Symbian S60 Smartphones

Managing Applications
S60 includes a task manager to view running applications and switch to or close any of them. Hold down the application key (the button with the two-dots-spinning icon) to bring up the task manager. Press the [C] (Clear) key to close the application and free up memory, or choose the application to switch to it.

Full-text Editing
Many don’t realise it, but there are a lot more text-editing options in S60 than is apparent. To select text, hold down the Text key (the one with the Pencil) and move the cursor. A “Copy” option should now be available. To paste the text, go to the place you want the text to be pasted, and hold down the Text key again. A “Paste” option should now appear.

Listen To Music All The Time
Go to the gallery and start playing an MP3. Press the “End” button to jump back to the standby screen while the music is still playing to see the song title on the standby screen. You can select the song with the up and down arrow keys, and you can use the left and right arrow keys to control the volume. Press the joystick/pad to open the music player again.

Reformat Your Smartphone
If your Symbian S60 phone is infected with a virus or a malware program and nothing you try seems to work, you should reformat the phone. Start by backing up all your data and contacts-synchronise your PIM with Outlook to make sure your contacts are safe, and write down all your Instant Messaging settings (if any). Also copy all the data from the memory card to your PC. Switch off your phone.

On recent S60 devices, simply hold down [Green], [*] and [3] at the same time to let your smartphone format itself. You should refer the phone’s manual to verify this.

Once this is done, you will have a clean, malware-free phone to which you can now re-synchronise your data and contacts.

Some Handy Shortcuts
Use these shortcuts to save some time while performing simple, everyday tasks:
KeyPad [1] : Copy
KeyPad [4] : Cut
KeyPad [7] : Paste
KeyPad [*] : Go to root
KeyPad [3] : Page up
KeyPad [6] : Top of list
KeyPad [9] : Page down
KeyPad [#] : File properties
[Shift] [0] ([Pencil] [0] for the Nokia 3650 or 6600): Take a screenshot

Get Rid Of The “App. Closed Main” Error
To get rid of the “App. Closed Main” error, do the following: open your file manager/explorer and navigate to c:/system/bootdata. Delete FirstBoot.dat. Now turn off your phone and remove the MMC card. Turn on the phone to put in the date and time. Once it boots up, switch it off again, put the MMC card back in and turn on the phone.

Image Viewer Shortcuts
Use these handy keypad shortcuts while viewing images:
[1]: Rotate image 90 degrees anti-clockwise
[3]: Rotate image 90 degrees clockwise
[5]: Zoom in
[0]: Zoom out
[2]: Move up
[8]: Move down
[4]: Move left
[6]: Move right
[7]: Full-screen

Y Not?
Palm’s Graffiti text input is accurate enough once you get the hang of it, but letters such as Y can still pose a problem. The best method so far seems to be an open figure-of-eight. Start at the top-left corner of the graffiti area, stroke downward and to the right, loop around when you hit the bottom and stroke toward the top-right corner, and you’ll never have to re-write a Y again.

A Swift Stroke
You can tie a function that you use often to the vertical graffiti upstroke-go to the Prefs application, and choose Buttons in the menu. In the Buttons area, click the Pen button at the bottom, and you can now assign functions such as the backlight, the on-screen keyboard, the beam data function, and Turn off & Lock, among several others.

Open the HotSync Application. Press and hold the up and down scroll buttons simultaneously with your left thumb, and use the stylus in your right hand to double-tap in the uppermost right corner of the screen. A small dialog box titled “Developer’s Backdoor” should open up, containing the text “DLServer Wait Forever is ON”. Click on OK, and your device will now wait until your PC makes a connection.

Resetting Without Data Loss
If your Palm device is misbehaving and you don’t want to lose your data in a hard reset, you can try resetting the Palm OS instead.

You’ll need a bent paper clip for this. Press and hold down the up scroll button and at the same time, use the paper clip to reset the device (the reset port is a small pinhole at the back of the device). Release the up scroll button when you see the Palm Startup screen.

Cursor Tricks In Graffiti
To do a backspace when using graffiti, make a horizontal right-to-left stroke on the graffiti area. If, however, you just want to move the cursor to the left, make a continuous left-right stroke: start at the right side of the graffiti area, stroke to the left and then stroke back to the right without lifting the stylus.

Similarly, you can move the cursor one step to the right by making a continuous right to left stroke.

Create Your Own ShortCuts
A ShortCut is a code that inserts a commonly used phrase when combined with the ShortCut stroke in the graffiti area. The graffiti ShortCut stroke is easy-much like the cursive letter L. Start at the bottom left, move upward and towards the right, loop around and move towards the bottom right.

