Perhaps it was a stretch to say that the Sony Ericsson 810i Walkman cell phone is an iPod Nano killer, but it is a heck of a gizmo. I have been iPod free for two days and am still pretty impressed with this phone/mp3 player. I have been sorting through my music library trying to widdle my collection down to a 4 gigabyte (* see note below) playlist so I can fill my phone with tunes. Since the phone doesn’t have built-in iTunes integration, organizing your music is just a bit complex. You don’t want to be sorting through 4gb of music by hand. Rather than drag folders of music onto the phone, it would be awesome to be able to simply make an iTunes Playlist that you can sync the to phone with a single click. Believe it or not that is possible, but you won’t find instructions from Apple or Sony. Here is the method I figured out…

How to Sync Your Sony 810i Cell Phone With iTunes
I am using the Sony Ericsson 810i phone for this example, but it will probably work with other phones too, maybe even non-Sony versions. This example is also Mac specific, so if you use a PC you are on your own. I imagine there is a similar way of doing this on a PC, I just can’t tell you how. I barely got it to work on a Mac, so count your blessings.

The first thing to do is to make a playlist of all the songs you want on your phone. I am not going to take the time to explain how to make a playlist, but if you want the script I provided to work without modification, you should name your playlist “Phone Playlist.” This can be a regular playlist or a smart playlist (* * see note below about smart playlists).

Now that you have the playlist containing the songs you want on your Sony 810 phone, we need to figure out a way to get iTunes to automatically copy all the files in that playlist from your music library to your phone. This is possible by using an AppleScript. Download the .zip file below and unzip it.

Sync Sony Phone to iTunes Playlist (* * * see note below about this script)

Put the file called “Sync Sony 810 Phone” in your iTunes Scripts folder. This is located in “user name > Library > iTunes.” If there isn’t a folder named “Scripts” there, create it. Now in iTunes you should see an “S” shaped icon in the top menu bar with an option that says “Sync Sony 810 Phone.” (Don’t select it until we plug the phone in.)

Now all that is left is to Sync the phone with iTunes. Plug the phone into your Mac using the usb cord that came with your phone. Two disk icons should appear on your desktop. One is called “PHONE” and the other is called “PHONE CARD.” If the second one is called anything other than “PHONE CARD” you will have to modify the script I provided (*see note below) or rename the phone card. Now in iTunes go to the script menu and select “Sync Sony 810 Phone.” This will activate the AppleScript and copy all the songs from your playlist into the “MP3” folder on your phone. It will also delete MP3 files from your phone that are not on the playlist. If this is a problem, you can modify the Applescript so that instead of the main MP3 folder the script puts the playlist files into a subfolder that you will only use for iTunes files. It will take a while to transfer 4gb of music onto your phone, so be patient. Monitor the MP3 folder to make sure the transfer is complete before disconnecting your phone. When the script has completed the action, the AppleScript icon will disappear from your dock.

There are a couple downsides to this method. First, it just dumps all the mp3s onto the memory card and doesn’t put them in folders or organize them in any way. The phone somehow automatically sorts them by artist, so it only makes a difference if you want to get a specific album or song off the phone. I should also mention that this won’t allow you to play songs that you purchase from iTunes on your Sony phone due to the DRM. It would also be nice to have a progress bar to check the progress. Obviously this is a hack so it is hard to be too picky. Good luck if you decide to tackle this. Enjoy your phone!

* Expanding the storage capacity from 128mb to 4gb
Expanding the memory capacity of the phone is a simple matter of switching out the included 128mb memory card with a 4gb Sony pro duo memory stick which can be purchased at a Circuit City or Best buy for $150. If you buy it online you can probably get the memory stick for closer to $100 and the cost of memory will undoubtedly go down from the time I write this post. The 4bg card is actually only going to give you 3.75gb of real space, but the same can probably be said about the iPod Nano. Can someone confirm that for me?

* * Note about smart playlists
I would encourage you to learn to use smart playlists if you don’t already know how. For example, I make a smart playlist that contains only songs that are in a “phone” grouping. I adjust my view options to show the “grouping” column in the main window. Now I can simply put any track I want on my phone by putting it in the “phone” grouping Since it is a “smart” playlist it will automatically be updated and will appear on my phone the next time I sync it up.

* * *Note about customizing the script I am providing
The script I provided is available for free with a suggested donation from Doug’s Scripts for iTunes. The script is called “Sync Playlist to Folder.” If my script doesn’t work for you, Doug provides a folder of files that explain the script and help you customize it for your own needs. I take no credit for the script and encourage you to donate to Doug if you find the script helpful.

