Steves71’s Blog

I ordered a Pogo printer from Amazon on Tuesday and it arrived today. For those that don’t know what it is more info can be found here.It’s a pocket photo printer that uses special ZINK photo paper 3×2 inch (slightly smaller than an average business card). The paper has three layers of coloured crystals that are activated during the printing process by firing pulses of heat at the paper. This means that there are no ink cartridges to refill or replace, you just load it up with a 10 pack of paper and you’re ready to print.

The printer is Bluetooth enabled so photos from most camera phones can be sent directly to it, or you can print via USB from any PictBridge enabled camera or phone. Polaroid quote it as being able to print a photo in 60 seconds, this maybe the case via USB but using Bluetooth it will take longer. I did two test prints today, both from my N95-8GB using Bluetooth, the photo’s were 956KB and 983KB  and both took just under 90 seconds to print. A break down of this time was roughly 40 seconds to send the photo to the printer, 15 seconds while the printer processes the data before it starts printing, 25 seconds to print the photo.

It can be powered from the mains or from the built in (replaceable) rechargable battery, a fully charged battery should be enough for 15 prints, I can’t confirm this though as I have only done 2 prints.

If you are wanting realistic prints like you would get from a full sized photo printer then the Pogo is not for you.  If you want a small compact printer that fits into the back pocket of a pair of jeans and allows you to print out photos/stickers wherever you are and have a bit of fun then the Pogo is perfect. Of the two prints I have done so far the one of the pink flower is the best, it has near perfect colour reproduction and the clarity of detail is fantastic. The other one is not as good but it’s not poor either, the bread roll is a bit yellower than it should be but other than that the photo is fine.

As a fun little printer the Pogo is a fantastic device, I really hope that it takes of so that Polaroid will continue to develop the technology.

——–Update——–

I’ve now tested the battery life of the Pogo. Polaroid claim it will do 15 prints, from a full charge, I got 20 prints and the battery was still going. As I was using it away from a power source most of the time I didn’t want to risk the battery going flat on me while I was out so after the 20^th print I recharged it. Even if the battery had died at that point it still exceeds Polaroids quoted number of prints by 25%.

I’ve been trying an application called Wavelog, it’s a blogging application for s60 phones. I wish I had tried it when I did a mobile blogging comparison test then I could have written about it earlier. Other than Shozu it seems to be the only option of composing a blog entry which includes images and easily uploading them from a phone. There is a trial version available but it only allows text to be uploaded, if you want to include any kind of media (images, videos, sound) then you need to register it which costs $10, quite cheap, well it would be if it was any good.

The trouble is that the trial works fine, once you have written the blog entry on your phone it uploads fine and everything looks great. It’s once you pay for the full version and include images that the problems start, and because there is no way of testing its media upload function without purchasing a licence you have to pay for the privilege of finding out how crap it is.

Below is a screenshot of a post I made earlier with an image, the text doesn’t flow across the full width of the page and the image is tiny, it looks ridiculous. I’ve tried all the different layout options, with the image below and to the right of the text but they all give the same result and look like shit.

It does work well if all you want to upload is text, but http://m.wordpress.com does it better because it allows tags which Wavelog doesn’t support.

One of my contract ends this month so in May I phoned up to cancel it, the guy I spoke to tried his hardest to get me to upgrade rather than cancel but as I already have another contract with them I stuck to my guns and went through with it.

On Monday I got a phone call from their 10day retention team, as soon as realised who they were I thought well I’ll see what you offer me but I’m not going to change my mind and I will go through with the cancellation, how wrong was I. If I hadn’t already been sitting down I would have fallen down with shock at the offer. If I continued my contract they would give me for £10 per month, 600 cross network call time minutes, 100 text messages and a FREE Nokia N95-8GB. I was speechless, I already have an N98-8GB but for £10 a month that was an offer I just could not refuse. It arrived today, so now I just have to decide whether to sell it or keep it. I had intended to sell it but now I’m probably going to keep it as I always carry more than one phone and could use this one for high power consumption tasks like video playback, push email, mobile web server etc, saving the battery on my other one for calls, text and internet.

