Showcasing Ghana 2008 with ICT (2)

So, you are keen to show Ghana off to the world—especially after that resounding trounce by the Black Stars, of Morocco. Even if we are a week away from the finals of the 26th edition of CAN 2008, it is still never too late to do one’s bit for Mother Ghana.

Camera Never Lies
Your average digital camera of between 4-5 mega-pixels can take a close-up picture of even your television set. Maybe you were not at the stadium, but you would like to be original? Grab your camera, focus it on the TV set, and capture (replays of) the image of the symmetrical Essien-Muntari delivery for posterity.

You can toe the line, if you are armed with your camera phone—but do bear in mind that unless you are holding a NOKIA N95, which already comes equipped with 5 megapixels (MP) your average camera phone will range from VGA--(640X480) to 2.0MP—enabled film quality. However, it will be a little less for wear—for the quality is never going to be tantamount to a dedicated digital camera.

After you have captured that picture, you might want to consider creating a video capture. Your average digital camera (be it SAMSUNG, CANON, KODAK or less well-known brands) will be equipped with video, but your mobile phone is a different kettle of fish altogether. Whether the capacity is unlimited or not, its ability to record clips depends – yet again -- on the capacity of your SD card. I found out very recently that the ever-popular MOTOROLA RAZR V3 flip-phone does not accommodate this type of card, going to confirm the suspicion that the aesthetics of a phone in no way determines its quality.

Once you’ve taken a video clip, you have to upload the picture somewhere. You can chose to store it on your computer or your laptop (if you have one). What you could also do is upload it onto the Internet. Question is where to?

Gee, this mail is good!
First of all, Google’s PICASA is a great place to start. By going to picasaweb.google.com/m/ on your phone, you will be asked to input your email and password. It’s preferable that you have a google mail, or GMAIL, account. Gmail, to be frank, is all the rage these days. For the fact that you can check any of your emails (yahoo is the only one that remains problematic being checked in gmail) through the service, and have unlimited and ever-expanding space (right now, it’s 63.4 GB and counting!) makes it a boon to both the luddites and tech-savvy people who might be both awed and impressed by the extent of this technology.

For instance, I have the priviledge of being able to check my work email through GMAIL—and respond to those mails accordingly. Excuses of not having received emails are (regrettably!) a thing of the past—as most people are cottoning onto how the service works. That my boss has now asked for assistance on the setting up of GMAIL has personally reminded me my bag of excuses around emails never being received have comprehensively bitten the dust!

In all seriousness, with your gmail account, you can access picasa on the web, and begin your uploading of those beautiful pictures of re-plays by our national team.

Secondly, FLICKR.com—a photo-sharing site—is also another great place to go. By clicking on http://www.flickr.com/tools/mobile/ , you can read up more about how to upload from your mobile phone. It might interest you to know that the top 5 camera phones uploading on that mobile site are: NOKIA N95; Apple I-Phone; Nokia N73; Sony Ericsson K800i and W810i. Incidentally, this is not a Google product--prepare to have your YAHOO email accounts ready for use on this site!

In order to avoid wasting more chances than striker Asamoah-Gyan in the Namibia-Ghana game last week, it might be a good idea to consider creating an online site where your thoughts can be recorded in reverse chronological order—or a blog.

Ready to Hit the Blogosphere?
For the past five years, blogs have also been the latest wrinkle, with one statistic claiming that in early 2007, bloggers would hit the 100 million point. You can imagine that if most Westerners are experimenting with blogs, then a fraction of that number will be by non-Western once, including African ones. This should not discourage you in setting up your own blog. A five-minute process, you can set up one on TYPEPAD.com; WORDPRESS.com and BLOGGER.com. The latter is one of the more popular platforms, and, you can probably guess, owned by Google.

Given that periods likes these turn the average citizen into an armchair strategist and well-experienced coach, why not take the opportunity to showcase some of your analysis and technical skills by writing and maintaining a blog—today!

Connecting Which People?
Nokia says that it’s done a survey, in which more than 50% of respondents in India, Pakistan and nearly 30% in Vietnam have indicated that they share, or would share, their mobile phone with family or friends. I don’t see Africa there, yet Nokia is keen to sell these to so-called emerging markets. Maybe Nigeria might get a look-in. Even so, no-one asked me whether I felt that would infringe my privacy. Whether it’s a cooked survey of the middle class within these countries or not, it can be argued that Nokia is living up to its slogan of connecting people by launching two new mobile phones—the Nokia 2600 and Nokia 1209.

Both phones are designed to be shared by five people, and both handsets would come with multiple phone books (one per person) and a cost-tracker, which would enable one see how much they have spent on calls.

The article from which I found this information claims this is an indication of “how in tune Nokia is with emerging markets.” I am not so convinced. What I do believe, though, is that there might be some value about phone-sharing, in the sense that an increasing number of families are buying mobile phones for the entire family—and not just the household. It’s probably about economics and convenience. The practicalities inherent in phone sharing may be challenging – ensuring that everyone gets to use the phone, for example – but, undoubtedly, we are led to believe that this is the way.

There will be Bluetooth
The new Nokia 2600 comes with a VGA camera (640X480), MP3 Player and FM radio, and will retail for €65.00, or around GHC80.00. The Nokia 1209, conversely, will go for €35.00. Just so that the phone-sharing makes sense, Nokia will most definitely be including nothing less than…Bluetooth.

It is interesting to note that despite the growing dominance of Bluetooth technology, there appears not to be any infra-red—unlike even some of the latest NOKIAs. Can we say that this means it’s dying a certain death?

