Makes Sense

Smart phones have become smarter than people, of late. The dumber people get the smarter the phone needs to be. The SciFi dream cum nightmare of Machines ruling human race is well in sight. If you have doubts ask your smart phone.

Just like a movie hero the iPhone made a dramatic entrance into the Gadgets market. And like in movies many people wanted to kill the hero. And every company sent out what is sweetly named as ?iPhone killer?. And Nokia has sent their own mercenary the Nokia N900.

I recently switched from a first generation iPhone to the N900. It was an easy decision to quit iPhone. But a tough one between N900 and Nexus One or even some other Nokia Sony Ericsson phones.

N900 is positioned as a Tablet PC with a phone. (If not it should be.) Because it is more a Linux running net PC than a phone. It even takes a few clicks to get to the Phone Application. And yes it is one of the Applications run by this cute little instrument.

N900 performs wonderfully. It multi-tasks better than my low end Compaq Laptop. I could have the Internet radio running while I was browsing or playing a game. The VOIP function is extended to chat services like Gtalk. Though the call quality on these were sub par. N900 has a 5MP camera and the photos looked awesome. This was something I was looking for in my new phone.

There are some cute applications available. And I just downloaded Firefox mobile and it looks promising with the usual Add-Ons.

Firmware update is very simple and can be done directly from phone. In fact the PC sync app that Nokia has sucks big time and seems to be incompatible with the N900. It has a file manager that is a very useful and gives you ways of keeping the inbuilt 32GB memory occupied. It even allows you to download stuff from internet on to the internal memory.

N900 is not without its share of downers. The user interface is not as intuitive as iPhone. Apple set very high standards with their super intuitive user interface which included the .com key, next key while filling internet forms (this is available in Firefox mobile), portrait mode applications etc. And the learning curve for an iphone user was much shorter. N900 has very few apps that run on portrait mode.

Getting N900 to work for you fully may require at least basic PC skills. Linux skills would help even better. While the out of the box apps and utilities are simpler to use there are times when you might have to get to the terminal and run some Linux Commands. I will soon be exploring this since N900 does not have Unicode font support but they allow me to install it.

I was disappointed initially when the N900 kept restarting for no reason. A firmware update fixed it.

I love the phone for what it is capable of. It does require some level of Geekiness. All I was looking for a phone that has a tiny little keyboard, a great camera and the ability to get my mails, social networking, and a bit of internet browsing. (Yes. That?s all ). N900 is much more than this. People have installed windows OS on it.

So I have no shame in admitting, like in TV Game show, I am Cyril Alex and I am not smarter than my smartphone.

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A great feature in iPhone is the Youtube widget. But as with the other functions this too has its limitations. I was not happy to see that the player did not play all the movies in you tube and the search results showed only a small list of ‘compatible’ videos.

Accidentally I discovered a better way of viewing more videos than just from Youtube.

In the iPhone Safari browser go to video.google.com. Click on ‘Advance Video Search’. In the next window look for ‘Domain’ leave the default ‘Only’ option as it is, and in the box type ‘video.google.com’. This would restrict your searches to the videos from video.google.com domain.

Now enter your search criteria in the 4 boxes on the top as you would normally search. The results are listed. Click on the video that you want to watch. A page loads up but the video does not play yet.

On the right side you would see the ‘Download’ button. Next to it you would see options – for ‘Windows/Mac’ in that dropdown choose the other option to download for ‘Video iPod/Sony PSP’ and click on ‘Download’ button.

Viola! iPhone opens up the video in Quicktime and plays the video.

Add the link to your browser bookmarks. This way you would have instant access to your favorite videos instantly without having to load them on to your iphone. Saves a lot of memory for your audio songs and other stuff.

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