Mike was wondering what the average age of other peoples mobile phones as been. And from memory I will try to put the mobile phones I’ve owned into chronological order..
The first phone I ever sort of owned was my Mum’s old Sagem. It was the most basic mobile phone you’ve ever seen. It was technically my Mum’s but I took it out with me whenever I went out so my parents could contact me.. It looked something like that picture but I can’t remember the exact model number. Eventually the screen became detached from the electronics inside and it couldn’t be used for anything unless I held it together, haha. RIP that one.. Took it apart to see what was inside when I got the next one..
I managed to acquire a Motorola v100 from a friend for a very good price. This was such an awesome mobile phone and is probably the reason why I still SMS more than make calls. If you made a call on the mini-laptop looking v100 you had to use the hands free kit but it’s Qwerty keyboard made it perfect for sending texts. I remember it had a really fun break-out game on it too.
We’re into 6th form territory now, I had my own income from my part time job. So I got my first contract mobile, a Nokia 3510i which I paid for myself. I got 100 txts and 100 minutes for £30/month, a true rip off in today’s terms but back then not a bad deal. I had this phone for ages, when the contract ran out I went Pay As You Go for a while as well, so far this is probably the phone which has lasted longest. As Nokia phones go, it was top of the range when I bought it, look at that colour screen and imagine the polyphonic ringtones! I had Toploader - Dancing in the Moonlight for a while.. Haha. It had GPRS as well, I used to make wallpapers for it on my PC and upload them to my website and download them to the phone - no Bluetooth you see and I wasn’t going to pay £2.50/week for those horrible wallpaper services on the premium text numbers. My brand loyalty for Nokia began here…!
When I started University, I started a new contract, got a good deal from the Intarwebz, a deal which even today no one can beat. Good ol’ Vodafone and the Nokia 6680! Another fantastic long living handset from Nokia. It still works perfectly today, just a few bumps and scratches. As for the reduced sized MMC card reader it has, I put a 1GB card in there so I never had to delete any photos from it. It came with a hands free kit as well, so I had a fair few mp3s on there too. The only real problem was, the Symbian 2nd Edition wasn’t built at the time to handle so much data so it did get quite slow.
November last year saw my upgrade to the Nokia N95 8GB. By far the best phone in the world And long may it live! So, that is five phones… four if you don’t count the first one cos it wasn’t “mine”. All have lived (and died in some cases) in the last, six years or so I’d say. And that is the history of my mobile phone ownership.
Widsets is another application I have found on my travels. It’s a Java based thing which gives you a dashboard onto which you can put different widgets added either from the dashboard itself or via the website.
The strange thing is, I’d have thought this would have taken off a lot more than it has. There isn’t even a widget for Facebook which you’d perhaps expect. There’s a few mini-games like Sudoku, Minesweeper and that Helicopter game. There are a hand full of one-site RSS readers, like the BBC News one or the Techcrunch one. But apart from those few, nothing really jumps out as being amazingly useful or interesting..
It’s pretty slow to load up and slows down again in order to connect to the Internet to see if you’ve picked any more widgets since you last loaded it and to update the content of the RSS readers. It seems like a bit of a let down all in all. Oh well..
P.S. I finished writing this a couple of nights ago and scheduled the post to be published automatically. At the time of publishing, I’ll be at Alton Towers
I have found a killer app for my phone. This is one reason why I went for the N95 8GB in the first place, for software like this to crop up and make it well worth the investment! WalkingHotSpot turns a wifi-enabled smart phone (like mine) into a wifi router! They’ve just released a trial version. It’s pretty much install, fill in a couple of settings and run. It sets up an ad-hoc wifi network, which can be secured if need be. The trial version allows only 1 connection at a time. I had a small issue with it not working initially but I was using the wrong Internet connection settings on the phone, oops. (Everything else connects via the other lot of settings, so who knows what the difference is.) It works like a dream now, so I might be able to use a bit more of that monthly 120mb I get from Vodafone.
I noticed when I loaded sionide.net, that the header image was quite poor quality. Apparently most 3G/GPRS traffic is filtered through a lossy HTTP proxy in order to cut down on the amount of traffic you use. It was also fairly slow when I tested it just now but I don’t live in an area covered by 3G..
No more messing about with annoying sharing the phones Internet connection over Bluetooth or across a USB cable, something I never even bothered to get working because it looked so.. needlessly complex. This is the perfect solution for “proper” Internet, when out and about.
