Tech update
After giving up on my current phone, went out and picked up the Sony Ericsson T630. The new phone feels very plasticky and the menu is terrible. But, I managed to get online in less then a min after I opened the box, bluetooth works great and my laptop, palm and phone are talking to each other amazingly well. I really miss the 6600’s design and the menu system. I didn’t think I’ll actually get back to a Sony Ericsson phone. I guess you just win some and lose some. Oh well.
Atleast the good news is that, I will be able to check mail and blog again from the forests.
I also moved to a standalone RSS aggregator called straw from LJ. In the forests, online time is a premium. so now I should be able to download all the feeds and read them later in my room. I’d love to use Bloglines, but that will need me to be online all the time. straw is pretty good and has a outlook like interface. brad, if you are reading this, do add support for categories of posts on LJ (with a possible different page and RSS feed for each of them). I really can use that feature 🙂
I now have a big collection of audio books on my palm. They should come handy during my long(4 hour) drives to the forests and back.
Aaarggh! I spent the weekend trying to get my 6600 to talk to my Linux laptop. I only managed to ping the 6600 from the laptop. Nothing else worked. I am able to OBEX between the two. But not tcp/ip. Sucks.
TCP/IP does not even work in windows ( with the valid drivers ) and in my palm. That’s why I decided to give up on this phone.
heh
Connectivity wise, nothing beats the SE.. I wish they had a decent UI like Nokias … and yeah, if it was easy to connect via linux with the N6600* series, i’d go for it :/ But I’ll stick to my SE K700i for now. Bluetooth works great with Linux – with gnome-bluetooth, gnome-obex-send and obex-server..
http://fma.sourceforge.net/index2.htm
Float’s Mobile Agent. (Buggy) windows program for SE phones. Amongst other things, it lets you remote-control your box via your phone… winamp, movie-players, powerpoint, etc.
Kinda cool. Works for the T610 feature-set, so it should work with the T630.
What do you do with the palm?
Re: heh
I still think messaging on the SE has a far superior UI. And excellent Bluetooth support. Except, SEs have a tendency to die the first time they meet the floor, which is why I no longer have one.
Re: heh
SEs are cheap Sony’fied Ericsson devices. These days, for many people, “Sony” means “cheap, not exceptionally good, fragile, built to break”. Sadly, that’s what these phones do represent.
Classic example on the T6xx phones – slide the cover off the back? Try it on a Nokia – it takes some doing. Try it on a SE? Comes right off, no resistance, and what you have in tehhand is a flimsy piece of plastic.
The UI doesnt really matter to me, as long as
1. I can hit the down arrow (or joystick), hit the first alphabet of the name I am looking for, and jump there
2. One button click to read a received message
3. One button answer of an incoming call
4. Speed-dial.
Most other functionality would be “off-phone”, e.g. bluetooth connection to GPRS.
For anything else, the SE’s UI is pathetic – designed to get in the way, not work for you. Nokia has that one down pat – hard to beat.
Having said all that, I bought an SE T630 as well, two days ago. I would have bought a Nokia if Nokia had something to offer, but apart from the (so far unreleaed) 6021, there isn’t a single model in Nokia’s catalog that makes sense to me.
BT and GPRS work like a charm on my new phone (which replaces a Nokia 6310i), and apart from receiving and making calls/sms, that is really all I care about – the rest of the functionality comes from my PDA or notebook.
Re: heh
Try these for comparison (I’m using SE T68i vs N 6600):
N: Sent Items is a separate folder from Receipts. There is no way to correlate receipts to sent messages, except by date, which is always off by half an hour.
SE: Sent folder shows a flag against each message, indicating pending, delivered or failed. This is updated live when a receipt is received.
N: In T9, you press # to choose the next selection. The Close button then becomes Previous. If you accidentally press space and realise T9 didn’t give you the word you wanted, so press Left and Previous,… oops. Phone’s frozen for several seconds as message is saved to Drafts.
SE: In T9, word options appear as a popup floating over the selected word. Use Next (forget which key, not #, maybe 0), Up or Down to make your choice, and press Space or Right to continue typing. The display is always very clear on what mode is active.
Having modal interfaces is bad enough. Having modal interfaces without sufficient feedback in the display is downright evil.
N: In T9, enter a word that is not in the dictionary (by using a few letters at a time and Right key), and the word gets instantly added to the dictionary, at the top of the stack. I DID NOT ASK FOR IT TO BE ADDED. Now every time I type ‘is’, my phone inserts ‘gs’. I can’t remove it. It’ll go away automatically after a few months, or it’ll swap positions with another word using the same keys. I end up with a new word every few days that has taken over a very common word. This is annoying as hell because I can no longer type without seeing. Worse, I have to look carefully at each word before moving on.
SE: No such nonsense. Words are added only when I ask for it, and always in the second place in the stack.
N: Press * to popup the character palette. The cursor always starts in the top left corner, so you can move right or down, but not left or up (actually you can, since it wraps, but to uncommon characters, and it’s not intuitive). Further, if you are in a URL field when you bring up the palette, the order of the characters changes to bring the common ones closer to the top. This again breaks sight-less typing.
SE: The cursor starts in the middle of the palette. You have five characters within one move away, and nine within two. This covers pretty much all the common characters. Further, if you selected one of “([< " the last time, the cursor now starts over one of ")]>“. Unlike Nokia’s method, this is actually intuitive because I can remember that I’m closing a bracket, but not that I’m in a special URL field.
I can’t stand SE phones anymore, but like it or not, SE’s keypad messaging UI is far superior to anything Nokia has.
Re: heh
Actually, if you look at, what you are describing is the SMS system, which *is* better designed than Nokia’s. But I have overall issues with the phone – including that the “Cancel” button…doesn’t! 🙁
I also hate the feel of the keys.
But I love the fact that this cheap phone (5K is what I paid for it) has the features I need, and doesn’t make me pay for stuff I don’t want (because my PDA does a much better job of it).
It will do until Nokia gets us something usable.
Re: heh
Or we just wait for apple to come out with phones. That’s one company that I’ll trust 🙂
Sorry. No idea. Google is your friend.
Anjana’s Friend!
Hi, I’m Jonna. Anjana’s very good friend in Bangalore. I met her mom on Friday and she told me that you were offered a job by Carnival as Corp Shipboard Trainer. I was just wondering if you had the time to talk to me about it as I’m considering it as well!!!
Cheers
Jonna
jo.smile@gmail.com
Re: Anjana’s Friend!
Carnival ? Corp Shipboard Trainer ? Are you sure you got the right person? 🙂
I am a ex-techie working as a naturalist now.