It is funny to see Techmeme going wild over a story which I broke over 36 hours ago!
Come on guys, that’s old news. Try to keep up. 
Archive for the 'mobile' Category
Courtesy of Paul Giltinan of Choice Communications, I have a loan of a Nokia N95 to try out for the next couple of weeks - excellent!
The first thing which strikes you when you pick up the N95 is how light it is. It is quite bulky (99 x 53 x 21 mm), so you expect it to be heavier than its 120g.
The next thing which hits you is the quality of the 2.6″ screen. At 240 x 320 pixels and up to 16 million colours it is the same resolution as my E65 but because of the larger size, it just looks way better!
A lot has been written about the poor battery life of the N95 but I haven’t found that to be the case. That may be because the N95 and the E65 use the same battery and I am used to its short life (!) but I suspect it has more to do with my not having the Wireless Scanning enabled.
The one time the battery levels did drop sharply was when I was following my Twitter Stream over 3G (instead of the usual WLAN at home).
The GPS application which ships with the phone is of limited use as it can never seem to find the satellites!
I tried a Fring call using the Skype client on the phone today to Conn O’Muinechain but the call quality was appalling and we had to revert to a normal call. This is more likely a problem with Fring, or Fring’s Skype implementation than the N95.
The camera in the phone takes very high quality pics (see photo below) and video but be aware that the 160 onboard memory will run out quickly. You will need to supplement it with a Micro SD memory card (it supports up to 2gb).
The bi-directional slider and the way the screen flips from portrait to landscape automatically is very impressive.
Overall, the N95 is a lovely phone and if I could afford it…
Several of the Irish mobile operators now have mobile broadband offerings and the offerings are getting more and more compelling!
All the operators are using the same Huawei external USB mobile broadband modem. O2 claim that unlike their competitors, their version will have drivers for Windows Vista when they launch.
The data for O2 is speculative as their offering won’t be officially launched until July 2nd but their roadmap, according to O2 spokesman Kevin Heffernan, is to ramp from an initial 3.6Mbps to 7.2Mbps by year end and then 14.4Mbps next year! Also, initially they were to roll out with a 6Gb download cap but it is now looking increasingly likely that this will be revised up to 10Gb.
O2 are saying that they are positioning this to compete with similar offerings from Vodafone and 3Ireland but if I compare these figures to my current Eircom DSL broadband connection, it is: 3mb, €40 per month (ex VAT), and a 40GB download cap. The biggest difference between the two is the download but I don’t download that much so that shouldn’t be an issue.
As I see it, the O2 mobile broadband product could easily start to replace DSL connections either for home users or for Solo Soho setups. The mobile broadband obviously has the advantage of being mobile so you can take it on the train, for example and work away while traveling! And with Ireland having the most expensive line rentals in Europe (€9 per month more than the EU average), this is one more nail in the coffin of fixed lines here.
O2 are also rolling out an EDGE network which should be fully rolled out by q1 2008 according to Heffernan. This means wherever the 3.6Gb HSDPA (or 7.2 or 14.4) is unavailable, the modem should fall back to EDGE’s semi-respectable 256kb. This is at least twice as fast as GPRS.
Finally, starting in 2008, O2 will start on building a HSDUA network - this will give upload speeds of 14.4 Mbps eventually!
Are DSL’s days numbered in Ireland
I was looking around this morning for Irish mobile operators who stock the Nokia N95.
- I asked O2 and they said they will be stocking it in a number of weeks and couldn’t give me an idea of a price point. However, I have it from an unofficial source that they will offer it for €399 for the Active Life 250 plan.
- I asked 3Ireland and they told me that it had failed their network tests and so they wouldn’t be selling it for the moment! and
- I asked Vodafone and Vodafone are selling it currently. The shop I was in (Oliver Plunkett St., Cork) didn’t have any in stock but can order it in. For the Perfect Fit 200 plan they sell the N95 for €439.
Online it is available from Expansys for €739.95 and from Mobilefly from €619.32
I saw a couple of Nokia N95’s recently and they look like a really nice handset.
I’d love to do a review of the N95 and maybe even a comparison between the N95 and my E65 (a bit like I compared the E65 and my old N70 - except more detailed!).
Does anyone know how I would go about getting an N95 for review?
Zinadoo.com is an online website creation tool specialising in creating websites for mobile devices! When you register with Zinadoo, you are setup with a free zinadoo.mobi subdomain. .mobi is the top level domain created specially for mobile devices.
The timing of this is very coincidental as I did an interview with Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi, on Friday which I will be publishing as a podcast on PodLeaders.com later this week.
The online website creator makes constructing mobile aware websites really easy. You can do all the usual stuff like adding links, creating pages, click to call, etc.
The only thing I couldn’t figure out was how to rename the About Us page to simply About!
Zinadoo also offer the ability to upgrade to your own .mobi domain (so I’d be tomraftery.mobi instead of tomraftery.zinadoo.mobi).
Best of luck to Zinadoo with this, it seems like an interesting app in a rapidly emerging space.
I see James has a piece up about Zinadoo as well.
Recent Comments