iPhone frenzy

Well, it's finally been announced, and it has far surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic Apple fan! I wrote a lengthy piece about it on my mobile phone blog. I bet Bill Ray is feeling pretty foolish right about now

Smartmovie - now with mpeg4 video

It's been a long while since I posted any 'software updated' news, but regular readers will know that SmartMovie, a movie player for smartphones and PocketPCs, is a particular favorite of mine. The good news is that this exceptional piece of software has been updated for mpeg4 compatibility. The word is that the new codec allows for higher framerates (up to 25fps) and better picture quality. Welcome news, especially considering that SmartMovie was already the best movie player available for smartphones, featuring very good quality xvid video at 10-15 fps.

Google Maps for your phone

I somehow missed it at the time but I've just discovered that back in April Google launched a Google Maps service on certain mobile phones. The service is a downloadable application which lets you view Google Maps (maps and satellite imagery tied together with driving directions and telephone directory information) on your mobile phone. Just like the computer version of Google Maps, you can drag the map around the screen. The mobile phone service also introduces a new feature named 'click to call' where you can phone up a local business simply by locating them on the map.

The service, named Google Local for mobile, is currently only available in the US and is officially limited to just over a dozen phones from a few manufacturers. Google say that 'most' Java-enabled (J2ME) phones released in the last year should be compatible, although phones from Sony-Ericsson are conspicuously absent from the compatibility list. There have been reports on the Google Local for mobile group that some unsupported phones are also compatible - notably the Treo, the SE W800i walkman phone, the SE P800/P900/P910, the SE K750i ... but not the Blackberry.

There are no charges other than data transfer charges for your phone's internet connection. The service is only currently available on certain networks, including Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint.

Sony Ericsson P990 announced

Say hello to the upcoming Sony Ericsson P990! The new flagship phone from Sony Ericsson is due in early 2006, with major improvements over the current P-series including 3G, true 320x240px QVGA screen resolution (up from 320x208px), a 2 megapixel camera, 801.11b WiFi, 80MB onboard memory, included 64MB MemoryStick (expandable to 2GB), and FM radio. The new model will also apparently support Blackberry 'push' email, and includes a VPN client. The phone is very similar in size to its P-series predecessors (114x57x25mm, compared to the P800's 118x59x27mm), although the screen has been moved upwards to make room for the new keypad on the actual body of the phone (instead of inside the flip as on the P900). Given the extra horizontal resolution the new screen should be 'squarer' that previous screens, which appears to suggest a slightly reduced dot pitch in order to maintain the candybar form factor.

Salling Clicker 3

Salling Software have released Clicker 3! The bluetooth-based software acts as a great remote for iTunes, DVD Player, VLC, iPhoto, Keynote, EyeTV and a host of other programs. In a move guaranteed to please huge numbers of people worldwide this fantastic software is now also available for Windows. The new version sports a snazzier phone interface as well as wifi support. The website has also undergone a slick revamp and now includes a WordPress blog by Jonas Salling himself.

New SE P910i P950i leaked

Gizmodo are reporting that Ubergizmo has been served with a Cease & Desist letter for revealing pictures of the new Sony Ericcson P910i P950i update, codenamed 'Hermione'. Update: It seems Gizmodo received a C&D themselves, but unapologetically ignored it. Ubergizmo got the picture from the French site MobileMag (who appear to have removed the offending article). The images are apparently from an Orange (France) internal presentation.

From the image we can see that the phone features a slick new all-silver look, as well as a prominent new central directional keypad. Other obvious differences include a forward-facing camera aperture (presumably the original aperture is still present on the rear of the phone). Other improvements supposedly include 3G UTMS connectivity and a 2 megapixel camera.

Comment:
This looks like a solid update. 3G will be a welcome speed upgrade, provided you live in an enabled area. It never made sense that a high-end phone like the P-series was limited to crawling along at GPRS speeds. And the 2MP camera is a drastic improvement over the current VGA resolution which again was a notable weak point in the P910 specs. The directional pad doesn't sound too appealing here, but some may prefer it over the scroll wheel.

Update: More info via Gizmodo, and collected here.

London A-Z on your P800

VisualIT's Tube London program is now on version 2. This new version moves on from a mere subway map to a full streetmap of London. Just tap on a station and see the nearby streets! Great stuff!

Free Tube Map for UIQ phones

In the wake of the London bombings, Visual IT have released a free version of their Tube 2 London software. This version reflects the temporary alterations to the London tube network which have been in place since the bombings.

P800 as a photo viewer

What a coincidence! I've had this entry on the back burner for a few days, when this hint appeared today at MacOSXHints, describing how to view your iPhoto albums on your internet-enabled mobile phone. Essentially the hint is having iPhoto generate a web page which you then view on your mobile phone. Not what I've been doing, but the end result is similar.

P800 as an iPod photo?
Rather than try to view my iPhoto albums online I've loaded several albums onto my P800 phone. Since the whole point is to view them on the phone, we can dramatically reduce the size of the image. I've found that reducing them to the size of my phone screen (320x208 ) and saving them as JPEG quality 20 results in perfectly acceptable photos for casual phone viewing (see the example at the end of this entry). And the file size drops from 1MB+ down to 15-25K! Taking 20K to be the average, that's over 6000 photos on a 128MB memory card. My entire photo library is only around 2500 photos so I could carry the whole thing around with me and still only take up 50MB of my 128MB card. I've actually chosen to carry around an album of around 200 of my best photos which only takes up 4MB.

