Yeah!

Keep on rockin' in the big shoes

Nokia E51 - No BS

T

hose two little words basically sum this phone up. I might be wrong, of course, but barring the absence of a small camera in the front for video-calls - it lacks nothing. Basically this is a smart-phone that mimics an ordinary phone. The slight wedge-shape of the bottom-part of the phone makes it perfect for snug pockets. The Nokia e51 is a good basic phone.

The keypad is small but distinct, the buttons feel nice with a slight laptop-feel to them. The only negative thing about the keys is the soft-button's size and placement. The angle and size of the left/right soft-button that could easily lead to erroneous key presses if one is not careful. The “OK”-button and navigational-ring will probably live forever – they're excellent.

The screen is crystal clear. A 2" display is probably as big as it gets on a phone of this size. In combination width the excellent color depth, youtube works OK.

I use my E51 as a (detachable) wireless broadband modem via the tele2 mobile network. My girlfriends SE w910 is actually better at this than my Nokia E51 since it supports usb networks. In practice this means that all you have to do is plug the phone in and surf away! After issuing the mandatory “ifconfig usb0 up” , I don't even consider this a step a step. The Nokia requires a serial approach, by using /dev/ttyACM0 as modem one simply dials (I use wvdial). This is my configuration (right):

Bluetooth configuration has yet to work for me - I could make it work with the trusted old Nokia 5500 sport by substituting “/dev/ttyACM0” with “/dev/rfcomm0” in the wvdial.conf-file but my current Nokia just won't have it... I haven't really tried the wifi but whenever I come across an open network it is as easy to surf the web off as the gprs is – no problem.

Using the E51 with Ubuntu 7.10 was no problem. Universal Mass Storage support for the NON-INCLUDED 2gb “hotpluggable” microsd-card that I ripped out of the 5500 sport and and pc-suite mode for data-transfer ie modem use. Unfortunately neither gammu nor gnokii supports it yet so no syncing! Not an enormous problem unless you want to back your calendar up... In which case it is.

Between the built in BrowserNG symbian browser and the java midp Opera browser virtually all web content is available. I don't know why but Nokia refuses to deliver this phone with stopwatch/timer applications but there is one available at mosh for free that seems to work well enough. I think that anyone who has come in contact with the standard calculator for S60v3 has learned to loathe it! There's a replacement called Calcium at mtvoid.com. The screenshot was taken using 'Screenshot for symbian s60'. The future of the PC is dead... and gone. It belongs to the mobile phone now! Everything in personal computing that I once needed a complete computer for can now be done with a tiny 100 gram mobile phone. I say the future because the day of mobile rule is not quite here yet. But the second they can figure out how to squeeze these things into the moblie - is the second I toss my desktop computer in the bin.

Full "big boy" operating system – access to applications.
qwerty-keyboard/voice recognition – fast text input
support for HD-video/TV-out

I soon learned that mailing using predictive/non-predictive text IS hell. qwerty desperately needed! 2” screen - it works - but built in projector or TV-out would be nice. Until then I'll have to make due with this extremely slick and capable phone.

Resolutions wallpaper

A

simple wallpaper that lets you check out what your site might look like at different screen-resolutions, without having to change your actual resolution.

resolutions.png

Just resize your browser window to fit in the applicable square and that's it. Not a perfect solution obviously but handy if all you want is to check what elements are visible at different screen-sizes.

Phone for harsh environments

Nokia 5500 Sport

(It still seems to have everything though)

I

t was time, time for an update! My old lg kg320 had played out its part and it was now time to find a replacement. A replacement that could deliver the basic functionality now lacking in my old workhorse. If one may call it that when I almost never got to use it - not much of a social life you see. And since calls are so rare in my life I have come to value them immensely. Making the need for a new mobile phone immediate.

A small fact of life that has always annoyed me is the illogical way in which mobile phones are dispersed among the populous. The smallest phones tend to end up with the technology-savvy mobile enthusiast while the larger clunkier models find their way to the casual users. The casual user who may not use their mobile phone very often, but rather wants it for availability, should opt for the smaller phone since it would be less obtrusive. While the enthusiast should be the one who ends up with the larger phone. Larger meaning room for more features.

I, at any rate, ended up getting the "Nokia 5500 Sport". Admittedly it was not my first choice (the new Nokia e90 communicator looked pretty good to me) but as it turns out fancy, posh and perfect phones don't do well in grease-laden industrial environments, not at all unlike my own workplace. And so I felt the need to revise my plans slightly. A tougher more rugged phone seemed advisable...

In this new "gem" of mine, a couple of features stood out:

TTS - STT Tapping

Text To Speech and Speech To Text. The ability to have a computer-generated voice read me my text-messages never ceases to make me happy. I take every chance I can get to fire up my own HAL 2000 and marvel at the current state of technology. And "yes" I am easily amused ;^)

The device automatically makes a voice-record of all of your contacts. Press down the right "soft-button" for a second and a half, say the name of the contact you wish to call and the phone will dial their default number. This feature also extends to a few of the applications, like the voice-recorder and bluetooth manager. One can also add other applications manually.

