5800 v40: Kudos to Nokia

By fernando | Published: January 13, 2010

They gave us the new homescreen!

We asked nicely, and today, V40 for the 5800 came out, with the new 5530 style homescreen and kinetic scrolling. Awesome?

Also as you can see, the transparency for it doesn’t work if you’re using the default Sound waves theme, so I suggest using Stripes Blue from the 5530.

Transparency where there should be.

Almost the same but better compatible with the new firmware. (Transparencies where there should be, darker blue for the “click” highlight. If you have no idea what that is, it looks like this with the default theme, instead of just blue like it should be.)

Other noteworthy things:

  • Is it my impression or does waiting for the Click highlight causes operation to get just a little slower?
  • New version of Software Update (Uses the toolbar for update, info and history buttons)
  • On the dialer, the middle toolbar button, Contacts, has a ridiculously small icon when you haven’t typed anything.
  • No landscape alphanum keypad anymore, and the qwerty option only appears on landscape, so they’re mutually exclusive and considered a single one options wise. Nice touch.
  • Capslock now has its own icon on the *Pencil* Abc area.
  • Hitting keys now shows the letter you hit over it, iPhone style.
  • You know the image shown when the music player didn’t find album art if the theme doesn’t have any set up? They changed that from a pink jacket to a silver CD.
  • New icons for Share Online, Accessory Config (that thing is still around wtf) and I think App Settings under Settings-Phone but can’t be sure.
  • Data Transfer (phone switch whatever) now is in the root of settings.
  • New zoom icon in the browser. (old was just a circled plus I think)

Also, it’s unhackeable with HelloOX 2.03!

Unfortunately I found that the hard way, updated it, it got super slow, formatted it and learned I couldn’t hack it anymore. orz. I can’t be bothered in signing most of the stuff I use, including SuperScreenshot. (notice I used SmartphoneWare’s Best Screen Snap for most of those (still no .png option and no way to disable the camera sound? wtf?) but I digress.) Maybe later. So yeah, kudos to Nokia, but why they got to hate teh hacking? :(

Also yeah will update the post if I notice anything else.

Update Jan 15:

  • When you just recorded a video, the middle toolbar button is upload, not send anymore. Bad change.
  • When the phone’s ringing with the screen locked, you get an interesting new screen. Not sure if I like it but it’s cool looking.

I think you're supposed to slide along the path, but dunno.

Also from what I’ve read, the same thing that happened on the N97 V20 happened here, so I doubt I’ll ever be able to hack the phone again D:

Posted in Bloggan | Leave a comment

RE: 5800 homescreen shenanigans

By fernando | Published: December 21, 2009

I still am under no disguise, fyi.

A while ago I had posted about how the 5800 was the only S60v5 phone with a sucky homescreen, and that the newer XpressMusic ones had the best one. Well, turns out that since this November, you can add more homescreens thru h4x, with just c2z and files lifted from other phones. Pretty nifty.

My favorite so far is the Omnia one, as every other has a little quirk that stands in the way more than it should. I still can’t quite figure how to have it active on boot, as c2zbin puts my phone in a restart loop (despite working), and it’s a shame I can’t get to modify the shortcuts/use the phone icons, as I’d substitute Messaging for WLAN Wizard. But it’s way better than what I had.

Also, beware of really light wallpapers, as the white icons/text will just become illegible on them.

Update: Welp, never mind, I was trying different ones today, and seems the 5530′s one, the same one I compared the default on the original post, doesn’t need c2z. Keeping it then yay.

Posted in Bloggan | Leave a comment

When will the recursion end?!

By fernando | Published: November 24, 2009
20091124318

Yaaaay

With a lot of thanks due to my fav internet e-homie, I just got a N800 for practically nothing! Now I can start exploring the magical & mysterious world of Maemo. (that and try webkit browsers to further expand my blog rendering recursion pic!) Awesomeness~

this might have been the most “dear diary” type post here in a forever lol

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Opera Mobile 10 Beta 1

By fernando | Published: November 5, 2009
20091104313

Rendering engine recursion!

After months of teasing, Opera finally released a beta of version 10 for Symbian, available here or at m.opera.com/next

It’s all fine and dandy, it’s basically Opera Mini 5 beta, with Opera Turbo and all their fast magic, only faster because it’s a native app. I know some people that swear by Opera Mini, and this release would only make them happier. I personally don’t like it that much, but it’s good for browsing pages too heavy that would make the webkit browser crash due to RAM.

But protip, Opera: fix the virtual keyboard. I don’t want to learn the layout of yet another keyboard that’s only used on your app, specially one that can’t even copy paste. You’re not dealing with java restrictions on text inputs here, get to adapting the build in keyboards right.

