3G – Enavigo

Nokia N95-8GB: Using it in the US and the joys of 3G tethering

When I first thought of getting the Nokia N95-8GB I was not sure how you would go about using it in the US. I never owned an unlocked phone and having been with AT&T for the last two years in a rather satisfactory fashion, I wondered what I needed to do.

In essence, all that is necessary is to take out the SIM card from your old AT&T phone and pop it into the N95. Still, to take advantage of it to the fullest extent, and for me that means a mobile photo studio with immediate uploads to Facebook and Share on Ovi, you need broadband. The N95 is great with WiFi connectivity that puts my truly awful Lenovo T61p laptop’s to shame. But on the go, you need 3G and AT&T has it. The upside, though, is that you can apparently spring for the cheapest of their mobile plans, the $15/month (MEdia Net Unlimited) as it does not count as a PDA (no QWERTY keyboard). For the money, you get unlimited data connectivity which with the N95-8GB means – tethering.

In other words, the N95 can be used as your cellular network broadband modem for your laptop. Connectivity is a snap using a USB cable and the dedicated program provided in the Nokia PC Suite. While I would not recommend running BitTorrent off of it so as not to raise the ire of AT&T, you will get a very impressive (for a phone) 3.5G 460Kb/s speed. It already saved a couple of sales meetings for me where wired and wireless connections were impossible to use. This being a Symbian phone, once you are done with your connection, you better reboot the phone as it will go into a weird state – not that it would tell you about it. Phone calls were not made or received. In short – just reboot. Oh, and the battery gets drained very quickly so play it safe and lug around the phone’s charger.

That said, tethering (or MMS…) is impossible with an iPhone. I take my joyful bit and run with them…

Nokia N95-8GB: First odd tidbit

I recently purchased a Nokia N95-8GB (aka Nokia N95-4) because I wanted a phone capable of taking really good photos that I could easily share over a 3G network. It achieves these tasks with aplomb. Still, the more I use the phone the more I feel, like I did when I tried out the Nokia E71, that the mindblowing hardware is being sold way short by the cludgy OS, Symbian S60 v.3. It is slow, its multi-tasking is mediocre and the user interface is just outdated. I often wonder is anyone tested the phone in a usability lab.

I plan to share on this blog moments from my life with this otherwise amazing device. I should have read the manual. I intend to. I am a busy guy so sometimes I will clearly should have RTFM.

Today’s tidbit – downloadable videos: I stumbled across the video service download capability of the phone in its Video Center application. You can tell the phone which services you want to get updates on available

e content from – using a special website the phone connects to. Once selected, the phone fetches recent videos available, probably from an RSS feed. The video downloads very quickly – a 1 minute long video downloads in about 1.5 minutes. The quality is great.

Once you’re done watching, though, and we’re talking about a device with 8GB of memory but no way to expand on that memory, there is NO way to delete the video you have just viewed. There is also no information about whether that video will be deleted automatically. If you read the help file, that is easily accessible, it tell you that the video is saved to another section of the video center, ‘My Videos’. It’s a relief to know that. But why? Why can I not just delete the video right there from the list of videos in which it appears? Does not make sense.