mobile phones – Page 10

Mobical & Nokia N95 “redesign”

I started using the free synchronisation services @ mobical.net and am pleasantly surprised at the ease with which I can now synchronize the address book on my mobile phone with an external website.

Mobical isn’t perfect, and I just use it to backup and edit my data more conveniently, but nevertheless it is a bit better than using MS Outlook (which, as an MS-Windows solution, isn’t free of charge) and best: it works. Hassle-free.

…which makes me WISH that my prefered webbased email provider should offer the possibility to actually synchronize a mobile phone’s telephone book as well as the SMS / MMS inbox, bookmarks, notes and, most importantly, the calendar with my email box. Just a neat all-in-one solution.

I wonder why in a world of wide networks and a huge repository of good, free and open software, some tasks like the exchange of data are still such an issue?! Just think of the various Character Separated Values, Comma Separated Values or Colon Separated Values (CSV) formats that exist as there’s no common standard on this. *sigh*

Which gets me to the next issue that has been bugging me for some time now: The Nokia N95 is a great telephone as it comes with lots of useful multimedia features which are still hard to find with other phones.

However, having switched from a Nokia 6230i that offered an ideal keypad to key in short messages and other text, i find the buttons on the N95 rather unuseful and also ugly. Especially the keypad just below the top screen is horrible. I wonder who passed this design from R&D to production?
Anyways, in short: i like the phone but think that it still comes in an ugly packaging. Especially the front cover could enjoy some redesign. This should actually be possible as it is only secured by four screws on the back.

the design issues i am having with the N95…

So what’s the task?

1. the keypad on the front cover (“S60 keypad assy”) is way too narrow and I understand it was already moved down and away from the screen to shorten the distance to the actual number keypad (Nokia calls this the “ITU keypad assy”).
While writing text (e.g. sms), I sometimes type in a wrong letter which needs to be corrected. Hitting the delete (“C”) button on the front panel sometimes – unfortunately – results in hitting the red phone button by mistake => the phone goes back to the standby screen. Argh. A redesign thus should include the delete button to have a bigger size. Also, the overall size of the keypad should make use of the whole space left on the front cover.

2. Other slider phones from Nokia such as the 6110 navigator or E65 come with a gently inclined front cover. While writing text on the N95 number keypad, my thumb often hits the edge of the front panel. This could be avoided or limited by removing this artifical border and reshaping the front cover so that the thumb may freely move between the (lower) number keypad and the keypad on the front cover.

3. The front video camera on the upper right corner looks like as if it has been put there at the last moment. Obviously, there should be a better way of moulding it into the front cover.

4. I “secured” the display on my N95 with some BRANDO display protector (foil) as it a) looks as if the screen actually is a bit sensitive to scratches and b) there’s a gap between the display and the frame = no seamless transition between the display and the frame as seen with other phones (= which shows that such an approach to a better design is possible).

my 5-minutes paintshoppro’d version on a change I’d like to see on the front cover keypad..

As these modifications only apply to the cover, and exchange covers are already available via ebay & co, such a redesign should actually be possible and isn’t too far fetched. Chinese manufacturers (since you’re masters of ~~copying~~ adopting designs anyways) – are you listening?

from iGoogle to GoogleReaderMobile

…so I changed my feed reader today: from iGoogle – Google’s personalized homepage – to (the mobile version of) Google Reader.

BECAUSE:

iGoogle looks like this on my laptop screen:

igoogle screenshot pc

and like this on my Nokia N95:

Screenshot0007 Screenshot0008

==> opening items takes some time and is a bit old-fashioned. While it’s good to obtain an overview on what’s new on each feed, it actually only lists items in a static order and you’d have to continue loading another page in order to see all feeds. Hence the need to switch from iGoogle (which I’ll continue using on my laptop) to Google Reader…

…which looks like this on my laptop:

googlereader screenshot pc

and like this on my N95 (==> http://www.google.com/reader/m !):

Screenshot0009 Screenshot0010

Obviously, accessing my feeds using the dedicated Google Reader – also because of it’s better navigation – makes sense. Hey guys, this thing is fast and it works!

All it requires is this awesome little export to opml utility that generates an *.xml file which may then be imported onto your GoogleReader settings page. In case you’re having different tabs installed on iGoogle, just merge all xml files into a big one. Kudos to Mihai, author of the OPML utility.

It’s fast, it’s simple, it works, it wins!

AOB: Soapstone Simpsons. Kenya believe it? :-)

my 15 minutes review of the N95

Obviously, there’s no real substitute to a laptop computer.

There are those phones that come with a working QWERTY keyboard, and others that do not but offer the connectivity to a bluetooth keyboard instead (such as the SU-8W). Such a phone with a way too small key~~board~~pad is my Nokia N95. “It’s what computers have become”, as Nokia advertises it.

