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> T630 (and OSX): Geekdom Incarnate review
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Geekdom Incarnate:
Sony Ericsson T630
Cellular Services came through and upgraded the firmware of my new T630 from R4C003 to R6C005, but there are still some issues. Most annoying is something that used to work on my T68i, but doesn't on the T630: Recording (and playing) voice memos through a bluetooth headset. I found this to be very useful while driving. If I thought of an idea, or a task I had to do, I could just tap the button on my headset, say "record", and the T68i would then start recording through the headset until I tapped the headset button again. The T630, however, does something stupid: Once it recognises the "record" command, it disconnects the headset and records through the handset. Useless. Same for the "play" command. I seem to recall that either the T39m or an early firmware version of the T68i did the same thing, but it was definitely fixed. So, why the bug reversion in the T630?
O2 isn't offering Wireless Village, I guess, since they deleted the "My Friends" application (one of the few bits of functionality that sets the T630 apart from the T610, as far as I can tell) in order to brand my T630 with an O2 icon on my desktop. (By the way, O2 blew it as far as publicising "O2 Active", their fancy WAP site. I had a compatible T68i for the past year +, and would have been willing to take advatange of their promotions on O2 Active, but never heard about it until I read the leaflet that came with my T630, and saw that all of the cool offers had expired. Still, it didn't come close to what's on offer from T-Mobile USA, which apparently is no longer metering GPRS usage for their voice plan customers!).
Once I weeded out old contacts on my G4 OSX Powerbook so that there were fewer than the maximum 510 on the T630, bluetooth syncing via iSync seemed to work OK for the most part. But:
I would have preferred flawless, in-order copying of contacts up to the 510 limit, and then halting with a warning message for any contacts beyond that, rather than what iSync and the T630 actually did: mixing up names and fields and not informing me that not all conatcts were copied.
You have to underestimate the number of contacts to sync; I synced 377 contacts from OSX Address Book, but my phone says that I am using 463!
A lot of my contacts are companies or other notes that don't have anything in the Last Name or First Name fields. Address Book has a box you can tick on a contact to indicate that the contact is a company, so that it uses the Company Name field for sorting, etc. Too bad the T630 doesn't seem to use this: all my companies end up at the end of my contact list, with ".." as the name. That would be OK, even desirable, if the companies were then sorted by Company Name. But no, they seem to be randomly arranged, making finding a particular company very time consuming. I guess I'll have to go modify all my company contacts, putting the company name into the First Name field or something kludgy like that.
Since Address Book and the T630 both associate pictures with contacts, it seems natural for syncing of pictures to at least be an option. Apparently it isn't.
I am not big into games (I play on my PC sometimes, but I've never played Nintendo, Sega, Playstation, or even GameBoy if you can believe it!), so I am surprised to find that one of my favourite features of the phone is the inclusion of the classic game Qbert, the only arcade game that I ever finished (way back in the 80s). Too bad there's only one other game on the phone; I downloaded some free games from the internet and installed them, but they only use a quarter of the screen, so they are too tiny to play, in my opinion.
Another plus is that the caller name feature actually works: If someone for whom I have a voice command phones me, then the recording of their name is played, which is especially useful while driving and wearing the headset.
What about the T630 and the internet?
WAP seems to work fine enough, but I have noticed that I am disconnected if I don't don't do anything for a minute or two. I thought one of the big selling points of GPRS is that you can stay connected, and thus have instant access when you need it, instead of having to dial up each time?
GSM is another matter. I was annoyed by the fact that the T68i could only connect to my Powerbook at 9600 baud, even though I now that the phone itself is capable of connecting at rates up to 28k. Can bluetooth really be the limiting factor here? As a matter of fact, I can't find any OSX modem scripts for the T630. If there are any, perhaps they solve the problem?
I decided to see how the T630 does accessing email on its own. I looked at the data accounts on the phone, saw one called "changeme.co.uk", and foolishly followed its advice. I took 10 minutes or so carefully modifying the account with my Freeserve server data. Unfortunately, there is no way to change the name of the account, so I'm stuck with "changeme.co.uk". I would have been better off if they hadn't put that dummy account in there.
One reason why it took so long to enter my details is because of an annoyance that first showed itself with the T39m. The dummy account has something like "pop.changeme.co.uk" as the incoming server, so you would think that you should put "pop.freeserve.net" in its place. If you do that, as I did, you get a "Server not found error". I recalled that after several hours of frustration and fruitless tech support calls, a Sony Ericsson (then just Ericsson) tech support finally told me that you had to put the actual IP address, in numbers, in those slots. So I put in 195.92.193.154, etc. and sure enough, that did the trick. What a pain.
