Well, it’s not actually there. After a brief chat with a NewEgg representative, I’ll be waiting 7-10 days for an answer as to where my package is. I’ve never had UPS just leave stuff here. I’ve always had to sign for UPS. DHL, FedEx and USPS (CanadaPost takes the blame once it crosses the border) have all dropped stuff on my porch and left it – stuff worth hundreds of dollars. This is why I went with NewEgg and UPS shipping, I’ve always had to sign for it – or I receive a phone call and we schedule a time for delivery.

I talked with another rep today, and he told me they are in contact with UPS so far, and will be e-mail me shortly. Worse comes to worst, I will dispute it with MBNA/Mastercard and fill my pockets with the missing cashflow.

Having said that, I’m not worried – as NewEgg has excellent customer service, and between them and UPS – I will get my N900, or I’ll get my money back, and simply order another one and set the delivery to a work address. I’ve been hounding the Maemo boards again and re-activated my account from when I worked on the N810.

Everything will be going swimmingly soon.

Thumbs up for the bum rush!

Software can be fixed. By Nokia, by 3rd party developers, by the community and by myself. It runs an un-adulterated Linux kernel with a full GNU toolset. I’ve been using and abusing GNU/Linux for the past 10 years, I’m sure I can cope with it on ARM architecture just fine. Nokia has had their Maemo platform around since 2005 on the 770. It is for geeks, hackers and DIY’ers. There is no doubt about it. If you don’t know the difference between ARM/RISC and x86, don’t know how to configure and compile a kernel or you are unable to program your VCR – probably should not have a current Maemo device.

So, what can the N900 do other devices flat out can not do for me? The following;

FM Transmitter. Hop into a car, you immediately have your music with you. No need for an aftermarket or factory headunit with auxiliary-in.

Autonomous GPS functionality. I don’t need a data connection to use my GPS.

5MP camera with autofocus and Carl Zeiss lens. Nokia incorporates THE best camera phone optics and processing algorithms. You can’t deny it. Ever. Don’t try.

InfraRed. Yes, I use. I can control just about any consumer IR device I please.

Non-proprietary connectors. A 3.5mm headphone jack. A MicroUSB charge port. TV-out that uses regular composite cables. I don’t need a special jack made only for my device, I can use any 4 pole AV-out line that somebody has laying around from a digital camera.

A physical keyboard. I prefer buttons. Squishy buttons. They make me smile.

32GB of on-board storage and a slot for a hot swappable MicroSD card. I can currently have almost 100GB of storage on my device. I have workstations in my home that don’t sport that much space.

The current iterations of the iPhone and Nexus One just can’t compete for me. On a hardware level or a software level.

N900. I await your arrival.

This list is organized by my top selections based on features, price and power.

First:

Epocware’s Handy Blacklist – $24.95

It’s a very ‘no-mess-no-fuss’ blocker that uses a black list to divert calls.

You can immediately activate the blocking software, even with an empty list. It won’t block any calls – however if you explicitly decline a call, the software will ask if you’d  like to add to a rejected list which is a very nice feature however it worked spontaneously and did not always give me the option to add the number.

In terms of the ability to set numbers to block, there’s the normal that you’d expect. Recent Calls will load your call log and show all incoming and outgoing calls that are saved.

The ‘Contacts’ option will show all your contacts and gives you the ability to select multiple entries AND groups (if you have any set).

You can also manually enter a phone number or block all unknown and private numbers.

Packing the ability to display a transparent status icon on the Active Standby screen, you  can easily see if your divert options are on.

The icon is painted a bit low, but it’s there nonetheless. One bug I found, was when I had enabled the AS indicator – the home/menu button on my E71 no longer worked for short presses – disabling it solved this.

You can also set the log of rejected calls and view it on the main screen second tab and setup a dialog to ask if you want to add a decling call to the reject list, but again, this does not always seem to work.

Good

Starts invisibly and has extremely small memory usage.

Ability to easily pull call logs and contacts, almost immediately without lag.

