Nokia 3650
My Experience with T-Mobile and Nokia 3650
I went ahead and bought the Nokia 3650 for use with T-Mobile after that changed from Voicestream. I bought the phone from a guy in Hong Kong. I didn’t know that a week later they would be offered by T-Mobile for less. So I spent about $200 too much. Ah well. As of today (April 8th 2003) Now all 3 big GSM carriers in the US have it.
I think, though, that T-Mobile (and everyone else) has locked out GSM Data from their distributions of the 3650. That means that one would have to use GPRS (called t-zones in T-Mobile), and thus pay for it ($2.99 for 1MB and $9.99 for 10MB per month right now), to send pictures with it or use it’s AWESOME built in email client.
Anyway. This phone kicks serious butt. The 8390 did too, but this one is it times 10 at least. No need to use anything external. It’s all built in. Even if you HAD to pay for GPRS, it would still be worth it.
But… I use High Speed GSM data to connect to the dialup box here at work just like I did on my Nokia 8390. I get a 33.6K/sec or so connection which is plenty. I think with GPRS you get about 40K/sec, and it’s always ready to go. For GSM data you gotta wait a second. That would be cool not to have to wait, but I dunno about $10+/month cool. I have my 3000 anytime minutes and spening minutes rather than data when I have THAT MANY minutes is better for me… I think. Anyway… from there I can send/check my email right on my phone as the phone actually speaks SMTP/POP3/IMAP and SSL over each of those.
In order to make SSL work over IMAP, that was easy on the server side. I just enabled IMAPs on my linux machines and blamo done. Sendmail was a little trickier. If you enable “security” on a mailbox connection, you MUST have security on both your IMAP/POP3 AND your STMP. That means STARTTLS must be spoken by your SMTP server. Sendmail 8.12+ does this automatically, but Sendmail 8.11 one needs to recompile to get going. I have Sendmail 8.11 at this time. Here’s what I did (quoting my Live Journal entry):
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There is only one little quirk so far... sending mail and receiving mail can have security turned on or off at the same time, but not independently of each other. So you have have security "on" and that means both your incoming and outgoing mail has security on it. I have IMAPS working just great already. Then comes STARTTLS (ie RFC 2487) in sendmail. My main server is RedHat 7.2 right now and I really really don't want to upgrade it at this point. So it's got Sendmail 8.11 on there. 8.12 has it already built in to it, but alas you pretty much have to upgrade all of redhat to get there.
So I'm messing with sfio and RedHat's source RPM for sendmail-8.11.6-23.72. I got it to work. I'm dumping all the RPMs I made at http://ds.initiated.com/nokia3650/sendmail_rh72_starttls along with my initiated.mc file that I use to make the sendmail.cf file with. The last part is just making the OpenSSL cert files… that’s all documented pretty well. All done.
The big thing was hacking the source a little bit (making #include point to the right directory on line 16 of sendmail-8.11.6/sendmail/sfsasl.h) and finding a goddamn compatible sfio package. Building that sfio stuff from regular source didn't go so well. So I looked around on google and found sfio-1999-1.src.rpm, compiled that in to RPMs, and that made that part go. Then my modifications went well. I added the lines
+define(`confSTDIO_TYPE', `portable')
+APPENDDEF(`confENVDEF', `-DSFIO')
+APPENDDEF(`confLIBS', `-lsfio')
+APPENDDEF(`conf_sendmail_ENVDEF', `-DSTARTTLS')
+APPENDDEF(`conf_sendmail_LIBS', `-lssl -lcrypto')
to the end of the sendmail-8.11.0-redhat.patch file and increased the "12" up at the top to "17" (since I added 5 lines... ya I'm amazing :)) ran "rpm -bb sendmail.spec" and out popped my RPMs ready to go. I just tested it... it still says my cert is all crazy, but that's ok cuz I made it... it's secure.
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All of this email stuff is done very easily from the Nokia 3650. It’s very intuitive. I haven’t even lookedat the book yet. Just from using Nokia phones since day 1, I know what to expect. There are a LOT more features of course, but they are all accessible how you’d expect in a Nokia phone.
