Undercrank

High on excitement from coming back from WWDC, and following the advice given from All About iPhone, I’ve picked up an iPhone 3G S on pay-as-you-go for work.

As is necessary on the day of release of a new handset, here’s the obligatory sample video and photo from the device:

(Or watch the same thing on Vimeo, which may or may not look a little bit better.)

The photo test is of some lavender in the garden.  There’s clearly some actual depth-of-field going on, and I was able to touch to move the focus to the foreground flower head, just like the demo at the WWDC keynote:

Just spotted over at Tech Digest that the Motorola C975 is being sold by Carphone Warehouse at the bargain price of £29.95 (as long as you purchase a ThreePay top-up voucher at the same time).

Having played around with this handset fairly extensively in the past week, if you’re really not that bothered about Bluetooth and can cope with a slightly smaller screen than other models in 3’s range you really can’t go wrong with it; particularly if you compare it with its clunky predecessors, the A835 and the beast that was the A830.

In fact, the only real gripe that I had with the phone is that it makes a horrendously loud BLEEP every few seconds when the battery life is running low. I expect this can be configured somewhere but I realised I’d probably find the charger for it sooner than I’d have found that menu option.

The article below was written by me back in April 2003 but never published – Having discovered it in a bit of a virtual ’spring clean’, I think the information still stands, although I doubt many of the handsets are widely in use.

Getting started

You will need a MIDI file that is no larger than 20k, and set to be in format 0 – more on that in a second. First up, you’ll need to download midi1to0 and unzip it somewhere useful. Using this utility, you can convert your .mid file to MIDI format 0 that the handset expects. For example, run from the command line:

midi1to0 mytune.mid mytune2.mid

Setting the title

At this point you can then go ahead and upload the file using the NEC utility on the CD that came with your handset, however it will show up as “No Title” in the playlist. It’s a bit fiddly to fix this (unless you fancy using a hex editor) but it can be done with another couple of tools. If you’re up to the job, go ahead and download and unzip midi2txt and txt2midi. Once you’ve got hold of them you’ll need to run the midi2txt tool as follows:

midi2txt mytune2.mid mytune2.txt

Next, open up the newly created mytune2.txt with notepad or similar. A few lines down there will be a line that defines the content of of the first MIDI track that will look much like this:

mtrk // multichannel track  // track 1

The e606 uses the MIDI meta data named “Text” to store track titles. To put one in this file, add a line like this underneath the one above and save the updated file:

  text "My Tune"

Finally, to recompile the MIDI file from your text file use the txt2midi utility you downloaded earlier. You can use the same .mid filename as before, and it’ll simply overwrite it.

txt2midi mytune2.txt mytune2.mid

Conclusion

Your MIDI is now correctly titled and ready to upload. (But on the other hand, it didn’t cost you two quid.)

Well, despite my own reservations, the Nokia 7600 sounds like it’s flying off the shelves.

Tech Digest reports that Carphone Warehouse are reporting sales of between seven and ten thousand units a week.

This is at least partially backed up by my own deeply scientfic research of spotting lots of trendy young things round London having them dangling off of their wrists.

I got to play a little today with the new Nokia 7600 (for work research purposes… of course). If you’ve seen it already, you’ll know it’s an odd shaped device with it’s curious “seed-like” shape, with a central screen and the keypad constructed around it. However, after using the device for a few hours, I can only concede that Nokia’s design lab up in Finland had been hitting the vodka a little too hard.

It’s not a bad phone by any means; the screen is sharp and clear, the speed and functionality of the device are all top notch. Streaming 3G video starts almost instantaneously with 3’s “QuickPlay”; the camera is crisp, clear and fast; it does SMS, MMS and everything else you might expect; the games aren’t too bad; it has the ubiquitous polyphonic ringtunes; its form and keypad are reminiscent of the clean white lines of Apple’s iBook; it has Bluetooth and infra-red support; hell, even my 12” PowerBook talks to it quite happily too over Bluetooth.

In fact I think it’s jolly good all round. Apart from that frickin’ keypad. It’s been coming for a while, but I honestly believe Nokia’s achingly hip handset designers have truly gone for form over function to the detriment of the product as a whole.

Maybe it’s the latent Jakob Nielsen inside me or whether it’s (oh, alright) the fact that I’m getting on for 30, but in all honesty I haven’t got the time or the patience to learn a completely new and seemingly counter-intuitive method of using a phone keypad. That said, your average teenager will probably love it.

If you’re considering it, definitely try before you buy. It’s a capable device by anyone’s standards, and unless you’re desperate to make use of 3’s video-calling, you’ll find it the smallest and lightest option for 3G in the UK right now.

I still think they put Finlandia in the water cooler up there though.