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Ubuntu & The Nokia 6300

The Phone

A few days ago I purchased the Nokia 6300. Visually the phone is very elegant, sleek and minimalistic in design. It has all the basic features that you find in modern phones; bluetooth 2.0, an mp3 player and a 2 megapixel camera. It uses Nokia's Series 40 platform, 3rd edition.

A word of warning, the camera only has digital zoom (8x) and no flash, in comparison to my older SonyEricsson D750i it is quite inferior. However this does not bother me as I am more interested in having a functional phone than too many bells and whistles. The audio quality of calls is very good and here it is better than the old SonyEricsson D750i. For someone like me, who doesn't need a phone mp3 player (because I have a proper mp3 player) or a phone camera (because a I have a proper digital camera) the Nokia 6300 is more than enough, and looks great.

I will not be listing all the features it has neither will this be a detailed review of the phone as there are countless great reviews already and I have no intention of reinventing the wheel.

The Phone and Ubuntu

Here is where it gets a little tricky.

Multisync

Some background info, when I was using the SonyEricsson D750i I was able to sync it nicely with Evolution to update contacts, to-do lists and calendar entries. The method I used is explained in this post of the ubuntuforums.

The bad news is that I tried this method with the Nokia 6300 and it did not work, I believe it may have something to do with the fact that the Nokia 6300 doesn't support IrMC. The following screenshots are from the Multisync tool which you can get from the Feisty repos:

Searching for the device finds this:

Testing IrMC shows this:

Gnokii

Thanks to this article however I was able to access my contacts and sms entries through Ubuntu, however in comparison to Nokia's Windows software, or in comparison to the Multisync method I had been using with my SonyEricsson D750i Gnokii is extremely primitive and basic.

Gnokii window

Gnokii contacts window

Gnokii contacts editing window

Wammu

Another application that worked is called Wammu, it is similar to Gnokii but more developed and not intended for Nokia only but for any mobile phone. It will retrieve information about your phone as well as sms messages, phone book entries, to do lists and calendar entries. Again, in comparison to Multisync and Evolution it is quite basic.

The Wammu window

Conclusion

For now the conclusion is that the Nokia 6300's Ubuntu friendliness has limits. If you do not use Evolution and don't care to use the sophisticated contacts management of the phone book then Gnokii or Wammu will serve you well. If, like me, you like to sync your phone with Evolution you are out of luck.

Currently I boot into Windows XP to sync the Nokia 6300 with an account I created for this reason in MS Outlook. Here I can edit the contacts, add business and home numbers, emails, etc.. and then sync them with the phone book on the Nokia 6300.

Update:

Thanks to some helpful members over at ubuntuforums.org it turns out that it is in fact possible to sync the Nokia 6300 with for example Evolution (contacts and calendar).

Upon testing the synchronisation using multisync-gui I was able to copy contacts from Evolution to the Nokia 6300's empty phone book, at the moment however, if I run the process a 2nd or 3rd time some contacts become multiplied. It's a start though.