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Tip index:
- Buy big
- Saving memory
- Lost apps?
- Get a keyboard!
- Camera matters
- Music on the move
- HTML page viewer
- Rolling your own video
- Case it!
- Watch those tasks
- The Secret Menu
- Understand how Email works
- Playing with screensavers
- Buy big
As with just about
every other current PDA or smartphone, get yourself a largish expansion card.
Memory Stick Duo is currently limited to 128MB, but you'll need most of this
once you start adding music and video clips, not to mention applications,
ebooks, etc. The P910 can take the 'Pro' version of the card, of course, so go
for at least 512MB or 1GB.
If you end up with two or three Memory Stick Duo
128MB cards and own a P800, don't forget you can store two at a time inside the
rear battery cover.
Try to keep the internal 12MB flash disk as free as
possible, for use for temporary files by both yourself and the operating
system.
- Saving memory
Each of the
Sony Ericsson UIQ smartphones so far has 16MB of execution memory, of which the
operating system needs just over half. 8MB of free RAM is plenty for most
built-in UIQ applications, but if you make a lot of use of third party
applications and/or games, you'll quickly find yourself short of RAM. Usually,
the only penalty for running out is that apps other than the current one get
politely asked to close themselves, but this can still be annoying.
On the
P900, you can give yourself an extra 300K of free RAM by going into 'Control
panel | Display | Flip open', tapping on the background image and then on
'Delete image'. It's a minor cosmetic thing to alter, but you gain a lot or
memory.
- Lost apps?
So you've just
installed an application and are wondering why all your application icons have
gone missing? This is due to a long-standing bug in the way the Symbian OS and
UIQ handle applications. All information about installed applications, their
associations and their abilities, is stored in \System\Data\Apparc.db, usually
read by the main 'Applications' system task, usually running in the background
on every P800, in order for it to display the right icons. However, installing
(or deinstalling) something also requires access to 'Apparc.db', and in
situations where you've got a lot of programs installed (where the file might
take a couple of seconds to be rewritten), it's easy for Applications to get
locked out. It's best to use a utility like
SMan, which includes a
'Fix applist' function that closes Applications down and restarts it, forcing
it to go back and re-read Apparc.db.
Even better, SMan's a superb task and
file manager, truly a toolkit for everyone. And it's freeware. I couldn't
imagine life without it and have it permanently assigned to my blue
('Internet') button.
(Interestingly, rather than fix the bug, early
versions of UIQ on the P900 simply forced the user to restart the phone when
this lockout occurs. Recent P900 firmware has seen this bug finally
quoshed...)
- Get a keyboard!
With the
aid of a free third party driver,
you can use a full size infrared keyboard (so far, I've tested the Palm
Wireless Keyboard with great success) for those occasions when you've got a
significant amount of text to enter. For example, working on a Quickword
document or answering email. Having a good keyboard to hand (almost) turns the
P800 or P900 from a great communicator into a standalone computer.
- Camera matters
Leave the
CommuniCam set to Picture size 640 by 480 and Picture quality High. You can
always downsample and degrade an image later on, you can't do it the other way
round! And remember to keep the lens clean, wiping it gently with a tissue
before shooting.
You'll also find it useful to keep the smartphone's
internal disk as free as possible, by loading most applications and documents
onto the Memory Stick Duo. This way you'll always have room for a couple of
dozen 'spur of the moment' high quality photos...
- Music on the move
OK, so
the P800/P900 can be your MP3 player, too. But what about that 128MB card
limit? They don't make the Memory Stick Duo any larger! Surely that means a
couple of hours of music at most? Not so, I keep around five hours of music on
my card and still have 20 or so megabytes free. See Music on the P800 and P900 for how to do this.
On
the P910, with possible card sizes of up to 1GB, using OggPlay can give you up
to 40 hours of quality music.
- HTML page viewer
Given the
P800's focus on Internet integration, it's surprising that it apparently can't
open a 'local' page, i.e. an HTML file (with or without images) on your
internal disk or memory card. It can be done though, with a little
trickery.
For example, to open up a set of pages, complete with internal
hyperlinks and images, put them somewhere specific (and preferably with a short
file path, e.g. 'D:\myweb') and use 'Internet | Open page', writing in
'file:///d:/myweb/index.html' (for example). To save scribbling this in each
time, save it as a bookmark or choose it from the recently-used addresses pick
list.
To get the files in the right place, either use a card reader/writer,
Epocware's PC File Manager, or (as a
last resort) bundle them as a ZIP archive and extract them on the P800 using
jZip or similar. (You can't just drag and
drop them using the standard PC Suite, of course)
- Rolling your own
video
I've tried some of the different video creation systems for the
P800/P900 and recommend both QuickTime Pro ($30 to
register), with the special, free 3GP plug-in, and
Mpegable X4 Live, which comes with its
own P800/P900 profile. Set your data rate to around 70kbps for slow-moving
subjects and up to 110kbps for fast-moving footage (e.g. light shows/strobes),
with your frame rate to 12fps, for ideal results. [Stop press: following
Nokia's release of their free (H.263-based)
Multimedia
converter, I'm going to publish a detailed guide to video creation soon.
Watch this space.]
- Case it!
The P800 and P900
sit in the grey area between traditional PDAs and mainstream phones, which is
why there hasn't been so much released by way of accessories. I can heartily
recommend the Chairman's case with belt clip (www.expansys.com) for the P800 and the
Alu-leather case for the P900 (www.proporta.com),
which I've been using for some time. Both include storage for extra Memory
Stick Duo cards.
Don't leave your expensive smartphone unprotected!
 Watch
those tasks
Having a proper multi-tasking operating system can sometimes
be a problem. For example, when programs that you're 'trying out' get left
running in the background and then misbehave. I had this happen to me recently
and the P800's battery was emptied in a couple of hours. So, if your battery
life seems to suck, use a tool such as
SMan to examine what you've
got running and kill off anything that doesn't have to be there.
Incidentally, SMan also gives you a super (and free) file manager. The UIQ
interface largely shields you from needing to know exactly where files live on
the P800 and P900, but I always feel naked without some kind of File manager,
for those troubleshooting moments....- The Secret Menu
Finally,
what P800/P900 tips page would be complete without repetition of the key
sequence to get into the all-important system engineering menu?
In case you
haven't already memorised it, with the flip closed, it's 'Jog-Up', *,
'Jog-Down', 'Jog-Down', *, 'Jog-Down', *
- Understand how Email
works
This seems to be one of the most misunderstood of the P800/P900's
built-in applications. When you 'Get and Send', it's NOT exactly the same as on
your desktop PC. All emails are left on the POP3 server, for you to pick up on
a desktop at a later date, to fill in your message base. Your P800/P900 simply
tries to show you the contents of your POP3 mailbox in as efficient a way as
possible. If you retrieve a message body, it's only for your temporary use in
order to act on its contents or reply. And if you delete a message on your
handheld, it also gets deleted on the mail server, the next time you 'Get and
Send' - you're NOT deleting just your local copy and there's usually no point
deleting items from Messages email views. They're only there because thery're
there on the server as well. Try the system and you'll soon see that it works
very well, letting you stay on top of your email when miles away from home.
- Playing with
screensavers
Yes, yes, it's all great fun playing with animated screen
savers and showing off your P800/P900 (e.g. 'Matrix.gif', 300K), but do watch out for your
battery life. It takes far more power to process and display an animation than
to show a static screen, and it's got to come from somewhere... Only set up a
permanent screen saver if you're confident about being able to keep the
smartphone well charged up.
See also Pete Sipple's
FileSaveAs for more
P800 tips and content. |
