6 posts tagged “s60 3rd”

Symbian Freak mentions em-Tube was released. It's a fully functional youtube browser and player. It performs well on my N95. Although downloading and playing simultatenous in landscape mode is stuttering. Portrait works allright. Saving then playing works best. The application allows for saving the flv-movies, searching, storing favorites and more. It is really fantastic. There is a special version fot the N95 for autoscreen rotation support.

It's a news reader application. It's for all S603rd edition devices. On the N95 the screen rotates if you rotate the phone. Yes, our first official application that uses the g-force sensor. Still the channels are limited. For now I hope. Still you can read European news in 7 languages, the new york times and the Helsingin Sanomat (Helsinki newspaper) in Finnish and English.

The first negative thing I notices was the scrolling makes the screen flicker and you can not switch it of. Worse even there are also pop-up advertisements.... :-\

The N-Gage website has some interesting information. The following devices will be N-Gage compatible: Nokia N73, Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8GB, Nokia N93, Nokia N93i, Nokia N95, and the Nokia N95 8GB. Nokia will continue to announce N-Gage compatibility with a wide range of S60 Nokia devices on an ongoing basis. There are some interesting games announced.

This is a quick note on how to secure the private data on your phone. Most people are unaware of the security features of your phone. The phone does provide some reasonable security features. The description here is for the N95, but most S60 3rd edition phones should have the same possibilities.

The N95 in its default version allows you to set a lockcode on your phone (Tools/Settings/General/Security). if you do. It asks the code in case of a power on, just after the sim code is asked. You can also set an autolock time, if the phone has been unused for a certain set time it locks itself and requests the proper lockcode. The lockcode of the N95 can not be circumvented unless one reflashes or hard resets (which requires the lockcode) the phone. And reflashing or a hard reset will erase the phone memory clearing all personal data.

So what about the microSD memory card. That's where most of us store our pictures, movies and documents. Well you can set a password on that one too (Tools/Memory). It makes the microSD card unreadable through a card reader on the PC. You can still read and write to the card if you connect the N95 to the PC. But in a  cardreader It tells you there is no disk etc... If you put a password protected card on you phone it will say it is broken, can't read it. But then if you set the password in the phone via Tools/Memory it will be able to read the card correctly. And you can always clear the password via Tools/Memory (proper password required to unlock first) and behold the microSD card becomes readable on the PC again. The card encryption is hardware implemented in the microSD card and not the phone. Thus no cpu capacity is wasted for the encryption.

The symmetric cryptomeria cipher used for microSD cards has only a key of 56 bits, but it is still uncracked todate. In any case it is more than sufficient to keep nosy people from reading your carddata. The phone memorizes the lockcode, so there is no need to reenter the code, not even after a reboot after a power off. Which is why a lockcode on your phone makes sense. Particular sensitive information can be compressed. Zip will do, but a good Huffman encoder is better. This will increase the entropy of the data and makes decoding in general a lot harder. Or one can use a separate encryption program that encodes your passwords with hardier encryption. But for my home videos and pictures I am content with the security level.

My phone's lock time is set to 4 hours. This is a different lock time than the automatic keyboard lock. Any thief will have to sleep some time and I am only bothered once a day to type it in ;-) And I would love to see him go to a service center with my phone and get brough to justice ;-)

Share and enjoy,

Snoyt

Well today, my second 2GB microSD card from Kingston arrived. The reason I bought the Kingston was that I got a primo small cardreader with it. The 2GB works fine in my N95 and incombination with the cardreader it functions as a usb-stick. The right picture shows the cardreader, the microSD card and the next cap separate. As one can see from the pictures the size is about as small as usbstick can be. The microSD card itselfs fits snugly inside the back of the cardreader with nothing sticking out. Better yet, mounted in the cardreader, the cap still fits over the cardreader and can protect both, the cardreader and your 2GB microSD card.

The transferspeed of the microSD card in the cardreader clocked at 5 MB/s writing speed and a whopping 18 MB/s read speed. It clearly supports USB 2.0. Which is a lot more than the 0.9 MB/s of the N95 in usb-stick mode and the 0.6 MB/s of the wifi. My older microSD cardreader hardly did more than 0.96 MB/s being USB 1.1.  So these are kick-ass. Note that I did not set any password on the microSD card.

Gotten curious, tested my 2GB microSD card from SanDisk. It came up with 5.5 MB/s writing speed and read speed of 10 MB/s. Not bad but the Kingston nearly twice faster. The Kingston microSD card tested to work fine. I did a quick movie playback, no problems. The cardreader got a bit warm during usage but, there seemed no detrimental effects on the cardreader or the microSD card. The metal usb connector easily dumps its heat to its surrounding. It feels small but sturdy. Getting the microSD card out of the cardreader does requires a certain level of motorcontrol and good fingernails. Getting the cardreader out of the usb slot or the protective cap is easy. Pull on the cord.

