Alan's Ramblings - nokia tag

Benchmark your phone

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 12:16:57 GMT

I stumbled across a rather interesting website that provides benchmarks and test results of the Java implementations on a wide range of phones. Being an ex-benchmark engineer, this rather appealed to me ;-) The results can be found here. You are supposed to be able to download the MIDlet by browsing the WAP page at http://wap.club-java.com/en, but I had problems reading that page. The direct URL of the MIDlet is http://www.club-java.com/TastePhone/TastePhone.jad, and that worked fine for me.

IRC on the Nokia 6820

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 10:44:56 GMT

Whilst the SSH clients I found for my phone were an interesting gimmick, to be honest they weren't actually much use because of the small screen on the phone - a simple 'ls' fills up screen after screen, even on the tiniest (i.e. unreadable) font setting. I thought IRC might just be doable, and in fact there are several Java IRC clients available for phones. I tried WLIrc and jmIrc. jmIrc was originally a fork of WLItrc, and the shared heritage is evident. I couldn't load either of the clients over WAP onto the phone, but they both installed fine after I downloaded them and squirted them into the phone via the IR link. Once on the phone, both clients were configured as detailed in step 5 of my SSH client post.

WLIrc proved to be less than usable as it kept dying with a Java null pointer exception. jmIrc however seems to work fine, with just one minor quirk that I've been able to find so far - If you modify a connection profile and then quit rather than saving the entry it loses the entry, and the next time you start it it dies with an array bounds exception, the only fix is to reinstall.

Once you have started up the client you can set up profiles to connect to your favorite IRC servers, specifying which channels you want to join, your nick etc. When you connect to a server each channel is indicated by a small coloured square on the screen. Backgrounded channels that have had traffic since you last viewed them are highlighted by changing the colour of the indicator square for that channel. You can switch channels with left and right with the joystick, and you can scroll up and down with the joystick as well. The number keys can be used to page up/down a screen at a time, home/end etc. When entering text with the fold-out keyboard closed you can use the phone's predictive text feature to compose your messages in the same way that you would if you were composing an SMS message. All in all it's an impressive illustration how careful interface design can yield a truly useful application even when the platform it is running on is limited. If I had any boring meetings to sit through I'd certainly be using it to chat to people I'd rather be communicating with, but one of the benefits of being a remote employee is that I very rarely have to sit through any such meetings :-)

SSH on the Nokia 6820

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 06:14:36 GMT

I was reading a review of the Nokia 6820 over at The Register and I was intrigued to see that Idokorro had written a Java app for it that would give you SSH and telnet access. A bit more digging revealed that there was a free alternative in the form of MidpSSH. The idea of being able to log in to my server from my phone appealed to the inner geek, so I downloaded both to have a play. There are several variants available for the MidpSSH client, for the Nokia 6820 you need the "SSH2 Lite Build (SSH1, SSH2, reduced functionality)" for MIDP 1.0 - the phone only supports MIDP 1.0, and it won't accept applications bigger than 64K. The first problem I had was getting either of them to connect over GPRS - they both just hung when trying to connect. An email conversation with Idokorro tech support ensued, and that helped me get thinking along the right lines to solve the connection problem. The default GPRS profile that's supplied by Vodafone for the phone ("Vodafone GPRS") is set up for WAP access - it uses the wap.vodafone.net GPRS access point (APN) and uses a proxy between you and the outside. I figured that this was probably the problem, either the APN and/or the proxy wasn't passing the SSH traffic on port 22 through. I set up an alternate GPRS profile and everything started working. Here's what you need to do - note that these instructions will only work for Vodafone, you'll need to google for the correct settings if you use another service provider.

1. Go to Menu -> Services -> Settings -> Connection settings -> Active service settings and pick an empty service settings slot.
2. Choose "Edit active service settings" then edit as follows:
Setting's Name: I called mine "Vodafone GPRS Direct"
Homepage: I set mine to http://www.google.com/wml which gets you the Google WML search page, specially designed for phone use.
Proxies: Disable
Data bearer: GPRS

3. Choose "Bearer settings, then configure as follows:
GPRS access point: Internet
Authentication type: Normal
Login type: Automatic
User name: leave blank
Password: leave blank
Note: Some websites recommend you use "web" as the username/password, but it doesn't seem to be needed.
4. Now exit the configuration screens, select "Services -> Home" and the phone should create a GPRS connection and display the Google homepage. Press cancel until you get to the default phone screen.
5. Menu -> Applications -> Collection -> Select Application
and select the SSH application you wish to configure, then "Options" and configure as follows:
Web access: Allowed
Connect via -> Internet
then select "Vodafone GPRS Direct" or whatever you called your new connection profile in step 2 above.
6. Press "Back" until you get to the "Collection" selection screen, fire it up and you should be able to open a SSH connection to the machine of your choice.

Both clients are hampered somewhat by the small screen size on the phone, but the Idokorro one seems to cope with the limitations of the platform best - inputting text in MidpSSH was kinda clunky, but then for $45 (which seems a little steep) I'd expect the Idokorro client to be better. I don't have an immediate need for SSH access from my phone, but it was kinda cool to see it working all the same.

