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Mobile Archive: Mobile

July 7, 2009

Music video shot on iPhone 3GS

This fantastic music video from Reyna Perez entitled "Love Love Love" was shot entirely on an iPhone 3GS. Though not the first music video shot using a cameraphone, this video features quality production courtesy of the fine folks at m ss ng p eces and an enchanting song by Ms. Perez.

[via boingboing]

July 3, 2009

3G on Dell Mini 9

Some mobile carriers have started selling subsidized netbooks with integrated 3G radios. If you've already got a netbook and enjoy the form factor, but would rather not have to plug in a dongle, here's a quick run-through for integrating a Novatel EU850D 3G radio into a Dell Mini 9 that should give you an idea of what such a project entails.

How-to: 3G to Dell Mini 9. Not so easy way.. [via jkkmobile]

June 30, 2009

QR Code ruglette

Nikolaus Gradwohl, an Austrian MAKE subscriber, created a QR code of his mother's name that she can weave into the rugs she makes. Our very own Becky Stern was showing off her knitted QR code scarf at the Mini Maker Square at the Google I/O conference last month. She hadn't had much luck with getting phonecams to successfully scan the code before, but a number of people at the conference were able to read it.

QR-Code Carpet

June 26, 2009

How to make a cheap tripod mount for the iPhone 3GS

Cheap iPod Mount

C.K. Sample III (author of PSP Hacks) just posted his technique for making an iPod tripod mount; he used the form-fitting packing material that came in the box as the basis of the holder. You could probably extend his technique to a lot of other gadgets, too:

I was thinking about this tonight, and remembered the nice little white holster of plastic that came in the box of my iPhone 3GS and cradled it so nicely. So, I took that, took a 3/16 drill bit and drilled a hole where the camera is and another where the recycle symbol was on the back of the plastic holster. I shaped each hole slightly wider using the drill. The recycle symbol hole was just the right size to be a bit tight for the mounting screw, so that the screw itself could tap its own path tightly in the plastic hold...

How to make a cheap tripod mount for the iPhone 3GS

Broadcast live video from Android

Qik, the "phonecasting" folks, have released an early alpha of their software to the Android Marketplace. Unlike most streaming video services out there, Qik focuses on streaming live video from mobile phones. What makes this release unique is the diversity of the Android OS. It can be found on mobile phones, netbooks, picture screens, embedded systems, and set-top boxes. New possibilities arise when you add something like live video into the mix.

[via diTii.com]

June 24, 2009

Flash 10 running on Android

Expected to debut during the Adobe MAX developer conference, Flash Player 10 is geared to bring it's widely popular media distribution format to a large selection of smartphone systems. According to a recent earnings call Adobe will be releasing Flash Player 10 for Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and WebOS this October.

[via TalkAndroid]

June 22, 2009

Nintendo NES emulation on Palm WebOS

It's now possible to run Nintendo emulation without 'classic' emulator on Palm WebOS. In just ten easy steps, provided by the kind folks at pre web wiki, you, too, could be shooting up the baddies in the Central American jungles of Contra.

NES emulator on WebOS [via CruchGear]

June 18, 2009

iPhone as sketch pad

Media player, mobile phone, Internet device, gaming console... sketch pad? It would seem that not only is the iPhone up-ending the mobile and gaming industries, but it seems to be making inroads into fine art as well. What had seemed like a novel concept for contemporary magazine cover art has turned into a global phenomenon. iPhone users across the world are producing fantastic works of art with little more than their index finger, a paint app, and a 3.5" screen.

By far, the top dog of the iPhone paint apps is Brushes. Its simple interface is both welcoming and direct. You get a canvas, brush picker, color picker and that multi-touch interface the iPhone is famous for.

What are you lookin at? by Susan Murtaugh

Circus (left) and Stinker by Mike Miller

Amazing iPhone Art [via digg]

June 15, 2009

Tether your Palm Pre

Here're some instructions for tethering your Palm Pre. It works the same way as tetherbot for Android in that it's an SSH tunnel to the phone running as a SOCKS proxy. It'll only get you HTTP, but hey, it's something! Via BBG.

