Why the Nokia N8 interests me

(image via Nokia’s media resources)

While stumbling onto the Nokia N8 together with the C7 today (okay this post is almost 2 weeks late due to the fact that I’ve helped my wife relocate to Australia) at Incomm HQ, it got me thinking about the future of phones and computers and got me all that more interested in the Nokia N8. The N8 is B$768 and the C7 is B$638. If you order online through the Incomm website the N8 is just B$730 (thanks GeekInWhite). My interest in the N8 is not just because it is Nokia’s flagship model at the moment, but just the functionality it brings and the possibilities of having a computer in your pocket.

First and foremost the Nokia N8 is a multi-touch capable smartphone with a 12 megapixel camera and Xenon flash. The N8 itself has stand out features that are not really found on any other phone. The camera, which is a focus on many reviews, has proper colour representation (vs the iPhone 4 that does post processing on photos to make them look more colourful) and while also taking relatively good low light shots (thanks to the large image sensor which is even bigger than some digital cameras). Some photo comparisons: DeviceMagazine, Symbian World, Into Mobile, It also shoots 720p video at 25 fps and has a built in video editor and image editor for photos too.

The device is capable to play back 720p content with Dolby Digital Plus Surround Sound via the HDMI out making it a multi-media centre device.There was even mass movie screening of the Prince of Persia on the N8 itself. When connected to an HDMI output the display will be mirrored on both the screen of the N8 as well as the output device (e.g. an HD display). This has possibilities to showcase gaming on the N8 by letting spectators watch exactly what the player sees. However for a regular user, this means it can be connected to a bigger screen and even act as a desktop computer (more on this later).

The N8 also has USB host with USB on-the-go support. This means that you can connect a regular USB drive to it (with the necessary connector cable: micro USB on the N8 to a full USB connector) and transfer files to and from it. What’s more is that you can even attach a keyboard and mouse to the device to make it a productivity device. Most video’s I’ve seen, show mouse and keyboard connected via Bluetooth so I am not sure if you can attach a USB hub and connect all keyboard, mouse and USB drive to the device all at once. However once keyboard and mouse via Bluetooth you will have a setup similar to a real computer as shown in the video below, with a (micro) USB port to be connected to a USB drive to transfer data.

Now the scenario of using the N8 as a full productivity device will also depend on software support: meaning to say that it needs to have applications to allow users to use this is a productivity tool. Software that will let users create and edit documents on the go would be great. According to the specifications the N8 has the feature of “Editing of key office documents” making this possible and what’s more is that with the HDMI output, you can even do presentations powered from your phone (caveat: seems that you need to pay for a ‘pro’ version to edit documents). Productivity is also enabled via the real multi-tasking abilities of the N8 (as opposed to ‘faux’ multi-tasking of the iPhone). Applications run in the background enabling switching from a browser (to search for something) and jumping straight back into your document / tweet that you were composing.

Note that the N8 also uses readily available standards: from micro USB (for data transfer and even charging), to micro HDMI, to a 3.5mm standard jack, a regular micro SD card and a normal sized SIM card. Using these readily available standards, makes it even more interoperatible with your existing devices / cables (as opposed to proprietary connectors like the iPod or even Galaxy Tab).

There are also a couple of technologies that could be built into the phone that I have not heard been mentioned like printing and Bluetooth transfer file transfer/file system browsing support. However I will base this on existing Nokia S60 devices such as the Nokia E71 that I originally typed this post on. The Nokia E71 has abilities to print direct to printers (via Bluetooth / infrared) and allows browsing the filesystem from a host device such as a PC or Mac. What I love about Bluetooth file transfer and filesystem browsing is that you can quickly and easily copy data from the phone wirelessly. Also with HP technology that is getting into printing from the web (i.e. Emailing documents from the phone to the printer to print), it will make things all so much the easier.

I know the device isn’t perfect: for instance in portrait mode you can only type in as a virtual numeric keypad and no QWERTY keyboard. Swype may change that. Also when typing in text, the entire screen is taken up by the text box where you type meaning that if you forget what you’re doing you will have to close or confirm the text input before seeing what you were filling in and going back into the text input screen. I think it was Daniel at Tech65 that mentioned that it seems like a separate application in the way it works and does seem a bit cumbersome especially having to press cancel/back or confirm before continuing.

There is no touch to focus on the device though is something a firmware update could fix but that being said it still at this moment in time does not have it. Also the video recording has no auto-focus and only records at 25 fps. A hack has been demonstrated to enable both but yet again it is not available to all N8 users.

S^3 is also an newly released OS meaning that there are not a lot of applications currently running on it. If application developers do not support it, then users will be at a huge loss compared to iOS or Android users. S^3 can also be considered a convoluted/complicated OS. S60 users would be more accustomed to it but users who like simplicity make be taken a back.

