A few weeks ago, I finally upgraded my old AT&T Wireless cell phone, and got a Kyocera 7135 Smartphone. I was looking for high speed data access, Palm applications, wireless modem access, and flat rate usage. Verizon was the only one to give all of that with very good coverage.
The phone is pretty amazing, I’ve been super-happy with it. I’ll do some more geeking about it a little later, but one of the things that’s been stalling me has been getting MP3’s loaded onto it. It has an SD card slot, which should let me store a fair amount of music (those cards are up to 1gig now). I picked up a 256meg card from Costco for $51, which seems to be a good balance of price and size. I’ll wait a bit for a 512 or 1gig card, which were going for like $189 and $260-ish. Too much 🙂
Anyway, the trick has been how to get the music files onto the card. The phone comes with a Windows-only app for ‘syncing’ music down (it has -nothing- to do with palm syncing, very annoying, particularly since I Don’t Do Windows [tm]). I figured I’d need an SD reader.
Dropping by MicroCenter in Boston, I found a sort of generic ‘9 in 1’ USB card reader, I believe marked by ‘Inland’ or the like. Anyway, the unit itself has no corporate markings on it, but it has a zillion slots on it. For $9, you really can’t go wrong.
Got home, plugged it into the USB hub,and voila! Instant USB-filesystem access. Mounting the SD card was a matter of
$ mount /dev/sda1 -t vfat /mnt $
Excellent, there it was. Problem was, where to put the mp3 files? After noodling around, I found out the MP3 app needs to ‘index’ the card on startup, and after running it once, I saw a /audio directory appear. Aha! That must be it.
I copied a pile of MP3s into that dir, socketed it back into the phone, and ran the MP3 Player app. “Creating playlist…” Looks good… Yes! All the songs appear, and are playable, and are indexed. Even read the id3 tags off the files.
So now my spiffy phone is not only my Palm address and calendar book (which is syncing happily with Evolution), but is also my wireless modem (mm, 1xrtt, more on this later), my cell phone, and my MP3 player.
Off to try it in the field, as I go get lunch.
How much did you pay for it, and what plan do you have? I’ve been looking for a combined phone/PDA/MP3 frob, though ideally I’d want a keyboard too (the Treo is a bit bulky, unfortunately).
Of course, because I’m an idiot, I just signed up for another year with AT&T, with this Motorola POS that I really hate. Their UI designers desperately need to be beaten with sticks.
I did the whole pacakage right at the Verizon store in the mall (don’t ever go through the ‘kiosk’ booth thingies. Most of those idjits are totally brain dead). The phone was $399, plus a 2 year activation plus tax ran me $430 or thereabouts. I’m on a smaller schedule than I should have, I suspect, I think I’m going through my data Kb and free minutes too fast. The best arrangement seems to be a grand total of around $90/month, but that’s for -unlimited- data access (on the 1xrtt network, that’s about 128kb). I’m planning on havnig hte phone replace all my ‘roaming’ data access stuff (like Starbucks and the like).
in case you didnt know, if you have an sd card in your 7135 and add mp3’s to the install tool, it’ll “install” them into the audio folder on the card. this is true of palm desktop for windows and for mac, not sure about the different palm tools for linux, havent bothered to try it yet.
also, theres tonnes of stuff you can do with the 7135 which is undocumented and unsupported, check the forums at pdaphonehome.com
free wireless access point