Actually, I haven’t realized the problem of the battery life consumed by the SEVEN application for push Email while it runs in the background until I received a heads-up on this particular issue posted in a comment. Again, I was curious and wanted to see wether using the SEVEN application in my Nokia E71 is a real batery drainer.

This is my test:

My batery bar was down to one on Wednesday August 6th ‘08 at 21:28

I started charging my device at 21:43 same day. During this test, I am running two applications in the background, one is the SEVEN application and the other is Nokia Intellisync:

I’ll leave my E71 on while charging and… well, I’ll just go to bed for now…G’d Night!

Thursday, Augst 7th ‘08, 05:45

G’d morning guys.. I just woke up now and my E71 is fully charged with 7 bars of battery life indicator. As usual, I switch my profile from personal to work and I’m all-set to get back to work:

Thursday, Augst 7th ‘08, 15.19

I’ts almost the end of my office hours now, I’ve had a few voice calls (around 10 to 15 minutes in total), received 8 emails using SEVEN push email, and no bluetooth nor wifi activity, and I’m down to 5 of 7 bars of battery after last nights full charge..

Thursday, Augst 7th ‘08, 22:38

It’s almost twelve hours since I started this battery test. I did a few online rss feed readings, and wrote a few paragraphs of blog entry using the active notes. And now we’re down to 3 of 7 bars of battery indicator. I’m planning to turn off my E71 while I sleep soon after this update (though I usually keep it turned on). Why? Coz I want to test the battery life in an affective time period. I don’t think keeping the phone active all night while I sleep will be an effective usage of battery life. Well… G’d Night…

Friday, August 8th ‘08, 06:07

I just turned my phone back on again, starting off the day with 3 bars of battery life, lets see how far it can go for the rest of the day..

Friday, August 8th ‘08, 13:52

it’s 13:52 and my battery have just run down to 1 bar left, I guess the this test will be over soon..

Friday, August 8th ‘08,15:47

Well, I guess thats it for my Nokia E71 batery life. At exactly 15.47 my phone starts to show the low battery warning.

Conclusion

This is the recap on my test:

• My count starts from the moment I unplugged the charger from my E71 which is at Thursday, Augst 7th ‘08, 05:45 am.
• Paused the test for sleep at Thursday, Augst 7th ‘08, 22:39 [ from 05:45 to 22:39 is 16 hours and 54 minutes ]
  
• Continued at Friday, August 8th ‘08, 06:07.
  
• The test ends on Friday, Augst 8th ‘08, 15:47.[ from 06:07 to 15:47 is 9 hours and 40 minutes]
• I used SEVEN and nokia intellisync to run in the background
• I’m connected to a 3G network (I heard that GSM connection saves more battery life)
• and my wireless scanning is off
  

It turns out that my nokia E71 lasted a total of 26 hours and 36 minutes. I was wondering how the heck did the nokia guys say that the standby time lasted until 17 days?? This is the specs on the Nokia E71 webpage:

Well, anyways, using the SEVEN application in the background seems pretty acceptable (for me that is) in terms of battery consumption in exchange for the ability to get push email.

Anyone care to test how long your E71 goes without the SEVEN application running in the background?

It wasn’t long since I started blogging. In my first few posts I just couldn’t find the right time between the time when an idea came to my head about a certain topic I wanted to share in my blog and the time I could pop out my laptop and start typing those thoughts I had.

Sometimes ideas just come by when I’m not in front of my laptop, wether I’m sitting in a bus, cooling down in my gym’s lounge after a few workouts, in a taxi, or even during a call of nature (most of my ideas come at this particular moment!).

