The Tlog - a technology blog » Mobile phones

Opera Mini 4.0 beta 2

Pedro Timóteo — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:48:26 +0000

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…

Pedro Timóteo — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 23:17:40 +0000

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

Series 60 phones – comparison and history

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:42:57 +0000

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

Pedro Timóteo — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 23:22:35 +0000

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"

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:40:21 +0000

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

Pedro Timóteo — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 23:08:52 +0000

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…

Saw the news on The Tao of Mac.

Software I like #6: Spectrian

Pedro Timóteo — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 12:02:03 +0000

(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.

Mobile Sudoku

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 13:57:41 +0000

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:

Nokia 6100

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 09:32:42 +0000

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.

Frankly, the 6100 didn’t impress me in any way, except maybe concerning its size and weight. But let’s write a couple of nice lists…

Good things about the 6100:

it’s small.
it’s light.
it’s simple to use (because it doesn’t do almost anything).
at the time, and compared to my previous phone, the Nokia 3510i, the bigger screen looked nice (but read the “bad things” section).

Bad things:

it’s a VERY buggy phone, compared to every other Nokia I have/had (which include(d) the 3210, the 3310, the 6310 and the two others I mentioned above). It’s common to see an “Insert SIM card” message from time to time, which is temporarily solved by turning off the phone, and back on.
I didn’t like the keyboard – after the 3510i’s, and before the N-Gage’s, it was a disappointment. The keys are too small, too close to each other, and quite unresponsive.
it’s slow. For instance, you can type SMS messages faster than it can handle. Sometimes, you choose an option and have to wait for the phone to catch up. Java games are also slower than in, for instance, the 3510i.
the screen is terrible for games, every movement leaves a visible (and ugly) trail. Again, the 3510i didn’t have this problem.
keypresses in Java games are very unresponsive – and I don’t have to compare it with the 3510i again, do I?
as I said before, I didn’t talk with it very much, but most of my colleagues, who do so, complain of battery problems – for instance, sometimes their phones, with a fully charged battery, complain about being out of battery power, and turn themselves off.
it lacks any “interesting” features, but in this particular case, maybe it’s just me. It’s a very basic phone – you can use it to talk, send and receive SMS messages, access basic WAP sites, and play basic Java games. But all of these played a lot better on the 3510i, even with its smaller screen.

My advice: unless you’re a “socialite” to whom having the smallest, lightest phone in the world is the only important thing, don’t buy a 6100. Even if you’re just looking for a basic phone, there are much better (and cheaper) options out there.

N-Gage QD

Pedro Timóteo — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 11:11:56 +0000

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.

The N-Gage, unfortunately, has an extremely bad reputation, much of it caused by the initial version (before the QD), which had two huge problems: “sidetalking” (which, as someone at the time put it, “makes you look like a dork”) and having the game cards be inserted below the battery (due to which changing games meant turning off the phone, opening the battery compartment, removing the battery, and so on). Those two flaws were corrected with the N-Gage QD, but by then it was too late – Nokia could have released the best gaming phone in the world and it would still have failed.

But, to me, it was a great phone, though I admit that I used it more as a “generic” Series 60 phone than for playing N-Gage games. Of these, I spent a lot of time with Pocket Kingdom, and Pathway to Glory is still one of the best turn-based tactical games I’ve played on any platform – including current PCs and consoles.

However, as I said, I used it most of the time for Series 60 applications – Opera for browsing, Profimail for email (and it was workable, not just a “gimmick”), Mobipocket for ebooks (and believe me, I read a lot) and some quick Java or Symbian games, playable in short sessions, like standing on a queue. Oh, and emulators. Game Boy, ZX Spectrum, NES… Almost every game for those platforms was playable on the N-Gage.

And there was the D-pad. That’s probably the thing I miss the most in my 6630 – with the N-Gage, I could play action games, while now I’m restricted to strategy, puzzles and such. I haven’t even bothered with installing emulators on the 6630 – I tried one, and while everything was faster and smoother, I simply couldn’t find a way to confortably play any action games, other than perhaps Arkanoid / Breakout clones.

What didn’t I like in the N-Gage? Well, it could be faster. It’s as fast as the 7650 or the 3650, but for some applications or emulated games it simply wasn’t enough. It could have had more memory. And, for gaming, a “landscape” screen works better than a “portrait” one, though that was a Series 60 limitation at the time. And I have to admit that always having a camera with me (on the 6630) is very nice.

It speaks volumes, though, that, to me, the 6630 (a much more advanced phone, supposedly) is simply a faster N-Gage with a camera, but with a horrible directional pad.

Nokia 6630

Pedro Timóteo — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 12:57:40 +0000

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…