Cooking with Juergen Kamau, part 2

Dishwashers are the greatest luxury since sliced bread. It’s a luxury like power windows on a car – so unnecessary – but just great to have them.

You know we’ve recently moved into a new apartment which btw also means that I am now as broke as a self-employed, tax-paying idiot can be by the end of the year. And still I urgently wanted to get my hands on such a dishwasher – found a good (= used) machine for sale here in Frankfurt for a really low price. You’ll especially learn to appreciate such luxuries if you’re the one that will have to carry it up to the 4th floor on the evening of December 23rd – with all your friends (= free help) being away due to public holidays.

Now as the year is coming to an end, I thought about publishing a blog post on some of my favourite luxuries that money can buy: foodstuff that I like buying from time to time:

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Pictured above are just some of the various things I’ve bought today:

  1. (Japanese) Green Tea Mochi from Taiwan
  2. Sheerpera (from an Afghan bakery in Hamburg) – Afghan sweets made from milkpowder, sugar, almonds, lots of cardamon and pistachio
  3. deep-frozen vegetarian dumplings
  4. soy beans for a salad with soy sauce & sesame
  5. Japanese seaweed (Nori) for some sushi
  6. fresh Tofu (from Germany)
  7. Japanese Udon noodles (from Taiwan)
  8. sesame
  9. fresh green pepper (Biber) from Turkey
  10. Mixed congee with red beans and sticky rice (it actually is a red bean soup which is very much appreciated during winter times, see also here)
  11. Turkish cheese, very smooth. Many Germans actually don’t know what feta cheese has to taste like and go for the much cheaper Greek supermarket version which isn’t that nice. Sure, there may be many different versions and tastes, but this one is my favourite (i.e. Turkish > Greek).
  12. (Japanese) sticky Sushi rice
  13. Chana Masala Ready-To-Eat mixture (chickpeas + onions + herbs)
  14. Fried & dried vegetable chips from Taiwan. Cheap & tasty, new product.
  15. PG Tips tea – because the black tea for sale in Germany just doesn’t do it for me.

So…..yes, good food is important to me. I know there are others who are willing to spend a fortune on high-quality and/or exotic food, but the one I like is very basic and I usually prefer locally produced food. A purchase like the one above is thus very special to me.

Our next task will be to set up a vertical garden on the balcony, i.e. fill a bag with soil & seeds in this Kibera-style and wait for good weather.

Everyone, please have a good start into 2010 and may the Gods of good food and fine taste always be with you! :-)

My Top 6 S60 apps

The reason why every new mobile phone will be compared to Apple’s iPhone – obviously a very succesful phone with a superb user interface albeit known disadvantages that even let this consulting company diagnose some Apple fanboyz with the Stockholm syndrome for their ignorance…. the reason why almost everyone out there likes the iPhone is because it comes with a HUGE market of “apps”: applications & games, something that’s not necessarily important, but will make you pull out the phone when you’re bored.

Not so on Nokia’s side. I am using Nokia phones since 1998 and have recently swapped my N95 for an E72 – Nokia’s successor to the very popular E71 with a QWERTY keyboard instead of the T9 keypad on traditional phones. I can’t find the link right now, but remember having read these days that Nokia will from now on concentrate on QWERTY phones on one hand, and on the other hand push touchscreen phones. Some, like the new N900 which runs on MAEMO, feature both methods, so this range will be very interesting in the next few years.

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The E72 is based on Symbian S60, an operating system that has been around for quite some time now. And although it’s been quite popular in terms of sales, there are almost no interesting apps available for this platform.

Remember, we’re in December 2009 now, and the iPhone has been out for at least 2.5 years, with the Apple App Store being online since July 2008. Since then, over 2 billion (!) apps have been downloaded from their store.

The iPhone may be a crippled piece of monoculture for MacBook users, with a fixed battery, a very restrictive policy, no out-of-the-box functionality you’ll find on many other phones and a list of other flaws – but it STILL wins over most other phones – just because it comes with those apps. And also because it comes with a very usable browser.

Apps, which are dearly missed on Nokia’s S60 platform.

I may not be the perfect reference when it comes to testing different applications, but I can tell you that I’ve only kept six (6) additional applications on my E72 that I think are useful. There may be more – there certainly have to be more – but these six are the only ones that make sense to me for the moment:

1. Gravity

Scr000009There can’t be enough praise for this application. It’s the only – really GOOD – application for S60. A Twitter / Identi.ca / FaceBook / Google Reader client, a software that will allow me to feed my three active Twitter accounts directly from the phone, check some subscriptions on Google Reader or comment on my friend’s FaceBook status updates.

