BillDay.com

I first blogged about sports venues lighting up WiFi networks earlier this year in posts about the San Francisco Giants. Now eWeek reports that there are other Major League Baseball teams also wireless-enabling their common areas.

I can’t wait to try this out on the 9500!

Vodafone has announced a lineup of new 3G handsets for their Japanese network.

New models include the Vodafone 702NK, a Japanese version of the Nokia 6630.

Nokia has begun shipments of its first Series 60 fold phone. Read the press release, or better yet check out the 6260’s specs and learn more about Series 60 Platform 2nd Edition Feature Pack 1 which it uses.

Nokia and other participating companies recently released jointly developed specifications for Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA).

UMA enables access to GSM and GPRS mobile services over unlicensed spectrum technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi with security equivalent to GSM. In other words, subscribers will be able to roam and handover between cellular networks and public and private unlicensed wireless networks using dual-mode mobile handsets while maintaining access to mobile services.

Re-read the paragraph above and think about this a bit. Very powerful stuff.

Learn more from the UMA site via its Overview and Technology pages. Or dive into the details by reading the specifications.

What next? UMA is being introduced into 3GPP for official standardization, so hopefully a seemless cellular and WiFi roaming experience will be coming to handsets near you in the not too distant future.

Following up on my Blogging on BillDay.com site changes:

I’ve continued merging various parts of my site into my CMS infrastructure and the new common look and feel. Changes I’ve made include:

• Updated my professional bio and resume for my recent job change
• Replaced outdated presentation topics page with a new Presentations blog category including abstracts and a link to slides for each posted presentation
• Posted links to my archived Sun presentations, prior publications, previous presentations, and other things involving me such as webcasts and interviews into my blog for better searchability and future reference
• Highlighted J2ME Archive and Mobile Jobs lists by linking to them from the “Resources” section in right homepage gutter
• Plus some other clean-up and housekeeping sorts of things (renamed “Blog Topics” section to “Topics” in homepage, removed outdated Professional page after merging various bits as noted above, etc.)

This completes the cutover to the new CMS infrastructure. Future site work will focus on content improvements such as J2ME Archive updates, context specific ads for related services, etc.

Reuters/Yahoo reports on INEEL’s new Cyber Security center in “On Fed Payroll, Hackers Seek to Save America“.

Following up on my other posts on Linux smartphones:

LinuxDevices.com provides an interesting portrait of a Linux smartphone, the E28 e2800+.

Read all about it from Reuters/USA Today: “Global handset sales reached record in Q2“.

Planning to attend CTIA Wireless IT or in the Bay Area anyway October 24th?

Check out the Nokia Enterprise Developer Workshop. Among other things we’ll be covering new Series 60 and Series 80 technologies and handsets such as the 9500 and 9300.

Bonus tip: Register today and you’ll also be eligible for free admission to the CTIA WIT exhibits and keynotes.

Nokia introduced the Series 80 based Nokia 9300 today. Read MobileBurn’s review and check out more photos from the Nokia press site.

The 9300 will support Blackberry email access along with other Series 80 based devices such as the 9500. In fact, one way to look at the 9300 is as a slimmed down 9500 for those with a “pocket space premium” (I definitely find myself in that camp quite often). Two areas trimmed to shrink the 9300’s size: digicam and WiFi support. If one or both of those is critical for your application development, look at the 9500 or other Nokia cellcams such as the 7610 instead.

Developer details: The 9300 is the second Series 80 Developer Platform 2.0 based device announced (the first was the 9500). 9300 supports development using either of the two J2ME stacks as well as C++:

• J2ME CDC/FP/PP and CLDC/MIDP 2.0 and related APIs
• Symbian OS 7.0s

Nokia and Six Apart have announced support for Typepad in Nokia Lifeblog.

Lifeblog’s blogging support will be Atom based. For more information, read Christian Lindholm’s post on Lifeblog and Typepad, learn more about Typepad’s implementation of the Atom API, and watch the Nokia Lifeblog site for more details. I need to dig into the details myself and verify if I’ll be able to Lifeblog to my own Atom enabled site…more to come on that as I get the skinny.

BTW, if you’re interested in Lifeblog you might also want to check out Nokia Album, available now for 7610. Russ wrote a short review last month if you’d like a third party take on it.

Nokia and Metrowerks announced a number of related things today including Nokia’s purchase of Metrowerks Symbian OS development tools.

Other details: Nokia will make employment offers to approximately two dozen Metrowerks employees who develop and support the technology being purchased. Nokia will also license a number of core Metrowerks technologies.

Click here for details from the joint press release.

I recently switched home broadband providers and decided to use the switch as an opportunity to upgrade my home network’s internals, too.

Centerpiece of my faster setup: Netgear’s WGR614 802.11g Wireless Router. This WiFi cable/DSL-ready router gives me 54Mbps speed for 802.11g devices while maintaining compatibility with 11Mbps 802.11b equipment such as the Nokia 9500 Communicator (Nokia’s first WLAN handset; click here for more details), older WiFi PC cards, etc.

Router specs are available from Amazon or the Netgear datasheet.