I still have to use Kannel for websites, but the phone can read regular HTML (and still WML if need be) in both webpages and email and display them correctly. It seems the phone can’t initiate webpage connections, but rather it must use a WAP gateway. That’s all fine.
So since Internet worked pretty much right out of the box for this phone, I have done more research on how to get this phone and my previous 8390 talking to Linux and doing stuff. I’ll just discuss the 3650 here, but I’ll add to the 8390 page later.
The first thing I got working is transferring files to the 3650 from Linux. The phone speaks IrCOMM and OBEX. Basically, you have to get IrDA working with your IrDA dongle (that is you can see the phone listed in “irdadump”) and install openobex (the libraries.. very small) and use the “irobex_palm3″ example utility in the openobex-apps. It’s beautiful in it’s simplicity. I use the ActiSys L220+ serial to IrDA adapter. Very simple. Look at the Linux IrDA HOWTO and it’s all there. OBEX is a reformatted HTML protocol (using MIME types) that will be used in both IrDA and Bluetooth, both of which the Nokia 3650 supports. The specification, which is new in Jan 2003, for OBEX
are found on the IrDA website. With this simple utility, I can transfer ANYTHING TO the phone and it’s up to the phone how to handle it. Just about all data can be sent out of the phone using this method as well.
Software for the phone… you want to look for Series-60 or Nokia 7650 if they don’t explictly say “Noki 3650″ which they are catching on. I haven’t written anything for it, but you can write java programs with the SDK from Nokia for Linux. I can’t link directly to it. Look for “Developer Forums” on www.nokiausa.com.
I also found an application that lets me mount my phone to the system like it’s on NFS. That’s pretty cool. I haven’t messed with it too much. I’m not sure how much I can do with it. After playing with it for just a second, I see that I can read from at least the image storage folders (might be good for webcam?). It doesn’t seem I can read my Contacts though which is what I was hoping for… segue…
Next I’m looking for, or looking in to making, an interface to the Nokia 3650 for synchronization with Ximian Evolution. There is a package called MultiSync that will sync with some of the Ericsson phones over something called IrMC. That doesn’t seem to be something Nokia 3650 speaks. I believe my Nokia speaks SyncML, for syncing which is another new specification. MultiSync has an alpha driver that they JUST started working on. I don’t get how it works right now. As of yesterday it crashed before I could play with it much.. but it’s alpha, so that’s ok 
Ximian doesn’t seem to want to touch this yet. They seem to me to be just focused on the core of Evolution, which is fine. It’s probably better to have other applications that plug in to Evolution. Then Evolution can worry about incorporating them later. I feel like I should buckle own and get some work in on this, but I’m afraid I’ll either be duplicating work or just not doing anything helpful. I dunno. We’ll see.
Pilot-link definitely does not work out of the box for the Nokia 3650. What would be fine is if someone would write an app for the Nokia 3650 that emulated how the Palm communicates. That would solve the problem too. The main thing is the “Press HotSync on the Palm now” prompts. So the pilot-link stuff is waiting for the connection to start… we so’s the Nokia. So nothing happens. I don’t know if they even speak the same language. When I do an “irdadump” it says “Palm/PDA” in there, but I dunno if it means it.
I’m so not a java programmer I dunno if I could even start to write something for the phone. The system side is probably where I’d look at making this happen. But it looks like you can do C++ stuff for the phone too… ends up in .sis files when you are done. This would probably be way better for java hating me.
So far I’ve tried miniGPS which would be fine if cells were smaller, but they are not. Therefore me and a place 5 miles away are in the same location. But, the real question is whether or not it’ll work for meto automatically do things in places I wish it would. So far the theater, where I want to shut off my ringer (silent mode) and tell my brothers I’m there via sms and then turn my ringer back to default when leaving there work just fine, but only if I’m outside the theatre. The cell # can change too erratically inside because it seems to be in the middle of a few different zones. So I ended up deleting it. It would only work if I lived in a big ass city where I had to go more than the 2-3 miles I do to get everywhere I go now.
One app that is a must is called
Here’s another page, a guy named Nick (not me) that is documenting his life with the 3650 and what it can do: here