Nokia 9500, MMC-cards and Canon Smartbase MCP190

Since my last post I've had a chance to test a couple of pieces of hardware with my Acer 2920Z laptop and Ubuntu 7.10. Here are my notes.

First of all, the Nokia 9500 Communicator, which I tried connecting with the Nokia USB cable. Nothing happened. I also tried Wammu and KMobiletools, which did not recognise the phone. The phone shows up on lsusb listing, though. Apparently some have had better luck with Bluetooth or infra red connection.

Then, the 128 MB MMC card which was from the Nokia phone and which I inserted in the internal card reader in my laptop. Nothing happened. A "Generic- Multi-Card" listing which shows up in Gnome file manager apparently means nothing.

And finally, the Canon Smartbase MPC190 printer with an internal scanner. The printer is broken but the scanner works with Windows. I was eager to see if I was able to scan something in Linux. I plugged it in and tried various things I found from the Internet. Nothing happened.

So, there you go. 0 out of 3.

I obtained these machines for free, so I didn't pay for anything I didn't want. Therefore I'm not too annoyed. But still it is sad to see how poor the driver support from big corporations still is. Canon is notorious for it's poor Linux support. I wouldn't buy anything from them, when at the same time HP is making open drivers and even some other cool Open Source contributions. Way to go HP, I know where I'll be spending my money next time I need a printer!

But Nokia... makes me really sad. I've been buying Nokia phones solely for several years. And what I'm about to say is almost considered treason in my home country. Nokia isn't doing so great, not at least on the Open Source front. Surely it is not too much to ask that their phone would be accessible from other OS's. But even their closed source Windows connectivity suite is pretty horrible. Sure, they have done some cool stuff with open tablet software, for example. Still, (unfortunately) I'm really rooting for Google's Android nowadays. Google seems to be showing Nokia how things should be done. At the same time, Nokia keeps shunning open formats on many fronts. Nokia's recent acquisition of Trolltech raisesy questions about Nokia's motives with not enough answers. And all this might mean that my days of buying Nokia phones only are over.

And, as far as the internal card reader in my laptop is concerned, I hope i get it working sooner or later. If anyone reading this has any suggestions I would be happy to hear them.