February 06, 2006
A Nokia Without A Phone
The Nokia 770 has just been released ... without a phone or a camera (photo taken from an Ericsson). But it does have a full-model Linux install and can be used for all things Unix.
(And, a VoIP phone is coming soon, they say, in the "2006 Edition." I wonder if Nokia reads the news...)
Seriously though, the nexus with FC is more than reading this morning's other blog entry - we want our own pocket PC so we can stick on our secure online payments program. Either a completely secure browser environment for online banking or WebFunds for secure payments. Unfortunately, the small model Java Mobile isn't worth the bother to rewrite all the apps.
Hi.
Yes, Nokia people read your blog.
You commented about the cellular location service. AFAIK, the stuff is based on triangulating your mobile phone's location using timing advance from several base stations. (Timing advance is what you need in order to hit the exact timeslot in a time-division multiplexing system when transmitting from a phone.) The timing advance is basically your distance from the base station.
There's a slight indicator of this happening if you have a 2G phone. An indicator on screen (in Nokia mobiles, two arrows beneath the antenna icon) says if your GPRS data connection is up. During a voice call, or when receiving/sending a text message, the GPRS data connection is temporarily disabled, and the icon shows a slash across the arrows. When you are being triangulated, it can be seen in a similar way.
Of course, no such indication in 3G and it may happen for some other reason as well. But if you have a 2G data connection always on, and you repeatedly see these hiccups in data connection when not moving, it may be an indication someone's tracking you. Or not.
Posted by: Anonymous at February 7, 2006 02:04 AMMeanwhile, ePointSystem got funding for porting stuff to java-based mobile phones.
First "utility" -- one generating big random numbers and calculating their SHA1 hash -- is already downloadable. It's the first step towards a fully functional wallet.
http://www.epointsystem.org/~nagydani/MobilePayment.jad (type the address into the browser of your java-capable mobile phone)