As some of you might remember, I lost my old cellphone in July and to replace it I got myself a Nokia E90 Communicator. I have been extremely impressed with the device. I was disappointed I had to buy a new phone, having lost my ol’ faithful Motorola SLVR, but of all the phones I have ever owned (and there have been a few) the E90 is by far the most powerful, most capable and most impressive of them all.

One of the really nice features of the S60 platform is that Nokia has made an official release of Python available for the Nokia S60 devices. You can run Python scripts on your phone, and even release Python applications if you wanted to. Its building a whole subculture of applications for Nokia smartphones that isn’t available on any other device yet.

A while back I started playing around with Python on my phone. One of the first applications I wrote for my phone was a very simple timer that would sit there and wait for a specific time, then send off an SMS to a specific phone number. Nothing exceptional at all. In fact, its so simple that you do have to write a script yourself do to that because no one else has bothered to release it. But it really got me thinking about what else could be done on the phone.

Anyone that knows me will know I come from a pretty strong Linux/Unix view of the world. I write lots of little scripts that do lots of little tasks to make my life easier. Whether it be a simple crontab job to run maintenance on my computers, or a script that actually does something substantial. In the past, this has always been done with bash or other shell scripts combined with tools like awk, sed, and so the usual culprits found in a *nix system.

But having Python on my cellphone has opened up quite a few other possibilities.

For example, I have Putty for Symbian OS on my phone so I can access various computers via SSH from my cellphone, no matter where I am. But there are a lot of other *nix tools that I would really like to have on my phone as well. In fact, the whole GNU suite of tools could be useful. Things like grep, awk and sed would be a massive bonus. I deal with lots of text files, from CSV to syslog output to all sorts of other bits and pieces. Being able to manage all these sorts of things offline from my phone would be a huge benefit to me.

But that is all purely geek stuff. The S60 platform could be and do a whole lot more.

So far I have only used my original Python script once to send Brooke an SMS after he had gotten up in the morning, but also after I was asleep for the night. And to be honest, that was the intended purpose. To send little messages completely at random when she’s not likely to expect them. But I haven’t used it since then because the novelty wears off when you use something too much.

So my next project has to be something that is less novel and more likely to get used.

What is something you wish you could do with your phone? A simple idea that would make life just that little bit … better, easier, more fun.

I need ideas. :-) Let me know people. :-)