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Showing posts with the label n900

When a sat nav is useless like CoPilot

I have been the proud user of CoPilot for android since my HTC magic. Recently I am using it on my nexus one and have to admit I want something else. Take a trip recently to Reading it frequently lost its signal. The live traffic was only reporting narrow lanes even though the I had been in my current jam for over one hour and when/if it detects a traffic issue it expects you to manually route around it rather than just get on and reroute like other sat nav solutions I have used. Again relying on CoPilot to get me to Chester tonight meant losing its GPS even though when selecting the dialog message it can see 8 satellites and is communicating with them. Plus opening Google maps at the same time CoPilot still cannot find the GPS signal  yet Google maps does. I have put these questions to CoPilot support and have yet to hear why their product just fails. Thankfully I have my n900 with Sygic maps with me for the return home. Satellite navigation is something I expect to work especially co

Spring Clean

Yesterday I made the drastic decision to get rid of all of my phones except the following: n900 - I am still interested to see how this develops E63 - a nice cheap phone that is being used as my work phone 5800XM - I am keeping this as a sat nav I am getting rid of the following because I want a nexus one and an ipad later this year but here is a summary why: HTC Magic - Great android starter phone but limited on specification HTC Hero - Compared to the magic this is a breath of fresh air with the sense ui but HTCs lack of Android OS updates has shocked me. The magic is already on 1.6 whereas the Hero is 1.5 and newer applications I want to use are on android 2. HTC will update the Hero in march 2010 to Android 2 but my fears of not rolling out frequent updates where correct and as such I am abandoning non Google based Android handsets. I am of the opinion HTC either want people to upgrade to their new HTC Desire or Legend to use Android 2. Whilst this is their prerogative they ha

Cross mobile platform exchange syncing with repeating events.

Back in the old days I used to sync a nokia 9500 and a Sony Ericsson P900 with outlook over a cable. I was pretty confident in that it worked and all appointments and events including repeats where duplicated correctly on each phone. It wasn't until my permanent move to linux that I needed to find a cross platform solution that didn't rely on a PC. I had always used exchange and had found the S60 and windows mobile exchange syncing to be fine but there could be issues with duplicates or missing entries. I would then spend valuable time tweaking them until they appeared on both devices correctly. Recently I have expanded the syncing to an android based HTC Hero, Maemo n900 and WEBOS Palm Pre. I have always sought to have a devicer with exchange syncing. Today on looking in my n900 calendar a recurring birthday hadn't synced. I tried a full resync then extended my search to my other devices to see which one it appeared on. My E63 and Palm Pre synced the event fine bit bot

N900 - To be or not to be?

There are a lot of n900 reviews online talking about specifications of the hardware/software and how all of the applications work to the nth degree of detail. My post is from using the n900 as my main device for a period of 4 weeks (the length of time will become significant later). Before Christmas 2009, after much deliberation I decided to purchase an N900. The phone was bought through a reseller where the price was competitive with what they where being sold for on eBay. When the phone arrived I promptly unpacked it and charged it up but within 1 hour of use it rebooted. I over looked this and promptly set about configuring the exchange sync, my email accounts and looking at what applications were available. I used various sources from NokiaAddict.com to allow me to access all of the development and testing resources and twitter for recommendations which gave me access to more applications. Previously being an N810 user I was aware of the issues around using test applications and

Holding out for a HTC Hero

Excuse the lame title but this has really been a long wait. You may ask am I referring to the review or a phone that I can finally get on with? Well the answer is both. I had always decided to avoid Android because I wasn't impressed with the lack installation space available and because you cannot install applications onto the SD card. After beginning to get numb over Nokia and their poor release of the n97 plus the boredom of the e75. I thought that I would take a punt at android and get a phone. As there was now more choice over the g1 I was looking at either the HTC magic or hero. Again because I didn't want to spend too much and because I thought a Google version of Android would be better than HTC's implementation I purchased the magic. At first the experience was great because I wasn't running out of space for installation. The phone worked smoothly and I enjoyed having a central location for application installs just like on the iPhone. However what I did find

HTC Hero

Due to delays in the n900 and the lack of software both in this and the Palm Pre application catalog I decided to purchase a HTC Hero. There was some hesitation wondering if I could easily transfer my original HTC Magic software over where kind soles on Twitter indicated this should be easy. I opted to get the sim free version from carphone warehouse. Setting the phone up took a couple of hours as I had over 100 applications to reinstall. Thankfully from entering my Google credentials the app market recognised what I had purchased and allowed me to download and reinstall the apps again. Overall I am happy with the phone and find it a lot more responsive than the magic. This is no doubt helped by the additional RAM available for the Hero. The other difference is the application installation space is smaller than the magic. However the changes that HTC have done to Android including built-in exchange support and the sense UI make this one hell of a phone. Also the multi touch on the brow

N900 Do I or don't I?

I have been an N810 user for over a year where I originally made the purchase of the device as I was disappointed using a converged device like the E90 as there were always issues browsing the web. I thought the idea of going back to two devices with a less powered mobile phone and using this to tether with the N810 would be ideal. Although the N810 was a good device, from being used to a converged device for a number of years the idea of carrying two devices again was daunting. Further while the N810 was good for web browsing it was slow. In the end I ended up hacking the N810 to utilise the internal 2 gb of SD space to allow me to install more applications but ultimately it has been gathering dust and is either used as an ebook reader for my emagazine or if I want to tinker. The last word 'tinker' is quite important because in reality this is all I can do with the device. There aren't really any productivity applications out there other than abiword and gnu s