Danny's Weblog
Mobile phones and their software
I have been quite interested in the latest advances in mobile phones, but I still use a basic model because my impression is that the multimedia etc features are poorly standardized: if you try to send even a .jpg to your buddy, it will not be supported by your phone, your network, his network, his phone, or software.
Additionally, the little convenience features are never spelled out, and on a device with such a lousy user interface the convenience aspects are crucial. For instance, my current phone has a big *inconvenience* feature: if you hold the backspace key down for too long (perhaps a second!) it deletes the entire SMS message you've been keying in! What maroon thought of that?
Anyway, I know a girl who has a Nokia 3200, an early camera phone, and tried to charm her by figuring out some of the features. I had previously tried to download Nokia sw and run into some peculiar provisions on the Nokia websites. In particular they required you to register your phone in order to make a download. Wtf?
Seemingly they have changed their policy. The following file was easy to find and download. It works for umpteen models (some restrictions on the features of course for different phones) for W2K and WXP.
[http://nds2.nokia.com/files/support/global/phones/software/Nokia_PC_Suite_641_] en.exe
I was also able to download the manual as a .pdf; I don't have the link handy.
I had no problems it all making it work under W2K with the infrared port though it's dog-slow; also, when I load new sw that uses my infrared port it tends to kill previous sw which was trying to use that port, so I'm thinking doomily about my Palm IR link.
The interface is a little strange. I was able to ctrl-a select all the files in a folder, but then when I tried to copy/paste them or drag them nothing happened. it turns out that you need to use not Nokia's nifty application file windows, but look under "My computer" for the Nokia device. (Make sure you look for the actual device, not some sort of sync folder arrangement which I haven't figured out yet: if the phone is disconnected, the actual device disappears from My Computer.)
Once you've figured out the general arrangment of the sw, there are a ton of little convenience features. For example, as it knows what kind of phone you're going to send to, it automagically picks the right file format. So you can click on "portrait" or "wallpaper" and it immediately picks the right pixel dimensions for your phone.
It also has the feature of previewing a sound as it will be played on the phone, which was quite helpful. (For some reason the quality of a paid music download was a lot better than one I made myself, but I'm not sure if that's a real issue.)
On the other hand, there were some worrying remarks in the manual about issues that did not concern me too much just yet. For instance, they recommend using a special data cable (for higher transfer speed) but for some reason it needs a special driver install, and the install procedure seemed to have a million known problems.
Likewise, I was not at all happy with the setup for using the phone as a modem. I did not play with that at all as it sounded as though you could easily mess up the basic connection.
Another problem area is transferring multimedia between phones. As I said above, the compatibility issues are still there; you need to have another compatible phone to check out multimedia setup, but most people don't have that or are trying to set up two phones at once. I left that alone, even though the girl would really like that.
Anyway, overall I was quite impressed. The 3200 is an early model, too, with few features: no Bluetooth, MP3, memory cards, and very little memory (2 MB, I think). Presumably more recent models like the N-Gage will have additional convenience features. But I was really quite charmed with the simple feature of being able to easily associate a snapshot with a caller.
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