Geeking with my Nokia N8

Another long day of work, interrupted with yet another evening meal at Li Jia He Xian! This time it was a “Big Sister” from Bang xu who invited us. Once again I needed to shower and pick up the kids first, and was called a few times to hurry up! I still don’t think they get it, that if you are on an electric bike coming back with your kids it takes more time to stop the bike and get your phone out to answer the “hurry up” call than to just keep driving and get there in the first place….

I forced myself to go out and get a bit of bbq in the evening as apart from the meal I had not really been outside today. But it felt forced, and I didn’t sit with others to eat or have a drink, and didn’t really want the bbq so I went home and put it in the fridge for tomorrow.

During a break from work in the evening I managed to update my phone – the Nokia N8 I got with financial assistance as part of my birthday present in April. I’d read a lot about this phone and the alternatives. Most important for me was having a decent camera/video camera, and although the N8 wins in this category, there are so many others in which it fails in comparison to an iphone 4 or Android. To me, what it boils down to is that if you want to benefit from a recent Nokia phone you need to be prepared to be geeky compared to an iphone, but that you will indeed reap benefits impossible with Apple’s offering. Nokia’s biggest asset, these days, seems to be its hardware, and indeed having a genuine flash on the phone was probably the tipping point for me. Not to mention the 12MP camera gives better results than my previous actual camera (and any other phone, I’m LED to believe). And in a few years time, when N8s and iphone 4s are discarded into the dustbin of history I’ll have better quality photos that will last a lot longer.

But the main reason I wanted to update was the the 30fps video recording that had been promised. I was disappointed to find that the video was still 25fps but after some searching found a beta update I could apply to the phone to get the 30fps. You really do have to be a geek to get stuff out of a Nokia phone these days. Another bugbear with me is that if you want to read or write in a language that Nokia doesn’t deign to give you in the firmware of the phone you bought, you have to break the warrantee and force a firmware from another country onto the phone. I’ve had to do that twice now just to read and write Chinese. Pathetic.

At night I wasn’t as sleepy as I should have been, and then a big storm blew around that kept me awake for a good hour or so. It was enjoyable just to watch the flashing sky and hear the deluge of rain that was coming down, so I did so for a good half an hour. And then, of course, the electricity went. So off with the computers, and as it was about 3am now I got to bed after opening one of our bedroom outside doors to let the sound of the rain, and, more importantly, some air infiltrate our room.