New phone

Having finally grown tired of T-Mobile's poor coverage, particularly as received by my Ericsson T68m, I decided it was time for a change. And thanks to the recent availability of wireless local number portability, I could do so without being forced to change my number.

So after looking around I settled on AT&T Wireless, where I could get service equivalent to my T-Mobile plan, but for less money, and they'd throw in a Nokia 3650 for free. How nice of them!

The 3650 is a slick little phone that comes with all the features you could want: color screen, built-in camera, speakerphone, Bluetooth, Internet access, Java, international roaming, and so on. Well, OK, I lied about it being little. It's pretty big by modern phone standards. But it runs Symbian OS, which makes it one powerful and flexible little device — in other words, worth the girth.

The phone was waiting for me when I got home this weekend and I immediately had to sit down and play with it. My main objective was to get it talking to Linux, since the software that comes bundled with the phone doesn't support Linux. Silly Nokia. Luckily there's lots of info out there about this, such as Nick Burch's helpful page. So here's what I've got working so far:

1. Bluetooth: This was easy to setup since I'm running Fedora Core 1, which includes Bluetooth support out of the box.
2. Accessing the phone's memory: p3nfs will let you mount your phone's file system, but I found it to be rather unstable. However, OBEX provides an alternate way of getting data on and off of the phone, and the OpenOBEX implementation was just an "up2date openobex" away, thanks to Dag's Apt RPM repository. OpenOBEX is just a library, so I needed some apps to use it:
   • Sending files to the phone: ussp-push
   • Sending files from the phone: obexserver
3. Well, with that setup I needed some files to mess with. So I downloaded Opera for Series 60, which seems to be a popular alternative to the browser that comes with the 3650. I downloaded it, ussp-push-ed it over, and it installed easily. I haven't used either browser enough to determine which one I prefer yet, though.
4. Next I recorded a short video clip (yeah, the camera in the phone can do video, not just photos) and used obexserver to get it on my laptop. And wouldn't you know it, mplayer could play it.
5. Finally, I decided it was time to make this gadget useful, so I set out to get it to synchronize the calendar and address book with my laptop. Which is where I ran into problems. I've decided to try MultiSync, which looks promising, and which should support the 3650 via SyncML (which Nokia just released support for on the phone). It needs to talk to the SyncML server (in this case, MultiSync on my laptop) via plain old TCP/IP. Which sounded easy enough to setup following these notes but which proved to be difficult. For some reason the phone seems to default to using GPRS when other connection methods fail, which makes it very difficult to debug the PPP connection to the laptop. So I gave up for now, and will try again later.

For what it's worth, I'm also still waiting for my phone number to be moved from T-Mobile to AT&T. Supposedly there were "unexpected delays" due to the glut of people switching carriers. However, since the process depends on T-Mobile to some extent, I have to suspect that they probably just drag their feet when it comes to fulfilling requests to transfer the number of a former customer.