Archive for June, 2009

Fedora 11: A short report

26/06/2009 at 23:44 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

The upgrade from Fedora 10 to 11 was not smooth. I knew that the DVD drive of my laptop that ran Fedora 10 had problems, and it showed. It failed to read the Fedora 11 DVD. Fortunately I still have another machine, the iBook. I made a DVD image, then copied it to an external hard drive, and then transfer it to the laptop. Then I proceeded to upgrade Fedora 10 to 11 from the laptop’s hard drive.

Strangely, even I can ran the installer without problems, it didn’t do the upgrade. I decided to nuke the OS and do a clean install. My /home directory was in a separate partition, so I didn’t bother to do a backup ( risky behaviour, I know). But, although the installer was for Fedora 11 (I rechecked), it still installed Fedora 10!

I scratched my head. Then I decided to install from the external hard disk: the DVD image was still there after all. This time the installation suceeded.

Soon I noticed some stability problems and graphical glitches, which was expected. Sadly it is not completely gone after installing updates. I also has problems with hibernating and resuming. Which is a pity, for Fedora 11 features some nice improvements (fast booting, presto updates …).

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QuickOffice Update for Nokia E Series

19/06/2009 at 00:23 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

Like it or not, Office documents editing application bundled for Palm devices (such as my old Tungsten E2), that is Documents to Go, is much more superior than any apps for other platforms. Office Mobile/Pocket Office in Windows Mobile, or QuickOffice in Nokias or BlackBerries cannot compare favourably.

QuickOffice in my Nokia E63 lacks one important feature for journalists: word count. So does the version in BlackBerry. One of my work colleague often complains (and then asksk for me to help her counting words) because of this. It is easy to type reports and send it by email to the editors, but she cannot count how many the words are…

Luckily for certain Nokia E Series owner QuickOffice offers free upgrades to version 6.0 of their application. This new version is equipped with lots of new features, but the most important for me is, certainly, the word count. Yes, of course E63 is eligible for the free upgrade.

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Nokia E63: An Quick Update

08/06/2009 at 16:21 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

I am still exploring and discovering my new phone. I manage to make Nokia Messaging pushmail work as intended. I am also able to configure so the new mail titles will show up in the home screen. I install Mail4Exchange, and sync contacts and calendars to Google.

Somewhat miss touchscreen features, and task manager found in my old Sony Ericsson M600i.

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Nokia E63: The criticism

04/06/2009 at 12:53 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

After much procrastinating and delaying I relented and buy a new phone. I have decided it was either Nokia E71 or Nokia E63. I chose the latter because financial reasons: I was not prepared to spend too much money for a phone. I have tried it for several days for review and at the time I couldn’t find any complaints.

Well, it is different when it is your own. You explore it much more intensely. And quickly found several annoyances.

The device itself is good-looking. I bought a black model which looks elegant. It is quite slim but not the keyboard is of comfortable size for the thumbs. My complaints are actually about the bundled software.

For starters: email. For a device that assumes messaging as its strength, the experience is disappointing. The email client just merely adequate, not outstanding. Okay, the email accounts setting is easy and quick, but from there it goes downhill.

It is already well-known that new Nokia phones doesn’t support Blackberry pushmail. But from the experience with Sony Ericsson M600i, I found IMAP IDLE adequately replaces it somewhat. Nokia E63 features IMAP IDLE but I cannot find how to activate (or deactivate, if it automatically supports it). In M600i you just choose the option “Always on Pushmail” (which is actually misleading, because it is IMAP IDLE).

Oh, and when you exit the email client, it disconnects. I want it to stay connected in the background, like in the M600i. Perhaps this is just different behaviour you should expect when switching phones, but it is still annoying.

The email client also forces me to always include the original message when replying, which is sometimes unnecessary. There is no option to discard the quoted message. It also enforces top posting. Good God.

The Nokia Messaging client, the part of the new Nokia pushmail solution, also suffers from the same sucktitude. It always quotes the original message. However, it is kind of nice looking. I reserve further criticism for this because there is an update, and I haven’t upgraded to it yet.

I am also still waiting to see whether device will choke when handling lots of emails, that is, about more than 1000 emails. It is snappy now. I hope it will stay that way.

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