Fun with a N80 and ubuntu (or why linux users shouldn’t be early adopters)
My new phone arrived from Orange yesterday. It’s a brand new nokia N80 with the kind of contract you can only get by threatening to dump your mobile provider. The N80 is a phone that you can turn on itside and use as a 3 megapixel camera. The good points of the phone are the excellent screen and the builtin wifi access. Google maps for mobiles really rocks on this and webpages look good. However, it has a number of problems that leave me frustrated.
First off, the build quality seems pretty poor. Its one of those slidey phones and the top part feels slightly loose. It wobbles from side to side in your hand - not what you expect from a new piece of kit. Secondly, orange seem to have done all they can to screw the UI. For example, straight after you take a snap it pops up a dialog box with two options: ’save to gallery’ or ’send to friend’. What’s the thing these two have in common? They both make money for Orange. The option ‘just save it to the 128meg SD card’ is completely absent. You have to press cancel, which is pretty hidden and unintuative, to get this behaviour.
The ‘gallery’ which that dialog box is speaking about is a web based piece of software from pixota which it seems orange *really* want me to use. Hence the other genius idea that orange had: to put this gallery as the first option on the phones ‘home page’ instead of contacts. This is where the cursor starts when you unlock your phone, and every time you press it by mistake the phone attempts to make a 3g connection, and so on, resulting in a pissed off phone user. I haven’t found out a way to change this, but given the labyrinthine nature of the series 60 menus, this could be my fault.
Now all that remains is getting this baby to work with ubuntu. Contact syncing I didn’t have much hope for given my previous experiences with opensync. The opensync version packaged with dapper is hopeless, but I did find subversion packages which gave me some hope. I did get the phone syncing this way with msynctool, and msynctool reports that it is sending stuff to the phone. The phone, however, steadfastedly refuses to show any of these changes.
So if syncing won’t work, what about getting the photos off the phone. The N80 has a mode where it can act as a USB storage device, so that should be simple right? Well, not exactly. It requires a kernel patch and I really don’t feel I have time for a kernel patch these days. That’s why I’m using ubuntu, right?
In the end, I have a nice brand new phone with no way of getting the pictures off and no way of doing a decent sync (google calendar, anyone?).
First off, the build quality seems pretty poor. Its one of those slidey phones and the top part feels slightly loose. It wobbles from side to side in your hand - not what you expect from a new piece of kit. Secondly, orange seem to have done all they can to screw the UI. For example, straight after you take a snap it pops up a dialog box with two options: ’save to gallery’ or ’send to friend’. What’s the thing these two have in common? They both make money for Orange. The option ‘just save it to the 128meg SD card’ is completely absent. You have to press cancel, which is pretty hidden and unintuative, to get this behaviour.
The ‘gallery’ which that dialog box is speaking about is a web based piece of software from pixota which it seems orange *really* want me to use. Hence the other genius idea that orange had: to put this gallery as the first option on the phones ‘home page’ instead of contacts. This is where the cursor starts when you unlock your phone, and every time you press it by mistake the phone attempts to make a 3g connection, and so on, resulting in a pissed off phone user. I haven’t found out a way to change this, but given the labyrinthine nature of the series 60 menus, this could be my fault.
Now all that remains is getting this baby to work with ubuntu. Contact syncing I didn’t have much hope for given my previous experiences with opensync. The opensync version packaged with dapper is hopeless, but I did find subversion packages which gave me some hope. I did get the phone syncing this way with msynctool, and msynctool reports that it is sending stuff to the phone. The phone, however, steadfastedly refuses to show any of these changes.
So if syncing won’t work, what about getting the photos off the phone. The N80 has a mode where it can act as a USB storage device, so that should be simple right? Well, not exactly. It requires a kernel patch and I really don’t feel I have time for a kernel patch these days. That’s why I’m using ubuntu, right?
In the end, I have a nice brand new phone with no way of getting the pictures off and no way of doing a decent sync (google calendar, anyone?).
July 25th, 2006 at 10:12 pm How about bluetooth? I’ve seen reports of that working(N80 Linux). And that’s a preferable interface anyway in my opinion.
July 26th, 2006 at 10:29 am Hi James,
an N80 question
My recent Orange UK N80 connects up quite happily
to Dapper via the USB cable and works as a gprs/3G modem via
/dev/ttyACM0.
However, I can’t persuade the phone to work as a bluetooth modem with Dapper - several previous generations of Nokia phones (6310i, 6600, 6630..) have all worked fine with Dapper or previous incarnations of Ubuntu. Bluetooth connects, but the phone won’t dial out as a modem. Oddly, it _will_ work with an Apple iBook.
Have you by any chance tried this? No-one else out there seems to have put their recipe on the web yet….
July 27th, 2006 at 6:34 pm [...] A few people commented on my previous post asking if I knew how to get the n80 working with bluetooth. File transfer works out of the box using gnome-obex-server, but the modem was a little more tricky. The chat scripts seemed to not get any response. [...]
July 27th, 2006 at 6:41 pm PS, I found you can change the apps on the home page by looking at tools -> settings -> phone -> standby mode -> active standby apps.
Now all I need is to get ris of that annoying blue strobe and I’ll be happy.
August 3rd, 2006 at 3:57 pm hi … i just wanted to know how can i use my mobile fone as a GPRS modem in ubuntu dapper drake… fone could be any one like nokia 6630 , 6230 … would be thankful if any one could tell me in detail for the voda fone tmobile or three network … i have tried with voda i get connected but i dont get any ping or any browsing etc i dont know why … i tried wvdial as a tool to do it …
thanks …
August 5th, 2006 at 6:49 pm you can disable the annoying camera nag through Photography (orange soft) in Imaging.
October 16th, 2006 at 8:18 pm if someone ever manage to syncronize the n80, you have to post it on the ubuntuforums. i have tried for days now without luck. http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=276832
January 7th, 2007 at 7:00 pm Have you tried KMobileTools?
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:49 am I managed it.
At first i installed the fresh 0.21 Version of all opensync related stuff. Next I didn’t use bluetooth, but WLAN.
iwconfig eth1 essid TEST mode ad-hoc
ifconfig eth1 192.168.0.1
Then I added TEST as a Connection Point under System -> Settings -> Connections. Don’t forget to configure the IP of the phone (if you don’t use ad-hoc this does not matter)
Then I added a new Sync under Connections -> Sync. by (at first) copying the PC Suite settings (you get asked for that)
Now I changed the new profile:
Server Version: 1.1
Connection Type? (Datenträger in German): Internet
Connection Point: TEST
Server address: 192.168.0.1
Port: 8080
username: uwe
password: XXX
At next: kitchensync
Created a new group and added kde as source
added SyncML-over-HTTP-Server
Configured SyncML-over-HTTP-Server as followed:
Port: 8080
Contact Database: Contacts
Calendar Database: Calendar
username: uwe
password: XXX
clicked OK. Then went back to the phone:
Connections -> Sync and Synced. Everything worked.