Only: you can get a full size laptop computer for the same amount you’d have to cough up for a Nokia N95. In other words: for an amount of around EUR 600,-, this phone has to be really good. But it isn’t.

It primarily is a phone, and as such it does it’s job quite well. The interesting, multi-tasking operating system Symbian S60, 3rd (feature pack1) does a remarkable job, and it is while working with this phone that you realize how this little gadget actually works. Much like an iPhone, I suppose, that also offers an interesting GUI which takes time to load – and sometimes hangs itself up due to a system-hiccup. A reboot as the interim solution, or the flashing of the internal firmware does the job. Frankly said, with banana software that ripes with the customer and short product cycles, I never expected anything else but exactly this behaviour. Another drawback besides of the ever draining battery (this has improved over the time now and I’ve managed to keep it running on one battery charge with normal usage for something like 48 hours – which would include lots of SMS and listening to music) is the narrow keypad, which makes entering text a pain in the…fingers (the multimedia buttons, actually, not so much the 0-9, *# keypad). The delete (“C”) button on the lower right of the front buttons is just next to the so-called “multimedia button”, meaning that I sometimes accidentally hit the multimedia button, and I have to switch back to the draft folder within the SMS menue where the started sms was – fortunately – saved automatically. Also, the other multimedia buttons on top when you slide down the front part are just useless. I hardly ever use them!

Now, those are the bad sides of the phone. And there have been numerous reviews on this phone during the past 2-3 months, a huge fan base around the world that diligently describes every new trouvaille, so nothing, really nothing is unmentioned. As for the Nokia N95 vs. the Apple iPhone – I am 100% d’accord with Steve Litchfield: the iPhone is 5 years ahead, but it lacks a LOT of features even average, mass-market phones such as the Nokia 6230i or the SonyEricsson W810i already have.

Which gets us to the hightligts. I initially decided for this phone coz I started using the mp3 player that came shipped with my previous Nokia 6230i. The phone had been “pimped” with a 2GB multimedia memory card (MMC) and thus had some “issues”: a) indexing took ages whenever the player was started afresh (after rebooting, as the index list wasn’t saved for whatever reasons) and b) it sometimes just rebooted out of the blue. So the idea was born that I would need to invest into a new phone. I wanted to get a phone with a working mp3 player, a decent internet browsing facility (~ screen size) and, most importantly, a good camera. The Nokia N95 has all this!

And this btw is also why I didn’t go for a Nokia E61i or the brand-new E90 communicator, both from Nokia (the E61i is very tempting indeed, only that it doesn’t have such a nice cam). The N95 DOES have a great cam (for a phone, that is!), it has EVERY possible communication interface there is: USB, IR, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA (UMTS 3), HSDPA (3.5G), a reliable mp3 player that remembers where I stopped the last time, even after rebooting the phone in between (nice) and the ability to record videos in near DVD quality (with a mono microphone though, which is kinda sad compared to the stereo mic on the N93).

So the point is: the N95 is a multimedia phone, and as such it does a great job.

And then of course there’s the e-mailing thing. I know there are other phones that do this job much better, even those with a push client etc (Blackberry & Co.), but for my private & “always-on-the-road”-needs, the internal e-mail client just works.

Heck, it even allows me to attach photos, video, audio files or other content!
Well…I guess some of these HTC PDAs running on Windows Mobile 5.x /6.x aren’t bad either (i hear you, Aegeus :-) and I should give them a try next time.

I switched back from using GMail to (the German freemail provider) Web.de which offers IMAP. This constellation is more reliable than GMail and even GoogleMail’s GMail dedicated java applet something hangs. For quicky checking my e-mail on the road, this is the quickest solution. Me I like… :-)

Oh, and btw: I didn’t pay anything for the phone so far, as I got it subsidized with two contracts – which are supposed to generate revenue for the network provider and pay up the subsidization. There’s a montly base fee, but apart from that, nothing else unless you use the two SIM cards. Well, I won’t.

p.s.: how could I forget to mention the awesome GPS inside the phone? You know what they are saying about men and how they never ask for any directions once they’re lost?… so this little add-on is just sweet! :-)

magical stuff

22072007057

My dear friend Nicky managed to secure this MagicalKenya package from the Kenya booth on the International Tourism Fair in Berlin (ITB Berlin) earlier this year.

After resurrecting her iPod Mini with a new battery, she rewarded me with these goodies: some posters, a tourist map, a cd with a promo video on tourism and why Kenya is THE perfect holiday destination and something like a scarf that reminds us of a Kikoi, or maybe also of that drapery one often finds underneath the TV & VCR setup at a typical middle-class home. Neat!

