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I upgraded my Blackberry 9500 (Storm 1) to OS5 this week from OS4.7. There are a few new features this brings that I like, and a drawback or two.

Pro’s:

• Major speed improvements. The OS is no longer sluggish, without removing any applications or data.
• gTalk, BBM and AIM status updates are shown when viewing a contact.
• Ability to Flag E-Mail’s for follow up.
• Bedside mode can be restricted to only activate within certain hours.
• Threaded bubble SMS interface, akin to the iPhone.
• Saner Keyboard layout in Landscape mode.
• New Font BBAlpha Sans Condensed allowing more characters on screen while keeping readability, a major UI boost.
• Macro shooting mode for camera.
• Radio is no longer disabled when battery is low. This was a real pain.

Con’s:

• Links between gTalk and the Contacts application break frequently, I haven’t been able to pin-point a cause.
• Still no useful E-Mail folders or filters. I can flag a mail for follow up, but I can’t see a list of just the mail’s i need to follow up, or a list of drafts.
• gTalk requires two lines per user. Before you could view 15odd users at a time, now it’s more like 6.

I own a Blackberry Storm (9500) and my dad has a Curve (8900). Both phones allow you to turn off data when roaming (Manage Connections -> Mobile Network Options -> Data Services), so that you don’t rack up expensive data charges (useful, I’m told, in places like Switzerland). However, this means you don’t get your e-mail.

The Curve has 802.11 b/g (Wi-Fi), but we were having trouble connecting to AP’s. It turns out that by turning off data for the Cell part of the phone, you turn off data for the whole device, meaning that the phone will never get an IP address, even with DHCP off (and manually assigning a valid static IP).

So, to get your Email (and other data apps that support Wi-Fi) working abroad follow these steps:

1. Turn OFF data, go to another country
2. When you want to check your mail, turn OFF the Mobile network
3. Turn ON Wifi
4. Turn ON Data
5. Scan for a Wi-Fi network and associate with it
6. Get your mail
7. Turn OFF Data
8. Turn OFF Wi-Fi
9. Turn ON Mobile network

The “Data Services” option should only turn off data transmissions over the Mobile network, not disable the IP stack (which I think it may be doing). Hopefully this bug is fixed in OS 5, I’ve not tried it yet.

Work has been hectic the last two weeks, I’ve been working 12+ hour days to get a CMS finished for a client, but thankfully it’s all done and finished now (let’s just hope there are no fatal bugs, like uploading a GIF will DROP a table or something else weird).

Agnès arrived in NY on Tuesday. Herself and artemis dropped up to the office and we sat around chatting for a few hours. I also met up with Agnès on Saturday afternoon for Lunch.

I’ve noticed a bizzarity in social event attendance etiquette. I’m not sure if it’s a New York thing or an American thing (I’m told it’s a New York thing) but saying you’ll attend x social event and actually attending it mean two completely different things.

On each of social outings I’ve had with American folk only 0-25% of them have shown up. Even for a co-workers birthday (which was joined with a going away party, as we weren’t going to she her for a few months) only about a quarter of the people who said they’d show up actually came. I suppose it’s something I’m just not used to, if you say you’ll be somewhere, you’d better have a good reason for not showing. Sure, you may be late, that’s almost expected, but to not show up, with no excuse? To not even call or text to say that you cant make it after you’ve made a commitment seems very aloof.

Also, there is a certain amount of suspicion and second guessing of ones motives in social encounters. A lady in a Subway station a few weeks back asked if a certain line stopped at a particular station. I told her that I didn’t know. I then tried to make small talk by saying that I’d just arrived, that the city was new to me and the I had only really taken one of the lines. I was glared at, as it to say “I only asked you for directions, nothing more. How dare you try and talk to me”.

Anyway, I went to see Infected Mushroom on Saturday in Webster Hall. It’s a really cool venue. There was Rap/Hip-Hop playing in the basement, trance/house on the ground floor, the band were playing on the Ballroom (which has a balcony for VIPs) and there was some Minimal Techno in an Upstairs room. There was also an EBM DJ playing before and after Infected Mushroom in the Ballroom. Infected Mushroom are a band who I’ve been into for about a year and I’m quite glad I saw them, considering I missed a free Coldplay gig and a Freezepop concert. I hope to get a few more gig’s in before I head home; I have my eye on Regina Skeptor, Bloc Party and Foo Fighters.

On Monday I wandered over to artemis’ to watch Dexter. I’ve also been watch a bit of Curb your Enthusiasm with my flatmates, Greg and Nanda. Both shows are pretty good and this has been the first time I’ve seen either.