At the time when I realized this shortcoming, it was the time I thought I needed some sort of device that is small enough to carry around in a pocket, simple enough to start typing any ideas I had without waiting for a looong startup time like the way notebooks do, or able to go online to add some references on a certain topic that I have in mind. Then I decided to look for a qwerty mobile phone. So I started the hunt for the many qwerty phones out there. Luckily not long during my search, BGR posted their video review “Nokia E71 walkthrough part 1 and 2“, and so I thought that my prayer was answered and looked for a qwerty phone no more! Yes, the main reason for me to purchase my own E71 was for the luxury of being able to type my blog post ideas with ease. This is how I do:

1. I like to use the ‘active notes’ application for drafting my blog posts:

   

   Some of you might say “but there is no saving options for the active note application like you would find in office notes or office suite?so how can you save your unfinished drafts?” Actually you can save active notes, it’s by simply pressing the right button marked “Done” any time you wish to pause your burst of ideas and it automatically saves your last typing just like a normal save feature in office notes/office suit apps.

2. The great thing about active post is that when I’m done writing an entry including the image attachments, I can send the entry to my laptop (via bluetooth) and the file transferred will be in a html format just like when you save a webpage in your desktop browser where all the pictures embedded in that page is saved in a linking folder.
3. Then, I would open my photobucket account from my laptop and upload all the images in that folder (corresponding to the blog entry)
4. Next, I would copy the html addresses of the images from my photobucket and paste it in my WordPress post editor for publishing.
5. A few layout editing and then Voila! I save and publish my new post to my blog site…

Currently I’m pretty satisfied in how I blog, particularly using my E71. But, I’m wondering am I the only one who does this or is there anyone else who blog with their E71?if so, please share how you make use of your E71 in writing your blog posts in the comments below…

As my Nokia E71 is an Asian Firmware edition, it does not have the smart contacts search that other E71 firmware’s have (how disappointing!). And so I go wondering around the web again and then found an application that brought a new hope for a temporary substitution for the shortcomings of my Asian E71. I read a review about t9Nav Beta where this application lets you quick search any contents in your phone right from the home screen including: contacts-media files-bookmarks-applications-calendar entries:

I had high expectations for this application, because it seemed like an acceptable temporary application at least until there is an update for the Asian Firmware for smart search function that I’m missing.

But then this is what happened when I tried it on my Nokia E71:

From the home menu I tried typing “opera”, but there was no result in finding my mini opera application. I also tried to find a name in my contacts but it wasn’t able to find any matching results. The reviews i’ve read in other blogs seems to have no trouble in enjoying the t9nav but most of them used other than a Nokia E71. I guess I’m still going to have to wait for the firmware update..

Cheers

I’m pretty sure all the power users out there have already used theese apps/services for getting push email in their own nokia E71, but maybe some one out there may find this post useful.

We all know that our precious Nokia E71 has the ability to retrieve emails as this device is somewhat a Blackbery contender, but bare the fact when actually the email that we setup from the email wizard (I’m not talking about the Mail for Exchange App) is truly a PULL EMail rather than a PUSH EMail like what RIM Blackberry does. Although the Nokia E71 device allows automatic retrieval every 5 minutes it’s still called pull email because your device actually ‘pulls’ information of any new emails that you get in your mailbox and then retrieves the new mail contents to your handset.

As I surfed around many blogs out in the net, I found two applications that offers PUSH EMail and I’m referring to the PUSH service as one expects in getting from RIM blackberry services.

The applications are SEVEN and Intellisync from email.nokia.com:

SEVEN is a service that lets you enjoy push email directly to your mobile device. These are the email providers that can be pushed through SEVEN:

SEVEN is easy to setup, all you have to do is create a free account in the seven website, then download the sis file to your handset, the E71 isn’t listed yet but there is an option for the general symbian s 60 3 rd edition devices. After installing the app in your device, you can easily set up any email account you have and even add more email accounts to use:

Please note that I use the free YahooMail account and it works as expected, I have not tried the YahooMail Plus!, I’ll leave it to you guys who has a YahooMail Plus! account.