The Mechanics
I've been using Adobe's ImageReady to resize and save my photos. ImageReady comes with a ready-made droplet (Constrain, Make JPEG 30) which only needs minor adjustment to do what I want. I just changed the Constrain to 320 pixels in each dimension and changed the Make JPEG to quality 20 instead of 30. Batch processing my 200 photos took about 10 minutes. If you don't already have ImageReady the well-regarded shareware application GraphicConverter can do all this as well.

Once you have your mini images you just need to transfer them over to the phone. You can bluetooth them all (although saving each one to the correct location is a pain), or do what I did and use a USB memory card reader to copy them all in one fell swoop. (I can't recommend these readers enough, especially since they can be had for as little as £9).

The final ingredient is an image viewer on your phone. The P800 comes with an image viewer (creatively titled Pictures), but it is a pile of crap pretty mediocre (it used to be a pile of crap that couldn't even display full screen images, but that got fixed in a firmware update). The interface is the main drawback, it requires several steps to display full screen images and cannot rotate images (which means you should rotate landscape photos prior to resizing). If that annoys you like it did me, I'd suggest using Resco Photo Viewer for UIQ, a more full-featured replacement. For non P800 users, Resco make this software for virtually every mobile platform there is.

And that's it! My P800 is now a fun little photo viewer I can bore friends and family with!

Comment
What are the pros and cons of each method?

Firstly it should be mentioned that contrary to first impressions, the MacOSXHints method doesn't provide 'live' updating of the photos, so new changes to the iPhoto album will only be available to the phone user when someone sitting at the Mac re-exports the album. That's still better than no updating at all, which is what happens with my method

Secondly the MacOSXHints method will give you the ability to scroll around a large version of the photo (provided your phone browser supports side scrolling) while my method only shows the photo at my phone's screen resolution. Luckily for me my phone has a large screen - the image to the right is a photo resized to fit my phone shown at actual size (the photo is a 320x220 JPEG quality 20, and is 12KB in size). Meet Pilipus from the island of Siberut

Memory Stick Pro Duo hits 2GB

Engadget are reporting that Sony has finally announced 2 gigabyte Memory Stick Pro Duo cards! These should work in the P900 and P910 - yet another reason I'm considering an upgrade.

Internet sharing success

Despite previous failed attempts to get this working I did not lose hope. Since the recent firmware upgrade hadn't done anything significant to solve the problem, I concluded that it must be the generic bluetooth dongle I had. I decided to do what I should have done to start with, and bought a D-Link DBT-120 bluetooth dongle. This has cracked it!

The combination of the new firmware and the new dongle allows P800 Manager to share my internet connection for what appears to be an indefinite duration! So far my P800 has been sharing my laptop's internet for about 6 hours straight without any problems.

The mobile Opera browser is, as you can see, pretty slick. It resizes images very nicely and the 'fit-to-width' option saves you from a lot of side scrolling. Furthermore the full-screen option (as shown to the right) allows you to make maximum use of your screen real estate.

P800 syncing, solved

After the failure of my recent P800 firmware upgrade to solve certain long-standing problems, I finally splurged and replaced my el-cheapo generic bluetooth dongle with a D-Link DBT-120 bluetooth dongle, which is incidentally the dongle that Apple recommends. This has completely and utterly solved my often mentioned syncing problems. Syncing works 100% of the time now! All Apple needed to do was to put a warning on their website - something along the lines of "using other brand bluetooth dongles may cause iSync to crap out" would have sufficed.

One more virus, nothing to write home about

MobileTech is reporting that Simworks have discovered another Symbian virus, this time one that affects only the more modern Series 60 phones running the latest Symbian OS v7. It does not affect UIQ phones. The virus, dubbed Gavno (as well as a variant Gavno.b) is said to be dangerous and "is able to" render your phone unusable, but can only infect your phone if you run a file named patch.sis. Not exactly contagious - but consider yourself warned.

Finally - P800 updated firmware

I've finally had a reason to go down to London where I had the chance to upgrade my P800's first generation firmware. I had it done in Tottenham at R's Electrics with a two hour turnaround. So far I have noticed a definite improvement in iSync reliability, instead of failing 100% of the time (unless you went through a complicated rigamarole) it only fails about 50% of the time. I'm still working on improving that, it may be 'interference' caused by BluePhoneElite or Salling Clicker.

Another noticeable change is the default video-player now has a widescreen option to play back video in landscape mode. The default picture viewer also benefits from a new landscape mode. Both huge improvements! The camcorder app also now has a night-shot mode.

Checking my firmware version numbers (in the Applications list, click view and then system info) displays this:

Phone: R2F Bluetooth: R5A Organiser: R2D02 CDA: R2A

I'm not actually sure if this is the very latest firmware or not, but it's several generations ahead of my old firmware. So far so good.

