I own a N95 8Gb.

I am very happy with it, i use it for listening to music, occasionnally for GPS positionning, I develop a few things on it.

Fine. I had it for almost a year and a half, and I am really getting used to it.

A few days back, however, it started showing it firsts signs of aging. I noticed one of the keys stopped working. The key is the Vol- key, very useful to change the volume when I get off the metro.

After a few manipulations, the volume was set to 100%, with no possibility for me to change it. It seems a quite insignificant key, however, it is essential for whom wants to use the music player.

Work around I found is I have plugged the remote command on the jack, which actually allows me to set the volume, but I would have prefered to find another solution, like a menu in the music player to set the volume with standard keys. I don't use the remote usually, and it is yet another thing in my pocket.

So I came with this conclusion: some functionnalities are strongly dependant on small pieces of user interfaces. (Some are not, the camera is usable without the specific keys). This sounds quite wrong to me. I think, as often as possible, user interfaces should show redondance, for durability, especially on a phone, so that a whole function of a device is not dependant on a single item.

Any thoughts about this ?

Atom is great. AtomPublish is even better.

And AtomPublish is nativelly included in my Nokia N95. 

By default, Vox and Flickr are the two Atom publishing server configured in Share Online.

I was looking for a way to add my own, and i came accross this http://randysimons.com/pagina_140_NL.xhtml.

Seems like Atom is really simple for publishing. 

Simon

Ps: this is probably my last blog post, so good bye people.

This is a not-so-clean trick to remove empty remanent Artist/Album folders on the N95_8GB.

In my last post, i pointed out the fact that using mass storage to transfer music to my N95, i was stuck with empty artists and albums. E.g., I had 'Live from Mars', by Ben Harper, I removed it and had no more songs from this guy, but the name kept being displayed as well as the album title. And i could not find any way to remove it. After a while, it gets pretty annoying.

So I made a few search, felt on this:

http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/discussions/board/message?board.id=music&thread.id=5869&view=by_date_ascending&page=2 

And the trick was to remove the Private folder.

Well, after a few searchs, here is my conclusion:

• Connect the N95 in mass storage mode
• Go to folder private101FFC31
• Remove the file mpxv1.mpd (This file is the phone music database)
• Start the music player, it will rebuild the database from scratch, so you won't have any ghost folder

NB: Be careful that music transfered in MTP mode being copied to Music folder, and not SoundDigital, if you follow this procedure, your phone may loose track of such files.

Simon

Please read this before what's bellow

I have a N95 8Gb thanks to last Developer day in London. I have been using it for a little while, and this is a compilation of what I don't like about it, and of what I like. This article is intended to be a subjective yet argumented and constructive criticism of the device, providing Nokia with quality feedback from an experienced user, feedback that I consider mostly important in the actual context of smartphones market competition.

So here it starts (By a good point)

• Transfer from a Nokia to another
I started by backuping the data from my N73, works like a charm, I simply ran the exchange utility on the N95, and 5 minutes later I had all I needed, perfect.

• Alarm

I use my phone to wake me up. So everyday, I wake up to the sound of the phone's alarm.
I wished it could wake me up with music, but I couldn't find such function. (By the way, is there? or is there a third party application which would do the trick ?)

Ok, actually, there is such function. But I am supposed to select one song (not a playlist, so when the song is finished, what?), one song trought a playlist of say 6GB - 2000 songs? - in one dropdown list. Not usable.

Later, I needed a countdown for my eggs, i had one on the 3510i, ages ago, but here, i search for 10 minutes without success. (Does anyone knows anything about that?)

• Music
  • Transfer

  Then I go to my computer to transfer music. Tell me about the transfer rate, it took forever. I even noticed that using the Nokia tool, it created a copy on my c drive before transferring. (Why?)

  Then I go to my Linux box to transfer other music. Good point, mass storage is here, works well, and i can directly transfer the music files. But still awfully slow.

  • Playback

  Then I want to listen to so said music. Here is goes bad. _Bad_.

  I press play. Nothing happens. I press it again. Still nothing.

  I go to the menu, try to run the music player, it freeze. I try to kill it, it ends by rebooting the phone.

  So I wait, fine, I try again, it loads the new songs, sometimes fails, eventually works. I plug the earphones, and the phones asks to know what it is.

  The provided earphones beeing pretty poor, i use my own. But this way, the jack cable is way too long. (This has nothing to do with Nokia, but I am actually looking for good earphones with retractable cable).

  It show the selection, i choose an album, press play, and now i have a general system failure, says the error message. Perfect. Here i go for reboot again.

  However, with the remote/microphone, it's pretty nice to use, and works quite well.

  • Other issues

  Two days later, i change the music on the phone. But some ghosts artists and albums stays: I have deleted the from the phone, refreshed the music player once or twice, but they still appear in the list. Pretty annoying. (Really annoying indeed. If anyone know how to get rid of it, please let me know.)

  One band I listen to, Justice, has an album called Cross (†). The music player does not recognize the symbol, so all the tracks belong to no album. And get mixed up in the full playlist for this artist. Quite annoying. Not really a big deal, but annoying.

• Menu browsing

Slow, flickering. frequent partial display, freezing. Particullarly anoying for SMS and mail.

E.g: going to the next message, instead of displaying the next message, goes back to the list, changes the selected item like you pressed 'UP', and comes back to displaying the message. And it takes forever. And it flickers.

• GPS

Not usable (may be in other countries with A-GPS?). Unable to find any satellite if the whether is cloudy or I am inside a building.

• Camera

Sooooooo slow to start, to autofocus, to capture (to do whatever, should i say).

However, rather good images, and efficient flash. Almost good enough to replace a basic compact camera.

But by the way, where is my flashlight?

Now i had a little tour on the iPhone. There is no comparison. Building seems so much more finished, clean, finelly designed and built, it runs smoothly, efficiently, rarely freezes, is heavily integrated, especially with MacOS of course, and is so much nicer to look at.

I know comparison is not that simple, there is more things to consider, but if i was given a choice here, there would probably not be much hesitation.

This device seems so good on the paper (gps, media player, web browser, calendar, camera, mail, phone), but so not good in real life. Buggy, heavy, bulky, slow...

I consider it an interesting proof-of-concept for a future one-device-to-rule-them-all, but not for mass market quite yet. It doesn't seems like there were a lot of user testing on this device.

• Pros
  • Mass storage, music Drag'n'Drop
  • So easy synchronization with other Nokia devices
  • Camera quality
  • Easy to use music player
    
• Cons
  • Bulky in my pocket
  • Generally buggy and slow
  • Lacks of imho indispensable functionnalities
  • GUI flickers

Simon