Nokia E90 and Nokia Maps - Satnav for people who don't want a Satnav

Up to now, I have never been a fan of Satnav. Watching motorists looking at a small screen on the dash instead of looking out for me on the bike scared me from the moment they became commonplace.

However, there's none so pious as the converted and an "incident" in Germany where my passenger's newly acquired Garmin was hastily unboxed and fired up started me on the path to richeousness. I was already looking for a new mobile phone and built in GPS moved from the "nice to have" category into a requirment.

I've been looking at the commercial software options but at the moment, most seem to have one disadvantage or another - they don't use the E90's internal screen, they can't use the internal GPS or worst of all, they are "locked" to the memory card they are supplied on. However, Nokia Maps has the answer for me. Although it can download maps on the fly (if you have a suitable data tariff) it is also possible to install the maps to the device using Nokia's "Maploader" software, a far better solution.

"Turn by turn" voice guidance is not a standard feature (nor is route planning in V2 of the software) but you can add it when required for a small fee - currently £6 for a month (UK only). This suits me fine as most of the time I know where I'm going. I'll certainly buy a month's licence for Europe when I go on holiday in August.

In the Mazda 2 which is "fully fitted" for the phone it's excellent. I keep the Navman B10 external GPS receiver in this car which means faster satelite "lock on" and there is now 12v power in the top glovebox so I can use the E90 open or closed when navigating. Despite the increased screen area of the internal screen, I find myself more likely to leave the phone in the cradle. This is because the small fonts are difficult to read and it's also harder to operate the controls on the keyboard when it is sitting flat on the dash.

I tried to be clever yesterday in Coventry and Nokia maps certainly saved me. I had previously saved a long term car park into favorites and was heading for my destination when I saw a sign for car parking at the venue I was attending. I ignored the SatNav, followed the sign then found that the car park was full and then simply re-searched on my original destination to get me back on track. Without the Satnav I would have been lost in Coventry's city centre.

It integrates well with the Visorlite and although I have nothing really to compare it to, "it does what it says on the tin". When I have used it on routes that I know and chosen to ignore, it recalculates quickly without telling me to U-turn. It gives instructions in good time and tells you to "keep left" as appropriate on merging motorways. Even in the upright cradle on the external screen, the details at the bottom are too small (time/distance to destination and current speed) but the mapping and directions are clear enough. It's best to turn off the various points of intetrest like petrol stations and garages as the small screen can get crowded.

It's a pity the call/hang up buttons don't work while navigating, you have to "long press" on the menu key to get back to the standby screen but otherwise it's fine.

Last week I was driving our other car, a Mazda 5. This has no provision for phone at all. All I did was put the Visorlight on the sunvisor and kept the phone in my pocket using the internal GPS only. As an example of the effortless use of modern technology it was peerless. Although I didn't have a screen to look at, navigation commands came clearly through the Visorlight.

I don't know how I ever managed without GPS. The licensing model may not suit everybody but until a "perfect" E90 solution appears, Nokia Maps will do for me.

Nokia Sportstracker - The GP800 and the E90 get it together

I was aware of the existence of Nokia Sportstracker but I noticed it again recently when I added Nokia Communication Center to my PC Suite from the Nokia Beta labs. As I'm trying to cycle to work at least once a week I thought I'd give it a go.


Of course it works however you're moving so I've been testing while riding the GP800 and it provides a datalog that you can very easily upload to the Nokia Sportstracker website at http://sportstracker.nokia.com/ directly from the phone. It's a pity the E90 takes a while to lock on to satelites so I may take to carrying my Navman B10 external bluetooth receiver in my pocket to speed things up. Once locked on it stays running in the background even on the one and a half hour trip from Ashford, Kent back home to Stanmore, Middx.

It can save "routes" so you get a comparison of your performance over time and it includes "altitude" which will be usefull when cycling to see where the hills are. It plots both against distanc eand time on the graph and map as well as identifying the fastest, slowest highest and lowest points on the journey.


This is a useful piece of software from Nokia and best of all, it's free.