Wolfenstein 3D on UIQ

The granddaddy of first-person-shooters has been ported to UIQ . Wolfenstein 3D is available for download here. Note that you will need the original shareware game's data files. The data files from the paid game will not work. Update: version 1.0.1 has been released - it now supports the full (paid) game data files.

PB CallerID

I tried out BluePhoneElite today and to my surprise it works with my original firmware P800! The manual even mentions the P800, saying that although you can initiate calls from the Mac - which will also have on-screen caller-ID - and have 'answer the phone' and 'ignore' options when the P800 rings, the SMS funcions will not work due to a firmware bug with all Series 60 and UIQ phones. A pity - something I would find very useful would be SMS composing on the Mac.

BluePhoneElite also has a slick proximity function. I particularly like the option to set your iChat status:

MGS Virtual Pool 2 reviewed

After briefly mentioning MGS Virtual Pool 2 a short while ago, I had planned on doing a fuller review at some point. That will no longer be necessary, since AllAboutSymbian today posted a glowing review of the game.

RSS on UIQ

Total Wireless Solutions have released NewsFlash, an RSS reader for the UIQ platform. I've been trying to estimate the total size of my 170 or so regular RSS feeds. On average each feed seems to be anywhere from 3 to 15 K of data when it refreshes each hour or so - except for blogs like BoingBoing which include images in their RSS feed as well as blogs like EnGadget and Gizmodo which put out a very high number of articles. If we call the average 5K and we have 170 feeds, the total is about 850K downloaded for each hourly refresh. That's 5 or 10 minutes by GPRS, not great but acceptable. On the other hand it would be half a minute or so on 3G - perhaps I should be investigating 3G options when I upgrade my P800.

Treo 650? P910? Something else?

The recent arrival of the Sony-Ericsson P910 has made me think about upgrading my P800, but I've been reading more and more intriguing things about the Treo 650. However today's Gizmodo review of the Treo has tilted the balance back towards the Sony-Ericsson side of the fence. There are still things I don't like about the P910 though, notably reliance on Sony's MemorySticks. Perhaps I'll wait for the P1000.

MGS MadMacs UIQ

Noumena have released their latest Magic Game Station (MGS) game. It's a 3D turn-based tank game named MadMacs which apparently includes the capability for 8-player online games. There is a downloadable demo, as well as a Series 60 version. If you haven't tried any MGS games, you are strongly urged to. Every one of their MGS games easily makes my list of great games available for the UIQ platform, while some, such as MGS Karting or MGS Virtual Pool 2, would both make the top five.

iSilo for UIQ goes beta

The popular Palm and PocketPC ebook reader iSilo has been released as a beta for UIQ! This is noteworthy since they already have an OS X converter.

CrystalPlayer Mobile for UIQ

An updated version of the CrystalPlayer video player was announced today. No horizontal playback, and another proprietary video format - no thanks. See my earlier take on the advantages of SmartMovie over VICS Video Player.

P910i Mac-centric review

I recently discovered a MacBidouille review (English translation here) of the P910i from a few weeks ago. The nice thing about this review is that it is Mac-specific. I mentioned the P910 back in July.

OS X polyphonic ringtone converter

I noticed the creatively-titled Polyphonic Converter listed on Macshareware.net today - it's for converting midi files into polyphonic ringtones for modern phones. The good thing about this is that there are thousands of midi files freely available all over the web.

P800 USB charger

While I was in Hong Kong last week I picked up one of these great little gadgets for about £2.50. It's a retractable cable which lets you recharge your P800 from a USB port on your laptop. I'm finding it very useful so far! Not only is it great when actually on the move, but simply having a second charger around the house is very useful (my phone charger lives near the front door so I don't forget my phone on the way out, but sometimes I need the phone at my Mac but it's low on power).

Free eBooks for your P800

I was recently directed to ManyBooks.net as a good site for free books. There are a lot of the Project Gutenberg books here, but the layout and organisation is much better, and books are available in many popular eBook formats, including my preferred PalmReader (pdb) format. I'm a long time fan of the late Robert Heinlein, and given his many references to Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars series, I've always wanted to read them. So it was a nice surprise when I found book one of the series, Princess of Mars. Books two to five are also available.

Ogg and the Music Man

When Mireth Technology, the makers of MacVCD and iVCD, released Music Man (formerly MacMP3CD) a few days ago I was curious to see if it would simplify the process of converting songs from my MP3 collection to 48Kbps Ogg files for my P800 phone. My current method involves batch converting MP3s to WAV with MACAST MP3 Converter and then converting the WAVs to Ogg with Ogg Drop X.

After installing Music Man as per the instructions, I discovered that in order to convert MP3s to Oggs I would need to install the LAME MP3 encoder as well as the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component. I already had the Ogg component installed, and after a quick read of this I was ready. Note: installing LAME 3.96 resulted in an error at the end of the make install process - the error was make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1, however the encoder seems to be installed correctly, since Music Man MP3 conversions now work correctly.