The great thing about this application is that it uses the standard messaging app from your E71:

It also tries to reconnect automatically whenever you loose connection coz of maybe poor signal reception, it displays the status of when the last time the connection was successfully established:

Next is the Nokia Intellisync from email.nokia.com. It’s a beta service that lets you enjoy PUSH Email in your device. Like SEVEN, there is an application that you must download and install to your device after you register an email of your choice (only one email is allowed). The difference is, the nokia Intellisync uses its own application to access the email in inbox:

Actually, the inbox interface is great, not like the standard messaging app, the Intellisync application lets you collapse or expand messages in the inbox based on date received:

The downside is that Intellisync does not support the free YahooMail account. And another issue that bugs me is that when you setup the Intellisync as active in the enabled application for the home screen:

It still shows read messages from the inbox, I’d be satisfied if it would disappear from the home screen view just like the standard messaging app would’ve handled it:

As a conclusion, I would recommend the Push Email service from SEVEN, but feel free to try out both coz after all the guys in nokia beta labs did try their best to deliver, the least we can do is try it out and send some feedback for future development.

Cheers!

I’m not sure whether it’s a good news or bad news but for sure today when I browsed to youtube (on my nokia E71) while spending an afternoon after going to the gym in starbucks and sipping a cup of cold caramel machiato, it turns out that this time the videos worked! You may recall from my entry here that there was a time when youtube used an updated flash player 9, while our loved device was equipped with flash lite 3 which is based on the flash player 8 so it wouldn’t play youtube videos directly from the website (I got a bit frustrated at that time…). Well, at least, as long as I know of, not until today.

At first I went to the mobile version of youtube (m.youtube.com):

The mobile version worked pretty well, as you see in the screenshots when I clicked to play a video, the browser automatically opened realplayer and the video streamed from it (it didn’t play directly in the browser like I hoped it would). Oh yea, and by playing the video in realplayer, you have the option of saving the link of the video stream to your gallery.

Then, I got curious, and I tried out the desktop version of youtube (replacing the ‘m.’ in front of youtube.com with ‘www.’). And all of a sudden, I saw it!Yup!There it is… The video played directly in the browser!

and you know when you press the full screen button on the bottom right corner of the flash video and the video becomes viewable in full screen? That is exactly what happened when I pressed the same bottom right corner of the flash video… It went full screen on my nokia E71 with additional player controls on the bottom screen:

Well, I guess what I have found out about here just made my day today!

It seems that this E71 device I’m holding in my hands is getting more and more powerfull each day!

Cheers!

//Update on 23.07.2008>Settings for RealPlayer//
Here’s how to set up realplayer just in case anyone doesn’t have a clue:

Laptop development have been an object of consumer’s demand in not only the sophisticated processing system but also the demand for design and lately a growing demand for laptop size.
A more specific demand for mobility has emerged for users in need for simple access to the internet and entertainment media. More and more public hotspots in coffee bars and pubs has inspired gadget consumers to demand a simple and portable gadget just for the ease of accessing media and web browsing. Therefore instead of having to carry the general sized notebook in a oh-so-obvious laptop bag, people turn to small and portable devices like pda’s or other smartphones that are wifi abled so a quick reach from a pocket and voila! a direct and quick connection to the hotspot and on to their blog update or any social website profile.
Then there comes the small sized notebook with moderate power for productivity but enough for entertainment, web surfing, basic word processing, or basic image editing.
Fujitsu first called their product as “lifebook”. A small sized laptop around 7inches of screen size. But their lifebook has features and specs that are powerfull enough to make the cost to acquire such a device quite unafordable to average gadget enthusiast. Then there’s the small Vaio from sony which is no different in price then the latter mentioned. As producers soon to realize the frustrated consumers with a limited budget in their bank accounts, they start to figure out how to satisfy the simple and humble needs of these consumers. Asus ran first place in providing a product with moderate processing hardware thus reducing the cost of production and eventually cut the selling price of their device launched as the Eee PC. Though the humble specs installed in their EeePcs, it’s quite budget friendly for the average customers but enough to deliver and serve their needs for simple access in websurfing and medias. Other producers start to realize the potential competition and start to cook their own ‘cake’ in the bakery. Eventually a new name was needed to identufy the new description of the small notebook. The word “Netbook” comes to the surface as described in wikipedia:

The term netbook was introduced by lntel in February 2OO8 to describe a category of low-cost and scaledown subnotebooks used primary for surfing the lnternet and performing other basic functions like word processing. These may be carried out using applications installed on a solid state drive or by the use of cloud computing services.

