Tank's Blog

First I must apologise for being a bit lax with my day by day.

Unfortunately right now I’m waiting for my new contract to kick in. Until then I don’t have free internet on my N97, so I’m avoiding using it as much as possible. Also I don’t have my Wifi access point at the moment. I’ve let my brother borrow it as his old D-link died. I have ordered a replacement, unfortunately Royal Mail appear to have lost it.

This has annoyed me quite a bit, as Nokia have decided to make it impossible for me to download any applications from the Ovi store using my laptop and then port them to the phone. I have to download them using the phone. How annoying. Luckily Ovi is not the only source for most applications, so it’s usually possible to find an install sis.

Also it’s hard to write much when the phone has been behaving pretty well.

If you read day 1 you’ll know I had an odd ghosting effect that sometimes appeared on my screen. It didn’t actually stop me using the phone, but it was annoying. After checking with quite a few others both on this blog and the Nokia support forums, nobody else had ever seen anything like it. I like to be unique. Anyway, I abused that phone for a week just fiddling with things and generally trying to learn how to use it. A couple of days ago I took it back to Phones4U under their “28 days like for like”. They went out the back and brought another off the shelf. It had finger prints on it, and had obviously been demoed. I said I’d prefer a new one. They didn’t have any in stock, but they did get me one in for the next day.

So nice try guys, can’t blame you for that, and cheers for getting me a very new and shiny one the next day

So now I have an N97 with a screen that’s not ghosting images every now and then.

So now to my curious quirk for the “day”…

Pin locking… I set my handset to pin lock after 60 minutes. This works perfectly well… Sometimes, just sometimes when I come to unlock it, the virtual keypad isn’t in numeric mode, it’s in old mobile text message mode. This means that if your lock code is “12345″, you press “12345″ to unlock it in numeric mode. However if you try this in the alphanumeric mode you get “-Beij”. You have to hold each number down for a second to make it produce the digits.

Rather weird. I haven’t noticed if this is the virtual keypad remembering it’s previous setting from me text messaging in the “old style” way or not. I’ll try to keep a mental note. However as I mix and match how I text message, it’s hard to say.

For a short message I will use the old method with predictive text. If it’s a long essay message I’ll use the flip out keyboard. Quite often I’ll start with one, and swap to the other mid message. Usually this is when I’m unsure of a spelling (so use the predictive text to confirm), or if I want to do a smily face. On predictive text “old style” keypad mode this is just pressing 1 three times, and then * to see the list (or add new ones). On the full keyboard you have to build it yourself from : – )

I still haven’t quite understood why early reviewers had a problem with the space key position, it took me all of about 3 seconds to get used to it. Maybe the reviewers have never had to use anything other than their own native QWERTY keyboard. They should try my world. US keyboard with the @ and ” transposed compare to a UK keyboard. German keyboards with the Y and Z swapped… It keeps you on your toes!

Alternatively I could just be that they’re so obsessed with the iPhone that anything without a fruit label on the back is instantly “unclean”.

Actually I did get an amusing message from a non-techie friend of mine the other day. It said “Can I try your phone, I’m starting to hate my iPhone, it’s got a mind of it’s own!”. I was helpful and suggested syncing it with iTunes to see if there is a firmware update, but I have yet to get my hands on it to see exactly what form this new AI feature has taken.

Having said all that… I do find having to press the number shift to get numerics on the N97 keyboard a bit annoying. But hey, they keyboard is just another option, it’s not like you don’t have old style and handwriting recognition to use too!

Recommended

A thank you to Mike O’ for his suggestion of the Greymobiles body armour for the N97. I bought some black armour for my black N97, and I feel far more confident about sticking it in my pocket now. Although it still gets a pocket to itself, no keys or change.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/GreyMobiles-Black-Hybrid-SCREEN-PROTECTOR/dp/B002GTFQ70/

–> Day 5

Well actually it’s been pretty uneventful. I needed several days to find things to moan about! Which it pretty much a compliment in itself.

I have totally failed to crash anything since I managed to mess up the photo album the other day. After clearing all the photos and reformatted the mass memory, everything has been perfectly well behaved. Annoyingly Spore was installed in the mass memory, so I’ve lost that, and there might have been some other games or fun things, but to be honest Spore is the only one I had played with.

I can download/install it again if I really miss it.

Contact list

I have found a bug with the contact editing. With contacts that have multiple numbers you can set defaults for when you call, text or video them. This saved the phone asking which number to do x,y or z to every time. Annoying the switch application completely lost all my default settings when it copied my contacts from my N95 (again… every Nokia supplied switch/importer program I have used looses this). So no great shock. I just reassign the defaults for the contacts as I come across them. Why can’t it use a bit of intelligence and work out that I have only one 07xxx number for a contact, then that should be the default number for text messages? (In the UK all mobile numbers start 07).

Anyway, that gripe aside, I have one contact who it will not let me edit the defaults for. I thought it was maybe because I have two mobile numbers for this person, a work and a personal one. So I deleted the work number and tried again… Nope. Every time I select “defaults” it dumps me back to the main contact list, with the offending friend highlighted. I thought maybe it was because my friend’s name has an extended funny character in it (my friend is Polish). So I changed the grammatically correct “ł” for an English “l”. That didn’t help either. I still can’t set the defaults. I also can’t change the “l” back either as my N95 was set up for Eastern European region, and my N97 isn’t. I also have email and work details for this friend, so at some point I shall try to create a clone, slowly adding more and more of my friend’s details to the clone until it stops letting me change the default.