All of the above only took 20 minutes or so, and soon after that I was merrily converting MP3s to Ogg in just one click. Very handy, although watching the output folder shows that Music Man converts the MP3 to WAV before reconverting to Ogg, so the actual workflow appears to be similar to my previous two step process. However, I was disappointed to discover that Music Man does not apparently allow you to set the bitrate of your output Oggs. They appear to be 128Kbps files, which is too large for me to consider using on a mobile phone with only a 128MB memory card.

eBooks and DRM

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing discusses a C|Net report on the current state of eBook publishing and whether or not Digital Rights Management (DRM) makes a difference.

RealVideo to SmartMovie

I missed this story on MacOSXHints while I was away on holiday, but I just noticed it tonight. Converting RealVideo to anything else on the Mac has always been hard, but this guy is reporting success converting RealVideo internet streams to SmartMovie AVIs using the command line encoder Mencoder.

Lens your P800

There is a great looking gadget on MobileWhack today! Some outfit called Brando Workshop (based in Hong Kong no less!) are selling a Camera Lens Kit for cellphones. The lenses, including a weak telephoto and a macro, just stick over your phone's camera lens.

New OS X, New iSync

The new OS X 10.3.5 update is out. I was hoping that this, in combination with the new iSync 1.5, would fix my P800 sync problems. Alas not...

PocketPC and Symbian viruses, neck and neck

The first PocketPC virus has been discovered! At the moment Duts, as it's known, doesn't do any damage and asks the user's permission before spreading, but transmission avenues include email, the web, synchronisation, or bluetooth. And Pandora's box is now open ...

Of course, over here on the Symbian side of the fence, we've had our first virus, Cabir, for over a month now (at the moment it only affects Series 60 phones, not UIQ phones like the P800). Again, the virus is a "proof of concept" non-malicious release which requires user approval to spread itself, and unlike Duts, can only do so via bluetooth.

Both viruses were allegedly created by members of the hacker group known as 29A Labs. I considered the ramifications of linking to 29A, but those of you who are interested could easily find them on the web anyway. Whatever the case may be, if you do decide to have a look at their page make sure you have a look at their 'old news' for a bit of an eye-opener.

Salling Clicker updated

The newest version of Salling Clicker is out! Version 2.2 adds support for the Sendo X, Motorola A925, Nokia 7610, palmOne Zire 72, TapWave Zodiac and Sony Ericsson T637, as well as adding integration with EyeTV and VLC. This new version also includes a separate installer for P800s with the original R1D firmware (that's the phone firmware, not the calendar or other parts). It appears to be working on my un-updated phone exactly as advertised so far. Great stuff!

Son of P900

Sony Ericsson have announced the P910! It's billed as a 'minor' upgrade, but in my opinion the major benefits are 64MB internal ram and access to Memory Stick Duo Pro (up to 1GB!). Not to mention the non-virtual QWERTY keyboard! The screen has been upgraded to 200k+ colours too, but that's not a big issue for me.

Breaking the 128MB barrier will make a huge difference. Instead of storing 6 albums of music in 48KHz ogg format, we're now talking about 48 albums. In my eyes 48 albums is a full-fledged music player, whereas a 6 album capacity was just a phone that dabbled in music. In a similar vein, we're now talking about 8 full length SmartMovie xvids per Memory Stick instead of just 1. Finally, we're also talking about enough storage for a movie in a VHS quality format now - think Divx or VCD/KVCD! Granted, it will take a phone with a beefier processor than the P910 has now to play back VHS quality Divx or MPEG1, but imagine plugging your phone into a 50" TV and playing back a movie...

Update: I'm not sure how I ended up posting this after the previous entry about the P900 firmware update, but there you have it

New P900 firmware

I was looking at the new firmware R5B02 release notes when one sentence caught my eye: "Improved visualization of the stand-by clock". I was curious what the difference was until I read the next sentence. It turns out the clock's digits are now larger than before! Silly me

On a more serious note, the update looks good. Lots of fixes, including improved Bluetooth, improved photos, improved handsfree sound, and fixed auto-caps in T9 text prediction.

The Land of Ogg

Until a few weeks ago I never gave the Ogg Vorbis format a second thought as a music format. I always knew it could achieve the same quality as mp3 in less space, but so what? Hard drives are bigger and cheaper than ever. Then came my awakening (cue choir breaking into song) - I got my first phone which can play real music. The limited storage on a 128MB memory card suddenly made the Ogg format rather appealing.

A bit of digging around on the Mac software sites turned up an OS X app named Ogg Drop X. This is a nicely done drag-and-drop Ogg encoder. It works well, can batch encode Oggs at a variety of bitrates and has good metadata tag support. Unfortunately the program is intended for ripping CDs to Ogg and as a result it only accepts the uncompressed music files you'd find on a CD (AIFF / WAV format). I'm reliably informed that audiophiles would recoil in horror at the thought of re-encoding an mp3 as an Ogg, which is presumably why this program doesn't offer the option. So you're stuck with creating your Oggs direct from CD, or using something like QuickTime Player to convert your mp3s back to AIFF prior to using Ogg Drop X.

Update: If you have a batch of MP3s to convert, using QuickTime Player to convert those MP3s to AIFF is a painstaking process, primarily because you have to sit and wait for each conversion to finish before starting the next one. After a few conversions I was heartily sick of it so I set off in search of a better solution. Enter the freeware app MACAST MP3 Converter. This a batch converter for MP3 to AIFF/WAV conversions.