So, lets all just sit back and relax and observe the new term “Netbook” as it develops in time to become a new powerfull meaning in the world of gadgets and technology.

Cheers!

Update Sept 1st’08: new version of expenses application from + free download link

My friend asked me about how much of my Nokia E71’s applications do I really use in everyday life? I thought of that for a couple of seconds and 90% was the percentage amount that came to my mind. Then I was curious to find out at what extent do I really utilize my smartphone. So, lets start examining the list of applications I use in my phone:

The pre-installed Apps:

• Microsoft for Exchange

  

  I rely a lot from this application. in fact, microsoft for exchange is one of the main reason I felt that I needed this device. lately my office emails became important and needs quick replies and responses, and the ability to open my office emails anywhere at anytime became quite urgent. So, this feature has a VIP place in my choice of smartphone feature.

• QuickOffice

  
  

  At first I used active notes for writing my blog entries, but soon I realized that it was a bad idea. In one of my blog entry attempt with the active notes application after some 3 to 4 paragraphs I accidently pressed a wrong button and everything was erased! From that on I started to depend on quick office coz like many desktop word processing programs, there is a manual save function that I’m most grateful of for avoiding more hair loss from brutally pulling my hair out from data loss distress.

• Calendar for Nokia E-Series

  

  You can really feel the difference between using the calendar application in a normal width nokia handset and calendar in the wide screen in nokia E71. In the wider screen, the layout of the application for the month view mode is separated in 2 parts, the left part of the screen is for the calendar dates, and the right part of the screen is for the appointments or to-do notes for the certain date selected, similar is to the calendar application in nokia e90. The difference in screen size creates a whole new experience which gives much more fun in getting your schedules organized.

• Flash Lite 3.0

  
  

  I really am thankfull for the application developers in adobe for making a mobile version of flash player that not only plays SWF files but also plays FLV files. I like collecting videos from youtube especially gadget reviews and music videos. Usually after I download the FLV file from youtube I have to convert it to a 3GP file and then save to my handset for later viewing. Now with flash lite 3.0 you won’t need to go through any file convertings, just download the FLV from youtube and transfer the FLV file from your laptop to your mobile and voila! Just select the video you want to play from the video gallery folder and there it is! All you have to do is sit back and relax and enjoy reviewing the videos anywhere you like using your mobile marvell.

• Nokia Maps with the GPS

  

  Earlier this year when I first came to jakarta a friend said to me in a boastful kind of way “Welcome to the jungle!” Well, truthfully he was right, being “blind” from the streets of jakarta I didn’t bother to go anywhere farther away from the transjakarta busway rout or from the Jakarta main streets. after experiencing nokia maps with GPS, I won’t be afraid anymore of being fooled by taxi drivers becouse nokia maps helps me show the shortest driving route to any destination I need to go to, or I can easily find a friend’s address and plan the route in advance. I’ll never be lost again in this big city with my GPS and nokia maps navigation.

• Music Player and Radio

  

  Okay, not much of a difference in the nokia music player experience here, and the usage is obvious.

Additional third party apps:

• MiniOpera

  
  

  I can’t live fully mobile without this application installed. I mean the standard nokia browser is okay, but miniopera renders webpages faster and webpages are downloaded in smaller kilobytes. I sync my miniopera bookmarks so that when my Indosat IM3 connection is jammed, I can always switch to my cdma phone and use the miniopera in it with the same bookmarks and feeds as the one in my E71.

  But I really hate the small “o” icon for the application, I mean the size of the icon is nothing close to proportion against the other icons in the menu or even in the shortcut of the home screen applications. Please Opera! Can’t you just fix this small problem? Or maybe anyone can share us some tips in customizing icons in a symbian s60 3rd edition OS?

