Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

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

So I’ve been using the HTC Magic for a while now, and have had to download some applications from the Android Market. Of course before that I had some experience with Nokia’s Mosh & Ovi Store distribution websites, and Nokia’s Download! application, which I will mention only briefly. Before I get right into it, please note that I am looking at the mobile clients of each distribution channel since, lets face it, who connects their phone to the computer to download content these days.

Well lets begin with the oldest, and now closed, Nokia Mosh. I always felt that while the service was in need of some control, as one would find dozens of different versions of some application you were trying to find, and in some rare occasions you may end up downloading the wrong application. The search function provided with Mosh by Nokia was, to say the least, forgiving. I often received results that only contained the abused “keywords:” line at the bottom of the description, obviously not relating to the application itself.
However, taking all that into consideration, I still enjoyed the service as I was able to find and download whatever application I needed with no restrictions. The only irony in using the tool was that going to the main site from my mobile browser did not automatically redirect me to the mobile version. Considering this is Nokia’s own site the missing feature became quite annoying sometimes.

In comes the “Knight in Shining Armor”: Ovi Store. Or so it would have seemed, only it really did not deliver on what it promised. The application selection is quite limited, which would have been bearable for a while if at least the store functioned well! If we were to compare the number of applications on Mosh and on Ovi Store we would probably find ourselves with a ratio of hundreds to one. The store is basically a mobile-friendly website, however, it is not a user-friendly one. The browser takes a long time to load the photos of each application, and when the photo is not available the entire layout of the page becomes skewed. Every single session requires you to log in in order to download even the free applications, the purpose of which I can not even begin to imagine. And the search has trouble finding even some of the simplest applications.

Android’s Market, on the other hand, is entirely optimized for the handheld that it is running on. It has a large selection of applications without actually repeating any of them for each version the provider uploads. The search capability, while surprising weak considering the major contributor to the platform, Google, at least works, and returns the search results quite quickly. The Market is quite user friendly, and even finds a way to non-intrusively suggest popular downloads. While I haven’t used the application store on the iPhone or any other platform, I feel confident saying that the Android Market is on-par with what a mobile content distribution channel should look like.

This review may seem to give very little credit to Nokia for improving on their existing store applications, however I believe that just like S60 5th, Nokia had a great opportunity to redesign an aging concept and come out with a ground shattering application, but did not. I think the reason behind this is that Nokia is not looking at their competition. After so many years of unparalleled success and market leadership, Nokia forgot how to look behind their shoulder at what the competition is doing, and in that time the competition has done a lot.

-Nokia FanBoy

I was just reading Engadget’s rather unique Nokia N97 review. To be honest with you I think that it is the best review I have ever read as it provides a true representation of how one may feel about the phone, going past all the little details and referring to the entire package. I enjoyed the review’s two sides, one from long-time Symbian user, and another from a user who cares more about the elegance and overall usefulness of the phone.

There are a number of aspects of N97 and S60 5th that the review brings to light, however I must say that I disagree with one side of the review relating to the sameness of S60. The reviewer noted that Symbian and S60 have a solid following, numbering in the tens if not hundreds of millions, and abandoning that following by completely redesigning the software would be foolish. I am not sure whether I agree with that. I consider myself a die-hard Symbian follower, and even I would like to see something different. I would like to see a UI which implores gestures, a UI that is finger friendly, whether using a resistive or capacitive touch screen. And I strongly believe that S60 5th could have been a great opportunity for Nokia to completely redesign the UI. Symbian in and of itself is a solid operating system, needing little updating, it is the S60 shell that is build on top of that OS that I believe could use an upgrade.

But don’t take my word for it, go ahead and read the review, if nothing else it is entertaining to watch close friends squabble over something so insignificant.

Your’s truly and always,

-Nokia FanBoy

So testing another client, lets see if this one handles photos any better. Although both clients seem to be fairly nice. Of course I never used the photo feature on my Nokia N95 8GB, so it may be difficult to compare.

And just found a bonus to this app: support for tags!

So I finally found an Android client for posting to Wordpress. Actually I found a couple and this is the first one I decided to test.

-Nokia FanBoy
Posted from my HTC Magic (Android)

This is just a quick update on the E72 vs. E71 post, I was looking over some of my favourite sites and noticed that someone managed to get their dirty paws on an E72 prototype. (sorry, I’m jealous) Well they not only posted a bunch of comparison photos, but also managed to disassemble the darned thing!