However in the default mode, MACAST MP3 Converter's output AIFF and WAV files are not accepted by Ogg Drop X. To fix this, select AIFF in MACAST MP3 Converter's pull-down menu, click options, select Custom, click Set, and then select Compressor: 24-bit Integer. The output files will now be compatible with Ogg Drop X.

Finally, MACAST MP3 Converter isn't totally bug-free. The notable one is that it appears to consume all available CPU power, even after the conversion has finished. So don't forget to quit the program once you've finished your conversions!

Who says size doesn't matter?

As far as size is concerned, mp3s at 128kbps (generally accepted as CD quality to the untrained ear) weigh in at about 1MB per minute, or just over two hours on a 128MB memory stick duo. However an Ogg can achieve very similar quality at half the bitrate. Since space is at a premium, I have chosen to encode my Oggs at 48kbps. In my opinion the quality is still totally acceptable, and this means we can fit almost six hours of music on a 128MB MS Duo. In practice I generally only keep a couple of albums at a time on my P800, for a total size of about 40MB.

Playback on the P800

The bad news is that there isn't a lot of choice. As far as I'm aware there is only one Ogg player available for the P800, and that is OggPlay. The good news is that OggPlay is a quality piece of software! It can not only play Oggs (you'd hope so!), it can do so in both flip-open and flip-closed modes and it's clever enough to mute the music if the phone rings. It's also skinnable - there are various skins available on the developer's site.

Crappy P800 headphones

I've heard the bundled headphones that come with the P800 are less than satisfactory (I wouldn't know since my phone from eBay didn't come with them!). But since they have the pickup-hangup button on them you are kinda stuck with them if you want to receive phone calls while listening to music. All is not lost however! On a recommendation I bought this headset adapter. What can I say - this is a nifty little device. It consists of a spring-loaded retractable wire connecting the P800 to a combination microphone, pickup-hangup button and headphone miniplug adapter, and it comes with a detachable single earpiece for your handsfree conversations. The clever part is that you can unplug the single earpiece and plug your high-quality third-party headphones into the miniplug adapter, and still use the pickup-hangup button and microphone on the adapter itself.

GPRS in the UK

GPRS is mighty expensive in the UK, just a month or two ago I looked into it on my T-Mobile pay-as-you-go plan and prices started at £1.50 per megabyte or £40 a month for 'unlimited' usage (discretionary 100MB cap, 12 month contract). This is way too much for me to use it for my regular email, let alone browsing the web.

So when I noticed this I thought, what a great idea!. A text-based web browser almost makes me want to sign up for GPRS so I could use the P800 as a mobile modem for the laptop. I'd still have to lug the laptop around along with the phone though. All I need now is a similar program for the Symbian OS.

P800 ringtones

The P800, unlike it's newer sibling the P900, cannot play an MP3 as a ringtone. It is restricted to normal ringtones (which are MIDI based, i.e. they only reproduce the melody of a song, not the actual sound or any lyrics) and WAV files. Unfortunately, a WAV file is by definition uncompressed, which makes them enormous when compared to the phone's memory. An average MP3 that is 4MB in size, when exported to WAV with QuickTime Pro at the default settings (48KHz, 16bit, stereo), will weigh in at around 50MB in size! How can we reduce the size of our WAV file? Luckily for us, since the file is only for a phone's ringtone, and given the limited speaker in the phone, we can drastically reduce the fidelity of the WAV file to the minimum possible and still have a recognisable song. Using the minimum settings (8KHz, 8bit, mono) when we export to WAV, our output file comes out to about 2MB in size. This is of course for the entire song - for a ringtone we only need about 15 seconds of the song which at the same settings will somewhere in the 100KB range. To cut out the section of the song we want, use the 'bookend' markers underneath QuickTime Player's position slider to select the portion of the song you want to keep, copy it, and paste it into a new empty QuickTime Player document. We can then export to WAV from this new document. To export to a WAV, simply choose Export (this requires QuickTime Pro), select WAV, click Options and choose 8KHz, 8bit, mono. If you have a lot of MP3s to convert you may wish to have a look at SoundConverter, a great drag-and-drop audio conversion application. It is free for input files under 500KB in size, otherwise it costs US$10. What I do is cut my MP3s in QuickTime Pro, save them all, and then batch convert the lot with SoundConverter (once your MP3s are cut down to size they should be quite a bit smaller than 500KB).

Backing up the P800

Although using iSync to sync with the P800 backs up all your contacts and calendar to OS X's Address Book and iCal respectively, it is probably a good idea to have a backup of the entire memory contents of the phone - if only to backup the contents of Jotter and PIM apps like HandySafe! Furthermore, it appears that when I finally get around to having the P800's firmware upgraded the procedure will erase all of my phone's data.

Unfortunately the included PC Suite software is for the PC only. The only Mac solution at the moment is to run it in Virtual PC. All I did was fire up Windows XP under VPC and then plug in the P800's USB Cradle (aka the SyncStation). XP should detect the new hardware (this may take a while, depending on your Mac's speed). You may need to select the cradle in the USB section of VPC's settings.

