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I worked on a J2ME app that needed to access location on phones without GPS, I was in touch with the operator and got a list of cell ids with lat, lon. With th

I worked on a J2ME app that needed to access location on phones without GPS, I was in touch with the operator and got a list of cell ids with lat, lon. With that I created a daemon in Symbian that would query the cell id and open up a socket server to give it to the J2ME app. With that we developed an app to request a taxi service, but none of the taxi companies wanted it. Some of the complaints were: 1. GPRS data plans were too expensive for end users 2. No one would put an expensive Sony Ericsson touch phone on a windshield, the windshield would be broken by thieves to steal it. 3. Looking at a screen on the windshield while driving was never going to be approved by authorities.

umeshunni 5y ago
To be fair, all 3 of those are valid complaints. #1 was true all the way till ~10 years ago when 3G became popular. #2 is still true is most 'urban' areas. People just take their phones with them when they get out of their cars. #3 is interesting - I think some regions had tried to ban mounting phones on the dashboard, but at this point, they must have given up
- zepearl 5y ago
  Confirming #2: I live in Switzerland (low crime rate etc...) but I would not even dream of leaving my phone visible in the car. Btw. in the 90' I used to detach each-single-time that I parked the car the front panel of the car's radio to then carry it with me (leaving the storage box in front of the passenger seat open, to show that I didn't just put it in there) to discourage people from breaking into the car to extract the radio (front panel & main car radio were individually coded to only work together, that's at least what I believed). What a silly thing to do, hehe, but to be fair the price of a fancy radio at that time was similar to today's phones ("Pioneer" and "Sony" were high on my list - some models had quite complex display animations/colors/equalizers/etc & sound modes).
  - zerocrates 5y ago
    The detachable faceplate for anti-theft reasons was (is?) a very common feature for aftermarket radios/head-units/whatever in the US. Built-in ones have just increasingly moved to not being a discrete, accessible, interchangeable component, another way around. I still remember when my dad had bought an aftermarket tape-deck-only radio, a Sony I believe, well into the era of the ubiquitous CD player (he just wanted a working tape deck). Someone broke into the car at some point and stole it and I can only assume they were very disappointed after looking closer.
    - dzolob 5y ago
      To this day I’d be afraid to park my car out in the open with that piece of hardware attached to it.
    - toyg 5y ago
      Italy, mid-80s, early summer. My primary school organises a day trip to a city nearby. During the trip, a classmate from a “difficult” background ends up getting slightly hurt, banging his head against a wall. When we eventually get back to our hometown, his parents don’t come to pick him up, and somehow that means everyone else has to wait on the bus. Eventually, his dad shows up, drunk and high (on heroin, we’ll found out later) with a car radio under his arm - and everybody knows he doesn’t have a car, he’s literally just stolen it…
  - kccqzy 5y ago
    And when I bought an ebike, the dealer told me to always remove the battery and carry it with me when I park the bike in public spaces.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bserge 5y ago
  GPRS was a godsend as it brought the always-connected, pay-for-data usage that we all know nowadays. The precursor, HSCSD, was ridiculously expensive because you paid by the minute. If my memory is correct, there was also dial-up on mobile/GSM (well, I used something before I had a phone that supported HSCSD), which was interesting, but quite useless at the time. Also, #3 makes little sense seeing as there were already cars with built-in satnav, and you had to look down, which is worse than a phone on the windshield.
  - Rerarom 5y ago
    > there was also dial-up on mobile/GSM Yeah, it was called CSD. HSCSD was high-speed CSD.
    - bserge 5y ago
      Right, a whole 9.6 kbit/s, HSCSD was a major upgrade at 56 kbit/s :D The technology has come so far, it's pretty incredible.
jazzsax 5y ago
what product was this?
mwcampbell 5y ago
> 3. Looking at a screen on the windshield while driving was never going to be approved by authorities. The solution to that seems so obvious: make the phone speak to the driver instead. Was turn-by-turn navigation not feasible back then? Or what else am I missing?
- blakes 5y ago
  Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it. Most likely this app was not navigation. Remember, feature phone, probably had less than a couple hundred MB of memory for the entire device. I assume the app would just give the taxi driver address details and what not.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    Oh, even easier then; the phone would just have to read the address aloud. Symbian phones were able to run text-to-speech as far back as 2002; my best friend is blind and used a Nokia phone with a screen reader back then.
  - jmkb 5y ago
    Dispatch knowing drivers' locations in realtime would have made this a killer app imo. Car services used to assign pickups based on drivers reporting their location by radio.
  - duped 5y ago
    That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again. In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark." Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      At least some of the time this was more to stretch out a fare on the unsuspecting, rather than a total lack of local knowledge. Not that it makes it any better.