Merry Methods to the Mobile Madness

With Christmas some nine days away, and precious little inspiration for a present, Ghanaians might be prompted to go for a mobile device. With all manner of shapes, sizes and sorts available, you cannot go wrong in bringing a smile to your loved one’s face. Here are some humble suggestions to guide you on what’s out there.

There are smartphones, which are considered “voice-centric mobile devices”, and are very portable. It does not necessarily have to have touch-screen functionality; its ability to handle corporate email, connect to the internet—just to name but two—are sufficient. Of the most popular ones, BlackBerrys and TREO are to-die-for; they have full QWERTY keypads. You can also find some that are slimmer, less bulky, and more of a phone. These have more letters and symbols per key; HP’s iPAQ is one such phone.

Generally, smartphones have wide-area connectivity, such as GSM and GPRS/EDGE or 3G/HSDPA capability. Smartphone pundits like to refer to the BlackBerry for its landscape-mode screen and QWERTY keypad; its ability to connect to the internet makes it all the more attractive. However, uneasy lies the crown for BlackBerry, for there are, newer pretenders to its throne; these include newer devices, such as HTC’s S710, which offers a slide-out QWERTY keypad. Off late, smartphones come packed with integrated Wi-Fi, allowing them to connect to a landline via Wi-Fi in the office, whilst using a mobile network elsewhere.

Secondly, there are the regular mobile devices, provided by the SAMSUNGS, NOKIAs, and MOTOROLAs (to name but three popular brands). These are coming packed with a number of integrated applications, such as MP3 players that are Windows Media Player-compatible, such as the MOTOROLA Z6. If you are just into sending text messages and making voice calls, you cannot go wrong with any of these. Buying a phone that comes with a camera and/or video is de rigueur these days, but if you rarely use the camera, you might want to cut down costs and go for one that just takes pictures—and cut out the video, as rarely do these two applications work optimally side-by-side.

In looking for a phone, you might also want to consider one that has “Bluetooth” connectivity. This is a low-power; short-range technology that supports lower data transfer rates (721 Kbps for Bluetooth 1.2 and 2.1 Mbps for Bluetooth 2.0+EDR) over shorter distances. Like the so-called “camera phone”, most phones come Blue-tooth ready. If you ever wondered where Infra-red went, it was pretty much killed by Bluetooth.

With mobile providers of ONETOUCH, MTN and TIGO providing GPRS capabilities, you could be forgiven for thinking that Ghanaians are capitalising on them. My far-from-scientific survey indicates that unlike my Western counterparts, Ghanaians rarely patronise these services, feeling they will be ripped off their units even more than they already are! A humble voice of experience can safely say that the prices are relatively cheap – if you just need to check your mail, and browse the odd BBC news story.

If you thought patronage of GPRS services in Ghana is low, you haven’t heard the latest from the New York Times that claims that mobile web, and 3G networks in particular, are flops. The article maintains that data accounts for only 12 percent of revenue for mobile phone operators; another survey indicated that only 13 percent mobile phone users use their phone to browse the Web more than once a month.

Three main points are highlighted for this failure: displays, which are too small to read effectively; difficult user-input, due to lack of a keyboard; and the billing method by most operators that allow you to pay per byte.

The GPRs-optimists among us would say that all that may be true—except when you are using a better and more efficient phone, like the Nokia E90 smartphone, which screen is sufficiently big to enable a satisfying web-browsing experience. Even the ever-popular-in-Ghana RAZR models of Motorola, like the L7i and flip-phone V3, enable you browse seamlessly without having to fork out twice a salary.


Has Mobile Video Been Killed by BlackStar?
A Ghanaweb report of 16 July 2007 indicated that ONETOUCH would be providing its subscribers television on their mobile phone. According to the mobile provider’s website, “this service which will be provided by Black Star TV will be commercialised in October, 2007 and will be available only on the Onetouch network”. Two lengthy calls to ONETOUCH’s hotline indicated that the service will be rolled out as soon as it’s ready.

Mobile Video Recording Soon
While we are keeping our fingers crossed for that, we can probably place faith in a Reuters report that says that video recording our humble mobile phones are set to reach “high-definition quality in a few years.”

Predicted by an executive from industry leader Nokia to be a reality “in a couple of years”, it was also predicted that this development would be associated with profits as better quality could “boost sales of pricey multimedia phones…” Beyond the NOKIA N95 being able to record such high-quality video, prospects for this latest technological convergence might fall flat, considering the acknowledgment that “increasing the video quality affects the quality of the still camera.”

Nokia—Still Connecting People?
With predictions that it will be embedded in upcoming Nokia S60 3rd edition devices, you might need to go beyond the Greek around the models to accept that if you don’t own a high-end Nokia phone, you will not be getting Nokia’s Internet radio anytime soon. This would be a pity, for reports say that it makes “music discovery effortless”, in the sense that the whole experience is made seamless (easy browsing; hourly updates of the top ten most popular internet radio stations; creating a list of “Favourites”).

Ready for download from the following mobile phones—Nokia N82; N91; N95; N95 8GB—the rest of us – using neither Nokia nor such high-end ones—will have to accept something less: our humble earphones connected to our radio-enabled mobiles!

Where’s That Payphone?
USA-based AT&T has announced that come 2008, it will nip the provision of payphones fairly and squarely in the bud. This comes in the wake of a steady decline of payphones from about 2.6 million phones inn 1998 to an estimated 1 million phones today. One wonders whether they might feel tempted to introduce a talk tax on mobile phone users as a result!