Archive for the 'Mobile phones' Category

Opera Mini 4.0 beta 2

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 1 month ago
in Browsers, Mobile phones and Mobile phones software
. 2 Comments

OK, I admit it, I was wrong. Opera Mini is fantastic; even the first beta of 4.0 is faster and more stable than the latest (native Symbian) Opera Mobile, and has some great features not available in the latter. And I absolutely love the use of their proxy and the resulting reduced bandwidth. For the record, this is on a Nokia 6630.

Then again, Opera Mobile hasn’t been updated in a year, and it’s 8.x, while Mini (the version 4 betas) are based on 9.x. I have great hopes for Opera Mobile 9, with its Ajax support, among other new stuff.

Anyway, I installed Mini 4.0 beta 2 yesterday evening, and it “feels” even better than the first beta: quicker, a new small font (should be great for screens larger than mine), custom search engines, and it saves whether you want full screen or not; no need to enable it every time I open the browser. :)

Plus, it’s free. Go ahead, try it out.

Opera Mini? Eh…

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 3 months ago
in Browsers and Mobile phones
. 13 Comments

Why is everyone so excited about Opera Mini, when this is, IMO, much more interesting? :)

Series 60 phones - comparison and history

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
1 year, 5 months ago
in Mobile phones
. 0 Comments

For anyone considering a new phone, this page will probably be very useful. It compares all released Series 60 phones (most of which are from Nokia), and shows them in chronological order.

It’s also very current (updated 2 days ago).

Reading blogs away from the computer

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years ago
in Blogging, Email, Mobile phones, Mobile phones software and PDAs
. 8 Comments

Now that I work at home (and yes, I’ve been incredibly lazy… where are the new posts? ahem… any day now :)), I’ve discovered something about myself: I don’t like to read stuff on my computer.

Sure, I do a lot of that, anyway, but, for instance, there are a lot of blogs that I have subscribed in Bloglines… only I usually skip them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the content of those blogs - I do. I simply tend, repeatedly, to find excuses, other things I’d rather do at the time, and so on. However, I love to read them in other places - in bed, in a café, and so on. Whenever I’m alone, with nothing to do, and away from a computer.

Reading them in a mobile phone or PDA, then, is the logical answer (a laptop is still much too “PC-like”, with all its myriad distractions; when you can do everything, sometimes it’s hard to focus on just what you need to actually do). I currently use a Nokia 6630, which I’ve had for more than a year. I’ve tried several aggregators, and also the mobile Bloglines, which is accessed through a web browser such as Opera, and, while they work well, they’re too slow and cumbersome for my tastes. Therefore, I used a combination of newspipe (to convert posts from feeds to email messages) and Profimail (to access a mailbox through IMAP). Recently, I’ve dumped newspipe for rss2email, for reasons I’ll mention in a future post, and that’s what I have right now.

I’ve been considering other possibilities, though. As I said, a laptop isn’t a good idea here. I’d mostly like something a little bigger than the 6630, with a larger and better screen, and possibly a QWERTY keyboard (to do annotations and so on). The Nokia E61 seems to fit the bill (and it supports Wi-Fi, which would save me a lot of money in phone bills), though I wouldn’t like to spend too much money (after all, it’s mostly a luxury - I can keep using the 6630, or even battle my distaste for reading on the PC). A PocketPC (are they still called that, these days?) PDA might also do the trick, though the ones I saw recently would cost an arm and a leg (really, 800 euros!? what are they thinking?).

So, any suggestions / tips? :)

ProfiMail and the Gmail "untrusted certificate"

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 2 months ago
in Email, Mobile phones and Mobile phones software
. 5 Comments

If you read your email on a Series 60 phone, you probably use ProfiMail, a very nice mobile email client.

However, when you configure it to access a Gmail account, you will always get the “This site uses an untrusted certificate” message. Quite annoying, since it requires 2 key presses to pass. Every single time. There’s no option for “I know, just ignore it from now on”.

The cause of the problem is that Series 60 phones, much like web browsers, have a list of trusted root certificates, and the one Gmail uses, from Equifax, isn’t in it.

