Joi Ito's Stuff

IM and IRC for my phone

I have a great Instant Messenger client Agile Messenger and an IRC client WirelessIRC which keeps me in touch with everyone on my Nokia 6600.

WiSIP WiFi SIP Phone

I finally got my WiSIP WiFi SIP Phone from pulverInnovations. It's the first WiFi SIP phone that I've seen. Someone on #joiito told me about it, but now I forget who. Anyway I got one.

Basically, the idea is that anywhere there is a WiFi, you should be able to call anyone you can access via SIP. Just like a cell phone. Except... for free.

It's a bit "prototypey" but it seems to work... Although I don't have anyone to test actual calls with. It comes with a Free World Dialup number, but I don't have any friend who use SIP. I heard that they are currently working on a deal with Vonage, which will let you receive your normal phone calls on it, but I'd rather have everyone using SIP. I got a few other friends to order them so I'll let you know how it works when I have someone to call. ;-)

My new P900i

I just got my P900i. It is an NTT DoCoMo phone made by Panasonic that works on NTT DoCoMo's FOMA 3G network. The coverage of the FOMA network has increased slowly, but their phone designs have been pretty crappy and overall the uptake of the FOMA phones was not very good.

From this series, they took the design/marketing away from the older FOMA team and the hipper and more successful i-mode team was in charge. I think this is the first FOMA phone that I might actually be able to use.

Feature-wise, it's a 1.28 mega-pixel camera pointing out and a 100K pixel camera pointing at you. The camera has auto-focus, so no more of this "macro" stuff. Which is good since the camera has OCR to scan email addresses and phone numbers as well as a bar code reader. There's a bit of politics around the barcodes, but I'll talk about that some other time. It takes MP4 movies and has a mini SD slot.

It has a 240 x 320 TFT display on the inside and a color 96 x 64 STN display on the outside.

Theoretically, it goes 384K and the i-mode browsing and email are noticeably faster. It has a bunch of other new features like multi-tasking, being able to download TV shows at home and watch them on the go, replaceable covers for the "customized look". It has Flash and Java and comes with Final Fantasy built in.

I was able to move my number from the DoCoMo PDC network to this new phone and have it configured to allow me to switch back to my PDC network and my old phone when I don't have FOMA coverage, but this is a clunky solution. It has a button to flip open the flip phone face, but it opens kind of sloooow. It's a bit "boxy" looking too.

Anyway, it's miles better than any FOMA phone I've ever had, but it don't love it like I love my Nokia 6600's. I haven't gotten the camera to work with the moblog yet, but the auto-focus might end up being a cool feature.