Mar 31
Reviews David
2mm, battery, bp-4l, charger, desktop, mains, micro, nokia, usb
Charge your spare Nokia Batteries
The benefit of having a phone with a user-replaceable battery, is that you can carry a spare when you’re going to be away from a charger. The downside, however, is that eventually the phone has to be plugged in twice as long to recharge the battery, and then the spare. This has been the case for me lately while using Nokia’s E55 and N97, both of which run on Nokia’s hero battery, the BP-4L.
Thanks to MobileFun.co.uk, I have a Nokia battery charger to review.
Continue reading …
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.
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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 …
Jan 31
Mobile News David
allaboutsymbian, app, application, mobile, nokia, s60, series60, symbian, Twitter
Twitter on Symbian
A while ago I set about doing a survey of all the Twitter applications I knew of for Series60 phones. As I explored them I built up a list of features, 44 in all, across eight, in which I included m.twitter.com, giving me a total of 352 feature checks to perform.
Since I’m still inducting myself into the world of journalism, I took this as an opportunity to introduce myself to some developers. Doing that was a really positive experience, you get to have an exchange of views, and in some cases, contribute to the direction of their plans, albeit in small ways.
Strange as it might sound, the downside was that I got to know about up-coming features. It worked out that three of the eight were close to releasing new versions. So not wanting my article to be outdated within a week, I decided to hold it back while they got their testing done. This was fine, but it was something of a mental weight to bear, knowing that the article was just hanging there waiting to be completed. Fate took a hand when the editor of AllAboutSymbian.com (that’s who I was writing this for) e-mailed me one night last week to ask if the article could be published the following day. Since by then, two out of three apps were already updated, and the developers of the third had said not to wait for them, I replied that I could have it ready go.
The comments posted on the article (see my publications page), were as I expected. A steady stream of you didn’t review X or Y application. To clearly show the features of each application, I’d constructed a table, which formed the core of the article. After publication I spotted it had some errors. Frustrating, but it was still over 98% accurate 
So, there’ll be two publications coming out of this project, as I’ll be posting an updated version of the feature table. I’ve already corrected my errors, and have compiled a list of even more Series60 Twitter applications, bringing the total up from eight to seventeen!
Now, forty-four checks per application, and nine more applications to check, so that means I have to do … 
Edit/Update
I did the follow up article for All About Symbian, where I covered seventeen Twitter applications and services for S60 phones. Read it here.
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