Author Topic: Anyone Using Their Zaurus With A Nokia Smartphone?  (Read 2251 times)

ev1l

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 608
    • View Profile
    • http://bbshuffle.blogspot.com/
Anyone Using Their Zaurus With A Nokia Smartphone?
« on: December 17, 2004, 09:23:02 am »
My current no-thrills phone has been dropped one time too many and it's now misbehaving, so I was thinking of getting a Nokia 6260 to replace it.
Is anyone using a similar phone with their Z? Basically any series 60/70 phone experience would be good. The 6260 is one of the few models with SyncML support.
If you've had a good experience with any other brand (good PDA-phone sync, etc), feel free to share that as well

tumnus

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1176
    • View Profile
    • http://www.cpinkney.org.uk
Anyone Using Their Zaurus With A Nokia Smartphone?
« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2004, 10:03:14 am »
What exactly do you mean in terms of using a Zaurus with a Nokia Smartphone?

I have a Nokia 6600 and use it as a GPRS modem with my Zaurus via Bluetooth. I also beam addresses and calendar events between the two via IR occasionally. So in that respect they generally play nicely (although using IR to send stuff from the Zaurus to the phone or using GPRS via IR simply doesn't work at times).

I've never had any experience of the 6260, but my overall impression of the 6600, purely as a phone, is quite poor. My main problems with it are that it is really really slow (it especially takes several minutes to boot) and the battery life is worse than my old 5500. It is also unreliable and needs frequent rebooting, which is made even more annoying by the fact it takes so long to boot. When my contract comes up for renewal again in February I certainly won't be rushing to buy another Nokia Smartphone.

My advance about the phone is to let a lot of other people test it out first and read plenty of reviews from real users that have it as their only phone. Initial reviews of the 6600 gave the phone a reasonable rating, but they should have marked it down a lot more for the problems above.
# Search the Zaurus Howtos ## Search the Zaurus FAQs ## Find Z software at ELSI #
--------------------
UK SL5500 with Sharp ROM 3.13, SL5600 with Sharp ROM 1.32 - SuSE 9.0 Pro, Windows XP Home
Qualendar for Calendar and Todo
Socket Bluetooth CF Card (Rev F), Kingmax 512MB MMC Card, Palm Tungsten T Stylus,
Pretec CF->Smartmedia Adapter, Semsons Universal Battery Extender

dwchapin

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 13
    • View Profile
Anyone Using Their Zaurus With A Nokia Smartphone?
« Reply #2 on: December 17, 2004, 11:33:07 am »
I am using mine (Nokia 6230) with my Z over Bluetooth, mainly for the GPRS.  I haven't had time to experiment with OBEX, but ultimately I'd like to get the KO/PI suite syncing phone #s with the phone as soon as that code is a little more stable.

Setting up the GPRS was extremely easy, I would recommend caution for anyone thinking of using the 6230 for GPRS-over-Bluetooth, as it seems to have some sort of serious hardware flaw.  It can maintain a GPRS connection for low-bandwidth browsing like WAP, but the higher-throughput rates of real browsing & downloading appear to blow out the phone's UART in some sort of nasty way, which causes the phone to reboot itself, or sometimes just drop the GPRS connection.

A little Google searching suggests that this is a known problem, but Nokia USA level 2 data support swears up and down that it's the first they've heard of it from anybody. (Their first line of email support also claims that they "do not support connectivity through third party devices", which is somewhere between highly misleading and patently false given the language they use to market the phone.)  So I'm about to send in the phone to the service center for maintenance -- we'll see how that goes.

Otherwise I think it's an excellent little phone, although the plastic screen is kind of cheap and scratches easily/instantly.  It boots really quickly (and because of the above problem I see it reboot quite a bit).  I looked at the 6600 and went for the smaller form factor of the 6230 since to me the whole point of Bluetooth -- especially if you're a Z owner -- is that you don't need all that PDA functionality, or the screen real estate on your phone, because all of your browsing and PDA functionality can be done directly on your Z.  Between a BT headset (for voice calls) and the Z over GPRS (for browsing) why ever take the phone out of your pocket?

I was hoping to get a simple Bluetooth phone without silly complications like a camera, but pretty soon it seems it will be impossible to buy one.  It's hard enough to find a small BT phone that isn't a full-blown "Smartphone"/PDA-style device, since cordless syncing to a laptop/desktop, and wireless headsets, is all marketers seem to think BT is good for.
« Last Edit: December 17, 2004, 11:46:37 am by dwchapin »
SL-5500 OZ 3.5.1, SL-C860 w/Cacko 1.22 lite, hotfix A
CF: Socket CF-Bluetooth 'G', SMC Wireless card, various storage CFs
SD: 1GB Lexar
SuSE 9.2 (home), Win2K (work)

kingmob

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 16
    • View Profile
Anyone Using Their Zaurus With A Nokia Smartphone?
« Reply #3 on: December 17, 2004, 01:38:50 pm »
I bought a Nokia 6230 for exactly the same reasons, and unfortunately am experiencing exactly the same problems...

I took it into my local service centre a few months back and they upgraded the firmware to v04.28, which made no difference. I think there's another update available - must try it out.

Tim

ev1l

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 608
    • View Profile
    • http://bbshuffle.blogspot.com/
Anyone Using Their Zaurus With A Nokia Smartphone?
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2004, 09:15:40 pm »
Quote
What exactly do you mean in terms of using a Zaurus with a Nokia Smartphone?
It means whatever you want it to mean. GPRS modem, PAN setup, anything.
It seems the GPRS problem is guite annoying indeed.
Does anyone have any recommendation for a phone to be used along the Z, compatibility-wise?
Ideally, I'd like to have the PC, Z, and phone synched up automatically, but this *is* Linux we're talking about  
Thanks for the info everyone.