>> Personally, after using a few level editors, I find it absolutely 
>> *astonishing* that games are ever produced. I mean, if it takes 4 
>> hours of hassle to construct an empty cuboid room, how the hell do 
>> people construct anything customers would pay money for?!
> 
> They go the UT3 route, and build the whole level in 3DS Max (you have no 
> idea how much this "design decision" pissed me off when I found out. 
> What's the point of UnrealEd if it just imports static meshes from Max?)

<Insert comment here about 3DS Max being even harder to operate than QOOLE>

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scott wrote:
> Oh yes, my current car and my last car had that.  It means when someone 
> calls you the car can display the name of the person from the phonebook. 

I have that too, but that's because I bluetoothed the contact list from the 
phone to the car. They slowly drift out of sync, of course, and it doesn't 
work for anyone else's phone.

> Note that the phonebook in most phones is stored in the phone and not on 
> the SIM card, because the SIM card has very limited storage capacity.  

Actually, I believe it's because the SIM card is very slow, so the phone 
caches the values when you put the SIM in.  I was under the impression the 
SIM cards stored everything of interest about your phone. I could be wrong.

> Also it means if you want to call someone you can scroll through the 
> address book on the car display and not have to use the tiny buttons and 
> screen on your phone whilst driving.

Yes, but for me that's because I copied the phone book into the car, not 
because the car is getting it from my phone real-time. It also means the car 
is using the radio in my pocket, running off tiny batteries, rather than the 
radio in the car running off a 20-pound lump of lead and acid.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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> I have that too, but that's because I bluetoothed the contact list from 
> the phone to the car. They slowly drift out of sync, of course, and it 
> doesn't work for anyone else's phone.

Oh ok, mine must work differently then, there is no way to manually add or 
remove contacts from the car, it just displays what is in the phone.  Not 
sure at what point it grabs the data, I haven't played about with adding 
contacts while it's connected to the car.

Also lots of new cars have an "SOS" button (usually up by the rear view 
mirror somewhere) that uses a built-in phone and SIM card to call the 
emergency services.  Some cars even call this automatically within a certain 
time of an accident if you don't manually cancel it.

> Actually, I believe it's because the SIM card is very slow, so the phone 
> caches the values when you put the SIM in.  I was under the impression the 
> SIM cards stored everything of interest about your phone. I could be 
> wrong.

My SIM card apparently can only hold 100 entries, and the entries are only 
just 1 name and 1 number.  In my phone I can store multiple numbers and 
other details (eg email, address, notes etc) for each person, plus the only 
limit is the size of memory in the phone.

> It also means the car is using the radio in my pocket, running off tiny 
> batteries, rather than the radio in the car running off a 20-pound lump of 
> lead and acid.

Or an engine generating 0.1 MW :-)  Interesting point though, I don't know 
on mine whether it's the car or the phone that is actually doing the radio 
comms, I never thought that it might be the car...  I wonder how I can tell?

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scott wrote:
> 
> Or an engine generating 0.1 MW :-)  Interesting point though, I don't
> know on mine whether it's the car or the phone that is actually doing
> the radio comms, I never thought that it might be the car...  I wonder
> how I can tell?
> 

Talk a really long phone call and check how much battery your phone has
used. If less than with similar call without connected to the car, it's
pretty sure that the car is doing the radio comms.

-Aero

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scott schrieb:
> Or an engine generating 0.1 MW :-)  Interesting point though, I don't 
> know on mine whether it's the car or the phone that is actually doing 
> the radio comms, I never thought that it might be the car...  I wonder 
> how I can tell?

If it uses the SIM Access Profile (SAP), you're the owner of a 
four-wheeled, combustion engine powered (and therefore in every sense 
mobile) full-fledged phone. The only thing it lacks is a slot into which 
to stick the SIM card (but chances are the circuit board has solder pads 
to connect one :-)).

In that case, usually your hand-held phone will not allow any 
interaction (at least not mobile phone stuff) while connected to the 
car. Also, neither rolling phone nor hand-held will provide any way of 
transferring a call to the respective other.

If you can switch between hand-held and carkit speakers, it's not SAP 
but classic Handsfree Profile (HFP), in which case your phone is still 
doing the hard work and burning battery power.

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> In that case, usually your hand-held phone will not allow any interaction 
> (at least not mobile phone stuff) while connected to the car.

OK, well I can definitely dial numbers using the phone handset itself, send 
receive texts etc, but the any call details appear on the car display and 
the sound comes through the car speakers automatically even if I dial from 
the phone handset.

> If you can switch between hand-held and carkit speakers, it's not SAP but 
> classic Handsfree Profile (HFP), in which case your phone is still doing 
> the hard work and burning battery power.

Maybe there is a way to switch between the two, I haven't found it yet 
though apart from turning off bluetooth on my phone.

Also what's cool is that if you shoot a video from the phone it mutes the 
music in the car :-)

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scott schrieb:
>> If you can switch between hand-held and carkit speakers, it's not SAP 
>> but classic Handsfree Profile (HFP), in which case your phone is still 
>> doing the hard work and burning battery power.
> 
> Maybe there is a way to switch between the two, I haven't found it yet 
> though apart from turning off bluetooth on my phone.

That's unlikely; usually, carkits feature /either/ Handsfree Profile 
/or/ Sim Access Profile. So far I haven't seen any carkit that did both.

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scott wrote:
> Oh ok, mine must work differently then, there is no way to manually add 
> or remove contacts from the car, it just displays what is in the phone.  
> Not sure at what point it grabs the data, I haven't played about with 
> adding contacts while it's connected to the car.

There's a blue tooth protocol for dialing the phone et al, a blue tooth 
protocol for transferring address books (not unlike what the old Palm did 
over IR), and a blue tooth protocol for accessing the SIM.

It's possible your car grabs or grabbed the address book via the "transfer 
address book entries" when you first associated the phone to the car. My 
phone isn't sophisticated enough that I didn't have to do that manually.

Or... it could be using the SIM bit, if you have a SIM-based phone. (I 
don't.) If there's no way to enter contacts, I wouldn't be surprised if 
that's what's happening.

> My SIM card apparently can only hold 100 entries, and the entries are 
> only just 1 name and 1 number. 

Odd. That wasn't how I understood SIM cards to work in general.

> Or an engine generating 0.1 MW :-)  Interesting point though, I don't 
> know on mine whether it's the car or the phone that is actually doing 
> the radio comms, I never thought that it might be the car...  I wonder 
> how I can tell?

That I couldn't guess. Maybe lock your phone, then try to call from the car? 
(Oddly enough, that seems to crash my car phone interface until I 
power-cycle the car. Either that, or it's an absurdly long timeout.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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clipka wrote:
> scott schrieb:
>>> If you can switch between hand-held and carkit speakers, it's not SAP 
>>> but classic Handsfree Profile (HFP), in which case your phone is 
>>> still doing the hard work and burning battery power.
>>
>> Maybe there is a way to switch between the two, I haven't found it yet 
>> though apart from turning off bluetooth on my phone.
> 
> That's unlikely; usually, carkits feature /either/ Handsfree Profile 
> /or/ Sim Access Profile. So far I haven't seen any carkit that did both.

He meant like what I have in my car. If I'm talking on the car's hands-free, 
and I stop the car, I get a button on the car's interface that lets me 
switch over to talking on the phone without dropping the call. I.e., it 
turns from "headset" to "handset".

If the car is the actual phone, it's less likely that there's a way to 
transfer the call to a whole different phone.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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Darren New schrieb:
>> My SIM card apparently can only hold 100 entries, and the entries are 
>> only just 1 name and 1 number. 
> 
> Odd. That wasn't how I understood SIM cards to work in general.

That's just the way it is - that's how they were standardized, back in 
the old days, when nobody ever thought about storing more information 
than just a person's phone number.

Later, phone manufacturers found that the SIM card standard not only 
sucked at flexibility to store other things than phone numbers, or 
storage capacity, but also at retrieval speed.

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