I had a go at using Google Maps Mobile for the first time yesterday on my O2 XDA Mini S, I must say I was impressed, its interesting to see that this is the only application (that I am aware of) which Google have released as a proper Windows Mobile installer. There’s a java based application for Gmail but its pretty useless for the most part, if they had taken the time to make a full program for windows mobile perhaps it might have had useful features such as integration with the today screen on windows mobile and not such a dodgy connection with the gmail servers.

I digress, anyway, I ended up trying maps mobile on Oxford street in the end after failing to find a particular branch of Maplin, the fact that you can install from the phone without going through active sync is in itself a good thing. I’ve yet to try it out with the bluetooth GPS I use for satnav but I’m impressed so far.

Now the only bad part is standing there thinking of the data costs and cringing, my next phone is probably going to be the HTC Kaiser and with that I think one of the T-Mobile web n walk plans might go down quite well. I’ve been in contact with a couple of T-mobile people via email and have been assured that they will be carrying the phone, although they refuse to comment further on when, they won’t even narrow it down to a month which is quite frustrating. However when it does arrive, with GPS on board this should be quite a decent phone to use with the maps app.

Update (12/11/2007): I bought the Kaiser and yes google maps works very well, click here for the post…

I noted today on via TechCrunch that a Belgian court has just ruled that ISP’s are responsible for preventing illegal filesharing by their users.

Similar to me attacking the postman for putting a bill through my door I guess, but as its based on EU legislation I’ve no doubt it’ll be winging its way over to the UK sooner or later.

So ISP legal and infrastructure costs will go up as they move to try and enforce this and broadband prices will shoot as a result. Yay!

Home media for the younger grouping of more technical minded people becomes a bit of a concern after a while. I’ve been considering options myself both for managing and storing digital media in a preferably protected manner as well as aquisition itself, be this via internet delivery or more traditional broadcast options (being in the UK this is DVB in my case). Firstly I’m considering what it needs to cater for. I have at home in regular use, one desktop, one laptop and an original Xbox running XBMC (Xbox Media Center), on this note I have yet to find a couch compatible media player which outdoes XBMC, especially when you consider the price (free!). I also live with others who might also wish to pull/push content at the same time so performance is a key consideration. In terms of media aquisition, bittorrent support is a definate must and expandability to cope with new delivery platforms is important. Broadcast DVB media could be aquired via this route, but my preference would be for a local receiver option.

Power consumption should also be decent, with the government busy bolstering the economy and pretending to care about the enviroment, energy prices are unlikely to fall and with multiple users and downloads to handle, the device will do considerable hours.

So from my point of view, the key points wind up being:

• Flexible (Bittorrent, perhaps DVB, DAAP?)
• Low power consumption (as low as possible)
• Expandable Storage (1Tb at least, RAID or similar redundancy a plus)

There’s an awful lot of interesting large capacity storage devices, unfortunatly most of them will not do the wide range of tasks which I would like them to perform as well as storage. Its a pity, especially with things like the Drobo around, extremly easy to use and well made, just a bummer its USB only, suitable for photographers etc (incidentally I picked up on the Drobo via Thomas Hawk). I originally thought the lack of USB was a bit short sighted of the developers but the review on ZDNet reveals a bit more about the market, turns out my needs are those of a minority (funny that). There are also things like the Buffalo Terrastation which received mixed press when it came out, or there’s the Infrant ReadyNAS devices, but they’re sort of expensive and thats without drives.

The best thing I’ve found so far as a prebuilt solution is the Bubba, runs Debian Linux as a backend, Webserver, Email, Print and file server in one as well as built in bittorrent support (although the bundled torrent handling isn’t that great so TorrentFlux might be a better alternative). And on the power front it kicks everything else into touch running on under 10W of power! On the down side it only has a single hard drive, although there are hacks to enable a second ‘internal’ hard drive so that could theoretically be either 1.5Tb or a redundant 750gb system. Kinda attractive and its not too bad on cost, it wouldn’t do the DVB side, but this could always be done by a nano-itx system as a side line. They’ve done a nice job with this device, the only major let down is the network interface which is only 100mbps.

Of course the other temptation in my head is the build the entire thing from scratch using a single nano-itx board with capacity for 4+ hard drives which would enable me to put in full DVB and streaming capability as well but at the expense of power efficiency. Decisions decisions! Not this month though, the government have stolen too much of my pay packet again! I’ll have to carry on mulling it over…

Update 04/04/08: I went for a totally different home server in the end, the Synology DS107+, click to read the results…

Interesting to note yesterday the announcement that Google has won a legal case regarding its image search functions, the case was related to the adult website Perfect10 which claimed that Google was undermining its business. This reminds me of the court case brought about in 2006 by Copiepresse in Belgium where the Belgian company got upset that Google was including snippets of its articles in Google News as well as cacheing them.

To stop Google and others, it would of taken just three lines of code, to prevent search engines investigating the site its this tricky line of code here and for the cache its the equally complicated line here, anyway, this has been covered before so there is little point in  labouring the point. The incredible thing is though, that Copiepresse have now done this, so after going through all the trouble of a court case they did the thing they could of done in the first place and put two lines of code in. I’m going to assume there’s a bunch of executives over there with a severe lack of understanding on how to best reap the potential rewards of the internet, they probably have a similar outlook to the Telegraph.

In addition, the papers only really hurt themselves in this, a recent report by Hitwise indicated that nearly a quarter of traffic to news websites comes from search engines, this will be why Copiepresse again were in a stew when they found they werent indexed on Google at all and make a quick agreement. Google and others steadily drive traffic to peoples sites and yet they get upset about it. I wonder how long it will be before those pulling the strings work out that it doesn’t make commercial or logical sense to try and treat the internet in the same manner other mediums are handled in terms of strict copyright.

I was going to post this as a comment to Mike Arringtons post on TechCrunch about BBC Jam, however as it started to get a little longer than would be sensible for a comment I’ve put it here instead (trackbacks are great!)

As far as BBC Jam goes, I don’t agree with the decision to suspend the service, the cost of it so far has been too high, however, suspending or axing the service will mean this money which has been spent thus far has not benefitted the British public. There are many public services in most countries which could surely in the same manner be construde as potentially damaging for commerce. In the UK the NHS for instance could be seen as damaging to the potential income of private hospitals etc.

As averse as many are to the idea of the BBC/PSB in general, the content the BBC produce is on the whole excellent when they don’t pander to the reality television market. I believe it is quite difficult for an american commentator as Mike Arrington is to judge the organisation on the small amount of their content which makes it across the pond. Certainly his comments in London recently were far from accurate or well informed and certainly the BBC Backstage mailing list(Mailing list RSS feed) was consumed for a while afterwards with numerous rebutals on the subject.

The BBC gives hugh benefit to many and a great number of its divisions have excellent reputations in different fields the world over. BBC Research and Development among others have been leading technological innovation in many areas of broadcast/television for some time and their work has benefitted other organisations in many ways. It is however quite sad at the way in which the BBC board seem keen to disband and/or sell off some of these well performing divisions, BBC Technology was recently made part of Siemens in a major outsourcing move. The BBC claim this is cost saving, however while Siemens may promise to save the BBC £30m, they at the same time (sources say) aim to increase the BBC’s overall spending in other ways.

[/rant]