Cingular 8125

As I posted before about upgrading my phone, here I want to review about my new smartphone, Cingular 8125.

For Cingular 8125, I found out that it is based on OEM from HTC. Some specifications I can tell about this phone is below:

• Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone Edition
• 128MB SDRAM / 64MB ROM
• TI OMAP 195 MHz Processor (don't know why it is 195, not 200 MHz)
• Integrated, sliding QWERTY keyboard
• 2.8" QVGA 320x240 64K Color LCD Touch Screen
• Integrated Bluetooth Class II
• Integrated Infrared
• Integrated 802.11b/g support (by default it is b, needs a hack to make it work for G)
• Integrated Mini-SD slot for greater storage and expansion
• 1.3 MPixels camera
• Comes standard with Mobile Word, PowerPoint and Excel
• Comes with Microsoft Media Player (it is able to play MP3, WMA, etc.)
• The handwriting recognition is quite good

Included Accessories

• Lithium ion battery
• Compact wall charger
• Stereo earbud headset
• USB data cable
• Leather pouch

I also download another media player (pocketmusic from www.pocketmind.com). It is able to play unlocked AAC (format used by iPod/iTunes) as well others (MP3, OGG, etc.)

The thing I don't like from the phone is that the processor is too slow, especially if you are running some other applications in the background. I have to kill other applications frequently to make it more responsive. Besides, I cannot put Skype on this one, as Skype requires minimum cpu clock to be 300 MHz. But for the rest, the phone is really cool!

Browsing the internet is really good, because it is MSIE (compatible to most sites on the internet). Synchronization with my PC is (almost) seamless. I hook up the USB cable, and voila, the background ActiveSync on my PC recognizes it and start synchronizing with it. It sync with Exchange server at work as well. So, all schedules, emails, notes and tasks are sync. We can also configure the period of sync, e.g, immediately, every 15 minutes and so on. We can also configure the email sync as well (e.g, today's emails etc.)

If we search on Google, there will be a lot of information about this cool phone. I have been lucky to get this phone relatively cheap (I paid only $225+tax, no S/H and activation fee was waived. The list price is actually $449 if bough without service plan).

Now, I am curious how to develop a program for this little-but-good gadget. I have downloaded MS Visual C++ for Embedded System (trial version?) as well as its SDK from MSDN. I am really eager to develop a small software for this one. Perhaps even make some money... :-)

Unlock Nokia Phones from Cingular

Recently I upgraded my 2 phones. My original service provider was AT&T Wireless, but as it has been acquired by Cingular, and also because my 2-year contract was over, I choosed to upgrade my phones. I upgraded my phones thru my employer so I got a really good deal (my company has agreement with Cingular, so Cingular gives special discount to corporate users) from Cingular. I selected 550 min rollover shareable minutes with FamilyTalk for the two lines. For the phones, I selected Cingular 8125 SmartPhone (Windows Mobile 5.0 -based) and Nokia 6102 (camera is built-in).

After activation, my old phones were not working anymore, even if I swapped the old SIM card with the new one. But, thanks to http://unlock.nokiafree.org/, I was able to unlock both phones and now they are working fine with new Cingular SIM cards (and, hopefully, with any SIM cards around the world). I am still having diffifculty to unlock my Cingular 8125, though. Eventhough I found a website that gives unlock service (http://www.imei-check.co.uk/m3000unlock.php), but it is ridiculously expensive ($38), and I don't trust the site yet. Anybody can point me to a free unlock tool as unlock.nokiafree.org?

Backup/Restore on Linux

This is the commands to backup the whole disk and to restore it back.

dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=1k conv=sync,noerror gzip -c ssh -c blowfish user@hostname "dd of=filename.gz bs=1k"

dd if=filename.gz ssh -c blowfish root@deadhost "gunzip -c dd of=/dev/hda1 bs=1k"

The backup command is done from machine where the backup file is located, not from the target machine we want to restore to.

