cat >/dev/null

Enter Moblin, Yet Another Mobile Linux effort, directly from Intel.

Looks interesting as others did before. But will it turn out to be something more than words, words, words, and Photosh… I mean, Gimp-ed mock-ups?

Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m betting €5,00 on NO.

…and boy have we patented it!

…we filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them.

Steve Jobs about the new iPhone™, @Macworld 2007

UPDATE 20070119

Well, everybody and their little sisters are blabbering about the iPhone, so I feel obliged to take my turn to say something at least as earth-shattering.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of things have been said about the little that’s been shown. Of course I drool over the technical side of it, as much as the next geek, and maybe a little more. But I couldn’t help but find the patent reference at least worrisome.

I won’t say Apple doesn’t look like they’ve come up with yet another revolutionary piece of tech, or that they don’t deserve credit and reward for doing that. It’s a shame they think they have to rely on patents to get them, but I won’t say this is their fault, rather than a fault in the System (well… let’s put it this way). But what I think is their fault, and incredibly lame, is that they’re stressing on the patents issue like that.

Anyway, I’ve already been asked if I intend to buy the phone. The full answer is probably quite complex, for a change, and I think I’ll elaborate here sooner or later. For now, suffice to say that I’m stuck between desperately wanting a device like that and hoping that they choke themselves to oblivion with their two hundred patents shoved down their throat (and yes, I had to resist the temptation to rephrase).

Moreover, anybody remember this? Now, who’s claiming what again?

All in all, I think I can live without this ultra-cool device, playing music and videos on its (almost) widescreen display, surfing the web on WiFi, running OS X widgets, all through a touch screen interface, that also happens to be a phone…

…or can I?

By the way, iPhone™ is a trademark of… your guess is as good as mine

UPDATE 20070119:

Looks like I’m not the only one to notice: here’s some juice and Jeff’s (very bland) remarks.

External links:

• Jeff Han @TEDTalks demoes mindblowing multi-touch interface
• Engadget – MacWorld 2007 live coverage
• Geek and Poke – Holy Steve
• Geek and Poke – We Want This Phone

How many times did you have to change the IP address of your workstation to match the IP subnet of that new network device you needed to configure, maybe just to change its address from the default?

How many times did you need to check something on the Internet during the process, and you had to switch addresses back and forth, maybe many times? Worse still, did you like all your TCP connections such as your umpteen IM logins, ssh sessions, VPN tunnels and the like, to be shut down on the occasion?

If you do my job, it happens a lot of times. But never before this morning had occurred to me that there is a smarter way to do that, if you’re under some sort of un*x operating system like GNU/Linux(*).

Suppose you have a device on 192.168.1.1/24 (if you don’t know about CIDR, this may be a good time to learn something about it) and your workstation’s interface, let’s say eth0, is on a different IP subnet (but of course plugged into the same Ethernet network). You can do like this (as the root user):

# ifconfig eth0:0 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0

As you may have guessed, this command adds an alias interface for eth0 called eth0:0, and assigns it the specified IP address. You can use this interface in the same ways you would use eth0, e.g. using your web browser to reach the new device’s web-based configuration interface at http://192.168.1.1 or whatever else.

The good thing is that this does not affect your main interface and the associated routing, so your existing connections don’t get killed.

Once you’re done, you can remove the alias interface:

# ifconfig eth0:0 down

and you’re back to your routine.

A couple of notes to the tech-savvy:

• (*) You can add multiple IP addresses on Windows also (from Windows 98 on, I believe). Just add a new IP address to the interface. I don’t know (nor care about) the details, though.
• Adding the alias interface automagically adds a route for the new interface’s IP subnet, but of course does not change your default route. If your new device is a router and you want to reach networks behind it, you’ll need to add specific routes to your system.
• You may unwillingly expose services running on your workstation which are listening on all interfaces (TCP *:port)

Some day ago I bought a ZyXEL Prestige 2602R*.

It is a ADSL2+ router/firewall device with VoIP capabilities. Specifically, it features two telephone ports, to which you can plug analog phones to use with SIP VoIP providers.

My work often leads me to evaluate new hardware devices, but I don’t usually post hardware reviews, because the kind of thoroughness you need to apply is something I can’t afford for my blog posts. Sometimes I buy a device just to evaluate it, because I find hardware/feature specs and documentation in general is lacking.

There’s one thing I hate more than lacking specs, though, and it’s misleading specs.

Since I have only VoIP at home, and I regularly use at least two SIP setups, I thought the device would fit well in my rack, taking the place of my current ADSL router, one SIP ATA and one IP phone. I understood the device was not capable of doing Least Cost Routing, but I was more interested in the ability to log into multiple SIP accounts at a time to get incoming calls from each, as I regularly do with softphones, but not with my Grandstream ATA and IP phone.

I thought the device was capable of that, since the feature list printed on the back of the box says:

• Multiple SIP Accounts/Phone Numbers-Freely assignable to Each Phone Port

In that respect, the device seems to work as advertised, except that the TOTAL number of SIP accounts the device is able to support is 2 (two)! So much for the multiple SIP accounts!!!

Worse still, each port can use one or both of the supported SIP accounts for outgoing calls, but if you choose to use both, you can’t sort them by preference (the order is fixed: account 2 then account 1) nor choose a specific one (e.g. by dialing a prefix code). You can mix-and-match incoming calls on the two accounts with the two telephone ports, though.

As such, the only reasonable usage pattern I can think of for the VoIP capabilities of this device is as a substitute for two distinct ATAs, each logged into its separate account, with the added option of being able to receive calls for SIP accounts on both ports.

Don’t get me wrong. All in all the device is all but disappointing. The price tag is very interesting and it could almost be covered by the cost of two SIP ATAs alone. The device features ZyNOS (ZyXEL’s legacy operating system), which in my experience is a guarantee. The NAT router/firewall features, upgradability options and configuration layout are ZyNOS-standard, thus very good. There is no IPSec VPN support, but that it is understandable for a device of this class. What I’d rather see is a four-port Ethernet switch, which is missing.

This does not change the fact that the device does not add anything to my current setup, so I’ve decided to put it back up for sale. Drop me a mail if you’re interested.

Following is a quick list of my turn-ups and turn-downs for the device (by no means meant to be comprehensive).

ups

• interesting feature set
• excellent price/features ratio
• ZyNOS based

downs

• limited SIP account support, esp. for outgoing calls
• misleading (in my opinion) feature description on box and web site
• no Ethernet switch for LAN

* Specifically, my device is a 2602R-61, with ADSL over POTS; there is a 2602R-63 for ADSL over ISDN and a 2602R-67 for ADSL over U-R2.