receiver. I promise to post on my configuration in the next few days. On my drive home to Dallas I decided to scan for wireless access points. While leaving my old neighborhood I found about 10 access points in the span of a couple of blocks where over half of them were completely open. If you take a look at the current coverage map you’ll see that out of 117 scanned almost 50% of them are wide open. Here’s the link to the interactive version:

http://www.db75.com/dev/wifimashup

and here’s a screenshot:

As the database continues to grow it will be interesting to see how the percentages of open/closed access points will change.

BenQ has released some nice Symbian devices based on UIQ.  Today I stumbled across the P50 which has to be one of the sweetest Windows Mobile devices I’ve seen.  It reminds me a tad bit of the Motorola Q.  I couldn’t get the “Where To Buy” link on the bottom right of the page to work, but I would expect to pay $400-$500 for this device.  I’m wondering if they’re initially targeting the European/Asian markets before they bring it here to the states.  Maybe by that time my 8125 will have gone stale.