Tag Archive for 'nokia'

Comparing search methods

Published
by
fernando
on March 2, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Recently Google launched it’s own native mobile search app for S60 phones, which was reviewed here by AAS, which was recieved badly by bloggers and enthusiasts, example: IntoMobile’s Stefan post.

But people don’t realize that this app is competing not with the internal browser (which btw, setting google as your homepage is cheating), it’s rival is Nokia’s own Search app, and it completely kicks its ass. See the videos below for comparison. I also measured the time between the first keystroke to when ebay starts loading in the browser.

Nokia Search app, 53 seconds

Google Search app, 13 seconds (and just because I missed the link when clicking in the browser =P)

And just for fun

Browser Bookmark, 24 seconds

You can take your own conclusions, my personal choice is the google bookmark, since it’s moderately fast and it doesn’t have a ugly shortcut like the Google app.

For me, if the google app had a standard standby plugin (which Nokia really need to open the api for) it would be a killer app.If only because it opens and connects the browser in the background, while you’re typing. So when you’re searching for big things, it takes off a HUGE part of the loading process.

And this again shows what a joke Nokia Search is. They should tear apart the device search and the web search, to make the web part faster. (But I still love the device search feature).

EDIT: To demonstrate why the pre-loading of the browser in the Google app is awesome, here’s two videos with a larger search string:

Rumors with Google Search, 18 seconds

Rumors with Browser, 31 seconds

The difference is that when you open the browser it stops to connect, the “Connecting via internets” dialog you see. In the Google app it connects on the background, definitely speeding up the process.

Garmin Streetpilot C330 vs Nokia Maps

Published
by
fernando
on December 23, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

So my father just bought a GPS thingy, and we were testing it, comparing it with my N95 and such.

Then when we went out to have dinner in a place called Santaniello’s and the GPS couldn’t find it while Nokia Maps could! Even though the garmin is updated to the latest maps and all, my N95 still won!

Also, the river view of the GPS is ugly, look at the river near my house in the GPS:

And the same place in Nokia Maps:

ss24

Needless to say, Nokia Maps is more realistic. (the lack of details is because of the zoom level, I wanted the lake to show up)

Thoughts on the N95 music player

Published
by
fernando
on December 6, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

First I’d like to start by saying that Nokia have one of the best music players around, the Music Edition phones/N95/N82 and probably all the new Nseries. By no means I’m complaining about it, and I’m aware that are third party apps that solve most of the issues I’m gonna talk about:

First, why I don’t use it as my main music player (not counting battery life, space etc… 80gb iPod ftw)

The volume: 10 steps are not enough, sometimes the best volume is something in between, like 45%. Or sometimes even 10% is too loud, for that case I use a equalizer setting that turns the volume lower than 10%:

ss15

lol, but it works, 30% using this setting is more or less equivalent to 10% in the flat setting .

Now the “music number “, I can’t really explain this, so I have an example; I went to my music library, picked an artist and an album, and selected a song on shuffle:

ss13

The little number in corner that reads “7/13″ as this is the seventh song in the album, but when you go back a couple of levels in the menu you get this:

ss14

Now it’s saying “1/13″ because it is the first song playing from my playlist (the album in this case), this way makes MUCH more sense and that’s the way iPods show it, I think it should be like in the now playing view too. Consistency please!

A more nit-picky complain of mine is the now playing view, as seen 2 screenshots above, it doesn’t show the album name, it doesn’t matter when you have album art, but there certainly is space for a third line of text to show the album name. They even have 3 lines of text in their most excellent Internet Radio app.

ss16

When you have album art brings me to my next point, album art is a pain to get in the music player, I don’t know about you, but it never recognizes album art on my mp3 files, only my m4a files (all managed with iTunes on Mac OS X), and until firmware V12, you could add the art manually with a downloaded pic from the browser then erase the pic in gallery and enjoy your album art; but now in V20 you have to keep the file, if you erase  the file in the gallery, the music player stops showing it. A step backward in my opinion.

Nokia should just work on better recognition of album art embedded in id3 tag in future versions of the music player.

In iTunes (warning, huge pic :p):

pic1

In N95’s Music Player:

ss17

And that’s it for now, coming next is a piece on the bugs that I have noticed in V20, so stay tuned :P

EDIT: Also, why does this doesn’t show up anymore when the track changes:

screenshot0042.jpg

(lol, old post, but I had this screenshot for a while on my phone)