Ok, so it’s been about a week since I got my Nokia N95, and wow, it’s quite a phone. Before we go on, I should mention that up until recently, I was employed by Nokia (in the ES group, not Multimedia, where N-series comes from). That ended on March 17. Consider yourselves disclaimed appropriately. I got mine at the Nokia Flagship Store in NY. The $750 pricetag, while steep, was certainly far more palatable than the $1300+ that other stores are offering, not to mention prices upwards of $1000 on eBay. At least the eBay prices have dropped closer to the Nokia store’s pricing in the past few days. When I got mine, however, the prices were still sky-high.

The specs are very impressive. Rather than bore you with all of them, here’s the highlight film:

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• WCDMA on the 2100 Mhz band, with HSDPA
• 802.11g Wifi
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Built-in GPS – real GPS, not A-GPS
• 5.0 MP digital cam with auto-focus
• Front cam for video calls in 3G areas (i.e. not the US)
• MicroSD expansion slot
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• Dual-slider (slides one way for the dialing keypad, the other for media playback controls)

For the past couple of trips into NY on the train or the bus, I’ve left my iPod at home, in favor of the music player on the N95. It’s a good player, but lacks certain basic features, like the ability to shuffle the tracks in a playlist. Well, either it lacks that function, or I just can’t find it. Either way, if it’s not able to be found, it might as well not be there, right? Otherwise, it works pretty well. Check out the image above to get an idea of what the interface looks like.

The idle screen is pretty much standard S60 v3, with the standard add-ons you’d expect to see – the wifi wizard, integration with the music player, calendar, etc. As usual, you can customize the soft-keys as well as the applications shown in the middle of the idle screen for quick access.

What’s good? Built-in wifi, SIP stack (which integrates with Asterisk with a bit of manual config, or Gizmo with the help of a little application you can get from the Download! application), S60 v3 FP1 browser, IMAP-IDLE support in the mail part of the Messaging app, support for POP3, IMAP and SMTP with both SSL and TLS, as well as every radio under the sun. The 16 million color QVGA screen is quite nice too.

Also included is a new version of Nokia’s “Barcode” application, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It uses the main camera to read barcodes. You can read the barcode in the sidebar of my site with it. So back to the what’s good about it? It actually seems to work this time around. I’ve got Barcode installed on my N73 Music Edition, and while it works, it’s very hit or miss (mostly miss) when it comes to reading a barcode. On my N73, I feel like a bunch of stars and planets need to be aligned, along with some sort of ritual sacrifice to get a successful barcode read. On the N95, that’s not the case at all — it seems to just work. Things that “just work”, as always, make me happy.

Speaking of just working, iSync. While the N95 isn’t directly supported by iSync, there are 2 sources for plugins to make it a “just works” affair. Nokia has made some plugins available, but I chose instead to go with the plugins from the UK-based S60 Themes site, as their plugins work for a wide variety of devices, not just a 1-plugin, 1-device model, like Nokia’s plugins seem to have done. And as always, PC Suite works as well.

What’s not so good? No US 3G bands (850 & 1900 Mhz), battery life, lack of shuffle features in the music player, very slow GPS lock-in. How bad is the battery life? If all I do is make a few calls and leave my mail connected over either EDGE or wifi, I get a bit over 24 hours. If I mix in some web browsing on top of that, just about a day. Throw in a few hours of time on the music player, and I get about 12 hours total. It ain’t pretty kids, but it’s also not the ugliest I’ve seen.

I was also disappointed to find that while my N95 (and N73 for that matter) both work with my Garmin Nuvi 660 GPS for hands-free calling & caller-id display, they do NOT allow the contacts database to be accessed from the Nuvi. Bummer there.

If you don’t need the wifi and/or GPS, go for the N73 or N73 Music Edition. You’ll save a few bucks, get better battery life, give up a bit of screen size, and have 3.2 MP instead of 5. And you’ll keep a few hundred bucks in your pocket.

The guy next to me on the train has a Zune. I politely asked him how he liked it. Boy, did he answer.

After first trying to install the thing, his PC just didn’t get along with the Zuneware. He had to reformat and reload his XP PC. Fortunately for him, he said he was using a volume lic key, so didn’t need to call the Microsofties to get permission to use software already paid for. Smart dude, he had a current data backup, and all software bits to reload at the ready.

Round 2 with the Zuneware was more successful. It works, though he thinks iTunes on his daughter’s PC is better designed.

His biggest axes to grind (other than the obvious software deficiencies)? Crippled wifi (ad-hoc, zune to zune only) and the ridiculous point economy of the Zune store. In the Zune world, you buy points, which you use to buy songs. Why not just set a price? To make Zune pricing look cheaper than the iTunes store. Instead of $0.99 a song, you pay 75 points. By the way, the math will tell you that 75 points = roughly $0.99, give or takes a couple of tenths of a cent.

So, does he regret his purchase? It seems. Is he going to chuck it in favor of an iPod? Only when it breaks, he says. With only 2 purchased songs invested, he doesn’t have much skin in the lock-in game.. All of the rest of tunes are ripped mp3s that he used to load on a Creative MuVo.