What’s Bambuser? It’s another random application I found which allows my phone (and 62 others) to stream live video to the Internet. Works best over wifi of course, but I’ve not yet tested it on the GPRS/3G connection. According to the website it shouldn’t be a problem but the quality isn’t going to be as good. The lag from real “real” time to video on the page is around 5-10 seconds which is pretty good.
All live streams are recorded and saved to the site, I’ve put a little demo video below to show the video/audio quality. It’s very quick to install and very simple to use. The site isn’t that widely used at the moment so when you start streaming live, your video is on the main page so basically, make sure you’re doing something interesting. I saw a user on there recording an album and streaming them mixing and editing it live so that was quite interesting to watch.
I read YouTube is to start offering live video this year as well. I wonder if they’ll be using the same sorts of technology?
Maybe I’ll start doing a “vlog” or two.. We’ll see so stay tuned.
In this day and age, many people have said the future is the mobile Internet. My phone has a web browser (2 actually), even my old phone had a web browser of sorts. Of course, the other thing to boom during 2007 was social networking. And cameras on phones now are so advanced, people aren’t forking out for a separate digital camera. Even my old phone had a better camera on it than my parent’s old digital camera and the 5 mega pixel camera on my N95 means I won’t be buying a proper digital camera any time soon…
So, what do you get when you mash all those things up? Wouldn’t it be handy to be able to upload photos from your phone directly to your favourite social networking site?? No mucking about with USB cables or bluetoothing your photos across to your laptop which is just frustrating. So what’s the solution?
ShoZu is one such service I’ve found. When I first tried it before Christmas, the application was very intrusive - asking if I wanted to upload every single photo I’d taken, as soon as I’d taken it, when the answer was usually no. So I ditched it. But the latest version has got rid of all that and is definitely heading in the right direction now. Now it’s simply a case of firing up the ShoZu application and selecting which images from my gallery I want to upload. My account on shozu.com is linked in my Facebook account, allowing me to upload photos straight from my phone! It’s not just Facebook either, ShoZu also supports uploading videos directly to YouTube and other supported sites include Flickr and even your own FTP server. If you’re not on an unlimited data plan, ShoZu will even compress your photos so they won’t cost too much to upload. I tend to stick to using the wifi to upload photos, saving my data for other things..
It’s brilliant to be able to upload random photos, of whatever, wherever, whenever, without it taking a bunch of effort. One-click mobile photo uploading.. The future of the Internet is here!
I managed to acquire a Motorola v100 from a friend for a very good price. This was such an awesome mobile phone and is probably the reason why I still SMS more than make calls. If you made a call on the mini-laptop looking v100 you had to use the hands free kit but it’s Qwerty keyboard made it perfect for sending texts. I remember it had a really fun break-out game on it too.
We’re into 6th form territory now, I had my own income from my part time job. So I got my first contract mobile, a Nokia 3510i which I paid for myself. I got 100 txts and 100 minutes for £30/month, a true rip off in today’s terms but back then not a bad deal. I had this phone for ages, when the contract ran out I went Pay As You Go for a while as well, so far this is probably the phone which has lasted longest. As Nokia phones go, it was top of the range when I bought it, look at that colour screen and imagine the polyphonic ringtones! I had Toploader - Dancing in the Moonlight for a while.. Haha. It had GPRS as well, I used to make wallpapers for it on my PC and upload them to my website and download them to the phone - no Bluetooth you see and I wasn’t going to pay £2.50/week for those horrible wallpaper services on the premium text numbers. My brand loyalty for Nokia began here…!
When I started University, I started a new contract, got a good deal from the Intarwebz, a deal which even today no one can beat. Good ol’ Vodafone and the Nokia 6680! Another fantastic long living handset from Nokia. It still works perfectly today, just a few bumps and scratches. As for the reduced sized MMC card reader it has, I put a 1GB card in there so I never had to delete any photos from it. It came with a hands free kit as well, so I had a fair few mp3s on there too. The only real problem was, the Symbian 2nd Edition wasn’t built at the time to handle so much data so it did get quite slow.
And long may it live! So, that is five phones… four if you don’t count the first one cos it wasn’t “mine”. All have lived (and died in some cases) in the last, six years or so I’d say. And that is the history of my mobile phone ownership.
I have found a killer app for my phone. This is one reason why I went for the N95 8GB in the first place, for software like this to crop up and make it well worth the investment! 
What’s 
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