iPhone Time

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:21:00 GMT

I really thing I should get some credit for this: I managed to wait until March 2008 to buy myself an iPhone. I didn’t rush out and wait in line on the day they shipped. I didn’t buy myself one when the price fell. I even bought my wife one first, in December for our anniversary. Admittedly, I was in a car on the way to the nearest Apple store when Steve first announced the iPhone last January, before he bothered to mention that it wouldn’t ship for 6 months, but it’d be totally unfair to count that against me.

More seriously, it took me quite a while to convince myself that it was time to retire my trusty Nokia E61. The E61 served me well for almost 2 years, but it was time to swap. In theory the two phones are fairly similar–fairly large screens, WiFi, EDGE (the E61 does 3G in Europe, which doesn’t help me much here), and Safari-ish browsers. In reality, they’re a wonderful demonstration of why feature checklists are worthless. Here are the things that I care about most:

  1. The iPhone is hands-down better for reading and writing email via Gmail. The native IMAP client is good enough, and the iPhone version of the Gmail web interface is vastly better then the version that we feed to the E61, even though they’re running very similar WebKit-based browsers. The E61’s keyboard is better, but the HTML edit box in Gmail’s mobile web interface is so bad that it cancels out the keyboard advantage.
  2. The browser is better. It’s faster, it doesn’t crash on every third Amazon page that I try to load, and the touchscreen scrolling is better than the joystick on the E61.
  3. It’s actually usable as a music and video player. In theory, the E61 can play movies and music, but (1) there’s no easy way to copy content onto it (unlike the N-series phones, it doesn’t come with an iTunes plugin), (2) out-of-the-box it only supports wacko video codecs, and (3) the UI’s bad.
  4. It’s easier to charge. My E61 has never charged right; swapping batteries and chargers never made a big difference. The iPhone, on the other hand, uses a semi-standard connector and charges via USB. It’s easy to find iPod cables and USB jacks, but finding a spare Nokia charging cable is tough, at least around here.
  5. I’m never, ever going to have to see Nokia’s stupid “which network connection do you want to use?” dialog box again. For some reason, Nokia decided that asking the user before letting apps use the network every single time was a good move. It’s smart enough to know which networks are available, and which ones I’ve configured it to use, but it’ll still show me a list with one or two choices every time. Bleh.
  6. The on-screen phone keypad includes letters. It’s a stupid thing, but the E61 doesn’t give you an easy way to dial vanity phone numbers, because there’s no way to tell which numbers map to which letters. I mean, can you tell me off the top of your head which numbers you need to press to dial ‘1-800-884-SOIL’?

The E61 wins a few points, though:

  1. It comes with a SIP client that’s actually be useful at home for me.
  2. It’s open, and you can install useful software.
  3. The Nokia podcast client does a great job of copying new episodes of Escape Pod for me on the fly.
  4. It’s louder. That makes it harder to miss calls.

SMS is kind of a push between the two; the E61’s ringer is louder and it has a better keyboard, but it takes way too many button presses to do anything.

So, for now I’m using the iPhone. Yeah, I could have waited for the 3G iPhone or Android, whenever they appear, and I may swap for one (or both?) of them when they’re available. From everything that I’ve seen, Android’s programming model will be vastly better than the iPhone SDK, at least for the weird types of things that I care about, but it’s not shipping yet.

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Nokia E61 Firmware Upgrade

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:19:24 GMT

I bit the bullet this morning and upgraded my E61 to the new firmware release that’s been floating around. I was planning on putting it off until I got back home from California, but there was kind of an E61 upgrade party going on in the office (E61s are kind of popular at Google), and the guy before me didn’t have any problems, so I went ahead and bit the bullet. It took 20 minutes or so, but everything seems to work fine.

The process was simple:

  1. Run Tools/Memory and select ‘Backup phone mem.’ to back up everything to your flash card.
  2. Run the Windows-based Nokia firmware upgrader.
  3. Run Tools/Memory and restore your backup.