• Palringo

There are many instant messenger for mobile that combines multiple chat accounts in one interface for instance morange, mig33Plus!Ultimate, ebuddy, but I think Parlingo is the one that cuts the cake!it has a simple user interface and loads offline contacts faster then the other messenger I mentioned. Anyways, mobile chatting is most usefull especially if you regularly chat with friends as a cheaper alternative rather than sms texting.

• Expense

I use this app for recording all my daily expenses, it’s important to keep track of all the expenses you make regularly so that you can monitor your cashflow on a monthly basis, thus lets plan a head for future savings plan. I prefer this application rather than handy expense just because I like the icon better!

Update Expenses v.2

There is a new update on the Expense Application V.2. With the new Expense version, now you can set a password to avoid nosy friends who are playing around with your nokia E71 and wants to see how you spend your money!

Free Download link: http://www.symbian-skin.com/upload/Symbian.Guru.Expenses.v2.00.sis

• Calcium

  
  

  This is a great 3rd party application. It’s highly recommended coz the simpleness of the interface compared to the standard calculator. It’s use is very simple, with fewer keys to push in calculating a given number it gets you answers faster,thus keeps you satisfied with yourself.

And here are the applications that I don’t use:

Standard preinstalled apps:

• VPN – Intranet; I just don’t know how to set that up with my office VPN
• Messenger – Because many of my friends use Yahoo messenger so I don’t use my Microsoft Live Account.
• instant messenger – I don’t know how to set this one up either.
• adobe reader – I rarely read PDF files on my phone.
• Zip – I don’t extract any ZIP files either.
• Card Reader – I never could get the camera to scan the correct information from any of my contact cards.

Well, thats all I have to share for now,

Cheers!

I got my very own Nokia E71 last saturday (YESS!! FINALLY!), and it turns out that I got it cheaper than the one sold from studiohp.com. I purchased mine at Plaza Senayan in Nokia’s Global Teleshop and paid 4.900.000 IDR’s (that’s 475.000 IDR’s cheaper than the price from studiohp).

I’ve been enjoying my Nokia E71 for 24 hours now, and I still can’t put this thing down even for a while. I’m starting to get used to the predictive text input method both while texting in english or in indonesian. But somehow I can’t measure and compare witch is faster between writing text messages using a qwerty keypad device like the one I’m using now, or am I faster using a conventional keypad. But still to be honest, the predictive text input gets me a lot further in total words but with less keystrokes with my thumbs.
Enough about the texting, after a few hours in checking up on all the menus, my so called instincts tells me that I just have to try adding more apps in this device. So, here’s the list of symbian s60 3rd edition apps that I added:

1. I love my operamini browser, so this app is the first thing that I added to the E71.
2. I have to have an all-in-one chat application that combines all my messenger accounts (i.e. Yahoo messenger, google talk, msn messenger). To enjoy the satisfaction, I recommend using Parlingo because the interface is simple and it’s easy to setup.
3. The third thing I tried is allowing my webrowser to play youtube vids directly from the site just like the guys at BGR did in their walkthrough videos. I don’t know why but I can’t seem to get it right. I tried installing the adobe flash lite 3rd but the phone refused the proses and tells something about the flash player was already pre-installed. But infact the browser just froze on youtube. I also tried installing emtube but still can’t seem to work. I gotta get my self some help on this one. Maybe some of you could help me out here?
4. The last one was I tried to set up my email accounts. YahooMail worked great and the setup was as simple as entering just your email address and password. Then I tried setting up mail for exchange, but I got stuck on the network connection timeout. I think I’m gonna have to ask the guys at nokia center here in jakarta to help on this.

Okay, to be honest, by now my thumbs are numb! After all this typing. Turns out that I’ve still gotta work out some method of ‘thumb warm up excersize’ to avoid future pains and discomfort.

Cheers!

UPDATE ENTRY on July 8th 2008:

@ 3: I found a different application for playing youtube on your nokia E71, it has a pretty decent interface and I think its much better than emtube.

