Hackszine.com: Mobile Phones Archives

Archive: Mobile Phones

Page 1 of 2 1 2 >>

April 24, 2008

Open GPS Tracker

Now this looks like fun:

The Open GPS Tracker is a small device which plugs into a $20 prepaid mobile phone to make a GPS tracker. The Tracker responds to text message commands, detects motion, and sends you its exact position, ready for Google Maps or your mapping software. The Tracker firmware is open source and user-customizable.

From the looks of things, the total cost to build a remote-operated GPS tracking unit is on the order of $100. The design uses a prepaid cell phone to receive commands and report its position via SMS.

I'm sure there are a number of boring nefarious application for this that will freak out a lot of folks, but just think about the more interesting possibilities. You could add this to a weather balloon or autonomous flying vehicle easily track it down if there were any flight problems. A bunch of people in any city could put these in their cars on a short time delay and automatically report traffic flow conditions. You could even roll your own "lo-jack" system that would let you find your car if it was stolen, only with this your car's location is only being reported to you instead of a monitoring station, actually increasing your privacy.

Open GPS Tracker

April 6, 2008

Windows Mobile del.icio.us plugin

If you're a del.icio.us power user and you use Windows Mobile, you've probably missed the del.icio.us plugin that's available in desktop browsers like IE and Firefox. Dale Lane took this problem as a challenge and coded a nice little Pocket IE plugin that adds a del.icio.us submittal form to the browser's menu.

This is not as trivial as I expected - it took hundreds and hundreds of lines of code just to get a new entry in the Internet Explorer's menu that gets me access to the web browser object as an IWebBrowser2. And (perhaps especially so for someone who has been getting a little lazy with Java and C#! ), some of it is a little intricate and complex.
Still, once done I could use my access to the browser to launch my "post to del.icio.us" form and prefill it with the URL and page name of PIE's current page. From there, the form uses the public del.icio.us API to send all the info off to my del.icio.us list.

It's written in C++ and he's zipped up the full Visual Studio project. Based on the difficulty and lack of great documentation for doing something like this, this is actually a pretty solid find. If you want to make a PIE plugin, this would be a good place to start.

A del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile (or C++ is a pain)
Pocket IE del.icio.us plugin and source

January 6, 2008

Turn a Windows Mobile 6 device into a WiFi Router

WMWifiRouter is a new utility that you can run on your WiFi-capable WM6 device to turn it into a GPRS-uplinked WiFi router. When activated, it will set up your WiFi link in ad-hoc mode and start a DHCP server. Your laptop will see a new network called WMWifiRouter, and connecting to it will funnel all of your network traffic through your phone and its GPRS connection.

It used to be that you had to use a separate laptop connected to your phone to do the routing and network address translation side of things. This hack will allow you connect 1 or more WiFi laptops anywhere where you can get a cell connection, and you can do it without additional hardware. All you need is your phone.

Why isn't this available as part of the base WM6 operating system?

WMWifiRouter - Link
WMWifiRouter forum discussion at xda-developers.com - Link

December 30, 2007

Eavesdropping on Bluetooth headsets

Here's a short video in which Joshua Wright demonstrates how a Bluetooth headset can be hijacked, allowing audio to be captured or sent to the device:

Few users realize that Bluetooth headsets can be exploited granting a remote attacker the ability to record and inject audio through the headset while the device is not in an active call. SANS Institute author and senior instructor Joshua Wright demonstrates.

All that is necessary is knowing the device address, which can be easily sniffed, and the secret pin, which defaults to 0000. The headset audio is tapped while not in a call, so any room conversation the headset's mic can pick up can potentially be listened to remotely.

December 21, 2007

Essential hacker stocking stuffers

Like most of us, you've probably got some last-minute shopping to take care of. Or maybe there's a special someone in your life who keeps asking you for gift ideas and you need to start dropping hints to avoid another button down and a neck tie. Whatever the reason, here's a quick and dirty hacker gift guide with a variety of gift ideas that should put a smile on someone's face.

