Nokia N810 review

I’ve been using a Nokia N810 for the past week and was interested to see how a pocket sized mobile device (but not a phone) might be useful in education.

If you are unware of the N810 it is the latest in a range of devices that Nokia call internet tablets. It has a size similar to that of an iPhone, but it is not a phone at all- it can only use WiFi or bluetooth to access the internet. It also has a touch screen and GPS like the iPhone, but I think that is really where the similarity ends.

Unlike the iPhone the N810 is an open operating system and any software can be installed on it. This openess does a lot to highlight why the iPhone closed system is more suitable for consumers than it will to encourage take up of similar devices.

The device is perfect for me but I can see that it would not be suitable for all. The OS is called maemo and is a linux derivative. The interface is very friendly and it can upgrade over the air which is missing on nearly all mobile devices. The problems come with the software, which is typical of a lot of linux software in my experience in that it just about does what you want. In the week I have been using it I don’t think I have used a piece of software that has not crashed at some point.

Even the apps that come as part of the OS have crashed, and this annoying for core apps like email and the browser (a firefox derivative). Those open source apps that I have installed have worked just about but I can’t see any of them making it in a world where Apple is setting expectations.

I think at this point i should mention that I love the device and feel it is perfect for me. There are times when i want to take a phone out and times when I want the capabilities of the N810 but I am glad that I don’t always have to carry around one device with all my eggs in one basket. It can utilise the 3G connection on my phone to access the internet when there is no WiFi.

It is interesting that Google’s new mobile OS Android can already run on the N810 but in a restricted way (slow). I am not sure of the technicalities but it would be great to see Android replace maemo completly because Android seems to have a much better memory management system and philosophy.

Anyway enough of the technical stuff - how is this device useful in education? Well in short it isn’t - sure it could be shoe horned to have a place competimg against a windows PDA but in all truth without a good range of software it has little use as a school or institutions sponsored device. For an individual who finds it fits their needs then it is perfect!

If Nokia want to make it suceed they need an OS that will give developers more of a platform than one niche device and for that Android makes perfect sense.

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31.Jul.08 devices, education, m-learning, mLearning Comments (2)

Impressive mobile solutions from the Polytechnical University in Valencia

Today I was visiting the Polytechic University of Valencia (La Universidad Politécnica de Valencia) and got to see some of the interesting work they are doing there with mobile phones and learning.

Within the DISCA department they teach two courses on programming mobile phones which are project based courses. I met Juan-Carlos Ruiz-Garcia who leads both of these courses and got to see some of the work they have done and are in the process of doing.

One tool allows a PDA or Windows Mobile Phone to take over a PC and has a simple custom controller for Powerpoint. The software can also be used to take control of another PDA or allow the screen from a PDA to be shown on a projector. The software works on bluetooth or over WiFi (I think the bluetooth is too slow to be useful) and can be installed on any windows device (PDA, phone, tablet PC etc). This was impressive software and will be used in anger in a trial of Tablet PCs that they will start using next year.

The second project I saw was a mobile learning platform for languages with really impressive facilities for loading up multi-media clips (both audio and video). I was shown an example of how it worked with “We are the champions” from Queen - the audio was loaded with two text files with the English and Spanish lyrics. The lyrics were automatically matched up so that each line in English was associated with the line in Spanish - but this could be edited allowing for translations that only work for double lines etc. The audio was then played using a neat flash control and the use just has to press the spacebar each time a new line of lyrics started in English. In the end an xml file was generated that could be used with their authoring tool to make up learning objects.

Using the authoring tool - a small course module was built using music, video and text which contained many exercises focused on the needs of the student. This was then shown to be in a web browser.

Where is the mobile stuff? OK the cherry on all of this was the Windows mobile client that allows a user to take the work offline on their phone and complete the assesment. The content was synchronised with the device and then a student can continue to revise offline. At the moment they have a few problems with synchronisation time (20 minutes), but these will be ironed out and I think it will make a nice piece of project work.

The approach is very similar to the uHavePassed system we have built, although their system can take much richer audio and video clips, this is only possible on a Windows device with Wifi - uHavePassed can support any Java based phone on any internet connection and with any QTI formatted data so any authoring platform can be used.

We plan to do some more work with the university and I will be interested to see how these projects move forward.

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23.Jul.08 education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones, tools, uHavePassed Comments (0)

Great talk on Cloud Euducation from Judy Breck

Talking about en educational “cloud tool” (as I just was)  here is a video that I found thanks to MAMK from one of his posts on Smart Mobs.

