After more than two years with my Nokia 6021, I decided that its time for a new cell phone. The Nokia 6021 was quite limited in it’s capabilities and this time I wanted an all in one wonder with lots of features to play with to help me with my daily business and at least with GPS. Actually I was thinking about getting an iPhone 3G but here in Germany you have to sign a contract with (from my point of view) very bad conditions plus the iPhone 3G seems to have quite some hardware quality issues (bad 3G connections, bad battery runtime, ...) and the software seems to be nothing I’d call rock solid at the moment. This was my impression while reading forums and newstickers. So I decided to better get a Nokia N82 in black.
In this blog entry I want to sum up a view of my experiences with Mac OS X Leopard and the Nokia N82.


First of all, the iSync that comes with Leopard does not know the Nokia N82 which means you cannot sync with an out-of-the-box Leopard installation. Fortunately Nokia provides an iSync plugin that works very well with Leopard. The installation is very easy and after that iSync can sync the addressbook including all categories and even the pictures of your contacts. The calendar gets synced too of course but “whole day appointments” in your calendar are read only on your phone later - no big deal for me but maybe for you.

That worked quite well even out of the box with the Nokia 6021 too (except for the photos of my contacts in my address book).








So, what else can we sync? How about iTunes and iPhoto? I found a software called Nokia Multimedia Transfer on the Nokia webpage and I tried it out. After installation you can start the sync by plugging the phone into the USB port of your Mac, and the phone asks you which protocol you want to use - choose “PC suite” then.
The connection cable for the sync comes with the phone by the way, which is good because the phone has a micro USB socket.

The software is awesome. When you start it, a new folder is created in iTunes called „Nokia N82“ and every playlist you drop into that folder will get synced to the N82 via Bluetooth or via USB. Unfortunately the N82 has only USB1.1 built in and so my 5,5GB of music took about 2 hours to get synced to the phone - thank god I only had to do that once. The changes you do to the folder in iTunes are getting synced the next time you plug in the phone. For some reason the album covers are not shown in the player on my phone, even though I stored them in the MP3 tags but that’s the only bad thing I can say so far.
The iPhoto sync is even easier. The phone is detected as camera and so you can sync the movies and photos from the phone with just one mouse click into iPhoto, Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture (I only tried iPhoto).

Quite impressive isn’t it? But that’s not all Nokia Multimedia Transfer can do. You can even sync your bookmarks from the phone into the safari webbrowser and vice versa. On the phone a bookmark folder “safari” is created where all the bookmarks you have on your Mac are synced into.
Nokia Multimedia Transfer is beta software but it worked very well for me so far. If you don’t want to use it, you can mount the phone as a mass storage device too and it behaves like an external harddisk then. Bookmark syncing is a bit complicate then of course.

The N82 is a 3G (UMTS) cell phone with a built in webbrowser, so you can browse the internet on the phone but with just a few clicks in the network settings of Leopard, you can use the phone as a modem for your Mac too so that you can share the N82 internet connection with your Mac. You need bluetooth activated and the configuration depends on your UMTS provider but for me it was a piece of cake to configure it (nothing to configure actually, just a view clicks in the bluetooth configuration of Mac OS X).

This blog entry was just about N82 and Mac OS X. Of course there is a lot more to say about the phone itself but that will happen in another blog entry.