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Nokia E71 Smartphone

Brian — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 02:38:15 +0000

Last week Expansys shipped me a shiny new Nokia E71. This is a follow on to the popular E61/E62, and a significant step up from my E60 which also lacked 3G support on AT&T’s network.

I was thinking about getting an iPhone, but the poor battery life and lack of real keys were a problem for me. It turns out Joel Spolsky got an E71 too – maybe great minds think alike?

The Good

Great battery life with a mixture of voice, WiFi, HSDPA (3G), and GPS usage. It only needs to be charged every third day.
Some very solid applications are available including Mail by Google, Google Maps with GPS integration, and a decent Web Browser (based on Safari/KHTML). It plays Flash in the the browser, so YouTube doesn’t need it’s own application. The device supports Java (J2ME), Python, and Symbian C++ applications so there is a big market.
Camera. Whilst users of the consumer Nseries phones may have a better camera in their phones, the 3 megapixels works pretty well for me. I was able to post to Flickr without downloading another application.
Bling factor! It’s lighter and slightly thinner than an iPhone. It’s stainless steel outer shell is also a nice touch.

The Bad

Application market is likely to grow faster in the iPhone and Windows Mobile world. Nokia need to improve their development tools and documentation. Python support is a nice touch but they can do better.
Locking the device can be a pain since the default option when you tap the power button is to switch off. Perhaps there is an application that can hook this button?
Headphone socket is 2.5mm instead of the regular 3.5mm size. It means you need to carry a convertor or a second set of headphones.
Flash Lite 3 seems to be integrated with the File Manager. This can be annoying if the Flash doesn’t fully support a device without a touch screen.
No touch screen. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to do things with a stylus or your finger. You won’t miss this if you are coming from a Nokia phone.

So that’s it for my E71 review. I’ll update this post as I get more experience with the device.

My new wheels

Brian — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 03:40:32 +0000

Since everyone around here seems to be biking these days I decided to pony up some cash and get myself a new bike. In September, I was able to try out Sarah’s cyclocross bike at the Jersey shore. It was comfy compared to ‘Donkey’. However, the problem with that style of bike, for me anyway, is having my weight on my arms for hours on end. I needed something a little more upright with just as much style.

After a peek in the Trek and Cannondale catalogues it was lust at first sight when I saw the Cannondale Bad Boy Disc. This is a hybrid based off mountain bike technology, with fantastic styling. It’s quite flexible so it can take road and offroad wheels (for a little extra). With a little help from the folks at Human Zoom in Ardmore, PA I parted with my cash.

It took them a little while to get the bike from Cannondale, but it arrived last Wednesday. Quite an impressive beast it is – the catalogue photos don’t do it justice. After a few days riding I’m really impressed. I’ll post an update when I have some proper mileage on it.

Relog Utility

Brian — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:43:08 +0000

Relog.exe isn’t some new fad amongst Bloggers – it’s a tool from the Windows Resource Kit that helps you convert performance counter logs produced by Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) into common text formats such as CSV. Earlier today I ran perfmon.exe and forgot to change the logging format from the default binary format to CSV. I searched the Web for a tool to convert to a format acceptable to LogParser and I found Relog. This utility saved me having to redo five hours of monitoring to get the data that I needed to analyse. Cheers to the Resource Kit team!

Syntax: relog input.blg -f CSV -o output.csv

Where can I get it? Download relog.exe for free from the Microsoft Download Center (requires a genuine Windows installation).