Once XP detects the cradle, insert the SonyEricsson CD that came with the phone. VPC should detect the inserted CD and autostart the PC Suite installation process. Obviously if you downloaded a newer version of the PC Suite install that instead. Just follow instructions, the software should install without any problems.

You should now notice a connection icon in the system tray at the bottom right of XP's screen. Stick your P800 onto its cradle and you should see the connection being established. This might take a minute or two. Be patient. VPC is slow. Choose Start rograms:Sony Ericsson 800 and fire up Backup and Restore. Cick Backup and off you go!

One caveat: I have yet to try and restore the phone. Watch this space

More Mobipocket Conversions

Some of my ebooks are in html format. I briefly experimented with reading them on the P800's web browser but the files are quite large and really thrash the P800's CPU. The phone is barely usable while the html file is open, at least with the default web browser. I was unable to access the html file with Opera.

I found a slick hint at MacOSXHints which details how to use txt2pdbdoc and the pdftotxt portion of xpdf to add the ability to export documents, via the Print command, in the pdb format. This means you can export any text from almost any document (it only exports text, not images), be it a webpage, a spreadsheet, a pdf, or an email. Note that the author had some trouble getting backslashes to display in the main hint, he's posted a correction here.

This solution, while extremely elegant, does have its downfalls. For one thing single carriage returns seem to be lost in the conversion, so you end up with extremely long paragraphs. This can be a problem, especially for novels with lots of dialogue. I had hoped to use this method to easily convert some pdf and html ebooks I have. I was unable to find a fix for this, so I am stuck with exporting the text from pdf and html ebooks manually.

For pdf ebooks I've just been choosing the File:Save as Text command in Acrobat Reader and then converting the resultant text with PorDiBle.

For html ebooks I've been opening the html file in Safari and choosing Edit:Select All, and then choosing Safari:Services:TextEdit:New Window Containing Selection. I then save the resultant TextEdit document as an rtf file and drop it onto PorDiBle. Note, according to this slightly dated Doc Converter review, earlier versions of PorDiBle could convert html files. Unfortunately this no longer appears to be the case. The review also mentions MakeDocDD, which I plan on experimenting with, but my initial test resulted in the app crashing.

Both of the manual conversion methods above produce properly formatted ebooks, within the limitations of PorDiBle (notably it's inability to translate some common higher ASCII codes, '...' is a particular bugbear of mine).

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but given that reading a novel takes ten hours or more, the two or three minutes it takes to convert an ebook becomes entirely acceptable. Especially when you save all your conversions to replicate your entire library in pdb format!

Finally, in the course of my experimentation I decided I needed an OS X pdb reader rather than bluetoothing the books over to the P800 to check the formatting. A quick google search turned up eReader. There doesn't seem to be a lot of competition, but eReader doesn't suffer for it. Everything works, it looks decent, and performance is good. What more could you ask? The Pro version includes skins and changeable fonts and font sizes.

Update: I recently discovered the OS X version of Palm's very own DropBook. It works well but like PorDiBle has problems with certain unusual higher ASCII characters.

OS X Internet sharing with a P800

On the face of it, this shouldn't be a problem. After all, it apparently works on Windows.

My early efforts at this stemmed largely from this hint and this hint at MacOSXHints. However I was unable to get it to work. I was continually getting this error in my Console log:

Failed to open /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync: Device busy

but I cant for the life of me figure out what device is busy.

I then spent a few days fiddling with this method from TechnoHappyMeal, but after a lot of frustration I gave up on it. At the time I had decided that because my internet connection was coming through a USB port I wouldn't be able to share it over bluetooth (the various scripts that were developed in this and the MacOSXHints threads above all only specified built-in-ethernet or airport connections).

I left it for a while but then I heard about an app called Bluetooth to Internet Utility. It looked promising, but unfortunately it seems to have been broken by one of the recent OS X system updates. (In step 3 of installation it tries to open Sharing Preferences but instead opens Universal Access Preferences and then pops up an error window).

Then a few days ago I read about an app called P800 Manager which has an internet-over-bluetooth option. This app looks like it has (almost) cracked it. For one thing it can establish (and maintain indefinitely) a bluetooth connection with the phone (the phone's bluetooth icon shows a two-way connection, which none of my previous attempts had managed to do). Almost there! However when I fire up Opera on the phone it appears to manage to send out a page request, and I can see some data being downloaded over the broadband modem (courtesy of MenuMeters), but the data does not reach the phone. I'm not sure what is going wrong, but I am investigating the phone's settings and the Mac's port settings.

Update 9/12/04: I recently went wireless with an Airport Express which involved replacing my USB broadband modem with an ethernet one. This has solved my problem - P800 Manager's internet sharing works now! I still get occasional drop-outs of the bluetooth connection (which requires a restart of the P800 Manager sharing process), but I'm confident that is a P800 firmware problem fixable by getting a firmware upgrade.

QuickContact screen lock issues

Further news on the QuickContact screen lock - I've realised that after turning the phone on that I have to manually launch QuickContact otherwise the screen lock won't kick in, so I decided to look for a way to automatically start QuickContact when I turn the phone on.

