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

18:21 Thursday, 23 Sep 2004 [#] [computers] (9 comments)

Posted by Baptiste Mille-Mathias at Thu Sep 23 19:18:16 2004:
I've just buy a SonyEricsson T630, and now I'm waiting for my bluetooth dongle, to try the gnome-bluetooth stuff. I'm very excited to try to sync my evo data with my phone.
The T630 is a very good phone, but not such as yours. I don't know if it use the same technology as the K700i.

Have fun with it
Posted by jpl at Thu Sep 23 20:29:36 2004:
s/loose/lose/
Posted by Doug McMorris at Fri Sep 24 06:49:45 2004:
I've got a T610, not as fancy as the T630 or k700, but it does the trick... lots of good stuff happens when you setup evolution and multisync:

http://multisync.sourceforge.net/

In windows, if you sync, recurring events dont' work, but with multisync they automagically do... the really nice thing is that you can set the phone to automatically change profiles durring scheduled events, so it will turn off sounds durring any meetings in your calendar... definately take a look at multisync... i think they are working on evo 2 support, but is not in yet
Posted by Baptiste Mille-Mathias at Fri Sep 24 12:31:14 2004:
Thanks Doug, for so much explanation.
Posted by David Hunnisett at Fri Sep 24 14:42:08 2004:
what are you doing with the old phone? hint hint :)
Posted by Ross at Fri Sep 24 14:49:08 2004:
David -- it's a very battered phone.  The only key which can you see all of the numbers/letters on is 5, the screen is very badly scuffed, pushing down on the joystick doesn't always work and when it's on charge it will generally give you a small electric in the ear if you try and make a call.  You don't want it, trust me. :)
Posted by Wade Mealing at Sat Sep 25 07:42:30 2004:
But even after all this, the sonyericssons phones are the best that I have come across. Just lost my t610 to a washing machine, 2 years without a fault, have myself a new k700i.

I'm looking forward to testing the evo-2 sync support, as this currently doesn't work with the multisync code.
Posted by Dan at Wed Sep 29 10:43:33 2004:
You forgot to rant about Vodafone screwing up the functionality coz their lawyers freaked about DRM.
Posted by Chris Perry at Sat Nov 20 09:24:25 2004:
Hmm.  My experience with a Mac and a K700i was that syncing contacts lost all the addresses when synced to the phone and then, during a further sync, over-wrote the laptop data with the phone data -- so the addresses were all gone!

I had a backup, so that was OK, but I have read of this problem on another site and also had no such problems with a P800.

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