60 things

[Blue Champion is a well-known sports blogger who blogs about his favourite football club, Chelsea, at bluechampions. He recently switched from a *cough* Razr *cough* to Nokia N95 8GB. This is his first S60 v3 phone. Here’s his take on the phone. - Kay]

Okay, here is another thumbs up review for Nokia N95 8GB, but I don’t normally do mobile phone reviews. It neither pays me nor is my passion. I’ve spent my hard earned 28k on this. So, I’m just another customer of Nokia N95 8GB.

I bought this phone a couple of weeks back which is enough time to review if you know the kind of stress we put on gadgets in the first few days.

When I was looking for a new phone I had to conclude on what I wanted. Was it style or power or music or internet or camera, etc. Then I realised that even if I were particular about all these, I could get all this into one phone.

When I was doing my research and analysis, it didn’t take too much time to realise that I had Nokia N95 8GB on one side and the ‘other phones’ on the other side. Then I was asking myself what stops me from buying N95 8GB. Firstly, I did not want a bulky looking heavy phone. Secondly, how good looking would be a black phone which has a width of three-fourth an inch? Thirdly, it has a million features but do I need them at all?

I went to a mobile store with few other phones in mind but I wanted to check N95 8GB before I saw anything else. The phone looked so heavy until the store guy placed it on my palm. Believe me, it is not at all heavy for a mobile. And if you really need those features packed into that phone, it in fact can feel a lot lighter. And you know what, it was stylish, it looked real good. It felt like a brand new gun with it’s color, finish and the mass.

Whatever inhibitions I still had about the phone were blown over by the size of the screen. Then the money and the mobile exchanged hands. I was just hoping that I made the right choice. That was not the most expensive tech stuff I’ve ever bought, but in terms of cost per cubic centimetre, it is right on top.

Let me do it like a pro now. I’ll try to catch up on the major features that I understand and use. I’ll split the rest of the review into (i) phone calls (ii) music (iv) videos (iv) camera (v) internet (vi) gps (vii) battery (viii) etc.

(more…)

The future is getting better and better. The newly announced Nokia N96…

• has got S60 v3 Feature Pack 2
• looks like, but better looking than, the N81, thanks to the 2.8 inch screen
• twice the internal memory than the N95 8GB + expandable external memory (40 hours of video / 12000 songs)
• mobile TV (DVB-H)
• Just the same 240×320 screen resolution
• 5 MP autofocus camera with Carl-Zeiss lens with two LED flashes
• Wi-fi
• 3.5 mm jack for audio, TV output
• 950mAh battery (if N95 8GB struggles when scanning the 8 GB hard drive, I wonder how this phone can handle all that storage)

Update: N96 pictures (YouTube slide show)

I’m buying my Nokia N95 8GB next month. Don’t know how much the N96 will cost, but I’m sure it will make N95 8GB very affordable!

N96 feature list at All About Symbian.

N96 - N95 8GB comparison at GSMArena

Image: GSMArena

S60 is getting closer and closer to desktop experience. EQ Soft’s EQ AltTab brings PC’s window-switching functionality to S60 v3 phones. This program runs in the background while you use applications to switch to.

Download it from here: http://www.box.net/shared/prjuy9iio0
It’s unsigned.

Pretty useful for S60 phones like N95, N95 8GB, N82, and N81, those with good memory. Why only top order NSeries phones? Because Call Filter - another program that needs to run in the background to do its job well - is shutdown when Opera, S60 Web browser, and similar apps are used. So such phones are for S60 v3 FP1, actually.

(courtesy: Nokia Users)

One of the major reasons why I bought my first S60 phone, Nokia 6630, was the fact that Symbian was Unicode compliant. I bought it in 2005. Two months back I got myself N80 and moved to S60 v3. But till now I’ve been unsuccessful in finding a way to read webpages in Tamil, my mother tongue.

I’ve made many attempts to get a Tamil Unicode (ta-IN) font installed in my phone without success. Last week I decided to take a risk by installing Latha, the Unicode TrueType font that comes with Windows, in my N80 using Font Router.

It didn’t work, but I think I learnt something interesting. After having installed the Unicode font and rebooted the phone, I was able to make out Tamil Unicode text in webpages in the S60 Web browser, but the browser displayed the Tamil text somewhat like Internet Explorer 5. Tamil letters are vowels and vowel+consonant combinations. The S60 Web browser split letters into separate characters, which I think is a clear indication that the browser couldn’t render Unicode.

The font installation turned all the English letters in the UI into boxes. During the past 4 years, as a language professional I’ve been involved in translation of Nokia phones to some extent. I, and my erstwhile colleagues and friends who are still involved in Nokia UI localisation, gave our output in Unicode. We believed that Nokia used Unicode text in its phones; but if that was the case and if S60 was fully Unicode compliant, I should have seen junk characters in Tamil instead of boxes. Nokia may be using images (bitmap fonts?) instead of a truetype font.

I’m not sure how many Tamil Nokia phone users want a Tamil UI for their mobiles. I don’t, but I certainly want to read news and blogs in Tamil. I’d also like to add the ability to write in Tamil, if such a basic thing as reading the text weren’t nearly impossible.

Nokia has localised many of its phones into Tamil, so at least its S60 phones should have no problems rendering Unicode. Language packs could be a good solution (they could include a font installer too).

I’d like to see if the latest S60 phones have this issue. If and when I get myself a N95 or N82, the first thing I’d check would be if it can display Tamil text.

If you have had the same problem with your language, please share your experience in the comments, so that we can explore and find out if there is a way to fix it.