graeme.blog

Tag: nokia

  • Firmware update for the Nokia N95

    Nokia have recently released a new firmware update for their N95 mobile phone. I have upgraded to this, and have to mark it as an update worth having. The main benefit is supposed to be improved memory handling, and thus battery life. I can’t say I’ve noticed this in particular, but I tend towards using it for one thing at a time, so I wouldn’t have seen much difference.

    However where it does score highly is in several little updates to the GUI, and to some of the applications. Search and the music player have been improved. In particular, the music player has had the podcast functionality merged into it more tightly, and the player will now remember a bookmark for each track you’ve listened to. This is very helpful with podcasts, as it means you can shut down the application, come back to it later, and if you play a track you had been listening to previously, it will remember where you were. I really missed this from the iPod, and in fact it is better, in that it seems to remember your place in multiple tracks. Also improved is the camera software, which definitely takes pictures much quicker than before. Finally, there are new applications as part of the Ovi rebranding, including a demo of the forthcoming new N-Gage platform

    This is the first time I’ve properly upgraded the firmware, and I have two points to make. Firstly, I just can’t see a way to either upgrade using Linux, nor to upgrade directly on the phone (I’ve certainly done the latter in the past on previous Nokia phones). This is just wrong, even if you’re not going to support Linux, at least let me use the Wi-fi you’ve put on there to allow me to run an upgrade directly. Secondly, back up your files. This WILL wipe your phone. The way to do this is to go to the Memory Card application, and to select the option to back up the Sim card to the memory card. Once you’ve done the upgrade, you can restore from this back up.

  • Sync to your Nokia N95 using Amarok

    I received an email today from a new reader, Mark, asking me if I had managed to sync music and podcasts to my N95 yet using Amarok on Ubuntu. This reminded me that I had been meaning to, but had been distracted by the podcasting application Nokia provide. So tonight I’ve had a look at it, and it is relatively straightforwards. This little guide assumes you’ve got Amarok installed and working in Kubuntu or Ubuntu.

    1) Open Amarok.

    2) Plug the USB cable into your Nokia N95, and select the Mass Storage mode on the phone. When connected, Ubuntu will ask you what you want to do, and choose to open the device in a new folder. Note the address of this folder (the mount point), it will be something like /media/name_of_your_memorycard .

    3) Amarok should open up the following dialog box to allow you to set up the N95 as a device:

    Manage devices in Amarok

    If it doesn’t, go to Settings > Configure Amarok > Media Devices. In both cases, now click on Add Device.

    4) Fill out the Add New Device dialog:

    Add New Device in Amarok

    Select the Generic Audio Player plugin, enter the name you want to call your N95, and the mount point for your device (that you saw in step 2). Click on OK, and OK again.

    5) In Amarok, you should now have something that looks like this in the top left:

    Connect to your media device in Amarok

    If you’ve connected an iPod before (Amarok is pretty good at managing iPods in Ubuntu too), you may need to change the device showing in the drop-down menu. Click on Connect, and it should pick up the N95 and show you the folders on your memory card:

    Nokia N95 connected to Amarok

    This is the view on the Devices tab in Amarok. Go to the Collection tab to search for music, and right-click on tracks or albums, and choose Transfer to Media Device to add them to your transfer queue. Podcasts take a little setting up, but once done, you have the option to automatically add new episodes to the transfer queue.

    When you’re done, click on Transfer, and then Disconnect when it’s finished. Once this is done, go to the icon for your phone on the desktop, right-click, and select Safely Remove. Your phone will been and show a message to let you know when you can remove the USB cable.

    Let me know if this little guide is useful to you. I think personally I am going to go back to managing my podcasts through Amarok, it is a good podcasting application, and a bit better to use than the built-in Podcasting app on the N95.

  • Channelflip shows on the Nokia N95

    When I heard about Wil Harris and his Channelflip network, I had to check them out. Wil is based here in Oxford, and looks like he is trying to replicate the sort of video podcast offerings that Revision 3 have, but from a UK point of view. Which is fine with me, nowt wrong with getting some more British accents into the podcast world.

    Channelflip has three offerings at present, Unwired, a tech show presented by Wil, Play:Digital, a gaming show, and Discus, a DVD review show.

    I did hit a slight issue trying to get subscribed to these shows on the Nokia N95, the issue being that none of the stated feeds worked for me. However I had a sudden flash of inspiration, and realised that I needed the iTunes feed, but needed to open it without the itpc protocol that the URLs for those feeds use. So I copied those, put http at the start instead, and they all worked for me in the Nokia Video player app. If you want to do this yourself, the links are:

    Unwired: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Unwired-iTunes
    Play:Digital: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Playdigital-iTunes
    Discus: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Discus-iTunes

  • Sync Gmail Contacts with Kontact

    So I’m on a quest to get, well, everything on everything. I want everything in sync. Now that’s quite a project, so I’m taking little steps. What I’ve done today is to get my Gmail contacts to sync with my desktop contacts app, Kontact (in Kubuntu). I do all my email in Gmail, so it makes sense to me that I have that as the base point. I thought that if I could get my contacts onto the desktop, then I’ve got a place to then figure out how to get them onto my N95 later on.

