TECHMUNDO 2.0

I’ve been quite busy for the past few days planning for my upcoming Singapore trip. I’ll be leaving for Singapore on the 4th of October with a few of my friends and will be staying there till the 10th. This will be my second time to visit Singapore and I’m quite excited not just to visit the sites but also to try out the capabilities of E61.

I loaded up some city maps of Singapore and I’m quite disappointed by the results. I used Adobe Reader LE and this is what I got.

The image on the left is a 1.5mb file that details Singapore street map, while the one on the right is a 650kb overview of popular sites and hotels in Singapore. These images are, to be honest, useless! I can’t make out the street names, I can’t discern any information from the map. And after a few tries of zooming in and out of the map, I got a Low Memory Error.

I also managed to get my hands on a 650kb chart of their MTR station in GIF format which yielded a much better result.

I saw another PDF reader the other day and I’ll try it out with the maps I got. Or maybe I just go really old fashioned and go get myself a map of Singapore from the local bookstore.

Also, I’ve read a lot of people raving about Google Maps on the E61 and I couldn’t help but disagree. My router broke last week so I can’t post any pictures from gmaps, but try searching for Singapore or the Philippines and any other country thats not the United States or probably the bigger European countries and you get nothing but the shape of the place (in the map view). There is very little detail on Google Maps that will be useful for me.

I’ll try to update the post in a little while with photos from gmaps.

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Ebay has E61 faceplates available in Blue, Black and Pink.  It’s priced at USD$15.00 plus shipping; included is a specialty tool needed to open the E61 so the faceplate can be installed.  I’m not too keen on the black and pink color, but the blue one looks nice.  Although I wouldn’t attempt this on my E61 because I think this will invalidate my Nokia Care One Year Warranty.

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E-series has four new themes for the E61. Although I would not personally use any of these new themes (they’re too loud, hence the info in the standby screen is hard to read), the E61 has very few themes available. So any new theme is a welcome addition to the limited selection of themes for the E61 users.

These 4 themes can be directly downloaded via Rapidshare.

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I’ve been getting lots of emails and post comments about the themes I’ve been using, particularly the S60 Metal theme. I initially sent everyone who asked to the S60 website because they were the one who made the themes without realizing that I got it some place else (Now I feel really embarassed . . .). To make matters worse, the themes in the S60 site were not compatible with the E61 (That was why alot of you guys were asking).

After much googling, I finally found where I got them. I got them from mobile9. And these are really compatible with your E61 (The guys at mobile9 probably tweaked the theme to work for the E61).  Apologies guys, enjoy your themes!

S60 Metal Theme Link
S60 White Theme Link

This post is for Roberto, Rob, Macberry, Simon, and all the wonderful people who send me non-spam emails.

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I was playing with my phone again earlier and I noticed something that could be a shortcut, but I’m not really sure if it will be helpful.  I’m putting off adding this to my shortcut list until I hear comments from people. 

OK, here’s the sort-of-shortcut I discovered.  On the standby screen . . .

By pressing any of the number keys, *, # or p, Options will show up as the Left Softkey.  Click Options and . . .

. . . you get three menu items.  The first one is pretty straightforward.  If you input a phone number, just click call to uhrrm call.  (That’s why I wasn’t sure if this would be a helpful shortcut, hehe).

The other two (I think) is more helpful — Send allows you to send Text and Multimedia messages, while Add to Contacts enables you to Create New Contacts or Modify Existing Entries in your address book.  The biggest problem with using this shortcut is that whatever character typed into your phone to make that Options selection come out will be used as the phone number to either send a text message or the new contact in your address book.

So there’s my dillema.  I consider these shortcuts in the sense that changing the erroneous phone number is much faster than digging through a bunch of folders for to access these functions.

Please send me your comments as I’m regreting even posting this tip.

