Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

One of my readers, atul recently asked me question on upgrading their phone:

…planning to move from Nokia E71 (my 4th eseries phone) and have always used a Nokia since ‘92. Do u think it would be sane to move to HTC Magic or should I wait for E72?

This isn’t exactly a question that can be answered with a couple lines, but I liked the question enough that I decided to actually write a post about this.

Choosing between the E72 and the Magic there are a number of factors you have to consider, first and foremost that the two devices are in a completely different class altogether. The Nokia E72 is an Enterprise-class devices. What this means is that the design of the phone, operating system, and software was all done with the requirements of the business world in mind. That also means that the manufacturing process didn’t compromise on quality, however may not have put too much thought into the physical appearance of the phone (granted, the E71 is the first exception to the latter).
On the other hand, the HTC Magic is a somewhat more mainstream phone. Thus the physical appearance was more important than quality (mine scratched in a matter of days and slightly creaks on the sides).

Another part of construction you have to look at is the input method. If you write a lot of emails, the Magic, or any touchscreen phone, is not for you. At the very least not until they have displays that can morph to have actual physical buttons raise up and provide proper feedback. Of course even then, taking up important screen real-estate for a keyboard will never be as good as having a separate screen actual physical keyboard.

Taking a look at the operating system is also important. Symbian is over a decade old and in that has become extremely stable, even if a little outdated. Android, on the other hand, seems to crash applications on a regular basis (3-5 app crashes per day). At the very least, however, when an application crashes Android and other applications continue running. You also have to keep in mind that there’s a fairly large learning curve going from OS to OS, especially when switching from hardware keys to a touch-centric UI (trust me on this one).
Also don’t forget to consider the applications that you are using on your phone now. Going from E71 to E72 you’re pretty much guaranteed that all of the applications will work. Going to the Magic, however, you will need to find equivalents in the Android Market or the online community, and that can take a large amount of time.

Finally, the features of the phone itself are important. The main one, for me at least, is the battery life. The HTC Magic is severely handicapped by its battery, whereas the E71, and likely the E72 as well, is not.

So what does all that mean for you, my dear friend?
Well just think about what you’re doing with your phone now, and what you will be able to do with your future hone. If you’ve gotten used to the E-Series quality then I’m afraid the Magic, and other mainstream phones for that matter, may be disappointing to you. If you’re connected to a MS Exchange Server then I must tell you that Symbian is integrated much more tightly with it. Also, Symbian has Nokia, Garmin and TomTom mobile GPS applications whereas Android is stuck with just Google maps.
So think about whats important to you, and which phone can better support your requirements. Also, take a look at my post on Nokia E71 vs. E72 (Nokia E72 – worthwhile upgrade?), maybe an upgrade isn’t even really required.
Lastly, consider other phones, such as the Nokia N97, or even other operating systems, such as Windows Mobile.

If you have any more questions just drop me a line and I’ll try to help as much as I can.

-Nokia FanBoy

So this little gem hasn’t even been released yet but there are videos of a pair of guys trying to destroy it already!

By the looks of it, the new phone is going to be a S40 dumb-phone, and it is at the very least water resistant. Sadly, there are no specs, however it is very reminiscent of Nokia 5630 XpressMusic.

The videos I am referring to are of a bunch of guys testing how well the phone stands up to:

• a rugby boot
• a golf club
• a dip in the pool
• a pint of beer
• and what looks like a 25 foot (~8 meter) drop from a ladder

Just how well the phone actually fares is quite impressive, but what is even more impressive is just how it looks. The phone seems void of that “ruggedized” rubber/plastic material that makes other heavy duty phones seem ugly, instead it is quite shiny and actually quite attractive. It will be interesting to see what the specs of the phone are, and whether any XpressMusic, N-Series or E-Series phones will be getting a similar make over. I can see how the Enterprise line would benefit from having a heavy duty phone for the businessman that goes through BlackBerries like pancakes.

-Nokia FanBoy

Hi Everyone!

Sorry took me so long to post again about my experiences with the new phone, however I was away on a vacation trip and unable to take the time to write the review. On the bright side, this gave me lots of time to play with the phone, especially considering most of my time was spent in transit!

I will not be going over many details of the phone, just some key aspects that stand out to me.

Battery:
Ok, I know that everyone will say that battery life has to be taken with consideration for usage, but I’m comparing the battery life to my old Nokia N95 8GB, and I’m disappointed! I mean I wasn’t using the media player, since I didn’t have a headphone adapter, I wasn’t using GPS since I don’t have a turn-by-turn system installed, but then why is it that the battery lasted so much less?!

