Category : Mobile Phones
Well I was recommended the HTC Hero by a lovely Mel at Orange upgrades ( over the Samsung HD Omnia ) and I am forever in her debt.
The Android powereed phone is like a natural progression into the area of cloud computing. I had already made forays into this via extensive usage of Google Apps and the HTC Hero just took it to a new level – cloud computing on the move.
The best thing you can say about a new gadget it that it is intuitive – and it is to the max!
Touchscreen is a joy and far more user friendly than the Omnia i900′s fiddly stylus dictated function.
What HTC have delivered here is a beatiful package which does credit to the Android’s ease of use.
Apps install simply and the market has thousands of useful packages.
Everyone keeps going on about the iphone but in reality this is only because it is their only experience of a high end smartphone, if any of them had owned a Palm Treo 600 some 8 years ago they would not be so amazed. God I get bored with iphones.
The camera is a bit dodge though.
Well I have been using the Samsung Omnia ( SGH i900 ) for a year now and have grown to love it.
Indeed I have come to rely heavily on its additional features, my email and the handy little Route 66 Sat Nav.
It all came crashing down last week, though when the phone appeared to be maxing out its RAM – you see unlike the quite locked down Symbian Phones or the Apple OS which keeps itself removed from its applications in essence, Windows is more feminine about its associations, it takes every piece of software personally and creates registry entries for them all, cute but not without issues.
I am at fault, of course, I had started installing 3rd party apps with little care or thought and one of these must have got itself into the start up registry entry and then managed to loop through some memory intensive and insensitive routine.
A long labour of turning on, sudden realisation that hard reset was only option, spine tingling fear as I entered 1,2,3,4 and allowed the Omnia to erase ALL data on its 16gigs…..
Then, a joy, I loved turning it back on, it was like an old friend, I had forgotten just how fast it had been in its youth, even with SPB Mobile shell it leapt and danced in time with my finger taps – the baby is back and whirring.
I am even due an upgrade from Orange, who now will be offering the 3G iPhone and am completely ambivalent, sing my sweet Samsung
Having just returned from a lazy 1000 mile traversal of France in a Renault Traffic I found the Sat nav facility on the Omnia superb. I have all the Western Europe maps on a small memory card which I bought on ebay
With the Route 66 application installed the i900 whirred into life. Sadly the battery was taking a hit as was the fuel tank of the Renault but we made it there.
The Sat Nav responded with alacrity to every sinuous and treacherous bend in the French transport system, it located the rare Garage on the peage and even warned when nearing campsites.
The phone ( the Omnia ) is a splendin travel companion, combining Sat Nav, Wifi, DivX movies, a very sturdy 5 Megapixel camera, mp3, radio, 16 gig of storage and of course a telephone. I would like more games but I guess they will come and a final reques would be a big stonking battery do that the machine stays on when you want it turned on.
Well this morning it happened, either carelessness or Mobile Suicide took place. The Nokia N95 leapt from safety to the bottom of the toilet bowl.
It was swiftly retrieved and stripped down and put out to dry.
Mobile phones seldom survive complete immersion and I will be expecting meltdown when I next try to fire it up.
Seems sad, and it is, that such a powerful and beautifully designed piece of kit should die.
bye bye baby bye bye
It has been replaced with the 6500 Slide for now.
Nokia have recenlty unveiled the Nokia N86. This latest of the superb N Series mobile phones boasts an 8 megapixel camera with Karl Zeiss lens.
This will be a beauty I am sure. They have steered further away from the almost boxy exterior of the N95 to deliver a curvaceous chassis which is reassuringly solid to the touch.
These days one does not need to list the features of an N Series mobile, save to say that it does everything we have come to expect from a mobile phone.
Additionally – the phone somes with an accellerometer to allow you to take N Gage gaming to a new level.
what is more the phone – as you see – comes in white as well – wowee
I am totally in love with my Samsung Omnia, but I do miss the Nokia N95 days of total faith in a phone and not having to look at it to do everything.
Well, I want to turn one on, would love to I reckon.
The ipod iphone delirium continues and I see normally sensible people go weak and jibbery over these gadgets. The Nokia N95 continues to offer a far superior OS and performance than the iphone.
But do you think they will ever ( Apple that is ) start supplying the iphone for the home, a cordless telephone that looks like it is an iphone.
Well, I saw this picture and wondered…
To tell the truth I am not certain that I actually believe this to be true.
Had been having a few issues with my Samsung Omnia of late, particularly with the SMTP settings and somehow not allowing me to send emails. The mobile runs Windows Mobile 6.1 and, though familiar with the Windows configuration of POP and SMTP and IMAP and all the lovely protocols I could not get email to send.
I called Orange who suggested that smtp.orange.net would work, it didn’t. Next they talked me into downloading, installing and paying for a subscription to Blackberry Connect ©. 24 hours later I had an answer – Blackberry Connect © is not compatible with the Samsung Omnia.
This was getting rather more and more annoying, it is great being able to receive your emails 24/7 but extremely frustrating to find that you can’t reply to them.