Make sure to add your own favorites to the list in the comments area and pass it along. I'm focusing primarily on smaller items that are available in local stores, but feel free to toss in whatever you think is important and shouldn't be missed.

Reading Material:

Make: The Best Of - a killer collection of the best 75 projects from our favorite magazine.
The Dangerous Book For Boys - this is a great book for sharing with your kids. Chock-full of essential information like how to tie knots, play poker, use a compass, build a tree house, and relate to girls.
Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition - the swiss army knife for your computer.
Illustrated Guide To Astronomical Wonders - ideal for anyone who's interested in knowing their way around the universe.
Also check out other books from the O'Reilly Hacks Series - Link

Gadgets:

Asus Eee PC - this ultra-tiny Linux laptop is just starting to appear in stores - Hacks
Linksys WRT54GL Router - the L in the GL stands for Linux. It's a $60 router that can be customized to do more than it's thousand dollar big-brothers - Hacks
Western Digital MyBook World Edition External Hard Drive - any extra storage is really nice to have, but this network-available drive contains mirrored RAID storage and a mini Linux computer that can run a web and database server - Hacks
iPhone or iPod Touch - did I really put that here? - Hacks
Broadband Mobile Card from Verizon or Sprint - they are getting super
popular, and heck, they are cheaper than an iPhone.
Nokia N95-3 - the winner of our most hackable mobile phone survey - Hacks

Toys:

Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle - remember the Picco-Zs and their clones from last year? Here's two of them in a single package, enhanced with a trigger that let's you zap your friend's heli down.
E-Sky Lama V4 Helicopter- Yeah, I'm crazy for helicopters right now. The counter-rotating models like this one are about $100, ready (and easy) to fly, and very hackable.
WowWee RoboSapien V2 - fun for the kids. More fun with a soldering iron - Hacks

Gear:

2GB or larger micro SD card, plus various SD and USB adapters - perfect for scooting files around, the size of a finger nail, and you can put a full Linux distro, anti virus software, or a Puppy Linux virtual machine on it - Hacks
Mini Multimeter - always handy.
Bike Multitool - a good one will pack allen and hex wrenches, screw drivers, and a knife into a pretty small package. Perfect for voiding warrantees in a pinch. Oh, and there's a chain tool, too - Link, Link
Soldering Tools - whether it's a new Weller or just a pair of helping hands, it'll be welcome in any stocking - Link, Link

What have we missed here? Add your wishes to the comments. Then find a completely non-tacky way to get this list into the hands of someone who wants you to be a happy hacker.

December 6, 2007

Nokia Energy Profiler--keep an eye on your power consumption

Screenshot0006-2

Nokia has released an Energy Profiler for Series 60 3rd Edition FP1 devices. The profiler will gather data on energy consumption and temperature so you can fire up the energy profile, launch that application you suspect of sucking down your battery, and see just how much power it's eating up. This is a great little program: it can take screenshots while it's running, export to CSV (which you can open in any modern spreadsheet program), and spit out SVG-formatted traces - Link

November 28, 2007

RC car controlled with the N95 acceleration sensor

Amazing! Andreas Jakl posted a cool N95 hack that uses the built-in accelerometer, Python, Bluetooth, and a microcontroller to control the movement of a remote control car:

Now we wanted to take the acceleration sensor of a mobile phone to the next level and use it to control something literally "bigger" than an application that is running on the phone itself.
The result is called "ShakerRacer" (thanks to Adam Montandon for this great name!). Stephan Selinger, one of our professors, bought a normal RC car for about €90 and "tuned" it. Not in the traditional way, but instead he replaced the standard remote control component with an own microcontroller and a Bluetooth-module.

Using the Python module aXYZ from cyke64, it was possible to write a small application that translates the movements of the N95 acceleration sensor to commands that can be understood by the car. This enables you to go as fast as 30 km/h by just tilting your phone!

ShakerRacer: Real RC car controlled with the N95 acceleration sensor - [via] Link

November 20, 2007

Ask the readers: what's the best hackable web phone?

