So after seeing Colin’s post on the search for a bluetooth headset, I thought I’ll post my search.
I’ve been looking at Bluetooth Stereo Headphones for a while to go with my Nokia e61i. I previously wasn’t much of a podcasting fan, but with my phone, I can easly transfer the podcasts to it, and listen to it while driving. Sure I could do it before on my computer, but I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the podcasts while hacking away on something else.
Good combinations:
- Podcast + Driving
- Podcast + Eating
- Podcast + LRT/Train
- Podcast + Taxi
- Podcast + Waiting for the person who should have arrived 45 minutes ago
The one problem that I’ve been having listening to Podcasts is that there is dangling wire down from my ear connecting the headphones to my phone. It increases the likelihood of accidents occurring that could be life threatening to the Nokia e61i. Damned!
While at Lowyat the other day I thought I’d press around.
Nokia has a product the BH-501. But when listening to it, the quality sucks. Songs sound like they are being played over a phone. Charges via the same adapter as my Nokia phone. 1 less charger to use. 1 extra charger to carry around. But sound quality sucked, so, no show.
Then there was the i.Tech BlueBAND R. This one came with a dongle so you could attach to to anything with an audio out. For example, your laptop, tv, anything really. Not bad I thought. It sounded great as well! Then I tried to test it on my phone. It sounded just like the Nokia one. The person said I needed “software” on my phone, so I let them load the software (MSI Player) and tried it out. Didn’t play all of my songs, except 1. But it did sound good. They said I should convert my music tracks. I said no. Then they suggested I listen to the music via the dongle if i wanted good quality. I said no, its Bluetooth for a reason, right? No wires. The dongle is nice if i want to connect it to non bluetooth devices though. Plus the mic feature wouldn’t work.
I’m sorry, I pay for convenience, not inconvenience.
It made me wonder, does the quality suck because the bandwidth between the headphone and phone is limited to Bluetooth at 40kBs?
I’ve done some Google-ing research on this topic, but the question is, do these headsets exist in Malaysia?
Any recommendations on some guys?
So continuing my series on the Nokia e61i.
Fullscreen Wallpaper
For some strange reason, if you take an image, resize it to the max resolution of the phone (320×240), and decide to use it as a wallpaper. It’s not fullscreen. This is because the status bars on the top and bottom block the way, and the image is squeezed between these leaving a gap on the left and right side. Very bad?
Example: The Good and Bad Wallpapers
Note: Notice the blank space on the left and right?
Disclaimer: Yes I also censored something…
After a bit of googling, I found the solution. Resize and crop to 320×198. Then it fits. So now I have the nice Dawn of Ubuntu wallpaper on my phone. You can grab my already cropped wallpaper if you are interested.
BTW: No I’m not going to stick a Ubuntu sticker on the phone, neither a GNU sticker. Though I have some Firefox stickers though…but nah… I might stick this though…
Mobile Code
Mobile Code is a way to encode information into a 2d image barcode, and decode it again.
Note: Notice the link is an IP address and not a domain? Why?
The image there supposedly stands for ‘http://aizatto.com’.
But in the list of mobile code readers only 2 are freeware applications Kaywa and UpCode.
Sadly Kaywa doesn’t support the e61i, and UpCode tries to connect to the internet via Maxis 3G, when a perfectly good Wirelees network is set up. Similarly I don’t have Maxis 3G service.
Video playback
So now I also have mini video player with me wherever I go. Awesomeness. But alot of my files are way to big in both file size and resolution for this tiny machine. Now I’m not underestimating the power of Nokia e61i but, it’s best to optimize things.
So I set my flags for ffmpeg, transferred the file. But no luck.
Thank goodness someone has covered converting videos via ffmpeg to be playable in RealPlayer.
ffmpeg -i movie.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -s 320x180 -acodec aac -ar 48000 -ab 128 -ac 2 movie.mp4
Note: You may want to be careful of the size (-s flag) of the output film, so that it doesn’t look stretched.
