I have replaced my V600i mobile phone with a K610i from Vodafone. For some reason they wouldn’t buy me a red one. Here’s what I did with it.
Vodafone remains my network provider and we’ll see how useful, clubsonyerisson remains over time.
Sony Ericsson have published an official K610i Support Page and have published their version of the user manual on their support site. They also have a developer site.
Web Browser
I wanted to avoid downloading files to use while on the road. I created among other pages a page with a google map of New Cross. I set up web pages at http://davelevy.info to point at this page and the original;google map. Unfortunately the browser on the phone won’t take the map because of its size and the bliki page probably because of the iframe. Some experiments in writing, or nor, mobile opitimised web pages. This didn’t work well.
When configuring an e-mail account for use with vodafone.net, the user name needs to known but does not include the @vodafone.net string. I have just discovered that the e-mail client will connect to more than one IMAP server, but it seems that it’ll only mail out (SMTP) using my network providers account.
3G Data Services
I finally configured the laptop to use the mobile as a modem using 3G. This is quite simple really. It is written up in detail on my blog, one of the laptop diaries series, onto the internet with 3G. After using an alternative XP build, I revised the instructions in an article called More Bluetooth on my blog. The process is
- Add a bluetooth modem device.
- Add a dial up agent and mount it on the modem
If using the Windows XP bluetooth drivers, you must use the following code instead of a phone number
*99***3#
The number 3 has to agree with the position of ‘contract internet’ in the ‘Data Accounts’ list, which can be found in the Data comm menu, in the Connectivity menu, in Settings. I assume this piece of the configuration is specific to the vodafone implementation of the software.
If using the Toshiba drivers the default phone number works.
tags: technology laptop vodafone bluetooth modem 3G internet sonyericsson K610i
Calendar
I got this working the other week, with my workplace calendar. It is a Sun iplanet calender server, or whatever we’re calling today. Truly useful, but its only bi-directional. I need to see if one can set the privacy flag on the phone client, otherwise my work colleagues might be finding out more about my life than they want.
There are some syntactic issues around All Day events. They don’t seem to count the day as the same set of minutes.
There are some issues on repeated events.
It seems that placing a reminder on the phone event copies back to the server and both alerts i.e. the server default action occur. This needs further testing.
tags: icalendar k610i calendar synchronization synchronisation
RSS Reader
This doesn’t seem to be working, which is a nuisance. I have written up the state of my findings at this thread at clubsonyericsson. It looks to me like Sun & Vodafone have disabled the RSS Reader. It’s Vodafone, they obviously don’t want all that RSS running over their lovely network.
Good things
The screen might be a tiny bit bigger, I am not sure, but many displays now use a larger font.
The buttons are not so close together, nor so violently bevelled. The are thus easier for larger hands.
It makes phone calls.
Bad things
Speaker is poor and drains the battery.
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