Active Standby icon that only shows when the blocker is active.

Bad

Active Standby icon is not dynamic and it’s incorrectly drawn with transparency.

Rejecting a contact does not always prompt addition to rejection list.

Pricey

Thoughts

It’s great. It’s very low-footprint and I do not notice it running at all.  An incoming call will be silenced, without your device being notified via ring or vibe, the screen will temporarily show an incoming call – and then automatically disconnect it. It’s pricey for mobile software, however it does sit in the middle area with software up in the $40 range and ones as low as *free* (Melon Mobile Easy Reject).

Second:

MelonMobile/WebGate Advanced Blocker – $39.90

WebGate has a few releases of software that has the ability to divert and filter calls; Advanced Blocked, Easy Reject, Easy Busy, Easy Mute. A bit of a disjoint here – with numerous applications that provide the same thing, but differ in features and prices.

Advanced Blocker seems to roll all these into one. It features the ability to import from the phonebook, phone log, manual input and group/wildcard input – which is an extremely nice feature (you can write off a whole area code if you want!). The preferences setting has the AS icon setting.

Importing from the phonebook is instantaneous while the phone log takes around 20 seconds to pull the information. You can import SMS and Call entries and full groups.

When manually entering a number, you can enter a wildcard and drop off any number with the defined pattern – GREAT feature if you want to stop a whole city block from calling you.

This release also features an ActiveStandby icon, however it does not draw transparency properly – this seems to be a thing with a lot of S60 applications, let’s chalk it up to linkable libraries within the platform and not to the authors of these fine applications.

The dynamic icon will change depending if the software has rejected a call or not. Static will simply display when the blocking software is active – and no indicator, well that’s obvious. Again, notice the black box around the icon, which is very visible when using a theme that does not have a dark background, pretty ugly.

Good

Extremely feature filled, powerful yet simple to use and configure.

Rules upon rules that you can set.

Great AS status icon that changes – keeping you informed of what’s going on.

Great wildcard functionality for including number patterns.

Bad

Phone log takes abnormally long to import, might be due to polling the SMS database.

Price. There’s really no market for software at such a high price. Chop it in half, maybe.

Thoughts

Great software, very full and well rounded with features. Extremely easy to set rules and filters and extremely powerful yet has a well-thought out way to provide the user with the ability to harness it. It’s a real shame that the AS icon doesn’t include transparency, but the application looks nice through out the screens and has nice representative icons.

Third:

SBSH’s WhiteList – $9.95

While this does not reject set numbers, it’s a new release from SBSH that will setup a list of accepted calls and then reject all other calls. Very simple, very straight-forward and concise. The main screen shows a dynamic switch indicating the state of your divert list.

From here, you can import Contacts to the single whitelist. The contacts are displayed with checkboxes which allows you to select multiple entries or the option of selecting any groups you may have set up. 

In conjunction with whitelisting your entire contact list, you can specify what to do when filtering a call – which does include filter an SMS.

You can also view and clear your whitelist log and there is even an option for a Skype alias.

Good

Very straight-forward and simple to understand.

Lowest price out of the 4 options.

Can filter SMS.

Bad

No ActiveStandby icon

Inconsistent capitalization, lack of punctuation throughout the UI and help. It feels like the application was poorly translated – and not created in english.

The “Get More!” listing in the menu. The app was already purchased. Save your advertisement for those who aren’t using your products.

Thoughts

It’s the cheapest application out of the select 4 products. It has the least amount of features but does exactly what it claims to do – and does it extremely well. For the price, when compared to the others and the features and simplicity – this wins.

Forth:

KillerMobile’s BlackBaller – $13.50

A feature packed application with the ability to block SMS, MMS as well as phone calls.  The main screen shows a log of rejected calls and the ability to ‘slide’ over to SMS, MMS logs and then the Settings. I’d prefer having a regular menu under the left soft key ‘Options’. It just makes sense.

