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Useful Applications for Smartphone?
merlinbasenji asks: "I've recently purchased an Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone for Cingular, and I'm looking for suggestions for good applications like: calendars, browsers, games, email client, etc. Anyone have a favorite, or had a bad experience with specific applications?"
The phone program is EVIL!! Whenever you press the buttons on the phone, it makes this beeping noise. Then, when you hit the right button, it makes the noise again and it COSTS YOU MONEY...
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
TCPMP is a great media player that can handle DivX. Then there's some Windows app that downsamples video files to fit the screen rather well. Pick up a 1Gig miniSD card online for $60 and the phone is extremely more useful. Then use Yahoo!Music to pull a gig of music onto the device at will - that part is rather convenient. I've got a single Family Guy episode on there right now, just because I don't really use it as well as it could be.
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And this is totally OT, but...
I managed to snag a new one of these for $20 and a three hour conversation with Cingular, because they were trying to sell me a Star Wars sound-injector (lots of demand, I guess, for sounding like you're friends with Chewbacca) with the prefurb I was ordering (they would add it to my basket after I verified my order without any notification they were doing so, and that pissed me off). Anyway, I worked my way up the ladder to the resolutions department.
Me: There is no chance I will use this device. Let me order the prefurb without sending me the $40 Chewbacca toy.
Cingular/ATT: I can't sell you the prefurb without sending that item. But you can return it!
Me: I'd like to do that, preemptively.
CATT: Oh, you'll have to send it back to us once we ship it out.
Me:
CATT: Sir?
Me: Seriously, you're going to cost yourself greater than $20 to sell me a $20 refurb phone, and waste man hours handling a return?
CATT: It's how the bundle works, sir.
Me: I'd feel morally reprehensible doing business with you if you're that stupid. I'll buy a Sprint phone.
CATT: No, no no! Tell you what, I'll send you a NEW one for the same price, so you don't have to return the Star Wars thingie.
Me:
CATT: Sir?
Me: Nevermind, I can do business with idiots. Thanks. Send it on.
-knewter
I have to maintain an insane number of passwords and systems - Flexwallet 2006 triple encrypts the database file that stores my passwords. It also includes a PC app that it syncs with.
Highly recommended.
pssh
tcpmp - plays movies
ptunes - mp3s and such
audible.com's player for ebooks
plucker for free ebooks
eatwatch so I don't swell up
chatter - best email client
tomtom navigator - don't leave home without the gps fob...
verichat for chatting
fileprog - a better file browser
an unzip utility so I can download from the web
my subway/train schedule
card export - turns the phone into a usb mass-storage device
LJP - a nintendo emulator (also gameboy and sega and tgfx etc)
niggle - a free scrabble emulator
I guess that's it.
I use imov Messenger on my Audiovox Smartphone. Its Googletalk, MSN, AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo Messenger all in one. Also works with any Jabber based system (Googletalk is Jabber based).
I'd say the ssh client on it kicks major butt. Had to configure sshd to accept the protocal but after that it was like using unix from 20 years ago... nice and slow... every keystroke a thing of beauty as the commands were only two or three characters each. I can even read my mail in PINE {sniff snif}.... now I'm all weepy... thanks...
Agile Messenger (all your IM needs rolled into one)
Opera for Smartphones
RJShortcut
NewsBreak (RSS Reader)
SmartIRC
RepliGo
Smartione (not a typo)
I got a PPC-6700--one of the reasons I wanted it was ssh.
I have to say, in general, the offerings are pretty disappointing. PocketPutty can't save sessions, so you're typing in a lot of the same information every time you want to connect. Also, I didn't see an immediately obvious way to send ESC events (for example).
mToken is pretty nice, though pricey. "Scripting" is completely unintuitive, but if you work at it, I understand you can get single-button CTRL-A events sent (for use with Screen). It supports multiple font sizes, which is nice (you can get an 80x24 terminal on the screen without scroll bars). If you do want scroll bars, you're stuck with 80x25 or greater, which irritated me.
I ended up buying and using PockeTTY because it was cheap and did almost everything I wanted. It only supports plain password authentication (had problems with PAM for some reason) and public key--which was fine for me. It supports port forwarding, which I use to tunnel my IMAP connection, and it saves sessions. It only has a single font size, so an 80x24 terminal will have scroll bars.
Keep in mind that any program you use will take awhile to negotiate the connection, and the connection will be a little slow (mostly due to encryption CPU overhead) and will really destroy your battery life (I can barely get more than an hour if I leave SSH connected). I ended up setting up OPIE (FreeBSD's s/key equivalent) and using telnet for most operations. I still use SSH when I need to port forward or do things which require an encrypted connection (bouncing from one host to another, for example, when I don't want my passwords to be sniffable), but most of the time, I'm happy enough with the one-time passwords and increased speed.
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In a bit of blatant self promotion...
The Hecl Programming Language: http://www.hecl.org/
It's an open source scripting language that's compact enough to run on cell phones. If you're the adventurous/hacker type, it's still in the early stages of development, but is far along enough to write real apps, such as this shopping list system:
http://www.dedasys.com/shopping_list/
It's a great time to get involved in the project because it's in its early stages, and there is a lot of fun to be had!
