Stupid Phone Tricks
Nov. 18th, 2003 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikI'm getting the hang of the smartphone. A bit of app customizing and it's getting to be less a microsoft ad and more "me"... useful instead of showy. I'm getting into registry hacking now in hopes of removing the last of AT&T-marketing's grip from the device and maybe make it run a little faster. I also found a good screen-shot utility which I used to make this post.
The phone has a 'home screen' that you can change just about everything on. I've been working on getting mine to swap look-and-feel based on time of day. At work it's got a very standard, blue-backdrop with a few menus and calendar reminders. When I'm off work, the home screen is much more casual, as shown here (thanks again for the pic, Hedgy!). Hitting the 'programs' key takes you to a standard set of numbered menus, making it easy to tap them with the keyboard. Pictured is a sub-menu of games, for instance.
The built in web-browser is PocketIE. It's surprisingly handy for it's size... handling just about anything the Web can pitch at it except for frames and pop-ups. Some of those will be fixed in the 2003 version of the OS, I hear. As the device is a GPRS 4+1 it's workably fast. Reading the LJ Friends list is a snap, as is buying movie tickets online, googling for stuff or even using Mapquest or other directory tools. This is very handy in a mobile environment.
One nice thing are the apps that are designed directly for the phone and its mobile-data nature. I've got a live-traffic monitor that will show the roads around this area by downloading the Caltrans data stream and posting it as maps or highway bulletins. Another free-of-charge favorite is the Connected Bits(tm) version of the Weather program that downloads NOAA data and displays simplified versions for easy use. I've got other weather apps that get downright involved in what they display, but this one is just swank looking.
At work the phone is very handy for looking through our source documents. It has viewers for PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and about any image format. Supposedly Microsoft is hacking up a visio viewer as well (for now I use PDF conversions). I've put about 300K of source docs on my SD card, such as the entire corporate IP-allocation table. Being able to pull that up on the fly was something I could do on previous smartphones and I'm glad I can continue to do it just as easily here. For more casual use, simple shareware programs like SmartTip are handy. It's a well thought out little utility that I was glad to pay the author $5 for. You can press left/right to change the tip% until you find something fair and an easy round number for everybody. It's really been useful.
Games are usually the first apps to break a device as developers try to squeak every cheat or bit of performance out of the development kit. The Smartphone is no exception. As a result, the screenshot util sometimes fights with the games, so no shots of the excellent PacMan, Space Invaders, Links or Atari EMU stuff. There's a pretty decent cache of games out there for the phone and the MAME project is supposedly underway too. For now I'll just post a screenshot of one of the few games that let me take a pic: NetHack. It plays in either tile or ascii mode, and auto-saves any time you shut it down or swap to another app (like taking a call). Funfun. :)
Ringtones can be just about anything. Right now my phone rings like an old Bell Telephones twin-bell ringer. This has the nice effect of being unmistakable and yet still original. It makes people laugh when they see me pull out this teeny thing after that sound; the humor helps take the edge off the 'eew a celphone' reaction some folks have started to get these days. When someone SMS's me it plays a series of R2D2 squawks and beeps, and the new-email sounds are the same as my laptop.
The battery life is better than the PocketPC Phone Edition but not as good as my Nokia 9290 was. I can get 3-4 days of standby with normal voice use, or 2 days of heavy use (including things like showing MPEG movies or leaving the GPRS connection up all day, like the time I left MSN-IM on by accident). Next gen devices should have a better handle on the runaway-app thing and keep battery life going a little longer.
The speakerphone is better than the PocketPC but again worse than the Nokia. Passable for daily use but not great for in-car. The earpiece is great when used normally. The phone itself is solid for its size and has a great feel to the flip; I think it'll last through the bumps and knocks I'll be giving it. It's already survived one drop from the hip to the pavement (hitting my shoe part-way down).
I've still not gotten deep into the voice-shortcut things; I prefer to press buttons instead of speak commands at the phone, though I know that doesn't make a ton of sense. The quick-lookup feature lets you type any part of any contact and get a narrowing-search as you go which is a big improvement over other phones I've used.
Unless anybody has more questions about this silly tech-toy I'll now stop clogging my journal with posts about it. Well... at least until the 2003 edition (with camera and bluetooth) comes out in the middle of next year.
