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Of Cars and Phones
Walking home down Main Road, we saw this old car. It's apparently the corporate vehicle of a traditional barbershop in the V & A Waterfront in Cape Town.
The photo above, and this blog entry, was respectively photographed and is being edited on my new mobile phone, a Nokia N73. It's a phone that's been described as "a camera with a smartphone attached". This is a very good summary of this phone... It performs both functions, and performs them well. The camera is really good, a 3.2 megapixel model with Carl Zeiss optics. On the camera software side, a nice touch is that you can upload your photos to Flickr directly from the camera interface.
The Symbian Series 60 Version 3 operating system performs well on this phone; very little of the lack of responsiveness of previous S60 phones is evident. The only time I've really succeeded in crashing it, was while using the Gallery program, and even then it's infrequent enough to be excused.
Just about the only factor that seriously detracts from my N73 experience, is the relative scarcity of S60v3 applications at the moment. Just to give one example: I have not been able to find a free music player for Ogg Vorbis files. As a member in good standing of the Open Source and anti-Digital Rights Management movements, I have converted much of my music into Ogg format. Sure, it's not difficult to convert those same files to mp3, but it would have been heart-warming to see Nokia supporting open formats. I mean, it's not as if it would cost them money in terms of licensing rights... I shudder to think what Nokia pays to Fraunhofer for use of the mp3 codec, not to mention to Real for their video player. Open formats cost less, offer improved performance and stability, and frankly... Open source is very chic and politically correct right now. The perfectly mercenary thing to do would have been to include a few open formats out of the box, theirs to be had for a token "voluntary" contribution to the open source project in question.
A very nice Web 2.0-ish touch is the program I'm using to write this blog. It's called Vox Mobile, and it was developed for mobile integration with your vox.com account. It is very well written, and pays attention to the little details: I was surprised to find a pop-up dialog in my camera interface asking me whether I wanted to add my newly-taken photograph to Vox. Upon entering Vox at a later stage, you're then shown a little thumbnail of the photo, which opens the blog-entry editing page at which I am currently looking. You can save your entry and continue at any time, only publishing the entry when you're good and ready. The same functionality as with the photos, apparently applies for video and sound recordings, although I haven't tested this yet. More on this later.
