Life with Me in the middle
Posts tagged s60
One week with the N96 as the be all do all
Feb 18th
David Gonzales over at Electronic Pulp has started his first week with the Nokia N96 as his only device for all multimedia and communication needs. Sadly I feel a rather bad review is on its way. I currently use the N96 as my primary device and I’m far from happy in many ways.
I won’t go into detail about the many things I dislike about the N96 right now but I did want to cover just a few. It should be noted that I am using the NAM (N96-3) variant of the device with the latest firmware release.
Firstly, when you pay close to $700 for any device you expect it to be fast and efficient. Sadly in the case of the N96 performance is not one of its strong points. I consider myself a very patient person and don’t tend to be overly obsessed with how fast something works as long as it works, but in the case of the N96 it tends to be neither at times. Moving around the device is not snappy as the N95 but I don’t mind that. The biggest trouble I have with performance is loading proper connections (Edge/3G/Wifi). The N96 is running on S60 3rd Edition FP2 which has some “improvements” with automatically connecting to the best source without user interaction. Not only is this painfully slow it doesn’t work at all at times and leaves you staring a useless application that can no longer process anything.
I admire Nokia’s attempt to make things easier with selecting connections because this is one of the most complained about issues with S60. However the implementation that is on the N96 is poor at best and is nothing more than a headache. I waste way too much time worrying if I am going to be able to connect to this or that to make it useful at all. Let us specify what connection we want for each and every application along with having a default, that if no other is specified, will always be the defualt. If they did this life would be good. No more prompting no more worrying.
The last topic I wanted to bring up was maturity of firmware and phone features. I find it very hard to believe the N96 was ever ready for prime time when they released it. Why? Because I feel it is still not ready. There are far too many issues with the device to charge what they do for it. Not only this but the software is just not there in the marketplace. I can’t tell you how many times a shiny new application comes out from Nokia and their supposedly flagship model, the N96, is not supported. This alone shows that the device was never ready for prime time and was put out way to early to hopefully get a few sales from gadget obsessed people like myself.
With all of this said I am looking forward to following up with David on his blog to see what his overall impressions are with the N96. If its great one week will feel like a day. However if he feels like I do one week will feel like 3 long months and he will have or hope to have something new in his hands ASAP.
S60 is filling me up
Feb 13th
Recently I have been keeping an eye on how much space I’ve been using on my N96. Like most of you I installed everything on my internal mass memory to prevent my smartphone from filling up. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to matter and I’m at a loss on how to fix this.
I have watched as the space of my C: continues to dwindle into nothing. The real question is where does this space go? Sure there are temp files and I understand this but over 70MB worth? I consider this a major flaw in the S60 platform. With no clear way on how to clean up your wasted space its inevitable that I will run out of room and then what. Will my phone simply crash?
If you know how to prevent or clean up my wasted space my ears are open. As for S60, we need a utility to clean up wasted space much like the one on windows that allows you to clear temp files. Am I alone with this concern? Leave your feedback below.
What I think of Synble
Jan 5th
With the usage of SMS ( Short Message Service ) increasing yearly the need for storage of this information is becoming more and more important. Luckily a new start-up by the name of Synble does just that and much much more for S60 based mobile smartphones. I have been trying this service out now for the last week and want to help you decide if this service is for you.
The first time I heard about Synble I was curious to see what purpose this would serve. I immediately went to their site and began my account creation. The first thing you should know is that you must install the client on your S60 device prior to creating an account on the service. During setup you will be prompted for account information, followed by your data being synced with the Synble service. I had a couple of issues with the initial sync on my device (N96). About mid way through the sync of my contacts the process stalled and I was left with a dead process. Closing the application would solve the problem and the sync would resume from where it left off. After the third attempt all was well. While this was a pain this was the only problem I had during the initial setup. To their credit I have over a thousand contacts and several hundred SMS messages on the phone. However this does need to be looked into.
With my account setup and the service enabled on my phone I went to the Synble website to see if all of my contacts and messages were synced properly. Sure enough all of my data was there and ready for viewing. At this point you see the screen and the question now what comes to mind. Looking for documentation on the Synble site was a waste of time because for some reason they feel the service is easy enough to use without any instructions. The Synble team needs to create documentation if they want this service to grow. I consider myself a very knowledgeable user and I was left feeling lost for a while. Had I been a user that was looking for a solution like this I would have moved on quickly. Luckily I stuck with it and learned for myself.
One of the big pushes from Synble is why would you reach into your pocket to check your messages when you have access to them on your computer. This is a nice feature however it has one flaw. You have the ability to read all of your messages but you can only reply to messages to those users than also have a Synble account as well. While this doesn’t sound promising there is a catch. If you can convince your friends to setup an Synble account you can send text messages back and forth free of change. Might want to read that last sentence again. Free SMS regardless of carrier. So if you have any friends with a small SMS plan this alone is worth having them sign up.
Use Jabber (Gtalk) as a chat service? If you do you are in luck. You can have all of your text messages forwarded directly to your chat session. For me this isn’t a huge plus but for those that have their phone on silent while at work this could be a big deal. I personally have not tried this yet but would love to hear from users that have.
Twitter twitter twitter, its all the rage. I know because I’m an avid user myself (@sloanb). In most countries twitter no longer supports SMS notifications due to the cost incurred. Synble has found a way around this by using their own SMS notifications. If you have the Synble service running on your phone you will receive notifications of all direct messages and @replies. Very cool if you always want to know who is keeping in touch with you via twitter while on the go. I have tested this feature out and it works as promised. It is far from fast but you will get the notifications. On average I was getting notifications five to twenty minutes after they were posted to twitter. In countries where this service was disabled I can see this as being a huge thing. I was impressed.
One of the coolest features is the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and have them sent via SMS to your phone. The post are not full but partial but give you enough information to know if you want to dig further. For those that want to know what is going on all the time with little to no interaction this is an awesome feature. Yes we have Widsets and Webtool widgets but both require you to actually start up an application to read the stories. I like the fact that I can get the new delivered to me without any interaction. If I choose to read it I simply click the link and go from there.
As you can see there is a lot that needs to be fixed but all in all this service has a real potential. On closing I would like to suggest that the good folks over at Synble please allow their S60 application to be a system app and start-up on boot. I don’t know how many times I forgot to start up the application on boot and kick myself for it. The speed at which messages both Synble to Synble and Twitter could use a enhancement for sure. With all of this said I have grown fond of the app and look forward to all that it may bring to the S60 platform in the future.
Do yourself a favor and check it out for yourself. Let me know what you think of the service.