Motorola IHF1000 Bluetooth Car Kit

Buying a new car is somehow out of the scope of this blog, but may be a good reason to talk about some automotive electronic gadgets. Actually I have changed a car recently, and the number of factory provided gadgets was not the most important factor of my decision. So it arrived quite stripped in terms of on board computers, audio - video systems and communication devices, as while they are nice, I do not consider them the most important aspect of automotive technology. But having said that I have to admit there are some gadgets that make me feel comfortable while driving, and a good handsfree phone system is one of them.

Because of my profession and my gadget drive, I change mobile phones quite often, so the only reasonable option is to have a Bluetooth handsfree kit installed, to avoid changing the main unit every time I change a phone. Bluetooth is very handy as well, as there is no need of taking the phone out of the pocket and is especially recommended to women, as they are able to keep phones in their handbags. It took me quite a while to narrow down the selection, as there is a galaxy of available devices on the market. My top priority was call quality and the first pick was the Parrot MK6000, because of the dual microphone system. It offered a few nice features as well, like A2DP music streaming. I was about to make a purchase, but following my recent rule of thumb, I browsed the Internet for user opinions on the product. To my surprise most MK6000 users have been unhappy. Not that it did not deliver the promised call quality, but because of it's buggy software implementation leading to unexpected freezes and requiring resets (stopping a car, turning the ignition off, waiting a while and turning the car on again, as the unit itself lacked a reset button). Lack of stability is the last thing I want from a new device. I am tired when a new, promised to be groundbreaking product delivers, but only occasionally... So I decided to look for something else, and based on user opinions, the new Motorola IHF1000 was worth considering.

The IHF1000 does not have dual microphones, but packs some good signal processing algorithms inside, as the resulting call quality is really good. I did my first test call to a friend of mine and the conversation was very smooth. At the end I asked him how it was at his side, ad he confirmed very good quality "because you are probably not driving now" (and I was actually driving at 60mph or 100 km/h). That first day I used only the basic call functionality and in the evening I went to read the manual (yes, there are still people like me reading manuals :) ... ). After the first section I jumped out of bed (it was already midnight) to test what I read. What I was not fully aware of was the voice control the IHF1000 offers. Yes, there are many products on the market offering voice commands, but actually the Motorola unit does not need any training - it implements full speaker independent ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), and does it in 5 languages. I tested only English, but there is no reason to be skeptical on the others. it works just flawlessly. Just talk. Like "Dial number +48 601 300 456" or "Contact list - add contact - Anna - +48 605 348 223" and then "Call Anna". I had 100% accuracy, which really impressed me.

Actually the IHF1000 is the first speaker independent voice recognition system I have used, that really works (despite my alien English accent). I wish I had a phone I could talk to in similar manner. May be it is time to switch to Motorola?

User Generated Content

Last week I have been traveling around Poland. Saving sunny coral reef resorts for depressing days of November, I really like Poland in Summer. A friend of mine took off a few days before and stopped for a few days at a remote lake in Tuchola Forest. This used to be some 6 hours drive from where I live, so without much rush I programmed my Garmin GPS unit to guide me there. Unfortunately I soon found out I would not make it in 6 hours, as all the major roads were under construction. After spending an hour in a traffic jam and moving just a few hundred meters, I decided to take the first road away I could. We do not have the TMC (Traffic Message Channel) implemented in Poland, so my GPS, while it knows A LOT, is not aware of blocked roads and traffic jams. On the other hand we are experiencing enormous growth of popularity of CB-Radios (drivers alert themselves about police radars and speed cameras, but also about traffic conditions).

The immediate thought was how nice it would be to touch the GPS screen to "submit to the system" an information about the blocked road. I bet an Internet - enabled GPS unit, working with a backend system gathering feedback from users would prove much better than any commercial, centrally operated TMC service. Drivers could alert themselves "on screen" about various conditions - accidents, jams, speed cameras... The comeback of CB radio is the proof, even when the CB technology is from the past century, utilizing analog transmission of voice instead of digital data.

