The Nokia Lumia 800, Part 1: Contacts

So I got a shiny Nokia Lumia 800 as a gift. I gave it to my girlfriend, to replace her old Nokia E51. So the first thing, transfer all data from the E51 to the Lumia, that shouldn't be too hard right ? AFAIK all new and somewhat new Symbian based phones have this syncing/data transfering thing so this shouldn't be too hard, the Lumia is Nokia device so it should have the same capabilities as an older phone, right ?

Contacts transfer, ok, that looks promising! And over bluetooth even, very nice. I start it up, do the bluetooth connection hurdle and.. nothing. Again? Nothing. Just an error message that it failed. After some messages on twitter and googling around I found that the source phone for Contacts transfer must support PBAP. And the old E51 does not do that. Now what?

git merge mess

Better branch handling would be best but I ran into a little merge problem with stuff I do at work. I've started making a major rewrite of parts, that work is going on in the master branch, still a lot to do so no way to run that yet in production. So of course a have a stable branch for production use and need to do some fixing there from time to time. Those changes of course need to go into the master branch too. But as these fixes are branches from the stable branch and master is going trough a rewrite there are plenty of merge conflicts in some files, that are not relevant in any way to the changes made.

I first tried the obvious, "checkout the current branches files for these":

git checkout file1 file2 file3

No, that didn't work:

error: path 'file1' is unmerged
error: path 'file2' is unmerged
error: path 'file3' is unmerged

Well, yeah I know that and I Don't Care, checkout the files ¤!#"f*!!%"# stupid git!

After googling around I finally found the solution in this old post.

git checkout HEAD file1 file2 file3

Yay!

Recording the N9/N950 "desktop"

More as reminder for myself, but here goes.

This has more-or-less been posted on many forums, but not with the flipping. gstreamer comes with a nice element for it, videoflip, worked fine on my desktop but didn't like to link on the phone, after some head scratching I found that it needed a colorspace conversion both before and after for some reason.


#!/bin/sh
ENC=dsphdh264enc
W=800
H=480
R=5
gst-launch-0.10 -e -t -v -m ximagesrc ! videoscale ! videorate ! \
 video/x-raw-rgb,framerate=${R}/1,width=${W},height=${H} ! ffmpegcolorspace ! \
 videoflip method=clockwise ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ${ENC} ! \
 avimux ! filesink location=desktop.avi


A Nokia Lumia 800

This arrived just before Christmas. Thanks Santa :).

Nokia Lumia 800

As I already have a N950 I'll let me gf use the Lumia 800 (replacing a Nokia E51), she promised to write a review for this blog. Might get a more objective one from her (as I'm a Windows hater). She was already "ooh, it's fast" and "nice big screen, now I can watch youtube".

Upgrade your dx bluetooth module firmware

The cheap bluetooth modules available on dealextreme have a very limited firmware (Linvor HC06), fortunately it is possible to change it! Found this blog the other day that explains the procedure of changing the firmware to HC05.

I haven't tried it yet as the SPI lines need to be connected, an well, it's not easy to solder anything to that tiny thing.

Qt and QtQuick/QML resources for N9/N950 development

Finding documentation and other resources for N9 (and N950) development is not hard, but it's a bit too spread around. Generic Qt information can be found on the Nokia Qt site, then N9 specific stuff are in another place. Then there are at least 3 forums to follow.

I started writing this some time ago already, I was going to write some more later when I had time but this post is more or less what I was about to write. So there, go read it.

My über soldering skilz aka Bluetooth module test rig

So I got a bunch these teenytiny bt modules, I didn't release that they where that small, so soldering was going to be a small challenge.

After some thinking i decided to try if even some of the solder points would match with the vero-board pitch, luckily they did so I first anchored the module on this points and added to extra connections that was needed. Luckly not that many, tx/rx, vcc and gnd.
Result:

Bluetooth module test rig

Ugly, but it works :)