Boxee is easy to use, mainly you need only six buttons on a remote to control it (the navigational keys, select and back). Sometimes you need to enter some text, maybe for a search box or to use the new feature of adding a comment to an item you liked. This can be time consuming with a normal remote, so the ideal device would have a little keyboard like the Boxee remote or the Logitech diNovo Mini ™ (which does seem a little expensive). The Nokia N900 has a nice backlit hardware keyboard though and a touch screen. One possible snag you might think is the lack of a “app” to control Boxee (such as the ones available for Android and iPhone), but “if you can't do something do something else” (according to a saying I may have made up). Fortunately it is possible to control Boxee through a browser, and this approach might work for other mobile devices too.

Despite the idea of "being in Cyberspace" and the power of the Internet to connect us to people all over the world regardless of our location, we often use a browser to find out about people and services close to us. These might be queries such as finding the opening times of a local store, the time of a train or local expertise. Each time we do this it is often necessary to tell the website where we are, typcially by providing a post code, but what if you don't know the postcode? Fortunately browsers and becoming much more clever, and some can even work out where you are.

If I was to walk into a mobile phone shop and demand a full size skateboard controller for my mobile or an interface to control an Etch-A-Sketch I wonder what they would do? Maybe they would laugh or insist that no normal person would want to do that or claim it can't be done. Yet last Thursday night in an unassuming corner of the east end of London, UK, I found people who were experimenting with these ideas and more. The event was the Push N900 Showcase, organised by Nokia, and I was delighted to be invited along. I even had a go at a bit of live video broadcasting with my trial Nokia N900 while I was there.

Just before Christmas I had a delivery of a large mysterious black box. There was no obvious way to open it, on the top was engraved “Nokia – connecting people” and on the front a mini usb socket. Also packaged was a USB lead and a card telling me that this was a Nokia “hackerbox” and telling me a web site to visit for clues on how to open it. I managed to connect up the box to my computer and got a terminal session going to “log in” to the box, admittedly I used Google to find out how to get in (as I am not very good at puzzles!). Dramatically, when the right command was issued, the top of the box popped open and a puff of smoke emerged. Inside was a the Nokia N900, a Linux powered mobile phone, accessories, a plastic fox and a nice bit of cake.

4777333366448844433777712226666 - a crazy long number, but what does it mean? It represents how you input 'greenhughes.com' into a browser on a mobile phone in terms of key-presses, that is without the pauses required to input the address correctly. Entering an address into a mobile web browser can be a time consuming and pretty miserable task, this example just takes you to the front page, if you wanted to get the RSS feed, which can work really well on a mobile phone, you will be confronted with an even longer task. Every day we walk past resources that feature web addresses with our mobile phones, like adverts, books, magazines and don't bother to use our mobile devices with them. Why? Well it just takes too long. This leads to a bit of a lost opportunity, fortunately there is a way to get web addresses, text and phone numbers onto your mobile by using a technology known as mobile codes, a two dimensional barcode (rather than the one dimensional bar codes scanned by the tills at shops) that contains a small amount of information within it that can be transferred by using the camera on the mobile to pick up the mobile code and turn it back to text. The whole process is quite painless for the user and takes advantage of the cameras on phones that have improved greatly over the last couple of years.