Saturday, November 15, 2008

What I dislike about the E71 / S60

As much as I like my Nokia E71, there are some regressions vis-a-vis the previous Nokia pure-phones I had:

The 6233 could schedule a call - you had a calendar entry that represented a call to another person.
When the notification would pop up, you just had to press the green button to actually call this person.
Quite handy.

Not on the E71. Does only know of "Meeting, Memo, Anniversary, To do", but not of "Call".

Quite disappointing.

Monday, November 03, 2008

I'm done with Palm

So, with my new E71 I'm now really done with Palm - thank you very much.
On the T|X, email was unusable, browsing was awkward, it was unstable, and Palm did not fix any of the issue.

I first started out in about 1999 with Palm Vx, then moved to an m500, later to a Tungsten T, T5 and T|X.
I did have the bluetooth adapter, the Wifi adapter and the wireless keyboard (I really thought I'd use the palm with the keyboard instead of a laptop when travelling... ).
I used it for data entry (offline and online/web, spreadsheets), for taking notes, as a pure PIM of course (i.e. address book, calendar), for email (wireless), and for playing simple games.
It never was much of a music player (not at all,a actually).

That's all past now.

I still love the Palm as a concept and what it did for they industry years ago. But I hate the attitude of the company.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Access Point Group equiv for the E71

Recently one of my first rants about the Nokia E71 was, that Nokia dropped Access Point Groups from connectivity options:
"its predecessor, the E61i had the concept of access point groups , where you could group e.g. your home Wifi, your office Wifi and your 3G connections (i.e. access points) into one group, and then assign this access point group e.g. to your email connection settings. So email retrieval would work on any of those networks, but go over the faster and cheaper Wifi first.
No longer possible with the E71."

However, there is a 3rd party tool called Psiloc Connect that does exactly this: re-introduce access point groups, or rather a single access point (which you then can configure in email, fring, synch ...) which itself checks and decides whether to you WiFi or fall back to 3G/GPRS.

I'm testdriving this for a couple of days, to see if it is worthwhile the 9.95 €.

Saturday, November 01, 2008

Shapes from the crowd

Here's an excellent post from Christian about flickr (geo-) shapes - derived from crowd-sourced tags.

Shapes from the crowd - Christian Spanring

The 2 examples he gives (Vienna boundaries, and Vienna inner city) to me are typical examples of the "wisdom of crowds" effect: quite accurate with a large enough sample and good mixture of people within the crowd (Vienna boundaries) and sometimes "totally off" with a specific narrow topic and (therefore) a badly composed crowd (Inner city vs Stephansdom).

It also highlights the problem with tags, that - especially on flickr - it is unclear what the are used for: the place where the picture was taken from, or the motif...

Thanks.