Do you miss your daily dose of news while you are stuck in a traffic jam? Or
while in office you miss business channels which tell you about which stock to
buy and which to sell. Well! Don't want to say anything about the daily soaps.
Mobile IP TV is a reality today and you can watch most of your favourite
channels on the go. The only thing which is not present today is a faster
Internet infrastructure on mobile devices. But with 3G coming its way we are
expecting this to become more mainstream very soon.
Direct Hit! |
Applies To: Smartphone users Price: Not applicable USP: Extend business and entertainment to mobile devices Primary Link: None Keyword: Mobile apps |
Well, you see favourite TV channels on your mobile phones in two ways. The
first way is that you live near South and Central Delhi and own a MTNL Jadoo
account which is essentially the first deployment of 3G in the country. But the
limitation here is that at the time of writing this article, the service is only
available in certain parts of central and south Delhi. They do have a pan India
expansion plan but the deadline for this is still unknown.
The second approach would be accessing the channels over a WiFi connection. All
you need is a wireless Internet connection at the airport, hotel, your office or
even a mall and can start watching your favourite channels. There are around 55
Indian, a few hundred international channels which are available free of cost
over IP. One brilliant website which lists all such free IP channels is
wwitv.com. The channels on this website are categorised by country and type and
are pretty easy to identify.
Once you find out the channel, a small hack would let you see the channel in
a full screen mode, without any ads on your mobile phone. All you have to do is
open the source of the page and search for a word “embed src=”. Now copy the
word link next to = and paste it on your phone's browser. The phone should start
the media player with the live TV stream.
Share locations with friends using Google Latitude. |
Remote Access on the Go
Enough of fun, now let's talk about something more serious. Let's imagine,
you are on a holiday and your Apache web server crashes back in office. The
problem is very simple and you need to get a terminal to the server and reboot
apache once. But for this you don't want to visit a cyber café or go to office
and of course you are not carrying your laptop. Your smart phone can save the
day for you if you have downloaded an SSH client for it. There are many such SSH
clients for phones available today. One such tool which I use in my two year old
HTC touch is PCSSH. You can get it from http:// www.irongeek.com/i.php? page =
security/ ppcssh. This tool comes with an SSH Client, SFTP client, and is free.
It's fairly light weight and easy to use. Running it is very simple. Download
the zip file from the link provided. Extract and copy the Unix folder to your
phone. Now go to the folder and run the two executable files, SSH and SCP.
But for those who can't live without graphics and like Windows interface,
they can give the remote desktop client for mobiles a try. Many are available
out there. A Google search will give you at least 50 different variants of the
same, both free and paid. One such tool is WM6 RDP-Finster. A simple Google
search will direct you to the link. Once you download it, copy it to your phone
and install it by double tapping it.
And for the VNC fans, you can give a try to VNCView. Again a very tiny and free
tool. All you have to do is to download it from http://www.cs.utah .edu/~midgley/wince/vnc.html
to your phone and just double tap on it to start using it. You don't even need
to install it to use it. It's just a standalone exe.
Chat/Presence
While on the move the most important thing one needs is a way to communicate
his/her presence to his colleagues and family. What can do this better than an
IM client? So here is an IM client for your smart phones which can connect to
all your IM servers and give you a single client to communicate and share your
presence information and that too for free. This is called Fring and you can
download it from http://www.fring. com/. The beauty of this client is that with
this you can connect with MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, Skype, ICQ, Orkut, etc. It can also
connect you to any SIP server with a public IP. This application lets you chat
using the IM servers and lets you talk over SIP or Skype. If you have a Skype
paid account then you can even make calls to mobile numbers over your Edge/3G or
WiFi connection directly from this client. It also lets you connect to your
Orkut account directly from this client and read and post your scraps from it.
Using SSH client on a smartphone, you can even reboot crashed web servers. |
A remote desktop client for Windows gives a GUI interface to manage apps. |
GPS
With so many phones equipped with GPS receivers how can we just overlook the
positioning and mapping tools available for mobile phones. There are now a days
so many tool available for tracking and positioning using GPS as well as using
GSM and CDMA triangulation where the approximate location of the device is
guessed by triangulation of the signals coming from more than one phone tower in
the vicinity. Google Maps did a lot in pioneering this technology and bringing
it to the masses. But Google Maps has gone a bit further in this and have
enabled sharing of location of the devices with others in the trusted list.
This means now I can share my location with all my friends who are added to
my GTalk account and have a Google Id. And irrespective of whether I have a GPS
enabled mobile or not I can still send my location (in case of GSM triangulation
approx location will be sent) to all my friends and they can access my location
both from a mobile phone with Google Maps or from a browser using iGoogle. This
new feature of Google Map is called Google Latitude. Currently this feature is
not available for all phones but most of the smart phones and pocketPCs are
capable of using this.
A popular channel being played via IPTV. The signal quality will amaze you. |
To use this feature you can download the latest version of Google Maps which
is 3.0 and above to your phone. Then all you have to do is to run it and go to
the options latitude and sign in using your Gmail username and password.
Once you are logged in you will be able to send joining request to your friends
and on confirmation your friend will be able to see you location and share his
location with you. This works on both GPS and GSM triangulation.