Upon reaching the Settings window, you can change the “Smart reject sensor” which can add the caller to a reject list. It worked just as described – but brought up the whole application – which I don’t quite care for, I’m sure you can open API and add it in the background.

All the usual suspects for adding a number to reject are there.

Importing call logs takes long. It actually chewed about 11MB of RAM while doing this and then gave an “Out of Memory” error. I killed the process and re-started it – same thing. I only have about 244 contacts.

BlackBaller has a lot of features, you can create whitelists, you can filter SMS and MMS messages per list and even set an SMS response to be sent for rejected calls. Worked just fine – except there’s no way to differentiate between a mobile and a landline number, an SMS will be sent to the landline number and if your provider charges you for an SMS-to-Voice transcription, you’ll be paying for each one if you enable this. It’s cool, nonetheless.

Also, when creating a new list – by default the Filter Call option is set to NO. You have to go in and change this for each divert list you create – which increases complexity.

Next thing? The Active Standby icon. It sucks. It’s drawn over EVERY application, and it’s buggy. You can see in the above screenshots, it covers the text and there’s no transparency. Also, after rejecting a call – the whole thing went red and stayed like that until a device reboot. Quite annoying.

Good

A lot of features, multiple lists and the ability to filter SMS and MMS.

Can dispatch an SMS reply to a blocked number.

Bad

Confusing and very disconnected UI.

Extremely buggy. From the AS icon, to loading contacts to actually starting up. Sub-par QC going on here.

Features and Settings are hidden deep within sub-menu after menu after ‘tab’.

Thoughts

All in all this application is quite buggy, powerful but extremely convoluted and has a UI and feature-set that is very disconnected. It’s still light-weight and hardly noticeable when running, it also rejects calls very quickly. It wins for features and power, but it’s poorly implemented.

Bottom of the Line

Epocware has extremely good software, I use their entire suite, including Handy Taskman and Handy Calendar. They all have very nice integration, are priced competitively and have great features.

Thanks and please leave any comments, questions or other software review requests.

Have a safe Christmas!

From the moment I received it, in fully glory, packaged in a large briefcase that really pushed the business-esque-ability of the device.

It’s a real heavy briefcase, good construction – I wish I could keep the bad boy and put all my tech gear in it. It came locked, lucky for me I didn’t have to bust out my SouthOrd pocket-picks, an accompanied envelope housed a key for opening it up.

I quickly opened it up and grabbed all the box contents and tossed them on top of the case so I could get my paws all of the plasticy goodness. Included in the box is:

3.5mm headphones – These aren’t all that great, but this isn’t an N-series device.

UK 2mm charger – Yes, it charges via MicroUSB and the old 2mm 5V Nokia charger.

Sync cable – MicroUSB to USB for sync and charge.

A manual – Not color, and heavy hefty, weighing in at 130 pages.

Maps and other promotional pamphlets – These are in color, and are a good way to get more information about accessories and software for the device.

And the device. Brilliantly red and a fingerprint magnet, as you can see. It feels good in the hand, real nice. Weighted and proportion properly. It feels like a solid E-series device so far. Let’s twist and flick, see how that slider feels.

Wheee. Just as I imagined, it’s a breeze to slide. It’s spring loaded and is very tight. I found myself opening and closing the device out of sheer boredom and fun. Yes, it’s that good.

Since it runs S60V3 FP2, I’m sure you all know about the changes. UI transitions, increased battery life, and much better functionality with Nokia Messaging. I’m not going to be going into much more in terms of software, I completely love S60 because it does basically everything I need a mobile platform to do, currently. I despise the hardware of the E75.

1). Both the front keypad and the QWERTY keyboard are just borderline useless to me. The 12 key front facing pad is single strips, which makes it very hard to differentiate between ‘buttons’ when I’m not staring directly at the keypad. Had the N86’s keypad been stuck on, it would have been infinitely better.

You’ll also notice at the bottom, there is no gap between the bezel and the keys. I used to wonder why the E71 had this weird chinstrap there, now I know. It’s hard to aim your finger at the * and # keys because they are curved and pressed right beside the chrome bezel.