The only real change that I’ve seen is that my phone’s browser doesn’t lock up with a specific HTTPS site that I use anymore. Other then that, everything seems the same, including the inane behavior with IMAP IDLE servers. Unlike firmware 1.x, though, it doesn’t seem to hang the messaging app when it loses track of the IMAP session, so SMS still seems to work.

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Python for Nokia S60 3rd Edition

Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 07 Jul 2006 16:43:31 GMT

It looks like Python for Nokia S60 3rd edition phones (like my E61) is now available. You can download it from SourceForge.

I’d really rather see Ruby on my phone, but Python will work. I’ll download and install it after I finish getting Typo 3.99.2 out.

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Charging the Nokia E61

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 22 Jun 2006 03:41:31 GMT

I’m mostly happy with my new Nokia E61, but there are 2 or 3 things about it that have been annoying the heck out of me. The most serious one is power-related: it’s been a royal pain in the neck to charge the phone. When I plug the phone into the charger, it’ll charge for a little while–30 seconds to 10 minutes–and then beep and say “Not charging.” If I unplug and replug the charger, then it’ll charge for a little while longer, but I have to keep doing it over and over again to get a full charge. This isn’t exactly an enjoyable and productive way to spend my days.

Obviously, it isn’t supposed to work this way. From doing a bit of digging online, it looks like I’m not alone with this problem. The general issue seems to be the charger–some third-party chargers (or even older Nokia chargers) don’t put out enough voltage to charge the phone. The phone sees the voltage as too low, so it aborts with the “not charging” message. I can see why this happens with the cheap third-party car charger that came with my phone, but it’s not at all clear why Nokia’s own wall charger does it. Admittedly, the one that came in the box with the phone is a UK model, but it’s supposed to take 100-240V. I just doesn’t quite manage to work right. There’s a slim chance that the vendor that sold me the E61 swapped out an older charger, but that’s kind of weird.

In an effort to avoid having to return the phone, I picked up a Nokia AC-3U charger from CompUSA on the way home today. The AC-3U is the travel charger that Nokia lists on their website for the E61. It uses the right connector for the phone (unlike the charger that came with the phone–it needs an adapter), and it’s quite a bit smaller then the original charger, too.

I plugged it in and the phone charged for about a half hour before “not charging” showed up. That’s a new record, but more importantly, it claimed to be fully charged at that point. So, most likely, the AC-3U does the trick. I’ll give it another shot tomorrow once it’s drained down a bit, but I think it’ll be okay.

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KaBlog Test

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:48:00 GMT

This is just a quick test–does the open-source version of KABLOG work with the E61 and Typo?

Answer: mostly. It posted okay, but died in the middle, presumably because I received a phone call and the GPRS service was disconnected during the call. I can’t add keywords (hence no tags in Typo) and I can’t disable trackbacks (which are too spammy to be useful anymore). But I’m able to post, which is a step in the right direction.

Does anyone have any suggestions on blog editing software for the Nokia E61, or any Series 60 third edition phone?

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Nokia E61 HTTP User Agent

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:36:25 GMT

For whatever it’s worth, the built-in web browser in my Nokia E61 uses this user-agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0

I knew that the browser is derived from Apple’s open-source webkit tree, but I didn’t expect it to call itself Safari in the user-agent header.

For what it’s worth, here’s the most recent Safari build that I’ve seen in my logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.3

Given the version numbers, it doesn’t look like Nokia’s lagging very far behind Apple right now.

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Nokia E61 First Impressions

Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 17 Jun 2006 05:10:08 GMT

I love FedEx–they somehow managed to deliver my new Nokia E61 today instead of Monday, so I have the whole weekend to play with it.

