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Less than a year after I started using Nokia N95 as my mobile phone, I have now changed (again). This time it’s Nokia E90 Communicator to be my phone. My dad (again) bought this phone in Indonesia. After a couple of weeks with this phone, he realised that he preferred Nokia N95, and so we swapped phone (again).

It’s good that Nokia has a very easy-to-use backup and restore, even between phone models. I backed up my dad’s E90 contents using Nokia PC Suite, and did the same to my N95. After both are done, I wiped out both phone clean for a fresh start. I tried to hard-reset N95 using *#7370# combination (beware when using this code, as you will lose ALL data in your phone) but somehow it didn’t work. So I tried another method to hard-reset, that is: turn off your Nokia phone, hold green button, three (3), and star (*) at the same time, then power button to turn it on. Hold on to green, 3, and * until your phone asked you to select a country, which can be as long as two minutes. Admittedly, you’ll probably need four very flexible and long fingers to do it. Luckily, it was easy for E90, I just did a firmware upgrade. The firmware in the phone was some v7 previously, while the updated one was v200, what a huge shocking jump in version number.

About 30 minutes later, both phones contents have been swapped with no issue. This phone is BULKY to say the least, it’s BIG. It’s as thick and wide as N95, and as tall as N95 slide opened. At 210 g, this phone is even heavier than my Dell Axim Pocket PC. However, using the huge screen inside was a joy, as well as typing SMS-es using qwerty keyboard. The GPS took less than 20 seconds each time to fix signal, and I have been using it to good use to geotag all my photos taken using this phone. Put it simply, with geotag, all photos taken has location information, and after you’ve uploaded it online, you can easily put your photos on the map.

One of the cool thing about N95 is its GPS ability. Couple that with mapping application like Nokia Maps or Google Maps, it’s a killer. You know how far you are from your destination, you can roughly know where to alight from the bus, since you know your destination and you know exactly where you are. You don’t need to be afraid of getting lost (maybe not in Singapore, but certainly you can in Jakarta). Last month, as I played a lot with Google Maps, unknowingly my data charges shot up. I used about 9 MB of data, for about S$27. That’s very expensive. I repeat, very. Come to the rescue is Nokia Map Loader. It’s an application, clearly from Nokia, to load selected maps around the world to my N95 phone, so I’ll have the maps ready in the phone without having to connect to Internet to download the maps. Cool stuff. I have loaded the map of Indonesia (I think only Jakarta is available), whole of Singapore, and Malaysia.

Nokia Map Loader

I was quite surprised, when I search for road names in Jakarta, the result appeared. The map of Jakarta is complex enough, but the 5.2MB download includes all the road names, complete with postal codes. I’m impressed.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been using Nokia N95 for the past two weeks. My dad bought it sometime back in Jakarta, and when he transited in Singapore, I met him, and switch our phone haha…. My dad is a simple user, he need only a phone to make phone calls, send SMSes, listen to music, and take good pictures. Well, my Sony Ericsson K800i could do that very well too. However, my dad doesn’t use the rest of features that N95 has, Wi-Fi, 3.5G, GPS to name a few, and certainly he’s not that kind who will bother to install apps onto his phone. I am, that’s why we switched

So far, I am impressed with this phone. I do agree that Nokia labeled this phone with the tagline “It’s what computer has become“. It has everything you can ever wished for in a phone, big screen, dual-slide, 5 MP camera, video recording at 640×480 (that’s DVD-like quality), Bluetooth, Wifi, 3.5G HSPDA, it even has a GPS built-in with Maps application. On a minor side that often overlooked by phone manufacturer, this phone also has 3.5 mm audio jack, which means you can plug in the normal earphone to listen to music, instead of using a proprietary plug. Mini-USB port is great too. Everywhere I go, I can plug in this phone without having to resort to some Nokia phones-only cables.

With it’s 3.5G, last week I tried a video call with a friend, and I was impressed by the speed, which involves my phone, the other party’s phone and Starhub’s 3.5G connection in between. It was a joy to use video call, not to mention that Starhub gives 100 minutes of free video call every month.

On application side, I have installed various useful applications like Biblereader (I purchased a version for my PDA few years back, and now I can download a N95 version for free, so great), Gmail for mobile, Google Maps (combine this with GPS, to see a map view with an indicator on where you are exactly, route planning, amenities nearby search, etc, this is a killer app), Live Messenger, Opera Mini, and Fring (for use of VOIP like Skype from mobile). I even have the Calendar in the phone sync-ed to my Google Calendar, wonderful stuff. The built-in applications like Acrobat Reader and QuickOffice (to view Microsoft Office documents) are great too.

Some shots using the phone, click for larger version

Of course, it’s not a perfect phone, it has number of flaws as well, though some are attributed to S60 platform, which affect all latest Nokia phones, instead of specific to N95. I have issues with the following scenarios (which I believe happen for all latest Nokia phones using S60 3rd edition platform)
1. You get an SMS from a number let’s say +65-9876 5432. You save this number to your contacts, you get back to Inbox, the message still stays there with that phone number. Only subsequent SMS-es will show the name as the sender. You get the person name if it’s inside the Call Log, but not in Message Inbox.
2. You save your friend name in Contacts as [First Name=John] and [Last Name=Doe]. When John Doe calls you, it appears as “John Doe calling“. However, when John Doe SMS you, the sender appears as “Doe John“. This is annoying to say the least.

Two more issues with this phone, which I think is only N95-specific. First, it has lost signal once that I have to reboot the phone.
Second, the battery life is awful. Normal usage will yield one day to 1.5 days of battery life, I hardly reach two days, with all Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G/3.5G, music player, camera turned off. Use this phone for Wifi browsing, listen to music, or play with the GPS, you’ll probably get the Battery Low message before you left office in the afternoon after you have fully charged the night before. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Some shots taken from the gathering at Grace and Gustaman house on Sunday.

I also got to play with Apple iPhone !!! So great !!! It’s thin, small, and the whole UI looks wonderful. Using the whole interface by finger was much easier that I ever thought it would be. I can foresee LOTS of people will be buying Apple iPhone when it’s out in Singapore early 2008, barring the price. My guesstimate when it’s out will be about $1,000 with two-years contract.