1a). The slide-out QWERTY keybad is just too flat. The keys have a smooth, uniform feel to them. They are flat, no nubs, no angle, nothing. There’s a gap between the keys, but that really isn’t enough for me. Secondly, the keys have extremely shallow and un-pronounced travel. It’s too easy to ‘engage’ a keypress when moving across the keyboard.

2). The dpad is recessed too much. The E71, has arguably the best dpad on a Nokia device, if not any phone I’ve ever used. With E75’s cluster is a cluster. It’s a mishmash of buttons that are entirely too close together. E75 on the left and E71 on the right.

3). Those stupid rubber flaps for the microUSB and microSD card are still there. This time they’re a harder rubber. They stuck out and get caught on things. I purposely ripped them off of my E71 and it gives such a more streamlined look.

They are absolutely awful and I am glad to see that the E72 has flush flaps.

What do I like about the E75 hardware?

The internals. The breathing/notification LED ring that sits in the dpad is brighter and much more “attention getting”. There is still slight “leaking” as you can see, not all the buttons light up uniformly and it really takes away from the high-class look of the device. It’s that much better than my E71. The below picture shows each at their “peak”, and no, it’s not contrasted by the white keypad – I’ve used the black keypad also and it’s the same.

The vibrate motor is powaful. The E71’s motor is nice muffled and doesn’t actually make any noise. Some complain that it’s too weak, and while it is a bit hard to feel while in a pocket, it’s nice that when I put my device on silent, the obnoxious vibrate isn’t heard by those around me.

I appreciate that the E75 sports a dedicated camera key now. I also like that it’s dual stage, hold slightly for focusing and then press completely to capture your image. The LED flash is also dual staggered to avoid flash flooding. One great feature is that the LED will light up when it’s dark enough to need a flash – this lets you know it will be discharging the flash and it also allows you to view what you’re taking a picture of with the supplied light.

The camera is also significantly better in low light and all other conditions, when compared to the E71.

E71. Auto flash and focused;

E75. Auto-flash and focused;

It’s quite clear that the winner is the E75 on all fronts. The dual stage LED makes a huge difference. Quality is better, less pixelation and a lot less noise. Let’s not even mention the purple tint on the E71.

The E75 will never take a place in my pocket. The E71 is my current main device, has been for well over a year. The small screen is only now beginning to bother me. I had very high hopes for this device, perhaps this is why I feel I have been let down. The only reason I was able to use this device was because it was an S60 smartphone. The software really does make a device, however in this case – it wasn’t enough.

Battery life was pretty decent, despite it having pretty much the same internals as the E71, but a smaller battery, a BL-4U weighing in at 1000mAH compared to the BP-4L 1500mAH. Thank FP2 for that.

The screen is clean and crisp, again, despite having a QVGA resolution of 240×320 and reversible – it also rotates very quickly upon opening the keyboard or turning the device and having the accelerometer enabled. The accelerometer is also very handy for silencing calls and alarms, I wish that the E71 had it.

I really wish that the keyboards would have been designed a bit better, I’m sure that the E75 could have easily become my main device because of the form factor, as it is – I have yet to find a device that suits my needs like the E71 does; Nokia really set a bar for me with it. I’m looking to get my hands on an N86 soon as it seems to be the best accompanying device currently. Will post my thoughts on it when I’m able to land one.

Thanks y’all!

Stoeger’s S60 Ticker makes an attempt to fix this, by running notifications for text messages and e-mails into a ‘ticker’ bar and drawing it over any application for you to see. Let’s see how it works in daily use…

First, you’ll be running a daemon at all times, but I haven’t noticed any lag or drop in performance on my E71 (which multitasks like a champ, and never dips below 30MB of RAM). You’ll need to install the TickerServer and the application that manages the settings. Once you’ve done that, browse into your Applications folder and you’ll see S60 Ticker. Hit it, gramps.

Here, you can adjust the settings for how to display notifications and which events are displayed.