Yesterday I bought a new Bluetooth headset to replace my aging Plantronics Discovery 640. I wanted something small, without an ear loop and preferable one that had a portable charger. This limited my choice dramatically but I finally decided on the Nextlink Invisio G5.

The Plantronics I had been using could be worn with or without an ear loop but I found that after a while the weight of it started to pull it out of my ear if no loop was used, particularly if I tilted my head or moved it sharply. From reviews I’ve read about the Invisio G5 this wouldn’t be a problem because of the soft rubber spring that fits inside the groove of your ear to help hold it in place.

The G5 measures 3.3cm in length and weighs just under 6grams. Read more »

Last week I received my latest phone bill from 3UK. Inside was a promotional flyer advertising a free USB broadband dongle with half price monthly fee for existing customers. Up until now I had been using my N95-8GB and bluetooth tethering it to my laptop for Internet access, but for half price this was an offer I couldn’t turn down.

There are 3 price plans to choose from, 1GB per month for £10 £5, 3GB for £15 £7.50 or 7GB for £25 £12.50. Currently I had a 1GB broadband lite plan with my phones contract, this cost £10 per month, I could drop that down to x-series silver for £5 which would still give me internet on my mobile and take out a 3GB plan with a free broadband dongle for the promotional price of £7.50 per month, thus only costing me an extra £2.50 for a whole lot more and a USB broadband dongle. See what I meant when I said it’s an offer I just couldn’t turn down.

So on Saturday I went to the 3 store and picked up a Huawei E169G USB modem. The software installation was simple, it pre configured the IAP so no settings to enter. The only problem I did have was that the first time I tried it I got an error 619 message. A quick call to customer services and they got it sorted, it turns out the sim card hadn’t been properly activated in store. After that I was up and running and I must say it works really well, I haven’t done any speed tests but it does appear to be quicker than when I was connecting with my phone via bluetooth.

I do wonder what will happen to WiFi providers like The Cloud as these devices and plans become cheaper and more popular. Currently in the UK The Cloud charge £9.99 per month for unlimited access, they have thousands of hotspots, but outside major cities they are few and far between. For example my local town center has 5 cloud hotspots, not exactly blanket coverage. As most people use hotspots for sending/receiving email and a bit if time in a browser reading the news and RSS feeds it isn’t very data intensive, they probably use less than 1GB per month. So even without the promotion they could have broadband where ever they go for the same price as a monthly cloud subscription and not be restricted to finding a hotspot. Companies like The Cloud are seriously going to have to change their prices, offer special deals or some other intensive if they don’t want to go out of business within the next few years.

Back in February I started trying to use my N95 8GB as my main media device instead of my iPod Touch, well it’s nearly two months later and in all that time I’ve hardly listened to my iPod, it’s probably only been used for about 10 hours. I’ve been an iPod owner for about 4 years and I’ve really enjoyed using them until this last year. This started with the release of the 3^rd gen iPod Nano and iPod classic, nice devices but old 3^rd party hardware to output video to a TV stopped working, then the iPod Touch was released and they removed mass storage mode, then they released the iPhone apps for the Touch and we had to pay for them, unless you bought a new one and then they came preinstalled. I had my Touch jailbroken so this didn’t affect me as I could and did install them for free but the vast majority of owners don’t even know what jailbreaking is, never mind how to do it.

It has been said in the past many times that Apple are locking people into using iPods because music purchased from iTunes won’t work on any other player, this was before they started selling the + tracks. This is partly true but they don’t force you to buy music from their store, you can quite easily convert your own CD’s or purchase MP3’s from stores like Emusic or Amazon. I’ve never agreed with what has been said but now I think maybe there is a bit of truth to it and it was part of their plan. Recently they seem (in my opinion) to be thinking “we have the best selling media player on the planet so we can do what we like, people will put up with it and still buy our products”. Well not any more, not for me anyway, I’ve had enough of them and I’m quite happy using my phone as my main music player.

