Smart Home Blog

After mobile Orbiter based on Java was announced I thought that Symbian Orbiter was dead. JavaMO works fine and it doesn’t need specific platform. The mobile phone just should support Java applications. There are some issues with JavaMO, but it looks much better then S60 Orbiter.

But I was wrong. Thanks to Hari, who started JavaMO development, owners of S60 v.3 smartphones can run native Orbiter on their devices. The updated version of Symbian mobile Orbiter can be downloaded here, demo video - here. Feel free to install it, test and submit found bugs and suggestions here.

UPDATE: There is the newest version of the S60 v3 Orbiter. You can find it here. The changes include hardcoded resolution to 240×320, used by many smartphones, local cache for the screens and some bugfixes.

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Recently I wrote about new Nokia’s product - Home Control Center. It’s based on wireless technology Z-Wave and uses mobile phone as a main control device. The system seems very interesting. Especially after Engadget posted demo video from the Nokia World show where it’s showed in action. Watch it after the break!

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Simplify Media released a new version of its software for mobile devices. That version includes following new features: using Amazon Web Service to search album art, getting artist bios from last.fm and lyrics from lyrics wiki, select Shuffle from the top of any song list, and the tracks from an album, a genre, an artist or a playlist will be randomized for your enjoyment.

Note that build 949 of Simplify Media Mobile is a recommended update for all iPhone and iPod Touch users with firmware 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3 and 1.1.4. Enjoy!

[via SimplifyMedia weblog]

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As you may know LinuxMCE supports smartphones under Symbian OS 1st edition, Windows Mobile 2003 and Treo as mobile Orbiters to control your home. It uses Bluetooth to communicate with smarthome system. So, it’s too difficult port every time the code to the new version of mobile OS. So, a big fan of LinuxMCE Hari decided to develop the Orbiter on Java Mobile platform. In that case we can have universal code which can work even on ordinary mobile phone with support of Java and Bluetooth. The idea of Java Orbiter will be more attractive if you remember about Google’s Android.

The progress of development of JavaMO (Java Mobile Orbiter) you may see on the picture. It’s really cool work! To get the latest news about JavaMO, please, read that topic on the LinuxMCE forum. If you’d like to participate in development or investigate the code just checkout it from the SVN repository. All contributors are very welcome!

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Nokia E65 is new and stylish mobile phone with built-in WiFi. But it has another cool feature - emulation of Cisco 7970. E65 can be connected to the Cisco Call Center as 7970. So, we decided to try add it to our Plutohome installation and see what’s happened. After a few hours of unsuccessful attempts we configured E65 as SIP phone and connected it to the Plutohome Asterisk. It works great! Now outside the office E65 is a mobile phone but near the Plutohome access point it allows to make cheap calls via Asterisk.

We didn’t give up with installation of emulator of Cisco 7970 in the E65. I don’t think that in might be useful (the XML Orbiter won’t provide wide functionality) but we try it again.

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