Bemused and ControlFreak.

Not long after the first Series 60 smartphone was released (Nokia 7650 in June 2002), a couple of new products were developed that took advantage of the Bluetooth capabilities of the new phone and the music storage and playback of a PC.

Bemused was written by Ashley Montanaro and was released as open source in 2002. You can download the Bemused software, including the Symbian client for the phone and the Winamp plug-in on the PC, from http://bemused.sourceforge.net/. Bemused provides the usual media player options in the form of on-screen buttons in a skinnable interface. It lets you control the current playlist as well as send the entire directory and file structure of your music to the phone. This can take quite a long time if your music collection is large, but once the data is received, it allows basic browsing and loading of your music. Bemused supports both GPRS and Bluetooth connections. With GPRS, you can control your music remotely via the Internet. However, you should be aware that most mobile operators charge for GPRS data, whereas using the local Bluetooth connection is free and more reliable.

Around the same time Bemused became available, a user interface (UI) design engineer, Michael Ahokas, and a software design engineer, Trent Fitzgibbon, were developing a commercial application called ControlFreak for a similar purpose. But compared to Bemused, ControlFreak has a much more polished UI and richer functionality. For instance, most ControlFreak operations are performed with a single click of the navigation pad (i.e., the joystick). You can also set ControlFreak to display track information in any application, and you can use shortcuts to adjust the volume or skip tracks from the phone application idle screen. We believe that usability is the key to any phone-based application. So, we will focus on ControlFreak in this tips.

Both Bemused and ControlFreak are Symbian applications, which run only on Series 60 devices. A Java port of Bemused called Bemused.java is available from http://elektron.its.tudelft.nl/~jkohne76/. It runs on any Nokia mobile phone with Java Bluetooth API support (e.g., the Nokia 6230 phone in Series 40). But Bemused.java is a much less-polished product than Bemused and ControlFreak.