OH MY, sweet lord above (or below). One of the best games ever, star craft (and presumably as its the same engine the awesome warcraft 2) has been ported to the N900. Now i presume the game originally worked in 640x480 so screen size isnt a problem :)
Tinned Luxury, Oh my WOMWORLD sent me a pair of these nokia BH-905 blue tooth (with wired option) noise canceling headphones to trial, and BOY they are good. I had a pair of sony noise canceling headphones about 10 years ago, and the were a bit rubbish. These are amazing, even without music playing a couple of seconds after you turn on the canceling - suddenly you get drawn into a silent place. apparently there’s 12 microphones built in to sample the surrounding sounds.
Music sounds great on them, I’m no audiophile but they sound really good to me, there are lots of specs that mean very little to me. Every bit of the product oozes luxury, the metal bit seem gold in some light and silver in others. Theres leather, fabric, metal, and a twist in every direction to get the right fit. This is solid engineering, yet they are smaller than you expect, lightweight and comfortable.
There’s a range of adapters for using in ‘wired’ mode, but the freedom of bluetooth make me never want to grab them. The carry case is quite large, and only really suitable for traveling. I would of liked to have seen an additional soft pouch for slinging in any old bag.
I had some drop out and that weird bluetooth catch up on the N900 when first connected, but no issues on the more mature firmware of the 5800. It worked a dream with my macbook pro, to give me spotify around the house.
My wife tried them out and I didn’t get them back for over an hour. Likewise in the office they got nabbed as soon as i put them down. Though we did have a tinny sound issue with a desktop mac pro, not sure why it was sounding very muffled, no problem with other connections so seems some sort of bluetooth compatibility issue with that mac hardware.
I made a couple of phone calls with excellent call quality. In fact it made a teleconference far less painful as i didn’t have to hold my phone for 20 minutes.
I’ve always avoided over the ear headsets before, but having tried these out i now want a pair, as they are so much better than the admittedly more convenient in-ear options.
They cost an eye popping £250, but you can get them a lot cheaper online, google shows £149 being best current price.
Click the main pic or HERE for lots of photos of the headsets.
Desktop vs mobile metaphores.
While messing with various twitter options, it’s apparent that obviously all ‘real’ web based twitter clients work just fine. (I havent tried tweetdeck, not sure if its linux version will play ball).
BUT they kinds don’t really work as they are designed for mices not stubby fingers, I know theres a stylus, but I haven’t used it once - whereas I use it all the time on the 5800.
I find a conundrum, I’m dazzled by the magic of having a full desktop experience in my hand, but from a frequent usability point of view I want a mobilised version. For infrequent use, doing the full website is fine. But for those you visit a lot I want it optimised for the screen size (not resolution) and native interface metaphors.
But hey its great to have the option for both, I’ve been using dabr.co.uk in it’s touch interface skin for twitter. But on the odd time I check facebook I get the full experience, though the app bar behaves a little oddly. Point in case i just check the facebook widget rather than visit the main site. Mind you i prefer the iPod/iPhone native app facebook to the full web version.
what are these little icon things
I presume they are data traffic in/out
But I’m not 100% sure.
UPDATE, on day one i installed the load widget. its that. one bar is cpu the other memory.
As answered on the lovely nokia users forum.
Nokia messaging bad vibrations. About once a day, Nokia messaging decides to lose all my emails and reload them as if new, complete with 5 mins of bells and vibrations. seems to be a bug in nokia messaging across platforms rather than anything to do with the N900 or its native mail application.
I’ve had this happen on the E71 version too, but not as frequently.
I seem to be getting corrupted text in all the ‘menu’ screens.
You can see original grab here.
twitter false alert!
arghh just spent ages looking for an N900 twitter app, announced and RT’d this am
but it seems it does not exist :(
dabr.co.uk will keep me tweeting on the go.
decent headphone at last, actually most N series ship with adequate headsets, but the N900 finally joins the in-ear gang, which offers much better bass for commuters. O.K. audiophiles won’ be satisifed but for most these will do nicely. nothing startling look wise, but the flat rubbery cables do prevent tagling quite well. Good solid sensible design.
Off for the weekend and forgot my charger. Started the day with about a 20% charge I smelt trouble. Little did I expect it to be a flat tyre on the m4, maps saved my life as I pulled into a nameless industrial estate and called the AA. Maps identified the road and location so I could tell them where I was. When I arrived I popped onto tesco not expecting to find anything but a regular nokia charger (after years of demanding USB charging, I now had second thoughts) but I got a multiple ended charger for under a fiver, with a micro USB adapter. They also had car chargers just shy of £7.
In other news I discovered the swipe to unlock screen for the first time. It appears when you press the power button rather than the screen lock rocker. Nice.
Share online is really well integrated with the viewing app, its no longer a seperate app as such but handles multi accounts well, you can have two flickr accounts for instance as well as an ovi one.The interface has been overhaulled and is way easier. Sharing is super easy, geptagging works a treat.
