SLAM - Social Location Annotation Mobile

[Rocco Augusto]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.msslam.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.msslam.com/</a><br /><br /></div>"<i>Slam is a Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group research project, developed in conjunction with the Microsoft Photo and Imaging eXperience (PIX) team. It is a mobile device-based application that enables lightweight, group-centric real-time communication, location awareness and photo-sharing. The core concept behind Slam is a “Slam”, a group of people with whom you can exchange messages and photos. When you send a message in Slam, it is automatically sent to everyone in the group to which you sent it. For smartphone users that have the Slam client installed, their phone will buzz and they will have an indication on their phone’s home screen that there is a new message. For SMS users, they will receive the message as an SMS from the Slam server. Like smartphone users, SMS users can be members of multiple slam groups. SMS users will send / receive messages to a different phone number for each slam group they a member of.</i>"<br /><br /><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/augusto-20060920-slam.gif" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/><br /><br />I was really looking forward to trying this program out but unfortunately it does not appear that I will be able to do so anytime soon. The problem with SLAM is that it needs to be installed directly to your phone. Through the website you enter in your mobile phone number and cellular carrier and you receive a SMS with a download location. Here is the fun part, the program is over 2MB in size which you have to download to your phone!<br /><br />I have two questions for the people at Microsoft that created this program. Question one, do they know how long it would take to download over 2MB worth of data on a GPRS or EDGE connection? Question two, who do you actually know that can afford 2MB of free space on their handset? Even after a fresh install I'm left with only 9MB of free space on my Cingular 2125 and even less than that on my older WM2003 devices. I'm starting to think that no one over there actually uses a Windows Mobile Smartphone. :(

[Mike Temporale]

2MB :!: Wow. between that and .Net CF2 and you're free space is all gone. :cry:

I would like to try this out, but there are no Canadian carriers listed. They say it accepts Canada and US based phone numbers, but it doesn't list any Canadian carriers. :?

[Rocco Augusto]

2MB :!: Wow. between that and .Net CF2 and you're free space is all gone. :cry:

I would like to try this out, but there are no Canadian carriers listed. They say it accepts Canada and US based phone numbers, but it doesn't list any Canadian carriers. :?

not only that, you have to download it to your phone and if i remember correctly, data is REALLY expensive in canada :(

[Mike Temporale]

not only that, you have to download it to your phone and if i remember correctly, data is REALLY expensive in canada :(

Yup. Thankfully, I have an unlimited data plan. :D

[ScottCounts]

I work on slam and wanted to point you to the new installer which is under 750k - you can find it at www.msslam.com/slam.cab. Turns out we had forgotten to enable compression for the latest build of the cab. That of course doesn't change the footprint once installed, but alleviates the large download issue a bit. Slam is a pretty complex app with lots of graphics (for a phone, anyway), so it is a little large. It could be smaller if we broke it out into separate packages for difference devices/OSs (i.e., we need things for some configurations that we don't need for others), but for now we're going with the single cab. Also, Slam should work just fine when installed to a storage card.

Re: Canadian providers. We can't support international SMS afterall, so we should take that reference down from the site. You can, however, just grab the installer from the above and install that way.

Thanks for checking out Slam. Oh, btw, yes, we do actually use windows mobile devices and are aware of the issues with building complex apps in limited resource environments. :)

[Mike Temporale]

Hi Scott, Thanks for the update!

Re: Canadian providers. We can't support international SMS afterall, so we should take that reference down from the site. You can, however, just grab the installer from the above and install that way.

Cool, thanks for the link. Without that it's pretty hard to give it a try (since the link isn't displayed on the site anywhere) :)

btw, yes, we do actually use windows mobile devices and are aware of the issues with building complex apps in limited resource environments. :)

Yeah, that's just us blowing off some steam. Obviously you would be using WinMo devices. It can be frustrating at times, since the devices actually have a fair amount of memory, it's just used up by things that you have no control over. :?