Tip: E65 Faster Data Transfers via Cable

I am sure most E65 users were glad to know that the E65 came with a data cable to connect the phone to any PC via a USB port. This means that we can transfer files faster than using bluetooth. However, every time that you connect your phone to the computer, the phone always asks us whether we want to connect to DATA TRANSFER or PC SUITE. Sure, you havent thought twice about this prompter. However... do you really need to be asked every time? I personally hardly ever use the DATA TRANSFER option.

In your phone under the menu CONNECTIVITY --> DATA CABLE you can choose to get your phone to connect via PC suite every time rather than being prompted. Likewise you can choose to make it default to DATA TRANSFER if that is what you only use your data cable. It may not seem like much but to the sanguines out there, that's one unnecessary key stroke eliminated!

New Nokia E66 Where class meets pragmatism and GPS

After a week of trialling the Nokia E66, here are a few other features that stand out for me. Note: All these have been stumbled upon while playing with the phone without reading the manual so there is much more to be discovered with more time. As Mike C said about the E65, the E66 is also a work horse: reliable and equipped with the features you want and the ease of getting to them quickly. For the average business person, this smartphone allows you to answer a call without the embarrassment of looking like you're talking into a brick. That is, if you choose to answer the call rather than just turning the phone over or tapping it.

GPS - The GPS takes minutes rather than seconds to find enough satellites to give you a co-ordinate and you need to be out in the open. However, once you have a lock, using the Nokia GPS software or even better, Google maps, is a lot of fun. Other than the usual applications of GPS, you could use it when you go jogging to see how far and how fast you ran.

Reading SMS by holding down top left selection key while driving or something will have the phone read out your SMS, telling you who sen

Blinking notification of new sms and missed call. For those that may have noticed, I slipped this into my previous post about the new Nokia E66 after I had posted the review so its worth mentioning again. When your phone is on standby, you can choose to make the breathing light pulse urgently when you have received a call/sms. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can tell immediately by looking at your phone that you have a missed call / new message.

New menu updates shown in the menu system by a round dot. For example, if you install a new application, the application option in the menu will show a new dot to signify that there is something new there.


Share Online options - Ovi, Flickr and Vox have their own links so that you can upload photos you took from your phone straight into one of those websites.

Radio is back For those that still listen to the radio, you will be glad to know the E66 brings back the radio but of course you still need your headset.

Multiple alarms! We talked in an earlier post that for the E65 we need to fill our calendar with alarms in order to have multiple alarms. Nokia has responded with the introduction of multiple alarms so you can have alarms for weekdays only, Saturdays or whatever. However, you still cant choose which alarm tone to use for each individual alarm. So you cant set alarms for Lunch that shout "Lunch time!!!" and another alarm for 23:00 that says "Go to bed!"

NEW! Predictive text for phone numbers? yeah... i just stumbled onto this one. When this feature is turned on, You can press 32843 (DAVID in predictive text mode) on the standby screen and all the Davids in your address book show up. Then press up and select the David you want to call. Nokia has saved us the need to go into the address book :) One keystroke saved!

Nevertheless I have somewhat against you...

Where's the pencil? After giving the iphone so much grief about not being able to cut and paste, it seems like I can't locate the cut and paste feature on the E66! The pencil button which E65 users would know is for copying and pasting, was on the right hand side of the E65. Perhaps someone who reads manuals can answer this one.. EDIT: thanks Rita.. the pencil is now the # key held down (see comments)

If you missed our first look at the Nokia E66's breathing, tapping and rotating features, it can be found here.

What the 3G iPhone Doesn't Have vs Nokia E65 (part 2)

Buying an iPhone is like going to the movies and paying half price but only getting to see the trailers. Apart from its advances in touch screen technology and innovation in manufacturing hype, the iPhone charges users to be introduced to a monopoly market of Apple branded products. It is hoped you would start buying songs, movies and TV shows from iTunes, iPhone applications from the apple iStore, wireless headsets to enjoy your music and who knows, the bitten apple might even convince you to get a matching colour iMac or iBook. Even better, upgrade your iphone to the next model coming out in a few months time, which may make baby steps towards being comparable to similar smartphones on the market.

If accessorising is your thing, then the following features that the iPhone doesn't have won't concern you.

Voice dialling I already mentioned in the previous post that one of the most celebrated features of the iphone (touch screen) is also its downfall, but equally amazing is that they have not made the effort to enable voice dialling on the iphone - something that comes standard on the Nokia E65.

The Toy Camera There is nothing funnier than hearing media organisations seemingly reading out of the Apple media release about the features on the iPhone. The camera resolution is a poultry 2 megapixels which is less than half that of the Nokia N95 and the same as the Nokia E65 (though released two years after the E65). On top of that, it has no zoom, can't take videos and don't even think about taking photos at night because there is no flash. I think the Nokia 6230 in 2003 was able to take videos and zoom. Flash comes standard with all N-series and most other Nokias.