When I just saw the photos I thought I was going to have to reconsider what I first wrote about them, however after taking another look I still feel I was mostly right. The E71 is a work of art, perfectly blending Business and Beauty, where as the E72 just looks like it was designed by an engineer who was told to think “Business”.

Anyway, don’t take my words for it, have a look on Symbian-Guru (read) and judge for yourself.

-Nokia FanBoy

So this post is a first on many levels. For starters this is the first post I am writing on my computer, since I haven’t found any apps to do so from the Magic. Also, this is the first time I am trying out a Magic! And finally, this is a first post in a series of reviews of the Rogers branded HTC Magic.

I will immediately apologize for the poor quality of the photos, as this is my first review, and it is 3:30am. My future reviews will have better quality photos.

Well why don’t we start with the obvious question: Why?

The answer is really quite simple, I wanted to try out something other than what I’ve been used to for a while, and Android seemed like a logical choice. At the same time I wanted to try out a touch screen device to see how I would like the interface.

Overall:

Well a quick overview of the phone revealed some nice features and some discerning issues:

• Solid construction, with a great weight balance
• Good screen, with sensitive and responsive touch
• Pleasant operating system, considering its still in its early stages
• No 3.5mm jack!!!
• Incoming messages show up as 3 hours ahead
• Short battery life

Well read on for more details on this, but I must say that overall I am pleased with the phone so far.

First impressions:

When I first picked up the phone I was surprised just how small the box was, even though all the same parts as usual were there. As soon as I took out the device I thought of how sleek it looks with that all glossy finish, and the second thought was, naturally, how much of a finger print magnet it is.

Turning the phone on seemed to take for ever, however the initial set up was quick and painless. I was impressed with how little set up is required for this phone. You take it out of the box and you can use it immediately. Being connected to Exchange made it even easier as I didn’t even have to load any contacts.

Construction:

The phone’s consutrction feels quite solid with the exception of that matte gray plastic that runs the entire side of the phone: it creaks when you put pressure on it. The glossy black plastic gives the phone a refined and sleek finish and really makes it look like a toy to get excited about. Unfortunately, it’s already gotten some scratches on the back side, so I’ve already put it in a silicone case and ordered an Invisible Shield to protect it further.

Thankfully the buttons aren’t left out in the construction of a touch screen phone: the press needs just the right amount force, and is confirmed with a confident click. The trackball I’m not too sure about – it seems to really be excess in this phone, and i’ve rarely had to use it so far. However I understand the need to go to it: differentiation. The volume rocker on the side, on the other hand, is not solid and has a lot of play in it, however the play doesn’t feel cheap, simply as if its supposed to be like that.

The port on bottom of the phone is the only physical way to plug into the device. While I’m all for using less ports in the device I do not understand why HTC did not include a 3.5mm audio jack. This makes the phone much less valuable to me as I have to spend money on an adapter so as I may be able to use my favourite headphones with it. And speaking of headphones, the ones that came in the retail packaging are complete rubbish, making my ears hurt after barely 30 minutes of listening to them. I understand the need to save money, but at the very least having the microphone as a sort of extension cord / adapter would have made them infinitely more useful as I would be able to use my headphones right out of the box! This is coming from the remote control / adapter that comes with the Nokia N95, it is extremely useful.

HTC Magic - Bottom/Right	HTC Magic - Top/Left
HTC Magic - Front with Si Case	HTC Magic - Rear with Si Case

Screen:

Well the screen on this phone sort of impressed me. The colors are fairly vivid, however they didn’t really jump out at me as amazing. The resolution is quite nice, however could be higher – HTC Diamond was released by that time with twice the resolution. What is also quite upsetting is that the screen tends to lag a fair bit, especially considering that the Diamond didn’t seem to lag any less (performed by turning on the camera on both phones and moving the phones side to side to see the screen refresh lag).

The capacitive touch screen feels nice – the actions smooth, and the construction high quality. While the hardware should support multi-touch the operating system does not. I do not see this as much of an issue since its not quite as useful as one would hope it to be. The touch screen is quite sensitive and responsive, making it feel even better.

Media Playback:

Unfortunately, the phone lacks in this department. The audio player has nothing in the way of equalizers, and lags a fair bit when dealing with large lists of artists, albums, or songs. The speaker in the back sounds tinny, and becomes useless in an environment even slightly noisy. For example: I used my Nokia N95 8GB to listen to music while in the shower, the Magic doesn’t get loud enough, or give out enough base, to make it audible while in the shower. Much in the same way, showing a video in the mall I had to cup my hand behind the phone to create an acoustic mirror so that the audio could be heard.