Browsing into General, there are a gamut of options to adjust. You can set the bar on the top or bottom, you can set it flush against the “border” of the screen, or move it to the middle of the screen. I put mine on the top, looks a bit cleaner. You can set scrolling speed. I set mine at 4x.

We can also adjust where the notification bar becomes available – Anywhere (it’s drawn over any running Application. ANY) or Active Standby only. I use ANY, so I can immediately dismiss the notification and continue “working”.

Next, you can configure the hotkey to bring up and dismiss the notification bar. I use the backspace button for ease of single handed use, but will be switching it to the OK selection on the dpad as I also use Google Search and the hotkey is forcefully bound to the backspace key. For shame Google, for shame.

You can also adjust theme support (read: transparency), color and font type and size. Lots to personalize.

Now, moving into the type of events for notification – there are 2 of real use – SMS and Email. They both have the same settings. You can set an automatic “dismiss” of the notification/ticker bar by adjusting the display duration. Setting it to –1 will run for infinite, 0 will disable that event notification.

What’s also neat here, is that not only can you dismiss a notification, you can even automatically mark a message as read. This is handy, as I use RemindMe – which constantly notifies me of an unread message or email.

Well, enough configuring. I bet you want to see what it looks like. Pictures are hard to do it justice, but it’s extremely fluid. Here’s an incoming message that’s scrolled across the top, with the time coming after it.  

You can select the notification bar by hitting your hotkey (holding the center of the dpad) and the bar will be selected, the left of the bar gives a number indicating how many notifications are waiting, if only one – it will display the time. Now, simply swipe/push UP on the dpad and your notification bar will glide away in a very smooth motion.

If you do this, the notification bar goes away and into “sleep” mode, but the notifications are still there. To remove a notification completely, simply select it and hit the backspace key. For sanity sake, I’ve also made a horribly out-of-focus video with Muse playing in the background. It’s real choppy. It’s raw cause I’m hardcore like that. Arf arf! What!

So, you get the idea. What a great way to display notifications. A few niggles about it, if you’re running a ton of memory intensive applications, you will notice a slouch when a message comes in. Okay that’s my only actual real complaint. I would like to see the ability to systematically remove a notification when hitting backspace on a selected even, as it is – you can only currently mark all messages and ‘read’ when they come in, and have them displayed by the ticker.

So, the unlock key for the daemon costs $10.39 currently. Is it worth $10 big ones? If you’re big into flashy notifications and don’t want to be interrupted while on your device, it’s extremely handy. I would like to see them drop the price perhaps. $5 would be a good area to settle at. Give it a shot, there’s a free trial you can use.

Comments and suggestions for more software reviews are REALLY NEEDED. If it’s out there, I’ll review it for you. My E75 review will be up within a little bit, probably next week – it’s exam crunch time for me.

Stay safe and remember…

Yes it came in a briefcase. A full sized briefcase. It’s stout. I was visiting my kid sister and she remarked – “so, that’s how people are carrying their valuable phones nowadays, huh?”. No, I’m just that important, suckafish. Oh, what’s that? A briefcase isn’t enough protection for you? How about 3 boxes housing a regular sized one, lined with velvet-esque cloth

I plan on a full review of the device, similar to my N82 one. It’s going to be harsh, I had high expectation for the form factor, since I came from an HTC S710 running Windows Mobile. If I could have that exact same device, with 3G and S60 slapped in it – I’d practically be set for life (in the mobile phone department at least). Well, as you’ll see in my review – I have quite a hard time with the hardware and some software quirks with FP2.

I’ll post up soon, and will be posting a few reviews on some software also. If anybody has any suggestions, or if anybody actually reads me updates – it’d be cool to know! Drop me a line or shoot me a message on Twitter!

Until then, stay safe!

There’s a reason I haven’t gone back to Windows Mobile. There’s a reason I haven’t gone over to Android. There’s numerous reasons I haven’t switched to an iPhone and the *only* reason I haven’t tried WebOS is because the only available device is on a CDMA carrier.

