Saturday, July 26, 2008

My Chinese made Mobile Phone | Adevnture with Linux Mobile Tools

Recently I purchased a new Chinese made GSM Mobile Phone by Microtech. It is ¨ MT6227 MTK1 Media Player¨ , a rather funny named but nice looking GSM mobile phone .I like it because it offers so many functions than my previous ancient Nokia 66010i mobile phone. But beauty always brings problems with it ! So did my new Chinese made moobile phone.

It was a great mystry for me how to access it and update and customize my various data as the Chinese did not bother to pack a PC suite software CD with my set . Even their website does not offer any download link for this software.

Windows mounted it as a mass storage device and I could only access the ¨memory card ¨ data . I found a software called ¨PCSyncManager¨ with USB driver for my mobile phone but after full ¨normal¨ installation it refused to access my phone.

So it was time to look around for some open source alternatives on my Linux system. Searching on synaptic I found gammu and wammu and I immediately installed them on my PCLinuxOS . Through online search I found about a kde project known as KmobileTools but unfortunately PCLinuxOS repositories did not contain this package.

Kurumin NG 8.06 was a pleasant surprize because I could get both the gammu/wammu and KmoblieTools easily from the repositories .

Gammu & Wammu

Gammu is mobile phone manager running on Linux. The communication is made by Gammu library. Wammu is a Mobile phone manager using Gammu as it's backend.

It was easy to configure and browse my phone book,messages ,contacts and calender. Wammu worked flawlessly to work around and clean various menus on my phone.

KmoblieTools

KmobileTools work similarly with few additional fuctions like signals levels and battery levels.


GmobileMedia

gMobileMedia is a simple GTK based tool used to browse and handle a mobile phone filesystem. You can easily upload and download images, ringtones, photos, and applications to & from your mobile phone through a data cable . I installed gMobileMedia from synaptic but unfortunaely it did not support my mobile phone.

Mount as a ¨mass storage media¨

My mobile fone can be easily mounted just like any storage media e.g a flash drive and I can upload and download different files to and from my computer to my mobile phone.

I was really disappointed to purchase a chinese mobile phone initially because I thought I could never access it and modify or retrieve its contents. But just a little effort and search on Linux gave me so many options to enjoy and customize my mobile phone and I am really enjoying it now.Thanks to Open Source and GNU/Linux :)