Random thoughts about nothing (usually) so special: October 2007

I fought with myself for weeks, but about 2 weeks ago I could not resist anymore and finally bought a Nokia N95. I have been using it since then and what I can tell is that the device is amazing!

For those who don’t now the device yet, it’s a GSM smartphone with a 5MP camera, Wi-Fi and embedded GPS running on S60v3 (Symbian OS). A great generic review is available in the link bellow:

Nokia N95 review: Nokia’s crown jewel
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n95-review-141.php

My digital camera is broken; I needed an mp3 player because I have been spending about 10h a week in a bus because of my current project and I like to listen to music while traveling, so I decided to buy this phone, because it can be used for these functions pretty well.

Currently I’ve been running some very cool softwares on it. For example:

Putty for ssh;
Python for some cool scripts (graphics, text editor, etc.) that I found;
Quake 1;
Google Maps integrated with the GPS, which, btw, absolutely rocks;
DivX Player to watch TV series episodes while traveling;
Fring to make Skype calls over Wi-Fi, which it’s also very very cool;
Gmail client for reading e-mails which is very close to the standard gmail, but gmail mobile is ok too;
Nokia podcasting software for listening to podcasts;
Nokia mp3 player is very nice too; most of my favorite albums are in the phone already, etc.

And now I can take nice pictures (5MP) whenever I want!

Using it for web browsing over Wi-Fi is very cool also. Currently more than half of my feeds I read on it using Mobile Google Reader, which is also very cool. The standard browser of N95 is very good in general; it uses the same engine of Safari and it’s a real browser (not a “wap” browser)! I can access most of my “standard” sites using it and everything works pretty well. I have installed Opera mini, but I think it’s too heavy. So, for reading and listening to music I've been using my N95 more than my laptop.

There are some things that I want to do in the future with it, for example, install a ruby interpreter, install a software for use it as a webcam that I cannot remember the name, buy more memory; install a software to download maps of Sorocaba and Volta Redonda to use with GPS without having to use any Internet connection (it already has a pretty good map for São Paulo), download more games like Quake, write some apps in python for it, send photos to flickr directly using it, etc.

I’m also impressed about how easy is to write graphical applications with python for S60. I’m thinking about writing some apps in python to explore the GPS and also, if possible, a Nokia mp3 player integration with last.fm site.

In my opinion, for advanced users, there’s no comparison with iPhone, which is VERY cool because of its UI, but it’s also much closed for custom software. I could not do most of the things that I’m doing with my N95 if I had an iPhone!

Of course, it has some problems, for example, the battery sucks, the camera flash sucks, internal RAM is not enough for running more than 3 applications in parallel, it’s very expensive (~2,3K reais in Brazil), it’s kind of big, etc. But, for me, up to now, it rocks!

Some images of my N95 running:

Some of my applications