Playing with the Tube

My Nokia 6600, which I’d bought for the princely sum of Rs 8,900 all of three years ago suddenly refused to switch on one morning about three weeks back. Did a survey on the Net for a new phone, was sufficently intrigued by the new touch phones from the Nokia stable (5230 and 5530) to check them out but finally zoomed in on the 5800 Xpressmusic  once I realised that I couldn’t do without 3G, Wi-fi and GPS. The newer phones had only any 2 out of these three. So, off it was to the shops to feel and touch, and to do a comparative price survey. The price quoted was between 16K and 18K…Nokia had dropped prices from 21k a month before after removing accessories such as the TV out cable, stand and leather cover.  Then it was off to the ATM to withdraw the moolah. Being an SBI ATM, after a lot of whirring and clicking and the sound of money being furiously counted, I got a slip with the message “unable to process”. (I later checked my bank balance and almost had a heart attack when I found the money had been debited from my account nevertheless, but that’s another story) Anyways, that turned out for the good, because the next day, Nokia dropped prices by another 3.5K, to Rs.13,500. Now that I’ve used it for a couple of weeks, I can say with certainty, that  for that price, it’s a STEAL.

What the Tube has done is to liberate me from the desktop.. I can check emails and surf the Net over GPRS and WiFi with ease using either the built-in browser or Opera, chat on gmail or any of the other IMs or make skype calls using  fring, and do a whole host of other things on the move that I used to use a desktop or laptop for before. For instance, I can take snaps and upload them on the move to my photoblog at  vella.vox.com. Why at vox and not to my WordPress blog, I hear you ask? Well, that’s because, while Nokia excels in hardware, it really sucks providing associated services. So, while it provides one touch access to mobile blogging on flickr, youtube and other sites in many parts of the world, in India, the only site you can access is vox and the Nokia M-blog site which seems to be defunct. Similarly, both the Nokia Music Store and its Ovi store are a royal pain to use, scoring a giant zero on both navigation and usability fronts. The  Ovi software that downloaded to my phone, for instance, gave up the ghost after a few uses, and now simply returns the message “initialisation script failed” whenever I try to fire it up.

That said, there’s quite a bit of free stuff in the Ovi Store that adds value and utility to the Tube. The software I’ve downloaded include the Nokia Photo Browser, a Hindi language pack for the dictionary, and widgets from Rediff Moneywiz and CNBC TV18..

Even before all that, the first thing I downloaded was Google maps for Mobile which i find to be much better than Nokia Maps…I was desperate to download Nokia Sports Tracker but to my dismay found that there was no version available for this phone yet. But, of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and after some digging around, I found a similar software and service on Ovi called Endomondo. Endomondo keeps track of my sporting activities with the software on the phone uploading data to the website which I can later access to find out details varying from distance run, or cycled or swum, time taken, and calories burned.

My contributions to Google Mapmaker have also jumped thanks to the A-GPS which makes it that much more easier to pinpoint locations. I have also downloaded GPSed, a trip tracking software that uploads my GPS traces to its site where it can be converted to gpx or kml files. Once I get the hang of it, I intend to start contributing to OpenStreetMap where basic info about Delhi is still missing.

I had an initial gripe about the battery uptime since I had to recharge it almost on a daily basis, but after trawling through the many 5800 help fora, I got a tip about switching off the 3G radio and after doing that the battery is draining at a much slower pace. The 5800 also has a habit of hanging once in a while, especially if any service is active when a call comes in, but I guess, that goes with the territory. The fact that there are nearly 8 million users of the phone, will, I hope, guarantee continued support to the phone by Nokia, and regular updates of the firmware. Other users have been crying out for   kinetic scrolling and whatnot, and I have gone along and signed the petition but I can live without that. The only thing that I have on my wishlist is that Airtel, my mobile provider comes out with a unlimited data plan for GPRS at a reasonable cost.

Finally, the 5800 does come with a camera with Carl Zeiss lens and built-in flash, but the indoor snaps are terrible.

That said, the photographs are geo-tagged and once uploaded on, say, Picasa, give viewers an idea of where exactly the pictures were taken. You can see it for yourself how that works by clicking here