Nokia Music PC app

Good greif… I hadn’t used this app before… and to be honest I think I might try to avoid using it ever again! I’ve been trying to put some of my MP3 collection onto the N97. It appears it purely depends on correct ID3 tag information in the MP3 files. Otherwise things end up in all sorts of albums, instead of the correct one. Even when the ID3 info is correct, I ended up with one album appearing twice. Once in the correct album name with the correct artist, and once in “unknown album”. I tried to edit the info of the tracks in “unknown” album, and it did nothing. Wouldn’t even open an edit window. The option might as well not even be there. So I deleted them… Which guess what… Left me with a correct album, with all the tracks listed, but all the files were now missing! So I had to delete that album too. At least it didn’t crash.

There is also no method/option to add album/track artwork, which means you end up having to use Windows media player to embed this into the mp3s. As Windows media player also lets you edit/correct the ID3 tags and recognises the N97 as a media player, I think I shall just use that to import music in future.

Which leaves me with the big question – Nokia Music – Why? What’s the point? Oh yes… The shop… To buy tracks… Well you’ve blown it guys, I’m not likely to buy tracks through it when I can’t trust the application to organise a couple of mp3 files onto one of your own phones!

I’m not sure if it’s the N97 or Nokia Music which does it, but the track arrangement on the N97s storage is a bit curious. It seems to be

\Mass memory\Music\Artist name\Album name\original trackname.mp3

I’m not sure how it will respond to me dumping a load of tracks in with just the album name\original trackname.mp3 as the format… Hmmm… Having just had a poke about in there I found the offending mixed up album (the one that was known and also unknown) is still there, twice… One folder had an extra “_” on the end. Both folders were empty. Nokia seems to replace any character it can’t handle in the file system as a “_”. So I just deleted them directly from the windows explorer. At least it didn’t crash!

So in summary, far too much time spent trying to make it look pretty, and too little actually thinking about how it would be used, and more importantly testing if the things they had added, like info editing, actually work!

Editing the track info on the phone is a bit painful. It used to be really easy on the N95. The N97 doesn’t have the dedicated “copy/paste” button of the N95/N70, which means you are at the mercy of the OS knowing that copy/paste might be useful in a particular situation, and offering it on the menu. In my experience it doesn’t. Hopefully this will get straightened out in the next firmware release… Assuming they ever bother issuing V12 for my Phones4U black model… At least it’s not a Carphone Warehouse one, I understand they are still waiting for V11 for their phones.

Being a software engineer by trade I will probably end up writing something that sorts out the ID3 tags nicely and the gets the album art for me before Nokia sort it out!

Battery life

Battery life has been very good. I charged the phone on Friday, and it hasn’t been connected to a charger since… It has been connected via USB with me shifting MP3s about, so it’s been sneaking in a bit of charge that way. However I have yet to see it go down more one bar on the battery, which is pretty amazing considering the terrible signal strength I have in my house (phones turn up the power on the cell radio circuit when the signal is weak. When they have a good signal they can wind the power down. Which is why you should turn your phone off – or offline – when you’re on the tube with no signal. Otherwise the entire time you are down there, the phone will be screaming “HEEELLLLLLOOOOO!” at full power in a desperate attempt to find a cell).

–> Day 4

Well I have finally managed to crash something! The photo viewer seemed to have got upset with my playing about. I noticed that no new pictures were appearing when I took them. Using the file explorer I could find them, but all the photo viewer application would show was the first one. I tried to delete it and got an error, and then the photo was replaced with a broken image icon. I tried delete again, same error, and it won’t go.

I fixed this by copying all the pictures onto my memory card using the file explorer. Then I removed the memory card and formatted the on board mass storage (32gig). After this the photo viewer showed zero pictures and everything I have taken since has appeared perfectly. I’ve done my best to try to break it again, but it’s working fine. I wonder if the thumbnail database (which I have yet to find) got corrupted, maybe by the import issues I was having with the Switch application when I first got the phone.

So the observations for today:

Alarm clock

I use my phone as my alarm, and the first thing that has struck me is that by default when you set the alarm for the morning the repeat option is “within 24 hours”… Ummm, what on earth does that mean? There is only one 07:00 within a 24 hour period… So surely “within 24 hours” is the same as “Don’t repeat”.

Signal strength

Now this was always going to be interesting. I live in a dip between two hills. My nearest cell is about a mile up the road, but unfortunately I’m in the shadow of the hill. So even with my old N95 I was regularly finding I had no signal. Sometimes when I thought I had signal I would not receive calls I was expecting. The N97 seems to show slightly lower signal strength than the N95, but to be honest I think it’s probably being more accurate, not a worse receiver. When I’ve put it on the table and it’s shown signal, I haven’t missed a call (that end up as voicemail) and I haven’t had a text message arrive 2 hours after it was sent, both of which regularly happened when the N95 said it had signal whilst placed on the table next to me.

Application wise I haven’t installed anything new. I’m still waiting for my unlimited data contract to kick in, then I’ll go crazy. The first one is bound to be an instant messenger, either fring, which I’ve had on the N95 before, or nimbuzz.

–> Day 3