Messaging, Gmail and Exchange:

This part really confused me. While the software is nice, typing is easy, there’s a very strange error: incoming text messages are time-stamped three hours ahead! After searching around online I realised that this isn’t really Magic’s or even Android’s fault, and is likely an issue with the provider. In order to solve this problem I had to download chompSMS, which managed to correctly keep track of my conversations, and displayed them in nice bubbles.

I was very pleased with the Gmail integration of this phone, with the exception that I was not able to select not to synchronize my contacts or calendar. Since I do not use my Gmail contacts, having an extra 300% of useless contacts is rather annoying, and the same goes for calendar.

Exchange integration, on the other hand, I was quite pleased with! The emails looked great, even supporting HTML and text formatting. The contacts were downloaded with complete sets of data, including pictures! And the calendar synchoronized perfectly, including repeating entries with some of those having been modified. I should note at this time that I am using MS Exchange Server 2007, as earlier versions may not support features such as contact image synchronization.

Programs:

As I am still getting used to the phone and downloading and trying out software I will need to make a separate post for this, based around Android as opposed to the Magic. I will note, however, that the Facebook app is great, but would be nice if I could leave comments on wall posts, status changes, etc.

Web Browsing:

The browser is quite  impressive, having come from a non-touchscreen browser. However it is upsetting that the browser does not support flash, considering my almost outdated Nokia N95 8GB plays embedded flash without any issues. Besides flash, the web pages look fantastic – paragraphs are automatically resized for landscape/portrait orientation, entering URL’s is easy, and clicking on links is a joy.

The only down side in this, as in most browsers, is the inablity to select a picture and save it on the phone. If I was able to do that then more of my posts would have photos in them.

Conclusion:

So far, I really like the phone. Its got some glitches and some poor design choices, but I like it. I guess we will have to see how this will go on for the next month or two.

The only thing I wish someone could tell me: What is the target market for the HTC Magic? If anyone can enlighten me please do so, as I am really confused.

-Nokia FanBoy

For once, not posted from my phone.

UPDATE:
This post has already been updated and the update can be found here:
Rogers HTC Magic (Android): Days 7-14 (Updated)
A new update will be coming fairly soon, as well as I will start daisy-chaining my posts from now on to avoid confusion.

-NFB

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.

Ok, this is the last update on the keyboard, I promise.

I was using it for sending SMS and found a couple strange issues. Namely some people were complaining that they were receiving blank messages or that the message was some garbage with a strange triangle in the middle. I didn’t really understand why it was happening and later noticed that as I was typing, every now and again the counter would drop by about 100 characters. This didn’t seem to make any sense as it seemed to occur completely randomly. Also, keep in mind this only happened when I was using my keyboard, and has never happened before.

So as I was typing up yet another message, carefull watching the counter so as not to send another screwed up message, I found the culprit: Shift + Space.

Don’t ask me why, I really have no idea, but I would really like to ask Nokia as to how that got past testing and just what is causing this. So, if you know why, please do let me know and I will make sure to give you the appropriate credits.

-Nokia Fan Boy
Posted from Nokia N95 8GB

Posted by Wordmobi

So I had to make an SSH connection to some Lunux computers for one of my assignments at school. I usually use Putty on my computer but I decided to try and use my phone and see how that goes.

Well while I can’t tell you which version of Putty I was using (no about action in the menu), I can tell you that it was quite usable. Of course it would have been completely useless without the keyboard.

One of the issues that I’ve found, the screen on my N95 was too low resolution to really do anything. Although I think if I were to use it on the N97 or 5800 it would be quite usable for something even a little more than just a quick fix. Of course the creators tried to correct that by allowing you to make the font smaller, and while this helps, no questions asked, it doesn’t beat a nice big, high-res screen.

The second issue would be the input method. If you don’t have a keyboard then don’t even think about using this for anything except, well, anything. With the keyboard that I was using (Nokia SU-8W) I was fairly proficient and didn’t have too many problems, but a full size keyboard is unbeatable if you’re using it for long periods of time.

So can you spend hours using it? Probably not.
Is it useful for network admins (or the like) that sometimes need quick access to their network to check up on some info? Totally.

To be honest, I don’t really use Putty that much, or SSH connections for that matter, but the bottom line is that using Putty on my computer and using it on this device only really differs in the screen resolution and the smaller keyboard. But if you can get a device with a higher resolution and then get used to the keyboard you’re set. In the small amount of time that I used it I stopped seeing those things as a problem.

-Nokia Fan Boy
Posted from my Nokia N95 8GB

Posted by Wordmobi