For more detail, see the following:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/saw27/notes/backup-hard-disk-partitions.html

Intel-based Mac

Now that Apple computers have started using Intel chips, is it time for business to replace their Windows PCs with MACs? May be not, at least for short term.

One of the reasons Steve jobs has decided to go with Intel is the more limited supply of PowerPC than Intel's Pentium processors, as well as temperature issue on PowerPC. Currently, x86 processor families have very good performance, comparable to high performance RISC processors, although these x86 CPUs are still considered CISC.

For Apple users, the migration news is all good: The new computers using Intel's Core Duo dual-core chips offer two to five times the performance of previous Apple computers and Apple is selling their PCs for the same price as its older, slower computers (based on G4/G5).

I have compared performance between the PowerPC-based MAC and Pentium-4 based PC in term of performance and quality of graphic, Apple is still the winner. The performance is somehow is higher on Apple, I think this is something to do with the Unix-based O/S (Mac X) instead of patch-and-stitch Windows. The Mac X was designed from ground-up with ease-to-use and performance in mind, while Windows XP is more or less inherits the nightmare of Windows 95 and NT. Not to mention that Mac X is also more secure.

Another beauty of Mac is its consistency. All the shortcuts are consistent and work the same throughout all applications, while on Windows this is not the case. Linux, in this case, is the worst. Commands on vi, for instance, mostly are different than emacs, etc. Another beauty of Mac is truely PnP feature. With Windows, we still have to spend some time to click here-there to make a device work. Forget that in Apple World!

Now, more and more commodity products are being used by Mac. From standard USB, graphic card, hard drive and now the CPU itself. I expect price on Mac will go down a bit because of this (unless Mr. Jobs wants to be mega billionaere).

I think, soon people will develop some kind of emulator to run Windows-based applications (sort of WINE in Linux), and guess what? more customers change their religion to MAC.

Connecting WRT54G router to another Router Wirelessly

As I posted before, I was unable to make my Linksys WRT54G router to connect to another wifi router (NETGEAR WG11) wirelessly, eventhough I downloaded a firmware that was supposed to support WDS. Yesterday, I tried again after reading an article at AnandTech: HOWTO: Use Linksys WRT54G as a Wireless Ethernet Bridge.

I downloaded all of the firmwares on www.dd-wrt.com, but only one firmware I tried, as the documentation told me to try the generic version first. After resetting my router, I saw the web menus of the router changed totally. There are more options/features available, but I was just concentrating on how to make my Linksys router could communicate and act as a bridge to my NETGEAR router as the Internet Gateway router.

I disabled all security settings, make ESSID and channels on both routers the same and then add MAC address of Linksys router in the NETGEAR's Allowed Address List. After that, I selected AP on Linksys. I checked the status, but still Linksys showed the signal is 0 dBm. After disabled security, surprisingly, after I check network status on the Linksys, it showed there was some signal. Cool, I said. But, still it did not get any IP address from NETGEAR.

I then bravely select "client-bridged", and it worked now! But I still don't know how to connect to my Linksys router, because it is now acting as a bridge and there is no IP assigned it. It is acting as a transparent bridge (connecting to NETGEAR wirelessly), and my other PC connected to the Linksys got assigned IP address from the NETGEAR.

Anyway, I am now happy because I can now used it to bridge other PCs which do not have wireless cards and the location inhibit them to connect to the Internet router by wire. I still don't know whether this wireless bridge really works as a bridge (able to connect more than one wired PCs to other PCs connected to another router) or just acts as a 'extender'. Will post again later after I've found out.

Game Emulator

A number of open-source developers has established a project called "Multiple Emulator Super System" (MESS) to develop an emulator to make Linux PC able to play old games. Sounds cool, heh?

The Official MESS Home Page

Here are some screenshots of the page. Look at those games, man...they are really old (some of them are like pre-historic games :-)

http://www.mess.org/messscrs.html