How to fix it? I search around, and didn’t find a single page with instructions on how to solve this thing. But, by combining this and this, I was able to remove that annoying prompt for good.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Using the phone’s browser (Opera also works), browse to http://www.ocasta.co.uk/cert.html. Click on the only link on that page.
  • It should prompt you to install the certificate. Accept it.
  • It should ask you what you want to trust the certificate for. Choose “Internet”.

This works on my Nokia 6630. Other phones may simply install the certificate, after which you have to go to Settings, Security, Certificate Management, and set the new Equifax certificate as “Trusted”.

Nokia E61

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
2 years, 12 months ago
in Gadgets and Mobile phones
. 1 Comment

Now this - the forthcoming Nokia E61 - looks interesting. Scratch that, it looks more than interesting. I wonder how fast one can type on that keyboard…

Nokia E61

Saw the news on The Tao of Mac.

Software I like #6: Spectrian

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
3 years ago
in Emulation, Fun stuff and Mobile phones
. 3 Comments

(NOTE: this is part of the “Software I like” series)

Spectrian is a ZX Spectrum emulator for Symbian (Series 60 and UIQ) mobile phones.

There’s not much to say, since it works perfectly. :) Among its features, it emulates almost every Spectrum, from the 48k to the +2A (not the 16k or the +3, though), at full speed, including the Speccy 128k’s sound chip. It’s really like having a Spectrum inside your phone. There are thousands of games freely available at World of Spectrum. And no, I don’t work for them, nor is this an affiliate link. :)

Spectrian - Jet Set Willy       Spectrian - Rainbow Islands

Mobile Sudoku

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
3 years ago
in Mobile phones
. 2 Comments

Like most of the civilized world, I’ve been bitten by the Sudoku virus. :) But, to me, the perfect place to play is… anywhere I want. Not at home, not at work, but whenever, wherever I want.

And, due to the nature of the game, it’s perfect for mobile phones. Especially Series 60 phones, which have relatively large screens.

After trying out several of them, the best one I’ve seen, and the one I have installed (and registered) on my Nokia 6630, is SudokuFun. It’s perfectly legible, looks nice, is user-friendly, and has a “pencil marks” feature which proves invaluable in solving the more complex puzzles.

Screenshot:

SudokuFun

Nokia 6100

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
3 years, 1 month ago
in Mobile phones
. 0 Comments
Nokia 6100

The Nokia 6100, seen above, is (and has been for about a year) my current “company phone”. Most of my colleagues have one, except for managers, who have 6600s or even better (and don’t know how to use them for anything other than talking, thus creating one of the biggest waste of phone features ever… but I digress). Before I bought an N-Gage, and later a 6630, I explored the 6100 quite a bit - since I’m really not a big fan of talking on the phone.

Continue reading ‘Nokia 6100′

N-Gage QD

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
3 years, 1 month ago
in Mobile phones
. 1 Comment
N-Gage QD

The Nokia N-Gage QD, seen above, was my main phone for about a year, until I switched to the 6630 a couple of weeks ago. One could say that I got to know it well. :)

Continue reading ‘N-Gage QD’

Nokia 6630

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
3 years, 1 month ago
in Mobile phones
. 6 Comments
Nokia 6630

The Nokia 6630 is my current cell phone. It was, I believe, Nokia’s first “3G” phone. It’s basically a Series 60 phone, but much faster than all the ones before (my previous one was the N-Gage QD (a very underrated phone, BTW) and the 6630 is more than twice as fast).

The 1.3 Mpixel camera is very good (for a 1.3 Mpixel camera, that is), and it was certainly useful in my last holidays. :) It finally has a usable web browser, although I still prefer (and bought) Opera. Many people (less gadget-inclined) will disagree, but Opera 8.0 on this phone is usable for normal operation, not just a gimmick (”look, I can see web pages in my phone!”) - for instance, I approved comments and posted in one of my other blogs during the last weekend… near the mountains, 300 km from home, and far away from any computer.

What don’t I like about it? It sucks for action games. After about a year using the N-Gage’s great D-pad, the 6630’s is a joke - well, it’s certainly not a gaming phone, I understand, but the hardware is there, and other newer phones like the Nokia 6680 have better directional pads, so why did Nokia ruin the 6630 as a gaming platform like this? Especially when it’s much faster than the N-Gage, and games run much smoother (and look better on the brighter, clear screen)? Oh well, there’s still strategy games like Ancient Empires…

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal