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 The user experience is completely outdated already at launch and to me it is not at all acceptable for something coming from the leading mobile company in the world.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 recently switched my Samsung NC10 netbook for an HP Mini 2140 HD to be able to really use it as my main laptop. The only really restricting factor with the NC10 has been the screen resolution as I find the Intel Atom based netbooks perfectly fine for basic work such as email, Internet, and even heavy MS Office usage (I still use my Mac Mini for sporadic photo and video editing). Therefore, when the HP Mini 2140 HD edition with a bright but glossy 1366×768 screen resolution was finally available a couple of months back I did not hesitate to upgrade. The NC10 was a great device itself but limited to the “standard netbook” 1024×600 resolution – just a little too much scrolling for my taste.
As I got the HP Mini 2140 with XP Home edition and a 160GB HDD I had 2 things I wanted to fix to get the most out of it. Upgrading the HDD to an SSD to significantly improve performance and battery life as well as upgrade it to XP Pro for some features I needed (remote access, advanced file sharing, etc.). This is usually an easy task but with the HP Mini 2140 it required some extra work as Windows XP installations does not recognize the SATA HDD/SSD drive by default so I decided to document the steps in this post.
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Mattias Netbook, Tutorials HP 2140, installation, Netbook, SATA, SSD, XP
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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