Travelling with N96 - pleasure or pain?

"Is it possible to use a phone as a hardcore travel assistant which does basically everything for you?" This was the question before I went for a short holiday. Before the holiday started I created a quite long list what I could do with my phone when abroad (thanks to Petteri and Jouni for additional suggestions).

When I was driving in Spain and using Ovi Maps as a navigator, I totally lost my mind because N96 rebooted itself numerous times and Ovi Maps failed to give me good directions. I even buzzed about this. After the buzz, I started thinking that I shouldn't make that strong assumption, which is based on few failures. I decided to create a list of pleasures and pains about using N96 (or any device) as a travel assistant. I made this list during my holiday, without any further planning, so the list is authentic and not made up.

Like everybody knows, these things aren't black and white so it is little difficult to make a final decision. I thought that I'll give one point (+1) for each pleasure and one minus point (-1) for each pain and then sum them. If pleasure wins, then it is a pleasure to travel with N96 or if pain wins, then it is a pain travelling with N96. I'll also add some suggestions in the end which could help travelers (or frequent mobile phone users) in the future.

Test equipment

• Nokia N96 v.30.333
• Ovi Maps v3.01 09wk44 b01 with drive and walk license and downloaded map of Spain.
• A car
• A 31-year-old male

Pleasure

• Downloaded maps to your phone before travel.
• Got drive and walk guidance relatively cheaply, only 9,99€ to N96. Although this hasn't been advertised anywhere. I noticed this from AllAboutSymbian.com.
• Saved GPS coordinates to some pictures which I took.
• Sent an unique postcard with a picture taken with N96 using 3rd party software from Finnish Post Office.
• Transferred podcasts and music before the trip to the phone.
• Installed 3rd party software during the trip to get information about Alhambra. Download was done using bluetooth in Alhambra. More information about the software.

Picture 1 & 2. Information of Alhambra in your phone

• Used Opera Mini to cut down the amount transferred data while browsing abroad.
• Recorded my running routes using SportsTracker and didn't use any data connection. Uploaded them to SportsTracker site when I came back from holiday.

Picture 3. One recorded running route, used only GPS, no data connection.

Picture 4. Uploaded route in SportsTracker.

• Saved the place to Ovi Maps where I parked the car in Malaga.
• Ovi Maps walking guide worked in Malaga and I found the place where I parked the car.
• Saved my thoughts about this blog post to Notes on holiday.

Pain

• Sometimes Ovi Maps didn't find anything, re-booting helped.
• Ovi Maps drive guidance was guiding in Malaga differently than it was showing in the map. Guidance told "turn left" but map showed "turn right". This happened more than once.
• GPS signal lost three times during trip from Alhambra to Benalmadena. Phone was all the time in the same place. Restarting of Ovi Maps helped.
• While driving to back from Alhambra to Benalmadena, N96 restarted numerous times, something like 5-7. Luckily my wife was able to operate N96, otherwise it would have been really difficult and dangerous.
• Ovi Maps didn't find "Calle de Noruega" street in Benalmadena. It seems that Ovi Maps thinks it is "Calle Cinoroega" like seen in picture 5. Also "Calle Italia" should be "Calle de Noruega".
• Ovi Maps gave totally wrong driving guidance near where I was staying.

Picture 5. Map from Benalmadena where driving guidance in Ovi Maps didn't work so well.

• I noticed after the trip that some of the pictures didn't contain GPS coordinates, although I'm really sure I had that feature on.
• There weren't any good place for placing N96 in the car. This makes navigation more difficult.
• While I was driving, Ovi Maps showed useless information about roaming charges although I had accepted it previously.

Picture 6. Ovi Maps showing useless information while driving.

• While I was driving, Nokia Messaging popped up numerous times. I don't know what initiated this.

Picture 7. Nokia Messaging popped up while using Ovi Maps.

• Ovi Maps didn't seem to be accurate enough, if there were two (or more) ramps which were taking you off the highway, it wasn't clear which one to take. I've been using TomTom XL in Finland, and it guides you really clearly which ramp or lane to take.