Judy Breck talks about Cloud Education at the recent Microlearning Conference.


Judy Breck - Cloud Education (Microlearning Conference 2008) from Teemu Arina on Vimeo.

UPDATE: After spending more time thinking on this I am still struggling with how to apply these ideas - SEO, and link strength etc - all seem to relate to work on the semantic web - but I can see there is more to it than that.

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17.Jul.08 education, mLearning, mobile phones Comments (0)

Evernote - an educational “cloud tool”

I came across Evernote from a  Tablet PC blog recently and looked into it as a replacement for OneNote.

Wow what a replacement it has been!

Evernote as a company have some background with the Tablet PC with the input replacement RitePen which I have previously used and although impressed with it on XP found it to be not as great as the native Vista input methods.

Evernote is now in version 3 and this has completely embraced cloud computing and allows you to provide input from many sources and send it up to their servers and then view from many devices.

They now have Windows (not just Tablet PC) and Mac clients and mobile clients for Windows Mobile devices and hot off the press is their new iPhone client. There is a J2ME client in development at the moment - but other mobile devices can email in content and view via their mobile website anything that is on the server.

So what can you input? Text, images and tablet PC ink documents. If you send an image then they will try and process that image - take a picture of a business card and they will OCR the image once it hits the server and make the content searchable. This is true of any document that is sent as an image - from either a photo or a scan.

Students can use Evernote as a central repository of their notes, and other items sending in notes from email or with a phone a nice and easy learning diary straight away. As the sharing and collaboration possibilities come on line it will become even stronger as an educational tool.

Content that is sent up into the cloud becomes accessible anywhere and that is what makes it really useful - if only someone could link the Evernote storage with a VLE that would be really interesting!

The great news - it is free to use, you get 40Mb of uploads a month for free and $5 for uploading anything more.

Please go and give it a try!

UPDATE: Title changed to remove the phrase “Cloud Education” so as not to confuse what I am saying with Judy Breck’s excellent concept of Cloud Education.

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17.Jul.08 education, mLearning, tools Comment (1)

The iPhone iPod Touch Platform and education

Now that the App Store has been launched for the iPhone and iPod Touch these devices must go down as the easiest devices ever made for purchasing and installing software on.

The App Store makes it so easy to install software on these devices in a couple of clicks, and if you need to pay for it - well you just use the same payment method you use for buying music amazing.

No other company / device has the infrastructure and user trust in place to emulate this (and for competition reasons I wish they did).

So what does this have to do with education? Well once you get over the ease of installation - the apps are great - the feel and way they work is so simple they look like they have been designed for a 4 year old - but lets be honest that is what we all want - simple and elegant. I hope that Apple have style guidelines and that they are insisting on developers keeping to them before then can have a place in the App Store.

Yes OK, but what does this have to do with education? Well easy to use and easy to get hold of applications that are engaging and accessible and on devices that students can fit in their pocket have never been available before. Technically all this has been possible, but not on a  real device that is being purchased by real students, and working in such an easy elegant way.

So let’s start getting content on to these devices - and find out what works and what doesn’t  - this method of easy installation and easy to use apps is the future on this device or others - we can only learn from here on in.

We (Luzia) missed the boat with these devices and I wish we were on the App Store today - but we plan to start work in August rectifying that!

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16.Jul.08 education, mobile development Comments (2)

Writing for the small screen

Working on the small screen is a different discipline and one with lots of new rules, over the past two years we have learnt many lessons about how to write content, manipulate images and design applications that work well on the small screen.

Differing screen sizes

Sizes of small screens vary from the practically unusable 96×96 pixels to what is now becoming quite common 240×320 pixels (see images below).

An example 96x96 pixel canvas

An example 96x96 pixel canvas

An example 128x128 pixel canvas

An example 128x128 pixel canvas

An example 176x220 pixel canvas

An example 176x220 pixel canvas

An example 240x320 pixel canvas

An example 240x320 pixel canvas

These canvases do not represent the physical size of the screen - just the amount of pixels that there are on a screen, the canvas that we can paint on.

Confusingly the physical size of phone screens is getting smaller (or staying the same but the canvas sizes are increasing)  because new technology now provides better resolution.

Screen resolution of a screen is measured in Dots Per Inch - DPI (the terms dot and pixel are often interchanged), in recent years the number of dots (pixels) that can be fit into an inch of mobile screen has increased from 96dpi to 153dpi. You still see 96dpi screens with a 96×96 canvas  which means that the screen is 1 inch by 1 inch (2.54cm x 2.54cm) because they are cheap to make, but phones like the Nokia N95 now have a 240×320 pixel canvas that is 1.56×2.09 inches (3.96cm x 5.3cm).

