My previous memory stick in my mobile phone was a 4GB MS Pro Duo card. This is the maximum the phone is supposed to be able to cope with. I took a slight risk and paid £23 for an 8GB MS2 card (with Pro Duo adapter) with the intent of extending my mobile's life as a thrifty guy's iPod.
Initially there seemed to be a problem reliably writing files but after re-formatting and using a card reader (rather than the phone cable) to update files, it seems to do the job. I formatted using DOS with the command FORMAT E: /FS:FAT32 /A:4096, check this discussion as to why I chose these options. The phone status only reports a 4GB card but it actually does cope with 8GB.
I'm amazed to fit such a large card on a three year old mobile phone. This is enough space to take a large MP3 music collection (about 50 CD's worth of music, including 15 hours of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung), 40 podcast subscriptions, a couple of free audio books, various maps supporting my GPS bluetooth gadget, document backups and 2.5GB spare for future growth.
For document backups I use TrueCrypt to keep an encrypted 400MB disk image which can be mounted on my Mac or a PC that includes all my scanned documents over the last two years (I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner to keep PDF versions of bank statements, tax bills etc.) as well as other key reference documents. This may seem an odd thing to keep on the phone but if I was on holiday and my laptop got stolen I could still print out identity documents if someone lent me a PC. By using encryption if the phone was stolen at least I wouldn't worry about my ID being compromised.
My old 4GB memory card? This is now in my pocket camera (Sony T100) giving enough space for 3 hours of 640x480 video or 1,600 photos at 2592x1944 (5MB) resolution.
Showing posts with label k750i. Show all posts
Showing posts with label k750i. Show all posts
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
How to use free GPS on a K750i mobile phone
Last year I bought a tiny bluetooth GPS device off ebay for £20. I set up my laptop with it and we managed to drive around Germany using a copy of Autoroute showing our planned route, current GPS coordinates and it even shouted helpful instructions such as "turn left in 400 meters"! We planned our route in the hotel the night before and as we are often looking for poorly road-signed ancient sites it is terribly handy to have the confidence of the computer pointing you down an empty track rather than guesswork.
I did get the GPS recognized by my Sony Ericsson K750i (due to a previous hack it runs using the W800i firmware) and used some trial software to show coordinates but little else. I spent some time yesterday further researching and managed to get it working quite beautifully yesterday.
The simple free java application is called TrekBuddy and it has an associated wiki site. After connecting to the GPS via bluetooth, the application shows where you are on a scrolling map that you define and store locally on the memory stick. I have it working with an almost A to Z street level map of London (spanning West Hammersmith through to Catford). You can load other maps as you go along so a later improvement would be to install a higher level road map of the UK. In the case of my map of London it was only 2mb in size (I use a 4gb stick!) so it would be no issue to carry around several maps.
I had to spend some time tweaking the configuration, in particular the initial location of the maps had to be entered by hand to point to the memory stick ("file:///E:/other/mapdata/london") and it took a while to work out that I needed to tick the option to enable a large atlas in order to display anything. The only other hard part was preparing the map, luckily someone has worked all this out and I imported maps from Open Street Map (setting default datum as WGS 84) using the tool listed on the wiki. I also managed to import using the rather neat Google Maps to TrekBuddy tool on the same page. The latter being slightly more limited as to the overall size of map but with the benefits of a better quality street map (just right for a pedestrian map in Central London).
I did get the GPS recognized by my Sony Ericsson K750i (due to a previous hack it runs using the W800i firmware) and used some trial software to show coordinates but little else. I spent some time yesterday further researching and managed to get it working quite beautifully yesterday.
The simple free java application is called TrekBuddy and it has an associated wiki site. After connecting to the GPS via bluetooth, the application shows where you are on a scrolling map that you define and store locally on the memory stick. I have it working with an almost A to Z street level map of London (spanning West Hammersmith through to Catford). You can load other maps as you go along so a later improvement would be to install a higher level road map of the UK. In the case of my map of London it was only 2mb in size (I use a 4gb stick!) so it would be no issue to carry around several maps.
I had to spend some time tweaking the configuration, in particular the initial location of the maps had to be entered by hand to point to the memory stick ("file:///E:/other/mapdata/london") and it took a while to work out that I needed to tick the option to enable a large atlas in order to display anything. The only other hard part was preparing the map, luckily someone has worked all this out and I imported maps from Open Street Map (setting default datum as WGS 84) using the tool listed on the wiki. I also managed to import using the rather neat Google Maps to TrekBuddy tool on the same page. The latter being slightly more limited as to the overall size of map but with the benefits of a better quality street map (just right for a pedestrian map in Central London).
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