It's not a simple decision, choosing on your next mobile device. There are a lot of different models with various features, built on several software platforms, and with hardware that works well for some carriers, but not well for others. It's a total mess.

One Hackszine reader wrote in on the subject, specifically asking about devices with a solid web browsing platform. He writes:

With all the reviews and nonsense out there. Its making it hard for me to decide on a new phone. I love the look and the screen of the iphone. But I've heard to many bad things about the software. I want a phone that has great web browsing. All I do is talk, text and hopefully browse. I have AT&T and will stay with them for a while. What do you think of the Blackjack? Would you recommend another phone for my needs?

I've messed around with a number of devices, and based strictly on browsing interface, I think the iPhone is at the top of the list except--and for some this is a big exception--for it's lack of Flash support. This being Hackszine, however, I need to also note that while the iPhone can be hacked to run end-user code, the manufacturer has been motivated to make this as difficult as possible, and it won't always be a sure bet going forward into new revisions.

So what other devices are available, and how do you choose a good one? What do Hackszine readers prefer?

I can't possibly list every device, but here's my personal evaluation cirteria.

Connectivity
This is the single most important factor to consider when you're deciding on a web-enabled device. What technologies does your network support? Are you often in range of an 802.11 network?

Find a device that works best with the network you plan to be using. For T-mobile and AT&T, this means the device should support EDGE. For Verison, you'll want a CDMA capable device.

For me, WiFi support is a huge must as well. In the city, you're often in range of free wireless and it's a drag to be sitting on a mobile network when real broadband is available.

Browser Technology
Mobile Safari and recent versions of Pocket IE are both really capable browsers that render web pages true to form, including fairly robust Javascript support.

There's also a mobile version of Firefox, called Minimo, that's available for Windows Mobile Pocket PC (touchscreen) devices, but not the Smartphones.

Navigating the web with a direction pad is a nasty experience. While the touchscreen devices like the iPhone and Pocket PCs are larger, if you're looking for a good mobile browser, you really should stick to a touchscreen platform.

Hackability
If you ignore the manufacturer's attempts to keep it a closed platform (can you ignore this??), the iPhone's unix core, open source development tools, and strong developer community make it a really attractive device. As I mentioned, there's currently no Flash support, though this is rumored to come soon in another update.

Both the Windows Mobile and Series 60 devices have more open development platforms and free development environments available. I've written code for both operating systems, and I have to say that writing anything but Flash Lite for the Series 60 devices is horrendous. The Windows mobile devices, on the other hand, are, for the most part, a pleasure to write software for. This is true even for native application code, which can be developed in a number of languages that are supported in Embedded Visual Studio.

Ask the Readers
I've only used a few devices on a day to day basis, and there are so many new ones available that I haven't tried, so I'm hoping you folks can help out with determining the best available, hackable mobile web device.

What do you look for in a web-enabled device? Which device has the best web browsing experience? What should be avoided? Give us a shout in the comments.

October 31, 2007

Decrypting GSM

Check out this video from last August's CCC Camp, which describes using a Universal Software Radio Perhiperal (USRP) to record GSM messages, and then using an FPGA to defeat the A5/1 encryption that's used to secure an encrypted GSM channel in the span of a couple weeks. By spending a couple months to precompute a 5 TB lookup table you could bring the decryption process down to just a few minutes.

First half of the talk is an introduction into GSM interception. Second half presents a new method for cracking the GSM encryption A5/1. This is a new attack that can crack any encrypted channel (SMS, Voice) within 3-5 minutes regardless of how long the conversation is (e.g. can crack a telephone conversation that only lasts 4 seconds).

Now, most of us won't be running out right now to grab an FPGA and a software radio so we can start cracking GSM voice converstations and SMS messages, but the actual discussion of how GSM works and how the team went about putting together a real-time cracking method for A5/1 is fascinating. What's really crazy is that for a few thousand dollars, anyone could really set up a GSM recording and cracking system. This isn't just NSA or government-funded spy stuff.

