Telephonator

I had a Nokia 7650. Awesome, but slow.

I had a Nokia 3230. Terrible, but reasonably fast. I mean, after a half-dozen firmware upgrades and repairs, the thing would crash on an incoming call, and I had to pull the battery to stop it vibrating-alert-ing itself to death.

Then the Siemens S65. Ahh, Teutonic understated simplicity. Great phone! Shame about their Bluetooth handsfree, which now won’t turn on. It just “bleep!”s feebly at me.

Then I said I wanted an iPhone on launch day. I still have the option open to me to get one, via Cingular International.

But I got a Nokia N95 instead.

For me, it’s the spiritual successor to the 7650. With speed, maturity of applications, real actual functionality and it’s an indispensable part of my working day.

Recommended!

To flesh out the bundled apps, I’d tip you get Fring, the GMail application and Salling Clicker.

…anyone know how to get it to pair with Address Book on Mac OS X, for dialing and sending of SMS? The Nokia iSync plugins allow me to sync perfectly, I just can’t “mate” with Address Book.

4 thoughts on “Telephonator

  1. Hi Bender,
    Good to see it’s giving you something of a nerdgasm. I’m half-looking at that for my next phone – when I cave-in to Telstra to go 3G so I can get a decent data plan (That’s a ways off yet though).
    The other Nokia Contenders are the N80-IE ($500-ish) and 6280/6288 ($300-ish Spot the difference).
    I won’t look at any other phone manufacturers (especially Sorny). But if a “cheap enough” 3G iPhone hits OZ with the right features added from what the US’s stuck with, I might go that way also.

    I don’t know about that Siemens monstrosity – it always looked like a perfect ear-remoulade collector to me.

    Q’s about your N95:
    1) Do you use (would you ever use) the FM radio? (My 6111’s radio will only work when you have the wired headset attached, which involves the spectacularly un-erganomic and badly designed “pop-port”).
    2) Do you get much use out of the GPS? Any tie-ins with location-based comms or such? (I find the only place I really desire GPS is in the car).

    M0les.

  2. M0les,

    Remember that Telstra has 2 3G networks. A 2100mhz one, and the 850mhz one called “Next G”. A Next G USIM works on both, but there’s no Nokias (yet) for Next G.

    I think an 850mhz Nokia 63xx is coming soon, and I believe that a Motorola Z9 is also. Possibly both with Symbian Series 60 or UIQ.

    You didn’t like the S65, or the “executive” style Bluetooth headset? Neither gathered….detritus…as you described. :-)

    I have used the FM radio. You must have the headset attached, as it uses that for your antenna. Funniest “Finn-glish” thing I have ever seen happens when you load up radio (Visual Radio) and choose to get a listing over-the-air of the channels for Sydney.

    One channel is called “2UUS FM”.

    2UUS? Oh…wait…phonetically…that’s 2WS FM!

    I think someone was verbally told the name, typed it in, and it was never checked.

    Classic!

    The GPS is nifty, and location-based comms is a coming soon event from the developer community. The Maps programme is about to exit beta, and the community is suggesting Jaiku and Fring might be the first candidates to get auto-GPS-locale.

    Via Fring you get IM and Skype, so you can no longer tell the missus you are in the office when she can clearly see your lat and long is….the pub…

    I use Google Maps (a standalone Java app) which can see the ob-board GPS, so that’s quite cool as well. I think that location/locale will help for posting status via your addressbook contacts, and for small apps like the ones mentioned above.

    Beyond that, getting the new Yahoo! To Go 2.0 to recognize that when I search for a pub, restaurant, etc I might mean “nearby to my GPS position” but I might also just be walking around a certain area, and trying to find a place for dinner in another area.

    For me, my actual Garmin GPSmap 196 will be my car, bicycle and motorbike GPS, as it is rock-solid. This phone’s GPS will be an always-with-me, always-on, solution to pico- /nano- mapping, location and routing uses.

  3. Yeah, I forgot to mention first time round that my 6111 “just worked” with iApps sync (addressbook and bt SMSing). Phone entries MUST be stored in the phone memory rather thanthe SIM due to the complexity if the data (meh, whatever, SIM storage’s irrelevant if you’re syncing it from your main Db anyway).

    I’d like to ftuz with some of the location-based games like that “Treasure Hunt” one (which I can’t find a solid reference for right now) or something like The Shroud: http://www.shroudgame.com/

    M0les.

  4. Oh and another interesting Java app: mobik.com (If you can get your friends to sigh-up so you can message them).

    M0les.

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