The weekend was very dull outside. It was a couple of degrees below zero and the sky was covered with cloud with forecast of rain or snow. I stayed mostly inside. Apart from chatting with my wife over the phone (thanks to VOIP telephony) I did not have anything exciting planned. So I decided to play around with something that was on my mind for sometime.
You all must have used (or at least heard) of software such as Nokia(TM) PC Suite and the Sony Ericsson(TM) PC Suite. I have always been wondering how these applications connect to the phone and retrieve all the data to and fro from the device. Well, it seems fairly easy. Whenever we hook up our phone to the PC (by USB cable or bluetooth) it establishes a connection on a PC's Serial COM port. Then these software issue AT commands (mostly) to perform all the "magical" operations.
So, there I was, I connected my ME (nothing fancy, W890i) to my laptop through the USB cable. I then identified the COM port, from the Vista Device Manager, being used by the connection. Fired up PuTTY and selected the serial mode with the COM port number (COM13 in my case). That opened up a session with my phone on the PuTTYconsole itself!
I then downloaded the AT Command list from Sony Ericsson developer site (Publication number: 1206-6103.15) and played around with them. For example, refer to the screenshot below for some of the commands that I executed:
For example at+csca? queries the phone to get the current SMSC address. at+csq? reports the signal quality. 17 indicates the rssi (received signal strength indication) is -70 dBm. at+cbc? reports the battery charge on the phone. 1 indicates that the phone has a battery connected as is currently being charged (which is obvious, because the PC was charging it through the connected USB cable) and 42 indicates the current level of charge (as a percentage) in the battery.We can do a lot more. Read SMS, write and store SMS and what not! I shall explore this further and come up with more ideas over time. A fruitful weekend after all!