Some of the reasons I prefer my Nokia over my iPod are

• It supports more audio/video formats
• It’s easier to put content on it where ever I am, either OTA or from another computer
• It’s one less device to carry
• I don’t miss calls when I’m listening to music
• The built in speaker is good for listening to podcasts without headphones
• It will play iTunes+ tracks so all my previous purchases still work
• I don’t have to be near a WiFi hotspot to download content, it works fine with a HSDPA connection
• I can purchase Audible books from the phones web browser then download them directly to the device without going near a computer
• Music purchased from the Nokia music store is easier to remove the DRM without loss of quality than regular iTunes tracks are

The iPod is still a good device and for some people it is the best media player there is, but for me personally I have found something better for my usage and needs, and that is the Nokia N95 8GB

On Saturday I woke up to find that my Digifusion Freeview PVR had died over night, nothing I did would revive it so by mid day I decided to give up on it and go buy a new one.

Normally when purchasing something like this I would do at least a few days research to compare features, price and user reviews. This time though time wasn’t on my side, the new series of Doctor Who started that evening and it HAD to be recorded. This meant that online stores were out of the question, I was restricted to buying from a local store and it had to be in stock for immediate collection. This narrowed down my choice considerably, I was hoping to get a Topfield TF5800 but nowhere local had then in stock, so I was left with a choice of Humax, Sagem, Thompson or Grundig. After reading a few reviews I decided to go for the Humax PVR9200T.

After a few days with it I’m very pleased. The main benefits of the Humax over my old Digifusion are,

• · Twice the HDD capacity
• · Better reception/picture quality
• · Series Recording
• · Search feature within the EPG
• · Playlist of recorded media
• · USB to transfer recordings to a PC
• · Much nicer user interface

There are some things though that I preferred on the Digifusion

• · It had a 14 day EPG, the Humax only had 8
• · EPG could be switched between multi channel timeline or just a single channel

Over all though the Humax is a much better device and I’m pleased with the purchase.

JoikuSpot is an application that can be run on any S60 WIFI enabled smartphone to turn it into a mobile hotspot. It works be using your phones packet data connection and allows other devices to connect to the phone via WLAN to get on-line. It’s been around for a few months but until now there was no way to create a secure connection, it was completely open. This meant that if you were in a coffee shop using it with your laptop there could also be another dozen people connected to your phone and there was nothing you could do about it.

Yesterday a new version was released, version 1.2 and it now has WEP encryption as one of the options. Read more »

From time to time I watch videos on my iPod Touch and N95-8GB, the trouble has been that videos created for the iPod either won’t play on the N95 or they don’t play well. Yesterday I spent the afternoon downloading and testing various video encoders to try and find one that created a file that plays well on both and I have found IMO the best two for the job. My criteria for the encoders were that they must be quick, create a video file that plays equally well on both devices and most importantly, it must be able to create a video in exactly the same aspect ratio as the original. It’s no good if the final video is 320×240 and it keeps the aspect ratio by adding black bars top and bottom because this then means it won’t work properly on the Touch in full screen mode. Read more »

At close to midnight yesterday I noticed that there was now a new way to jailbreak version 1.1.4 of the iPhone and iPod Touch. My iPod Touch was still on version 1.1.1, I’ve put off upgrading it until now because it worked fine and I didn’t want to lose the MobileScrobbler application for listening to last.fm streams. This new method seemed to have a very high success rate using version 2.6b of ZiPhone so I decided to update to 1.1.4 and jailbreak it. After getting a BSOD the first time I restored my iPod and tried again, this time all went well. I added a few applications including the iPhone apps which are now available for purchase through iTunes for none jailbroken iPods(if they think I’m going to pay for a bundle when all I want is Maps then they can think again) . Read more »