I got a new phone on Saturday, a Nokia N70 (Music Edition). It’s a small step up from the 6680, but it’s got a better camera, more RAM and an Active Standby screen (which Vodafone decided the 6680 didn’t need, so they stripped it out). All my apps from the 6680 also just worked straight away when I pop’d my old card into the new phone, which was really handy. I also picked up a BL-6C (at last) and a Bluetooth Keyboard. Here’s a great list of S60 handsets (maintained by Steve Litchfield) which I’ve used for reference since I’ve owned an N-Gage.

I went to my first Movie Premier/screener on Wednesday. Some of the nice people in Media at Large gave us tickets. It’s called The Rocker and is basically a story about Pete Best. In a hilarious coincidence it actually contains Pete Best, playing a cameo role. There was one line I found amusing where a bland hippstr type is referred to as “[...] like Abercrombie are making people”.

I’ve just watched Once twice, the second time with the commentary. It’s been the first time in years that I’ve liked a film enough to watch it a second time, with the commentary. It’s a film everyone should watch.

I saw one more cockroach in the basement. I don’t consider two in a month to be an infestation but apparently the germphobic upstairs thinks otherwise and has asked the landlord to get the building fumigated. Germphobia is another big thing I’ve noticed over here, but I’ll leave my comments on that till another day.

When the N-Gage was launched in October 2003 I remember reading a comparison review in GamesMaster Magazine between the N-Gage and another handheld console. The N-Gage lost due to it being more expensive, having a portrait orientated screen and having a shorter battery life. But it was also a phone.

I’ve always been a bit of a phone nut; I got my first mobile the summer before 2nd year of Secondary school (2000). At the end of first year 3 or 4 guys in the year of 50 had mobiles. When we came back to school in September 3 or 4 didn’t have mobiles. My first phone was a Nokia 5110 with Eircell. At the time you could easily pick your number, I remember myself and my dad went into the Carphone Warehouse store in Waterford, and we were given a choice of 5 numbers. The number I was given during August 2000 I still have. I also remember that I had my eyes set on a Nokia 3210 as they were just out and incredibly cool to own, due to Snake, Interchangeable Fascias and a Ringtone Composer. But my dad had a business account with Eircell and managed to put me on the business account, so I started off with a bill phone. I taking it home and read the manual intently, eventually logging onto e-merge and getting an operator logo for the phone that I had designed myself, it was the Matrix logo. About a week later I paid a visit to my great uncle Cahir (who passed away last weekend). He had just got a Motorola M3888 which he found desperately hard to use. I offered to swap and so I wound up parting ways with the 5110. The Motorola was not too bad a phone, the battery would last a good week on a single charge which was perfect as plugs were sparse in Boarding School. You would have to queue for a plug and if you didn’t get one by lights out you would have to do without and try the next night.

At the time my dad had a Nokia 6110 and my mum had a Nokia 5110. My mum later upgraded to a 6110. A couple of weeks after this I managed to kill the M3888, it fell out of my pocket while I was running to get dinner in Roscrea one evening. I had the 5110 for a few months until it broke (I think). I then got an Ericsson T10 which I had for the first summer I spent in Irish college (summer of 2001). It had a vibrating alert and a ringtone composer. The ringtone I had for a long time was the Exorcist which I keyed in myself using the following combination e a e b e g a e +c e +d e b +c e b e a e b e g a e +c e +d e b +c. In Roscrea we had Word documents with thousands of pages of keypress ringtones obtained from the web. I think it was with the 3210 that you could also send a tone to a friend of yours in a text or download it (there were some free ones online, I cant remember where, possibly e-merge, a content portal offered by Eircell, it also contained services such as gizmo [I think this was the name of it] where you would send free text messages to care for a tamagotchi style pet. It was services like this that launched texting). Tones from online providers were also copyrighted so you couldn’t edit them or read off the noted used so a friend could copy them down.

This was also the time of strange message center numbers (SMSC) where you would get free texts because some foreign country were launching the service and offering it free for a trial period so its users would realise its massive potential. You would get a month or two of free messaging out of a SMSC before it no longer worked and you would have to move on to a new one. At the time one would rarely pay for texts (or maybe this was just in Roscrea in 2001-2002). It became harder and harder to find free SMSCs (Though Brian Murphy always seemed to have one up his sleeve). It was around this time too that my Phonebook was starting to get out of hand. I couldn’t remember which John was which, or which Emma was which. I decided to put a Letter before each persons name depending on how I knew them. This way all the contacts on my SIM were sorted into groups. Family members were under F (so FMum, FDad, FHome and FLowley-Pot for Louise, who though it said Flowery-Pot), Girls at home were under G, Guys in Roscrea were under P, Relatives were R, and people in Irish college were IG or IB (Girl/Boy).

