My Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic phone

I recently bought this Nokia 5800 XpressMusic mobile phone. Recently as in, a few months back! I have been exploring it a lot and with time I have come to like it a lot. This guy is a full screen touch mobile phone from Nokia with GPS, 3G and wifi capabilities. It has got dual camera, so the front camera helps in making video calls. For full specifications you can always refer to the Nokia website. I have also taken a BSNL 3G connection on this phone so I have got a fast access internet connection in my hand all the time (well, almost all the time).

This mobile phone has become very famous so much so that many of the meetings I have gone to, almost half the attendees san this phone. Its almost two-thirds the size of any of the world famous smartphones (read iPhones and Androids), but I have behaved like any of the price conscious Indian consumer and gone for this smartphone which comes for half the price.

Nokia has poured in many of the goodies with this set, when I bought it, I got a free Sennheiser headset, 100 free songs from Nokia music store (people buying the set now get unlimited free songs) and free OVI maps with GPS capabilities. One also gets access to the OVI store with loads of free apps to install. I would talk about some of those which I have installed on my set.
  1. Snaptu - This guy is a great aggregation of some of the typical online activites I perform on a daily basis, vis-a-vis news reading (general, tech news, sports), social networking (facebook, twitter, flickr) etc. It gives one single interface to aggregate all of those and neat uncluttered UI to use them. This is the most frequently used app on my phone now. Most of my tweets now show up from Snaptu on twitter.
  2. Fring - This is another aggregation of various online chatting tools. I had kind of stopped using them but now with Fring I am back in the chatting world again. Most of my online chats or VOIP calls now happen thru Fring on my mobile. I have got aol, msn, yahoo, gtalk and skype configured thru this. I can see all of my friends online at one single place "on my mobile". With msn, yahoo, aol folks I can do a hand-typed chat and with gtalk and skype I can have a VOIP call. Interestingly, Fring offers video calling using skype whereas skype's own Symbian S60 app for my mobile won't allow video calling. One intresting story I am almost always telling my friends is that I went to a shop to do some gift shopping. But I went alone and was confused on what to pick. So I asked my wife to come online on skype and then using Fring and 3G internet, we had a video call from the shop and I showed her various options and "we" finally picked something.
  3. Audible - Twit got me into Audible listening and I have a membership now. This is not too old a flirtation but I have already enjoyed a great book thru this app. I was recently going for a training to one of my office which is a good 1 and half hour drive away from my place. Within 3 days I finished listening to almost 10 hours of read. So I don't mind going to far off offices now :P (just kidding).
  4. Podcasts - The default music application comes with podcasts section also. So I have revived my interests in podcasts and have already splurged on Twit, then there's Twig and Buzz out Loud as well. These are my companion on my daily one side half an hour trip to office. Yup, I have gone a bit of green now and let the Vajra bus drivers negotiate with the crazy traffic while I listen/watch the podcasts.
  5. Tunewiki - This is an interesting app with capabilities to fetch lyrics when a song is playing. It can read thru my library for songs, search in youtube if I want to watch the song video, connect to shoutcast and play online radio and other typical capabilities of any mobile based music player. I like but I am not an avid listener of English music (yup I call all of them English music) and with this lyrics fetch capabilities I can at least understand what Mr Adams is singing while I used to enjoy only his rock music whatever he sang. Not all the hindi songs I listen to have their lyrics with tunewiki and its a surprise if I find any. But then, I don't need their lyrics anyway.
  6. Shazam - Another problem I had with English music was the inability to find which album that song belonged to. Heh! If you don't understand the lyrics how would you find the album. So I found Shazam, this guy literally "listens" to the music currently being played and tags them or rather finds the album to which the song belonged to. Nice, another good tool to handle that peer pressure ;)
  7. Google Maps - Yes, I am on latitude, people know where I am if they are on my friend list. Google maps is really good in Bangalore. I have even used it usefully in Chennai.
  8. OVI Maps - Unlike Google maps, this nokia app also helps as a speaking navigator. Uses GPS well and finds my exact location on this earth. The maps are not really as updated as Google and search capabilities are questionable. But the speaking navigator gets some brownie points. Apart from English, I have also installed Hindi and Urdu language support. Its fun to hear the Urdu speaking lady telling you - "आपकी मंजिल आ गयी है" - Meaning "You have reached your destination". Using GPS navigator is also fun when you know the one ways and how to go thru the roads with less traffic. It picks up the shortest distance path mostly, it tells me turn left and I turn right and then poor guy recalculates the route again.
There are many other nice apps that I have installed on this phone but I mostly use the above. Other mentionable apps are skype, cricinfo, communities, qik, youtube, dictionary, sudoku etc. Cricinfo is anyway seasonal app; I have used qik to upload a few videos; if you find a tweet of mine from Nokia, that means I am using the Communities app, it also connects to facebook for me. Communities also finds my location and attaches that to my tweet. But its in effect a bit.ly url to the OVI maps site taking one to my current location which doesn't look very nice, guess twitter is not able to separate that url from my tweet at show it as my location.

Another thing that has happened is that my father has stopped using the computer. With a 3G mobile connection at both ends, we can now make video calls to each other instead of the traditional skype/google video calls. His technology needs are getting fulfilled with another 3G nokia mobile.

That is it for now. This has become a long post after a very long time. And long posts get boring in these days of micro-blogging. Thanks for reading till this point of the blog.

~mks

Comments

How is Audible? I checked and you've to pay the equivalent of 8K+ INR in a year for the collection of books. While I think I spend quite a bit on books in a year, I like the feel and smell of the "dead tree" versions of books. Especially the second-hand, well-read ones you get from Blossoms!
There's no two things to it - "dead tree" version!

I feel/know that book reading helps me a lot but I have not been able to commit myself for spending time in reading books. The only time I used to do that was when I used to commute to my workplace in E-City. With Audible, and someone reading the book to me, I have at least been successful in finishing 2 huge books equivalent to over 30 hours of reading. All this reading (listening!) has happened in commuting. Add listening to podcasts in this as well which will be another big quantum altogether. Altogether, its at least an hour of reading/listening everyday and feeling good about it.

Popular posts from this blog

Coorg Trip

In US...

Web 2.0 Sites