Suppose you use the phrase “Meeting With” a lot. You could assign a shortcut called “MW”, which will just insert the phrase for you.

In the Application launcher, open the Prefs application, and tap the drop-down box in the upper right corner. Select ShortCuts, and tap New. In the line under ShortCut Name, write “MW”. In the line under ShortCut Text, enter the full text-“Meeting With”. To use this shortcut in a memo, first make the ShortCut stroke (which will now appear on the line), and then write out the ShortCut name (“MW” in this case). Your ShortCut text should appear on the line in an instant!

Applies to Smartphones from O2 and iMate, and PDAs like the
HP iPAQ

Get MSN Messenger In The Start Menu
Windows Mobile 5 comes with PocketMSN, which combines MSN Messenger, Hotmail and a couple of other programs in the same interface. This makes starting up Messenger a more tedious task than it should be. To make MSN Messenger accessible in a single tap, follow these steps: start File Explorer and navigate to the Windows folder. Look for “instmsgr”; tap on it and hold to bring up the menu, and select Copy. Now navigate to WindowsStart MenuPrograms. Select Menu > Edit > Paste Shortcut. You can now rename this shortcut to “MSN Messenger” or anything else.

Change Opera’s Behaviour On Windows Mobile
In the Opera 8.5 beta for Windows Mobile, you will notice that when you try to scroll through Web pages, you’re actually taken from link to link. This can get extremely annoying if you’re viewing a site with lots of links. To get around this, use any file editor to edit
Application DataOperainput.ini.
Change:
Up = Navigate up
Down = Navigate down
to:
Up = Page up
Down = Page down
Sites will now scroll page by page.

Reinstalling Software To A Flash Memory Card (Windows Mobile 5)
To save internal memory, you can reinstall existing applications to your extendable memory card instead.

Go to Tools > Add/Remove Programs in Microsoft ActiveSync, and locate the program you want to reinstall. Deselect the checkbox next to it to uninstall it from your Pocket PC (the installation files will remain on your Desktop PC, though). Close Add/Remove Programs and start it again.
Now check the box next to the software to install it. You will be asked where you want to install the program-simply choose “SD Card” and click Install.

Really Close Applications
Contrary to what it suggests, the X button doesn’t close an application-it only minimises it. To really save your system resources and close the program, you have to click on Start > Settings > System and select the Memory icon. From there, click on the Running Programs tab to end your tasks. You could also use a freeware task manager such as vBar or PocketNav.

You Can Overclock Your PocketPC Too!
If you want to push your PocketPC to the limit, try overclocking it using third-party tools such as Immiersoft’s XCPUScalar or Pocket Hack Master from Anton Tomov. You should back up all your data first, because overclocking can cause your device to freeze or hard reset-which will wipe our all your data and settings.

Switch screen orientation quickly
If you find yourself wanting to switch between portrait and landscape mode often, assign a button for it. Tap Start > Settings > Buttons and select the button you want to assign. Under “Assign a Program”, select “Rotate Screen” and click OK. From now on, you can use this button to switch orientations quickly.

Get the most out of the battery
Go to Start > Settings > System > Power. In the Advanced tab, set your device to turn off in 3 minutes or less to conserve battery power.
If you’re ever using a CompactFlash card or interfacing with any peripherals, use the AC adapter to save your battery.

Unless you really need a bright backlight, turn it down-go to Start >
Settings > System > Backlight > Brightness. Turn down the brightness to the lowest setting you’re comfortable with.

Make the battery last longer
How long your battery power lasts depends on battery type and how you use your device. Try the following to help preserve battery life:
o Tap Start > Settings > System > Power. On the Advanced tab, you can specify when your device turns off to conserve battery power. For optimum conservation, specify 3 minutes or less.

o Use the AC adapter to plug your device into external power whenever possible, especially when using a CompactFlash card or when using a modem or other peripherals.
o Adjust the backlight settings.

Ted is a text editor much like WordPad. It can read and write Rich Text Format (.rtf) and text (.txt) documents.

XPdf and PDF Viewer can read Adobe PDF Documents.
Siag is an Excel-like spreadsheet program that can save spreadsheets as Comma Separated Values (.csv), which can then be read by nearly any spreadsheet program-so
you can share it with Excel users as well.

My Own DSL
To download and install applications built specifically for DSL using the MyDSL tool, double-click on the MyDSL icon on the Desktop to start it. Click on the category of application you want to install to view a list, and then download the one you want.

If you’ve downloaded a .dsl package and want to install it, navigate to it using the Emelfm file manager, select the package, and click on the “myDSL” button right in the file manager.