    What I used was a rather nifty piece of software called GCALDaemon. What this is designed to do is to sync Google Contacts and Google Calendars to, well, pretty much most things you can think of. And it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (as it’s Java-based). Follow the detailed instructions, and then you can have both sync’d. I’ve got it working nicely fairly quickly. The only thing I can’t do yet, rather embarrassingly, is get the Daemon itself to run automatically on login. I’m going to hassle someone to help me out with this.

    One gotcha is to make sure you are running Java 1.5 or higher as your default Java JRE, I missed this first time round.

    And I found this thanks to the lovely people at Lifehacker.

  • Getting Skype on the Nokia N95 with Fring

    I’m starting to experiment a bit more with what my Nokia N95 can do. I had installed Fring on my old phone a while back, but not really used it too much out of worries about cost. Fring is an instant messaging application for mobiles, which allows you to use MSN, GTalk, and most usefully of all, Skype on your mobile. Now over 3G, as I say, I was worried about cost, and also for Skype I found the quality a bit lacking. However as I can use a wifi connection on the N95, it comes into it’s own a bit more. I spend the majority of my time at home or at work, in range of a connection, so most of the time I can have it turned on, which is how you want to run it. And also on the bus into London from Oxford (which I seem to end up on about once a month on average), which I’m looking forwards to trying out. Nice little moneysaver potentially.

    Quite easy to set up, and it picked up all my contacts from the account I had before. I was also pleased to see it now has twitter, so I can update my status on that too. Impressed with it thus far. And in general with the N95, for one I was encouraged to see that for my normal usage of a phone (i.e. not that much in terms of phone calls, but the odd bit of messing about here and there) the battery life is more respectable that I thought. One charge in two days, and I have been messing about with it a lot. I do get the impression it drains faster on wifi, and I haven’t starting using it as a media player yet (need to get a decent memory card first). So far, glad I made the switch from the 6300.

    Related Posts:
    Review of the Skype Mobile Beta on the Nokia N95
    Skype Beta for Nokia N95 now available

  • Moving to a new phone – Nokia N95

    Well I’ve been away for a week in New York, which was rather exciting and relaxing. Upon my return to work, I was somewhat delighted to find my new phone had arrived. I’m now the proud owner of a Nokia N95. So naturally I’m going to be testing out just what I can do with it and Linux. Baby steps tonight, I’ve managed to copy over a few files manually, just so I could check that video Drum n’ Bass podcasts work okay on it. I’ve just been listening and watching the Hospital Records video podcast #3 on it, which looks and sounds great, especially with headphones on. Definitely happy with how the N95 handles such things.

    However the challenge is now to get it really working for me as best I can. I want to replace my iPod with it, so I need to see if I can get it to sync with Amarok like my iPod nano does. I’d like to get a reasonable level of contact management working, better than I have managed with the 6300 so far. And I would like to see what else I can do with it. Of course I’ll be tracking my progress on here too.

    What I also hope to do though, is to try these things out on a few Nokia models, so I’ll hang onto the 6300, and may try and revive my previous phone as well. I’ve got a little collection now, so it makes sense to try a few things out on them, and see if I can broaden my knowledge a little further.

  • Managing your Nokia 6300 using Wammu

    I’ve written before about connecting to a Nokia 6300 using Gnokii. John Dickson mentioned in the comments about using Wammu, and that he’d found it worked in part (but that also he’d written something in Java that did the backup side better). So I thought I’d give Wammu a try first, then John’s program another time.

    Under Ubuntu or Kubuntu, having followed the instructions in my previous article for installing Gnokii, I simply installed wammu via the adept package manager. This installed it under Utilities. Upon running, it pointed out there were no records for any phone, and asked if I wanted to search for one. This is a good start. So I hooked up my Nokia 6300 via USB, and set it into Nokia mode. I then let it perform the search, and after about a minute it showed that it had found one phone. It looks to me like it used the same settings I had for Gnokii. Now I don’t know if it used the connection I’d set before, or if it had figured that out for itself. I’d be interested to know if it is self-configuring like that, so I might try it out on another computer when I get chance.

    Once connected, it is a fairly basic program. It reads the address book to an extent, but can only see the name and the phone number (I am after other information as well ideally). It can’t see the calendar or SMS messages, but it can read the phone log. It looks like I could potentially use it to send SMS from the computer, but I’m not so bothered about that. However it does seem to do a basic backup of what it can see fine.

    So I’m not completely happy with it so far, but it does work to some extent, and if it is figuring the connection out for itself, then it is at least a lot easier than what I’ve done before. So a casual thumbs up for Wammu thus far.

  • Applications I’m missing at the moment

    I was just thinking about the applications that I don’t have, that I would like. So I thought I’d write a quick list, explain them, and then revisit them in a few months time to see if they exist. I was going to put SMS notifications for Google Mail for my phone on there, but a quick check just now revealed they have added that since I last checked, so I’m one up for the evening already!

