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2006-03-30 22:35
Here’s the easy bit. After getting my phone, I joined the MotorolaFans forum to share my findings and request help, so I can now copy wholesale my comments from there as blog posts. That means simple content for my blog, as well as preservation and dissemination of my work (I’m all about Data Libre, and you should be too). Anyway, below is my first post to the forum, explaining how I got the phone, and my initial findings and advice. The moderators on the forums set it as sticky, to stop it falling off the bottom of the page, and I hope it has duly helped people. I called the post “Starting with the A780”:
Buying the phone.
I had previously bought the chinese import version of the phone with no GPS software, but decided this was too limited. The company had a great returns policy and my money (except for the delivery charge) was fully refunded. I then found a place online that offered the UK version, so I bought that. I was again pleased with the service.
Buying the SIM.
I had already decided on the contract I wanted, and where I was getting it from, so I had been to an O2 shop and asked them about the phone. (Carphone Warehouse had been incompetent when talking to one of their staff). Although not familiar with the phone, they assured me I could return it within 7 days if I didn’t like it, and that they would test whether GPRS would work before selling me the SIM. They said this testing service would cost me some small fee, but they waived it in the end. The test SIM they tried didn’t work, but upon trying one of their personal SIMs, the phone accessed a website. Satisfied, I signed up.
GPS.
Didn’t work when I tested it while walking, but as the passenger in a car it worked fine. I need to do some more tests, but don’t be put off if it doesn’t work straight away.
User dictionary.
For the security conscious, and paranoid, I recommend turning off the user dictionary feature. If you give your girlfriend the phone to write a text message, and the predictive text comes up with “Clarissa”, you might have some explaining to do. If you can imagine a variation on this that would affect you, then I suggest you follow my advice. If your A780 user dictionary already has sensitive data in, the simplest thing is to do a master clear as explained in the manual.
Mass storage.
Good for taking backups of things on your phone, as well as transferring individual files. I used the instructions here to mount the phone using Linux. It worked right out of the box, after giving the phone some time to switch to USB storage mode. Also, I found that sda1 was the phone memory and sdb1 was the transflash, whereas that Howto seems to disagree. Remember to umount before unplugging the phone, just in case.
Transferring large files.
One particular case to mention is transferring large files. I transferred a 30 MB file to the phone (leaving only 400 kB free) and although I could see the file on my desktop machine under /mnt, I don’t believe it was actually on the phone at that point. After issuing the umount command, the console I was using seemed to freeze, so after waiting a while and considering my options, I unplugged the phone. No harm seemed to be done, but the file was not present on the phone. Testing with a smaller file I saw I did have write access, so I tried again on the 30 MB file, waiting even longer for the umount to complete, and fortunately it did and the file was then on the phone. Be patient!
Creating videos.
Here is the good stuff. Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to use patent infringing software, but if you want to make MP4 videos that play on the A780 then here is a page which should give you an idea about what is needed. If you want to tweak them more for the A780, then try something like:
ffmpeg -i -s 176x144 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec aac -r 12 -b 100 .mp4
That should turn a ~24 minute episode into a ~30 MB file, I hear.
Anyone else not like signing up to fora because of the overhead of managing different accounts?
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