New Phone
Today my new mobile phone, a cute little Sony Ericsson K700i, arrived. This is a marvel of technology which Just Works and Does The Right Thing from beginning to end.
First I had to move my address book from old phone (a T68i). This isn't as easy as just it used to be, when one could save it on the SIM, as both my old and new phones use a more powerful data format and you lose data when exported to the SIM. I knew that both phones supported IrMC, a synchronisation protocol, so I installed Multisync. Despite having a rather overly-complex interface, it pretty much does what it says. I created a new synchronisation pair, one end of which was a Bluetooth phone and the other end was the Backup source, which simply stores what it is sent. Doing the synchronisation was trivial: point the Bluetooth source at my old phone and ask it to sync, and seconds later I had all of my contacts on my laptop in vCards. Change the Bluetooth source to my new phone, tell the Backup source to Restore All, and ask it to sync again. Another 5 seconds later and my address book is on the new phone, complete with Home/Work/Mobile annotations.
Next, to do something about the look of the interface. The default theme is not too bad, but I do feel like a walking Vodafone advert. I quickly searched around the Internet and downloaded a number of .thm files, which are themes. I expected these to be some proprietary format, but Nautilus did a MIME sniff and swore they were tarballs. I doubted this, double-clicked, and the theme opened in File Roller... Themes for this phone are a tarball of images (PNG, JPEG and GIF for the themes I had) and an XML file to define the theme. Getting the themes onto the phone was no trouble at all thanks to Edd's excellent gnome-bluetooth tools, right-click on the file, press Send via Bluetooth and select the right phone.
But the surprises didn't end there... I had a look through the supplied images, most of which were photos but there were a few short (and mediocre) movies. One of them caught my eye as it had very sharp lines and flat colours, and found out that it is actually an animated SVG file. Invalid is may be (the xlink namespace isn't declared) but Inkscape could still open it, despite not understanding animated SVGs.
So what is next? The phone has a calendar/task list so I'll probably try (again) to use the Evolution calendar for more than birthdays, and export it to the phone (and my iPod, so I've no excuse for missing an appointment). All in all, a very satisfying play with a new phone. I'm don't expect the media player to support Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Theora, but XML, SVG and PNG is a very good step in the right direction. Kudos to Sony Ericsson!
NP: Music For The Mature B-Boy, DJ Format