However I think the biggest problem with the N8 is the web browser (TechRadar, Engadget, All About Symbian). I think all Nokia S60 phone users will know that the standard web browser isn’t fantastic and while the browser on S^3 is an improvement, from reviews I’ve read, the browsers still has quite a bit to go to catch up to Safari on iOS and Android browsers. It does play Flash Lite 4.0 which is a nice touch but nothing to write home about.

The N8 software needs real tweaking to make things more usable for the user and for it to make the product really great. But all in all the prospect of the functionality of the N8 makes things one step closer to having a computer in your pocket. Oh yeah it is also a phone with mobile broadband capabilities.
Able to output to a display? Check
Able to connect keyboard and mouse for productivity? Check
Able to copy files to and from USB drives? Check
Able to print to printers? (Probably) Check
What else more do you need from a computer?

Notes for ‘O’ Level (1998/1999) & ‘A’ Level (2000/2001)

Page of Notes

Not sure why it took me so long to re-share this but here it is. These are my notes that I made back in the day. I studied them (and I think even made some of the images) from my Casio Cassiopeia E-11. I hope to share this and build upon it and possibly make something like MIT Open Courseware but for Brunei. While the notes may not be fully up-to-date, I believe there are still useful. These are very concise notes and are only meant to be the core information needed for studying in exams. For further understanding and examples I suggest that you search online =)

Brunei Finally has Unlimited Prepaid 3G/Mobile Broadband catering for Tourists

So during my travels I found out about prepaid broadband SIM cards that let you have unlimited mobile broadband (e.g. 3G) while on the go. The ones that I’ve used are fromM1 (Singapore) and Digi (Malaysia). I stumbled upon this poster advertising Zoom! (bmobile’s mobile broadband) while visiting Telbru. This is a perfect opportunity for people to test Zoom! to see how well it works in their area: remember it is a shared Internet connection so it can be slow if the area is saturated. Speed also depends on the modem you are using.

Amount Days of Unlimited Usage
$4 1 day
$8 3 days
$20 9 days
$35 18 days

Note: Just realised my titled was wrong. I forgot to put the word ‘Unlimited’. This is important as DST Go! and bmobile Zoom! already have prepaid options but they are not unlimited. This new unlimited option is a great option for tourist who are here for a short period of time and need not worry about the amount of data they use.

Prepaid Zoom Broadband Poster
Prepaid Zoom Broadband Poster

TelBru Upgrading their Infrastructure

It seems that TelBru will be upgrading their infrastructure from the 7th to 31st of October. There will be possible disruptions of Internet connectivity and lets all hope that this will bring a better Internet experience for all eSpeed and Zoom! users. For further information or queries contact their customer care centre at 111.

Source: TelBru – Upgrading Network and Systems for BruNet New Infastructure Project

Australian Housing Scam

As my wife is looking for accommodation in Australia she showed me an ad that seemed a bit too good to be true: rent was much lower than any other accommodation within the area (suspicion #1). The person insisted that they not go through the real estate website but to email them directly (suspicion #2). On emailing the person in charge the following email was received:

Hello,
First of all I want to thank you for your reply. I really appreciate you took the time to answer me. I am the owner of the apartment located 500/408 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, Vic 3000. It is still available for rent for $190 p/w including utilities for as long as you need. The apartment is in the best conditions, it is newly furnished and equipped with all the dependencies. I bought the apartment in 2007 and I lived there with my pet until last month when I received a promotion and needed to move to Padova / Italy.

In the apartment you will find a dishwasher, a refrigerator, a freezer, a washing machine, a dryer, an iron, , an oven, a toaster, a coffee maker, vacuum cleaner, a big screen TV, cable TV with the basic access, ADSL internet and Wi-Fi access. Also the apartment is near the public transportation, a shopping mall, a gym, and other facilities. There are no problems if you have any pets, as long as you clean up after them. The apartment has a parking space for one car. I have spent a great amount of money refurnishing the apartment and my request is that you treat it like it was your own. I am not interested to make a lot of money from the rent as I am interested to find a tenant that will take good care of the property until my return(minimum lease period, 3 months).

My contract here in Italy expires in October 2013.

Because I had to move to Italy so soon I didn’t had the time to find a trustworthy agent, I had to take the apartment keys with me. I had a real bad experience with the renting agents from the area with my previous home. I can’t come to show you the apartment and I don’t have any friends in the area to send the keys. I found an alternate solution in order to close the transaction safe for the both of us, it is an international delivery solution called Express Metrix (I will pay for a 2 days delivery),they will provide assistance in handling the payment and delivery of the Keys and Lease Agreement.With this procedure you will be able to check the apartment before I receive the payment.

Let me know how this sounds to you.

Looking forward to your answer.

Best regards,

Milda Stoehr.

