The Obsessed Programmer

As discussed previously, I have a bit of a… problem with gadgets. My latest toy? A PPC-6700 from Sprint. I was tired of having my cell phone reception (previously from Cricket) go out every time I got on the highway. Or, for that matter, when I entered my house. So, in typical style, I decided it was finally time for me to get the coolest. phone. ever.

The only bad part is that it has just 64MB of onboard flash memory. That fills up very, very quickly with some e-books, maps, a homebrew calculator program, a weather forecast checker, etc.

I use my phone so little for actual phone calls that I got the cheapest minutes plan and text plan available, for a total of $45. Since I was still under the price I was paying with Cricket, I sprung for a $15/month unlimited data plan. And I am very glad I did–I spent the better part of Saturday morning hunting down some useful websites that are made to be viewed by smartphones and other WAP-enabled devices. My favorites:

• Mobile Wikipedia
• Mobile Google (and Gmail)
• Mobile Mapquest (not available in full browser)
• Mobile Weather Channel (not available in full browser)

One thing was missing: GameDev.net. GameDev.net’s forums can keep me entertained for hours at a time, but they look awful on the smartphone. Never to be discouraged, I built my own WAP portal for GameDev.net’s forums, and added it to my list of awesome things I can do with the phone:

• Mobile GameDev Forums

It’s a simple proxy–the full source code to my little piece of this project is only 10KB. I just read pages from GameDev, find the primary information with regular expressions, and spit out the simplest version of each page as possible. I’m still waiting to hear back from GameDev’s staff on whether it’s okay for me to be doing this (since they still use their full normal bandwidth for this, and don’t get to serve ads). I’m hopeful they’ll see the awesomeness of it and build it themselves

The phone can also operate as a modem for my computer anywhere in cell phone reception, with download speeds around 60KB/s. This saved me the other day when the wireless network we leech off of had their internet go down. I just plugged my cell phone into my computer with a regular USB cable, and I was back online.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.