TECHMUNDO 2.0

Akin to the beloved widgets of Mac users, E61 has built in Flash Lite 1.1. Those of us websurfers have experienced Flash in one way or the other; either from those quirky animations passed around on office emails or though tiny games embedded in webpages like my personal favorite, Whack Your Boss.

Smartphone users have always been on the prowl for the perfect app to make their smartphones a little smarter. We’ve always tried to one up each other by being the first one to find that program that will have that little incrimental benefit to our mobile life. With Flash Lite, we no longer need to be limited to Symbian apps specifically written for S60v3 handsets, Adobe Exchange has tons of free apps most of which supports the E61.

Although not all of them (or none of them) runs full screen on the E61, what I like is that there is no need to install anything. Just make a Flash folder on your mini-sd card and load on freewares. The easiest way to access them is just to click on the files on FileManager.

There seems to be a little bit for everyone, from basic cocktail recipes from The Party Bartender, to Stopwatch, to Lady Calendar - an easy way to track down menstrual and ovulation patterns (maybe even moodswings , although why it’s filed under business I’ll never know ). My favorites are BookLook to search for authors, ISBN, etc etc; TapGap Ebay that monitors your watchlists on ebay; MarketReader to be kept abreast with the latest happenings in the financial markets; and mSFO for flight info on major airlines.

There are also some Flash Lite games that caught my eye.

Go Sushi!

President Dance

Micro Invaders

Crazy Taxi Night

and Monster Kick

Also check out the etch-a-sketch Doodle, and Winter, a cool app where you speak to your mobile’s mic and the characters in the app will give you advice or answer your question.

There were some apps that didn’t work well with the E61. Either the softkeys didn’t work as they should, or it just froze. Normally the right softkey exits the application.

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I just wanted to share the photos I took last week when I went to Singapore and Siem Reap.

All the shots were taken using my trusty Nikon D50 with the Nikkor 18-70mm and the 28-200mm lense. I’m a newbie at photography and as usual, comments and constructive criticisms are most welcome. None of the pics were photoshopped, although I think I will when I get the time, as I intend to print some of them as souveniers.

Access my Flickr page right here.

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I’ve been away for some time and I just wanted to summarize what’s been happening on the E61 front. Quite a lot of news for one week time, just in case you guys missed it (like I did) . . .

A nice little dictionary app for free by Simon Judge (the same author of SExplorer) can be accessed here.

Profimail has an update. Version 2.6 is already available.

Papyrus 1.2 has now been officially released. E61Blog has more coverage. AquaCalender 5.03 is also out.

TomTom Navigator6.0 has been released.

E61Life’s 2006 Theme Contest has been getting a lot of nice themes. Apart from Nokia’s Turquoise theme which every E61 user probably loves, notable submissions are Feras’ Green Dots and Horizon.

Also EQO Mobile is another free alternative to access AIM, MSN, YM, ICQ, Jabber, GoogleTalk and Skype on the E61.

Also worth checking out are the flash lite apps available at Adobe. There are tons ton tons of stuff available from games to productivity apps. These little flash apps are akin to widgets on Mac. I’ll try out some of these apps and report to you guys pretty soon.

This is my lame attempt to try to consolidate what happened the past week. I’m still pretty lazy and jet lagged.

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I don’t think it is. I went through some mobile phone shops and I didn’t see it on display. I hunted for some accessories that I can bring home and I couldn’t find any. I really wanted to retire my silicone case with something nicer (maybe an affordable leather case) but I found none.

One good thing about the E61 in airports is that it doesn’t look like a standard mobile, so I can get away with watching movies or listening to my music in the airplane without hassles from the flight attendants. Of course, it’s on offline mode, but with my old Motorola E398, even in flight mode, the stewardesses wouldn’t believe that it is, hehehe.

It’s 0530AM and my flight is in 0730. I’m still sleepy!

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My vacation is almost over. I have a full day ahead of me today to visit Orchard Road once more, hit the electronics stores in Fu Nan Mall and Sim Lim Square and check out Suntec City, and tomorrow early morning I fly back.

Mostly I found myself using the free internet access terminal in the bed and breakfast place we stayed in to check my emails and keep my blog spam free. While staying with my sister, I have her laptop with me (which I find very cumbersome, I never got used to laptop keyboards). I mainly use the E61 in places where I have no access to computers or where I can tap into free unsecured Wi-Fi connection (hehehe). I encountered some problems with Wi-Fi though, it seems that I always get timed out if the connection is less than optimum (anything less than 3 bars won’t work).

I brought no ipods with me this time. I kept my phone in offline mode inside the airplane and I was able to watch tv episodes or listen to my music on the E61. I really enjoyed the versatility of the phone on this occasion, I was kept from being bored while waiting for buses or my flight in the airport. My travel itinerary is backed up on my phone, and what a relief this was as I almost lost my travel documents when my passport case (with all my travel docs) slipped from my pants pockets (Thank you Mr. Taxi Driver for returning it to me).

