So far, I’ve watched all kind of sports, on the road in the bus and MRT, and at home when channel 5 doesn’t show the game I wanted to watch.

This is only the fourth day I watched Olympics on my mobile phone, and I’ve already hit an astonishing 700MB of data transfer.

With Olympics still due to end in a couple of days, expect me to hit 1GB transfer very soon

I tried streaming China vs Brazil soccer match LIVE on my mobile phone, and here’s the data usage after the first half. Astonishing 85MB of data transfer !! The quality are as you would expect on a mobile phone screen, but you could still watch the match with enough detail, and there were no lag or pause felt during the whole of first half.

This must have been the most data I ever transferred to my mobile phone ever since I started having the data plan. The good thing is I can now watch Olympics matches LIVE anywhere in Singapore, simply superb !! No more boring bus or MRT trips

Surprisingly, it turned out to be simple. Very simple in fact. Here are ten detailed step-by-steps.

1. Download and install Nokia iSync support for your phone.

2. Connect Mac to Nokia phone via Bluetooth. Click on Bluetooth icon, then select Setup Bluetooth Device.

3. Bluetooth Setup Assistant should appear. Click Continue.

4. Select Mobile Phone, click Continue. Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, make it Discoverable.

5. Mac should be able to find your phone. If no, make sure that Bluetooth on your phone has been turned on and it’s Discoverable.

6. Select your phone and click Continue. Wait for your Mac to gather information about your phone.

7. With Nokia E90, the following options appear. Tick both, then click Continue.

8. Bluetooth Setup Assistant will ask you more details on your connection. For me, since I uses Starhub, I only need to put in APN value shwap, left username and password empty, and clicked Continue. This is potentially the most difficult step of all as it need you to find out what is the APN name for your mobile phone data connection.

9. When everything goes well, you’ll be congratulated Click Quit.

10. Go to System Preferences -> Network. Select Bluetooth and click on Connect. Voila, that’s it !! Your Macbook should now be able to connect to Internet using your mobile phone data plan. To be sure, I turned off my Airport, launched Firefox, and browsed to Google. It works !!

If you go to Connection Manager in your phone, you should see an active connection established.

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.

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.

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.

So I told myself, let me do a little survey. See how many Nokia phones out of the first ten you see from now. I was in city area last night. So, while I am walking around city, I started to look around me to find ten mobile phones around me. Result was as expected. Eight Nokia, and Sony Ericsson and Samsung one each. Three Nokia 6600, Two 3100, One 3650, one 7250, and one 6510 in Nokia camp. T610 and E700A was single fighter from their respective camp.

I repeated the little survey again today and found similar result. Nokia grabbed 8 out of 10, and surprisingly, the other two slots went to Panasonic.
If you consider O2 XDA II as a phone, then the result will be 8 for Nokia, one each for O2 and Panasonic today.

You can try it for yourself and post in the comments below what kind of result you got. It’s quite fun I tell you. One thing I learned from this was if there was a subject in my school to identify mobile phone model by looking at it from any angle and position, I would passed with flying colors. Hehe…

Note: It is raining and I am still stuck in this freezing bus in the middle of nowhere.