Three Wise Men

MobileCamp Ljubljana – The Movie

Less than a week ago another geek event was happening in Ljubljana. This time it was a MobileCamp – a barcamp kind of an event, with ad-hoc talks, lectures and debates. Big emphasis was on mobile technologies, everything from content providing to hardware hacking. If you were able to carry it around then it was mobile, whatever it was. We were there, we recorded some footage, made few interviews and wrapped it up in a movie …

We hope that this short movie will show to everyone how cool these kind of events are and that there is much to learn from other people. Camps are also a great way to hang out and meet a lot of new, interesting people.
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Can Twitter replace SMS on cell phones?

Past few days I have noticed that being connected to my home WiFi access point with Nokia E71 cell phone does not drain the batteries as expected. In fact, with normal usage of the phone I managed to stay connected for about 48 hours. I was really amazed. On top of that I was also running twitter client – Gravity set to retrieve new twits and @replies every 15 minutes and retrieving of Direct Messages happened every two minutes.

The problem with Gravity is that it does not close the connection after an update and if you are not near your wireless access point it will use 3G (or whatever you are using) connection. An active 3G connection will drain the battery in four to five hours if you have a good battery, in most cases even sooner.

Twitter pretty much replaced my short message service¹. Now, here is an idea: a push service for Twitter that would be even friendlier on the battery life. Some smart phones already support push services and writing an application for that should be trivial and it was probably already done, right? The whole concept is useful in the situations where people cannot receive your text messages. Either because there is no roaming contract between two operators or receiver has to pay a ridiculous amount of money for outgoing messages and in some cases receiver is charged even for incoming messages².

Properly written mobile twitter client with push support could in fact replace texting completely for all twitter users and in global it would be cheaper for all the foreign communications. In the end it all depends on your subscription plan. For me, there is no flat rate for data transfer but 2GB of data will cost me 12€ per moth and this means around three million messages³. On the other hand with my subscription plan I can send one thousand messages for free and receiving is also free, no matter who the sender is.

Increasing the connectivity and the range of communication between people has been a goal of humankind every since the first proto-language evolved. Today we carry around Star Trek communicators and we are reachable almost everywhere on the planet in a matter of seconds. For instant communication we are missing only one thing – a better battery.

1. SMS, texting. [↩]
2. So much about North American subscription plans … [↩]
3. If the overhead for sending/receiving one message is five times of the maximum message size which is 140 characters. [↩]