Techy odds and ends

The much awaited update landed on my own N9 yesterday. At first sight there's nothing really new in it despite Nokia's surprisingly undetailed claims of over 1000 improvements in various areas (see here ). As far as I can see there are only 3 visual changes, but it goes a little deeper than that. Read on... Firstly, there is now a small status icon that appears when the phone's "beep" profile is selected (see photo to the right, screenshot of the top-right corner of the display). Previously, there was only such an icon when the phone was in silent mode, a similar musical note with a bar through it. Secondly, the UI seems to be a bit more fluid. Scrolling through photos in the gallery, entries in the music player or tweets in the twitter app seems less jerky than previously. Finally, there has been some improvement to the camera. Focussing seems to be improved, as does the camera's ability to function in poor lighting conditions. The ...

Since writing this, I have found a "solution" to the problem. "Solution" in quotes because it is merely a work-around and doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. All I did was install firefox , set it as the default browser and start over with the procedure described below. Here's one that has me stumped. Rest assured, if I do get an answer to this problem I'll publish it here so that other people coming up against the same problem can find help. The nature of the problem is quite simple: it is seemingly impossible to set up my flickr account on this phone. Flickr apparently uses an oAuth system similar to that of twitter, whereby the client application (the built-in flickr client in the N9 in this case) contacts the flickr API saying "I want permission to access your services". The flickr API then prompts the user (me) to log in and grant the client this permission, in response to which, the API returns a token to the client. In...

The time has come for me to choose a new mobile network! I'm currently using Tesco Mobile as the coverage was excellent where I used to live. I was also led to believe that the coverage of most competing networks was poor in the location where I now live, so Tesco or O 2 (the former uses the latter's network anyway) seemed the logical choice and I took out a 12-month SIM-only contract. The big 5 available here in the UK are Orange UK , O 2 , Vodafone , Hutchison 3G and T-Mobile . MVNOs piggybacking on some of these networks are, among others, Virgin Mobile (on T-Mobile), Tesco Mobile (on O 2 ) and Asda Mobile (on Vodafone). They all provide different levels of coverage in the various locations that I frequent and different levels of service. The primary concern when choosing a network has to be coverage and service levels, with the deals being offered by the networks only your second consideration. There's no point in getting boatloads of inclusive minutes, more t...

Wow! It's some 18 months since I last published anything here! Time to add a quick article that puts in one place the results of something I was looking at last night. The idea here is to synchronise your Google calendar(s) with your N9 (and presumably N950 since they both run MeeGo Harmattan), which isn't that hard in itself. What caught me out and had me searching was how to sync all my Google calendars with the phone. Single calendar In its most basic form, this system allows you to sync just your main Google calendar with a mobile device. On your phone, go into "Accounts" and start setting up a new CalDAV account: Fill in your Google e-mail address (eg. your.name@googlemail.com) and your Google account password, and in the "Server/URL" field enter: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/ Tap on the "Sign in" button and you will be presented with a page allowing you to set up the scheduling (just like with any synchronised account)...

Wow! Nearly 8 months have gone by since the last post I made on this blog. Those of you who know me offline will also know that life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for about 6 months, which kind of explains the lack of activity both here and on my other blog . So here goes... How many of you have become irritated at Nokia OVI Suite's stubborn refusal to mark as read text messages that you have, well... read? Am I the only one? You can click wherever you like on a message marked as unread and nothing will change that status. I'd read posts elsewhere that sugessted sorting the list of messages by date rather than grouped by contact but even that didn't work. The only thing left to do was to go into the message database and change the status of the messages manually. For this, go and grab yourself a copy of SQLite Expert available from sqliteexpert.com . The free, "personal" version will work fine for this, although I'm sure the author would appreciate you pur...

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion as to what these beasts are and what they're for. Hopefully, this article will clear up some of that confusion, although I certainly do not profess to be a real expert on any of the subjects herein and have simplified things before writing them down here. Reading up on the concepts dealt with here and implementing them was in fact prompted by a real-world problem that I came up against at work. Part of my work involves maintaining a control panel site, each page of which can contain multiple "components". Each component comprises three elements most of the time: a PHP template file that handles the display, a PHP class that manages the mechanics of the back-end (often invoked via an AJAX call) and, given that AJAX obviously involves JavaScript , an associated JavaScript file containing data and functions that tie the display and the back-end together. Different components are written/maintained by different members of the develo...

Nokia released a major update for the E72 handset in September 2010. The previous version was V31, so V40 and V50 weren't even released to the public. According to many online resources there are something like 450 bugfixes in V51. There are also some new features that some people would consider to be bugs, and curiously enough, some pieces of software appear to have been down graded between versions V31 and V51. V51 is currently available via Nokia Software Updater and as Firmware-over-the-air. There are various sources of information on the internet listing things that are supposed to have changed. What I'd like to do here is give you an idea of what the new firmware feels like, which is something you can't put on paper. Visually, very little has changed. To be honest, the only difference I've noticed is a smaller clock at the bottom of the screen. People who tend to use the keypad to select elements in the phone's menus will be pleased to hear that the '7...