Friday, June 29th, I happened to find myself in Beverly Hills to meet some friends for dinner. We arrived early, so we decided to go to a nearby mall to kill some time. We got on the elevator and as the doors opened, proof of the iPhone hype was immediately confirmed. A swarm of people had been waiting in line since 6:30am for the new Apple iPhone, and the actual launch was minutes away. I snapped this picture to capture the moment.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in the Apple iPhone. After all, it is fully converged! So now the question is… will the cost of the iPhone + the cost of breaking my VZW contract be worth it? The investigation begins… I did find this handy iPhone availability checker which shows which stores have iPhones. The list is updated nightly.

I know, you are probably thinking, what is he up to now… of course you would get a mailbox online! And why would he want to spend $150 to get yet another email account! Well, I definitely don’t need another online mailbox, but I did order a new postal mail box!

Sunday afternoon as we were heading out to run our family errands, we noticed one of our neighbors installing a new mailbox by his house. We stopped, briefly, to ask what he was doing. Turns out mail theft has become a huge problem in our neighborhood, causing identity theft problems and a lot of banking headaches with stolen checks. Our mailman recommended to him that he get a locking mailbox.

Already having dealt with identity fraud first-hand, this was something I wasn’t going to put on the back burner until I was personally taken advantage of. So, while strolling the isles at Home Depot, I whipped out my Q (insert wild west “do-e do-e doo wah wah wah” soundbite here) and went online to get a locking mailbox. I had never ordered something online through PocketIE, and since I had some time to kill while my wife was looking through the tile and wood flooring section, I gave it a shot.

Despite some annoying scrolling back and forth to see everything and find the “Next” and “Check out now” buttons, it went very well. I blew $150 plus shipping on a mailbox, wirelessly, through my phone. I realize I wasn’t the first to do this, and quite honestly I’m surprised it has taken me so long to order something online through my phone! It was very easy, I had no issues with the SSL pages, and the email confirmations were received, so I know I didn’t mess anything up!

Any day now I’m expecting my shiny new overpriced mailbox to show up so I too, can protect my Verizon Wireless bill from being stolen (wait, what the hell was I thinking… take it thieves!)

This is so cool… YouTube has found itself released from its Verizon contract and can now open up YouTube videos to the rest of the mobile world. Here’s what their new site at m.youtube.com looks like on my Motorola Q:

Here’s the problem: the videos are streamed using a rather archaic (these days) video format called 3GP. The 3GP format is still used for a lot of mobile phones due to its low file size and thus low bandwidth requirements. You would think that current-day high-end mobile phones such as those that run Windows Mobile Smartphone edition would support 3GP streaming. But they don’t. So, instead of watching a video, you get to watch an error message from Windows Media Player:

ALERT: An unknown error 0X80004005

Pretty cool, huh? Not so much. So today I set out to solve the problem. “There must be an answer out there somewhere,” I thought. And after several hours of research and trying third-party solutions, I’m sad to say that there doesn’t appear to be a solution. Plenty of people in various forums are asking the same question. Some are finding solutions that work for them, but none of them apply to the Motorola Q Smartphone.

A few things I have tried include The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) which is a light 685KB install. It does support 3GP files, and it is easy to file associate them: Options > Settings > Select Page > File Associations > Check “MPEG4 files (MP4, MOV, 3GP, M4A, M4B, K3G, MQV)”. Here’s the problem with this solution:

Error: RTSP protocol not supported

Another “fun” error message. Seems TCPMP supports 3GP formatted video files, but not streaming of them from YouTube’s new mobile site.

My last attempt was based on another suggestion, using the HTC Streaming Media app which required downloading a ZIP file, copying the files to my \Windows folder on my Q, then installing the Resco registry editor to import a bunch of registry keys from a .reg file. After all that effort, yet another error emerges:

The address is not valid. Check the address and try again

I’d like to give up at this point, but I know there is a solution out there, somewhere.

I did learn that the 3GP format used is 176×144, bitrate ~34 kbps, video codec H.263, audio codec AMR-NB. YouTube is streaming these videos using Darwin Streaming Server v5.5.3 (Open Source) running on Linux. Geek out on that, will ya? Why they are using H.263 (3GP) formatted videos instead of the more current MPEG-4 format found on most PDA phones is beyond me. I guess there are still a lot more folks out there using old technologies? From what I have read, the video and audio quality of these YouTube Mobile videos is not that great… so why not go with better technologies?

I’m sure that this version of YouTube Mobile is just the start, and that they will begin to support other formats in addition to 3GP. Or, at the very least, third-party developers will bust a move and add support to their own applications

Side Notes:

1. Someone added a great YouTube Mobile compatibililty list at Wikipedia, of which the Motorola Q is included in the “Not Working” column. Hopefully that will change soon!
2. The specs on the upcoming Motorola Q9 Windows Mobile 6.0 smartphone include “H.263″ support, but then again the current model Motorola Q spec sheet says the same thing. I guess there’s more to it than that!

Stay tuned…

I don’t really know what version this is, but 2.0 sounds good enough. I just switched over from Blogger to WordPress on my own server to have more control over my blog. I’m so glad that I did… WordPress is pretty damn cool!  Their blog import tool imported all of my Blogger posts and comments in just a few seconds.  That saved me a ton of time.

With this change I’ll be posting more articles and product reviews which is something I never got around to doing as often as I wanted to with the old Blogger blog.

If you had subscribed to my RSS feed at my old blog, please be sure to subscribe to the new feed here!

Along with the server and software change comes a new site design (I hope you like it) and a much-needed update to the About page (I even through my mug shot up there so you can put a face to the blog). Click the link to the About page or click my mug to find out more about me and why I made this blog.

Thank you for reading!
Chris