Ordinarily, I don’t go in for Opie & Anthony, but this is too funny. Completely SFW too.

Currently playing in iTunes: How to Save a Life by The Fray

Update: It seems I’m not the only one to point out some of these things… To the guy who pointed out the Slashdot story about this, thanks.. Honestly, I don’t read /. regularly any more…

I’ve spent a couple of weeks now with Windows Vista running on a test laptop. So, for that time, I’ve been using 4 operating systems, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Mac OS X 10.4.8 and various forms of Linux (Ubuntu, primarily). Overall, Vista is certainly a bit more easy on the eyes than XP is. But then again, we said the same thing a few years back when we compared 2000 and XP. Did Microsoft simply move a bunch of stuff around, or did they make substantive, useful changes to Windows?

Let’s look at a few examples…

Changes to the Display

For about forever and a day now, you right-click on your desktop, choose properties, and you can change all sorts of stuff, ranging from wallpaper to screen resolution and color depth to desktop icons. Now, with Vista, you right click on the desktop and you get to “Personalize”. What the heck? I don’t know about you all, but when you think about changing your screen resolution, does that make you think “Personalize”? I certainly don’t.

Annoying Measures that Don’t Help

User Account Control, or UAC has to be the single most annoying feature in Vista. The only good thing I can say about it is that it’s certainly a good thing you can disable this annoyance, err… I mean feature. What good does UAC do? If you ask Microsoft, they’ll tell you it prevents bad things from happening to a PC. If you look at reality, all it does is introduce extra clicks that don’t serve any useful purpose. We all already know that users don’t read dialog boxes. They blindly click whatever button that looks like it will get them past the dialog and back to whatever they were doing. Buttons that say “OK” or “Continue” get clicked almost immediately with no attention paid to what question was raised by the dialog.

So what was Microsoft trying to accomplish with UAC? The same thing that Mac OS X does with their authentication dialogs for processes that require root priviliges, or Linux programs like gksudo or kdesu. The problem? UAC is not an authentication system. UAC is all about approving an action. Like I said, it’s certainly a good thing that UAC can be deactivated.

Inconsistent UI

In Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs is gone. Now it’s “Programs and Features”. What possible reason was the change needed? Mouse settings, where you go to do things like change cursors, which sounds a lot like Personalization, now doesn’t it? Doh! There’s a completely different control panel for mouse settings.

Other “minor” things like Vista’s lack of clear differentiation between foreground and background Windows just makes the UI worse.

So, Is Vista a better choice than XP? In a very limited number of ways, yes. Otherwise, it just feels like XP thrown in a blender and cast back into a new mold.

Recently, I spent a bit of time with the Cingular 8125 (aka HTC Wizard) and the 8525 (aka HTC TyTN). Both of these devices are Pocket PC phones, running Windows Mobile 5. The 8125 came first, and just recently the 8525 showed up on the scene, stealing the 8125’s thunder, unseating it as the top dog Pocket PC phone at Cingular.

First, let’s be clear. These devices are PDAs first and phones second. Don’t get me wrong, they’re very good PDAs, and offer excellent wireless capabilities. The 8525 carries with it a laundry list of radio types and frequencies supported. Does all this connectivity make for the perfect mobile device? Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Cingular started selling the 8125 just about this time last year, and continues to sell it today. This is despite the fact that late last year, they started selling the newer, cooler, faster cousin, the 8525. These facts aside, the 8125 has a pretty impressive feature set:

• Ti OMAP 195 Mhz CPU
• 240×320 color screen, 64k colors
• GSM 850/900/1800/1900
• EDGE Class 10
• 802.11b
• Bluetooth 1.2
• Slide-out keyboard
• 1.3 MP digital camera
• MiniSD expansion slot

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So recently, Heather’s RAZR started acting up. Ok, not so much the phone as the battery. I was quite satisfied with my Nokia E50, so thought about looking into one of the new Black Metal edition E50s for myself, at which point I’d pass on my existing E50 to Heather. Well, the only places I could find them was at various European stores that I’d never heard of before.

So, I went off in search of a new phone for myself. Having recently had occasion to take quite a few pictures with my phone, I decided that something with a nice camera would fit the bill nicely. I wound up settling on the Nokia N73 Music Edition. Why the Music Edition? It was only a few bucks more than the standard N73, except it came in black and with a 2GB MiniSD card in the box. I was sold. The N73 Music Edition would soon be mine.

First impressions? The packaging was classic Nokia, very well done. In the box, as expected was the handset, a battery (BP-6M), charger, data cable (standard CA-53 pop-port) and a nifty clip-on remote control that has a 3.5mm headphone jack on it. Pretty much standard fare, for a phone like this. (more…)

Ever found yourself wondering, “Hey, I wonder what products people bought most from Amazon…”? Now you can have all the answers, at least for 2006.

Warning: The linked site appears to be Amazon, but it is an Investor’s Relations service that Amazon outsources PR to. While probably safe, I wouldn’t try to login to Amazon from there if I were in your shoes.