Is that my mother on the phone?
September 10th, 2006
I picked up my new Sony Ericsson W810i phone from the post office this morning. It was really easy to set-up. I just pulled out the SIM card from my old phone, and put it in the new one, and viola the phone was up and running. None of my contacts or other personalized setting were on the new phone, so I’ll have to take care of that. The battery had almost a full charge out the box. I was able to use the phone right out of the box. I surfed around the menus on the drive into work this morning.
When I got to work, the first thing I tried was plugging the phone in over USB into my Windows XP workstation. Windows was very good about finding drivers, and this thing needed about 4 different drivers. I’m not what all the functions of the device are, but I am able to put the phone into “file Transfer” mode and the phone and the memory card show up like removable drives in My Computer. The coolest thing, is that the phone charges over USB. That’s so cool!
Now that I have the phone plugged into my Windows PC charging, I turned on the Bluetooth to get my contacts from my Mac onto the Phone. The Mac Bluetooth Set up Assistant got it up and running in no time. iSync swooped in and zapped all my contacts over to the phone.
That was fast! while I’m working, I like to monitor my phone with BluePhoneElite. Since the new phone was already paired to my Mac, it took all of 2 seconds to change BluePhoneElite’s preferences.
THe first thing I’ve noticed from using the new phone, is how fast it is. It is really responsive to commands and getting around the menu is fast.
On the way out to lunch, my coworker Jonah[you know, from Jonah's secret blog] asked if it mounts as a drive over USB on my Mac. It does, and iPhoto detects it as a camera and prepares for import. That will save some time.
I encoded some aac audio files, loaded them over USB and bam! Walkman!
To get data access to the phone, all I had to do was go to this link, and make a few selections. They sent em the configuration via SMS, and BAM! Internet access. This is going great.
Now that I have internet access, I thought I’d try the built-in software update. 2 seconds to find out I have the most up to date. With internet access I thought I should get a decent Web browser. Used the crappy built-in browser to get Opera Mini. Just go to mini.opera.com using the phone and download and install. DOUBLE BAM! We all love google maps right? How about using it on on you phone. On your phone, go to www.google.com/gmm
Setting email is slow and kind of sucks since I have to use the stupid number pad to enter in server names and email addresses. Now I have to install certificates for the SSL encryption to use Gmail. I had to do this for the old phone. WHAT A BITCH!!! There is little documentation and help on setting up google mail on the built in mail client. Here are the settings:
Email address: USERNAME@gmail.com
Connection type: POP3
Incoming server: pop.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Encryption / Incoming Server: SSL
Encryption / Outgoing Server: SSL
Incoming port: 995
Outgoing port: 465
Now here’s the magic ingredient… The W810 doesn’t ship with the proper certificate to verify the SSL encryption. You need to install it yourself. You could probably find the right certificate online somewhere online, but I couldn’t. Here’s an easy way I found. On Mac OS X 10.4, open the Keycahin Access application. Select the X509Anchors from the Keychains list on the left. Find the “Equifax Secure Certificate Authority” certificate. Select just that certificate. From the File menu, select Export. Export the certificate as a .cer file. Know send the new .cer file to the phone via bluetooth, and your done. It is simple, yet hard to figure out.
I grabbed a bunch of free themes from Esato.com.
I downloaded a bunch of free games from SonyEriccson’s WAP site.
Well that’s enough for now, But I’ll share my new ringtone with you.
Ring Away: Macarena.m4a.
Still to do:
Get my Mac to use the phone as a modem over bluetooth
Get the phone to use Cingular’s high speed Edge network
Explore Media management software
Get some sort of Instant Messaging software for the phone
probably more…