While doing a regular checkup on Slashdot, I've came across a new product announcement concerning PuTTY being ported to Nokia Series 60. If you are not familiar with PuTTY, it is the best freely available SSH client for the Windows platform (it is also available for Unix).

As I'm a Nokia user for almost 5 years now, I've instantly downloaded the software and installed it on my Nokia 6600 cellular phone. I must note that this version (1.3) of PuTTY for Series 60 is in its fourth beta, so I won't go into details with the product's pros and cons, but rather share some initial usage information accompanied with a couple of screenshots and a simple bug report.

Installation and usage


I've used the Nokia PC Suite for installing the program (PuTTY_s60_1.3beta4.sis) and everything went like a charm - after clicking a couple of OK and next buttons, the package was successfully installed. The readme file states that the package wasn't digitally signed because some troubles with installing new certificates to a Series 60 device, but the author noted that all of the official releases are PGP signed. Check the readme.txt file situated in PuTTY's zip file for the appropriate public key information.

After the install process is finalized you should restart your Nokia device. This is done in order to make the new monospaced fonts working properly. The PuTTY executable can be found on the bottom of your Menu folder. While starting it for the first time, the product will record a few seconds of audio from your internal microphone. This is done for the purposes of creating a pool of random data to be used for random number generator seed. The GUI is so simple, but on the other hand it provides all the configuration settings mobile SSH client users need to use.