Another Kenyanesque moment that brought a smile to my face was when I discovered the pre-configured video podcasts inside my new Nokia N95:

Screenshot0003 Screenshot0004

As mentioned earlier, the ability to instruct this phone to go online over a wireless broadband connection such as UMTS (3G), HSDPA (3.5G) or even my local Wi-Fi (at home & at work) and downloading all this content by itself – without any other computer in between – is just very very sweet.
These days, I hardly ever get to watch TV, so being able to pull the desired content from the net “on the go” is just a great help.

node-hopping

Just a side note: while reading Christian’s latest post on knowledge sharing within companies, I just came to realize that I had instinctively used the blogosphere for gathering useful informations on my new Nokia N95 telephone.

Interesting applications, utilities and widsets? User experiences, shortcuts on the menu or tips on how to optimize battery runtime? The international blogosphere +? multimedia platforms such as the popular poparchive? youtube or flickr deliver all you need – without even a single search through Google.

Hopping from one blogging “node” to the next, the need for simple googleing becomes almost obsolete, as others have already compiled interesting articles such as? a “TOP 10 must have N95 utilities” list.?
So instead of doing a Web 1.0 search through Google on keywords such as “Nokia N95 appz”, I instantly consulted del.icio.us for anything on “N95” and received a list of quality links that would give me quick results. Whereas I always needed to check out various Yahoo!Groups in the past for an interesting file here or there (those small java applets that run on Nokia’s S40 OS-platform)? or -? even worse – forums that only sometimes come with a? “sticky thread” where all interesting and important things? are gathered in? an FAQ-collection, the blogosphere? delivers much more useful info on a topic. Selected, tested, rated and – most importantly – communicated to others.

And here I am now, happily runing a few selected and tested (!) applications on? my new phone. This whole process of gathering informations on how to personalize my phone to my needs just took me a few hours of reading different blogs. Sweet :-)

direct access to multimedia content (N95)

I am yet to figure out how to actually improve the different services provided by my new Nokia N95, and since I am a? bit short in time these days, I try to limit my current N95 activities to small issues – discovering new stuff one by one.

What I eventually managed to run as a service is the streaming of video podcast. This service is just sweet as it enables me to download videocasts through a WLAN (@ home & @ work) or GPRS/UMTS (3G) directly from? the phone.

==> Whereas an iPod Video still requires some syncing with iTunes + the pysical connection to a host computer (dito the Zen Vision:M I had used for some time), the N95 directly accesses the net. This way, all you need is network coverage and some memory space on your phone (I just ordered a 2 GB microSD card).

My next task will be to figure out how to make screenshots from the phone…

m.uhuru.de & co

Earlier this year in March, I discovered that the WP-ShorStat plugin I had been using for a long time actually congested my database, so I cleaned up the database by simply deleting all WP-SS values on my db.

I had to do the same today, as – just in a time span of 4 months – WP-ShortStat again bloated my db to an extent I just didn’t like. Mzeecedric already suggested the other day to use external statistic tools only – which is a very smart idea to keep your WP-database clean.

While visiting Christian at his desk on friday afternoon, we talked about using Google Analytics, and I really have to admit that I am a bit slow when it comes to implementing new stuff on my site. ‘Nways, I consequently switched all my statistics to Google Analytics and currently looking for a plugin that implements some important stats (= whatever you like to appear on your GoogleAnalytics dashboard) to the WP dashboard – just what WP-ShortStat did, but much better.

Oh, and in case you’re using WP on your site + are tired of implementing the code into you site, pls try this awesome GoogleAnalytics plugin that does a bit more than simply adding the GA code.

Also, I took this opportunity to activate the WordPress Mobile Plugin by Andy Moore, who is an active member of the dotMobi group.
Considering that mobile phones are rapidly becoming the IT platform / interface for those who don’t use a desktop pc / notebook, it does make sense to prepare websites so that they run on the tiny screens of most mobile phones. Oh, and Andy also blogged on the upcoming Mobile Web 2.0 conference… :-)

You know these ppl want you to register another domain ending on the top level .mobi – which I think is a bit absurd, as subdomains actually do the job:

m.uhuru.de ==> kikuyumoja.com, optimized* for mobile phones

Using the “m” subdomain makes much more sense to me (and others), unless of course you’re Mzeecedric who is already using the m. subdomain to extend his zung.us domain into m.zung.us :-)

*[at the moment, m.uhuru.de is just a redirector to my blog, which has the above mentioned WP Mobile Plugin installed – so the optimized content is only visible through mobile phones or emulators…]

the mobile code

One of the initial reasons for getting a new phone was that I wanted to have a good tool that allows me to blog “from the road”, as I had already done that last year on December 30th through my old Nokia 6230i while waiting in the lobby of a neat Hotel in Mombasa. With the Nokia N95 in my hands, this task seems to be a bit easier now, although I still have to figure out how to enter hyperlinks + the ~~keyboard~~ keypad is a bit disappointing. Should I switch to a Nokia E61i?

And….haiiyaaa…there’s SO much more to write about this new gadget, but then – the internet is full of interesting stories + I am horribly short in time these days, so the mobile code below actually says it all. Ama? :-)