Walkman 3 player on the P1

The UIQ Evangelist has reported that the Walkman 3 player is now able to be put onto the P1 thanks to the hard work of some very clever folk.

I won't repeat the isntructions here, as there are already some decent tutorials out there - first off, you need to download the files that make up the Walkman player: Walkman 3 files. Next, you need to enable access to the system files on the phone. This requires you to install Python on to your PC along with the Sony Ericsson smartphone suite. Links to both, and an excellent tutorial on the process are here: UIQ 3 hacking page.

Once you've enabled access on the phone, copy the walkman files to the memory card (I just created a folder within "Other", then use Swiss Manager to copy the four folders to the C: drive on the phone. It prompts to overwrite the folders - jsut say yes, as you're actually adding new files, not overwriting existing ones. Once done, reboot the phone, and the Walkman player is in the application list (I made a shortcut on the desktop to it, replacing the one I had for the built in music player).

So what does the new player offer? Functionality wise, not much... it will organise music a little better into artist/album and so on, and you can also tab albums or individual songs with "moods". This means when you're "happy" you can get it just to play through all your happy songs! The best part though is the visualisations. The screens flow nicely from one to another with some transitions, and the backgrounds are animated with items flying across behind the actual text and information. Search YouTube for some videos showing this.

All in all, a recommended mod - you don't junk the existing player so it's fairly safe to do, although bear in mind you are putting files into the system folders on the phone so take care to follow all the instructions carefully. Enjoy!

Change the font on your P1!

I recently came across this post on Esato, and thought I'd give it a try on my P1 - pleased to say it works!

The basic steps are:
- Put your M2 card in to a PC, and create a folder called "resource". Within that, create a folder called "fonts".

- Find the font you want to use (I suggest this site for free fonts) Note that for best results you should find one that has 4 types available - regular, bold, italic and bolditalic).

-Rename the font files to these names:

Sans-Serif_Latin-Regular.ttf
Sans-Serif_Latin-Bold.ttf
Sans-Serif_Latin-Italic.ttf
Sans-Serif_Latin-BoldItalic.ttf

-Copy them into the fonts folder you created on the M2 card, and reboot the phone - new fonts!

I have made a seperate fonts folder on the memory card with a subfolder for each named font, and the 4 files within it, the plan being I can copy them from there to the d:\resource\fonts folder and reboot to try a different one without needing the PC. You'll need to use something like x-plore for this though, as the resource folder will be a system one. Note that this won't work with newer windows fonts as they have a .ttc extension and are a different type...

If you find any fonts that work well - leave a comment!