All Beta'd Out

This has been a tough week for trying new stuff in my ample free time. The things this week that drove me insane:

Helio. I should have waited for a little while. I don't think that you can do an evaluation of the service right now. The software to connect to the PC isn't available yet and I don't think they intend to lock the handset down as much as it currently is locked down. Please let me put Opera Mini on the phone. Cool? Again, love the phone, love the UI. Not much else to say at this point.

Aimpages. I heard they went beta earlier this week and signed up. I tried to edit my template but it was really screwed up. Painfully screwed up. I tried it on Firefox, IE, Safari and Camino. Each time I couldn't get it to work. I sat down with one of our developers and watched him go through the process and realized that when I had signed up my base template had been improperly initialized and there was no framework to add the Ajax widgets. Grrr. I deleted my page and started over and it was working. Well sort of. But its a start. Pretty wacky. Here is a start for my page.

YouTube Mobile Video Upload. I deserve what I get on this one. Video off the phone, over the air to a web service is a leap of faith. Is my file to big? Will the MMS gateway on my side barf? Will their handler work on the other end? Will the specific flavor of encoding on my phone work? I knew better going into this. I tried to send a big file from my P910 through the MMSC for Tmobile. Nope. Too Big. I sent it over the Internet Gateway. No Problem. YouTube barfed on it. I sent a smaller file over MMSC. No Dice. Smaller file over Internet. YouTube barfed. I sent a smaller file over MMS from Helio. No error message and no video. I can't even figure out what happened to that one. I am going to try some other carrier gateways like Verizon or Sprint MMS which I believe will actually work. User Created Video is going to be big. But there is a long way to go before it is a good consumer experience.

All in all it was a bit of a frustrating week but on the plus side, the amount of innovation that is happening everywhere right now is breathtaking. I expect the three above mentioned services will all get their kinks out and I suspect that each of them will be successful in the long run. I am going to take a break from trying new things out next week. One thing that occurred to me though is that it would be really cool to see a side by side comparison of Helio and Ampd. Of Myspace, Aimpages, and Pages.google.com. Of all the video hosting sites and how they handle mobile video upload. Someone? I am off next week.