Next day, after meeting our friends, we wanted to find a new place to stay. The Garmin unit I use, combined with the GPMapa software (a must when you have a Garmin and want to rely on it in Poland), has a decent database of POIs (Points Of Interest) divided into categories. With my position pinpointed down to 4 meters in 3D, after selecting "Lodging" I had a dozen or more places within 30km range to choose from, but was really lost (pun intended), having no idea what to choose and how to make sure I would like the selection. Driving around for a day was not a better option either... Again, the user feedback would help here a lot. Surely somebody must have stayed at some of those places before. And most of them had an opinion, either good or bad. There just was no platform to share it... Last week I wrote about my new rule of thumb when purchasing gadgets:

BTW the Amazon.com user reviews section, available for almost any home electronics product you can imagine is a great service. Kudos to people who find their time and take the effort to post the reviews. It really becomes my rule of thumb to go to the Amazon website and check for reviews before I buy anything.

I would pay real $$$'s if my car GPS unit could not only sort the POIs based on the distance from my location, but also based on user feedback. And I would like to read the feedback as well. Sceptics claim the reviews may be loaded. Sure. But Amazon, eBay and others prove the concept of user generated content works very well, statistics filter out the sponsored reviews.

Looking for some related services I found the MSN Direct. While it delivers some real time information, its general flaw is one way operation. You cannot submit anything to the system. It works like an FM radio (BTW it really uses FM radio airwaves to stream down the information). But we already know the one way FM Radio is fading... to make room for the two-way Internet services, where user generated content is the king. I really do believe my next GPS unit will be not only able to steer me away from the traffic jam, but also with a press of a [I'm Feeling lucky...] button will offer me a smorgasbord of options I'll like.

Toshiba Network Camera

I was thinking of adding a network (IP) camera to my home network for a while. First idea was to have it wireless (WiFi) connected. But as I wanted to have an outside look at my house and garden, WiFi was not solving anything - I still needed a wire for power supply. After a quick browse through various on-line shops and auction sites, I soon realized the task to pick a really good one was not that trivial.

There are hundreds of USB web-cams on the market, but for me USB was not the option. The original idea was to be able to run the camera without any PC and to be able to view the video stream from any PC. Thus it had to be a standalone, network - connected camera. Then there are a few (Linksys, Dlink) vendors offering fairly inexpensive network cameras. Unfortunately when I dived deeper into the specs of these cams, I soon found out the output picture was not going to be what I wanted. The low end cams offer QVGA (320x240) resolution (comparable to a resolution of a mobile phone display), and there is a higher class of products offering VGA (640x480). But still VGA is roughly a quarter of a typical computer display, so the level of details is not really high. I explored one model (Linksys) a little further, mainly via the comments people leave on the Amazon.com, and learned there was nothing to expect but problems - rather typical problems with many recent Linksys products like complicated setup (that I could live with) and stability problems (something to stay as far from as possible). The last thing I wanted is my "home video surveillance system" to freeze twice a day and require a reboot.

BTW the Amazon.com user reviews section, available for almost any home electronics product you can imagine is a great service. Kudos to people who find their time and take the effort to post the reviews. It really becomes my rule of thumb to go to the Amazon website and check for reviews before I buy anything. Unfortunately Amazon refuses to ship electronics down to Poland, so I just use the service to read the comments and keep buying elsewhere - something to reconsider, Jeff, especially as you can still send books and CDs down here without problems...

But coming back to the webcam business - I finally locked my focus on the Toshiba IK-WB15A. The specs were good (1280x960, motorized pan/tilt/zoom, outdoor mount included). The price was high. Something around $600. Finally I decided to go for it and do not regret it at all. Actually this has been my best buy for a long time. Everything, from picture quality to build quality to feature set has exceeded my expectations. I bundled the camera with a POE (Power Over Ethernet) power supply, so there is just a single Ethernet cable going to it - elegant and reliable. The camera has hundreds of features. Just to give you an example: it can stream video down to two redundant FTP servers and maintain a cyclical buffer on own SD card. Or can detect a motion and send you an email with picture attached. Actually the only thing I am missing is to send an email TO the camera and get back a reply with picture attached - that would enable an easy method of viewing the pictures on demand from my smartphone (a smartphone cannot log in directly to the camera, as it does not handle ActiveX controls, while they are the only way to view a live stream).

