The Symbians Are Coming

I was a bit ho-hum about the news that Nokia is buying the rest of Symbian, the operating system used on their N-Series handsets. I'm a big fan of the OS, I find it intuitive & efficient & like the way applications interact with each other seamlessly (for example if you hit save on an SMS containing a song it automatically gets placed in your music folder). However, initially this news was just a case of meet-the-new-boss syndrome.

Now we learn that Nokia plan to release the application as Open Source partly due to pressure from both Windows Mobile, the iPhone & upstart Linux systems. None the less it's a great step in the right direction.

More Cool Stuff 4 Your N95

Users of the World's greatest mobile phone, the Nokia N95 can now enjoy eBooks on a free .prc Symbian reader from Mobipocket. For starters you could try Zittrain's "The Future Of The Internet & How To Stop It," also for free (and also available as a PDF). Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

Flickr Fun

Here's one I made earlier! Taken with the Nokia N95 at the PBA Summer Series in Chicago. This piece of steampunk machinery is actually the pin setting machine seen in 1,00s of bowling alleys. Photo was post-processed using Picnik, an online photo editing package with a lot of nifty tools. Basic package is free but $24.95 gets you multiple effects including a great Lomo & Holga!

Apple made me do it!

The end of a long story is that I have an 8GB iPhone. Now being the happy owner of a far superior product for communication purposes (the Nokia N95) I had been using my iPhone as an iPod happily. Last week it wanted to install an update (1.1.4) which effectively locked me out of the unit unless I authorized it onto AT&Ts network. A quick call to Apple's tech support confirmed that without an active contract on AT&T the iPhone will not function at all. Sorry Apple I thought I actually owned this device, silly me, apparently I'm only using it at your pleasure.

Some heavy Googling turned up a lot of information on hacking (or jailbreaking) the iPhone but most was pre-the latest update. Then I came onto this gem of a Wiki. 10 minutes & a small amount of geek'ness later I am back in possession of my iPhone-Pod with a bunch of new features to boot & no $ to AT&T. Hey Apple, this is what customers do when you trample on their rights, get used to it.

Wot's All This About Then?

Finally settled on a smartphone. After looking at iPhones & Blackberrys I settled on the Nokia N95. I acquired a new one, unlocked of course, from Craigslist and spent the better part of 2 days learning all the features! It will interact with Flickr & Blogger, hence the slightly odd posts below (I'm still learning the Nokia Lifeblog package). All in all an incredibly impressive phone that has many great features (VOIP, 3G, 5MP camera) sadly missing from the contenders.