Joy of Gadgets

The folks at Sony sent me a Sony Ericsson W995A to review. This is the first time I have actually used a Sony Ericsson product, so this is as much a review of the specific handset as it is the experience of using Sony Ericsson products in general.

The phone came in a FedEx box and was clearly used in other reviews. It came with a USB cable, a power charger, an inactive T-Mobile SIM card, and a CD with their version of PC Suite and other documentation.

The phone did not come charged, so it would not power up out of the box. I figured the USB cable would work for charging the phone, but not so. Instead, if you want the phone to be charging AND hooked up to the computer at the same time, you have to daisy-chain the USB cable into the power cable, which has a convenient port on the back of the plug for this purpose. This is worse than having a separate plug for charging the phone!

The phone also did not come with any memory installed. Worse, it uses a proprietary Sony-only memory format. Not having any Sony Ericsson phones around, this means either suffering without a memory card or spending money on a 8GB Memory Stick Micro so I can review a phone I will be sending back in less than two weeks.

One other thing about the phone I received–it was a prototype unit. Why am I getting prototype units when the phone is supposedly shipping? Am I looking at production software? How much does the build quality differ from this prototype with the real production?

So we haven’t gotten into actually using the device yet, and there are already three strikes against the device–strikes Sony PR could have easily corrected by ensuring I got a production model, the phone was charged when I got it AND included some sort of memory card with the device. It really makes me appreciate the work that Andy Abramson’s team at Comunicano does with the Nokia blogger relations program, who truly sets the standard for how these kinds of programs should be run.

Meanwhile, I only tested a few specific areas of the phone: the camera, the media player, and the web browser. I go into some detail after the jump.

Continue reading ‘Review of Sony Ericsson W995Argb’

If you’ve ever listened to the album Joe’s Garage by Frank Zappa–highly recommended–you’ve heard the phrase “It looks just like a Telefunken U47.” As a kid, I had no idea what it was, or if it was even real.

Turns out, it is a real thing. Specifically, it’s a microphone originally sold and distributed by the German radio and television company Telefunken in the late 1940 thru 1958.

Apparently, Frank Zappa collected and used vintage German microphones like the Telefunken U47. In fact, his collection was restored between 2005 and 2007 by Telefunken USA, a company that is dedicated to repairing various vintage Telefunken microphones as well as creating faithful reproductions.

Telefunken USA has a couple of different recreations of the Telefunken U47, this one being the Telefunken U47V Long Body. Using a combination of new old stock parts along with custom-made parts, these microphones are hand-assembled to be as close to the originals as possible.

According to Telefunken USA, the U 47V is big and warm, with a velvety upper mid-range and top end, making it an excellent choice on many sources including vocals, upright bass, brass instruments, and acoustic guitar.

The mics are only available through Telefunken USA and due to the nature of the parts they use, quantities are limited. I have no idea what this might cost, but if you’re looking for a high quality mic, this might be the one for you.

The folks from Radius Products sent me a pair of their Atomic Bass headphones to review when I was writing for The Gadgets Weblog. These headphones are clearly styled to go with an Apple iPod-and even have an iPhone friendly connector-but you can use them with other MP3 players as well. I used them with my Nokia N95 on my recent vacation, and they worked fine.

The Radius Products headphones go in the ear a bit deeper than the typical headphones. They come with 3 different sized soft, silicone earpiece covers, which allow the headphones to fit snugly in just about any ear. They do a fairly good job of blocking outside noise.

The Atomic Bass headphones are designed to enhance hip-hop beats and dance rhythms. They are angled, which supposedly allows the bass sound waves to get longer so they have a much more natural sound. The headphones are also supposedly more power efficient, making the battery charge last longer.

The headphones are reasonably priced at $39.99 and are available now from Amazon.com and other retailers.

Happy Mothers Day to all you mothers out there!

This past week has been a busy week for posts, it seems like. I even managed a post on my internal Nokia blog this week.

The post list this week:

• How Operators Dialed Long Distance Calls (From voip.com/blog)
• Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV (From Digital Music–The Future)
• Click To Call (From voip.com/blog)
• Belkin Desktop Internet Phone For Skype (From The VoIP Weblog)
• Tommy Telephone: The Making Of A Telephone (From The VoIP Weblog)
• The World of Communications, Then And Now (From voip.com/blog)
• Qt 4.4 Brings The Best Of Web And Native Applications Together (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• Sprint Ceding WiMAX to Clearwire (From The Wireless Weblog)
• TopMobile20 Announces Mobile Software Contest (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• Twitter With Your Voice With Twitterfone (From Web 2.0 Weblog, The Mobile Technology Weblog, The VoIP Weblog, The Social Networking Weblog, and The Republic of Geektronica)
• How Sound Synchronizes Up With Pictures (From voip.com/blog)
• Go Back To Your Roots, Carriers! (From The VoIP Weblog)
• Qwest to Resell Verizon Wireless Service (From The Wireless Weblog and The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• What About The Analog Devices? (From The Digital TV Weblog, The Gadgets Weblog, and The Wired Home Weblog)
• Jangl Team Joining Jajah (From The VoIP Weblog)
• How Does A Phone Work? (From voip.com/blog)
• G.729 versus G.711 (From voip.com/blog)
• Your Antenna On Your Roof May Need Replacing (From The Digital TV Weblog)
• More Bars In More Places–Except Where You Go (From The Mobile Technology Weblog)
• Touch Tones and VoIP (From voip.com/blog)

I got an email from Comcast recently that had a lot of crap I could care less about. However, there was a small little blurb that did catch my attention:

As a Comcast High-Speed Internet customer, you’re entitled to receive a wide range of benefits and services at no additional charge. One of these is called Rhapsody Radio(TM) Plus!