Also, I saw this yesterday morning, what took me so long to post about it? I was waiting until I had the Maemo meetup post ready, so I could screenshot it and have the recursion picture. Awesomeness~

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Maemo meetup, Chicago

By fernando | Published: November 4, 2009
DSC05866

:D

I was there! Yesterday night, after some years meaning to go to the “Evening with S60″ events in Chicago, I finally was able to go to one. This post won’t have many pictures, mostly because I was more excited about playing with the N900s than about taking pictures. :P So, things I found noteworthy, in no particular order:

  • The thing is small. First thing I noticed about it when first seeing it. Even after seeing comparisons with other phones on the internet. It made a T-Mobile G1 look incredibly bloated in comparison.
  • Which makes the screen insanely sharp. 800×480 on that diagonal is superb. My camera couldn’t get the separate pixels.
  • Back to the screen, the cursor mode on the browser is brought by swiping from outside. From what I got that means the touch sensitive area goes a little beyond the screen. Maybe gesture control using that area is possible?
20091102159

Samir, awful pic courtesy 5800

  • After the intro, there were a couple presentations. Head of Maemo operations, Samir Agarwal, showed a slide using tv out on his N900, when something went unresponsive on his N900 he simply took out a second one from his other pocket to continue it, it was kinda cool :P
DSC05864

Yes it can be used with gloves. Don't underestimate Chicago weather btw.

  • Anssi Makela’s (or at least I think it was his) N900 had a One Piece wallpaper :P
  • Lots of people asking about .mkv with subtitles support, there’s always mplayer amirite.
  • One thing I noticed on the camera, focus is kept after the camera key is let go. So for example, press it to focus on something close and let the button go. On S60 phones focus goes back to infinity, the N900 keeps focused on close. Way better in my opinion.
  • Macro mode was great too, able to get way closer to the subject than any other phone I saw. (mostly comparing with my N95 classic)
  • Slider was solid, opened and closed it a couple times just to check it. No play and with a pleasant noise. (for comparison, I think the N97 is too loud)
  • I saw Bounce running along with a flash video on the browser. Sure, that was shown in videos, but to see it live in front of you is just wow.
  • One of the demo N900s had Transmission installed, with a torrent being seeded, 1gb upload on the counter. Edit: Whoops, sorry, it was a legal torrent. Still, the concept of torrenting on your phone is what matters here.
DSC05868

Way smaller than what I'd thought it'd be.

  • Supposedly you can kill browser windows separately if they hang by using the “End task” option in the power button menu. Does that mean they’re using the Chrome/IE8 approach of one process per tab? Awesome if so, couldn’t check.
  • I tried typing both “*#06#” and “*#0000#” on the dialer, nothing happened. Just thought it was noteworthy :P
DSC05867

You get that info on the Settings app. Also, there were at least 2 different software versions running across all N900s.

  • Installing applications is amazingly easy and fast, installed AlmostTI on one of them. Clicked install then switched to the task manager, then when I noticed, the icon was in the main menu.
  • And as nothing can be perfect, I didn’t really like the kickstand, doesn’t seem really solid.

Now for the meta part:

  • All the Maemo people are incredibly nice, and it was a really personal thing, as in they showed their own devices with what they use them for. Extra kudos for John Loughney, Collaboration Manager for Maemo, as I was messing with his N900 the most. :P
  • There will be two ways of installing apps, Ovi Store and App. Manager. Inside the App Manager you have the maemo.org repository, you can add extras. Besides that maemo.nokia.com’s Maemo Select section will pick the best apps from both the Ovi Store and the community for promotion. Seemed a little confusing at first, but seems that Maemo Select will just have .deb links, and won’t be yet another store.
  • Software updates are really fast in the internal development, and I think the latest they showed us was a second release candidate version.
  • Regarding updates, no promises made, but we were told to expect portrait browsing in time for Christmas. Nice.
  • I didn’t get anything in the raffles :(, but I got a totally sweet shirt and three stickers with the Maemo penguins. lol
20091103163

:D

I tried scanning one of the stickers for the penguin graphics (because they’re totally sweet irl) but it didn’t come out nicely. Oh well, if any Maemo marketing people are reading this and want to hook me up with the original graphic, feel free :P

oft2qa

I hate scanners

Aaaand that was it I think? I’m posting this two days after the event, so maybe I’m forgetting something, I’ll update this post if I do remember any other cool things.

To conclude: Man do I want an N900.

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Mobbler 0.07 (beta) finally scrobbles songs on S60v5!

By fernando | Published: October 19, 2009
SuperScreenshot0025

The Knife is awesome btw

Finally! Only took Nokia about an year to release the APIs needed by the Mobbler team to enable scrobbling on S60v5 amirite? 0.07 is still not out for the public, but I am participating in the beta test. Haven’t found any bugs yet, so it’ll probably be out soon!

Update: Hey it’s out, go get it on google code.

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Guess who’s back? (or, landscape Maps & Furtiv)

By fernando | Published: October 15, 2009
Photo on 2009-10-15 at 15.53 #3

Webcam pic woo

Who’d have thought? Whoever found my phone on the waiting area I had left it returned it! He/she found it, took it home, took a picture, made a couple calls before returning it to my college’s front desk/lost and found thing, lucky me!

So, to kick the blog posting back on a good note, here’s a couple neat things I found about yesterday and today.

