Antony’s Mobile Blog

Do you store sensitive data on your phone, such as bank account, insurance number or even passwords? Personally, I do it. It is more convenient because I don’t want to carry all of my cards with me. Imagine if I have to carry all of my bank cards, credit cards, insurance cards, loyalty cards and identify cards.

Storing all the sensitive information on the phone is convenient on the one side. On the other side, it is very risky. What is going to happen if someone steals the phone? We often hear about identity theft these days, don’t we?

Handy Safe, an application from Epocware, is one of the available solutions to this problem. It allows us to store sensitive information on the phone in a secure way. It uses 448 bit Blowfish encryption to keep our data private and secure.

Handy Safe runs on most Symbian OS phones, including S60 2nd Edition, S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 2.x, UIQ 3.x as well as Nokia Communicator Series. It is available in English and major European languages.

You can store 35 types of information on Handy Safe, including credit card, bank account, calling card, driver’s license, password and even clothes sizes!! It uses a “master password” to encrypt your information. So, make sure that you choose a strong password.

The user interface of Handy Safe is intuitive and pretty easy to use. It categorizes our data into several folders, such as Personal and Business. We can even create our own folder, if needed.

There is one feature that I really like, which is synchronization to the PC. It means you can store all of your sensitive data to your PC too. There is a standalone application on the PC, called Handy Safe Desktop, which allows us to do that. You can use Bluetooth, USB or Infrared for synchronization.

There is one tip for you, use Handy Safe Desktop to enter all of your data on the PC. Don’t use Handy Safe on the phone to enter your data; unless you can type really fast using T9 keyboard.

This review is sponsored by ReviewMe.

Links

• Handy Safe for S60 2nd Edition
• Handy Safe for S60 3rd Edition
• Handy Safe for UIQ 2.x
• Handy Safe for UIQ 3.x
• Handy Safe for Nokia Communicator Series

I just got a new book, “S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance - A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers“. I am not a test engineer, so most of the content of this book actually does not apply to my job. However, I found this book still quite interesting.

The author of this book is a Nokia employee, Saila Laitinen. This book is divided into two sections. The author didn’t divide it explicitly, but we can see it clearly. The first section, which is the first five chapters, describes the process of building software for S60 phones. The second section discusses about testing and quality assurance on S60 phones.

The first chapter gives an overview about the S60 architecture and explains about the competitive advantages of the S60 platform.

The second chapter discusses about baseline, which is used by S60 licensee to create S60 phones.

The third chapter goes further by describing the release management process of S60. How is each component of the S60 platform integrated into the phone?

The fourth chapter would be very interesting for developers too. It discusses binary compatibility. How does S60 team maintain their promise of binary compatibility starting from S60 3rd Edition?

The fifth chapter is more general information about certification and standard. There are standards from government that must be fulfilled, such as FCC. There are also some certifications, such as Java and Bluetooth.

As I said above, the rest of the chapters talk about quality assurance. Since I don’t work as test engineer, I don’t read them in detail. However, if you work as test engineer, they may be interesting for you.

As I said on my previous posting, Sony Ericsson (SE) marketing team has kindly sent me a Walkman phone, i.e. W810i. Now, I would like to give my first impression after using the phone for a couple of days.

There are actually two variants of W810, i.e. W810i, is for Americas, APAC and EMEA market and W810c is for Mainland China. I am going to concentrate on SE W810i only. The functionalities of both models are more or less the same though. The full technical specification of W810 is available on Sony Ericsson web site.

Phone

W810i is a GSM quad band phone. It means you can use it almost anywhere in the world. However, it is not a 3G phone. For local connectivity, W810i supports Bluetooth and Infrared.

The phone design is robust and attractive. It is small and light. That’s why it is very convenient to carry or put into our pocket. The latest models, W610i and W880i, which are coming soon, will have even slimmer design.

Camera

As many other phones these days, W810i has built-in 2 MPix camera with flash and auto focus support. It has a dedicated camera key on the right side of the phone to capture picture. So, if you rotate the phone 90 degrees counterclockwise, the key will be on the top. We can capture pictures just like they way we used to do it on standard camera. The picture quality taken from the camera is surprisingly good.

Audio

Now it’s time to discuss the most interesting part, audio. W810i supports the most popular music format, MP3, as well as other formats, such as AAC and M4A. The audio quality is pretty good although not the best in the class.

The phone comes with 20 MB internal memory and is expandable with Memory Stick Pro Duo. The package is bundled with 512 MB Memory Stick Pro Duo, which should hold around 100 songs in MP3 format. If you want more, you can buy 1 GB or 2 GB memory card.

Controlling music player is very convenient using dedicated music keys. Walkman key is used to switch between phone and music functionalities. There is Play/Pause key on the left side of the phone and volume key on the right side. Additionally, we have navigation keys integrated with the joystick to jump to previous or next track as well as to rewind or fast forward the current song.

Music Synchronization

How do we transfer music files to the phone? There several ways to synchronize music files from PC to W810i, i.e.:

• Windows Media Player. When you connect W810 to your PC via USB cable, you can select File transfer mode and use Windows Media Player for synchronization.
• Disc2Phone. It is an application as part of Sony Ericsson PC Suite. It allows us to transfer music files from our PC to the phone.
• iTunes. iTunes is not officially supported by Sony Ericsson. However, there are some third party applications that allows us to synchronize W810i to iTunes. One of them is iTunes Agent.

Unfortunately USB connection between phone and the PC is relatively slow. Transferring 100 MB takes about 15 minutes. You can estimate how long it will take to transfer songs to 1 GB memory card.

Summary

As summary, W810 is a good basic phone with excellent music player.

What I like about W810i

• Robust and attractive design.
• Small and light.
• Dedicated music keys to play, pause, rewind, fast forward and change volume.
• Easy synchronization to PC via Windows Media Player support or Disc2Phone.

What I don’t like about W810

• No 3.5 mm port on the phone. There is an extension cable to connect to 3.5 mm headset, but it would be nice if the port is integrated into the phone.
• Non-standard USB port connection. We cannot use standard USB cable to connect phone to the PC.
• Slow music transfer from PC to the phone. Having high-speed USB connection would be very nice.
• No album art in the Music Player.