News today that there is a new version of Google Maps for Mobile alongside there now being a Symbian native version it also includes a ‘My Location’ feature that triangulates an approximate location based on the cell towers the phone can communicate with. So away I go downloading it – runs great, aside from the ‘My Location’ feature which produces an error that my location is temporarily unavailable. Anybody managed to get it to work on an N73 running X-Series on 3?
Tag Archives: X Series
How to Make Your Wi-Fi Really Useless
So tonight I’m off on a business trip, visiting a potential customer in the morning, and enjoying the delights of a hotel. Thankfully I managed to find an alternative to the Travelodge room that was originally proposed for me (at a site that someone on Trip Advisor reviewed as ‘Absolutely Awful’) at a Best Western in a village a few miles up the road, the Llyndir Hall Hotel. This place is only £5 a night more than the Travelodge, but Trip Advisor has a load of good reviews for this one – on paper it looks an absolute bargain – plus it has broadband internet in every room, either cabled or wi-fi.
So lets start off with what’s good. The location is lovely, a nice country house surrounded by fields. Incidentally, the postcode for the hotel in Google Maps – also used by the hotel itself sends you slightly off track – the actual location is just round the corner and clearly signed from the main road. All the staff are friendly, and it’s a nice big room with a decent bathroom and pretty quiet – I can’t hear the corporate party downstairs at all! The food in the restaurant is good too – certainly beats the Little Chef that is apparently the only option at the Travelodge.
The main annoyances are the TV setup, which like many hotels in the UK has a seemingly random selection of channels, some of which are showing Sky card errors – and the broadband internet access.
My room is one of the ones with wi-fi, whereas other parts of the hotel have ‘broadband modems’ – according to the guest directory both should have a login, but I didn’t see any of that when I connected.
The problem though is the restrictions. The key things I want to be able to access are my e-mail and the company network – neither of which I can get to. Trying to access any site using SSL produces this web page – basically the unable to access page for the hotel networking appliance they have installed. Since our e-mail is kept secured I can’t access it that way. The other option is to use the corporate VPN but like pretty well everything outside normal web pages, that is blocked too. As a result, aside from browsing round websites, I can’t actually access anything useful. Just to round it off really well, the wireless router is just far enough away that the signal keeps dropping off.
It’s not as if it isn’t possible to do it properly. Last year I stayed in a hotel in Chester that had network points in every room (a much more reliable connection than Wi-Fi) – and had no problems accessing either the VPN or e-mail, it’s just seems that here someone has decided to install networking, but without actually considering what people might want to use!
So if you want a nice well priced country getaway this place is great – just don’t bother if you’re on a trip where you need full internet access, indeed access to anything other than standard non-secure sites.
Just a little post-script, I have been able to get all my e-mail – thanks to the wonders of X-Series. All a bit compact on the small screen, but I found out what I needed to know.
Nokia N73 Camera
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…
X-Series Up and Running
So after a pretty long wait, earlier this week our new phones were finally enabled by 3. It took their IT department several attempts to get it all working – including one slightly bizarre call where I was speaking to Simon on one mobile, whilst testing the other, and he was on the other end talking to one of the IT staff on another phone. Ultimately, they just came on. I had a MSN messenger message from Simon saying that the IT department had tried something else, but they thought it was unlikely to work – but it did.
Over the past few days I have been installing software onto the phone, and trying out various of the features of both the Nokia N73 and the service, including installing Opera Mini and Google Maps Mobile – both of which run well and look great on the phone. Also, in a move that probably will please Andy Tiller who spent a good deal of time trying to help me last year, I have got Shozu installed onto the new phone. Unlike with the K750 it went on without a hitch, and I was impressed with how easy it was to upload a picture. You can see my Shozu uploaded pictures on Flickr. (Nothing particularly awe inspiring as yet though…)
Although I said that I was going to leave setting up the Slingbox for our new house, since after the events of last weekend there will be no new house, I had to find a way to get the Slingbox somewhere suitable, but connected to the network. In terms of the best place, this had to be downstairs on top of our Sky+ box, as this isn’t in a cabinet, and so shouldn’t suffer from the heating problems I had when I previously tried out the box. However that is about as far from our internet connection as you can get in the house, and in a location that although a wireless link would probably work, the performance would be pretty poor. Running a normal network cable is not really an option either, so instead I turned to Power Line Communication, specifically a pair of HomePlug Turbo units from eConnect.
I have to say that these are probably the first device I’ve come across that really deserves the title plug-n-play, I literally plugged one unit into a socket upstairs, the other in downstairs, hooked the cable up to our router and the Slingbox popped up on the network, no configuration required at all. Speed wise it is not quite up to the speed of a direct network connecting, but faster that I could get with a wireless connection, running at between 65Mbps and 75Mbps. Certainly for anyone looking to extend their network in a similar way it seems by far the most straightforward way to do it, and certainly beats messing around with wireless settings.
Initially I have set the Slingbox up as before, using it’s inbuilt terrestrial digital decoder. Later I may well set it up to use the Sky+ box as well.
Having got that all set up, and confirmed it was working using the desktop version of the SlingPlayer, I then moved on to try the mobile version supplied as part of the X-Series.
The first thing it did was to download the latest version of the software itself, and then it was just a question of entering the identifier code for our particular Slingbox. Unfortunately this is the one really tedious aspect of the whole set-up process, as the identifier is a very long hexadecimal identifier, which is a bit of pain to key in using a mobile phone keypad. Thankfully it only needs to be entered once, as the player stores the Slingbox in it’s built in directory.
Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t do it justice, the picture quality is surprisingly good. The main issue, which could well be a routing issue between 3 and our current ISP, Zen Internet is that the data stream quite often stalls. Looking at the router, the data is still going out, it just seems to be getting delayed somewhere along the way to the phone. At some point I’ll try using a desktop version of the player on some other connections and check out the variations in quality and performance, and hopefully nail down where the stalling in the stream is coming from. It is not apparent when watching on the LAN, so I can only conclude that it is somewhere along the way across the Internet.
Anyway, despite the hiccups, it still is a really impressive feat. Whilst the mobile sized screen is not the best way to watch TV, the mere fact that it works as well as it does over a mobile connection is amazing.
Still Waiting for X-Series
So there I was on Saturday, fully expecting by this point to be able to write about my now activated X-Series phone, but come Monday morning, I was still getting the ‘your phone will be activated in 24 hours’ service message on both mine and Beth’s phone.
I’d already talked to Simon on Sunday about the time it was taking, so when I let him know that the phones were still not on, he chased it up. After talking to some colleagues he came back with the answer that both our phones, together with a whole batch of other sales (another six customers I believe) that went through at the same time had produced an error on registration. From what I can gather, although our phones and SIM cards are valid for the 3 network, the phone also has to be registered at the other end. As part of this process, the sales order number is validated, and for some reason the network systems are refusing to accept all the sales order numbers for our particular batch – so it’s not just us with the same problem. Currently their IT department appear to be trying to fix the problem to allow the phones to register – not the most salubrious start to our relationship with 3 – have to hope that X-Series is worth it!!!