With Rhapsody Radio(TM) Plus, you can listen to over 100 commercial-free radio stations; create your own radio station based on your favorite artists; and download 25 free, full-length songs each month.

Simply download the latest Rhapsody Music Software and manage all your music in one place. This is the only music software you’ll ever need!

Click here for more information.

Given that I’ve been looking for a “free” account to try Rhapsody on the Nokia N800, I figured I’d go through whatever crap I had to in order to come up with something I might be able to use on my Nokia N810. Hit the jump for the gory details. Continue reading ‘Free Rhapsody For Comcast Subscribersrgb’

One of the cool things about the Nokia N81 8GB is that podcasts are actually treated like first class citizens now! As you can see, it’s right there with Music.

Disclaimer: Yes, I work there, but they don’t pay me to write about phones. I do it because I like to, and these are my opinions, not theirs. Got it?

There are two ways to get podcasts to the device: either through the various sideload methods or via the Nokia Podcasting application, which is built into the device. Provided the media is tagged as a Podcast in the ID3 tags, the Nokia N81 8GB groups the file as a podcast.

The main benefit this classification has, aside from making it easier to sort your music from your podcasts, is that the Stop button on the music player acts a little differently with a podcast. When you push play again with a podcast, the device will resume the podcast right where it was stopped. I wish it did that with music as well, but I’ll take it for podcasts!

The integration with the Nokia Podcasting application, however, leaves a lot to be desired. If you want to download podcasts direct from the device, you have to go into the Music Player, then into Podcasts, then from the Podcast menu, you can hit the Select button to bring up the Go to Nokia Podcasting menu option. It’s not even an application listed in any of the regular S60 application listings.

Once you’re there, the application looks familiar to anyone who has ever used Nokia Podcasting before. You can use the search tools to find your favorite podcasts, browse the directories, or type in the RSS feed URL for your favorite podcast and have it added. You can set the application to auto-download your favorite podcasts also.

But here’s a kind of obvious point of integration that they missed. If I delete a podcast from within the Podcast menu outside of the Nokia Podcasting application, it’s not reflected as deleted inside the Nokia Podcasting application. I don’t believe the reverse is true, either.

Of course, there shouldn’t be a Nokia Podcasting application anymore, it should just be part of the media player. It would not be difficult to integrate those functions right into the media player. Maybe that is what’s happening, but because I don’t work for that part of the company, I don’t know.

Despite the areas for improvement, this is hands-down my favorite mobile device for podcasts now.

Edit:  Looks like most of the above is also true for the N95-1’s recent firmware update (20.0.015). Decisions, decisions…

The Symbian Guru reviewed nuTsie earlier today. I have to agree, it’s a pretty cool idea for an app. The idea of streaming music to my mobile phone is something I’ve wanted since I purchased a locker on MP3Tunes. However, I have some serious issues with it–serious enough that I would much rather sync my Nokia N95 with Nokia Media Transfer.

1. The app requires that I enable Warning sounds in my profile on my Nokia N95. I turn these off for a reason.
2. Can’t control the volume with my usual volume control. Lame!
3. The tracks are encoded in a lower quality bitrate. Now that’s useful for streaming over EDGE, but I’d appreciate the option of choosing a higher bitrate when I’m using WiFi.
4. Some of the tracks are flat out wrong or are missing large chunks of data.”Us and Them” on Dark Side of the Moon is only 3:29? Try 7:40 (at least on my copy). Oh wait, it is playing the whole song. Obviously displaying the wrong information in the client.
5. I can hear “blips” and such. Not sure if it’s due to streaming, bad encoding, or what. But it detracts from the experience.

I will be watching this app develop. I’d love to see a native Symbian version of this app. The fact this is a Java app is supposed to explain why #1 and #2 are issues.

Now that I’ve had a week with the Nokia N95, I have some more fully formed thoughts about this device. Various observations if you will.

The first thing I noticed about this device was the speed. Everything about the device was snappier. It is a lot faster than my other S60 device in many respects, but it definitely can use more horsepower for some of the multimedia tasks. And yes, the device also needs more RAM to work with programs. And better memory management. It still kills programs without asking.

The Media Player is vastly improved in the Nokia N95. I noticed that with the Nokia Podcasting application that album art now shows up when I play a podcast (or any other music file for that matter). The UI is also a bit better on the player as well.

