In a nutshell, GoogleVoiceForS60 pulls a list of all your contacts, dialed, received and missed calls from the phone and allows you to initiate a phone call or send a SMS message to one of these numbers by using the Google Voice API. 

This application is a work in progress and as such it is in a continuing beta stage. It has been tested and is used in every day on the following phones: N97 NAM, N95-5 8GB and N95-3. In addition many users reported it works fine on E75, 5800XM, E71 and E71x phones. In theory it should work on all phones that support the pys60 1.9.7 runtime.

Screenshots

For privacy reasons the screenshots were done by running the emulator version. There might be slight differences in look and fee in the real application.

List of phone contacts

Sending SMS through Google Voice

The video below demonstrates the application running on N95-4:

Installation

1. Download and install the PyS60 2.0.0 runtime
2. For 3rd Edition phones (N95, E71, E75 etc.) download and install:
   ssl.sis
   stdioserver.sis
   pips.sis

3. Download and install GoogleVoiceForS60_0.7.27_merged.sis
4. Reboot the phone.

Please make sure to install all the packages to the same drive (it does not matter if it’s the c: or e: drive).

Feedback

Please post all bugs and feature requests in our new support forum

Change Log

Version 0.7.27

• You have to install Python 2.0.0 or better runtime for this version to work!
• Migrated application to Python 2.0.0
• Fixed authentication issues after recent Google Voice changes.
• Fixed app crashes after unsuccessful call attempts.

Version 0.7.24

• Bug fixes to new GoogleVoice API code base.
• Removed on startup auto-login feature.

Version 0.7.21

• Rewritten Google Voice API Interop to accommodate recent changes in the API.
• Added credential caching to optimize speed. In theory placing call should be much faster now.
• Added user feedback when certain error condition occur (Google refusing to place a call etc.)

Version 0.7.20

• Fixed issues related to latest Google Voice API changes
• Added ability to view numbers for selected contact

Version 0.7.17

• Added default Access Point setting. Once set the application will automatically use that AP for future communications.
• Added contact search functionality.
• Added workaround for crashes on phones with 1000+ contacts. On startup the app will detect if there are more than 500 contacts and will force the user to specify search parameter to limit the list of contacts it displays. This workaround will be in places until the bug is fixed in the python runtime.
• Fixed issue, where a popup dialog would ask user to select a phone number on a contact even if the contact had only 1 number defined.

Version 0.7.14

• Fixed “Unable to set data directory” issue
• Added debug tracing. Just create a file called ‘debugversion.txt’ in the GoogleVoiceForS60 directory and the application will log debug statements to debug.log

Version 0.7.12

• Added wait dialogs and user feedback for call and sms functions.
• Added password encryption
• Added support for C: drive location. Default is E: but if not available app will fall back to C:
• Added password masking
• Fixed phantom contacts crashes
• This version will DELETE your existing settings database and you will be forced to re-enter your Google Voice credentials and phone number. Sorry.
• Received and Missed calls tabs. It’s not intuitive but there are Missed and Received calls tabs in addition to the Dialed tab. You can use the directional pad to scroll right in the tabs or on 5th edition phones slide/drag the Dialed tab to the left.

Version 0.7.9

• Added password masking in options dialog
• Fixed login url encoding issues
• Added code to gracefully handle contact database issues

Version 0.7.3

• Improved exception handling
• Added settings validation
• Added invalid login detection
• Added logic to send long SMS text as multiple SMS messages (although the input is limited to 80 chars at the moment due to the UI component limits)

Version 0.7.2

• Added Received, Dialed and Missed call logs to the selection
• Added SMS sending (free SMS through google voice)

Version 0.6.2
Initial alpha release

Most of the time I transfer songs to the device in mass-storage mode and have not experienced any slowdowns or transfer issues (as experienced by symbian-guru.com). The reason I transfer in mass-storage mode is twofold:

1. All my music is stored on a file server, neatly organized in folders
2. I have many computers and not one is designated as a “primary” computer and hence I don’t use anything like a multimedia library

Last Played entry is gone...

The multimedia player is organized as pretty much any other player out there: It scans the mp3 files and organizes them by the usual tags. In addition you also have the ability to play songs based on playlists. The drawback is that like any other player (except for rockbox) it does not allow you to play songs based on folder structure (which is my setup).

Unfortunately not all my music folders have playlist files and the multimedia service on the phone will not create automatic playlists based on folder structure. One workaround that I created and use is a small python script that will scan the library and automatically add .m3u files to folders containing mp3 files.  Right now the script has to be run manually but I am in the process of converting it to a background service.

Even though the sound quality is phenomenal, there are some usability issues with the player that should be addressed by the dev team. The first annoyance is that the player forgets the “Last Played” item. This does not sound as a big deal, but is quite important if you have a large library.

Another issue has to do with button placement and general usability. See, most of the time I use the player in my car. It is hooked up to the stereo through the headphone jack and usually sits on the passenger seat. I am used to operating the mp3 player with my right hand without even looking at it but that is not possible on the N97:

Auto-rotate Feature

The auto-rotate feature switches between landscape and portrait mode frequently and you don’t know which mode it’s in when you pick-up the phone. The button placement in both modes is different and so you have to look at the phone to see what’s going on.

