Skype, Fring, Google Chat and more

I have installed Fring on my phone and given it a go. I now have Skype and google chat but no Battery.

Installing it is simple, go to the site select the link and you are off. You then setup and account, put in you credentials for the services you are interested in in my case Skype, Google talk and twitter. Then you are online. You can chat with contacts, make skype and google calls and post to your twitter thing.

That's the theory but I found that it was not that simple. I have not been able to make any calls except to the test number and nobody has responded to my chats!

The phone keeps searching and switching between 2G, 3G and 3.5G all the time and fring keeps dropping off. Then it stops and asks me if I want to try to reconnect. In this day and age no mobile applicaiton should be asking be for a retry. It should just back off exponentially then when the phone gets some signal have aother go.

Anyhoo the result of all this activity is that it managed to drain my batttery for the last two days in a little over 5 hours. So that is getting the bin for now. Nice idea just that the technology is not quite there yet. I am not to sure if it's the phone or fring or both that need the extra work but perhaps when the next version comes out I will try again.

It does do SIP as well though which is nice as this is going to be the new Skype.

I may do another post later on how I think that all this is a waste of time anyway as it wants to be a nice open standard and built into the phone as a service. S60 has SIP so we are getting there.

Spacial Widening on the Nokia phones

I am normally not somebody to turn on equalizers or sound processors and I can see no reason why you would want to have your music altered so that it shoulds like you are in your bathroom but I turned on the spacial widening on my phone and I think that I like it.

I have been thinking recently how, when using headphones, you get a really tiny sound stage. The band feels like it is playing about a gig on the bridge of your nose. Now this is okay for most things and I think that it helps with the feeling that you are not interfering with other people on the train or bus but it is missing something.

Spacial widening settings have always left me cold, giving a feeling that you have somehow just taken the heart out of the music. Nokia's new system on the other hand still keeps the majority of the sound at the bridge of the nose gig but just pushes some of it out beyond your head on either side. It does sound pretty nice. Having said all that it still fails for some tracks, sounding too open and washy but for the majority it's an improvement.

It looks like they have stopped thinking "What else can we do with this DSP?" and started to think "How can we improve the sound?".

Time will tell but for now it's getting left on.

Nokia please name your photos in a nice way.

My phone, the Nokia 6120, names it's photos in the format DDMMYYYY(nn).jpg. So you get listings like the one below:

01122007.jpg 02102007.jpg 04112007.jpg 04112007(1).jpg 11102007.jpg

Talk about useless. How many years have we been naming files in the format YYYYMMDD so that they sort really nicely?

Nokia. Please find the engineer who made that decision and beat him round the head with the printed source code of the ls command.

Thats all.

Keep it simple

I know you, my reader, have been hanging off the edge of your seat waiting to find out about my phone purchace. Did he go big? Did he keep it simple? Did he get the same again? To put you all out of your misery I got the the Nokia 6120 Classic in the end.

Pretty good choice if you ask me but why not the N95 for it has all the features, I hear you cry. Well there are a couple of reasons. Battery life, I have heard that some people have made it last nearly 8 hours. Cost, it would have been an extra six pounds a month. Camera, no really, I know it has a 5Mpix camera but to be honest the photos that people are getting with it look not that much better than the 3Mpix ones of the SE K800. Speed, most reports that I have read say that it is a little sluggish, the camera takes about 10 seconds to start up for instance. So all in all it's not the bargin that I was thinking off. Lets hope the N82 is a bit better.

The Nokia 6120 on the other hand is tiny, has a reasonable battery life, really fast and runs all the Series 60 apps that everybody is developing. Best of all it's free! I have to say I am impresessed about he buzz that Nokia is creating around the S60 operating systems in terms of developers. There are loads of Nokia hosted resources for that one.

I have so far opted for the the x-series silver tariff for data. This means that I have an unlimited* data allowance for using the internet from the phone. Including email. I have to say that I have been using that pretty heavely right now and it's quite cool to try things like streaming radio and not to have to worry about the cost.

Bad points so far. I have noticed that sometimes it's struggles to get an internet connection hopping from 3G to 3.5G and back before finally settleing back on 3G. This may be just because I am in a bad reception area but who knows. I have not used the voice much yet as I am trying to use up the last of the old voda contract first.

There are loads of apps to download and I am trying them all! I will report back if I find any good ones but please feel free to make any suggestions.