Otherwise, the phone is a pleasure to use. The display is wonderful, the response is fast.
[ This Message was edited by: chrisley on 2004-05-25 22:21 ]
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Posted: 2004-05-25 23:09:12
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Try
PhoneAgent for syncing contacts with pictures, as well as loads of other useful things...
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Posted: 2004-05-26 00:35:57
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Thanks for that, Jools. I'm downloading the trial version of PhoneAgent now.
One other thing I forgot to mention: I travel to Sweden a lot, so wanted to get the English/Danish/Swedish/Norwegian/Finnish version of the T630. But O2 only has the English/French/German version of the phone. I asked Cellular Services if they could change the language, and they said yes, but it is not covered under warranty so they would have to charge me £17.
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Posted: 2004-05-26 11:15:23
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OK, just downloaded and tried PhoneAgent. It downloaded the contents of my phone address book to my Powerbook OK, except it didn't download any photos that I have associated with my contacts (which would be the main reason for me to use Phone Agent). This is odd, since it is listed as the first feature of PhoneAgent:
"
MAIN FEATURES
Phonebook
- reading phonebooks from the phone memory and the SIM card (extended phonebook from the phone memory is supported - 5 numbers, 2 texts, email and a person's picture for each entry)"
There is no mention of the reading pictures feature being disabled for the trial version.
On another note, another disappointment about the T630 (and SE phones in general) is lack of Apple support. It would be nice to have MMS Home Studio or Image Editor running on my PowerBook rather than my PC.
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Posted: 2004-05-26 11:42:55
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Another feature that should be on the T630 is this: One should be able to select an existing contact entry to use as a business card. As it stands now, one has to create a new business card from scratch. This isn't just a waste of time -- it also leads to duplicate entries when syncing with another device that has its own business card.
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Posted: 2004-05-26 11:49:03
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Quote:
On 2004-05-26 11:42:55, chrisley wrote:
...
There is no mention of the reading pictures feature being disabled for the trial version.
On another note, another disappointment about the T630 (and SE phones in general) is lack of Apple support. It would be nice to have MMS Home Studio or Image Editor running on my PowerBook rather than my PC.
I've seen the full program on a Mac before (don't have a Mac myself, yet) and it is possible.
But it's also mentioned on the site, just below the product requirements what is disabled during the trail.
Quote:Unregistered version of PhoneAgent
It is not possible to:
- upload phone memory phonebook to the phone
- send SMS messages
- save SMS messages to the phone
- delete SMS messages from the phone
- upload MMS messages to the phone
- upload themes to the phone
- save themes
As a future Powerbook 15" user, I've to agree about the lack of support for Apple regarding the software
is offering. Kept me from buying the P900. Which is too bad.
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Posted: 2004-05-26 11:56:34
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> On another note, another disappointment about the T630 (and SE phones in
> general) is lack of Apple support. It would be nice to have MMS Home Studio
> or Image Editor running on my PowerBook rather than my PC.
Well, as you've probably discovered, PhoneAgent allows you to create MMSs, and to be honest, I think I'd prefer an experienced Mac developer to create programs specificially for Mac users, rather than have SE do some half-arsed Windows port!
Also, Apple themselves (through the OS) support SE phones so well out of-the-box with iSync etc. that I seriously doubt offerings from SE would be any better. Although I can't understand why iSync doesn't sync Mac OS X's Address Book photos with the T610/T630/Z600 etc. as its obviously possible if PhoneAgent can do it.
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Posted: 2004-05-26 12:16:47
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Thanks Defiant and Jools.
Yes, I saw that list of features not supported in the trial version of PhoneAgent. But note that it does not say that downloading of contacts' pictures is not supported.
If you have seen it working, that's great. But I'd like to know exactly what you have seen. I can imagine that PhoneAgent might support only one direction: from pix in OSX Address Book to pix in T630 phonebook.
Can anybody confirm that PhoneAgent will really sync photos added to a phone contact?
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Posted: 2004-05-27 01:59:39
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I will check for sure when I get home, as I have a fully registered copy of PhoneAgent...
However, from memory I know that PhoneAgent will read the address book from the phone, and optionally load the pictures from the phone and assign them to the relevent contact within PhoneAgent.
I can't remember if it does it the other way, and I'm certain that it does not sync with Mac OS X's Address Book and its pictures. PhoneAgent has its own address book, independant of Mac OS X's.
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Posted: 2004-05-27 11:19:01
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