Hi there, I'm a longtime Windows Mobile user and I've decided to switch to Symbian. I'm going to go with the E70, as I like "jack of all trades" phones. I've done a ton of research, but before I go ahead and purchase I did have a couple of questions I haven't been able to find answers to.
1) With Windows Mobile phones there are a ton of tweaks that you can make to change the phones functionality, etc. I haven't seen anything like this for Symbian, is there a good website to get all the S60 tweaks? Specifically I'm wondering how to change the function of the voice notes button on the E70, as I don't use voice notes.
2) Has anyone used the S60 web browser in conjunction with Skweezer.net? Does it squeeze the content down to a single page width? I don't like the idea of spending all of my time scrolling about.
3) I'm in the U.S. so I'll be getting the E70-2. I've always had quad-band phones before, how badly will the lack of the 900 band hurt me when I travel to Europe or Asia?
4) Will the s60 music player play aac files from itunes (non-protected ones) with the .m4a extension?
5) How good is overall integration with a mac? I know there are isync plugins out there, but what about file transfers and using the phone as a dial-up modem?
Thank you for your answers!
Alfredo
www.mobile-penguin.com
ajpprc wrote:Hi there, I'm a longtime Windows Mobile user and I've decided to switch to Symbian. I'm going to go with the E70, as I like "jack of all trades" phones.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Symbian then.
ajpprc wrote:
1) With Windows Mobile phones there are a ton of tweaks that you can make to change the phones functionality, etc. I haven't seen anything like this for Symbian, is there a good website to get all the S60 tweaks? Specifically I'm wondering how to change the function of the voice notes button on the E70, as I don't use voice notes.
S60 has never been a very tweakable platform. And things haven't improved on this front with the introduction of the Platform Security crap (excuse my french) in Symbian OS 9, which makes it very difficult or even impossible for third party applications to tweak the system (supposedly in order to protect yourself against, err... yourself).
The only thing that you can tweak really are the menu layout, the stanby screen background picture and the standby screen application shortcuts. And of course, you can also install third party themes that change the colors and background pictures as well.
As of now, you can't map the voice recorder button (or any other button for that matter) to another application, you can't change the size and color of the fonts or of any other UI element (short of creating your own theme which isn't easy), you can't replace the standby screen with a third party standby screen, you can't even add third party plugins to the standby screen, you can't add a new input method (i'd love to be able to add an input method to my E61 that would autocomplete words and do spell checking) etc, etc, etc.
See here for a list of pretty much all that you can tweak: http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/tipse70.htm
ajpprc wrote:
2) Has anyone used the S60 web browser in conjunction with Skweezer.net? Does it squeeze the content down to a single page width? I don't like the idea of spending all of my time scrolling about.
No, i haven't used it but i'm not a big fan of the built-in web browser anyway. I'd suggest you to try Opera Mobile (http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/s60/). It's commercial but it's got loads of extra features that make it a lot more usable than the built-in browser in my opinion. If you try it, make sure that you make the most of its cutomizable shortcuts (and in particular the page Up/Down and Open link in new window shortcuts) as it's one its biggest advantage over the built-in browser. It also has a fit-to-width mode that i originally intended to use for most of my browsing but i've found that using the normal desktop rendering mode was actually (and surprisingly) more practical for everyday browsing.
ajpprc wrote:
4) Will the s60 music player play aac files from itunes (non-protected ones) with the .m4a extension?
Yes it will but i've found that the built-in MP3 player wouldn't recognize my iTunes-encoded AAC files tags and therefore displays them all under the Unknown Artist / Unknown Album categories, which renders it quite useless unfortunately. The strange thing is that it does read just fine the tags of MP3 files encoded with that same iTunes so i'm puzzled as to why it can't read the tags of my AAC files. My ageing iPod doesn't have any problems with either my AAC or MP3 files.
ajpprc wrote:
5) How good is overall integration with a mac? I know there are isync plugins out there, but what about file transfers and using the phone as a dial-up modem?
Not having a Mac, i can't say for sure but the E70 can be connected in USB mass storage mode so you shouldn't have any problems transfering files to its memory card (it will show on on your Mac's desktop as a USB drive).
3) You should be ok as there is a lot of dual coverage here with multiple networks. It will limit you somewhat but I imagine your operators romaing agreement are mainly with 1800 band using operators.