What's MMS? Well, maybe in a few years time you will hear about MMS capability on the iphone. For the rest of us, its the ability to send pictures and videos over the network to your friend for only 2x the cost of a SMS. Iphones have no MMS capability. Again, this feature was out in 2003 with Nokias and of course with the E65.

Disabled Bluetooth capability How's this for annoying? Bluetooth technology allows phones to wirelessley connect to other phones, computers, advertising promotions etc (see this link for bluetooth capabilities in the E65) has been installed on iPhones ... but you can only connect to audio headsets. Correct me if I'm wrong.. this means that the iphone cannot receive contacts from another phone via bluetooth?

Predictive text Perhaps designers of the iphone thought users would only watch videos and listen to itunes downloaded music. It was mentioned before that you cutting and pasting is impossible on iphone but also the predictive text feature is hard to escape from when the words you want to use are not there.

Limited access to Online Videos etc You hear a lot about iphone enabled websites coming up to meet the demand of iphone users but for some reason we didn't hear such a response to other smartphones. This is partly because iphone does not include a flash player and therefore a lot of online content such as those provided by Australia's Optus network, Telstra and Vodafone actually do not work on the iphone but do work on the Nokia E65 and other Nokia phones. An analyst has suggested in a recent article that Apple's strategy could be to force users to buy content from iTunes instead.

One thing I especially object to is the continual use of "Jesus phone" as a reference to the iPhone. Since when did marketing involve blasphemy, especially with such a low-features product such as the iphone? Those in true search for salvation should go here instead.

Part one of this post can be found here:Warning about iEnvy

First impressions of the Nokia E66

Does your phone 'breathe'? Does it know which way is up? Introducing, the Nokia E66, which is not yet available in Australia. It is Nokia's latest tribute to the crowd favourite, the Nokia E65. At MyE65, we will have the opportunity to get our hands on some of Nokia's latest instalments and today we play with one of Australia's only Nokia E66 handsets. The idea of this post is not to do a complete review... there are plenty of websites that do that. I'll give you the gut reaction of a E65 user to the phone and spend less time on the technical details (though sometimes I can't help it).

First of all, what does it look like? Rather than put up a lousy picture of the phone, have a look at it here from the Nokia site. First impressions..

The phone design looks very clean and polished and with a stylish back cover. However, the E65 slider is much more solid and defined than the E66. The slider on the E66 is similar to the old 6280 sliders and they had a reputation for weakening over time. It is slightly lighter than the E65. The keypad is better than the E65's which took some getting used to, to figure out where the keys were.

In the excitement of trying to get this phone to work, I found it took me a while to figure out how to open the back and get the battery in! Refusing to check the manual, I pulled, twisted, fingered, slid and finally relented and pulled out the manual. Apparently you need to squeeze the sides and the cover will pop up a little like the bonnet of a car. Just like any good gadget, it keeps you guessing.

All is forgiven when you look at some of what's new with the E66. Let's look specifically at what makes this phone E-class.

After opening the box, one of the first things that will put a smile to your face browsing the features is how you can silence your E66. When the phone rings, tap it twice while its in your pocket, or turn it over and the phone switches to silent mode!

The introduction of the accelerometer in the phone means that you can rotate the phone 90 degrees and the display will rotate for you. You can then view a photo in landscape mode, browse the internet, watch videos or just read and sms with the phone on its side.

The phone has an optional "breathing" light which pulses subtlely in the dark, not bright enough to annoy you while you are trying to sleep but bright enough to help you find your phone in a dark room or your car. This breathing light becomes a more urgent pulse when you have received a missed call or an sms. That way, a quick look at your phone at night will tell you whether you received a missed call without blinding you.

Pressing down the main button when the phone is unlocked allows you to see the time without the phone turning on all the LEDs. Again, this will prevent you being blinded by your phone in the middle of the night if you just want to check the time.

There is more to be said but that will do for now. Meanwhile, I'll try get this A-GPS working....

Edit: more on E66 can be found here

Communications Centre Broken? PC Suite 7.0.7.0 on closer inspection

I’ve tried sending SMS with the new Nokia Communications Centre that comes with Nokia PC Suite 7.0.7.0.

Using Bluetooth. I tried to send an SMS but it didn't work. Sometimes the failure will result in the sms being put into the SENT folder and other times it isn’t – even though it has not actually been sent successfully. Wonder whether anyone else has come across this problem. Once the message fails to send, all your sms messages that was visible in the other window suddenly disappear and the computer can’t open up the list of SMS messages unless the program is terminated and restarted. This did not happen with the previous version of PC suite. Also, it seems that the “Incoming Call notification” which is meant to be a new feature in 7.0.7.0 is only available to a limited number of phone models of which I am starting to conclude does not include the E65. Perhaps we should eagerly await PC Suite 7.0.7.1?