The E61 is a nice thing to have. I never was a big fan of convergence. I knew that when I needed an audio device, a dedicated ipod would be unrivaled. I don’t often watch videos on a teenie-tiny screen so an iPod Video never interested me. PIM things like Palms and iPaqs didn’t really sit well on my needs. It’s great that the E61 can do all these, but when I have the real deal in front of me (like a computer with internet access), I’ll haveno second toughts.

I guess what I really want to say is, for me, this week. the E61 is my insurance. Everything that I needed can be adequately filled in by the E61, but there’s no substitue for the real thing.

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I’m happy to report that based on my site stats, people read my articles!!! WOOHOO!!!

For the longest time the most read part of my blog is the tips and secrets page. For the first time, my main page and rss gets more viewers than the tips page. Thank you for reading!

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I’ll be back home in Manila this coming tuesday. I just arrived back to Singapore from our trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Such a beautiful beautiful place. We didn’t have much time to explore the temples since we only had 2 full days to explore, so we hit as much temples as we could. I have a 1.5 gig sd card with me and it was wiped out in a day. Tons of things to take photos of, friendly locals and good food.
Most of the time it’s lights out at 8 pm coz we had to wake up at 5 in the morning to at least attempt to get to the temples by sunrise. Most of the times we didn’t make it but you’ll be thankful to be there early to avoid the hordes of tourists. I’m going to check out the tags for Siem Reap and Angkor Wat next week at Flickr and I’m pretty sure my face will be plastered in some photos. It’s next to impossible to take a photo without any person being caught in the frame.

I’ll post some of my photos when I get back home to Manila. It was a tiring trip. We walked everyday for 12 hours, only to take 30 minute breaks during the ride to the temples or our lengthy one hour lunch breaks.

My entire lower body hurts.

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I just wanted to do a side by side comparison of both highly anticipated scheduling software AquaCalendar and Papyrus.  Both really does a great job improving the built in application in the E61.  I slightly favor Papyrus at the moment, because it is noticeably faster than AquaCalendar.  I also liked Papyrus for using Hi-res fonts to cram more usable information on screen (those with bad eyesights might disagree with me on this one though).  As previously stated, I am not a heavy user of scheduling software, but for those of you who are interested in these, here are side by side screenies.

Daily Views (Papyrus vs AquaCalendar)

Monthly Views (Papyrus vs AquaCalendar)

Grid / Busy Week Views (Papyrus vs AquaCalendar)

Papyrus also has a list view that I find most helpful.

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I don’t read my manuals. I normally find it more fascinating to discover new features on my own or read about them in forums or blogs. I guess it feeds the primal hunter gatherer instinct (ehrrmm, hunter gatherer of info, not food) in me. I read the manual of the E61 though, and I saw something that might be helpful to most (since I know most of you don’t read manuals as well). I’ve wanted to share this a few weeks back but I was lazy scanning this page.

Ok, now can someone send me a picture of of anyone doing what the line art guy is doing?  Or a picture of someone using the E61 entirely wrong as per the manual’s instructions. hehehe

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I’m leaving for Singapore tomorrow morning. I will be there from October 4 to 6. From the 6th to the 8th, we’ll be flying to Siem Reap in Cambodia, then back to Singapore till the 10th of October. I will be away from my blog for a whole week. I’ll try to post updates whenever I can, but don’t hold your breath.

I loaded up my E61 with music and tv episodes. I’ve officially switched from Real Player to DivX. I don’t know if it’s because I’m more used to divx and xvid files or it’s because it is a better app, but for now, divX it is. I used Super before with most of my video conversion, but I’ve had problems with it whenever I had to convert mpegs. I have some old mpegs tucked away in my hard drive and whenever I want to bring those files around, I can’t do so with Super.

One program that I’ve been using for the longest time is TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress from Pegasys. Version 4.0 is currently out but being the cheapo that I am, I am reluctant to upgrade. And besides, the older version hasn’t given me any problems.

I just wanted to share my E61 template for this program. This was the first time I transcoded videos from different sources using this program, and the settings that I’ve used might not be the most efficient, but for now it works for me.

Size is 320X240 pixels
Framerate is 25 fps
Video Codec is DivX 6.2.5 Codec
Audio Codec is mp3 32kbit/s 16,000Hz, Mono

Before, I scoffed at the idea of encoding videos into mono, but doing so somewhat makes the volume a little bit louder. I have an Athlon64 3200+ generic computer with 1 gig ram and I was able to convert a 42 minute divx file (prisonbreak episode) into a smaller package for the E61 in 16 minutes. The original file size was 350MB. It shrunk down to around 95MB.

Not like with using Super and RealPlayer, I did notice some artifacts (those annoying squarish things that pop up every now and then), but for now they’ll do.

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