sangsara.net

Year: 2008

  • A note from above

    To answer the brilliant nick hornby question of whether we listen to pop music because we’re sad or if we’re sad because we listen to pop music, my research indicates the latter. I’ve been pretty clean of the depressing stuff for a couple of years now (read: since i ‘grew up’), save for a little ryan adams, and have noticed being quite a bit more balanced, more than a little less broody.

    This comes to me as i sit outside of a coffee bean with a goddamned latte, listening to old songs while writing this post on my new nokia n82, which it does at the same time. In the background, i’ve got a browser window open with feeds from a bunch of design and consumerist blogs, and i don’t know whether i should be hating myself or enjoying all of this. It seems you can buy happiness after all, it’s just called an unlimited data plan.

  • Undocumented facts about the Nokia N82

    Edit: I’ve decided not to write a review because the guy at Gadgetnutz.com has done a really comprehensive job here. It’s got all of the points I wanted to make and far more insight into the tech. If you can hold out though, it seems Nokia will be releasing a touchscreen version of S60 in the first half of 2008. That might be one reason why Nokia made a candybar as appealing as the N82, with all the power of the flagship N95 and the first Xenon flash unit in the N-Series – it’s a swan song.
    Here are some annoyances I’m noticing about my new phone, the kind that nobody tells you about before you buy it. Updated as I go along.
    – As much as I love the idea of a WebKit-based browser on my mobile phone, Nokia’s built-in browser is a bit of a pain to use. The weak navikey/d-pad (see point below) doesn’t help either when you want to move the virtual mouse cursor around. Another glaring oversight is the lack of shortcut keys for page scrolling. I’ve installed Opera Mobile for S60 and the Opera Mini Java applet to make up for its inadequacies, and they are fantastic.
    – The screen isn’t very bright or sharp compared to the N95, or even my old SE K800. Needs some glass.
    – Camera shutter sound can’t be turned off.
    – No volume control over Java apps. Powerful speakers mean every game will be played too loud.
    – Once installed, you can’t move apps from the memory card to the phone or vice versa.
    – The PC Map Loader software doesn’t let you remove maps once installed on the phone. You may only add new maps, or wipe them all and start over. Every map has to be downloaded before it can be installed, even if you’ve downloaded it before. This deters you from frequently wiping and loading new maps.
    – The D-Pad is a little soft and fragile-feeling. Pressing to the right (if you’re right-handed) puts your thumb in a position to accidentally hit the Multimedia Menu button, which pauses what you’re doing.

  • Nokia’s N82 – Might not be shit

    On New Year’s Eve, I blew a load of cash and got myself a Nokia N-Series device just two days after first thinking about it. Sure, I’d seen it around before, but I’d never paid much attention to the N82 because a) it’s kinda ugly, and b) I had a terrible experience with Nokia’s Symbian S60 UI once. You can read a little about why I hated the E65 here.

    I don’t know whether I fell for the marketing again, or if Nokia has just finally built a solid, modern phone. It’s been 2 days, and I suspect the latter.
    The feature-set is the most impressive of any candybar I’ve ever seen, Japanese models included. Sure it may not be much to look at, and it still uses the same Symbian OS I hated on the E65 (with some small tweaks in a new FeaturePack 1 update), but it’s hard to hate a phone that essentially packs all the power and features of the new N95-8GB into a slimmer, narrower form factor. The N82 has the same 128MB of operating RAM as the N95-8GB (twice that of th regular N95), which makes using the phone much less of a pain. Things happen snappily enough, and there’s little lag when switching between applications. It’s stupid that it took Nokia engineers this long to finally make an N-Series phone feel good in actual use.
    I still don’t believe that it’s a phone for everybody, as some of the menus go quite deep and are thick with options. But for someone determined to have GPS, locally-stored maps, WiFi and HSDPA data connections, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (whoohoo!), and the best damned 5-megapixel camera I’ve seen on any phone, even besting Sony-Ericsson’s new K850, then this is it in one package.
    I must stress that as far as I know, the only two Nokia N-Series devices worth buying are the N95-8GB and the N82. The former has a larger, brighter screen, and the latter has a very bright xenon flash unit. The N95 is fat, and the N82 is acceptably sized. Everything else performs like junk. Have a look at what Om Malik thought of the N81 while you’re at it.
    First impressions have been good, and so unless I fall out of love with it, I should be writing a proper review after a week or so.