Using Cable. Following the Bluetooth experiment, I tried again with a cable connection to the laptop. The SMSes went out ok. Also, a while after an SMS is received, a small speech bubble appears over the nokia icon in the system tray that says "A New Message has been Received". This will happen even if the Communcations Centre is not open (but the PC suite is and the phone is connected). However, even using the cable, the notification of an incoming call does not appear.

If you have tried the new PC Suite, share your experience here. Do you get incoming call notification? Does bluetooth connectivity with PC Suite also send your program crashing? Do you also get the Microsoft Vista "blue circle of death?".

3 or 4 Good Reasons to Download PC Suite 7.0.7.0!

I have downloaded the new Nokia PC Suite 7.0.7.0. The release notes state that the following features are now available with PC Suite.

• Create, edit, and send contacts and messages with a single easy-to-use application
• Be informed of incoming calls and new messages received on your computer!
• Add new entries into your device calendar in the main window of Nokia PC Suite
• Get Nokia Video Manager installed together with Nokia PC Suite

Download this update here and add your comments below. Some of the features that I have explored include:

1. Add Calendar Entries Now you can update your calendar entries by right clicking on the date and selecting NEW MEETING.

2. New Contacts Organiser The new Nokia Communications Centre is quite a useful means of organising your address book and messages etc. Your address book loads very quickly and the window also shows you how many contacts you have in your address book. Right clicking any of the entries gives you options to EDIT, SEND, DELETE or COPY the contact.

3. Memory Bar Also added is the ability to see the amount of memory avaiable on your phone and your memory card just by hovering your mouse over a memory bar to the left of your phone icon. The worst thing is not realising you have 900k left in your memory and you try to take a once-in-a-lifetime video of a celebrity in your town only to have your video finish with "insufficient memory to continue".

4. Notifying of new calls/messages? I couldn't find in the program where or how you could be notified of incoming calls and new messages as claimed in the release notes. I tried calling my phone but nothing showed up on the PC suite. Neither did an sms sent to my phone show up until I pressed F5 to refresh the SMS list.

If you haven't already downloaded this new PC Suite for your computer, this is certainly an update worth upgrading to. Just hope someone can explain how to make this PC suite show me who's calling me...

5 Things You Didn't Know (or Forgot) About Your Nokia Web Browser

1. Auto-bookmarking: I've had the phone for almost a year and never noticed that in the bookmarks, there is a sub-folder called "Auto-bookmarks". As far as I can tell, your browser works out your most visited websites and puts the links in this folder. So if you want to get to a website that you often visit quickly, perhaps try looking in the auto-bookmarks folder. If this folder is empty, you will probably need to go to OPTIONS --> SETTINGS --> AUTO-BOOKMARKS to turn on this feature.

2. Full-screen browsing. OK so it doesnt make THAT much difference but since you are in the OPTIONS --> SETTINGS at the moment, have a look at changing your SCREEN SIZE to FULL-SCREEN. When you go back to your browser, you will notice that OPTIONS and BACK no longer appear on the bottom of your screen, giving your browsing experience a cleaner look. Again, I didn't notice this feature till recently.

3. Zooming in and Out. As mentioned in an earlier post, there is the option of zooming in and zooming out of a webpage whilst browsing by pressing * to zoom in and # to zoom out. You will be surprised how high resolution your phone is when you zoom out and still can read the text even though the text is so smal. You can also press 8 to show an extreme zoom out of the page and then when you select a section of the page you would like to see, press 8 again to zoom back in.

4. BACK. If you bought Microsoft Vista for the WIN+TAB option (try it if you don't know what I'm talking about), then you will love Nokia's web browser's BACK button. Pressing the right selection key when viewing a website will enable you to switch back to a website/screen that you were previously on.

5. Easily Forgotten Shortcut keys. I admit, if you read the manual you probably could know all these things but who reads manuals nowadays anyway? In fact, there was probably a time in your use of the E65 that you knew these shortcuts in your head but you've forgotten them. They are very handy so here is a list of the shortcuts you can use when surfing the net on your E65.

• Press 1 for bookmarks.
• Press 2 to search for keywords in the current page.
• Press 3 to go to the previous page.
• Press 5 to show all open windows.
• Press 9 to enter a new web address.
• Press 0 to go to your homepage.

Nokia Tips You Bet No One Knows...

Found a nifty tip for the Nokia E65? Think you're the only one who knows? Leave a comment here and share it with your fellow power users of the E65... If you are not sure whether its been covered on this blog, use the search bar on your right. Even if it is covered, feel free to share it anyway.