Not sure what those flags are? Tip: man ffmpeg
Note: Ubuntu will blow up on you because of the codecs. There are suggestions out there though, so just look for em. I initially did this on my OpenSUSE box, so I didn’t even notice…
Example: the love bug by m-flo featuring BoA. That hotty is BoA 
Example: Creative Commons - Reticulum Rex
ODF Support
Thanks to the comment on my blog by Oscar B, there seems to be another alternative to ODF support on the s60. Though it looks a bit outdated (1st June 2006). Similarly its only quite basic.
Collecting Links
For all of these stuffs, I googled most of them. So I’ve been collecting links and storing them in del.icio.us using the s60 tag.
There is so much Freeware/shareware
There is so much Freeware/Shareware out there for s60, but how about Free and Open Source Software?
Guess the only way to solve that is to put my words into action…
s60 Development
Kudos to mypapit for advice on doing s60 development.
I have a growing list of ideas of what software to develop in (hopefully) the near future.
Possible software to develop:
- Better calendar, with tagging/folksonomy support
- ODT viewer - help adoption of ODT in Malaysia and learn the technical details of the fomrat
- FOSS video player
- Remote keyboard - I want to contorl my Linux machine!
Any suggestions? List them down!
If you have freeware alternative to these now? Please suggest some, especially for the remote keyboard. I’d love to give presentations using my phone so I don’t have to keep going back to the laptop.
Stupid Problems
So here is a list of stupid problems I’ve encountered. I’ve already checked if I am running the latest software/firmware. Yes I have.
- Audio recording is only for 1minute
- Where is the FOSS
- Mobile Code isn’t working as well as I hoped it would
Originally this was a very very long post, I decided to put it into two seperate ones.
So after having the phone for a while, I can finally discuss somethings about it.
Wireless
The phone works on Wireless 802.11 G, thats basically for most common day routers available :).
WEP, WPA ad WPAv2 key works also. Been only using pre-shared keys.
Screenshot for SymbianOS
Awesome software Screenshot for SymbianOS (Free Software). Best part is its licensed under the GNU GPLv2. So I can learn from it :).
Note: Press both the buttons at the same time. Stupid me.
Google Reader
Instead of using the RSS reader, Yoonkit suggested I use Google Reader instead. I didn’t even know Google Reader existed for the mobile, because last time I went to the original site on the phone, it broke. You have to go to the mobile version, which I only found via Googling.
HTTP User Agent
So if you were curious what the HTTP User Agent for the e61i was…here you go.
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 es61i
Anything else you’d like to know about the phone?
If you want to see the e61i naked, well then it’s already been done, but not by me.
Note: Geek pr0n
Exif Data
Using the Eye of Gnome and exiv2 program I can investigate the properties of the images taken.
Aperture: F3.2
Focal Length: 4.9mm
ExposureMode: Auto exposure
WhiteBalance: Auto white balance
Now this means nothing to me at all, but I bet some of you may be interested.
Gnome Bluetooth
So now with some screenshots, I need to transfer those screenshots to my phone. Finally I can play with the Bluetooth on my IBM ThinkPad. So I did the required sudo apt-get install gnome-bluetooth, and tried it out…but no luck. Didn’t seem to work at all.
Transferring via USB
Bluetooth doesn’t work. Don’t even want to think about IrDA… so one of the remaining choices was USB.
Note: The phone can act as a USB storage device or be enabled for the Nokia PC Suite software. Naturally I chose the storage device.
Messaging Application Bug?
Funny thing though. When connected, people can’t call you. So when you disconnect, you get “1 new message”, and when trying to open it, it seems to hang the Messaging application. I can’t close it or anything, so I have to restart the phone.
Once started up again, you can read the message just fine. Damn weird.
The message?
You have X missed call(s) from +6XXXXXXXXXX
Or something like that…
Wonder if it’s related to the last time it hung at the Creative Commons event. Except I wasn’t connected to anything at all.
In the end I decided to flash my firmware, even though it’s at the latest one. Hope it doesn’t occur again. Die bug die!
More!
Stay tuned, more coming up later!