Here is the download link: Youtube for Mobile 1.0.8 beta

@ 3: I finally understood what it means when my nokia E71 device “says” to me that it is already pre-installed with flash lite 3.0. It means that if you have a youtube video file (the one with the flv extension) you can play it dirrectly in your nokia E71 device without any need for converting the video vile (for instance to a 3GP file). All you need to do is copy the video.flv file and paste it to the file folder in your device, get to the Video Clips folder in Gallery and there it is! your flv file is ready to play! (uuuuu… I love my new phone even more!!!)

@ 4: Finally I was able to connect to my exchange server and able to retrieve emails from my office inbox. (Satisfied full throttle!!)

Cheers!

I got an email from www.studiohp.com telling me that the NOKIA E71 is IN THE HOUSE! The guys at studiohp are the first to sell in indonesia. Based on their info, it is sold at IDR 5.375.000, here is the email that I got earlier today:

Nokia E71 Telah Beredar

Salah satu ponsel E-Series terbaru dari Nokia yaitu Nokia E71 telah beredar di pasaran dan kini bisa diperoleh di StudioHp. Perangkat seri E bari ini memiliki desain sleek tampak sangat chic dan memiliki keyboard Qwerty. Didukung dengan fitur HSDPA, GPS, kamera 3,2 megapiksel dan memori sebesar 128 megabyte.

Ponsel ini juga support email account dari lebih dari seribu internet service provider (ISPs) di dunia seperti Gmail, Yahoo! mail, dan Hotmail.

Selain mementingkan fitur-fitur ’serius’ untuk para pebisnis, E71 juga dilengkapi dengan fitur hiburan seperti musik, video dan ovishare. Untuk soal konektivitas, selain dilengkapi dengan fitur koneksi berkecepatan tinggi HSDPA, juga telah mendukung Wireless Lan.

Fitur-fitur :
* Built for messaging inside and out
* Optimized mobile email and messaging experience with full QWERTY keyboard
* Simplified email set-up
* Intelligent input with auto-completion, auto-correction and learning capability ensuring fast and error-free typing
* HSDPA data connection of up to 3.6 Mbps for fast downloading of emails and attachments and web browsing
* Two customizable Home Screen views with active stand-by plug-ins and application shortcuts
* Quick access to applications with One-touch keys (Home, Calendar, Contacts, Email)
* Nokia Calendar and Contacts for Eseries applications with improved features
* Support the latest OVI services, including maps, music and media sharing
* Integrated A-GPS Navigation and Nokia Maps
* Music player, Media player, Visual Radio
* Online sharing: Share on Ovi
* 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus and flash, front camera for video calls
* Up to 110MB internal memory; support for up to 8GB microSD memory card
* Built-in mobile Nokia VPN for convenient intranet access
* Data encryption for both phone memory and microSD
* Nokia PC Internet access (via Phone as modem functionality)
* System: WCDMA 850/2100, WCDMA 900/2100 and WCDMA 850/1900, HSDPA, GSM/EGSM 850/900/1800/1900

Hubungi: (021) 6386 8000

I’ve just stumbled upon this cool new feature from the guys at cooliris. It’s a great new application add-on for my current webbrowser (it works with many other supported browsers).

First of all, I got really stunned by the 3D experience in using the PicLens. You are brought into a 3D interface where a stack of images and videos are displayed together for viewing. Scrolling in the PicLens is a great experience. When scrolling, the stack moves sideways like this picture below:

when you stop scrolling, it slows down and comes align with the screen:

The best thing I enjoy using Piclens is that it supports YoutTube Browsing, while the IP administrator in my office proudly says to them selves “ho..ho..ho.. NO MORE YOUTUBE BROWSING FOR YOU GUYS AT OFFICE HOURS!! HAR!HAR!HARGH!..” Using Piclens enables you to bypass the protected keyword by your office admins for accessing www.youtube.com website. Maybe because PicLens does not enter directly to the youtube.com site, so we can say that we all outsmarted the enoying admins and “Let The Videos Roll!!”

Don’t hesitate, and just try it for yourself!

Cheers!