But the above are just minor feature requests, overall I am very satisfied with the product!

UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access)

Being a fan of all sort of wireless technologies, the recent announcement by T-Mobile USA to start UMA service grabbed my attention. The service has been rolled out as Hotspot@Home. Not long ago I thought UMA is just another dream tangled in technical and regulations problems and would not see the light for some time. So this surprised me and I started digging around, being soon redirected to http://www.umatoday.com/. There I quickly learned actually the leading carrier in UMA deployments is not T-Mobile, but Orange, and - funny - the service has been available in Poland since April 2007 as Unifon.

UMA is an abbreviation of Unlicensed Mobile Access, another TLT (Three Letter Technology), being recently renamed to GAN or Generic Access Network. Whichever acronym we take, the concept itself is really cool. In short, by using dual mode (GSM + WiFi) handsets, it allows a handset to connect to your home / office WiFi hotspot instead of connecting to a cellular tower. It does not require any setup, software, nothing but a UMA - capable handset (currently not many can do that, but the number is growing). In return you get basically two things: better coverage when being at home (provided your home is well covered by WiFi) and cheap calls. Myself I like both features, but actually the coverage is a breakthrough for me, as living in a remote deep valley I have extremely poor cellular reception, very often being just out of the network, when I am not close to the big window on the first floor).

Once the phone is paired with a WiFi access point, the handoff is seamless. Actually you can start a conversation on a WiFi network at home, get into a car and drive away, the call will not be dropped, only the connection will go via the usual GSM radio network. The only noticeable difference is the green circle meaning WiFi connection is active, instead of an antenna symbol (when GSM connection is active) left to the signal bar indicator (see the Nokia 6136 picture above). Everything else works the same as you were using a standard cell phone. Just dial a number and talk. Or write an SMS or reach for a WAP page (there is even the "G" indicator standing for active GPRS session...). But technically things are substantially different. Normally when a phone is connected to a cellular tower, it establishes a GSM (or UMTS) radio link, registering itself with the tower and the signal once reaches the tower goes down the private telecommunications link of the service operator. On the other hand when a UMA phone connects to a WiFi hotspot, it establishes a secure (IPSec) tunnel through the public Internet. The tunnel starts at the phone and ends at the mobile carrier's UMA gateway, so from the MSC (Mobile Switching Center) perspective it looks like an ordinary cellular handset.

This concept brings a lot of advantages to the carriers. Suddenly it is the subscribers who build and pay for the radio access network - instead of expensive, carrier-founded base stations, UMA makes use of inexpensive, subscriber-founded WiFi hotspots and free Internet. It relieves the radio network congestion, increasing the network capacity at virtually no cost. And - as in my case - it brings network coverage where there are no towers, that should be especially interesting for carriers who do not have broad coverage.

For users there are cheaper calls - most carriers offer either flat rate UMA calls across the entire network or significant discounts. There is an interesting benefit for international roamers - if you are abroad and happen to have a WiFi network access (most cheap hotels offer one for free, luxury hotels charge a lot - like for bottled water :P), you log in direct to your home network as you were in the home country, so no roaming charges.

UMA has been included in the 3GPP Release 6. While most 3G networks are operating at Release 4 level now, this bodes well for the future. With the convenience of personal cellphone in a pocket bridged with Internet (flat / free) call rates, the service seems to be the carrier's primary weapon targeted at Skype et al. Especially when the voice quality (given more available bandwidth on WiFi network) is upgraded as well, who would bother to launch Skype on the PC when you could just use the phone to make a call?