[Bitpim-devel] Samsung VGA-1000 phonebook notes

[Stephen Wood]

I have a SCH-620/VGA-1000 now.

It looks like it has a fairly full file system. The wallpapers and
ringers are in the filesystem, so media up/downloads won't be as much a
pain as the Sanyo's.

I did try writing the schedule file, but as Ben has observed, it is not
easily writable. I also tried offlining the phone fist, but this didn't
help.

The phonebook uses straightforward AT commands rather than the HDLC used
by Brew mode or phonebook protocols for other phones.

One of the AT commands is "AT#PCBIT?" which looks like it returns a
bunch of useful information like number of entries in phonebook, field
lengths etc. This phone returns:

#PCBIT: 1008,1,0,5,5,300,300,6,1,12,32,20,32,3,"URL",32,"Birthday",10,"Avatar",2

This might mean that a fairly generic driver that works for multiple
Samsung phones could be developed.

Other commands are AT#PBOKR and AT#PBOKW to read and write phonebook
entries. AT#PMODE=1 puts the phone into a mode so that it will read and
write the phonebook.

These commands are close to what works with the SCH-8500, a Samsung
Sprint phone of a few years ago. There is a perl script, sambru, that
talks to the SCH-6100 and SCH-8500. The author learned the command set
by sending half a million AT commands to his phone.

sambru can be found at http://sandeen.net/sambru/. There also seem to
be commands for manipulating the calendar. (AT#PISHR and AT#PISHW). A
terminal program like hyperterminal or kermit should be sufficient to do
some exploration of this phone.

Stephen

[Roger Binns]

Post by Stephen Wood
It looks like it has a fairly full file system. The wallpapers and
ringers are in the filesystem, so media up/downloads won't be as much a
pain as the Sanyo's.

It is usually the index files which are the pain.

Post by Stephen Wood
One of the AT commands is "AT#PCBIT?" which looks like it returns a
bunch of useful information like number of entries in phonebook, field

You should look at the GSM specs since the Samsung stuff seems to mostly
be the same. You can download them from
http://webapp.etsi.org/key/key.asp?GSMSpecPart1=27&GSMSpecPart2=007

(The required registration process is horrible. I have the 1MB PDF
downloaded and will email you a copy. If anyone else wants it, please
email me, or go through the registration crap yourselves.)

I think Motorola phones use a substantially similar protocol.

Post by Stephen Wood
#PCBIT: 1008,1,0,5,5,300,300,6,1,12,32,20,32,3,"URL",32,"Birthday",10,"Avatar",2

Well, since you got the new phone, you get to update the commport
code :-) In particular it will need the following methods I think.

sendatcommand

This would need to send an AT style command, and then peek at the
first line returned and if it is an echo back of the command then
throw the line away. It could also throw an exception if the
next line is ERROR and do nothing if it is OK (or return nothing,
"OK" or "ERROR")

readline

Read the next line of data

readlines

(Dunno if this is needed) Read all the lines up until the
next OK (or ERROR)

peekline

Read the next line of data, but preserve it so that it can be
returned in the next call to readline

Once you have all that figured out and working, let me know and I
will put it into the BitFling code.

I think we will also need two new types for the protocol description
stuff. One would be an integer specified in string form, and one
would be a string in CSV quoted form. It would probably also make
sense to have a new list type as well that seperates entries with
commas. I would suggest writing a description file, and then I'll
be happy to write the types for it.

It would be good if you can do some investigation of what happens to
string values that have double quotes, carriage returns, commas, backslashes
and other characters in them. It would also be useful to know how
rigid the whitespace requirements are - for example is leading and
trailing whitespace of the string.

Roger

[Stephen Wood]

This post is just to note for the record a couple of more URL's with
information about talking to Samsung phones.

http://webpages.charter.net/hideo_a310/downs/TechNotes/a310_atcommands.txt

has a list of for the SCH-A310, found by trial and error (similar to the
SCH-8500 list in my previous post).

http://webpages.charter.net/hideo_a310/a310_tech.htm

has a bit more information about the A310. (The cable I have for the
VGA-1000 actually is labeled A310.)


http://www.howardforums.com/archive/topic/83000-1.html

is a thread about the S105, some other Samsung phone (not CDMA). There
is more information there about possible AT commands.

Stephen