The Dark Furie

I'm really enjoying my new phone and loving the available themes.

There's art, and then there's this...

Despite the obvious jokes about Clint and Tils having found new love, there's really only one word to describe these:
Why?

A while back I posted about the upcoming Nokia N97 Mini and today I'm following that up with a couple of photos taken from differet sources that show the phone off.

As you can see, the phone is physically smaller than it's big brother although not by much, and the removal of the navigation pad should actually provide more room for typing on this handset.

No further details or specifications have been released yet but you can be sure I'll be talking about it here when they are.

A little while ago my involvement as an S60 Ambassador won me a Bluetooth keyboard and I planned to use that as my main means of text entry on the Samsung i8910 HD that I was recently awarded as an ambassador for that phone. It's no secret that I don't really like pure touchscreen phones, with text entry being one of my main problems with them. I have enough problems keeping my phones clean (they can get filthy while charging overnight in a different room to me) without wiping my grubby fingers all over the screen each time I want to type something. However I did promise to give people a detailed overview of this phone so it's only fair that I at least try out the built-in touchscreen text entry methods and report on them.

The first thing I should mention is that only three of the four S60 5th edition text entry methods have been included in the phone, with the portrait orientation mini-QWERTY being missed out. This leaves the full-screen QWERTY keyboard, an alpha-numeric keypad and handwriting recognition as the primary text entry methods. Of the three, I was most skeptical about handwriting recognition so decided to test it out by writing this very post using it (impressions to come at the end of the post). I've tried out both the full-screen QWERTY and the alpha-numeric keypad for a while now and have found both quite accurate, although they both share one quite annoying problem - it's hard to see much while you're typing. Here, check out the following screenshots to see what I mean.

Those tiny spaces show what you're typing as you type it and, so far, I've found no way to even shrink the text size down to show more at once. Still, both entry methods are well implemented and before long I was typing on the alpha-numeric keypad at almost the same speed I usually get on hardware keypads. The QWERTY however still seems rather alien to me, especially when I try to enter punctuation or numbers as these involve me hitting buttons that bring up new keyboards. Punctuation in particular is a pain as some things are included on the main keyboard and some need the punctuation keyboard to be called up. It's probably just a case of getting used to it though.

I mentioned earlier that I was skeptical about handwriting recognition on this phone. It's not handwriting recognition in general that I have a problem with, as I've used it before, more the fact that the i8910 is a finger touch phone not a stylus touch phone, so I couldn't see it working well at all. I couldn't have been more wrong. Choosing handwriting recognition as your primary text entry method opens a transparent blue panel over the text screen with a few extra options for things like capitals or repositioning the panel. Drawing a letter in that panel adds it to the text field. Drawing a line from right to left deletes the last character. Drawing a line from left to right adds a space. Tapping the screen twice in rapid succession adds a full stop. The other options on the screen allow you to type numbers, change the case of text, paste or copy highlighted text and reposition the entry panel. Although I've had continual trouble entering the letter K, apart from that it actually works quite well as a one-handed text entry method, although it is by far the slowest method on the phone.

A couple of interesting tidbits of information for Symbian owners have snuck out of the Quickoffice um office this week and for once I'm slightly late with the news.

Firstly if you've got any Nokia device that comes preloaded with Quickoffice you're eligible for a free upgrade to the latest version, Quickoffice 6. The new version is streamlined yet more powerful, with better handling of your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Just go into Quickoffice, click upgrades and refresh for the update. The update you get depends on the version you already have so, if your phone can already edit the documents or you've bought the ability to do so, you'll get the full editing version. If you just have the document viewers the upgrade will just bring you the new viewing functionality. Worth investigating if you do a lot of text editing.

Secondly they've finally gotten around to allowing touchscreen phones to edit documents. Previously this functionality wasn't present on S60 5th edition as they were still working on it, but they've finished testing and have now released the document editing capability for touchscreen Symbian phones. Again enter the application and check the upgrades section to buy this function.

Quickoffice is the premier office application built into most S60 phones. While business users usually get the full version in Nokia's E-series phones, most people have to pay to add editing capabilities to the application. Stay tuned for a full review sometime in the near future.

My calendar today announced that it's Cheesecake Day. Whether there's some obscure celebration of cheesecakes, or I was looking forward to cheesecake and accidentally set it as an annual event I have no idea, but simply seeing "Cheesecake Day" on the calendar cheered me up loads today because I'm a big fan of cheesecake, particularly plain old vanilla. I'm off to find out what the deal is. See you in a while.

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Okay it seems that Cheesecake Day is an unofficial national holiday in the States, started by the Cheesecake Factory to sell more cheesecake. Well, it's a good idea so I'm declaring it a holiday in all Furtopian countries. And a quick browse around the web has come up with a dish that both fits the day and sounds absolutely delicious.

Let them eat cheesecake.