Nokia Smartphone Hacks

1 minutes estimated reading time

O’Reilly are known for their technical books and they publish some of my favourite reference books: Flickr Hacks, Mac OS X – The Missing Manual and Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther.

At first I was skeptical, a book about hacking Nokia phones, what’s the point they’re so transitory as devices? I go through a new phone every 12 months or so.

Nokia has released a plethora of OS’s for their phones: Series 40, Series 60 (of which we now have the 3rd edition), Series 90: which is what powered the 9X00 series communicators.

To be fair most of the focus is on Series 60, the book provides advice on what hack doesn’t work with older Series 60 phones and highlights model exceptions.

Nokia Smartphone Hacks at first seemed similar to other O’Reilly technical books, but as I worked through it over the past eight weeks in between work and travel I started to realise that Nokia Smartphone Hacks was different.

The style and content of Nokia Smartphone Hacks has lots of useful content for the non-technically orientated users, this realisation slowly morphed into a realisation that Nokia Smartphone Hacks was in fact the manual that Nokia should ship with all their phones. It has a raft of helpful tips and links to really useful applications; many of them freeware and tips on how to get your phone to work with your Windows/Mac OS X/Linux box (delete as appropriate).

Now some of the downsides:

  • The performance of a phone relies on a symbiotic relationship with the carriers network services (like port access), most the data in book usually relates to US carriers like Cingular / AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile USA
  • Size- its quite a weighty read but the content is really good

More wireless related posts here.


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