Shane Molloy’s Blog of… blogness

Well yesterday I got a Nokia N95 delivered to me and have to say it’s a brilliant phone. It’s the highest spec phone i’ve owned yet (last phone being a motorola razor v3x).

Wasn’t looking for one until one became available second hand for cheap enough so decided to go for it. It has a gps chip inside of it and had looked into it’s features before it arrived. Was thinking that the nokia maps probably wouldn’t be that great for Ireland as even TomTom maps can be dodgy but I came across a Garmin mobile xt software package.

Garmin seem to be the best GPS units for Irish roads at the moment so I got the garmin software and eventually got it working on the N95. Works just the same as a Garmin Unit with voice navigation, recalculates routes etc. Tested it today coming home from work and had no problems.

Battery life is pretty bad, lets say somewhere between day or two depending on how heavy your usage, but I can charge it in the car and off the laptop so no problem really.

After getting used to the interface and knowing where the settings where, I got Exchange mail syncing and pop3 mail connection properly. The client for Exchange will sync your email but also you phone contacts with your Outlook contacts so it’s handy.

It’s also possible to install 3rd party applications onto the phone that support the Symbian OS. Most of these are unsigned which means you have to go through the process of creating your own developers certificate to sign applications with. The cert is created using your own phone’s IMIE. It takes a while to figure out (plenty of tutorials on the web) how to do this but once the cert is created and you have it saved you can use it to sign downloaded 3rd party applications.

One of the best I found is rotateme which, like the iphone, will rotate the display to vertical or horizantal depending on which way you tilt the phone. Nokia didn’t seem to take advantage of the chip that allows this but many 3rd party apps do. There’s a whole host of other stuff to get like a youtube and divx video viewer app.

Anyway that’s enough on the phone, i’d recommend it to anyone that’s into gadgets or needs the functionality!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.