Continue reading »]]> As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded to the Nokia X6 16GB and as when I reviewed the N900, I’m posting my experiences of just over two weeks with it so far. All from the perspective of being a Linux user of course.

I am loving the X6 on the whole. The ‘X’ range is targeted at entertainment based users but, running Symbian^1, it’s fulfilling my Smartphone requirements. There’s an irony in that my reflection on the N900 was that I had to keep reminding myself that it was “a tool not a toy” whereas with the X6, its work functionality is married up very well with its fun applications.

I’m going to do a straight mirror of my positive and negative points from the N900 – that is to say for each point in turn there, I’ll post the X6′s response. That means that unlike in the N900 review, they’re not necessarily divided into positives and then negatives but reading the two next to each other could give a simple comparison of Maemo (MeeGo that will be) and Symbian^1 (as yet, there are no Symbian^3 phones on the market but I’d love to get my hands on the N8 when it is unleashed later this year). After the responses to the N900 review, there’ll be things that are either unique to the X6 or that didn’t occur when reviewing the N900.

• Symbian doesn’t have the same wealth of applications as Maemo – and what there are are often payware rather than Open Source. That having been said, there are a few that I have found invaluable, along the same lines as those for Maemo:
  • Funambol Sync – allowing me to sync with Evolution on my main computer. Now, it bears mention that in theory I don’t need this. When I first got the X6, I set it up to sync over bluetooth using SyncEvolution. This worked great but where I had long descriptions on calendar items (such as the lectionary entries), these are truncated. I think this is an issue with doing it over Bluetooth generally so I’m not blaming the X6. It does mean that I reverted to using Funambol.
  • Gravity – a superb Twitter client. It’s payware and I must confess that I paid because it’s fantastic. I would love to have Witter on Symbian and if that were a possibility, I’d never have gone near Gravity but the best Open Source Twitter client for Symbian in my view is Twim which is Java-based. I used Twim on the N95 but found it far too fiddly with the touch screen of the X6.
  • SymbianBible – Bible software that uses the file format of the venerable PalmBible+. This has the advantage that over the years a lot of translations have been produced for that format but the disadvantage that also a lot of those translations have ceased to be available for download. If it could be ported to Sword (and a conversion script from PalmBible+ to Sword produced), it would be near perfect. It does suffer from a general issue I have with Symbian – of which more below.
• The default browser is pretty poor. I’ve never got on with the Symbian’s browser but I’ve installed Opera Mobile. Sadly, there isn’t an obvious way in Symbian to set a default browser so other apps open the Symbian browser if they need to open a link.
• Symbian doesn’t automatically switch between WLAN and mobile data services. I really hope this has been added in Symbian^3 as it’s really frustrating to keep having to tell apps which network to use. Gravity makes a decent effort at switching but it’s not perfect.
• I love Ovi Maps. With the X6 (as with all recent Symbian based Nokia phones), I get free Sat Nav, worldwide. The GPS seems really strong, picking up my location very quickly and the navigation in Ovi Maps is exceptional. I’ve switched to it wholesale in preference to TomTom. Frustratingly, you need a Windows box to install the map and voice data. This is the only function for which I’ve needed a Windows box. It seems strange to me that I can install the Maps app itself directly on the phone and it can even update its firmware directly without needed a computer yet I need to plug it into a Windows box to download and install this data. Again, I hope this will be resolved in a future version.
• The X6 has a notification light like the N900. Simple idea but extremely useful.
• As is the case with most Nokia phones these days, the camera is of a very high quality. It comes with Carl Zeiss optics of course and although it’s only 5MP, for someone of my standard of photography, that’s plenty (although I’m loving the prospect of the 12MP widescreen camera in the N8). Here’s a picture I took with the X6 that try as I might, I simply could not get with my “proper” camera (Fuji FinePix F40fd, 8.3MP) without it blurring.
• The switching between portrait and landscape mode is amazingly smooth. The homescreen only works in portrait mode (the opposite to on the N900) but otherwise, every app other than the camera (for which, forcing landscape makes sense when you think about it) works fine in either orientation and the rotation detection is setup perfectly to rotate at the right time, most of the time. This is a small thing that makes a big difference and it’s made using the X6 a lot easier.
  • The charging socket for the X6, like the N900, is on the top. At the time of reviewing the N900, I said this was a failing on its part. I’ve changed my mind. What it actually serves to do it to ensure the charging cable is out of the way of the car’s dashboard when it’s in a windscreen mount. Using the maps in portrait mode (as the universal car mount requires) makes a lot more sense than using it in landscape as it provides more information about what is ahead rather than what is around. This makes me wonder why for so long, SatNav companies have produces units with landscape screens.
• The battery lasts a full day under constant use (mostly data in my case). This is perfectly adequate as it’s not that uncommon or difficult to have it on charge at some point in the day whether on the desk in one’s office or in the car.
• In addition to the points from the N900 review, I also want to highlight the music functionality of the X6. 16GB is plenty of storage and it’s meant that I’ve switched to using it as my music player. So happy have I been with it in fact that I sold my Cowon S9 on eBay.
• Two niggles that I want to mention:In the “Orange” homescreen. This is the screen I’d like to use but I’d need to have the option to put application shortcuts on it but when I tap “Add a shortcut”, nothing happens. If I try to drag it to the screen, it locks it up until I change to a different homescreen. It’s a small issue and it’s not ruined the phone for me. When I first got it home, it worked fine but had ceased to work before I’d added the shortcuts I wanted. I suspect that if I do a factory reset, it may work again but I am concerned that it might also reset it to Nokia’s default which doesn’t even include the Orange home screen so I’d lose it altogether (a soft reset didn’t solve it).
• Font support is pretty poor.You can add TTF format fonts by putting them in a specific directory (C:/Data/Fonts although it’s not documented and I only found this out from the SymbianBible site) but you can’t then use them in the menus or homescreen or select a default font for apps to use. Moreover, not all characters from fonts are available. This is a particular issue in apps that require characters other than the basic Latin set. For me, this applies to SymbianBible and texts in Hebrew and Greek. They simply are not displayed correctly. I know this is a niche use but failing to support fonts fully in this way is appalling for any Operating System on any platform in 2010. I really hope this is resolved in Symbian^3.

