Hack your way into Google Buzz

If your mobile phone is not Android or iPhone… or your gmail still does not have Google buzz folder, you still can get into buzz, albeit only mobile version. Use Firefox extension – UserAgentSwitcher. Choose iPhone3.0 profile, go to buzz.google.com.

You can also buzz from symbian (and I presume winmo, although I haven’t tested it) goole maps (v.4.0) which was updated yesterday on google servers. Works on Symbian s60v5.

Opera Mobile 10 Beta for Symbian

This is important. This is hilarious if you have got fast symbian phone with lots of RAM. Opera Mobile 10 is here. Installed it on my Omnia HD i8910 and immediately  tweaked RAM cache to some 50MB. Running well and not getting any “low memory” erros, like poor N97 guys. :)

It’s fast. It’s fucking Ajax compliant.

Gmail. It opened gmail in “standard view” and works fast.

Google Reader also opened in “standard ajaxy” mode. Wow.

Google Wave opened with errors. Not usable.

Youtube. Hmm, it doesn’t play youtube yet, but I have heard it from Opera some time ago, that Flash will be supported.

Friendfeed  works, as does Facebook.

How to: run 2 mobile gmail apps on the same phone

Do You have more than one Gmail account and java enabled mobile phone (probably 99% of phones on the market now), and you would like to conveniently access both (or more) accounts without having to logoff/login between them all the time?

There is a simple way to do it, you can have several gmail clients installed on your phone, each configured with different mailbox name and password. On phones that allow more than one java program running at the same time (89% of them do...) you can even keep several mailboxes open.

The only problem that keeps you from doing so, is the fact that most phones will not let you to install more than one instance of any java app. To overcome this, we need to edit java midlet name. While at it, you can also customize application icon, for example, to coincide with your avatar for that mailbox.

Ok, first, we need to get the .jar file, which is the actual body of the program. If you go to gmail.com/app using non-mobile browser, you will not get a download link for your phone model. I used Firefox addon, called " User Agent Switcher" to create simple UA filled with "x" in each field. This tricks google into thinking that we connect from unknown mobile browser and giving us a download link for a generic java app (not optimized for your specific phone). If you want to find app exactly for your phone model, then you need to find your phone's precise UA string. (Google for it?)

Now, download .jad - the java declaration file, from given link.

Use Notepad to open .jad file. It contains path to .jar.

Now, download .jar file. Back it up. Unpack with RAR, 7Zip or any other program that works wth .rar files. Inside, find META-INF\MANIFEST.MF. Change midlet name - this allows to install several identic apps under different names. Then change text after mdlet-1: this will be the name that will appear under icon of installed app. And last, I changed icon to my avatar. For this, save your avatar as 32x32 or 64x64 .png file.

Now, it's time to put the changed manifest back into jar :). You can do it by opening original .jar and drag-n-drop new manifest overwriting the old one. If you changed icon, drop it in the .jar root, nearby or instead of GmailIcon.png.

Now, send your .jar to the phone, install, login, enjoy.

You can switch Firefox back to original UA profile.

Multiple Gmail apps on Nokia

The same .jar files that I prepared for Sony Ericsson couple of weeks ago, also works on my new Nokia 6120 Classic.

Mobile Gmail app, v1.1.1 MIDP - 2nd and 3rd instance

If you have several gmail accounts, and wanted to run several mobile gmail apps on your java enabled mobile phone, you probably ran into trouble when trying to install more than one gmail.jar into your phone. Java doesn't allow multiple instances of the same program on Sony Ericsson phones. I edited program name in java manifesto to circumvent this restriction.

You can find v1.1.1 (generic MIDP2) gmail2 and gmail3 here http://rapidshare.com/files/40491513/gmail23.zip.html

I tested it on SE K610. Please comment how it works for you.