The N95 integrated in the home environment via UPnP, SIP and bluetooth
The N95 is a wonderful device. On the road it does everything for you. Satellite navigation, internet browsing, e-mail, making and receiving calls, picture taking and video recording as well as other stuff. It is the one do-it-all device, the one thing in your pocket you need to carry around to be prepared.
And guess what? It does that all at home too. But does it end with that? The N95 has some features that make it very useful at home. First of all it there is less need to have the desktop PC running when at home. Some of them are:
- SIP support, making and receiving landline calls
- Fring support
- Internet
- UPnP
- A2DP bluetooth
SIP
Well first of all I have the N95 scan every 10 minutes for a wireless LAN. This hardly takes any battery power unless you tend to stay on the edges of those wireless networks. However at home and work this is not an issue. My N95 is configured to automatically connect to my SIP account on designated networks. So when at home or work I am automatically receiving my SIP calls over a landline number. Note that I am using the built-in Nokia SIP stack. Although Fring and TruPhone can do something similar.
Fring
Similar as SIP. When at home it automagically logs me in on MSN, Skype and GoogleTalk.
E-mail
You set a default network for an e-mail account. I suggest here to set your home wifi network. You can then configure the e-mail account to automagically download your e-mail headers each 5 to 10 minutes and have it beep when there is new e-mail. Short e-mails I I can do per T9, larger things go by Bluetooth keyboard. Unfold it, touch a key, wait a second of 3 and start typing! Attach a voice-record if you are really lazy and some video or pictures directly from the phone at need. No need to sync first and go through the PC.
Internet
Yes, I check the tv-guide via the phone, the weather, and more. Why switch on the PC unless the phone can not cope? It's often faster to use the phone than to switch an boot on the powerhungry PC. Windoze is so very slow.
UPnP and A2DP
I have an Asus WL-700gE. Its a router, firewall and a 250 GB file server supporting among others the UPnP protocol. It can stream music and show pictures to my N95 wherever I am in the house. I can also use the N95 as a UPnP control center and stream the music directly to my
Pocket PC Dell Axim X51v that is hooked to my home stereo setup. The Axim is running Conduits Pocket Player that gives it UPnP and A2DP support. I already had the Axim so that made it the cheapest solution. Besides the touchscreen gives it a cool interface. An alternative would be to connect a A2DP receiver or gateway (Nokia AD-42w i.e.) to the home stereo. The Asus WL-700-gE and an A2DP receiver cost about the same as the cheapest classic Apple IPod (80GB) or a similar product.
However through UPnP/A2DP I can control music playback to the home stereo via the N95 that is always at hand. And I can play music directly from the N95 to the home stereo. Since the Asus WL-700-gE only has a peak power usage of 25 Watt, it is low-cost to run it 24/7 compared to a desktop PC (150-250 Watt). Especially since you don't need a separate firewall and router any more. Furthermore since it supports CIFS (Windows shares), NFS and more I can automatically sync new music and data to it whenever data changes on the Desktop PC.
Of course there are the security concerns when using UPnP. However the default settings of the firewall of the Asus does not give access to UPnP from the public internet (WAN). The Asus WL-700gE runs Linux on a ARM processor at 200MHz, which I hope makes it more difficult to hack. Since the N95 requires wifi, I am running WPA encryption over a hidden network configuration on the WL-700gE. Still I only store non-private multimedia data on it. No family pictures and such. Only commercial movies and music. The private data is stored on my PC which is nowadays mostly offline. Which makes it very difficult to hack ;-)The four things still missing are: Video chatting over the wifi with the N95, a mini-qwerty on my N95 and a larger screen resolution 800x480 pixels or more. So in the future I will consider a fullfledged UMPC or a Nokia N810 for my tv-couch. I also would like to be able to streaming N95's the internet radio application over UPnP.
The two things I really love about the setup: Automatic network detection and login for SIP, Fring and e-mail, music access and control from anywhere to anything at home. A single compact point of convergence.
The thing that annoys me:
- As you can see from the screenshot the Asus WL-700gE UPnP implementation is a bit rough. It does process the mediatypes. It does not parse the mp3-tags inside the music files. Windows Media Player 11 on the desktop automatically generates playlists on genre, album, artists and more. Still there are GPL firmware versions for the WL-700gE that have extra features although a graphical userinterface is still missing. They are mostly meant for the Linux initiated.
- UPnP is definitely not always stable on the N95.
Are you running or using the N95 with other UPnP devices? Or have used it for other home comforts. Post it please. I want to hear about it ;-)
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Comments
Great review!
I've used UPnP with N91 8GB / N93 but software was too lazy on my XP machine and mobile devices were restarting often. Of course that I showed my great trick too all my friends and they were so impressed:-).
N95 is a great device, but at the launch was too problematic (little RAM, bad built quality etc). Now I saw an "update your N95 software " on the Nokia Europe main page. That says something.
UPnP seems to work allright on my 2.4 GHz Pentium4 box with XP, albeit a bit buggy, but the wifi stack of Symbian is not rockstable as is the case for BSD base unices (OS-X, IPhone). But then BSD has been around for a couple of decennia ;-)
And yeah, the N95 was not without trouble. But hey, buy the first car in a new series and you have the same trouble. The iPhone had faulty battery troubles!
For the price I do require perfection ;-) Still after all the trouble I'd still buy a N95. Only my service experiences of the N95 are very below par. They actually can not seem to write down my name properly.
Haven't got UPnP with my N95 running on my network at home.
I know you have already seen my blog entry entitled, "The N95 Rules my World", where I outlined how I use my N95 everywhere; out-and-about, at home, at work, and even in the car! Since then I've even upgraded the car stereo in my Lan Evo to accomidate my N95. I purchased a Sony stereo Bluetooth receiver for the car (about $150 on eBay) and now, when I get in my car and turn on my car stereo, my N95 automatically syncs with the stereo providing me with a wireless way to play all of the music from my N95 (I'm currently rolling with an 8GB card with over 600 songs) through my car's speakers and a hands-free phone solution. Best of all the music sounds great!
I am using the SONY BT5000 Bluetooth radio in my car. The nice thing is the minute I get into my car and turn on the stereo, my N95 syncs with it. It streams music from my phone in high quality stereo; I cannot tell the difference between that and playing an actual CD. When a call comes in, the stereo, of course, mutes the music and plays my phone call through the car’s speaker system. To be honest, though, I don’t use the voice navigation on the N95 very much so I can’t really say for sure, but my guess is that this would sound loud and clear on this stereo system. However, I would also like to mention that I’ve added two amps (equaling about 1000 watts of power), six high end in-car speakers, and two sub woofers in the trunk, so that definitely helps with the sound quality/volume. I got the stereo itself for around $200 on eBay.
Looking forward to it! I am looking forward to your bluetooth results with call + sat nav, music + sat nav, call + sat nav + music ;-)