Thoughts

• It would be really helpful if Nokia (or someone else) would be selling "one-size-fits-all-Nokias" car kits where one could place phone while driving. This could be also used for watching videos in the plane.
• There are still space to improve Ovi Maps' user experience.
• I think navigation using phone is little like comparing taking pictures with phone and taking pictures with "real" camera; it is in a way OK, but not really good.
• Search results in Ovi Maps aren't as good as in Google Maps. Biggest two problems with Google Maps is that you cannot download the maps to your phone and you can't get drive guidance to Nokia phones.
• As you can see, most of the issues were caused by Ovi Maps. I wasn't using the newest version, so I really hope it works better.
• I didn't use Foursquare or Gowalla during my holiday because I was lazy. I checked few times if something could be found from Foursquare, and it was basically empty. After the holiday, I noticed that Gowalla is more popular in Benalmadena area. Also Dopplr were quite empty, although I decided to add few hints there after the trip.
• When you are travelling battery consumption is really an issue. Luckily I had my Nokia DC-11 which gave the external push for phone's battery when needed. It would be really useful if one could define which features will be left on when battery is about to die, I mean now some Nokia devices have power saving option which dims the screen light, but it could be used for example shutting down Bluetooth, WiFi discovery, unused open applications, etc. and reserve the rest of the battery for the most important, e.g. sometimes for Ovi Maps.

So, here is my verdict: it is a pleasure to travel with N96 but Ovi Maps can cause you to lose your mind. What do you think? What kinds of experiences you've had with your personal travel assistant?

Little help for power problems

I believe everyone have had some issues with their phone's power consumption. In today's smartphones the situation is even worse, because you can use lots of their features simultaneously and this way use even more power. For me it is quite normal to browse, use Nokia Email, listen to music and navigate at the same time. When you add here calling, taking pictures, writing SMSs etc. you'll soon find yourself in situation where you would really need to use the phone but the battery is dead.

I've managed to run to these kinds of problems with my Nokia N96 quite often and started thinking of buying an extra battery, just like in my digital camera. Unfortunately there are some problems having two different batteries, for example charging and changing the battery when you need to switch your phone off. Due to these problems I decided to struggle with one battery.

Today I ran to a little helper called DC-11, which enables you to charge your phone wherever you are.

Picture 1. Nokia DC-11 gives you an extra boost.

After charging DC-11 I noticed that my N96 switched itself to power saving mode which means that battery is about to die relatively soon. I plugged in DC-11 and was able to move freely, make calls etc. and after about 2 hours the battery of N96 was full.

DC-11 is a really handy and small gadget that helps you before the batteries get better and power consumption lower.

Enhance your S60 3.2 with full screen caller ID

It is nothing new that you are able to assign a picture to a contact, but S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2 enables you to use full screen caller ID instead of the "small print". This is a nice way to enhance your experience when calling or receiving a call.

1. An example of full screen caller ID (I know that you probably don't want this guy calling to you... :)

To be able to use full screen caller ID, you need of course to have the desired pictures. I noticed that if you add picture in Outlook and then synchronize contact to S60 3.2 (N96 in my case), only small caller ID is shown. It is the same case if you have assigned a picture to a contact and then remove the original picture.

To avoid this, you have two options. You can use fonebook for fetching pictures from Facebook and assiging them automatically in Outlook. Symbian-Guru told recently how to do this. I chose more "conventional way" and desided to do this manually. The reasons why I chose this approach were that I didin't want to install Fonebook to my work laptop that has Outlook, I still have a bunch of friends / relatives / colleagues that are not in Facebook and I'm not going to assign a picture to every contact. I'll be assigning pictures little by little.

I created a sub-folder called Contacts to Images -folder in N96's mass memory and transferred desired pictures to Contacts -folder and assigned them to contacts. Whenever I take a picture that I want to assign to contact, I'll copy it also to Contacts -folder to avoid the case where original picture is removed and N96 shows only the small caller ID. I noticed that N96 is not trying to stretch the image, so if the image is smaller than 240x320, it won't be shown in full screen.

