Tag Archives: Sony Ericsson

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology, PocketPC, Psion, Symbian

Stephen Fry – Devices and Desires

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I blogged a couple of years ago about an article about Stephen Fry that appeared in Mac Format and about his addiction to the Mac platform stretching back twenty years.

Recently Stephen has started a blog and the topic of his first posting – Devices and Desires – which discusses another technological addiction, mobile devices and Smartphones. Not surprisingly he has an iPhone, but this looks at the competition, most of which he has tried.

Style wise this is a bit different from your usual technical article – very Stephen Fry (so it does have a couple of more adult comments) – but it is a great read, and pretty funny in places. Incidentally as an example of the quirkiness, the title of the article is taken from the General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer (“I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heartâ€?)- not a common point of reference for a computer article, but somewhat appropriate!

Looking at his history, it seems he is a Psion 3 fan whereas I only came in when the Psion 5 was launched. He’s tried Palm devices, but is very frustrated with the way they seem to regularly try to commit corporate suicide. He is particularly damning about the Palm Foleo, a mobile device even he did not want.

As an aside he also mentioned Markspace Missing Sync as a good way to synchronise a PocketPC with a Mac – not surprisingly after my nightmare with the product I can’t agree. Despite it’s numerous updates over recent months, I’m still not sure I actually trust it not to scramble my diary!

According to the article, he has tried a number of Symbian smartphones, and has some harsh words for Sony Ericsson:

What a crushing, lowering, fury-inducing disappointment. Just how dumb are the software engineers, designers and marketeers at Sony E?

On the other hand, he seems to quite like the latest Nokia offerings.

Moving on to the iPhone, he has many of the same criticisms as other techies and industry commentators – but again like quite a few in the US he is using the phone anyway.

What is quite impressive is that for a blog with only one article, Stephen Fry has so far had 140 comments – hopefully that will persuade him to write more as I for one will certainly be reading.

Pictures

Nokia N73 Camera

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Night Shot of Reading

One of the disappointing aspects of my current phone, the Nokia N73, has to be the camera. Maybe I’ve been spoilt before with the Sony Ericsson K750i, which produced great pictures, but the quality of the images produced by the Nokia N73 aren’t up to the standard of pictures produced by the lower resolution K750 camera.

On paper, the Nokia N73 sounds like it should be producing good pictures. It has a 3.2 Megapixel camera, with Carl Zeiss optics, however what comes out is usually fairly noisy pictures, and quite often with a weird purple hue. You can see the effect looking at the night shot of Reading I took last night. Although the centre of the image is pretty good, heading towards the left and right edges, and less so on the top and bottom, the picture gets increasingly noisy – bear in mind that the image here has already had noise reduction filters applied to it. The effects of trying to remove the hue can also be seen if you take a look at the set of pictures I tool last week at Wellington College, all of which required work in photoshop to be presentable. Certainly with the K750 I didn’t have the same issue.

Unfortunately, at the point I signed up for X-Series, this was the only choice of handset – ideally I would have liked to have gone for a Sony Ericsson K800 which is much more focused on taking good quality pictures. Maybe when upgrade time comes around there will be some choice…

Pictures

Howard Tests his K800

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Howard has grabbed one of the first Sony Ericsson K800’s for his latest mobile phone upgrade. We’ve been e-mailing comparing experiences between his and my K750i, partly because I’m trying to work out whether the extra size and weight of the K800 is balanced by the improvement in picture quality.

As an example of the picture quality, he spent part of the weekend at a garden centre trying out some close-up shots of flowers and insects, one of which, Butterfly, I’ve posted here. The whole set is fantastic, with only minimal fringing when you look closely – certainly no worse than many regular digital camera shots I’ve seen. Interestingly, he didn’t have to alter too many of the settings, as unlike my phone, the unit comes configured as a camera, rather than the default configuration on mine which takes messaging size pictures, using the extra resolution to provide a zoom feature.

The results he’s getting are certainly tempting, assuming my network are willing to play ball with a good upgrade offer. However, the real world reports I’ve seen have been mixed, with the glowing reviews coming from people who haven’t previously had a K750i. Among those who already have a K750i comments have been more reserved, with some regarding the picture quality as less good, and others bemoaning the increased size. I think we’ll probably have to arrange a side-by-side comparison at some point to really satisfy me.

You can browse through the rest of Howard’s set on Flickr.

General

Apple and Sony Ericsson Announce New Products

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Whilst you might expect that the Apple announcement today would be the most exciting, I’m with The Unofficial Apple Weblog in thinking that after all the rumours, it was a bit of a letdown. Really the iPod cases and Intel based Mac Mini’s haven’t really hit the ‘I want one’ buttons for me at all.

The same can’t be said for the announcement today from Sony Ericsson. As you’ve probably seen in some of my recent postings, I’ve been being tempted by the upcoming Sony Ericsson P990 Smartphone, which seems to offer a pretty effective combination of PDA and phone, in a reasonable sized handset, something that could replace both my K750, and Dell PDA. However today, as predicted by All About Symbian last week Sony Ericsson have announced the K790 and K800 phones, essentially the same phone, but for 2G and 3G networks.

The reason it is so tempting is that whilst the underlying OS is much the same as the Sony Ericsson P990 Smartphone, this phone includes a much better camera, indeed they are selling it under the Cybershot brand that Sony use on their normal digital cameras. It looks to be not much larger in terms of size than my existing K750, indeed the K800 has been touted as the replacement for the K750 in the range. About the only significant missing features that I might find useful are that there is no support for Wi-Fi, but that is only really a nice-to-have, and that it lacks the touch-screen – being driven instead with a regular phone style keypad. So decisions decisions, do I go for the smartphone, or the better camera… I guess I’ll have to wait for both to be released and compare!

MobLog, Pictures

Butterfly

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Butterfly

I know I keep harping on about it, but I continue to be amazed at the quality of the pictures I can take with my Sony Ericsson K750i.

Take tonight for example, at Choir Practice I spotted this butterfly, which had settled for the night onto the ledge at the bottom of one of the windows. It being Choir Practice, I didn’t have my camera with me, but of course I had my phone. So I switched it into macro mode, and turned on night mode, and with a very steady hand, snapped the picture above. Sure with the normal camera the picture would probably have been slightly sharper, and you can see the effect of the small sized lense, but I have to say that for a phone, that cost me nothing, it is a stunning little picture – so much so that I’ve entered it into the latest Flickr Camphone competition, which has the theme ‘Out the Window’.