How to like a Symbian^3 smartphone?

I have a Nokia N8 and while some aspects of it are awasome out of the box, some others are downright poor. I think I can say this now even though I work for Nokia as our CEO has basically said the same thing in public.

Most of the frustrating bits have to do with the built-in applications in N8. Luckily there is a pretty good offering of 3rd party apps as well as innovative Nokia ones that have, at least for me, turned the thumb firmly towards the sky. So here's my advice on what to get to whoever wants to live life to the fullest (heh) with N8, C7, E7 etc.:

Social networks: get Gravity. Gravity is an awesome native Symbian application for all kinds of social networking needs. I use it for Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and flickr image uploads. The version of Gravity on Ovi Store is great, but that's just the starting point. Jan Ole Suhr (@janole) releases frequent updates that have made the great into fantastic since I bought the 1st version. The gret thing is, one can follow @janole in Gravity and get 1st hand info about what he's developing next as well as where to download the latest and the greatest.

Music: I live in India now so this will not help the natives, but Spotify has transformed music for me. Admittedly the Symbian client is awkward at best, but the overall service experience is so good that it almost doesn't matter at all. I would especially wish for better support for headset controls and such.

Browsing: in all the N8 reviews the biggest downside complained about has been the browser. Yes, it's slow and the zooming doesn't really work like it should. After the release of Opera Mini 6.0 this is a moot point now as there's a fantastic browser now available. In India the proxy browsing is fantastic as 3G was just launched and coverage is spotty at best. With Opera Mini GPRS is enough for fast browsing of full-fledged desktop sites.

Profile management: I am one of those people who forget to put the phone on silent when going to bed or entering a meeting and leave it silent for the rest of the day once the meeting is over. Now it doesn't matter anymore as the beta-available Situations does all that automatically. If you tried the first version and got tired of restarting it, try the latest one. It's much better and does what it promises.

Outdoors: Whenever I do any kind of sports outdoors (except swimming), I use Sports Tracker. Sadly they don't ship the heart rate monitor to India so I need to pick one up when I am next time in Finland. Even without it this is a fantastic app-slash-service and I've used it from day 1 when it was a small science project in Nokia. They just announced that they're coming out with iPhone and Android versions too - good for them!

Gaming: there's plenty of good, even great games in Ovi Store. The latest Angry Birds is coming to Symbian with only a few weeks delay :-). Sky Force Reloaded is great too, but I go long back with that game so it's probably just me.

E-mail: here the built-in mail app has developed into a really usable tool. I use it for Gmail and Outlook access and have no major complaints. If I sometimes need the full Gmail UI, I use the iPhone version with Opera Mini.

Maps: in most parts of the world Ovi Maps is great, but not here in India. Here addresses don't really matter or make sense and everything works with points of interest. The PoI database on Google Maps Mobile is a lot better so that works better here.

Bubbles: you don't you need Bubbles before you try Bubbles. I couldn't use my phone without Bubbles anymore.

Consumer complaint power and the Internet, or "Don't get mad, get even... and then some"

So it's probably obvious by now that I'm a little more than slightly pissed off at DishTV for delivering me a service some 3 weeks later than promised and then cutting me off from it less than 1 hour after finally getting it. Oh, yes, and for constantly promising to fix it without actually doing so. That too.

I can complain all I want to the care personnel, but those people are just earning a pittance listening to people yelling at them so I'm not too hard on them - I can't help but laugh when they again promise me what their workflow system tells them to promise - I'd bet knowing full well that the problem will still be there tomorrow.

Blogs like this are actually suprisingly effective for getting back at companies who treat their customers like crap. Consider this post of mine from 2008. Google Analytics tells me that 908 separate people have viewed the rant 1059 times since I posted it. If I managed to convince even 50% of those people to buy something else the companies I complained about lost over 25k€ / $35k in sales, some 150 times more than I lost buying their crappy products. And counting. People find the post through google searches and it still gets a steady 30-50 pageviews per month - I've cut my losses a long time ago, but they aren't done with theirs.

Cricket looks fantastic on DishTV TruHD - NOT...

So I have this problem with our bricked DishTV set-top-box. DishTV customer care has a standard promise of 24-hour service restoration, but it's based on, well, apparently nothing more than a hope and prayer. The care center personnel do a pretty good imitation of being surprised that no technician has showed up with a laptop to revive the bricked device, but I have a hard time believing I am the only one with this experience.

The funny part is, today is the quarter final match of the cricket world cup with India playing Australia. I had actually thought that I might watch this as the DishTV installation came with the cricket WC package included. I've never watched a game and thought this would be a good opportunity to start and maybe understand the rules even. For me the fact that I'll miss this is not really a biggie, but imagine if I was Indian and could not watch the big game in my spanking new HD super duper package? I'd be suicidal.

Well they told me, again, that with 100% certainty a technician will come within 24 hours. I'm not holding my breath...

Why not to become a DishTV subscriber in India

Many Indian companies feel that no punishment is severe enough for people who dare become their customers. Satellite firm DishTV seems to be one of these. After 3 weeks of patiently trying get the darn thing installed it finally came today in the form of and old guy and his rusty scooter. The joy of joys getting HD service again was short lived - after about an hour of use DishTV proceeded to brick our new HD set-top-box with an OTA firmware push.

They tell me that a technician will come in 24 hours but that's what they said about the installation too (which took 3+ weeks and required an interpreter because the technician was illiterate and spoke no English).

I think it's a very good thing that the Indian government restricts foreign companies from coming here to do business because most of the successful local firms wouldn't survive a day in open competition.

Supermoon, in auto focus

Supermoon, in auto focus a photo by Dopeyrizer on Flickr.

Picture of full moon at close orbit to Earth, or super moon, as it's also called. Given that Bangalore is almost 1km above sea level and pretty close to the equator, I wonder if this is the closest I ever will get to our only natural satellite.

I had my auto-focus optics calibrated in the local Canon service center here in Bangalore and based on the pic above, at least the 70-300mm is now right on the money. All my previous moon pics have been taken with manual focus, which is fiddly to the extreme due to the focus ring being both really fast and not damped at all in this otherwise nice lens.