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Ten Pence Mix

When I was young I can remember going to the newsagents and asking for a ten pence mix. The shop owner would count out ten sweets (or the equivalent) and I would hand over ten pence and then have a bag full of sweets. Back then you knew what you would you get when you paid the money and would be able to sort out any problems should there be a sweet missing. Today shouldn't be too dissimilar in that you pay for service and you either get it or you don't. There are always issues with the quality of service thus you have to look at the terms and conditions. Now take O2 where I have been a customer of theres' for a number of years. I pay so much a month I get 600 minutes and 500 texts. If I use them the usage decreases until it gets to zero then I start paying. I used to pay for their data bolt on called data max at 3GB a month where I knew I had up to 3GB of data allowance. Through being made redundant and reducing costs I decided to go to O2 simplicity where I was told t

To Hell and back again

The HTC Magic has been driving me mad today. It has taken me over 5 minutes to write a tweet to the extent I ended up slapping the phone through frustration . Although this calmed my nerves I ended up looking at cooked roms for the phone hoping it would speed it up. After advise from people on twitter I downloaded a recovery image to put phone into a mode where I could back it up to SD. I also used the Astro file manager to back up my apps as well to SD. Then using Linux ( Ubuntu 8.10) I re flashed the phone and went upon my way restoring it. The Asto File manager was bad in that it would allow me to bulk select all apps for backup, but I had to individually restore the apps back onto the phone. Further even though I had restore the apps individually the market application would not acknowledge this. This means I would not be notified of any application upgrades unless I reinstalled the application via the market place. This, coupled with the phones failure to sync agai

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I have been an N810 user for over a year where I originally made the purchase of the device as I was disappointed using a converged device like the E90 as there were always issues browsing the web.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

Copilot Live on Android

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

A photo from my HTC Magic

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

The android cometh....

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

Profimail Issues

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