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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm one of them, for example eurovision or euro'20 in a few weeks. Memes and stuff it's literally better than watching it. It just become a base to make memes of

Nobody could have anticipated that YouTube poop would be more compelling than professionally produced television.

FWIW I do this all day at work now :)

Teenagers now have a third screen (TV + phone for friends + tablet for watching a streamer)

The Jackbox series of party games also does this very well.

This was a prototype app we built circa-2012 for a rapid app dev class. Due to time constraints though, we took the less interesting path and ran off pre-time & answer coded data files.

The best thing to come out of the project was the "advertising" video featuring YT casually answering every question correctly. Which is a thing you can do when you've watched the same episode 15 times to record second-level timing!

It always confused me why Jeopardy never pushed anything official.

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

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).

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.

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…

To this day I’d be afraid to park my car out in the open with that piece of hardware attached to it.

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.

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.

> there was also dial-up on mobile/GSM

Yeah, it was called CSD. HSCSD was high-speed CSD.

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.

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

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.

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...

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I heard these stories and would direct cabs the same way, until I realized that the cab drivers were right and I was wrong, and that the depictions of them as shady thieves who would purposely take you out of your way, or were horribly incompetent, were urban myths.

And I was being disrespectful to the drivers, to presume that and treat them that way. I don't treat other service industry people that way. And if you think about it, cab drives make more from a flag drop than a longer trip - as one cab driver said, 'people say these things to me - do you know how much I make for an extra few blocks? 50 cents? And what is my take of that?'

I learned to trust and respect the cab driver, who after all were human beings, and drove around all day long, and like most people was honest and considerate.

Being able to get to you and actually taking a good route are two different things though.

How did Cabbies know where to show up when called?

Or did they not? I only ever took Taxis from places I could flag them down pre-Uber.

Most taxi drivers required a license - and that required passing an exam. Big part of the exam was knowledge of town.

People also could tell the "main" roads, which would be known.

On a side note: my usual experience with taxis (not uber) is that they first ask the question to figure out if you know the town or not and then they know very well what is the longest route. Also even when asked for estimate of price it would always be the top.

Big reason why uber is so popular: you wont get a ling ride through whole town and you can rate the driver.

Calling a cab resulted in a cabbie showing up maybe 20% of the time. You would hail cabbies in the street.

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.

> 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.

In what city? London cab drivers famously were (are?) required to pass a memorization test, but in American cities I've had many cab drivers who didn't know their way around. They've been generally better than Lyft/Uber drivers.

In just about every city a cab driver was expected to know where they were going. For more obscure addresses they may have asked for major cross streets or similar, but it was generally assumed that the driver knew where he was going (which led to the inevitable problem when he didn't or when the passenger was not precise in their description of the destination.) You would also always find a Thomas' guide somewhere in the front of the taxi just in case...

People knew this too - and so navigating by landmarks was much more common.

Some cities are setup so that with most addresses you can pinpoint almost exactly where it is in the city. Seattle’s a good example of this.

Also if you think of most taxi trips they will either be to a major location (hotel, airport, restaurant) or to a place personally known by the rider (house, work).

These feature phone did have Google Maps, and lists of GMaps directions, and could have done navigation just like the Garmin devices - but they crucially didn't have GPS.

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.

This is me guessing: This sounds like before turn-by-turn navigation was possible. If they had to approximate location via a set list of cell ids, then that doesn't give very precise location data. Also, back then, I am guessing, there where not as good map data available, especially not that would fit in a phone. I would also think that this was before synthesised speech was really possible to do on a phone.

The world is a different place today.

Before smartphones and before cheap GPS, I got spoken turn-by-turn directions while driving from Tellme.

1-800-TELL-ME launched in 1999/2000. You told it your address and the destination address, and it read you the directions one at a time. E.g. after you made the first turn, you'd ask for the next one and it'd tell you. It did not need any GPS this way, it's like talking to someone sitting next to you reading the map for you.

Microsoft bought Tellme in 2007 for $800 million.

And did what with it?

