Tag Archives: Rant

Its a Google life

When I got my HTC Desire a few months back, it truly revolutionised the way I ran my life and how I interacted on the move.

 

ispi012369 Back on my old Nokia N95, the limitations of the Symbian operating system and the lack of any proper push email service really stifled what I could do with my phone. Sure I could view Youtube [When it decided I could,] and surf the web [with it crashing every now and again], but there was no proper integration with social networking services. The Facebook “application” was just a link to the mobile version of the site and Twitter was nowhere to be found.  Here ends my Nokia rant.

 

google-android-logo The HTC Desire, from the box, was such a refreshing experience. Things just worked, everything flows, applications talk to each other and Android’s eyecandy really helped to set it apart from my old Nokia.

 

Now to the main point of this post, Google’s integration in this phone. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad thing at all! It just works. I have all of Google’s services at my beck and call at any time. Push GMail to my phone, Google’s Calendar service in the phone’s calendar, Contacts synced with the other services Google offers and my Youtube with its favourites. Well. Google Docs is missing at the moment, but I suspect it will appear very soon.

 

I write this post because I was imputing in my timetable into Google Calendar and totally forgot that I had my calendar on my phone synced with it, 10 seconds later I look at my phone, bam, there it all is, ready to go.

 

It makes me wonder how much Google does run my life…

Dancing bees

Good day fair people! This is mostly a rant post so feel free to skip it, moan at it, print it off and use it as kindling, you know.

<rant>

I spent the good part of an hour listening to a man rant on about how bees like to dance in the direction in which the food was found. Not putting the man’s work down or anything but please, I know about that and have done since I was a little kid. Also, an hour of rambling about the dances they do… or don’t do for that fact, takes it out of you. I feel I wasted the best part of an hour that I won’t get back anytime soon. With the foreboding exams coming up I could have used this time to prepare my notes, study or do anything apart from learning about bees. And the best part is, there’s another lecture next week too(!)

</rant>

That’s all in the way of ranting at this precise moment.

Other things shall be left to another post for another time. Good luck to all revising for exam and whatnot. Boo to irrelevant lectures.

Phone woes

Due to the terrible build quality of the N95, the time to replace my phone draws close.


N97_main

The all evil, N97


Previously, I said I was getting the all new Nokia N97. However, after reading reviews and whatnot, it becomes apparent that its terrible. Underpowered for the operating system its running [Seriously, Nokia should drop Symbian, its old and buggy], causes the phone to slowdown and lock up at points. Gizmodo reviewed the phone and seems to share my sentiments in the terrible OS that is Symbian.


Still being rather loyal to Nokia after 10 years, I have come to expect quality phones from them. This was not the case with the Nokia N95 8GB that I bought less than 2 years ago.


Being a relatively light user of the mobile and treating it nicely, you would expect the phone to last at least a good 4 years or more. Currently my N95 has lost all its metallic surrounds on the buttons, chipped off metallic paint around the camera surround and has severe problems with the sliders. I can accept that the metallic paint would chip off over time, I found this with my Nokia 6680, but slider problems? From day 1? I know you’re thinking “Why didn’t you send it back?” but at the time I didn’t really notice the dodgy slider. However, after spending many hours trawling though various Nokia forums both unofficial and official, I noticed that this was a common thing with all the N95 8GBs.


Various other things bug the hell out of me; including the fact that it can take a good 10 seconds to open the text message application on the phone, frequent lockups/crashes with the YouTube app, crappy web browser and others.


Nokia-N900

Nokia N900 showing all


The next phone I hope to get will be the ever lovely Nokia N900.

“Nokia again?” I hear you ask. Well its Nokia again for a few reasons.

  1. I still trust that I will be getting a good phone
  2. Maemo 5 is the operating system of choice. A Debian based system, so essentially this is a pocket computer/phone.
  3. Touch screen, gotta love ’em.
  4. Windows Mobile just doesn’t cut it for me at the moment, although 7 series looks good.

So there are my reasons, I know a few of you [Mark 😛 ] love your WinMo/Android phones but I’m a Nokia man at heart [although I was nearly seduced by Samsung with their Omnia HD]


I’ve now got to find  £449 to buy it :/