Gamaze.com
The last mile of consumer experiences, home media, wireless stuff, and life
This is all about the difference between good and great! New cool gadgets pop up daily, many of them do not decrease consumer headache as intended. While giving my few cents to the geeky world I\'m still working on creating the ultimate gadget...
-
The New Nokia N97 Crapped on Me From a User Experience Point of View – Had to Order an HTC Hero Instead
Posted on July 19th, 2009 3 comments
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 The user experience is completely outdated already at launch and to me it is not at all acceptable for something coming from the leading mobile company in the world.
-
Top 6 Free Applications to Really Improve the User Experience of a Nokia S60 Symbian Phone
Posted on July 7th, 2009 No comments
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 5top 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. -
HP Mini 2140 Notebook: SSD Upgrade and installing Windows XP Professional for Significant Performance Improvements
Posted on July 4th, 2009 3 commentsI 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.
-
How to Automatically Sync Your Contacts & Calendar Between a Nokia Phone, iPhone, Gmail and Outlook / Mac iCalendar / Address Book on multiple computers
Posted on June 19th, 2009 7 comments
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.
Most Recent Opinions