Nokia obviously knows this fact (they are busy promoting it on Ovi.com and other sites), but they had even failed to invite the developer (@janole, from Berlin/Germany) to their Nokia World 09 event which took place in Stuttgart this year. It’s not only a failure, but a disaster.

You can actually stop reading here because it won’t get better. In my not-so-humble-opinion on this, most – if not all – future applications for Nokia phones should be designed like Gravity. And remember that Gravity was designed & coded by one humble programmer only. Which goes to show what’s possible if you really want it. If interested, pls make sure not miss out this interesting interview with @janole. On this interview, Jan Ole also mentioned that any serious developer should get an iPhone or an iPod Touch to get some orientation on what a good user interface should look like. Hej Nokia, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel – just take the 100 best apps from Apple’s AppStore and port them to S60 (if possible). I know this approach has been discussed before on Nokia Forums, but I for one am still waiting for this …luxury.

A fully registred version of Gravity will cost you about 10 EUR – but it’s the best app you can buy for a Nokia S60 phone these days.

2. Fring

Scr000013Fring is a chat & VoIP client for your phone. You can use it to connect via Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo Msg, ICQ, AIM, Facebok, Twitter, last.fm & Co with your friends. It’s free, it works, it wins.

Fring is a nice app that I’ve tested right from the start two (?) years ago, it’s been constantly updated and will even work on a brand new phone like the E72. I don’t know how these guys are earning money with the provision of such a well-developed tool, but they have been around for some time now, are serious about what they do, respond to user requests and also cover many different operating systems.

It’s not that you’ll be seeing me chatting via my phone that often, but it’s great to have a mobile Skype version.

3. QR-Code Scanner

Scr000019Nokia BarCode / QR Code Scanner tool is a rather inconspicuous little tool, but of such great functionality to me that I’ve put a link to it on the stand-by screen of my phone.

While surfing the web, I sometimes see pages that I would like to instantly open via my phone. So I click on a barcode icon on the lower right corner of my Mozilla Memoryhog browser and – voilà – a QR-code window pops up with a link to that page, encoded via a nice little Mozilla FF plugin. I then only have to activate the scanner tool, scan the image and will instantly have the link or encoded text on my phone. Dead simple. And it works. I’d even pay for this app and the browser plugin if it wasn’t free.

4. YouTube client & Google Maps

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I am not a YouTube kid, but since it enables me to stream videos to my phone, I’ve started appreciating this nifty application – provided free of charge by Google.

Something similar applies to Google Maps which I actually prefer over to Nokia Maps just because it’s faster. Nokia Maps 3.x may be better these days as it also comes with preloaded maps and an optimized application. However, Google Maps worked right from the start. There wasn’t any iteration of updated versions which would remove this or that bug like on Nokia Maps. Google Maps just worked right from the beginning.

I’ve also tested full-blown Navigator suites for Symbian S60, but why should I pay extra if I can have free navigation via Google Maps? I am on a 1 GB flat fee on the phone anyways… so I am back to using both Google Maps and Nokia Maps – whichever is more appropriate for each situation.

5. Spb TV

Scr000003Speaking of multimedia content, I’ve been searching for an application that will stream live TV to my phone. Something like Zattoo for the European market, but with an S60 client (which they unfortunately don’t have and which could be their killer application).

And again, as much as I am not a YouTube kid, I even do not like TV that much. But sometimes I do, and those moments I want to watch it on my tiny phone screen. Sorry, David Lynch!

So the only option I can think of is Spb (IP-)TV, a rather strange application for USD 14,95 with a lot of unknown stations from around the world. The screenshot above shows it playing BBC Arabic with picture-in-picture mode.

Now, I probably won’t understand what they are saying as only learned how to order a cold beer in modern standard Arabic, but there are other channels on this (still locked on the screenshot, now unlocked) application. Some are in German, most in English, some in French, Russian, etc. Interesting. I understand German, English and French, so there’s some choice for me. It may not be the best TV app for a phone, but it works, has a unique and smart interface and made it to my Top6 list of Nokia Symbian S60 applications. And besides – is there any other S60 TV app?

Exactly. There are no alternatives.

6. Internet Radio

Scr000022Came shipped as a pre-installed app on my N95, had to add it manually on the E72 though (use the one from the Nokia 6120 Navigator). Works brilliantly well, perfect user interface, perfect out-of-the-box experience, no unnecessary information for the user which would probably only confuse. Choose your desired (internet) radio station by name, location/country, language or genre. Unfortunately, Radio Okapi from the DRC isn’t included anymore, but they do have triple r from Australia (which I obviously like :-).

