HTC and Motorola

Just over these two weeks, over 5 thousands came to my humble blog from XDA-developer's forum. It turned out that Chad "thundershadow14", based on the HTC Touch port, set to create a PictureFlow-based image viewer and release it as Windows Mobile executables. And seems that people like it, there are already 290 posts in that thread as I write this. It was reported to work on a wide range of HTC smartphones, among others Touch, Trinity, Herald, Hermes, Kaiser, Atlas, Prophet, Himalaya, Wizard, as well as other Windows Mobile devices like Treo 750, LG KS20, Asus P535, Axim X51v, and a bunch others. So if you have an HTC gadget (preferably with WM6), give it a shot. Looks like it quickly becomes one of the first popular Qt/WinCE-based application, this is considering that (as of now) the final official Qt/WinCE is not even released yet!

On the other side of the world, my countryman Ketut "blackhawk" Kumajaya brought PictureFlow to Linux-based Motorola phones (BTW, he is also the one who ports Rockbox to EZX). It runs smoothly on some Motorola phones like A1200, A780, E680i, ROKR E2, and ROKR E6. He kindly sent me the following screenshot:

There is even a short clip showing it on A1200:

From these two exciting developments, and since the response is overwhelming (I can't still believe people *do* really bother to mess around with such a weekend project), I want to be a bit more serious and plan to create a specialized image viewer with that lovely CoverFlow effect, designed with mobile device in mind (and targeting Qt/WinCE and Qtopia). From what I read in the forum, people are not happy with the loading time and memory consumption. Of course, this is definitely the case since the example I include with PictureFlow source code is not optimized for speed or memory footprint. It is a typical example program, meant to show how to use PictureFlow only, not as a basis of a real-world application. Thus, a really usable viewer must be implemented differently.

So, folks, stay tuned. Of course you can send me a smartphone, something like HTC Kaiser, if you want. I'll be glad to take it :-)

Motorola w205: some tips

After using Motorola w205 for some time, here I would like to share common tips which might be useful for others new w205 users:

Does it support key lock? Yes, of course. To lock the keypad, press menu button (middle button in the four-way pad) followed by * (star). If the screen becomes suddenly black, then the key locking is successful. To unlock, do the same step.

How to disable iTAP? iTAP is intelligent typing (or rather TAP-ping) technology from Motorola, used for writing text message (SMS). It's claimed to be better than T9 (text-on-nine) which is used everywhere else (Nokia, SE, Siemens, ...), but my personal experience shows that iTAP is inferior to T9.

There is no really menu item for disabling iTAP. The trick here is to switch the input method from iTAP to TAP . So iTAP means intelligent typing and TAP means non-intelligent typing. Yes, it's very confusing and not usable at all.

While you're composing an SMS, just press the menu button so that Input IME Menu shows up. There you can move from iTAP English (or German, French, etc) to TAP English (or German, French, etc). Then press the soft-button for Select. Now, word autoguessing is inactive and you can enjoy normal typing thumbing again.

If you feel like using iTAP again, just change the input method to iTAP English (or German, French, etc).

How to switch between capital and lower-case letters? This is also not obvious. When typing an SMS, suppose now the display always shows capital letters for each button that you tap. When you press 2, A will show up and it is highlighted. Right away press 0 and that A will be transformed to a. If you continue thumbing, only lower-case letters are produced. To switch to capital letters, just do it again (press a button, continue with 0 while the character is highlighted).

Why right away? Because 3 seconds after you press a button, the displayed letter will not be highlighted anymore and thus you can't change the case from lower-case to capital and vice versa.

Why 0 button? If you see carefully, there is a symbol that resembles an up-pointing arrow that button. So, it is supposed to be a shift key like in a typewriter or a keyboard.

(Picture from official Motorola w205 site)

back to basics: Motorola w205

During my adventure to find an ideal mobile phone, I often get arguments like: well, if you don't need a particular feature, just don't use it. The counter-argument is easy: if I don't need a feature, why should it exist after all? Reducing the complexity of software and hardware in a mobile phone could simplify a lot of things, increase the battery life, ease the technical support, and possibly even as far as improve its environment-friendliness factor. However, normally it also means less profit for phone sellers.

Fortunately, for those who are old-fashioned and need simple and basic mobile phone without all the unnecessary gimmicks, nowadays there are already choices from Nokia (1110, 1600, 2610), Sony Ericsson (J110, J120, J220), Samsung (SGH-C300), Motorola (F3, w205, w208), and many others.

Some time ago, I decided to bite the bullet and switch from the lovely black Motorola RAZR V3 to another phone: Motorola w205 (SAR head: 0.83 W/kg, body: 0.48 W/kg). It is considered one of the latest entry-level basic mobile phone as it is available only since Q1 this year. From Amazon.de, it costs only 46 euros including VAT and shipping. There are even cheaper offers, if you are willing to take SIM-locked phone in a prepaid bundle.

The phone is compact and light. It can do SMS but not MMS. I don't really care for MMS, all these 6 years using mobile phone, I have sent like 2 or 3 (useless) MMS. As for typing SMS, instead the common T9, again Motorola's own iTAP is used for intelligent/predictive typing. It is a minus point for me, for I always hate iTAP and disable it all time, but I guess I can live with that.

Its 1 MB memory is enough for 500 address book entries or 750 SMS. With 850 mAh Li-Ion battery, it is claimed to have talk time up to 8 hours and stand-by time up to 12 days. For sure, I reach the charger less often than with RAZR. If this is not enough, more powerful 1700 mAh battery is available for less than 7 euros.

The phone has a decent color display, 128x128 pixels with 65 thousand colors. Actually, I'd prefer to get a sharp black-and-white display with e-ink technology (as in Motofone F3, but the dot-matrix version thereof) as I'm sure the battery life would even be improved. But again, this one is already good enough.

There is no camera in this phone. Also no infrared. No Bluetooth. No WAP. No GPRS. No MP3 player. No radio. No singing-and-dancing stuff. No extra bells-and-whistles.

I am a happy man.

(Picture from official Motorola w205 site)