Joy of Gadgets

This past week, I have primarily been using my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic as a way to listen to my podcasts. However, I have been using it without a SIM card. This is good, as it extends the battery life of my Nokia 5800 substantially, particularly when all I am using it for is browsing via WiFi and listening to podcasts.

The bad thing? Well, just about everything else. Some applications, such as Mail for Exchange, will not work when a SIM card is not inserted. An error similar to the one pictured on the right is shown. In other applications, you are asked to confirm whether or not a connection can be established in offline mode.

I understand why you might want to prompt in this manner. On an airplane, or in other areas where you must be “radio silent,” this kind of prompting is necessary. The current Offline profile should be maintained.

What we really need is a new Profile type. Called it SIMless. It would allow the WiFi and Bluetooth radios to be activated as if a SIM card were there without the stupid “Create connection in offline mode” prompts.

How about it, Nokia? Seems easy enough to do.

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• Maximising Battery Life on the Nokia 5800 (allaboutsymbian.com)
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I will admit that I’ve thought a device like a Chumby might be kind of a cool nightstand clock. It provides a lot of functionality at your fingertips and has kind of a cool form factor.

The thought of dropping $200 or more on a handheld gadget is not something I like to do. It also seemed quite wasteful when much of the functionality I want can be had with a device I already own: the Nokia N800 tablet.

What you see here is the home screen of my Nokia N800, which has all the information on it I need 98% of the time: the current time and the weather. The clock is a program called cairoclock, which is an applet that appears on the home screen. It’s resizable and movable.

The weather is an applet called omweather, which I configured to pull the 3-day forecast for Gig Harbor (and those temperatures are in Fahrenheit, also configurable).

The IP information is courtesy of the HomeIP applet. Good for “just in case” I need to SSH into the tablet (I have Dropbear SSH installed).

The only other thing I configured on it is a bookmark for the one site I’m likely to need to look at while in bed: the website for the local school district. They post school closure/delay information on the front page.

Granted, the tablet can do a lot more. However, for a nightstand device, that’s really all I want. If I need to do anything more serious, there’s always my office just down the hall

I really, really like the guys at PhoneNews.com. They post a lot of hard-hitting stories about mobile phone industry. They are also trying to go ad-free by running a rather peculiar promotion–buy a refurbed Nokia 2610 from AT&T for $0.01 after rebate. If 10,000 orders come in by the end of February 2009, the site will take down its ads. Sweet!

I have no reason to believe the guys from PhoneNews.com aren’t on the up-and-up here, but go to their post and follow the directions there! Even if you don’t get your rebate for some reason, $9.99 for an AT&T phone shipped to your door with $10 in airtime is a steal!

The Nokia 2610 is very much a low-end, no-frills phone. Great phone to have for a backup! (Nokia still pays my paycheck at the moment, so you might want to take my words with a small grain of salt.

Tuesday, I received my white Nokia E71. The phone’s been out a while, as I’m sure anyone who follows a Gadget blog or reads Wired can tell you. Since I work for Nokia, you should realize the following is my own opinion on the Nokia E71 NAM, i.e. E71-2, RM-357, or at least one other name I’m not allowed to use in public.

The first thing I noticed when I opened my package was how small the box is compared to even the N96 I received not too long ago. It’s about half the size. Inside the box, pretty much everything inside that wasn’t shrinkwrapped was cardboard instead of plastic, making the packaging a lot more recyclable. Very green, even if the inside of my box is mostly black

Inside the box, I got the phone, battery, 2.5mm stereo headphones–more on that in a minute–power adapter, micro USB cable, manual, CD. Pretty much everything I expect to come with the phone, though the matching wrist strap and carry case were nice bonuses.

I had seen and even handled some pre-release versions of this handset, but they are never as good as the production units. This one felt wonderful. Solid construction, not too big. The keys are crammed together, but it’s pretty easy to push the right ones.

Continue reading ‘The Nokia E71 NAM: The Good, Bad, and Uglyrgb’

The Nokia E63 is a lower-cost version of the wildly-popular Nokia E71 that was released several months ago. It’s a little thicker than it’s cousin, and the case is plastic instead of metal. It also downsides the camera to 2 megapixel without auto-focus, and loses HSDPA data and GPS.

However, the handset still has a 320×240 color screen, 3G data (at UMTS speeds of 384k/s), WiFi, an awesome keyboard, and the ability to easily switch between home and work profiles. And it has something the Nokia E71 doesn’t have: a bog-standard 3.5mm headset jack on the top of the handset!

The price is certainly right on this handset: 199 EUR before taxes and subsidies. Three variants are being produced to account for the different 3G frequencies around the world, including for the North American market, i.e. for use on AT&T and Rogers. No word on whether or not we’ll see this device taken by a carrier, but this device could easily become under $50 with a two year contract!

The other phone I got last week was the Nokia N96, though this came from the folks at Nokia’s Blogger Relations program instead of T-Mobile.

My first impression is that it is a cross between the Nokia N95 and the Nokia N81. Unlike the Nokia N95, and like the N81, the headset jack is up top. This is an infinitely more useful place for it to be when I, say, want to set it on the treadmill like is shown here.

Unlike the N81, and like the N95, it has a nice 5 megapixel camera. Whereas the Nokia N81 has a similar quality camera to the Nokia 6301 I used to take this picture, the N96 has a good camera. I’ve posted a few pictures on my Share on Ovi account.

