Priyadi’s Place

Dr. Erik Tapan kemarin bertanya-tanya mengenai paket Palm Treo 650 yang ditawarkan oleh Mobile-8. Mobile-8 menawarkan paket Palm Treo 650 dengan harga Rp 5.999.000, sudah termasuk biaya paket MaxSurf 1000 selama 12 bulan. Paket MaxSurf sendiri bila dijual tersendiri harganya adalah Rp 500 ribu/bulan dengan kuota 1 GB transfer data/bulan, sedangkan untuk setiap kelebihan transfer data dikenakan biaya Rp 2/KB. Sebagai pengguna Treo 650 versi GSM, saya memang sempat tertarik dengan layanan ini karena jika dihitung dengan harga layanan Fren MaxSurfnya, maka Treo 650-nya praktis gratis.

Yang menjadi masalah, menurut laporan dr. Erik Tapan, ternyata Treo 650 versi Fren tersebut tidak menyediakan fasilitas dial up networking, yang artinya tidak dapat dimanfaatkan sebagai modem. Berikut adalah transkrip pembicaraan Erik Tapan dengan petugas layanan pelanggan Mobile-8:

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MGMaps is a mobile application that displays maps and satellite imagery on Java J2ME enabled devices. It is Google Maps on the road. MGMaps requires devices that at least support CLDC 1.0 and MIDP 1.0. That means almost all mobile phones sold today should be able to run MGMaps.

MGMaps was released almost two months ago. However, my experience with my old SonyEricsson P900 and older version of MGMaps was less than satisfying. It was too flaky to be considered useful. After I got the new P910, I decided to try MGMaps once more. This time MGMaps runs almost flawlessly. The only problem I encountered is that MGMaps crashes occassionally on less than stable GPRS connection.

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I decided to trade in my almost two years old SonyEricsson P900 for a secondhand P910. For most cases, the P900 has been more than enough for me. The only gripe I had is that it’s got a measly amount of working memory (RAM).

Running Opera and Agile Messenger at the same time? P900 will gladly terminate one for the other, and background tasks too, most of the time it will choose the important ones. Opening a few web pages in Opera? The notorious ‘out of memory’ error will appear very soon.

Physically, the P910 has twice the amount of working memory than P900. It’s better than that though: by counting resident part of the operating system, the amount of free memory available for user is almost three times the P900! I really hope this can get rid of those dreaded ‘out of memory’ errors.

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Kemarin saya baru mendapatkan nomor TelkomFlexi Netter. Flexi Netter adalah layanan telepon selular CDMA dari Telkom yang dilengkapi dengan fasilitas akses Internet flat. Harga abonemen per bulannya adalah Rp 200 ribu belum termasuk PPN.

Layanan ini adalah layanan promosi, kabarnya hanya berlaku sampai bulan Juli. Setelah itu tidak ada aplikasi baru, tapi yang sudah mendaftar masih bisa memanfaatkan layanan ini. Layanan ini juga tidak tersedia di seluruh kota. Walaupun bersifat promosi, namun saya tidak dapat menemukan promosi apapun dari Telkom mengenai layanan TelkomFlexi Netter. Informasi mengenai layanan ini justru saya dapatkan dari ForumPonsel.

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Pada akhir 90-an, ICQ membuat layanan instant messaging untuk pertama kalinya. Langkah ini kemudian diikuti oleh pemain besar seperti Yahoo! dengan layanan Yahoo! Messenger, Microsoft dengan layanan MSN Messenger dan America Online dengan layanan AOL Instant Messenger. Selanjutnya adalah sejarah, instant messaging menjadi bagian dari penggunaan Internet sehari-hari.

Pada awal tahun 2000-an, Motorola, Ericsson dan Nokia berkolaborasi untuk mendefinisikan yang dinamakan “Wireless Village”. Wireless Village adalah spesifikasi dari layanan Instant Messaging and Presence Service (IMPS) yang terdiri dari fitur-fitur:

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I’m an active mobile Internet user. I get on the Internet whenever I had a chance. My primary tool of hooking up to the net is my trusty SonyEricsson P900 and its Opera web browser. Opera is a versatile web browser, even so when on the road.

