Tag Archives: Hardware

Nokia N73 Progress

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Following my rant earlier in the week about the annoying habits my N73 had developed, Pedro Timóteo pointed out a software upgrade was crying out as the best solution. This should have warned me that my entire week was going to be highlighted by generalised acts of stupidity on my behalf, but blithely I carried on as normal. The consequences have been discussed in previous posts.

Anyway, two days ago, in a fit of common sense, I went to the Nokia site and began the upgrade. This was not without problems but I had backed up all my data (phew) and it was fairly painless to reinstall it all. Except Lifeblog. Three, in their infinitesimal wisdom send out the N73 without Lifeblog installed — mainly, one suspects, because they are too tight fisted to provide a mini-SD card with the phone, which Lifeblog needs to be present. This must save them all of £10 per phone.

This makes all manner of problems crop up, as going to the Nokia website you are told you can’t download this application because it comes pre-installed on the N73. What N73 owners do after an upgrade is beyond me. Anyway, the only solution I could find was to download the version for the N71 and install that. You get a few warning messages about the application not working on this phone, but it seems to work.

Generally, in the time since I have run the upgrade, the phone seems to be working better. Not as good as when I first got it, but the delay between pressing send and regaining control has returned. Setting caller specific ring tones still causes the phone to reboot though. Oddly, the upgrade has meant I now get a stronger signal at home. I find that quite strange, to be honest but then again, I am having a stupid week.

I must say a big thanks to Pedro Timóteo for reminding me to get an upgrade. It seems to have improved things a fair bit. Has it changed my opinions of the phone? Not yet.

[tags]3, 3g, bad service, Bad Shops, Cameraphone, Cell Phone, communication, Hardware, hutchinson, mobile phone, N73, Nokia, Nokia N73, Opera, phone, Phone Browser, symbian, Technology, Telephone, three, penny pinching, idiot, lifeblog[/tags]

Nokia N73 – Cameraphone disapoints (long)

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About seven months ago I bought a Nokia N73 camera phone as part of a contract with the 3 network. Although initially I was very impressed with this, and the service, I think a lot of this was simply down to the “excitement” of buying some new technology. As a fair amount of time, and a lot of use, has passed I felt it would be reasonable to do a “mid term” review. Some of the issues (good and bad) I have with this device are difficult to pin down to being the responsibility of either Nokia or 3 so I will talk about both here. For the terminally impatient, I can summarise this by saying that given unrestricted choice in the future I would neither buy a Nokia N73, nor would I connect to 3. This said, the things I find important may differ from every one else, so your mileage may vary…

First off, I haven’t had any problems with the Nokia when it came to making telephone calls. In this, most basic of features it worked perfectly 🙂 . Sadly, this is about the only feature where I haven’t found things which annoyed me! If you only want a phone to make (and occasionally receive) calls then the Nokia N73 is brilliant. However, if this is all you want, there are a million other makes and models which would serve your needs at a fraction of the cost.

I was looking for a phone which would allow me to take photos, access the internet, send emails and maintain a basic calendar service. I could have opted for a PDA but connectivity would still have been an issue. In a given month I use the phone more for text messages, emails, note taking and photos (over 2000 to date) than I do for basic calls. As a result, this is not an ideal phone. Continue reading →

Linux – Partial Success

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Well it seems I have had at least a partial success with the installation of Linux onto this machine. Numerous attempts with openSUSE, Ubuntu and Solaris all failed dismally.

openSUSE 10.2 in both 32 and 64bit versions refused point blank to find the USB device (previously they found it) and certainly wouldn’t give me the facility to configure it. This is doubly strange as I have openSUSE 10.2 running on an older machine in the spare room which uses an identical USB WiFI dongle, and it worked straight out of the box. This really is a shame as over the years, I have come to like SUSE and thought it’s progress was excellent.

Ubuntu 6.10 (32/64bit) and Ubuntu 6.06 (32 bit) also completely failed to work. While it was similar to openSUSE, Ubuntu is a lot more frustrating with it’s problems. The way Ubuntu obsesses about hiding the inner workings and hand-holding pretty much drive me insane. As I see it, the main reason some one will go to Linux is because they want the power and capabilities offered by a great OS. Making all of this hidden and “unintuitive” strikes me as abject lunacy.

Solaris 10.2 (32 bit) bombed. I wasn’t really expecting much from this, my experiences with Solaris on desktops in the past has never been “fun.” This time was no different. It got as far as trying to set up the graphical interface and crashed. A reboot and it was the same all over again.

While the Solaris farce was no surprise, I was a bit disappointed by the first two. This time last year I was happily running multiple linux machines (SUSE and Ubuntu) and would regularly tell people about the benefits of using them (see blog archives for examples). I honestly thought that the way both were heading, there was actually a chance you could get Linux out to the broader audience (ask heather – I kept harassing her to try it, saying how easy it is now, etc.). Give my recent experiences, I think both have taken a step backwards.

No one expects a “niche” OS like Linux to have out of the box support for every hardware device on Earth, but I would expect them to make it easier for people to find the problems. Having lots of on-line resources is useless when your problem is the network connection! I wonder what the goals of the various distros are – in the case of Ubuntu, I can only assume world domination. If the distro makers want to really move away from the small home market share (in the main, people who work in technical jobs), they need to re-think their approach.

This brings me to my last attempt. PCLinuxOS. Worked straight out of the box. I even did it twice to check. Both time this ran perfectly. Given the frustrations, and the cabinet full of install DVD/CD-Roms I have, this was amazing. I am even writing this on Firefox, under PCLinuxOS.

While I am impressed with it’s ability to find and connect to the network first time (with lots more configuration options than either SUSE or Ubuntu), I am not fully convinced I “like” PCLinuxOS yet. Give me some time to play with it, and see what installing new software is like – the main reason I want Linux is to set up an Apache server with PHP5, Perl, Python and Ruby/Rails to assist with web development. If this is not up to the task….

Anyway, let me close with a big well done to PCLinuxOS. It has succeeded where the bigger names failed (Even Mepis dropped the ball).

Blog Problems

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There may be a dramatic reduction in the post rate to Why Dont You… Blog for a few days. We are suffering from some pretty major hardware problems and need a bit offline time to rectify this.

Hopefully things will be sorted in the very near future though and we will still occasionally blog as the rant takes us!