I may have confused things now, but what I want to make clear is that canvas size on a phone is not the same as physical screen size, writing in a font that is 20 pixels high will result in text of physically different heights on two different phones.

When we develop an application we only know the canvas size of the phone we are working on - not the actual physical size of a phone screen.

What is usable?

Well 96 x 96 pixels is our view is next to unusable, fonts on these screens mean that readable text is physically quite large and you can fit between 10-18 words on a screen, this means the user must do a lot of scrolling, and also there is little space on the screen to make the experience a little nicer using nicer graphics and borders.

We view the minimum usable screen size as 128 x128 and this works well for mostly text based applications, but if images are important in your application then you must move up one more notch to 176×220 as a minimum screen size. An example of this is that in uHavePassed for the UK driving theory test we need to show pictures of road scenes and in our testing with the content for the UK driving theory test - the image detail on a 128×128 canvas was not good enough (even using the tricks mentioned later).

What are the restrictions?

The first thing you need to review when designing a mobile application is how the lack of “spare” or “extra” space on the phone screen will restrict the design, a good analysis of these restrictions and proper understanding of them means that you can in most cases turn the understanding into a positive experience for the user.

Firstly you must look at which parts of the content are actually going to be relevant to the user and if the current organisation of the content is ideal - questions to ask for text based content:

  • Should the content be reduced?
  • Should the content be re-ordered?
  • How should the content be grouped?
  • Should it be accessible from different perspectives?
  • Would some users prefer summary content and others the original? if so how will this be enabled?
  • Should the text be hyperlinked to allow better navigation and accessibility?
  • Is it really relevant to the user?

For image based content you might want to consider:

  • Is the image needed?
  • Could an image that is used elsewhere be reused?
  • Would it be better to crop the image to remove extra irrelevant content or resize it for the phone?
  • Would panning and or zooming on the image help the user, would it get in the way or is it over the top for the purpose?
  • Should we rotate the image to use the screen better?

Then you have to start looking at what can be displayed together, do the text and images need to be displayed together, how to show a link?

New Interactions

All of this should lead to a cut down set of content and a cropped set of images perhaps even a library of images for each canvas size.

We firstly like to create mockups of our projects using index cards to mimic the canvas size of a 176×220 phone and try to work out how interactions will work with a brainstorm. I plan to cover intereactions in a follow up post.

UPDATE with iPhone canvas size:

An example 320x480 pixel canvas

Here is the iPhone canvas and to get some perspective on this - it has twice the number of pixels of the largest screen we have shown above.

Should we think of this as a small screen? I think so - even though it has more pixels than any of our other examples - the actual size of the screen is still fairly small at 51.42mm x 76.38mm (2″ x 3″).

iPhone applications don’t waste space and are very aware of the lack of spare screen - so it is generally designed for as a small screen.

In landscape mode this screen is the equivalent of two Nokia N95 phones side by side (casing not included).

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16.Jul.08 m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones Comment (1)

What we’ve been up to?

This could be of those blog posts that explains why there has been a long absence of blog posts, then goes on to explain explain why there will be more in the future and is shortly followed by a lack of blog posts again.

I’ll try to make sure it is not!

So what have we been up to?

We have been increasing the number of users of uHavePassed and currently have just over 3,000 people who have used it to pass their UK driving theory test. We have worked a lot on compatibility of uHavePassed with various handsets and also the communications that are used from the handset to our synchronisation server. We are really pleased how this is helping people and each bit of feedback has been great to receive - both positive and negative, as the product has developed.

The memory training and flashcard concepts in getawayphrases are in the process of being incorporated into uHavePassed allowing users to train their memory in addition to doing formative assessment.

We are looking for content partners and institutions to be able to increase the scope of content on uHavePassed.com beyond the UK driving theory test - so please get in contact if you are interested. We are already working with Leeds University and the Open University on this. More news soon…

With uHavePassed we are also in the process of launching a service so that organisations can use it to provide any assessment content to their users via web and mobile phone. More news soon….

We have also continued to work with the Open University on a couple of ad-hoc projects. These projects have been done at a very low cost and the aim is to push forward ideas and techniques in reasearch of the applications of mobile phones in higer education. Again more to follow….

I (Al) am now going to commit more time also to this blog and try to start up more of a conversation about how mobile phones can (and are) being used in education.

So on with the conversation…

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14.Jul.08 Driving theory test, education, getawayphrases, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, uHavePassed Comments (0)