Archive for the ‘Mobile phones software’ Category

Opera Mini 4.0 beta 2

Friday, August 31st, 2007

OK, I admit it, I was wrong. Opera Mini is fantastic; even the first beta of 4.0 is faster and more stable than the latest (native Symbian) Opera Mobile, and has some great features not available in the latter. And I absolutely love the use of their proxy and the resulting reduced bandwidth. For the record, this is on a Nokia 6630.

Then again, Opera Mobile hasn’t been updated in a year, and it’s 8.x, while Mini (the version 4 betas) are based on 9.x. I have great hopes for Opera Mobile 9, with its Ajax support, among other new stuff.

Anyway, I installed Mini 4.0 beta 2 yesterday evening, and it “feels” even better than the first beta: quicker, a new small font (should be great for screens larger than mine), custom search engines, and it saves whether you want full screen or not; no need to enable it every time I open the browser. :)

Plus, it’s free. Go ahead, try it out.

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Posted in Browsers, Mobile phones, Mobile phones software | 2 Comments »

Reading blogs away from the computer

Sunday, October 8th, 2006

Now that I work at home (and yes, I’ve been incredibly lazy… where are the new posts? ahem… any day now :) ), I’ve discovered something about myself: I don’t like to read stuff on my computer.

Sure, I do a lot of that, anyway, but, for instance, there are a lot of blogs that I have subscribed in Bloglines… only I usually skip them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the content of those blogs – I do. I simply tend, repeatedly, to find excuses, other things I’d rather do at the time, and so on. However, I love to read them in other places – in bed, in a café, and so on. Whenever I’m alone, with nothing to do, and away from a computer.

Reading them in a mobile phone or PDA, then, is the logical answer (a laptop is still much too “PC-like”, with all its myriad distractions; when you can do everything, sometimes it’s hard to focus on just what you need to actually do). I currently use a Nokia 6630, which I’ve had for more than a year. I’ve tried several aggregators, and also the mobile Bloglines, which is accessed through a web browser such as Opera, and, while they work well, they’re too slow and cumbersome for my tastes. Therefore, I used a combination of newspipe (to convert posts from feeds to email messages) and Profimail (to access a mailbox through IMAP). Recently, I’ve dumped newspipe for rss2email, for reasons I’ll mention in a future post, and that’s what I have right now.

I’ve been considering other possibilities, though. As I said, a laptop isn’t a good idea here. I’d mostly like something a little bigger than the 6630, with a larger and better screen, and possibly a QWERTY keyboard (to do annotations and so on). The Nokia E61 seems to fit the bill (and it supports Wi-Fi, which would save me a lot of money in phone bills), though I wouldn’t like to spend too much money (after all, it’s mostly a luxury – I can keep using the 6630, or even battle my distaste for reading on the PC). A PocketPC (are they still called that, these days?) PDA might also do the trick, though the ones I saw recently would cost an arm and a leg (really, 800 euros!? what are they thinking?).

So, any suggestions / tips? :)

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Posted in Blogging, Email, Mobile phones, Mobile phones software, PDAs | 8 Comments »

ProfiMail and the Gmail "untrusted certificate"

Monday, July 31st, 2006

If you read your email on a Series 60 phone, you probably use ProfiMail, a very nice mobile email client.

However, when you configure it to access a Gmail account, you will always get the “This site uses an untrusted certificate” message. Quite annoying, since it requires 2 key presses to pass. Every single time. There’s no option for “I know, just ignore it from now on”.

The cause of the problem is that Series 60 phones, much like web browsers, have a list of trusted root certificates, and the one Gmail uses, from Equifax, isn’t in it.

How to fix it? I search around, and didn’t find a single page with instructions on how to solve this thing. But, by combining this and this, I was able to remove that annoying prompt for good.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Using the phone’s browser (Opera also works), browse to http://www.ocasta.co.uk/cert.html. Click on the only link on that page.
  • It should prompt you to install the certificate. Accept it.
  • It should ask you what you want to trust the certificate for. Choose “Internet”.

This works on my Nokia 6630. Other phones may simply install the certificate, after which you have to go to Settings, Security, Certificate Management, and set the new Equifax certificate as “Trusted”.

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Posted in Email, Mobile phones, Mobile phones software | 8 Comments »

More on Firefox 1.5, and “release candidates”

Wednesday, November 30th, 2005

I wondered why I didn’t get the auto-update prompt, and so I went and got the 1.5 final version from the FTP site. I installed it, and… the build number is exactly the same as RC3. Which means, apparently, that 1.5RC3 and 1.5 final are the same!

This is what a release candidate should be – a candidate for the final version, which, if no new bugs are discovered, becomes the final version (otherwise, those bugs are fixed, and a second RC is released). But I’ve got so much used to the fact that “release candidate”, to most software authors, means just “what comes after beta” or “we can’t keep calling them betas forever”, that I didn’t even think that they would be using the term properly here! :)

Posted in Browsers, Mobile phones software, Unix / Linux / *BSD software | 2 Comments »

Software I like #3: MobiPocket Reader

Monday, October 3rd, 2005

(NOTE: this is part of the “Software I like” series)

mobipocket 1           mobipocket 2

The MobiPocket Reader is the software I use for reading ebooks in my Series 60 cell phones (the 6630 and the N-Gage). (there are also Palm, PocketPC, UIQ, Windows SmartPhone and Windows desktop versions)

Contrary to what you may think, reading ebooks in your mobile phone is perfectly fine, and fully readable without tiring out your eyes – not as pleasant, certainly, as a real book made of paper, but, on the other hand, you tend to bring your cell phone anywhere and have it with you all the time. And it can easily hold 10-20 books or more, with a mere 128MB card. When I go on holidays, I usually bring a bag of books; this summer, I just brought my 6630, with the “Autumn” series by David Moody, plus, of course, the Zombie Survival Guide (don’t leave home without it!) :)

MobiPocket don’t just make the reader – they’re also an ebook store. I’ve bought many books there – they have a lot of fantasy and science fiction, and prices are usually lower than those of the “dead trees” versions.

Posted in Mobile phones software, PDAs, Software | 2 Comments »

Software I like #1: Agile Messenger

Friday, September 30th, 2005

(NOTE: this is part of the “Software I like” series)

First, welcome to the second series in the Tlog. :)

Agile Messenger is, as the name implies, an Instant Messaging (IM) software for mobile phones. It supports MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger (no Jabber, though. :( ). Very easy to use, with “helping” features so you can, in a short time, write almost as fast as you do with a real keyboard.

It has, both on my N-Gage and on my 6630, helped me through a lot of boring times, such as when dealing with Portuguese bureaucracy (that means waiting for hours and hours…). Yes, there are other ways to keep oneself entertained when you only have a cell phone (and maybe I’ll mention some of them in a future part of this series), but sometime you’re really not in the right frame of mind to read a book or play a game… but a quick conversation with a friend or two can be fun.

It can be left running in the background, so you are warned when you receive a new message, but can, meanwhile, use the phone for other things, or simply put it in your pocket.

It’s not free, though – it costs 3 euros a month, paid by premium SMSs. Or you can pay 20 euros and use it forever.

It has versions for Series 60 phones, Series 90, UIQ, PocketPC and Windows Smartphones.

Pros: works as advertised :) , nice interface, easy to use, cheap, includes smileys, can also send and receive voice messages, can run in the background.
Cons: no Jabber :( , only one account per service (that is, you can’t connect to 2 MSN accounts simultaneously, for example).

Posted in Mobile phones software | No Comments »

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
This work by Pedro Timóteo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal.