SSH on the Nokia E63

I just got a Nokia E63, a long-awaited replacement for a support phone from work. It's not as advanced as, say, a Nokia E71 or a Blackberry in terms of business-related features, but it would do quite well for my purposes.

(My philosophy in mobile phones is that so long as I can connect — through voice, SMS or WiFi — I'm cool with it. :))

The QWERTY pad is a sweet spot for the E63: soft enough so you won't develop calluses, yet with enough toughness for tactile feedback. I'm more interested in the apps I can place in the phone, though.

The apps I loaded on the E63

For starters, I downloaded Opera Mini — the WebKit-based Nokia Mini Map Browser bundled with the phone just wasn't up to size with what I planned for it.

I then downloaded Google mobile apps. The E series comes with email integration, but I've grown to love the Gmail mobile client.

The kicker, though, is S2 puTTY, the S60 port for the nifty puTTY secure shell client. Hey, I'm a command-line zealot: I'd much rather get things done on the CLI, if tools exist; and accessing a shell through a mobile phone is a geek's dream.

Just like its desktop equivalent, S2 puTTY worked as advertised. Setting it up is similar to what we're accustomed to. I opted not to add my SSH private key so I don't have to worry about adding weak link in the security chain.

screen session using the S2 puTTY client

I was able to log in to my Linux boxes, even going as far as accessing the screen sessions. As expected, scroll-back sucked, then again, nothing's sweeter than using mutt from a phone. Heh.

Geek dream: Using mutt on the E63