So, yet again, in my quest for the perfect smartphone for Linux users, I find myself bound to say it’s Symbian despite the niggles – and roll on Symbian^3 for even more goodness!

Continue reading »]]> [Previous posts on this subject]

Had a response back from Cowon basically thanking me for the infomation and guide on how to resolve it and that it had been passed on to the relevant developers. If it gets included in a future firmware version, the announcement will say so. Lets hope it happens.

Track my thoughts on this via Twitter.

Continue reading »]]> [Ref 1/Ref 2]

I had subsequently discovered that the M3U issue was some sort of combination of needing DOS slashes and line-endings rather than UNIX ones but I couldn’t figure out why no matter how many times I converted into DOS mode it didn’t work.

I had an email this morning, pointing to this forum discussion saying the same thing and it prompted me to revisit the issue but still to no avail – until I tried making sure there was a backslash at the beginning of each line and suddenly it sprang to life. Now, the problem is that Banshee rewrites the playlists everytime you synchronise the S9 so I’ve written a little script to do the conversion – it only requires sed and unix2dos. You need to use it everytime you synchronise.

Instructions on using it are in the comments at the top and remember, it may destroy all data in a fifteen mile radius so you use it at your own risk. Any improvements gratefully accepted though.

Download cowons9playlistconverter.

Update: I’ve fed this information to Cowon to try to get it included in the next firmware upgrade – it would be trivial for the S9 to do these checks and conversions when reading in playlists. (It would also be nice if the arbitary 400 track limit in M3Us was removed)

Track my thoughts on this via Twitter.

Update 2: If you already downloaded the script, please re-download as I made a small change.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been having a long discussion with Cowon about the M3U support they’ve added to the S9. Here’s the content of it so far. My comments are in normal text, theirs in italics:

Great news to see M3U support added in firmware 2.31b. Naturally I upgraded having requested this feature when I bought the wonderful S9.

The problem is that the S9 doesn’t seem to be able to read the M3U files. They are shown under Playlists in the browser but when I select one, it just says “No File”.

They are extended M3U as the firmware information says they ought to be and they look correct to me.

I’m attaching an M3U taken from the S9.

Hope this helps.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:224,Mario Vazquez - 4 The 1
F:MusicRnB2000s4 The 1 - Mario Vazquez.mp3
#EXTINF:232,Kylie Minogue ft. Mims - All I See
F:MusicRnB2000sAll I See - Kylie Minogue Ft. Mims.mp3
#EXTINF:184,Kylie Minogue - All I See
F:MusicRnB2000sAll I See - Kylie Minogue.mp3

Are you saying any of the following (based on the differences between what you pasted in and what I have):

1) The S9 will only support M3U files for MP3 tracks, not Ogg?
2) The S9 requires the paths referenced in the M3U to include a dummy Windows drive letter at the front?
3) The S9 requires the paths to be delimited (Windows style) and that / (Linux) won’t work?

