I’m writing this post in Terminal 3 of Heathrow Airport waiting to board a flight to Chicago (and then another to Vegas) for Microsoft’s MIX07 conference.
I’m looking forward to the conference, the line-up of talks looks really impressive and I’ll get a chance to meet some great people.
What is really cool as well is that Pat Phelan has ensured that my phone charges while I’m there will be minimal! How did he do that? Well, he mapped a Cork number (+353212349915) to my TruPhone number.
Now anyone who calls me from Ireland can call me on the Cork number Pat provided and, as long as I’m in a wifi zone, I will receive the call without incurring any roaming charges. And with Truphone, all outgoing calls to landlines are free until the end of June!
The only time I expect to incur call charges is if I have to call someone on mobile.
I have been trying unsuccessfully, to sign-up for Jangl’s service for several days now.
Part of the process involves calling their service, choosing and entering a four digit PIN. However, every time I have tried this, Jangl says it doesn’t recognise the PIN I have entered.
The explanation can’t be as simple as Jangl doesn’t recognise the DTMF tones from my phone because to enter the PIN, I had to enter 1 and it recognised that, no problem.
Maybe I should try again using 1111 as my password!
I took a couple of close-up photos of my bookcase to compare the quality of the cameras in the Nokia N70 and the Nokia E65
Here is a copy of the photo the N70 took:
and here is the E65’s photo of the same bookcase (in high quality mode):
As you can see from these images, the N70 photo is higher quality! The colours from the N70 are richer and there is a lot of noise in the image from the E65.
The fact that the N70 takes better photos than the E65 is strange given that the N70 was released well over a year ago and the E65 has just come out.
Making calls from your mobile over wifi, instead of your mobile provider’s network, saves lots of money on call charges. This has the obvious consequence of reducing the income of the bloodsucking mobile operators (all together now, awwwww).
To ensure you can’t do this, some mobile operators have crippled the ability to make Internet calls on the phones they sell you as this video demonstrates:
If your mobile operator has done thisto your phone, shame on them. I presume re-installing the original Nokia firmware on your phone will bring back the Internet calling functionality. Can anyone confirm this?
In response to my last post about which replacement phone to get for my dead Nokia N70, several people have suggested that I get a Sony Ericcson k800i.
Despite my bad experiences with the N70 (and worse with my wife’s N91) I am slow to move away from Nokia. Why? Well, almost all my phones back to 1995 have been Nokia’s. I’m used to Nokia’s and for the most part they have suited me well.
The two non-Nokia phones I have had were the Siemens S55 and the Sony Ericsson z600. I hated them both. The S55 had a lousy screen. The Z600 had no memory (I had to constantly delete texts to make room for more). And they both had terrible user interfaces.
I went running back to Nokia and bought a 6230, before buying myself the N70 last year. The 6230 was rock solid, if a little limited in functionality, the N70 had the functionality but was flaky!
I guess, to a certain extent too, I fear change!
Looking at the spec for the K800i though, it does seem to be an impressive phone. The only thing it is missing, that I can see, is wifi. I’m not sure how useful wifi on mobiles is yet. Is it any good?
What do you think, have Sony Ericsson phones improved enough that I should consider abandoning Nokia once more? Are the Sony Ericsson phones more reliable than the Nokia ones?
My phone has never been the most stable but I couldn’t update the firmware because I didn’t have a PC and Nokia don’t believe in supporting non-Windows platforms (despite Microsoft having a ban on its employees buying Nokia phones!).
As I received a PC the other day, I decided now was the time to try to update the firmware and do away with the phone stability problems. Big mistake.
I downloaded and installed the Nokia Software Updater without any problems however on applying the new firmware the progress bar seemed to be stuck at the position below for a good 20-30 minutes.
It proceeded a bit beyond that but then came to the following message:
No matter how many times I try (or retry) it craps out on me. The phone itself won’t startup at all now. Fortunately I backed up the data before I started this process but now I am without a mobile. Damn.
Tom Raftery
Sevilla, Spain.
E tom@tomrafteryit.net
Tel +34 954 255 105
Mob +34 677 695 468
Skype/Gizmo: tomraftery
Twitter: twitter.com/tomraftery
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