And why?

To do the same thing Google was doing that year when they launched GOOG-411:

Using the interactive phone calls to train their speech recognition systems, so that they could eventually use what they learned to develop things like Google Assistant, Cortana, Windows Voice Recognition, etc.

Tellme was taking 2 billion calls a year when they were acquired. They had all the training data Microsoft could want to compete with Google in that area.

> In early 2012, Microsoft divested itself of Tellme Networks' interactive voice response (IVR) service and the majority of its employees to [24]7 Inc. The service was moved to a non-toll-free number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellme_Networks

GPS navigation is 90s tech, though. I had garmin barking turns at me in the early 2000s same as siri today. In fact usually better reception than my cell phone if it was a clear day, since cell coverage is still terrible where you really need need it out in the boonies where gas stations are miles and miles apart.

Devices like the Garmin [0] were chunky though, weren't they, like a few cm thick, even compared to phones of the times they were big. And to my [limited and shaky] recollection people had car mounted antennae for GPS (in the late 90s) because they worked poorly without it?

The first retro-fittable GPS was in 1997, the Alpine CVA-1005 [1], which weighed >3kg and had a display of 26cm across; it connects for nav to a CDROM drive containing base unit [2]; here's the wiring diagram [3].

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/the-c... [1] https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/ a good review of early GPS [2] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Alpine-NVA-N751A-Navigation-Syste... [3] https://elektrotanya.com/alpine_cva-1005_wiring_diagram.pdf/...

Chunky doesn't matter for a car GPS. They sit on your dash, not in your pocket. For my old garmens, the weighted sandbag mount they used to hold the device onto the dash was honestly less frustrating than a suction cup that falls of the windshield down to your feet while you a driving on the highway.

Oh, for sure, but surfsvammel was on about tech that fits in your pocket, you responded that GPS was 90s tech, and I was just fleshing out that whilst it was 90s tech it was only really widely available as tech for a car (and of course USA restricted GPS accuracy, which meant it often got confused in the UK as to which road one was on).

The last Garmin my dad had, maybe 5 years ago was decidedly chunky compared with phones at the time (but you need a reasonable sized screen and the use case meant it didn't need to be thinner, so perhaps not a fair comparison).

GPS nav hasn't improved much since the 90s, but smartphone nav relying on multiple positioning methods has improved remarkably in even the past 5-6 years. It used to be neither a dedicated GPS device nor a smartphone could handle dense urban areas (where buildings cause satellite interference) if you were moving much faster than a pedestrian.

True, but also your phone utilizes the same GPS signals. It's all about the maps. Your Garmin typically had maps for the whole country preloaded, your phone typically downloads them on the fly. So in the boonies your phone knows exactly where it is in terms of longitude and latitude, but hasn't a clue where anything else is.

It's not just about maps. Unlike a dedicated GPS device, your phone uses A-GPS for faster geolocation. Before A-GPS, you often need to wait a couple minutes before the device has any idea of its location or the time. Offline maps are available for both phones and non-phones, and aren't an issue at all.

Is everyone here too old to remember MapQuest or CD based car navigation systems? Apparently. We had decent turn by turn in the 90s. In the US mapping data was heavily derived mostly from public Census TIGER data, which had flaws but was good enough.

Just recently I had to explain how that thing works on an old car. In the end, my advice was to just slap an Android phone/tablet on the dashboard and forget the stupid CD satnav :D

They also had a backseat DVD player with (shudder) analog video input. The quality was atrocious!

> 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?

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.

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.

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

what product was this?

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.

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.

Heck, this happened to me in the late 2010s...

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 .

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.

Anything in a car is a theft target. I've had a window smashed so someone could steal my $7 knockoff lightning cable.

In the UK, we were reminded to clean the inside of the windscreen to remove the telltale suction cup marks, so thieves wouldn't assume there was likely a satnav hidden in the glovebox or boot. (Windscreen = Windshield, Boot = Trunk)

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.

A lot of people have entirely different perceptions of risk than actual risk exposure.