At about the 19 minute mark, Steve talks a little about how mobile identification and position information is transmitted. If you've ever called the phone company to track down a stolen phone, you've probably been told this isn't possible. Turns out that if you've had a phone lost or stolen, it actually transmits its position information _all_the_time_. So, technically, your network operator should be able to tell you the phone's location to within 200 meters.

The A5 Cracking Project - [via] Link
GNU Radio - Link

October 9, 2007

NES on the Pocket PC and Smartphone

Paul McGuinness sent us a few more Blackjack hacks today, some of which are particular to the device, and some that apply to Smartphones and Pocket PCs in general. My favorite, though, is getting an NES emulator running on the device.

I've played with the PocketNester NES emulator on my PPC quite a bit. You just download the PPC ARM installer from the SourceForge site, run the installer when you are connected to ActiveSync, and copy some ROMs over to play. It's painless on the PPC, but it won't install on the Smartphone.

I haven't been able to test them, but there are a number of alternative PocketNester ports floating around, including PocketNesterPlus which is said to run correctly on the landscape/widescreen Smartphones. I've linked to what I could find. Hopefully one of them will get you up and running on your particular device.

While you're checking this out, you're going to need to find some ROMs to play. Instead of just downloading a bunch of old Nintendo ROMs, I always get a kick out of trying homebrew NES apps. The game pictured above is called Grave Digger, and it's an addictive (maybe twisted) take on the old computer science "game of life" cellular automaton. The goal is to dig up all the zombies, but every time you dig, the adjacent graves will toggle between exhumed or filled.

The reason I mention Grave Digger is that it was written in 2004 as part of Bob Rost's game development class at Carnegie Mellon. If you start to get into playing retro Nintendo games, it might be worth taking the next step and taking a swing at writing one. The CMU lectures, tests, and a nice collection of NES homebrew resources are available on Bob Rost's site (as well as a few cool game ROMs). It's definately worth checking out.

References:

Original PocketNester (PPC portrait @ sourceforge - I've tested this one) - Link
PocketNester (for qvga SP @ surrealnetworks) - Link
PocketNesterPlus (for landscape SP @ surrealnetworks) - Link
PocketNesterPlus @ modaco forums (most recent? download appears to be corrupt right now) - Link
Samsung Blackjack Hacks Wiki - [via] Link
Game Development for the 8-bit NES - Link

October 1, 2007

HOWTO - use Gmail with your Windows Mobile Smartphone

An anonymous reader sent us a few hacks today for the Samsung SGH-i600 phone - Link. This is basically the US Blackjack, except that it's released in the UK with Orange's branding and a bit of crippleware. One of the hacks that's mentioned is using GMail with the device, and it's a cool hack that can be applied to any Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC with internet access.

Overview
One of the things I've liked about these devices, in addition to the free dev tools, is that the mail client supports IMAP and POP email servers, not just the corporate Exchange setup. If you use GMail, you can set up your phone to send and receive email via GMails POP and SMTP servers.

This howto will guide you through the necessary settings. The screens may look a little different depending on what device and OS version you have, but the basic settings information will be the same throughout.

Read full story

September 26, 2007

Turn a Symbian Series 60 phone into a webcam

Smartcam is an open source utility that will turn a bluetooth-enabled Symbian Series 60 camera phone into a webcam that you can use on your Windows PC. Half of the application runs on the phone, reads from the camera and sends video frames to the PC via bluetooth. The other half of the application runs in Windows, receives the video frames and creates a virtual web camera that can be used in programs like Skype or Yahoo messenger.

There's not much documentation, and the project is still alpha, but if you can grep the source, you technically have everything you need to make other applications which pull live video from the phone.

SmartCam project page on SourceForge - [via] Link

August 20, 2007

HOWTO - iPod and PSP movies on Windows Mobile

Last week I mentioned that you can use TCPMP on Windows Mobile Smartphones and Pocket PCs to view H.264 encoded MP4s. I glossed over a few details, so here's a quick guide for getting everything running.

