Time for an upgrade. I have been using the Nokia 6120c as my main phone now for nearly a year and it has been a mixed blessing. The camera is useless, the memory is limited, the speaker turns off at random points and you have to reboot to get it back, it gets confused and won't make a data connection on times. On the good side it is running S60 which is a pretty nice OS. It may look a little dated next to an iPhone but I quite like it.

I have been looking at reviews of all the new phones that have been coming out and I think that the N85 is one of Nokia's best so far. I can't wait to see how the N97 turns out but for now the N85 is the one to get.

So I brought a N82.

A couple of reasons drew me that way. The first was cost. You can get a N82 for less than £170 on ebay while the N85 is still over £300. The second and this was the main one for me, it has a Xeon flash. I have been really annoyed with the 6120c camera for some time now so I think that I wanted the best camera I could on the next phone.

I decided some time ago that I would get another S60 phone as I really like the OS and the community that it has. Nokia are doing great things with their beta labs and most mobile applications that create.

Right now I have the following running and in RAM with still 40Mb free.

• Web Browser - I quite like the standard webkit based browser and by default it is opened when you click on a link in other applications.
• Web Server - Just 'cause I can. It is a cut down version of Apache and you can visit it at http://choffee.mymobilesite.net
• Music Player - It works okay. It has problems reading some tags but it works nicely with all the buttons. Ogg support would be nice.
• Fring - Mobile IM. Google chat, msn, jabber, and Skype support. Sending files and VoIP. This runs all the time.
• Contacts - It's just running right now.
• File Manager - I used it to install an app uploaded from my PC earlier and it just still running. It's basic but it does the job.
• Swim - This is a bit of a fix that runs the sync to http://scheduleworld.com/ with all my contacts and calendar. This should be part of the base os if you ask me.
• n-Gage - Play server. I have tried a couple of games and they are pretty impressive. Using the camera to look around a virtual room is quite cool. But I don't really play that many games.
• Shozu - For automating picture uploading. It just runs in the background, when you take a photo it pops up and says "Upload this?" you press yes or no and it goes away and deals with it.
• ?T9Nav - This is new but at the standby screen if you start typing as though you where entering text eg. 5646 it will search your contacts, apps, bookmarks, images, videos, calendar entries and music and give you list of things to choose from. I think this could be a keeper app.
• Nokia Image Exchange - This just syncs your photos with an online site. It is dynamic so if you change a picture name on your phone or the web that info is reflected on both sides. It's from Nokia Beta Labs and has some rough edges but I quite like it.
• JBakTaskMan - A little task manager that give you a list of running apps and some shortcuts and some important OS stats such as memory.

All that and I still have 50Mb of RAM free for things like the light saber that is controlled by the way you move the phone, tetris, frozen bubble with phone movement support, twitter apps if you don't like fring to handle that and many other apps that I have not mentioned here.

It's got GPS built in and it pretty quick taking only a few seconds to pick up a signal and 10 or so to get a fix. I would imagine this would be a little slower if you don't have internet access for it to get the A-GPS info. I had some fun with Nokia maps the other day which is pretty good for giving driving directions. I like the fact that I can use Google Maps and it's mega powerful local search to find somewhere, save that as a favorite in google maps then load Nokia maps and have it available to navigate to. I probably won't pay Nokia for Driving directions when my trial runs out in three months but I shall try to use it as much as possible until then.

The N82 does have some bad points. I think that I have mentioned before that I don't like the headphones at the top because as you get the phone out of your pocket or bag it is always up the wrong way. It does have the same charger as other modern Nokia phones but the USB connector is some crappy micro version that is just a tiny little bit smaller than the ones that everybody else uses. Why would they do that? The 3G reception is still a bit flakey but I think that is a general problem with three in some areas as the change over to 2G is slow and drawn out. This is probably not helped by my office being clad in metal and having generally poor phone reception.

Generally it all works better on the N82 than the 6120c. A lot of the little niggles are gone. I can mount it as USB drive and manage music and podcasts without having to shutdown the whole phone. I can install loads of apps in the main memory without running out of space. I can run a lot of those apps at one time and not struggle for memory.

There is loads more to talk about but for now I will leave it there. There are loads of other reviews of this phone on the web so I won't add to that noise a great deal. I may post some more on the apps that I like. Nokia is struggling to get an app store in the same way the iPhone does but there are some really good apps out there. You just have to look for them.

Did I mention that it can make phone calls as well?

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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.