So our Nokia 6200 phones that have served us well for somewhere between 3 and 4 years have finally started to not keep a charge – we have to charge them every couple of days or so, which is just annoying. So we decide to replace them.
We initially go looking for phones like what we have. Solid, well built, cell phones. Not a camera, not a MP3 player, not bluetooth, nothing fancy. But apparently these days, there are no inexpensive phones, only cheap ones. We both got the impression that any of the phone phones that we looked at would crunble into dust if they were taken more than a few miles from the store. So we settled on the Samsung d807, which seems like a good quality phone, but it is also, you guessed it, a camera, a MP3 player, and of course it has bluetooth.
I already have found some features that I know I am going to miss. The first is that there are no sound profiles. With the Nokia, it had this very useful option that you could put it into the silent profile for a period of time, so for instance, every Sunday, I put it into the silent profile mode until 12:30 or so, so that it will not go off in church, but I won’t have to remember to turn it back to the normal profile mode. I usually don’t feel the vibrate, so if it stays in silent mode, I am going to forget, and miss calls. I know this.
I went quite a saga to get my old contact on the new phone. At the store, the sales rep was kind enough to download the contact off my old phone onto the new SIM card, but he was not able to upload them to the actual phone, so we had to work with the limits of the SIM card, namely a limit in the number of characters in the name, and a limit of one phone number per contact.
I figure there has to be an easier way than to re-enter all the phone numbers, so I give it a shot. It took quite a few steps, but I got it done faster than Jesse going at it the manual data entry way, so go technology! The steps were:
1) Download and install the Nokia PC Studio.
2) Download my contacts from the Nokia into Nokia’s proprietary format.
3) Open said proprietary format, see that (yeah!) it is text based and comma delimited.
4) Notice that there is way more than just contact info, and it is not well defined how it is going to work.
5) Go for option 2, sync the contacts to (yuk) Microsoft Outlook Express / Windows Address Book. At least I did not have to have the full blown outlook!
6) Search, dig, hunt, and after finding the answer in the Samsung FAQ that says that you cannot download Samsung PC Studio, you have to buy it, and oh yeah it is $80, I find the link to where you can in fact download it off the Samsung site. Go figure. Download the software.
7) While waiting for the software to download, use Google to find out that it seems that no one has been able to use the software without the USB data cable, and Bluetooth does not do the trick. š
8) Not one to be easily discouraged, and being a bit of a hacker, I decide to try it anyway. Just because others could not do it, does not mean that I won’t be able to, right?
9) Install the software. I have wasted many long hours doing things based on the above premise (just because others were not able to does not mean that it cannot be done), but in this case it worked out, and was actually pretty straight forward.
10) Sync the contacts from Windows Address Book (ignoring the pop up complaining the it was not able to initialize Outlook, which is not installed).
11) Notice that all the contacts only have last names, no first names.
12) Notice that when the contacts were synced by Nokia, the Nokia utility synced them to Windows Address Book this way.
13) Being a bit of an anal retentive kind of guy, this is not good enough, so I:
14) Export the contacts from Windows Address Book into a CSV format.
15) Throw together a Python script (Python ROCKS!) that parses each line of the file, reading the last name and parse the first and last name from the last name field by splitting on the last space, and if there is no space, just putting the last name in the first name spot, and leaving the last name blank. Dump the parsed lines out to a new file. Examine the file, notice that it screwed up the header line of the CSV file and fix this manually rather than changing the script.
16) Delete all the contacts from the Windows Address Book.
17) Import the contacts from the new CSV file into the Windows Address Book.
18) Delete the contacts previous synced to the new phone, luckily this is easy enough to do using the Phone Explorer utility in the Samsung PC Studio.
19) Sync the contacts again, this time with much more satisfactory results.
20) Do some quick cleanup with the Phone Explorer utility to fix the non people entries so that they had a first name of “Acura Sunnyvale” instead of a first name of “Acura” and a last name of “Sunnyvale”. Have I mentioned that I am a little anal retentive?
Whew! Done, and before Jesse š I did have to manually go through and re-add the groups, but hey, there is only one grouping that I have (Family), and I had not kept a very accurate group in the previous phone, so it would have needed some work anyway.
For posterity, here is the Python code that I used to convert the file. So simple, straightforward, elegant, and it took me only about 5 minutes to write!
input = open(“in.csv”, “r”)
output = open(“out.csv”, “w”)for line in input.readlines():
line = line.strip()
fields = line.split(“,”)lastname = fields[1]
lastspace = lastname.rfind(” “)
if lastspace != -1:
firstname = lastname[:lastspace]
lastname = lastname[lastspace+1:]
else:
firstname = lastname
lastname = “”
fields[0] = firstname
fields[1] = lastnameoutput.write(“,”.join(fields) + “\r\n”)
input.close()
output.close()
There are a few bugs (or things that I consider bugs) that I have found. First is that, since it is a slider, when you slide it open, it unlocks, and you slide it closed and it locks. Very cool. Except that you can unlock it without opening it, but you cannot (that I have figured out) lock it without sliding it closed. So if you want to lock it after unlocking it without opening it, you need to open it and then close it.
