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

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.

:)

:(

Yay! For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

Yes! Finally today I went to the Nokia Flagship store in Chicago to get my very own Nokia 5800! This post is going to be just my first impressions, not meant to be a through review, I’ll leave the nitpicking in specific apps (or lack of) in the next posts.

The good:

• Since the moment I took it out of the box, I was suprised with how small, and how solid the device really is. It’s miles away from my N95, and it lets you know the moment you put your hands on it.
• Box full of accessories! Pouch, stand, 8gb memory card, strap, tv-out cable in a mid-range device.
• +1 Nokia for finally giving me a choice of colors, the Flagship Store had both the red and the blue version of it. I can’t remember the last time I had such a choice. (Perhaps never?)
• Nokia took a page out of the Motorola book and started bundling content with their devices! 29 awesome wallpapers, 8 songs (all different genres, sure you’ll find something you like!) 5 videos (2 music videos, the trailer of The Dark Knight, a promo video of the 5800 and a documentary trailer?
• Talking about content, I really enjoyed some of the tracks that came with the memory card, specially the one that included the music video, Minipop’s Like I Do. (I even caught myself airdrumming to it on the trip back :P)
• +1 for all content being widescreen, great demonstration of the awesomeness that is the screen. And it is awesome, how can something so (relatively) small pack so much pixels! Best screen evar.
• Again on the built in content, all tracks had album artwork. And to think it was just a year ago that my N95 only came with a artwork-less track of Moby’s In My Heart
• That was then I plugged my N95′s microsd, of the 100s of tracks I skipped, the music player detected the album art of all tracks except for one. Huge improvement!
• Battery life ought to be good. I listened to music during all the trip back, and the battery stayed at 2 bars during the whole time. (Using only the charge that comes with it)
• The gap between one track and another while playing is smaller, not truly gapless playback, but close.
• Early reviewers weren’t kidding, this thing is loud.
• And at last the lock switch: it’s so cool. :P

The bad:

• Refreshing your music library still takes foreeeeever.
• Accelerometer powered screen rotation sucks, it was never a good idea, and now I’m forced to use it since there’s no physical way of rotating the screen.
• The games on it are a joke :P
• Oh Nokia, still no option to customize a newly created folder’s icon. :( See how weird my makeshift office folder looks in my menu.
• You can do anything with the touchscreen only, except getting in the menu. Where’s the option to use the standard S60 homescreen with softkeys Nokia? Update 2: You can put a menu shortcut on the active standby bar. Only 4 slots, 6 apps I’d like to put there :P
• Weird stuff that you can uninstall: Welcome, Settings Wizard, Accessory Setup (whatever that is). But most importantly, wtf is with the Myspace shortcut icon?

The other stuff:

• Clever of them to have the screen protective film with those weird markings. If it was clear, nobody would take it off and then they would complain about the screen’s sensivity :P
• And because this sort of thing matters to people, my blue, USA 5800 with the product code 0575384 has these languages.

Now to wait until the transfer of my 7gb playlist is completed. Oh Joy. (at least transfers average in 1200kb/s)

Update 1: Forgot to mention that I’ve been trying all input methods, oddly enough, the full screen keyboard is the one that feels the most awkward to me, alphanumeric and mini qwerty are fine, and the handwriting recognition works surprisingly well! (except for the fact that I never dot my ‘i’s :P)

Oh and click after the break for more pictures :P

Just got this in the mail a moment ago! :D (address blurred for obvious reasons)

If you accompain the Beta Labs blog, you may know I won the contributor of the month for this October, and so I got Spore, the new game from EA. But I still haven’t installed it, just stopped what I was doing for a quick post :P

Read on for more pics :P

This saturday, my modem decided to die, just after business hours too, so I’d have to wait until monday to order a new one. So it was up to my phone to keep me connected meanwhile. And, surprisingly for anyone who tryed to tether an older phone (memories of my 6600 :p), it was incredibly straight forward!

I started connecting my phone to my mac in PC Suite mode, just to see what would happen, I figured I’d have to download thousands of drivers and whatnot, but that was not the case. As soon as I opened the Network prefpane, a new connection appeared on the sidebar:

A couple settings after, and I was connected! The only thing that slowed me down for a while was the modem type, but that was solved pretty quickly by clicking the Advanced… button and selecting the right “vendor” from the drop down menu:

So there, I was online again, kudos to whoever at Nokia or at Apple who made this so simple. The only downside to all of this really is the speed

I really wouldn’t mind having a N95-3 now. :P

And it’s pretty nice. But don’t go away my fellow S60 fan, next I’ll compare a couple features that I think my N95 is better then the iPhone (besides the obvious ones, almost everything). Stay tuned!

EDIT: ok, forget the comparison, it’s shortcomings are starting to annoy me, I’ll probably get rid of it soon.

Nokia N95 + Nokia SU-8W + TV-Out + Sony KDL-46XBR2

Edit: for some reason, this is the post that attracts the most traffic to my blog, huh.