okay looking at a new phone and the shortlist is down to nokia 6600, noika 6230 or sony ericsson T610 or T630

want to use it with my mac laptop not really intrested in poo like flashy phone rings or cameras etc But i do want a useful phone and would like GPRS working

I've just got a 6230. It's a great phone but bluetooth is buggy at the moment, I'm sure they will sort it out with future firmware updates.

I'm lucky, there is a Nokia Service Centre near me that I can just drop into and they do it on the spot, I doubt if everyone can do this, and it could be a royal pain in the ass.

The camera is pretty good (for a phone!) and I'm happy with it, it's not built half as well as my 6310i though. Glad I got it for free

Cheers

Cris.

any experience with sony phones

I have a T610 and use it for GPRS over blutooth and it works great. If I had to choose between the T630 and T610 I would probably go with T610 for the metal body, but the T630 apparently has improved reception and screen.

I use the Sony T610 with my Powerbook quite a bit. Once paired, I am able to surf the internet ia GPRS, use iSync to sync phone numbers and the calenadar, and use the file exchange to send themes and ringtones to the phone.

Usability, it's about as easy as my old Nokia phones were. And actually seeing the newer Nokia phones, I'd almost say Sony has them beat now in a few ways. In general, the Sony phone has a context menu on about everything, so if I am trying to send a file over to another phone, I find it in whatever listing, context menu, send via Bluetooth. The same procedure on the Nokia 3xxx phone a friend had seemed to sometimes act like this, but not 100% of the time.

For me, I got the T68i first, then the T610 due to the size and features more then anything else. I had a Nokia 8290, and didn't see any phone on the horizon from Nokia to replace that form factor that also added features like bluetooth.

The T610 has a good screen, great sound quality and fantastic build quality. But the battery life sucks.

I get about 6-7 days on my T610 of standby/light use. Or 2 days with 24 hours during that time of solid bluetooth use. Not bad to me, maybe your battery isn't giving as much power as it should.

Hmm. My Nokia 6230 seems to be fine on Bluetooth with 3.15 firmware. I don't have a headset though. So far I've just been using it with a USB bluetooth adapter (Billionton/Cadmus).

Has locked up once or twice but it's still been pretty good overall. Better than other brands I've seen

Battery life isn't fantastic. No Bluetooth and minimal calls sees a maximum of about 3 days battery life. Not too good IMO.

okay got my T610 now the questions

the sounds i can just drop in mid files for ring tones and is there anyway of getting mp3s to convert into the right format?

I am hitting the wall with the GPRS using a powerbook and vodaphone any hints or tips it appears to be connecting and i can ping the Ip it is connected to but i can't get any sites/e-mail or anything

i have got it to sync via bluetooth and i can drop pictures onto the phone

the sounds i can just drop in mid files for ring tones and is there anyway of getting mp3s to convert into the right format?

Not easily, if at all. MID (or, in fact, MIDI) files are the computing equivalent of sheet music. They're basically a list of "play a D, then an E, then a cymbal hit...".

MP3 files on the other hand, store the resulting waveform.

Converting from MP3 to MID is hard. It's like listening to a symphony orchestra and trying to write out the sheet music that they used.

Now, why doesn't the phone just allow MP3 ring-tones? At the very least, it ought to allow WAV ring-tones.

According to this German t610 FAQ, it supports MIDI, IMY, and EMY ringtones. Each of those is sheet-music-like. No waveform formats.

Okay didn't know the difference but to be perfectly honest i really have no intrest in ringtones it was more of a techy knowledge question then can i do it

It's like listening to a symphony orchestra and trying to write out the sheet music that they used.

Which, surprisingly, is infinitely easier for a human to do than for even the most powerful of computers and most advanced algorithms. There's something downright magical about the way the human brain picks out sounds and images (especially those related to language and music) that computers can't quite touch yet.

I'm looking forward to the day when things like speech recognition, language translation, and music transcription really can be done properly by computers. All sorts of other amazing technologies are going to appear as a result of that, stuff we haven't even dreamed of in sci-fi movies yet.

Very true. It's the predictive nature of the human brain. The fact that over the years, we learn what to expect to hear/see and the brain filters out false information. Very cool. It's kinda like the blind spot phenomenon. We all have a blind spot, but we never see it. If you hold a piece of white paper with a dot on it and position the dot in your blind spot, you "see" all white, even in your blind spot. Do the same with a green sheet of paper, you "see" green. Do the same with a piece of paper with stripes on it, you "see" stripes. Neat. The brain just draws in what it expects to be there, whether you know it to be true or not.

I'm currently ready to upgrade, but after a trip to the orange shop I found nothing that tickled my fancy for under £100. A friend of mine has an SPV which convinced me not to get one after seeing all the hassle he has.

I'm thinking either a Treo or the P900, but orange seem unwilling to budge on price. You'd think with nearly 8 years of patronage they'd want to treat me nicely.

I am hitting the wall with the GPRS using a powerbook and vodaphone any hints or tips it appears to be connecting and i can ping the Ip it is connected to but i can't get any sites/e-mail or anything

If the Powerbook says it is connected (in Internet connect, not just the bluetooth menu) and the phone has a globe on the top, it is on the GPRS network. There is a possibility however that your provider blocks access to the internet by default, even if you get free data with your calling plan.

One other check I can think of, open System Preferences and go to Network when you are connected. Bluetooth should be an option with a green, yellow, or red light and a message like "You are connected, but do not have an IP" or other such informational text. Knowing what that says may help narrow down the issue.

i was a dump ass and didn't have the right settings in but now cured after expert advice from a man that nows http://www.taniwha.org.uk/

Another reason to get the 6230 then, which does support MP3 ringtones

I have a 6230 and have been very impressed with it. As for GPRS data, it also supports EDGE (up to 230kbit downlink) when the networks upgrade themselves. I know AT&T in the US are supposedly EDGE capable already.

Hugo

Just managed to get GPRS here. I bought a second-user Compaq Evo recently and then got a GPRS "multiport" module off eBay for £11.50 (bargain!). Put my Orange "Just Talk" (pay as you go) SIM in it, called Orange to get it GPRS enabled and I was away!

Impressively expensive - £4/Mb. Loading the BBC News home page without images cost me 10p! Time to set up a compressing proxy I think....

Gareth

Impressively expensive - £4/Mb. Loading the BBC News home page without images cost me 10p! Time to set up a compressing proxy I think....

AT&T wireless, (the same ones supporting edge) charge 3 cents a KB for data. That's $30.72 a megabyte. You can add data plans which make it cheaper, but not reasonable.

For those of you in the US, T-Mobile's prepaid includes all you can eat GPRS on port 80 and a few others. Highly reccomended. It won't last forever, but it's nice at the moment.

Matthew

For those of you in the US, T-Mobile's prepaid includes all you can eat GPRS on port 80 and a few others. Highly reccomended. It won't last forever, but it's nice at the moment.

Even if they do find a way to close this loophole, their data rates are much more reasonable, with $20 a month for unlimited. The reason limited data access works right now is that TMobile wants all their customers to be able to view their WAP site to download ringtones, and to also be able to e-mail pictures from camraphones. Thus those ports are open on the data network, including the SSL variants of IMAP and POP.

Might be worth trying www.onspeed.com - they have a reasonably priced compressing proxy with some big claims about how good it is. Not tried it myself, but it looks like a good option.

Hugo