There is a program called Autostart which does this, but apparently it doesn't work very well and in any case seems to be no longer available at the developer's website, so after some further searching I found a post by zhubajie in this thread on HowardForums which describes how to manually create a startup item.

However when I tried to use the instructions in zhubajie's post to make QuickContact auto-load at startup I found it wouldn't work unless I also had HandyDay 2004 installed (I found I didn't have to have it autoload at startup though). Uninstalling HandyDay 2004 broke the QuickContact auto-start again. I'm guessing that HandyDay changes a configuration file somewhere to tell the P800 to look in the /system/startup folder when it boots up.

eBooks on the P800

One of the reasons I took the plunge and upgraded my old Nokia 8250 to the new P800 is that I wanted a portable device to read eBooks on. I had originally gone onto eBay looking for an obsolete £30 Palm and ended up with a £150 P800 phone, but that's another story...

One of my early finds on the P800 was MobiPocket Reader. This is a great eBook reader which can handle many (but not all) popular formats. The one major drawback is that it does not like gzipped text files (oddly enough the default reader that comes with the P800 handles them with aplomb). Since a gzipped text ebook can be 30% the size of a plain text ebook I really wanted an easy way to compress my many plain text ebooks into a format MobiPocket would like.

Enter Pordible. This is a slick OS X drag-and-drop app that converts text or html files into a compressed .pdb (PalmDoc) file. PalmDoc is not quite as space efficient as gzipped text, but it's pretty good. And it is compatible with MobiPocket

One final note: after bluetoothing a .pdb file over to the phone, I found that it would only get imported into MobiPocket's library if MobiPocket was not loaded. If MobiPocket was already open in the background, it would read the .pdb file, but would leave it in the Beamed messages folder. My workaround is just to remember to quit MobiPocket before bluetoothing a new ebook over.

P800 Screen Lock

One of the first things I needed to sort out on the P800 was a decent screen lock when in flip-removed mode. The default one is the bouncing Sony Ericsson logo which, being animated, isn't too battery-friendly. What's even worse is that when the screen is locked touching the screen will turn on the backlight. This means the light is likely to turn on when the phone is bouncing around in your pocket. A partial workaround is to use the virtual flip screen lock which does disable the touch screen, but I don't like the virtual flip and would never use it otherwise, so I don't see why I should use it just to lock the screen.

I set about looking for a replacement. My early searches resulted in an app called SClock. SClock will display a basic lock screen showing the date and time, and most importantly, it disables the touch-sensitive screen when locked. Problem solved! However as well as the lock screen looking distinctly amateur and generally unimpressive, there also seems to be a bug where the time digits do not appear the first time you activate the SClock lock. Nevertheless, I continued to use this for a few days, that is until I gave QuickContact a try! This is a replacement Contacts app which has an included Screen Lock module. This screen lock is just what I've been looking for! It shows the date and time, disables the touch screen, AND looks very slick! I've been using it exclusively for several days now and am very pleased with it.

Update (Jan 2005): getting a screen capture of the lock screen proved to be impossible, so here is a photograph instead:

Encoding for SmartMovie

Okay ... I've made some progress on SmartMovie. After spending hours reading every scrap of information I could find on the net, I've come up with a couple of processes for encoding SmartMovie files on OS X. There seems to be some sort of obscure bug in ffmpegX which means we have to demux and process our audio seperately before remuxing the final file.

Note: depending on the aspect ratio of your source movie, these are the resolutions you want to aim for when resizing (step 4 below)

4:3 -- 272x208
3:2 -- 320x208
1.66:1 -- 320x192
16:9 -- 320x176
1.85:1 -- 320x176
2.35:1 -- 320x128

METHOD 1
Pros: Works on a wide variety of formats
Cons: Needs QuickTime Pro, only works on movies you can open in QT Player

Required software:
DivX 5.1 Mac codec
ffmpegX 0.0.9h
QuickTime Pro

1. Open the movie in QuickTime Player.
2. In the Movie menu choose Get Movie Properties (cmd-J)
3. Select 'Video Track', select 'Size', click 'Adjust'
4. Drag the corner of the video until it is the correct size for your aspect ratio (see chart above), click 'Done'

Exporting video from QT Player
5. In the File menu choose 'Export', select 'DivX AVI', click 'Options'
6. Uncheck 'Audio', set framerate to 12.5, click 'Settings'
7. Set 'Encoding bitrate' to 120kbps, click OK
8. Click 'OK'
9. Change the name in the 'Save As' box, click 'Save'

Exporting audio from QT Player
10. In the File menu choose 'Export', select 'Sound to AIFF'
11. In iTunes, option-click the Advanced menu, choose 'Convert to mp3', choose your AIFF file. An mp3 version of your AIFF will appear in your iTunes library.
12. Drag the mp3 from your iTunes library onto your desktop, delete the mp3 from iTunes

Finishing up with ffmpegX
13. Drag the mp3 from your desktop onto the ffmpegX icon
14. In ffmpegX select the 'Audio file to mp3' preset
15. In the Audio tab enter an Audio bitrate of 32kbps, click Encode
16. In the Tools tab, click the first 'Browse' button, choose the AVI file you created in step 9
17. Click the second 'Browse' button, choose the mp3 from step 15
18. Choose AVI in the drop-down menu next to the 'Mux as...' button
19. Click 'Mux as...'

