Motion sensor fun

I played around with the accelerometer in my Sony Ericsson W910i phone which is accessible for JME applications via JSR 256. I took the physic engine from Marcin Ploska and extended it with accelerometer support. See the results here:

Marathon

On Sunday I finished my first marathon in Duesseldorf. Crossing the finish line was a strange moment between happiness and exhaustion. Not sure if I will do this again ;)

JSR 226 Demos

I gave a speech at JAX this year (on the mobility track) regarding JSR 226 and the usage of SVG for the UI of mobile applications. I think that SVG is still a bit underastimated at all. The scalability features of SVG are very useful especially on the various screen sizes on mobile devices.
To show the audience the features of SVG on pratical use cases, I created some demos which I'd like to show you here. Static images can't replace the animations of course, but it should give you an idea what SVG can do for you ;) I should mention that the SVG artwort was created by our graphics team, I'm just doing the java piece :)

Java on iPhone

It looks like some guys really make progress on this.
JamVM is already available as posted here and here.
SUN announced to port it, and it looks like the guys from the phoneME team has taken this challenge and ported phoneME advanced (CDC) to it.
Cool guys, go ahead, the iPhone is definetly the coolest hardware platform you can run on currently!

Opera Mini 4.1 beta

...is out and it has pretty cool new features. My favourite is the graphical text-input of URLs including auto-completion and suggests. Very nice. Also the "save page" function is cool for saving time-shedules of trains or something like that. Good job opera!
Go to
http://mini.opera.com/beta/
for download!

How accurate is Google's My Location?

I've done some tests (with the help of some colleagues) with the My Location service of Google mobile maps. We know that the service works based on cell-id, means that there is cell-id database at google which maps the cell-ids back to coordinates. Question is: How accurate is the database? To answer that, we did some measurements in the 2.5 G network in germany.
We just compared our current location (via GPS) with the result of the My Location service and calculated the distance. We did 132 measures.

Here's the result as a graph:



To summarize, My Location is 707 meters inaccurate on average.
80% of the measures are less then 1075 meters accurate.

So this is (of course) far away from GPS based LBS, and it depends on the use-case of a service if this is sufficient.

on my run yesterday...

... I took this picture. I wish my mobile would have a better camera, the quality is really disgusting...