I understand some aspects of why the battery was low. For example, the bigger screen with the brightness set to 100% does eat up a lot juice. Since the screen is twice the resolution of the N95 8GB it makes sense that it would consume more power rendering the graphics. The fact that the input is primarily via the touchscreen it probably consumes more power than buttons. And of course the faster processor would consume more power. But what about the fact that N95 8GB has a 16M color display, dual CPU’s, and a hardware 3D accelerator? That takes up juice too!

But personally, I think that the main drain on the battery is inefficient code. Just looking at how much my battery life increased when I upgraded my N95 8GB firmware (from v11 to v20) tells me that a large portion of battery consumption is inefficient code.

Screen:
Maybe I’m just spoiled by Nokia’s 16M color displays, but 65K just doesn’t seem to be enough. I mean sure, its color, I can’t see that its only 65K colors, but when I look at a picture on that screen and on my computer its clear as night and day!

On the upside, the higher resolution is nice, and the bigger screen itself is very attractive!

Audio:
It would be unfair to judge the audio capabilities of this device solely on its core audio player performance. To be fair, the Magic does not seem to be placed as a media device, as can be seen by the lack of 3.5mm jack, however I found the sound quality to be decent, at best. The biggest issue is, of course, bass. For someone listening to classical music with little bass instruments, this would be fine, however I like Jazz, Rock, a bit of Pop, and of course, at times, Classical. And the sound quality just wasn’t high enough for me.

What is an issue, however, is a lack of equalizer presets, which do not seem to be included with third party media players. This tells me that media players are only a front-end interface for the same back-end sound “producer”. In lament’s terms: don’t expect third party media players to improve sound quality.

Now, the really bright side to this is the innovative media players available for Android!

TuneWiki automatically downloads lyrics to your songs and displays them together with the song… Synced!!! Of course not all songs are available in their database, and sometimes the words are slightly mismatched, but this is just such a cool feature that I don’t care!

MixZing, on the other hand, suggests songs based on which song you play and what songs you have in your library. When you play a song it automatically creates a playlist for that song and throws in 20 suggested songs, which you can add or delete via a kind of impromptu rating system. The benefit is that the playlists created by MixZing are available from other media players on the device.

*** I was out of town for the last couple days, but now, as promised: ***

Camera:
After being spoiled by my Nokia N95 8GB’s camera, this camera is really quite upsetting. Before I got the N95 I was debating buying a high-end P&S camera, but decided against it after seeing the quality of the photos of the N95. Unfortunately, however understandably, this is not the case for this phone. After all, this is not a super high-end phone, like the N95 8GB was made to be, nor is this a camera centric phone, but it still would have been nice to see a decent camera.

One thing that I would like to see in the future is a better camera interface design. While it is nice to be able to see the entire picture without having to look past icons on the screen, those icons can be very useful. Especially if you know what you’re doing you can greatly improve the quality of the photo, or add an artistic flair to it.

Reception:
I was very surprised by the quality of the reception of this phone, this time comparing it to an old model by HTC: the original Touch (also from Rogers). One would think that a phone’s reception would improve as the manufacturer goes through generations of very similarly featured phones. Well I wasn’t sure what to think of the results…

Driving around the gorgeous Rockies poses a big problem for reception, however a perfect testing ground for comparing the sensitivity of the signal. This would show how well the signal strength will work in places like underground garages, elevators, etc. My expectation was to see a clear winner – either the Touch or the Magic, however that was not the case. As we were driving around sometimes the Touch would have 4 bars signal strength while the Magic had no reception, and sometimes it would be the opposite. Overall I believe the Touch, sadly, won out. But there could be a number of reasons for that, ranging from 3G nature of the Magic and EDGE nature of the Touch, it could be one was more sensitive on some frequencies while the other on others (the Magic did catch the signal sooner when we were entering a 3G area vs. EDGE area).

However, in the city, both phones performed equally well. While the Magic did generally show a weaker signal, neither phone had an issue connecting and keeping a call.

Telephony:
Ironically, this is the one part of my review I am not ready to talk about. Since my main mode of communication is via SMS, I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly review this part of the phone. I did, however, notice some issues of having the audio cut out every now and again, and talking last night the other person complained that the audio was cutting out on their end also. As there are a large number of reasons for this I cannot say if it is an issue yet, and will have to do more talking first.

*** Again, I will add more as I have more time ***

-Nokia FanBoy