It would be very interesting to know WHY Nokia hasn’t included this wonderful application with all their phones (why not on Nokia’s E-Series?), but I guess that it’s because they want to push us users into purchasing music files via their online music store. Ah, marketing. Horrible.

——

Marketing may be one of the reasons why most applications for Nokia’s Symbian S60 still suck in 2009. Probably a mixture of greed and mismanagement that have led to this problematic situation where we see Nokia still producing great phones (c’mon, they are well engineered), but totally fucking it up on the AppStore side. Ovi.com is a really bad joke at the moment – the website is even more informative than their S60-based tool to access the Ovi store. It’s a chaos with mostly shitty applications, I’ve spend quite some time on Ovi.com, trying to find useful applications, only to quickly realize that I am much faster googling for anything of interest instead. Ovi.com may experience a relaunch in the coming month, but to imagine that they can pull anything positive with it right now is a dream that will not come true with the current version. Nokia is supposed to be the leader in the smartphone market – and their app store is anything but smart.

Scr000017Nokia’s Ovi.com app store or even individual stores on the interwebs – all of these initiatives are pretty much useless if we won’t see more applications like the few good ones above.

I don’t know which phone I’ll buy next, but I can tell you that I’ll put the availability of decent & cool applications as a top priority on my list of criterias for any upcoming phone. If Nokia can’t deliver, well then I’ll switch to Android or maybe even an iPhone and its OS (as much as I’d hate doing that).

Nooooh!kia…

Seriously, Nokia…

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…what kind of crippled, 7″ long USB cable is this you’ve shipped with the new E72?

Sure it makes sense to have a smaller cable for the pocket, but please, it is so useless at this length. Very annoying.

Else, the phone looks like a great new toy. A bit different from the E71 which was almost all metal. Coming from an N95 though, anything in monoblock shape will be better for me.

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So.. yes, I’ve eventually settled on a new phone after 29 (!) month. I know it will not have the same smart browser I’ll find on an iPhone, a HTC Hero, a Motorola Droid / Milestone or even Maemo-based Nokia N900, but it will give me real keys to press with tactile feedback, provide we with a known operating system and I’ll be able to shot snapshots @ 5mpx and multitask some applications. Now let see if it lives up to all expectations – the build quality already is a bit different from the E71 which I remember being a bit slimmer and much more even on the edges. Like when you move your thumb between the screen and the menu keys, you’ll notice a sharper edge.

What I’ve come to appreciate on the N95 is a good grip on the rubberised back cover. The E72 having a metal plate, it still seems to provide a better grip than the E71. The lock on the back cover isn’t as strong as on the E71 though, and I even had to bend the metal cover a bit to fit it better into its position. Not so nice on a brand new phone.

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Whatever. It is mine, I’ll have to use it for the next 24 month and it will hopefully do a good job. The moment I unpacked it, I realized how really small it is. Annette even mentioned that it would be too small for my fingers, but it’s surprinsingly easy to hit the right keys.

You know I’ve been waiting for this phone I had never actually held in my hands before I bought it (because it wasn’t yet on the market), so I had to rely on the user generated opinions you’ll find online only. But something similar actually also applies to the N95, and since I am no TED fellow or something like that, there’s no swag aka free E71 coming my way… so a purchase like this one has to be well planned. I got mine via a 24-month contract as a subsidized phone. Since I am normally using a prepaid card only (with a 1GB data flat), the new SIM will remain – unused – on the old phone. 10,- EUR / month for the next 24 month = cheaper than buying a new phone for ~ 360,- EUR.

Talking about money, the “Kikuyu” in Kikuyumoja probably isn’t such a good idea. I’ve recently spend most of my savings on a new kitchen from IKEA, or let’s say..

from this:

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to this:

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Not that big, but it’s MINE and I’ve built it with my own hands. Very rewarding. :-)

Considering that my kitchen corner in Embu looked like this:

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… the real difficulty is to find the right partner who will understand that even average kitchen corners will be superb when compared to the alternative. And mine in Embu even was a brand new one! I am mentioning this because my sis has an awesome kitchen with all extras. It’s these two worlds we’re living in that sometimes still make me think: yes, Germany, nice & comfy. But do I/we really need all these extras? Maybe one of the reasons why we’ve only now – at this advanced age (yeah!) – agreed to give up the single room appartment and move into a bigger one (from 25 sqm to 76sqm, actually).

Anyways. I haven’t been offline or on a blogging hiatus – just working on the new kitchen and renovating my new home.

As for the E72, it’s a great phone and I will certainly come back for another, more detailed review, even though I’ve also said that I actually don’t want to do a review this time. I am too much of a geek not to waste some precious time on a new gadget.