The Phone Show

Posted by Lester Madden under Smartphones, Symbian

Interesting YouTube series on the smartphone industry and the Symbian Foundation in particular

Polymer Phone

Posted by Lester Madden under Smartphones

Fancy a phone you can roll up and put in your pocket?

Take a look at this

Welcome To The Darkside

Posted by Lester Madden under Smartphones

It was only a matter of time before I went out and got myself a new phone. For the last 6 years all my phones have been Nokia devices, before that they were all Windows Mobile Devices, so I needed a change. My brother-in-law recently got himself an iPhone and a few ex-colleagues got themselves Android G2 Heros, both of which looked pretty good. So which way did I jump?

We’ll eventually after a lot of ‘oh look at this’ from my brother-in-law I opted for the iPhone.
My shiny new device arrived on Saturday morning in a tiny box. Apple don’t supply you with any form of instructions leaving you to fend for yourself. I had to do a Google search just to find out where the sim card went.  The only instructions were from O2 that simply said download iTunes and activate your phone.

Getting the contacts off my Nokia and into the iPhone was no easy feat either, no phone swap wizard here. o2 mumbled something about looking at their help pages on how to do it, but after wasting time I decided to do it my own way and backed-up and imported into Google Contacts. This works really well as the sync between Google and the iPhone is seemless. After I was setup I spent the weekend installing some apps. I love the appstore, it’s possible to spend hours searching for things to spend money on.

There are a few things I don’t like however, well one really. I have always heard people say the battery life on the iPhone sucks. I can’t really tell as at the moment it’s not out my hands for more than 20 minutes at a time, and during that time it has background process running that are connected to the web retrieving email and what not. Time will tell when I am away from home and using it for lots of calls, but for the time being the battery is lasting a day so it’s not a problem.

People complain about the call quality, I can’t judge call quality yet but I did get cut off on my last call. I’m hoping it was a one off experience. I didn’t care so much about being cut off, it was only O2 doing their welcome call and trying to sell me upgrade packages and insurance so it actually did me a favor.

My biggest gripe is iTunes. iTunes is awful, it’s up there with Lotus Notes in the bad software league. I installed a load of applications from the appstore and today when I tried to copy music to the device iTunes deleted most of the apps. iTunes actually apologised for the fact that it couldn’t delete all of them which was a nice touch in the same way a user friendly virus might apologize if it was unable in infect all of your files. iTunes is so awful, having tried to copy music over for the best part of the morning I’m considering carrying an MP3 player in future just to listen to music.  I can’t figure out how to move just a few tracks over as I seem to have to create play lists for every album I want copied. My last attempt resulted in all my wife’s music appearing on the device so now I have the added bonus of trying to remove them. In general it’s really annoying having to use 3rd party software just to copy things to a device. I prefer a device being treated as mass storage so I can do what I want.

But all that aside I love the iPhone and have a heavy dose of iPhone love (that stage were you start looking around for accessories that you don’t really need but feel you should have) but iTunes is that dark secret that iPhone owners don’t talk about, it’s the app that must not be named.

Contrary to popular belief I’m not dead

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Smartphones, Software, Symbian, Travel

I left Symbian at the end of August and have had a nice relaxing September at home. I haven’t been up too much, other than catching up on a few xBox titles I missed out on.

Sony Ericsson Satio

Posted by Lester Madden under Smartphones, Symbian

One of the guys here in the office managed to get hold of a Sony Ericsson Satio to play around with a few weeks ago.
He loves it and I must admit that it looks pretty hot.

The Thursday blues

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Smartphones

It’s been a bit of a crap week this week. My cat has been ill for some time now and we had to make that painful decision to have her put down on Monday. That was a real gut rencher I can tell you.

Samsung Jet – UFO Video

Posted by Lester Madden under Smartphones

After the disappearing i8910 HD video that Samsung produced recently I was really keen to see the viral video they produced for the new Samsung Jet.

New Nokia Devices, E72 & 5530 XpressMusic

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Smartphones, Software

Most of you will know that I love both my Nokia 5800 and my Nokia E71. I’m torn between them in a love triangle, I love the touch screen but I love the flexibility of a keyboard. The N97 will partly end my woes as I’ll have touch screen device with a keyboard. But it will only make me yearn for device with touch, keyboard, and HD screen. (a projector wouldn’t go amiss either) Nether-the-less it will keep me happy for a while.

In the meantime Nokia have announced a few other devices based on S60 5th Edition. (Symbian)
The E72 (click here for a review) which is an updated of the highly successful E71 and the 5530 XpressMusic (click here for a review) which is a 5800 clone.

Nokia E72

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic

Samsung HD Camera Trick – Revealed

Posted by Lester Madden under Smartphones

Remember back in early April Samsung posted the disappearing Omnia i8910 HD trick to YouTube?

In case you have forgotten

Well, there were all sorts of suggestions how they did the trick, but here is the answer.

The never ending story

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Smartphones

How would you feel about a book that was different every time you read it? Here is an interesting idea for a book based completely on QR Codes and twitter.