Nokia E71

Some bits and pieces about my current phone. A Nokia E71, which succeeded the Palm Pilots and Siemens I had before.

Data transfer from Palm

There is no native sync app for Linux, maybe SyncML enabled applications might work. The Nokia can sync with Google Calendar though, so I decided to move all my contacts and Calendar entries there.

Export as iCal and vCards from jPilot worked with some minor glitches (disagreements about which data fields are which). Import into Google Calendar worked ok despite some strange errors messages after import.

Contacts could also be synced with Xing-exported vCards -very nice.

Almost everything ended up in my E 71 after installing and configuring MailForExchange 3.0 (see glitches and hiccups below).

Python for Symbian

Well, at least a serious reason to consider the evil company from Finland:

http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=193112

Usefull apps

The E71 comes with a pretty complete set of business-oriented apps, but some things are missing:

ScreenSnap
	Capture screenshots of your phone.
EnergyPro
	Watch energy consumption over time.
DB RailNavigator
	DB booking and scheduling info.
Birthdays
	Manage birthday reminders (written in Python).
Profile Scheduler
	Automatically switch profiles based on day and time.
Google Maps
	-if you don't want OVI Maps (although it is free and comes with free turn-by-turn-navigation for the E71).
Pocket Protector
	Encrypt sensitive information. Open source. If you need additional security on top of the built-in encryption of the phone memory and smartcard.

Issues

Google sync

The HowTo on the Google sync page is not up to date. Mailsync does not work with MailForExchange, Tasks can't be synced and the Google Calendar does not sync the overlay calenders (just the primary one). The Google Calendar app from Google is slightly sucky, so no option either.

Memory card

Had some memory card issues with the phone "forgetting" the card, which led to nice hickups with apps, who had their data or config installed on that card. Can be fixed by powercycling.

Installer issues

Apparently there where broken files from a failed install, which led to strange errors about failed installation on boot. This can be solved by deleting files from a hidden directory in "private/10202dce" (after you mount the phone as a mass storage device).

OVI Maps

OVI Maps (aka Nokia Maps 3.03) has issues with maps and route calculation.

In detail:

Upon installation of Nokia Maps 3.03 (default seems to be the older 2.0 version on the E71, which is auto-upgraded after first boot) the old maps which where preinstalled are deleted (as it should be). Unfortunately no new maps data is downloaded automatically, but the navigation utilizes on-demand online download of map data.

This can be changed (even if you don't want to use the Windows-based installer).

Afterwards, OVI maps shows the maps of the countries you selected even in offline mode without download lag.

Navigation does not work though (as described here and here).

The fixes are:

• Make sure you have OVI Maps 3.0. (or later) installed to get free voice-assisted turn-by-turn navigation (see Options/Support/Info for Version info).
• Make sure you have downloaded and installed the map data of the countries you want properly (needs lots of space for even Central Europe).
• Make sure you disabled all non-GPS-based positioning methods (E71 in "/Menu/System/Settings/General/Positioning" (German: "/Menü/System/Einstellungen/Allgemein/Standortbestimmung").
• Set Navigation to offline, wait until the phone got a GPS fix, enter you destination. Done.

This is all actually pretty simple and straight-forward, but gets confusing because of the way you need to set the positioning method and the lack of helpfull information from OVI maps (no info on map status, no info on location method, no further info on failure reasons for route generation).

Links

• http://www.symbian.org/
• http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Python_Quick_Start