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My sister gave me a D-Link Wireless Router (DI-524) last year for my birthday and it just decided to stop functioning yesterday. I tinkered with it a little and I still couldn’t get it to work; the led indicicator for WLAN doesn’t light up anymore. I shuffled power, changed cords, looked for new firmware, Aaaaarrrrghhh, this is so frustrating!

Today I’m cross because I really wanted to try a couple of things with the E61. E-Series has a really interesting article on Internet Radio that I wanted to try out; also I’ve been hearing alot of good things about Truphone for the Nokia E Series.

. . . grumble, grumble . . .

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I was looking for puzzle games to install on the E61 and I stumbled upon Brain Juice. For those with the Nintendo DS, this game is almost an exact copy of the cult hit Brain Age/Big Brain Academy. In a nutshell, players (and I use the term players very loosely) have to play the mini games daily to train their mental faculties; the more you train, the more mini-games are unlocked. With the E61 being touted as a business phone, I think that games such as these should be a big hit for Digital Chocolate.

The games are quite simple, from counting certain shapes and colors, to guessting which mathematical operation would yield a certain answer, to memorizing a specific path. Most of the mini-games give you a time bonus every time you get to answer a successive number of questions correctly, and the more questions you answer, the questions get tougher. After each game, Brain Juice will assess your performance, if you’re as fast as a cheetah or as slow as a tortoise.

Your progress is charted by Brain Juice, it even profiles your metal aptitude. I’m one of those people who enjoy puzzle games and I can just go on and on playing the mini-games Elevator and Operation. It plays FULL SCREEN on the E61.

Check out other reviews for Brain Juice from IGN and Mobile Review.

Brain Juice is available at Jamster.

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I picked up the trial version of Mobile Search 2.08.  Its a nice application that adds a search functionality to the E61 similar to what Google Desktop will do to your PC.  Input a search string, and the application will search for it in your Contacts, Inbox, Files, Calendar / Appointments, etc etc.

It’s one of those functionalities that I know alot of users have been asking for.  I tried out the trial version and here’s what happened.

I keyed in LOST to see if it can find my Lost videos in my mini-sd card and it did.  It even found an mp3 I had that had “lost” in its title.  (Note: you can limit the sections you want the program to search to make it a little bit faster, e.g. if you want it to just search messaging, just go to Options > Settings)

Then highlight the file you want, click Options > Switch Application, and . . .

. . . the file opens up in the associated application.

USD$19.99 for the full version.

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I’m not a person who reads their manuals. I normally rip open the box and toss it aside, and just look for it when I’m ready to sell it off for another upgrade; but I saw myself thumbing through the manual of the E61 last night.

I got a comment in one of my posts asking me for some tips on the Sheet application and I found the user manual very lacking in information. I can’t understand why the manual would offer a longer procedure to do a simple task, for instance, inserting values on the cell the manual instructed that I should click Options > Show Cell Field > Edit Cell Field when clicking the joystick button accomplishes the same thing much faster. I also wanted to learn about which formulas I could use and the manual had nothing on it. I eventually found the information I needed about formulas in the Sheet’s help section.

Now I understand why the tips page gets flocked by a lot of users. As I don’t use every single feature of my E61, I have to rely on emails from readers of this blog, posts from forums and blog entries from other E61 sites. I’ll try to create tips for the applications I regularly use and update the tips section regularly, but it just strikes me as odd that instead of making things simpler, the manual sometimes complicates simple procedures. I don’t understand why certain shortcuts have in fact been coded into the application and the manual doesn’t reflect these shortcuts; leaving users to have to rely on sheer luck or intuition to deduce the existence of such.

An ambitious project, but maybe when I get more tips and shortcuts, I’ll publish a pdf version my E61 manual.

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I noticed from my site stats that alot of visitors of Techmundo 2.0 are from non-english speaking countries.  I know that the language translator widget (which is based on google) isn’t perfect, but I hope installing it makes my blog more accessible to other people.

Let me know what you guys think.

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