Mobile phones

A couple of things I’ve noticed in my phone after the upgrade:

• Multitasking/memory management is better: the music player no longer crashes if I want to use e.g. Widsets at the same time.
• Music player works correctly with the headphone remote: previously when I hit pause, the music paused but didn’t restart when I hit play. If I hit stop, the player shut down. Now when I hit pause, the song pauses and restarts without a hitch. Also, stop button stops it and playing starts from the beginning. I would prefer the stop button to close the application, though, because I’m afraid it’ll start playing on its own if I forget to lock the remote.
• The font seems bigger or clearer. Also, bold font has appeared in many applications — maybe now the phone obeys what the 3rd party programmers have intended.
• [Added Feb 12] The email program no longer crashes when I want to remove an email from both the phone and the email servers.

The phone hasn’t rebooted accompanied with pretty coloured pixels — but it’s too early to tell if the upgrade fixed the problem I had.

I’m about to upgrade my phone’s firmware. Wish me luck!

It’s been acting up lately: rebooting suddenly. The screen pixelates and goes black, and after a while it reboots to the active idle screen without having to enter the PIN code. Odd and annoying. And today was the last drop — it started playing Nokia Tune when someone called me! Of course, there are many things that can cause this but then I had just had it. That’s it, you’re getting an upgrade.

Let’s see what happens…

@10:03 pm: At least it’s not bricked. The computer says the upgrade was successful.
So, I had done a backup of everything on the phone and now I restored it. It brought back my selected theme and even the very customised menu. It is missing some of the applications I’ve installed but I listed those (the important ones) before the upgrade.

So, now I’m at version 4! My old version was 2.0628.0.0.1. I hadn’t upgraded before because my operator either hadn’t approved of many of the previous versions or hadn’t bothered to approve them.

Unfortunately, now the music player doesn’t open directly to the playlist but in a completely useless menu. Now there’s one extra step between me and my lovely music. Getting it on full blast (ehm, 20% volume) quickly is sometimes crucial — after a long day at work and there’s a kid, or just other kind of noisy crowd, on the subway/train/bus.

I try to read as much as I can and I like to carry a book with me wherever I go. When I’m close to finishing one book, I start carrying two books with me which sometimes makes my handbag quite heavy…

Luckily, I stumbled across eBook readers for mobile phones. I’m currently using Mobipocket Reader. At for example Manybooks you can download several different formats — one of which is the Mobipocket Reader format. It’s also really easy to convert text files, HTML files or Word documents into eBooks with Mobipocket Creator.

Let’s pick a book at Project Gutenberg and convert it to Mobipocket.

I’ll pick the HTML format even though plain text would do. HTML format contains tagging for headers and things which can be used in formatting the text in eBook.

After opening Mobipocket Creator, I choose to create a new blank publication. This way it’s easy to pick the title and I can combine several files if I want.

Now I need to choose the files to include in the publication. I drag and drop the HTML file I just downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

For demonstration’s sake I’ll pick up an image to be used as the cover image. I’ll drag and drop this image into the Cover Image window.

As far as I know, the image doesn’t show in the mobile application. Instead, it’ll show up in the Mobipocket Reader’s library.

Finally, I click the build icon and the Build button.

Then I open the Mobipocket Reader and send my newly created eBook to my mobile.

The resulting eBook from this HTML looks like this:

In Mobipocket reader there are several settings. For example, if I read just before going to sleep, I change the background to black and the text to yellow. Last night I tried out teal text on black which was quite good. On the bus it’s usually best to read black on white. The font size and font type are also adjustable, as well as justified text or unjustified. There are options to add highlights, bookmarks and notes to the text as well as create hyperlinks.

What I miss is a way to check the total number of pages. There is a meter at the bottom of the screen to show how far you are in the book but it’s difficult to really make out how much there is left. Maybe it’s just me, I like to look at the number on the last page no matter how interesting the book is.

I spotted my first N95 in the wild today. It was sitting right next to me at the ontology lecture.

The owner was fondling the device all the time (I still fondle my N73 — constantly…). I hate to see people get gadgets that I want. I sure hope they appreciate the amazing gadget they have obtained. But, I’m determined to give this one a pass and wait for the next device which will of course be much better and more wonderful and more beautiful (they better have it in plum colour, too). And hopefully it’ll have a miniSD card slot instead of microSD.

I still have 1 year 7 months left of my contract (I could switch the phone to N95 but I’d have to pay the rest of the N73 first) so I’m going to wait.

There better be something much better around the corner (in 2 years — no sooner, no later).

Here’s some information on the applications I’ve installed as well as some theme places I stalk in order to find The Perfect Theme.

Applications

Most of these are freeware.

Lifeblog

(Pre-installed) Lifeblog logs your messages and media (photos, videos, sound), and you can add your own notes, too. I don’t use the mobile application at the moment because I haven’t figured out how to moblog to WordPress with it, but Lifeblog is very handy in transferring the logged items to the computer.

Y-Browser

A file explorer. The search seems to be working very swiftly.

Omat Lahdot

Timetables for the capital city area (Helsinki, that is). You can save a list of bus stops/stations and filter out all unnecessary lines.

Screenshot

Take a screenshot of a lovely theme or a horrible-looking user interface

Opera Mini

A browser that filters out the blingbling on sites for easier viewing on a small screen and smaller load to data transfer. I like the built-in browser better though.

Nokia Search (unofficially out)

Search messages, emails, calendar, to-do, contacts, notes, and other files. Available for download at Symbian Freak for example.

Calcium

Simple calculator but it’s much easier and faster to use than the built-in calculator.

Trivial Pursuit Genus Edition

Not freeware. Bought this via the N73 Services on Download!.

Themes

I’m currently using Clarity by Submarine (Clarity Wine variation). It has some blue in popups but I can live with that. The colours are very clear and the red is wonderful.

I check the following theme places daily:
- MobileThemes.com Forum thread “Upload your 3rd Edition themes here!”
- MobileThemes.com themes
- Mobile9 theme gallery
- 4urMobilePhone

New site
- Zedge.net » Themes

Please note that for some reason some people want to look at naked women (etc.) on their phone screen, so those theme places may contain NSFW (not safe for work) images. They do censor some theme previews but not nearly enough.

Some of the uploaded themes, particularly at Mobile9 and MobileThemes’s general upload section (not the forum post), have been created using online resources which may add icons and other “advertisements”.

I’m waiting for an email from the library so I changed the address in my library information to my mobile email. I also set up the phone to check mail every hour (not in the middle of the night). I use the Finnish user interface and this, not surprisingly, caught my eye:

First of all, it’s funny how it says “30 minuutin väl.” instead of “30 minuutin välein” even though there’s quite a bit of empty space… (This isn’t by far the worst case I’ve seen. I’ll show you a bad one if you’re interested ) but the 4th item makes you miss a few heartbeats (no? Is it just me?). How did that happen? When you look at the English options, they are nice and consistent:

I envy you who use the English UI! (I know I could use it too, but Finnish feels somewhat more comfortable — despite things like these.)

[Edit: Dec 6th]
By popular demand Here’s the Swedish UI

S60.com has opened a Wishlist for all our great or crazy dreams about S60 applications. I added my humble wish for an Advanced photo sequence. I haven’t received any ratings yet but I hope people won’t find my wish completely idiotic.