If you’ve been waiting for the Layout Planner Pro beta I’m happy to announce it’s ready for user consumption. Please visit LayoutPlanner.com to request access to the beta program and create a user account. In about 24 hours (if faster if I can get to it) you’ll be given access to the download area where you can grab Windows and Macintosh versions.

In a previous post I mentioned the Gizmo Project SIP configuration for my Nokia E61. It turns out this is wholely unnecessary because Gizmo provides a downloadable Symbian application to perform the configuration for you.

Read about GizmoVOIP.com using your computer’s browser then point your E61 here to download the application. Although the web site says this is for the N80 I had no problems installing it on my E61. All I needed to provide was my Gizmo username and password – the rest is automatic. No more manual entry of SIP and Internet Telephone configuration.

Gizmo on the E61 works well although it appears to freeze the phone every so often as a call is attempted. This a major flaw and I’m guessing an issue with Nokia’s implementation of SIP or interaction with router’s handling of NAT.

I’ve owned the Nokia E61 since it first arrived. Probably a bad idea since any Revision 1.0 product has issues but fortunately the hardware has been solid. It’s the firmware (and OS) which has needed improvement.

Although the version 3.06x firmware has been around since last year I finally got around to installing it. I decided to go with a clean install which means no “restoring from backup” and get wonky bits hanging out there. In contrast to user reports at All About Symbian and My-Symbian, the upgrade went flawlessly.

It’s only been a few days but the noticable improvements:

• Speed improvement: the device is a little faster overall
• Faster browser: renders pages faster and downloads faster via EDGE and wi-fi
• VoIP works: Gizmo Project’s SIP configuration works flawlessly; it’s nice to see standards in action unlike Skype
• Contacts: looking up a contact is super-fast unlike previous versions where you could come back five minutes later and it’s still trying to open

That’s a short list but the last three improvements are significant in my opinion.

Imagine my surprise when I opened iSync (after upgrading to 10.4.9) to find that my nova media iSync plug-ins weren’t compatible. This is good news, actually, as it means that popular Nokia smartphones (i.e.: E61, N73, N93) now have native support in iSync.

Since my E61 is on the list of newly supported devices I no longer need nova media’s excellent plug-in but if it weren’t for them I couldn’t have synced for the last year. If your phone isn’t on the latest iSync compatibility list then swing by nova media’s site and grab yourself a copy.

Ever since I began to implement GTD I’ve been on the lookout to simplify and slim down projects. For one, I eliminated a number of e-mail accounts and was left with Gmail, .Mac, vanity, and work. Next on my radar is telephone service.

There’s no reason to have a home phone, work phone, mobile phone, and softphone. It’s silly and embarrassing that technology can’t merge them together into something more manageable. I don’t give my mobile number to just anyone but that shouldn’t preclude me from taking business calls on it and maintain a separate voice mail account. But since I can’t, enter the myriad of other telephones and service platforms.

Ideally I consolidate to a single phone device using traditional cellular networks and VoIP (via SIP). Of course, the biggest players in the VoIP market (Vonage and Skype) have closed their SIP-based services to the outside world. Thus my Nokia E61 (with SIP capability) is rendered useless. There are other options like Truphone but Skype dominates and allows me an area code in my home State.

While I wait for the perfect marriage of mobile and SIP I’ve discovered dual-mode phones which offer POTS (plain old telephone system) and Skype services. That’s getting somewhere since most mobiles don’t have a Skype client (at least not one which works well). It appears some of these dual mode phones even support SIP for those players (like Gizmo) which don’t lock out their SIP network.

After much Googling I discovered Dualphone which appears to do POTS+Skype/SIP. Pricing isn’t too bad ($100-150) but what about SIP support? To find out I keyed http://www.dualphone.net into my browser and after a brief wait I got this lovely message:

All day today. Not once could I get through – just the mocking error page vomited by a Windows server. It’s not Windows I should be sore with, it’s the Dualphone people who (clearly) don’t monitor their web site. What’s the story? No webmaster? Five employees doing the job of fifty? Maybe there isn’t even a company – just a bunch of people spread around Earth connected virtually.

In any event…if you operate a business which uses the Internet as a means of communication, please monitor your site. If not, then take it down because a broken web site is worse than a non-existent one.