symbian

Joikuspot connection problem with Ubuntu Linux

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This weekend I had to resort to Joikuspot (software that turns your 3G-cellphone into a wireless gateway to the internet) for my web-needs. Because I encountered a few problems setting up a connection from my Ubuntu laptop, here’s a quick recap for documentations sake.
The rather fundamental issue was that I couldn’t get my computer (a Dell D620 running Ubuntu 8.04 with the iwl3945 driver) to join the ad-hoc wifi-network which Joikuspot (on a Nokia e61i) created. As connecting from my wife’s Windows XP laptop did work, I googled around a bit and it turned out I had to specifically set the channel used by Joikuspot to 1 or 6 instead of “automatic” or 11. Although NetworkManager still seemed confused, this did allow me to connect from the command line (disabling wireless networking in NM first and then using iwconfig and dhclient). But why joining an ad-hoc wifi-network on channel 11 doesn’t work in Ubuntu, that I still don’t know.
Once connected to the wireless network, I found out that Joikuspot Light requires your browser to auto-detect a proxy. The proxy in Joikuspot seems to be used to limit the functionality of the free version and gently push you towards the non-free Premium product. As my normal web-connection came back soon after I figured this out, I didn’t bother to test if I could tunnel my way out of those limitations. But crippled or not, Joikuspot is great to have around when your broadband connection is down.

My Nokia e61i really isn’t just a phone

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With all the continuous Iphone 3G and HTC Touch buzz, one would almost forget how much truly awesome software there’s out there for Symbian-based handsets.
Just look at my Nokia e61i: it’s not just a phone, but also;

To be completely honest; except for MfE and the browser I don’t use all of this on a daily basis, but I can assure you that just calling someone on the phone works swell as well 😉

Webkit Konquering the mobile world

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With the nineties browser wars and the quasi MSIE monopoly that followed after the Netscape debacle behind us, the desktop browser scene can be considered a mature market, with some very good products vying for our approval. Time to shift our attention to the next battleground; mobile browsers. Netfront and Pocket Internet Explorer dominated this emerging market for quite some time, but as of late some newcomers are making great advances in this area. And apart from Opera Mobile and Mini (the Mozilla-guys are really ages behind here), these all share the same open source core; WebKit.
The history of WebKit in 10 1/2 sentences
WebKit is a fork of KHTML, the html rendering-engine that was developed by the KDE-community for its Konquerer-browser. In 2002 Apple decided to build it’s own browser based on KHTML and thus WebKit was born as the core-component of what would become Safari. Since it’s inception, WebKit has gained enourmous momentum; Safari now has a market share of approx 6% on the desktop, but smaller projects such as iCab and Epiphany (the Gnome browser!) picked up WebKit as well. But there’s more; Adobe decided to incorporate it in Air (the Flex-like platform for building desktop-software). And Trolltech, the company behind the Qt GUI-toolkit and one of the primary backers of KDE, announced they would include Webkit in Qt 4.4 as well.

WebKit 0wnz Mobile
But the mobile area is where WebKit is really taking the world by storm; it not only powers the mobile version of Safari on the iPhone and the iPod Touch, but WebKit (in its S60webkit form) it’s also the basis of Symbian’s S60-browser. Nokia ‘s Mini Map Browser, as it’s officially named, was first released in november 2005 and thanks to the succces of Symbian it’s probably the most widespread mobile browser by far. Being a proud Nokia e61i-owner myself, I can testify that it is a great browser indeed; I didn’t even bother with installing Opera Mini (which I used instead of Netfront on my Sony-Ericsson w810).
Next to these two well-established WebKit-derivatives, the lesser known Iris (for Windows Mobile), newcomer Digia (for Symbian UIQ-devices) and last but not least the browser of Google’s highly anticipated mobile Android OS are also part of the family.
Mobile Web, but there’s more then One
So thanks to KDE’s great job on KHTML and Apple’s (and Nokia’s) subsequent work, we are at a point where users of ‘smartphones’ and similar devices can access the internet almost as if they were using a desktop-browser. But screen-size, text-input, data transfer (bandwidth and price) and context remain very different from normal browsing, so don’t believe the “one web”-hype just yet. But still; these sure are great web times for building mobile(-ready) websites and -applications!