What You Need:

TCPMP: download the latest version for Pocket PC or Smartphone (currently 0.72RC1)- Link
H.264 ffmpeg plugin: under "additional plugins" - Link
AAC plugin: grab the Windows Mobile download under the "BetaPlayer AAC plugin" heading - Link

You'll also need your Smartphone or Pocket PC, a PC with ActiveSync, and enough space on the device (or SDCard) for storing the video you want to watch.

Install the Files:
The TCPMP download is a CAB file. You can either drop this on an SDCard in the device or copy it to the device with ActiveSync. Once it's there, use the file explorer on the device to find the CAB and execute it to begin the install.

After you've installed TCPMP, you'll need to also install the H.264 and AAC codecs so that you can view and hear videos encoded for the iPod. Both of these plugins are downloaded as a ZIP file. Inside you'll find EXE and CAB installers for the Smartphone and Pocket PC Windows Mobile platforms. You can install the CAB files just like you did with TCPMP, or you can execute the EXE installer on your synced PC and ActiveSync will take care of moving it to the device for you.

Transfer and Play Videos on the Device
The fastest way to get large video files to your device is just to drop them on a large SD or MiniSD card and insert it into your device. I did this with a few MP4s I had lying around from MAKE podcasts and Google Video downloads.

You'll find the TCPMP/Core icon in your Start Menu. After executing, you can choose "File->Open" to browse and select an MP4 file to play. There are some settings under options to adjust the video buffer and playback settings. You'll have to experiment to see what works best for your device.

On my test Smartphone, the MP4 video playback is pretty poor, but it does work. The audio doesn't skip, but there are a bunch of dropped video frames during playback. From what I can tell, the device just doesn't have the CPU muscle to decode the video fast enough without hardware acceleration. I have a feeling the Pocket PC hardware might be more up to the task. Please leave a comment if you can confirm this.

August 17, 2007

YouTube and iPod video content on Windows Mobile

Out of the box, Windows Mobile devices can only play WMV files. Formats like Flash video or Quicktime are not supported. Using the open source media player TCPMP and some Pocket IE tweaks, however, you can view the FLV video content available on several popular video sites like YouTube and Google Video, right on your WM5 or WM6 Pocket PC or Smartphone.

For all you Tube-aholics, this is it! You now have direct, unfettered access to Youtube, Google Video & Veoh, in all their glory. Install the CABs listed below, go directly to these websites, and click on a video to play. That's it :)

Even better, you can also use TCPMP to watch H.264 MP4 / iPod encoded videos. With a large enough SD card, you should be able to use the same MP4 encoded videos on your Treo that you play from iTunes or on your iPod or iPhone.

Correction:
dankirkpatrick comments that the device referenced in the MP4-to-Treo article at jaydryden.net is actually a PalmOS device, and not the lookalike Windows Mobile Treo 700w. TCPMP is available for Windows Mobile, though, so I'll try and put together some instructions for this and verify that it works (it should). The encoding info on the Palm article should still apply, you just need to install TCPMP for WM, not for PalmOS.

Full Youtube and Google Video access - Link
Watching MP4 video on ~~Windows Mobile~~ PalmOS using TCPMP - Link
Wikipedia entry on TCPMP - Link

July 16, 2007

Browsing the Web on Windows Mobile Smartphones

Dash and Opera Mini

Smartphone Thoughts has posted a comprehensive article about all your web browsing options on Windows Mobile Smartphones:

As you'll see, on the SP platform, there're far fewer really usable browsers and there are (currently, before NSIcom fixes the bugs with the current CrEme version) absolutely no Java and, if you don't apply the Flash "hack", real Flash support. This, fortunately, makes one's life far easier - generally, you only have four browsers to select from: IEM, Opera Mobile, Opera Mini or the really promising newcomer, jB5. The two Operas are, as you may have already guessed, generally superior to the built-in Internet Explorer Mobile.

I had to take a break from messing around with the iPhone to give some of this a try. It's striking how locked-down the iPhone is compared to a gadget like the T-Mobile Dash. My Dash was a very functional Internet device, even without a SIM card installed: I was able to browse the web, check email, and use other Internet applications using just the built-in Wi-Fi. Part I | Part II

Page 1 of 2 1 2 >>