...stuff I do and things I like...

Today I got my Dual-SIM adapter I bought for my Simyo UMTS card (very cheap UMTS service in Germany). The Dual-SIM adapter is one of the NoCut kind (see image) since I don't want to cut my SIM cards. It was a real tough fight to get the adapter in my Nokia 6233 while being able to close the battery cover. I managed it by fixating the 2nd SIM card in the middle of the battery with a small piece of sticky tape and using some force to push the cover onto the phone. It took me about 10 minutes before I had it done but the whole point of a Dual-SIM adapter is that you don't need to disassemble your phone every time you need to switch the card.



The bad part is that the adapter I bought only works in GSM mode. UMTS cards work but only in GSM mode. So now I'm searching for a adapter that works in UMTS mode. at least I know that this kind of adapter will fit.

one hour ago one of my colleagues unlocked our iPhone using this method. The iPhone then worked with his T-Mobil and my E-Plus (Simyo) SIM. Voice quality sucks but this is not new.

So I guess Apple is not able to convince any German mobile phone operator to do an exclusive now? Hope the contract is not in Apple's favor :-)

today I had about 30 minutes to play with a iPhone. Here is my impression: The device actually looks really good once you have it in your hand (better then I expected), it is slim, light and has nice rounded edges (real nice look and feel). The screen is really bright for a touchscreen (the best I have seen so far - also I only used it indoors). Surfing the web is also quite fun as long as you don't need to enter any URLs by hand. For a first impression the keyboard kind of sucked - I know that it should be better after using it for a few days. The web browser seems quite fast, but it couldn't handle some of the websites I've tried. I really like the zoom feature (double tap). Since I spent most of the time playing with the web browser I can't say to much about the rest. But the overall impression is rather good (much better then I expected). The user interface concept seems really good; on exceptional good idea is the big button at the bottom of the screen that all ways takes you back to the application screen. Palm devices have a similar button on the Graffiti area, but having a real hardware button is it much better.

All in all it was a rather positive experience. Also I would still not buy a iPhone because of it's lack of certain features.

I got my hands on a Nokia N95 so I can play with it over the weekend. It turned out that I don't like it, here is why.

First, I really don't like moving parts on any mobile device. Because these will either break or will allow dust to get into the phone. Second, I tried to surf the web using wireless (WiFi) this was a really bad experience. It took 15 minutes until it finally connected to my WPA-PSK network (the router was about 2 meters away from the phone). Also the user interface for this kind of sucked (this was the first time for me using a Symbian device that has WiFi). The web browser seems fast, but the website don't look good at all. It is like I remember web surfing on a mobile phone a few years ago. Not having a touchscreen doesn't help either (navigating with the 4-way button isn't fun).

I don't care about having a camera in my phone, but this one is soo big. I really think the camera makes the phone 3-4 millimeters thinker. This is stupid.

Some good stuff: USB and stereo jack (I like standard connectors).

Lets hope there will be a new phone with all these (impressive) hardware features but without the moving screen and buttons. Instead reduce the number of hardware buttons give it a bigger screen and use a touchscreen. Making it thiner would also help.

Just my 2 cents...

reading reviews linked from OSNews I get the impression that the iPhone is a OK or maybe a good PDA and a bad phone. Also calling it a smartphone is just exaggeration, you can't install 3rd party software so it is not a smartphone, period! Web widgets don't count. EDGE is just a joke - the reviewers basically say that web and email is unusable using EDGE.

Comparing the iPhone UI to WindowsMobile is a really cheap move since the WindowsMobile UI always sucked.

Apple claims to have the best smartphone that is currently available but the iPhone lacks very basic features found in other top devices like: an expansion card slot (e.g. SD/MMC) and GPS receiver.


iPhone I DON'T want one!

I just got a Nokia 6233 GSM/UTMS phone with my new phone carrier (BASE). From what I can say after a half day is that it seems quite nice. The first thing I did was to play with Bluetooth of course - it supports EDR (ACL 2 and 3 Mbps, and eSCO 2 Mbps) thats really cool. It has all the usual Bluetooth services found on current phones. But the best thing is that is syncs just find with Evolution using syncml via Bluetooth using opensync (a quick howto can be found here). I still need to try out my Bluetooth headset and a few other things but it looks real good so far.

I'll keep you posted...