A1000blog

3 Sweden in Denmark

I'm currently on a scouting camp in Denmark (see separate blog). 3 has great coverage here, and best of all - the prices for voice calls and data traffic are the same her as in Sweden. In other words I blogging a lot from my A1000.

Tracker and looks like OSX

This post should have been written months ago. But, for many reasons it's not until now I tell you about Tracker - the desktop and skin application I ended up using.

When I started to look around in forums, even before I bought my A1000, I noticed that many threads were talking about skins and the applications Handy Day and Tracker. Both these are kind of add-ons to the Symbian/UIQ operating system to make it more user friendly and above all - better looking. What you get is basically a desktop-like user interface that is highly customizable.

I began by trying out Handy Day 2005 (USD 29.95). It worked fine and I was suprised to find how useful the included weather information service was. After the trial period was over I installed Tracker 4 for UIQ (USD 19.95). It delivered similar features, but no weather (other apps can do that). But what really made me stay and pay for Tracker was that I could re-define some of the physical buttons on the phone.

Basically the big point is that I have defined the right game button to close the current application. With UIQ you tend to start something and then find yourself struggling to get back to where you were. Even worse, after a while the memory tends to overflow and the A1000 re-boots without warning. Say that you are checking your calendar and want to make a call. What I do now is press the address book icon, find the contact, and call it by clicking one of the phone number icons. After the call I simply press the game button and I'm back in the calender.

There are a number of skins, or skin packages, available for both apps. Actually these provide more than cosmetic enhancements. You can have multiple desktop, re-arrange icons, add short cuts, and more. After I decided for Tracker I tried some skins in the Diamond Pack, but ended up with the OSX.SE skin - mainly for emotional reasons. It's cool to have a phone that looks like a Mac. Seems though that many preferrs to have their A1000's look like a Windows XP-machine. I actually saw a forum poster, and Windows user, that said he was surprised to find how easy it was to use a Mac - after using the OSX.SE skin on his A1000!!!

As you can see on the picture I have put some icons on my desktop. The top and bottom parts of the screen is part of the OSX.SE design. My items are:

• shortcuts to my girlfriends and sons voice numbers
• three notes (misc stuff, kind of to do lists)
• (white paper and pen is the OSX.SE's built in apps menu)
• shortcuts to doHeadlines, sCap and stacker
• shortcut to eDoom and the Calculator
• shortcuts to the sound and video players
• shortcut to Desktop suite (facilitates syncing enormously)
• (waste basket comes with OSX.SE)

OSX.SE is designed for the SonyEricsson P900 together with some apps that I don't have on my A1000. That means everyting is not working, but I find it really nice and useful anyway. Especially in combination with Appicker (see earlier posting).

To sum it up. I recommend anyone with an A1000 to get a desktop add-on. They really make the phone more useful, convenient, and good looking.

Mobile Personal Video Recordings

A couple of weeks ago I purchased a video/TV-card (Hauppage PVR-350) and installed it in one of the PCs we have at home. Included in the package was a software based service called TvOnTime (similar apps exists for other countries). TvOnTime integrates Swedish TV-channel listings with the possibility to do web-based set ups of Personal Vide Recordings. See PVRblog for more info, although that blog is geared more towards the TiVo-system).

One of TvOnTime's features is mobile access through either a wap or xhtml-interface. I use the xhtml-interface, which is really convenient (remembers me so I don´t have to log in all the time). Besides giving me the possibility to check out TV-listings on my A1000, I can select the programs I want recorded. The only drawback is that the PC has to be turned on at home. At user defined intervals the application in the home based PC accesses the TvOnTime system to dowload the TV-programming I have defined. It works very well indeed.

Calling for appointments

Today I called a customer in order to move a meeting. Using my calender in the A1000 I smoothly changed the date and time for our appointment. In fact, my customer asked me to wait a minute so that she could move to another room where her calendar was. This is about have and have nots (I´m one of the former).

Simple profile selection

Some like much a lot, other´s like less more. My previous phones offered many profiles with a multitude of setting options that tended to be difficult to manage as well as remember. With the A1000 I like that the number of "alert profiles" (silent, vibrate, and audio) is three and no more. Even better is how easily you switch between the profiles - it is a matter of a two-click sequence on the status bar.

As icing on the cake is the "aeroplane profile". By clicking on the signal indicator you not only see the connection status in more detail, you can also turn the radio transmitter off. That is, go into aeroplane profile (wish they called it "disconnect mode" instead). If you don´t see the use of this feature, imagine flying and wanting to play a game. Or listening to MP3-music without letting anybody know where you are.