Recently the funky bunch of WOM World crew invaded Chicago. I had a chance to hang out with Amy, Tom and Robbie when were a wonderful hosts. The even took place at a cute restaurant in Buck Town area of the city.
Everyone had a chance to mingle and talk...and such event would not be complete without a galore of Nokia devices. Mind you that there were certain "less desirable" :-) brands (Samsungs) but let's not hate the less fortunate ones...their time will come. After receiving the invite from WOM crew I was invited to do a little demo on two of my favourite applications that I can not live without. I was to do this with "another" secret blogger whom later on I found out was Jeremiah from www.nokiausers.net
I met Jeremiah previously in during the LA Unlock event in September 2007 so it was nice to see him again and chat about the geeky stuff. Unfortunately he stole my 1st favourite application from the list of things to talk about so I was forced to talk about my 2nd one :-) Jeremiah demonstrated Sling player for S60 which worked better in his case as his carrier of choice is at&t allowing him to ride N95 to its full potential (HSDPA) while I'm on T-Mobile (therefore limited to EDGE or WiFi). Prior to the event I coordinated with Tom, Amy and Robbie whether I could invite two of my friends. Both of my good friends turned were happy to attend. Patrick (Northwestern University Professor) is a technology buff and geek just like myself while Russell (Rusty) (Colorado University Doctorate student) is like a child in an amusement park..his eyes light up when he sees kick ass gadgets. There were supposed to be about 20 people at the event but only half showed up...To those who did not show up...that means no more toys for you from WOM World...just kidding. The crowd that showed up was a good mixture..people "In the know", geeks, technology adopters AS WELL AS a the regular "every day users". It was nice to demo the applications and the possibilities of the N95-8GB (the star of the event) and see people's reaction to various possibilities. Sling required some explanation as the "regular" crowd was under the impression that this was a TV services for the phone. A quick clarification and everyone realized that this was "Your home tv on your phone" kind of software / hardware. I do have to admit I'm bad when it comes to remembering the names so I apologize for not remembering everyone's names. One of Chicago bloggers had a "Non S60" device... HTC piece of marvel with a full VGA screen, 3.2 MP camera, slide out QWERTY keyboard...a true piece of gem. Now if HTC would start manufacturing S60 devices we would be in heaven. The hardware workmanship is amazing, the devices feel sturdy like a brick and have a hardware specs to match. Perhaps in the near future we may see them start using their S60 licensee status. Co-writer of Nokiausers.net had Nokia N90 which I had to touch and see and play with for a moment (a review will be coming up as WOM is supplying me with one soon). But back to N95... My demo part involved 1: Nokia internet Radio. The radio selection in Chicago is a garbage in my opinion. There are no decent dance music stations here so N-Radio is a savior and allows me to get my daily dose of Euro news (Radio ZET from Poland) and music. Amazingly it works quite well via EDGE connection so no issues there. The second application I was demoing was Nokia Maps. (Un)surprisingly we had a signal inside of the restaurant thank to assisted GPS (A-GPS) so I was able to demo pretty much all aspects of the software. Again the "regular" crowd wowed and ooohhhed :-) It's a good feeling when one can wow someone with a piece of technology... it's so hard to do it within the geek crowd.
The whole event had a very relaxed atmosphere and due to the fact that there were only about 10 of us we could touch a lot of subjects. One of them was "The connections wizard" on S60 devices. Personally I did not have anything against it until a few drawbacks were pointed out to me...such as access point prioritisation.. . Now I see the point. Usually I launch the internet radio on my phone while I'm at home and thus it streams over WiFi. It would be nice if the phone would switch automatically to EDGE (or 3G) upon departure from WiFi coverage and then switch back to it as soon as it would sense an open access point. Sometimes one doesn't realize something is missing until another person makes a mention of it. It's good to network with other technology lovers. Overall the event was a success and the host restaurant owner (also an airline employee like myself) was a hoot. The event ended with a trip to Down Town for a late night snack and more geek talk. It was nice to be the "part-hosts" of WOM World crew and I hope we will be able to have another event like this in Chicago. I even recommended a beach bash...now that would be fun. See you at the next event.
After a L-O-N-G wait Nokia finally released long awaited update for N95-3 (the US edition of N95 basic). Unfortunately Vista users are out of luck as Nokia removed vista support temporarily from the updater software. Sweat no more...there's always an XP machine around so yesterday I stayed long(er) at work just to get the update rolling. The update itself was flawless...it took about 5 minutes to download the 113 MB file and then about 5 more minutes for the update itself
The first thing that I noticed was the start up time. GREATLY reduced; around 20 seconds from power on to a "ready for take off" mode. The new firmware introduced demand paging. I won't get into the explanation of it (just click the link to read more) but essentially what it does is it gives you more memory to run the whole OS / applications. How much more you ask... I'd say as much as 90% more. Before I had only about 30-40 MB of ram left after a clean restart with Shozu running in the background. After the update I now have 81.30 MB free. Amazing. One thing I need to mention is that I downloaded the most recent version of Shozu which seems to be updated (now it boasts 4.0.56 version) recently where the previous one was a step or two older. Either way demand paging rocks. Another great improvement is the camera start up. As most bloggers have reported this was reduced by a GRAND number of seconds. You no longer need to wait 8-10 seconds for the start up. Press and hold the camera button and voila...a 2..that's TWO seconds of time to get the camera up... Lights, action...rolling....now you can do that. This will allow you to capture your child before the food spews out of its mouth vs capturing the vomit dripping all over their bib.
There are other things which I like. One would be the "semi standardization" of the home screen. The old firmware did not have search or share online plug in appearing on the stand by screen. I wrote about this in my previous posts (N81 review) and hoped that such features (home screen plug ins) would be uniform among all devices. Well...we're slowly getting there. You can't select which plug ins appear on the stand by screen just like it's possible in the E-series) but it's a step in the right direction. The menu structure has changed a bit where Podcasting application is now a part of music player; it's no longer a stand alone application and is nicely implemented into the player. Some folders were moved around. Before there was an Office folder on the main menu screen; this was moved to applications and is now replaced by N-Gage shortcut. It's not a very drastic change - no worries - nobody will get lost. And if it's not to ones liking, it's possible to move everything as needed. Interestingly Nokia did not include share 3.0 or Maps 2.0 applications which are now Nokia Labs graduates but again it's S60...it's a PC in a phone form factor so it's very easy to update everything. Web browser has been updated as well with Flash 3.0 which allows you to watch YouTube videos on the desktop version of the site (not the mobile one). As I'll be using my phone in the next few days I'll try to pinpoint the changes and will add them but for now I give it a thumbs up
and recommend that you find that old fashioned XP machine and get the update on your phone asap.