A few first impressions:

  1. It’s much more solid then it appears on the website. It has a metal case, and everything about it feels well-made.
  2. The screen is wonderful. It’s big, bright, and easy to read. While doesn’t have as many pixels as some of the other models in Nokia’s latest lineup, I have nothing to complain about. The text fonts for the browser and office apps are small enough that it’ll fit a lot of text on the screen.
  3. It seems to work fine with Asterisk. I was able to make and receive a few VoIP phone calls over WiFi without any problems.
  4. The built-in web browser works well enough. I was able to check gmail and look up a few directions without a problem. Strangely, the only site that hasn’t worked for me is http://www.google.com. I think Google’s trying to feed the phone a WAP page or something, while the phone is expecting HTML. It shouldn’t be hard to fix.
  5. Google Maps for Mobile phones works great. That’s half of the reason that I wanted a new phone :-).
  6. The audio quality is better then my old T616.
  7. The keyboard is good. I’m not used to the layout yet, and it’s weird having to hit a shift key to get numbers, but it’s better then Graffiti.
  8. I’ve had some weird problems when copying large files using the USB cable. For some reason, the transfer locks up from time to time. Unplugging the cable solves the problem without rebooting either end, but it’s annoying. I should probably find a USB-to-SD adapter; it’ll be faster.

I’ll post more later, once I’ve had a chance to really break it in.

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New phone time

Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:23:36 GMT

Long-time readers here know that I’m prone to getting all excited about getting a new cell phone, and then never quite pulling the trigger to buy one. My current phone is a Sony-Ericsson T616 from early 2004. I came close to buying the Treo 650 and waited for most of a year for the Nokia N91 to ship in the US. Then, when the Nokia E70 was announced, I stopped waiting for the N91 and started waiting for the E70.

The E70 just started shipping in Europe. It looks like a nice phone. The problem with the European E70 (and the N91 that’s finally shipping in the US) is that it doesn’t support GSM at 850 MHz, so it’s mostly useless on Cingular’s network. And it’s increasing looking like Cingular is the only US GSM provider with a decent data network. So, unless a US-specific 850 MHz version of the E70 starts shipping, it just isn’t going to work for me.

Right now, I’m carrying too many gadgets around–I have my phone, an iPod, a Palm TX, and (unfortunately) a 2-way Pager for work. I’d really like to roll the Palm and the phone into a single device, but I can’t cope with PalmOS 5 anymore. Similarly, I can’t cope with mobile versions of Windows–I tried it for a month with the Motorola MPX200, and it just didn’t work for me.

Finally, I’ve come to the conclusion, again, that I can’t cope with non-keyboard input methods. I don’t like T9, Graffiti, or any of the alternate input methods that I’ve tried on the Palm. If I’m going to enter text into a pocket-sized device, then it’s going to have to have a keyboard. I’ve found that the pain of writing with the Palm keeps me from using it, and that makes it mostly useless. And that leads to me missing appointments and forgetting tasks, and I can’t cope with either.

So, basically, I want a phone with a QWERTY keyboard that doesn’t run Windows or PalmOS, and works with 850 MHz GSM. I believe there are two phones on the market that fit that description–the Nokia 9300 and the Nokia E61. I’ve played with the 9300 before, and it’s just too slow for me–loading web pages crawls while it’s slow little CPU renders pages.

The E61, on the other hand, has almost the same features as the E70 that I wanted, except it’s Blackberry-shaped and doesn’t have a camera. It does have everything else, though, including 802.11 and a native SIP client that supposedly people have been able to get working with Asterisk. Someone at work just bought one off of eBay and is really happy with it.

So, after over 2 years, I finally ordered a new phone. My E61 should be here on Monday. I’m still trying to sort out Cingular’s data plan options, but I should have that dealt with by the end of the day today, and then I’ll be set. I’ll be able to drop the Palm and T616 out of my life, and probably be able to get by with a few songs on the E61 most of the time–it’ll hold a 2 GB flash card, and there’s a sync plugin for iTunes, so it’ll work with almost everything but iTMS songs. I’ll still be stuck with the pager, but that’s a whole other story for an other day.

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