I’m pretty sure it’s not 3 as I replaced all instances of / with in an M3U and the S9 still behaved the same way.

Any of these would represent major breakage really – surely the S9 can understand paths that are relative to itself and there ought to be no problem with either using / or using Ogg files.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:294,Motherless Children
E:Music1-Motherless Children.Flac
#EXTINF:247,Better Make It Through Today
E:Music2-Better Make It Through Today.Flac

As you see above. The music files are located in the music folder of COWON S9. If the path is correct then it will work.

2) But surely the software just skips over it as it could be different on any occasion.

Windows has its main HDD as C: and lets say a DVD drive at D:. Attaching the S9 will mount it as E:. But the next time you attach it, if there’s already a USB drive attached, the S9 will mount as F:.

So, surely it would be trivial to be able to be able to cope with paths that don’t begin with a drive letter – adding support for the two major OSs (Linux/MacOS) that you support that don’t use that style of drive nomenclature.

3) A similar point to 2) really here. Allowing the lines to be parsed by / as well as would open up support for non-Windows OSs.

When reading the line in, all that would be needed would be something like (in pseudo perl code

if ($line =~ m/^//) {  # Check if the line begins with just a /
                        # indicating a UNIX OS being used (escaping of course)
  $line =~ s////g;   # Replace / with  with appropriate escaping of characters
}

This avoids – of course – a situation where a Windows user has a file with ‘/’ in the filename that gets renamed incorrectly.

These trivial changes would mean that the M3U support would mean that the only functionality not available to Linux/MacOS users through mass storage would be album art (not a huge loss) and I could get the S9 supported in HAL for Linux (not sure how it works with MacOS I’m afraid) so that music players would be able to automatically sync with it – and write playlists.

It would also mean that those of us with a voice in the Open Source community could trumpet the S9 as the music player of choice – its quality already invites that and these relatively trivial fixes would seal it.

Please understand too that I’m genuinely trying to help – not just to be awkward, I love the S9 and I think more people should use it and those with whom I have influence are generally Open Source users.

Continue reading »]]> Previously, I’ve blogged about my adventures with the gorgeous Cowon S9 and Banshee/Linux. In the intervening time, I’ve been working towards getting it working with libmtp.

While I’ve been doing that, Cowon have released an updated firmware that adds M3U playlist support. This is a real result for Linux users. The S9 doesn’t actually seem to be able to read the M3U files correctly as yet but I’ve opened this as an issue with Cowon and hopefully they’ll fix it in the next release. Remember, this latest firmware is only a beta and may eat your children or your data – install with care although I’ve had no problems other that then non-reading M3Us.

Just have to get the HAL information integrated upstream so that people don’t have to download my .fdi file for it.

Track my thoughts on this via Twitter.

Continue reading »]]> Yesterday, I posted about the Cowon S9 and mentioned that I had emailed Cowon about adding support for .m3u playlists. In my email I was clear that I exclusively use Linux.

Today I had a response telling me that I can create playlists using Windows Media Player.

There’s something to be said for a complete unwillingness to read an email properly before responding and for that – and nothing else in this instance – Cowon are to be applauded.

I’m going to go back to them and point out the flaw in their reasoning.

Update: Track my thoughts on this via Twitter.

Continue reading »]]> I just bought a Cowon iAudio S9 music player. It is described as supporting Linux out the box and it does as far as Cowon state – which to say it’s a mass storage device. In fact, it appears to HAL as being a Photo CD and F-Spot gets launched which is fine as it can be used for managing photos too.

The thing is that I want it to work with Banshee too. To do this, I need to persuade HAL that it’s an music player, so with a bit of lshal and some XML munging, I’ve produced a .fdi file for it: 10-cowon-s9.fdi. Save that file, remove the .txt from the end and put it in /etc/hal/fdi/information. Then execute rchal restart (on openSUSE – other distros will likely have a different command to restart HAL) and plug the S9 in.

The only downside I’ve come across so far is the S9′s lack of support for playlists. I’ve included playlist support in the .fdi as Banshee can play from it and I’ve emailed Cowon asking them to add this trivial function to the next firmware update. I’m using the latest Beta firmware and it works fine.