Installing new fluxbox themes
You can use MyDSL to download and install new fluxbox themes, but if you’ve downloaded them from somewhere else, you might not find things that easy. The themes will usually come in a tar.gz or tar.bz2 file which contain the directories “styles” and “backgrounds”. To install the theme, just extract the background files to /home/dsl/.fluxbox/backgrounds and the style files to /home/dsl/.fluxbox/styles.

View HTML mail in Dillo
Sylpheed-the e-mail client that comes bundled with DSL-translates HTML mail to plain text, which can be quite drab if you like receiving pretty, colourful e-mails. You can’t change this about Sylpheed, but you can make HTML mail open in the Dillo web browser (or Firefox, if you please). In the e-mail, click on the Attachments tab; you will see text/plain and text/html and any remaining attachments like images, etc. Right-click on the text/html attachment and choose Open With. Type in “dillo (or firefox) ‘%s'” and click OK. You’ll now have this option available to you every time you right-click on the attachment.

Tearaway Menus
The Fluxbox window manager supports tearaway menus-which can stay on your desktop for as long as you want-for items you’d be accessing often: just click on the coloured bar at the head of the menu and drag it to make it a persistent item on your desktop. To get rid of it, right-click on the top bar.

Set Up An Internet Connection
To set up your LAN-based Internet connection, right-click on the desktop and go to System > Net Setup > netcardconfig. Use this utility to enter your IP address, DNS address, etc.

If you have a dial-up connection, use the Net Setup > Dial-up PPP utility and set up your connection.

You can now use any of the three browsers to surf the Net-Dillo, Firefox or Netrik, accessible from the Apps > Net > Browsers menu.

Use Apt To Install Packages
DSL is based on the Debian kernel, so you can use the apt-get command to install new programs and updates from the Web. First, you need to enable Apt. Right-click on the desktop and go to Apps > Tools > Enable Apt.
If you know the package name for the software you want to download, type sudo apt-get install <package>
in a terminal window, and the application will be downloaded and installed from Debian’s repositories on the Internet.

Shoot to Kill
If you’ve used Linux before, you will know that the [Ctrl] [Alt] [Esc] combination is manna when you need to kill an errant application with a single click. You can get this in DSL as well. Start Ted by double-clicking the icon on the desktop. Navigate to the ./fluxbox folder and open the file called “keys”. You will get an error saying “keys” is not in the rich text format-ignore the error.

When Ted opens with “keys”, add this entry at the end:
Control Mod1 Escape :ExecCommand xkill
Restart the Fluxbox window manager by
right-clicking on the desktop and going to Window Manager > Restart. Now, when you need to kill an application, you can use [Ctrl] [Alt] [Esc] and then click on the misbehaving app to end it.

Keeping Track Of Network Traffic
Linux, by default, does not show a network traffic icon in the panel. The icon shows if your computer is connected to the network or has a broken link.

Gnome users need not worry. The tool is there-all you need to know is where to find it. KDE users, don’t waste time looking for the tool! And obviously, those who prefer to work in text mode do not have such privileges.

For Gnome users: to add the Network Activity Monitor to the panel, right-click on the bottom panel and choose ‘Add to Panel…’ This will open the “Add to Bottom Panel” dialog box. Scroll down the list to choose Network Monitor and then click Add. The Network Monitor is by default configured to eth0, so double-click on it and configure your Ethernet card accordingly.

KDE and text mode users need not be disheartened by the absence of this facility. You can make use of the LEDs on the keyboard. The Scroll Lock LED is never used, and the Num Lock is turned off by default in Linux. You can make use of these two LEDs to show network activity. Download the Tleds package from http://users.tkk.fi/~jlohikos/tleds.html
Download version 1.05beta10, available in tar.gz format. Any Linux x86 machine user can download and use this software. You may have to make a few changes or get certain dependencies resolved, because the package may not cater to all distributions. The newer beta version has support for kernel 2.1.x, 2.2 and also 2.4. So, after you have downloaded the tarball and extracted it to a suitable folder, open the Makefile in a text editor and make the following changes:

Append the line ‘GCCOPTS = -D_GNU_SOURCE -O3 -Wall’ with an entry ‘-DKERNEL2_1’ to support lower version of kernel. The final line will be ‘GCCOPTS = -D_GNU_SOURCE -O3 -Wall -DKERNEL2_1’
The last change is for the man files entries. Tleds adds man pages to /usr/local/man; we need to change this to /usr/share/man. Look for the line ‘MANDIR  =   /usr/local/man/’ and make the necessary changes.

After you are done with the changes, install the package by issuing the following command:
#make all install [Enter]
You can run this software on any interface, such as ppp0 or eth0. You need to know which interface of the machine is connected and active to the network. Let’s assume eth0 is connected to the Internet, and it is also active offline but on a LAN. To activate tleds on eth0 issue:
 #tleds -qd 50 eth0 [Enter]
The Num Lock LED shows received packets, while the Scroll Lock LED shows sent packets.

