Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Continuing my Skype saga…

I’ve finally fixed the headset at the office. Again, it turned out I had two sound cards - it’s just one of them was disabled completely. Instead of trying to please the SoundBlaster Live! I turned that other one on, and it worked like a charm. Damn Creative. Every time I try to use - I have a problem.

So, anyway, with all the headphones and microphones working, I decided to go further along and buy some SkypeOut minutes. SkypeOut minutes allow one to call from Skype (read: computer) to any regular or mobile phone. Anywhere. Dirt cheap.

I used my PayPal account to buy a 10.00 EUR credit. It worked like a charm. I made a couple of test calls around. The quality is OK. The additional benefit is the anonimity. The calls are not signed with any number, so if you want to call anyone anonymously - here is your option.

That’s it for now. Soon, I’ll tell you about things that I think suck in Skype.

I’ve got myself a little Bluetooth USB adapter and now I can easily beam files to my phone. No need to use expensive (and slow) GPRS connection for file transfers anymore.

There is a problem though that I am not sure how to fix. You see, transferred files appear as beamed messages in the inbox. I can save the files later to any place I want. But the inbox itself is on the internal drive of the phone. How smart is that?

The internal drive of P800 is 12 MBytes. The external card can be as large as 128 MBytes. But there is no way (or, at least, I haven’t found one) of transfering a file larger than the internal drive. It’s good that I can fill up the 128 MBytes. But it’s terrible that I can’t do so with a couple of 60 MByte files (podcasts anyone?).

Does anyone know of a way to tell Sony Ericsson P800 to save beamed messages on the external card? Furthermore, is this situation fixed with P900 and P910? Those phones can take bigger cards, as far as I know, but their internal memory is not very much larger…

I came across a simply, but really useful plugin WP Mobile. It provides a much lighter version of WordPress blog for users of mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. Since I am a rather often guest of my own, and on many of this occasions I use my smartphone, I decided to install this plugin and link to the mobile version of the site from the navigation menu at the top. Feel free to bookmark it too.

In the last five years mobile phones became much cheaper and much more feature rich. They do everything from call and contact mamangement to web browsing and photography. There is still one feature that I would really like to see implemented.

When someone calls me, I see the originating phone number. If the number is in my address book, then I also see the name of the person and possibly his/her picture. If the number is not in my address book, I get no information about the caller what-so-ever.

It would be nice to get both the name and the picture from the caller, if he’s not in my addressbook. There are a few ways to implement this, I guess. Either use the phone profile or have a centralized directory as a telecom service. With centralized directory land phones can be also associated with names and pictures. This way I will always know is calling me and I won’t have to keep five billion contacts in my addressbook.

Can I have it before Christmas? Next year? Please?

Most of the modern cell phones are equipped with both “Bluetooth” and “Infrared”. “Bluetooth” is extremely popular these days. But “Infrared” also has its use. The other day I was reminded of this.

My brother and I were in the car on the highway between Paphos and Limassol. I was driving at about 140 km/h. My brother was occupied copying ringtones from my SonyEricsson P800 onto his SonyEricsson P910. “Bluetooth” connection wasn’t working at all. When I slowed down to about 80 km/h it managed to connect, but was very slow and unstable. “Infrared” on the other hand, worked like a charm.

I suspect that this was because “Bluetooth” is a point-to-multipoint connection. Basically, it is like a small radio transmitter. It sends waves to about 10 meters around it. Because the car was moving so fast, it was getting out of the 10 meters radius pretty fast. “Infrared” on the other hand is a point-to-point connection. As long as it can “see” the other end, the connection will work perfectly.