Re: A month with a Nokia n95 (long)

BGN wrote:

Nice summary and I agree with virtually everything, plus a couple or three comments from me:

4) Audio player: A very good audio player, for a mobile phone. Why
not give it a hardware equaliser instead of just a software one as I
find that the bass isn't as strong as it could be, even with it up
full. Still, a very good quality reproduction for a mobile phone and
I can even leave my Bose QuietComfort 2 Noise Cancelling earphones on
'high power device' mode.
Mine hisses a lot - both with headphones and with the built-in speakers. I don't use it much for music so not a problem but some will be upset by it, I'm sure.

12) Podcasting. The Nokia Podcasting app seems pretty good (although
it would be nice if it linked in with the normal browser instead of
having to manually key in RSS/Atom feed URLs to the application) –
When I download the BBC Breakfast Takeaway in the morning to watch
when I'm sitting outside having the first cigarette of the day for 10
minutes it always says something like "Video will not play on this
device" but then launches it in RealPlayer and it plays perfectly.
Someone needs to tell the podcasting application what the phone can
and can't play.
This seems to be general feature of the web browser/RealPlayer integration. It often complains about Listen Again from the Beeb and claims no player plugin available but if you hack around and extract the rtsp URL then RealPlayer on the phone will play it perfectly.

I've just created a small html file with the links of those that I listen to regularly and click on those. One of these days I will get around to writing a small app to do it all on the fly.

14) Move the GPS receiver into the top of the screen, perhaps bin the
2nd camera as I don't use it and video calling hasn't taken off in my
circle of friends. The GPS receiver appears to be at the bottom of
the phone, under the keypad. Yes, where you're going to be holding it
and have your hands around it or if you want to take sat-nav into the
car then that's likely to be where it's mounted too. If it was at the
top near the camera and environment sensor then it would get a much
better signal as nobody holds their phone by that area.

It would be nice to move it but who knows how tightly the hardware is all squashed in there? I bought a cheapo car cradle that grips the side of the phone and sticks to the dash, powered from the ciggy lighter and it works perfectly.

15) My Nokia e61 has the option to kill off applications from a kind
of 'task manager' but the n95 doesn't have this option. If you've
exited out of an app by going to the 'hang up' button the application
is still active and you can see it's active by going to the phone menu
where a little icon shows next to active applications. If the app has
died then you can't go into the app and then close it so have to
reboot. If the option to kill off running processes was present
(perhaps accessable by holding the 'hang up' key for a few seconds)
then it would save power cycling. Not that any of the applications
crash much.

You can do this. Press and hold the menu button and you get a pop-up list of the running apps. Select the one you want to kill and press the C button.

17) Despite my initial reservations this phone is excellent. After a
month I haven't got bored with it and use it for pretty much
everything. Well done Nokia.

Seconded.

Very good on the internet connectivity. HSDPA works well and you can have more than one internet connection going at once. For example I can use it as a modem for my laptop and also "listen again" to a Beeb radio programme.

You can receive & send texts while a modem connection is open without problems. Voice calls come through but the modem link is more or less suspended (not actually dropped but throughput drops to a very low rate). The impact this has depends on how robustly your software handles such things.

Only caveat is that using it as a modem with a USB connection to a laptop stuffs the battery - I get an hour at the most in that combination. Ironically, Bluetooth to the laptop seems to last a bit longer. I would have thought that it would draw power from the USB connection if it got the chance but it doesn't seem to.

All in all a great phone if you want to more than talk and text.

Regards,
--
Bruce Horrocks
Surrey
England
(bruce at scorecrow dot com)
.