The single most important feature of Opera for Mobile is its Small Screen Rendering. It reformat any web page to fit inside the screen width to eliminate the annoying horizontal scrolling. It does the job very well on almost any web site. Of course, there are some exception to this. There are highly broken web sites which are incomprehensible in SSR mode. For these broken sites, Opera also provides normal rendering mode which render web sites the same way we see on computer screen.

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I need to see how my web pages looks on my P900’s Opera after a few changes. But it is unconvenient to send files back and forth to my web server, and then test it using GPRS connection. Even so considering I’m using that GPRS connection to do my uploads . Yes, I have tested it on my desktop Opera using small screen rendering, but that’s not the real thing.

The following is what I did. Note, this is NOT a guide how to connect to the Internet using p900 as a modem which is probably what you want. This is a guide how to connect a P900 to a desktop computer using Bluetooth under Linux, so that I would be able to open web pages available in the desktop computer’s web server.

This guide is also applicable to the P800 and P910.

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Pada tagihan GPRS Matrix bulan ini, seperti biasa saya mendapat brosur mengenai layanan dari Indosat. Pada bulan ini, produk baru yang mereka coba tawarkan adalah Indosat Blackberry.

Dikutip dari brosur tersebut:

Blackberry merupakan solusi mobile office yang lengkap dan terintegrasi serta aman dengan menggunakan teknologi enkripsi triple DES: email, telepon, SMS, browser, organizer, dll.

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Pemakai Palm == Tukang Becak, itu topik yang akhir-akhir ini banyak dibicarakan di forum-forum pemakai PDA Palm di Indonesia. Saya sendiri terlambat menyadari hal ini karena kepergian saya ke Medan minggu kemarin. Sumber dari pernyataan tersebut tak lain dan tak bukan adalah satu lagi artikel ‘berbobot’ dari ReviewLand.com.

Oleh karena itu cukup konyol jika masih ada orang yg lebih berpendidikan dari tukang becak ternyata masih punya cita-cita / berencana memiliki PDA Palm

Saya sendiri pernah me-review Reviewland.com sebelum ini.

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My out of warranty Palm Tungsten T3’s digitizer has been drifting away since several weeks ago. Just like everybody else did, recalibrating didn’t work. I tried from hard resetting the unit and trying several third party digitizer recalibration program like DigiE but the drift is still there. Knowing a software solution won’t solve the problem, I gave up and let the drift there. I’d just make mental adjustment whenever I was using the stylus.

I’m always reluctant to take apart things like this. I’m not that good with hardware. For example, in theory I know the pinout of an RJ-45 jack. However, whenever need to crimp them, I always end up with more failures than success. However, I’m also getting tired of this digitizer problem and decided that enough is enough. In the Internet, I’ve found some people have taken apart their Tungsten T3s in order to eliminate their digitizer problem with varying degrees of success. There are several take apart instructions, I use ones from gethightech.com and palmbattery.com.

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Now that my digital camera is working, I just created a script to download pictures semi automatically from my digital camera. It currently does the following:

• Camera device scanning, will refuse to run when camera is not plugged in.
• No need to specify the ever changing device node, the script will attempt to obtain necessary information from /proc filesystem
• Mounting and umounting
• Moving pictures from camera to specified directory (big deal!)
• Create two downsampled files from the pictures: a 200 pixel maximum side thumbnail and a 1000 pixel maximum side for online viewing, while still maintaining aspect ratio.
• Pictures are moved into subdirectory named after the current date.
• Open a Konqueror window on the final directory, if running under KDE.

Theory of operation: plug the camera, and run the script (keep in mind the ‘theory’ part

Requires:

• sudo, configured to run mount, umount and mkdir as root (security hole I know, this is not designed to run under multiuser environment)
• Kernel 2.6 with devfs
• ImageMagick

To do:

• Hotplug could be configured to run the script automatically whenever a camera is plugged in

Download it here.

After I lost my previous digital camera, the Casio Exilim EX-Z3 (it was stolen at Roxy), I turned my attention to my wife’s Olympus C-4000. In my opinion, this camera is nicer than the lost one. It is a bit bigger, but it is also more comfortable to hold. The picture quality is a lot better and the flash is much stronger.

However, it uses Smartmedia memory cards which I found very fragile. With my old camera, I used to transfer pictures to my computer by removing its Secure Digital and placing it inside my card reader. With Smartmedia, I found out that reading a Smartmedia card with a card reader often rendered it unreadable by the camera, while still readable by computer.

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