I am a big mobile fan, and have been for about a year now when I started my little projects.

My Phone

I have had quite a few phones over that time, but my main baby is the Nokia N80. I had been looking forward to the phone for a long time, and finally took the plunge and got it on Orange last week. Love the phone, the screen is immense!, it has speech to text built in so I can just say a person’s name (without setting up a voice tag), and it will dial them without an issue.

There are some bugs, namely the rebooting of the phone sometimes when I check my mail.

The battery life is really quite bad, and seeing as I use this for personal and business, it does last 1 day after heavy use. So if you don’t mind charging daily, this shouldn’t be a problem.

And of course, buddyPing and MobileGlu Java clients run very nicely on the phone.

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My projects

I wrote buddyPing and MobileGlu to satisfy a curiosity I had, can a guy with a background purely in server architecture, Unix and Linux write a mobile designed application? I actually found that I had quite an advantage in that I do a lot of the hard work on the server for locating a user etc, or getting and optimising RSS/Flickr/delicious/upcoming/….. feeds and just pump a nicely formed XML feed tot he user. What that does mean is that any major changes to the infrastructure (e.g. moving from PHP to Java/Rails) doesn’t affect the mobile app as long as the XML stays the same.

I am a firm believer in British innovation, and over time have come to be friends with two exceptional people, Alfie Dennen and Ewan MacLeod who are great guys to chew the fat with about mobile things.

If you have an idea about being mobile, writing a cool system etc. etc. and want some advice, pointers etc., feel free to drop me a line and I would be more than happy to help you out.