Button Location

What makes it worse is that the “Next Song” button is located close to the “Back” button in portrait mode but in landscape it’s next to the “Options” button (See below)

Landscape mode

Portrait mode

This causes two issues: if you are not precise you will hit the back button (very annoying) and of course depending on the portrait/landscape mode you don’t know if you are navigating forward or backward.

Also the buttons are too small and are too close the bottom edge of the phone. I know it was convenient to reuse the button API but the usability suffers big time here.

Gesture Support

What would mitigate the issue is gesture support for skipping songs like this:

Gesture support would be nice to have...

When I pick-up the phone this is where my thumb is resting and a swipe left or right would be natural for song navigation. If you want to be adventurous, an up/down swipe could navigate between playlists

Other Items

There are some additional “nice to have” items like: song rating, history of songs played including most played list that are missing from the player . In addition it would be nice if the main screen widget could span two slots so that it’s easier to navigate the songs without looking at the phone (again that usability thing).

Good MP3 Player

Even though the software player has some usability issue I still use it as my primary mp3 player. The convenience of having to carry only one device outweighs the issues and with small modifications this could become a great player.

I am a developer and I do develop software for Nokia phones. As any developer user will know, no tool and no software application or platform is ever perfect. There are always issues. It’s just a question if the benefits outweigh the downsides. That’s all.

I like this phone. Did I have doubts and questions before I bought it? A big YES. This was mostly caused by other people’s reviews and ultimately a good thing because it lowered my expectations ;-) For instance: I wasn’t expecting much from the keyboard but I really like it. It’s perfect for me and I much rather use it than the keyboard on an E71. Another issue was the free memory on the phone. After I stopped some useless apps from running at boot-up, I ended up with 50mb free for the apps and tools I need.

Overall this phone is already the best phone I have ever used. It’s fast and easy to use. The new theme looks very polished. Keyboard is excellent. And of course the phone has so many features that I’m still surprised every day by something new I uncover. I am also amazed how good the phone sounds as an mp3 player. It beats my ipod, sansa and every other mp3 playing gadget I own.

However, like I said in the first paragraph, nothing is perfect and there are some issues with this product I would like to see addressed in future revision. There are some embarrassing mistakes and annoyances and there are some serious issues. I will start with the easy and embarrassing ones:

Why does the NAM edition ship with a manual that states on the first page; “DRAFT DO NOT USE” and why are there localization translation errors in the manual?

There is not much to add on this topic ;-)

I just can't resist...

Localization issue

Menu

I really like the new menu organization feature. Nokia finally found a way to intuitively move the shortcuts around. Excellent. Well, apparently some shortcuts don’t like to be moved and “move back” automatically a short time after they have been moved. I swear I moved all the game shortcuts to the games folder at least four times and every time after a few hours they get moved back to the app menu by some system process.

There is also an empty “MfE” folder in Applications that should not be there. Either ship MfE or get rid of the folder.

Another annoyance that’s bugging me quite a lot is the inability to uninstall crap like Boingo and JoikuSpot. I will never use these apps. Give me a way to uninstall these and reclaim the space on the phone. Boingo is especially evil because it comes with a protected access point that you can’t delete!

Web Browser Crashes

One of the more serious issues is the 11 browser crashes I experienced in the first week. Two of them happened on flash laden sites, but the rest happened on simple google search pages. This is a bit concerning considering how much functionality of this phone is based on the browser engine but the good news this only happened while browsing websites and not while using any widgets or apps.

One feature I would add is a crash recovery. Just give the user an option to continue from where the crash occurs on next browser launch (ala Opera or Firefox)

Phone Unlock

This has occurred multiple times but I was unable to figure out the steps to reproduce this. Essentially what’s happening is I lock the phone, put it in a pouch and next time I take it out either the phone is unlocked or the phone is locked but the front facing camera and app are active in the background. This has happened multiple times but it’s not easy to reproduce.

There are other issues that I have encountered but will go into the details in future articles. For now that’s it and stay tuned for the next part in the series: The N97 Music Library

Creating the actual skin configuration file and the bitmap for the N97 is fairly simple because in portrait mode the phone has only four buttons visible that have to be mapped. Making the new skin file part of the emulator configuration was a bigger challenge and the only way I got it to work is by overriding the original portrait mode configuration file.

Once installed, the emulator will look as follows:

Emulator with simple small skin sized for 1280x800 resolutions

Issues

The only issue I have encountered so far is the partial redraw issue on the right border of the screen. This is a cosmetic issue only and it will not affect the operation of the emulator. For some reason when the emulator powers on it draws the phone screen at incorrect coordinates and later on restores the location to the correct offset coordinates. Weird.

Installation

Installation is fairly simple:

1. Backup the following file: epocdata epoc_360×640_touch_keypadoff.ini
2. Download the n97_small_emu_skin file and unzip it into the epocdata directory in your SDK location. Make sure you overwrite existing files.

Customization

I have also uploaded the N97_Small_Emu_Image that can be used to easily customize the look and feel. Again, this skin is fairly simple to customize because you only have to define four button positions. Once you open the ini file it should b self explanatory on what to do.

Hope somebody will get some use out of this.