Author Archives: David K

Nokia have announced their latest top end Smartphone this week, the N8. Will it be enough? I don’t mean to save the company, or anything dramatic like that, Nokia is big enough that they will be around for years in one market or another. But will it be enough to stop the tech bloggers complaining? (and I include myself in this group). On paper it looks very good, at least as good as the N95 looked when it was announced, surely the last great smartphone from Nokia. Compare that with the N97, which at announce time looked pretty average, and when it was available something like ten months later, was even more underwhelming. At least the N8 has a top specification now, and will be available in a few months, so should still be able to compete. I think hardware wise, the N8 is up there with the best, all that remains is to see if Symbian3 is good enough to go up against a revitalised iPhone OS, Android 2.x and even Blackberry v6. Nokia have a few months to sort out a decent set of applications to have in the Ovi store and make sure the thing runs smoothly. A series of well placed and relevant ads to get people aware and a good set of deals with carriers, something Nokia has always been good at, and they might have a chance.

Could this be the phone that makes Nokia cool again?

I was called into a client today in town. No problem, grab the shoulder bag (man purse?) with all my gear in and drive to a free parking area, a short walk and I was at the client. A five minute job involving a mallet (don’t ask) and a fifteen minute chat, and I was finished. So, may as well grab a coffee at Nero’s and get a bit of work done while people watching, or so I thought.

At home I have BT Broadband which has always given me access to BT Openzone hotspots all over the country, usually with a bit of hassle, but I can normally get it working. This time, no such luck. The laptop would connect but not allow me to log on and the iPhone just hung trying to load a web page. Couldn’t even use 3G on the phone because it insisted on connecting over WiFi, this is where S60′s always asking how to connect it is  an advantage, on the iPhone you have to turn off WiFi to force it onto 3G (and I just know I will forget to turn it back on) . When I did get it on 3G, I remembered that the tether option had gone away at the last software update!

No worry I thought, I’ll use the unlocked MiFi. Hmm, real struggle to get it to connect and only 300k download speeds, but at least it worked. For a while. It seems that it runs the battery down even when switched off, so not having checked it for a week or so, I only had a few minutes of power! So now I have it plugged into the laptop with a Heath Robinson affair of wires and connectors to charge it.

I could have used my old T-Mobile Dongle, but I never remember to keep it topped up with credit, and really, how many means of connecting do I need to get a reliable system? This stuff should just work!

Almost half an hour of messing about to get connected and even then at a pretty slow speed, it’s no wonder normal people don’t bother.

I don’t really know how I’ve missed seeing anything about the Airport Express, I think it’s because I just thought it was a wireless access point and never took much notice, but it turns out it’s much more than that. My thanks go to Jon Honeyball for pointing out in a column in PC Pro that these thing are really quite useful, and I’ve become a big fan and now own two, with another on the way.  They can indeed be used as a AP, plugging into your router with a Ethernet cable and allowing you to share your connection wirelessly, and they also have a USB port on them, so can  share a printer or USB disk. But the hidden gem is that they  have an audio jack as well, allowing you to connect a set of powered speakers. These speakers then show up in iTunes and you can direct your playback to them. So, from iTunes I can select the speakers attached to the PC, or the ones in the lounge or bedroom (and soon the garage) or all four sets and have music or podcasts play throughout the house. Throw in the iPhone Remote app and you have a rather neat system for pipping music everywhere.

I’m sure there are other solutions for doing this but the Airport Express is an easy to setup, relatively cheap system that gets my vote.

Has anyone else noticed how often smartphones are cropping  up in TV programs? Palm are the masters at this, a year or so ago it was the Treo appearing in all the action programs like 24, Bones, and CSI and now the Pre is showing up all over the place. Everyone in 24 is using one,with a nice sequence of Jack flicking through open cards, Without a Trace had a brief flirtation with the iPhone but now seems to be back with Pre’s and the latest one I spotted was in CSI New York. Mind you, in that they were using in for a video conference using the non existent front camera!

The iPhone gets a lot of spots as well, it seems to be useda lot to show mug shots to witnesses, something that is probably not to far from reality, but the speed they pull pictures up is a bit far fetched.

I even spotted an android phone being used the other day, but I can’t remember what it was in.

I guess it’s a clever way to get you products out there and visible, has anyone else spotted any?

Picture the scene, our hero, lets call him Jack, has just had a big argument with his boss on the phone. He’s just threatened to expose him and his missmanaging of the crisis to the president, he ends the call with a stunning ultimatum, snatches the phone away from his ear and, with a crescendo of music in the background, stabs ineffectually at a non responsive touch screen to end the call…….
What he, and all TV goodies, and baddies, need is a dramatic way to end a call. There is something satisfying and final about flicking shut a flip phone that says “I’m done and don’t mess with me”. You just don’t get the same effect with a slide or a touch screen. Let face it flip phones are cool, ever since Captain Kirk first flicked open his communicator and told Scotty to beam him up, that’s all a true geek has wanted their phone to do. If it can get on the Internet, pick up emails and stuff, so much the better, but really, it just needs to flip.
Here’s a 2010 prediction for you, the first company to produce a decent Smartphone in a flip format will have a runaway success on their hands.

I’m not sure when this happened but Google’s streetview seems to have been expanded to cover a lot more places in the UK. All the locations I tried on my iPhone now come up with some really good quality pictures, and the data doesn’t seem to be much more than about six months old. Try your own post code and see what comes up, and if you want a rather odd picture of a street lamp try searching for “Victoria Esplanade, Mersea” and pan round to the seaview.

Odd pictures aside, this is now a pretty useable service.