Forget about the Zune. The Sony 810i is the real iPod killer. IPod Nano, that is. let me tell you why…

I bought an amazing phone this weekend. The Sony Ericsson 810i is a phone, an MP3 player, and a digital camera all in one. Yes, there are several phones with this combo, but none of them compare with the Sony. That is because the MP3 player can be expanded to 4gb and the digital camera is 2 megapixels. With a little work, you can even customize iTunes to let you Sync the 810i with an iTunes playlist. (Watch for a tutorial in the near future if that is something that interests you.) Don’t fall for the hype around the Motorola. What they don’t tell you is that the integrated iTunes on the Motorola Razr only let’s you put 100 songs on the phone regardless of memory capacity. In a head-to-head battle between the iPod Nano and the Sony Ericsson 810i here is how things broke down:

Style: Nano
Storage Capacity: Tie (4gb)
Interface: Nano
Size: Nano
Color Screen: Sony 810i (scratches less than the Nano)
Price: Sony 810i if you shop around (Sony: Free - $99 with plan + $100 - $150 for the 4gb memory card = $100 - $249; Nano: $199)
Features: Sony 810i (it has a camera, cell phone and FM tuner!)
Battery Life: Tie (From what I can tell)
Games: Sony 810i
Headphones: Nano
DRM Free: Sony 810i
Video capabilities: Sony 810i

In a close battle, the Sony wins 6 to 5 by my tally. Obviously some of these things may be more important to you than others. For me the selling point was that the Sony is also a phone and a decent camera. Undoubtedly my vote will change when Apple finally comes out with their phone. For now though, I am very happy with this new toy.

If I have any regular readers, you may remember my list of life upgrades and downgrades. One of the things I mentioned in the “downgrade” list was not having a cell phone or watch. I started wearing my watch again a few months ago, and this weekend I purchased a cell phone. Before you get too disappointed in me, let me tell you how I can rationalize it: I may be adding a phone to my life, I am actually consolidating my camera and MP3 player and watch and adding a phone while I am at it. Not too bad, right?

I while back I added a new feature to Be A Design Group that created a list of the top commenters on our blog with a comment count next to the name of the comment author. It seems like it would be a native feature of Movable Type, but it isn’t. In my search for a plugin that could do the job I found some conversations about plugins called “CommentLeaders” and “mt-leaderboard”. The plugin were no longer listed on Movable Type’s plugin directory, and they don’t seem to be available anywhere else online.

Finally I found a thread on Six Apart’s community forum that eventually led to the comment leader board plugin. The conversation wanders through several suggestions and improvements, but there isn’t a clear cut solution. I thought I would attempt to save you some work by explaining the solution that worked for me. I know just enough to make this work, so I apologize in advance for not being able to improvise beyond the following steps. Here it goes:

The first step is to create a page called “connect.php” that will be used to access your Movable Type database. In a text editor, create a file with the following code:

<?
// name of your database
$database = "databasename";

// connect to database
$db = mysqlconnect("localhost", "dbuser", "dbpassword")or die (’I cannot connect to the database.’);
mysqlselect_db("$database",$db);
?>

Be sure to change databasename, dbuser, and dbpassword to your specific info. Save and upload to your server as connect.php.

Next create a php page called “leaderboard.php” with the following contents:

<? include 'connect.php';

echo "$authorlink ($comment_count)<br />\n";
} ?>

There are a couple things to notice. First make sure that you have the correct path to your “connect.php” file. Next, you can exclude commenters from your list by replacing “name to exclude” with the name of the author who’s comments you don’t want to appear in the list. This is very helpful because if you are active in the comments of your blog you are probably the top commenter.

If your blog id is not 1, change “blog_id=1” to reflect the blog id number of the blog you are adding the leader board to. Another thing to notice is that this will link the commenter’s name to the url they entered when they made a comment. If no web address was specified then their name will not be linked to anything. It would be simple to link the name to the email address of the commenter, but that would expose their email address to spammers and is probably not a good idea.

Finally, at the spot in your blog where you would like the Leader-board to appear, add the following line:

<!—#include virtual=”path/to/your/leaderboard.php” —> .

If you are lucky, you now have a list of the top commenters on your blog. Like I said before, I just barely got this to work, so if you need help, you are pretty much on your own. If anyone decides to try this, and has suggestions about how to make this tutorial better, please let me know. Good luck!

References: Six Apart’s community forum www.thegirliematters.com