What are the other reasons? Here are the top 5, in no particular order.

1). SMB/SAMBA support.

I run Windows and Linux at home. I have an 802.11 network with WDS. I have multiple routers feeding my home location for seamless hand-offs anywhere. I can step inside my garage, and access any computer on the network via SMB. I can lounge on the deck and access my main workstation, my laptops or my audio server. This of course isn’t native, but it is done with the very intuitive software from Telexy Networks called SymSMB. Not free, and it’s also been officially discontinued but it’s worth every penny and it’s a first install on any of my S60 devices.

2). Intelligent Profile Switching.

Just like many people, I sleep. I also wake up. I go to school (or work) and I have other daily activities. I don’t want my phone interrupting me when I’m busy. A ringer switch isn’t smart enough to know when to enable itself (I’m looking at you, iPhone). I want to have my phone work itself around me. When I walk into a theater – go to vibrate/silent mode and turn the brightness down to 5% just incase I need to use it. When I’m sleeping – silence all SMS, MMS and e-mail, switch the ringer to a lower volume and play a more soothing tone to wake me up, and while you’re at it let’s also drop the brightness down to 20% and turn on bluetooth so I can answer with my headphones since I’ve been known to fall asleep with them on. Oh, and I want it to happen only on week-nights between 10 PM and 7 AM. But, I’d also like you to know when I’m in class and switch to Offline mode since I don’t always get a signal and when I’m done, switch back Online and retrieve my messages for me.

Doesn’t sound possible does it? It is and my E71 does everything I’ve mentioned, thanks to SmartphoneWare Best Profiles. It has the ability to switch profiles based on GSM LAC-ID (location based), calendar entries (fully customizable search) and time of day.

3). WiFi Sharing/Tethering.

Oh hi, I’m on the VIA train with my friends. We’re all on laptops, doing work, checking our favorite websites or just playing games. We didn’t need to pay an extra $15 for WiFi access. When we get to our hotel, we don’t need to use the insecure pipeline they provide. When my home connection goes down, I don’t have to switch to dial-up just to stay online. Why, thank you JoikuSpot. Using JoikuSpot, I can share my 3G/UMTS connection with 254 clients. That’s right, 254 people. I don’t have to pay an extra $10 to my provider for a “tethering SOC”. I don’t have to buy a new device to do so (I see you, MiFi). I can simply fire up the software, which does all the work of configuring a DHCP server, enabling WiFi and setting it into EITHER Ad-hoc mode or full Infrastructure with the option of using WEP (I know, I know). I give my friends the SSID and key, and before you can punch Mahatma Ghandi in the solar-plexus – we’re all online consuming the internet best as we can.

4). Hardware Changes.

Another easy reason? I can make subtle changes to the hardware on my device. I bought my E71 as a gray steel. I purchased a white keyboard and a black housing after the fact. I can change them out at anytime I feel like it. This might be trivial, but after a few months of using one color, swapping makes it feel like a whole new device at times. I can match my dark themes with the black housing and my lighter themes with the white housing.

5). Open Platform.

I like S60 and Symbian. I like how Nokia has put it all together. I like their integration. I like their beta applications (ImageExchange). I like their officially released applications (SportsTracker, Share Online, Nokia Maps). I like the ability to have Python on my device. I like the ability to have Ruby on my device. I can write full MS Word, Excel and and PowerPoint compatible documents. I can get instant push email via numerous 3rd party providers or via IMAP Idle. I can access the filesystem. I can torrent. I can download podcasts directly to my device, and play them in almost any format at my leisure. I have A2DP with AVRCP. I have full OBEX-FTP.

Okay, so the last item was a bit of cheating, but as you can see, S60 on the E71 and comparable hardware is just simply the bee’s knee’s to me. Android is bringing some great changes to the mobile platform world, same goes for WebOS. Hopefully Symbian Foundation can step up to the plate. As for me, I’ll be sticking with S60 and my E71 until something that can fulfill the above needs comes out. The E72 does it, but too many little changes and not enough larger ones, such as the screen.

