Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

So Nokia just relelased the Nokia E72 as E71’s successor, and I looked at the pictures and thought to myself:

Really?

I mean the E71 was to the business line what the N95 was to the entertainment line! The follow up seems like a bit of a flop. The E71 was a wonderfully crafted piece of machine: unbelievably thin for a QWERTY phone, and looked like it was designed by an architect and a businessman. The E72’s design looks like a follow up to the E63 drawn up by a someone who spent to much time in front of a video game console – a little plain and boring and not enough business sense. To be honest, it looks a little like E71’s young, a little more athletic, assistant.

So the design is a little controversial, but what about the hardware? Could the hardware push an E71 owner over the edge to upgrade?
The major differences between the two phones are:

• Optical trackpad
• 3.5mm audio jack
• Extra 140MB of internal memory
• 10.2Mbps HSDPA
• 5MP camera with VGA video recording
• Extra 2hr talk time / 70hr standby (2G)
• Symbian 9.3 S60 v3.2 UI

Well I haven’t used the optical trackpad, but the cool factor would at least make me consider it
Everyone knows the 3.5mm audio jack is a necessity in today’s phones, which means this wouldn’t be necessarily a deciding factor for me to choose this phone, but may be important for E71 users.
The extra 140MB of built in storage is definitely an upgrade. My N95 8GB has the same as the E71 and I’ve already had to delete a lot of programs and other items.
The 10.2 Mbps download however is overkill I think. I’m using 3.6Mbps and I find that more than enough. In fact, there has been a survey conducted in England which showed that most people are only getting about a quarter of the bandwidth that the technology is able to provide, mostly due to a lack of towers. So if you have an issue with slow speeds, talk to you provider, not the phone manufacturer.
Now I’m not sure what the quality of that 5MP snapper is but if its anything like my N95 8GB’s, then it is a giant step up. And of course, the E71 was known for its unbelievable battery life and the E72 builds on that even further. So longer lifetime using more capabilities? I’ll go for that !
Finally, the operating system. I’m not familiar with the 3.2 UI, however I have heard good things about it, and its quite likely that its the new OS that prolongs the battery life, so its likely a good thing.

So is this worth it?
Well its definitely an upgrade, maybe even a worthwhile upgrade as a couple features are quite welcome, such as extra internal memory and 3.5mm audio jack. So I guess if you can live with the design, its a worthwhile upgrade.

– Nokia FanBoy
Posted from my Nokia N95 8GB

Update:
Shortly after posting this I realised what it is that I dont like about the design… too much plastic.

So I’m not sure about my readers, however I am a little upset that Widsets closed down.

I’ve been using Widsets since its early days and i’ve always enjoyed the various widgets they provided. I had one for horoscopes – the only one I can see on Ovi Store costs 7 Euro; I had a couple apps which downloaded some pretty amazing photographs, such as 500 mpx, and I cannot find anything similar to that on Ovi Store.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that Nokia opened up the Ovi Store, however I just wish they didnt close down Widsets, as there were some great things available there.

Of course the benefit that Ovi Store has over Widsets is the ability to download and install native and Java apps as opposed to just some widgets. Too bad they didnt port something to support those widgets via WRT.

Posted by Wordmobi

First off I have to appologize for not writing anything in such a long time. I have been extremely busy with work and school and have had very little time for myself.

I did, however, find the time to stay on top of what’s going on in the mobile space, and have found some intriguing news which puts my in a position that I have to make some decisions.
There are basically a number of phones which I would like to try out:

• HTC Magic (Dream is too heavy)
• Samsung Omnia HD (a.k.a. i8910)
• Nokia N97 (or other N/E-series Nokia touchscreen)

This puts me in a bit of a jam because I don’t really know what to get. I wanted to try out these phones because I wanted to see what Android is like, to see what other manufacturers have made of Symbian, and of course to see Nokia’s take on touchscreen devices.

Now the Magic is easy – Rogers recently released it on their network and my upgrade cost is $150, which I could possibly lower by some $50 after talking with retentions.

The i8910 and N97 are a little more difficult, mainly because I’m not made of money
I could wait to see what Rogers comes out with in a couple months, or I could look on craigslist/eBay and pick something up there, and of course i could just find an online retailer and grab it from them. Of course both of these phones are Very expensive, so I will not be able to afford both. And the fact that Nokia is supposed to release 4 more touch screen devices this year doesn’t make things any easier.
Granted, to make them more affordable I could sell the Magic after playing with it, however I’m not one to sell a phone, no matter how bad it is (in fact I still have my very first phone that has a broken screen). So that’s not really an option.

The most likely course of action is going to be to wait two weeks until I have a bit more time on my hands, then pick up the Magic from Rogers (given nothing else changes), and come fall or winter pick up either the i8910 or N97 once they fall in price, or maybe Nokia will have released some new totally better phone by then

-Nokia Fan Boy
Posted from my Nokia N95 / SU-8W combo

Posted by Wordmobi