What is the best mobile phone for playing videos?

Or more specifically, which smartphone can play mp4 video and divx movies without skipping?

My SPV M3100 cannot, and apparently neither can the HTC TyTN II (which looks startlingly similar to the M3100). They both run the Windows Mobile operating system.

Does anyone know the answer?

I don’t know much about video formats, so I don’t know if there can be much variation between mp4 formats.

Windows Vista is really annoying

• When you put in a blank DVD and choose to open it in Explorer for writing, the default setting is some kind of Windows Vista filesystem, that can only be read from Windows Vista. I have to change it to “normal filesystem” every single time. Not such a great job done on making Windows more user-friendly.
• When you drag files onto the blank DVD, it tells you if they will fit or not. This would be a great feature, if only it worked consistently. Half the time it says they won’t fit straight away. The rest of the time it lets me put the files there and then errors later on, after I tell it to burn.
• Ordinary file operations, like deleting files have become much slower. Also, a confusing information box appears, where the progress bars bear even less relation to reality than in previous versions of Windows. I didn’t think this was actually possible, but they have made some of the most common Windows operations even less pleasant.
• If you go to the Properties of a hard drive and turn off “index this drive for faster searching”, it has to apply some kind of attribute *to every single file on the hard drive*. This takes forever. Idiots.
• There’s a new bar at the top of Windows Explorer, that I don’t understand. It often makes a ‘progress bar’ move across from left to right behind the current directory name. Often the bar gets slower and slower as it moves, until it seems like it will never reach the other side.
• It’s always popping up an error message saying that “COM Surrogate has stopped working”. Yes I know people have described ways to “fix” this, but I’ve tried them and they don’t work for me. And anyway, that isn’t the point. I shouldn’t have to fix it in the first place.
• Also, sometimes when I drag files onto a blank DVD, the “copying” dialog box just stays there on the screen and doesn’t go away, as if the files aren’t getting copied. The progress bar area is just blank. I left it overnight once, and it didn’t disappear. And when I click the cancel button, nothing happens – the box is still stuck there, except now the cancel button is greyed out. Totally useless, and very typical of Windows.
• Oh yes, and when that “authorisation” system kicks in, where the screen goes dim and you have to click to allow certain programs to change windows settings — why does the entire screen go blank for a second before the dialog box appears? It makes it feel as if the monitor has a loose connection or something, instead of making a smooth transition.

Memetastic!

These are the commands I’m running. Great idea!

 

$ history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
    184 ls
    118 cd
    117 vi
    116 less
     54 tail
     43 ps
     41 perl
     31 rm
     27 for
     23 grep

Vista is worse than XP

You know in Windows XP when you tried to move a folder, but you had one of the files in that folder held open by some other program? You couldn’t do it, right? You got a standard error message.

Well now in Windows Vista, you still can’t do it, but instead of the standard error message, it tells you:

You’ll need to provide administrator permission to move to this folder

Okay, great! Click “continue” — the screen dims dramatically, “Windows User Account Control” — “File Operation” it says — Windows needs your permission to continue. Brilliant, you have my permission, go on… So I click the Continue button.

Oh oh! “Destination Folder Access Denied” — “You need permission to perform this action”.

What the hell? I just gave it permission! Click “Try Again”, it just comes back with the same error. Grrrr!

I click cancel, it flashes up quickly “Moving item, time remaining 8 mins 5 seconds…” And then the window disappears, and of course the folder has not been moved!
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME! In XP I could have figured out what the problem was in half that time. Instead Vista leads me down the garden path, asking for my permission, totally failing to tell the difference between an open file and a file I don’t have permission for.

And even after that, it shows a dialog estimating the time it will take to move the file, even though it has no possibility of moving the file!

Isn’t software supposed to get better with each release, not worse?

I really cannot understand how Microsoft can mess up such a simple thing that worked perfectly well before.

Windows Vista

For god’s sake Windows Vista.

I downloaded installed a program to view my cache.
Windows tells me “this program wants to access your computer: Cache Viewer, do I let it?”
Okay fair enough, even though it doesnt say what that access actually *means*.

So then I run the program and it doesnt work. I go to uninstall it in the control panel.
Then pops-up another window saying

“This program wants to access your computer: Unidentified Publisher, do I let it?”

…what?! It *knows* what it’s uninstalling, it only just installed the damn thing.
And why does it need special access to *remove* a program?
What the hell is the point in having that safety feature, if it can’t give me any information about what I’m allowing access to what?

It’s actually much worse than not having it at all, because its teaching people to just click “ok” when they dont understand what’s happening.

Safari is fast!

I’m very impressed with the speed of Safari on Mac OSX. I’d previously been using Firefox 2, which despite its name is as slow as a dog! Safari seems to execute javascript much, much faster, and just be more responsive overall.

Be evil

If Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, then Microsoft’s must surely be “Be evil”:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7414547.stm
“The International Standards Organisation approved its use but the full specification of the OpenXML format has yet to be published”.

http://www.noooxml.org/
“Microsoft has compromised the International Standards Organisation (ISO) during the rush to get a stamp for their Office OpenXML (OOXML), using unfair practices such as committee stuffing in several countries and political interventions of ministers in the standardization process”.

I heard that they forced it through the fast-track process which is meant to retrospectively approve standards that are already widely in use.

iPlayer on Virgin Territory

Notes:

You don’t need a TV license if you only watch iPlayer on the web! (loophole). The loophole doesn’t exist with iPayer on Virgin.

Why promote the iPayer brand so much?
Because in 5 years time when on-demand is everywhere, they don’t want people to say “I won’t pay the BBC license fee because I only watch Virgin ‘on-demand’, not realising it’s brought to them (funded) by the BBC.

What about the PVT?
It was included in the main iPlayer PVT.

Can’t turn PIN off for adult content.
But doesn’t display after 9pm.

App built in Liberate.

Uses MPEG2 (all virgin needs this) around 3Mb/s, 4 for BBC One.
Metadata: Seachange flatfile bespoke virgin feed.

Has an ’sms’ search feature that even Virgin doesn’t have.

1/4mil programme views in 2 weeks.
With no marketing!
normally 2 mil views/week thru Virgin Catchup.

Blogging websites

WordPress

Good:

• It’s got built-in webstats, referrers, top posts, recent comments

Bad:

• It’s more clunky than Blogger

Blogger

Good:

• It’s awesome
• It lets you put all your blogs in one place
• It’s all dynamic and AJAXey
• So good they named it twice
• Integrated with your google account

Bad:

• Sometimes it errors. At http://www.blogger.com/home. Yesterday.

We are sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

 

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Flickr and Picasa

I have used websites with bulk-uploading tools written in Java before, that ‘just work’ providing you have Java installed. So why do both Flickr and Picasa require a full install of an operating-system-specific executable in order to upload files? For that matter, why don’t they use a system the same as facebook’s picture uploading page? I don’t know what technology it’s built on, but it’s very easy to use.

Plus the authentication is a bit fiddly with flickr, having to swap backwards and forwards between the browser and the application. With Picasa it was smoother.