Connor Bevans

Thanks to Nokia, I was able to get my hands on their latest Nokia N95 8GB smartphone. Let’s get down to this thing they call, um, what is it again? Oh yeah, a review.

Media and Look

Well, I’m sure you’ve seen a few shots of the phone before, but it comes in Silver and Black and is about 4 inches long, 2 inches wide, and insanely thick. Like, literal Candy Bar thick, not Candy Bar phone thick, approximately .82 inches thick. That’s no joke, people. The phone’s a slider, which takes a bit off the length, but the huge phone is made up for by a nice 2.5 inch screen.The built-in speakers are quite impressive for a phone, but still aren’t anything amazing. It works in landscape and portrait mode, but you have to actually have to slide the slider one of it’s two ways to make it change mode. For landscape, slide out the multimedia tab which includes basic media controls, and for portrait, slide out the keypad tab. It includes two cameras, a 5 megapixel camera with flash which takes great pictures which are generally the quality of a point and shoot camera from a few years back. There’s also a front-facing camera which is about 2 megapixels. Another nice thing is the face that it actually has a 3.5 mm stereo jack included right on the side.

Feel, Operating System, and Technical Specs

The N95 runs Symbian OS, and can use great apps like Qik for live video from your phone, twibble for mobile twitter, or Fring for all of your IM and VOIP on the go. However, I’ve experienced a few problems with the phone. For one, it locks up occasionally. It will freeze and sometimes it just needs to load something, and other times it entirely stops working and forces me to pull out the battery. Overall, the OS looks and feels nice though, and the apps are welcome and work great. The system has a great big 128MB of ram, which definitely packs a punch and aids in it’s impressive gaming section. It comes with integrated GPS, however I haven’t been able to connect to it, because of Rogers’ network. It uses 3G, which definitely makes a huge difference in speed.

Conclusion and the (Inevitable) Comparison to the iPhone

So, where do we go from here. We’ve found out it’s a nice phone. We’ve found out it has 3G, GPS, multimedia, and downloadable apps. Sounds like a product that’s recently been announced? Yes, as expected, I’ve come to the comparison between it and the iPhone. The iPhone 2 has all of the features and more that the N95 has, and more, at a lower price. The only real reason to get an N95 over the iPhone is if you really care about the camera in your phone, and have some sort of love for really thick objects. I have a digital SLR, if I use the camera in my phone, it’s for quick little action shots at times where I wasn’t carrying around my camera, or was really bored. The N95 isn’t next generation for mobile phones other than the fact that it’s got good specs, 3G, GPS, and a great camera. It doesn’t have something comparable to multi-touch or the amazing web browser  of the iPhone. It doesn’t step up it’s game. And now, there’s been rumored replacements for great camera phones, for instance Sony’s apparent 8 megapixel camera. It’s got custom apps, the iPhone has the App Store, a single place to get all of these apps. It’s got multimedia, the iPhone has the classic and loved iPod interface. It’s got 3G and GPS, so does the iPhone. The iPhone has twice the RAM the N95 has. The iPhone is better in almost every aspect. The iPhone, unfortunately, leaves the N95 in the dust. However, I’m excited to see what Nokia pulls out their sleeves to try and compete with the iPhone now.

Wow, that’s all I can say to the news that Intel will be shipping a SIX core xeon processor this year. It’s planned for the second half, and will be part of the MP 7000 series. Not even sure what to say about this, but how impressed I am at modern computer technology. Now, I’m not one for speeches but…Wait, I am one for speeches, woops. Although, apparently Intel has an 80 core processor (with each core running at 3.16 GHz) which Intel says will be released in the next five years (OMG!). Also, considering that the four cores only came out in 2006, this is pretty amazing. Let’s just hope that 80 core doesn’t weigh 80 pounds.

Yes, 68 is the title of this post, but no, we aren’t talking about Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. We’re talking about blogs, and RSS, and why I love it. (I also love formatting :P). You’ve probably figured out that that means I have 68 blog posts to read. Well, 68 posts to skim through and find the good ones! At the top of the list was news.com at 21, core77.com with 12, and Macworld, also at 12. Hopefully, soon I’ll be able to post ALL of my RSS subscriptions to the blog. You know you can tell a lot about someone from their RSS feed subscriptions. On the same subject of RSS, what do you guys use as a reader? Personally I love NetNewsWire, though any would work as long as I can flag certain posts (in order to remind me to link to them). Don’t you just love RSS (except for the fact that it can totally destroy your social life)?

Well, a few days ago I decided I wanted to learn about High Dynamic Range (or HDR), which basically enables a higher contrast between the light and dark in an image. So, I took it upon myself to find out how to do it, and I found out that it was easier than I had thought. All you have to do is set your digital SLR (not sure how to do it on a point and shoot) to “Auto Bracketing” which takes a number of pictures with different exposure times, take the pictures, open them in Photoshop, and go to File>Automate>Merge to HDR. Not only can you use HDR to make images have better contrast, you can use them to make cool effects, like this:

HDR Mac Keyboard 

No, if you’re wondering this post is NOT about Canada, or the US, it’s about the Republic of Ireland, and the insane price of the iPhones there. iPhones will be coming to Ireland on March 14, carrying with them a price of $1813 USD, and runs on older networks than some other phones. And the minimum service plan is around $70 USD per month, and that only allows 175 minutes of talk time, and 100 text messages. So, if you’re thinking about getting an iPhone in Ireland, do yourself a favour, and Jailbreak it! Source: CNET’s News.com

Yes, that’s right, a few days ago Sony announced that they would be releasing the DualShock 3 controller (which includes rumble, a feature the SIXAXIS didn’t have) for the PlayStation 3 in April at the price of $55 USD. That’s $5 more than the old controller, and still retains the existing SIXAXIS technology, which enables motion sensitive controls. In general Sony seems to be dong well, with the Blu-Ray victory and games like Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Metal Gear Solid 4 coming up, Microsoft and Nintendo might actually worry about losing sales this year. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? Source: Sony’s Press Release on the subject 

Well, if you’re like me, you shoot a lot of stuff at high ISO because you don’t want to use flash as it will give you too much specular light (making things look super glossy), and want to be able to get more natural lighting. The problem with a high ISO is it gives you a lot of noise and grain, and trying to remove it with Photoshops built in tool is terribly inefficient, but I’ve got a GREAT plugin for Photoshop, which patches it right up. Noise Ninja sells for $44.95 for the home version, and 79.95 for the pro version. 

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Well, Creative Zen dropped the price of their 8 GB music player to $150, the same price as the 4 GB iPod Nano, yet which one should you get? Pretty obvious choice here, the Zen has a bigger screen, more memory, an expandable memory slot, longer battery life on music, and pretty much everything the iPod has, except for one thing; iTunes. While it’s not ALL about iTunes, it does make it a bit of a harder sell. Now that I’ve moved to mac, iTunes has become my hub for music, video, and podcasts. Not necessarily because I purchase songs online (I usually prefer a physical format), but because everything is already in there, and instead of pressing sync, I’d have to drag everything into the folder on the desktop. If I was going to get one of the two, I’d probably choose the Zen, but I’m also wondering what everyone else thinks, so give me a comment, and tell me what you’d use.

From NewsBlog on CNET  

Sorry, Just thought that that was SOOO hilarious. And sorry for forgetting to use lens correction…

Well, yesterday I decided to look around for some mac software, and I found MainMenu, find out more about the program in the video. 

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