Monday, September 21, 2009

Eid Mubarak

After bidding a farewell to Ramadaan, it is now time for Eid.

Eid Mubarak, everyone. Meanwhile, we'll try figuring out why Pakistan still has two Eids...

Saturday, September 19, 2009

5320's handy search

And here's another bit of the 5320's review.

Last night, I discovered that my phone is actually pretty nifty when it comes to searching for files and folders. And for free, too! Click on the post to read more.

Facebook now lets you login via your username

Title says it all. You can now login using your username - the same username you've chosen for your profile.

If you haven't, then... I'm not sure. But it's definitely quicker than typing your email address again.

Facebook

Telenor Pakistan's Customer Support Initiative - via SMS

When using *444# to inquire about the balance, I got the message that the SMS bundles won't be available for Eid, but right after that, it said "SMS queries to 346".


Click on the post to read more


Sunday, September 13, 2009

Jailbroken iPhone 3.1?

I came across this link just now on Redmond Pie that has a FAQ on jailbreaking and the iPhone. Apparently, a quick runthrough of the FAQ revealed you can't jailbreak the iPhone in all cases - read more to find out. (it's pretty in-depth, I'll say, but still not a reason for me to use the fancy-yet-limited touch-screen phone).

See you (hopefully) in a few days, when I post something again.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Reduced posting frequency

I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up with the previous posting level that I had maintained, due to a number of reasons (one of them being that my university has started, and I've got lots of other work to do). Hence, I regret I won't be able to post as much as I should (or would like to).

N-gage on the 5320

The N-gage service works like a charm on the Nokia 5320, another reason to buy the phone. Since N-gage's decline, Nokia decided to take a bold step: make it available on other devices. From what I've read, this is the only music phone WITH a keypad to support not only the S60 platform, but N-gage too.

Visiting N-gage's site will give you details on whether your phone supports the N-gage platform, and where you can download it. Since my phone came with it preloaded with two N-gage games (SIMS 2: Pets and Creatures of the Deep: Hooked On), I managed to get my hands dirty - except there is a caveat - the games were trial only. Some games let you play for a certain number of levels, others didn't.

There are cracked versions of the N-gage games, but not all work with this phone. Some may give an error, others won't. It's a trial-and-error, and the reason cited for this is because the phone is a feature-pack 2 phone, and the games haven't been cracked for this software release as of yet. (In order to play cracked games, you need to go through a process called "hacking" on your Symbian phone, which involves installing a program. A firmware update or a phone reset erases those "hacks").

While I go on hunting for more (trial) games, I guess you can wait for another segment of the Nokia 5320's review.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Facebook, finally with SMS notifications

I just saw this pop up in my account - Facebook will let us use SMS as an alert-based service. Interesting.

From what I've gathered right now, you can get alerts for wall posts, pokes, comments, inbox messages and a few other things. Oh, and if you want, you can subscribe to someone's status feed by typing in their name either via SMS or the web interface.

The service works with Warid, Mobilink and Telenor in Pakistan. I'm sure they have support for other operators abroad.

And this comes amid my decreased usage of Facebook. Interesting, indeed.

The (Xpress)Music in Nokia 5320

 (I know it's later than a day, but it was unavoidable).

The Nokia 5320 is an XpressMusic (XM, from here onwards) phone, and it does boast a pretty nifty musical experience. For starters, here's what I noted.

When you hook up the phone to the PC, you have the option to either go into the PC Suite mode, or a hard disk mode. There are two others, but not related with music. The hard disk mode will work everywhere (and when you are in the hard disk mode, the phone doesn't go offline, as was the case with some N-series phones).

After putting in your music, when you launch the music player, it sometimes detected new music and asked you to refresh - sometimes it doesn't, and you have to manually refresh. This takes around a minute or so if you've used alot of the space on your memory card (I have a 1GB card that came with the package).

After scanning, you can create playlists or listen artist-wise or all songs, or listen to the podcasts (separate service). The music plays fine, without glitches, although the response isn't instant when you forward/rewind (it takes up to half a second to act upon... maybe because it's symbian). If you forward a track, it takes almost a second to start playing the next track, but if you leave the player alone, it takes a split of a second to switch to another track.

The main screen has album art view in it, and you can set your own equalizer settings, amongst from a few other choices. On the track listing view, you can scroll either in normal speed, or a faster speed (press the button again, and it scrolls quickly). Or if you want, search by typing the name of the song!

The N-gage button, if pressed and held, is a "Say and Play" feature. You say the name of the artist, the song title, album or playlist, and it'll play the first track in the pop up list that follows. The speech settings may need to be tweaked in the phone settings before you can get good matches. Since I listen to English music only, I didn't have a problem with many tracks, though some were not recognized.

When forwarding, rewinding or playing/pausing while not in the music player nor on the desktop/standby screen, a small pop up appears telling you what it's doing. A helpful feature if you want to know what the title of the current song is, but it doesn't appear when the songs are in their normal playback.

The phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack - you could use either those pair of earphones that came with the phone, or use your own. I don't like the set that came with the phone because they don't fit in my ears (!), although if you can get them to fit in your ears, the sound quality is quite good indeed.

Nokia says they added a separate audio chip in the phone, and that audio chips certainly shows good results. The loudspeaker doesn't work well with loud volume, as I noted there's a bit of hiss. Lowering the volume a bit solves the problem.

I'd say this is probably better than the walkman phones in the sense that there's a standard headphone jack in the phone (and not as an adapter), and if you use any other pair of earphones, the phone's microphone can be used to answer and make calls - something that many new phones lack capability of. I'd give this a 9/10 for the music, and not full because there are a few (minor) glitches (such as the slow response while changing tracks manually)