Feb 22
Reviews David
e55, martin fields, mobile, nokia, phone, protector, screen
Martin Fields Screen Protectors
For the last four weeks, I’ve been trying out a screen protector for my phone, sent from MobileFun.co.uk. I’ve been particularly keen to try these out after reading their blog post on all the various screen protectors they sell.
After 18 months of constantly wiping finger prints from my E51′s screen, it was badly scratched. It really is amazing how much damage even paper kitchen towel can do to a plastic screen. So, when I bought my E55 in September 2009, I didn’t remove the plastic slip that covered the screen as part of the original packaging, in a cheapskate way to protect its screen. The packaging cover did a good job of keeping scratches off. Although, after many months of constantly going in and out of my pocket, the cover’s corners began to curl up and pick up fluff. this forced me to peel them back and cut them off so that the peeling didn’t spread. Although the more I did this the more screen was exposed to the elements.
So yes, this pathetic state of affairs meant only one thing, it was time for a real screen protector. MobileFun.co.uk kindly sent me a set of their Martin Fields screen protectors. The first thing that struck me when unpacking them was that not only was there a cover for the main screen, but also for the camera on the back of the phone – very thorough. The packing was a simple moulded plastic affair, with both sets of protects on a backing sheet. The screen protector is cut to shape, and they even thought to cut a hole out for the light sensor so that the phone could still take accurate readings of the ambient light level.
Continue reading …
Feb 15
How-To Guides David
buzz, e-mail, email, filtering, gmail, google, privacy, socialnetworking, Twitter
Google Buzz
Google Buzz was released last week, and a positive spin on it would be that it could succeed where FriendFeed didn’t quite succeed, because of Google’s ready-made user base. A negative spin would be - we don’t need this. Certainly, I personally think that it’s naive to try replacing Twitter at this point. Twitter is not perfect, but we’re stuck with it, and there’s a great ecosystem of web services built up around it.
Sure, Google Buzz can take posts from Twitter and therefore work along side it, just like Facebook can. Although, Google Buzz is just going to be another place for replication of links. E.g. my blog posts updates to Twitter, and my Buzz account takes updates from both – I can see that it wouldn’t take many more steps to create a painful recursion here. To be fair, this is what the mute button is for, but why should we have to start playing whack-a-mole with all this? Duplication is also going to happen for committed Google users, who are likely to see the same updates appearing in their Google Reader as they are on their Buzz feed; unless they’re very strict about who they follow. Which reminds me, I had better unfollow most of those people Google automatically made me follow on day one …
In the interests of fairness, I should report that Google have responded, saying that they have replaced auto-follow with auto-suggestions. They’ll also make it easier to hide who you’re following, and to opt-out of Buzz completely; all via your GMail settings. At the time the writing though, none of these options were available in my GMail settings. Fortunately, there are other ways to get to these options, so here’s a round up of blog posts showing you how to protect yourself with Google Buzz.
Continue reading …
Feb 8
Mobile News David
5530, 5th edition, allaboutsymbian, chat, cnet, cnetuk, gravity, lifecasting, nokia, rseven, s60, sms, symbian, touchscreen, Twitter
Writing about Symbian
I’ve been busy on a few writing assignments lately, so I thought I’d do a quick round up!
I’ve had a couple of reviews published on All About Symbian. The first was a co-authored piece about a new cloud service called “Rseven“. This is a sort of lifecasting service, where everything that passes through your phone can be saved onto the Rseven servers. Even if you delete something from your phone, it remains in their servers, but is just excluded from PIM sync. You can even record and upload phone calls, which are then displayed as part of your Rseven calendar. It’s an interesting concept, although I found the website needed a lot of usability work, and my sensitivities for privacy were particularly stinging from the idea of this service.
The second review I had published was for a nice little application called “SMS Chat“. This is a useful application which presents your text messages in the form of a two-way conversation, and has a rather fun interface. Has a bunch of other features too, like scheduling outgoing messages. Also, when I mentioned to the makers about a feature I thought was missing from the app, they went into rapid development mode to get it added in. The only downside, as the comments on my review rightly pointed out, it’s expensive for what it is.
I also have also written a follow up to my Twitter apps for Symbian feature. The comments on my original feature mentioned so many apps and web services I hadn’t heard of, it was clear that I should write a follow up piece. It turned out there are seventeen options for using Twitter on Symbian phones, with a range of 46 individual features. So that meant I had to do a an eye-watering 782 feature checks. I did it though and it’ll be published on All About Symbian on today, read it here.
The nice guys at AllAboutSymbian have also loaned me a Nokia 5530 touch screen phone. This is useful for me in two ways. First it’s a 5th edition S60 phone, I only had 3rd edition phones, so there’s more apps I can review now. Also, I’ve been a touch screen sceptic, so now I can actually get hands-on with one. I have to say, it feels horrible to be spreading finger prints all over its lovely screen all the time 
I’ve also written a review of the best Twitter application for Symbian, Gravity, for CNET UK, which if not published today, I’m hoping it’ll go out soon. You can read it -here- (place-holder for link).
Feb 1
Mobile News David
beta, nokia, predictive, s60, series60, sms, symbian, text
Nokia Beta Labs
Today, Nokia beta labs announced something which I, among millions of others, have been waiting for. That was an application to edit your phone’s custom predictive text dictionary.
To some, this may sound a bit boring and dull. To me though, this is a god-send. How many times have you tried to ‘teach’ your phone a new word, only to then go and make a typing error? With this you can easily fix such things. Before, the only way around is was to delete your entire custom dictionary. Which was a course of action only for brave tinkerers and hackers.
The other cool feature is that you can import and export your custom words for transferring to other phones. Although, there’s another potential use of this feature which nobody else has mentioned. It occurred to me that if you could get your address book exported into a .csv file, you could import your entire address book into your custom dictionary. This would be useful especially for typing out strange street names or surnames. I haven’t tested this, and it would be complicated if you need to have one word per line in the import file, for example. Although a little bit of spreadsheet magic or script hacking could do it.
Continue reading …
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google
Flickr
YouTube
RSS