In the “cross between the N95 and N81″ category, it has both a 16gb internal storage memory and a MicroSD slot for additional memory storage. I was able to load all my 4 and 5-star rated song from iTunes on my phone and I still have a ton of space left over!

Speaking of which, it took an order of magnitude less time to sync 7.6 gigs of data to the N96. Instead of the 700k a second I have typically gotten with most other Nokia devices I’ve played with, I was getting around 5000k a second (give or take). The device actually enumerates as USB 2.0 unlike previous Nokia’s that I’ve played with, and it synced much faster!

The phone has a newer version of S60 on it, S60 3rd Edition FP2. It has several enhancements that I discuss on phoneboy.com that I won’t get into here. They are nice usability enhancements over previous handsets.

Some other random things I’ve seen that are improvements:

• A kickstand to allow the handset to stand up on its side.
• The volume increments in 5% increments with a headset plugged in. Nice idea, but it doesn’t actually seem to work.
• A power-save mode the handset goes into when the battery life drops down to 1 bar. I’m not sure exactly what it does.
• Geo-tagging photos. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
• Slide-to-lock on the top of the phone like the N81. I know people have different feelings on it, but I like it.
• Dual-LED flash. Not Xenon, but it’s still better than the N95.

However, based on the experience with the software build on the phone, I am not entirely happy. It reminds me very much of the early public releases of the N95-1 in that it was buggy, locked up, and otherwise did weird things. I can get this to happen with just the built-in apps and Mail for Exchange 2.7 using the v11.018 firmware. If I were the product manager for this program and saw these problems, I would have at the very least questioned if this product was ready for release.

Some of the weird things I’ve run into include:

• Music Player playing weird, sped-up, garbled audio in the middle of a song or podcast. Pausing and restarting the audio clears it up.
• After several hours of being on, applications will randomly lock up, crash, and hang. Power cycle restores functionality.
• Applications do not always reorient from landscape mode properly. For example, try taking a photo/video and emailing the video to a friend. Screen should orient out of landscape mode, but it does not.
• The phone does not respond to the media keys at all or takes more than a few seconds to do so.

Of course, I have no doubt that my Nokia colleagues will fix these issues in due course. If anyone inside the mothership wants more details on the problems I’m running into, look me up in the Nokia Phonebook.

A while ago, when I was writing for Gadgets Weblog, I reviewed the Solio H1000 Universal Hybrid Charger. At $79.95, it seemed a bit pricey. Especially since I could never get the solar part of the charging to work very well.

Meanwhile, Mark Guim over at The Nokia Blog got a Solar Cell Charger by Daylight Savings. Unlike the Solio H1000, which required special cables, this appears to use standard USB cables both for charging–in case you live someplace where the sun never shines–and for the compatible charging tips for phones.

The battery in this bad boy is 1200mAh, which is enough to fully charge the Nokia N95 8GB that I typically carry. However, I will likely have to heed Mark’s warning about the included charging cables being too short and use the Nokia CA-100 cables I already keep handy.

I ordered one of these guys because the price was fantastic–$24.99 including shipping. We’ll see how the solar panels fare up here in the Pacific Northwest.

A developer involved with the Nokia Internet Tablets posted on Jaiku about the latest iteration of the Maemo software that runs on these tablets. Note that unlike the Symbian OS that runs on all of Nokia’s smartphones, the underlying Linux OS of Maemo is open source–80% of it is, anyway.

The big news–although not entirely surprising–is that the the next release of Maemo is going to have HSPA support, and it will be open-sourced! Is that for data only or will it have phone features, too?

There is also mention of photo sharing, a higher-quality camera, and a faster OMAP3 process. Wonder just how this stuff will all go together. Will it be a replacement for my beloved Nokia N95 8GB? Will it be a data-only device or a phone as well? What’s it going to cost?

Software is one piece of course. I wonder what the hardware’s gonna look like. We obviously won’t know for a while yet, but it’s nice to have a new piece of gear to look forward to.

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If you want mobile email on the go, but don’t want anything else–including basic phone functionality–Peek may be just for you.

Peek is an email-centric device. In fact, that’s all it does. No web browsing whatsoever. However, the reviews of the device have universally said it handles email fairly well.

The device is a tri-band GSM device (GSM 850/1800/1900) that operates at GPRS speeds only, meaning it will fetch data slower than dialup speeds. However, GPRS is pretty much available everywhere, which means it will work, just very slow.

While it doesn’t say so explicitly anywhere in the FAQ, it appears that Peek’s service does proxy the email before sending it to the device. Given the relatively pokey GPRS speeds, this probably a good thing.

The device will set you back $100 and the U.S.-based service will cost you $20 a month for unlimited data. However, if you take advantage of this special offer, you can get 3 months of service for half off!

Me? My email-only device right now is a Nokia E61i. It’s a bit more complex of a device, but unlike the Peek, it handles web-based email, SMS, and can make phone calls in a pinch.

Via Boing Boing Gadgets, Picture from Geeksugar

Let’s get straight on with it:

• How S60 and Share on Ovi Can Help You Meet (From The Convergence Zone)
• Cell Ranger: Boost Your Bars (From Joy of Gadgets)
• Need Your Gadgets Blessed? Go to Japan! (From Joy of Gadgets)
• Three Power Outlet Panel: About Time! (From Joy of Gadgets)
• Sarah Palin Action Figures (From Joy of Gadgets)
• Timeband by Fairchild Model C-6110 Digital Alarm Clock (From Joy of Gadgets)