I wonder what will happen if I need to restore my N96, will these changes be included in the backup? I'll keep you informed if I run to this.

Putting videos to your phone

Phone screens are getting bigger and better all the time. This gives the users the opportunity to watch their favourite videos or TV series wherever whenever. For encouraging the users to do this, Nokia atleast have included some movies or trailers to their smartphones. Nokia N96 had Transformers, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic had Dark Knight's trailer and if I remember correctly Nokia N95 had Spider Man 3.

Sony on the other hand has taken little different approach and they are selling UMD movies that can be used in Sony PSP. Personally I don't understand this kind of approach because why should I buy another copy of my favourite movie which I have on DVD (or on Blu-Ray)?

Unfortunatelly putting videos to your phone is not too straight-forward because you need to convert the desired video so that it has the right resolution, good enough bitrate for video and sound and good enough frame rate. The better quality you want, the longer converting usually takes and the bigger output file gets.

Nokia offers a tool for this called Nokia Video Converter that is bundled to PC Suite and Ovi Suite. Unfortunatelly the program has still some flaws. I tried to use it for few times but it crashed and when it didn't crash, my Nokia N96 didn't have any video - only sound.

Luckily there are other (free) converting tools for Windows like Super, HandBrake, MediaCoder and Vio. I thought to test all of these, just to get some experiences and to see do they work similarly and are there big difference in converting speed.

My test environment were Windows Vista Home Premium with 2 GB of memory and a 17 minute avi-file with DVD quality. The file size was 121 MB, frame width 800 and frame height 450.

Basically every software converted the desired file in almost same time (7-9 minutes), and with same output size (56 MB). For some reason files converted using HandBrake and MediaCoder refused to work in N96. I didn't investigate the reason, probably some wrong setting caused this because MediaCoder used to work with different file some time ago.

Vio offered broad list of settings for different phones, but it lacked N96. Overall this is really important because settings are something than clear. Vio suggested 128 bitrate for N95, which seemed to be ok also in N96 but 400 that I used with Super was much better. With Vio's settings, the whole process was extremely fast, it only took 2 minutes and the output file was only 20 MB.

It seems that the most important thing in converting is to use pre-loaded settings. After this converting is easy and it can take some time and it is worth it. In future your trips will go much faster by watching interesting movies or series.

Inspired on discussions in Jaiku I'll try out soon a VGA quality video in my N96, then I could watch it from hotel's tv when I'm travelling. After all, N96 came with a S-Video cable.

First impressions on Ovi Suite - no thanks

I thought that I'll explore Nokia's relatively new Ovi Suite and start using it with my Nokia N96. After all Ovi Suite should be designed for NSeries phones. How wrong could I have been?

I'm not going to go through all the features Ovi Suite has because it has lots of those. Maybe best way of describing Ovi Suite is to say: "Ovi Suite tries to be your 'home entertainment center' that has everything, from music to maps and from videos to software updater and phone backups."

My first impression was that it is just a big mess and it is difficult to find or do anything. I don't know the reason for this because, for example, I think Nokia's phones, especially S60 phones are easy to use and I can find all the features easily. If I compare Ovi Suite to iTunes, iTunes was much easier to use in the beginning. I think the reason for this is a little similar to the fact some say that iPhone is much easier to use than S60 phones. After all with only few features it is easy to make usable product. This is a really big challenge for Nokia because they want to do all the possible things with their Ovi concept.

I have to be honest and say that I haven't used Ovi Suite enough to make a final decision, but it didn't impress me in the beginning. I'm for example getting "runtime error" when I've chosen "Yes, show me what's new" and try to resize the window.

This is something that you shouldn't get in this kind of product.

I'm a big fan of PC Suite and use it daily at work for synchronising calendar and contacts and sending SMSs using my PC. It seems that Ovi Suite is missing all these features; at least I didn't find them.

If I understood correctly, Nokia remade everything from scratch when they created Ovi Suite, and might eventually stop supporting PC Suite. I would like to say that this will not happen any time soon.

I think I'll try to reserve some time on weekend and explore Ovi Suite more, maybe my thoughts will change...