In order to activate tleds for eth0 on every boot, do the following:
#echo “/usr/local/bin/tleds -qcd 50 eth0” >>/etc/rc.d/rc.local
If you want to run tleds again but on a different interface, then issue ‘tleds -k’ and re-run the tleds command on the interface you want it to run on. For ppp0 users, the command switch will vary slightly: ‘tleds -qd 100 ppp0’.

MP3 In Text Mode, MP3 Blaster
The heart of the Linux or Unix platforms lies in the text mode of the OS, popularly known as the command line. Many enthusiastic open source developers have helped to bring entertainment even to the command line atmosphere, which is perhaps unimaginable for a Windows user.

MP3Blaster is one such non-graphical music player for Unix-like operating systems. The development of this utility is still alive as a project at sourceforge.net. To download MP3Blaster, go to
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=154673&ugn=mp3blaster
The file you get here is a tarball (tar.gz or tar.bz2). We follow a method by which we download such applications to a folder called “Utilities”, and if it is a tarball file, we extract it to another folder called “more-apps”. This way, we can avoid folders and files of the same name (extraction creates a folder with a name identical to the compressed file) under the same folder, and this is also a methodical approach. So the command we use to extract is:
[root@test3 Utilities]# tar -C /usr/more-apps/ -zxvf mp3blaster-3.1.3.tar.gz

Now change your directory to /usr/more-apps/mp3blaster-3.1.3 to start with the installation. To install:
#./configure [Enter]
This command collects the system details and creates a file containing these details. The process may take some time, and if dependencies are encountered, you need to clear those by downloading the necessary packages.

#make [Enter]
Uses the system information recorded by the configure script to build an application as per your system. This process may consume time depending on your system performance.

#make install [Enter]
This process places all the build files of an application in folders as per the Linux File System Standard.

At the shell prompt, type in “mp3b” and hit [Tab]. This should complete the command as “mp3blaster”. If it doesn’t, then hit [Tab] twice to list all probable commands that begin with “mp3b”. This is a shortcut to know if your application has been installed perfectly, and of course, even run it.

#mp3blaster [Enter]
Will start the application on the entire Konsole window. That means you will have to dedicate a mingetty (TTY) to MP3Blaster.

Once you enter a folder view using [F1] or [F3], the function of certain keys listed above changes. For example, [F6] gets assigned to “Convert MP3 to WAV,” and [F7] is assigned to “Add URL (shoutcast).” Look at the key list given on the player’s interface-the playback keys will never change. Use [Q] to exit the player.

Tricks with ifconfig
This is a versatile command. It is mainly used to deal with network adapters such as displaying the address and details of an adapter, say eth0. It can also be used to shut down an active adapter or bring up a deactivated one. But very few are aware that it can be used to spoof the MAC address of your Ethernet controller.

This command followed with the interface name and parameter “up” or “down” will start or shut down the interface specified.

#ifconfig eth0 down [Enter] will shut down the Ethernet service.

#ifconfig eth0 up [Enter] will bring up the Ethernet connection on your PC.

Assuming that you have only one network interface i.e. eth0, we shall try a different trick with the ifconfig command.

We all know that ifconfig by itself will display the details of all the installed interfaces. Use it to get the MAC address of your Ethernet card, as shown in Table 1 below.

Select the line ‘HWaddr 00:0C:76:52:E6:F5’ using your mouse (note that your interface address will be different from ours). Open a text file using any text editor and paste this line by clicking the middle button of your mouse (applicable for a three-button scroll mouse; else enable emulate three-button feature) or if you have emulated three-button feature, then click both the left and right buttons simultaneously to paste it. Name the file ‘MAC addr-orignal’ or something similar so that you will remember this file contains the real address. Although the original MAC address is restored on restarting the PC, we maintain this step so that we can restore the MAC address manually, without restarting.

To spoof the MAC address, you need to shut down the interface and then change the address, and finally, activate the interface connection. Here’s how to go about doing it:
#ifconfig eth0 down [Enter]
#ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 [Enter]
#ifconfig eth0 up [Enter]
Now check if the changes are made:
#ifconfig [Enter]
You will see Table 2

You can even change the “inet addr” (IP address) and “Mask” (subnet mask) directly using the ifconfig command:
#ifconfig eth0 10.10.124.28 [Enter]
This will change the IP address. And
#ifconfig eth0 netmask 255.0.0.0 [Enter]
will change the subnet mask from 255.255.0.0 (/16) to 255.0.0.0 (/8).