More:

Tetherbot - browse on your laptop through the T-Mobile G1

Nokia N95 accelerometer in Blender 3D

Marco Rapino, a developer working at the Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research at HSE in Helsinki, has developed a prototype controller using the accelerometer in his Nokia N95 smartphone, some Python, and the Blender 3D content creation suite.

The application is structured in this way:

Mobile client, a python script which reads the accelerometer data and sends it via bluetooth to the pc

A server that runs on your pc and shares the data with the BGE through a local UDP non-blocking socket

A Blender script which handles the cube rotation in the BGE using the n95 accelerometer's data

Source and examples available here

N95 accelerometer with Blender [via BlenderNation]

June 12, 2009

PhonePoint Pen prototype

Duke University students have developed a prototype smartphone app that reads characters drawn with accelerometer data and outputs text using OCR. Though a little impractical as a keyboard replacement, it would be great for gestural input. You could annotate photos incorporating this method or use it in conjunction with other eyes-free input methods to enhance alternative user experiences.

Air Writing: Next Big Thing in Cell Phones? [via hackaday]

June 10, 2009

Android Scripting Environment

Google recently released the Android Scripting Environment, which allows an Android user the ability to access the myriad APIs available directly from the device itself. Initially Python, Lua, and BeanShell are supported, but Ruby and JavaScript are on the way. Some folks will definitely find this very useful for prototyping in the field.

The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device. These scripts have access to many of the APIs available to full-fledged Android applications, but with a greatly simplified interface that makes it easy to:

Handle intents

Start activities

Make phone calls

Send text messages

Scan bar codes

Poll location and sensor data

Use text-to-speech (TTS)

And more

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale.

June 9, 2009

Mega-Minty Boost?

Think of it as a Minty Big-Boost. Micah and a buddy are leaving on a cross-country trip and they don't want their handheld gaming systems to run out of juice along the way, so he put together this battery powerpack using 12 Volt 7 AH Lead-calcium battery. They're hoping to get some 30 hours of juice out of the thing.

"Luggable" power pack [via lady ada]

Android/XP Frankenbook hybrid device

The Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan have cobbled together from existing parts a truly unique device. It's part netbook, part tablet. They started by gutting an HP Mini 1000 and replaced the Intel Atom chip with a Via processor running XP SP2. They then removed the standard display and replaced it with a tablet of the same size running Android. Pop the tablet out of its holder and you've got a fully functional Android tablet. Slide it back into the base with the keyboard and you're running XP.

via howtobemobile

June 8, 2009

DIY teardowns at iFixIt.com

One of my favorite things at this year's Maker Faire was iFixIt's repair area. They had obviously worked their butts off to create a really cool environment conducive to teaching people about fixing their own cars, home appliances and electronics gear. They had awesome displays, like physical exploded view "diagrams" of handheld devices, using the actual parts in a stacked cube of Plexiglas. Really clever. Oh, and they had a Trebuchet that launched T-shirts. They're a really great group of folks, too, very passionate about what they're doing. I gave their booth one of my Editor's Choice ribbons. Well deserved.

On their website, their latest project is the launching of a site where users can post their own teardowns. If sites like Instructables offer a means by which anybody can post how to make something, this is a system for how to post about the process of unmaking things. It's exciting to think how a resource like this can be used by people to learn about the goings on inside the tech they use, what parts are involved, how to replace them, etc.

Kyle explains the new site:

We use a powerful home-grown documentation tool to write our repair manuals. Over the years that software has developed into a fast and efficient way to publish the Mac teardowns that we create. Our hardware teardowns and analysis have become world-renowned for providing a first look inside new hardware. Tons of people have asked us to publish their teardowns to our audience. This demand helped us realize the importance of releasing this platform for everyone, so we spent the last year polishing our tool and making it robust enough for anyone to create teardowns free of charge.

In the past we've focused primarily on Apple devices, but we've recently expanded and published a number of non-Apple teardowns. Our recent teardowns of the Nintendo DSi, Amazon Kindle 2, and Dell Adamo were massively popular and have been viewed by
hundreds of thousands of people.

The deviation from writing Mac teardowns foreshadowed today's epic announcement. We hope that people use our flexible teardown platform to create teardowns of devices of all kinds, not just Apple products.