At some stage in 3′rd year I got a Siemens C35. My dad got an S35 around the same time. My Uncle Raymond had a Nokia 7110 (Which was the first phone I played Snake2 on) at the time and my Uncle Pat had a 6210i. Some months later I got a Fascia for the C35 (similar to this) which had a hash leaf on it. It caused my mother much commotion as she though I had suddenly become a hardened addict. The truth was that I liked the look of it and in my innocence I hadn’t realised it was a hash leaf until after I had bought it. The phone wasn’t designed with cover changed in mind and changing the covers was a dangerous chore, initially the vibrating motor wouldn’t work and needed to have a bit of a matchstick wedged under it. Because my dad had almost the exact same phone when I text him I could insert special codes (like %shark%) into the text messages which would show as pictures on his screen. Also, when you put an exclamation mark after someone’s name in your phone book they became a VIP. All VIPS could be seen on a shortlist of phonebook entries.

My sister Louise later got a S35 too and got a denim cover. Helena was later heading to Coláiste na Rinne and so got a Motorola V51 (I think). Christmas of 4th year I got one of the first camera phones available, the Sharp GX10. It was an amazing phone, though in hindsight I would have preferred the Nokia 7650 which was on sale too at the time, for the same price. It was one of the best Christmas presents I ever received. It was the first time I played Java games, the two I remember being 007 Ice Racer and Prince of Persia.

I had the Sharp GX10 for about 10 months before it was murdered. One Sunday morning while I was sleeping after a hard days work till 9 the night before my mum threw my jeans in the wash. The phone was water damaged beyond repair. I was back to the S35 while I was in Waterpark. Around this Time Louise and Chair both had 3510i’s, my mum had a 6100. My dad got his first Blackberry around this time too, it was a 7100v. Eamon Quinlan got a Sharp GX10 the same time as me and has it to this day, so it has outlived the N-Gage.Later my dad got a replacement 7100v, my mum got a 6680 and Helena got mums old 6100.

Around this time I read that N-Gage review and shortly after saw Vodafone selling them for something crazy, like €300 and so it quickly slipped my mind. The following May (2004) Vodafone were trying to shift the last of the N-Gage stock and so put them on special offer. They were selling for €100 including a bonus of €60 credit once you registered the phone on the Internet. So basically I got the N-Gage for €40. This included all standard retail accessories Plus a free copy of Fifa. When I was in the store (Vodafone City Square) I was asked if I wanted a free game, I asked what the game was and he told me it was Fifa. I replied that I’d never play it but sure he might as well throw it in. I made a point of never playing it. The only reason I opened the box was to get the MMC card holder out.Due to the deal a large number of my friends now owned N-Gages including Dale Cantwell, John O’Connor, Dave Evans, Connor Clear and David O’Brian to name a few. One person I always felt sorry for was Daniel O’Mahonny who advised me to get the phone. He would have gotten one if he had the cash but he didn’t at the time. A week later when he came back with the money there were no more to be found, all the Vodafone shops in Waterford were sold out.

I got the phone at a lunchtime and skipped all the classes I had that afternoon, sitting in a corridor upstairs playing with my new toy, programming radio stations, Recording songs off the radio, setting up Home/Mobile numbers for people (something I could never do before), ringing Vodafone Customer Care to get settings, Playing the Snowboarding game that came with the N-Gage etc. I went online that night and after a few quick googles found the Nokia Free Forums and the All About N-Gage Forums. I think the First piece of software I put on the phone was FExplorer. When I realised the immense capabilities I was hooked. I filled the 32Meg card that came with the device with freeware games and demos. Within a few weeks I realised that the card I had wasn’t big enough and so I Purchased a 512Mb MMC from Alack and a Card reader from Lidl. This opened the device to a world of possibilities. I soon had a few full length movies on it (via SmartMovie), some MP3s, eBooks, etc. These were most useful for my trip to Germany that summer. Later in the Year I discovered eProfiles and miniGPS. The combination of these two allowed me to change my profiles automatically based on where I was (Via Cell IDs). I Then discovered ControlFreek (Which is now free! Go grab a copy!) which is another killer app. I had to get the phone flashed once due to the WSoD issue (if the root partition does not have at least 50k free it won’t boot). I think the phones battery cut out during a large Bluetooth transfer. Thankfully a free flashing and the phone was fixed, plus, as a bonus, I got the latest firmware too.

Coming up to the leaving cert I knew I was hooked and so I resorted to using a Nokia 6210 for the exam period. As soon as the exams were over I cracked the N-Gage out again and got myself a 1Gb card. When I joined Skynet WirelessIRC became invaluable. Then a little later I discovered some nifty things I didn’t know the N-Gage could do, like sync Contacts with a PC. Message stored allowed me to store all SMSs in a single .txt file.

