It is easy to say that I’m a very satisfied owner of the HTC Hero since a couple of weeks. Overall, the smart phone is great and having the ability to run apps and processes in background gives it a clear edge over the iPhone. On the other hand, there are several areas where the Apple experience is just so much smoother. Without going into details I hope the rumoured couple of Android updates still this year will help ease these early misses.
Regardless,there is one thing a smart phone just has to offer and that is getting through a full day or 2 without having to recharge the battery. This is an area where the HTC Hero is struggling a bit. I often end up having to give it some more juice during the afternoon or early evening with the default factory settings. That is fine for a laptop but not acceptable for a smart phone.
To solve this I’ve been fiddling with the settings quite a while to maximize the battery life and below is a short summary of how I’ve managed to get through a heavy usage day without having to recharge the phone. One of the not so secret ingredients to a long battery life is to minimize active network connections – that is also where I focus my tweaking effort below.
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Mattias Mobile, Tutorials android, battery life, HTC Hero, Mobile
Since a couple of months, I’ve been excitingly waiting for the Nokia N97 I ordered in May to arrive in my mailbox. The other day, when I finally got my hands on it my high expectations were brutally crushed. Frankly, I was depressed by the user experience. Since it officially made it to the stores, the new flagship device from Nokia has also been publicly bashed by reviewers across the world – and not completely without reason.
The few strong areas where the N97 still keeps itself above the surface are the excellent dual-flash 5 MP camera, the hardware build and the familiarity of the Symbian S60 to devoted S60 users. Looking back, it really is a huge improvement to previous Nokia high end phones, no doubt about it. Still, when compared to its real competitors such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 and Hero devices, the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre, the N97 is not able not keep up at all. The user experience is completely outdated already at launch and to me it is not at all acceptable for something coming from the leading mobile company in the world.
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Mattias Mobile HTC Hero, N97, Nokia, phone, user experience
We all know Nokia, it is the leading mobile phone brand and is heavily pushing to stay there. Unfortunately, the huge corporation is seriously struggling with keeping up with the user experience in the smart phone area and competition from Apple, HTC, and now Palm with its new WebOS. They are all a few steps ahead currently. As a previously devoted Nokia user I’ve collected a few simple ways to improve the Nokia S60 user experience to a more acceptable level. I’ve been testing these out on the Nokia E71 and partly on the new N97 as well.
Anyway, the top 5 top 6 list below is a current snapshot of my best findings. If you have found any other great tweaks and application suggestions I’m more than happy to try them out and update this post accordingly.
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Mattias Digital media, Mobile application, email, media, navigation, Nokia, S60, smart phone, software, user experience, web browser
I have a lot of gadgets in use and I really don’t like keeping separate versions of my contacts (~500 of them) and my calendar. Therefore, I’ve done the painful work of trying to find the perfect and free solution for syncing them between all my different digital storages automatically over the Internet including a Nokia E71 phone, an iPhone, an HP 2140 HD laptop running Windows XP with local mail and calendar software (currently Outlook 2007), a Mac Mini as well as Gmail contacts and Google calendar for online access. I really recommend you back up your data properly before starting a journey like this. Once done, you should be care free of backups and up to date versions of your stuff.
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Mattias Digital media, Mobile, Tutorials Apple, calendar, contacts, Google, Nokia, outlook, phone, software, Soocial, sync
It is easy to say that I’m a very satisfied owner of the HTC Hero since a couple of weeks. Overall, the smart phone is great and having the ability to run apps and processes in background gives it a clear edge over the iPhone. On the other hand, there are several areas where the Apple experience is just so much smoother. Without going into details I hope the rumoured couple of Android updates still this year will help ease these early misses. 
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