flir 5y ago
"Good idea but before it's time" crashed so many mobile startups pre-iPhone.
- tylerc230 5y ago
  I worked for a company that allowed you to play along with jeopardy on your brew/Jme device in real time as you watch the show live on tv. You could compete with your friends in real time, leaderboards, chat etc. The company eventually went under but I can’t help but think if it had been ported to iOS when it came out it would have been a hit. I’ve still never seen any technology like it.
  - ayyy 5y ago
    At the time, "second screen" was the term I heard used for those types of experience. The only prominent example I can think of these days is kahoot, which is only sort of the same idea.
    - tylerc230 5y ago
      Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the phrase "second screen". It was going to be big thing until people realized that no one wanted to look at 2 screens at once.
      - Hydraulix989 5y ago
        FWIW I do this all day at work now :)
      - oe 5y ago
        Teenagers now have a third screen (TV + phone for friends + tablet for watching a streamer)
      - flir 5y ago
        That's not my experience. There's a constant background hum of "what else have I seen him/her in" in my house. Not so much "lets all talk about this in realtime!" I admit, but there seems to be a subset of people who use Twitter/Reddit like that when watching politics or sports.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
asdff 5y ago
Point 2 and 3 are baffling to me. Garmins mounted on the windshield have been a thing in vehicles since the early 2000s at least.
- drewmol 5y ago
  Regarding point 2: When I worked for a valet parking company not too many years ago it would astonish me how many people would 'remember' they must secure their GPS in the glove box, despite leaving much more expensive items like iphones/laptops/purses/wallets in plain sight strown around within their vehicle. They were an easy and common theft target at one time I guess .
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    In 2009 somebody smashed my car's window to steal my garmin. Even if the GPS is worth little, they are worth hiding because thieves are morons who will smash your window for it anyway.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Anything in a car is a theft target. I've had a window smashed so someone could steal my $7 knockoff lightning cable.
- sneak 5y ago
  A lot of people have entirely different perceptions of risk than actual risk exposure.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Can confirm. Had a Garmin/Palm handheld (iQue 3200 or sth) with Garmin mapping software for Windows to prepare/preload map tiles onto SD cards, plus a complex setup involving VirtualPC and NoMachine NX to make it run on my PowerBook.
- dangrossman 5y ago
  In the early 2000s, I had to take my Garmin off the windshield and hide it in the trunk every time I parked, otherwise someone would break in and steal it. My car was broken into 3 times. Someone also stole my Microsoft Zune when I forgot to take that in with me.
grishka 5y ago
> a daemon in Symbian that would query the cell id and open up a socket server to give it to the J2ME app Why not just make the entire app native in Symbian if you require it anyway? Or did the Symbian SDK suck even more than I remember?
- theintern 5y ago
  I tried to do a college end of year project in Symbian, and couldn't get anything to work for months. This was likely a combination of lack of ability as much as the SDKs problem, but it definitely was not novice friendly. I pivoted to J2ME with about a week to go in the project and managed to get an MVP working in time, after 3 months of wrestling with Symbian.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Ex Nokia here, yes the Symbian SDKs required high comfort with C and C++ development environments on Windows, then there was Symbian C++ dialect. Also it did not help that the SDK was rebooted like 4 times. Initially based on Metrowerks, coupled with a mix of Perl and batch files, rebooted twice into Eclipse based IDEs, and finally the QtCreator initial effort before the burning platforms memo happened. Still, it was still much more friendly than dealing with NDK issues on Android.
girvo 5y ago
Oh UIQ3? Sony’s M600i and later phones are my all time favourite smart phones. That dual-key QWERTY is my favourite input, ever. I’d love something like that on iPhones soft keyboard lol
spoppy 5y ago
Pre-iPhone I used my Symbian phone as the GPS system in my car, using software called Route 66 and a bluetooth based GPS receiver. The map data was all stored on an MMC card so it didn't need any GPRS data. I used both a Nokia 6600 and then a 6680 with the same software. https://www.pocketgpsworld.com/route66-mobile-britain.php https://www.pocketgpsworld.com/route66-mobile-britain.php Only the bluetooth GPS receiver had to be kept in the windscreen, and both parts were small enough I could easily could take out of the car when leaving it. I suppose it was slightly bleeding-edge stuff for it's time but it worked pretty well considering the capabilities of the device and was much cheaper than a dedicated GPS unit with no ongoing costs.
- Nexxxeh 5y ago
  TomTom on my Orange-branded HTC Windows phone/palmtop for me. Unrelated obviously, but as someone who was surprisingly poor for an owner of such a phone in those days (it was on my mum's phone contract and we had to fight and haggle to get it), satnav software piracy was rampant back in the day. I think there's still a Bluetooth GPS receiver somewhere in my old room at my folks place...