Something I’ve noticed when powering on the Nokia N95, it vibrates a little bit. I actually think that’s a nice touch since you have to hold the button for a couple of seconds to get the device to start the boot process.

I did get to play with the GPS on the Nokia N95. It seems the GPS wants to see five satellites before it gets a fix on your position. It does a fairly good job of following you once it goes get a fix. I did notice the Smart2Go mapping application seemed to, as I came to an offramp, think I was going down the offramp for a brief moment as I passed it. That could be within the GPS margin of error, though.

One thing of note: the Smart2Go web site offers a map downloader for those of you who either don’t want to use GPRS to download maps or would rather have the maps for most places pre-fetched. You must use the Smart2Go mapping application at least once before using this downloader. The application lets you pick the maps you want by region. For the US, you can download maps by state. I am in the process of downloading the maps for Washington state. If the process didn’t take so long, I’d also get the maps for California as well as that’s the other place I happen to be more than occasionally.

Battery life, let’s not go there, especially if I use anything beyond the basic phone functionality. Let’s just say I keep battery chargers in both my cars and keep topping off the battery throughout the day. I hope Nokia finds a way to make a higher capacity battery for this phone.

The phone feels light given the functionality built into it. There is a small amount of “flex” between the slider/screen and the keypad. A small worry to say the least, but otherwise the build quality of the phone is excellent, as I expect it to be. The slider has a very satifying thunk when I open the phone to the keypad.

The external speakers are suberb. The included headphones aren’t bad, either. You can also use your own headphones if you prefer. If a call comes in while you are listening on your own headphones and they are plugged directly into the phone, the mic built into the phone will be used. If you plug your headphones into the little control unit, you can control tracks, and volume. There’s also a little “switch” that you can throw to lock the buttons. Nice.

Something about the built-in FM radio that is worth noting. Of course, you need headphones plugged in to use it since they serve as the FM antenna. When I first fired up the FM radio, I was asked what my location was. I was able to find my area and a fairly accurate station listing populated my presets. You have to have data service in order for this feature to work, but I think it’s very cool.

WiFi reception on this phone is better than my other WiFi-enabled Nokia phones, at least in the one spot in my house where it is frequently unreliable.

When you are using the phone as a USB drive, instead of putting the phone in offline mode as is done for every other phone that supports this feature, you are simply forbidden from actually using the MicroSD card while in this mode. Better than offline, but it’s still annoying. I know why they do it, but it’d be nice if they could work out concurrent access to the MicroSD card.

Using this phone to download podcasts with the Nokia Podcasting application is finally something approaching the same as downloading them on a computer in terms of speed. I don’t know what the bottleneck is on my other S60 phones, but on this N95, they download fast over my WiFi. That is a huge bonus, particularly when I want to do a last-minute update of my podcasts before I leave the house.

The camera. I haven’t done much with the camera yet. I’ve taken a few pictures. For one picture, I rotated the camera 90 degrees to get a long, skinny picture. When I snapped the photo, it was automatically saved rotated. This saved a step of me having to rotate the photo later. I guess that means there some sensor in there to notice that. That is very cool.

I wish the phone came with a wrist strap. I used the wrist strap that came with the Nokia N73, which of course worked just fine.

The audio recorder built into the phone will record in WAV files now and will record for longer than 1 minute. I’m sure when Ken Camp gets around to playing with that, he will like that.

I have to say that, on the balance, I like the phone a lot better than the other Nseries phones I’ve had, but the biggest flaw compared to the others is the battery life. I would have happily taken on an extra ounce or two of weight for a battery that can do a better job.

I am not even going to attempt to read what’s currently marked as “new” in the RSS reader. At least not right now. I am, however, going to go through what I’ve been meaning to get to for a while and highlight a few older things here:

• GAIM wen Pidgin, yah?: As a result of an ongoing, secretive trademark dispute with AOL, GAIM has now been renamed to Pidgin. Seems like a fitting name for an IM client, if you have any clue what pidgin is. Having lived in Hawaii for a few years, I am all too familiar with Hawaiian Pidgin.
• Why Cell Phones Aren’t Allowed On Planes: Two people: Big-Time Bob, and First-Time Betty. Listeners to KenRadio know who I’m talking about.
• Keep Internet Radio Free: The folks at Pandora remind us that new royalty rates are about to go into effect. This link will allow you to craft a letter to your Congress critters that will be faxed to them free of charge.
• Pink Floyd TV: Ok, it’s just links to stuff on YouTube, but hey. It’s Pink Floyd!
• Skype For Mac 2.6 Improved: The “typing” indicator caught me off guard the other day. That addresses one of my Skype complaints, and it even worked with someone using a PC version that didn’t have this feature. Skype’s PR folks get an F, though. They didn’t tell me about this version even after I expressed an interest to them.
• What Kind of Computer?: For me, it’s more than just one or more computers. It’s mobile devices such as my Nokia handsets and now the Internet tablet.
• Why the Nokia N95 is Better than the iPhone: Most importantly, you can get it today.

That’s the stuff older than a week. I’ll have to come back and do the others later.