7610 Rocks!

May 13, 2005

Oh boy, this is going to be a really geeky post, so brace yourself.

The Nokia 7610 is awesome. I’ve done everything but hotwire the little beastie so far.

First up, Bluetooth is fantastic. I’m using it to hook up to the PC, as well as suss out other phones on the train etc. Nokia have just put out Sensor, and while I haven’t yet found anyone else using it, the prospect is pretty cool. What’s more is that the PC-Bluetooth connection opens up a whole stack of options. I’m running ControlFreak and PuppetMaster as PC remote controls, so now I can use iTunes and Winamp remotely as well as a bevy of other options. I can lie in bed and listen to music, adjust volume, playlists and iTunes ratings and when I’m done, shutdown the computer all by remote.
It works the other way, too. GPRS data is ridiculously expensive. As in sell-the-house-expensive, not to mention god-awful slow. However, I have a broadband connection hooked up to a Bluetooth-enabled PC and a Bluetooth phone. See the connection? After three very late nights, much swearing, a little praying and a drop of determination, I am now running my phone’s data off the broadband connection. How cool is that? Using the mobile Opera browser, I can view the full version of this site, as it appears on the web. Including the >170k title picture, which alone would cost more that $3.50 to download over GPRS (see this pic for a zoomed in example). It was damn hard work, though. Opera connects to a proxy server (AnalogX’s Proxy) on the PC, via another app on the phone. The firewall lets the 7610 talk to the proxy server, which talks to the wireless network, which talks to the ADSL modem connected to the ISP. I have never seen such a settings nightmare. But it works!

I’ve also butchered LifeBlog to my liking. As I mentioned earlier, LifeBlog is in bed with TypePad and I am far too cheap to layout cash when I’ve just got this blog setup to my liking. So there’s the first problem. I managed to get around this by convincing LifeBlog to post to Flickr instead. This way, whatever photo I submit is added to my photostream. Not bad, we’re halfway there. Now to put that on the blog. Flickr conveniently has the ability to post photos to Blogger blogs built right in. This now happens whenever something is posted to the stream. Ta-da!

LifeBlog + Flickr + Blogger = makeshift LifeBlog blog
I’ll be adding links to the sidebar soon, but you can find the blog here. The next step is to rig the LifeBlog app on the 7610 to post via the Bluetooth connection to the same blog.
LifeBlog.sis + Bluetooth + Flickr + Blogger = makeshift LifeBlog moblog
Excellent!

The standalone apps for the 7610 are pretty neat too. There’s the QuickOffice suite, which I originally encountered on my old Palm m100 (sidenote: this Palm had 2meg of memory. The 7610 comes standard with a 64meg card. Progress). Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents are now good to go. I’m just about to check out Documents To Go as well, for the same purpose. Another app that I’ve reencountered from the Palm days is AvantGo, however, this is proving to be a bitch to setup. Games aren’t too bad either, the clear standout here is a prot of the original Doom. How cool is that?? I’m also in the market for a decent email program and RSS reader, preferably one I can sync over the Bluetooth connection. The FeedBurner MFR app doesn’t let me specify the proxy I need to tunnel through to the net.

I do have some gripes. Quite a few really, but I’m on a high at the moment getting everything working, so I’ll save that for another day, when it all crashes.

So there you go. A modern, connected man. I’m having a ball.

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