Monday, July 28, 2008

Back to work (with Nokia N78)

Oh no, a four week vacation (never had a vacation this long before) is over and office is calling. Normally I walk 15 minutes to office but today it took half an hour to get there. By a bicycle.

During vacation I got myself a new Nokia N78 smartphone. It is a nice device but some things bother me. For example:

Terminal was supposed to come with a free 3 month navigation license. Couldn’t get that working, so I contacted Nokia’s support. No answer yet, but other users seem to have the same problem.

Terminal has a “naviwheel” that imitates iPod’s control wheel. This wheel is less accurate and doesn’t work with all applications.

The keypad isn’t always working precisely. Especially end key (the red one) and clear key (c) are difficult to use and false key presses happen a lot (maybe this is just my terminal?)

Camera application can geotag images (i.e. add coordinates from GPS to picture’s metadata). Photo viewing application from terminal can use this information but when picture is uploaded to Nokia’s Ovi service, location information is lost or not used.

Podcast application still doesn’t remember the position nor does it offer ability to fast forward the episode. Once you have listened a one hour long episode half way and accidentally stopped it, you know what I mean.

FM receiver does strange things. Once it started to have once a minute a five second break. Another time channel didn’t change at all - UI was refreshing, frequency information changed and so on but channel was same all the time. A device reboot fixed these.

With default settings active idle screen has an item that takes you to “Share online” application. That item also has two small icons with a number that probably mean something. However, I couldn’t find from manual any explanation what those are. Maybe somebody knows?

Finally something not actually related to Nokia: because terminal so willingly wants to upload data to Flickr, I also created an account there. To my surprise an account created with default settings published pictures to everybody. When I uploaded family pictures there, those were suddenly shared with the whole world.

What was good with the terminal? New access point handling makes WiFi usage a lot easier than before.

What was exceptional with the terminal? The ability to mount WebDAV disks over the air. With this feature my terminal suddenly had 50+ GB storage space; my previous laptop didn’t have that much.

//Harri

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