Nokia E90 - T9 Predictive Text

Like many people who crave smartphones with QWERTY keyboards, I have always been "sniffy" about predictive text. Even with early predicitve text equipped phones I simply switched if off - or disabled it in settings as soon as possible. However, time has marched on and predictive text in it's latest T9 guise is actually quite clever. I tend to get most of my Symbian related news and info from the very fine All About Symbian website and recently, this thread was posted in the forum http://www.blogger.com/T9%20Thread%20on%20All%20About%20Symbian. So in the spirit of investigation, I turned it on on the E90 and was singularly unimpressed. But I persevered, and it suddenly became clear. Here's my "T9 in easy steps"

1. Press the numeric button which contains the letter you want once for each letter, ignore what's displayed on the screen until you get to the end of your word. If it's correct, press 0 to accept it, put in a space and move to the next word.
2. If when you get to the end of the word it's wrong, press * to cycle through the possiblities. When you get to the right one press 0 to accept it. When the dictionary runs out of alternatives, it will offer you the opportunity to "spell" (in multitap) the word and add it to the dictionary.
3. For words with apostrophes (Don't, her's etc) press the 1 after the "Don" and the screen will display a full stop. Simply enter the t (or s) and the full stop will automatically change to an apostrophe.
4. For numbers press and hold the appropriate button.
5. For other punctuation, press and hole the 1 button
6. That's it. There is a way to do "smileys" but I guess if you're like me, the point is to write gramatically correct English not "txt spk" so smileys aren't really in the picture.

I'll still use the QWERTY for e-mails and longer messages but for short SMS text messages, I'm now converted to T9. I'm sure an eight year old can multitap faster but for me, T9 has made life simpler and given me a new option for entering text.

I'm converted - T9 rocks.

Vodafone, Firmware and the E90

When I bought my E90, one of the questions I asked was "is this a "fresh" phone". The guy in the Vodafone shop (a major branch) assured me that it was.

Now, it might have been new stock for them but it certainly wasn't "firmware current". In fact it was running v07.24.03 dated 12th June LAST YEAR. I had taken the guys word for this and hadn't bothered to check until I'd been using the device for a week or so.

It's bad enough that if you have a Nokia E series device on Vodafone, you'll always be at least one version behind the firmware that Nokia has released - but it's adding insult to injury to supply the phone even further backdated. I had strongly considered going "sim free" to avoid this problem (as well as the issue of "network crippling) which was well covered in a feature by Krisse on "All About Symbian" http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Its_time_to_buy_SIM-free_phones.php but the upgrade price of the E90 was too tempting.

Having upgraded the firmware, I come to the next issue. Why is updating the firmware on a Nokia such a "hit and miss" affair. It's fair enough that you have to back-up and restore all your personal data (and a big memory card helps here, especially if you always install applications to the card). It's also reasonable that the phone will wake up "factory fresh" - but why do some settings stay and others dissapear, why do some applications re-appear in the correct user defined directory and others go back to the default location, why can't bluetooth pairings be saved as part of a backup... the list goes on.

Worst of all, why do some things simply not work after a firmware upgrade. I am now completely unable to use push e-mail. I am using Emoze and it now will not allow sufficient characters in the OWA server address to connect to the server. I'm sure I will get this worked out eventually - but it shouldn't be this hard.

Introduction

I've had my own website for a few years now. It's mostly about my motorcycles - especially, the BMW R1100RS, the BMW K75 and the Gilera X9 500. You can find it here:

http://gibsonfamily.interactivehosting.co.uk/mysite/bmw.html

Like many people, I struggle to find the time to update the site and I've felt for a while now that a blog is the way to go - so here it is.

The "launch" of this blog co-incides with my aquisition of a Nokia E90 Communicatior, probably the best (and certainly the most converged) mobile phone/pda/satnav device available today. I have also placed an order for a shiny new Gilera GP800, definitely the the best scooter available today.

I'm a terminably incurable researcher. I spend days on the net hunting for reviews and information before making any major purchase. Here's my chance to let others see the results of my research, read my opinions & reviews and share my experiences.