Second bug is that it has this annoying beep each time you press any of the keys. I was pretty sure I was going to go into shock or something with it beeping all the way home as Jesse checked out all the settings. Turns out that there is a setting, so you can choose from 5 or 6 different sounds for the key presses, and you can control the volume. Or so you would think. Turns out that any of the choices for the sounds and the volume only control the number keypad, when you are dialing a phone number. The rest of the keys stay at full volume, and use the annoying beep. Unless you choose “off” instead of one of the sounds, and then it really does turn off the beep for all the keys. Huh?
Keep in mind that since I don’t make all that many phone calls, I have only briefly used the actual phone so far, so bear that in mind about my complaining above. I am pointing out the faults, with of course none of the benefits. And I have all this swirling through my mind at 1 in the morning, so I am not able to get to sleep. Hence this post, not because it needs to be written, but more so that if I write it down, it will leave my head.
One very nice thing about the phone is that it has a very nice screen, full color, nice resolution. So true to form, one of the first things that I try to do is to modify the wallpaper. Bad move, this things in very non-intuative when it comes to the wallpaper.
First I notice that the easiest way to create a new wallpaper it to take a picture with the camera and then make that the wallpaper. I notice that the max resolution of the picture is 1280×1024, nice and standard, but landscape mode, wider than it is tall (as opposed to portrait mode, which is taller than it is wide), and it seems to crop the sides off the picture to allow it to display nicely on the portrait mode screen. I figure, what the heck, why be difficult, I will just create a 1280×1024 photo, and put it on the phone, see if that works.
I try to upload a picture to the phone, but oddly enough you cannot store the picture into the folder that the photos go into, you have to store them into a different folder, oddly enough namely the downloaded graphics folder.
This de-rails me a little, and I forget about doing the easy thing, so I decide to create a portrait mode picture, 1024×1280, but when I upload the picture (to the downloaded graphics folder), it complains that it cannot take a picture bigger than 1600×1200. Hrm, ok, I am 80 pixels too wide, ok, lets forget about the portrait mode, lets go back to the landscape mode idea, and just leave the extra space on the side for it to cut off.
Next try – a 1280×1024 landscape picture, well within the stated limit in the error message above of 1600×1200. Hrm, a new error, this one different, stating that the resolution of the picture that I am uploading is too big. HUH?
So I begin stepping down the size until it fits, which it finally does around 640×480. Great, now we are getting somewhere! I go select the picture as the wallpaper, and go look, and . . . crap! Nastly, ugly white bars like you would see when watching a wide screen movie on a TV with a normal aspect ratio. Grr!
I have beat my head against this brick wall for too long, so I decide to take a step back, and try a new approach. I remember seeing something about the actual size of the screen on the box or somewhere, so I go look that up and see that the actual size of the screen is only 176×220 pixels. OK, so I will make the picture in portrait mode, exactly 176×220 pixels, so the phone will not need to resize the image, and I might save some space as well.
Finally this works, the picture uploads fine, it fills the screen, no white bars, but it looks like CRAP… Going on instinct and quite, um, frustrated with the phone, I crank it up to 352×440, upload, and it looks better. Which makes no sense whatsoever, it does not matter how many pixels you have, as long as you are not making the picture display on a screen that has more pixels than are actually in the picture, you should not get a better picture by using more pixels and then shrinking down. If fact, if the algorithm for shrinking down the pixels is not so good, the picture can even be worse if you start with more pixels.
Oh well, don’t try to figure it out and make sense of it, just go with it. Turns out that the biggest (and best looking) picture that I can get on the phone is 3X the screen size, so 528×660.
Makes no sense, but why tempt fate, just go with what works… I hope to post some pictures showing examples of the reasoning above with the extra pixels not looking any better, and showing a stretched picture that the 176×220 picture looked like, but it is late and hopefully now I will be able to get to sleep.
I am still slightly irritated that the pixels on the phone do not seem to be exactly square, in that the pictures that I have uploaded so far tend to look a little stretched from top to bottom, as if you were looking in a convex circus mirror (the kind where the middle is bowed out, but only from top to bottom, not side to side. Going to have to let that one go though, not worth figuring out the distortion factor and compensating for it in the Gimp.
To end on a positive note, I love the fact that you can create your own ringtones from MP3s! I wasted a lot of time playing around with creating cool ringtones from songs that I like that have a nice intro!