Two days in and we've had 19 devices borrowed and used by participants. Its been a bitterly cold weekend – not ideal weather conditions for an outdoor tech trial – but in some ways good in itself as we've really had to contend with the daily reality of using pervasive mobile devices in the real world.
Having had to postpone the arrival of the P800 mobile phone version due to a bug in its XMLRPC library, we are now hoping that a recently provided fix will mean its trial debut mid-week. Meanwhile the iPAQs have taken the brunt of the testing and have been put through their paces. As expected we've noted a number of bugs and issues, as well as hearing wish list functionality from trial participants that we've already planned in, but had to leave out of this prototype version. A quick bug fix has much improved the speed of the software on the iPAQ, and we hope to resolve further bugs and issues in the software over the next week.
Our mesh has also had its tribulations, as three network outages dropped the number of active nodes and reduced the extent of wifi coverage. Hopefully we will manage to reconnect these nodes to each other during the week – allowing trial participants to spend more time out in the freezing cold!
Posted by Giles Lane at December 8, 2003 02:20 AM