the new iphone4

In May 2007 I got a new mobile phone which had a 5 megapixel camera, video calling, video editing, Bluetooth&tm;, flash player, customisable folders…. everything one could wish for.
It was a Nokia N95.
It still works.
It still is better than the iphone 4.

Nokia 5800 is a soft touch

Well, I am nearing the end of a contract and looking rather desperately for the successor to the Nokia 6500. To tell the truth I thought it would be more like an N Series phone when I ordered it and did not realise that was not S60. Still it has proven a reliable and rugged gadget and has logged 100′s of hours of gaming time thanks to the RBS Rugby 08 game installed on it. ( the 09 looks rather silly so far).

So, I look around and the Nokia 5800 shouts out, like imagine a touchcreen S60 – sounds great, oh and I am dying to get back to a standard 3.5mm jack plug as anything else really does not work the same – way too fiddly.

Nokia Announce :
“As Nokia’s first mass-market device with a touch screen, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic turns a ‘user interface’ into a ‘human interface’ by truly putting people first. For example, we’ve introduced the Nokia Contacts Bar, which is like a digital RSS feed on your life,” said Harlow. “By adding the benefits of touch screen technology to S60, the world’s leading smartphone interface, Nokia is taking the familiar and giving it a human touch. We have used touch technology where it really adds value such as the Contacts Bar, Media Bar and clever shortcuts from the homescreen to menu items such as calendar, profiles and clock. ”

The phone has, as we now expect, everything , like every thing you can imagine from a mobile. Lay it on me.

Worth mentioning in retrospect that the Nokia N95 survived the fall into the toilet and total immersion.

Death of a Mobile Phone

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.

iphone for the home

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.

Samsung Omnia Turned On

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.

Nokia 6500 Slide

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.

Nokia N96 – power in your pocket

Just been on the Nokia site and I am transfixed again. They have managed to cram all of the features of the N95 into a newer, sleeker model, with 16 huge gigabytes of on board flash memory

The ipod is dead, long live the N96

I can feel a certain longing feeling growing in by bowels, softly reverberating and calling me to the fatal joy, that sad consumerist moment….

I shall have it…

Roll Back Nokia N95 Firmware

The removal of the tracking facility on the N95 was, in retrospect, an absolute piece of thievery. In one fell swoop Nokia removed the raison d’etre of the phone.

I had initially been attracted to the N95 as it had sat nav/ GPS built in and in the early days of its useage, once I sussed out the Nokia Maps plug in .
I used to select endpoint of journey and start tracking and I was off. I did not really need the voice prompts, I could glance at the screen or give it to a passenger and just say : are we on the blue line.

Nokia have removed this useful function, leaving you with a GPS device which is incapable of Navigation ( unless you pay for it. ). I suspect that the providers (Orange in my case) were moaning about a lower than anticipated ARPU ( average revenue per user ) and hence the subterfuge.

Does anyone know a way I can have this changed, can it be rolled back??

Nokia N95 8GB

Happy as I am with my Nokia N95, I cant help but get dragged into the nasty conumerist world of upgrades.

Just because the new one is in a shiny matt black, just because it hs a slightly larger screen than the normal silver Nokia N95, just because it has 8gig of memory, I do not feel the need to start pining for an upgrade or looking upon my relatively NEW mobile phone as kind of past it, or old hat, or passe.

You see, I am an adult and I am capable of viewing and judging things based upon their intrinsic quality.

Nokia Maps after Software Upgrade

Nokia maps have completely flummoxed me of late. I upgraded my Nokia N95 software as I had been promised a faster GPS connection as a result. I put up with the loss of my beloved Brian Lara Cricket game, but that is a waste of time anyway.

I rebooted and waited – a standard procedure for some of today’s latest mobile phones. On opening up Nokia maps I was saddened to see that the phone had no recollection of my previously lovingly installed maps from Smart2Go. I love zooming in on rethymno, Crete to see my old haunts. I tried reinstalling the maps using Smart2go Maploader ( a lugubrious application ) to no avail. I was becoming rather disillusioned by the software upgrade, losing my cricket and all that.

My next step was Orange who advised I called Nokia ( buck passers ). I did call Nokia, indeed I spent an hour on hold at various times of the day and night.

By chance and through a process of elimination I discovered that the old Smart2Go maps are no longer supported by the new Nokia Maps application, I downloaded the new Nokia Maps Loader and was soon zooming into my sat nav maps and even enjoying a markedly faster connection time to the satellites I believe are up there somewhere.

The unfortunate thing was that my original download of the Nokia Maps App had included a free 3 day trial of their navigational software ( with voice prompts) and it took me 4 days to solve the issues with me Nokia N95 above….they also seem to have removed the tracking facility on the new map software.. cheeky, like they are trying up revenues…