Seemless Texting, Phone Functions, Wifi/3G Dongle And Back...etc

[thantik]

I've just been pondering ideas late at night and figured I'd come here to post some of my ideas/bounce things off of people.

Texting - Is there any planned way to make 'texting' on the pandora seemless or semi-seemless? I was thinking a lot about getting a 3G data service, or something similar so the pandora could be connected at all times. I know you can send texts back and forth between mobile devices but each carrier has their own little email address to use for specific numbers, etc. If nothing like this is planned or exists yet, it would be fantastic as I don't believe anyone else has touched on the idea as far as I've seen. (And surprising too considering the full qwerty keyboard kinda goes hand-in-hand for that kind of thing). Is/Will there be a way to type in a cell# and be able to text someone as if the device were a cellphone? If not, what would it take? I was thinking it would be really cool to have a free text-based service with a modified pop/imap server that could take care of the phone number -> email conversion lookup to make having a pandora a seemless experience. (This is actually my 'idea' I mentioned earlier)

Network Management - In Angstrom (is that still the distro being used?) what kind of network management features will be available for 3g dongles and what kind of support is there for swapping back and forth from available wifi/3g dongle(usb thingy)? My guess is it might be best to use some sort of proxy so the proxy is connecting to services instead of it looking like an attack on someones network if your swapping from wifi and back regularly? I still don't know much about this.

 

[Gary13579]

This is actually one of my planned applications... if I get a device (still waiting to hear back from openpandorasales...).

It would be a VoIP app designed to run over 3G (assuming your carrier allows it, some block it), but completely integrated with Google Voice. GV would be the part that gives you SMS, as every google voice account has unlimited SMS. The VoIP client would most likely just connect to Gizmo (not saying others won't be supported, just Gizmo is my main target), as Google Voice links very nicely to a Gizmo account.

As for 3G dongles, it gets messy. The very few that say "Linux support" on the packaging could likely be precompiled x86 drivers, which are of no use to us. You also need to make sure the dongle can support the carrier you're using (AT&T and T-Mobile are both GSM, but they use different 3G frequencies. Using a T-Mobile 3G adapter on AT&T will result in an EDGE connection only).

 

[Mycohl]

The Sierra Wireless driver appears to be working on my SheevaPlug.

I don't have any devices from other vendors on hand at the moment
to test with, but it seems like Sierra USB devices would be a safe bet.

 

[thantik]

Thanks for the replies - I didn't even think about google voice, that practically already accomplishes most of what I need since they really already did the work for SMS-ing seemlessly, and yeah - I had planned on possibly doing VoIP over 3g as well, and I've even researched a few cases where it's worked, and worked well enough to consider doing.

Is there an app for Android that ties into google voice? - I ponder if google may have open-sourced such a thing already and might even be able to be ported to the Pandora - I'll do some quick google searches after this post...

Maybe we should start some sort of thread on supported USB 3g adapters/carriers for the pandora, as I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't mind tinkering with it to make it a replacement for their current cellphone...or at least a backup of some sort.

 

[gruso]

Maybe we should start some sort of thread on supported USB 3g adapters/carriers for the pandora, as I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't mind tinkering with it to make it a replacement for their current cellphone...or at least a backup of some sort.

http://pandorawiki.org/USB_compatibility_list

The list is pretty sparse right now, but will start to fill up when the first batch is in the wild.

 

[Gary13579]

Is there an app for Android that ties into google voice? - I ponder if google may have open-sourced such a thing already and might even be able to be ported to the Pandora - I'll do some quick google searches after this post...

Android applications are (almost) all coded in Java. It'd be useless even if you had the code.

There are currently two applications for Android that do it, one by Google and one by an independent developer. Both of them just sit there and query the mobile Google Voice interface (which you can find here: www.google.com/voice/m ). It'd be a sinch to rip the data off of their.

Unfortunately, they haven't made or released an API for GV yet. So this is the only way (for now).

 

[El Jefe]

This is actually one of my planned applications... if I get a device (still waiting to hear back from openpandorasales...).

It would be a VoIP app designed to run over 3G (assuming your carrier allows it, some block it), but completely integrated with Google Voice. GV would be the part that gives you SMS, as every google voice account has unlimited SMS. The VoIP client would most likely just connect to Gizmo (not saying others won't be supported, just Gizmo is my main target), as Google Voice links very nicely to a Gizmo account.

As for 3G dongles, it gets messy. The very few that say "Linux support" on the packaging could likely be precompiled x86 drivers, which are of no use to us. You also need to make sure the dongle can support the carrier you're using (AT&T and T-Mobile are both GSM, but they use different 3G frequencies. Using a T-Mobile 3G adapter on AT&T will result in an EDGE connection only).

You've got google voice?
Can you invite people yet? (ie. me)

 

[Gary13579]

This is actually one of my planned applications... if I get a device (still waiting to hear back from openpandorasales...).

It would be a VoIP app designed to run over 3G (assuming your carrier allows it, some block it), but completely integrated with Google Voice. GV would be the part that gives you SMS, as every google voice account has unlimited SMS. The VoIP client would most likely just connect to Gizmo (not saying others won't be supported, just Gizmo is my main target), as Google Voice links very nicely to a Gizmo account.

As for 3G dongles, it gets messy. The very few that say "Linux support" on the packaging could likely be precompiled x86 drivers, which are of no use to us. You also need to make sure the dongle can support the carrier you're using (AT&T and T-Mobile are both GSM, but they use different 3G frequencies. Using a T-Mobile 3G adapter on AT&T will result in an EDGE connection only).

You've got google voice?
Can you invite people yet? (ie. me)

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/49986-will-we-all-have-our-pandoras-by-xmas/page__st__15__p__763623__fromsearch__1&#entry763623

:rolleyes:

 

[El Jefe]

oh... how awkward... it appears as though you lack an avatar or recognizable name...