Phone-Rush

An Overlook On The Nokia N95 8GB NAM (N95-4)

The N95 has come a long way since its introduction late 2006. Later on Nokia was forced to create more functional variants to address the criticisms and ride on the successful sales of the original. I'm taking a look at the 4th member of the family, the Nokia N95 8GB NAM or simply N95-4. The N95-4 is a featured packed phone, sporting HSDPA, 5 MP camera, near DVD quality video recording, GPS, Wi-Fi, and much more. Here I want to talk about the features and issues that stand out with this device. What I won't cover is most likely standard N95 features that don't need me to talk about, since it's been covered before. This is more focused on people seeing whether if this phone is worth getting over the N95-1 or the N95-3 (I'd say it's worth getting it over the N95-2 if you can use US 3G as they have almost the same exact features).

Voice Quality:

Let's not forget, the primary focus of this phone is to make phone calls. The N95-4 is awesome for calls because first it has great quality and the voices come in very clear, and second that it is pretty loud, so there is no trouble hearing the other side even when your walking on a busy street. The loudspeaker is excellent, and plenty loud and clear for a noisy environment. I give props to the 3G for the clear call quality.

Followup: Review of Nokia 6500 Classic

if you haven't been following my experience with the Nokia 6500 Classic, I recommend checking out the preview and start from there. For those of you who did read that, I've followed up and rounded up my take on the OS and overall performance of the phone and will go into detail of some of its strengths and weaknesses.

Active Standby

when active standby is turned on

There are four rows that can be selected and each row is highly customizable, giving you a vast freedom and control over what you want to see on the default page. Also it's relatively simple to customize the feel of this home page directly from there by not more than 2 clicks, which is great in the sense that doesn't require the user to go digging in the menus to try to find the appropriate settings.

Most likely one of the these rows is set to be the shortcut bar, which is equivalent to the s60 active standby apps. The small screen can only fit 5 shortcuts at a time, but this standby is dynamic, meaning that if you keep pressing left or right, they well scroll accordingly and you can select a 6th shortcut in there as well, which is a great feature. This is a significant omission on S60 phones (most notoriously the E90 with its internal screen) that don't utilize the space they have for adding additional shortcuts to the active standby, and yet S40 in general allows you to have scrollable shortcuts for applications in their smaller screens.

When active standby is turned off

Pressing any direction will directly take you to designated operations or applications when the shortcuts are disabled and can be accessed indirectly when the active standby is on. This can be setup in the settings of the phone.

The left and right softkeys are also customizable.

 

Review: Proporta Mobile Power Pack and Accessories

Mobile World Congress this year was an enormous event. There were announcements flying in the first day. With all this news to cover, and given the number of gizmos I carried around, it was essential to make sure that the devices I need were powered to cover as much as possible, at least for a whole day until I make it back to power outlets. Therefore having a mobile power backup solution is dead necessary. After searching online, I came across the Proporta Mobile Power Pack. Also this would have been a great scenario to review their unit as well. The people from Proporta sent me their unit complete with multiple adapters to review. I took the unit with me with the necessary accessories and gave it a good rundown. Here is an overview of my experience with it:

What is included

    The Proporta Mobile Device Charger was sent to me with complete accessories. These include the power pack itself, a retractable cable with a full USB head on one end and a connector head of your choice on the other end, multiple connector heads for charging old Nokias, newer ones, Sony Ericssons, a micro USB head, and one for an iPod or iPhone I presume. The "Survival Kit" also comes with a AC to USB power adaptor with heads for different regions in the world, and finally a car cigarette charger that has a USB output.

The Rundown Of Google Maps 1.70.2

Google Maps was updated about a week ago, and the biggest addition to it was support for either external bluetooth GPS or integrated GPS. This is my most used app, due to my continuous driving situation I'm on right now, and it's searching and traffic display are impressive for the most part. I've been switching back and forth between my E61i + External BT GPS and my N95-3 using the integrated AGPS. I've been trying to use different aspects of it as much as possible in both scenarios, and these are what stand out for me:

Nokia N75 Review

I was waiting for the perfect time to start blogging, although hopefully I can pick up the pace once I get to sort out my schedule. This review has been put together after a week's usage.

Initial Impression:

    Based on what I've seen before in the pictures and videos taken of the Nokia N75, I didn't think that it would appeal to me aesthetically. The keypad looked decent, and with me having large fingers, I couldn't resist the chance. 3G here in Los Angeles has been expanding in the past few months, but still doesn't reach my house (5-6 miles more to go), but I thought I could get a chance to test out the speeds when I'm in a 3G area to see if 3G really makes a difference on a cell phone. So once I got one unit, and I held the phone, it was better than I expected. The front of the phone is a little boring, but from the sides it actually looks nice. When the phone is open, it looks relatively thin. I was baffled by the tiny speakers Nokia placed on the two sides of the phone, however as you will read later on, there almost up to par with the speakers of the N73. The hinge also feels almost rock-solid, and all you need to do is get it half way open, and it will do the job. When the flip is open, it has two small pads on the bottom of the keypad, and it seems all it does is it creates a little separation between the keypad and the flip when it's closed, so that a fingernail can get in between easier to open the phone.