Notes on setting up the WGR614 via the provided Web administration interface and recommendations for usage:

• Limit the visibility of your network to casual WiFi users by changing your network name (SSID) to something other than the default and turning off SSID broadcast
• Use the MAC address based access control list to limit access to particular devices
• The router includes stateful packet inspection (SPI) and a number of other security capabilities built-in, but you should always assume your network is vulnerable and being sniffed: Use the highest level of encryption supported by your devices (WEP and WPA-PSK are available in the router), and even better still, use VPN (WGR614 supports IPSec and L2TP pass through)

If you’re interested in the WGR614, you can buy one via Amazon.com for $34.84 USD after a $20 mail in rebate. Be sure you get the latest available revision (when I bought mine, the WGR614 was up to v4).

Read LinuxDevices.com’s comments on BusinessWeek’s recent article on Linux in mobile phones.

Interested in OpenGL ES support in upcoming Series 60 2nd Edition Feature Pack 2 based devices such as the Nokia 6630?

Check out the training from Khronos Developer University available in 2004 and the first half of 2005.

Following up on things I’ve written about number portability in the US: Switching seems to be picking up steam of late as Reuters/Yahoo News reports in “Pace for Wireless Number Switches Quickens“.

Stats worth noting from the article include:

• There are approximately 168.5 million US wireless subscribers as of now
• 5.4 million customers have switched since number portability rules went into effect in November 2003
• More than 2.8 million of those switched from May to July 2004
• 544,000 “cord cutters” moved their home or office landline phone number to their wireless phone since last November

Wireless highlights from my August blog entries:

• Nokia and Vodafone announced critical next generation J2ME tech, the Mobile Service Architecture, including two JSRs in the JCP to specify MSA for both CLDC and CDC based J2ME devices
• I delivered a presentation on “J2ME at Five” to the inaugural meeting of the Bay Area Mobility Forum (click to access abstract and slides)
• Nokia Developer’s Suite 2.2 for J2ME was released (adds support for Eclipse and open source Fedora Linux, among other things)
• Forum Nokia published information on Series 60 Platform 2nd Edition Feature Pack 1, in other words the latest release of Series 60 available in phones today such as my Nokia 7610
• Asian trends to watch: 3GNewsroom.com published some interesting worldwide CDMA adoption statistics, followed a short while later by a Business Times article on Nokia overtaking Motorola in China and an interesting Nikkei Electronics Asia article on Chinese and South Korean adoption of W-CDMA, CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, and TD-SCDMA
• I delivered a “Tips and Techniques for Advanced Wireless Java Programming” webcast as part of the Nokia Developer Learning Series (click here to access the abstract and a PDF copy of the slides)
• Russ Beattie hacked together mOlympics, a mobile RSS news aggregator for all things related to the Athens 2004 Olympics (note that mOlympics now resolves to mGuru; what gives, Russ?)
• Filipinos protested a proposed ‘texting’ tax meant to help relieve the national deficit (that’s a lot of twitching thumbs!)
• AT&T Wireless detailed their new UMTS service (click here to access the archived webcast)

Previous 2004 wireless recaps are available for: March | April-June | July

Top wireless news for developers from July included:

• Strategy Analytics released some interesting projections on how Asia will be the driving force behind smartphone sales in the future (the trend is obvious, but it’s worth a read for the details)
• Sendo began shipping the X handset, its first Series 60 based device
• Nokia and STMicroelectronics introduced a new camera module standard for mobile devices
• After quite a few people asked me about my new handset, I put together an “Everything about my Nokia 7610″ post detailing how to migrate data from a previous phone, where to get a number of my favorite mobile apps for development, business, and personal use, and what specs and support docs one should check out to get a jumpstart
• Published my JavaOne 2004 recap including my take on wireless at the conference, slides for my sessions (and later a link to most of the Nokia presentations), and day 1 to 4 updates about the various sessions I was able to attend; check out the visual cross reference at the bottom of this post to jump straight to posts that interest you

Previous 2004 wireless recaps are available for: March | April-June

Now that I’m settled in my new position at Nokia, I’ve got some catching up to do on my monthly wireless recap posts.

My last installment was in my java.net blog way back in March. What I’ve decided to do to catch up is post this April, May, and June conglomeration, then resume monthly posts from July and August onwards. And since I’ve ramped up my wireless-related blogging on BillDay.com a great deal since March, I’m going to post the original entries here, then link from java.net.

Without further ado, here are some of the major wireless developments and stories from April-June in reverse chronological order:

• The JavaOne conference ran June 28th to July 1st; check out the June bits here, or jump straight to my July JavaOne recap (nested recaps, tres geek chique!)
• Sony announced it will halt Clie sales in the US (another clear sign non-networked PDAs are on the wane)
• Nokia overtook PalmOne in Q1 2004 as the number one seller of “mobile computers”: PDAs are dead, long live smartphones!
• I joined Nokia to head up Technical Services & Consultancy for Forum Nokia in the Americas (admittedly not big news for everyone, but at least it’s worth making the disclaimer so that everyone knows to take my comments in the proper context)
• IDC reported that the worldwide smartphone market grew 85% year-over-year
• Sony ceded the low end camera market to cellcams
• I WAP-enabled my site, again not a big deal to everyone, but it is interesting and instructive to see just how easy it is to enable new access streams when you’re using a good database-backed XML-based content management system (in my case the blog software Wordpress) and also to note how WAP access to your site is becoming less and less relevant as more and more handset minibrowsers support XHTML