Hi there, I visited one of my customers yesterday - he has just got an "upgrade" to a Nokia N95 and wanted it set up to transfer his photos to his laptop.
Many aspects of using the phone reminded me why I hate mobile phones. Once a mail account has been added there is no way to change its name - I initially spelled "aol email" in small letters, so in order to make its title neat on the phone's homescreen ("AOL Email") I had to delete the account completely and recreate it. I bought the Freerunner so that I can fix stuff like this by editing a text file. The N95 fails to create a mail account half the time you enter the details, falling silently back to the mailboxes screen without an entry for the new account you just tried to setup. Orange, my customer's mobile phone provider, have installed a utility to upload your photos to your "blog" account on their website, and every time you take a photo it comes up with an annoying menu asking if you want to do so. As free software zealots you may be interested to read that whilst Googling on how to disable this menu I came across a number of forum posts and news articles complaining how the UK providers Orange & O2 have removed the N95's VoIP application from their software builds, for obvious reasons. I never quite managed to work out how to remove the Orange Blog Gallery software completely, as it's not shown in the phone's application manager. You are able to remove the annoying pop-up menu, however, by choosing the "upload" option, agreeing to the long and small-printed terms-of-use and then cancelling out of the operation. Only after that is there an option present, so you're not able to remove this menu if you refuse to accept the terms of use for their software. I find this sort of non- obvious behaviour - for me it is logical to ask "do you wish to disable the feature?" when I decline an agreement - the ideal way to piss me off. Another reminder of why I hate mobile phones was the connection options. I told the phone always to get mail by 3G (and always to ignore the user's home wireless network and any others) because the choice was to set one specific network or to ask every time which network to use. The connection options included "Orange Internet" and a confusing array of about half a dozen other "Orange ..." options. Previous mobile phones of mine have had a similar number of options included by O2 - "O2 Web And Walk", "O2 Mobile Web", "O2 GPRS", and so on. This completely baffles me, as I would expect only one option for internet over mobile phone networks (and another for wifi). Why so many? I could surely work out what is going on if I spent enough time at it, but I am reluctant to delete all the apparently-spurious options without knowing what they're for, and my technically- challenged customer should not reasonably be expected to select the right one time after time. Anyway, on to the stuff that is REALLY COOL about this phone. I apologise if this is old hat to everyone else, but for me (even after I discovered the N95 model is at least 9 months old) it was an eye- opener into what modern mobile phones do these days. Firstly under wifi is an option to wake up the WLAN module every X minutes and scan for networks. As far as I understand the N95's configuration, this isn't presently as useful as it ought to be. But on an Openmoko device we could surely configure wifi to automatically be used for services whenever available. The waking of the wifi module (and then, presumably, putting it back to sleep) allows full wifi versatility, however, without the battery consumption of having it on all the time. Secondly, mail settings also have an option to connect every XX minutes, with the option to only do so on "home" phone networks (to avoid roaming charges). I have been wishing for this since getting my Sony Ericsson P990i, which requires a manual check of my IMAP accounts. Obviously one only uses a manual email check when one is waiting on a particularly important or urgent message, and one tends only to do this on a mobile phone when one wants to check quickly. For me, at least, this isn't a daily occurrence, so my P990i has to spend ages synchronising the last 3 weeks' worth of messages across GPRS before its able to tell me whether the important message has arrived (or not) yet. But on the N95 you're alerted immediately (checks can be scheduled every 5 minutes) if a new email has come in - it doesn't need "push technology" for this to be as seamless as SMS alerts, as long as you have an unlimited data plan. I guess my big question is whether this is what the dbus stuff (that Openmoko are developing) is all about? A mail program needs to be able to check to see if any usable wifi networks are available and to wake GPRS (and tell it to dial) if not. Obviously if one has to call `modprobe` and `iwscan` then the process is a bit non-portable - this is the one software feature that I really want Openmoko to provide I'm sorry if I'm "not with it", but I've never had a mobile phone that will properly alert me the moment a new email comes in and (especially since vgetty on my home Linux box will answer the phone & email an MP3 of an answerphone message to me) it is quite a killer feature for me. Stroller. _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community