After Googling this search phrase “I received a promotion and needed to move to” and found the following 3 links:

  1. Suspicious Housing
  2. Apartment Rental Scam
  3. Beware of new rental share accommodation scams (see comments for some scams)

This is probably a bogus escrow scam and I hope this will help inform people of these scams and to be wary of dealings with people online. While it seems to be Australian focused, a friend mentioned that there is a similar thing in Canada and probably in other countries as well. It’s sad to see people to resort to such tactics but we all need to be vigilant.

Have a great week and stay safe people!

Tumblr shall be my stream

So I have decided to jump onto the Tumblr scene. Well not exactly. I thought it would be good as a bookmarking service and more for sharing other people’s content. This will still be the main blog of my own content but if you want to see what I find cool / interesting or just something I want to share you can follow me at http://stream.thewheatfield.org

Wedding Ideas – #1 – Get a logo

So when I found out I was getting married (or rather when I put my work aside to actually prepare for the wedding) I wanted something different: be it invites, presentation or something to add some spunk to it. By default it would be streamed live over the Internet and recorded for keep sake. But I wanted more

Idea numero uno came to me after Easter service. The image in my mind was the Portal logo. It started off with just changing the portal into a heart. Then I thought the logo should have 2 characters and have it to be the bride and groom. So after messing around with the GIMP I came up with this quick draft.

From Portal:

to this:

For those unfamiliar with the “this is a triumph” bit of the logo please refer to the following YouTube video below of Still Alive sung by Jonathan Coulton

After more tweaking and some designing I was amazed to find a pretty decent logo as I’m no designer. And even better, when I imported it into Inkscape and converted it to a vector image it turned out very nice. So now I have a vector image of my wedding logo. I hope Valve will be ok with me using it =)

To add to my delight my friend commented that it was a good take on ‘falling into love’ which was a totally unintended, but very welcome, consequence =)

In following posts I will outline how to make an normal image into vector graphic and the benefits of vector graphics

Joikuspot + bmobile Zoom! + OS X = Data Corruption?

So I’ve been using Joikuspot to tether my bmobile Zoom! wirelessly to my MacBook Pro running OS X and I noticed some weird hiccups and glitches that show some sort of corruption of the data bits I’m receiving from the Internet. The 4 main issues are

  1. Corrupted Webpages: that will show HTML markup in the middle or end of the page or even load gibberish

  2. Corrupted Images: the image will not fully load and reloading will not solve it (forgot to try clearing the cache though, I used Opera Turbo instead)

    Check out Lizzette Piltch’s Photos at Dragon Con 2010 for the full TMNT costumes among others

  3. Corrupted downloads: downloading the same file multiple times gives different md5sum hashes. Downloading directly from the phone seemed to get the file properly (so perhaps this rules out bmobile’s Zoom! as part of the problem)

  4. Interrupted videos streams: YouTube shows that it has loaded the whole video (after seeing the red progress ‘bar’ load fully) but in the middle of the video it just stops (this is different from truncated video streams where if you monitor the red progress bar it will jump from the middle to the end abruptly when loading the file)

Marul seems to have no issues for his Joikuspot so could it be OS X? Or could it just be an unreliable Internet connection from bmobile? Whatever is the cause of a combination of causes it does get annoying and wonder if there are ways to detect what’s going on and solve this strange problem of mine.

OS X: Solving “The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items” problem

I was trying to backup some of my files in OS X onto an external hard disk and ran into the following error dialog box: “The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items”

So I thought it was a permission issue of a file/folder that I did not have permission to read. So I went to file information (File > Get Info) of the folder and under “Sharing & Permissions”, I made sure that I had read permissions and clicked “Apple to enclosed items” (I believe this applies the permission rules to all sub files and folders recursively).

I tried copying the folder over again and the error dialog persisted. Wasn’t too sure why it still happened so I tried cleaning out the dot files using the “dot_clean” command from Terminal and viola! Copying went on without a hitch.

So when you encounter the “The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items” again

  1. check file/folder permissions (use get Info from Finder)
  2. use dot_clean (from Terminal)

Don’t We All Love Competition?

So it all started with Concepts offering a promotion for senior citizens (aged 50 and above) and DST card holders for the Acer Aspire One 255 for B$498. Soon after that I saw Yappe advertise in the newspaper offering the same model netbook for the same price. Not to be out done Netcom offered a similar offering but with the Acer Aspire 533. The 533 is equipped with the newer N475 processor, runs DDR3 RAM and has Bluetooth 3.0 according to the specifications while the 255 runs on an older processor with DDR2 RAM (and no Bluetooth according to specs). According to the specifications the 255 could also come with a lower rated 3 cell battery meaning a lower battery life. On a bright note both seem to support Android InstantOn which I am curious to play around with. I will update on the configurations when I can but all I can say is that I continue to support Concepts as they are the leaders in these promotions and it is good to see that other shops are following suit and trying to compete. However it is a bit hard to support Concepts here when the 533 from Netcom seems like a better deal. At the end of the day we, the consumers, are the ones who benefit from this competition and I for one am welcome to see more competition in Brunei. Perhaps the next step is to offer better customer support/service?