My old iPod Nano 1st generation is half dead, my old Nokia phone from 2003 is half dead, my current mobile phone carrier (Orange) charges an arm and a leg for a service I don’t use that much, it’s time for some change!
My first decision was to switch to another carrier, Swisscom (I’m in Switzerland obviously). If you sign for a 2 year plan that costs around 8€ per month, they offer you a bunch of nice mobile phones to chose from. What I wanted was:
- A phone as light as possible
- A phone that can replace my iPod as a music player, with 8GB storage capacity
- Compatible with Fedora/Rhythmbox for my music and podcasts
- Has to be free with a new mobile phone plan
Very quickly, it became clear that the ideal candidate was the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic. This little phone is very thin and light but looks solid and has all the functionality I need:
- It’s only 9.9mm thick (115mm for an iPhone 3G)
- Weights 72gr (133gr for an iPhone 3G)
- Has a microSD slot that supports 8GB cards
- Has an USB connector so the microSD card can be seen by Fedora
So I ran to the store and came home with it, god it’s light 
The phone has all the standard whistles and bells, FM radio support, Bluetooth, e-Mail and big buttons on the front to control the music player. The OS running on this machine is Symbian System 40.
When you first connect it to Fedora, you have to create a “.is_audio_player” on the microSD card, so that Rhythmbox detects it. Restart Rhythmbox, configure your Podcasts folder on the memory card and transfer the rest of your music: done.
You have a thing that can make phone calls, replace an iPod and is compatible with Linux for “free” (and I also received Kylie Minogue’s latest album in 320kbps MP3 for free, yeah well…).
Note that the phone only detects a 4GB SD card if you browse the card via the menus, but the 8GB are available and it works flawlessly. I bought a 8GB SanDisk card for about 30€ at my local computer store.
Bye-bye iTunes + iPod, welcome Rhythmbox + Nokia 5310!
One of the top result when googling “Nokia 5310 + linux”. Great stuff, just what I was after dude.
*kudos* Worked like a charm on my girlfriends Ubuntu 8.04 laptop with her 5310.
Thanks!
In fact since I wrote this post, I’m simply using rsync to copy my podcasts and mp3′s to my phone, it’s even less of a hassle than using an application :p
this successful transfer is over USB only, right? is there any possibilty of doing everything over bluetooth?
Indeed, it’s over USB. You can also see the device with Bluetooth and browse it, but I’m not sure if you can send files to it. I didn’t try it.
So, can the 5310 use an 8GB card?
I though it could only handle 4 GB cards.
If you update the firmware via the nokia software updater, it supports higher resolution cards.