for almost 10 days i’ve been the proud owner of a new mobile phone, the htc hero, an android and, thus, linux based mobile phone! over the past year or so i had become increasingly fed up with my apple ipod touch — yes, i had jail-broken it, yes, i had amarok synchronizing via ssh with it, but at what “speed!” ridiculous!¹

when my trusted nokia n95 started acting up and started crying for power more and more often the writing on the wall was quite legible: “get a new phone” — so i did :-D

after a bit of research — the palm pre looked sexy but is not available on the continent for some time to come and also lacks the standard API set of the android platform — i settled on the android based htc hero.

copying music over, sync-ing those podcasts i love to listen to — it’s all just a matter of plugging in the USB data cable to the htc hero and my thinkpad, telling the hero to offer the SD card as a USB drive to linux and we are in business: gone are the hour long transfer times for those ARD radio tatort radioplays or the swiss SF TV dok vidcasts — it all happens in a flash now, sweet :-)

the only thing i was missing: vidcasts :-( turns out the hero can play those, but you need to - install the video player application via the android market, and - “hack” amarok’s config file so that amarok would be cool with sending .m4v vidcasts to the hero

for the latter you need to locate the line that reads

supportedFiletypes=mp3

in your .kde/share/config/amarokrc file and change it to read:

supportedFiletypes=mp3, m4v

voila! amarok will now transfer those vidcasts to the hero and the video player application will play them :-)