After all this time the N-Gage is one of the best gadgets I’ve had. But the opportunity arose to grab my mums 6680 this Christmas and I ran with it. After all the N-Gage has certain faults. Such as the lack of a camera, sidetalking (fixed), the fact that you have to take the battery out to get the MMC card out, meaning every time you change a game you reset the clock, playing an MP3 with the stock player puts a read lock on the MMC, WSoD, Lack of themes, The inability to use the phone without a SIM card and lack of Bluetooth support in Java.

One of the biggest issues was due to the fact that the N-Gage was a games player and an MP3 player as well as a phone. It had two processors, one to handle GSM related stuff (making and receiving calls) and the other for everything else, so basically if you had a game open and a call came in, the game wouldn’t cause your call to take a performance hit. It also meant you could do stuff like browse though your phonebook while on a call (Loudspeaker, Headset or just taking the phone away from your ear). Having two processors is a fantastic idea.

But why did it stop there? What’s more important is that you have sufficient battery. Who cares if you can listen to songs for 8 hours on the bus from London to Edinburgh if you are basically left without a phone after that time? The phone contained a standard BL-5C which is used in many Nokia Phones. There have been several successful attempts to replace this with the longer lasting BL-6C battery (You need to file off the plastic ridges or the back cover wont fit on). This is connected to the phone via a three pin connector on the top left hand side of the battery. What should have been done is that they should have made a special battery for the N-Gage that had the same overall design, but had a second set of connectors on the top right. The battery would be effectively Partitioned and you would have one section for gaming, multimedia and non-Phone Related tasks and the other for text messaging and calls. If the Multimedia partition ran out of power you would no longer be able to game with the device but you would have plenty of time left for calls. If the phone partition ran out first it would be able to grab the other partitions remaining power. If one of these batteries was put into any other BL-5C compatible slot just one partition would be seen (as only one set of contacts would line up). If a standard BL-5C was put in it would work as it does now.

The batteries break down like this:

The first two are the official ratings given by Nokia (here and here). The overall battery power would be 1070 mAh like the BL-6C which was used in the QD and which had been used in the N-Gage. The gaming partition would be the same size as the current N-Gage battery, 850mAh but the special reserved partition would be 220mAh giving a total of 1070mAh. Using Just phone Functions you would be able to get up to 5 hours talktime, using just games you would be able to get up to 6 hours gameplay, but after that 6 hours gameplay you would still have up to 3 hours of talktime left.

Then the N-Gage QD came out and I was appalled, they added a hot-swap slot, but they took away Tri-Band, USB support and the FM radio. Overall the QD was worse than the Original. Had they added a Camera and kept USB support the QD may have outsold the Classic but it is the opinion of many that Nokia took one step forward and two steps backwards with the QD (which, according to a cunning forum signature allegedly stands for Quick Downgrade).

So finally, back to the present tense. This Christmas Santa delivered a 6230i to me. I believe it was his intent to deliver a shiny new 6680 but a naughty elf nicked it from the box at the last minute. So on Christmas morning I discovered the 6230i and asked my mum if she’d like to swap. She agreed and so I got cracking on transferring her data from the 6680 to the 6230i and then transferring my data from the N-Gage to the 6680. I must say, the Nokia PC Suite and iSync are two cracking pieces of software. iSync is easier to use and compatible with a wider range of devices but the Nokia PC suite had a very wide range of options for Nokia phones. Bonus points to OSX for having such a great app built into the OS though.

The only thing my mum was looking for which wasn’t offered was SMS transfer. For some reason the PC suite couldn’t read the SMSs off the 6680. This may be due to the SMSs being stored on the phone memory but I can’t see this as being a problem. Apart from that I learnt that Calendar data (at least my mums) is quite hefty.

So, after tinkering around with the dive for a few days I think its about on a par with the N-Gage, here’s the breakdown; you no longer have access to the full range of S60v1 apps. WirelessIRC will only connect to non-SSL servers, the demo of ExplodeArena I had looked really dreadful, eProfiles is very flakey. On the flipside, the programs which so work are nearly all faster (ControlFreak Screams!). I was looking forward to using IrRemote but there’s no IrDA port.

Since I’ve come to the 6680 I’ve discovered and rediscovered many sites and apps that I haven’t used in years. Among them is FExplorer which is now much better than SeleQ (though this wasn’t always the case). I wish I had discovered PyS60 sooner and the ScummVM. Solution is quite nifty and SplashID works fine. Sites worthy of a mention include Steve Litchfields amazing compendium of knowledge, Nick’s Adventures with Series 60 Phones and Linux and All About Symbian.

I’d Also like to add that we used Route66 with the 6680 while we were in the US over the summer (I’ve already posted about it here) and it really is a great piece of software. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone with a capable device looking to do some travel on the continent or in the US.