Symbian in Motion

Normally I don’t post stuff like this but I haven’t yet had a chance to talk about my Proporta battery pack here on SiMo so I feel like I owe them one. Long story short, I’m really not sure how I survived without one. Proporta’s 3400 mAh mobile battery pack is an absolute must-have to combat the poor battery life experienced with most Nseries / Eseries handsets. It will refuel your Nokia (or iPhone, or iPod, or Samsung, or Sony Ericsson, etc) about three times on a single charge and if you’re a power user, you need one.

Proporta also makes a load of handset cases and other items design to protect mobile devices. Been thinking about checking something out? Well this might just be the push you needed:

Proporta love that they have such a good relationship with their customers across the pond. To celebrate such a wonderful friendship, we’re offering free shipping on all orders placed to the U.S. throughout the month of June.

Simply place your order between the 1st and 30th June 2008, and if you live in the U.S., you’ll get your shipping free of charge. Enjoy.

I have long been of the opinion that “camera phones” can never and will never replace good quality good stand-alone digital cameras. I still maintain that opinion. The quality will never be as good, the available resolution will never be as high, and so on. The usefulness of the camera phone - for me - is capturing random places in time. Situations that creep up on you in your every day life. In doing so however, it’s nice to have a camera phone that is capable of capturing a good photograph as opposed to a blurry pixelated mess.

This past Monday I snapped a picture of something on my N95 8GB and emailed it to a friend. Her response upon opening the photo:

Woh, that picture was taken on a phone?!

Sure, the photo quality is nowhere near that of a solid dSLR or even a good lower-end digital camera like my Sony Cybershot H9. When you’re out and about however, there are few camera phones capable of capturing random places in time better than the N95. Had I taken said photo with a lesser camera phone, sure my memory of the situation would have been immortalized. Sure, I could have emailed it across to my friend. Sure, she would have seen it. Would she have had the same reaction when she saw the image though? Would she have been able to see the sharp lines and great detail that the N95’s macro mode is capable of capturing or would she have just looked briefly at a dull blur and then moved along?

Just one of the many points in time each day when I’m glad I have an N95 8GB in my pocket.

I’ll let the commercials do the talking. Enjoy. :)

Also, there’s another Open to Anything event tonight in Chicago. If you can’t make it, WOM World’s Qik stream is the next best thing…

I’ve discussed the good and the bad with regards to the N95 8GB, some here on SiMo but mostly elsewhere as this handset has been discussed ad nauseum throughout the blogosphere. One thing that hasn’t been discussed very much - and I find this incredibly surprising - it the audio quality.

The N95 8GB is the King Kong of do it all handsets, at least until the N96 is released. It’s supposed to be a multimedia phenom as the hoards of marketing would dictate. A multimedia computer. But forget about the marketing, plenty of you have used this handset. Great 2.8″ display, 30 fps video recording, a host of music, video and streaming possibilities, etc. The thing that continuously amazes me however, the the incredibly sub par audio quality I have experienced with Nokia handsets.

It’s a shame really. I have so little to complain about when it comes to the N95 8GB. It seems like the only real downsides however, are huge ones. The amazingly inadequate transfer speeds brought on by USB 1.1 and the terrible OEM email support are other examples. This however, is my big one. I’m an audiophile through and through, and every time I use my handset to listen to music I die a little inside. Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration…

I don’t want to get too deep into this rant, but as Nokia pushes its new music store, Comes with Music, and so on; I sincerely hope that this issue is addressed. I’ve used the N95 8GB with the included ear buds, the aux-in in my car, top of the line studio monitors and everything in between. Unfortunately even the best of the best can’t salvage the audio hardware in this handset. In fact, most mid-range MP3 players I’ve used significantly trump the audio quality of the N95 8GB (and other Nokia models). I love having one device that can do it all so to speak, so I often bite the bullet and just use the N95 8GB as a music player. You know that face you make when you taste something extremely sour though? That’s the face I make each time I start up a music player on my N95 8GB.

The first thing I’m going to do once I get my hands on the N96 is load up a few MP3s and fire up the music player. I really, really hope that I am pleasantly surprised.

S60 people, stop drooling over the E71 for a few minutes so that we can give you some important news. Remember how we reported on the guy from Nokia stated that the new v20 firmware for the N95 NAM would be out in early June? Yeah, he totally lied. Ok, maybe he didn’t lie and plans were just changed a bit. As of early this morning the updated firmware is available for all to enjoy, possibly to celebrate Memorial Day. Whatever the case may be, it’s taken entirely too long but it’s here so back up your phone and get to flashing. Some noted improvements:

• Flash Lite 3 support
• Faster bootup
• Faster camera load time
• Integrated Search
• Demand paging
• No ASR
• N-Gage demos

So there you have it; better than any Memorial Day sale we can think of. Hit the Nokia Software Updater and get rolling.

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(from my post on BGR)