Next the helpful operators suggested I add port numbers :995 and :465 to my incoming and outgoing mailservers respectivley. However there are no fields to allow this setting in the Windows Mobile Device.
Orange’s final suggestion was for me to have a look around to try to solve the problem myself.
Then I hit on the result…Windows Mobile 6.1 Hot Fix for Sending POP and IMAP E-mail – worked a treat.
The dialogue above may be short but the total time taken was 2 weeks and many phone calls and much swearing.
Getting more turned on by the lovely touch Omnia I managed to grab the only piece of iphone that is really missing from the Windows Mobile experience. – the sliding touch unlock bit.
My first installation of a 3rd party GUI tweak ( Port Splitter was still working ) was masterful.
If anyone is looking for a slide to unlock function for a Windows Mobile Device the lookee here : S2 applications for Windows Mobile. – it is superb.
It was never going to be easy choosing between the Samsung Omnia and the HTC Touch Diamond to replace my Nokia N95 but in the end I was swayed by the Omnia’s larger screen, higher onboard memory ( 16gig ) and DivX playback facility. I kind of knew at the time of ordering that I preferred the Touch Diamond, it looked more sturdy and compact, more professional. My sister Jessie had though had a recent Samsung model which had impressed me at its build and usabilty pushing me towards this brand for the first time ever.
I received it and was pretty pleased with its initial appearance and functionality, I had used windows mobiles before and hadn’t really likes the operating systems, but Windows Mobile 6.1 seemed pretty featured.
With 16gig I was naturally going to fill it with a decent bit of music and it was playable via Windows Media for Mobile or Touch Player – neither was really that quick to use without stylus though.
my main gripe, though, is based upon connectivity. The Nokia N95 had a standard 3.5mm audio jack plug, a standard usb port and a simple power socket for charging. This made it easy to use, easy to charge and easy to synch. The samsung Omnia has decided to use the single port for all interfacing. This means that you HAVE to have the correct leads upon you always and also that you are unable to charge the phone and acces the audio output simultaneously.
I was saddened to discover that the mobile phone had no inbuilt satellite navigation system nor mapping software – unlike the Nokia N95 – and spent a long while trying to find a suitable GPS Mappping software for it. In the end ) after relying on Google maps with GPS for a while I managed to install Route 66 but had to go about strange methods (Port Splitter ) to allow the Navigational Software to run from an internal GPS.
My first Omnia stopped working after 6 hours and the second ( current ) one does seem to go into some sort of deep sleep occasionally which means that only a battery removal and reinsertion will allow a reboot.
I see the recently released Nokia N96 and do lust after it a bit, they are so well made, so easy to use and so compatible with ganes and software. I am amazed that I have not yet managed to find any interesting software for Windows Mobile 6.1 nor games for the Samsung Omnia. With the N95 or even the Palm OS Treo I found an abundance of plugins and software to keep my relationship fresh.
Locking the phone is a c*nt as well. Which makes me jealous of the apple mobile telephone which has that nifty lock thing.
Everyone these days seems to be buying the iPhone, I wont ever, they all look stupidly smug, like somehow they have caught “cool” off their phones.
I have had the Nokia 6500 slide for a while now and it is as I would have expected.
But this has quite annoyed me.
For a start, when I synchronise it with Nokia PC Suite it gives me the option to install Nokia Maps. i would like to, even though the mobile has no GPS functionality it would still be nice to search and look at the maps. Any way that is that really, you cant install them on this.
More annoying is the preinstalled TrafficTV app in the phone. on initial boot it looks like a maps app sort of thing and I played with it for a while, but was worried lest I rack up any data costs. I tried deleting it from the phone in case I started playing with it after a few beers, it wouldn’t let me.
Worse was to come, I called Orange Customer Services yesterday on a separate matter and they told me that I had been signed up for a £4 a month contract to TrafficTv, I had made doubly sure that I had not accepted any terms or conditions to that affect. I am super wary of such things these days.
happily they cancelled this dubious obligation on my part and we parted on good terms. I even took up a free 2 month evenings and weekends data offer so felt quite pleased.
To summarise, watch tgose prebundled applications installed on your new mobile phone. They are throwing a lot of money in development of these devices and need to claw it back by increasing average revenue per user……… Sneaky bunch they are.
OK, please ignore my post of yesterday, or was it the day before I am not sure. I looked at all the hugely featured mobiles available and came to the decision that it was time for something solid and sensible. A bit like the choice of a Nokia 6230 a few years ago.
I phoned Orange, and with little deliberation or consideration opted for the Nokia 6500 Slide in Black. Orange took very little time to dispatch and deliver this lovely little number. It charged up nicely and turned on with a wink and a smile.
It is fully featured, yet not overdone. Although I am the type to enjoy exploring menu structures ad infinitum I think I had explored the 6500 in a couple of hours. The camera is a 3.2 megapixel Karl Zeiss © lens. and is a joy to use.
I will miss the GPS functionality of the N95 as well as its Wifi Sniffing capabilities, but it is all mine.
