interface cobalt

If you have a Sony Ericsson T610, T630 or similar phone, and you’re a Windows user with Bluetooth on your PC, you really should give FMA a try. Actually, I didn’t have Bluetooth on my PC before, but that program was such a good reason to buy a USB Bluetooth adapter that I just had to do it.

FMA makes pretty much all of what’s on your phone accessible from your PC. It detects incoming calls and messages, and allows you to send SMS from within the program (i.e. you can type on your PC’s keyboard). You can sync your Outlook contacts with your phone contacts (which is great because I’m no longer able to get the sync program that shipped with the phone working). Also, it can detect that you’ve walked away (out of the Bluetooth range) and automatically lock your computer.

The coolest thing about FMA, however, is its scripting framework. I said that it makes what’s on your phone available on your PC, but it goes the other way around as well. You can control your PC from your phone. For example, you can browse your Winamp playlist and select songs to play, and you can change the volume. And, perhaps more importantly, you can quite easily modify the scripts by yourself to make it suit your needs. I changed them to mute the sound on my PC whenever there is an incoming or outgoing call.

There are quite a lot of bugs in FMA though, but it’s only a beta so perhaps that is to be expected. Still, it’s already very usable and works well enough for me to keep it running all the time. Here’s where to go if you want to give it a try.

While spending some time in the lovely public transportation system, I played a bit with mReader which I had installed on my cell phone (Sony Ericsson T630). mReader is a J2ME RSS reader created by Mark Allanson.

It really worked quite well. Having added a feed from Wired News, I could read through the summaries of their latest articles. Hey, it’s probably more interesting than reading one of the free newspapers, don’t you think?

Reading entire articles (or long blog entries) on that rather small display might get tiring, I guess, but for short summaries and excerpts, I think it works fine. By the way, my subscription provider is Vodafone, and they currently charge fees for reading news on their mobile site (in addition to the GPRS transfer costs, that is). There are no such fees for downloading feeds and reading them instead, which means you have more options of what to read while it’s also cheaper.