Last summer (5 months ago), I bought my first cell phone ever. I ended up getting a (then expensive) Motorola RAZR V3C with a plan from Bell Canada
It was quite stressful, actually. Before buying it, I asked many, many times if Bluetooth was supported to allow transfer of files between my phone and my computer, especially the photos I would take. Their answer was continuously "Bluetooth is only for wireless headsets". Even on the web site you could read "OPEX file transfers are not possible". I also took the "unlimited data" plan which came with a package for downloading videos, even though I don't really download videos. The plan was to use the web browser to connect to my work's webmail, etc. But then the sales guy wouldn't let me try the web browser on the model phone, much less trying to synchronize it with my laptop. So, for a 3-year plann, a step of faith it was.
Well, first off, Bluetooth was working with iSync on my Mac. OPEX "file push" didn't work, but pretty much everything else did. The phone was recognized as a Verizon model, so it would support accented characters nor the calendar, but after hacking the XML files in the iSync.app bundle, both contact and calendar synchronization worked fine.
I was also able to do file transfers of both photos and videos between my PowerBook and the phone. Can't put ringtones, they want you to pay for that, of course... But transferring photos worked much better that those "multimedia" SMSs, and using QuickTime 7 I could encode any video and put it on the cell phone. I tested with a full episode of The Simpsons, and it was decent. Drained the battery almost completely after 23 minutes, though, so it's not like a video iPod.
Still, the built-in "web browser" sucked. It doesn't support most SSL certificates (so no work webmail), it would be massively slow, and downright ugly on any web site, especially those made with WAP.
I tried installing Opera Mini, but it failed every time because of some "unexpected signature" error. Even worse, the downloaded file would use memory in the phone, but you can't delete that memory since the installation failed. Basically, a permanent memory leak. Not good for a cell phone I want to use for 2 or 3 years...
So I abandoned all hope of getting a decent browsing experience. I moved on to other things, for example at work with out new Microsoft Exchange server. I was surprised to discover that Microsoft Entourage for MacOS X supported synchronization with iCal, making it possible to synchronize my work calendar and meetings with my cellphone.
And then, the discovery. While reading a discussion about the release of Opera Mini 3.0, a user named mizunoX pointed out that you could use this site to download any JAR application file to my RAZR phone. Minus the annoyance of asking confirmation to let Opera Mini connect to the network on startup... It worked!
Now I have work email, home email, calendar and contact synchronization and web browsing, all unlimited, including a 50-minute plan (unlimited nights and weekends) and the usual junk (call display, unlimited SMS, voice mail...), for $60 per month, taxes and fees included. This is basically half of what it would cost for an equivalent Blackberry. And my cellphone is much smaller than a Blackberry or a "Smart Phone".
Now I was wondering if I could write my own software for the phone, now that I know how to upload it. I heard J2ME is hard to develop and test. One day I'll try my own version of "Hello World", or maybe a simple SSH client...
Published on December 5, 2006 at 19:44 EST
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