Tag: phones

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Nokia E51

nokiae51My 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.

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Nokia 5310 XpressMusic

Black is back. I’ve been eyeing the Nokia 5310 for quite some time already. My primary reason being it’s one of the, if not the smallest, slimmest, lightest phones out there. The personal multimedia player features clinched the deal. However, what held me back was the availability of only red and blue accented models. I thought that a silver accented model would be better. But I was surprised that Nokia actually did one better and released an all black model. Nokia has been releasing black models recently including the 6500, the 6300 (originally in silver), and now the 5310. I guess they finally realized that silver nor pink (supposedly the new black) just isn’t as classic and versatile as black. Of course they’re not the first, Apple had long discovered that black iPods and black iBooks sold better. Welcome back black!

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Sony Ericsson K700i

My Nokia 6100 is now definitely dead. The repair guy said the board has been cracked. No surviving that I guess. It was pretty saddening. The Nokia 6100 is really neat no-frills phone in a small package. Worse is I wasn’t ready to buy a new phone yet. So I put off buying a new phone for several days. Thankfully, Jem lent me his old but still functional Nokia 3530 and I used that for for the meantime while I scoured around for good deals.

The best deal I found was Globe’s zero interest installment promos for existing subscribers where you can pay for your phone via credit card for up to 18 months. Supposedly this is at no interest. Of course the base price are a bit higher than your typical side-street mobile phone vendor. But installment payment sure is hard to beat especially if you have little cash on hand.

I’ve decided beforehand that I will be getting a Sony Ericsson. My first choice was the K750i. I’ve been lusting over this phone for some time. It has good features including a serious 2 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, it’s so good that it’s out of stock in most if not all Globe Centers. Besides, it was rather expensive. My next choice was a K300i. It is a lot less expensive but is a bit too shabbily built for my liking. So I settled for the middle-ground which is the K700i.

For a phone, this basically has everything you would expect: tri-band, hands-free operation, voice commands, SMS, MMS, etc. For connectivity, there’s IR, Bluetooth, GPRS, and USB cable. The only phone feature missing is a speakerphone mode which is rather a bummer but not so much as to earn it negative points. UPDATE: It actually has a speakerphone though it’s a little bit unintuitive to activate.

On the extras side, the influence of Sony is very evident as this is essentially an entertainment phone. It has a media player that can play MP3, MP4, 3GP, and WAV files. It also a radio that uses the headset as an antenna. Both the media player and the radio can be minimized and run on the background.There’s a Java engine for some pretty neat games. There’s a VGA-resolution camera that you can also use to record videos albeit lower resolution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have external memory card storage which would have been great for music files as the internal memory is only around 40 MB.

And the design is pretty cool too: simple lines, subtle accents, and a silver, gray, and black colored casing. It has Sony Ericsson’s dual-front design: The front of the phone is your traditional vertically-oriented display and keypad but the back of the phone is horizontally-oriented and designed to look like a camera. I actually like the overall design better than the K750i which, although shares the basic shape and design, has a charcoal colored casing.

Definitely a good deal.

Rating: 4/5

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Nokia 6100 Rebirth

What is it with my stuff? They seem to be all dying! Yesterday, my Nokia 6100 gave up the ghost. It just powered down on its own. Powering it up is a hit-or-miss affair. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, it powers down again after a few minutes. Now I wouldn’t mind if the damned thing completely dies but all my contacts are on the phone and not on the SIM!!! As soon as I got home I desperately tried to power it up and was eventually able to. I quickly backed up all the data using a trial version of Oxygen Express which I had hastily downloaded.

The next day, my friend Eeya accompanied me to a phone repair shop that had fixed her phone a few weeks back. I showed them my phone and they promptly flashed it. Bye-bye data. Good thing I was able to back it up. When they’re done with flashing, the phone still didn’t work. All my data gone for no reason! Grrrr. They eventually were able to fix it while Eeya and I were eating lunch at a nearby Subway, so I don’t know what the problem was. But it damn sure is not the flash memory. I hate it when people use their favorite magic tool to fix all the world’s problems. Well at least the phone is now working.

After dropping off Eeya at her place, I rushed home and tried restoring my data only to find out that the trial version of Oxyen Express does not allow restore of back-up data! Curses!!! I tried looking for warez or cracks but it is so new there are no warez and cracks. Looks like I’m gonna have to order it online :(

UPDATE: I finally bit the bullet and ordered Oxygen Express. After a day, I got the download link and the registration details. I quickly installed it and restored my back-up. My phone is back!!! :)