    • Firefox Mobile – I have to admit, I don’t mind Mobile Opera. However it does seem a bit basic, and I’m not that keen to have to pay for a browser with more features. I’d like to use what I’m so used to using on my computer, and ideally to be able to extend it to do many other things.
    • Decent Nokia software for Linux – I’m lazy, I just want to plug it in, and it to do all that it does in Windows, as that is a rather nice little suite of software. One day.
    • A proper movie file browser and player for Ubuntu – What I want is a self-updating catalog of all my movie files, thumbnails (in a perfect world I’d just hover over the thumbnail for a couple of seconds, and it would start playing in the thumbnail itself, so I could identify it if it wasn’t clear), and proper indexing and searching. I’d love something for video that was the equivalent of Amarok for audio. Kaffeine is almost it, but the index/search side lets it down a bit. This may be down to my knowledge of it though.
    • A way of syncing contacts between Google Mail and my phone – Again, I want an easy life, and I just want them all to keep up to date, rather than having to maintain two lists.
    • An open-source program that edits CSS in a WYSIWYG style – I’ve heard tell that this sort of functionality is creeping into Dreamweaver now. Great, I’d like it for free. Ideally in a way that would plug into Eclipse as well.
    • Something that manages podcasts perfectly – I’ve never found this since I started listening to podcasts. It’s always felt that it’s been tacked onto music programs such as iTunes. Amarok does a better job than most, but it still feels like hard work some times. I’m going to think about this more, try and describe what I’d want.

    Well that should do me for starters. How about you, what applications do you want that you don’t have yet?

  • Linking your Nokia 6300 mobile phone to Ubuntu

    So I did some further investigation tonight into getting my Nokia 6300 working under Ubuntu, with very positive results. What I tracked down was a program called Gnokii. It is a project to provide connectivity to Nokia phones that has been going since at least 2001, so they’ve got quite a bit of collective experience. And it has got me started.

    First of all, I installed the software. It was available as a program to install, but I went with the trusty:

    sudo apt-get install gnokii

    Next I had to configure the connection. The documentation on the site is a little dusty, and does deal with a lot of different options depending on the phone, so I’m going to concentrate on my model, the 6300. First connect the phone using the usb cable, and select the Nokia mode on the phone when asked. You then need to edit the config file by hand (I tried setting it within the program itself, but it wouldn’t allow me):

    sudo cp /etc/gnokiirc /etc/gnokiirc.OLD
    sudo vi /etc/gnokiirc

    And you will get a very well commented config file. If you are using a different phone, or connecting through another means such as Bluetooth, have a read through the file, there are good pointers for the changes you need to make. For the Nokia 6630, delete the contents (you’ve already backed it up) and use the following:

    [global]
    port = /dev/ttyACM0
    model = AT
    initlength = default
    connection = serial
    use_locking = yes
    serial_baudrate = 19200
    smsc_timeout = 10
    [gnokiid]
    bindir = /usr/sbin/
    [connect_script]
    TELEPHONE = 12345678
    [disconnect_script]
    [logging]
    debug = off
    rlpdebug = off
    xdebug = off

    and save the file. You may well prefer to comment out the port and model in the existing file, and then just uncomment the two lines I’ve set at the start of this file.

    Now to test the connection:

    sudo gnokii --identify

    If this has worked, it will show a small amount of information about the phone, the make, model, EMEI number and revision number. If you’ve got this, you’re ready to go. If not, check the config file, or look up on the Gnokii site for further help.

    You can know run Gnokii from the applications menu (it should be under utilities). You will be able to view and edit basic details about your contacts, back them up, and send SMS from the computer via the phone. There is also an option for Calendar entries, but I can’t get this working yet. It may be down to me using the model = AT option, which I think is more limited in what it can do. I’ll certainly keep investigating to see if I can solve it.

  • Ubuntu and the Nokia 6300 mobile phone

    I’ve just received my almost annual upgrade mobile phone, a Nokia 6300. Now with my previous phone (Nokia 6230), one of the last things that has had me booting back into Windows has been doing anything with the phone. The Nokia Windows software is quite nice, you can edit contacts, backup data, browse files, and install Java apps. And it was by far the best way of moving from one phone to another, I just had to backup the old phone, then restore the data to the new phone. Took everything off both the memory card and sim card, and put most of it onto the new one (apart from some games I’d bought, which was slightly annoying).

    However even though I could connect the phone to my computer using a USB cable, under Ubuntu it wouldn’t do anything with it at all. This has changed with the Nokia 6300 though. It has a proper mini-USB connector, and once hooked up, the phone asks if I want to use it in Nokia Software mode (i.e. for Windows) or in data mode. The latter means that my memory card in the phone becomes available as if it were a standard flash memory drive. Which I like a lot. I can now copy pictures off and upload them to Flickr using digikam (I think that comes as standard with Kubuntu). I can add music and images as I need. I would still love to be able to sync contacts, calendars and to-dos, but it is a defnite improvement. I’d ideally like Nokia to provide that for me too, but I think I’ll start digging and see if anyone is doing anything on Sourceforge and the like that could help me. If you’ve seen anything that might be useful, please let me know.