T9 through your menus as well as texts
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, Beta, Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Mobile on
Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.
The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…
Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.
Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary
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Always check the cable!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, Networking on
It’s a simple rule, and one that fixes a huge proportion of IT problems. I’d have done well to remember it when the door to the office NAS neatly unplugged a network segment, and I spent a happy half hour trying to debug just why the wireless printer wasn’t working.
It’s also one that might have saved us several days of little or no phone connectivity, and an extremely flaky DSL connection that has yet to train back up to full speed. Still, at least now that the BT engineer has visited, we have a new cable between us and the street furniture, hopefully ensuring a faster and fault free connection in future.
BT’s online fault tracking service is well designed, and surprisingly helpful. Log on and report a fault with a line, and you’ll be able to receive reports by email or text, and even set up a free divert to another number. It wasn’t long before my mobile became the office phone (and as a result I may well invest in YAC or similar number so I can just give the world one number that redirects to wherever I am).
Every half hour or so I clicked refresh on the fault page, to watch just where BT had tracked the fault to. First it was in the exchange, then the street cabinet. Finally it was the network, and this afternoon an engineer came to take a look at what was wrong. That’s where checking the cable came in, as he was able to just look at the wire between the pole and our office to see exactly what was wrong.
At least everything’s back to normal now, and the nearly 7 seconds of delay on our DSL caused by the death throes of an aging, fraying cable, has gone away (along with an old junction box under the window). But can I have fibre now please?
–Simon
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