The phone has a 'home screen' that you can change just about everything on. I've been working on getting mine to swap look-and-feel based on time of day. At work it's got a very standard, blue-backdrop with a few menus and calendar reminders. When I'm off work, the home screen is much more casual, as shown here (thanks again for the pic, Hedgy!). Hitting the 'programs' key takes you to a standard set of numbered menus, making it easy to tap them with the keyboard. Pictured is a sub-menu of games, for instance. The built in web-browser is PocketIE. It's surprisingly handy for it's size... handling just about anything the Web can pitch at it except for frames and pop-ups. Some of those will be fixed in the 2003 version of the OS, I hear. As the device is a GPRS 4+1 it's workably fast. Reading the LJ Friends list is a snap, as is buying movie tickets online, googling for stuff or even using Mapquest or other directory tools. This is very handy in a mobile environment.One nice thing are the apps that are designed directly for the phone and its mobile-data nature. I've got a live-traffic monitor that will show the roads around this area by downloading the Caltrans data stream and posting it as maps or highway bulletins. Another free-of-charge favorite is the Connected Bits(tm) version of the Weather program that downloads NOAA data and displays simplified versions for easy use. I've got other weather apps that get downright involved in what they display, but this one is just swank looking.At work the phone is very handy for looking through our source documents. It has viewers for PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and about any image format. Supposedly Microsoft is hacking up a visio viewer as well (for now I use PDF conversions). I've put about 300K of source docs on my SD card, such as the entire corporate IP-allocation table. Being able to pull that up on the fly was something I could do on previous smartphones and I'm glad I can continue to do it just as easily here. For more casual use, simple shareware programs like SmartTip are handy. It's a well thought out little utility that I was glad to pay the author $5 for. You can press left/right to change the tip% until you find something fair and an easy round number for everybody. It's really been useful.Games are usually the first apps to break a device as developers try to squeak every cheat or bit of performance out of the development kit. The Smartphone is no exception. As a result, the screenshot util sometimes fights with the games, so no shots of the excellent PacMan, Space Invaders, Links or Atari EMU stuff. There's a pretty decent cache of games out there for the phone and the MAME project is supposedly underway too. For now I'll just post a screenshot of one of the few games that let me take a pic: NetHack. It plays in either tile or ascii mode, and auto-saves any time you shut it down or swap to another app (like taking a call). Funfun. :)Ringtones can be just about anything. Right now my phone rings like an old Bell Telephones twin-bell ringer. This has the nice effect of being unmistakable and yet still original. It makes people laugh when they see me pull out this teeny thing after that sound; the humor helps take the edge off the 'eew a celphone' reaction some folks have started to get these days. When someone SMS's me it plays a series of R2D2 squawks and beeps, and the new-email sounds are the same as my laptop.
The battery life is better than the PocketPC Phone Edition but not as good as my Nokia 9290 was. I can get 3-4 days of standby with normal voice use, or 2 days of heavy use (including things like showing MPEG movies or leaving the GPRS connection up all day, like the time I left MSN-IM on by accident). Next gen devices should have a better handle on the runaway-app thing and keep battery life going a little longer.
The speakerphone is better than the PocketPC but again worse than the Nokia. Passable for daily use but not great for in-car. The earpiece is great when used normally. The phone itself is solid for its size and has a great feel to the flip; I think it'll last through the bumps and knocks I'll be giving it. It's already survived one drop from the hip to the pavement (hitting my shoe part-way down).
I've still not gotten deep into the voice-shortcut things; I prefer to press buttons instead of speak commands at the phone, though I know that doesn't make a ton of sense. The quick-lookup feature lets you type any part of any contact and get a narrowing-search as you go which is a big improvement over other phones I've used.
Unless anybody has more questions about this silly tech-toy I'll now stop clogging my journal with posts about it. Well... at least until the 2003 edition (with camera and bluetooth) comes out in the middle of next year.
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Date: 2003-11-18 04:59 pm (UTC)Cool Phone
Date: 2003-11-19 11:57 am (UTC)Tug has made his phone branch well beyond 'phone' status, and while he's probably been tweaking and tinkering with it since he got it, it is still a small investment of time, for a major payoff.
Tug, thanks for the info on the phone. I've been wondering why people get these mega-advanced phones... and now I know!
-=B.