One of the irritating things about my new Nokia E51 is that the calculator is so damn crude! The calculator from my recently-departed 5310 is so much better. And to think it’s an S40 not-so-smartphone. Thankfully, Nokia is aware of the issues and has actually been working on a replacement calculator. It’s still in beta but you can already download and install it. Way better.
My Nokia 5310 XpressMusic bit the dust after a horizontal fall. I went back to my trusty old Sony Ericsson K700i while searching for the perfect replacement phone.
The perfect replacement phone has to be small, slim, and most importantly black. My first choice, the Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition fits the bill and is the coolest but is a bit too expensive. My second choice is still the Nokia 5310 which is the second coolest. Reason why I got one in the first place.
But lately, I was thinking of going back to my geeky roots and get a gadget phone. You know, those phones with everything but the kitchen sink. So what would that phone need to have? Bluetooth, GPRS (2.5G), EDGE (3G), HSDPA (3.5G), VoIP, WiFi, etc. aside from voice, SMS, and other phone things.
The Nokia E51 is all that (okay, less the GPS) and more. It comes from a line of business-oriented smartphones and so it has everything you need to remain connected wherever you may go. It’s so business-oriented it doesn’t even have Snake!!! But hey, all those three-letter acronyms is really where the fun is. So who cares, right? So I got it and so far I’m not disappointed.
UPDATE: Very good phone overall but after just over a year of use, ALL the rubber buttons along the sides have disintegrated. Talk about planned obsolescence. Makes me want to boycott Nokia.
Two months and a big price drop later, I have finally upgraded the memory of my Asus EEE PC 1000H from the 1GB it came with to the full 2GB. It was pretty straightforward unlike in some other netbooks. First, you’ll need to buy a full 2GB DDR2-667 SODIMM as there is only one memory slot on the machine and it’s occupied by the old memory module. Unplug the adapter, remove the battery, and unscrew the access panel at the back and lift it up gently to reveal the expansion bay. Take out the old module by releasing the tabs on the sides of the module and gently lifting the module up and then out of the slot. Put in the new module by inserting the connector edge into the slot, pressing it in then pressing it down until the tabs click into place. Replace the access panel, the battery, and plug in the adapter. That’s it!
A few months ago, I got myself a Nokia 5310 XpressMusic. However, I haven’t been playing music on it much. One of the reasons is because I didn’t like the look of Nokia earphones that came with it. Maybe it goes well with the original editions of the phone but definitely not my all-black edition.
And then I saw the plain and simple all-black Sennheiser MX-160 hanging on the store shelf for P550. Not bad for a respected audio brand. I bought it without even testing.
And I wasn’t disappointed. Remember, this is Sennheiser’s entry-level earphone so you can’t possibly expect mind-blowing bass and spine-tingling clarity like those high-end in-ear earphones. But audio quality is quite obviously better than my Nokia earphones. Sound is reasonably crisp, clear, and very audible. Definitely a good deal.
After a lot of dilly-dallying, I finally pulled the trigger on the Asus EEE PC 1000H. As I mentioned on my comparison, it seemed to me that it is the best of the current crop of netbooks.
The Asus EEE PC 1000H is definitely bigger than your typical netbook. But it brings with it a bigger display, keyboard (majorly sucky wrongly-placed itsy bitsy right shift key), and battery. Although these lead to less portability, these definitely improved usability and coupled with the bigger memory and disk space brings it up almost to the level of ultraportable notebooks but without the hefty price tag. The sleek black case even reminds me of the Fujitsu P7020 that I was lusting for a long time ago.
It booted up straight out of the box and, with the input of some personalization and localization information, was almost ready for use.
The wired network worked fine. It let me get my wireless network’s security details which I then keyed in, unplugged the network cable and I was wireless in a snap.
The 80gb hard disk provides a comfortable amount of space but is partitioned in two. Not very flexible. So merged the two with the freely downloadable EASEUS Partition Manager. As with most netbooks (and some ultraportables), there is no built-in optical drive. So I had to use my USB to SATA/IDE adapter to copy my backup files from my external drive and install software from their CD installers.
And that was it. It seemed snappy with Firefox 3.0, Yahoo! Messenger, Open Office 3.0 beta 2, and Eclipse. Movies and music played smoothly with VLC. I’ll also be running Tomcat and MySQL servers but maybe after a 1Gb memory upgrade.