umeshunni 5y ago

To be fair, all 3 of those are valid complaints. #1 was true all the way till ~10 years ago when 3G became popular. #2 is still true is most 'urban' areas. People just take their phones with them when they get out of their cars. #3 is interesting - I think some regions had tried to ban mounting phones on the dashboard, but at this point, they must have given up

zepearl 5y ago
Confirming #2: I live in Switzerland (low crime rate etc...) but I would not even dream of leaving my phone visible in the car. Btw. in the 90' I used to detach each-single-time that I parked the car the front panel of the car's radio to then carry it with me (leaving the storage box in front of the passenger seat open, to show that I didn't just put it in there) to discourage people from breaking into the car to extract the radio (front panel & main car radio were individually coded to only work together, that's at least what I believed). What a silly thing to do, hehe, but to be fair the price of a fancy radio at that time was similar to today's phones ("Pioneer" and "Sony" were high on my list - some models had quite complex display animations/colors/equalizers/etc & sound modes).
- zerocrates 5y ago
  The detachable faceplate for anti-theft reasons was (is?) a very common feature for aftermarket radios/head-units/whatever in the US. Built-in ones have just increasingly moved to not being a discrete, accessible, interchangeable component, another way around. I still remember when my dad had bought an aftermarket tape-deck-only radio, a Sony I believe, well into the era of the ubiquitous CD player (he just wanted a working tape deck). Someone broke into the car at some point and stole it and I can only assume they were very disappointed after looking closer.
  - dzolob 5y ago
    To this day I’d be afraid to park my car out in the open with that piece of hardware attached to it.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Italy, mid-80s, early summer. My primary school organises a day trip to a city nearby. During the trip, a classmate from a “difficult” background ends up getting slightly hurt, banging his head against a wall. When we eventually get back to our hometown, his parents don’t come to pick him up, and somehow that means everyone else has to wait on the bus. Eventually, his dad shows up, drunk and high (on heroin, we’ll found out later) with a car radio under his arm - and everybody knows he doesn’t have a car, he’s literally just stolen it…
- kccqzy 5y ago
  And when I bought an ebike, the dealer told me to always remove the battery and carry it with me when I park the bike in public spaces.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bserge 5y ago
GPRS was a godsend as it brought the always-connected, pay-for-data usage that we all know nowadays. The precursor, HSCSD, was ridiculously expensive because you paid by the minute. If my memory is correct, there was also dial-up on mobile/GSM (well, I used something before I had a phone that supported HSCSD), which was interesting, but quite useless at the time. Also, #3 makes little sense seeing as there were already cars with built-in satnav, and you had to look down, which is worse than a phone on the windshield.
- Rerarom 5y ago
  > there was also dial-up on mobile/GSM Yeah, it was called CSD. HSCSD was high-speed CSD.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Right, a whole 9.6 kbit/s, HSCSD was a major upgrade at 56 kbit/s :D The technology has come so far, it's pretty incredible.

jazzsax 5y ago

what product was this?

mwcampbell 5y ago

> 3. Looking at a screen on the windshield while driving was never going to be approved by authorities. The solution to that seems so obvious: make the phone speak to the driver instead. Was turn-by-turn navigation not feasible back then? Or what else am I missing?

blakes 5y ago
Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it. Most likely this app was not navigation. Remember, feature phone, probably had less than a couple hundred MB of memory for the entire device. I assume the app would just give the taxi driver address details and what not.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Oh, even easier then; the phone would just have to read the address aloud. Symbian phones were able to run text-to-speech as far back as 2002; my best friend is blind and used a Nokia phone with a screen reader back then.
- jmkb 5y ago
  Dispatch knowing drivers' locations in realtime would have made this a killer app imo. Car services used to assign pickups based on drivers reporting their location by radio.
- duped 5y ago
  That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again. In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark." Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    At least some of the time this was more to stretch out a fare on the unsuspecting, rather than a total lack of local knowledge. Not that it makes it any better.

flir 5y ago

"Good idea but before it's time" crashed so many mobile startups pre-iPhone.