Card encryption seems to work well too. I set a password on the card via the N95 and the card became instantly unreadable in the cardreader on the PC. As it should. Clearing the password made the card readable again with the cardreader.

Conclusions:

The microSD card as wel as the cardreader work well. The microSD card and the cardreader had excellent read and write speeds (20/5 MB/s). Used as a usb-stick in combination with the cardreader the high read speed is well suited to run applications or a virtual pc directly from it. One might even use it to boot a PC from the usb into one's private and personal OS. In that case I simply hope an 4 or 8GB version will come out for my N95 ;-) The cardreader is really small but usable and can be used as a store for a spare microSD card, turning it into a 2GB usb stick.

Here is one clear reason why Symbian is such a powerful OS for your phone. The N95 has a wide range of possibilties to communicate with other equipment. A wide range of third party software extends these capabilities even further to webserving, ftp, ssh, telnet, vnc and more. SymSMB 2.0 is one of those applications. A very useful and nifty one. It allows you to export shares to a windows network and it can copy data from shares within this network to its flash memory or the card drive. So let's have a look:

The capabilities

The first thing one notes is that it does not do a real mount of external shares. You can copy within the SymSMB applications files from an external share to and from the phones flashmemory and the SDmicro memorycard. As such you can not search through large files or play music or video from external shares. A real pity. 

Exports of directories in the flashmemory and the memorycard however are real exports and can be opened as a real share on a remote machine. This works under Windows XP and other SMB/CIFS supporting OS systems. It tested out OK under XP and my Dell Axim Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5. Shares can be configure to automount/export when a connections is made to a certain network. Access to the exported shares (read or write) is configured per user. It works both in a domain as well as for a momentary point to point mounting using ip numbers.

 
The manual and configuration of SymSMB 2.0

The manual seems well written and readable. Since it is very easy to configure SymSMB I actually did not read much of it, but the parts I read seemed clear and simple. In no time I had SymSMB configured for my home and work network.

 
Communication speed

I did a quick test, copying some files. There is some variance in the results, I did not do long term copy actions and timed them with a stopwatch. I just copied some simple multi MB music files and watched the transferrate in Connections of my N95. Here is an overview of the results:

• Copying under SymSMB from the N95 card to my PC's windows share, 150-190 kB/s.
• Copying under SymSMB from the PC's windows share to the N95, about a 100-120 kB/s
• Copying under Windows from a N95 shared directory to my PC's main drive, 180-220 kB/s
• Copying under Windows from the PC's main drive to a N95 shared directory, 310-350 kB/s

As you can see SymSMB is a significantly slower than the N95 in USB mode, which is around 900 kB/s in both directions. it is also slower than a download with the webbrowser on the phone which is about 500 kB/s.
It shows that transferring large files is might not be really interesting over the wifi network.

 
Conclusions and usability remarks

All in all the software is a nifty piece of programming, which allows you easily transfer or access files to and from your corparate file server or your home PC. The transfer speed is a bit slow, making  it is most useful for smaller files. Luckily when talking office documents, pdf's and others these in general are in an acceptable size, especially if you would like to read them on your phone.

This is however not true for media files. A nice movie can easily be 500 MB to a GB large. And transfering such a file from a PC's share to the phone before playback is not practical. I would like to see SymSMB 2.0 to be further developed to truly mount external shares visible for the phone's OS or add media playing capability to the SymSMB copy application. I want to hookup my N95 to a TV or stereo and playback A/V media from my favorite file server. 

Sharing the phone's media to a PC is workable. The transfer speed however is not enough to playback the highquality video's recorded by the N95 video camera. These require an average  of 365 kB/s. But a quick test with a encoded mp4 (from a DVD) at 175 kB/s (1400 kbit/s) played back smoothly via an exported share from my phone on my PC. Note that 1400 kb/s is about the maximum bit rate for a mp4 video to playback at 640x480 pixels at 25 fps on the N95's tv-out. Playing Mp3's from a phone share is no problem at all, since they require a much lower bandwidth than video.

However if you only want to exchange files between a file server and your phone using any (free) ftp client/server for Symbian might do the trick at most likely higher data transfer rates since the protocols have less overhead. FTP speeds from a server to the N95 may be expected to match that of a browser download ( ca. 500MB/s). So wether this application is worth the $25 in its current state is up to you. In any case Telexy is a company to watch since this product shows they are capable of producing userfriendly, smart and stabile software. I am looking forward to their next project. A PPTP capable vpn-client for S60 3rd edition might not be a bad idea to complement SymSMB. Allowing users secure access of their data files through the phones 3G network.

Visit their site for product information or to check out more about transfer speeds in their publications and their user feedback forum.