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Here is a list of things that any phone more advanced than a Nokia 5160 could concievably do (especially with Symbian or other smart phone OSes), but which don't ship from the manufucturer, and are thus relegated to half-written, poorly integrated shareware apps that don't work on different smart phones running the same OS:
* Answering machine. Who needs voice mail on the provider side? Your phone probably has memory onboard + expansion slot memory. It has enough brains to record voice memos, do voice dialing, and play MP3s as ringtones. How hard is this to implement? Plus there's no monthly fee!
* Time-of-day call ignore. Are you in a meeting for a certain time? Have lectures or classes? Doctors appointment? Your phone should automatically go into a silent mode (and kick over to the answering machine). Why let yourself be the point of failure?
* Selective disturb. Studying, working on a project, or otherwise engaged, but don't want to drop off the face of the earth? Make it so that only certain call groups can contact you, just in case.
* Privacy mode. Automatically reject calls from caller-id blocked numbers or long-distance (based on an area code list) numbers, or from people in certain groups.
* Smart synchronization with Palm or WinCE PDAs. Most smart phones have bluetooth, but so far I have yet to find a way to sychronize the smartphone with the PDA in any useful way. Don't we have vcards and other standards for this?
* Smart synchronization with a PC. Even just a stupid Windows client + some documentation would be fine. I can write something that'll let my Linux desktop sync if it's documented! This could be as simple as dumping the data from the internal memory to the expansion memory in a parsable format, and then restoring it the same way -- the PC could have a program to read the memory card and deal with the data.
* Some kind of automation system. I have run across lots of little situations where I need to do something to a lot of contacts (move them into a group, delete duplicates, etc), and have found there's no batch interface. You have to deal with everything one click at a time.
All of this stuff is pretty simple to do, and would elevate a smartphone from a fancy phone with a colour display and better ringtones. No Symbian OS phone I know supports time-based silencing, call ignore lists, answering machine, selective disturb, or sychronizes well. You can fake some of that with custom ring tones, but that's a hack.
The most disapointing feature of mobile phones are the SDKs; you can't write this stuff if you want to, in many cases (and the Java support is terrible). Why make something programable if the only thing it'll do is load the code that shipped with it?
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I've had 3 replies so far. All of them are from people who didn't read my post or understand what I was saying.
1) Voicemail's not free for everyone. There is no real security in having voicemail (or any private data) on your service provider's equipment, either, as the recent Google vs. DOJ should show. Why shouldn't my phone do it, regardless of what the providers offer?
2) These are obvious features; once you go beyond a simple phone that just does DTMF based on a keypad, you would think this would become a standard functionality. 9$ shareware applications are not standard functionality. 9$ shareware applications do not move with me when I replace my Symbian phone with one running Motorola's OS or a PalmOS-based phone! 9$ shareware applications do not integrate with each other. These should be in the phone software itself. A secondary download means the phone is not a smart phone so much as a colour phone with a camera and fancy ringtones.
3) Synchronization is a big problem! Symbian phones don't synchronize in any documented way; no means exists on MacOS to correctly sync (iSync will ignore the phone's groups, randomly delete contacts, etc), and no means exists to sync it with Linux. PalmOS does not sync to MacOS (iSync destroyed or duplicated a lot of my memodb and contacts, and destroyed my calendar, when I tried syncing my T once). WinCE by design does not sync with MacOS or Linux. None of these devices will sync with each other in any standard way. Yay, I get to enter duplicate data!
4) Selective ringtones are a hack as a means of selective ignoring calls; setting someone's custom ring tone to a blank recording is not as effective as just saying, "Never accept calls from this person" in a check box somewhere.
If you're going to reply to me, give me real solutions, don't just prove you didn't read my post.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Sorry about that...
I have that exact phone and have been very happy with it. Here are the 3rd-party apps I use:
- Smart Database Viewer, because it doesn't come with Pocket Excel
- Smartphonenotes - notes that synch with Outlook notes
- Pocket DVD-Studio for ripping DVDs to smartphone-usable format. There's also Mobile Media Maker that's cheaper but has fewer options and can only do smartphone output, not Pocket PC.
- gStart - Start menu replacement
- Total Commander - file explorer with actual features (contrast with built-in one)
- AlarmSet - just what it sounds like
- Tasks+
- SplashID - for passwords
- PHM Registry Editor
- TCPMP as mentioned by others
- WordNet CE - English dictionary
- S-Tris Tetris clone
- Games from www.absolutist.com
- BTToggle to turn Bluetooth on and off. I haven't had much luck getting BT to work, but the utility works.
- Mobipocket for eBooks
- Jeyo Personalizer - setting home screens, etc, not all that useful but OK
All but the first three are free. Others I can think of that I've tried or looked at and didn't buy:
- City alarms - looks good but don't really *need* it and it's $10 I think
- Torch - sounds good and works, except it doesn't override the screen timeout. So it ends up being pretty useless
- CPTools - haven't had time to evaluate this one
- PTab - another Excel substitute
- Wordpad (I think that's what it's called) free notes/text editor but doesn't synch with PC
- Rubber Stamped Data - backup utility. Works, but don't feel like paying for it
That's all I can think of/find right now. Have fun!