  • Disappointed Ovi Maps can’t go on landscape mode on the 5800, for whatever crazy ass “software differentiation” idea the folks at Nokia came up with? Simple, install Maps 3.1 beta then uninstall it, accelerator based screen rotation works now.
  • Furtiv (AAS review) is a gateway between Share Online and Twitter/Facebook/Picasa/etc. What that means is that you can now upload a photo from the camera app directly to twitter in just a couple button presses. It’s really convenient! It’s basically PixelPipe done right.

Oh, also, Sky Force Reloaded was recently adapted for S60v5. I played the free demo available on the Ovi Store, and let me tell you something, their use of the touchscreen is the best control method I’ve seen in S60v5 games yet. Screw people trying to be trendy with accelerometer controls, this is how gaming on S60v5 should be.

Maybe I’ll record a video of myself playing the first level and post about it later. So yay, that’s it.

:)

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

I lost my 5800

By fernando | Published: October 2, 2009

The title says it all. Lost it with my phone number this last monday. I’m currently using the N95 without a SIM card. No money or prospects of getting enough for a N900. Expect that to impact the posting frequency.

:(

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged | 1 Comment

Transparent icon shortcuts (or, let me see my wallpaper!)

By fernando | Published: September 25, 2009
SuperScreenshot0021

Iamundernodisguise~

Let me start with two facts: First, being able to do anything on S60v5 using only the touchscreen except entering the main menu is annoying. Second, finding a wallpaper that has the proper amount of er… top padding (245px!) so that important parts of it won’t get obscured by the shortcut bar is kinda hard!

First issue is solved by adding a main menu icon to the shortcut bar in active standby. I’m not the only one that does that, pretty much any desktop thread on mobile phone forums will have something like that. That brings you the second issue. Say you’re in a huge SVIIB mood lately and you’ve found this totally sweet promo pic of them. But when setting it as your wallpaper, the icons obscure their heads. That’s clearly no good!

The solution I’ve found (at least I’ve never heard about it being done before) is to simply add an application with a transparent icon in those slots. So there I went, fired up my html editor and made a simple WRT widget, if you open it, you get a black screen, tap it (or the softkeys) to close it.

Throw it on a obscure menu folder, and just pretend there are no icons on those places. :P It doesn’t solve the dotted line problem, but that’s a theme thing, so no easy way to edit it. If you only have one icon there you win 280x100px of screen real estate to display your wallpaper!

And for the obligatory rant at Nokia paragraph: None of this would be needed if they’d let you keep empty slots. Or even better, port the 5530/5230/every other S60v5 phone’s homescreen to the 5800! The fixed Contacts and Dialpad icons are ridiculous! Some 5800 love please. :P

Update: So I was playing with a Nokia X6 on RDA today and decided to try this there too, disable all homescreen plugins but the shortcuts one.

Nokia X6_004

DEFINITELY CLASSIER YOU GUYS

Srsly Nokia, give us the new homescreen! D:

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Converter Touch (or, Offscreen rules)

By fernando | Published: August 29, 2009

SuperScreenshot0011SuperScreenshot0012

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of the Ovi Store. I was really hyped for it and it kinda let me down, from the server errors and links breaking constantly, to the lack of content that’s available elsewhere (Nokia support sites or even the old Download! app (Quickoffice, Adobe Reader and Zip Manager, for example.) They even use push SMSs for the send to mobile link, they should use QR Codes. I’m a sucker for QR Codes. (And they’ve been pushing QR Codes since forever)

That said, if there is one gem in the Ovi Store, it’s Offscreen. I’ve been keeping an eye on them ever since I learned that the developer that made that neat timer app I mentioned last April was on the Ovi Store. Lots of good looking little apps, games and even ebooks (The first Sherlock Holmes one is free, go get it!). I just noticed I had never featured an application by them, so I’m picking my favorite for this post, Converter Touch.

First thing you see, on launch, the app is just plain good looking. You get everything you need to control the app right on launch, no submenus or steps. It supports all units (except currency) the built in converter does, and switching units is awesome.

SuperScreenshot0014

You select what you want to convert by tapping and dragging the first bar with icons, which rolls around with fast and perfectly fluid animation. Once you picked what you want, you can tap the the units next to the numbers to pick the to and from units (which shows up in a very good looking pane). Then just input your value. As a bonus treat, it remembers what units you picked last time when you launch it again.

Only things I could suggest is ‘ and ” keys to lenghts and times in ff’ii” and hh’mm”ss notation. Also the ability to select which of the numbers is the to and from (or a flip units button to the left, changing ºC for ºF and ºF for ºC in the screenshot above, for example.) My last concern with it is Offscreen’s insistence of putting the quit and about buttons on the top, instead of on the bottom of the screen, like every other app for S60 ever. :P

Good looking and efficient, the cherry on the top is that it’s free! Go download it, and show some appreciation for Offscreen and get something paid from their Ovi Store selection too. And if you’re a developer that want your apps to look as good and fluid, take a look at their Origo IDE. I’m no developer, but from the results I assume it’s quality stuff.

Posted in Bloggan | Tagged , | Leave a comment