We keep our website running fast. Over the course of dozens of large traffic events, we've learned a thing or two about handling large spikes in server traffic. Thanks to cloud computing and Amazon EC2, today we're able to dynamically scale our capacity to
meet demand.

Writing a teardown is simple, and we wrote a step-by-step guide to show people how it's done.

We are also proud to announce our first user-generated teardowns. Using our tool, PhoneWreck.com has published their detailed cell phone teardowns and circuit analyses in our easy to understand step-by-step format.

T-Mobile G1
BlackBerry Bold
BlackBerry Curve 8900
BlackBerry Storm
HTC Touch Pro
Motorola Krave
Nokia N95
Samsung Omnia i910
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1

All of these teardowns are immediately available online.

We are absolutely thrilled to be launching our new site. This platform has been a labor of love for a long time, and we're excited to see what tinkerers all over the world create with it. Join us, and show the world what's inside your gadgets!

iFixit Teardowns

June 5, 2009

How-To: Charge 12v batteries with a Voltaic 15-watt panel

MAKE contributor Mikey Sklar has posted a how-to on Voltaic about using the solar power company's 15-watt panel to charge a 12v battery, for use in camping, festivals, powering personal electronics, etc.

Charge Car Batteries with a Voltaic 15 Watt panel

Android on OMAP

Android seems to be popping up on everything these days. Netbooks, set-top boxes, embedded devices, washing machines, E-Ink displays, you name it. Of the many available solutions out there it seems that some folks are having great success with OMAP-based solutions such as Gumstix and the Beagle Board. The combination of low power and high performance delivers reasonably efficient Android-based solutions that fit well in tight spaces.

One thing that impressed me in the above videos is Android's ability to adapt to the display. Full-screen web browsing seems right at home on the Beagle Board connected to an external monitor.

June 4, 2009

"Eyes-Free" Android interface

The MIT Technology Review website has an article highlighting the work of T.V. Raman and Charles Chen, two Google engineers working on an eyes-free interface for Android called Marvin.

"We are building a user interface that goes over and beyond the screen," says Raman. Often, eyes-free interfaces are employed for blind users, but Raman, who himself is blind, assures that these interfaces have much broader implications. "This is not just about the blind user," he says. "This is about how to use these devices if you're not in a position to look at the machine."

This effort at creating a new interface is in line with the notion of "programs without borders" and is exactly the sort of thing that gets me excited about Android. With a system designed to foster mash-ups, each new component amps up the possibility you'll find the elegant solution you're looking for.

May 26, 2009

The New Yorker cover art produced on iPhone

Jorge Colombo created the cover artwork for the June 1st issue of The New Yorker using an app called Brushes on his iPhone. The image was produced in about an hour outside Madame Tussuad's Wax Museum in Times Square.

"I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself," says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. "Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner's hat, I could not draw in the dark." (When the sun is up, it's a bit harder, "because of the glare on the phone," he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he's checking his e-mail.

The video below, captured using the Brushes Viewer app, shows the technique Colombo used to produce the June 1st cover. He's also selling limited edition prints of his iPhone-produced work online.

Finger Painting [via iPhoneSavior]

May 19, 2009

Bacterial Orchestra uses iPhones to create "viral music"

Debuting at the Volt Festival (site in Swedish) on June 6th in Uppsala, Sweden, the latest incarnation of the Bacterial Orchestra - Public Epidemic No 1 - will be unleashed on a participating public. Organizers speculate impending world-wide sound pandemic.

What do you get if you gather hundreds of iPhones and let them play with each other? A huge musical organism that is not only self-organizing, but also evolving with the sound environment.
Enter the new generation: Bacterial Orchestra - Public Epidemic No 1 (2009).

Bacterial Orchestra (2006) is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. The installation consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds, trying to play together in a musical way. The musical material comes from the background noise, people talking or sounds played by other cells.

Public Epidemic No 1 (2009) is a generation of the installation where each cell lives on an Apple iPhone (it can be ported to any mobile phone, but the iPhone was chosen because it's popular and the centralized App Store makes it easy for the epidemic to spread...

Bacterial Orchestra [via TUAW]