Mischa Kroon

Nokia and it's software a .Net developers take on things.

First off I would like to say that I started this quest with a good amount of confidence that I would be pleased about things on the software side of things. But each time when I look further it starts to look even worse.

So let's begin my little review of the state of the modern phone + it's pc software.

I set out this little quest to copy about 200 name / phone number pairs to my mobile phone.
My mobile phone is a Nokia N73 which runs on the S60 3rd Edition platform based on Symbian OS v9.1.

This means that it supports Java, Python and Symbian C++ as programming languages. Which seems to me like it should be easy to do what I want with it.
I mean I only want to copy a couple of addresses in there and I'm willing to whip something up to get there.

The existing program which can be downloaded for free from Nokia to do the communication work is: Nokia PC Suite.
It's quite a big program, and the parts I'm interested in work quite slowly and with a horrible interface.
There is another version coming up in a while which looks to be even worse. (total install size around 440 MB) 70 MB for an updater.
At those sizes it really doesn't look like something I want to install on my PC.

At first I was overjoyed to see that Nokia developed an SDK to help developers out with programming what is needed for the things I wanted to do, i was even getting some nice ideas in my head of applications which would work like a sort of msn like interface with your phone contacts list and a chat / message history of what you sent / received to the currently selected person on your contact list. Which would mean that I would finally be able to Text message as fast as my friends, well actually quite a bit faster :)

After registering on the Nokia forum (this registration process could use some work) I was able to download the SDK, there were even examples in VB.Net and C#, how good can it get :)

My happy feelings about this unfortunately ended there, that SDK didn't contain all the possibility's of the Suite instead it only contained some file operations.

So for my cause this seemed absolutely hopeless, since the bar had been raised a bit I figured I would be better of using someone else his work this also didn't go as smoothly as planned. It seems that there is an API out there which Nokia supplies, you just have to become a member of a Pro Network and fork over $4000 this might be excluding the membership fee of $800 a year.

Since the cost of entering is quite high this also means that the applications for things like updating your addressbook aren't available for free.
That is barring the standard Nokia PC Suite.

Or at least that's what it looks like after spending quite a few hours googling and otherwise scouring the internet for applications which would make this possible.

The salvation seems to be in the fact that the Nokia PC Suite does have a synching option with MS Outlook. So the contacts will be added to my phone with with Outlook as the middle man.

Still this whole adventure does feel like Nokia is trying to make a buck from the developers instead of really trying to provide the best service and getting the best platform out there. Too bad, because if they openened up their API Í'm sure better alternatives for their own software would arrive and that might be a big selling point for the people who are turned off by their current software offering.

Conclusion

State of the PC interface software: Not very good from my point of view
State of the API's surrounding it: Very limited or pay up

In other words don't try this at home and if you want to do anything just work with the standard software no matter how much it pains you :(

What others have tried / done 

A guy wanting to write his own importer as a midlet

An effort for a thunderbird contacts sync program