There's one other major advantage of setting up your own direct GPRS profile that I haven't mentioned yet - it apparently bypasses the abysmal Vodafone proxy and content management mess - Vodafone have decided it's their job to reformat and censor the internet, but unfortunately they've done an appalling job of it. Pictures that the phone can display just fine are removed, it's as slow as hell and it decided at one point that Ikea are providers of porn rather than of furniture. It even decided that this site contained adult content at one point, which offended me greatly - I've been accused of many things, but being an adult isn't one of them.

Nokia 6820

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 08:03:21 GMT

My old Motorola Timeport finally gave up the ghost recently. To be honest it was always less than excellent anyway - I only got it because it was the only tri-band phone available at the time. The user interface was at best idiosyncratic, at worst unusable - certainly for sending SMS messages it was a joke - I used to challenge people in pubs to send a SMS in less than five minutes. I had a scan through the list of phones we can choose from, and quite liked the look of the Nokia 6820 as it has a really cute flip-out QWERTY keyboard - I figured that even I could sent a SMS using it! I paired it up with a Jabra BT250 bluetooth headset so I'm car-legal as well.

I'm really happy with the phone so far, and yes, even I can send text messages with it! The fold-out keyboard is quite useable, I can type quite comfortably with my thumbs on it. When you open the phone up to use the keyboard the display rotates around to match the orientation of the keyboard which is kinda cool. The phone has lots of toys, it supports GPRS, SMS, MMS, WAP, yada, yada, yada. It also has a simple inbuilt PIM so I can keep my diary and to-do notes on it. I used to use a Psion 5mx, but to be honest I couldn't be bothered carrying it around with me all the time. I've already started using the phone as my main diary, and it has got the balance between simplicity and usefulness just about right. I've also had endless fun downloading stupid ringtones onto it, however I have noticed that if you set up ringtone groups it doesn't always pick the correct one, which is a little annoying. It also has a 352x288 camera, but quite frankly it's useless - it's not only that it's low resolution but it produces pictures that look like they have been drawn by a three year old in wax crayon - and then left on a radiator for a week.

The phone also comes with some PC software that allows you to manage the address book and upload/download files to the phone. The phone shipped with version 5.8, but I subsequently noticed that version 6.41 was available from the Nokia website. I duly removed 5.8 and installed 6.41, and that's where my problems started. 6.41 couldn't see the address book entries I'd created with the earlier version, even after I'd de/reinstalled 6.41. And to cap it all, the 6.41 version was distinctly inferior to 5.8 - for example the address book editor wouldn't let you assign contacts to caller groups, and wouldn't allow you to assign email addresses to contacts either. I tried rolling back to 5.8, but that also didn't work any longer. In the end I had to uninstall the software and manually delete all files and directories it had created, and then go and manually delete all the registry keys that had 'Nokia' in them - eek! However, on reinstalling 5.8 everything started behaving. I contacted Nokia tech support and they gave me a strong hint that 6.41 was to be avoided in favour of 5.8, so 3 out of 10 for the software, Nokia!

The phone has a web browser which is OK in a 'WAP is pretty crap' way - I used it to check the reviews for the rather good Gurkha restaurant we ate at in Fleet when we were down there on Monday, and I suspect it might also be useful for cheating at pub quizzes ;-) The other thing that intrigued me was that the phone has an email client that includes IMAP support. My service provider (Vodafone) supplies it's customers with a free email account - if you register and upgrade your voicemail account you can manage your voicemail from the web, and if people email your vodafone.net email address you can get the emails read out to your phone by an electronic lady, which is kinda spooky. The website gives instructions for how to set up Microsoft Outlook to work with the email system and from that I figured out how to do the same for the email client on the phone. I thought I'd document it here as it will probably work for any similar Nokia phone. The first step is to register to upgrade your voicemail account, then configure the phone as follows:

1. Menu -> Messages -> Voice messages ->Voice mailbox number
and set your voicemail number to 242 instead of 121.

2 . Menu -> Messages -> Message settings -> E-mail messages -> Edit active e-mail settings
and configure as follows:

Mailbox name: vodafone.net
E-mail address: yourname@vodafone.net
My name: Your Name
Outgoing (SMTP) server: smtp.vodafone.net
Incoming server type: IMAP4
Incoming (IMAP4) server: imap.vodafone.net
IMAP4 user name: yourname
IMAP4 password: yourpassword

Then go into the "Other settings" submenu and configure as follows:

Use SMTP authorisation: Yes
SMTP user name: yourname
SMTP password: yourpassword

Then go into the "SMTP connection settings" submenu and configure as follows:

Proxies: Disable
Data bearer: GPRS

Then go into the "Bearer settings submenu" and configure as follows:

GPRS access point: Internet
Authentication type: Normal
Login type: Automatic
Username: leave blank
Password: leave blank

Then select "back" twice and go into the "IMAP4 connections settings" submenu and configure exactly the same as the "SMTP connection settings".

If you now fire up the email client you should be able to both send and receive emails via your vodafone.net account. One thing to note: the phone email client doesn't delete messages on the server even if you delete them from the phone, so you'll occasionally have to log on via the web interface to delete them. You can use the web browser in the phone do do this - the web-based email system is linked to from the Vodafone mobile homepage.