METHOD 2
Pros: Does not require QuickTime Pro, can encode directly from a vob
Cons: Limited to mpeg 1 and mpeg2

Required software:
ffmpegX 0.0.9h
0sex (only if you wish to encode a movie from a vob file)

Doing everything with ffmpegX
1. In the Tools tab, click 'Browse', choose your mpeg or vob file, click 'Demux'
2. Drop the video file (the m1v or m2v created in step 1) onto the ffmpegX icon, choose the 'Xvid' preset
3. In the Video tab, set bitrate to 120kbps, 12.5fps, screen size according to the aspect ratio of your source movie (see table above), click 'Encode'
4. Drop the audio file (created in step 1) onto the ffmpegX icon, choose the 'Audio file to mp3' preset
5. In the Audio tab, set bitrate to 32kbps, click 'Encode'
6. In the Tools tab, click the first 'Browse' button and choose the avi file created in step 3
7. In the Tools tab, clock the second 'Browse' button and choose the mp3 file created in step 5
8. Choose AVI in the drop-down menu next to the 'Mux as...' button
9. Click 'Mux as...'

After both methods you should end up with a file named 'yourmoviename.muxed.avi'. This movie should play at full screen in SmartMovie.

Using the values I've given above you should get about 10mins of video per 9MB file size. The video shows some compression artifacts and the audio is slightly tinny, but both are acceptable. You can experiment with changing the video and audio bitrates to achieve whatever quality is suitable. For example for a music video you would probably want to increase the audio bitrate to at least 64kbps, while for high speed, wide angle footage (like sports) increasing the video bitrate will help.

A 21 minute episode of the Simpsons encoded with the above settings comes out to 18.1MB (12.1MB video, 4.8MB audio, plus overhead)

Full screen video on the P800

After a lot of time and effort, I've given up trying to figure out the VICS video format. It looks like the only way to encode it will be with the proprietary PC-only encoder. So after looking around a bit for an alternative player I've discovered an app called SmartMovie that can not only play full screen video, it does it with better (in my opinion) quality picture than VICS.

After some testing I've concluded that SmartMovie is pretty impressive - given a decent bitrate the full screen video is of eye-popping quality. The app is advertised as being an xvid player, but I have learnt that it can also play DivX 5.1 video.

As far as content generation goes, the software package includes an encoder for the PC platform. I've tried it out on a PC at work, and it works very well and is amazingly fast. Unfortunately there is no Mac equivalent so we'll have to work out a manual method of conversion, however I'm not too worried - xvid and divx encoding on the Mac is pretty good these days. I've had a few brief stabs at converting to a format SmartMovie accepts, but ran into a couple of bugs with ffmpegX. I'm confident I'll get it worked out soon though! Watch this space

P800 - second opinions

I've now been playing with the P800 for a few days, and have discovered some other things about the phone, both good and bad.

On the positive side of things:

Mobipocket Reader is a fantastic application for reading ebooks.

VICS Video Player is a promising-looking program, although it's still in beta. This program apparently can play video at full-screen resolution at 25fps! It seems to occasionally crash (although it may just be that I am low on memory) but when it works is a real eye-opener. The one drawback is a proprietary video format which you can't encode on a Mac.

On the negative side of things:

I've discovered what seems to be a major (from the point of view of an OS X user) problem in the last few days. It appears that if you don't have some way of sending an email from your phone (such as GPRS), there is no way of transferring a file from the phone to a Mac. From my readings it appears that the most common way to do this is to browse the phone (from a PC) via the SyncStation and just copy the desired file off the phone. As noted earlier this doesn't work on a Mac. But when I try and send a file via bluetooth from the phone (which should work!) I almost always get an error - actually, I've only succeeded once!

Cool phone, pity about the Mac support

Over the weekend I bought a three-month-old Sony Ericsson P800 mobile phone on eBay UK and it just arrived today! These phones can be had for a bargain right now, due to the recent introduction of this phone's successor, the P900.

The phone is, on the surface, awesome. It has a large 320x240 screen (Edit: it is actually a 320x208 screen) and, unlike most PDA phones, is shaped pretty much like an ordinary mobile phone. The screen is touch-sensitive screen with handwriting recognition (there is a stylus embedded in the side of the phone) and the Symbian OS it uses has a decent selection of third-party software. The major drawbacks are a proprietary memory card (Sony Memory Stick Duo - which is limited to 128MB at the moment) and the lack of Nokia's T9 predictive text input system.

However there is another major drawback to this phone - lack of OS X support! Firstly the included USB SyncStation stupidly does not work with OS X. You'd think you could just plug it in and browse the contents of the phone (as you can with other USB storage devices such as an Archos). Secondly the compatibility (via bluetooth) with iSync is atrocious. It is possible to sync the phone with OS X's Address Book and iCal, but only barely. To reliably sync even once you have to follow the steps in this Apple KnowledgeBase article - including a restart of your Mac system! After the one successful sync you will be unable to sync until you again go through the whole rigamarole.

I will keep on experimenting with the phone and report back here - I've added a P800 category to keep track of my exploring.