Soon we can all be Mr Bond ...

Interested to see that the concept of using a mobile phone as a remote control for a car (as demonstrated by Bond in The World is Not Enough!) is finally making an appearance as a real product - though only a car show prototype at this stage.

Not quite at the level where you can lie in the back seat and accelerate wildly up the ramp in the car park yet though. Current functions allow only:

• "Control ambient lightning
• Control front and rear seat settings
• Lock the car
• Open the rear compartment
• Switch on and off the lights (blinkers, main lights…)"

Of course in the Bond film the phone was a Nokia Communicator so perhaps we need to wait for that version for those features ;->!

To iPhone 3G or not to iPhone 3G

All very tempting - big touchscreen and nice web browsing etc. Perhaps it could be the successor for my current E61i. Having scanned some of the huge amount written about it there are a few concerns though ...

• No tethered use as a modem for my laptop. This seems to be a deliberate decision to keep the operators happy.
• No IMAP IDLE support - again I suspect deliberate in order to drive folks towards the subscription based MobileMe service. There is at least one app out there that addresses this though it isn't an official app and so require jailbreaking the phone.
  
• Can't mark emails as read without actually opening them - that's a biggy!
• Uncertain how well it will work with SyncML based OTA sync services such as ScheduleWorld and MyFunambol - though there is now a free funambol client in the app store I understand.
• To get an ssh client at present requires jailbreaking - OpenSSH.
  
• On screen keyboard as opposed to blackberry style physical keyboard - though have generally heard good things from folks who have tried it.

Now just need to find somebody who has one and can confirm/deny the details of the above!

PS. The latest carnival is up over at the Mippin blog.

First post from mobile

The E61i seems to be a pretty practical tool for this - though perhaps a dedicated app might be a bit more streamlined than just logging in to the blogger website in the browser?