Yesterday I switched my mobile network provider to ‘3′, mainly because of their attractive fixed-rate Internet bundle. For £5 I get 30 days Internet access, up to a 2GB data-transfer limit. Compare that to my previous network provider (who shall remain nameless) and my £5 would get me only 1MB (0.5p per KB). Obviously this has given me a lot of freedom to surf the web, send/receive email and read RSS feed, which are supported nicely on my Sony Ericsson K800i. Other networked applications I have installed so far are Google Maps and YouTube. I had always wanted to use Google Maps when out and about before, but the amount of data that it uses was just too expensive before.
A particular feature that I have found interesting is my phone’s support for IMAP4 ‘push’ email. After adding support into my Courier-IMAP server, the phone receives email notification (like receiving an SMS message) as soon as new emails are stored on the server. If only my desktop mail client (Evolution) supported this too!
The other thing I want to mention is mobile TV. For £2 I decided to try out 3’s 30 day mobile TV add-on. Quality is obviously not brilliant as it is streamed and there’s not a mass of channels, but it’s amazing none-the-less the first time you see it. I don’t know yet whether I will continue to purchase this add-on, but I can see it being a boredom-buster for those train and bus journeys.
Overall, I’m really happy with the switch–SIM card cost nothing (free with £10 credit), it’s given my phone so much more value, I’m getting to keep my old number and still on pay-as-you-go (pre-pay).
I’ve been having trouble transferring/playing music on the SE W610i and K800i phones. Copying the MP3 files to the phone is easy–when you plug it in with the USB cable you can select ‘File Transfer’ on the phone and it will reboot as a mass storage device so Linux can mount it. However, after transferring albums and safely unmounting the disks, they appeared to have strange names in the music player. When viewing by artist, album and track in the Walkman and standard music player sometimes the ends of names would be cut off even if they weren’t particularly long. For example, after transferring Mark Ronson’s album ‘Version’ and viewing by artist, the album would be split apparently between three artists:
Mark Ro
Mark Ron
Mark Ronso
Initially I assumed the files were becoming corrupt somehow, even though I made sure I was unmounting properly from Ubuntu and even tried the same files from a Windows machine. After a bit of searching I found a forum thread about the same problem. The problem is due to ID3 tags–specifically version 2.4. The way the Sony Ericssons (at least these phones) display artist and track names has nothing to do with directories or file names but ID3 tag embedded in your MP3 files. Many of my albums had information stored in v2.4 of ID3 (Amarok uses 2.4 by default), but the phones can’t handle this properly and much prefer the 2.3 version. Problem identified! Now for a solution.
Warning: There is a possibility you will loose some ID3 data when converting from v2.4 back to v2.3, However the stuff that does get removed can’t be that great as I havn’t noticed anything missing. V2.4 is supposedly a bit controversial anywa, so v2.3 should make your files more widely supported.
There are two open source tools I can see as being helpful–id3v2 (command line) and Kid3 (graphical KDE application). id3v2 has the argument -c (–convert) which is supposed to convert from id3v1 to id3v2. This will allow you to convert all MP3s in a directory with one command as follows:
id3v2 -C Music/MarkRonson/*
Kid3 has a reasonable user interface and may in fact do a better job at conversion as it has a specific v2.4 to v2.3 conversion tool. You select the files you wish to convert by opening them, Ctrl-A then from the main menu select ‘Tools’ -> ‘Convert ID3v2.4 to ID3v2.3′.
Hope this has helped someone out. This fix works but hopefully a more elegant solution will come at a later date (e.g. ID3 tags get converted automatically when being copied or SE release a firmware update to support v2.4)