Tapping

Once set up one can easily play, pause, skip forwards and backwards by tapping the phone with your fingers. Two taps on the bottom of the phone pauses playing music or plays paused music, while tapping the right side of the phone skips to the next tune, tapping the left side skips back.

Tapping the phone within 30 seconds of receiving an SMS makes the TTS-system read the message for you. When in sports mode; tapping makes the TTS tell you what your current training statistics are.

3d-accelerometer

Through which a flurry of applications are derived. The 5500 Sport has the ability, by virtue of being angled at active people, of functioning as a workout tool. After entering your own personal data like height and weight etc. the built in pedometer will calculate how many calories you burn while "power walking" to work every day. A feature more likely to be used is the Groove game. The game consists of a maze through which the gamer would angle the phone to navigate a steel ball. I found the game seriously addictive and along with the new 3d rendition of the Snake game (Snakes) I have all I am going to need for a long time.

Operating System

The phone uses Symbian 60 3rd edition. I have already downloaded oggplay that enables me to play my ogg-files and a small horde of apps that might come in handy one day, including putty for ssh.

Gmail Works!

The phone supports SSL which makes it possible to check your gmail account. My old phone did have a mail-client but lacked TLS/SSL.

The Browser

is Nokias own xhtml-browser. And it is EXCELLENT! It is definitely better than ie6 at rendering web pages and it will do css. If the page is larger than the screen, as it always is, a thumbnail overlay will appear to show you where your at. click at the picture above for an example.

Python!!!

This really blew my mind. My phone had a python interpreter preloaded on the included microsd-card. This opens up an entire new world of opportunities.

Wrapping up

All things said I am very happy with my choice of mobile phone, except for these "few" points;

• Connecting the phone to computer over USB
  My desktop computer summarily refused to mount the
  telephone as a usb mass storage device. I use Ubuntu 7.04
  (Feisty Fawn) as my desktop. The solution? format the card!
  After formatting the MicroSD-card in the phone it was found
  by the mounting software. Now it all works.
  


• The awkward placement of the menu-button
  I'm constantly tricking myself into pushing the
  contacts soft button. Silly me! but everything else works so
  nicely I just had to say something about this.
  


• Battery life
  If one uses all of the phones features; e-mail,
  mp3-player (or oggplayer - oggplay), play a few games and
  browse the web your battery won't last for more than a
  day! Summa sumarum it's all good and well having all this
  functionality - as long as you don't use them, the price to pay
  for the size of the phone I gather.)
  


• The ad-45 hands-free adapter?
  The hands-free adapter that was included in my box, namely
  ad-45, is a bit short on perfection. The cable is so
  short; that I have to carry the phone in the belt-clip.
  


• No software cd included!
  Normally this is not a problem for me. I generally
  never use the included cd but since all of the
  software is PREinstalled on the accompanying 64MB
  microsd-card (not nearly big enough) it would be nice
  to have access to the cd. Moving installed programs
  from the old card over to my new 2GB card could prove
  a bit tricky.
  

If all of the software-packs were available online then I would side with Nokia and consider the cd superflous but... They aren't!

Phew! IE 6 Support...

F

inally! Now my little site "works" with the archaic headache-generating browser a.k.a Internet Explorer 6! It is not perfect but at least a basic level of functionality is has been reached.

Now the site works with every "big boy" browser out there.

• Firefox 2
• Konqueror 3.5.6
• Epiphany 2.18.1
• Internet Exporer 7
• Internet Explorer 6 (GA-AAH-RGH!)
• Links 1.00pre12 (fairly ok)
• Lynx 2.8.5rel.1 (fairly ok)
• Opera 9.22
• Safari 3 beta

I had to download Opera for linux to check out how this page would look like in that browser, and to my surprise it worked! They had packages for Ubuntu Efty/Fiesty but only for the i386 architecture though. This was easily circumvented by forcing it on to the system:

dpkg --force-architecture -i opera_9.22-20070716.6-shared-qt_en_i386.deb

As long as you have the apropriate 32bit-libraries - it should work.

My current Desktop

Screenshot

B

ecause the default window-manager in Gnome (Metacity) refuses to adhere to the contemporary X standards for window movement and resizinging, or even make it possible to, I decided to give the beryl 3D windowmanager a try.

These are the standard way of moving and resizing windows under X:

• Alt+Mouse1="move window"
• Alt+Mouse3="resize window"

Beryl is absolutely beautiful. And I think I'll actually stick with it for a while.

• Gnome Theme = Gorilla
• Beryl Emerald Theme = frame (by pomalin)

Slackware DVD-cover

Scalable Vector Graphics

I

created this normal-size DVD-coverimage using inkscape 0.45 on Ubuntu 7.04. Designing this cover was a great opportunity to learn a little more about SVG.

Link to a zip containing all images and inkscape-compatible svg-file.

A point not to be forgotten is that the penquin-graphics and the Slackware-button were not created by me. The Slackified Tux-image was taken from the Slackware propagande site: http://www.slackware.com/~msimons/slackware/grfx/ and the Slackware button was found somewhere on the internet.

Oh... lest I forget - the background tile was snatched in its entirety from the slackware website. It's all more of a composition really...