Cragnet

I will be posting an initial impressions blog of my HTC Magic in a few days but this morning I was using the phone for sat nav and it was a major failure. On my normal route to work a road was closed where I was forced to go another way. Because I was not familiar with the area I fired up my Co Pilot Live 8 Sat Nav on the HTC Magic and this is where it began screwing up. For some reason it insisted it needed setting up again with my local language, choice of voice navigation, imperial or metric measurements then to accept the disclaimer. The last time this happened I managed to select maps of Italy that required a complete reinstall. Considering I was using the sat nav at the weekend why did it do this? Then the icing on the cake it already had my route in from the weekend (several stops) and insisted on routing me to these destinations. Trying to clear each one out (it has to be done indivdually) resulted in slow menus, bad response and general sluggishness as it was trying to ca

The first picture taken on my phone. Can anyone identify the beetle and how to get rid of it?

I have recently got back from holiday where I used Garmin maps on my E75 to redirect me around the traffic enroute to home. Garmin with google maps and occasional use of Ovi Maps was great on holiday for getting about. A quick lookup on google maps to find places then using the postcode in garmin to get me there by car. Or using the same postcode in Ovi maps for walking navigation. One wonders why we ever need maps. Well, due to the lack of 3g coverage and because I hadn't preloaded the Ovi Maps I still either needed a paper map or the preloaded Garmin maps. On the journey home it was different because my phone required 5 manual reboots because Garmin kept freezing. I had even removed all of my memory hog applications to give it room to breathe with no luck. It worked fine taking me to my destination using this strategy until we neared the location. A swift stop and reboot fixed this, but why did I need 5 reboots yesterday. For this reason I love dedicated PND (personal navigation

For an email client on all of my 4 symbian phones I use Profimail because it provides a desktop like experience, is highly configurable and support rules for filtering. I have been using it for over a year and pride in using it over the standard nokia email client including the new nokiamessaging client. The number of issues with nokia messgaing over the past months have had me laughing at people who use it and the number of times it failed. However today we the profimail users were the ones to be laughed at. For some reason we could not collect email for the majority of the day and we were getting weird connection 300/301 errors please contact the application vendor messages. At one point I had a blue screen of death (BSOD) which whilst common in windows was most unwelcome on the phone. But I had to laugh at least I didn't need to reboot. Anyway the issue was because the software we had purchased couldn't connect to the registration server to see if we had a legitimate versi

I can recall the first time I used a HP UNIX computer at De Montfort University back in 1991. The screens were huge at 21" where for back then both these machines and screens would have cost thousands of pounds. The workstations themselves had a RISC processor and 32mb of ram and a hard drive. Previously I had used a PC with Windows 3, an Atari ST and Apple MAC. All except the atari could run multiple applications concurrently but unless you had enough memory on the PC, like the apple mac it would task switch. This meant the application in the foreground would run and other applications in the background would sit and wait until they were brought to the front to continue processing. Windows had a 386 enhanced mode which would allow mutlitasking and you could set the priority times for dos applications. The HP UNIX boxes at university could multitask properly with all of the applications. I could be compiling, on IRC, doing FTP downloads, emailing and possibly some text editing all

It has been over a month now and I am still using my E75 and it is going strong. Even with the v10 firmware the phone is solid. In hind sight I have made the right decision to avoid both the E97 and Omnia HD. It also proves how mature s60v3.2 is to provide a good user experience. I have read many reviews of the N97 and all have commented saying the build quality of the phone is exceptional but actually using the phone is bad. I have already blogged about the low memory even before the device came out and I was right. After using the 5800 of which like the N97 is not for power users. Probably in 6 months time when there have been several revisions of firmware the n97 might be worth reviewing especially when the price comes down. What surprised me recently with the omnia hd was samsung actually have released new firmware. Even after owning the i8510 for 6 months, getting rid of it and then 6 months later there has been no firmware. Because of this I no longer will have a samsung as I

The following report on Digital Britain that read about on BBC News is 245 pages of drivel. It was commissioned in October 2008 and is still yet to be completed. From skimming over the report it looks like a preface on what they intend to do in the actual report. My fear is by the time it is completed and actioned it will be far out of date and as such will require another report. Whilst they are claiming 2mb broadband links for everyone other countries such as South Korea already have 50mb. Whilst companies such as Virgin are putting fibre into the home, BT are still using copper, are asking for more money yet still take £12.50 per month rental for a copper wire to deliver these services. This in itself is too old hat and I don't have a choice if I just want broadband and not telephone. Until their monopoly and stranglehold on our telecoms is removed I believe we will never be leading the Digital revolution merely following.