This review will be on Psiloc irRemote which is a piece of software that allows any S60v3 device with an IR module to control a plethora of media devices. The database holds over 1400 codes for devices and it’s very easy to find and use the codes. No more entering in numerical sequences and hoping it works. Simply find your model and presto.

Upon opening the application you’re greeted with a listing of the saved devices and can select one for immediate use.

If you’ve got a fresh installation and need to find a device simply push Options and select Add Device.

You now have a selection that varies by the type of device.

There are many types you can control by scrolling down.

We’re going to search for Sony TV. After selecting TV, we hit Refresh to sync the codes to the online database to ensure we have the most up to date listings.

You can either immediately start typing to find the device or scroll using the dpad. Once you find your model, select it and hit Refresh.

The great thing about the irRemote database is that it is user submitted and ranked. You can see the amount of stars which will indicate if it worked for other users or not. To download and install, simply select it and press in on the dpad.

Select it from the saved devices list and you will be presented with the remote interface which is very straight forward and easy to use.

You control it using the dpad and the numeric keys. If for any reason your device will not send the codes, you can change the interaction mode by heading into Settings.

Here, you can also adjust the Settings for skin, network access prompts and default access point for downloading.

The only issue I have with irRemote, is since the database is community driven, there are many duplicate entries. Some work, others do not. You can rank them so others will know, which is nice. It’s one of the trade-offs of have a user submitted database. A lot more support, but chances for duplicates and errors as the codes are not tested or moderated.

Psiloc irRemote is one of the many reasons I keep my E71 with me instead of using the other rival choices, such as a Blackberry Bold, HTC Hero or Touch Pro 2. I’m never without a remote anymore. Available for purchase at Psiloc Homepage for a time fee of $28.55 and the IR database community site is available here. Also worth mentioning, they have a 10 day free trial version.

Upon installation, a customized and self-explanatory icon shows up.

After selecting it, the application will open up giving you an information/status window.

This shows you the next sync date and time, the current status and the last sync and if it was completed successfully or not.

In the options window, keeping it simple, there are few options.

You can force a synchronize, do a full sync, interrupt a sync that is taking place or adjust the settings. The settings allow you to change your Google account, the connection details and the SMS/MMS rules.

For connection, you have a few of the regular S60 options including the Access Point to use, re-using existing sockets or sync when roaming. This is also where you can set the schedule for synchronizing. There are a few options to select from here.

Once you’ve select the time, you have to force a manual sync in order to set the interval. I set a note for 3 AM sync. So at 3 AM I had to manually sync in order for it to sync again at 3 AM after that. A little annoying, but only a one time issue.

When you start to sync, it will format your messages as viewable by HTML or not, depends on the rule you set.

GSync will also create a separate label named “SMS” or “MMS” and pre-label all messages synchronized.

It will login…

Sending the messages, it will display how many have been completed and how many are left.

And lastly, all the messages will be automagically marked as “Read”, so they don’t all appear as unread messages. This is a very nice touch.

Final thoughts:

Now, there some limitations to GSync due to Google. Only 250 emails per day are allowed. This might be an issue for the first sync if you have over 250 messages in your Inbox. They will automatically be split over 24 hours until the mailbox is in sync with your device.

I never notice this application running, especially since it is set to synch while I am sleeping. It has a very small footprint. I do however end-up with the emails sitting in my Inbox, this is an issue with Google Mail and not the application.

Psiloc also has XSync which can sync to any mailbox, while GSync is solely for Google Accounts. Get it @ http://shop.psiloc.com

Here are a few pictures of after the modifications, I’m currently using the white keyboard with the black bezel and a silver chin, although I wish I had a black chin to even everything out. Oh well, I might take it off and use some Krylon Fusion to paint it, which is made specifically for hard plastics. Anywhere, here is some eye candy.

Email me if you want huge/large resolution pictures.

And yes, in that last picture I used a short-hook lock pick to open the casing.