tylerc230 5y ago
I worked for a company that allowed you to play along with jeopardy on your brew/Jme device in real time as you watch the show live on tv. You could compete with your friends in real time, leaderboards, chat etc. The company eventually went under but I can’t help but think if it had been ported to iOS when it came out it would have been a hit. I’ve still never seen any technology like it.
- ayyy 5y ago
  At the time, "second screen" was the term I heard used for those types of experience. The only prominent example I can think of these days is kahoot, which is only sort of the same idea.
  - tylerc230 5y ago
    Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the phrase "second screen". It was going to be big thing until people realized that no one wanted to look at 2 screens at once.
    - Hydraulix989 5y ago
      FWIW I do this all day at work now :)
    - oe 5y ago
      Teenagers now have a third screen (TV + phone for friends + tablet for watching a streamer)
    - flir 5y ago
      That's not my experience. There's a constant background hum of "what else have I seen him/her in" in my house. Not so much "lets all talk about this in realtime!" I admit, but there seems to be a subset of people who use Twitter/Reddit like that when watching politics or sports.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

asdff 5y ago

Point 2 and 3 are baffling to me. Garmins mounted on the windshield have been a thing in vehicles since the early 2000s at least.

drewmol 5y ago
Regarding point 2: When I worked for a valet parking company not too many years ago it would astonish me how many people would 'remember' they must secure their GPS in the glove box, despite leaving much more expensive items like iphones/laptops/purses/wallets in plain sight strown around within their vehicle. They were an easy and common theft target at one time I guess .
- wearywanderer 5y ago
  In 2009 somebody smashed my car's window to steal my garmin. Even if the GPS is worth little, they are worth hiding because thieves are morons who will smash your window for it anyway.
- asdff 5y ago
  Anything in a car is a theft target. I've had a window smashed so someone could steal my $7 knockoff lightning cable.
sneak 5y ago
A lot of people have entirely different perceptions of risk than actual risk exposure.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Can confirm. Had a Garmin/Palm handheld (iQue 3200 or sth) with Garmin mapping software for Windows to prepare/preload map tiles onto SD cards, plus a complex setup involving VirtualPC and NoMachine NX to make it run on my PowerBook.
dangrossman 5y ago
In the early 2000s, I had to take my Garmin off the windshield and hide it in the trunk every time I parked, otherwise someone would break in and steal it. My car was broken into 3 times. Someone also stole my Microsoft Zune when I forgot to take that in with me.

grishka 5y ago

> a daemon in Symbian that would query the cell id and open up a socket server to give it to the J2ME app Why not just make the entire app native in Symbian if you require it anyway? Or did the Symbian SDK suck even more than I remember?

theintern 5y ago
I tried to do a college end of year project in Symbian, and couldn't get anything to work for months. This was likely a combination of lack of ability as much as the SDKs problem, but it definitely was not novice friendly. I pivoted to J2ME with about a week to go in the project and managed to get an MVP working in time, after 3 months of wrestling with Symbian.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Ex Nokia here, yes the Symbian SDKs required high comfort with C and C++ development environments on Windows, then there was Symbian C++ dialect. Also it did not help that the SDK was rebooted like 4 times. Initially based on Metrowerks, coupled with a mix of Perl and batch files, rebooted twice into Eclipse based IDEs, and finally the QtCreator initial effort before the burning platforms memo happened. Still, it was still much more friendly than dealing with NDK issues on Android.

girvo 5y ago

Oh UIQ3? Sony’s M600i and later phones are my all time favourite smart phones. That dual-key QWERTY is my favourite input, ever. I’d love something like that on iPhones soft keyboard lol

spoppy 5y ago

Pre-iPhone I used my Symbian phone as the GPS system in my car, using software called Route 66 and a bluetooth based GPS receiver. The map data was all stored on an MMC card so it didn't need any GPRS data. I used both a Nokia 6600 and then a 6680 with the same software. https://www.pocketgpsworld.com/route66-mobile-britain.php https://www.pocketgpsworld.com/route66-mobile-britain.php Only the bluetooth GPS receiver had to be kept in the windscreen, and both parts were small enough I could easily could take out of the car when leaving it. I suppose it was slightly bleeding-edge stuff for it's time but it worked pretty well considering the capabilities of the device and was much cheaper than a dedicated GPS unit with no ongoing costs.

Nexxxeh 5y ago
TomTom on my Orange-branded HTC Windows phone/palmtop for me. Unrelated obviously, but as someone who was surprisingly poor for an owner of such a phone in those days (it was on my mum's phone contract and we had to fight and haggle to get it), satnav software piracy was rampant back in the day. I think there's still a Bluetooth GPS receiver somewhere in my old room at my folks place...